On Tollswitch Hill Stories from the Averraine Cycle

by Morgan Smith

  “Sorry,” I said. He just shrugged. I looked past him. The alley was deserted. Whatever I’d seen, and I clung to the notion that it had been a trick of imagination and midnight, because it simply could not have been real, it was gone.

  I squinted up at the keep. There were two windows roughly in the direction she’d pointed to, but both were mere arrow slits. Don’t be stupid, Bridget, I thought. The dead don’t walk, and they don’t point out architectural details, either. You were dreaming on your feet.

  Still, it was a long time before I could sleep, unable to shake the feeling of guilt and foreboding that my momentary fantasy had given me.

  ***

  I wasn’t wrong about my misgivings, at least.

  Just as we were coming in from a day’s march along the road, to let any thieves know we were there and watchful, we were met by the Toad’s stable-boy, out of breath and wild with excitement. There was trouble in the village and Lord Saidear wanted us to get there quick.

  “All right, all right,” Tighe said. “We’re practically there, ain’t we?”

  “Shift your lazy butts,” he added, more for form’s sake than anything else, because we were already falling into our lines. We could tell this was serious.

  Out on the green, quite a crowd had formed. A noisy, angry crowd. We could hear them halfway down the lane. And at the centre of this knot of yelping villagers, Lord Daric was standing, his head bowed and his shoulders drooping, the very picture of resignation and defeat.

  The gist was easy enough to pick up on, despite the confusion. He was cursed, he had driven his wife to suicide, he was a witch who had by some nefarious pact with demons brought evil down onto them, he should hang for his sins.

  His brother was beside him, which might have been the only reason Daric wasn’t dead already. Plainly, Saidear was at a loss himself, though, torn between family loyalty and his own suspicions. And that was odd, really. You’d think that someone trained by the holy ones at Braide would have a firmer grasp on how these things work, and not fall back on ignorant superstition.

  Tighe made an attempt to be diplomatic about it all. He tried talking to the village headwoman, but she was so hysterically distraught that every word she hurled at him was flecked with spittle. Then he tried to get Saidear to calm them down, but the man seemed unable to raise his voice, and finally, Tighe snapped.

  “HOLD!” He roared it out, in a voice not even we twenty, who knew him best, had ever heard him use before. It was the loudest thing I think I’d ever heard come out of anything human.

  It worked. Everyone present just stopped, some of them mid-harangue, and stared at him.

  “Right,” he said. “Now, then. We’ll take this in a lawful, orderly fashion, if you please. If you’ve something to say, you’ll have your chance, but you will not,” and here he paused and glared around at every one of the villagers, “You will not string anyone up without a proper looking-into, and my bloody say-so, or I’ll have your guts for garters. Do I make myself clear?”

  The tension was easing off now. A few of the folk, especially those more at the edges of the crowd, were beginning to step a little away, as if to state that they, at least, had not been a real part of this, and even the headwoman stayed silent.

  “The captain’s right,” said Saidear. “We should look into this properly. I can see people in the hall, and you can tell me –“

  “Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” Tighe said, and the firm confidence in his voice was a surprise to him, I think, as well as to us, “Beggin’ your pardon, but you cannot do that. It would not be lawful, being the man’s brother. As representative of Her Majesty, and adding the fact that we arrived after these doings, my troop and myself are best placed to look into this. As I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  There was a moment of slightly uncomfortable silence. The villagers didn’t like it. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? No one likes strangers taking charge and looking through the midden-heap.

  Lord Saidear blinked, then swallowed. “Er,” he said. But Tighe met his eyes confidently, surrounded as he was by twenty fully armed soldiers. He was a captain in the Queen’s army, and birthrank be damned. He held the dice in this game.

  “Yes,” said Saidear, reluctantly. “Yes, of course. The thing must be done properly.”

  Back up at the keep, Lord Daric’s state did not improve. He huddled on the chair he’d been led to, still muttering under his breath, and his eyes wild with fear.

  “Bridget, get him some wine,” said Ari.

  “I can,” Saidear began, but Tighe waved him back.

  “We’ll need you here sir. We don’t know the folk – it’s for you to tell us who’s reliable and so on. And you were there. If you could just go through that night’s events…”

  By the time I got back with a full wine-cup, Saidear was trying, at Tighe’s urging, to remember just who was in the hall that night and who might have left it after Caronwyn had gone upstairs.

  I went to Lord Daric. He’d fallen into a sort of quietness, almost a trance, and didn’t seem aware of anything. Certainly not me, at least. I had to shake his shoulder to get his attention so I could hand him the cup.

  His fingers touched mine, and he stiffened suddenly and looked at me, and I swear, for that instant, his eyes were clear and sane and terrified.

  He said desperately, “You’ll help me, won’t you? She wants you to.”

  The cup slipped and hit the stone floor with a crash, shattering the moment. Daric turned his head away, and fell to muttering something I couldn’t quite catch.

  The rest of them were staring at me. I shrugged.

  One of the servants came and began to clear the mess, and another went to get more wine, and for the next hour, Tighe tried to get a sense of just what had happened the night Daric’s lady had died. He talked to her maid, he talked to Nyx, he talked to everyone he could think of, and none of us were any the wiser.

  The alewife’s tale had been surprisingly accurate, except that Ari was wrong about the search for the weapon that had killed her. Saidear had made them search very thoroughly indeed, and there was still some resentment on the servants’ part, because he hadn’t been terribly tactful about it.

  You could see why her death had bred so much fear.

  “I think,” I said diffidently, when Tighe had exhausted these avenues, “I think the answer might still lie in her room.”

  “Her room?” No one thought that made the slightest sense.

  “She was a little fanciful, wasn’t she?” I went over to where Daric still sat, off in his own little world of torment. “She was, wasn’t she, my lord? She liked wild creatures, and songs, and poetry, didn’t she?”

  He dragged his gaze to mine with effort. “What? Oh, yes, poetry. She used to write it sometimes. Things about springtime and night stars…so pretty…”

  I looked at Tighe. “She wrote things down. She was that kind of girl. Maybe she wrote down what was happening to her.”

  “Nonsense,” said Saidear. “She liked poems, I grant you, but she wasn’t at all bookish.”

  “She wrote me a love poem,” Daric said, wistfully.

  “This is idiotic,” said his brother. “He’s out of his wits. And he needs to rest.”

  I caught Tighe’s eye, and shook my head a little. For a wonder, it seemed he understood.

  “Mayhap,” he said, slowly, “Mayhap if we leave it for now, then things might look clearer come morning.”

  “I’ll take him up,” Saidear said. “He’s exhausted.”

  “Well, as to that, sir, we’ll see to his well-being. Colm, your squad can take him to his room. Check it thoroughly, and stay with him. No one’s to be with him but us. I won’t have an execution ahead of a trial, if you take my meaning.”

  The evening was a tense one. When I went up with my squad to relieve the others, Colm was at the chamber door with Lord Saidear, who had a mug of something in his hand.

  “Orders are orders, sir.”

  “Surely
your captain didn’t mean for those orders to apply to me. I’m his brother, for Goddess’ sake. Now let me through.”

  “Problem, sir?” I asked.

  “I’m just bringing Daric an infusion. The poor man can’t sleep unaided these last weeks, and tonight, of all nights, surely, he will need some respite. But this oaf,” he nodded contemptuously at Colm, “seems to think I am not permitted to minister to him.”

  “Well,” I said, carefully, “That’s a soldier’s lot. We don’t interpret our orders, we just follow ‘em. Worth our pay-packets to go against them, no matter how foolish they might sound. But I can certainly take the drink in to him, if you like.”

  He looked, for a moment, as if he would argue the point. But then he made a conscious effort to control himself, gave a harsh little laugh, and handed the mug to me.

  “Mind he drinks all of it,” he said. “He needs some ease, poor man, and sleep’s his only refuge, nowadays.”

  I waited till he was on the stairs before I even looked at Colm. We both grinned.

  “Overbred bastard,” he said, cheerfully. “Came up like he was the high mucky-muck of something, all ‘my boy’ this and ‘ho, soldier’ that. And he’s wrong about those herbs or whatnot. His lordship’s been sleeping like a babe this last hour or more.”

  “Aye, well, we won’t wake him, then. Go on, you lot. There’s roast mutton and new bread they’ve kept back for you.”

  I knew it was coming. At midnight, Ari brought his squad up, and Tighe was with them. The rest of my squadmates headed for the stairs, but Ari’s look told me my night’s rest wasn’t going to come so easy.

  “What do you think, Bridget?”

  “Why are you asking me? I’m as much in the dark here as anyone.”

  “Come on, Bridget. Don’t play the yobbo with me.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I don’t know why you want my opinion, anyway.”

  “Because this is what you’re good at.”

  “What?” I said, caught off-guard.

  “Puzzles,” said Ari. “Puzzles, and twisty things, and how people think. You’re always working out what’s underneath the words. Remember when you said they’d make Diarmuid captain because they hoped he’d fail? And then Ruan as good as admitted after that they’d had bets going? No one else but you would have seen it.”

  “Yes, but this isn’t anything like that.”

  “Still, you have some ideas about this, don’t you?”

  I did. But I couldn’t explain any of it to them.

  “I just think that tomorrow morning we should look in Caronwyn’s room. And I think Daric should be there.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. They weren’t happy. Well, and I wasn’t too joyous myself. I wasn’t sure about any of this. I could be wildly wrong about everything.

  ***

  The one thing I know about life is that things never turn out the way you expect. A day that starts off looking fine can end in a thunderstorm. A length of cloth that shines in the market place might look like sackcloth in candlelight. You can keep house for your old Da for years and one day he ups and marries a woman who drips poison in his ears and he ends up disowning you. You just never can tell.

  So I didn’t try to hope for too much. I could make my assumptions and my guesses, but I knew it was just as likely to come to nothing as not.

  Saidear wasn’t at all in favour of our plan. It was only through sheer stubbornness and persistence that Tighe managed to convince him into handing over the key to Caronwyn’s room, and he was more than agitated when we said that Daric must come up with us.

  “He’s in no way fit for this.”

  Truthfully, he had a case. Daric, despite sleeping fairly well without his herbal infusion, looked haggard and ill, and still very twitchy. He sat staring into his cup, not drinking, not paying any attention at all to the arguments swirling around him.

  But Tighe, Goddess love him, was a country boy at heart. He wasn’t loud, or insulting or high-handed; he was just dogged and patient and unmoving. Like an ox. And like any farmer facing an obstinate ox, the opposition was worn down eventually into acquiescence.

  Finally, with Caronwyn’s maid and the keep’s steward as witnesses, we trooped upstairs. Saidear insisted on coming as well, “to look after Daric, because Goddess alone knows what this will do to him”, but it wasn’t until we were at the door and Tighe was fitting the key into the old iron lock that Gosset’s lord roused himself and began to protest.

  I put out my hand to him.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “She won’t mind.”

  The castlefolk were hanging back. They’d either seen what was in there, or heard enough lurid description, that they were less than eager to get a view. When the lock squealed into openness, and Tighe pushed the oak forward, it was only us three and Daric and Saidear who were close enough to look in.

  “Don’t go in,” I said, urgently. “Don’t let anything be disturbed.”

  Tighe looked at me in surprise. What else were we here for? his expression said, but I ignored him. If there was an answer here, I didn’t want to miss the signs.

  It had been weeks gone by, now. They’d shuttered up that narrow window against the cold, and the maid had tidied things as best she could. You could still see the stains on the floor, though, no one had done much about that.

  There was a lot of dust, which was to be expected. I breathed a sigh of relief, because if there hadn’t been dust, my theories would have come to nothing.

  “Look,” I said. And they did.

  There was a small chest against the far wall, and it was open, its contents spilled roughly onto the floor and scattered about. Daric moaned. It was all pretty gruesome, really.

  I turned and grabbed the maid’s arm and pulled her over.

  “Was it like that when you left it?” She shook her head.

  “Well, so?” said Saidear. “I mean, if there’s some witchery to this, it isn’t unlikely something eldritch could get in here.”

  He seemed pretty calm for a man whose brother’s life was on the line.

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s anything witchy about this,” I said.

  Ari said, “No, Bridget’s right. This wasn’t done by magic. This was done by something wearing shoes and walking.”

  We all followed his gaze. You could see the footprints. They started at the wall beside the bed, and they tracked plainly through the dust on the floor, straight to the little chest. You could even see where someone had knelt there, rummaging through poor Caronwyn’s things, making sure she’d not left something incriminating behind.

  “I wonder,” said Tighe, “What’s next door to this?”

  “A linen cupboard,” Saidear said, contemptuously, but he was pale now, and his breathing wasn’t completely even. And Daric: Daric was looking at him as if he’d never seen him before. And maybe, in a way, that was true.

  I walked across to the wall where the footprints began and ended. It didn’t matter now. We had witnesses for that, and if I could just figure this out, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

  It was not really that well-hidden, if you were looking for it. Just a small depression in the stone, about the size of my little finger. I pushed, and the stones began to move, sliding inward so slowly.

  And Lord Saidear decided to make a run for it.

  ***

  They say the old tales are the best tales. This one was old enough, certainly, and balanced on the most common of little sins, jealousy and greed. But it was too raw and ugly for the sadness to be in any way a familiar fireside entertainment.

  The narrow passageway didn’t go far. It ran behind the linen cupboard to Saidear’s chamber on the other side, and there it also let into an equally narrow set of steps that went down into the butteries. Maybe long ago, servants had used it to bring wine up to the lords and ladies of an evening, but it had fallen into disuse and been forgotten. Daric certainly had not had the slightest notion of its existence.

  Saide
ar didn’t get far. Colm had been stationed with his squad at the foot of the stairs, and I don’t think he minded at all that Saidear resisted and that he had had to black the man’s eye. I should have liked to have done it myself.

  He’d always been jealous. His brother got the holdings, the lordship, and eventually, the pretty young bride, and then, it seemed, an heir to cut away at any hopes he might have had.

  He didn’t admit to it, but I guessed that Caronwyn’s lassitude and sadness had been the result of those “tonics” he’d brewed up for her. Daric’s rambling wits, ghostly sightings and hysteria certainly were; the keep’s cook took one sniff of the drink that we hadn’t given to Daric the night before, and turned pale with fear and anger. She knew her herb-lore, and she was shocked at the concoction.

  “It’s the Goddess’ own luck he didn’t die from that,” she said, and spent the next hour fussing over Daric as if he were a toddler.

  He needed it. The shock of discovering that his brother had murdered his wife and was preparing to get him hanged for the deed was almost too much for him. But after a week or two, it seemed that time would heal him somewhat.

  ***

  I went out to her grave. They’d laid her out on the hillside, near a big rowan tree, which seemed fitting enough for a girl who’d liked to wander the hills at dawn.

  I told her I was sorry. That I knew it was too little, too late. I hoped the Goddess had a care for her, a better care for her than her older sister had had.

  And then I begged some leave, and went home, one last time.

  ####

  The Finding Charm

  By Morgan Smith

  Copyright 2016 Morgan Smith

  Traveling Light Publications

  The Finding Charm

  There’s a rule that you don’t leave a charming brew unattended in the middle of the Making. It’s a good rule, and Glynnis had never broken it before, and certainly she never did so again. And because she never knew what it was that Keeley had done, she was never completely aware that she had, in fact, broken the rule at all. As far as she knew, Keeley had sat stirring the pot all widdershins, as she’d been told, and no harm done at all.