In the center of the stage Sybilla sat enthroned, veiled head to toe in deep blue, almost like a burka, except that in the center of the veil covering her face was painted a single staring white eye. In a grand gesture, she rose, slowly raising her arms skyward. From every side, horns and drums and flutes swelled into a great crescendo until with a single motion downward, she silenced it, and with it the chatter of the crowd. For a moment there was no sound in the square save wind whipping through banners and, in the distance, the cry of a frightened child.
When she brought her hands back up, she was holding a knife. It rippled in the firelight. I took one step closer, peering at the blade. Down its center ran a line of runes.
Ben had seen it, too. Lily had delivered the knife.
And Sybilla had accepted it? What the hell was she thinking? Beside her, Eircheard sat wrapped in some kind of fur that made him look more than ever like a bear. Draining a flagon in noisy gulps, he tossed it away. It rang on the pavement in the silence. He pushed himself to his feet and lurched across the stage, grabbing at the knife in Sybilla’s hands but coming up empty. He yelled with frustration. Around him, his court tittered with drunken laughter.
At the edge of the stage, the wolves of Winter rushed into the open space, cornering Eircheard and scattering his revelers. Through it all, Sybilla stood motionless at the center.
As the last of the Summer Court slunk whining away, Jason strode toward Sybilla, sweeping into a great bow. As he rose, she extended the knife toward his breast. One thrust would send it piercing into his heart. I wondered whether he’d yet seen that the knife was sharp, but beneath his horned helmet, it was impossible to tell.
A deep drum began to pound out a slow beat. Sybilla offered Jason the knife, and the wolves howled in triumph. The queen had chosen her champion. From his corner, Eircheard bellowed with anger and lurched over to Jason, who let him come, stepping aside at the last instant, slashing out at him as he stumbled by. A piece of Eircheard’s cloak fluttered to the ground, and the crowd clattered with laughter. Eircheard turned, a puzzled look on his face, and trundled back. In another graceful arc, Jason sliced a second bit off his opponent’s cloak. The crowd warmed to it, the handsome young outsider showing up the boorish old king. It was a brilliant routine, bombast versus finery, light catching and flickering on armor and silk and fur.
I heard Ben’s voice in my ear. “Watch Eircheard.”
He stood blinking and swaying, unsteady on his feet, his eyes glazed. I frowned. This wasn’t an act. He was having trouble staying upright. “He looks drunk,” I said quietly.
“Or drugged.”
Lowering his head, Eircheard went at Jason again. Another arc of the blade sliced through his cloak, and this time it caught skin. A rivulet of blood flowed down his arm and he bayed in fury.
Glancing over at the Winter King, I saw something that sent a floe of ice running down my spine. Jason’s hands were large, a workingman’s hands that could handle a broadsword or a horse, a pick or a hoe. But the hand that held the knife had long, tapered fingers, more suited to the piano or the rapier.
Whoever was behind the Winter King’s mask, it wasn’t Jason. Ben’s head jerked around; he’d seen it, too.
Eircheard charged again. This time, he was tripped and fell sprawling on the pavement, subsiding into unconsciousness. The Winter King strode toward him, knife gripped in his hands, and the crowd roared with laughter.
“Kill him,” a woman screamed, and the Winter King raised his head, as if sniffing the bloodlust in the air. His knife rose. Pulling off the wolf mask, I began to run, but the knife was already slashing toward Eircheard’s neck.
Just before the blade reached Eircheard’s throat, another hand rose and parried the blow. Pulling off his mask, Ben had stepped forward. His knife was black, of some dull material that caught little light, hard to see in the night. There was a long aaaah, and the crowd silenced, leaning inward.
Alone in the center, the matte-black blade and the pattern-welded blade swayed this way and that. And then both blades flew into the air, clattering to the ground, and both men fell heavily to the pavement, rolling over and over. The Winter King dove for his knife, and as he did, Ben caught his helmet, twisting it up and away, so that it came off. The face beneath was painted entirely white, and it took me a moment to recognize him: the dark-haired man from the Esplanade.
Holding the helmet by the horns, Ben was off, scooping up the pattern-welded knife as he went, dancing about with both of them. And then he clapped the Winter King’s horned helmet on his own head.
The dark-haired man charged and Ben ducked, scampering about the square, using a large statue as a shield. Drawing him, with each move, farther away from Eircheard.
Once, Ben ran behind me, using me as a shield, spinning me a couple of times so that my cloak swept outward, enveloping us both.
“Trade,” he said under his breath, thrusting the knife from the hill into my hand and plucking the stage dagger from my belt. And then he was off again, the crowd cheering him on as he led the dark-haired man in a merry chase, prancing about, juggling with the stage knife while the Winter King, no longer looking regal, lunged for it.
Across the way, Eircheard stirred. He sat up, squinting. And then I saw him recognize the antlers. With a yell, he pushed himself up and lurched across the stage, plowing into Ben’s back. There was a sickening thud and Ben went down on one knee, the knife skittering across the pavement, stopping not far from the dark-haired man’s feet. Eircheard skidded after it, catching himself on his knees just in front of the Winter King. With a slow smile of victory, the man scooped up the weapon and raised it over Eircheard’s head.
It had no edge and a rounded point, but it was steel. Driven hard into the chest of an unarmed man, it could still be lethal. Again, a lone woman’s shrill voice filled the square: “Kill him.” This time, the crowd took it up. “Kill him, kill him.”
Within the chanting crowd, the four of us might as well have been alone on the moon.
“Strike now,” said Ben, “and it will look like what it is. Murder. And there will be ten thousand witnesses.”
“It will look like an accident.”
“Is it worth the risk, with the wrong knife?”
The dark-haired man looked up at the blade in his hand and his smile died. The crowd’s chant died away and silence blanketed the square, broken only by flames crackling in the cold wind. “You bloody fool,” he snarled, thrusting the knife down viciously. Eircheard subsided with a groan.
Someone screamed. I stepped forward. There was no blood. And then I saw the blade, lying jagged and broken on the ground. The dark-haired man had driven the knife into the stone pavement.
Throughout the fight, Sybilla had stood motionless. Now she stepped forward and gave Eircheard her hand, pulling him to his feet, and the crowd sighed in relief at the Cailleach’s resurrection of the old king.
At the back of the stage, sparks spurted and a pyrotechnic display shot flames into the night. Around the edge of the square, a troupe of fire dancers began spinning fiery batons, and the drummers pounded out a quick rising beat of anticipation.
Slowly, Sybilla reached up and unpinned her robe. The drumming grew more insistent. The blue cloak and hood fell to the ground.
Surprise stopped a cry in my throat; beside me I saw Ben do a double take. The woman beneath was not Sybilla.
She was Lily.
22
BUT IF LILY was the Cailleach…if she’d been there beneath the Cailleach’s blue veil all evening, where was Sybilla?
Lily held a pale hand out to the Winter King, who stepped forward and was presented to the crowd. The Cailleach’s consort.
Before the crowd could cheer in approval, a single voice rose through the square: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” from near the back, a burning baton streaked straight toward the stage like an arrow, catching the edge of Lily’s robe, which caught fire in a quick whoosh.
I reached the stage
in two steps, tossing her to the ground, smothering the flames. Ben was not far behind.
It was over in an instant. Lily sat up. The fire had torched one side of her robe and singed her hair, but other than that she was fine. Around us, chaos erupted.
Ben turned back to the spot where the dark-haired man had stood, but he was gone. I gripped Lily’s arm, as if she might also disappear. “You’re hurting me,” she whimpered.
“Who was he? The Winter King?”
She glared at me in mute fury, and I shook her. “Lily. He tried to kill Eircheard. And someone’s just tried to kill you. Where are Jason and Sybilla?”
“Do you have to ruin everything?” she wailed. “Get her out of here,” said Ben tersely. “And that goddamned knife, too.” And he pushed into the crowd.
.
.
Still gripping Lily, I began weaving through the crowd, but she made no move to resist.
“Where are we going?” she asked grudgingly. “ramsay Lane,” I said. “Just under the castle.”
Loosed into a spontaneous dance party on the street, the crowd made the going frustratingly slow.
A little way up, Lily motioned to a doorway opening onto one of the closes that ran down the side of the hill. “Shortcut,” she said sullenly, “if you want it.”
I hesitated, looking from the chaotic street to the quiet close. “Jesus,” she said, pulling me through. “This’ll take sodding days.”
Inside, the sound of the crowd cut to a distant hum, and our pace quickened. Twenty yards in, a raucous party of drunken spectators erupted into the small space from a side door, whirling us apart as they folded us into their dance. It was a moment before I realized what they were singing:
The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I
The gunner and his mate,
Loved Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate.
Glimpsing Lily, I reached for her, but she was spun away. I heard light laughter and someone shoved me against the wall. There was a scream and then the crowd was running off, half uphill and half downhill, and I could not see her in the fray. “Lily!” I shouted, turning about wildly, but in a matter of seconds, I was alone in the dark in an Edinburgh close.
“Lily!” I called again. But she was gone.
. The crowd had scattered in both directions, so I had no idea which way to head in pursuit. Knowing it would be futile, I tried them both. Above, the royal Mile still surged with a dancing crowd. The lower street was mostly empty.
My mobile buzzed. It must be Lily.
Thank God.
It was a text, and therefore succinct:
Lily 4 knife. Hilltop. Midnight. Alone.
I stared at it, dread sinking through me. Up on the hill, Lucas Porter had laid out a stark choice: Lily or me. Someone must die. But that was when they thought they had the knife.
Now it seemed they were willing to trade Lily for the blade.
Or was I part of the trade as well?
There was only one way to find out: alone on a hilltop at midnight, with a ritual blade a thousand years old.
My call to Ben had rung twice when another text came through, from an unrecognized number. I cut off my call to Ben and pulled it up:
Contact anyone & deal off. Watching & listening.
Car @ bottom of hill. Keys under floor mat.
I looked up. The windows lining the small space all seemed curtained and dark, even opaque. But suddenly they seemed like staring eyes. Canceling the call to Ben, I made my way quickly down the hill.
As promised, there was a car just at the end of the close, where it came out on the main road that wound down the hill toward New Town. A black Mercedes. The driver’s door was unlocked and the keys were under the mat. As I started the car, I found that the GPS was already programmed for Dunsinnan. Shaking, I pulled out into traffic.
Ben called four times on the drive north, but I didn’t dare answer. Watching & listening. The car was probably bugged, and for all I knew, they were monitoring my cell calls. But I couldn’t turn the phone off, in case I heard from Lily or her abductors. From that direction, though, there was silence.
What was Lucas up to? Why engineer Lily bringing the knife to Edinburgh only to pull them both back to Dunsinnan? How did the Winter King, the dark-haired man, figure into it? Where were Sybilla and Jason? What happened to Lily?
I looked at the knife on the leather seat beside me, gleaming now and then in the lights of the motorway. Nothing is but what is not, it seemed to whisper.
Other words kept playing through my head:
She must die:
She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin,
A most unspotted Lily shall she pass
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her.
Behind that, oddly, I heard Ben’s voice: “An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel.” Whatever had possessed him to say that, it seemed heavy with irony now.
I drove north as fast as I dared.
23
I PULLED INTO the lay-by at the foot of Dunsinnan Hill with no more than fifteen minutes to spare before midnight. Slipping the knife from the seat, I headed quickly up the hill.
The path seemed longer and steeper, the stand of pines more ominous, in the dark. My footsteps thudded softly on the grass along the field and into the heather, my breath shortening as I ran. The moon hung high overhead, dimly lighting the way. Just below the summit, I paused, my heart thudding wildly in my chest, and not only from the climb. In my hands, the knife was cold. Stupid not to have a backup weapon, I thought suddenly. Though where I would have gotten one, I didn’t know. When I handed it over, I’d be unarmed.
What choice did I have?
I set my shoulders and peered over the rim. The cairn seemed to have grown. Then I realized that it was not the cairn I was looking at; it was wood, stacked into a high cone. Other than that, the summit was empty.
At the base of the stacked wood, a red gleam kindled into life. And then a breeze lifted, and the bonfire caught with a whoosh, orange and yellow flame licking upward through the cone. From behind it, a lone figure stepped into the light. A woman with pale hair falling to the middle of her back, her face lined with the fine-china crackling of fair skin in old age. Lady Nairn, in a shimmering blue gown. In her right hand, she held a knife with an angled back and a blade that seemed to ripple in the firelight.
What was she doing here? Where was Lily?
In a low voice, she began to hum, walking in a wide circle with the knife pointing outward and down to the ground, stopping at each of the cardinal directions to cry out in words drowned out by the wind and the roar of the fire. Slowly, she walked to the center, raising her arms to the moon. Her voice rose into a strange keening that soared into the night and seemed to wrap around the moon like a slender cord, drawing it down toward the hill.
On the far side of the summit, horns rose over the rim, branching into antlers, as if she were pulling a stag up from the deeps of the earth even as the moon dipped down. The head that followed, however, was not that of a stag, but of a man. He rose over the lip of the summit, naked and in his prime, his member erect, and strode down toward her carrying a cup, which he held high. It was his eyes I could not look away from. Fringed with feathers, they were the unwinking golden eyes of an owl.
What I had seen in Edinburgh was a play, a good-natured performance. This was the real thing. It wasn’t Lily who was the witch in the household, it was Lady Nairn.
I must have made some sound, because they both turned toward me, Lady Nairn’s eyes meeting mine. She is Artemis, I thought, Diana, the Lady of the Hunt, and I will be torn apart by her hounds.
Even as that thought crossed my mind, a cry of loneliness condensed and distilled rose in waves toward the moon. To my right, a wolf leapt onto the rim of the summit, its throat arced back in a howl. To my left, others answered. And then other figures rose into view. One of them was the dark-haired man. T
he Winter King. From the startled anger on Lady Nairn’s face, he was as much an intruder as I was. “Run!” she cried in a deep voice, looking straight at me.
As if blocked, somehow, from entering the bowl of the summit itself, the wolves and dark figures who stood with them began to pour around its edges, heading toward me, erupting into a cacophony of yipping and howls. I stepped back, stumbling and falling, scrambling up and away. Something nipped at me from behind, and I turned, knife in hand, as someone lunged at me. I was hit on the head, and the world went dark.
24
IT WAS THE cold I became aware of first, dimly and far away, as I slid back into consciousness. A clinging damp cold. A throbbing ache in my head. And grass prickling my cheek.
For a moment, I lay still. Hearing nothing but wind, I opened my eyes. I lay in the bowl of the hilltop, just near the rim. Thin fingers of steely light pierced a cloudy sky. This far north, in November, dawn came late. I must have been here for hours.
Lily. Her name tore through me in a silent, white explosion. She’d disappeared after the Samhuinn festival, and I’d come here with the knife. Where was it? Where was she?
I sat up. I seemed to be alone. Off to my left, a pile of gray ash, thinly smoking, was all that remained of the bonfire. In the grass, my hands were sticky, and a musty and metallic scent rose thickly around me. Blood. I looked down. I was red up to the elbows with it.
Just before blacking out, I’d slashed out with the knife. What had I done?
In panic, I began to wipe the blood from my hands on the grass when I heard a shout from over the hill, and then thudding footsteps. I stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to hide. A man rose over the rim, stopping as he saw me.
Haunt Me Still Page 15