Young children were cavorting on the banks of the channel and dipping their bare feet in the water. Their laughter and chattering was like birdsong. How strange, Lilith mused, to recall that she had once scorned the notion of motherhood. Such scorn seemed incomprehensible now. She found herself longing for the chance to hear the voice of her own child; a voice that had never yet spoken. As infants grew to adulthood, what conversations could be enjoyed! What a pleasure it would be to watch the buds blossom and to be granted the privilege of revealing the marvels of the world to new, innocent, and amazed beings: to behold the world afresh, through young eyes, and relive the thrill of discovery! How would their personalities unfold? What activities, sights, and sounds would delight them?
How would it feel if your child were to smile at you—would your heart in awe stop beating?
What could it be, to look for the inaugural time upon the face of your firstborn and to know that you had called him or her out of twilight into a new day?
Shadows were stretching out attenuated limbs and the warmth was dissipating from the afternoon by the time Lilith returned to her grandfather’s cottage. She found Eolacha beside her patient, dozing in the wicker chair while her patient stretched prone on his pallet. He looked to be very ill indeed, lying there pale, unmoving, his deep-lidded eyes closed like two white marbles stuck in their sockets. The chamber seemed filled to the brim with the rasp of his labored breathing.
Eolacha roused from her repose to see Lilith kneeling at the old man’s bedside.
“Methinks he will soon be fading,” the carlin whispered sadly. “Bathe his forehead with cool water. There is little more that can be done for him now.”
Lilith nodded. Mint leaves floated in the basin of water Eolacha had placed near the pallet. The girl rinsed a cloth in the liquid and smoothed it across her grandfather’s brow.
“Go and find rest now,” she murmured to the carlin. “I shall keep vigil.”
The carlin departed. About an hour passed. Lilith sat in the rocking chair, lost in a reverie. The sound of approaching footsteps startled her; she jumped to her feet, her heart knocking in her chest as though it would try to escape. From behind the door a familiar voice called her name, and in relief she greeted Eoin.
“I heard he is failing fast,” said her stepbrother in low tones. At her nod, he went straight to the patient’s bedside. Kneeling there, he took the old man’s shrunken hand in his own and bowed his head over it.
“Rest easy, goodfather,” he mumbled at the end of a moment. “May you find peace.”
He stayed in that position for many minutes. Then, placing the elderly hand under the coverlets with scrupulous tenderness, he stiffly got to his feet.
“Is there anything I can be doing?” he asked Lilith. She shook her head.
“Then at least I shall keep surveillance with you,” he said, his eyes glistening with unshed tears.
“Eoin,” she replied, touched by his compassion, “you have done your part. Now it needs only one person to be watching over him. It is clear you are tired, and by the way you are moving I judge you are also sore from this day’s hard rowing. It is for me, his only blood relation, to be going with him on this last part of his journey. Be away home to sleep. If he is still with us in the morning, you shall take my place.”
Eoin was reluctant to depart, but eventually she persuaded him. He placed one last kiss on the old man’s brow; then he was gone.
Into the night Lilith sat beside her grandfather, and he neither moved nor spoke. The raucous stertor of his respiration seemed to enfold and envelop all, blocking out the normal sounds of the marsh at night. Uncomfortable and restless, Lilith tried to sleep, but in vain. Every so often she bathed the old man’s brow or rearranged his blankets and pillows. He evinced no reaction. His eyes remained fast shut.
Toward morning, a single falling note penetrated the walls of the cottage: the cry of a weeper. It petered out into a welter of sobbing, but by then Lilith had snapped violently out of her light slumber. She shivered. The room seemed curiously cold. Through cracks in the shutters, a weak, bluish predawn light came trickling like watered ink.
Suddenly the old man opened his eyes and spoke with perfect clarity. “They are nowhere, but are with us now, the footsteps,” he said. “Cannot anyone hear them? They hunt me as they hunted my mother, as they would have kept hunting my daughter, had she lived. Ah, Liadán, shall I see you again?”
He did not appear to be aware of the presence of his granddaughter as he ranted in his bed, speaking of his mad mother and the father he had never known. Somehow, despite his pitiable condition, he rallied the strength to raise up his starved frame; it was a frightening scene, like a corpse elevating itself. Then he fixed his eyes on a certain spot before him, not far from his bedside.
Fear paralyzed Lilith. Her blood soured; her skin shriveled like parchment.
The old man was staring hard at something she could not see.
He spoke to it. “Come then, you’ve drawn out the torment long enough. Take me.”
No sooner had he uttered these words than a horrible rigidity seized his body, his eyes flew wide open, and his chest heaved. Arrested by horror, Lilith could not look away. She thought an unseen hand must have gripped her grandfather’s throat and squeezed. His fragile rib cage was moving slightly, as though he struggled to draw air into his lungs, and no sound issued from his lips. For an aeon, or for a few moments, this ghastly scene of strangulation remained in stasis before her anguished eyes. Then a last gurgle bubbled from his throat as he fell back, lifeless, on the pallet, his eyeballs rolling back in his head.
The lament of the weeper reverberated through the cottage as though the wight, in her ragged washerwoman shape, was wailing at the very doorstep. A third time she shrieked, then silence fell.
Lilith felt her own throat constricted. Too terrified to move, she dared not stir so much as a finger and sat motionless, barely breathing. She had seen Death’s work, but the horror lay in the fact that there had been no visible cause.
Death’s agent stood in the unlit chamber with her. Sensing a malevolent presence a hair’s breadth away, she could not bring herself to look around and sat frozen as if her muscles had rigidified to iron hawsers.
On she sat. Her horror grew. Now the only sounds piercing the smothering stillness of the night were the chortling of water in distant ditches, the random glop of condensation dripping from the eaves, and the dry laughter of wind-shaken reeds, so reminiscent of a death rattle.
Then a floorboard creaked.
She jumped up, flung the door wide—crashing it against the outer wall—and sped into the night.
Eolacha, Earnán, and Eoin were sleeping when Lilith burst in the door of the Mosswell cottage. Savage sobs jarred her body. The family, roused from their beds, came to her as she crouched trembling before the hearth, where embers glowed: heaps of rubies burning through black lace.
“He’s gone,” croaked the damsel, breathing fast and deeply. “He’s gone at last. The footsteps caught up with him”—she drew breath—“as they overtook his mother. And as they would have overtaken my own mother, had she lived long enough. He’s gone, and the sequence is clear.” She surrendered to tears and could not be consoled.
After the funeral ceremony, Lilith consulted at length with Earnán and his mother in the cottage.
“Now has come the season for learning,” said Lilith, seating herself on her favorite stool. “There are many things I now must be knowing, matters I have avoided, conjectures which have remained unspoken between us. It is time for all truths to be laid bare, for now more than ever I fear my destiny. What do you know of my grandfather’s history?”
The carlin rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
“Tréan Connick was a young man when he first arrived in the marsh,” she said slowly. “He had traveled, as I recall, from Cathair Rua, and he came alone. Because he possessed mighty battle skills, he was permitted to remain here. At that time the Marauders were plaguing
our eastern borders in great numbers, and we had sore need of warriors. A bold and comely youth was he, and his company was sought by the girls of the marsh. Of them all, he chose to wed Laoise Heronswood Swanreach.”
Lilith nodded. “The knowledge of this much was already at me,” she murmured.
An ibis hooted from some distant islet, and a serpent of a wind hissed in the reed beds.
It seemed then, to Lilith, that the eyes of the old woman filled with reflections of water and sky, as though she looked upon the memory of some other place or time. Unexpected insight broke open a picture in Lilith’s mind. She imagined Eolacha as a marsh maiden with bright brown buttons of eyes, and that maiden watching a young man walking across a pontoon footpath. His arm was linked with that of another girl. Stepping lightly, they were laughing together, this couple—yet she who gave them her attention—Eolacha in her youth—remained still and silent.
Suddenly comprehending, Lilith gazed upon the old woman with renewed compassion.
“From the union of Tréan and Laoise came your mother, Liadán,” continued the carlin. “She was born here in the town. When Laoise died of the swamp fever, your grandfather raised his daughter alone. Liadán was twenty Winters old when she wed Ardagh Yellowflag Hawksburn. He was a fine man, one of the best watchmen the marsh has birthed …”
Again she broke off. There was no profit in repeating what Lilith knew so well: that before she had even arrived in the world, her father had died in a hunting accident.
After clearing her throat with a quick cough, Eolacha resumed her monologue. “Soon after you came into this world, it was noted that your grandfather’s behavior had turned somewhat outlandish. Around that time, he first told us he heard footsteps. He left the marsh, saying he wished to be wandering the Four Kingdoms; in truth, he sought an answer to what plagued him. He found no answer. When at last he returned, he was almost unrecognizable—no longer the fine man he once had been.”
The reflections in the carlin’s eyes clouded over. Lilith’s dark hair fell forward around her face like wings of night, enfolding her bitter sorrow. The upial jumped onto her lap and settled there.
“And little wonder,” said the damsel, eventually mastering her grief, “for at the last, he told me he had seen his own mother lose her wits. He never knew his father, who passed away in Grandfather’s infancy. Then the loss of his wife, his son-in-law … Even without the delusions, such tragedies would pulp any man’s wits, I daresay.”
A cloak of silence settled briefly around Eolacha.
“Three generations,” said Earnán thinly, “three marriages. Each time, one spouse met an early grave and the other was driven mad by some delusion of being followed. It is not mere mischance that is laboring here.”
“To myself I have been denying the truth,” said Lilith. “Yet there is no escaping it.”
“I suspect …” The carlin paused. She interlocked her gnarled fingers and stared at them as though endeavoring to find the best way to string her words together. “A curse.”
Lilith managed a tight nod. Scarlet ichor trickled from her lip where she had bitten it. The upial stood up in her lap, yawned, kneaded her thighs stingingly with its claws, and settled itself again.
“I surmise it is a malediction of the bloodline,” added Eolacha bleakly, “passed down through the generations. Long have I been suspecting this, but now I am certain.”
“Well,” said Lilith, “what is the solution to this problem?”
Eolacha sighed. “I always say, for every question there is an answer, but for this the knowledge is far from me. Perhaps the weathermasters might have a remedy—but their lands lie too far away. I have not encountered any of them for years. In days of yore I was well acquainted with several of their number, but no more.”
The upial snarled in its sleep.
“Well, if ’tis a pattern, it is one that’s simple to interrupt,” said Lilith. “The doom follows my bloodline. I must never bear children. I must never marry.”
In an effort to repress any sign of her anguish, she set her face in an adamant mask. She felt that if she allowed the slightest sign of her grief to be indicated by the tiniest twitch of a muscle, then the dam wall would break asunder and she would crumple beneath an outpouring of devastation and despair. To subvert the curse she would have to give up Jarred and any hope of a happy life. Such a notion was too much to bear. It must be locked away behind steely eyes and clenched teeth, lest it escape and rend her spirit to ribbons.
Blackshaw Bank rose high above the surrounding wetlands; of all the eminences in the vicinity of the marsh, only Lizardback Ridge soared farther. Autumn had not yet begun to paint the foliage of the southern lands of Tir, but on Blackshaw Bank her colors already tinged the heavy clusters of elderberries hanging thickly on their cerise stems, the sloes ripening on the blackthorns, the bright red berries festooning the wayfaring trees. The last bees of Summer hummed amongst the flowering ivy.
Here, soon after the conversation with Eolacha and Earnán, Lilith trysted with her sweetheart. A handsome couple they made: he as straight and proud as a flagpole, his spice-colored hair flowing loose upon his shoulders; she as graceful as a deer, her drab raiment contrasting sharply with his embroidered tunic.
“Sorely do you grieve, love,” Jarred said compassionately, taking Lilith’s arm as they strolled between the creeper-clad boles, “and sorely do so many others. Old Man Connick was well loved and respected in bygone days. Would that I had known him then.”
“His release from torment was a boon,” said Lilith. “Still, I miss him. I grieve not only for him, not only for my mother, but for us. For you and me.”
“Why should that be?” asked Jarred in astonishment.
They came to a halt beneath the leaning boughs of an ancient apple tree. Pale sunlight rinsed the leaves like watered wine.
“Before he died, my grandfather told me of his mother’s madness, his father’s early death. That pattern repeats itself throughout three generations. Eolacha and Earnán are of the opinion that my family is cursed.”
Jarred looked askance. “Cursed? Impossible!” He dashed his hand across his brow, as if clearing his thoughts. “Nay. Naught may threaten you! Eolacha and Earnán do not know of the amulet. It protects against all harm. You are secure from all banes, Lilith, take my assurance.”
“Can the amulet be split into three or more?” she said quietly.
“Why should it be?” Bafflement charged his tenor with a note of anger.
“Because the peril is directed not only at myself—it aims for my future husband, our future children. If I marry you, you will be brought under the malediction’s sway.”
At first Jarred laughed, unable to believe her words. “Nay, that is impossible,” he said. And then the seriousness of her mien bore home the truth. All movement and vitality drained from him. He stilled as though struck in iron. A pang of fear sped through Lilith; it was as if a fast-flowing stream had frozen at the sudden touch of an enchanted Winter.
“No! No, it cannot be!” In disbelief and frustration, the young man kicked out at the tree trunk, smashing off a small branch. “It cannot be! If you wear the amulet, this curse—if such it is—will be stymied. It will henceforth have no power over you or yours.”
“Can you be certain of this?”
He would not meet her gaze but stared grimly out over the lake. “No.”
Swift shadows crossed the Bank as flocks of swallows winged their way through a bluebell sky.
“The curse must end with me, my darling,” said Lilith. “I love thee too much to wed thee.”
Jarred railed against fate, against reason, against all sorcery, but eventually his wrath burned away and was replaced by a placidity as cool and tempered as steel. The lovers walked on together in quietude for a time. Then he said with conviction, “There is an answer to every riddle, and every curse can be lifted. It remains only to find the method.”
“But the method is clear,” she said. “I must remain
unwed.”
“No, not that, my flower damsel. I will not surrender you.”
“Then I can only guess,” she countered, “that you mean to try and discover the origin of the curse and thereby to learn if its course can be thwarted.”
“You read my thoughts.”
“If I do, I also wonder. I reckon the curse must be more than sixty years old. For all we know, its commencement might lie more than a hundred years in the past. Or it might be altogether lost in the fogs of ancient time. How can its origin be traced, and how should we start to look? It is said that my grandfather came from Cathair Rua. Little is known of his parents beyond the fact that the doom was already on them. He never spoke of his past—not to my mother, or Earnán, or Eolacha—not to anyone. Surely both time and distance are against us in such a venture.”
“Maybe so, but I will not rest until I make either a warm bed with you in my arms or a cold bed in the ground,” he said quietly, and he looked at her in such a way that she felt as though she had suddenly fallen from a dizzy height. His glance took her breath away.
“Southerners,” she said lightly, battling to regain composure, “should not be subject to the cold. They are not accustomed to it.”
“In which case I have no option,” he relied with a swift smile. “Tell me, sweet flower, what was Old Man Connick’s given name?”
“Tréan.”
“A Slievmordhuan name—that bodes well! We shall not have to look far afield. I shall journey to Cathair Rua and seek information about his history. It may be that some crone or graybeard still recalls Tréan Connick in his youth. The chance is slim, but worth trying. Even if he never dwelt there, even if he was merely passing through from some other region, surely the good citizens could not fail to notice such a man. I hear he was a strapping, stalwart man, a warrior of no mean prowess.”
The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 18