Beyond the Pale

by Mark Anthony

  Soon the queen’s words would merge with the whir of the shuttle, the clack-clack of the pedals. At night Grace would close her eyes and dream she was caught in the loom.

  Aryn already knew how to weave—evidently that was something noble ladies were supposed to learn in this world—so she had been spared that particular task. However, Ivalaine had other work in mind for the baroness. That first evening the queen’s lady-in-waiting, the red-haired Tressa, had led Aryn away. When Grace saw Aryn next it was late, and they both had been exhausted. The baroness’s left hand had been dirty, and her cheeks and gown smudged.

  “Gardening,” Aryn had said with a mixture of outrage and amazement. “She had me gardening.”

  Grace hadn’t known how to respond. “What did you plant? Medicinal herbs?”

  “No. Turnips.”

  The last several days had offered little more in the way of explanations. The Council of Kings had reconvened two days ago, so that left only the evenings for their studies. Grace and Aryn would come to Ivalaine’s chamber when they could—and when they did not think King Boreas would notice. But it wasn’t as if Grace was betraying the king. At least, that was what she told herself. However, once in Ivalaine’s chamber, she never seemed to find the chance to ask the Tolorian queen about her motives for abstaining at the council. There was so much else to occupy her.

  Like weaving. At first Grace had feared her hands would be crippled from the loom, then they had grown calluses, and the shuttle had seemed to barely touch them as it flew back and forth. A picture had begun to form beneath her fingers. It was a garden at twilight, purple-green and secret. Yesterday, when she arrived at the queen’s chamber, she had almost looked forward to weaving.

  The loom had been gone.

  “It is time for new lessons,” Ivalaine had said. “Lady Aryn, you will continue to study with Tressa, though you are finished with gardening, I think. And since I am occupied by the council, you will have a new teacher, Lady Grace.”

  Only at that moment had Grace noticed the other figure that stood in the room. She moved forward with a rustle of emerald wool and parted coral lips in a smile.

  “It’s time to learn what it truly means to be a witch, Lady Grace.”

  Grace shivered and returned to the frosty garden.

  “What do I need to do?”

  Kyrene made a lovely frown. She must have practiced the expression many times before a mirror. “That is the wrong question, Lady Grace.” She moved closer. “What do you wish to do?”

  Grace started to shake her head. What did Kyrene mean? It didn’t matter what she …

  No, she did know. Everything around her, it was always so distant, so removed. But she wanted to touch it, like the threads of the loom beneath her fingers—the lushness of the winter garden. “I want to feel,” she said. “I want to feel everything.”

  A smile coiled around the corners of Kyrene’s pink mouth. She took Grace’s hand, led her deeper into the grotto. They stopped, and the countess started to untie the sash of Grace’s gown.

  Grace pulled back. “What are you doing?”

  “You have no need of this garment.”

  “But it’s freezing out—”

  Kyrene’s eyes flashed, and her usually soft face was stern. “I am your teacher, sister.”

  Grace tensed. Kyrene was vain, and maybe even dangerous. Yet she knew things—things Grace wanted to learn. She lowered her arms and stepped forward.

  The countess moved supple hands over Grace’s gown, loosened ties, pulled straps. Grace stood stiff and stared forward into the hedge-wall. Ever since her time at the Beckett-Strange Home for Children, the thought of being naked before others had terrified her. It was logical enough, the clinician in her knew. Even long after the marks faded the fear had remained, as if others still would be able to see the places where they had touched her, like shadows against her skin.

  Her gown slipped to the ground, and a soft cry escaped Grace as the winter air wrapped a new, frigid cloak around her body. She began to shiver.

  “It’s cold,” she said through clattering teeth.

  “It doesn’t have to be, love.”

  “What … what do you mean?”

  Kyrene gestured to the tangled garden walls. “There is no need to be cold when there is so much life all around you.”

  “I don’t … I don’t understand.” The air was damp. In this environment it would take mere minutes for the first symptoms of hypothermia to set in. She had nearly frozen once in this world—she did not intend to again.

  Kyrene only gazed at her, and her smile coiled in on itself like a red serpent.

  “Tell me,” Grace said. She knew it was what Kyrene wanted, for her to beg, but Grace didn’t care. She had to know. “Tell me, please.”

  The countess’s eyes glowed in satisfaction. “But of course, sister. You had only to ask.”

  Kyrene stood behind Grace and murmured in her ear. “Close your eyes, love.”

  Grace did this.

  “Now reach out and touch the evergreens in front of you.”

  This seemed an odd request, but Grace lifted her arms to obey.

  “No, sister, not with your hands. You have the Touch. Reach out with your mind, touch them with your thoughts.”

  What was Kyrene talking about? Grace shook her head. “I can’t touch something with my mind.”

  Kyrene’s whisper was soft and cold as snow. “Then you will freeze, sister.”

  Convulsions wracked Grace’s body now, yet she knew they would stop soon enough, and an irresistible sleepiness would wash over her. That would be the beginning of the end. Grace tried to move her feet, but Kyrene’s words buzzed in her head, and she felt rooted to the spot, as if she were a tree herself, slender and pale, leafless in winter.

  “Touch them, Grace. Do it.…”

  No, it was impossible. Or was it? There was that day in her chamber, the day she first met Kyrene. She remembered now. It had felt as if something—someone—had come close to her, too close, and she had pushed the presence away.

  Her shivers faded, she had to try. Grace concentrated and tried to remember how she had felt that day, only this time, instead of pushing, she reached.

  Her mind was dark, all she felt was coldness.

  “Do it, sister.” The voice was an icicle in her brain. She hated it, wanted it to go away. “Reach.”

  She couldn’t do it, her whole being was brittle, she was going to freeze here in the garden. She stretched, flung her mind out, but there was nothing to touch. Only ice, and blackness, and …

  … warmth. Green, golden warmth. It brushed across the surface of her mind, like a candle in a darkened room, then was gone. Desperate, she cast her mind back. There—there it was, a beacon in the barren murk. It was so beautiful, so gentle and bright. How could she have missed it before? She smiled, and it seemed so easy.

  Grace reached out and touched the light.

  Her eyes flew open. The air of the garden was still frigid, she could sense that, but she was warm—wondrously, deliciously warm. Like a balmy breeze from a summer forest, it rushed over her, and through her, until her skin glowed. She drew in a deep breath and smelled green.

  “Yes, that’s it, love,” a triumphant voice purred in her ear. “I knew you had the strength.”

  “But what is it?” Grace had never felt so much a part of something before.

  “It is the Weirding.”

  Kyrene stood before her. Grace hadn’t noticed when the countess’s fur cape and gown had slipped off, but she was naked now, her skin flushed with warmth.

  “The Weirding?”

  “It is the power that resides in all living things. In the evergreens, in the hedges, in the moss between the stones. It dwells in everything alive, and it flows between them in a great web, vast beyond imagining.”

  Grace closed her eyes again. “Yes, I can feel them. The evergreens there. And the tall tree on the edge of the grotto—its leaves are gone, but I can see the life still m
oving inside it. And there! There’s a mouse hiding in the stones, watching us. I’ve never … I’ve never felt anything like this before.”

  “But I think you have, Lady Grace. Are you not a healer?”

  She started to shake her head, but even as she did she knew there was truth in Kyrene’s words.

  Kyrene reached into her fallen gown and pulled out a small clay pot. It was oil, scented with herbs. She rubbed the oil over Grace’s body. At first Grace stiffened—it had been so long since she had let another touch her, she wasn’t certain she could bear it—but the countess’s fingers were deft and soothing. Grace relaxed, and warmth encapsulated her in a gold haze. She knew now how the two of them had been warm that day in this grotto, despite the cold and their naked skin.

  “Yes, you have sensed it before, sister. That is what it means to be a witch—to have the Touch, to feel the Weirding, to reach out to it, and to shape it.” Kyrene’s voice became a low croon. “Hear me, sister. Once we were crones: hags and hedgewives and madwomen. We were ugly and despised. People threw stones at us and burned us on piles of sticks. But now … look at who we are now, sister.”

  Kyrene gestured to a puddle on the ground, melted in the heat that flowed from them. Two women gazed up from the silvery water, naked and fey, eyes glowing emerald and jade. They were ethereal beings—beings of power.

  “Yes, look at us, sister,” Kyrene whispered in an exultant voice. “We are hags no longer. Now we are women of rank and power—beautiful, radiant, and strong!”

  Grace drew in a shuddering breath. The trees, the vines, the moss. How dull and dead the rest of her life must have been, for at the moment, for the first time in her life, Grace felt as if she were indeed alive.

  “More,” she said. “I want to feel more.” She shut her eyes, started to reach out, farther, deeper.

  Her eyes flew open as, like a black curtain, cold descended around her and shut off the golden warmth. In a heartbeat the fey being was gone, and she was merely Grace again, naked, bony, and shivering.

  Kyrene’s gaze upon her was calculating. “I think that is enough for today, sister. It does not pay to drink too much too soon.”

  Grace’s teeth nearly broke as they clattered against one another. You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Kyrene? Giving me something, then taking it away.

  However, Grace said nothing. She shrugged her gown over her against the chill and left Kyrene and the garden behind, to step again inside the castle’s walls of lifeless stone.

  77.

  It was a cold afternoon, two days after he had gone with Grace to look at the door, when Travis learned about kennings.

  “There is always danger in speaking runes,” Jemis said.

  A soft snow fell outside the tower’s narrow window. The doves huddled together for warmth in the rafters of the drafty tower. Travis and the two runespeakers did the same around the brazier.

  Rin continued. “Even when you whisper a rune’s name, if you are not careful, you might invoke some fraction of its power. That is why we use kennings to speak about runes.”

  Travis tightened his grip on his mistcloak. “Kennings?”

  Rin pointed to a rune on Travis’s tablet. Sindar. Silver. “This is Ysani’s Tears.” He pointed to another rune. It was Fal. Mountain. “And this is Durnach’s Bones.”

  Ysani. Durnach. Travis recognized those names from some of Jemis’s stories about the dawning of Eldh. They were Old Gods, like Olrig One-Hand. Understanding sparked in his mind. Why not use a code to speak about runes? That way there was no danger of invoking their power, no chance of hurting another.

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  Rin did so. Sharn, the rune of water, was Sia’s Blood, and Kel, which was gold, was called Fendir’s Bane. According to Jemis, Fendir was the first of the dark elfs—fairies whose lust for gold twisted them into small and ugly, but clever and nimble-fingered, creatures.

  The following day, Jemis finally let Travis speak a rune.

  “This is your first rune,” Jemis said. He drew a symbol on his own tablet and showed it to Travis.

  I already know that one. Travis almost said the words aloud but bit his tongue. He carefully copied the three splayed lines onto his own tablet. It was Krond. Fire.

  Travis sat at a table in the tower’s main chamber and stared at an unlit candle. He licked his lips, then spoke the word.

  “Krond.”

  His right hand tingled, there was a brilliant flash, and the tip of the candle burst into flame and flared upward. Travis jumped back from the table.

  “Sharn!” Jemis shouted in a commanding voice, and at once the candle was extinguished.

  Travis sucked in a breath. The candle had melted and slumped over, and a dark ring had been scorched into the surface of the table.

  Jemis glared at him, his eyebrows drawn down over his small eyes. “You do not use a sword to cut a thread, apprentice.” He turned in disgust and disappeared, as he always did when angry, into one of the tower’s upper chambers.

  Rin tried to stand the twisted candle back on end. “Why don’t we work on moderation?”

  Travis only nodded, and tried not to think of the mad lord in Eredane.

  The next morning, Travis opened his eyes and stared into the tempered dawn light that filled his bedchamber. He no longer needed Falken to wake him. The bard’s steady breathing drifted from the other side of the room: He was still asleep.

  Travis had hardly spoken to Falken or Melia since he started his studies. When he returned to the chamber at night he usually flopped down on his bed in exhaustion. Besides, the bard and the lady were busy with the Council of Kings. Sometimes he woke late in the night and heard the two speaking in low voices by the fire, about the king or queen who had made a report to the council that day. He never caught more than fragments—

  … the dire wolves coming from the Barrens have …

  … is the fever, but that it harms only children and …

  … see shadows in the forests all around Embarr …

  —and these wove themselves into his strange dreams.

  Travis saw even less of Beltan than he did Melia and Falken, and every time he did, the big knight was walking away from him, head bowed and eyes on the ground. The blond knight’s bleak mood—which had lifted a bit that first day of the council—had returned, even stronger than before.

  Travis rose from his bed and gasped. The floor was cold. He scrambled into his clothes, threw his mistcloak over his shoulders, and slipped out the door without a sound.

  He had grown to like this hour of the day, when it seemed the entire castle slept. The moon was just setting over the high wall of the lower bailey, and its light rimed the battlements like frost. He hurried to the tower of the Runespeakers. Deeming it too cold to knock and wait for Rin to come down for him, Travis entered the tower and started up the stairs to the main chamber above. He halted halfway up the stone flight. Voices drifted down from above.

  “… that we should stop now.”

  “We can’t, Jemis. We have made a vow to him by taking him on as an apprentice. We can’t break that.”

  “Yes we can! He is too old, he has no control, he can barely read. He cannot be taught!”

  “But we have to teach him. He’s strong, Jemis, you know that. Stronger than me. Stronger than you. By Olrig, I wonder if he isn’t stronger than All-master Oragien himself.”

  The only reply to this was a low grunt.

  Travis did not wait to hear more. He stumbled back down the steps, out into the bailey, and breathed in deep gulps of frigid air.

  He’s strong, Jemis.…

  No, he didn’t want that power. He didn’t want any power. “Why, Jack?” The words were moonlit ghosts on the frosty air. “Why did it have to be me?”

  The moon slipped behind the castle wall. The misty words went dark and drifted away, unanswered. After a while he turned around, walked to the tower, and knocked on the door.

  78.

  It was several more da
ys before Grace found a chance to slip away again with Travis to search for other doors with runes on them. Every day that passed in Calavere the demands on her time seemed to grow. Not that Grace wasn’t used to being busy. In Denver she had spent nearly all her waking hours at the hospital. More than once, after she had worked for thirty-six hours straight, Leon Arlington had had to pry a stethoscope or a syringe or a scalpel out of her numb fingers and lead her, stumbling, to the residents’ lounge.

  “If you can’t let yourself go home, then at least let yourself lie down for a bit,” Leon would say, and he would waggle a dusky finger at her protests. “Now you listen to me, Grace. Sleep a little while now, or you’ll end up sleeping in one of my steel drawers downstairs for a long, long time. Got that?”

  She would nod, and lie on the vinyl sofa, and let Leon throw a spare lab coat over her, and sometimes she would even close her eyes and drift off for a while. Yet after no more than an hour, two at the most, she would be back out there, walking the slick tile floor. Sleep offered no comfort, not like her work did, not like taking broken people and making them whole.

  Doctor, heal thyself. Leon had told her that once. Except that was impossible, and Leon Arlington was dead, sleeping that cold, steel-cased sleep he had always warned her about.

  Challenging as they had been, Grace’s days in the ED could not have prepared her for her life in Calavere. Never before had she tried to do so many things, to be so many things, and to be them for so many people—so many living, whole people. For a while, after the start of the council, it had seemed King Boreas had forgotten her. She had spoken to him that day after the first reckoning and not since.

  Appearances could be deceiving.

  “What news have you for me, my lady?”

  Grace was no screamer, but when the king of Calavan leaped out of an alcove into her path, even she couldn’t help letting out a small cry.

  Boreas bared his pointed teeth in what wasn’t quite a grin.

  She forced herself to stop shaking. “Good morrow, Your Majesty,” she said.