by Lisa Cach
“Ruined. It’s ruined.”
“So dastardly of those men, not dying more tidily.”
He heard my suffocated chortles and glared at me. “What?”
My laughter bubbled out, growing at the confused disapproval on his scowling face.
I had been frightened by the bandits, and frightened even more by Maerlin. I was shocked by the swiftness of the killing, and the lifeless bodies left beside the road. To then see Maerlin fussing like a vain woman at a spot on his clothing . . . It made him both more and less human.
“I don’t understand you,” he said.
“Good. You won’t have an unfair advantage over me.”
I was following a repeating pattern with him, spending hours or even days at a time feeling as if I were getting to know him, and to comprehend and sympathize with him; even to like him. Then something would happen to shake me out of my comfort, and I’d find myself staring at him as if at a foreign savage who spoke a language I’d never heard, and whose customs I would never understand.
Now, sitting on a bale at the front of the ferry, I felt a floating sense of unreality as we approached the shore of Mona. My mother might be here.
I tried to convince myself of the reality of that, and couldn’t. My heart tripped with excitement at one moment, then slowed under the force of reason at the next.
If she were here, wouldn’t I sense it?
Wouldn’t she have sent word to Brenn?
Why would she stay in a place that had such a poor reputation, and that was below even Maerlin’s questionable regard?
Or maybe she had come here to wait for me, knowing I would find her. Knowing I would find Brenn first, and that he would point the way.
Maybe.
Even if she was not here, and had never been here, I still wanted to meet Maerlin’s mother and sister. Not since I was a child had I spoken with a woman of the Phanne.
And under that all was a burning curiosity about why Maerlin dreaded seeing his kin. His alarm was such that he’d been tireless in his efforts to teach me to defend my mind, before we reached them. My mental shield wasn’t as strong as his, but he’d drilled me until I raised it with the unconscious reflex of a soldier seeing the first glint of sunlight off his enemy’s sword.
“It’s about eight more miles to the college,” Maerlin said, as we disembarked from the ferry and remounted our horses.
The “college” had once been the school of the druids, the last of its kind before Paulinus all but destroyed it four hundred years ago. A remnant of the college had survived, a few men and women trying to preserve the ancient lore and tradition of the druids. Their original wisdom was eventually lost through the years, as theirs had been an oral tradition, with the written word forbidden. Even with the druidic knowledge lost, though, the essence of the college’s purpose—to study and teach the esoteric arts—had remained.
What warped form it had now taken, I would soon find out.
The track through the forest was wide enough for us to ride abreast, though the undergrowth brushed our flanks. The earth in the center of the track was a slick, thick churn of mud, and we stayed to the sides where the grass grew. Though not yet noon, the sky was a dark, heavy gray behind the tangled, bare branches of the trees overhead, and the dim light had me feeling it was nearly night. At least the wind spared us, leaving the chill damp to seep quietly through our clothing.
“The weather’s so warm here on the island, it’s a good place for growing apples,” Maerlin said, out of the blue.
I choked out a startled laugh. “For certain, I was thinking I should have dressed more lightly.”
“It rarely freezes or snows—”
A large white and gray animal dropped from the branches overhead onto Maerlin, startling him and the horse, his horse dancing to the side and into me, Maerlin’s arms flailing as the creature screamed and slashed from where it clung to his back.
Not a creature. A girl.
I realized it as I saw the knife in her hand arcing toward Maerlin’s throat. I lunged, grabbing her white hair and one arm, digging my fingers into her and yanking with all my strength. She shrieked in fury, and Maerlin twisted, disarmed her, pinned her arms, and dragged her forward. He looked into her face, and his own was overcome by a revulsion that turned his skin as white as the girl’s. His body shuddering, he flung her to the side, off his horse. She landed with an oomph in the mud and quickly scrambled onto hands and knees, her hair hanging tangled around her face, her teeth bared in a snarl.
I gaped down at her. She was twelve or thirteen, slender as a blade of grass, and the color of milk tinted with blood. Her white brows and lashes made her look like she was covered in frost; her cheeks were pink from cold, her lips deeply red against her pale skin, and she had eyes like shards of white ice and blue sky. She was beautiful in an ethereal, eerie, disturbingly unnatural way.
“My sister Tanwen’s daughter, Una,” Maerlin told me, watching the girl as if she were a fanged snake.
Una looked up at Maerlin with hatred burning red rims around her eyes, then shifted her gaze to me. “Here’s a riddle for you,” she said in Phannic. “What do I call my mother’s brother?”
Though I knew there was a trick hidden in the question, I said, “Uncle?”
Her lip curled. “Father.”
“I’ll kill you before I let you rape her again,” Una said, and pushed herself to her feet, mud clinging to her rough gray breeches and baggy tunic. She retrieved her blade and cleaned it on the grass, then held it lightly in her palm, playing with it, showing her comfort with the weapon. “This is your only warning. Turn around and go, now, while you still can.”
Shock left me gaping. Rape? Incest? Daughter?
“I’ll risk it,” Maerlin said.
Una tensed to spring, but Maerlin had the tip of his sword under her chin before she’d done more than sway toward him. “Don’t tempt me,” Maerlin said, his voice both soft and sad.
Una made a high noise of frustration deep in her throat and spun away, diving off through the underbrush. From high on my horse I could see her white hair and the shaking of branches, and then she was gone, like a rabbit gone to ground.
Maerlin slowly sheathed his sword, his face blank. His horse shifted. We sat in the silence of the winter forest, nothing moving, and I tried to sort out what had just happened. Was his stillness the quiet of a man confronted with a guilty past? Or was it something else?
I reached out and touched his arm.
He jerked and turned his head.
“Who is Una? What is Una?”
“The nightmare from which I can never wake,” he said, his voice a raw rasp.
“It’s true, what she said? You . . . raped your sister?”
A hoarse laugh scraped its way out of his chest. “I was fourteen, just starting to build my powers. My half sister Tanwen is eight years older. Skilled. Powerful. She forced me to her bed and used me like a puppet, making me . . . Again and again, she made me come inside her. Night after night.” He closed his eyes and swallowed. “And all with my mother Akantha’s blessing.”
I was too stunned to make sense of it, and teetered at the edge of disbelief. I could not imagine Maerlin as such a vulnerable boy, being so perversely used by his sister. “But why?”
“For that,” he said, and flung his hand in the direction Una had fled. “I’ve told you that powers are almost never found in Phannic men. They thought that if Tanwen and I—that rarest of rarities, a Phannic male with power—had a child, she would have double the gifts, double the strengths. Instead, they got Una.”
“So she only has normal gifts?”
He snorted. “She has no gifts. No powers whatsoever.”
“Maybe she’s still too young, and they haven’t shown themselves.”
He shook his head. “Mothers begin to sense their daughter’s future
powers while still in the womb. The tattooing begins long before the child begins to come into her gifts. Una has none, and is useless to Tanwen and my mother except as a weapon against me. A weapon they’ve done a good job of honing by raising her on lies.”
“You should have told me. I wouldn’t have made you come here. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You should have trusted me, when I said this place was no good.”
I dug my hands into my hair and squeezed my head, a shriek of frustration tearing loose. “Maerlin! We’ve talked about this: trust cannot be blind. You could have trusted me to hear the truth.”
He bowed his head and pressed his fingertips against the ridge beneath his brows. His chest heaved with jagged breaths.
My anger shifted to alarm. “Maerlin?”
He mumbled something.
I leaned closer and lightly touched his thigh. “What was that?”
“I hoped she wouldn’t be here.”
“Where would she have gone?”
He shrugged. “Dead. Run away. Sold.”
“You can’t have wanted any of that for your own daughter.”
“It’s worse to have been raised here by Tanwen.”
I hesitated, then said, “You never tried to take her away?”
He dropped his hands and looked at me. “I last saw her when she was a babe, and even then I could barely look at her. I never wanted her to exist; I almost convinced myself she didn’t. I cannot think of Una without seeing Tanwen’s eyes glowing blue with power. I feel Tanwen’s fingers digging into my buttocks, trapping me inside her. I feel her mind gripping mine, controlling my will, my desire.”
I realized then that he feared his sister; maybe even feared that the same thing would happen again. “You’re stronger now,” I said.
“So’s she.”
I took his hand and squeezed it, feeling the back-and-forth rush of power and arousal that came with the contact. “You aren’t alone this time.”
“You can barely protect yourself.”
I pulled his hand up to my mouth and kissed the backs of his fingers, closing my eyes and trying to open myself so he could fully see the forces I dimly sensed churning in my depths. I heard his indrawn breath, and opened my eyes to find that some of the color had returned to his face. A spark lit his green eyes. “I have no skill, no control,” I said. “But what strength I have is yours, if you need it.”
“You and I,” he said.
I tilted my head in question.
A small smile touched his lips. He looked at me with the same awareness, the same appreciation as when I’d suggested our prophecies were so vague because they could mean what we intended them to mean; that we could make them come true in the way we wished. It was a look that spoke of equals.
“We can both turn around, right now,” I said. “We can leave.” Yes, I wanted my answers about my mother; I wanted to know the secrets of Phanne womanhood. But to beg the answers from such as Tanwen and Akantha . . .
Maerlin’s smile twisted into wryness. “I won’t give them the satisfaction of scaring me away at their very doorstep.”
“They knew we were coming?”
“They’re Phanne.”
As we nudged our mounts back into motion, I wondered for the first time in my life whether that was a good thing. As I thought about it, I wondered. If they knew we were coming, and sent Una to harass Maerlin, it begged the question that I now asked him. “Do they fear you?”
“Fear? No. Hate, yes. I didn’t give them what they wanted, and fled from them as soon as I was able. I wouldn’t stay and be a part of their ‘college.’ ”
“There is no hate without fear to lay its foundation.”
“You haven’t met my mother and sister.”
In a short time we came out of the forest, and before us lay a placid lake rimmed by reeds, their stalks broken and dull yellow-brown. To the west of the lake lay a complex of gray buildings with walls built of stacked stone, their roofs high and peaked, covered in a dense layer of reeds. Layers of woven wattle mats made slowly sinking walkways between the buildings, the only protection for feet from the ever-present mud. Smoke rose from the roof holes, and we heard the normal sounds of life: animals bleating and quacking, a pail of water sloshed onto the ground, the thump of a churn. Female figures appeared and disappeared, going about their work and paying us no heed. My gaze skimmed over each one, wondering, Could she be my mother? but none of them reminded me of Ligeia.
Maerlin led the way to the largest of the buildings, which had a wide, wood plank porch before the double doors at the front, and half-height wings stretching out to either side at the back. No one came to greet us. We dismounted and tethered our horses to a nearby post, and then climbed the two steps to the porch. Both of us stared at the closed doors, each caught up in private hopes and fears for what lay beyond, each delaying the moment of discovery. As long as the door was closed, I could hope that my mother was behind it. To open it and know she was not would be to force me back upon my search for her.
Maerlin raised his fist to knock.
As his hand came down, the door jerked open and an overripe, red-haired woman burst forth, cried Maerlin’s name, and threw herself onto him, her arms wrapping tight and squeezing until his stiff body seemed to vanish into her plush depths. She had one hand on his head, pulling it down to bury his face in her soft neck; she planted loud, smacking kisses on any bit of his flesh her mouth could reach.
The welcome was so warm, so exuberant, it took me a moment to see Maerlin’s hands straining against the woman, and the arch of his back as he tried to free himself from her embrace.
“Little brother, it’s been too long,” she said, gripping his shoulders and holding him away from her as if to look him up and down, but her blue eyes flashed to me, a quick glance as if to gauge my reaction to this homecoming. She beamed at Maerlin, ignoring the tight set of his mouth.
“Tanwen,” he said in Phannic. “You’re looking well fed.”
She pealed with laughter, a bell rung too hard and too fast. “Aren’t I? The college is prospering, and I along with it.” She patted his cheek, a little harder than was friendly. “We’ve done well for ourselves, without your help.”
Tanwen turned to me, and reached out to take my hands. “Nimia. We have waited so long to meet you.”
A hundred questions tumbled through my mind at that simple statement, confounding me so that it wasn’t until my hands were in hers, a soothing heat spreading up past my wrists, and I felt the first brush of her mind against my own that I raised my inner shields. Her mental touch slid away, making no attempt to press or test my strength, and by the friendly grin she was giving me, I might almost have thought it was meant as a greeting, nothing more. If Maerlin hadn’t told me all that he had, I would have taken Tanwen’s warmth as genuine.
“I am so pleased to meet fellow women of the Phanne,” I said. “It is something I have desired for as long as I can remember.”
“We are sisters of the Phannic blood. I hope you feel that we are family, for that is how Mother and I think of you.”
I smiled as brightly as I could. I didn’t know how much they knew of me beyond the message I had sent; the little I knew of them made me hesitate to claim them as kin.
Even knowing what I did, as Tanwen led us inside and made all the sounds and motions of a jolly, welcoming hostess, doubts about Maerlin’s story crept in. Maybe Tanwen had been as much at their mother’s mercy as Maerlin when Una was conceived; maybe she had long ago tried to put it all behind her, and was genuinely happy to see her brother. Maybe the quick looks she shot at me were eagerness to befriend a stranger, and not the reptilian assessment of a snake watching its prey.
Maybe.
Inside the great front doors was a dim foyer lined with benches, its walls made of vertical planks and a heavy curtain hanging over the doorway
to the interior. Girls and young women giggled and whispered as they took our cloaks and helped us exchange our muddy footwear for soft, clean slippers, and brought warm water and towels for cleaning our hands and faces. Others dashed outside to tend our horses and gather our things. They were so practiced that it seemed guests were frequent, and this cleaning-them-up-before-entry a common ritual.
With each moment that passed, my small flame of hope that my mother was here fluttered more weakly in disappointment.
I caught Maerlin’s eye, seeking a hint of how he was feeling during all this fussing and greeting; all I got was stony neutrality. Whatever he was feeling, he wasn’t going to risk showing it. He submitted to the ministrations of the girls with an uncharacteristic passivity, his arms limp at his sides, his shoulders loose. It was as if now that he was in his mother’s hall, he was no longer the fierce wizard-warrior feared across the lands, but a boy waiting to be told what to do.
A shiver crept up the back of my neck: I hoped it was an act. I’d been counting on his protection and support, perhaps more than I’d let myself admit.
“We met Una on the road,” I said, as the girls filtered away and Tanwen put her hand on the curtain. “She attacked Maerlin.”
Tanwen tilted her head and made a sorrowful tch sound. “The girl has . . . strong emotions. Some say I shouldn’t let her run as free as I do. I’m too indulgent—a mother’s failing. I hope she didn’t cause you any harm?”
“Does she often try to stab visitors?”
She shrugged. “Not as often as she used to.”
Her casual attitude annoyed me. “Una shouldn’t be allowed a knife if she can’t control herself.”
“But then, how would she dress her kills? Una is a skilled huntress, and I couldn’t take that away from her. We all need to feel as if we have a special gift, don’t we? And she has no other. Now, let’s do come through.” She pulled back the curtain. “Akantha is eager to see you both.”