Sisters of the Fire

by Kim Wilkins

  ‘But I don’t love him. You, of all people, must know the misery a loveless marriage can bring.’

  ‘Yes, and you of all people will do what is necessary to secure your kingdom. You wouldn’t be the first woman in Thyrsland to marry where you bear no love. My mother did. I expect to. Why should you be different? At least you like him.’

  ‘I will be king and I will not share that power.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to make him king. I asked you to marry him. Bring him to Blicstowe, and let him believe you love him and he will be so happy.’

  Bluebell didn’t know if she was talking to a child with a silly idea stuck in her head, or a half-magic heir to Ærfolc blood who had cold flint in her heart. Then she realised: Rowan was both.

  ‘What if I make him unhappy?’ Bluebell said. ‘What if I change my mind about him? What if I am always away at war? What if I take –’ She had been going to say ‘What if I take other lovers?’ but pulled up, remembering she was talking to a child.

  ‘Snowy would expect no conventional marriage,’ Rowan said simply.

  Bluebell considered her. The forest was very still. ‘You will only keep our family’s secrets if I do this?’

  ‘I promise to.’

  ‘Then I will do it.’

  ‘And never tell Snowy I made you?’

  Bluebell shrugged. ‘No good would be served by telling.’

  Rowan smiled, pressed her hand into the dolmen, and in a blink they were in a clearing among old woodland, hazel and oak, and it was late afternoon.

  Bluebell fought to gain her bearings, but Rowan was already moving. ‘This way,’ she called.

  Bluebell followed.

  Skalmir didn’t know how long had passed – minutes or weeks – in the hastily repaired cage in the singing tree. They had bound him hand and foot, now, so his time was spent wriggling in discomfort, unable to find a position that wasn’t painful or constricting. Sometimes he fought against his bonds. Sometimes he laid in the bottom of the cage and wished to die, while the tree was singing in its uncanny beauty.

  They never left him alone as they left Rowan alone, and he understood now that leaving her alone had been a strategy to frighten her. This fact made him harden his heart all the more against Rathcruick. To frighten a child deliberately was cruelty beyond his imagining.

  Then one late afternoon, a commotion arose below him. Two woodlanders came rushing along the path from the encampment, and spoke in urgent voices to the guardsmen who had been placed below him. He couldn’t make out everything they said, but one phrase was very clear, ‘Dardru returns.’

  Dardru. They meant Rowan. She was coming back to rescue him. In his head he said no a thousand times, willed her away. He wanted her to be away and safe. Perhaps Rathcruick had always known she’d return. Perhaps that was the point of keeping Skalmir alive.

  The cage began to move, and Skalmir realised they were bringing him down to the ground. They normally only did this when they were going to feed him, which they had already done two hours ago, so his spine prickled with suspicion. One of the guardsmen, a large, meaty fellow with an enormous flaming red beard, pulled the key off his belt and unlocked the cage.

  ‘Where am I going?’

  ‘Rathcruick wants you at the camp.’

  The camp. Skalmir had never seen it. In fact, he hadn’t seen Rathcruick this entire time. He was roughly pulled through the door of the cage and stood on his feet. They slashed the bonds around his lower legs, then marched him into the woodland.

  It has been so long since he’d walked that at first his knees buckled under him. His feet were still bare, though the dog bite had healed. The woodlanders did not tolerate his weakness, taking him under each arm and half-dragging him along the earthen path, layered with leaf fall, to Rathcruick’s camp. The woods opened up on a round encampment, surrounded by a wattle fence that stood to head height. The gate was unlatched and the woodlanders pushed him through. Inside the fence were a dozen small round houses, roughly built of mud and thatch. In the clearing between them all, a pyre had been built of bracken and cut wood. And in the centre of the pyre was the hewn trunk of an oak sapling.

  ‘No,’ Skalmir said.

  Two more of the woodlander men and one stocky woman descended on him, pulling his feet out from under him. He kicked vainly against them, but the bonds had been so tight that his muscles were feeble and they easily got him up the pyre and against the post, where they lashed him around and around with vines and ropes so that he was tied fast. Then Rathcruick himself emerged from one of the huts, the antlers on his head, dressed only in a deerskin, and poured fire oil on the kindling.

  Skalmir had seen many people die, including those he loved the most, but he was unprepared for the sheeting panic that burned inside him now, and was ashamed and horrified to realise he’d wet his breeches in his fear. ‘Please spare me,’ he gasped. ‘I have never meant you harm.’

  ‘Dardru comes,’ Rathcruick said, as if it explained everything, and he stood aside, his back turned to Skalmir, eyes fixed on the gate.

  They waited.

  Bluebell sped through the forest after Rowan, who seemed to know it as well as if she had lived here her whole life. Bluebell understood this knowledge was from the other woman, Dardru, whose spirit was lodged somewhere inside Rowan’s lithe body. They passed a gigantic tree whose branches caught the wind in such a way that something like music radiated from it. Bluebell found the music too eerie to admire, but Rowan stopped a few moments to listen, and to point out the empty cage that lay on the ground.

  ‘That’s where they held me. And Snowy.’ Her face looked uncertain. ‘Do you think they’ve killed him?’

  ‘If they have I’ll kill them,’ Bluebell said. She was longing to kill someone, and she fought to regain her rationality. Grief over her father’s death had thrown her off-balance.

  Rowan frowned at her. ‘Please don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to.’

  Bluebell sighed. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘This way to the camp.’

  Deeper and deeper into the wood, swallowed by its shadows and its pockets of cold air. Then finally they came to the fence. The gate lay open.

  ‘They are expecting us,’ Bluebell said, indicating the gate. ‘They want us to come in.’ She drew her sword and this time Rowan didn’t tell her not to kill anyone. She cleaved close to Bluebell’s side as they walked through the gate.

  The moment they emerged from between two round houses, they found themselves in an open area with a pyre in the centre. Snowy was tied to a post on top of the pyre, Rathcruick standing in front of him, bramble antlers worn proudly on his head. An archer stood to either side of the pyre with flaming arrows nocked in their bows.

  ‘No!’ Rowan cried, pulling her hand out of Bluebell’s and running towards Rathcruick.

  Bluebell lurched forwards and caught her, yanked her back in the crook of her arm and held her firm. Other woodlanders emerged from the little round houses, so that in all a dozen people now stood around the pyre.

  Bluebell could rush at Rathcruick, but that would almost certainly result in the fire beneath Snowy being lit. If she tackled one of the archers, the other would still find his mark. So she stood and in her biggest voice boomed, ‘Let him go.’

  ‘Let her go,’ Rathcruick said, indicating Rowan with an imperious sweep of his arm.

  ‘Let me go,’ Rowan said in a low voice to Bluebell.

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Let me go,’ she hissed again, more urgently.

  Bluebell looked at her, felt the tingle of uncanniness again, and released her.

  Rowan walked directly towards Rathcruick.

  ‘No, Rowan,’ Skalmir shouted. ‘Don’t do this. I am not afraid to die.’

  Rowan took another pace, another, then swift as lightning had her bow in front of her, an arrow aimed directly at Rathcruick’s head. ‘Tell the archers to stand down,’ she said.

  Rathcruick blanched. ‘Dardru, I –’

&nb
sp; ‘I am Rowan, not Dardru. I feel her inside me, I know you are the father of my spirit, but that man –’ she indicated Skalmir with a nod of her head ‘– is the father of my heart.’

  The sky seemed to hold its breath, and Bluebell was alert as a cat. In a half-moment, everything could change, it could be Rowan with a weapon held to her head. That was the nature of war.

  But then, ‘Extinguish the arrows!’ Rathcruick cried.

  As they did, Bluebell exhaled softly. She sheathed her sword and strode towards Snowy.

  ‘You stink,’ she told him.

  ‘So do you,’ he replied, as she hacked through his bonds with her knife.

  Rowan continued to hold Rathcruick at the mercy of her arrow. ‘I will want to know you one day,’ she said to him. ‘But you cannot demand my esteem, you can only earn it. I will come to you when I am grown to learn about my Ærfolc blood, but only if you let us go now.’

  Snowy fell into Bluebell, and she dragged him off the pyre and got him on his feet. They were surrounded on all sides by woodlanders. She drew her sword again, alert to the slightest movement.

  ‘As you wish it,’ Rathcruick said, with the slightest bow of his head. ‘But do not forget who you are.’

  ‘I know who I am better than you do,’ Rowan said, lowering her bow. ‘Bluebell, Snowy, we can go.’

  Skalmir was right on his feet now, moving away after Rowan. Rathcruick turned and gave Bluebell a withering look – disdain, loathing – and without thinking she lifted the Widowsmith and swiped it through his antlers, reducing them to an inch in height.

  Woodlanders lurched forwards, crude weapons drawn, and Bluebell turned to fight them.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Bluebell said.

  ‘Stop it!’ Rowan cried.

  ‘Let her pass,’ Rathcruick said grudgingly. He was no longer the noble woodlander king, but a sad, slightly plump man with broken antlers. Bluebell liked him better that way.

  She ushered Rowan and Snowy out of the encampment, backing out behind them with her sword ready. The woodlanders watched her go but didn’t follow. She kicked the gate closed and Rowan was already running into the wood.

  On the other side, under the oak canopy in what Bluebell thought of as the real wood, Skalmir finally took Rowan in his arms. Now he was safe, the crushing weariness and grief of the day roared over Bluebell and she sagged against a tree, and dropped her head.

  ‘Bluebell?’ This was Skalmir, standing in front of her. He was filthy and she was in blood-splattered mail.

  ‘My father died,’ she managed to say, then stopped speaking in case she cried. She felt weak, needy. She didn’t like it, because that might mean she was wrong; that she did love Snowy after all.

  Snowy stepped forwards, opened his arms and she let herself fall into his embrace.

  Thirty-one

  Rose spent two days in Nether Weald with her daughter after the siege of Sæcaster, in the times of confusion and chaos as the world righted itself. But then it was time to say goodbye as she always knew she would. Rowan, for her part, seemed easily able to separate and Rose felt keenly her own foolishness at having lost the child, at teaching her to expect the departure of loved ones.

  Rowan had taken Rose to a barrow in the river valley, given her a perfunctory kiss and sent her across the gate to the moors near Yldra’s house. From there, Rose walked.

  With aching feet, she approached the place she had lived these last four years, across grass wet from recent rain, under grey clouds lowering on the distant flat horizon. When the small white house became visible, she hurried her steps. Sun sliced through the clouds, and it was then she saw them. Heath and Linden, sitting on a wooden bench in front of the stable. Heath was showing Linden how to carve. Their heads were bent together: Linden’s dark curls, Heath’s long golden locks.

  She stood still a moment, watching them. Heath looked much better, had regained some of his masculine denseness of muscle. Then Linden looked up and saw her, eyes wide.

  He jumped to his feet and ran, leaping into her arms. Rose let the tears fall, feeling his dear little body against hers again. A few moments later, Heath joined them, reached across Linden’s head to touch her cheek.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  ‘And all is well,’ she replied. ‘I will tell you everything over supper.’

  ‘If all is well, then it’s time for me to go back into Bradsey.’

  Linden turned to him, his mouth upside down. He reached out his chubby little hand and grabbed a hank of Heath’s hair. Rose had to laugh. She wanted to do the same.

  ‘I see you and Linden have grown fond of each other,’ she said.

  ‘That we have.’

  ‘Then we will come with you, and live as a family. If you will have us.’

  Heath smiled and even though his face was still gaunt, she knew that smile and loved it with breathtaking force.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course I will have you.’

  The day they burned Æthlric’s body was grey and gloomy, with drizzle setting in at sunset. The sky cried where Bluebell could not, would not. She stood beside the pyre in her mail and waited until it had burned to the ground, her face like a stone, then scooped up a handful of ash to keep in a bottle in her bower.

  The day of Bluebell’s wedding, the weather conspired to persuade her that love and marriage were things of wonder: endless blue skies and soft sunshine, ripe blackberries heaving on the vines, and white ribbons tied to every building in Blicstowe as they all came out to feast in honour of Lord Bluebell’s new husband. Little children dressed up in hunting gear in his honour and shot rough toy arrows at each other.

  Ash bound their hands together with ribbons and they made vows and Bluebell grimaced through it all. Her heart was still sick from the loss of her father two weeks before, and she knew it would be a year before she had room in her heart to try to love anyone else properly. Nonetheless, Skalmir Hunter was well loved by the people of Blicstowe and everyone said they made a handsome couple, though nobody really meant it about Bluebell.

  The day Bluebell took the throne of Ælmesse, exactly a month after her father’s death as was custom in Blicstowe, fog had settled between the bowerhouses and the hall and the ruins. She hadn’t slept the night before, her guts churning and thudding, her long legs twitching. Snowy slept on peacefully beside her. Curse Rowan for forcing this marriage upon her: marriage to a man who could sleep peacefully the night before the world tilted on its axis.

  Now, her eyes gritty and her heart bruised, she took her place on the great carved oak seat that had been in her family for over a hundred years. It was the middle of the day, and the sun should have been streaming through the windows of the hall, but the fog was thick and cold and the shutters had all been closed against it. She was the only light in the room, all in coronation white with her long, fair hair brushed loose. The hall was crammed full of people, mostly soldiers in full armour, standing shoulder to shoulder. Old Dunstan was there, stooped and white haired. Somehow he had outlived Father. Other grey old men who looked at her with eyes both sorrowful and hungry. How they longed to be young again.

  Bluebell’s arse was aching. Whoever had designed this chair hadn’t put much thought into comfort. Thrymm sat at her heels.

  The chatter of voices died away as Sighere walked solemnly to the front of the hall, holding Æthlric’s crown. No – Bluebell’s crown. She swallowed hard. Her whole life had been tending towards this moment; why was she so unequal to it? Nervous like a virgin on her wedding night?

  Bluebell turned her mind to higher things, away from the hall and the watching eyes, and the self-doubts that she would have sworn she would never feel. Instead she thought of Father, and his ancestors, all in the train of the Horse God now. One day, she too would join that train. Father was right to remind her: she would grow old and die. But to die having brought fierce glory to herself and her ancestors was rich indeed. That was the new horizon towards which her life would tend.

  Sighe
re, as her first-ranked thane, laid the crown on her head, then kneeled in front of her, his hands on her knees. ‘Long may you live, my lord,’ he said.

  And the cry went up around the hall: Long may she live!

  She stood and spread her arms and they cheered wildly. The Horse God moved inside her, and to the gathered assembly, Bluebell seemed ten feet tall.

  The day after her coronation, Sighere entered the state room late in the afternoon while Bluebell was sorting the maps her father had left of all the civic districts in Ælmesse. He closed the door behind him and waited for her to look up.

  ‘Sit down, Sighere. I really should get somebody else to do this, but many of these are his own drawings and I feel close to him when I touch them.’

  Sighere did not sit down, and Bluebell raised her head warily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘We have news from Marvik.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Gisli is dead. Hakon is king.’

  Bluebell held her breath.

  ‘Willow is queen.’

  ‘And they have converted?’

  ‘It would seem so.’

  Bluebell nodded. ‘What is your opinion of the stronghold at Merkhinton?’

  ‘It can keep raiders out. But the stronghold on the northern border of Bradsey, at Harrow’s Fell, is vunerable.’

  She looked around at the maps, thinking about her civic duty and how dull it all was. With Sighere’s words, a feeling of purpose surged in her body. ‘Then we must secure Harrow’s Fell as a matter of priority.’ She bit her lip, remembering the old curse that forbade her to travel in Bradsey. ‘Ash will have to come with us,’ she said.

  ‘As you wish, my lord.’

  Bluebell smiled up at him, her blood leaping at the thought of moving. ‘Make all preparations. We head north tomorrow.’

  Willow travelled under a heavy cloak with her hood raised, and every ferryman and horse trader thought her a grim spectre of some kind. She had gold, though, and they happily took it when she offered it. Long enough had passed now since the unsuccessful siege of Sæcaster, the failure of Hakon’s plans to kill Bluebell, and the first wave of forced and bloody conversion through Marvik. It was finally safe to bring Avaarni to Is-hjarta.