The Wicked

by Douglas Nicholas

  “That was when you said something over the pouchstrings, Mistress?”

  Molly drank off her ale. She was in a mood to explain some of the mysteries of her Art to Hob, a rare thing, and Adelard and Hawis were upstairs making Joan lie down, with one of Molly’s calming potions inside her.

  “ ’Twas. She’s fancying herself a grand adept, but ’tis Sir Tarquin who’s to be feared in that marriage. There’s a great deal hinges on whose will is the stronger in these matters, and I am not some novice at this.”

  She paused, and looked moodily into the fire, and poured more ale from the beaker on the table.

  “My words were—I’ll not be telling you the exact words, and any road they being in Irish, but ’tis this that they signified—that whoso loosed those strings with evil intent would loosen the strings of their blood. You could have opened that bag, lad, and it would have been safe as mother’s milk. But she opened it with evil intent, that she might burn me up with that doll. It’s herself she was killing when she plucked at those strings.”

  Hob looked at the table and sighed. Every time he learned more about the two women in his life, the ground beneath his feet, so solid when he was a boy in Father Athelstan’s care, seemed less substantial. But he yearned to know things, and he had to ask.

  “And how was it that her spell failed, and you giving her blood and hair and she having the doll and . . .”

  Molly looked at Nemain. “What would you be telling him, so that he’s understanding it?”

  Nemain shrugged wearily. “Nay, seanmháthair, I’m after thinking you were courting your doom myself. I’m knowing what you did, but it’s something I thought would fail.”

  Molly turned to Hob. “It’s a thing that is not in words, and there are secrets in it that you are not to know, but think on it in this wise: she’s after attacking me, and I knowing ’twas coming, and the doll and the blood and the hair giving force to her attack. And my inward . . . call it armor, the armor of my will. ’Tis that armor that’s stronger than the weapon she’s hurling at me, and she’s failing. But her armor, her armor—’twas too weak, and it crumbling like sand before that spell, and all the strings of her blood loosed in her body. But it’s she who killed herself, with her evil intent.”

  Hob looked at her, the closest thing to a mother he could remember, and for a moment he had a vision of a world in which some people were inwardly as lions or pards, powerful in secret ways, and striving invisibly, and Molly not the least of them.

  Outside the inn, the sky was growing ever so slightly light, so that the windows were beginning to become visible against the dark walls. Molly drained her mug again, and set it down with a thump. “Hob, mo chroí, go and fetch Timothy; send him here, and then go up and ask Goodman Adelard to come down, for we must be closing this inn and fleeing to the castle. That maid’s after having the right of it: Sir Tarquin will be coming for us. It’s we who must be gathering our forces, for he’s a giant of the Art, and from this night on he’ll be burning for our destruction.”

  Part III

  THE WICKED

  CHAPTER 24

  ALONG THE COAST ROAD, TURNING onto the upward way toward Chantemerle’s outer gates, came four wagons: the three barrel-roofed caravans of Molly’s troupe and a wain, drawn by two horses, with Adelard driving and Joan and Hawis on the seat beside him; Timothy rode in the back, on heaps of hay. They had locked the inn and fled to the castle just before daybreak.

  Joan sat slumped against Hawis, who held her mother in her arms, a strange reversal of roles. Last night Molly had finally managed to calm Joan, still in a frenzy of fear and rage, mixed with a sort of vengeful gloating, engendered first by the reappearance, and then the death, of her tormentor. At intervals Joan would peer into Adelard’s face, and ask, “Yon’s truly dead?” Finally Molly gave her a draft to drink, and bundled her off to bed for a short nap. Now she rested against her daughter, wrapped in a shawl, sleepy and unenthusiastic, but with a modicum of tranquillity.

  Molly had reassured Adelard, just before they left the inn: “ ’Tis your Joan she’ll be again, in time, friend Adelard, but not tomorrow. Give her to drink from this—a swallow only, mind—each morning.” Here she handed him a clay jug stopped with Spanish cork. “ ’Twill ease her past the next days, and by summer’s end she’ll be well, but for now you must be tender with her, and patient.”

  Now, in the brightening morning, the valves of the gate swung open, the guards recognizing them; they rolled within; Daniel was sent for, and appeared soon afterward. The clerk bade Molly welcome courteously, if a bit hastily; escorted them into the stables; and as grooms unhitched the wagons and rolled them manually against the wall, went quickly over to Hawis and her parents, bowed, and stood talking and smiling graciously at them all, but mostly at Hawis.

  Molly was looking back at Daniel Clerk, tall and keen of expression, with a certain elegance in the simplicity of his manner of dress, beaming down at the innkeeper’s daughter, who peeped shyly at him and away again. Hawis did not seem displeased at his attention, and Adelard was positively jovial as he beheld his daughter and the young castle official.

  “Hmm,” said Molly.

  Nemain stood beside her. “Och, aye,” she said.

  Hob looked from Molly and Nemain to Hawis and Daniel and back to the two women, unsure of what they meant. Then he shrugged and began to pull Milo toward the ramp, prepared for another battle of wills. But Milo, for an ox, had an excellent memory, particularly where his comfort was concerned, and he stepped smoothly onto the ramp and walked placidly upward, setting a good example for Mavourneen and Tapaidh, who were being led by Jack, a set of reins in each hand.

  By the time they got the beasts settled and made their way down again, Jack and Hob found the innkeeper and his family gone, as was Daniel. The page Guiscard stood with Molly and her granddaughter, ready to escort them to the great hall. Jack got a chest with clothing and other necessities from the main wagon, and Nemain locked everything up, and they set off, Sweetlove at Jack’s heels and generally underfoot, making their way toward the gate to the inner ward.

  In the hall Sir Odinell greeted them, had them settled in their former quarters, and bade them attend him, when ready, in a tower room. He left Guiscard as a guide. A while later they had everything stowed, had quaffed off jacks of honey beer, and were ready to follow Guiscard along narrow passages, up winding stairways, to a door in a seaward tower.

  Here, in a circular room with shutters open to the salt air, the cries of gulls floating on their long narrow wings coming up to them from the shoreline, they found Sir Jehan and Sir Balthasar, newly arrived that morning, welcome sights in this time of peril. After a round of greetings whose restraint just covered a real warmth on both sides, Sir Odinell had them be seated at a large table, on which were flagons of ale, tankards, and nothing else, not even cloths.

  Sir Odinell stood at the table and regarded the others. “I have some matters of urgency to impart,” he said. “I have had communications from the De Umfrevilles, by privy channels. The reports of Sir Tarquin’s doings have reached as far as London, and even unto Rome. Both the king and the pope have become uneasy with their creature, coming to the understanding that there is more to him than they had realized, and all of it worse than they had realized, and in short: they have begun to fear him, and what he might grow to be, away here in the North Country, with none to check him.

  “I said they have begun to fear him, but in truth it is more: the pope, fearing deviltry, had an exorcism attempted in absentia—they had some articles of Sir Tarquin’s clothing, and . . . Well, I do not pretend to understand these matters. Apparently all seven priests, and a senior exorcist was among them, were found in the chamber where the ceremony was conducted, and they were quite dead. And . . . horribly so.

  “The king, for his part, sent a summons to appear at court in London, by the hand of Sir William filz Gerald, one of the foremost knights of the king’s retinue and a mighty champion, successful in wa
r and tournament, and he went up to Sir Tarquin to bring him down to London, and he had thirty men with him. The thirty were never seen again. Sir William was found sitting on a bench in a garden in Durham, hard by the cathedral, staring at the garden wall. He has said not one word since he was found, and cannot abide the sight of rat or mouse—he begins to scream and become unruly, and he is still powerful of body, and thus a trial to his attendants, for he must be kept confined, and attended.

  “So word has been sent to my kinsman that the protection of church and crown has been removed. Since they fear him, though, we can expect no aid if we move against him; if we fail, they will pretend ignorance, so to avoid his vengeance.”

  Molly heard this with a grim smile. “Ah well, we shall not be interfered with, any road.”

  “We may move against him, then,” said Sir Balthasar.

  “Be said by me, he will move against this castle within the week,” Molly said. “I’m just after saying—”

  The room, bright with the last rays of the waning sunlight, grew a bit less bright: one of the windows was partially darkened, filled with a four-foot spread of black wings, a rustling as of silk, and then a large raven settled to the sill, snapping its wings shut. Sitting in the window, the late-afternoon sunlight falling on its back, the raven’s feathers had a purple sheen. Sweetlove came to her feet beside Jack’s chair, but the dark man put a big hand down to keep her still. Sir Odinell took a step toward the raven, hand raised to drive it back out, but Molly’s voice came sharply:

  “Nay! Let be—’tis a watcher of mine.”

  Sir Odinell stopped, retreated a step, looking curiously at Molly. “Your watcher, madam?” he asked.

  “ ’Tis.” She tapped the table before her with her forefinger and the raven sailed effortlessly into the room, the silken rustling louder in the confined space, and came to rest before her. It cocked its head this way and that, looking about the room, and Hob felt, when its keen brown eye fell upon him, that it was more than an animal intelligence that was assessing him.

  The raven turned back to Molly, and very deliberately dropped a white pebble in front of her. It bent to the pebble, moved it to Molly’s right. Then it straightened and looked at her expectantly. Molly reached for a deerskin pouch that hung from her zone, the belt from which her dagger and pouches depended. She undid some thongs, and slipped the pouch free from the zone. She loosened the drawstring, and carefully emptied about twoscore black and white pebbles to one side.

  The raven strutted over to the pile, cocked its head to look at the black stones, the white stones, each a flat disk about the width of a grape. The raven chose two black stones, strode back over to Molly, dropped them in front of her, cocked its head and looked at them, bowed and nudged them this way and that; walked back, rocking a little, to take up a white pebble, then back to Molly again. The large handsome bird, solidly built, with feathers of glossy black, kept walking back and forth to the pile of pebbles, and soon was arranging the white and black stones in a complex pattern on the tabletop before Molly’s seat.

  Sir Odinell crossed himself several times, and wore an expression of deep disbelief, as though he could hardly bring himself to credit what he saw, but otherwise the knights watched, fascinated. At one point Molly moved one of the stones, a question. The raven moved two stones in apparent response. Molly sat back, her expression somber. She looked down at the table, and became very still.

  The raven took three strutting steps toward her, and tilted its head to look up into her face. Molly said something low to it in Irish, and reached out her hand. She slowly stroked the nape of its neck with two fingers, smoothing the ruff of feathers there, perhaps a half-dozen times. Then she murmured something else to it, and the raven walked to the table edge, spread its wings, and flew through the open window, out into the sea air.

  The sun began to dip behind the mountains, far to the west, and outside the window the light dimmed, and dimmed yet more, and Molly sat in the darkening room, and looked at the stones, and said nothing. The three knights, Jack, Hob, even Nemain, sat in silence as well, fearing to interrupt Molly’s thoughts. Finally she roused herself, took a deep breath, spoke in low tones.

  “That buidseach, that . . .” Molly looked at Nemain and shook her head in frustration. “Buidseach?” she asked her granddaughter.

  “Wizard,” said Hob, with his excellent memory for things once heard, before Nemain could answer. Molly glanced at him in surprise; Nemain, sitting next to him, just patted his hand in approval.

  Molly returned to her thoughts. Her face was very bleak. “It’s something I’m after marking about Sir Tarquin the last time we were here, and Hob bringing it to my mind, so that I’m understanding the secret, and a secret it is, that’s at his core. He is as mighty—and as evil—a magus as I have ever even heard of in tales. Such things are spoken of in shadowed places, but to think—”

  “But what have you learned of him?” asked Sir Odinell.

  Molly stood, walked to the window. The tower they were in stood at the lip of the promontory, and to its height was added the height of the cliff that fell sheer to the water. Molly looked out at the gray twilit sky above the gray booming sea far below. She came back and stood by the table. “It is best you know as little as possible. You have said you trust me utterly—now is the time for you to act upon that trust. My watchers have told me that he will move on us, and move at night, and ’twill be soon.”

  “I must bring the folk within the walls,” said Sir Odinell. “We must prepare—”

  “Nay, now it’s your trust I must be having, and you must heed me—it’s a man he is who can rot the pintles of your castle gates with a word, this draíodóir; who can burst the iron bands on every door with a wave of his hand—and you yourself no more safe here now than on yon strand below.”

  “Then what—”

  Molly was standing just across the table from the burly lord of this castle, and she was a big, handsome woman, erect, commanding, and she said to him quietly, “Hush, now,” as a mother speaks to a frightened child, and the Sieur de Chantemerle sat back and fell silent.

  “We’re needing to meet him on the road, you and your knights and Sir Jehan and his people—come on him at night as he marches up the coast road. I’ll be after attempting a glamour, and that concealing us from his ways of seeing through his Art. There’s a fear to me that he is so strong, that it’s all unavailing that my Art will prove, yet it’s try we must. You to fall upon his men-at-arms and those ensorcelled knights of his—they are spellbound, yet aren’t they mortal as you or I—and Nemain and I will deal with Sir Tarquin.”

  “You and—” Sir Odinell turned his eyes on Nemain, so young and so small—she would never be as tall as was her grandmother—and looked back to Molly, who said again, “Hush, now.”

  Molly looked around the bare table at the big grim men seated there.

  “Be said by me, it’s an enemy that’s more powerful than any you’re after facing in your lives; aye, even the Fox.” This last was directed toward Sir Jehan. “Nor can you be about killing him.” She leaned on the table, her palms flat to the wood glossy with beeswax.

  “It’s a thing I’m not wishing to say here, or anywhere outside my family—” Here she nodded at Nemain and Jack and Hob, sitting to one side. “It’s trust from you I must have, and your tongues with all their questions silent—I will not say all that I know, ’twill only make things worse, but be said by me, he can kill any one of us, even Sir Balthasar, even myself, and nor can we kill him, not even Sir Balthasar, not even myself. But myself and my gariníon”—she gestured vaguely toward Nemain; she was so wrapped up in her urgent thoughts that she had lost the English word—“my, my—”

  “Granddaughter,” said Nemain, very low.

  “—granddaughter,” said Molly, “can between us trap him, and hold him, though we cannot kill him, and then, we having him trapped, I’m having a way to destroy him utterly.”

  There was some clearing of throats; Sir
Balthasar spoke aside to Sir Jehan, very quietly, a tone of complaint in the knight’s gravel bass. Molly raised both hands and brought her palms down with a bang on the table.

  “You are lords of castles, and high men, but I am a queen on my own earth, and in this matter, be said by me, you are as children and I as your wise seanmháthair—”

  “Grand—” began Nemain.

  “—grandmother,” said Molly. “And you to do what I say, and no more, and no less; else all will perish at the hands of this gruagh, this giant of evil. ’Twill be a near-run race as it is, and nor can I be having the least disobedience to think about.” She glared about the table, and those prideful high men, each with brightly burning soul, glanced down or aside, even Sir Jehan, save only Sir Balthasar, who looked her straight in the face and said, inclining his head toward Sir Jehan, “Madam, I am first his man in all things, but after that I am your man, as you know, and if he will follow you, as I think he will, that will I.”

  Sir Jehan raised his head. “I am your man in this, madam, and will do what you say, neither more nor less.”

  Sir Odinell, looking from one knight to the next and taking his direction from their trust in Molly, said, “And I as well, madam.”

  She gestured toward Jack and Hob. “These two will be protecting Nemain and myself from meddling by any who eludes your knights, but ’tis only ourselves who must deal with Sir Tarquin. I’m after seeing what he is, and calling to mind things I’ve heard from women older than myself, and feeling his power. It’s a great magus he is, and it’s the death of others that’s giving him strength, he’s drawing it from them—if you’re coming nigh him, and he able to reach you with his hands, sure and he’ll be killing you, even the mightiest of you, even Sir Balthasar, and him growing stronger on the instant, and that by the amount, the exact amount, of his victim’s strength.”

  Sir Jehan spoke up. “Then we aid him by engaging him?”