by Judith Tarr
By the time she was done, she was as calm as she could expect to be. Her first, childish impulse, to run crying through the dun, was gone. The messenger from the south would come soon enough. Until then, let Malcolm’s people live without grief.
It was a fine resolve, and she was strong enough to keep it, too. She could feel her heart turning to steel. She was not a child any longer. She was going to learn how to use what she had, and how to make herself stronger.
The queen lay exactly as she had been before, hovering between life and death. Her priests had debated fiercely whether to give her the Last Rites. That would come soon, Edith thought.
There was no room in her for any more grief. She could be cold and dispassionate as she gave the vial to her mother’s physician and went to stand by the bed, looking down on that wasted figure as the Horned King had looked down on her.
Had he felt powerful? Edith did not. She felt nothing.
She knelt beside the bed. Queen Margaret lay very still, but her breast rose and fell. Edith laid a hand on her forehead. It was cool. The life in her had retreated to her center.
Not long now, Edith thought dispassionately. She drew back for a moment as the physician dosed her mother from the vial. The queen struggled faintly, but her strength was nearly gone. When she lay still again, Edith returned to her side.
People came and went: priests and nuns mostly. Sometimes a man, uncomfortable in that thick, close air, came to assure himself that the queen was still alive. One or two of those were her brothers—strangers to her when she was small, and no more familiar now. She had to search her memory for their names.
She doubted that they were any more familiar with hers. They hardly seemed to see her: yet another female in black, hovering over their mother.
One of them must be king now, since Edward was dead, too. It little mattered to Edith which of them it was. She was growing out of Scotland, or Scotland had grown out of her.
Night fell as she knelt there. She hardly felt her body. Someone brought food that she ate and a cup of something that she drank. She was the only one who stayed so long. The rest took watches like guards.
In the deep night, when life even in the young and hale burned low, Edith started awake. She had not been asleep, exactly, but she had been dreaming: a dream that fled as consciousness recovered itself.
The queen’s eyes were open. In lamplight they were dark, already fixed far beyond the world. But they saw Edith; they knew her face.
The cold gaunt hands gripped hers. Flesh covered them still, but she could not help but think of the Huntsman’s skeletal fingers, and the terrible power that was in them.
He had never touched her. The queen held her fast. The black eyes bound her. The voice was a whisper, but it filled her skull. “I must go. My Lord, my beloved—He calls me home. But you I bequeath to England. You will restore it as I could not. I sinned—I loved a mortal man. You will turn from that path.”
“But—” Edith began.
“I see,” her mother said. “I know. . . . You are more even than I hoped. You must go back; take vows. Give yourself to God.”
Edith bit her tongue. What she did not say, she could not be forced to unsay.
The queen’s grip tightened, grinding bone on bone. Edith hissed with pain. “Your father will try to force you into sin, as he forced me. Resist him.”
“My father is dead,” Edith said.
The pain did not stop. The queen had gone so still that but for her burning eyes and her agonizing grip, Edith might have thought that she was dead.
“He died yesterday,” Edith said, “in an ambush. Edward died before him. Your sin and your hope are dead. You will be gone by morning. Will you let me go, or must you break my hands?”
The queen barely heard the last of it. “Dead? Malcolm is dead?”
Edith set her teeth. She was not going to say it again.
Nor did she need to. Margaret was breathing hard. “He cannot be dead. He was to live. He was not to—”
“You should be pleased,” Edith said. She did not know that she meant to be cruel, but the truth was not often kind. “A Norman spear killed him. The Old Things took him. Now he rides with them, because he thinks they can give him revenge on the Norman king. But all they can give is damnation.”
The queen’s eyes flicked from Edith’s face to God knew what, back and forth. “I prayed,” she said, “for him to see—to understand—and turn away from the Normans. And he did. But he was supposed to live. It was the Norman king who should have died.”
“Didn’t you teach me,” said Edith, “that prayer is a dangerous weapon? ‘Be careful what you pray for. You might get it.’”
“I did not pray for this,” the queen said, fierce even in her dying. “God would not be so cruel. This was the Normans’ doing, they and the devils who serve them, and on their king’s head be it. He will pay. Oh yes. He will pay with blood and soul, to all eternity.”
Edith could not move to avert the curse. She could not honestly have said that she wanted to. It was William’s fault in the end, and William’s failure, that her father was dead. Let him pay as God and the gods willed.
She was almost content with that, until her mother’s eyes fixed on her face. “Daughter,” the queen said, “you are our legacy. Through you shall this be fulfilled. Take what I have to give; cherish it. Destroy the reivers who seized our kingdom.”
Edith should have warded herself while she could. It was too late now. Greyness swirled about her. Death of magic, destruction of all that was not Christian and Saxon; deep hate and longing for vengeance overwhelmed and all but drowned her.
Her mother’s life, all that was left of it, was pouring into her. She was everyone’s vessel: her father, her mother, her aunt, the Church, her blood and lineage, the as yet unknown king whose sons she was meant to bear—yes, even her magic and all the powers that either depended or preyed on it. There was nothing anywhere for her, for her soul and self.
She dug in her heels. The greyness shrank. She wrenched free of her mother’s grip, not trying to be gentle. Gentleness would destroy her. Her hands ached and throbbed.
“I will do what I am destined to do,” she said, “but I will do it in my own way and in my own time. Your time is done. Be glad; go to your God with a soul that has only and always done what you believed was His will. Maybe you can intercede for Father, and save him.”
The queen’s eyes were all but empty. Edith wondered if she had heard a word of it.
It did not matter. The spell was broken. Queen Margaret was near to death, sinking low with the last of the night. When the sun rose, she would be gone.
And so would Edith. She had come to the moment when truly she must choose: whether to go on being everyone’s instrument, or to make her own mark on the world.
It would have been terribly easy to turn coward, to give up and let it all roll over her. She would stop resisting after a while, even by instinct. She could recite the prayers by rote, take her vows under compulsion, shrivel away into a simple weapon for someone stronger and surer and much wiser to take up and wield.
Perfect submission: the purest of Christian virtues. Utter meekness, that would inherit the earth. She had only to surrender.
The greyness was there, waiting. Whatever part of it had been her mother was gone, slipped away while she maundered. If she opened herself, it would fill her, and she would be all that her mother had been—and more, because she had magic, and the power of the Gael. She could transform not only this earth but the Otherworld, too.
She was more than her mother or her aunt had ever dreamed of being. Even her terrible namesake, Queen Edith, whose presence drained the earth of its strength, had not been what she could be.
She turned her back on it. She gathered what belongings she had—so few they fit into a small purse—and raided the kitchen for a loaf of barley bannock and a wedge of cheese. In the dark before dawn, she set out on the southward road.
CHAPTER 31
&n
bsp; Edith walked alone until she was well away from Edinburgh. The sun came up; she turned off the road, making her way across the open hills. She was aiming for the place of stones.
It was not an altogether mad thing to do. She knew this country. If what she had in mind turned out to be hopeless, there was always the mortal road. She could make her way from monastery to monastery, as pilgrims did. This was a pilgrimage after all, though none that the Church would acknowledge.
Deep inside her was a great emptiness, far emptier than these stark hills. Her father and her mother had been there, alive and in the world. Now they were both gone: one to a fate quite literally worse than death, the other securely and blessedly dead.
She set that aside to grieve over later. For this moment she had to be focused. The greyness was still haunting her; she had to be rid of it, or it would taint everything she touched.
The fallen barrow had a guardian. The puca sat on the edge of it, wearing his cat-shape. He had been gone for long enough that she had thought he was driven away. But he seemed as insouciant as she remembered, springing down from his rock to coil mewing about her ankles.
That was approval. It warmed her heart a little.
Someone or something else was waiting in the green bowl. It seemed as if it had grown in the earth until it moved, rising: a figure in a hooded mantle the same color as the stones. Something in the way it carried itself told Edith that it was female.
The face in the hood was smooth and ivory-pale and of no age in particular. Edith would have said it was young, but something about it made her think of the Old Things: unimaginably old. Yet it was human, and presumably mortal.
When the lady spoke, Edith knew her. She had been with Cecilia when Edith taxed herself to her limits. She had promised something. Edith could not remember what.
“Good morning,” the lady said. A very ordinary greeting, in a pleasant but distinctly mortal voice. “You come in good time.”
Edith’s brows went up. “Were you waiting for me?”
The lady smiled. “My name is Etaine,” she said—not an answer, but not a refusal of one, either.
“Edith,” said Edith, bowing slightly. “I think . . . I may have been looking for you.”
The smile deepened. “You may,” Etaine conceded.
“I heard you,” Edith said. “Talking to Sister Cecilia. Making promises—about me. Should I be sure I want to know you?”
Etaine laughed. It was much brighter laughter than the Horned King’s. Edith did not find it particularly comforting, but it did not make her skin creep. “You will have to make your own decision about that,” Etaine said, still laughing. “Come, are you hungry? I have honey mead and apples, and there’s water from the spring.”
“I have bread,” Edith said a little slowly, “and cheese.”
Etaine’s eyes danced. “A feast! Shall we dine?”
Whatever Edith had expected, it was not this. They sat on the grass and shared their provisions. Etaine’s were clearly of earth, as she was, but also like her, they had an air of something altogether different. The apples were gloriously sweet, and the mead tasted of sunlight and flowers.
Edith’s bread and cheese were terribly ordinary beside them, but there was something to be said for ordinariness, too. There was strength in it, and nourishment. It satisfied hunger admirably.
When they had eaten their fill, the sun was visibly higher, transcribing its low arc across the threshold of winter. And yet in the hollow the air was warm and sweet, the grass as green as in summer. They were not in the Otherworld, not quite, but neither were they precisely in the world of grey and grief.
The puca had shared a bit of Edith’s cheese, then drunk from the spring. Edith knew well what that water could do: she watched him swell and arch and gleam, and gain back the brightness that the queen’s presence had leached out of him.
She moved on impulse to follow his example. Almost she thought Etaine might stop her, but the lady watched without a word. She bent over the water, and paused.
At first glance she thought it was her own reflection there. But that should have been a narrow oval face and a long fair braid and wide-set blue eyes. This was a man: Cecilia’s grey-eyed brother whom she had seen so often before.
She could not tell where he was. He was simply there, in the water. He looked up as if he had heard or seen something, directly into her eyes.
She could almost have sworn that he saw her. His eyes widened, then narrowed slightly. Suddenly he smiled.
That smile transformed him. Without it he was pleasant enough to look at, not handsome particularly, but what the servants would call a comely man. With it, he made her breath catch. It lit his whole face, and made him—yes—beautiful.
She had never seen a smile like that before. It made her want to touch him. But of course, as soon as her hand touched the water, the vision rippled and shattered. She looked into her own face, wide-eyed and startled, and the tumble of stones on the bottom of the pool.
She tried to bring him back, but he was gone. She sighed with regret and filled her cupped hands with water so cold it numbed her fingers, and sipped slowly.
Somewhere in the middle of that, she knew a stab of fear. One did not eat or drink in the Otherworld—that she had known since she was small. But here between the worlds, what would the cost be?
Whatever it was, she thought, it was worth this: brightness, calmness, strength. And if the man in the vision had helped with that, so much the better. What her mother had taken from her, this at least in part restored.
She laved her face, gasping with the cold, but it invigorated her wonderfully. Then she turned.
Etaine was on her feet, the remnants of their breakfast hidden away, and the puca sitting upright on her shoulder. “It’s time,” she said.
Edith had a fleeting thought of asking Etaine why Henry FitzWilliam kept appearing in her visions. But she had a long habit of silence and ingrained mistrust. She found she could not break it now.
She nodded instead, not sure at all what she was agreeing to. Maybe something terrible, but she trusted the puca, and the puca was purring raucously.
Etaine nodded as if Edith had spoken aloud, and said, “Come.”
Then she walked into the hill.
Edith stood flat-footed. The barrow was still fallen, the ground green and hollow, and stones scattered in the grass. And yet there was a door that should have been flat on the ground, but was upright as it must have been while the barrow stood. On the other side of it was a shimmer that Edith knew very well: the light of the Otherworld casting a reflection on mortal earth.
She was less glad of that than she might have been, after the things she had seen: blighted land, corrupted Hunt. But the light seemed as bright as ever, clean and pure. She took a deep breath and stepped through the door.
She almost leaped back out again—but the door was shut. There was only more of the Otherworld behind her.
Ahead of her was a great crowd of people. They were all Old Things, high and terrible, dancing to the tune of pipes and drums. It was a weird and potent music, shivering in the skin and throbbing in the blood.
She had never been so close to it before. Always when she was in the Otherworld, she had seen it from far away, or hidden in hedges or along the edges of thickets, peering out at the Old Ones in their revels.
Etaine led her straight through them. The lady was almost as light on her feet as they were, and she seemed unperturbed to find herself there.
They gave way before her. Edith told herself they were simply eluding the passage of a solid and mortal body, but it was clear soon enough that they knew the lady. They were bowing as they dipped and whirled and spun away, bending low before her: Great Old Ones paying homage to a mortal woman.
Edith began to think that she was a fool and a child. Then she stumbled in confusion, because the Old Ones swayed like grass in the wind, bowing to her as well as her guide. She could find no mockery in it.
“It is a great thing,
” Etaine said in her ear, “to be one of earth’s children.”
“It’s more than that,” Edith said.
“Maybe,” said Etaine. She was not a person who liked to answer questions, Edith thought.
Or else she only answered them in their proper time. That would be a fine thing, if somewhat exasperating.
They came through the dance to a green level, with the shadow of a wood beyond. It was green shade, living shade: no greyness or creeping blight that Edith could see or sense. Folk of air were thick in and above it.
The pipes skirled in the dance. Edith almost turned back and vanished into it. But Etaine said, “Come.”
It was not that Edith was obedient. It was that she knew better than to let the dance ensnare her. Wherever Etaine was leading her, with the puca still upright on her shoulder, was safer for Edith’s soul than this beautiful and treacherous place.
The wood was not as deep as it had seemed from the edge of the dance. The trees were tall and the growth beneath them low and thin, ferns and creeping vines that fed on dappled light. Folk of air shimmered through the trunks and danced on the ground.
There was no track that Edith could see, but Etaine walked unerringly, as straight as she had since she entered this country. She seemed utterly at ease. This might have been her own garden for all the wariness Edith could sense in her.
The wood thinned to a long roll of downs and a green marshy country. Light glowed on the horizon. A sea, Edith thought, or a broad lake.
Her nostrils twitched. She smelled no salt, but of wet and richness there was enough.
Lake, then. And beyond it the steep loom of a tor. A tower rose there, high over the lake.
Edith sucked in a breath. She had heard legends of such a place. “Is this . . . ?” she asked, too faintly maybe to be heard.
Etaine’s ears were keen. She smiled over her shoulder. “Yes,” she said.
