by Judith Tarr
She bound the last knot and bit it off with her teeth. A slight shock ran through her; she started and nearly dropped the weaving. Hastily she thrust it into the purse she wore at her belt.
It buzzed there like a swarm of bees. It could sting, too, if she let it go. She shuddered in her skin.
Magic was no easy thing to master. Even this little working, so simple any hedge-witch could do it, made her dizzy and sapped her strength. She staggered as she turned in the direction that Erynna had gone.
By an effort of will she made herself walk steadily, firm and not too fast, up the track toward the summit. She fought the urge to run—if she had, she would have fallen. Timarete was almost within sight.
The spell was reaching already to tangle the priestess’ feet. It tugged at Myrtale’s own, but she pulled herself free.
Erynna waited just below the summit, where a hollow hid her from sight but let her see what passed below. She had made herself a cradle of thread and trapped a ray of sunlight in it.
The thread was smoldering. Myrtale spoke a word that brought a drop of rain to quench the fire.
Erynna’s glance was unreadable. She was not jealous, surely. Her arts were far superior to Myrtale’s and might always be.
Without warning the witch left the hollow, slipping away down the slope. A fold of ridge there concealed her from the trap.
Myrtale wanted very much to see Timarete stumble into the snare, but she had to admit that Erynna was wise. Grudgingly but quickly, she followed where Erynna led.
* * *
Timarete was hot and breathless with climbing. Her skin prickled as she came up the last ascent and looked down into the pasture.
It was empty. She could not have said she was surprised. She paused to breathe, leaning on a stone.
The girl could not have gone far. Witches in Thessaly could fly, but there was no sign or smell of the ointment. For whatever reason, Myrtale’s new teacher elected to travel as mortals did.
Timarete began the descent into the pasture. It was much longer and steeper than it had looked. So long and steep in fact that she began to suspect a trap.
It was clever, she thought when she tried to pause and found she could not. The path went on and on, winding like a tangle of thread. No matter how far she walked, she advanced neither forward nor back.
She set her teeth and pushed against the spell. It was well made. It did not yield.
She was not afraid, not yet. A body could die in such a trap. But she had arts of her own. She would work free of the spell; she would win her way home.
Eventually. Somewhat before her feet had worn raw with walking forever without advancing, and her flesh had melted from her bones with hunger and exhaustion.
* * *
Not only Myrtale could lay a trap. She followed Erynna innocently round a bend in the path and walked straight into a camp of armed men.
As soon as she realized what she had done, she spun on her heel and bolted. A man who seemed as tall and wide as the Mother’s temple barred her way. He grunted as she collided with him, but he barely swayed.
She knew no spell swift enough to free her before he held her fast. He was adept at restraining small, snapping, clawing beasts. In half a dozen breaths he held her motionless, breathing hard, glaring through tangled hair at the king’s envoy of Macedon.
Lagos’ face was carefully expressionless. “Lady,” he said. “We’re most glad to have found you.”
Myrtale was anything but glad to have found him. This time when she twisted in her captor’s grip, he let her go except for a light but firm clasp on one wrist. She chose to ignore that, glaring past him at Erynna.
The witch looked back at her without guilt. “Why?” Myrtale asked her.
“It’s time,” she answered.
Myrtale tossed her head in fierce denial. “We were not finished!”
“For now we are,” said Erynna.
Myrtale bit her lips hard. Maybe this was not a betrayal. Maybe it was a gift.
She wanted Philip still, his kingdom and the power that came with them both. She wanted magic, too, as much as her hands could grasp. Erynna had as much as promised her that she could have it all.
She would trust the witch, for the moment. She turned back toward Lagos. “You were hunting me?”
“We had thought you missing, lady,” he said.
“That I was not,” said Myrtale, “but I thank you for your diligence.”
“Epiros will owe Macedon a debt,” he said. “Perhaps, lady, you can suggest a way in which his majesty may repay us.”
Myrtale had not heard that the lords of Macedon were skilled in the intrigues of courts, but this was as subtle as anything in the queen’s house of Epiros. Lagos had just offered her what she had professed to want. Arybbas would not refuse Philip’s suit, not if Philip’s envoy brought back the wayward bride.
Her belly clenched. It was one thing to want and fret and dream. It was another to take what was offered, that was everything she had wanted, and yet—
She nodded crisply. “I can think of a payment for the debt. Take me to my uncle.”
She held her breath. A queen learned to be imperious, but men did not always do as they were told.
It seemed Lagos had been raised properly. He bowed to her will.
Fourteen
Myrtale returned to Dodona on the back of a Macedonian warhorse, with the king’s envoy beside her. Rumor had it that she had run off to marry the king in spite of her kin.
Neither Lagos nor Myrtale did anything to quell the rumor. She was amused to see how furious her uncle was, but how powerless he was to speak of it.
Completely without intending it, she had won the battle. Arybbas had no choice but to give her what she asked.
She spared little thought for Timarete. Her aunt would escape the spell—but not, by the Mother, easily or quickly. By the time she roared off the mountain in a fiery trail of outrage, Myrtale would be long gone.
That was no more than she deserved. She was fortunate that Myrtale had done no worse.
Lagos was in no way reluctant to end his embassy. He had his king’s inclination toward swift action, and this had taken more than long enough, in his estimation.
Myrtale was of entirely the same persuasion. Her sister would have delayed them all for at least a handful of days, to gather the following proper to a king’s bride. But Myrtale had waited too long as it was.
* * *
The day after she returned from the mountain, she rode out of the king’s house. The sky was grey and blustery, shot with sudden, dazzling flashes of sunlight. Summer though it still was, winter’s breath had chosen to blow—just a little; enough to remind every mortal that neither warmth nor brightness would long endure.
Nor would dark or cold. It was all one in the Mother. Time passed in its endless round, from light to dark and back to light again.
She shook off such thoughts. Now of all days, she should think only of the light. She was going to be married to the Bull of Minos, the Lion of Macedon, the king who alone was worthy of her.
For all Troas’ protestations, Myrtale took with her a caravan of treasures fit for a queen, a train of royal gifts, a company of the king’s guards, and a pair of tattooed Thracian slaves, each leading one of the great hounds of Molossia. For herself Myrtale brought little: her young snake in its basket, a chest of belongings, and Philip’s gift, the witch Erynna.
Erynna had returned to her old silence. Myrtale did not choose to break it. She disliked to be taken by surprise, even if that ambush led to her heart’s desire.
That heart of hers was trying to play her false. It kept beating wildly and then going cold.
When she left Dodona for Samothrace, she had known she was coming back—even if she cherished some hope she might not be. This was a truer parting. Even if she came back, it would never be the same. She would return as a wife and, gods willing, a queen.
In the crowded solitude of a royal bride’s train, she ran over i
n memory the lessons she had learned on the mountain. There was more to them—much more; but she refused to beg Erynna for them. Erynna would teach them, Myrtale did not doubt, but in her own time and at her own pace.
Myrtale could wait her out. Meanwhile there was a new country to see and new faces to remember, and a new world opening before her.
And Philip. She had, like a child, half hoped he would be waiting at the border of his country. There were men waiting, but they were not the king—only the king’s Companions, sent as an escort.
That was a considerable honor. It was not enough. Philip might think he had her, but he would learn what was worthy of her.
His men were bold: they looked her full in the face. It seemed they found her beautiful, though she heard them talking in their own language that was not quite the one spoken in the peasants’ huts of Epiros. They called her a foreigner, and muttered of proper Macedonian brides.
She smiled at them, aiming to addle their poor male wits. For many that was enough. The rest she wooed with words, quick brushes of attention, learning each man’s name and family and whether he had wife or lover. And sons—they did love to talk of their sons.
While she spoke to them, she softened her accent—not so much that she could be accused of pretending to be Macedonian, but enough to seem less jarringly foreign. Not every man was so easily won over, but she had gained no enemies, either.
* * *
It was ten days’ journey at the pace of an oxcart from Dodona to Pella. That was time enough for Myrtale to weigh and measure Philip’s men and discover their names and families and where they came from. They were shy at first, but when she persevered, they proved willing enough to speak to her, though they had not decided, yet, to accept her.
Erynna kept to herself. Her escort, Epirote and Macedonian alike, knew what she was: Myrtale caught the glances and the muttered words. They did not appear to know that she was Myrtale’s teacher, or else they chose not to acknowledge that uncomfortable fact. Myrtale, it seemed, was not to suffer for their misunderstanding of Erynna’s nation and arts.
Was it a misunderstanding? Myrtale slid away from the thought. In those few days on the mountain, she had opened her eyes to a whole new world.
It was still there, all around her. Every ray of sunlight and every shadow under the moon held both spirit and power. It was numinous, the Mother’s priestesses would say—Promeneia most of all. She had seen more clearly than the others.
It was all one in the Mother. Myrtale held tightly to that, and made it her constant prayer. Inside herself she felt the power growing and putting forth roots, making itself part of this land into which she traveled.
It was not so different at first from her wild mountain kingdom, a land of high pastures and steep rocky slopes and sudden cataracts. Then as they drew near the king’s city, the mountains opened into a rolling plain cut through with rivers and, on the far horizon, the glimmer of a lake.
There was Philip’s city, the place where he was born, royal Pella. It stood on the shores of the lake: a walled city that dwarfed Dodona. The sprawling edifice on the hill above it must be his palace, and that too was greater than any she had seen.
It seemed forever that they traversed the plain, crawling infinitesimally closer to the city and the palace. Myrtale was put in mind, with a stab of guilt and a prickle of fear, of the spell she had laid on Timarete.
Surely the priestess had escaped by now and was back in her temple. Equally surely Myrtale would come to the city before the sun set; it was only morning, and the men and horses were fresh, with the smell of home in their nostrils.
This would be home, she promised herself. On this day it was almost unbearably strange. She clutched her little snake’s basket for comfort, and looked up at the palace walls and tried to remember the pride and strength that had brought her here.
This palace was worthy of her. Whether she would be worthy of it …
She would be. She was. She raised her chin and sat straight on the bay horse’s back.
The beast caught the spark from her, arched its neck and danced—gently, but it made her smile. Grins flashed through her escort.
That little bit of insouciance had done more to win them over than all her careful blandishments. Macedonians liked bravura. She would have to remember that.
Fifteen
Once Lagos’ embassy passed the gates of Pella, Myrtale expected to be taken directly to the palace. Instead she found herself in a house of no distinction without and breathtaking luxury within, under the hands of half a dozen diligent servants. Her baggage and its treasures were gone, her maid and her escort taken off wherever servants went when they were not guarding royal brides.
She was alone in a house full of strangers. They stripped her naked and had at her with clippers and tweezers and pastes, stripping every hair off her body that was not on her head, then rubbing her with sweet oils and scraping them off with strigils. They followed that with water, hot and then cold, that bore with it an indefinable scent of the sacred, and vigorous scrubbing with bundles of herbs that overcame the reek of the oil with their sweet, sharp fragrance.
At first Myrtale struggled, startled; she squawked indecorously. But the servants had iron hands and no mercy. Eventually she judged it best to grit her teeth and submit.
She had never been so vehemently clean. Her skin felt strange, as smooth and soft as a newborn’s. She stung in her tenderest parts.
They washed her hair in herbs and henna and dried it with Egyptian linen, then brushed it until it shone. They painted her face and her fingertips and toes, and hung her with heavy ropes of gold and amber, emerald and ruby and carnelian.
Just as she thought she would go before the people wearing nothing but her hair and a king’s treasure, they dressed her in an elaborately embroidered gown of imperial purple bound with a golden girdle, adorned her feet with golden sandals, and crowned her with gold and laid over it the wedding veil. Her skirts were so stiff she could barely move, but that was no impediment to these servants. They half-carried her out of the room.
In the central court of the house, an altar stood. Victims waited for the sacrifice: a snow-white kid for Artemis, to whom Myrtale must dedicate the girdle she had so recently been given; a pair of white doves for Aphrodite; and for Hera, a cream-colored heifer. They regarded Myrtale with calm and innocent eyes.
The court was full of people—but not of Philip. In his place stood Lagos, speaking for his king here as he had in Epiros.
Myrtale stood firm against the rising of anger. This was not her father’s house, either, and the grave-faced woman who assisted her was not her mother, as tradition would have dictated. It was all for show, to make a marriage that the Mother had long since made in the Mysteries on Samothrace.
She spoke the words as she was bidden, slit the victims’ throats with fast, firm strokes and poured out the blood in the Mother’s honor. It was all the Mother, always, here as everywhere.
From the sacrifice she passed to the feast. In this unfamiliar hall, among all these unfamiliar faces, she sat enthroned on a golden chair, swathed in her veils, and watched a crowd of strangers eat and drink and dance and make merry.
She ate nothing. There was wine that she was required to drink, but she barely sipped it. Her stomach was an aching knot.
The man who sat beside her was not her husband. If he came to her bed tonight, she would kill him. She made that decision calmly and reasonably, without resort to temper.
Meanwhile she endured a wedding feast without a bridegroom, and waited for the hours to pass. Men in Epiros were fond of their wine, but Macedonians could down a vat of it and still be steady on their feet.
Under cover of the veil, she wove stray threads and bits of hair into a certain shape. She let it rest in her hand, keeping the words inside until she should need them.
This place, this country, was full of magic. Strange that she should become aware of it in the midst of a raucous feast. It was deep and quiet beneat
h, flowing up through her feet like sap through the roots and veins of the Mother’s tree. In this very mortal celebration, she felt the Mother’s hand, subtle yet strong.
The long day waned. The feast wound to its ending. When the guests rose, Myrtale restrained herself from leaping up with them. Strong men lifted her, chair and all, and carried her back out to the court.
The wedding carriage was waiting. Rather than mules or oxen, snow-white mares drew it. It was made of rare woods from the east, sweetly scented and richly carved; its fastenings were all of gold, and the mares’ trappings were plated with the bright metal.
Myrtale stiffened against the hands that lifted her into it, but they did not belong to Lagos. They were not Philip’s, either. Strangers raised her, nobles by the richness of their dress; later she would learn their names. For now she committed their faces to memory.
In this strange wedding, she had yet to show her own face to any of them, or unveil herself before the bridegroom. Nor would she until she stood face to face with her proper husband.
The torches were lit. The dancers had come out, and the players on flute and drum and lyre. One of the white mares pawed imperiously.
Myrtale’s patience snapped. She wrested the reins from the man who held them, tipped him out of the cart, and turned the mares toward the open gate.
They needed no encouragement. Torchbearers scattered. Dancers fled. The marriage hymn ended on a broken note.
If that was an omen, so be it. Myrtale had had enough. She did not know this city, but the way was clear inside her, as if someone had cast a spell to draw her to her desire.
The spellweaving was still in her hand. Maybe she would not need it, but she made no move to cast it away.
She rode the cart like a chariot, streaming smoke and fire from the torches, down the processional way and then up toward the palace.
Its gate was open. Torches burned there, and a crowd waited.
Myrtale saw one face only out of them all. He stood in the middle, dressed in purple and gold, foursquare and sturdy but oddly graceful.