“Like the berserkers, Mistress? You said the Northmen kings used them; how could they control them?”
Molly took a deep draft of the mug, then picked up her spindle.
“It is my thought that those cruel Norther sea-kings used them as another of their weapons, with the priests of Odin to control them, though they are a weapon that can turn in the hand: sometimes they fall to killing friend as well as foe, and I believe they were not well trusted.”
Molly attached a leader thread to the spindle, a stick with a wooden disk attached to the bottom for weight, then attached the leader to a bit of wool that she teased from the roving, the batch of unspun wool. She took another sip from the mug, and then rolled the spindle along the swell of her thigh, imparting a spin to the leader thread. Then she held the spindle up, the spin reversing as the weight hung free, imparting a spin to the carded wool, hooking the fibers into a thin strong thread.
“Or else the sickness was in among them, and it being brought on by the fury of battle. There are those that can control it somewhat, but mostly when it comes on them, it comes, and there’s nothing they can do: they must have their blood, their meat. It’s more often at night, and more often in moonlight, but by no means always. One skilled in the Art can control them, to some extent, someone like Vytautas.”
“Or like yourself, Mistress?”
She did not say anything for a moment; she concentrated on drafting out another piece of wool from the batch of roving, her dexterous fingers moving speedily, albeit with care. At last: “Like myself. And that is not to be spoken of outside this family.”
A bit later Molly sent him to the stone basin to draw a pitcher of water. While the chill water was burbling from the wall, Hob suddenly thought back on her words: he heard her again saying “this family.” He considered this as he waited for the vessel to fill. In a little while he began to hum softly to himself.
BACK IN THE SOLAR, Hob sat again to listen. The pitcher of water stood beside Jack’s bedside; the fire crackled, so hot that one side of Hob’s face was uncomfortable and he kept shifting to ease it. The firelight played about Molly’s face; her hands, strong and deft, flashed in and out of shadow as she spun the whirling spindle and teased wool from the batch. After a while she spoke again.
“I think that Lady Svajone could control herself while in the monastery: she was just after killing and eating before they stopped there. That poor monk. Brother . . . Brother . . . Athanasius, Brother Athanasius. And further, I think she was of no mind to have any doings with us, or rather I think Vytautas would have advised against us, against Nemain and myself. He cast a glamour on us the moment he sat down at that table, that we would not perceive her for what she was, nor he for a wizard. Nor I nor Nemain expecting it, not in the midst of the monastery; and we sitting there like lambs, all unawares. Once it has taken hold, well, isn’t all our judgment flawed from that very moment on. But still, caution would have advised him not to trifle with us.”
She paused; the wool had separated from the thread. She cursed in Irish, softly; then she pulled up a bit more wool from the batch in the basket, reattached it to the line on the spindle, resumed spinning. Hob watched, partly entranced from the repetitive motion.
“He would have been wary: he would have regarded the monastery as a kind of trap, and all those warrior monks, and we with them.”
“But, Mistress, the castle is also a kind of trap, and all those knights and men-at-arms, and you with them.”
“Aye, but by then she was desperate, and the storm growing—they could not leave in that, even they would die of the snow and the cold—and the hunger growing in her, and the moon strong. She had to change, and they had to hope for the best.”
The spindle whirled, sank; she twirled it again against the curve of her thigh; then let it hang again. Thread built up in a coil about the spindle. The fire spat, crackled; golden ash fled up the flue.
“Here is how I’m seeing it: they passed the inn, wanting to be away from us, and crossed the Dawlish, and headed south, and the bandits did not encounter them. Then they found the way sealed, where the land had slid down from the mountain, and she being able to wait no longer, she slew the masons. She would have sworn blood oaths against harming her Lietuvan grooms and servants, they being her countrymen, and her needing them in any case; and of course that vile doctor and those two blond lapdogs were the three of them her paramours.”
“All three, Mistress?” To Hob’s dismay, his treasonous new voice broke into a squeak on the second word. He still had enough of Father Athelstan’s influence left in him to be genuinely shocked. “But how could you tell?”
“I could tell, I could tell. Once you broke Vytautas’s hold upon my vision, I could tell, by the memory of the way they moved around her. And I could smell them all on her corpse; I could smell her on Vytautas and the others, dead though they were.”
“Smell!” blurted Hob, staring.
“Can a crow smell a corpse half a league away? You would be surprised at the senses the Crow Mother grants me, when She wills it.”
Hob gave a kind of mental shrug, exhausted by wonder piled upon wonder. There was no question of doubting Molly. He was silent, and after a bit she resumed.
“Now she is sated for the moment, feeding on the masons in the woods, away there by that great slide, but her time is waxing, it will be days before it wanes, and she comes back to the inn. Osbert’s Inn has a kind of fame. It is isolated, the villagers retire in the evening, there is human meat confined in a kind of pen, and she and her people can be away again before morning. Also there is Osbert’s storehouse. That was a great riddle to me, that some Beast or berserker had slain all within, and yet would be human enough and cunning enough to seek gold for its purse, for they are ever confused and helpless when they change back: their minds are still somewhat the same as a Beast’s for a while, and an animal does not understand treasure.”
She put the spindle on her lap for a moment, keeping her place on the tongue of roving she had teased out. She took up her mug and drank off a couple of swallows; put it down; wiped at her eyes, which had begun to tear a bit as the strong drink made its influence felt. She picked up the spindle again.
“But it was Vytautas who directed the looting of Osbert’s gold. Think you: they must travel and travel through strange lands, and gold buys many favors, and they far from their holdings, and having no way to enrich themselves, save that Vytautas and her pets follow in her wake, like scavenger birds, and despoil the slain. So they maintained themselves.”
Hob sat and listened, enthralled. The night hour, the chill late-winter wind outside, Molly’s quiet voice, gave the chamber a sheen of enchantment. Even the mug, made of brown iron-rich fired clay, decorated with rampant lions that the potter, adding a touch of copper to the clay, had rendered in green, even this humble mug seemed to glow in the firelight; and Molly’s tumble of gray hair seemed wrought of iron and silver in the gleam of the flames.
“It was her cry we were hearing that day at Osbert’s Inn, and she ranging the nearby woods. When they’re seeing us make the rounds of the walls, they’re quick to withdraw into the forest for a few days, fearing to engage us. The night after we left, and ourselves camping by that little ford over the Dawlish, she struck, and killed all within the inn, like a stoat in a rabbit warren.
“The next day they were away south again, and they took the second path to Dickon’s Ford, for I think they were aware of us at all times, and where we were, and Vytautas seeking always to avoid us. He was a man of power, and when she was in her human guise, I could detect nothing of her nature, nor yet of his, and all because of the glamour he had cast upon Nemain and myself in the monastery. But he knew me, and Nemain, knew us for women of power, and he feared us, and mayhap he sensed the Beast in Jack, although I had thrust it down, far down.”
She paused and put her spindle in her lap again. She picked up the mug, but paused with it halfway to her lips, looking into the fire with blind eyes, retra
cing the position of the two caravans, hers and Lady Svajone’s.
“So they’re passing us in the forest, and we returning with poor dying Sawal, and it’s then that Nemain and I were feeling that something was in the west, or should be in the west, but could never sense nor see them for the blindfold of moonlight and spellcraft that Vytautas had bound about our eyes. They forded the Dawlish and set off east on the castle path, and we yet at the inn, discovering her handiwork.”
She finished the mug; exhaled heavily; put the mug down with a thump. Immediately she poured some more of the uisce beatha.
“Mistress, I could not move when the doctor had cast his spell, but you spoke and you slapped him, and you silenced him. And he could not break your spell when you slapped him, nor say a word. How comes that, Mistress?”
“I was ready for him, as I was not at the monastery. And mind, it’s the men are stronger than the women when iron or stone must be lifted and carried, but it’s the women who are stronger in spellcraft: so the world is arranged.”
The fire settled, the smaller branches transformed into ash and ember; two large logs were still licked about with flame. A cold draft skittered along the floor, and Hob shifted a bit closer to the fireplace. Another thought occurred to him.
“Mistress, why did you not throw your dagger at the Fox, as you did in the hall? Surely you could have hit its eye?”
She laughed. “You remind me of Nemain, when she was younger, questions upon questions. Nay, you remind me of myself, one who must know everything. It’s a way to gain power, that asking, and not the worst thing in the world. In the hall I must convince Sir Jehan that I was all that I claimed, and not some traveling beguiler, as he was coming to believe. The dagger cast, the chess, the harping, all those were to this end, to preserve our sanctuary here, and besides, he was after offending me, and myself thinking it time to bring him up short.”
She sighed. “But to throw steel at a Beast . . . they’re hardly noticing it, betimes: iron will not bite, it does not do them great harm. They are best destroyed as animals destroy each other, living body to living body, as those Templar destriers trampled Jack’s assailant Beast.
“There is another reason, as well: before even we left the solar, I was after beginning Jack’s change, and casting him at the Fox by spell and instruction. When we encountered the thing, away there in the upper gallery, Jack’s course was set, and having cast him at the Fox, I had yet to bring him under control again afterward, and back to himself, works of power. To work power with a bloody hand is to chance failing in the spell, and that would have been death to us all. And besides, I swore that Jack would be my weapon, and it is peril to go back on words like that, words of high purpose: it is itself like working power with a bloody hand.”
Jack began to twitch and mutter in his sleep, as one does who has an evil dream. Molly lowered her voice.
“It may be that he can hear us, in some wise.” She put a hand on Jack’s brow, tsked, dipped a cloth in the cold water of the pitcher. She wrung it out onto the rushes at her feet, then draped it over Jack’s brow.
“It is not a thing to do lightly,” she said in a murmur. “I hated to ask it of him, but I saw no other road to safety. Or to revenge. He agreed. Part of them always longs for it, surely, and I did not want to offer it to him, and blow on the embers once more. But he knew as well that he must change back again, and at once, and again go through the pain of purging the fever from him, and part of him did not want to live through that again. But he agreed, he agreed because I asked it of him, brave lad, and I love him for it.”
She poked at the fire until it revived somewhat, and then sat looking into the flames, distant, abstracted. Hob thought it unmannerly to intrude upon her reflections. He began to gaze into the fire instead; in any event, he did not lack for things to contemplate.
CHAPTER 25
HOB ENTERED THE CASTLE IN snow and left in sunlight; entered the castle a boy and left nearly a man. The months they spent there, as Molly coaxed Jack and Sir Jehan back to health, saw Hob shoot up, tall and awkward, with outsize hands and feet. His voice broke and wavered, and finally sank to a bass, interspersed with the occasional embarrassing squeak. But that was much later, toward the summer. It was in the spring that he grew up.
AS SOON AS JACK was able to leave his sickbed, he expressed a desire to stand without help. He tottered about the room, collapsed back into the bed. The next day he walked about for a while, and then sat for the rest of the afternoon, and was asleep by dusk. The day thereafter he walked the corridors, and the next day went down and out into the bailey.
A cool spring rain clattered down on the slate tiles of the stable roofs. Jack stood just outside the keep, and looked about at the wide world, and breathed deeply, as if the homely smells of the bailey’s damp earth, horse dung, woodsmoke, were nourishment itself, and the rattle and gurgle of rain, the ringing of iron hammers on steel from old Thierry’s forge, were the music of Molly’s harp. Then he turned and made his way upstairs and slept through the night.
Jack had always had a formidable constitution, and Hob suspected that some residue of the Beast in Jack’s blood lent him a measure of further vitality. He remembered Molly saying, “. . . and they live long, long.” Within a sennight Jack Brown was helping old Thierry in his smithy, which was also the castle’s armory. At first Jack performed light chores for Thierry, pausing frequently to rest. Another fortnight brought Jack to full participation at the forge, and Thierry was pleased at the help.
Even when not hammering at the anvil, or thrusting bars of iron into the forge, Jack would spend hours picking up and moving lumps and bars of raw iron, or handfuls of horseshoes, from place to place at the forge. Hob thought it strange and purposeless; Thierry, whose joints now barely troubled him at all, thanks to Molly, looked on with an uncomprehending but benign gaze.
One day when rain roared on the smithy roof, Jack brought Hob into the forge with him, the chill spring air from the open doorway thwarted by the heat from the forge, the dark smithy glowing with firelight, sparks showering from the prentices’ hammers as they struck down upon the anvil, the glowing fragments bouncing on the floor and winking out in the shadowy corners.
Without explanation, Jack handed Hob a short bar of iron. The weight sank immediately toward the ground, but Hob gripped it the tighter and managed not to drop it.
Jack gestured for Hob to give it back. The lad did so, wondering. Then Jack gave it to him again, and Hob recognized it for a sort of game, although to what purpose he could not see. This went on for a while, then Jack picked up a sledge and turned again to the forge.
The next day Hob’s arms were sore, and he applied to Molly for some salve, “For Jack kept handing me these bars of iron, and then taking them back, I know not why, and now I ache from wrist to backbone.”
“It’s a way Jack has: it’s getting his strength back he is, and giving you your own as well. Jack was by way of being a master of strength, even before”—she lowered her voice abruptly—“he met that Beast”—and in more normal tones—“and it’s a mort of power that you can gain from him.”
A FORTNIGHT OR SO LATER, Hob’s muscles began to grow, and while he was becoming gangly with increased height, his limbs began, though slowly, to thicken. A few more weeks, and he began to help hammer at the forge, and he discovered calluses on his palms from handling tools and iron and steel. He ate well each night, for Sir Jehan stinted them nothing, and Hob and Nemain were honored and even pampered by all the castle’s folk.
One night, Molly called Hob over, looked at his wrists and ankles, turned his hands over to inspect his palms. “Coming into your growth, you are: ’tis time you knew weapons. I’ve asked Sir Balthasar to set you at learning Norman swordcraft, he being the grandest killer of the North Country, or so I am to hear.”
The fire was burning merrily now, and the firelight shone in Molly’s silver hair, making ruddy highlights reminiscent of Nemain’s. She had a ceramic crock of the uisce beatha by
her side, and her eyes had a glassy sheen.
“He will show you those arts that he knows, and afterward, when we have left this castle, I will show you those arts that he does not know. One day you will be even more dangerous than Sir Balthasar.”
A twig popped in the fireplace and drew her gaze to the flames. She suddenly sat very still, looking into the blaze as though there were something there, far down in the fire.
She turned back to him, and looked at him with the same glistening, empty eyes. She was drunk, or she was fey; perhaps both.
“Be said by me, one day kerns will call you Robert the Englishman, and you dwelling in Erin the while, and an adopted man of the O’Cearbhalls, and a high man at that, and you will walk the fields of battle all unscathed. Foemen will step away to the right hand and the left, fearing to engage you, the dread champion in Erin. I tell you that men will be boasting, not that they prevailed against you, but only that they had a passage at arms with English Robert, and lived to walk the earth afterward.”
She came to herself a little, and used her shawl to dab at her brow and upper lip, and drank again; and that was all he heard from her that night.
HOB PRACTICED WITH THE SQUIRES in an exercise yard formed from a part of the bailey and defined by an internal wall, only two stories high, that ran from the keep to one of the northern watchtowers. They grunted and strove with wooden weapons, wrestled and ran, covered in sweat and dust.
Whether it was Molly’s healing power, or his own resilience, when Hob now looked back on Fox Night, it was to draw from the memory strength rather than weakness: what mortal foeman would he ever face that would be as terrible? He threw himself into learning combat with such zeal that often Ranulf or whoever else was instructor that day would have to pull him back, like an overeager hound. Hob felt in some obscure way that he must prepare himself, to make himself worthy to be in Molly’s troupe, and worthy, as well, to be Nemain’s companion. He remembered that slim pale hand and its dagger and the thrust that had saved his life, and his ferocity at practice soon caught him up to the older youths, and indeed dismayed them somewhat; indeed they began to fear him a little.
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