She still hoped Tobias had not known about that.
The closing of the Mist had disconcerted her greatly, for no other establishment would do for her. Privately she felt that it was not only the excellence of Tobias’s honeywine that drew her to his tavern. There was some other draw, one she had no way to define, for during the weeks of its abandonment Dorothea drifted listlessly about Northtown and pined sadly for the Moss and Mist.
John Quartermane was no substitute for Tobias Dwerryhouse; on this point, everyone was in full agreement. But at least he had opened its doors once again to the people of Berrie, even if he had begun his period of proprietorship by making a great, noisy to-do about a stolen strongbox. Honestly! The man was a fool. Since the strongbox was not his anyway, the degree of his indignation over its disappearance moved some to question his motives in taking over the running of the tavern at all.
Dorothea wondered whether either Tobias or the strongbox had something to do with her former satisfaction with the Mist, for her appreciation for it was undoubtedly lessened under Quartermane’s stewardship. But though Tobias was well-looking, he had never taken her fancy in that way; and how could a strongbox, or anything likely to be contained therein, be imagined to have any influence over her comfort?
One night a week or two after the reopening of the Mist, Dorothea sat with a glass and a rapidly diminishing bottle of honeywine, listening desultorily to the outpourings of her companions. She had gathered a group of drinkers around herself with the regularity of her visits, folk such as Marmaduke Pauncevolt, Fabian Mallory and Verity Wilkin. They were congenial enough company, but Dorothea could not persuade herself that their concerns were as absorbing to her as they were apparently imagined to be, and her friends were blissfully oblivious to her splendid and total lack of interest.
What she wanted to do was finish her wine, stumble out into the night and make her way to the river, whereupon she would divest herself of her warm and sensible clothing and dive straight in. Autumn had cloaked Berrie in a fine mantle of chilly evenings, drizzling rain and clinging fog, however, and even she could no longer persuade herself that the conditions were well suited to night-time swimming. The river, in point of fact, was perishingly cold. Dorothea knew this because she had last taken a dip three nights before, and emerged blue and shivering and thoroughly miserable. She had almost expired of the chill and had sternly informed herself that there would be no more bathing until the spring.
But her bones ached with the need to feel the water over her skin, and she could think of nothing else. What drew her to the river was as mysterious and unfathomable as her attraction to the Moss and Mist, but Dorothea had given up on her attempts to decipher the mystery. It was as it was, and she accepted it.
She shifted in her seat, restless, as Fabian regaled the company with an account of the petty theft he had foiled two days before. He had told the story twice already and seemed entirely unaware of it, and he was only growing more garrulous with each new tankard of ale.
‘Dulci Seabrooke’s cottage!’ he was saying, exuberantly and with unnecessary volume. ‘Of all the places to go looking for valuables! Oh, ‘tis only brass, she said, grateful as you please. But ‘twas my mother’s and I should be awfully sorry to lose it. And do you know what she said after that?’
Dorothea did not care. She stopped listening, thought once more of the river with wistful longing, and stood up from the table.
Conversation ceased at once, and her companions gazed up at her in surprise.
‘All finished, Dot?’ said Marmaduke. ‘Why, you have yet to finish your second bottle, and haven’t touched a third!’
Gracious, thought Dorothea. Had it come to that? Was she fixed among the neighbourhood as a three-bottle woman at minimum?
Perhaps it would be better to spend a little more time bathing, and a little less time drinking.
‘All finished,’ she said, and it occurred to her distantly that for all her splendid good spirits these days she was perhaps a trifle annoyed tonight. ‘Excuse me.’ She bowed with all the dignity she could muster — which was not so very little, at that, for she was less inebriated than usual. Gathering her shawl about herself, she stepped out into the night, ignoring Quartermane’s importunity to linger a while yet, Mistress Winthrope? and Shall you not be wanting your third?
The night was every bit as cold as she was hoping it would not be, and she sighed. Undeterred, she trudged through the streets until she reached the broken Wynspan, focusing upon the marvellous flexibility in her once-lame leg instead of upon the biting chill in the air. Leaving her garments in a neat pile upon the bank, she jumped into the river at once, giving herself no time at all to quail at the iciness of the water.
The cold bit fiercely into her thin, shrinking limbs and she shrieked.
‘Mistress Winthrope?’ called a familiar male voice, and Dorothea grumbled something under her breath about interfering apothecaries.
Malachi Amberdrake stood upon the north bank of the Wynspan, right next to the pile of clothes she had left awaiting her return. How he had learned of her night-time bathing habits she did not know, but when she left the Moss and Mist every evening he had apparently taken to following her.
‘Mistress Winthrope, are you quite well?’ he called. ‘I do not wish to interfere, madam, but I must advise against night-bathing! I really must! The water is far too cold!’
Which was a fair point, Dorothea reflected as she swam with furious, shivering strokes. Why did it have to be night bathing? She could not remember ever feeling the urge to swim the waters during the day. In fact, she could not remember feeling any particular urge to do anything during the day.
‘I am well!’ she called at last, exasperated when Amberdrake declined to desist with his nagging. ‘When I wish for you to look after my health, I will pay you for the trouble!’
He had brought a pile of blankets to wrap her in, she noticed, which meant he had prepared for this moment. Planned his interception of her bathing adventure! Huh! And there he stood, holding them out in hope, his face partially averted, trying to watch for her removal from the water while simultaneously respecting her nakedness.
It was awfully kind of him, but he could hardly be expected to realise how terribly inconvenient it was as well. For it was distracting. Sometimes, when she came here alone and swam under the stars and relished the silence of the night, her mind went to other places entirely. It was that, she thought, more than the water itself that she loved.
He would not be deterred, so she took a deep breath and dropped beneath the surface. Amberdrake’s voice faded into blissful peace, and Dorothea closed her eyes against the intense blackness underwater.
Her mind drifted.
Dorothea was airborne. She was a bird, perhaps, sailing aloft upon spiralling currents of air. The skies were dark around her, glittering with stars, and she felt an overwhelming tenderness for each bright mote of light in the velvety firmament. All was fresh and clear and bright, and Dorothea felt a soul-deep serenity which she had never otherwise known.
She felt younger, too; no longer age-withered, nor weary in spirit and limb. In fact she felt ageless, invulnerable. Nothing could ever touch her up here, nothing could harm her.
She did not know how long she dwelt in her beautiful daydream, but the icy-cold of the water penetrated her consciousness at last. Dorothea came to herself with a gasp, forgetting that she was a few feet underwater.
Curses, she thought distantly as water filled her lungs. Come to think of it, the cold ought to have killed her the last time she had bathed at night and lingered too long. Why had it not? And just how old was she, at that?
Dorothea was grateful for the care of Malachi Amberdrake after all, as he hauled her from the water and turned her upon her face. She did not altogether enjoy the force with which he pounded her upon the back, berating her for her foolishness all the while, but since it expelled the freezing water from her lungs and restored her ability to draw in air, she could not f
ault him for it.
‘Thank you,’ she spluttered at last, her throat raw and her chest hurting. She accepted the blanket Amberdrake handed to her and pulled it gratefully around herself, leaning briefly against his leg in a rare moment of weakness.
‘Why do you do it, Dot?’ he asked her in a gentler tone, his more forceful remonstrations at an end.
Dorothea wiped the water from her face with a sigh and sat shivering, feeling oddly forlorn. ‘I do not know,’ she said. She could have reprimanded him for his curiosity, for they were not close, and he had no real right to question her habits. But he had just saved her life — probably, for she could not say she had felt at all likely to expire from the experience, however much her lungs had protested against her ill-usage of them.
It was more that some impulse prompted her to answer the question honestly. She had not had anybody to talk with in so long — not the real, open conversation of friends. And it was the truth: she did not know why she sought the river, nor why her mind produced such strange and delicious visions when she did.
She did know that she could not give them up. Now that her lameness was gone and the river was restored to her at last, she would keep going there, and she would continue to immerse herself in the drenching cold. Even if it killed her, but she did not really believe that it would.
For Dorothea felt a lurking suspicion that she had lingered in life for rather more years than her neighbours realised, or than she herself could count. She had been young once; she must have been. But if she had, those days were so far lost in the distant past that she could no longer remember them at all.
Chapter Two
In which Helewise Dale revives a star.
The starflowers and the bees and the honey had occupied Helewise’s time so well, their withdrawal from her everyday concerns left her feeling bereft. The time came where Southtown had completed its transformation into the Wynweald, and more than sufficient starflowers carpeted the dales. The bees of Sevenleaf and Thistledown and beyond had performed their work diligently, producing more than ample honey even to meet the exacting standards of Pippin Greensleeves. The alorin was made, by what means Helewise knew not. She no longer saw many of the motley folk at market, and those who still came were different from before: no longer frail and fraught and froward but stronger, more vibrant and much more at ease. She saw nothing of the King of Faerie.
She took Ambrose to the market early on, to ensure he received his own share of the tincture. It operated swiftly upon him, to her relief, and the creeping colourlessness and debility which had been assailing him gradually faded away. He was her own, dear Ambrose again, his eyes bright and blue, his limbs restored to their former vigour.
Helewise blessed the tincture that held back the fading of Ambrose’s vibrancy, though it could not ease her concerns entirely. How long would the alorin last, and when would it again run out, as it had clearly done before? Was Ambrose beyond the reach of renewed debilitation, or would it plague him as long as he remained in Faerie? For she had no reason to imagine that Greensleeves would soon release Southtown back into the mortal kingdoms.
Helewise’s days were spent clearing parts of her garden of the starflowers, in preparation for the spring plantings. They made for such a beautiful array, it hurt her heart a little to root them up and throw them away. But Sevenleaf had lost so many of the flower gardens that had formed the Dales’ livelihood down the decades; she had no choice but to restore them as she could, or at least to try. Some of her arbours and groves had taken many years to grow, and the knowledge that these could never in her lifetime be replaced grieved her deeply.
Other changes came, mostly for the better. The stifling cloak of fog began, at last, to shift and stir and drift away, and Helewise received a clearer view of her gardens than she had enjoyed in many weeks. Light filtered through, a clearer light than she had dreamed possible in Faerie. Though it remained weak and tricky and all too brief, its effects soon began to be felt. Those of Helewise’s roses which had not been lost threw off their gloom and smiled again, their petals blushing in all the hues of the rainbow. Even the starflowers, lustrous enough though they had been, flourished still more under the sun’s gentle glow, and Helewise began to fear that she was next to lose her house to their boisterous exuberance.
It was somewhere in the middle of the second week that she remembered the colourless woman she had once met near Heatherberry Spinney.
Helewise paused, arrested, in the middle of fertilising a rose bush, her thoughts flying far. She had, perhaps, assumed that the alorin would have reached the pallid lady by now, but was she right to conclude such? Did anybody save she know of the woman’s fate, or her resting place? Was it even possible to revive her now, or was she lost forever?
Once the idea had occurred, Helewise found she could no longer concentrate upon her mundane tasks. She thought of nothing but the few words the woman had spoken prior to her demise; her desperation and despair; the chilling sight of her hopeless face, frozen forever in cold marble.
She did not know if anything could now be done for the pallid lady, but she had to try.
This resolution made, she did not immediately know where to begin. She could return to the Spinney and determine whether the lady was still there, and indeed she would have to before long. But it was of no use to establish that the woman required aid when she had no means with which to provide it. So, first she must secure her own supply of alorin. If it proved unnecessary, she would keep it for Ambrose.
That meant she needed to see Pippin Greensleeves, but how did one summon up the King of Faerie, if he did not wish to show himself? Where did such an august personage reside?
All she could do was ask, Helewise decided. She left Sevenleaf, donning her warmest garments and taking with her a basket of provisions, for she could not say how long her errand would take. Lately she had been blessed with sights which had never before occurred during her weeks in Faerie: glimpses of wild creatures darting through the ever-present starflower plants and nesting in the branches of the trees, filling her world with the soft sounds of their vibrant little lives. She greeted each of these as she passed, and asked the same question: Do you know where the King of Faerie lives?
Many responses did she receive, all of them vague and many contradictory. Why, he lives over the next hill! said a rabbit she encountered in Willowingle Lane. But he was not there, of course, and Helewise wondered how a rabbit’s sense of distance compared to her own. He lives past the third morning star, a nightingale gravely informed her. Two laps beyond and veer south-west. As Helewise could not fly, it did not much matter to her whether this information was accurate or not, as she could make no use of it. Seven fathoms below, said a mole at Fox’s Yard. Seven and four-thirds, to be most precise, and mind you take the left fork at Scrump Corner and not the right, for the right one takes you past Mottle Dasky’s hole and around Iggin Niggin’s burrow and that is quite the wrong way. Now, when you reach Tromp Taggle’s place you want to veer just a wee bit southerly—
Helewise thanked him hastily and moved on, assuring the mole that she could very well find her way from his excellent and meticulous instructions.
She received similarly muddling and impossible answers from a butterfly, a sparrow, a weasel, a pair of foxes (who could not at all agree), a dormouse, two herons and a number of creatures of full strange appearance to whom she could give no name whatsoever. At length she despaired, for it was clear that none of them knew where the King of Faerie lived, though each believed stoutly that they did.
Helewise sat down upon the trunk of a fallen tree, and took out the pie she had packed for her luncheon. She ate slowly and in silence, searching fruitlessly through all the information she had received for some useful, comprehensible clue. Nothing presented itself, and she thought in some despair that she had set herself an impossible task.
And then she was no longer alone, for beside her upon the tree sat a man in motley coat and mulberry trousers, cross-legged and inte
nt upon the devouring of a pie identical to her own. He was seated just far enough behind her that she had not noticed his arrival — nor heard it either, for not a sound out of place had reached her ears.
‘It is very good pie,’ he informed her around a mouthful of pastry.
‘Thank you,’ said Helewise. ‘I have been looking for you.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You made a great deal of noise about it.’
‘It is important.’ Helewise tried not to sound apologetic, for her cause was more than just enough to warrant his attention. She was not altogether sure that she succeeded.
‘Let me have it, then.’ The King of Faerie finished the last bite of his pie and brushed the crumbs off his long, thin fingers. He sat, looking nothing like royalty in his relaxed posture and odd attire, waiting for her to speak.
‘There is… a lady,’ Helewise began, and hesitated, unsure how to proceed. Had she truly seen the pallid lady turn into marble? What if it had been merely a vision of some kind, as had happened before in Faerie? What if she was mad?
The King of Faerie blinked. ‘It will take you a long time to come to the point at this rate,’ he observed.
‘She was one of your people,’ Helewise said, mustering her confidence. ‘I am almost sure of it. She was sick, fading away. I saw her first at Market, and when I saw her again there was no colour about her at all.’
Pippin Greensleeves’ eyebrows went up at that. ‘And?’ he said, and his tone was no longer bored or indulgent.
‘She was desperate for alorin. She begged me for it, but of course I could not help her. And then it was too late, for she… died.’
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