by Jude Fisher
Cruellest of all, however, had been the unmistakable swell of her belly. In this other time, this other place, with this other husband, she had conceived a child.
And if that were the case, why could she not now?
She sighed and pressed her hand against the defiantly flat muscles of her abdomen. ‘Grow,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘Grow.’
But what good was such an instruction if there was no seed planted within? It had been almost two weeks since Ravn had made love to her, and that one time he had withdrawn before ejaculating: some old wives’ tale about a man’s seed deforming the growing babe in the womb. And when she had stared at him in disbelief and dismay he had merely stroked her face and reassured her that once the child was born they would take even greater pleasure from one another than they had ever before, since no one would be able to begrudge them such, with one healthy heir already the consequence of their enjoyment.
She was called back to herself by something stirring beneath her hand, the hand which rested amid the herbs in the clay planter against which she leant. She blinked and looked down. A sturdy green shoot had forced its way between her first and second fingers, its continuing upward progress bizarrely visible. She drew back, at once afraid and fascinated. And still the shoot grew; unfurled its green head, put forth a pair of tiny leaves on its stem, then a second pair. A moment later the new herb had produced nascent shoots and tiny buds; and then – in the middle of a bitter Eyran winter, surrounded by plants which lay blackened and frost-withered – it burst into a dozen pale pink flowers.
The Rose of the World stared at this miracle, then at her hand. She bent to touch the plant, and the aromatic scent of its flowers engulfed her. No illusion, then. Her fingers tingled. She touched them experimentally to a patch of creeping thyme, its twiggy runners bare and leafless. ‘Grow,’ she whispered again.
And it did.
The Rosa Eldi gazed at the herb, wide-eyed. Then, as a thought occurred to her, she smiled. If she could bring such magic out of herself for the sake of a tiny plant, should she not be able to channel the same power, and more, inwards? She returned to her chambers, her cheeks flushed by something more than the nip in the air, and finding her husband just returned from the hunt and in the midst of changing his mud-spattered clothes, she dropped her furs and her robes to her knees and embraced him in such a manner that no amount of self-control could possibly withstand.
King Ravn Asharson, Lord of the Northern Isles, announced his wife’s pregnancy that very evening; sent ravens and runners out across the mainland and to every Eyran island with the joyous news that his queen, the Rose of the World, had conceived him an heir. A great feast of celebration was planned. Across the realm, many would breathe great sighs of relief. But there were others yet who wished the royal pair ill, whose plans would be thwarted by these tidings. The King’s mother took to her chambers under the pretence of an ague and awaited the visitor she had summoned ever more impatiently.
The magic kept flowing. She grew apples in the frosty garden; then buried them for the worms. She healed one of the castle dogs when it was gored by a wild pig and the wound turned septic. None knew she had done this, for the dog had been left in the stables to survive or expire; there was much rejoicing from the houndsman the next morning when he found his favourite bitch up and about, if limping heavily: it had not seemed wise, the Rosa Eldi thought, to make the healing seem too miraculous. Ice bound the earth so hard that the castle’s well ran dry. Unseen, the Rose of the World laid her hands on the rock floor of the well chamber and sent her thoughts down into the land. Ranging out through the rock-veins, she at last located a small stream which ran down from the mountains above the city, then veered away through the forests to pour itself dramatically in a great waterfall into a mossy chasm above the sea. Making a subsidiary branch of this stream, she guided it deep beneath the frostbound earth, through the ancient volcanic rocks on which Halbo stood; and then, unnaturally, upwards so that it carved a strange new course into the well.
This last exhausted her; but it also exhilarated her. She felt the thrill of a deep connection with the world which bore her name, had the sense that something at its heart had heard her call and answered it. And surely, surely if she could move rock and water, manipulate the core of the world to her will, she could bring life into herself?
But for all her efforts, the Queen felt not one tiny change in her own body. Her belly remained as empty and as flat as ever it had; and now she began to learn the true sharpness of despair.
And the voice that had called to her as she had laid her hands on the rock and called forth the water, and now quested after her – joyful, sharp with unanticipated hope and desperate yearning – went unheard.
Some days later a small vessel drew into the harbour of the capital at dead of night, its sail filled with a non-existent wind. It came sweetly into the lee of the seawall, bumped gently against the stonework as its occupant disembarked onto the weed-covered jetty, and then drifted out into the night again as if it had a mind of its own. Which, perhaps, it did.
A tall, thin moon-cast shadow preceded the sailor who had thus arrived as he – or she – made their way through the sleeping streets. More than one cat stopped its midnight prowling in mid-stride and stared, one paw raised, tail a-quiver, the silver light reflecting from its eyes, as the figure passed; and then slunk quickly into a safe dark place, and did not stir till morning. The castle hounds, usually more than a nuisance with their incessant bayings and howlings at the moon, fell uncharacteristically silent as the eastern lych gate creaked open and then closed; though as the shadow passed by one or two of the older bitches lifted their heads, sniffed the air, and gave the merest whimper of recognition.
The guards on duty at the entrance to the castle saw nothing out of the ordinary that night, though an observer might have noted how their conversation ceased for the space of a few seconds and their eyes flickered closed; only for the argument as to the merits of the beer to be found in the Stag’s Head as compared with that served in the Enemy’s Leg to ensue again in the middle of a sentence as if there had been neither pause nor lacuna.
The Rosa Eldi, however, felt an itching inside her skull; a little vibration through her bones; an unwonted shimmer of heat. She sat bolt upright in the bed she shared with the King of Eyra and, like a cat, her green eyes went wide and reflective. Like a cat, she trembled: if she had had whiskers, she would have twitched them, felt the movement of air currents through the castle walls; but as a woman, she listened and looked and every pore of her body opened itself wide to sense whatever was out there – and now in here, in Ravn’s castle. The palms of her hands began to grow hot; the base of her spine tingled: she could feel the approach of magic, like a change in atmospheric pressure, like the coming of a storm.
Slowly, she rose up out of the bed, pulled on the gown she had learned was seemly to wear if she went abroad, and slipped out into the corridor. There was no guard outside the royal chamber: Ravn preferred to avoid such formalities in his home, though Stormway and Shepsey would no doubt soon win their argument over this omission now that the Queen was with child. So no one saw the Rose of the World as she passed soundlessly through the passages of Halbo Keep, her bare feet white and fragile against the massive granite flags. The sound of voices – conspiratorially low – came floating to her through the night’s thin air: one was sharp with spite, the other as mellow as a sun-ripened fruit. The itching in her head and hands grew stronger: heat pulsed through her extremities, conducted by the length of her spine. Something she remembered, something she knew . . .
Turning a corner, she could see that the end of the passageway was aglow with flickering light: a candleflame guttering in the draught from an open door. A large and lumpy knapsack sat propped up against the wall: a poor-looking item, all frayed hessian and patching. She walked toward it, intent and alert, frustrated recognition clawing at her scalp. At the door, she paused. This was Auda’s chamber: she had never set foot here befo
re, but she knew as much at once from the heavy scent of lilies permeating the air. That much was no surprise to her; what made her catch her breath was the candle-cast shadow that leapt and danced on the wall opposite the door: it was tall and lean, impossibly so; but unmistakably that of a woman. Words came to her then: seer, scryer, seither . . .
As if called, the shadow’s head turned. The Rosa Eldi could see its profile clearly: a sharp nose, flat brow, well-defined jaw; long hair in a tail. More words now, as if spoken, though there was no sound to be heard: You! It cannot be . . . Yet I knew: I felt you all the way here, beneath my feet, in the air . . .
And then the figure came swiftly through the door and stared at her with its single eye.
The Rose of the World dropped like a stone.
‘Rajeesh, mina kuenna. Segthu mer. Mina dea, mina dea: rajeesh . . .’
The pale lids fluttered, revealing a flash of emerald green. The exquisite lips parted, framed a question, whispered into the air.
‘Hverju? Hvi segthu?’
The seither hesitated, as if suddenly unsure of her ground.
‘Jeh Festrin er, Kalas dottri, Brigs sun, Iels sun, Felins sun, Heniks sun—’
‘Henik?’
Now the extraordinary eyes came full open and Festrin One-Eye stepped back, unnerved.
‘What? What are you saying?’ The Lady Auda pushed herself between the two of them, and pallor accentuated the normal angularity of her features. ‘What bizarre language is it you were speaking?’ She confronted the seither suspiciously. ‘It sounded . . . foreign. Certainly not Eyran, or no dialect of our tongue I ever heard.’
Festrin turned her one eye on the King’s mother and took some satisfaction in the way the old woman quailed away from her penetrating gaze. ‘That, my lady, is the most ancient tongue in this world. It existed a thousand years before either Eyra or Istria came into being; before humankind found its way over the Dragon’s Backbone and trailed out of the emptiness of the Bone Quarter like a colony of ants; aeons before the Eternal City was founded, or the earth was cultivated; while dragons patrolled the mountain fastnesses and great herds of undomesticated yeka roamed the plains. It has no name: it needed none, for when it first was spoken, there was no other language on Elda.’
Auda’s eyes narrowed. She did not believe a word of it, but to press the point risked being drawn into madness. ‘And who is she – do you know her?’ She stared down her long nose at her son’s wife, then up at the seither.
‘I – no,’ said Festrin, avoiding the old queen’s avid attention. She knelt beside the Rose of the World and made to touch her, then drew back as if afraid to do so. ‘We have never met. But, my lady—’ and she addressed this last to the woman on the ground, ‘—I think my great-great-great-grandfather may have known you.’
‘Six generations back?’ Auda scoffed. ‘The girl can be no more than two and twenty, and even your father has been dead these forty years and more. Are you completely out of your wits?’
Festrin blinked her one eye. ‘Even were it a single generation since this lady was known, I have not heard this language spoken in these isles since my father died: I had not thought any were left who knew it.’
‘Sudrinni, alla ieldri segthir,’ the Rosa Eldi said suddenly. Something in her demeanour had changed in the course of these few minutes: a light seemed to shine out of her, a new confidence, or something yet more crucial.
‘Alla?’
‘I Istrianni.’
The seither looked stunned. ‘I have not travelled as widely as I should have done. I have been very stupid. Had I only known—’
The King’s mother looked from one to the other as if they were both insane. ‘I haven’t got time for this nonsense in the middle of the night,’ she raged. She glared at the seither. ‘Quite what I can have been thinking of to summon your help, I cannot imagine. And as for you—’ she curled her lip at her son’s wife ‘—you need not think you have deceived me with this charade of bearing an heir for my boy. Anyone with half an eye can see you’re not pregnant. Well, your desperate ploy will soon be clear to all, and then we shall be rid of you, and I shall have no need for this freakish creature – no great seer, she; for her one great eye appears to see far less than my two rheumy orbs!’
And with that, she stepped smartly back into her chamber and slammed shut the heavy wooden door.
The Rosa Eldi swayed upright. ‘It is true,’ she said to the seither in the northern tongue. ‘There is no child in me.’
‘Ah, my lady.’ Festrin bowed her head. ‘If you are who I think you are, then there is ample reason for that sad truth.’
The Queen looked stricken. ‘If I cannot conceive, then I fear for my life.’
‘I could help you leave this place—’
This only had the effect of making the Rose of the World even more despairing. ‘No! I cannot leave: do not think to make me.’ The thought of being separated from Ravn produced something akin to a physical pain in her chest.
Festrin threw her hands up in conciliation. ‘No one can make you do anything you do not wish to do, my lady.’
The Rose of the World regarded her curiously. ‘I do not understand what you can mean by that,’ she said, thinking of the way Rahe had kept her in the wooden box, removing her only for his pleasure; of how Virelai had sold her the length and breadth of the Istrian coast; how the whim of men had blown her this way and that, like a piece of chaff.
‘Perhaps I can help in some other way,’ Festrin offered, although she could not think of anything miraculous.
She hefted the knapsack she had left by the door and patted it solicitously, thanking all that was sacred that she had had the intuition to leave it outside the old woman’s room. The idea of her most precious crystal and the herb-knots made by her great-grandfather lying in the avaricious claws of such a bitter woman was not a comforting thought.
‘It is a ship!’ the Rosa Eldi cried.
She seemed, Festrin thought, as excited as any child seeing its first moving image in a crystal; and in many ways she was like a child, partly formed, learning new skills, new information every day. She had decided in the space of the last few minutes, and with a sureness she could not put into words, that to disrupt this delicate process by blasting it with what she believed she knew about the beautiful woman seated opposite her would be both dangerous and damaging. And so she held her tongue, and her thoughts, in check and gave herself up to the scrying instead.
‘Let me see.’ She placed a hand on either side of the rock – a small quartz orb with which she travelled, since she always left her great master crystal in the safety of her sea-bordered cave on the hidden island of Blackshore – and then recoiled. The rock was alive with weird energies. Tiny lights flickered in and out of the interior facets as if the orb contained a lightning storm. She waited a few moments for the charges to ground themselves, then replaced her hands and gazed into the crystal’s depths. The image was indistinct, as if she were seeing it through a fog, but this seemed to be caused by the aftershock of the last user, for when she bent all her concentration upon it, the mist burned away, layer by layer, until she could see not only the vessel, but every thing aboard it with preternatural clarity. The ship looked Eyran, at least in its design; but the crew which manned it appeared a ramshackle bunch indeed. Festrin had never travelled beyond the Northern Isles: to sail too far from her rocky home seemed to her tantamount to relinquishing the seat of her power: for it flowed to her through the very ground of Eyra; but she recognised the origins of many of these folk from descriptions in the knots and scrolls salvaged during her great-great grandfather’s flight from the South, and from her own experience of wandering the wharves and docks of Halbo and its surrounding ports, where Empire sailors and merchants brought their trade in years gone by: there was a dark man at the helm with the distinctive clan tattoos of the Farem hilltribes, which was fascinating in itself; and a number of ragtag sailors of indeterminate origin. A small, round man wearing a steel skullc
ap looked vaguely familiar to her; but the man at the steerboard she knew well. Joz Bearhand! She remembered him as a small child at the steading at Whaleness, fighting his brother with a stick, and clearly getting the best of him, even though the other lad was older by a number of years. Hadn’t he gone as a sell-sword? She frowned. Her memory was becoming hazy with the years. She had lost track of her age in any but the most general terms; but many seithers lived beyond a hundred and twenty years, and she knew she had not yet attained that longevity. If it were a mercenary ship, it would certainly explain the ill-assorted crew. But why had the crystal chosen to offer the Rose of the World this particular view? She scanned the other occupants of the vessel more closely, dwelling for a long time on a tall, broad-shouldered woman with her hair bound into a complex arrangement of braids and a mouthful of pointed teeth; then her eyes shifted to the figure with whom this fearsome woman was conversing. The latter was a pretty girl, with long dark hair flying wildly in the wind and soft brown eyes. She was dressed in an ill-fitting tunic and boots that were too big for her; but it was not the incongruity of her presence on this ship full of seasoned hands and motley adventurers that made Festrin catch her breath, but the swell of the woman’s belly – to all but the most observant eye camouflaged beneath the oversized folds of the gathered tunic.