by Prue Batten
‘Feckless Faeran.’ The swan-maid muttered as she hitched the plumage over her shoulders. She launched into the skies silently, banking and heading northerly to the mountains.
The journeymen had slept, waking only when an insistent banging at the door had rendered their peace shattered.
‘Hey. It’s almost mid-afternoon.’ Buckerfield’s voice bounced achingly off the whitewashed walls of the hall. Kholi opened the door and Buckerfield took in the tired eyes and the grey pallor. ‘Well, good grief, you have been asleep. My apologies.’ Kholi smiled and stepped aside as Buckerfield entered the room. ‘Ah, methinks you’ve had troubles on the road for you look done in. Well never you mind. If you want to talk I’m here and if not, well that’s alright too. But I bet it were them bloody Others, weren’t it? Anyway, you’re safe here and it won’t be long before your friends come. Aannnd...’ he drew the word out to indicate he had something special to announce. ‘Tonight is the Fire Festival because a Traveller has just arrived from up top and the first snows are falling. Aannnd...’ his eyes twinkled and the double layer of chins shook and jostled. ‘Tomorrow is the Fire Festival market!’
At this Adelina’s face lit up.
‘Yeesss! Thought that’d brighten you. But there’s more!’ The folds and wattles of his face creased in an excitement he wanted to share. ‘The Faeran will be selling their wares. And whilst I don’t take much with them Others, the Faeran do have some beautiful stuff and honestly I reckon it’d be once in a lifetime they’d bother to mingle with mortals in a market of their own making. I don’t think they do it for the money, that’s for sure. I reckon it’s for the game. And Adelina, a group of traders has just arrived from the Raj with some stuff that’d be right up your alley and Kholi, I bet you know half the folk anyway.’ He paused for breath. ‘Anyhoo, my lovelies, I must get back to the bar, very busy it is. But I think you need a bit of diversion so get you up and out and be a part of it, eh? I’ll see you later.’ He departed on soft light feet, closing the door gently behind him.
Chapter Nineteen
Liam slowed Florien to a walk as he negotiated the foot of the Barrow Hills. He had travelled back over trails already covered by the foursome in earlier days until he had found a track that was barely a defile of broken grasses leading to a fold in the hills. Sequestered in a quiet vale was an orchard of peach and apricot trees, the last of their jewelled leaves dangling. They waved, miniature pennants undulating in a welkin wind whereupon some detached to flutter and land between the trees, forming a carpet that crackled under the horse’s hooves. The trees were twisted into espaliered lanes and the tortuous results became the infamous Ymp Trees... gateways to places outside nature and one of the gates to which Liam had retreated so often over the past few weeks.
Florien walked down the first lane and then up the second before turning carefully into a third so that Ana would be neither jostled nor jolted. The reins hung loose over his neck and all the while as they walked along, Liam had been stroking Ana’s forehead, smoothing her dried, muddy locks back, away from her catatonic face. Had a mortal been watching their progress into that third lane, he would have thought himself bosky as the horse, his rider and cargo vanished as if they had never been.
‘So you are come at last.’ An elderly man leaned on a stick, the Ymp Trees sporadically unloading their plunder around his shoulders. Some landed to mix with his white hair which was cut short, closer to his head than the fashion. Jasper had an elegant forehead lined with a wealth of grooves that indicated kindness and a goodly dose of humour.
‘You knew I was coming.’ Liam’s voice betrayed little emotion as he gazed at Jasper who was said to be wise, possessed of the ability to seer, to scry - one of the privileged few.
‘Indeed. Watching your progress these last few weeks has been somewhat of an entertainment, my boy. My, my. If your father were alive he would flay you for the turn you appear to be taking. Living with mortals, helping them? No, no, don’t look so. I am not your father. In fact most Others think me very strange indeed. I have always thought kindness in anyone, mortal or Other, will bring its own reward. But come now, I can see the girl needs attending.’ He set off between the Ymp Trees, using his stick more as a scythe than as a support, his swagger indicating an agility belying his years.
Here, through the gate to Faeran, the colours were richer, the fragrances more overpowering. Where peaches and apricots had dropped, so they rotted and fermented, wafting a heady odour. Liam had become more used to the subtle tastes of mortal life and found the scent of Faeran clogged his nose and fogged his senses. Birds chimed and chorused, butterflies flitted, touching Ana’s head with soft wings. And everywhere was the sense of richness and excess. Liam grimaced.
Jasper called over his shoulder. ‘Mortal life suits you then, more than your own home.’
Liam wondered if the old man had eyes in the back of his head. ‘There are things I prefer,’ he said.
The hauteur in his answer caused Jasper’s eyebrows to shoot for the sky, as if he found something amusing and ironic in Liam’s reply. They had wound their way through a dense knot garden full of thick privet and box hedges groomed to intertwine in some ancient Faeran way. A charm to be sure, thought Liam, to keep the unkind and unkempt away. Cypresses stood at each corner of the garden, reaching to the sky like sentinels. In the middle of the knot, right where the trees met in a controlled explosion of tightly pruned branches, a white dovecote stood proudly. The paunch-bellied doves swaggered around, dipping and curtsying to each other, the feathered parody of a Faeran Court.
They had reached the forecourt of a stone house. Long and sitting on a gravelled terrace, the sandstone dwelling looked as if it had been dipped in honey, the colour dripping onto the gravel. Jasper tapped on a deeply carved door with his stick and Liam had a moment to observe the carved runes curling, presumably telling only Jasper the charm to use for the thresh-hold to be safely traversed. As the massive piece of cedar swung noiselessly back to reveal a light, interior, Liam sat aboard Florien, nursing his bundle whilst Jasper chivvied Folko, his ostler, to help. The stocky servant reached up and Ana was placed in the wide, tender arms and then Liam jumped down, loosened Florien’s girth and hurried inside after the others.
The interior smelled of beeswax and herbs. Tellurions and orreries glinted in the beams of sunlight falling through the large oblong windows; globes, spheres and discs rolling, swinging, rotating silently in movements of eldritch propulsion. Shelves exploded with all sizes of books and those not shelved were marshalled into ordered rows along the walls. Vast rugs covered polished floorboards and at the far wall, where a stone fireplace stretched from floor to ceiling, a woman was setting kindling and logs and brushing the hearth with blacking.
‘Margriet,’ Jasper called. ‘We have our company at last and I need your help.’ He walked rapidly ahead, his boots making no sound on the rugs and his long black damask coat sweeping behind him. Through the high centre-vent at the back, one could glimpse breeches that were dirty with a saddle mark. The man had obviously been riding early that morning. They proceeded past vast story-telling tapestries that clung to the walls and illuminated books which glistened shyly from lecterns until Jasper turned through a door into a sparse room where a large bed stood in the centre. A huge silver framed mirror was propped on the mantelpiece and had Liam looked he would have seen an image of himself following Ana as she walked around a small lake. It played the same scene over and over. As the woman was laid on a brown rug on the bed, the mirror returned to its normal, reflective form.
‘Will she be well?’ Liam asked as if it should matter.
‘Not sure just yet, my boy.’ Jasper placed a hand on Ana’s forehead. ‘Folko, carry the bath in and then Margriet, bathe the girl in warm water with lavender and camomile oils. Light the lavender candles as well. Try to be as calm and gentle as you can. Methinks that while she may not feel you touching her, any sudden move may cause her to break even more.’
‘What do you m
ean ‘break even more’?’ Liam moved to Ana’s side, grasping a hand as limp and lifeless as a corpse.
‘I doubt her physical injuries are much at all. But she is catatonic and I think all the events she has experienced these last few months have finally pushed her into a deep depression. And yes, I know all about her, Liam, so don’t prevail too much upon my good humour.’
‘Can you heal her?’
‘I will try, dear boy, but she is mortal.’ Jasper looked around the room, searching for something. He pushed at the door of the room beside Ana’s. Capacious, lined shelf upon shelf with manuscripts and folios, the workroom smelled of herb and vellum, parchment and oil. A massive table extended along the room covered in an array of alchemical glassware. Mortars and pestles marched along the windowsill. A low fire glowed in a hearth overhung by an iron trivet. Ranks of drawers filled one wall. Liam watched him go immediately to this fine piece of cedar furniture and fling open one drawer after another to place herbs and petals on the table. Then he turned and stared at them, fingers to his mouth. The night-sky blue eyes looked up at Liam, unfocussed.
‘What are you doing?’ Liam picked up a crucible and turned it this way and that before thrusting it back on the table.
The Elder grabbed the dried flowers and stored them again. He spoke to himself, ignoring the man closeted with him, each sentence underlined by a small slam of a drawer. ‘No, this is all useless. I need fresh flowers.’ He grabbed a small basket and placed a bottle of clear water and some glass bowls wrapped in cloth, gently inside. ‘Come to the garden.’
The sun saturated the walled garden at the back of the house and the whole was suffused with the overpowering scents of flowering shrubs and the drone of bees. Jasper immediately headed for the far wall, mantled in a swathe of clematis. Beside the climber, a wrought gate stood open, giving a glimpse of the Ymp Trees and their fragrantly rotting fruit outside. His liver-spotted hands reached up to the flower heads and he deftly plucked a small number with a pair of pincers, then turned to Liam who stood hands in pockets. ‘Fill the glass bowls with the water and dear boy, don’t allow your own skin to come in contact with the interior of the bowls or with the liquid. Ana’s sensibilities depend on your care and must not be tainted by your own juices. Clematis, you see, when steeped in water and allowed to heat in the sun and pour out its properties, is a marvellous medic for unconsciousness. But there are other things too.’ He picked up the clematis petals with the pincers and dropped them into one of the bowls Liam had prepared. ‘I need some golden helianthum for extreme shock and some gentiana. Altogether, the three flowers will insulate her from the terrible mental injury she has sustained and allow her psyche to re-build.’
‘How long? Is there not a charm, some form of incantation?’ Liam stared at the few paltry flowers, unimpressed.
‘No my boy, there is only this. And patience.’ And love, he muttered to himself but Liam didn’t hear as they went about their pruning. Mimulus was picked and scleranthus and the feathered white blossoms of the cherry plum. This last to prevent loss of mind. And then sweet chestnut to cure the mental anguish the young woman sustained. Throughout the garden, the water-filled glass bowls continued their distilling process under the warmth of the sun until presently Jasper gathered them all, passing the basket to Liam and returning to the sickroom.
Ana lay clean and smelling sweetly of the fragrant oils on her skin. Her hair, still damp from Margriet’s tender care, was spread on the pillow and mahogany strands of it glinted in the light coming through the wide window. Her skin shone more healthily, although two spots of bright carmine coloured her cheeks. Jasper placed fingers against her forehead. ‘Margriet, open the window and pull back the covers, she is a little warm. I shall return forthwith.’ At this last, he turned in a flurry of black, the damask silk hissing against the cedar door as he brushed past.
Forgotten by the Elder, Liam walked to Ana’s bedside and ran his fingers into her open hand. Margriet, watching covertly, had never seen such a tender moment. His fingers slid slowly and almost wantonly over Ana’s palm to curl her inanimate fingers in his own. There’s a thing, she thought and turned away.
Adelina and Kholi stepped along the cobbled streets of Star. Excitement about the coming Fire Festival fizzed around them but they felt insulated from it all, slung deep in worry.
‘What if he can’t find her?’ Adelina walked with a thick padded coat wrapped around and tied with a cord to exclude the cold. A chill breeze blew down the mountainside, bringing with it the smell and feel of the approaching snows of winter. But she knew her own cold was more than skin deep, it came from a heart and soul filled with anxiety. Kholi put his arm across her shoulders and pulled her close.
‘Liam is Other. He has many ways of searching.’
‘But I told you Kholi, she’s fragile and I am so worried. She has become family. I hadn’t realized how much I have missed family since my own parents died. I honestly always felt I was a self-contained person and content with it but I can see I am not. She filled a gap. A sister-friend, someone to care for, to mentor. All those things that families do, that they feel.’
They had reached the small lake at the far side of the town. It filled from the mountain streams that would soon be frozen. Now it eked an overflow into a narrow waterfall that could often be seen from parts of Trevallyn, a glistening gold and copper ribbon in the rays of any dawn sun. Kholi led Adelina to a bench under a bare willow. The branches undulated in the breeze and the two lovers tipped their faces to the sun as it moved westward. The day had begun to darken as the sun slid down towards the precipitate crags. The lake ruffled here and there as the breeze danced across. Small green ducks with curled tails and upswept tufts of feathers on their wing tips floated past, saw the strangers had nothing to offer, quacked in a dejected fashion and moved on. Their white ringed necks made them look bureaucratic, reminding one of the collars of the suited clerks in Veniche. A movement to Adelina’s left caught her eye and the waving willow branches parted as a pair of swans glided through. White and graceful, they rested their eyes for a moment on the mortals and then with a hiss of warning to stay away, swept regally on.
Kholi’s arm draped over Adelina’s shoulder. ‘You won’t lose her, Adelina, I swear. And in addition, you have me.’
Adelina looked up at him and kissed him as a black swan paddled through the twiggy willow veil. It approached the shore and stepped onto dry land... to transform, feathered cloak sliding down to rest on the slim white arm of Maeve Swan Maid. The lovers untangled with a gasp. This unexpected Other in her singularly chill fashion was breathtaking.
‘Kholi Khatoun and Adelina, Maeve Swan Maid comes from Liam. He has found chit. He said to tell thee he takes her to Jasper. She is wounded, but...’ she paused, her sibilant tones shivering to a halt.
‘But what?’ Adelina had quickly buried her awe of the swan-maid. She reached out to grab Maeve’s arm but with a hiss and a sweep of the elegant neck, the long midnight hair describing an arc, the swan-maid stepped back out of reach.
‘She is wounded but can be repaired.’ The beautiful lips sealed, as if to say ‘That is all’.’
Kholi, prescient in the extreme, desperate not to offend, stood and bowed. ‘Thank you, swan-maid, we are grateful. But can we prevail upon you a moment longer?’ Maeve looked at him and heaved a sigh. He continued, choosing to ignore the compressed red lips and the black eyes closing to slits. He also grabbed hold of Adelina’s hand with one of his own in an effort to impose some order on his lover’s behaviour. Her dislike of Maeve had tainted the air like a fog from the minute the woman uttered her first words to them. ‘Who is Jasper?’ he asked.
‘Ah, thou knows nothing.’ Maeve looked at the two with a contemptuous scowl. ‘Jasper is Faeran Elder, a healer. Everyone,’ she looked down her nose, standing tall like a black lily above the seated traders, ‘knows the healer.’ Her sibilance gave her the sharpness of a knife.
‘Will she be well?’ Kholi persisted.
> ‘Thou asks many questions. Yes. Maeve Swan Maid bids thee adieu.’
Adelina watched the fingers begin to pull the luscious cloak up the flexuous arms and her concern for Ana burst its banks. ‘Is that all? Is there nothing else? How long?’
‘Thou pushes too hard, mortal. Ah, but yes.’ Maeve dug into the pocket in the side of her black gown and withdrew something that she held it out to Adelina. ‘This is for thee. Liam said thou would understand the intent. And as to time? As long as it takes. But Other did say he would bring chit to thee when she is well.’ As she spoke, Maeve pulled on the cloak and walked to the water. A swan again, she pushed off with a flap of the gracefully stretched wings and flew away, a harsh cry swooping lakewards.
‘The chit is called Ana,’ Adelina muttered as she turned over the object in her hands. A brass and copper wristlet, it was exquisitely wrought in an under and over rune. The opening and closing ends of the rune depicted horses’ heads, manes flying back in the unseen breeze.
‘It is the Færan rune for honour.’ Kholi examined the piece. ‘Liam explained it to me once. See, my doveheart? He has found her and even though she is hurt, she is to be made well. And he will bring her to us.’ He grasped Adelina and shook her gently. ‘On his honour.’
Adelina slipped the jewelry on and off her own wrist, trying to believe Liam was helping Ana. That this wasn’t just one more move, the final move in his gameplay. She could spend hours trying to explain to Kholi how she believed she and Liam were locked in some sort of combat with Ana as the prize, but he would think her mad and if not mad then difficult. Certainly wrong. So she kept her counsel, hinting by other less satisfactory means that Liam was not all he appeared to be. But Kholi could not be convinced and she hated that they had this one bone of contention between them because in every other way they melded perfectly. Sometimes, as her lover lay asleep next to her, she would lie staring into the dark and wonder at how her life had changed these last few weeks since Kholi had appeared. She had never loved so completely before. If she lost the focus of her love then she would die too, she was sure, or if not die then go mad with grief. It frightened her because she knew the other side of love was loss. As a solitary Traveller, uncommitted to anyone, she believed her life had balance. Now her life was like a mountain track; exhilarating and exciting but one never knew what was around the next precipitate corner.