by Kim Wilkins
Her face grew mournful. ‘I can’t leave. Æthlric is dying.’
‘Æthlric doesn’t know you any more. His mind is already dead. You are only waiting for the body to catch up.’
She shook her head. ‘This is such a mess, Wylm. All my happiness has fled.’ She fixed him with her pale eyes. ‘My son. My son. Can I tell you anything? Everything?’
Uneasiness stirred across his back. ‘Of course.’
Gudrun stood and began to pace. ‘I am in so deep ...’
‘What do you mean?’
Pacing. Pacing.
‘Mother?’
‘I meant ...’ She fell silent a while. Then said, ‘I meant no harm. Not to him.’
Wylm struggled to understand her with his mind, but his skin was already shrinking in fear. ‘I don’t understand.’
She stopped, came close. Kneeled at his feet and put her head in his lap. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, against the fabric of his pants. ‘I’m so sorry, Wylm.’
Wylm touched her hair lightly, fearfully. ‘What have you done?’
She raised her head. ‘I did it.’
His stomach shivered. ‘You ...?’
‘I bought an elf-shot off a traveller, an undermagician. I was specific. I said I didn’t want to hurt Æthlric, I merely wanted to change his mind about Bluebell. I wanted him to take the trimartyr faith, so she couldn’t rule.’ Here her face contorted and she began to sob, her voice coming out high and whining. ‘I never meant to hurt him. I love him. But I knew it would be better for me, and for you, if Bluebell wasn’t here. Maybe he would have even made you his heir.’
‘But I didn’t want ... I don’t want ...’ His heart was thundering. Because he did want. The closer such a fate moved towards his outstretched fingers, the more he saw that it was right and good. King Wylm of Ælmesse. And timidity would avail him nothing. He fell silent.
‘The traveller gave me a stone. I put it under his pillow. He found it when we went to bed and I said it was to give him sweet dreams and he ... he smiled at me and put it back. The next morning, it was gone and he seemed confused and ... he bumped into things and he said he needed to lie down and ... he didn’t get up. I tried to find the traveller, but she was gone.’ She palmed tears off her face. ‘It’s done, Wylm. I can’t undo it.’
Self-preservation helped him find his voice. ‘Does anyone else know?’
‘Osred. He says there’s nothing we can do.’
Wylm realised his stomach was rolling with nausea. He gently pushed his mother away and stood, went to the shutter and opened it for fresh air.
Behind him, his mother continued to sob. ‘Perhaps I deserve to die,’ she said, her voice raw and harsh. ‘Look what I’ve done to him. Look what I’ve done.’
He turned to watch her. Her eyes streamed, her nostrils were gleaming wet. He was overwhelmed with pity, but then he imagined Bluebell seeing Gudrun like this. If she knew, she would feel no pity. ‘You don’t deserve to die,’ he said. ‘Nobody will find out.’
‘She’d kill me, wouldn’t she?’ Gudrun said in a small voice.
‘There is no doubt.’ And she would enjoy it. Bluebell was in love with death. Wylm approached his mother, put a hand on each of her arms.
She broke into sobs again, sobs big enough to break her. ‘I can’t see my way out. Wylm, I trust to your judgement because I have none. Consult with Osred. He’s in the infirmary. Between the two of you, you must find an ally. Any ally. One who will not side with Bluebell.’
‘Gather yourself, Mother,’ Wylm said. ‘All will be well.’
Wylm left her shaking and crying on her bed and made his way to the infirmary. The edges of his vision were bright and blurring. Fear, mortal fear, had hold of him. His mother had done a stupid, selfish thing and unless he managed his next few moves very carefully, there was no doubt both he and his mother faced brutal deaths. The vision of Bluebell splitting open the head of the bandit replayed in his mind’s eye, only this time it was his mother’s face crumpling. His gorge rose. He stopped, thumped the wall with the side of his fist. What an idiotic thing she had done, what a grumbling storm she had invoked.
And yet it was done. Now he had to be man enough to walk into this storm, and emerge as Ælmesse’s king.
Osred practically leapt from his bed when he saw Wylm.
‘You must get me out of here. Bluebell is crazed and —’
‘I’ve come to remove you,’ Wylm said. His own pulse snapped so hard in his throat that he was certain Osred would be able to see it.
‘Oh, thank you.’ Osred’s shoulders and chest were wrapped in blood-soaked bandages. ‘I know I’m probably too ill to travel, but I don’t know what she’ll do next.’
Wylm stilled him with both hands. The other man winced against his grip.
‘Osred,’ Wylm said, ‘you know what my mother has done?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how do you think we should proceed?’
‘We should take your mother and leave.’
‘Would our departure not be an admission of guilt?’
‘No, it would be self-preservation.’
‘And you would do whatever it took to preserve yourself?’
Osred cocked his head slightly. ‘I am of no use to your mother dead.’
Wylm considered him a moment. Osred would tell. Eventually. That he hadn’t so far, even under torture, was no indication of how he might behave in a week, or a year, or a decade. As long as he was alive, he could reveal Gudrun’s betrayal. Should his mother’s crime come to light, Wylm’s future was dashed.
But was Wylm the man who could silence Osred? Was he the man his mother needed him to be?
‘Dress quickly,’ Wylm said.
‘I’m not under guard.’
‘Nonetheless, I don’t think we should be seen together, lest Bluebell assume we are colluding.’
It was not even an hour out of town when Osred complained that he must rest, that the jolting of the horse’s hoofs on the poorly finished low road was making him bleed. Wylm’s heart seemed too big for his chest. Osred kneeled by the muddy stream, forcing breath into his lungs, scooping a handful of water to his mouth. Wylm felt at his belt for his knife, drew it slowly, noted his shaking fingers.
Then he strode through dappled sunlight to stab it hard into the muscle and gristle of Osred’s back. He would have given all his riches not to have heard the noise Osred made — a thudding, coughing, gurgling noise — before he pitched forwards into the brown water, his blood pulsing into the stream.
Wylm retrieved his knife and stood. Blood dripped from the tip of the blade, a slow flat noise against the ground. Then it stopped. He wiped his nose with the back of his free hand. Not crying. He wasn’t crying.
Find an ally. Any ally.
A strong ally. One that already hated Bluebell. She had plenty of enemies. Wylm turned the thought over in his mind as he left the glade without glancing back at Osred’s body.
Undermagic was dangerous, and Ash knew that. She had learned a little about it during her studies: always wear sweet violets to protect yourself from undermagic, don’t turn your back on one of their conjured spirits, beware that undermagicians say one thing and do another. And yet, the undermagicians would not think Ash’s second sight unsafe or a burden. They actively trained the sight, though some went mad with it.
Ash wound the cold fear up tightly and kept it tucked away. Yes, she was afraid of using her sight again, especially for something as risky as travelling on the thought channels of undermagic. But there was a small part of her that wanted to know her father’s sister, this hidden aunt. What if it was from her that Ash drew her talent? What if she understood Ash? What if she could save Ash from her blighted Becoming?
Bluebell had left her alone in her bower, so she could close up the shutters and stoke the fire. The smoke was thick and choking, but she knelt by the hearthpit and tore up the leaves and roots of an angelica plant. The milk stuck between her fingers as she scattered the pieces in
to the fire. A sweet, sharp smell arose with the smoke, and Ash closed her eyes. Her head pounded, the thrum of her blood against her temples. The smells were sticky in her throat and she felt as though the world were growing distant from her, as though time and light were swelling and stretching away, and she was shrunk to a hard, sharp pin in the middle of it. She breathed deeply, and began to say her aunt’s name over and over.
‘Yldra, Yldra, Yldra ...’
The word droned on, losing its meaning, disintegrating, floating apart and travelling on the billows of the sky. Ash lost sensation in her body, felt the pull and welcome snap of freedom as she left herself on the floor of the bower and shot upwards with Yldra’s name. North and north. She blurred out of the bower, out of Blicstowe, up the Giant Road, then west over darkening woods and giants’ ruins. North and north again, trees and roads flickering against her sight, then slower, slower, slowing down. Her breathing was audible again, and she was both in the bowerhouse and on the edge of a dark plain. A towering stone cast a black shadow against the grey ground. Ash reached out with her hands and, even though she knew they were held out towards the fire, she felt the cold rough surface of the monolith. She looked down and saw her bare feet on the dewy grass. She reached up to her unbound hair, checking the crown of sweet violets was still in place. As she touched the petals, a sharp, hot shock leapt into her fingers.
‘Yldra?’ she called, turning in a slow circle.
There. A path leading into trees. She began to walk. Her lungs felt raw and she coughed. The path led upwards, the trees were sparse. She stopped. At the top of the hill, she could see a human figure. Now when she looked hard there were two. Now three. Lined up, one after the other, on the side of the path. She had to pass them to get to her destination. A cold dread seeped into her chest.
She moved on and up, the rocks poking hollows in her soft soles. She drew closer to the first figure, and realised it was made of straw and corn, an attenuated slender thing that lurched to one side for lack of strong support. She stopped, looked at it closely in the gloom. Eyes made of dead beetles looked back at her. She turned and kept walking towards the next. A noise behind her.
She spun. The corn dolly had turned its head to watch her. Her heart frosted over. These were thraels, made of mud and straw and undermagic.
‘Pull away, pull away,’ Ash told herself, lifting up off the ground and trying to see the corn dollies from above. She glimpsed a little lime-washed hut, a warm light in its window, then she was slammed back down to the ground with a bone-jarring thud.
The woman’s voice came from everywhere. ‘What do you want?’
‘Yldra, I am your niece.’
‘You are blighted. You are destined to take thousands with you into death. Come not near me.’
A surge of invisible darkness began to push her backwards along the path, to carry her along like a doll in the waves. She flung her arms out, flailing, then felt herself funnelled roughly back into her body, on the floor of her bower.
Ash opened her eyes. The smoke was thick and choking, sweat ran in trickles from her temples. She coughed and coughed, then pulled herself to her feet and ran outside into the sweet evening air, gulped it.
All her joints were swollen and sore.
Yldra’s words circled her, their dark import pressing on her. ‘You are destined to take thousands with you into death.’ She knew it. She had known it since she’d seen the dragon’s indiscriminate fire in the vision. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, but it was true. She knew not how it was true, but it was for a certainty.
As she stood, aching and coughing, Bluebell emerged from the infirmary and saw her.
‘Sister? Are you well?’ Bluebell strode over, her face grim in the darkening twilight.
‘I ... I am well.’ Ash coughed again. ‘I found her.’
Bluebell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Yldra? Is she father’s sister?’
‘I don’t know. She is certainly a powerful undermagician.’
‘Can you lead us to her?’
‘I think so,’ Ash said, ‘but I don’t know if we’ll be welcome.’ I certainly won’t.
‘Which way?’
She coughed again, pretending it was difficult to breathe. ‘I’m sorry. The magic takes its toll on me. We go north and northwest. Into the heart of Bradsey. There’s a stone on the edge of a plain ...’ Her heart stuttered again as she thought of it.
‘We’ll find it,’ Bluebell said, squaring her shoulders. ‘Go and get some rest. You look exhausted.’ Then she was striding on her way to finish organising their journey, Ash’s ever-capable sister.
Ash watched her go, then sank to the grass to breathe the soft evening air. Her mind whirled. If her Becoming meant the deaths of others, then the only way to prevent such horror was to take herself into exile. Away from everyone. Away from her sisters. She could lead them to Yldra’s, but then she would have to leave them, lest her Becoming sweep them all away.
Ten
Willow took a deep breath and let her hands fall in her lap, the fine silver chain loose over her fingers, the triangle spilling down and swinging slowly. She sat on the grass, in the shadow behind her father’s hall. Evening damp pressed against her skirts, a light in a lantern flickered beside her. Breathe in, breathe out. But no matter that she told herself to relax, she could not stop the whirling thoughts in her mind. Where were they?
Come to me, come to me, most beloved angels, messengers of Maava. Praise Maava, may his glory be great. Come to me, angels, let me hear your sweet voices. Where are your sweet voices? Forsake me not ...
Their silence infected her heart. Why did they not speak to her? Once, perhaps a year ago, she hadn’t yet known their voices could be heard and had not realised how empty time and thought were without them. But then the preacher who lived behind her village — the one people warned her to stay away from — had told her about the voices, about how he had been chosen by Maava to hear angels speak in his head. And Willow had wanted that so much. She’d wanted it so much she couldn’t sleep at night for feeling her ribs and spine push against her soft flesh inside. Finally, finally, after weeks of prayer, the voices had come.
But here she was, far from home, and nothing but silence.
Come to me, angels, for Maava’s love. For pity of sweet Liava and her doomed twins. I would die for Maava, too. You can’t leave me alone now. Come to me, tell me what I should do.
Then, when she was about to dissolve into despair ...
‘Here, child. We are here.’ A chorus of sweet voices, whispering across each other. ‘We are here. Be not sad.’
Oh, thank you. Thank you. I ask only what I should do, here, so far from home. My father is dying, my father by blood. I barely know him, but I love him as a daughter should, though he is not my lord. Maava is my lord. May all pray for his might. Praise Maava may his glory be great. The one god, the only god.
‘Your father is a heathen king. Your father will pass, on his death, to the Blacklands.’
Her father in the Blacklands? Maava would judge her by her father’s fate, surely. Her heart spiked. No! Can I not save him? Can I not pray for him? I will pray every second, I will not blink, yet I stop to pray.
‘You may pray. You may hope he dies when you are with him, so that you may ask Maava to transport his soul into the Sunlands. But he is a sinner and may yet not be saved.’
Then the voices turned into the snarling swirl they sometimes did, where words weren’t clear but meaning bloomed in her belly, dark and cold. Maava was unhappy with her. She had a heathen for a father. Heathens for sisters. She hadn’t done enough to bring them into Maava’s light. She brought the triangle to her lips and prayed and prayed until the feeling slipped behind her heart; there it would remain until the next time Maava decided to punish her.
Self-hatred, despair. She took the edge of her trimartyr triangle and dug it into the soft flesh of her wrist. It did nothing more than leave an indentation in among the crisscrossing of faint scars. She pulled the
knife from her waistband and lightly scored three lines across her wrist. Tiny beads of blood bubbled out. She put her knife away, licked the blood off her skin.
No use moping. She had to do something. The angels had told her to be with her father, but Bluebell planned to take him away in the morning. She would have to make sure she travelled too. Maava would want that.
Bluebell wouldn’t.
She rose, picked up her lamp, then her skin prickled. She realised she wasn’t alone.
Willow turned sharply. Her stepbrother, Wylm, was watching her from around the corner of the hall. She quickly tucked away her triangle. He smiled, nodded. The usual cruel set of his brow was absent. His expression was almost warm. She was taken aback. Then he slipped away.
Her heart hammered. Would he tell Bluebell? Well, perhaps it would be good if he did. It was well past time Willow told Bluebell herself. Maava was the one god. Those who didn’t accept that committed their souls to the Blacklands. That was precisely where Bluebell was headed if she didn’t accept the trimartyr faith.
The dark feeling again. I’m sorry, Maava, I’m sorry. I’m a poor sinner. I’m sorry. I will do better. But if I tell Bluebell now, she won’t let me travel with my father. I will save his soul. I will send him to you in the Sunlands. With new resolve, she went to find Bluebell.
She wasn’t in her bower, though Rose was there with Rowan, Ash and Ivy.
‘Have you seen Bluebell?’ she asked. ‘I need to speak with her immediately.’
Ivy’s curiosity was piqued. She stood and approached. ‘Willow, what’s all this?’
Willow ignored her. ‘Do you know where Bluebell is?’
‘Over at the infirmary, I think,’ Rose said as she brushed Rowan’s long, dark hair.
Ivy caught her at the door, dropping her voice low. ‘Why do you need to see Bluebell?’
‘That’s my business.’ Willow kept walking, head down.
‘Your business is my business. You know that.’
‘I’m going to make her take me tomorrow. With Father.’