Water, Circle, Moon

by Sally McBride

  “Weakened for Jaird as well, fortunately. But we’ve gained little.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” asked Laine.

  “I . . . I don’t know.” Her voice was low, troubled. “I must think on it . . . ”

  Arren’s ears went back. Laine said, “Arabella, if there’s anything, anything at all . . . ”

  “I’m not sure that what I have in mind is something I should do.”

  “Should?” Arren’s voice was gentle, with undertones of irritation. Laine hoped that only she could hear his impatience.

  “Should in the moral sense. I don’t wish to step too far across the boundaries . . . ”

  “In the moral sense?” Arren pushed up close beside Laine and nudged her forward. “I think we’re past moralizing by now. We don’t have time for a lot of introspection.”

  The little cabyll sighed as they all kept walking. The glowing footprints kept on straight, eastward, deviating only to avoid trees and rocks. Laine tried to split her consciousness, to follow the trail and to attend to Arabella’s doubts.

  “I believe I can summon up a ghost, perhaps more than one, to help us.”

  “A ghost?” Arren said, “You’re joking. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I will, however, ask for your permission.”

  “All right, stop,” said Arren, digging in his hooves. “Laine, how’s your mother’s trail look? Can we take time to talk?”

  “I think so. Yes.” The footsteps, looking like heat signatures pocking the earth, remained fairly stable. Ghosts? Could the Gypsy woman summon the dead?

  They stood in a circle, muzzles together, ears pricked for sounds of danger.

  “Just what do you need my permission for, may I ask?”

  “Arren, one of the ghosts might very well be your sister. It’s possible she could resent being called back.”

  “Good God.” He stepped back involuntarily, then resumed the circle. “Delsie . . . I never imagined . . . ” Then his voice firmed up. “No. I can believe a lot of things, but that’s going too far.”

  “But why?” broke in Laine. “Haven’t you ever wondered what happens after death?”

  “Nothing happens after death! The myth of an afterlife is a sop for the fearful. When we die, that’s it.”

  “And that’s exactly what I used to think. But listen to me—how can you be what you are and not open your mind to other possibilities?” Laine stamped a hoof. Innis, the young boy who stargazed and debated aliens and werewolves, would get it right away. “We’ll talk about this later. Right now, let’s hear what Arabella has to say.”

  “But—”

  “Later! Arabella, why would a soul resent being called back?”

  “It isn’t easy to summon the departed. I’ve never done it; I’ve only heard tales around the campfire. If I fail—or worse, succeed only partially—the spirit or spirits will suffer. When a soul is sundered violently, before its time, it lingers near the place it was torn from this life and hurled into the next, attempting to gain the strength to move on. To return to that moment between life and death is said to be excruciating.”

  Arren stood without moving, only the hairs of his mane and tail swirling gently. “Go on.”

  “I was told by my grandmother that some souls fly off immediately, but others must linger in a healing time. Calling upon the dead hinders their motion through this healing time.”

  Arren nodded. “So Delsie, and presumably the other women Jaird killed, may be gone already to heaven or wherever souls go, or they may be floating about here somewhere. And to interrupt them would be cruel.”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s a bit of a toss-up, actually.”

  Regarding Arabella and her determinedly businesslike attitude, Laine said, “There’s more, isn’t there, for you?”

  Arabella peered up at the taller animals. The foreign language that was cabyll expression was starting to become clearer to Laine. From what she could read, Arabella was fighting a hopeless longing for something she’d desired for a long, long time. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted. Was she afraid of the soul she might conjure up? “My Einar is one of those ghosts who linger. I’ve felt him over the years . . . just a touch or a sigh, a feeling that he’s there. But I know it. I’ve never had the nerve to contact him.”

  Arabella was spooked for sure. Yet they needed whatever she could come up with.

  Arren kicked out at a small tree with his hind legs. If he had hands, he’d be tearing his hair. “We don’t have time to debate. I understand your warning, Arabella, but I know my sister. She would want to help in any way she could. Perhaps your Einar would too.”

  There was no real choice. Laine knew it. If it were me who’d been murdered, she thought, I’d want revenge.

  “Yes.” She stepped to Arren’s side. “The dead can help capture their killer. I’d do it, were I one of them.”

  Arabella nodded briskly, but Laine could see her eyes glistening with tears. A cabyll could cry . . . for some odd reason, Laine found this immensely comforting. We can cry. We are not monsters. We have not abandoned our humanity.

  “How do you do it?” demanded Arren. “How do you summon ghosts?”

  Laine said, “Can we help?”

  “No, my dears. You aren’t Romany.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Arren thought about death as he watched Arabella kick away tufts of grass and weeds to expose the earth, then quickly begin to incise a large circle in it with her forehooves. Meanwhile, she was quietly chanting something he wouldn’t even try to decipher.

  He’d never believed in an afterlife. Why should he? The concept was ridiculous. When one died, one’s body rotted in the grave or burned to ash in the crematorium. One’s brain rotted too, the electrical currents that powered thought and memory quenched. Simple, straightforward and logical.

  But what if there was something beyond logic? It was equally as ridiculous to believe in shapeshifters as it was to believe in heaven. Some people believed in the soul, some didn’t. Some even believed their pet dogs had souls. He didn’t. Yet here he was, his consciousness residing in the body of a horse. In fact, to make things even more complicated, it wasn’t even a horse—it was a magical, changeable creature of legend: one that despite everything he’d seen, he’d never truly believed in. Part of Arren’s stubborn sensibility had clung desperately to logic.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  But it was. Perhaps humans really did have that ephemeral, arguable quality men called the soul. Perhaps Delsie wasn’t really gone forever. Perhaps, when his parents had been slaughtered so violently, they had not really vanished wholly from the world. He shook his head. His mane moved; his shaggy ears pricked and turned; his heavy, sharp hooves restlessly dug at the ground.

  A horse’s body with a man’s mind inside. Insane. But if this was insanity, he did not want to trade it for reality. Not now.

  Arabella was inside her circle, still digging away energetically, though not fast enough. Arren felt the passage of time like the stroke of a whip on his rump. He wanted to move, go charging after Jaird Fallon and pound him to death with these illogical hooves of his.

  He ground his teeth as Arabella inscribed a second, smaller circle near the center of her first one. Then, starting at the top—east—she proceeded to dig a large cross so the inner circle enclosed the intersection of her two lines in the dirt. It looked like a traditional Celtic cross, the freestanding stone relics he’d noted in Ireland, Wales, and here and there across the British Isles. Sturdy and intricately carved, the stone crosses bore scant resemblance to Arabella’s crude scratching.

  She stepped back to inspect her work, still chanting in a high, singsong voice that sounded strangely right coming from the throat of a small, tawny horse, like the trill of a bird whose important message was lost on other ears. For a rushing moment, Arren was taken by the beauty of the scene. The black and silver night, the swaying trees, the brilliant moon overseeing Arabella�
�s work. It was a fairy tale, a legend come true, and he was in the middle of it. A feeling almost like reverence overwhelmed him, and he wondered if Laine felt it too.

  She was watching Arabella as he was, and he was about to speak to her, but just then they were beckoned to enter the circle. Obediently, feeling eager and nervous, Arren stepped inside, Laine beside him. Immediately he felt a difference in the moonlight on his back, already sizzling with promise and power as it poured down on him. The difference was in the tone of it, for want of a better term.

  It was like the touch of a lover, passionate and insistent, and he knew now, as never before, what that was like. Could the moon compete with Laine for his sensual allegiance? He looked at her.

  Never. Nothing could match what he felt for her. Laine glowed. Moonlight flowed along her curves, outlining the strange, powerful muscles under her hide, caught cold fire in the threads of her mane and tail and the pools of her eyes.

  But the light had become tarnished. There was a softness about it, a dragging stillness that made him want to bask forever. A stillness like death . . . this lover’s touch was laden with sadness and regret. He shivered superstitiously and felt the urge to surrender creep upon him like suffocating oil.

  And then the whispers started. At first nothing more than the sighing of a slight breeze, the flutter of leaves, the combing of long grass by fingers of air . . . and then they thickened, grew bolder, burgeoned into words. One separated itself from the rest.

  I love you, Delsie. You were always kind to me.

  A girl’s voice, wreathing his head like smoke. Or was it right inside his brain? A voice full of the sharp sweetness of youth, just as he remembered it. He stood perfectly still, barely breathing. Delsie . . . is it you?

  No reply.

  Where are you, Delsie?

  I don’t know. Nowhere.

  What do you want?

  Peace. Sleep.

  He was about to promise her anything when, like a door opening onto a prison cell full of screaming people, a hundred voices shouted. What do we want? Rest. Forgetfulness.

  And some said: Revenge.

  The other voices took it up. Together they spoke. Revenge . . . Death to the one who did this to us. Delsie’s tiny voice was drowned in the flood.

  Arabella sang, turning in place. She asked a question. Will you help us?

  Yes, they chorused, we will help you.

  And that was the most chilling thing he’d heard all night.

  Arren was starting to get an idea of what soldiers felt, knowing battle would come before they were ready. No one was ever ready. He certainly wasn’t.

  And now they had a cohort of murdered souls to accompany them into the field. Lord help us.

  Arabella stood in the center of her mystic circle, concealed for a moment and then revealed again by a thin, layered mist.

  He said, “Are you two hearing what I hear?”

  Laine stood stock-still, her ears swiveling. “I don’t know. It sounds like wind, or water running or something . . . no, it’s voices! But I can’t make them out.” He could feel her excitement and frustration.

  Arren said, “I thought I heard Delsie’s voice. I recognized it. But then it was drowned out.”

  “Drowned out? By what?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He turned to Arabella. “Have you finished what you need to do?”

  She didn’t reply. Within the mist she turned, forcing it to swirl around her, thrusting her head this way and that as if seeking something. A high crooning came from deep in her throat. She was trembling.

  “Arabella! Can we go now?”

  Her head turned and she looked at him, but he knew she wasn’t seeing him. “Just another minute . . . ”

  Laine had backed out of the circle and now stood at its edge, watching Arabella. “He’s not coming, is he? Your Einar.”

  “No . . . no. I don’t believe he is.” Arabella’s glow dimmed; her bright, gallant spirit shrank. “Well. I suppose he’s gone. Truly gone.”

  She looked around, bending her neck this way and that as if following a circling horde. “Yes. I can see them clearly. Many, so many . . . thin and moving, restless. Einar is not among them.” She left the circle. “Oh! They’ve faded . . . but are still there. They should stay close to me now, wherever I go.” Her voice held resignation, as though she faced a difficult task and only wanted it over and done with.

  “How can spirits help us?” asked Arren. “What can they do?”

  “Though the dead cannot physically influence anything, they can pass us the strength they were denied by being cut down too soon. Willingly they will share their hatred and anguish with us.”

  That didn’t sound like it was going to be much use. Arren stepped out of the circle, more alarmed now than before Arabella’s Gypsy magic. This summoning of souls might turn out to be a very bad idea.

  Sounding chastened and grim, Laine said, “Follow me. Bethea has gone to meet Jaird, I’m certain of it.”

  Laine moved as quickly as she was able through the open forest that lay to the southeast. Any lights that might have been visible, of the town or the inn, had vanished, and she wondered if they had entered that realm of ancient otherness Jaird had showed her. She couldn’t know, and didn’t want to find out.

  Whatever incantation Arabella had used was working. She felt strong, and found Bethea’s glowing tracks easy to follow, though Laine feared what she might encounter when the tracks met up with their owner.

  She could hear the whispering of the dead in her brain as she paced along, nose to the ground like a dog. What the women and men said made a kind of sense to her, though it was fragmented and blurred like something rain had pelted for hours and left as mush. All that remained of these poor souls was need. Need not simply for revenge, but for a way to reach that safe and peaceful land beyond death, beyond the nether corridors where they now coiled and wisped.

  Arren strode beside her, dark as the thundercloud he’d been when they met. She could feel electricity like small lightning from him, and from Arabella as well, an effect of the powers they had gained; and though it was thrilling, she knew that such a state could not be borne for long. She sped up, her hooves thudding dully in the thick, damp mulch.

  He quickened his pace to match hers and nudged her briefly. “I hear something.”

  She raised her head and turned her concentration away from scent and sight to sound. “Yes. It’s . . . it sounds like someone crying.”

  “This way.” He turned and plunged ahead. She followed, her heart clenching painfully. A woman crying in the middle of the forest—it had to be Mother. Unless it was yet another of Jaird’s victims.

  They broke through the underbrush and entered a small clearing. The moon shone down so brightly that Laine had trouble making out what she saw—the shadows were so black, and what lay in the middle of the small meadow was so white. It could have been a sculpture, a pure form carved of marble. A horse half-lying on the grass, caught in a moment of rising, its pale neck arched and its muzzle bent to the ground. One long, slim leg extended forward like a ballerina’s, the effect enhanced by the black stockings she seemed to wear. Milk-white, with black muzzle and black legs to the knees, pure white mane and tail, she was beautiful.

  Beautiful . . . then Laine heard the high, thin note of pain, a sound that went right to her gut. It was Mother. The smell was right, the luminous tracks she’d been following lay here and all about as if the cabyll mare had been plunging back and forth, or racing in circles. In fact, the ground itself was churned and glowing, roughed up as if a battle had been waged. More than one set of prints had trampled this patch of earth. She started forward. “Mother? Is that you?”

  But Arren blocked her with his heavy body. For a moment, she tried to fight him, but he was too big, too strong; ruthlessly he shoved her back into the trees’ shadow. He said, “It’s a trap.”

  Arabella moved close, sniffing the air. “He’s right. This looks bad. You two st
ay here while I scout around.”

  “But she’s hurt! Let me go to her!”

  The white horse raised her head, her eyes black pools without a glimmer of comprehension. She made no attempt to rise.

  “No,” Arren said, not without compassion. “Stay here. Arabella and I will check things out.”

  The white horse shifted and groaned, and Laine saw what was wrong. Her legs were broken.

  Instinctively she leapt forward.

  Arren hissed, “Laine, no! Oh, Jesus—”

  She heard him right behind her, and then she was down on her forelegs beside Bethea, nuzzling her, trying to get a reaction.

  She did. Bethea tried to bite her. Laine flinched back, pity and fear stinging her eyes. “Mother, it’s me!” She had wanted Jaird dead before; now she wanted him alive so she could kill him. “We’ve got to get you out of here before Jaird comes back.” She pushed desperately at Bethea’s head with her own, wishing for hands to soothe and help. “Can you hear me?”

  Bethea’s head rose by inches, as if it was weighted, and Laine at last saw understanding behind the pain and shock. “Laine . . . oh, Laine. Get out of here. He’ll kill you.”

  “No, he won’t. Can you change back to human?” Though her limbs would still be broken, perhaps they could get her up on Arren’s back, or her own, and carry her away. Jaird wouldn’t let them alone for long. Bethea’s placement was so obviously meant to lure them in and keep them busy. But they couldn’t simply wait for Jaird to spring his trap.

  Bethea sagged back to the ground, shaking her delicate head, elegant and pitiful on its long, pale neck. She was panting, and her ears were laid back. Every second or two a ripple of pain ran down her body. Laine could see the bone jutting through the skin of her forelegs, right where the black stockings met the milky white. With every labored breath, the edges of snapped bone moved and grated. Blood threaded Bethea’s legs and soaked the earth where she lay.

  And then Laine knew. Jaird had done this before.

  Mother’s legs. Always hidden under long skirts, jeans, gowns. Those thin scars like scribbled letters on her skin told the tale. Jaird had punished her before. No wonder she had fled across an ocean. But she had never escaped from the fear.