by Judith Tarr
“I am a Guardian of the Isle,” said the lady in her soft cool voice. “You will learn what that means—among many other things.”
“Does Mother know?” Edith asked her.
The lady’s brows lifted, as if she had not expected that.
“Mother thinks I’m going to Aunt Christina,” Edith said, “to learn to be a nun.”
“And so you are,” said the lady, “but there is more to the world than some will admit.”
That went without saying. Edith closed her eyes. She had not been counting days, but there had been more than five and fewer than twenty. They were very close now to the abbey— and to somewhere else, somewhere strong. She could feel it inside, ringing on a deep note.
Deep in the heart of her, a hard knot loosened. Much of it escaped her in a gust of air. Here was where she was meant to be.
The guards had drawn away for once, so that she could see where she was. The broad plain stretched to the edge of the sky. Clouds tumbled above it, full of glimmering shapes.
A ring of stones rose ahead of them. It was very old. Powers gathered to it, and all the roads led there.
They rode past it. The guards barely glanced at it, but the lady bowed her head as they went by.
Something in the way she did it made Edith want to do the same. One paid respect to the Powers. Her nurses had taught her that, although her mother would have been very angry to hear of it. Her mother had no use for any powers but the Lord Christ and his Church.
They passed the ring of stones at midmorning. By noon they came in sight of the abbey: a stone wall and a low square tower, crouched on a hill beside a river. The water was high, the current swift, running down toward the walls and roofs of a town.
Edith had not expected that. She had thought the Lord Christ’s house would be far away from anywhere, like the ring of stones; but it stood not far at all from the town’s walls. People were coming and going on foot or on horseback or in wagons. Voices were singing and shouting. She even heard laughter.
Within the walls was silence. Sounds from without were muffled; as she left the guards and the horses in the courtyard, they faded to nothing.
Even more than the silence, she noticed the smell. It was familiar. Her mother’s chapel was the same, a mingled scent of stone and cold and incense, and something that she could not put words to, that made her think of a rabbit in a trap.
She turned to the lady, to take comfort in a familiar face, but the lady was gone. Edith had not even felt her leave.
The nun who led her away from the horses was an old woman, gaunt and stiff, with a face that had long since forgotten how to smile. Not that the lady ever smiled, either, but there was a lightness on her that Edith could not see anywhere in this place.
Only one thing kept Edith from turning and running: the glimmer of an inhuman face perched on an arch of the cloister above her. The folk of air had kept their promise. They were with her even here, in a place that racked their insubstantial forms with pain.
Edith gave the creature a bit of herself, a flicker of strength to take the pain away. It sighed in relief and fluttered above her as her guide led her on down the cloister.
CHAPTER 2
The Abbess Christina surveyed her niece with a cold blue eye. She looked older than her sister Margaret, and taller, and much thinner. Years of prayer and devotion had made Margaret more beautiful, but Christina looked as if she had withered in the bud.
Edith did her best to seem harmless and humble. Maybe it worked. Christina sniffed audibly and said, “You look like your mother. I trust she has raised you properly.”
“She hopes that you will make a Christian of me,” Edith said, then added with care, “lady.”
“I will make a Christian of you,” the abbess said, “and a bride of God.”
Edith kept her lips tightly pressed together. She knew better than to say what she thought of that.
“Sister Rotrude will take you to the mistress of novices,” her aunt said, inclining her head toward the aged nun who had brought Edith from the gate. “Your mother, no doubt, has taught you the rudiments of obedience. You will be obedient always, and humble before the face of the Lord. Do you understand?”
“I will try,” Edith said, and again: “lady.”
“You will call me Mother Abbess,” her aunt said. “Now go.”
Edith could hardly have been happier to be dismissed. The air in the abbess’ study had the same deadness that it did where her mother was. Even the cloister was easier to bear than that.
As her guide led her away, she found her wits somewhere. She remembered what her father had told her once, that a fighting man was wise to notice everything around him. He never knew when a small thing might save his life.
This was war in its way. She kept her head bent, but her eyes were alert, taking in as much as they could. She set herself to remember where they went: which turns, how many steps in each stair.
She did not know how well she did it, but she tried. It gave her something to think about, and it kept her from dissolving into tears. She was a long way from any home she had known, and from any human thing that she could call friend.
There was no one in the novices’ dormitory when she came there—no novices, no dour nun to rule over them. Sister Rotrude left her without a word, all alone in the big bare room with its rows of hard narrow cots. Each had a thin blanket folded over a straw pallet, and nothing else to warm it or make it comfortable.
The only light came from high narrow windows. At night there must be lamps, but Edith did not see any now, while it was still midday.
What she did see was a flock of the folk of air peering through the windows. They tumbled together into the room, a whole babbling stream of them, scattering through the barren space and casting light in corners that had not seen such a thing since the abbey was built. They brought more than light: they brought beauty, and a memory of the world’s splendor.
Edith sat on a cot that did not feel as if anyone was using it, and tucked up her feet and folded her hands. The folk of air explored every crack and cranny of the room. That did not take them very long. When they were done, they gathered in a flock, clustering along the beams and hanging head down, bat-like, from the windowframes.
They made her smile. She wondered if anyone had ever smiled in this place. How she was going to live here, she did not know. She was tired, hungry, thirsty. She was terribly alone.
Someone was watching her. There was no danger in it that she could feel. She waited quietly.
After a while the watcher came round in front of her. She looked up along a length of black-robed body to a face that made her start.
The lady smiled. Even Edith’s fierce glare did not make her stop.
“You went away,” Edith accused her. “You left me alone.”
“Some things are necessary,” the lady said. As soft as her voice was, it had the ring of steel. “Come now. The rest of the novices are waiting to meet you.”
Edith narrowed her eyes. “It’s you. You’re the mistress of novices.”
“Here,” said the lady, “I am Sister Cecilia, and you owe me obedience.”
“You’re not always here. Are you?”
“I am here while you need me,” Sister Cecilia said. “For many reasons, you need this place. You’ll learn those reasons as time passes. For now, study what you see; and remember. And cultivate obedience.”
“That is my weakest virtue,” Edith said.
Sister Cecilia looked as if she would have laughed, but even she did not dare do that here. “It’s a virtue to know oneself so well,” she said. She held out her hand. “Come.”
Edith decided to be obedient. She was still angry, but it was hard to keep a grip on her temper with the lady smiling at her.
She had one question left to ask, even while she let herself be led out of the dormitory. “Who are you really? Besides whatever you told me?”
“In time you’ll learn,” Sister Cecilia said. And that was
all she would say. She was like the folk of air: mysterious and rather wicked.
It was that wickedness which kept Edith from running away: that and the folk of air who followed her everywhere, even to chapel. It was not an unfamiliar life, in the end, with its daily round of offices and its constant duties and the long hours in the schoolroom learning to read Latin and write in a fair hand.
What was least familiar—and least bearable—was that the gates never opened for the novices. The walls were always there, the gates shut, the bonds of obedience compelling them all to live imprisoned.
Most of them did not seem to mind. They were quiet, milk-faced girls with a clear calling to this life, or else they knew no better. The few who did mind had learned to keep quiet about it. Edith could see it in their eyes, how they were trapped. But none of them had found a way to escape.
A few could see the folk of air. Some of the nuns could, too; and there was Sister Cecilia, who Edith was convinced did not belong there at all. She walked and talked like the others, prayed as they did, and her Latin was beautifully learned—and yet she made Edith think of a falcon shut in with a flock of ringdoves.
This was a Saxon abbey. Edith was half Saxon. In Scotland it was nothing terribly remarkable; people cared more that her ancestors had been kings.
In England it mattered a great deal. England meant Anglaland—Angle-land, land of the Angles and the Saxons. But years ago, before Edith was born, the Saxons had been defeated in a great battle. Foreigners ruled England now, invaders from Normandy, and the king was a Norman.
Edith had known all that before she left Scotland. She had known how much hate there was, and how much the Saxons yearned to be kings again. What she had not known was that the Normans let their worst enemies live together, shut in an abbey, too firmly locked in duty and sanctity to mount a rebellion.
There was Abbess Christina. There was Sister Gunnhild, whose father had been the last Saxon king; he had died in the battle at Santlache, and lost the kingdom for all of them. There had been another Edith, Edith the queen, who was the last king’s sister; but she lay in a tomb in the cloister.
Edith was not entirely sure that her namesake was dead. A few days after she came to the abbey, when she was ready to fling herself over the walls and into the river, Sister Cecilia sent her on an errand to the infirmary. She was to fetch a jar of salve for Aldith’s eyes.
Aldith was one of the younger novices, even younger than Edith, and she could almost see through the world. Maybe, once her eyes were better, she would be able to do it.
Edith had not been to the infirmary before, but she knew where it was. She had been studying as the lady advised her, and watching and listening. She found her way out of the schoolroom and through the whispering stillness of the chapel.
Beyond the chapel were the cloister and the tomb. There were others buried there, holy nuns sleeping under unmarked stones. Only the queen had the flat grey bulk of a tomb.
There was no effigy on it. That was somewhere else, the folk of air sang in Edith’s ear. Mortals thought her body lay in another place far away from here.
It was here. This was not Edith’s blood kin, not one of Alfred’s line, but she had married Edith’s great-great-uncle Edward. Her brother had been the last king before the Normans came. She had been royal twice over, and she had been something more.
The folk of air stayed well away from the tomb. It was as deadly to them as cold iron. Edith felt in it the same thing she had felt in her aunt and her mother. Where they were, the brightness in the heart of the world—the thing that her nurses called magic—shriveled and died.
It was very much stronger here, as if the body in the tomb had drawn great quantities of nothingness to itself. Edith could feel the bitterness in it, the long rankling of defeat. In her mother it was a fierce determination to rule again; in Christina it was a stone-cold sanctity. This was simpler as well as stronger. The name Edith found for it was hate.
She backed away, shuddering. She had to leave this place. She had to.
The sun beat down in the courtyard. The grass in it was fiercely green, flecked with yellow flowers, each as bright as a sun. The folk of air danced above it. The air sang with their glee.
The tomb was still there, heavy and dull. It tried to swallow the light, but it was not strong enough for that. It muddied the brightness directly above it, and no more.
Edith had slid through the veils of the world. She was in the Otherworld, the world that most humans were too blind to see.
And it was strong—stronger than it had ever been in Scotland. The power of the stone circle was here, spreading in waves through the earth and singing in the air. Edith had only been able to see this world sometimes. She had never walked in it before. And yet here she was, in both worlds at once.
She was almost afraid—but only almost. It was beautiful here. The sun was as sweet and strong as wine. She drank it when she breathed. It made her dizzy.
The folk of air were dancing around her, wild with excitement. There were greater beings nearby, but they did not make themselves visible to her. She could feel them as she felt the ring of stones, deep inside her.
They wanted her here. They had something for her to do—not right away, maybe not soon at all, but someday. Meanwhile she was to wait and study, and learn all she could. Then when the day came, she would be ready.
Slowly the brightness faded. The sun was ordinary, the grass plain mortal green again. Edith blinked, trying to make herself see the Otherworld, but it was gone.
It would come back. For now she had an errand, and Sister Cecilia was waiting. That was part of what she had come to learn: obedience, and patience.
She sighed, because after all she was very young, but she drew herself up and stiffened her back, and went where she was bidden.
CHAPTER 3
The old bastard was dying.
He lay like a bloated spider, half crushed and stinking, while his scattered realms shook themselves apart. No one pretended to grieve. He hated pretense, and he had never indulged in illusions, even when they would have made his life easier.
Ease had never been old William’s vice. He had been sacking a city when the hand of God struck him: hurdling one of the earthworks thrown up against him, overbalancing his war-horse with his burgeoning bulk and catching himself against the high pommel of his saddle. His belly was crushed; the pain, for all that he would not speak of it, was brutal. He was rotting from the inside out.
It was a hideous death, and slow. He had lain for a month now outside of Rouen, in the hushed stillness of St. Gervais’ priory. He was still lucid more often than not, although his memory tended to wander. Sometimes he spoke to people who were not there: old friends, old enemies, and above all his queen, his Mathilda, who had gone into the dark before him.
But then, thought Henry, maybe they were there—especially Mathilda. If anyone would come back from the dead to help her husband over the threshold, it would be she.
In the nights, when even the monks were asleep, Henry almost could see them himself. He had the gift and the eye, but not, in the end, the will.
The grief of his mother’s death was still sharp, even after the passage of years. Now that his father was dying, too, he found that he wanted to see the world as simple men saw it. It was more bearable somehow, although his heart persisted in calling it cowardice.
That night, a month and more after the king’s fall, Henry sensed a change. It was subtle; he almost thought that he had imagined it. The shadows were darker. The light was brighter. And his father looked, not transparent, no, but somehow less solidly there than he had before.
He was letting go. That was a mercy.
“If he’d been a horse or a hound, we’d have put him out of his misery weeks ago.”
Henry had felt his brother come in. Young William, Red William, had no magic to speak of, but his presence sent a shiver along the edges of Henry’s awareness.
William came to stand by the bed, breathing sh
allowly. His wonted high color had gone faintly green. “How long now? Can you tell?”
“He can hear you, you know,” Henry said.
William’s jaw tightened under the curling copper-colored beard. The rest of his hair was more gold than red, but the hair of his face was almost defiantly bright. He bent as close as he could bear, eyes narrowed, peering at the distorted mass of the once familiar features.
Henry saw the gleam beneath the eyelid, but even with the warning, he did not expect his father’s hand to rise as swiftly as it did. It caught hold of William’s shirt and fisted in it.
“You,” the king said. His voice was thick, wheezing with effort. “Get out. Now. Get to England. Take the treasury. Get yourself crowned before the other can move.”
“But,” William began. “I’m not—you’re not—”
“By the time you get there,” the king said, “I’ll be dead. Go!”
As faint as the word was, it carried such a weight of command that Henry found himself on his feet. William reeled back as his father let him go. His face was the color of cheese. He turned abruptly, with none of his usual honed grace, and ran stumbling out the door.
The room seemed empty without him. But there was still a presence in it, awake and aware.
Henry met the cool grey eyes in the ruined face. People said Henry had the same eyes, if not the same face. In that, he tended to favor his mother.
“So,” he said. “William gets England. Robert gets Normandy. What’s left for me?”
“Treasure,” the king said. “And patience.”
“No land? What’s a lord without land?”
“Patience,” the old bastard said. “You’ve got the sight. You’ll get more than either of them in the end.”
“Do you know,” Henry said, quite calmly when all was considered, “I think I hate you.”
There was no telling what expression that face wore, but Henry could feel the laughter behind it. “Yes,” his father said. The tide of pain was rising again, squeezing the life out of his voice. “Of all my get, you’re the most like her.”
