by Prue Batten
Lalita nodded. She knew of rades, those enchanted journeys through mortal country that did more damage than delight as the Færan sought distraction.
‘My mother left her babe somewhere. Forgot him. And my father’s wrath reached the heavens and back. He never found the child and he got another babe immediately on my mother as revenge. Isolde found out and after the death of the first daughter, she had only vengeful thoughts against my father. The staff said she lived in my mother’s pocket right to the last, when she and only she delivered my mother of me, whom she hid. What she didn’t tell my father was that as my mother bled to death on her birthing bed, Isolde delivered my twin – my brother Liam, presenting him as the only child. I did say I thought my father’s seed was a bane, didn’t I? And apparently not just for his first wife, but his second.’
‘Finnian, this…’
‘Let me finish. It’s not long. I wouldn’t want to visit it again.’
She understood her purged himself with the telling and her heart opened to him as he continued.
‘Isolde stole me away. Punishment to my father.’ He lapsed into silence.
‘But why not care for you, her daughter’s son?’
‘Oh I have a rationale although I have never told a soul. I believe I may have looked like my father. As I grew older, in Isolde’s eyes she could not or would not separate one from the other. And there is a bestial side to her, as I said. She liked having a whipping boy. I served her well.’
Will o’ the wisps lit the copse with a candle-like glow, a welkin wind sifting the leaves, clicking the beech-discs together. Lalita sat by the rill, leaning back against an oak tree and at one point Finnian jumped up and grabbed a twist of thick grasses to rub at the sweat marks on his gelding, all the while talking. She made no comment as the tale spread across the glade, a patchwork of cruelty and belittlement that even as he spoke had her crying inside for the little boy who sobbed for his unknown twin. All around the mizzle dripped like the child’s tears.
The story came to a halt and he laughed, an acidic sound. ‘You see, there is no altruistic motive in her possession of the cantrips, Lalita. It is purely an obsession to dominate. Once it was a small boy, now it’s our entire world, as insane as that might sound. By threat and by deed, it has always been her manner. Firstly one dead and then another until such fear of her is rampant that her bidding will be done. It pleases her to have such dominance.’
He sat down and she surprised herself as her hand burrowed into his, spreading her fingers to interlace with his own and then to squeeze. Her other slipped into the warm pocket of his jacket and she felt the crisp crackle of paper and withdrew a slip of parchment and a quartz stone. ‘What’s this?’ She took her hand from within his own to unfold the parchment and felt him tense beside her. Her fingers smoothed out the creases and she shielded it from the drizzle. ‘Aine, it’s…’
‘A good enough piece of artwork and a pleasant enough verse. And that’s just a stone.’ He reached across and took the parchment back, folding it and placing it inside his shirt, the stone in the pocket of his breeches.
‘Finnian, I’m not blind. That figure is as like to me as if it’s a personal portrait. It’s uncanny.’
‘Coincidence I am sure.’ Once again he didn’t look at her as he spoke, a deliberate remove so as not to engage.
‘Why do you have it?’
‘The stone was a gift from a… friend and the paper has been with me for my lifetime. It matters not.’
‘But it does. Why do you carry an image that could be me? Surely you find it odd that it depicts someone as like to me as my own reflection. Can you imagine what I feel like when I see it?’
He gave a heavy sigh, sounding as exhausted as a man who has lost everything. ‘I’ve wondered on it since I met you. Fate? Destiny? I don’t know, Lalita. It’s an enigma that I am unable to answer. I found it in a book in Isolde’s library when I was young and for a reason that I can’t identify it gave me comfort when I had none,’ his eyes locked onto hers with a fierceness that shook her. ‘As it does now. As to the rock, it is a talisman.’
Her heart felt such sadness and empathy that she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. His stubble dragged at her lips and he turned his head and she allowed him to kiss her back. It was as if Finnian’s touch could banish the world’s woes from her life for just a moment, just as his parchment did for him. He held her in a strong clasp and she felt secure and cherished for the first time since Imran and Soraya had left on that last trip. She lifted her hands to his jaw, awed at the strength of the line, and ran her fingers through his hair as it lay at his nape, loving the feel of it on her fingertips, hearing him sigh as she drew those same fingers down the side of his neck, inside his collar to the top of his chest.
Later, with no attempt at coyness, she lay pliant as he began to ease off her clothes. She chided herself faintly for profligate and immoral behaviour but the better part of her enjoyed every gratuitous second as touch skimmed her body and she wondered if she were being wrapped in the delicate strands of a gossamer web. He took her gently and she flew once again along the byways of the stratosphere, neither he nor she speaking, until the end when he said one word, ‘Lalita.’
‘It is beautiful.’ They lay together in front of a spluttering fire, as she turned the stolen paperweight in the desultory light. She had told him of the strip lying folded and secure in the silver locket about her neck and now the millefiori worked magic as she turned the ball first one way and then the other. It glistened, occasionally sparkled and all the while, the ‘thousand flowers’ gleamed blue, yellow and white behind the glass confines. ‘It’s a different pattern entirely to the one that smashed and yet it has a harmony.’
Her fingers rolled the object around as Finnian replied. ‘And if not for an accident, you wouldn’t have discovered what it was.’
‘Perhaps the shattering of the glass itself was a accident, but events prior were not accidental at all.’
‘You truly planned to end your life?’
She nodded, feeling the weight of his chin on her head. ‘I had nothing to live for. Or so I thought.’
‘But if you had, you would not have begun this journey. You see? Fate.’
She pocketed the paperweight and rested her own chin on his arms as they encircled her. ‘Then it was intended I should live. Sometimes though, I wonder what Fate has in store next as it would seem tragedy dogs our footsteps like a faithful hound. The Barguest, maybe. I’ve heard of the Black Dog of Doom.’ She shifted as if something dug into her. ‘Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by everything.’
He rolled her toward him and placed a palm on the side of her face. ‘In the back of my heart I cherished an absurd dream that I should find goodness, that I should be privileged to hold it in my hands at least once in my life. These last days, firstly with Gio, then Ibn the tellak and most perfectly you, I have been given that gift. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that all the heartache has been worth it for these last hours, Lalita.’
She stared at him long before risking words that may hurt him. ‘I understand what you say. But no life should be the price of another’s joy. It’s wrong.’
But he was equable in his reply. ‘Fate, Lalita. We should revel in it while we can for maybe our joy will be cut short also.’ And even though she quailed at his prophetic words, she was glad that all pretence at separateness vanished as they made love again.
She fell asleep cocooned in his arms, dreaming of nothing, not even conscious of the heavens passing through their celestial cycle far above her. She burrowed further under the warmth of the clothes laid over her. But frigid cold slid in and touched her, fingering her shoulders. She opened her eyes and such a feeling of being solitary overwhelmed her that she sat up, heart pounding.
‘Finnian?’
But it was pointless. She knew he had left. The blackest disappointment filled her and her fingers reached unconsciously to her neck to touch the locket for reassurance.
Gone.
She jumped up, dragging her clothes over her naked form and felt in the pocket of her breeches. Taken.
The fire was nearly out but in the last of the light she saw the glimmer of silver and grabbed the opened locket off the ground. Its emptiness spoke of lying and deceit and she picked up the chain and threaded the locket on with shaking fingers, feeling humiliated and abused.
She hated him. Hated what he had said to her, hated that she had believed him, hated what she had done with him and she wanted to tear shreds from the man, wanted to confront him with her dagger in her hand. She could hear the mare sidling back and forth and snorting in the dark at the edge of the copse and went immediately to her, spoke to her, smoothed her hand along the neck and saddled her quickly.
‘You leave then, scribe?’
She spun around to see a small, delicate woman becomingly turned out in a hunting suit of dark colours and a cap with long feathers arching back. She carried a longbow to suit her size and a quiver of arrows joggled at her shoulders as she walked to Lalita’s side.
‘You seek to follow the Færan?’
‘And if I do, of what interest is it to you or anyone else?’
‘We are all interested, Lalita of the Raj. It affects us all the way this plays out, for already we are in the never-ending night. We would like to think we can trust him but one never knows. I was merely going to say that if you do follow him, it might be a good thing. Insurance that he intends nothing bad with what he has taken and what he might find at Killymoon.’
‘Who are you? Another of those malicious Others so like him?’ Lalita swung herself far above the sprite and into the saddle.
‘Not at all. I am Siofra, Botanica is my name and I am kin to another of my kind who has already helped the Færan. We do no harm if we can help it. And besides, it may be that you judge him too harshly.’
‘I haven’t time to talk, Siofra. Do you know which way he went?’
‘Follow the path that way,’ Botanica gestured with her bow, ‘the will o’ the wisps will guide you and go with grace, my pretty mortal. May Aine smile upon you because you will need her care where you are heading.’
Lalita let the woman’s words drift past her as she tapped her heels into the mare’s sides and launched into a gallop.
***
Finnian’s horse had flown like a bird, leaving sleeping and satiated Lalita far behind. The ground sped under its hooves, thuds cushioned by aeons of falling leaves and thick mosses growing in the moist shadows of the forest. Pinpoint eyes surveyed Finnian as he dashed by, the black gelding fleet and fired. Night birds cried with shrill fear, wings battering the chill air as they lifted to the dark skies; disturbed, on edge, their nightly pattern of foodgathering interrupted. The small creatures that fed the avian bellies had ducked and dived for burrows and nests as the vibration of hooves rippled over the forest floor. All around was uneasiness at this night of the long dark.
He had suffered when he woke, cradling Lalita in his arms. I could love this woman. His lifelong dream had become as real as the face that lay in repose. But I must not. He knew he must get the charms and go for Lalita’s life was at stake, and so he had cast a mesmer on her, a sleep enchantment from which she wouldn’t wake for some while. As his hand moved, he could hear the crone’s voice as if she crowed in front of him, her face lined with venom, ‘I shall win.’
Thus he secreted Lalita in misty glamour within the deep green of the coppice, hoping the need to secure the charms would drive Isolde on, well past the hidden bower. As Lalita slept the sleep of oblivion, he had pulled the paperweight free of the pocket in her breeches where they lay by the fire, removed as he remembered, in a moment of unguarded passion.
Then he reached for the silver chain around her neck. Biting down on the scald that flamed across his hands, he lifted her soft hair and slid the clasp around to the front, eyes watering, teeth pressing further into his bottom lip until he drew blood. The clasp clicked back, the chain sliding as he pulled and flicked it to the ground, opening his palms carefully, ugly welts and blisters revealed, burns from which fluid oozed. The silver chain and its locket lay ominously innocent at his toes, a twinge of heat permeating through the leather of his boots so he reached for a stick and levered it under the necklet to shake it till the locket fell off.
Stealing himself for more pain, he quickly grabbed it, flicking the spring so the little washi strip fluttered out. He thrust the paper in his pocket, sucking in a breath as the fabric of his breeches caught on the weeping wounds, and hurrying to the side of the rill he let the water run over the cuts and burns. But it would take more than a stream in the world of mortals to heal the silver injuries and presently he knew he should move on regardless.
He tied the mare securely before he left, springing aboard his own mount with a quick breath as the damaged hands grabbed at the reins. He left at a trot, not looking back, and as soon as the copse was behind him, he set the gelding to a blistering gallop southeasterly, to put distance between he and his scribe. He rode swiftly, increasing the space between Lalita and himself until the track narrowed to nothing more than a winding defile and he was forced to slow to a walk, chafing at the snail’s pace. He wanted to get as far from her as he could so she would have no chance of finding him and so that his grandmother would leave her alone, focusing on her grandson. And no matter what, care and concern aside, he now had two paperweights and he was damned if he would allow anything to stop him securing the others. Not his grandmother, not Lalita, no one.
He looked skyward. She’s an adept, my grandmother, infinitely so. She’s put such a barrier between light and the world that none will see anything but night. And the moon – it battles Isolde’s glamour for look how it pushes. In the heavens, the moon shone like sunlight, shoving against the blackness, constantly breaking through the shrouds of night that coloured the sky. Even when its face was concealed, moonbeams radiated, lighting the shadowy woods through which Finnian’s horse tracked.
He moved on and came to a fork in the road, the left-hand track lit by the luminous beams and opening out for him to quicken his pace. The relieved horse began to canter, eager to begone this place of equine nightmare and the trunks of the trees fled by, Finnian bending low over the horse’s neck as low-hanging branches threatened to dismount him or worse. Noise rose behind him, whispering that chilled him to the bone, faint heckling that reminded him there were horrific things that must be feared in this wood.
As a child, Finnian had always been afraid. For him, there had always been fierce anxiety that the last punishment would be exceeded in strength by the next and the next. Always in his young mind was the knowledge that he was damaged goods – bad, spoiled, hopeless. One of Isolde’s favourite taunts as she locked him in his room at night had been, ‘Be good, little boy, or the night-ghasts will come for you or maybe the Strigoi will suck your blood and leave you empty.’ He would lie frozen, staring into the blackness, as the wind, or was it the Strigoi, howled around the walls of Castello. He lost count of the nights in his childhood when he had lain awake waiting. Only when the moon broke through the dark clouds could he sleep, as lulled as if the Moonlady herself rocked him in her arms. Now the Strigoi were astir, flying forth from their hellholes and he in a race to beat them before they plucked him off his horse and made him one of their own.
Above him, the moon shone through the clouds, a perfect alabaster circle shining light in a gleaming path out of the forest, vertiginously down a hill, and to a house.
Killymoon.
He rapped the reins over either side of the horse’s neck, a shouted ‘hyar’ adding wings to the horse’s speed. He leaned back over the horse’s rump, trying to balance the animal so they both didn’t crash forward and roll downhill and he thanked Aine for its surefootedness. Instinctively the animal found the perfect foothold, never once checking in its stride. Halfway down the slide, the Strigoi’s screams filled the forest behind and he knew they had sourced prey and his heart leaped in his mout
h, his hands becoming slippery on the reins.
You won’t catch me.
In the light of the moon he glanced through the horse’s twitching ears to see the bottom of the slope. A fallen tree lay like an impossible bulwark. He gathered up the reins, checking the horse in its downward flight and it fought him, shaking its head, pulling at the taut hold. With a click of his teeth, his heels kicking hard, he managed to collect the animal so that it lifted a stride before the tree, tucking in its forelegs and pulling itself in an arc to the other side. For the first time it stumbled and Finnian glanced down to see what tripped it but spying nothing he stroked the lathered shoulder with one hand. ‘Steady man, steady. Not far now.’
But the horse’s ears lay flat as the distant screams of the Strigoi spoke of murder and bloodlust. Finnian coaxed the horse, pushing it past its fear toward the safety of the grounds ahead. The walls of the house rose up in the night time luminescence – clean elegant lines, a bow-fronted wing and columned portico, as bleached as washed wheat in the moon’s light. Edging along the graveled drive like an incoming tide was a stretch of dark and he looked into the heavens to see the moon’s outer edge blurred by a black bruise. The battle between moon and matriarch had been won and he hated his grandmother afresh. He rapped the reins urgently across his horse’s neck and it shrieked as his heels dug in harder. He thought he heard a cry from behind but he kept going. Speed was all.