The Stumpwork Robe (The Chronicles of Eirie 1)

by Prue Batten

  The ribbon dangled from her hands as she looked at the man she had disliked for so long. The anger coursing through her died a little as she examined the broad shoulders slumped in defeat, the titian hair messy and knotted, the bloody and mud-stained garments. There was no need to rant. Nothing she could say would have any more power than the raging pain Liam obviously suffered at this minute. Momentarily, she almost reached a hand to him but then the elderly man stepped forward.

  ‘Adelina, my name is Jasper. I am...’

  ‘Yes, I know. You are the Other who healed Ana. How...’

  ‘I heard the Caointeach. And I had a vision and felt Liam needed me. Perhaps you do as well.’

  Adelina bristled. Everything she had ever felt about Others and the Faeran in particular, erupted like pus from a nasty sore, her compassion for Liam dissolving in an instant. ‘Not unless you can bring her back to life. Or perhaps you can reverse time. Right back to when she first met me at the Stitching Fair when he hovered like a death wish. But no, come to think of it, I don’t need any Other to help me through this ghastly thing. Your help would be tainted with debt and obligation and I have no wish to involve myself any further with ANY of you! And if Ana hadn’t, possibly she would still be alive too. Everything I fretted about has come true.’

  Jasper touched her shoulder gently. ‘My dear, perhaps now is not the time, but I should say the only thing these two impetuous, unfortunate people are guilty of is falling in love. Each is an individual and entitled to live how they choose.’ He sighed. ‘I can do none of the things you say. Ana is dead. But perhaps I can help in other ways. May I see her please?’

  Adelina was too distraught to argue and turned to show him out. As she went to follow him through the door, Liam turned around. ‘Where did you get that ribbon?’

  ‘What?’ Adelina scrunched her eyes and spat the word at him, disbelief at the mundane question he had uttered.

  ‘The ribbon - where?’

  ‘It was outside the door. I picked it up as I came in. Why?’

  Liam looked at her, eye to eye. ‘Because she had it on when I last saw her at breakfast.’ His face was as bleak as the Barrow Hills in the middle of winter. ‘And so Adelina, I am guessing she had it on as she stood outside the door this morning. Outside as you and I talked about revenge and death and murder. Would that be enough, do you think, to make her rush to the mews and catch Florien and ride as some say, as if Huon and the Wild Hunt were behind?’

  A rhetorical question.

  Adelina’s hand crept to her mouth as she thought how she had told Liam the truth would wound Ana to the core. And then she rapidly followed that crushing thought with memories of Kholi’s request that she cease her persecution of Liam for fear of the possible consequence such an action might have. But surely he had not meant Ana’s death. No! She suffocated under the weight of guilt, of Oisin and Niamh. Of Other and fated mortal. As each thought thundered into her consciousness, she moaned, her hands clenching the ribbon into a sodden knot. Guilty. If we hadn't spoken, she wouldn't have heard. Guilty.

  Behind her, a hand touched her shoulder. Jasper turned her around and he rubbed his hands up and down her arms. ‘It is no one’s fault, Adelina. It is Fate. Be at peace.’

  The day of Ana’s funeral had dawned with speed and with glaring mountain light. Adelina was glad of the sun; it lifted the spirits enough to be able to get through what must be done. She looked at Ana as Kholi and Buckerfield began to close the casket lid. Some enchantment of Jasper’s had smoothed away the contusions and had given her a gentle blush. Her hair was shining and clean and she was dressed in a fine lawn gown embroidered with softly lustred pearls. Adelina recognised it as Other - the quality was unsurpassed. The young woman’s graceful hands lay folded gently over each other and her dark eyelashes cast feathery shadows on her cheeks.

  ‘Oh muirnin,’ Adelina reached for her hand at the last minute. It was cold and she replaced it and stepped back as the lid was nailed down. She turned to see Liam enter the room, as silent and morbid as a wraith, in time to shoulder a corner of the casket. He looked stricken, as if death held his coat tails a little too tightly. He had barely spoken since the outburst in the attic the previous day, answering questions in monosyllables.

  He shouldered his burden mutely. Kholi and Buckerfield each took a corner but their faces betrayed their feelings like open books. Jasper took the remaining corner on his thin shoulders, his black riding coat, like Liam’s, an aptly worn garment.

  As Adelina preceded them out the door, she brushed at her hair which she had tied back severely on her head. At her wrist fluttered Ana’s blue and white ribbon. She had washed and hand pressed it and tied it in a firm bow, an irregular contrast to her sombre brown garb. Liam noticed it and gestured. ‘Why, Adelina?’

  She looked at the ribbon. ‘To remember, Liam, to remember. And maybe I shall wear it until it falls into ragged skeins on the ground if I so choose. Each time I see it, I shall remember her on the stair with her hair in that ribbon yesterday.’ This was her penance and she trusted that Liam would understand. That she would forever feel the weight of guilt at Ana’s death, just as he would. He scowled at the ribbon as she held the door open.

  The cortege paced up the snow-covered slope to the Place of Everlasting Life, mourners heavily wrapped against the grievous cold of the mountains, protected from the corrosive pain of death. At the lych-gate, a woman sunk deep in thick black furs stepped back as the pallbearers eased by. Jasper’s chest tightened in the fiercest grasp of a cramp that threatened to fell him, a rope of a sensation that twisted and spliced. He gasped, stumbled and took one hand from the coffin to rub his chest, mumbling a charm, a protective spell to restore himself. The pain eased but a dark foreboding flooded to his very backbone, tingeing everything with the ebony cast of death. He knew with the instinct of an Elder that he had just passed something cataclysmic. He tried to glance back but the inexorable drag of the coffin and the other three pallbearers pushed him on. Liam, insulated by his own deeply incised pain, sensed and saw nothing.

  But Adelina saw Severine. Stepping out of the procession, she confronted the woman, just as Severine had begun to draw off her gloves, the sun glinting on a plain gold ring. The fraught sensitivities of the last day welled into a fount of invective. ‘Get out of here,’ Adelina spat. ‘You do Ana’s memory no favour. Take your stinking servants and yourself and leave here!’

  Severine exhibited mock dismay as people walked past casting curious glances at the two women who bristled like dogs, sizing each other as they circled. ‘But Adelina, I only came to pay my respects.’

  ‘You bitch! Respect isn’t even in your lexicon. You make me sick with your falsehoods and your arrogance.’ She pointed with a shaking finger, her face stained red with the effort of containing a voice that would burst free from the constraints of etiquette. ‘There goes the sweetest young woman you can imagine and you think to soil her departure with the foulness of your presence? You are insane.’

  Severine’s eyes hardened to flint and she took a breath, her hand moving sharply. Adelina’s own shot out and grabbed it before the woman could strike. She dug nails as sharp as claws into Severine’s wrist, drawing blood, dragging the woman close so she could whisper in her ear. ‘I mean it, Severine. Go.’ Her hazel eyes flashed with a green spark and her grip tightened. ‘I’m of a mind for murder. Leave.’ Her voice lifted. ‘Now. You didn't belong many years ago and you don't belong now.’

  Severine pulled her wrist away, wiping at the blood, conscious of more glances and whispers as mourners passed in groups. She began to turn, her shoulders rigid with fury, her glance full of flying daggers, her final words full of innuendo. ‘You’ll pay, my dear friend, how you will pay.’ She swept away, her furs trailing in the snow like a black bloodstain.

  Adelina watched as the carlin lit a flame under the faggots of the pyre with her staff and was filled to the brim with anger, guilt, grief; any number of deep-seated feelings that crucified and tortu
red. The heat of the fire forced people back to the lych-gate and someone began to play a soft melody on a lute, calming and soothing as the notes wound amongst the mourners and down into the town. They turned from the conflagration, wishing to recall Ana as she was, not what she was to become and they all wandered arm in arm to the Inn of the First Happiness, to think about fate and destiny.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Exhausted, wrung out into a crumpled heap, Adelina sat by the lake with Jasper late in the afternoon that fiery day as they watched the fine plume of smoke continue its heavenly journey.

  ‘Can you help Liam? He's utterly wretched.’ she spoke softly as an oriental duck paddled by. The ice had melted in the sun and waterfowl flexed their muscles.

  ‘I have tried but he doesn’t care to be helped. It is worrisome. He has repudiated so much of his heritage. If he had not, he may have had something to focus on which could pull him from his mortal-styled grief.’

  ‘Faeran don’t suffer the same way as mortals with loss?’

  ‘Generally no. It has advantages. Certainly there are great love stories but they are on the whole the exception. Liam’s is a love story and indeed a tragedy for he had a wretched early existence, Adelina. Whatever you and I felt, we could never have stopped his connection with Ana. She was searching to fill an empty place in her life and so was he. He tried hard, you know, to deny the growing love almost to the end. Of course it was fated not to last and we knew,’ Jasper touched her hand with a light gesture, ‘that it was doomed but one cannot change Fate, no matter how hard one tries. One can just limit the damage.’

  ‘Damage? Huh, we didn't limit much of that for sure. Tell me Jasper, did he really procure buckthorn potion from you?’ Adelina shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her frieze coat.

  ‘Ah, he told you. Yes, he did. He had some outlandish notion that if he assumed mortality, he could change his fate. That his destiny would alter significantly. In its simplest form the rationale probably makes sense, except that Fate can never be altered, immortal or no. It is mapped from one’s very beginning. He refused to see that in his youthful arrogance.’

  Adelina listened with interest, cobbling together the fragments of her knowledge of Others. ‘How is it then that you have banes if you are immortal?’

  ‘Simply a Divine method to prevent overpopulation of Eirie by the Faeran. When you think about it, it is actually no different to a mortal death, be it a snake-bite, drowning in the ocean or some natural death. You call it an accident, we call it a bane. We all, you and I both, call it Fate. If there is any difference, it is that the Faeran can live hundreds and hundreds of years before meeting their bane. The mortal span is miniscule by comparison.’

  ‘But you are special people, enchanted.’

  ‘Apparently, although being special has meant little in this most recent tragedy.’ Jasper shook his fine head, staring into some Liam-filled distance.

  ‘So what will happen to him?’

  ‘Ah. Truth? I don’t know. He suffers a pining sickness and already it consumes him, now that he is ‘mortal’.' Jasper shook his head. ‘How ironic it is that an ordinary girl should be so powerful and be unaware of it. Unwittingly she taught him to see the other side, the reverse. The Faeran only know perfection and the next most perfect thing to replace the last most perfect thing.’

  ‘It sounds boring and self-indulgent.’ Adelina’s strong views of Others could not be concealed. She still felt a need to hit out in order to ameliorate her own guilt.

  ‘Indeed,’ he replied. ‘And Ana may have had the capacity to change that if she had returned to Faeran with him. But!’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘If only I could get him to return with me he may escape the darkness I see coming his way. I have the capacity to see some things and I fear greatly for him.’

  ‘Could you be wrong?’

  ‘I foresaw Ana’s demise.’

  ‘You say?’ Adelina turned to face him fully, the slatted bench dragging at the folds of her coat.

  ‘I saw her in a vision and there was a horseshoe. Liam joked it was a mortal sign for weddings and meant that they were to marry. But in fact when she was found, she had a print of a horseshoe on her forehead where Florien had kicked her as they both fell.’

  Tears filled Adelina’s eyes as she winced, the healer patting her hand.

  ‘So you see, muirnin, I am never wrong. I always maintained Ana would be his bane, even in death, so I suspect he may pine away for her, like an old dog after his master. There is nothing to be done, as terrible as that may seem.’

  Further down the bank, loud quacking and honking drew their attention to a fellow with a bag full of bread. He cast pieces on the water and eventually the flock of mixed fowl quietened, concentrating on pecking every last crumb he threw on the surface of the lake. After a while he turned their way and as he walked close by, the strap of his bag broke and fell to the ground with a muffled thud, disgorging objects all over the place. He knelt hurriedly to pick up his possessions and grinned shame-faced in their direction. ‘Sorry sir and lady. I won’t be a minute and you can have your peace back.’

  Jasper smiled and waved an understanding hand. ‘Take your time. You don’t disturb us.’ He turned back to Adelina, realizing she had been speaking.

  She watched the interloper pick up an apple, some pieces of scrappy parchment and a knife. ‘We are leaving tomorrow, Jasper. We’re going to Veniche for a little while. Kholi says I am not ready for the heated chaos of Ahmadabad. He thinks the gentle waterways of Veniche may sooth me and I have never been there. Kholi will ask Liam to join us and I suspect he will agree because we are his link with her. How shall he fare, do you think?’

  ‘As well as he can until he has worked his way through the black purgatory in which he has placed himself. And I think we need to accept that like mortals in your own world, Adelina, he may choose not to fare well at all. But it will be good for him to be with you. Tell me though, can you cope with him? Can you coexist without blaming him? Because remember what I said about fault and fate, what has happened is no one’s fault. And he deserves no more pain than that he currently experiences.’

  The clumsy fellow in front of them had piled all his spilled goods into the bag and with a polite salute, departed close by their seat. ‘I’m sorry again,’ his voice was course and low. ‘Have a nice day.’

  Jasper nodded at the departing back as Adelina answered. ‘I can no more blame Liam than I can blame myself. It is something I must learn to live with. I have Kholi Khatoun to lean on but Liam is not so fortunate so we must stand by him as well as we can.’

  Jasper smiled. ‘I think it would be good for Liam to be with you. You Travellers are renowned for intuitive kindness and Kholi has great affection for the boy... I can see that. And when all is said and done, he won’t return to Faeran with me so there really is no choice. Just give him some medic at night in his wine. Here.’ He passed her a small, stoppered bottle of some brown stuff. ‘It will help.’

  He hung on the verge of revealing the chest-cleaving pain of catastrophe that had almost felled him at the funeral. But on reflection, he couldn’t bear to detail the awful heart-stopping sensation. Enough that he was aware. He tucked her hand in his arm and they walked back to the town to join in what was left of the gentle wake.

  The man with the bag was seated at the inn opposite the lake as they left. Pulling off the knitted cap concealing his bald head and rubbing the itchy spots the wool had exacerbated, Luther, Severine’s brutally qualified henchman, gave a satisfied sigh.

  So much to tell, he thought and no doubt we shall be on the road to Veniche in the morning.

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Adelina sat back against the doorjamb as the caravan was pulled along the highway. Roads were the same everywhere, she thought. They wander and lead and the predictability of their nature and the gentle swaying of Ajax’s rump lulls and sooths me. For Adelina and her companions the verges of the highway, the rounded foothills and the soaring slop
es of the Goti Range provided the detail; the stuff that took one out of one’s thoughts if they became too deep and unbearable.

  Liam slumped against the other side of the door - thinner, paler, quieter. Speaking only when spoken to. He allowed life to wash over him. And neither Kholi nor Adelina tried to draw him out. Enough they believed that he sat with them, travelled with them and went through the automatic motions of living. They could ask nothing else of him yet.

  When Buckerfield had said goodbye, he had taken Liam in his arms and hugged him, tears threatening in the big face.

  ‘You’ll always be welcome, Liam. Come back when you’re ready.’

  Adelina’s eyebrows lifted, even more surprised when Liam actually returned the clasp and said in a quiet voice how he would always be grateful for the gift of friendship. She had expected him to stay within his shell, like a hermit crab from the Pymm shores. Her own farewell to the big publican had been no less easy.

  ‘No heart for snow angels at the moment, Buckerfield,’ she said.

  ‘Nope. No heart, love. Maybe next winter, eh?’ He kissed her on each cheek and hugged Kholi. ‘No nuptials without me, do you hear?’ He whispered in Kholi’s ear, not wanting Liam to hear, for fear of hurt.

  Such a poignant farewell for them all and leaving so much behind. Adelina doubted they'd return to Star in a hurry, the pain was too great and for Buckerfiled's sake she was newly sad.

  As evening began to fall, they rolled closer to the Luned Forest, home of things eldritch and enchanted. From atop the be-fringed and bedecked back of Mogu, Kholi spoke quietly.

  ‘The evening is festooned with golden clouds