by Anna Elliott
Isolde shook her head. She’d long since ceased to question the ebb and flow of the Sight that ran in her veins—gift by blood from the time when the Old Ones had watered the trees with milk and wine and oil and cast silver into the rivers and streams. Or so Morgan had told her, years ago, now. But she did sometimes think that the Sight was, in fact, neither a blessing nor even a curse, but some huge joke on the part of whatever gods or air demons or powers of the Mother Earth governed such things.
She’d been called Witch Queen for all the seven years she’d been wedded to Con—had been tried on a charge of sorcery five months before. And in all that time, she’d had not a flicker of true Sight, what her grandmother had once called the space inside where one might hear the voice of all living things, echoing like the strings of an unseen harper’s lyre.
Only now, when she’d escaped so nearly being burned for a witch, when she walked a knife-edge line amidst the remains of the king’s council—on the one side the only one among them to expose Marche’s treason, on the other, still the daughter of Modred, King Arthur’s traitor son. Still the granddaughter of Morgan, enchantress, sorceress, and devil’s mistress—
Only now, she thought, when even a breath of ill rumor will bring a second charge of witchcraft—and a sentence of burning that I could not possibly hope to escape again—does the Sight return.
The strewn floor rushes rustled and sent up a breath of herb-scented air as Isolde knelt, lifted the pottery jug, and carefully poured water into the basin, filling it to the brim, so that the shimmering surface of the water swelled out just above the basin’s edge. She set the jug down, then fixed her gaze on the surface of water inside the bowl.
Until a few weeks ago, the water would have been frozen in the mornings, and she would have had to set the pitcher by the fire to melt enough of the ice—for bathing, not for this. Because if the wash water had been frozen, so were the mountain passes and the roads, and Marche and Octa’s armies had withdrawn into winter quarters. But now, with spring’s thaw, the snows had melted and the streams were running again, and the raids and fighting that had bloodied the autumn had begun again.
Looking down into the basin of water, Isolde saw at first only her own reflection, raven black hair plaited in a heavy braid down her back, with a few curling tendrils loose on her brow, gray eyes set wide in the smooth, pale oval of her face. Isolde kept still, clearing her mind, pushing all thoughts aside, consciously slowing her whole body—the beat of her heart, the pulse of her blood, the rise and fall of her own breath—forcing all to move in the same steady rhythm. In and out. Out and in. Reaching inside herself for the place where the quivering harp strings of Sight were tied, the space where she might hear the voice of whatever the water chose to say.
And, gradually, an image took shape on the water’s surface, as Myrddin’s dragons might have taken form in the pool of the bard’s tales. Wavering and indistinct, at first, overlaid still by her reflected face. Then the image cleared, and she saw the smoldering ruin of a hut, the thatch ramparts blackened and fallen in, the walls collapsing in on themselves, a sullen, dirty spire of smoke rising to hang in the air above.
Another shudder twisted through her, but she kept her eyes fixed on the wavering image, forced her breathing to remain deep and slow. She could see, now, small crumpled figures in the muddied earth before the hut, hear the distant frightened bleat of a goat. Smell—
She was standing in the rain, on the narrow goat track running through the village, the smell of smoke and charred flesh acrid in her throat. A man lay in the dirt to her right, his throat cut, blood pooled all about him, mixed with the wet, mucky earth. A raven had found him already. The bird was pecking at his eyes.
Two more lay nearby—a woman and child. A girl, maybe six summers. Maybe eight. Hard to say. The woman’s mouth was open. Face stupid and surprised. Skirts torn. Thighs of both the woman and girl were rusty with blood.
A moment’s regret. The girl was a pretty child. Should have had her before the rest of the men.
Isolde felt herself turn away, felt herself speak in a rough voice that was her own, and yet not her own. “Nothing more for us here. Come on. We can make Cadar Idris if we ride out—”
And then with an abruptness that was like a thunderclap, the vision was gone, and Isolde was once more kneeling beside the washbasin and looking at her own shivering reflection, her palms slick with sweat, nausea rolling through her in waves. She drew in a ragged breath and pressed her hands tight against her eyes, swallowing bile and wondering whether it would do any good to give up the Sight again, as she had seven years before. Or whether this slithering, clinging awareness would stay inevitably with her the rest of her days.
Though at that, this vision was no worse than the last, when she’d seen Marche’s newfound ally Octa, Saxon king of Kent, riding down an old woman who fled from her burning home. She’d seen him clearly: a big man with graying blond hair and a braided beard, who’d laughed as he ran the woman through with his sword.
And this vision was far, far better than when she’d slipped inside Marche’s thoughts to feel him dreaming of his father Merchion, dead now these thirty years. In the dream, she’d felt Marche aching from his father’s blows, biting his lips until the blood came in an effort not to cry. Hoping that one of these days his father would love him if he could only be strong enough. Isolde had seen Marche of Cornwall wake crying wet, gulping sobs like a small child before at last that vision had broken.
Now Isolde drew a steadying breath and tried to push all memory of that aside. The stars will still shine tomorrow, whatever—
And then she stopped herself. Not Trystan’s words. If he wasn’t dead like Myrddin and Con, he was gone, all the same. Another to be put away. However much it hurt, still, every day.
A groan from the bed behind Isolde made her start upright, realizing that it was this same sound that must have broken the vision a moment before. She pushed the basin aside and quickly turned.
The girl who lay beneath the fur-lined blankets was Isolde’s own age, twenty, or maybe a year or two less or more. Her face, even in health, would have been too thin and sharp featured for beauty, the dark eyes sly and set close together, the skin pasty and scarred with the marks of childhood pox. Now, though, the flesh was almost yellow, drawn tightly over the bones of cheek and jaw, and her eyes were both sunken and hectically bright.
And beneath the fugue of high fever, a reek like putrid flesh hung about the bed—the stench of the discharge from where Marcia had scraped an unborn child out of her body with a dirty knife, leaving her womb a mass of scars turned to poison that spread, in spite of all Isolde tried.
Now, seeing Isolde, she licked dry lips and made a feeble motion towards the wine jar on a table nearby.
Isolde crossed, poured wine into a cup, then helped the girl to drink, supporting Marcia’s head and shoulders and guiding the cup to her mouth. When she’d taken several swallows, Marcia pushed the cup away, then shifted restlessly, her lips tightening as the movement jarred her lacerated womb.
“Why are you kind to me? You ought to hate me after what I did. I tried to have you burned for witchcraft. Tried to make you believe this child was King Constantine’s.”
Isolde set the cup down on the bedside table, wiping a drop of wine from the rim. “So you did.”
“Well, then?”
Isolde was silent, for a moment recalling the witchcraft trial so vividly that she could almost smell the smoke from the great central hearth of the council hall. Feel herself, standing before the king’s council, her whole body bruised and aching fiercely with the marks of Marche’s fists. And Marche’s voice, condemning her to be tied to a stake in the ground and burned alive.
Then she looked down at the other girl’s fever-flushed face and nervous, restless hands, picking fretfully the edge of the linen sheet. The memory of the smoke and the bruises and the councilmen’s watching eyes faded, and she shook her head.
“I don’t hate you.”
She’d hardly, Isolde thought, have needed the Sight to sense the pain that gnawed at Marcia night and day. But as it was, every time she stood by Marcia’s bed she could feel the raw core of anger and grief and loneliness Marcia guarded jealously and with all her strength, like a child clutching a favorite toy—or as the dragons said to sleep beneath the surrounding mountains hoarded their gold.
Isolde had never liked Marcia—and still, if she were honest, couldn’t like her now, though she had lain for nearly three weeks in Isolde’s care. But she could be achingly sorry for the other girl, who lay here slowly bleeding out the pitiful fragments of the life she carried—and held clenched inside her such a raw, desperate, ravenous need for love that she ended by pushing all hope of it away with fits of temper and sharp, sly looks, and a venomous tongue.
“I’m a healer, and you’re suffering. And if I can help you, I will.”
Even that, though, made Marcia’s brows draw together, and she shot Isolde another sidelong look, voice petulant and sharp with dislike.
“So I’m a duty to you, then? A pity case?”
Isolde said nothing, only smoothed the down-filled pillows so that Marcia might lie back once more. As her hand came away, though, her fingers touched something beneath the lowermost pillow, something sharp enough to prick her skin.
“No!” Marcia tried to twist, grabbing at Isolde’s hand. But then as Isolde drew the object out, she stopped and sat staring, her pockmarked face set and her dark eyes both defiant and somehow frightened as well.
“Well? I suppose you know what it is?”
Isolde looked down at what she held. “So I do.”
What lay in her hand was a crudely made doll, little more than a bundle of rags with a face painted in a rusty brown Isolde knew must be dried blood. The body of the doll was pierced through with several bone needles and skewered through the neck by a pair of great bronze-headed pins.
“It’s a curse doll.” Isolde fingered a ragged scrap of cloth wound about the doll’s body. “Made for me?”
Marcia sank back against the pillows, eyeing Isolde with a look that was half frightened, half angry.
“Is that all you can say?”
Isolde had a sudden memory of what her grandmother had once said to her across the beside of an old huntsman—a crabbed, elderly man with a badly broken arm who cursed and threw his own slop jar at them every time either Morgan or Isolde came near. You’d need the patience of a saint to nurse the sick without losing your temper. And the horned one help us, child, we’re neither of us likely to be named holy by the Christ or his God.
Isolde looked from the blood-painted little figure to Marcia’s sullen face and angry eyes. “What should I say? ‘Marcia, have you been trying to ensure I die a death of searing agony? And do be honest, please?’”
Marcia said nothing, only set her mouth in a thin, hard line. Isolde knew, though, that she was both afraid and in pain. She let out her breath and said, more gently, “It’s all right. Just because I’m caring for you doesn’t mean you have to be grateful—or even like me. Go ahead and hate me if you want. I don’t mind.”
There was a silence, and then Marcia asked, in a slightly altered voice, “Are you going to stop taking care of me?”
Isolde heard again the mingled defiance and fear in Marcia’s tone. “Of course not,” she said. “As long as you need me, I’ll be here.” She rose and poured out a measure of poppy-laced cordial into the wine cup. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help with the pain.”
Marcia swallowed the dose and was silent, looking down at her hands, picking again at the edge of the sheet. Then abruptly her fingers clenched. She looked up at Isolde and burst out, “I had no choice, you know. It wasn’t my fault. They made me testify against you. Marche and Lady Nest.” Her face twisted, eyes fever-bright and wide, her voice rising, “I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t. I—”
An edge of hysteria had crept into her tone, and Isolde put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, easing her back onto the pillows again. “Hush, it’s all right. Don’t think on it anymore. You do what you must, and live with it after. So do we all.”
Marcia’s eyes were starting to grow heavy with the poppy syrup, but she said, her voice once more sullen, “What would you know?”
The memory of the dream crawled over Isolde’s skin once again, and she realized that she was unconsciously rubbing the place on her wrist where purple bruises had showed five months before. Deliberately, she forced her clenched hands to relax, took up a damp cloth, and began to wipe Marcia’s face. Her forehead, the flushed, pockmarked cheeks, the thin, sallow neck.
“At least as much as you do.”
When she’d finished bathing Marcia’s face, she set down the rag and picked up the ill-wish doll again. Drawing out the pins, she crossed the room and laid the now limp figure on the logs of the hearth fire. From behind her, Marcia said, her voice sounding feeble and resentful both, “I paid good coin for that.”
Isolde stopped herself before she could say, Then it will make expensive smoke. That was the worst, she thought, about losing your temper with someone gravely ill—that you were sorry for it almost at once. She kept silent, and after a moment Marcia asked, “You’re not afraid of it?”
Isolde watched as the doll took flame, shriveled, and burned. “I think if my safety depends on pins stuck in a nasty little bundle of rags, it’s more or less a lost cause in any case.”
“Then why are you burning it?” A hard, malicious edge crept into Marcia’s tone. “Are you afraid someone will see it and blame you for it?”
“They probably would, at that,” Isolde said. The Witch Queen, she thought, returning to her old ways. She turned back to the bed. “But, no, I wasn’t thinking of anyone’s thinking it’s mine. If Garwen sees this, she’ll be frightened—and grieved. And whatever you think of me,” Isolde said evenly, her eyes on Marcia’s thin face, “Garwen deserves better of you than—”
She broke off as the door behind her opened, and the woman she’d been speaking of came into the room. No one, Isolde thought, as Garwen entered, would believe she’d been mistress to Arthur himself in her youth—and a great beauty, so the stories ran.
She was a small woman, no taller than Isolde herself, with a plump, pillowy body, and a red-cheeked, rounded face that might have been pretty once but now looked crumpled, like a withered apple—though she couldn’t be more than forty or forty-five. She had a weak, indeterminate chin and large, misty blue eyes, and she wore a gown of rich purple shot with threads of gold that made her look older still.
Her fingers shone with gold rings, and her sparse gray hair was caught back with a pair of jewel-studded pins. A number of gold and silver chains hung about her neck, one with a heavy cross of the Christ worked in silver and set with chips of some luminous green stone. All likely crafted from the melted-down battle trophies taken off dead Saxon warlords.
But Garwen wore the finery almost carelessly, without a trace of vanity, and if her face was soft and slightly foolish, it was also sweet and very kind. She ought, Isolde thought, watching her, to have a husband and sons to care for her and a bevy of grandchildren clustered about her knees. And instead she had only a life as a ward of the crown at Dinas Emrys, a lifetime of accumulated finery about her neck and wrists, and the hollow memory of her only son—Arthur’s son—Amhar. Amhar had joined his half brother Modred in civil war against their father—and had died by his father’s own hand.
Isolde could summon up an image, now, of Amhar’s face—though it still felt strange to be able to do it. Strange to have memories again where once had been only empty blackness in her mind. Amhar had been a handsome, black-haired boy, seven or eight years older than she herself. She could see him now, kneeling before her father, touching his lips to the blade of a sword, drinking the cup of ale that would make him oath-sworn as Modred’s man. She’d been maybe seven at the time and had thought Amhar looked like the hero of a harper’s song.
Isolde had never hear
d Garwen speak of the past, of Arthur, or of her dead son. But she had felt no bitterness from the older woman, either—though as Modred’s daughter, Garwen surely had cause to hate her if anyone did. And Garwen’s lot, Isolde supposed, might have been far worse. Had she been mistress to anyone but Arthur, she’d almost certainly have been reduced to following the army as a common whore after the great king’s death.
Now, as Garwen entered, Marcia looked up, a brief flare of something like hope lighting her fever-bright eyes. Then, seeing Garwen, she sank back against the pillows, turning her face towards the wall.
Isolde, watching a bleak, despairing look fall over the girl’s face, felt a flash of anger. She could guess whom Marcia had hoped to see.
Marcia was serving woman to Lady Nest, who had been lover to Marche before he’d abandoned her to turn traitor and swear allegiance to Saxon allies. Nest was a prisoner at Dinas Emrys—a prisoner in name, though she had the freedom of the fortress, like Garwen and Isolde. But Lady Nest kept entirely to her own rooms and had never once set foot in Marcia’s sickroom—nor even, so far as Isolde knew, sent word to ask after her maid.
Garwen, too, must have seen Marcia’s look, for she watched the fevered girl a moment, her soft pink mouth tightening almost imperceptibly before she turned to Isolde.
“The king is here, Lady Isolde.” She had a prattling, slightly honking voice and a breathless way of speaking as though the words tumbled out too quickly for her to keep up. “He rode in with the men of his honor guard. Before dawn, it was.”
Isolde straightened in surprise. “Madoc has come here? Why?”
Garwen shook her head. “That I don’t know. But he sends word to ask an audience with you. He waits in your workroom.”
“My workroom?” Isolde had started to tuck the blankets round Marcia once more, but at that she looked up quickly. “Is he injured, then?”