“You must wear this for me,” she said. “Wear it and Our Lady will speak to her son for you and for your mother, as she watches out for all mothers and their children.”
I put the pendant around my neck, slipping it beneath the cloth, and felt Alienora’s warmth in its metal as it struck my chest.
“Alienora,” I said, then faltered, remembering my station in life. “My lady.”
“I must go,” she said. “I’ll aid you in this. Your mother needs you more than me at this moment. But take one thing with you tonight that will be not for you, but for the one who brought you into this world.”
Then she leaned forward and bestowed the slightest of kisses on my forehead.
4
Alienora first went to her sisters, all of them pious maidens, and when she had rallied their support, they went to their sickly mother. Then to their father, and begged that he might show his mercy to help the Falconer’s mother in this time of terrible trial. Generously, the baron consulted with my master, Kenan Sensterre, with whom I had chilly relations at best, and the huntsman came to me within the hour and told me gruffly, “You have worked your own kind of sorcery on the baron, Falconer. I am to give you a horse and a bag of coins. You are to ride to the abbey this evening and speak with the abbé himself.”
My heart gladdened at this, and I felt hope rise up in my soul. But as I rose to take the small cloth sack of coins, I saw an undisguised disdain on my master’s face. “Sir, if I have offended you in any way, I ask your forgiveness,” I said. “You have been good to me all my life, and if I have repaid you with sorrow, I would like to know of it and atone for this sin against you.”
His eyes grew cold and distant. He whispered something that sounded like an oath. Then he said, loudly, so that I would not mistake his words, “Honest Corentin has told me of your kind of mischief. I had known your mother in my youth, and I had assumed that she was a victim of the world. But you, the spawn of her womb, are the worst sort of man. And your grandfather had been a great man. How your name has fallen in the world and in my estimation. If the baron had not commanded me to give you these coins, I would have thrashed you and thrown you out of the castle.
“You return any favor I have offered you with lies and with trouble. And now your mother has murdered a baby as it was born, and you expect to save her using the baron’s good faith and the piety of his daughters. Do not ask for forgiveness where you shall get none. I have only the memory of a young woman named Armaela, your mother, as a girl who was full of love and innocence once, to stay my hand from throwing you into the marshes. Pitiably, she has returned to the perversions and deviltry of her bloodline. Your grandfather may have been godly in his old age, but your kind always comes through.”
5
I rode out of the castle with confusion and pain in my mind. What had Corentin told him to make Kenan believe that he was Honest Corentin and I was worse than a thief?
But even these questions had to wait as I rode down the hillside toward the abbey. I felt bolstered by the faith of Alienora, and of her gift; the encolpion pendant that swung against my skin beneath my shirt. The coins from the baron would no doubt buy my mother’s safety, if this were at all possible. And Alienora’s words about Our Lady watching over my mother in her innocence of this horrible charge, these thoughts also gave me comfort.
I arrived at the abbey at nightfall and asked immediately to see the abbot.
“I am sent not merely as a dutiful son,” I told the brother who came to me at the gate, “but as a servant of His Lordship, as well as of Our Lady of Sorrows.”
The monk, who was young and seemed frightened by my approach and demeanor, scurried off to find the abbot. Soon enough, I was ushered into the abbot’s quarters, and sat with him at table. He offered me wine and game bird as we spoke, but I could not touch any of his food, for thoughts of my mother and her pain swelled within me.
He told me of the charges. They had come from an official in the village who had come to the abbot because of a curious story he’d heard from one of the prominent, if humble, families within the abbey’s protective reach. It seems that a woman named Katarin Luhan, a good woman of virtue, had been giving birth when she had erroneously called out for her sister to go find a midwife. Had she called for one of the Sisters, the Brides of Christ, perhaps none of this would have come to pass. Katarin experienced great pains, but could not deliver her child. An old woman of unknown origin who claimed to be Brewalen du Tertre had come soon after, along with my mother. They had spent many hours trying to help Katarin deliver her child, but realized that either the child would die, or the mother must. Katarin’s sister heard clearly words said between the two women that the mother must live and the child must be sacrificed. Other words were also spoken in the ancient tongue, and her sister believed they invoked demons, for the baby itself, born dead, had another child attached to its scalp.
Thus, Katarin and her sister brought the charge in the village, and the two women were brought to the abbey to be examined and determined if a trial was necessary.
As he spoke, I felt my heart pound with fear. A fever was beginning to sweep the country—a new plague had been reported to the east—and when these plagues and miasmas came through, the Devil was often to blame, and the women of what I have come to think of as the Old Religion were considered to be the emissaries of Satan on Earth, though I knew them not as such.
I must add that I did then believe in a Devil, but my belief must not have been strong, and this news of my mother now had me doubting anything I had ever believed about Hell and its minions. I knew the Forest women as good folk, knowledgeable of herbal lore, difficult only in that they did not mix with the village or town, and no one could ever remember them in the abbey or at church or chapel.
I gave the abbé the bag of coins, and he took them with some delight. “Of course,” he said, while counting them, “if your mother is a friend of the baron’s, then we must be very careful with this case. Our Lady will show her as innocent, I have no doubt about that.”
I asked if I might see her. First, he asked if would be willing to disrobe so that he might make sure I took no weapon or poison to her. I balked at this, but quickly enough decided that this was a small price to pay for seeing her. I had no masculine modesty as some young men seemed to exhibit, and was perfectly content pulling off my breeches and boots and tunic and standing before him naked except for the pendant my lady had given me. He asked me what it was. I drew it from my neck and showed it. He came over to me, far too near, and took it from my hand. He turned it back and forth between his fingers. “This is the Eastern Heresy,” he said.
“It was a gift from her betrothed, now in Heaven,” I told him. “Although it may be from Constantinople, surely you can see that it is Our Lord and Our Lady.”
“Yes,” he said, and the “s” of his “yes” drew out too long. “I must keep this while you visit her. It is a precaution. It will be returned after.”
He then reached over and touched the edge of my scalp. “You are unusual,” he said. “A fair youth when most of your brethren are dark.”
I nodded and said, all too proudly, “My father was from another land, I am told.”
“A Norseman?”
“I have heard he was Saxon,” I said, “though even that may not be true.”
His fingers lingered too long in my hair. “Turn around,” he said. I did as I was bidden to do.
He had a peculiar gleam in his eye when I looked at him again. I went to dress. He watched me the whole time. It made me feel dirty and lower than my station, which was low enough as it was. I did not like putting myself on display for this man, nor did I enjoy his fish-eyed stare.
Then, he rang a bell for a servant, who came and escorted me to quarters beneath the abbey, where my mother and her friend were imprisoned.
To call them “quarters” was too kind, for it was little more than a tunnel into the earth. Without windows, and with very little light, my mother and Brewal
en might have been buried alive down there.
I was able to bring them out into a room above to talk. I felt my heart gladden when I saw my mother’s face, for she seemed to have hope and some sense of purpose, the like of which I’d never seen before in her. She held my face in her hands and told me not to be afraid for them. “The Lord will help us,” she said. “I am certain.”
Brewalen was less faithful. She began to talk of Katarin and the baby with another body attached, and how, in the old days, this would not have been considered amiss.
“You killed the child, then?” I asked, surprised by her manner.
She nodded, her pockmarked face filled with hate. “As would any of these Brides of Christ. She was to die if that baby were to live. And that baby would die before it reached its first morning of life after the mother died. We had to. I used an herb called by some the Beautiful Lady, and I put it in my mortar and crushed it with the juice of the mandrake root. This is not sorcery, Aleric, this is simply healing.”
“It is not healing to kill an unbaptized newborn,” I said.
She gave me a look of scorn. “You are too much like the baron himself. I knew you as a little boy. I saw in you a terrible future. I saw on your forehead a mark, and it meant something too awful to contemplate then. But now I see it more clearly. It is the mark of the betrayer, Aleric. You may yet wash it clean off.” Then she put both hands on me, as if seizing me to throw me. This was somewhat laughable, as she was a thin, frail hag, but I felt strength in her hands as she grasped me.
“Even the anchoresses, when in the birthing room, will smother a newborn child if it has deformity. They will not baptize the child, so Katarin’s child would also have not been anointed with your Church’s sanctity. It was a terrible choice to make. But there was no choice. If I had to do it again, knowing what that woman and her sister did, the charges they brought, I would have let her die and saved the child, though that child would have been dead before sundown. But had I done so, and brought that child to the baptismal font, our priest would have dashed its brains against the stones beneath his feet. And now, I am afraid, I will be murdered simply because I did what was necessary to protect a life.”
Her eloquence was startling in its simplicity. Her anger had not made her thoughts ragged. She let go of me, then went to my mother and put her arms around her. “Do not weep, Armaela, my sister, do not shed one tear for these people who do this to you.”
“I have come to save my mother,” I told Brewalen. “Perhaps I can save you, as well.”
Brewalen smiled then and nodded to me, as if she acknowledged that I had some small spirit. Then she said, “It is already written that I should die, Aleric. My body has dark humours within it now, and I awake with blood and sleep at night with pains. I am not afraid for my own life, for I know that my spirit will return to the Forest and I will awake a moment after the death of this body. But for your mother, who has children, whose body is not ready to die, she needs your protection. Do what you must.”
Then she retreated to her prison, and I was left alone with my mother.
“Your brothers and sisters need you,” she said. “Please help them. I don’t know what they will do. I don’t know how they will eat...”
“I will make sure they have what they need,” I said. “And you, as well.”
“Son,” she said, her voice a bare whisper, “there is so much I want you to know. So many things I have hidden from you. I did so to protect you, as the life I have led has not been one of purity or sanctity. But everything I have done, it was so that my children might live a better life than I have. And I am proud that you are here now, favored of His Lordship, with skill and talent.”
I felt a chill as she spoke. It had not simply been skill with birds, or any natural ability of mine, that had secured my fortune of working for the baron. She herself had done something to help ensure my placement. I tried not to remember the men whom she had bedded, thinking that she had even done that to help her children. Had she slept with Kenan more than once simply to ensure that her children would find work and food? I recalled the phrase my grandfather had once used, “a terrible price” that she had paid when a maiden. What had it been? I longed to ask her, but knew this was not the time for it.
She held my face in her hands as if I were still her little boy. “You must not be near me when I die. You must keep your distance, for you may lose your position if you show me affection. You’re the child of an accused witch. You don’t need to lose all you have for my sake.”
“I don’t care about position,” I said, willing my own tears to remain within my eyes. “I do not care about them. I’m not one of them. No matter how much I want to be. We’re different. Grandfather said we were of a bloodline of forest priests.”
“If you speak about that,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “they will, one day, burn you as well. Forget the past. Forget our home. You have younger brothers and sisters to feed. Although Annik and Margret will take them in and others will help, they will need their older brother’s favor in the castle to survive.”
“I will do all I can,” I said, and no longer held back my tears.
She began weeping as well and covered her face with her hands. Then, her tears dry, she took my hands in hers. “They will burn me. Or drown me. Or they will keep me in that burial chamber beneath this floor until I die of plague. I am not afraid of death for myself. I only wish that I might take care of my children who still need a mother. I have been changing how I’ve lived. The crones of the Forest have been teaching me the skill of midwifery and of healing plants. I am an outcast of the world, but not of the Forest. If I die...”
I shushed her and promised her that I would find a way to gain her release, and, God willing, Brewalen’s as well.
“No,” she gasped. “Please, Aleric, do nothing for me. You cannot risk this. I did not do all I did so that my sons would return to the dirt.”
“I will do what I must,” I said.
Then I kissed her and bade her pray so that God’s light might shine upon her and bring a spirit of grace to her and her companion.
6
I rode home across marshes and along fens, and kept to the path by the light of the moon. But as I crossed a narrow way, at a crossroads between the road that led beyond our homeland and the one that led to the castle, I saw a strange figure with a small bundle in its hand. I tell you, I felt it was a phantom of some kind, for its cloak was long and hung in front of its face like a mask. Beside it, another cloaked creature that was only a few feet tall.
My first reaction was to ride by fast, for crossroads were terrible places where the unbaptized were often buried and where oaths to the Devil were made. But as I rode near, I heard a woman’s voice call out my name.
I brought my horse to a slow trot and turned about. The moonlight struck the face of the figure. It was not a stranger at all, but Mere Morwenna herself. Beside her, that misshapen changeling stepchild, now perhaps ten years old, clinging to her like it was a monkey. I dismounted, and the crone shambled over to me. The child, veiled from head to foot, clutched at Mere Morwenna’s skirts as if afraid that I might bite it.
“Your mother,” Mere Morwenna said. She reached to embrace me, and I fell into her fragile arms as if she truly were my blood kin. “I am sorry.”
“I’ve just been to see her,” I said. “And Brewalen. While they are in good spirits now, the charges against them are serious.”
“Yes,” Mere Morwenna said. “My child saw this.” She glanced down at the veiled creature. Her child pressed closer into her cloak and skirt as if trying to disappear there. “She has the Sight. She told Brewalen of the trouble that might come.”
I looked from the veiled child to the crone. “Why, then, did Brewalen take my mother to midwife the newborn?”
Mere Morwenna said nothing. She drew back from me and took my hand in hers as she had many times when I had been a little boy. She turned my hand over so that my palm caught the moonlight
. With her index finger, she followed the curves of slight lines on my hand and pressed an area between my thumb and fingers that causes me slight discomfort. “There is much that can be seen of the future. But it is like these crossroads. We know the destination of each, but to get here there are a hundred choices that must be made first. You are still the boy of birds. I see a crossroads ahead where you will rise up like a dragon. Or you may not, Aleric. You may instead marry the girl you love and live far away from here. But wait, I see in your future something entirely different—you will die at the hand of a beautiful woman. You will have a child. A boy. No, a girl. Your child shall die. No, your child of some future year lives.”
She looked up at me from behind her veil. Her small eyes seemed shadowed and bright all at once. The wrinkles of her forehead and around her eyes seemed deep, drawn creases. “Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“The Sight offers the crossroads, and the destination, but does not always follow the journey we expect.”
“Is there nothing that can be done?” I asked.
The veiled child stepped out from Mere Morwenna’s moon-shadow, and said, in a voice that was older than her years and yet still of a young child’s timbre, “You stole a relic from a great oak. You brought up the winged demon and had it slaughtered. Your destiny is dark, Falconer, and your journey will be on a thorny path. I see a hundred fires along these marshes. I hear the screams of women and men. I smell the burning flesh and smell the wood of ancient oaks as they blacken. And from your loins comes the fire.”
I shivered as I heard her words. I wished my mother had never grown close to these Forest witches and their Old Ways. I could not get back on my horse fast enough. I did not want to think what deviltry they were up to in the marshes, where the roads met. I snapped, “What is your name, little accursed one?”
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