by Kim Wilkins
‘At first light, tell Sighere where I have gone, but ask him not to speak of it. We don’t know what the future holds for my father, or for Ælmesse. If an idiot like Ricbert got wind of the idea that Father was ...’ Curse it, she couldn’t say the word.
Heath pointedly looked away.
‘People would panic. Just don’t tell anyone. Urgent business. That’s all.’ She let the dogs off the chain and vaulted onto Isern’s back.
Heath grasped Isern’s reins. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Your sisters?’
Her chin stiffened. He was right: they needed to be told. A chill wind rattled through the trees. She spat hair out of her mouth. While she didn’t want to send him to Rose — it was better if they were apart — she was sensitive to her sister’s feelings. This news shouldn’t come from a stranger. ‘Ride at first light to Rose. Tell her to join me in Blicstowe immediately.’
‘And Ash?’
Bluebell frowned. ‘Get Rose to send a messenger. Ash will likely feel us on the move.’ Her words turned to mist in front of her. She dropped her voice. ‘Perhaps she already knows.’
‘My lord.’ Heath nodded and stepped back.
Bluebell picked up the reins and urged Isern forwards, thundering down to the moonlit road with the dogs barking in her wake.
The night began to lift as Bluebell approached the Giant Road. She glimpsed the first curve of the bright sun as she galloped over a wooden bridge and down towards the wide road. In some ancient misted past, grey paving stones — the length of two men and easily as wide — had been lined up five across for hundreds of miles: from here in the midlands to the far south of Ælmesse. The giants had laid them in a time before recollection, but now they were cracked and worn, with grass and wildflowers straggling up through the gaps. Bluebell’s heart breathed. From here to Blicstowe was two and a half days’ good riding, directly south. She was almost home.
But Isern would not go further without rest and water. He was a warhorse — huge and powerful — but she had no desire to drive him into the ground and have to run home on her own legs. Once, a witch princess up in Bradsey had offered to sell her an enchanted horse faster than a hare, but Bluebell had kept Isern: speed mattered not so much, in battle, as courage and weight. She reined him in at the edge of a stream and jumped off to let him walk a while. Her dogs realised they were stopping and ran barking into the stream. When Isern had cooled, she led him to the water and spoke soft words to him. He dropped his head to drink and she lay herself out on the dewy grass to close her eyes. A beam of sun hit her face, and she could see her pulse beating in her eyelids. She was tired and sore, her thighs aching, but the constant frantic movement had kept her thoughts from growing too dark.
Bluebell wasn’t a child. She knew one day her father would die, and she would take his place. She had prepared her whole life for the moment, but it had always been abstract, like a story. The real moment — hot and present — had lit a fire in her breast. She wished she had her sisters with her. They would understand. Well, the oldest two would: Rose and Ash. She barely knew Ivy and Willow, the twins. They’d been raised a long way from home after they’d killed her mother by being born. Bluebell wondered if anybody had sent for them; wondered when Rose would hear, when Ash would hear.
‘Ash,’ she said, soft under her breath. She was closest to Ash, who was away at the east coast in Thriddastowe, studying to be a counsellor in the common faith. Ash had a second sight: she wasn’t supposed to, she was far too young. Nevertheless, Bluebell had made use of her sister’s premonitions many times before battle. ‘Ash,’ she said again, drawing her eyebrows together, wondering if Ash could feel her words across the miles, vibrating on the sunlight.
Sleep caught her gently, and she dozed lightly against the growing dawn. Then a shower of water made her sit up and open her eyes. Thrymm stood by her, shaking water from her coat. Bluebell pushed the dog away with her foot and rolled over on her side. The dawn light made her stomach swirl. A new day. Perhaps he was already dead. Surely not. Surely she would have felt it: the sudden absence, a new quiet where his breath had once been in the world. She sat up and rested her long arms on her knees. Isern wandered over, nuzzled her shoulder with his big hot nose. He was keen to be going too. As keen, perhaps, as she was to catch up with Wylm and find out what dangerous ideas he and his mother were brewing.
The Giant Road was the main trade route through Thyrsland. Even during war, it was busy with traffic. But there hadn’t been war this far south since Bluebell’s sister, Rose, had married Wengest, the king of Netelchester. Ill will had evaporated overnight, and Netelchester and Ælmesse had raised a joint army to keep out the much greater threat of raiders from the Is-hjarta, the icy lands far, far north. If raiders ever got as far south as the Giant Road, blood would flow freely.
The road wound in and out of woods, wearing sunlight in shifting patterns. The chestnut leaves were thick and green and the trees bristled with creamy catkins. Pink and white soapwort grew in profusion on either side of the road, ivy crawled across fallen logs, blackbirds and robins sang in the sycamore trees. Life bloomed around her, even as she made this journey towards death. Bluebell urged Isern to canter, then let him walk, then pressed him forwards again. Every two hours she stopped — her stomach itching the whole time — to rest him. The day drew out. Around dusk, Bluebell flagged a caravan to stop. The woman at the front of the caravan grudgingly reined in her horses. She wore gold rings on every finger, and a richly dyed robe of red.
‘Have you seen a young man, travelling south alone?’ Bluebell asked.
‘I’ve seen many travellers today.’ The woman’s eyes narrowed.
‘A young man. Dark-haired.’ Mean-spirited. Dull-witted. Snide.
‘Less than an hour since I saw a dark-haired man on a bay horse.’ The woman shrugged. ‘Could have been your man.’ She eyed Bluebell’s baggage, the dented shield that hung on Isern’s rump, the axe and the helm. ‘Are you going to kill him?’
‘No,’ Bluebell said, kicking Isern forwards. With his big stride and some speed, surely she would catch Wylm.
Poor Isern. Even the dogs were exhausted. Even Bluebell was exhausted.
At the crest of the next rise, she thought she saw Wylm. But then the road wound into the trees.
At the trees, she thought she heard his horse’s footfalls. Long shadows drew across the grey-green road. Robins returned to their beds. Isern began to slow. Bluebell’s heart was hot. She didn’t want to kill her horse, but she wanted to catch Wylm.
Through the other side of the wood, she saw him on the open road. She whistled the dogs forwards and they streaked ahead, barking loudly.
Wylm slowed and turned as the dogs caught up with him, yapping at his horse’s feet. His horse shied, but Wylm held steady. He glanced up and saw her approaching. She urged Isern forwards, but he slowed to a walk. This wasn’t how she had imagined approaching Wylm. She had imagined thundering down towards him, terrifying him. But Isern had had enough.
Wylm waited. He recognised her now. Was probably carefully thinking up excuses to give her. He would lie. She would be unforgiving.
‘Princess,’ he said as she approached. ‘Are you looking for me?’
‘Don’t call me princess,’ she snarled. ‘My lord will do. Or Bluebell.’ She pulled Isern’s reins and he gratefully stopped. She dismounted and let him walk to cool down.
Wylm dismounted too. He extended his hand for her to shake, but she refused it. She took pleasure in the few inches of height she had over him.
‘Well, my lord?’ he asked.
‘My father is dying and your fucking mother sent for you and not me.’
He blinked his dark eyes slowly. Now the lies would start. ‘Yes,’ he said.
It took her a moment to realise he’d admitted it. ‘Why?’ she spluttered.
Wylm shook his head. She watched him carefully. Her greatest skill was to judge fast and well, but her greatest failing, she knew, was not to notice change. And Wylm had changed. Sh
e had in her mind’s eye a picture of him from their first meeting. Back then, he’d been a slippery, spotty youth. Now he was a man, not tall, but dense with muscle. Not a child she could push around with ease.
‘I’ve no idea why Mother didn’t send for you,’ he said. ‘I can’t read her mind.’
She wanted to kill him for being so flippant: remove his greasy head from his wretched neck. She fought down her anger and nodded once. ‘We’ll travel back together.’
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the only sign he wasn’t comfortable with the suggestion. ‘As you wish, my lord. It’s twelve miles to the next town. I intended to stop there the night.’
Bluebell glanced about. Her dogs had found a soft patch of long grass and both lay on their sides, panting. Isern sagged, his eyes pleading with her to take off his saddle. They could travel no further.
‘No, we’ll camp nearby.’ She indicated the edge of a lake, a mile off. ‘Over there,’ she said.
He began to protest, but she interrupted him. ‘You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?’
Wylm lifted his shoulders lightly. ‘No,’ he said.
His calm coolness was like a burr in her blood. ‘Follow,’ she said. ‘I have to tend to my animals.’
Wylm took a long time to go to sleep. It wasn’t the cold night sky above him: cold had long since ceased to worry him. Bluebell had shipped him off to the northern borders the day he turned eighteen, six months ago. It had been an instruction in hardship, as well as an instruction in how his stepsister felt about him.
Rather, what kept him awake was how he felt about Bluebell.
She lay three feet away from him, on a rolled-out blanket by the fire. She was on her side, her back turned to him, her hair tied in a knot on top of her head. She’d barely spoken a dozen words to him since they met on the road, and sleep had come to her as though she commanded it. Now he watched her pale neck. It was the only part of her that looked as though it belonged to a woman. He loathed Bluebell and yet was fascinated by her. There was no more famous soldier in Thyrsland, unless one counted her father. Up at the border camp, they told tales of her reckless courage, of her famous sword, of her ability to take on three or four armed men and still be standing while they lay dead. They called her unkillable. And yet, staring at that bare, white neck, he believed her very mortal indeed.
In the dark, distant woods, a mournful bird cried. The fire cracked softly. The night was still, apart from the occasional soft shudder of the uppermost branches of the ash trees that formed a semicircle around them. Soft, grey dark settled like mist. His face was hot and tight from the fire. Slowly, his eyes fell closed ...
He woke with a start to a different kind of night. Darker, colder. The fire had dwindled to embers. The sharp-sweet scent of earth rose strongly as the dew fell. And Bluebell was no longer there.
A moment passed, or perhaps only half a moment. He wondered what had woken him, then decided it must have been Bluebell moving off to find a private place to relieve herself. He smiled, wondering if she shit steel. His bones ached from being in the one position, so he rolled on his other side. And fear slashed his heart.
A foot away, a beefy man with a long, tangled beard and a weatherworn mail shirt held a spear point towards him. Over his shoulder, he wore Bluebell’s pack.
‘You want to die?’ the man said in a harsh whisper.
Wylm’s hand tightened at his side, looking for his spear. But of course, his spear was an inch away from his nose, in the bandit’s hands.
And then, Bluebell was there. It happened too quick for him to put in order. One moment he was alone with the bandit, the next she was towering over the both of them, her face grim in the shadows: a giant, grisly thing fashioned from blood-rusted iron. She made a noise, somewhere between a grunt of exertion and a guttural roar of rage. It was the most terrifying sound he had ever heard, doubling back on his ears as the dogs barked harshly and the sword came down with enough weight and speed to bruise the air.
The bandit fell, his head split from crown to nose.
The dogs were on the body in a second, at the throat, their fast, eager paws in Wylm’s face. He gasped for breath, sat up and pushed himself to his feet.
Bluebell retrieved her pack and bent to check the body for any further spoils.
‘What happened?’ Wylm asked.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she muttered, her bloody fingers closing over a gold shield-boss. ‘I saw him from over by the road.’
‘It’s a good thing you were awake,’ he said.
She fixed her pale eyes on him in the gloom. ‘I wouldn’t have slept through it. As you did.’
Wylm thought about defending himself, but saw no point in using his breath. He was satisfied, though, that he needn’t doubt the stories of her abilities. Perhaps she was unkillable after all. Who had the courage and skill to defeat such a monster?
Two
Don’t dream.
Ash hauled herself up through leaden sleep to wake gasping in her dark room. The soft hush of the moving sea in the distance. The slow breathing of the women in the other beds. The twitch and pull of her own blood pressure.
But she had done it. She had avoided the dream that had been trying to press itself into her mind for the last six months. She filled her lungs. The room was dim, dawn swallowed by early morning rain, but Ash didn’t dare fall back to sleep in case the dream was still waiting for her. So she rose, tiptoed past the beds around her, and went to the shutter. She pushed it open an inch, letting in a fist of cold air and the smell of damp earth. Rain fell between the bowerhouses in the grey light. Early morning rain was common here on the south-east coast. It would clear to a fine day, the gulls would spread their wings to dry on the gable finishings of the great study hall and the grim darkness would be forgotten. But the clouds in Ash’s mind would not lift so easily. Only two days had passed now, since last time she stopped herself having the dream. Before that four days. Before that eleven. It was becoming more urgent; of that there could be no doubt. But if she let herself dream it, then she would know what it was about. And every sign told her she did not want to know. Knowledge was irreversible.
Ash closed the shutter and sat on the end of her bed to plait her long, dark hair: hand over hand in practised movements. A gust of battle-keen north wind buffeted the shutters, and one of her bower-sisters stirred, then settled again: untroubled sleep. Ash opened the chest at the end of her bed and pulled out a dress to go over her shift; she belted it on tightly and pinned on a long, green jacket. Then she slipped into her shoes and quietly left the bowerhouse, closing the door behind her. She stood for a moment under the gable. The sudden rush of damp cold pierced her warm clothes, and the rain fell steadily. Head down, she dashed across the muddy wooden boards to the great study hall, careful not to slip. She pulled open the heavy doors and hurried inside. The doors thudded closed behind her, shutting out the cold and the wet. In the dry, firelit room, she listened to the rain falling on the tiles, above the high, arched ceiling. Rain spat down the chimney hole and hissed onto the fire, freshly lit by the new scholars. Ash remembered her first year here, how much she’d hated rising early to light the fires and change the rushes and cook the breakfasts. Her father was a king; for her to be servile was unnatural, like speaking in another tongue. But she’d soon grown used to it and come to appreciate the lessons it taught her. To know the common faith and practise it in the community — whether it was offering medicine or advice or a soft shoulder for sorrow to spill upon — meant understanding how common people lived. Besides, the first difficult year had passed soon enough. Now she was in her fifth and final year of study.
She sat heavily at one of the long tables where they took their lessons. Behind her were shelves and tables overflowing with vellum scripts, but Ash read only grudgingly and most of their lessons could not be captured in words. Here at this scarred wooden table, she’d listened to the accumulated wisdom of many counsellors, earned from their many years of pra
ctice. Stories she had heard would never leave her: the crushing grief of mothers who had lost their children; the ordinary cruelties men and their wives were capable of towards each other; miraculous cures for diseases and daring rescues of babes from their mother’s body. Of course, the counsellors had talked about the common faith too: the observances that structured their year, how to prepare for mother’s night or the proper way to honour the Horse God on his festival day. They had even talked about the trimartyrs, the new faith that was growing roots in Thyrsland, and how they could work alongside these pilgrims if they had to. Though pilgrims were notoriously narrow of mind and dismissive of women.
But one lesson she had never learned was how to manage a prescience so insistent it threatened to drown her. Because she wasn’t supposed to have any prescience. She was far too young and inexperienced.
‘You’re up early, Ash.’
Ash looked up. It was her teacher, Myrren, a tall woman with an age-spotted face the shape of a perfect oval. Ash’s pulse quickened in her throat, as though Myrren could read her thoughts. But Myrren couldn’t read thoughts: she had been clear about that at their very first lesson together. ‘We are not magic,’ she had said. ‘We are only people who read other people well. Do not make the mistake of thinking you are a seer. It takes many, many years to become a seer. And some of you, like me, will never feel the stirring of the sight.’
The stirring of the sight? For Ash, it had never stirred. It had sprung up like an ocean squall on her fifteenth birthday. And every year it intensified.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ Ash said, rubbing her eyes as evidence.
Myrren looked at her closely. ‘A poor night’s sleep is a troubled woman’s burden. Something on your mind?’
‘No.’ She kept her face studiously blank. ‘Alice was snoring.’
Myrren’s mouth twitched into a smile. She placed a knotted hand on Ash’s shoulder. ‘I’m going to see a woman in town. She has a fever and is managing on her own with a small child. I promised I’d call at first light. Do you want to come with me?’