by Joni Sensel
Once he stopped looking for the uprooted tree, he came across it almost immediately. The shadow of the leaning trunk jumped out at him, and he recognized the root wall at its end.
“Lana,” he called, to prevent startling her. Aidan shoved through the hawthorn gate, ignoring the thorns grasping at him. He froze.
The hollow was empty. No eleven hummed there, and no Lana awaited; the lamp left no doubt. The ground where Aidan had drawn Latin letters had been brushed smooth. The only evidence that either of them had been there was the scent of recently trampled fern fronds.
Aidan burst back outside, calling loudly. A thorn ripped at his neck and he fought briefly to break the hawthorn’s grip on his robe.
“Lana!” he repeated. “Where are you?”
He stopped calling abruptly. If she’d been within earshot and able, she would have answered already. Perhaps she’d given in to the longing for news of her mother. Aidan knew roughly where her mother’s cottage must lie, but not surely enough to find it in the dark.
The flickering lamp cast threatening shadows in the branches and brush around him. He closed his eyes to shut them out and took a deep breath, trying to decide what to do.
As his thoughts slowed, he again caught the far-off purr of Lana’s eleven. Alarm had risen to drown it when he had realized she wasn’t where he’d expected. Now he turned in place, trying to fix it. He should have realized at once that she could not be here; that hum was too faint. He walked farther east, slowly, covering the ground with as little attention to his body as he could manage, because thinking of low branches and sharp rocks and brambles made the humming harder to hear. He followed the soft sound like the distant shush of falling water.
He found her shadow crouched alongside the creek a stag’s flight or more from the uprooted tree.
“Lana?”
She squeaked, startled, before she whirled and recognized his face in the lamp’s glow. He heard her splash something into the water before rising to meet him. After an awkward instant, they embraced.
“You worried me,” he said. “Why did you leave your shelter?”
“I couldn’t stay there without even a candle,” she said. “Once the light was all gone, I heard too many frightening things in the blackness. I felt trapped. And I didn’t expect you to come back. At least not so soon.”
“I told you I would.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not used to someone who does what he says,” she murmured. “Most people don’t. I thought you’d just stay at your abbey. Is everyone safe there?”
He looked away into the darkness. “No.” Not ready to relive those scenes yet, he changed the subject. “What were you doing just now? In the water?” He had spotted the wooden bowl in her hand and recognized it as the one from her nook. She may have been merely getting a drink, but Aidan didn’t think so. Even when he had been able to see no more than her shadowy shape against the gleam of the creek, something about her position had alerted him that she’d been unusually intent on the bowl.
Lana lowered the bowl to the farthest extent of her arms and wrapped both hands around it as if she would just as soon stash it behind her back. “Oh … do you want to go back to my hiding place? ’Twill be cozy enough with the lamp.”
Her clumsy dodge of his question sharpened his interest. When she started to step away, he didn’t move.
She took only a few steps. When she saw he wasn’t following, she stopped at the outer reach of the lamplight. Standing motionless and silent for several long breaths, she finally whispered, “I’m afraid to tell you.”
“Why?”
“You might … be scared of me. Or hate me.”
Apprehension built in his belly, but he couldn’t guess what she might mean.
She took his silence as confirmation of her fears. “Why do things we can’t understand have to come from the Devil?” she protested. “Surely we do not understand everything about God.”
Aidan gnawed the inside of his cheek, his dread doubling. He resisted the desire to retreat a step. Instead, he pressed, “Tell me, Lana. What have you done?”
“Well … I was trying to scry in the moonlight,” she said, low. “I needed to see what had become of my mother.”
After all her reluctance, and the abundance of gore he’d seen that day, Aidan had begun to imagine some rite with lamb’s blood and severed parts of a bird. He exhaled in relief. Then his mind engaged what she had said.
“You can scry?” Catching glimpses of other places or times in a bowl of moonlit water was as likely as seeing a leprechaun—or so Aidan had been taught.
“Sometimes,” she said. “With the moon out of round, what I saw might not be true, but I think she’s all right.”
Her plaintive hope emboldened him—and summoned his guilt. He should have reassured her immediately.
“Your mother is fine, I’ve been told.” He had asked at the smithy. “The raiders bypassed homes that far downriver to hit the abbey more quickly.”
Relief washed over Lana’s face in the moonlight. “It’s true, then! Oh, thank you!”
The joyous rise in her voice lifted Aidan’s heart, too. Now and again Lana made him uneasy, but the rest of the time, she drew him like an ant to honey.
Eyeing her bowl, which she no longer tried to hide, he snorted and shook his head. “I knew you were a witch.”
“I’m not bad, though. I would never hurt anyone. I’m just a … a wood-witch, I guess. Nothing evil!”
“I didn’t say you were. But you do make me nervous.”
“You make me nervous,” she countered. The idea was so laughable, he didn’t bother asking why. He figured she had said it only for argument’s sake.
“Then we’re even,” he said. “But I’m glad you finally admitted it—because I need your help with something.” He took two paces to catch up to her. “Shall we return to your tree now? I’d really like to rest.”
She nodded and led him straight back to the upthrust gnarl of roots.
They sat down inside and he explained, as briefly as he could, all that had happened to him since he’d left her. When he talked of finding the bodies, his voice dropped. In some trick of memory and talking and time, he abruptly came back from the shadows of his family’s cottage to find himself here once more, fallen silent, his head propped in his hands.
Lana reached to stroke his shoulder in sympathy. For a moment, he rested silent in that bittersweet distraction. Then he raised his face and traded his sorrow for the thin consolation of vengeance. Relating the news of the ransom, Aidan described what he and his kinsmen planned instead.
. “So can you tell me how to behave like a witch?” he finished. “Something frightening?”
She gazed silently at the knuckles of her clenched hands.
“I don’t mean to make fun of you,” he added, afraid he had insulted her. “I just thought you would know something to distract them with. You’ve startled me without even trying.”
Still she didn’t reply.
“Lana, won’t you help me?” Aidan pleaded, gripped with fear that his plan would fall undone on such a small hurdle. He could invent a ploy without her advice, he supposed, but the notion sent a flush of cold terror through him. The thought of walking alone into a house he would probably never walk out of was dreadful enough. He didn’t think he could make his feet do it without the confidence of an authentic act.
“No,” she said softly.
He dropped his head back into his hands.
“What you’re talking about is going to be terribly dangerous, Aidan,” she said. “Pretending won’t be enough. You’ll need real witchery.” She looked up. “I’ll do it for you.”
XVIII
When Aidan recovered his tongue, he couldn’t spill his protests quickly enough for them to make sense.
“Don’t be a fool,” he told Lana. “I thought about that, but I can’t let a girl—Could you really … ? No. No, I won’t allow that. I’m going. They might believe you’re a witch faster, but �
��” Hearing himself, Aidan stopped to collect his wits.
She folded her arms and watched him, her lips a tight line. Finally he came up with a sound argument. “It won’t work,” he said firmly. “You’ll be useless for rescuing Donagh’s heir.”
“I have no interest in keeping Brendan Donagh alive,” she said flatly. “But I do care about you staying alive. We can both go, if you’d rather. In fact, that will make it easier to scare them. If you want to save their hostage, that’s your problem.”
“But even if it works, Lana …” His voice trailed off again as he traced the possibilities to their likely and unlikely conclusions. “As it is, you no longer exist. Nobody at the abbey has even thought about you, and when they do, they’ll assume you were captured or killed. Even Donagh will think you are dead. So you can do what you want. But if anyone sees you with me—”
“I won’t be any worse off than I was this morning.”
“We both very well may be killed,” he said, hardly wanting to admit it to himself. “That will be much worse.”
A sly and almost sinister smile crept onto her face. “Aidan, you haven’t much faith in your witch.”
While he tried to decide how much she was joking, she fingered her lips and gazed at him with unfocused eyes. Nodding to herself and rising, she declared, “I’ll need branches of holly and yew. Might as well take a sprig of hawthorn, since it is here.” She snapped a twig off the bush blocking the entrance and slid its thorny length carefully into a pocket of her mantle. “And elder, perhaps—if I dare. Bring your lamp and help me find them.”
He argued with her as she crept through the woods looking for just the right trees. She barely responded, and Aidan felt his resistance wearing away. His shoulders drooped under the weight of her possible death, but now that he’d set her in motion, he wasn’t sure how to stop her. Certainly his words were not working.
After the yew had been found, Lana hushed him. She bowed her head before the tree and asked for permission to harm it.
“I ask with full understanding of the results I may reap,” she added. “May I proceed?”
Aidan shivered, the tone of her voice banishing the fond idea that she was playing a harmless if childish game. He waited with her, wondering what kind of answer she expected. She gazed into the shadowy branches while the night breeze lifted and sighed through the needles. Then she reached to stroke nearby boughs as though the tree were a prickly pet.
Lana let loose a long sigh of her own. “Thank you,” she breathed. Quickly she found a bough of arm’s length that she wanted, bent it back, and stripped it from the tree like a handful of feathers plucked from a goose. She passed it to Aidan.
“Don’t drop it,” she warned, her voice sharp. “Don’t lose even a needle, if you can help it. And for your soul’s sake, don’t let the lamp flame get close.”
“I won’t,” he murmured. The gravity of her voice and her rite made him feel as though he bore a severed limb. Skin crawling, he cradled the bough against his chest.
Lana moved on in search of a holly. He followed in silence.
She startled him from dark thoughts with a cry of recognition. The prickly leaves of a holly bush glinted in the lamplight. She took a long time finding a branch with exactly nine sprigs of leaves. Aidan watched, remembering all the bad-luck tales he’d ever heard about holly. He grew even more uneasy when she called, not quite singing,
King Holly, give me of thy bright, white wood,
And I will give thee of my bones
When I am dead and laid to molder
Underneath a tree.
Fingering her chosen bough, she peered abruptly past Aidan to the sky. “Where’s the moon now?” she wanted to know, shading her eyes from the lamp with her free hand.
He caught that hand to halt her. “Lana, stop. Never mind. I won’t mind dying so much, if that’s what will happen. I think our Father in Heaven will still raise me when the Messiah returns, even if I have been a lousy novice today. But I really do not want your death on my head.”
“Why—you think He won’t raise me, too?”
“I’m not joking.”
“Neither am I.” She squeezed his hand. “You thought it was worth doing before, Aidan. If you’re right, then ’tis worth doing as best we can do it, so there might be some chance it will work.”
She brushed her fingers through the bough trapped in his other arm.
“Besides,” she added, “it is already begun.”
“We could just go back to the smithy,” he said, “and let Donagh pay his ransom.”
“You’re not listening, Aidan. No, we can’t. I’ve ripped a branch from the Tree of Life and Death with violent intent and on your behalf. It is too late to stop now. The yew will give both of us life or death, one or the other, before we are done, whether we go to the alehouse or not. We might as well go and finish your plan. Our fate will be the same either way.”
Aidan’s tongue stuck in his mouth. His training told him not to believe what she’d said. He couldn’t help it. Her steely gaze pierced the intense waves of eleven that battered his ears, rising from her now like heat off a coal. The sharpening pitch of that number convinced him.
He only bowed his head and nodded.
Lana checked the sky again, the eastern horizon this time. “How long until dawn, do you think?”
“A few hours yet,” he said. As they’d begun searching for holly, he’d heard the abbey bell distantly tolling for Matins. So the new day was still many praises and prayers away.
Lana sat down away from the holly, where the leaf litter would not feel so prickly. “We might as well rest a bit, then. I’d rather wait until the moon sets to take a branch of the holly. It’ll be stronger that way.”
“Stronger for what?”
When she didn’t answer, he gave up and settled beside her. He asked her permission to set the yew branch on the ground alongside. She let him lay it down only after removing her mantle to spread beneath it. Aidan felt as though she’d begun to speak a separate language, one he didn’t know but whose powerful words would determine the fates of them both.
That uncomfortable notion reminded him of something that seemed to have taken place days ago. “Did you learn the letters I showed you?” he asked.
She nodded, a smile alighting on her face for the first time since they’d departed the uprooted tree. She recited the sounds. With the tip of one finger, she traced the shapes, not on the ground but on his leg, which he’d stretched out alongside her. “Ah,” she repeated, her finger moving, “bay …”
The wool of Aidan’s robe was thick, but not so thick that her touch didn’t send a shiver the length of his body. Without thinking, he reached to stop her hand, trapping it against his leg before it could tickle kay or dhay. The abrupt motion startled them both.
Their eyes met—as much as they could in the flickering glow of the lamp. The shadowed hollows hiding Lana’s blue eyes drew an unexpected shudder from Aidan, recalling dark splashes of blood masking the true colors of clothing and flagstones and grass.
“There was so much blood, Lana,” he murmured, aware that his unprompted words would probably only confuse her. “I can still smell it now. It won’t go away.”
She looked down at his hand holding hers captive. “I can see it on your robe in the lamplight,” she murmured. “And I could see part of what you’ve seen on your face, when you told me. I’m so sorry.”
Slipping her hand from his grasp, she raised it to the hawthorn scratch on his neck and coursed her fingertips down alongside it. Aidan knew she meant it as a comfort, but that’s not how his skin wanted to receive it. His own fingers lifted to touch the pale fire of her hair, tangling in it.
She did not pull away. Instead her hand shifted. Her fingertips stroked his cheek from the corner of his eye to his jaw.
“I wish I knew a tree charm that could wipe that sadness away,” she whispered. “Willow catkins, perhaps, or balsam from the buds of an aspen. If this were the spring.”
Aidan didn’t move a muscle, afraid of quenching the spark between them. Bloody corpses still cluttered his mind, but they’d faded behind the brightness of Lana.
She leaned in, veering sideways, and brushed his cheek with her lips. A sharp intake of breath betrayed him. Her body was much too close for his comfort. When she straightened, however, that movement away felt even worse.
He drew on the hand in her hair, pulling her back. She hid her eyes behind her lashes but came directly to him. He kissed her until he could barely breathe. Naught and None boomed through his head. Aidan had to tip himself back to clear his ears and snatch a breath.
Given fresh air, his sluggish brain whispered that his lips had no business touching hers. “I cannot do this,” he murmured, sliding his hand back out of her hair. “I’m supposed to be a monk.”
Lana nestled her head to his shoulder. It took a moment for her soft words to reach his ears and add up in his mind.
“Are you sure? You’re like no monk I’ve ever met.”
He looked down at her, almost in his lap, his thoughts lining up poorly. They got lost in her whirring eleven and the warm, musky scent of her skin. Her lips, her eyes, the soft swells under her shift blotted out both the blood splashed that night and, behind that, his time in the abbey.
Giving up his soul and his hopes, Aidan kissed her again.
XIX
Aidan explored the feel and taste of Lana’s lips, the underside of her jaw, and her throat. His hands began roaming over her shift, tracing the arc of her waist to her lean belly and then back to the maddening mounds of her breasts. The mysterious None of her kisses roared through him, wiping his own identity blank and heaving all other numbers aside.
He wasn’t sure why or precisely when her soft yielding changed, but it did. Abruptly, None ebbed. Aidan cringed at the loss. An instant later, Lana stopped pulling him close and instead pushed him back.
“Aidan, wait.”
He gazed at her through a fog. With effort, he pulled his awareness back from his body and at least partly into his head so he could understand what she said.