by Judith Tarr
“Then you are a fool,” said a voice Edith had not heard so sharp or so clear since she was a child.
Queen Margaret was standing in the door that led to the women’s solar, slender and tall in a gown as blue as her eyes, and a mantle the color of the sky at dusk, and a great collar of gold and pearls, and the crown of a queen.
Edith found that her mouth was hanging open. The hall had fallen silent. Even the most boisterous revelers were struck dumb.
If Edith had not known that her mother was dying, she would have sworn that the queen was as strong as she ever had been. Her voice certainly was. “What possesses you, my lord? Your people are worn out with fighting. Surely you can give them a winter’s rest.”
“It’s not winter yet,” Malcolm said. He was smiling, but it was not a pleasant smile at all. “Come down, my lady. Drink a cup with me. Wish me well; I’m going to war in the morning.”
“If you go,” Margaret said, “you will die.”
The king’s eyes gleamed as he looked up at her. “Will I then? Have you had a vision?”
“God speaks to me,” said the queen. “Your death is out there. Stay home; be sane. Let the Normans think you cowed. When they least fear you, then is the time to strike.”
“They don’t fear me now,” Malcolm said. “They laugh at my name. I’ll turn their laughter to pain.”
“The pain will be yours,” the queen said.
“On your head be it,” said Malcolm, “both you and your ill-wishing.”
Edith tasted blood. She had bitten her lip through. Her father was quite out of his mind, and her mother was no better.
“I forbid you to go,” the queen said.
“Do you, lady? Isn’t this your dearest desire? Haven’t you urged me to do exactly this?”
“Not in a fit of temper,” she said, “and not for simple spite. My desire is victory, not the shame of defeat.”
“I will give you victory,” Malcolm said.
The queen looked at him. She must have seen what Edith saw: that he would never yield for strength. Her face softened as much as it ever could, when softness was no part of what she was. “My heart, I go so far as to beg. Stay here with me.”
“My heart,” said the king, and there was a snarl in it, “I will not.”
The queen had to have expected that. She pressed harder—with softer weapons. “Not for me? Not for your sons and your daughter? Not for your very life?”
He wavered not at all. “For my soul and honor, and for the honor of my kingdom, I must go.”
“You will die,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“So you persist in saying,” said Malcolm. “And I say to you, my lady, that if I shrink from this, Scotland will rue it for a thousand years. The Normans will invade us, hound us and hunt us, and trample us into the ground.”
Edith shivered. There was power in what they both had said: truth so strong it made the stones of the hall shift subtly under her feet.
Neither seemed aware of it. This was the worst kind of war: war born of love. Pride fed it, and fear—not of death, but of things that were worse than death.
“Go, then,” said the queen, letting go her grip on a temper as formidable as his. “Go and feed your pride, and die in sin.”
“If I die,” the king said, “and believe me, lady, I do not intend to, then I die in honor, for my kingdom’s sake. I cannot do otherwise. It is not in me.”
“Nor is plain common sense,” she shot back in the passion of despair.
He flung down the cup that he had filled for her, splashing dark wine over her blue hem. Then he whirled. “Out!” he roared to his startled men. “Up! To horse and ride!”
“Father,” Edith said—it was futile and she knew it, but she had to try. “Father, don’t go.”
He never paused, not even for her. She doubted that he even knew her. His back was turned already, his men scrambling up from the tables, abandoning food and drink and comfort. His will was strong and they were trained to obey.
“The sun is nearly set,” the queen said, cold and clear. “Will you ride in the dark? Where will you sleep?”
“Anywhere but here,” the king snarled at her. “Better cold in a hedgerow than warm under a Norman thumb.”
“If there were a drop of Norman blood in my smallest finger,” she said with gritted teeth, “I would cut it off.”
He bared his teeth. “I’ll bring you Red William’s head, and a sack of Norman bones for the dogs. Isn’t that what you’ve prayed for?”
“I pray that you come home safe,” she said.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” said the king.
Edith ran after him. But he was too quick. When she would have stretched her stride to catch him, a soft furry body tangled her feet.
She fell headlong. Hands reached to catch her, but she struck the floor hard enough to knock the breath out of her. By the time she had been lifted to her feet and had made a hasty count of her bruises, with a hearty curse for the puca who had barred her way, her father was gone, and the whole of the royal warband with him.
Her mother too had vanished. But that, Edith could act upon. She was as polite as she could be to the people pressing wine and tidbits and poultices on her, and escaped as soon as she could.
The queen had exhausted her last strength. Her maids were still tending and folding her royal garments, cleaning spatters of wine from the hem. Margaret had returned to her bed, and lay barely breathing. A gaggle of priests and nuns surrounded her. Their prayers mingled into a dull confusion of sound.
It was like a thick smoke, a cloying incense. It made Edith dizzy.
They were praying for the king as well as the queen. Edith struggled through the fog to her mother’s bed.
Margaret was conscious. Somehow Edith had not expected that. Her lips moved: she prayed with the rest, in silence that in its way was more powerful than her servants’ voices.
They were making matters worse. It was like a curse on them all. Even the puca seemed to have succumbed to it.
Edith could do nothing here. She would not have said she fled, but her retreat was rapid.
If it had been daylight she would have found a way to escape to the open air, but the dark had closed in. Her father was already too far away to catch: he had pressed his men and horses hard. They would make a hunting camp, she supposed, and sleep on the ground under the fitful stars.
Her only refuge was the room in which she slept. It was as bare as it had been when she came, but with the puca’s help she had warded all its walls. Its door was protected against intrusion; its window was open to folk of the air, but ill spirits and mortal invaders could not pass through it.
The puca was curled tightly in the middle of the bed. He wore his human shape, which was rare; but he was drawn into a knot like the cat he most often was. He shivered in spasms.
Edith had been troubled. Now she was honestly afraid.
When she touched him, he erupted. She recoiled from a flashing nightmare of wings and fangs and claws.
As abruptly as he had moved, he was still, as human as he was ever going to be, shuddering and gasping. It might be absolutely foolish, but she touched him again, this time to set her hands on his shoulders and hold him still.
He quieted slowly. “Tell me,” she said.
She wondered if he had forgotten human words, it took him so long to answer. But in the end he did. “Too much,” he said. “Too many things all at once. Taking magic out, pouring magic in—death, rebirth, war and gladness, everything all tumbled together and no sense in it. No order. I am mischief, lady, but even I could not have stirred this pot into such confusion.”
“I don’t understand you,” Edith said.
“Nor do I,” said the puca.
She shook her head. “No. That’s not what I mean. I don’t know enough. I can feel things. I can do a little. I know Latin and Greek and grammar and theology. I don’t know anything that matters.”
“No,” said the puca.
/> He was not going to help her with that. He was not human enough. She needed humanity—magical humanity—to teach her what she should know.
She should have stayed in the abbey. It was a horrible thought, but there, close by the Giants’ Dance, where Sister Cecilia could come and go, she would have been within reach of what she needed. She could have found a way around the vows, surely. Sister Gunnhild had. Or she could have been granted rescue or escape. Something better than what she had here: one warded room and a frightened puca, and no one to help or teach her.
Almost by instinct she reached for the part of her that could pass into the Otherworld. But the puca flung himself at her, babbling words that only slowly came clear. “No. No! Not now. Not here. Too much—too dark. Too many. The Hunt rides. The Black Hunt, the Hunt that eats souls. It will eat yours.”
“I’ll go to a safe place,” Edith said. “I know where—”
The puca thrust his face at hers. She had an eyeful of wild cat-eyes and sharp cat-teeth. “It is not there! Everything is dark now. Nightfall—starfall—”
“It is there,” Edith said. “I feel it. You’re feeling my mother, that’s all. She swallows magic. The bright place, the safe place—it hasn’t gone.”
“For us it has,” the puca said starkly. “She swallows magic, yes. And places that are magic. And doors that open on them. Souls, too. Her own. Her king’s. You are safe, but for how long—I can’t—”
“I have to get out of here,” Edith said. She was suddenly, perfectly calm. “I can’t stay.”
“You have to.” The puca was calm, too, but it was not the same kind of calm. “This room is safe. Nowhere else is. Outside is fate. It drives us all.”
“I can’t stay in this room,” Edith said.
“I can make the dun safe,” the puca said, “if—”
Edith waited, but he did not go on.
“If?” she pressed him.
He shrank almost into cat-size. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. “If there is no queen.”
Edith stared. Sometimes, she thought distantly, quick wits were a curse. “You mean . . . ?”
The puca nodded.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t kill my mother.”
“No,” said the puca. “Not kill. Enchant. Make safe. Take out of the world.”
“Into the Otherworld? Where the Black Hunt rides? Where souls are swallowed?” Edith sat on her hands. They wanted to wrap themselves around that half-human neck. “That’s worse than killing her.”
The puca hissed. “She did it. She and the others. They made this. They twisted the Hunt and opened the darkness. If the darkness swallows them, it will not be so hungry. And you can go where your fate is. Your good fate, not the bad one.”
Edith shook her head. “I can’t. No.”
“Then you are a fool,” said the puca.
“Like my father?” Edith almost laughed. “So that’s what he meant. That’s what honor is. Even when you know what it will do to you, you can’t stop yourself. I can’t murder my mother—body or soul.”
“This will bring great grief,” the puca said.
“Maybe,” said Edith. “And maybe good will come of it—in the end. I’ll have to hope for that.”
“Hope has wings,” said the puca. “We who walk on earth, we can’t catch it.”
“We can try,” Edith said.
CHAPTER 27
In spite of the puca’s doomsaying, when Edith emerged from her sanctuary, she fell prey to neither darkness nor the Wild Hunt. She was still protected. The world was still quiet—more so for that her father had taken most of the men to his new war.
Her mother was still dying. The grey pall of prayer still lay over her and threatened to spread through the dun.
Edith did what she could to keep it contained. That was not very much: she knew too little. No one in this place could teach her.
The puca, who knew more than he admitted, was not choosing to impart it. The weight of foresight had crushed him down. He shrank into cat-shape and stayed there, hunting mice and sleeping in the middle of Edith’s bed.
He was hiding. So, in her fashion, was she. She was waiting again, and lying low, and letting the world pass over her.
This time she did not feel quite so helpless. Something was coming. What it was, whether it would come to her or she would bring it about, she did not know. But the time for waiting and hiding was nearly over.
On a fine but blustery day, a fortnight after her father stormed out of his hall, she appropriated a pony and went for a gallop through the heather.
The pony was shaggy and unlovely, but he was fresh and sturdy, and he was as glad to be out as she was. He showed a surprising turn of speed, and a flash of heels toward the grey walls that had kept him confined through a week of rain. The road was muddy but the turf beside it was solid enough, and the pony was sure-footed.
The blight in the earth had spread far since Edith was small. It showed itself in the dying of heather along its track, and the stunting and twisting of the lesser greenery that grew there. Where the greyness met stone, it dissipated; but she could see where the stone was beginning to crumble.
This land was both stronger and weaker than the earth of England. Saxon power had not ruled here until Margaret came, but neither had the Old Things been as potent in this heath and highland as they had been for so long in the south. This was raw earth, where magic lay close to the surface, and was all the more easily disposed of.
Edith was looking for a place she remembered. The memory was half a lifetime old, and she had been much smaller and the world much larger then. But she had ridden the same pony on those escapes, and his stride had not changed since she went to England.
He was wise, that pony. He knew where she wanted to go. She let him pick his own way off the road, following a track too faint for her eyes to see. Streams crossed and crossed it again; it bent and doubled and twisted.
Edinburgh’s grey bulk vanished quickly, but the firth came and went: a tumble of waves, a promise of endless sky. Folk of air danced in the wind, swirling like leaves and then scattering in sudden gusts.
Between the pony and the flocks of Old Things, Edith found her way at last to her old hiding place. It had been a hollow hill long ago. But time and the earth’s shifting had broken the roof. Now it was a green bowl with a spring in it, and a tumble of fallen stones, and magic bubbling up like water from the earth.
She had more than half dreaded that the stream of magic would have dried or been corrupted. But it was as clear as the spring, and as strong as ever. It rose from deep wells, and it was as pure as any power in Britain.
She drank the magic with water from the spring. It was cold and clean, and it filled her stomach and spread through her body.
She lay on the grass that was still green, here in this sheltered place. She could feel her heart healing. Grief was there still, and fear, and old pain, but the longer she lay there, the more able she was to bear it.
That was what she had hoped to find here. But there was more to this place than a healing spring. Just before she turned the pony loose to graze, she rummaged in his saddlebag for a napkin of barley bannock and strong cheese, and a silver bowl that she had stolen—quite shamelessly—from her father’s treasury.
She was not exactly sure what she was doing. She had read a little, heard a little. It might be a terribly foolish thing to do. Or it might break the spell of inaction that had been on her for so long.
She filled the bowl with water from the spring until it trembled just on the brim. Carefully she set it down on one of the fallen stones.
It was the flattest stone, and maybe had been part of the roof once. There were carvings on it, faint and all but worn away, but she could still trace their intricate, coiling shapes.
Once she had set the bowl down, the shapes seemed somewhat clearer. It was almost as if they had reached to twine about the bottom of the bowl.
She paused, listening hard with mind and ears. There
was nothing evil nearby, nothing dangerous that she could sense. The magic bubbled as clear as ever. The folk of air danced as they always did. Their whole existence was the dance.
When she first set the bowl down, the water had quivered, perilously close to overflowing. Now it was still. It reflected the sky: scudding clouds, intermittent flashes of sun.
Nothing was going to happen. Edith knew no words to say, and nothing to do but let the magic flow, and wait.
Little by little she began to feel that the magic had diverted; that it was flowing not through the spring but through her. It was a strange sensation, more pleasant than not, as if she were hollow and empty and clean.
It came to her that she could direct the magic, turn it toward the bowl and the water. It fluttered like a moth, trying to escape, but she held it in a soft firm grip.
Its fluttering eased. It sank into the water and filled it. The surface rippled as if with the touch of a breath.
Edith was suddenly very tired. Her eyelids drooped; her body swayed. Just as she caught herself, the water changed.
She was looking down, not through a reflection of clouds to a silver hollow, but into a place she had seen before: a nobleman’s hall. She knew the nobleman sitting in it, too. He was the grey-eyed lord—Henry, that was his name: she could almost see it written in the air of this place. Cecilia’s youngest brother, who was so full of magic.
It was not magic she could use, though something told her that he knew a great deal more about it than she did. She needed to see another face, a face she held in memory, becoming more distinct the longer she pondered it.
Henry did not vanish easily. Either he wanted to stay, or the vision wanted it—she could not tell which. She had to call on her fading strength to dismiss him.
Then, at last, the one she wanted was there. Eyes as grey as the young lord’s looked into hers. They saw her; knew her. “Edith,” said Sister Cecilia. Edith heard her as clearly as if she stood in the hollow, clear and present beside her. She did not sound surprised at all.
Edith stumbled over the words she had planned to say, caught between startlement and urgency. “Sis—Sister—I can’t—I don’t know how—”