Fallowblade

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  ‘I am seeking a remedy to bring my wife out of her long sleep,’ Arran said. ‘I have found cneadhìoc and skjultånd, but there is no knowing if they will be of any use. Her sleep is deep, only one step from death, and if there is anything more that might help her, pray tell me.’ The weathermaster gingerly rubbed his chin where a leaf of crowthistle had prickled it when he lay on the ground. After a while he said, ‘Good tömte, did you hear me?’

  ‘Rognvald is thinking, blinking,’ the wight said sharply, opening and shutting his lids. ‘Blink-king of spades to dig for answers! Did a lot of drinking when farms thrived, bees hived, honey for the mead, there is a weed.’

  ‘A weed?’

  ‘Beneath the snows something grows. Snow melts in Summer daisy dozy lazy days, and three leaves.’

  ‘What is there, when the snow melts?’

  ‘Little lobes of lichen like lace lick the lovely face of rocks. Misty, moisty moss, fairy floss, green as emeralds for the queen, have you seen? And the prickly one, the stickly one thickly grows purple-petalled in Summer sun of Avalloc. Pricked your chin! Needles in!’

  ‘Lichen, moss and crowthistle,’ Arran translated. ‘What of those three herbs, friend Rognvald?’

  At the mention of crowthistle, Asrăthiel drew breath sharply. The term triggered agonising memories. Her gasp passed unnoticed, for all attention was focused on her father. The barely intelligible wight had told him about some rare varieties of those plants, which grew nearby. Taking these ingredients in specific proportions and treating them in certain ways, a health-giving remedy, trebladen, could be made, to be taken by mouth. ‘They may not cure, to be sure, the leaves of herbs upon the moor,’ said the tömte, ‘but they oust bloodsuckers, feather-pluckers, liver flukes and leeches, creechers what bites, toads and nematodes, spongers and scroungers, lollers, lawyers and other parasites.’

  ‘Mistletoe is a parasite. Prithee give me some of this remedy.’

  ‘Cannot give it, haven’t any; not a penny. If you would take it you must make it; pick and grind and boil and bake it, pat-a-cake it.’ The wight flicked its tufted ears and made to skip away, but Arran jumped up saying, ‘Wait! Prithee help me with this task!’

  ‘Why should I? Goodbye apple pie, apple of your father’s eye’ll be going now.’

  ‘I will pay you. No coin or food have I, but I can move the winds. I can call or banish snow.’ In his desperation Arran was again ignoring his kindred’s prohibitions on meddling at whim with the weather. ‘Do you dislike snow, Rognvald, since the cold drove your farming families away? I can make the snow melt, for a while, here where you dwell, so that the earliest flowers of Spring will blossom for you.’

  ‘What care I for snow to flow away, blow away with the fairies at the bottom of the garden?’ The tömte skipped a little further off.

  ‘I can entertain you,’ Arran said wildly, uttering the first words that came into his head. ‘I can tell stories. I can sing and dance.’

  ‘Sing?’ said the tömte, pricking up his ears. ‘That’s a pretty thing.’

  So it happened that Arran Maelstronnar sang for the tömte of the foothills, while the enraptured wight sat at his feet, hands clasped around his stringy knees. The weathermage sang a ballad of love; of parting and longing, which he himself had composed during the years of his travels. The theme appeared to suit the tömte, for after Arran sang the final verse he brooded in silence for a few moments, then leaped energetically to his feet saying, ‘Come with me to wild-weeds three. Trebladen we shall blend, before day’s end of the world as we know it.’

  Away they went together, the man and the wight. Rognvald showed him where to pick the ingredients—including some early buds of a stunted variety of crowthistle—how to measure them precisely, pound them to pulp in the mortar of a hollowed-out stone with a pestle of granite, and boil them in a little distilling apparatus the tömte retrieved from a hole in the ground, which he usually employed to make a kind of akvavit from wild roots and tubers. The purple juices of the crowthistle petals coloured the entire mixture. Arran wondered if trebladen might be poisonous, so he placed a drop on his tongue. It tasted bitter, but there were no ill effects; indeed, he felt invigorated. ‘No toxins taint trebladen,’ the tömte assured him, ‘but bitter bites the purple petal; feral flower has fierce flavour of the month.’

  When all was finished Arran filled one of his phials with the mixture, expressed his gratitude to the wight without thanking him, and took his leave. Just as he was setting off, the tömte said, ‘Did you see them? Flee them? Disagree with them, so nice, the lovely lordly lethal goblins in the Land of Ice?’

  ‘No,’ said Arran, ‘I did not see the Ice Goblins.’ But later, when he thought about it, he said to himself, ‘Perchance I did.’ And he was glad he had not met with them, for there could be no doubt they were dangerous; but he wondered, again, about the beautiful, cruel faces mirrored so briefly in crystal, and it came to him that they might have been the imprints of memories.

  Late one evening he was climbing the rising ground beneath a stormy sky. Dark clouds swirled overhead and the wind blew in sharp gusts, tossing the thistle-strewn sedges and stunted heath. As he trudged he was suddenly gripped by fright, and became aware with shock that a tall, humanlike figure was walking alongside him. It looked to be an old man in blue robes, using a wooden stave as a walking stick. His long beard and ragged hair, the colour of sleet, were blowing in the wind, and his garments flapped like wings. Beneath his broad-brimmed hat he wore a patch across one eye, and strangest of all, a great black bird was clinging with hooked claws to his left shoulder.

  Show no fear, Arran said to himself, but he could not prevent a swift, involuntarily glance behind him. Dimly outlined against the scrub, two spare, svelte creatures were slinking: wolves. So this was the patriarch of whom the frost giant had spoken. Arran sensed great power in this personage and remained silent, subdued by awe and dread.

  Presently, in a deep, resonant voice, the stranger asked what he carried, and Arran answered truthfully, for he was reluctant to lie to this formidable manifestation, even though he was half fearful that the old man might seize the medicines and take them for himself.

  ‘Show me these remedies,’ said the greybeard, and Arran did him this service, upon which the stranger threw back his head and laughed, but without mirth. He uttered no further word but shook his grizzled head, as if to indicate, There is a new fool born every minute. Still chuckling he strode away, his two lean wolves trotting in his wake, leaving Arran angry and baffled and on the point of following him and asking what he meant by it; but Fridayweed squeaked, ‘Let us go! Quickly! Let us get out of here while our luck holds, before he turns back. If he sees us here still, I trow there will be no small disturbance and gnashing of teeth!’

  Discomfited by the note of urgency in the little wight’s tone, Arran heeded his advice and hastened away, but his heart curled up in his chest, as heavy as an embedded fossil.

  The weathermaster had put a good distance between himself and the stranger. Now that the danger was past and he was close to home, with three plausible remedies in his possession, his excitement began to rise. He could hardly wait to see his family again, and to try out the treatments he had gathered. So pressing was his need that as he crossed the Northern Ramparts he broke into a run, and had been running ever since, barely stopping to rest or take refreshment, neglecting niceties such as shaving off his sprouting beard. He sprinted through Narngalis; across the Silverton region and the Harrowgate Fells, past Paper Mill and the Wuthering Moors, through King’s Winterbourne and down the Mountain Road to the East Gate of the Mountain Ring.

  ‘And here I am,’ said Arran in conclusion to his tale.

  ‘You mentioned there was a fourth remedy, dear boy,’ Avalloc reminded him.

  ‘Ah yes. As I returned through my homeland, everywhere I looked I beheld the aftermath of war. I heard about Uabhar and his schemes, the slaughter of my kindred, the invasion of Narngalis, the coming of the goblins, t
he rise of the Kobold Watch and all the tragic events that have taken place during my absence. Folk were picking up the broken threads of their lives and piecing them together, and I was astounded at their resilience. No matter how much they had suffered, no matter how much was lost to them, they persevered. They loved life, and laughter, and each other, too dearly to give in. Thus, without the help of any eldritch wight, I came to the conclusion that love and laughter in themselves can help to heal the spirit. That is the fourth remedy.’ Leaning over his wife he murmured again, ‘Jewel, can I awaken you?’

  And Asrăthiel cried desperately, ‘Of course she will waken!’ but she perceived the uncertainty in the faces of those who surrounded her, and pictured the old one-eyed wight with the staff throwing back his head and laughing, and she came close to despair.

  From a pocket in his tunic her father took a wide-necked glass phial containing a green paste. He placed the container on a small side table, then with utmost tenderness unfastened the lacings of Jewel’s bodice and laid aside the fabric, exposing the wound made by Fionnuala Aonarán’s mistletoe quarrel, just below her breastbone. The injury had never quite healed. Picking up and unstoppering the phial, Arran said ‘Here is cneadhìoc, a poultice to draw out any lingering splinters of mistletoe.’ Gently he dabbed green ointment on the lesion, while the crowd—now augmented by the entire household—looked on in silence.

  ‘Awaken,’ said Arran. ‘Jewel, awaken, love, laugh, live.’

  Jewel’s lids fluttered like the two wings of the blue Lycaenidae butterfly. That was all. There was no more; yet it was a sign where no sign had existed before.

  The watchers gasped, but before anyone could make a comment Arran bade them hush. He said in a commanding, nervous tone, ‘Fridayweed, give me the phial of ice,’ and an impish face peered from another pocket of his tunic. A small, wizened paw handed Arran a second flask. This one was filled with a colourless substance, veined with whiteness.

  ‘Here is the ancient ice, skjultånd,’ said Arran, ‘from the heart of the Land of Midwinter, filled with trapped bubbles of air that was burned by falling stars, kept frozen by the use of the brí. Never have I been so glad of my weathermaster’s powers.’ As he was speaking he allowed the ice to melt in the phial, warmed by his hand. Removing the stopper he placed the container beneath the nostrils of Jewel. ‘Inhale the world’s first breaths,’ he whispered. ‘Jewel, awaken! Love, laugh, live!’ and he held the phial in place until even the water had evaporated.

  The rate of Jewel’s breathing increased, and the colour of dawn flushed her cheeks, but she did not wake up.

  Nobody stirred.

  What could it mean? Was she really coming back to life, or had the queer galenicals tipped the balance the other way, from sleeping to death, and the onlookers were witnessing Jewel’s final gasps?

  Said Arran to the onlookers, his voice unsteady, ‘Do not rejoice. I warn you, she is not safe yet. She is not back with us, though the wheels of that machinery seem to be in motion. This is the most dangerous time. I beg you, do not distract me. The power of her forefather’s benediction was as strong as his curse. Jaravhor of Strang never properly completed the enchantment of invulnerability that he laid upon his descendants. Through laziness, or incompetence, or carelessness, or arrogance, he omitted the spell that protected them against mistletoe. I have here something to complete that spell. If this does not bring her back, then I have failed.’

  Between his fingers he held a purple phial.

  ‘What could protect against mistletoe?’ he continued. ‘It turns out to be something inconsequential, something common. Trebladen is the essence of flowers of crowthistle, mixed with other things and distilled in the same manner as attar of roses.’

  Arran unsealed the purple flask, parted Jewel’s lips with one finger, and allowed a few drops of a purple liquid to fall on her tongue.

  ‘It tastes bitter, I know,’ he murmured, ‘I am sorry. Awaken, dear love. Love, laugh, live!’

  Jewel opened her butterfly lids.

  The blueness of her eyes was moonlight shining through sapphire. Gazing up at her husband, she smiled faintly.

  She had woken.

  Overcome by emotion, Arran lifted his wife into his embrace, buried his face in her luxuriant mane, and rocked her back and forth as if she were a child. Asrăthiel’s were the only dry eyes in that house.

  ‘Let the bells ring out!’ cried Avalloc Maelstronnar. ‘Spread the news! Let there be holiday and dancing in the streets!’

  The household’s outpouring of joy was like an explosion. Albiona, the children and all the servants ran outside, proclaiming the tidings to all and sundry. Word travelled swiftly around Rowan Green and down to the plateau below, then flooded across the kingdom by means of semaphore.

  In the House of Maelstronnar the carlin Lidoine swooped upon Jewel, who vainly protested that she was in perfect health and needed no physicianly assistance. Multitudes converged on the house, bringing bunches of flowers and foliage. Albiona shooed away the well-wishers with the words, ‘You are too kind, but Jewel is not yet fully hale, and we must give Arran time to rest. You may not visit them yet.’

  This did nothing to dampen the celebrations. The royal family sent their respects and gifts, and the Maelstronnar miracle was the talk of every town and village in Narngalis.

  After so many long years the mother of Asrăthiel had been roused from her suspended animation. It would take some time before she regained her customary wellbeing, but they had time aplenty, now, the Maelstronnar family; time to enjoy their long-desired reunion, time for such rejoicing as had never been known in High Darioneth.

  13

  REPRISE

  How many bitter hours have passed since my last sight

  Of thy belovèd face, more beautiful than night?

  No balm to soothe the pain, no hope of remedy

  To ease my tortured mind. Obsessed am I with thee.

  Methinks I hear a sigh resound from days of yore,

  Up in the lofty void where these dark arches soar;

  The voices of the past lament for what was lost;

  Thine unforgiving heart, redeemed at such a cost.

  Here I linger alone in this dim forsaken place

  I am cursed by my longing to look upon thy face.

  I have been thy downfall, thou art bound for some dark shore,

  With thee goes my heart’s passion and all that came before.

  A SONG OF THE FORSAKEN

  So it happened that as the returning sun warmed the Four Kingdoms of Tir and Spring embellished the countryside with a froth of gleaming blossom, there began a season of unparalleled joy at the House of Stormbringer.

  Avalloc was ecstatic, now that his heir had returned and his daughter-in-law had been restored. He called for the election of a new Storm Lord, and began preparing to resign from his office. ‘I have captained the Council of Ellenhall for long enough,’ he said. ‘Since the betrayal and slaughter of my dear kindred, my heart is no longer in the task. It is time for a new leader to take over.’

  Albiona and Dristan could not be more delighted at Arran’s homecoming and Jewel’s recovery. Their children Cavalon and Corisande were likewise elated, and even the household brownie seemed more cheerful on the rare occasions it was glimpsed. Possibly it enjoyed the congenial and unthreatening company of Fridayweed, Arran’s impet.

  As for Asrăthiel, she was wildly happy, yet her heart was heavily burdened. Somehow, between two opposite poles of emotion, she existed. Back in the loving arms of her family she dwelled almost in a state of satisfaction, but when the north wind blew she became restless and discontented, as of old. Hardest of all to bear were the haunting memories. Her heart ached for her eldritch lover. Daily life insulated her from the shock and pain of losing him as wrappings of silk stuff and thistledown might muffle a stone. The anguish could be temporarily ignored, but it was always present, cold and hard and remorseless, at the centre of all. And she knew that eventually, when Averil’s firs
t moon rose, if there came no sign, no message from Zwist, then Zaravaz would have succumbed to the burning. She would never see him again.

  Jewel’s health was delicate after her long sleep. She was weak and easily exhausted, lacking appetite and vigour. At length, when she had recovered—much quicker than the carlin had expected—the reunited family assembled in the dining hall one evening, for a celebratory meal.

  Tall vases stood about the room against the walnut panelled walls, overflowing with the sumptuous blooms of late Spring. A clear, bright blaze danced on the hearth, its flames like a flurry of spun-sugar Autumn leaves. Firelight glinted off diamond windowpanes, brass candlesticks and silver tableware, polished oaken settles. Over the mantelpiece Fallowblade rested in its decorative scabbard like any ordinary sword, giving no hint of its strange history, its marvellous qualities. Avalloc sat at the head of the table surveying, with great satisfaction, the shining faces around him; his sons with their wives, his three grandchildren, and his two venerable house guests Clementer and Agnellus. The diners laughed and conversed, exclaiming over each new dish as it was brought to the table, drinking deeply of the cellar’s best wines and generally making the rafters ring with the sound of their happiness—except, perhaps, for Asrăthiel, who—the Storm Lord had noted—still seemed more subdued than of yore, as if she were haunted by some sort of indefinable shadow ever since her imprisonment under Silver Mountain.

  During Jewel’s convalescence the family had taken care not to pester her with questions, plying her instead with delicacies to tempt her and joining her for measured strolls in the garden, all the while making light-hearted small-talk and attempting to shield her from the worst impact of the events that had transpired while she slumbered. Patients who were burdened with oppressive sorrow took longer to recover, it was common knowledge. Though the family could not—would not—conceal the massacre of the weathermasters, or the war that had ravaged the four kingdoms, they had painted as palatable a picture as possible. Their efforts had been fruitful. Jewel had grown to become the very picture of robustness. No one had any more qualms about quizzing her as to what—if anything—she recalled about the period when she slept. She remembered, nonetheless, very little—no more than some vague though not unpleasant dreams.