The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “Good.”

  “It won’t help to find it, though, will it? Are you just giving me something to do? Keep him occupied, keep him from panicking, make him feel useful.” The light eyes held hers.

  “I told you,” Fern said, “it will help her to know she’s loved. She has to want to come back, or she may not be able to.”

  “I’ve tried to be here for her.” His tone was level, but the words sounded faintly defensive.

  “And before?” Fern inquired, almost without thinking.

  He did not answer. He was holding his sister’s hand, looking down into her face. “Have you any idea where she’s gone?”

  “I have an idea,” Fern admitted. “I just don’t know if it’s the right one. I saw someone last night who told me something that might be relevant.”

  “Research, or coincidence?”

  “Not research, but . . . there are no coincidences, only patterns. Fragments, so they say, of the greater pattern. It depends on what you believe.”

  “No pattern,” Luc said bleakly. “Just chaos.” And then: “What did you learn?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I need you to answer a couple of questions.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s the name of your father’s country house where your sister fainted?”

  “Wrokeby,” he said. “With a W.” He saw the slight alteration in her expression. “Was that what you wanted—needed—to hear?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Never mind. It ties in, but there’s still too much I don’t understand. At that party, were there many people you didn’t know?”

  “About half of them, I should think. Anyway, I told you, everyone was in fancy dress. Costumes, wigs, bizarre makeup, masks. I couldn’t always recognize the ones I did know.”

  “The person I want would be a woman—”

  “That really cuts down the list of suspects.”

  Fern ignored his sarcasm. “Perhaps dressed as a witch.”

  “There must have been several witches. No pointy hats: the glamorous kind. Come to think of it, Dana went as a witch of sorts. Yards of ragged chiffon and hair extensions. Medieval meets New Age. Not Morgan Le Fay, but some name like that. She’d been reading T. H. White.”

  He saw Fern stiffen; for a moment, her face was as pale as the girl in the bed.

  “Morgus?”

  “I think so.”

  Fern went to the window; her fingers gripped the sill. In the cloud-cast sky, a chink of blue opened up, like an illusion of hope. She thought: Morgus is out there. She’s out there and she’s invulnerable. And if she isn’t looking for me, then I have to look for her. At Wrokeby—Wrokeby with a W. Her stomach knotted in fear; her heartbeat quickened. I’m not ready. I can’t face her, not again, not yet, not now. If she cannot be killed . . . She struggled to conquer physical weakness and mental block. It seemed to her a long time before she turned around, managing at least the semblance of calm.

  “I must go away,” she said. “This weekend. I have to go to Yorkshire. There’s someone I need to consult.” Like a doctor, she thought, a specialist—in witchcraft. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

  “You’d better have all my numbers.” He gave her a business card with office and cell phone, wrote his home number on the back. “Should I really fly her friend over from Oz? She may not want to come: she’s pregnant.”

  “Leave it for now.”

  She’s scared, he thought. Behind that immaculate face, she’s really scared . . .

  He said: “So what can I do—apart from the teddy bear?”

  “Think of her,” said Fern. “You have the Gift. Look for her in your dreams. You can find all sorts of things in dreams.”

  “I know,” he said.

  The dream came to him when he was barely asleep, plunging him from a state of half-waking into a world of turbulent darkness, with no interim of quiet slumber, no gradual descent through the many layers of the subconscious. This was not the sleep-spun region of fairy nightmares and haphazard imaginings: this was a different reality, violent and harsh. He stood on wooden planks that heaved and tilted, clinging to a great wheel. Water streamed across the boards and black rain drove in his face and lashed at his body. His clothes were clammy rags, his long hair—he had worn long hair, in his teens—whipped around his neck, almost cutting his skin. He was on the deck of a ship—no, a boat, some kind of fishing vessel, less than forty feet long, with a single mast and sail splitting under the impact of a savage wind. Giant waves reared up like cliffs on either hand, spume capped; thunder boomed; greenish lightning darted from the tumult of the clouds. There were other people on the boat with him, half a dozen or so, hauling on the rigging, clutching the base of the mast, but he could not call out to them, he was isolated in a vortex of chaos. His teeth chattered from terror and cold.

  As long as he could remember, he had been afraid of the sea. In childhood, his worst nightmares had been of a huge tsunami, a great wall of blue-green water rolling over the land to engulf him. He climbed the nearest hills, but they were never high enough, and he would waken, sweat sodden and shaking, convinced he was drowning. His father made him learn to swim at five, believing that would cure him, but the enforced proximity of water taught him only to hide his fear, not to conquer it. The dreams faded as he grew older, but not the phobia. He once spent three days on a friend’s yacht, a trip undertaken in a spirit of icy determination, and the whole time he was pale and silent, unable to eat. His friend thought he was seasick; but he was never seasick. After his mother’s death in a car crash when he was nineteen he woke gasping from a dream that he was actually drowned, lying on the seabed while tiny creatures picked at his flesh and his bones poked through and a mermaid with eyes like bits of glass came to stare at him. And now here he was, pitchforked somehow onto a tiny boat in the heart of a hurricane. He did not know how he came there, or why; he knew only fear. He thought: This is madness, folly and madness, we must use the engines, radio for help; but there were no engines, no radio. He heard the hissing crack. Lightning struck the mast, and it broke. The sail was in shreds. Someone screamed, perhaps a man overboard, a dreadful long ululation that sounded hardly human anymore; but he could do nothing. He hung on to the helm because that was all there was. And at last it came to him that he was in charge, he was the captain, he had led the others into this, the madness and the folly were all his. The realization dragged him down like a great stone, down through the breaking timbers of the boat into the black water. And there was the mermaid with her strange flat eyes, her living hair crackling with storm static, her arms reaching for him.

  Afterward, he did not want to remember the dying. It was more vivid than dream, more real than memory. The sea closing over him, and him trying to breathe, but his breath was sea, and there was sea in his lungs, in his ears, in his head, and the terrible infinite struggle, and the slow uprush of darkness that took everything away . . .

  He woke between clinging sheets, and the throb in his ears became the hum of the city, and a glance at the clock told him only minutes had passed since he’d gone to bed. He sat up, gulping air, and lay down again slowly, eyes wide as if he were afraid to close them.

  You can find all sorts of things in dreams . . .

  But that night he slept little, and did not dream again.

  IV

  Fern left work early on Friday and drove to Yorkshire. It was still daylight when she came over the moors: great cloud bastions were building up in the sky; giant shadows traveled ponderously across the landscape. At one point she pulled over, getting out of the car to catch an advancing band of sunlight. The moor stretched away on each hand, green with summer, heather tufted, humming with insect life. She took off her jacket, unbuttoned her shirt at the neck, and let the wind ruffle her sleek hair. To the casual observer—had there been one—she was a city girl shedding the trappings of an urban lifestyle in preparation for a country weekend. But Fern knew she was crossing a bounda
ry, both familiar and imaginary, from the superficial realities of her routine existence to a world where reality was unstable and everything was dark and different. Yet now the very boundaries had changed: the dark otherworld had come even to London and lurked around corners, and under paving stones, and in the blackness beyond the streetlamps. So she stood in the sun and bared her throat to the wind as a gesture of acknowledgment and acceptance. I am Fernanda Morcadis, she told the clouds and the plateau and the indifferent bees. I am of the witchkind, Prospero’s Children. It is everything else which is unreal.

  The dog came bounding over the grasses as she got back into the car. It might have been a German shepherd, except that the brindling of its fur included brown and gray rather than tan and its face was more pointed and wilder, and there was a speed in its movement and a light in its yellow eyes that no domestic animal could match. It came over to Fern and waited, panting slightly, tongue lolling between wicked teeth, while she caressed its rain-damp ruff. “Lougarry,” she said. “Tell your master to come to the house. I need his help.”

  Go carefully, said the thought in her head. These are troubled times.

  Then the creature turned and sped away. The sun disappeared, and in the gloom beneath a vast cloud the moor changed, becoming cold and unfriendly. Fern shut the door and teased the engine into life. As she drove off a sudden squall struck, almost blinding her: the wipers struggled ineffectually to clear the windshield. The rain passed, but the murk still lingered, turning the world to gray. Yarrowdale lay ahead, a narrow valley winding down from the North York Moors to the windswept beaches of the North Sea.

  As she swung onto the road that led down to the village she had her lights on, but the oncoming car showed none. It appeared as if from nowhere, on her side of the road, heading straight toward her. She swerved onto the verge, her heart in her mouth, and it shot past without slowing. Fern braked to a stop and leaned forward, breathing deep and slow to calm herself. Her headlights had shone directly into the approaching vehicle, and she was sure that what she had seen was no freak of fancy. For one instant of panic she had faced the driver of the other car, and she had glimpsed not a human visage but a grinning death’s-head grasping the wheel with hands of bone.

  She waited a few minutes before restarting the engine. Then she drove gently down the valley, turning off at Dale House. Lights in the windows indicated that Mrs. Wicklow, their local housekeeper and theoretically long past retirement, had come to welcome her. She parked the car and went indoors.

  The big kitchen at the back was warm from the stove and smelled of cooking. Mrs. Wicklow had been widowed the previous year and with the departure of Will, who had been loosely affiliated with York University before he abandoned his M.A., she had suffered a dearth of recipients for her generous cuisine. Fern’s father, Robin, paid Mrs. Wicklow regardless of what she did, but she claimed she was too young to accept a pension and took whatever opportunities there were to justify her wages. To Fern, she was family. They embraced, and Mrs. Wicklow produced gin and tonics for both of them. Her Christian name was reputed to be Dorothy, but no one ever used it; for all their intimacy Fern still called her “Mrs. Wicklow” without thinking.

  “There’s trouble,” the housekeeper said sapiently. “I can see it in your face.”

  “I had a close shave in the car,” Fern said. “Some idiot driving like a maniac on the wrong side of the road.”

  “That’ll be one of the vicar’s boys,” Mrs. Wicklow deduced. “Expelled from school halfway through term and he’s pinched his dad’s car twice that I know of. That poor Maggie’s out of her mind with t’ worry of it. Vicar’s children are always the worst: it’s like t’ devil goes after them special. But that wasn’t what I meant. I was thinking of t’ other kind of trouble. T’ kind we had before. The old man’s been around since New Year’s Eve: that’s always a sign. Him and t’ dog. Mr. Watchman or Skin’n’Bones or whatever he calls himself. You’d better have him around to a decent supper tomorrow. Don’t know how he keeps body and soul together.”

  “Habit,” Fern murmured.

  She went to her room early, after Mrs. Wicklow had gone home. She pulled out a box from under the bed—a box that had once belonged to Alison Redmond, who had come to stay one bright morning fourteen years ago and had died in a flood where no water should have been. And because of her, Fern thought, I am who I am. I might never have known I had the Gift, if it wasn’t for Alimond.

  Inside the box, there were a pair of dragonskin gloves, a videocassette that Fern had only played once, a handwritten book, the writing changing gradually from an antique script into a modern scrawl, and a number of miniature phials whose labels she had never deciphered. In a compartment she had missed previously she found a leather bag of dull bluish crystals and a small receptacle containing a silver-gray powder. Fern put on the gloves: they seemed to meld with her hands, and the mottled patterns shifted and changed without help from the light. “It is time,” she said to herself, and the realization made her shiver. The mad driver, whoever he might be, was just part of the picture, an emissary of Azmordis, a wild card, a manic phantom who had picked up her description from somewhere. In the otherworld, she was wanted. She knew that now. She removed the gloves again and went to bed, lying awake in the dark.

  The house-goblin considered coming in to talk, but he knew Fern had a human concept of privacy, so he went downstairs to the kitchen and drank the whiskey she had remembered to leave out for him.

  Ragginbone came to the house the following evening. He was old, old and tough, like an oak tree that has weathered many winters; his clothes were shabby, gray-brown and gray-green, blending with the moorland. The greatcoat that he had worn through all seasons had been abandoned in favor of a misshapen jacket of antiquated cut hanging almost to his knees. Atop his head he wore a wide-brimmed hat that would have been pointed at the crown if it had not been permanently dented. But the eyes beneath his hat brim were gold-green and bright as spring, and the rare smile that rearranged his wrinkles was as warm as ever. To the villagers he was Mr. Watchman, Ragginbone the tramp, but to Fern he was Caracandal Brokenwand, ex-wizard, Watcher of history, a man of many names and many travels, of short words and tall tales, her mentor, insofar as she had one, her friend since she was sixteen. And the wolf-dog with him was Lougarry, with the soul of a woman in the body of a beast, and a silent voice that could be heard only in the minds of a few.

  They sat long over their dinner after Mrs. Wicklow had gone, while Lougarry lay in her accustomed place by the stove. Fern related everything that had happened and the conclusions she had drawn, and Ragginbone’s smile grew even rarer, and the lines deepened on his brow. “Mabb is a chancy ally,” he said at one point. “Goblins are by their very nature untrustworthy, and the female of the species is invariably more extreme than the male. More vicious, more capricious, shallower of heart, sharper of whim. Be wary.”

  “Sexist,” said Fern.

  “I was born in a sexist age. Experience has not taught me to think differently. To generalize: men are rash and cowardly, women are prudent and brave, men are strong in the arm, women are strong in the heart, men are stupid and cunning, women subtle and devious. Men are self-centered, soft-centered creatures, armored in loud words and harsh deeds. Women are gentle and fragile, selfless beyond sense, and steel to the core.”

  “Is that how you see me?”

  His face creased. “You are a woman of your time. Beside you, steel is pliable. Your spirit was cut from diamond.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “Neither compliment nor insult, merely an opinion.” He reached for the wine bottle, topped off both glasses. “Go on with your story.”

  The light was failing now, and the shadow of the hill leaned over the house. Fern switched on a single lamp and lit the only candles she could find, fixing them in a serviceable iron candelabra that dated from an era before electricity. Night crept slowly into the room, filling up the cracks between cupboards and under the fr
idge and tallboy. The wine bottle was empty, and Fern poured whiskey into three tumblers. “There’s always whiskey in this house,” she remarked. “The vodka runs out, and the gin, but never the Scotch. I suspect Bradachin of doctoring Mrs. Wicklow’s regular shopping list.”

  “There’s nae harm in it,” said a thickly accented voice. “Nae harm and muckle guid. Usquebaugh warms the belly and strengthens the heart, and we’ll hae need o’ strong hearts in the days to come, I’m thinking.”

  The house-goblin appeared from nowhere in particular and climbed on a chair, accepting the glass that Fern pushed toward him. He was a reddish, hairy creature, tall for his kind, limping from a malformed limb or old wound but spider-swift in his movements. He had come from a castle in Scotland that had been converted into a luxury hotel, dealing with the trauma of his exile by bringing the spirit of the McCrackens with him. He played the bagpipes in the small hours, and filled the dour Yorkshire house with the echoes of great halls, and high towers, and dreams of the wind off the loch. Both Fern and Ragginbone knew him to be courageous beyond the custom of his folk, stubborn, resourceful, and loyal. He had spent all his history with a family of fierce fighters, passionate feuders, and hopeless plotters, and some of their skills and their prejudices had rubbed off on him, setting him apart from his own people. Mabb had banished him from her court, when she troubled to remember it, for excessive fealty to Man, but Bradachin was still attached to his queen.

  “So ye’ve had speech with the maidy,” he commented. “For all her kittle follies, she’s nae fool. What o’ this witch, then? Can ye be siccar she’s the one ye met afore?”