by Judith Tarr
Edith could easily believe that. Aloud she said, “Will Mother come? Would she be here for the ceremony?”
The abbess’ smile was gone as if it had never been. “Now those,” she said, “are the words of a child. We forsake worldly bindings here—among them the bonds of family. We are your family now. I am your mother in spirit. Your mother in the body will know from me that you have become Christ’s bride.”
Edith bowed her head. “Yes, Mother Abbess,” she said, as low and yet as clear as she dared.
“Go now,” the abbess said. “Meditate; pray. This is a great thing, not to be undertaken lightly. You are ready; be sure of that. But there is much to do to prepare for the final vows.”
Edith knelt in respect, then rose and backed out of the room. Each step she took, she dreaded that the abbess would call her back—but she had been properly dismissed.
Once away from there, she knew a powerful temptation to slip sidewise out of the world. But something held her back. Not fear of discovery—she never had been caught—but a deep reluctance, and a voice far down that said, Not now.
Anyone with magic learned to listen to that voice. Sister Gunnhild was waiting for her in the library, seated at the table that had become theirs as a matter of course. No one else was there; Sister Librarian was ancient and doddery and more inclined to find a warm corner to sleep in than to play chaperone to the abbess’ favorites.
There were books open on the table and parchment and ink laid out, but Sister Gunnhild was neither reading nor writing. She sat with her cheek resting on her hand, and such an expression on her face that Edith’s steps slowed to a stop.
Edith had never seen her other than serene. But she had never surprised her before, either. Sister Gunnhild was always ready and waiting for her, with her face a cool mask and her self walled behind a barricade of words. Such passion as she would ever show, she kept for the books she read with Edith.
This was a different person altogether. For the first time in a long while, Edith realized that Sister Gunnhild was pretty—maybe even beautiful. Nor was she nearly as old as Edith had first thought. If she had been married or had children, she might have been wrinkled and toothless already, but in the sexless quiet of the cloister she had kept her body’s youth. She was a young woman, or nearly, and in that unguarded moment, Edith saw a part of her that she kept hidden as rigorously as Edith concealed her escapes out of the world.
If Edith had not had such a shock as she had just had, she might not have understood what she was seeing. But the thoughts that had been running through Edith’s mind were mirrored in that face—without the possibility of escape. Sister Gunnhild had taken her final vows long since. She was bound to this life, whether she would or no.
In twenty years, this could be Edith.
No, she thought. It was quite clear and quite uncompromising. She was not going to let it happen. No matter what she did or how she did it, she was not going to take those vows.
She shuffled her feet and coughed, as if she had just come into the room. Sister Gunnhild started slightly. The mask came down; the living woman vanished. She was the holy nun again, with no thought in her but what turned toward God.
There was no solution to Edith’s dilemma in the books of theology, unless one believed that they encouraged every Christian to seek the life of the soul. She found theology interesting enough, but it seemed bloodless to her. Magic was a much realer thing.
Probably that was blasphemy. But still, had not God—or the gods who were His many faces—made magic, too? And all the beings that came of it?
Sister Cecilia would have relished such questions, but she was not there to ask. Sister Gunnhild would have been appalled. None of the other nuns, and certainly none of the novices, could have understood. Edith was alone with her troubles.
Days passed in the endless round of duties and holy offices—either comforting or stupefying, depending on whether one was meant for this life or no. Edith had been tolerating it well enough. But with every day it was clearer: she could not live with this until she died. She was not made for it.
The feast of the Ascension passed, then Pentecost with its hints of an ecstatic sanctity that had scarce been dreamed of in this chill and proper place. Edith felt her soul closing in on itself. To walk out the gate and brave the world, or to walk between worlds and vanish into the Otherworld, both were beyond her. It was as if, after she had discovered in herself the capacity to scatter the abbess’ web of unmagic, she had fallen prey to it herself.
Even in the cloister, rumors from the world crept in. Some of the older nuns were allowed to walk abroad, to bear messages to the bishop—one of which must be the petition for Edith’s vows—and travel to sister houses. They brought back word that the king had taken ill, and on his sickbed had compelled the most holy abbot Anselm to take the archbishopric of Canterbury.
That woke Edith slightly—enough to ask Sister Gunnhild at lessons the next day, “Is it the same one? The Anselm whose book we read in the spring?”
Sister Gunnhild nodded. They were back to Augustine again—wrestling with that angelic intellect, and losing more often than not. “The very same. He fought it, they say, so that they had to hold him down for the consecration.”
“And yet he was consecrated,” Edith said.
Sister Gunnhild shot her a glance. “It was a terrible thing to do to so holy a man—and thoroughly Norman. Seize, compel, overwhelm. They know nothing of subtlety.”
Edith thought of Sister Cecilia, whom she reckoned deeply subtle, and wondered. But she held her tongue. “Will it hold?” she asked. “His consecration? Because it was against his will?”
Sister Gunnhild frowned. They had been studying canon law, too, sometimes neck and neck now, because Edith was very quick. “That depends on the Lord Pope,” she said. “Yes, such things are supposed to be freely chosen, but as with marriage, reality is not always in accordance with the law.”
“What is real?” Edith asked—then stopped, and startled herself with laughter. “Oh, no! I’ll be a theologian in spite of myself.”
Time was when Sister Gunnhild would have laughed, too, but Edith had not had even a smile from her since before she had that brief glimpse of the woman behind the mask. Today Sister Gunnhild simply said, “You do have a talent for it.”
Clearly that was as far as that would go. Edith suppressed a sigh and turned back to the book she was supposed to be studying.
Somewhat to her surprise, Sister Gunnhild said, “It’s not an easy lesson: that free will is so often subject to the whim of those in power. That’s why we take vows of obedience. We’re supposed to take them willingly—but if we’re ordered to take them, and disobedience is a sin, what else are we to do?”
That was as complicated in its way as anything in Augustine. Edith wondered if she dared ask the question that came immediately to mind.
Best be silent, she thought. In all these years, she had learned little of Sister Gunnhild but that she had a very clever mind and very little pride. She was willing to learn as well as teach; she always listened when Edith had questions, and she always found an answer, even if that answer was, “I don’t know. Why don’t we find a book that does?”
Sister Gunnhild shook her head. “I’m talking nonsense. Here—where were we?”
In Augustine, she meant. Edith could not remember, either. “Does he say anything about monastic obedience?”
“Shall we look and see?”
“That’s a great deal of looking,” Edith said.
“Then we’d best begin,” said Sister Gunnhild.
CHAPTER 18
Midsummer’s night was a great festival in the Otherworld. The gates between the worlds lay open then, and the Old Things danced under the moon.
In other years, Edith had danced with them, slipping out after the Night Office and slipping back in before dawn. This year she was all confused. She wanted desperately to vanish out of the world, and yet she could not muster wits or magic to begin.
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It was not the abbess who had done this to her. That struck her as she knelt in the Night Office, chanting the responses with no thought for them at all. It was her own body, growing and changing, and her magic transforming into God or the gods knew what.
Abbess Christina had sensed something—perhaps she herself hardly knew what. She sought to bind and compel it.
Edith was suddenly so restless she could barely stand it. The rest of the office was a torment. She held herself still by main force of will. When the office ended, it was all she could do not to bolt for the door.
If her gait was stiff in the slow procession to the dormitory, it seemed no one noticed. They all lay down for what remained of the night. Most of the novices were asleep even before they dropped to their cots.
Edith was painfully, irretrievably awake. The moon taunted her, sending a shaft of light down into the dormitory. Folk of air slid up and down it, chittering with glee. They loved Midsummer.
So had she, once. She could feel her heart tugging at the moon. One thought, one sidewise slip of the mind, and she was there, in the world where magic was all there was.
No—there was something more. Something . . .
She rolled onto her face, away from the moon. Her skin quivered. Her body was now hot, now cold. The rough linen of her shift was excruciating—unbearable. Then somehow that shuddering discomfort shifted and changed, melting into pleasure.
The moon was in her, filling her. The folk of air swirled and sang. Magic shivered through them. The rhythm of their dance was in Edith’s blood.
Her eyes were squeezed shut, and yet she saw the green country, and the dancers in a shimmer of mist and enchantment. There were visions in those dances, dreams and prophecies, and wild fancies given flesh and substance.
And temptation—oh, by the old gods, such temptation. To see what was to be; to know what would become of her. Whether she denied it all and bowed her head and took the veil—or whether . . .
She could become one with those dances; be part of them forever. Or . . .
So many unfinished thoughts. Not only her body was a stranger to itself; her mind was slipping its moorings, too.
Dawn found her still awake and in her bed. The folk of air had followed the moon to the Otherworld, bored with her refusal to follow. It was still early; the morning office would not begin for yet a while.
She rose softly and put on her habit over her shift, and slipped out of the dormitory.
The air in the cloister was cool and smelled of rain. Clouds had chased the moon away. There would be no sunrise, only a slow swelling of light through a mist of rain.
It suited Edith’s mood perfectly. She stood in the shelter of the cloister near Queen Edith’s grave. Her late namesake was as angry as ever, blighting the earth beneath her tomb and the air above it.
One moment Edith was alone. The next, Sister Cecilia stood beside her—slipping out of air as Edith had so often done herself.
Edith was barely startled. She had felt something coming, but although it made her spine shiver, it was not an evil thing. Nor was Sister Cecilia, even if she was a Norman.
Sister Cecilia looked tired. Her magic was as bright and strong as ever, but the many threads of it were spread far and thin. Without thinking, Edith reached toward it and made it brighter, the threads thicker.
Cecilia drew in a sharp breath. “You are remarkable,” she said.
“I was born to live in two worlds,” Edith said. “I don’t think Mother knows which they are.”
“Nor Mother Abbess,” said Cecilia. She drew a bag from the depths of her habit and held it out. “This is yours,” she said.
Edith studied it for a moment. It did not look familiar. It was a plain leather bag, like one of the satchels in which she had seen clerks carry their pens and parchment.
Cecilia waited without impatience. She always had understood Edith—and not many people did.
Slowly Edith took the satchel. It was light in her hands, and yet she felt the weight of importance in it. She opened it.
There were letters inside. One or two she recognized. Those had her mother’s seal. She knew what was in them, too: exhortations, instructions, commendation of Edith’s life and soul to the abbess and the abbey.
But others she had never seen, though she knew the seal perfectly well. It had been broken on each letter. Each had her name written on it.
She smoothed one broken seal with the tip of her finger. “These are from Father,” she said. “For me. I never saw them. I thought—”
Cecilia nodded. Of course she knew what Edith had thought. Edith had told her often enough. Her father was a king, he was busy, he sent greetings through his queen on the infrequent occasions when she wrote to their daughter.
It had hurt at first—a great deal. Then she learned, as she thought, to be a rational person, and put aside the hurt. What did a king care, after all, about a daughter, when he had sons to inherit his kingdom? She was safely stowed. He could love her from a distance, when he remembered. That was all a mere female either needed or deserved.
There were twelve letters. Two for each year Edith had been in the abbey. She almost could not bear to open them.
When she looked up, Sister Cecilia was gone—melted back into the mist. Edith slid sidewise and inabout for herself.
There was mist in the Otherworld this morning, just as there was on the other side. The place she had slipped away to was a dolmen in a grove, serene and quiet, and sheltered from the soft rain that had begun to fall. She made a light with a thought and set it to hover above her head, and with hands that shook a little, took out the letters and spread them on the mossy stone, and read them one by one.
They were simple letters, mostly. Malcolm could read and write, and he had written these in the old language, which they had loved to speak between them—though the queen did not approve of that at all. He asked after Edith; he added a bit about this or that—a foal born, a book found that he had thought she might like, a story about one of the people they both had known.
There was no book, of course, or any other gift that he spoke of. Edith was surprised that the abbess had kept the letters, and not burned them.
It had been Abbess Christina who kept them—not Sister Cecilia. Her presence was heavy on them, like thick grey dust. So was the weight of her disapproval.
They were all terribly worldly letters. There was nothing about religion in them, and no exhortations to Christian behavior. Malcolm had always left that to his wife. They were little bits of Scotland, so clear and present that Edith could smell the heather.
She had to stop halfway and choke down the tears of homesickness. When her eyes were clear of tears again, she read the rest one after the other. They were all much the same—until the last one.
That had come in—Edith read it three times to be sure—the day before the abbess called on her to take her final vows. There it was in his sharply angular hand, smudged here and there and marked with hatchings and corrections. He was not a frequent writer or a practiced one, but in his way he was fluent.
My heart, he wrote, while your letters to us both have pleased your mother and me, this is for you and you alone, and I ask you to answer me only. I know what your mother wants for you. It’s a high and holy thing, and no doubt a very good one, but even those stiff Latin exercises you call letters are telling me you’re not made for that life. I would be happy if you were, never mistake that, but if I’m guessing rightly, I have an alternative to propose.
You’re nearly grown now, daughter, or so they tell me. They say you have beauty—you take after your mother there, God be thanked, and not your old wreck of a father. Even in the cloister I’m sure you’ve learned enough of the world to know what a daughter can be to her family, if she and her family are so minded.
I’m coming down to England, daughter, before the summer’s out. Red William’s been sick and nearly died, and he’s having a fit of setting his house in order. Since we have a certain disagre
ement as to borders in the north, I’ll be on my way to settle things with him. I’ll come by your abbey afterwards, and it’s possible I’ll have a gift for you—one you might be pleased to take.
That was all there was, except for his name: Malcolm King of Scots. Edith smoothed the parchment over and over, until the ink began to fade from the page and darken her fingers.
Her father did not want her to be a nun. He was not forcing her to be a bride of Christ. His ambitions were far more secular. He was going to bring her a husband—that was what he promised.
Her mother must know of this by now, since the abbess had intercepted the letter. Clearly Edith was not to know. She would be bound and sworn before her father came, snatched away out of his reach.
Did she want a husband? Did she want anything but to be free to work her magic?
That, she could not answer. Maybe she was too young. Though princesses married in infancy often enough, and no one ever asked them what they thought of it.
She had almost rubbed the words from the page. She folded the parchment carefully and laid it with the rest—years’ worth of damnation for Abbess Christina, if God chose to be just.
Edith found she could not be as angry as she should. Her mother and her aunt only thought they were doing what was best for England. Edith in the cloister, her wings clipped and her magic bound, was worth more to them than Edith in the world, married and making sons for some lord or prince.
What was Edith worth to herself? That was what she had to decide. In the way of the world, she was not really her own person. She belonged to her family, who could dispose of her as they would.
But how they would dispose of her, neither her father nor her mother could agree. That was a choice she could make, if she had the strength. But which? If she wanted and was ready for neither, how could she choose?
Beyond the shelter of the dolmen, the mist was thinning. Light glimmered through it. As she sat staring, the veils of the world grew transparent. She looked down as if from a lofty height on a steep promontory, a high domed rock above a level country and a river. On the rock was a castle. In the castle, as she spiraled down like a bird on the wing, was a great crowd of people.