CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
Wind from the west battered her face. The black clouds that had covered everything for the last few days were gone and a pale dome of grey overarched the world, pocked with stars.
Lilia stood with her back up against the willow, her willow. She let her fingertips trail over rough bark. With eyes part-shut she listened to the wind hushing through the branches. She remembered. His touch. His laugh. His eyes full of life. An evening spent in idleness. But she'd had to return. She always had to come back, eventually. A few hours snatched. A small time in happiness.
A long, languid patchwork of black and white meandered into view.
"Hello, Piebald," said Lilia as she widened her eyelids and gazed down at the cat. "Does Ermengarde know you are out stalking the gardens and walls so late?" She crouched down, smiling as the cat let her scratch his chin. "You know," said Lilia, "I am not sure I will be living in the Toren much longer. So you will have the garden all to yourself soon. How would you like that?"
Piebald purred and bunted his head into her, then dragged the length of his body against her knee.
"I miss him you know. Already. It's a strange feeling. It can be painful, almost tormenting, and it does not pass until I see him again. He is always with me." She ran a hand along Piebald's hard spine and stroked his tail. "I used to think it was the pain of love. Perhaps it is, but it is more beautiful than that. And I think more powerful too." With a shrug she gave up trying to explain it to the cat. "Don't worry," she said, "no one else understands either. At least you don't pretend to... or look worried, or mistrustful, scared."
The cat lounged to the ground and rolled onto his back, letting Lilia tickle his chin and the tufted soft fur of his belly. He closed his eyes slowly, indolently, and purred louder.
For a while Lilia was happy.
Quite suddenly Piebald tensed all over. His tail curled at the tip and he pricked his ears. Rolling over and looking about he hissed in alarm and with fur now on end and tail all bushy he shot from the garden up and over the brick wall. He paused on top of the wall. His sharp little teeth were bright in the starlight, before vanishing over the wall.
Lilia stood up, her heart suddenly racing. She looked about the garden and then her eyes flickered to the door. There was a shadow there.
"We have not been properly introduced." The voice was rough and harsh, and as he stepped into the light she could see, so too was he. A tall man with a close-cut, but grizzled beard. His eyes had small lines about them and looked older than the rest of his face. He wore a doeskin cloak and had hunter's knives at his belt, but this uncouth, unkind, savage sort of man sketched a bow. "I am Kveldulf son of Kaldulf."
Lilia turned to him slowly and edged uneasily a step away, until she was half-hidden by the willow. "I have noticed you in Rosa's company, and talking to her pet thane. That blonde one with the smile fixed always so idiotically on his face. You know me already, no doubt."
"Lilia. Daughter of the Eorl Fainvant."
She nodded. His stare was so careful, as if those deep eyes were hunting for something. "As long as we are talking about company kept, I mean to warn you about your choices in the area."
For a moment confused, Lilia knotted her brow, glanced at the leaf-strewn ground and then raised her eyes to him. She understood. Her voice, for a moment tremulous, dipped into anger. "So Rosa has a new pet then?"
"I'm not here to discuss your sister."
"What did she tell you to do to me? Are you to just threaten me? Or worse? Will she laugh and smile when you tell her what you did, detail for detail."
"No. This is my business, not hers."
Lilia stalked around the tree like a white shadow, an omen presaging death. "You lie."
"I do not lie. I am too simple and too plain-speaking. You are in danger, and it is not just your life you have to lose. Other less tangible things can be taken from you."
"So you do threaten me?"
His voice was edging into frustration. "I am doing my best to warn you."
"The same."
"I won't stand here bickering with you. Take my advice or leave it. It's all much the same to me."
"Oh how very chivalrous of you. How wonderfully paladin. I must seem a small slip of a thing for you to threaten me with such disregard. Everyone thinks that. Everyone knows Lilia is nothing. Small. Hopeless. Helpless." Her voice was thick with venom now, and it gave her a perverse pleasure to make herself even more malign. "Get away from me. Take your threats back to Rosa, and when she has the courage to command you to take out those knives of yours, then come back. Then see if I am such a desperate, floundering weakling."
He did not move but stared at her so long that she began to shiver. Darker, more scalding words simmered up in her mind.
"Alraun is dangerous. Forsake him."
Feeling pale and shaken now, she said, "Get away from me."
"Well, I tried," said Kveldulf to no one in particular. But before he turned his back and was gone he added one last thing. "Once you understand the meaning of my warning you can come to me. I will help you as far as I can. That, I promise."
And she was alone.
Lilia was trembling. She leaned against the willow and her face became wet. She shook, embarrassed, angry, frustrated.
Eventually her tears ebbed to sniffles and something soft touched her leg.
"Piebald," she whispered, "you came back. He scared you didn't he?" and she picked up the fat, black and white cat. "What has happened to me? When did the house of my birth become something so hateful and hated?" She cradled Piebald and scratched him around the chin. "I don't suppose you understand," and breathed a sigh, "Perhaps," she said, thinking immediately of the sweet, memoryless, senseless pleasure of him, "perhaps I shall go for a walk tomorrow." She shook her head. "But not in the morning. It is too soon. I should spend some time in the fortress. An hour or two with father, perhaps. But I have barely been back in the Toren really, and yet has anyone missed me?" She sighed, knowing even as she argued with herself that the decision was made.
"I should choose a dress. Something pretty. It wouldn't do for him to see me in the same old dress I wore today, would it?"
Piebald purred.
BEFORE THE VELD
That night, Kevldulf locked his small inn room, and took the feather out of the wood case. The air was charged with a woodsy, sweet smell from the box. There was a small chain in the box too, and a eyelet at the pinion end of the feather where the chain could hook through and make a sort of necklet of it.
The feather was warm in his hands, and it gave off a faint light. Kveldulf had no illusions about his place in the cosmic dance of the Sister Queens of the Sun and the Night. His blood was of the north, of the shadow-lands, of the darkness. No radiant being would want Kveldulf in any sort of blessed host. But, the she-wolf was also a creature of the benighted northlands, and she might well feel an instinctive fear of such a potent bit of corpora, taken from a sacral spirit.
He drew the symbols in chalk, arranged the stones and hung the feather over the head of his bed.
That night he rested easily, dreamed easily and was not woken. His chalk and rune charm had more strength in it than he had ever been able to put into it before.
He woke rested, head clear. Birds were singing outside his window, and he opened the shutters. How many years had passed since he last rose early enough to hear the dawn chorus? A hundred years? Two hundred? He had lost count of the summers and winters of his unnatural longevity.
That morning, Kveldulf returned to Auxentios's house to return the feather.
As he listened to the birdsong, as he watched the dawn rise, he realised that he could not in good conscience keep the feather. The object ought to be in a temple somewhere, or passed quietly about the streets and hovels of this city, curing ills and blindnesses. It felt like avarice to keep it all for himself.
He would find some other way forward. There had to be some other way.
Perhaps, he thought, Auxentios might have
thought of something overnight even.
But when Kveldulf entered the ruined building, he found it in disarray, even more than the day before. Bookshelves were toppled, and there were raking claw marks on the floor. He found Auxentios in a pool of his drying out blood at the far end of the room, dragged bodily from the small cot he evidentially slept in, and torn, gutted.
There was a smell of honey, and strange spices and lavender in the air above the corpse.
Kveldulf knelt down beside Auxentios, and moved his fingers to close to old sage's eyes. "Well," he said, "I suppose she was following me more closely than usual." Although he had seen so much death in his life, this sight, the old man strung out and savaged like an old starved deer in the woods attacked by a pack, this still stung him inside.
He knelt beside the dead man and closed his eyes, considering what to do.
Leave.
Go far away.
Enough is enough. He would leave the cities and the towns, the fields and the villages, and walk north. Eventually, he would be able to find somewhere remote and wild. Perhaps if there were no prey for her to hunt, she would grow bored and leave him alone. Perhaps. It was a small hope, but all he had.
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