by Judith Tarr
“Hush,” Sister Cecilia said. “Be calm. Focus. Breathe.”
Her voice eased Edith’s confusion. Edith did as she bade, trying a little too hard, maybe, but not so hard that she failed altogether. After a while she could speak more or less coherently. “I need help,” she said.
Sister Cecilia raised a brow. “Do you?”
“I don’t know anything,” Edith said. “I don’t know what to do, or how, or where or when or anything else that I can think of.”
“You know more than you know,” said Sister Cecilia. “Be patient. Sit still and wait. When the time comes, you’ll know.”
“But how—”
“Patience,” Sister Cecilia said.
Edith raised her hand as if to strike the water, but Cecilia had vanished. Edith felt no better than before. In some ways she felt worse.
No one was going to help her or teach her or show her the way out of this trap she had thrown herself into. She had no one to rely on but herself.
She moved to cast the water away, but some wild impulse made her drink it instead: raising the bowl to her lips and draining it in long gulps. The water was cold and clean, with a faint taste of silver. It met the magic in her and melded with it.
She was no wiser for it, and certainly no more patient. She dried the bowl and wrapped it in the napkin and thrust it into her saddlebag.
The pony snorted rebuke. Her temper was not his fault.
She was too deep in it to be contrite. She flung herself into the saddle and wheeled the pony about, clapping heels to its sides. He grunted, squealed, and bucked her into a clump of bracken.
She lay winded, too busy struggling for breath to feed any more of her temper. The pony had been kind. He had not thrown her into the rocks—though maybe she had deserved it.
Slowly, still wheezing a little, she got her feet underneath her and pushed herself erect. The fall had shaken the wickedness out of her. Though her eyes were blurred with dizziness, her mind was clearer than it had been in a long while.
It was not thinking of much but getting back on the pony—more politely this time—and riding back to Edinburgh. Maybe that was patience: this clarity, this emptiness waiting to be filled.
Before, she had been waiting because she knew no better. Now she knew that something was coming. What it was, how it would come, she could not see. But Cecilia had said it: she would know.
CHAPTER 28
The Day of the Dead passed in careful Christian observance. No one within reach of Queen Margaret, however near she might be to death, dared mention that great pagan rite and festival.
Edith stayed in the mortal world despite powerful temptation to go wandering elsewhere. It was not her mother she was afraid of. Something felt wrong. Even the desire in her to walk between worlds seemed to have come not from her heart but from outside. That made her more than wary. She was almost afraid.
She lay in bed that night, doubly and trebly warded, with the puca warm against her side. It was a wild night, full of wind and storm, and with the sun’s setting, rain had turned to sleet and then to snow. The Night Office was already sung, deepening the greyness that had sunk through the castle’s walls into the earth below. Any magical thing that passed it withered and died.
Tonight, that was not the sorrow it would have been at any other time. What rode the wind was deadly. Even through walls and wards and three heavy blankets, Edith could hear the baying of hounds and the eerie cry of horns.
She hoped her father was safe, raiding away in England. Letters had come in from him only that morning, most meant for his clerks and the commander of his guard, but there had been one for Edith. It was a hasty scribble, with nothing much to say but that he kept her in his heart.
She had laid it under her pillow, a silly, sentimental thing to do, but she made no apologies to herself or anyone else. An answer would go back to him tomorrow, written in her careful scholarly hand, saying as little as his and meaning as much. She had laid a blessing on it, a prayer for his safe return home.
The wind was howling. Sometimes there were words in it, but none of them had anything to do with comfort. They were hungry words, words that yearned after blood and souls.
She slid into an uneasy sleep. Dreams stalked the edges. She kept seeing her father, and the English king, and her mother—or maybe it was Abbess Christina—prostrate before an altar. Then the dark shape shifted and took wing, flying through a tumbled heaven: an army of skeletal horses bearing shrouded riders, in the wake of skeletal hounds.
They were hunting mortal blood. High blood, royal blood. Their thirst was for kings and princes. The earth cried out to them, begging for a share in their quarry.
King’s blood could heal this earth, bring back the magic, put the greyness to flight. England’s king refused to rule as the Old Things believed he should. But there were other kings in Britain.
Edith tossed in her sleep. She had king’s blood, too, though she could never be a king. So did her mother, and her aunt in England. The Hunt bayed outside her window. It could smell her; it lusted after her.
Her wards held. They strained; they tattered in places. But they were strong enough—just—to keep the Hunt away.
Her spirit reached out across the dark land, through the wind and the storm, to a camp in a storm-tossed wood. The tents rocked and swayed, but like her wards, somehow they held. Dark shapes huddled under trees: the horses, heads down and backs to the wind.
She could feel her father in the middle of the tents, a surge of warmth in her heart. The Hunt had not found him yet. The earth was quiet beneath him.
She should have left him to his safety. But she had seen the Hunt; her heart was cold with terror of it. She did the only thing she knew to do, which was to try to set wards on him.
It was one thing to set them while she was in the body, with the puca to give her the words and the ritual. Bodiless in a dream, she had words and magic, but no more. There need not be more—she knew that in the core of her magic—but what to do, how to do it, that was a quandary.
Magic, in dream, had substance; it glowed like mist in moonlight. Tendrils curled about her father’s tent, shaping the elements of the wards. It was reassuring to see that they were set properly—for a little while.
Not only Edith could see what she had done. The heavens had eyes, and the earth had bones to sense the shifting of powers above it. The Hunt wheeled, following the track of fresh and delectable magic—and finding the scent of royal blood.
Edith spun in her dream, now impelled to shut down the wards that had so betrayed her, now reeling back before she destroyed her father’s only useful protection. She had made a terrible mistake—and it did no good to tell herself it was only a dream. It was real. On the boundary between waking and sleep, she heard the muting of the wind. It was still blowing hard enough to rock the towers, but the eerie howling was gone.
She had banished it from Edinburgh—but sent it straight to her father. She woke sitting bolt upright, her back rigid, hand outstretched as if to pull herself back into the dream.
But it was gone. Nothing that she did could bring it back. Nor was the puca there to help her. He had vanished.
She had no doubt that her stupidity had put him to flight. The one bit of magic she knew had turned on her. She could think of nothing else to do but get up, dress as warmly as she could and venture her last resort.
It was very late, and the chapel was dark. The vigil lamp had burned low. The air was perfectly still, and seemed colder even than it should. Greyness suffused it.
Edith drew a deep breath. This might make matters even worse. But she could not think of anything else to try. She clasped her hands and stilled her mind.
The prayers and psalms that came to her were in Latin and the beautiful lilt of Greek. She was very careful to keep her mind away from Saxon. The words poured through her, taking shapes as notes of music: pure clarity of chant rising to heaven, up and up to the limits of her strong young voice.
The wal
ls caught it and sent it echoing back. The chapel rang like a bell. Edith’s body resonated with it.
She had sung her heart out and exhausted her voice, until even her silence poured upward to Whoever was there to listen—God, old gods, she hardly knew. She crumpled onto her face and lay there, perfectly empty. There was nothing left in her—not even enough to know whether she had succeeded in what she tried to do. She had given it all away.
Edith opened her eyes on daylight. She lay in her bed, and the sun was well up: it streamed through the window. She had no memory of coming here—unless she had never left at all.
If it had been a dream, then it had left her remarkably spent and ill. When she tried to get up, dizziness sent her reeling back down again.
The maid who had been looking after her, whose name was Myrna, was outside the door. Edith could hear the girl chattering to another of the servants, greatly excited about something.
With dizziness came an unnatural clarity of hearing. The words rang in Edith’s skull. “Oh, yes! Angels, for a fact—they sang in the chapel all night long.”
“Did you see them?” the other girl asked. She sounded skeptical and rather bored.
“I was asleep,” Myrna said regretfully, “but my brother Dougal, who works in the kitchen—he was up to bake the bread, and he heard them. The chapel was full of light, he said, and wings and eyes and voices—he never heard such singing. It sent him a little mad, I think.”
“Oh,” the other girl said. “Well. That one was addled long before this.”
There was a sharp sound like a slap. “Don’t you speak so of my brother! Dougal sees a little differently than most, I’ll grant you that, but this he did see. I saw the light in his eyes.”
“Angels in the chapel,” the other servant said, with a shrug in her voice. “Where else would you expect to find them?”
“Angels are everywhere,” Myrna said, “and you are a fool, and if you don’t stop lagging about and bring my lady her breakfast, I’ll see you thrashed right good and proper.”
Even as sapped of magic as Edith was, she could feel the other girl’s indignation, and hear her loud sniff and the thud of her feet as she flung open the door and stamped into the room. She was young and very sulky, and she dropped her armful of plates and bowls onto the table from a palm’s height above it. They crashed down with what must have been utterly gratifying emphasis.
The noise bade fair to split Edith’s skull. She buried her face in the pillow and tried to stuff it into her ears.
Even through that, she could hear Myrna knocking the idiot girl down and laying her out with ferocious—and sickeningly loud—words. None of them made any sense. Edith was not well at all. In fact, as far as she could shape the thought, she was very, very ill.
And very, very foolish. That was the last thought in her head before she sank into greyness.
“Foolish child.” The voice was Sister Cecilia’s, but the place in which Edith lay was too bright and beautiful to be mortal. It seemed to be a bower in a wood, under an arbor of roses.
Roses. There was something—Edith should remember—
She was outside of memory. The people who bent over her were not human, except Sister Cecilia—no nun here; her gown was white and shimmering and clung to her body—and one other, likewise in white, whose eyes on Edith were deep and quiet.
The rest were the oldest of Old Things, the great ones, tall and fair. They were all women, or creatures like women. “Folly is every mortal’s way,” said the tallest of them, whose hair was like a fall of silver, and whose face was almost too beautiful to bear. “Yours no less than hers, child of men.”
Cecilia bent her head, but she was not cowed. Not even close. “You know better than I what will be. I did what I had to do.”
“That may be,” the great Lady said. “Now you may lose her before she fulfills her destiny.”
“We won’t lose her.” Cecilia said it softly, but the edge of it was fierce. “Help us!”
That was imperious, and impossibly impertinent. But the Lady chose not to take offense. “Once and once only,” she said, “will I give this gift. Have a care you do not squander it.”
Cecilia held out her hand. It was very easy just then to remember that she was a king’s daughter.
But the Lady stood above any mortal king. She passed by that outstretched hand to rest her palm on Edith’s forehead.
The touch was warm and cold at once, calming and troubling, comforting and deeply disturbing. “You will be what you will be,” the Lady said. “First patience. Then endurance. At last, perseverance. Then destiny will hold you in its hand.”
Edith did not know what that meant at all. But she would. That was the Lady’s promise, sunk deep in the silence beneath the words.
Patience she had had. Now she must endure—what?
“Patience,” the Lady said. If she had been mortal, Edith would have said that she smiled. She drew back, taking both warmth and terror with her.
The light whirled away, and the vision with it. The last of it lingered in an exchange of voices. One was Cecilia’s. The other was a stranger’s, but something about it was incontestably mortal.
“I will take her,” the stranger said.
“Are you certain?” Cecilia asked. “After this, the gods know what will happen.”
“I have faith,” the stranger said. Like the Lady, she seemed more amused than not. “The child needs teaching. Who better to instruct her?”
“No one,” Cecilia conceded. “But—”
“You have troubles enough,” the stranger said. “Go, attend to them. I’ll keep watch. When the time comes, I’ll do what is necessary.”
“As you will,” said Cecilia. She sounded reluctant, but not so much that she would keep resisting.
Edith stored that exchange away in her memory, keeping it there until, like the Lady’s words, it should begin to make sense. She lay for a while then in her own body and her own bed, until the world was steady around her, and she could trust herself to open her eyes.
She felt like herself again. Her body was strong. Her magic was safe in its place. Her wards were even stronger than she remembered.
She had been given more than restoration of strength. Her magic was more solid somehow. At the same time it was more supple. She could lift it like a hand and make a light in the dark room, and open the window on wind and starlight. But it would not let her see where her father was, or if he was safe.
That was part of the burden that was laid on her: to be patient and endure. She had not been given a choice.
Someday, she vowed to herself, there would be choices. Someday soon. She was not a child any longer. When she was fully a woman, she would act as she judged best—and nothing, mortal or otherwise, would stop her.
CHAPTER 29
King Malcolm had been feeling strange since the eve of All Hallows. That was an unchancy night in any age or place, but as he lay in his tent, struggling to sleep, he had thought he heard the Wild Hunt in full cry above him.
It had not touched the camp or taken anything from it, man or beast, but the raiding that until then had been almost care-free had gained a wild edge. The blood they shed was redder, and their weapons thirstier for it. The earth drank it greedily, but gave nothing back.
“There’s a haunting on us,” said Connall. He had been Malcolm’s squire years ago and still looked after the king’s weapons when it suited him. It had, lately—he had demoted Malcolm’s squires to cleaning armor and tending horses, and taken the royal armory into his personal charge.
Connall was of the old blood—so old that people whispered he was part fey. He was small and wiry and dark, with quick eyes and quicker hands. No one could catch a fish in a running burn faster than Connall, with only his hands and the light of his eye. That eye could see farther through a stone than most, and make good sense of what was on the other side.
Today, the day after Martinmas, they had taken a little cesspit of a castle outside a market town. Th
e market had retreated before a torrent of rain, but the castle was surprisingly well provisioned. Malcolm’s men had found ways to warm its drafty keep, mostly having to do with tanned hides on the floor, bolts of wool fashioned into makeshift tapestries, and a decent supply of firewood.
The garrison that had supposedly been left to defend the place had buckled easily once the Scots overran the town. Malcolm had stripped them of horses and arms and let them go. They were on the road to Newcastle the last anyone saw, trudging glumly in the rain.
Connall’s commentary on the supernatural came in the midst of a council. To stay in the castle and hold it, or go on raiding along the river—that was the decision Malcolm had to make. He was inclined toward the raid, but too many of his captains found the lure of warmth and walls too tempting to resist.
Connall was not helping it. “Haunted?” said Rhodry, who was superstitious at the best of times. “What do you mean, haunted?”
Connall shrugged. “We’ve had company since All Hallows. Things watching us. Other things hunting our trail. We’re not raiding alone.”
Rhodry shuddered and crossed himself. Dougal the Huntsman, who happened to be his brother, cuffed him until he reeled. “Idiot! Stop your quaking. It’s no more than Norman spies sniffing our arses. I’m for leaving a garrison here and storing our loot, and seeing what else there is to raid.”
Now that, thought Malcolm, was what he wanted to hear. But Rhodry was no coward when it came to facing down his brother, whatever else he might be afraid of. “If there is something out there,” he said hotly, “whether it’s a mortal ambush or the Wild Hunt its very self, then I say we stay here where the walls are more or less solid and we can hold off whatever it is.”
Dougal snorted. “What, be caught in a siege with winter coming on and barely enough provisions for a week? If you have to die, wouldn’t you rather do it fast than slow?”
“I’d rather not die at all,” muttered Rhodry.
