by Morgan Smith
I considered this. But an abundance of wine can do that sort of thing to you, leaving you with only the haziest outline of whole evenings. One’s companions are usually only too happy to fill in the gaps for you, of course.
“Well, then. Let’s find whoever went down to get my horse, if that will ease your mind.”
That proved less simple than it would have seemed. It took a long time to find someone who could remember as far back as early dawn, and Arlais was getting visibly more anxious, but at last we ran the stable-boy to ground, just finishing with the stacking up of all the tack from the morning’s hunt.
“Oh, aye, she was there,” he said.
“Was she well?” I’d created, in my mind, a plausible story to cover Arlais’ agitation. “She complained last night of indigestion.”
“Well, I didn’t speak to her, like.”
“But she looked well?”
He hesitated. From one of the stalls down the way, I could hear Guerin, telling Shadow what a fine, strong, brave boy he was, to come through the colic so well.
“I didn’t see her, altogether,” said the boy, finally. “The door were shut up tight, you know? But she were in there, right enough. I could hear her voice. Praying, like. And she had a fire going.”
I turned to Arlais. “We’ll walk down and see her. Will that content you?”
If I’d been her, I’d have heard - and resented - the patronizing note in my voice. But she was too focused on her own concerns.
“We should go now,” she said, “We should just go. And not a word to anyone.”
At that moment, of course, Guerin walked out of Shadow’s stall. He looked at the pair of us, and he smiled that smile, the one that never boded well.
“Here, now,” he said. “What’s afoot?”
“Just thinking of taking my spears back to the cottage,” I said hastily. “Indeed, we ought to be going, so…”
The smile deepened. Arlais was, if anything, more upset than before, and she was hopping impatiently from one foot to the other, in a fury to be moving.
“You might want to collect those spears before you go,” he pointed out. “Or, of course, you could tell me what is really going on. Your choice.”
Apparently, leaving no word with anyone did not cover Guerin of Orleigh, because Arlais immediately began to pour out a somewhat incoherent summary of her worries to him.
I understood it, I suppose. He was the heir of Orleigh and the duke’s man and they’d spent days on the road together. She trusted him. Most people did. It was one of his more lethal qualities.
He listened patiently, and then looked at me.
“It is a bit odd,” I said. “She seemed well enough last night, and it wasn’t so late when she left.”
“Right,” he said. “It’s a fine day, and we fancy a walk. “ He gestured casually towards the yard. “After you.”
Chapter Eighteen
The laneway to Eardith’s cottage lay opposite the little roadside shrine on the far side past the village.
It had only been the merest chance, that first night, that at the very moment I had been riding by, desperate for shelter from the threatening storm, Eardith had taken her lantern to light her way to the privies by the garden. I’d seen the light, bobbing faintly in the darkness, and then I’d noticed a break in the trees where the path began, and turned toward it, in hopes of at least getting Balefire a little protection from the incoming weather.
Otherwise, I expect I’d have gone on that extra half-mile and stumbled into Rhwyn village. I probably would have pounded on the innkeep’s door, and she might even have woken up, and the next morning, or the one after that, I’d have taken the road south and hired on as an unknown trooper in Birais’ garrison at Glaice.
But there had been that light in the darkness.
Our walk down from the manor was a quiet one. Arlais was lost in her own thoughts, and Guerin, after a few abortive attempts at lighthearted conversation, had mercifully shut up as well. There had been only a couple of people awake and moving in the village, just Joss’ mother wearily dragging an armload of hay down to the sheep-cote, and Briega’s eldest shooing a couple of goats out onto the green. I suspected most everyone else was still nursing sore heads from last night’s excesses.
The road was utterly empty of folk by the time we reached the outskirts, where it began to curve northward. It was very quiet; you could hear birdsong and the chuckling of the brook, and a soft breeze among the trees, all quite pleasantly spring-like and peaceful.
It was only when I saw the shrine that any misgivings truly disturbed my heart.
It was the usual half-circle of three stone uprights. You see them everywhere: one Mother-stone, flanked by the two smaller ones representing Her in Her other attributes, and then the little flat offering slab, where the villagers could leave flowers or grain or little trinkets, in supplication or in thanks.
There was, this time, the stiffening corpse of a little squirrel, blood still brilliantly red and congealing, against the flat, grey stone.
In some places, they still do offer Her blood. In some places, She is still, first and foremost, Destroyer of Worlds.
But not in Keraine. Never in Keraine, and especially not in Dungarrow, where we had had to fight so hard to be free of that darker, more implacable vision of Her, and rein in that will to power from the priesthood.
Arlais stopped suddenly in her tracks. It was not, apparently, a common sight for her, either.
In that moment before I saw her face, I’d been hoping that this was something that made sense to her, that it wasn’t a confirmation of her fears, but that hope was dashed immediately.
She was suddenly pale, her breathing was short and raspy, and she seemed unable to look away from the little carcass on the stone. After a long moment, Guerin took her arm and turned her away, away to where the path began, and without any words at all, we started slowly walking down the lane.
The stable-boy might have seen smoke leaking from the thatch, but any fire Eardith had had going had long since died out. He’d said the door was shut tight, but it was ever so slightly ajar now. For just a little bit, this gave me a kind of vague hope, although every nerve in my body knew already at least partly what we would find.
Guerin looked over Arlais’ head at me; he still had hold of her arm, and I didn’t need him to say anything. I knew that whatever was inside, he didn’t want her to see it, at least not without some warning. She had been living on her fears for hours by now, and any sort of shock would do her no good at all.
I walked alone to the door. Even before I reached it, I could see that things were not well within. An overturned, broken bench was clearly visible just a foot or two inside the threshold. But worse: there was a smell about, a smell I knew all too well. The stench of death. And underneath that, there was something else. Something alien, and chill, and oddly familiar.
I pushed, but something was blocking the door and I was fairly sure, from the feel of it, what that something probably was. I put my weight into it, finally, and felt the heft and heard the dragging sound I had expected, as Eardith’s body gave way and the doorway widened.
Her throat had been savagely, mercilessly torn away, and she lay in a pool of her own blood, but that was not the worst of it. There were marks, calculated, carved marks cutting away at her wrists and ankles. I wasn’t priesthood material, nothing even close, but even I understood what that sort of marking could mean.
The cottage was a shambles, but still out of all that mess, I grasped that something deliberate, something ritually symbolic and organized, had been taking place.
There were three plain, unglazed clay cups, overturned and shattered, with the wine stains still wet and visible on the floorboards.
There were three dark candles, beeswax ones, not tallow, and two were knocked clean out of their undecorated wooden holders, and I noticed, too, almost mechanically, that our larger cauldron lay on its side amid all this, and that a noisome, black-looking mess
of oily debris had spilled out of it, to join itself to that thickening pool of blood.
I turned away, backing out of the door, and said as quietly and as gently as I was able,
“It’s what we - it’s worse than we feared.”
Arlais seemed to almost fold in on herself, with a sad, forlorn sigh. Her body swayed a little and both Guerin and I thought that she was going to faint, but here she once again surprised me.
She drew in a long, shuddering breath, and straightened.
I’ve seen soldiers do this. When they’re truly frightened, when they’re outnumbered and they know that this, surely, will be their last battle, but they cannot possibly avoid the inevitable, something in them faces up to that, and lends them a last, unknown strength.
It was just the same for Arlais. She looked up and met my eyes and said, tonelessly, “I see. Well, then.”
I said, “You needn’t look. It isn’t… it isn’t pretty. But… there are things in here I don’t understand.”
She shook her head, as if to clear it.
“I need to see, then, don’t I?”
It was all right for me, I thought. It was all right for Guerin. We’d seen the ugly aftermath of battles. We’d witnessed the wild results of long sieges, and the beastliness soldiers can display in those frustrating, angry victories. This was worse, of course, but only because of the circumstances and the lack of any obvious reasons for it, and we’d get over it. I wondered if Arlais ever could.
But I moved away as she walked to the cottage door, and silently let her pass. It was, in the end, not my decision. It was arcane, priestly stuff, and she was, as she had been at pains to establish, not a child anymore.
At Arlais’ direction, we touched as little as we could. One of the candles had rolled away off towards the hearth, but when Guerin stretched out his hand, unthinking, to retrieve it, she barked a rather sharp command at him to leave it be, and we were both careful, after that, not to disturb anything without her permission.
She was composed and business-like now, but it was a control made up, I thought, of equal parts expertise in occult lores and a barely submerged terror. Whatever had happened here, Arlais understood enough of it to be not merely horrified, but almost paralyzed with fear, and that in turn made the two of us as jumpy as woodland deer in autumn.
She crouched beside Eardith’s body for a long while, peering intently at the marks, before looking just as closely at the rest of the room.
“Is there oak growing hereabouts?” she asked, after a bit.
“I think so, yes.”
“Can you cut me a green branch, about like so?” She held out her hands about the length of a hunter’s long knife apart.
I went out. There was an oak at the bottom of the field, but I had to shinny up to the first strong branch to get what she wanted.
She had found a plain tallow candle in the clutter, and the broom, and she had brought out, from some pocket under her skirts, a bit of chalky stone and was drawing, laboriously, around the mess and the corpse, a careful circle.
She motioned us away. We went to stand over by the hearth, as far back as we could. She stood as close to the centre of her circle as she was able, without touching any part of Eardith or the blood or that disgusting mess from the pot. She lit the candle and set it carefully down, and began to sweep at the ooze and the carnage, whispering all the while in a language I could not even slightly understand.
The sweeping, I could see, was not meant to actually tidy things up. In the dimness I could see a bluish glow forming on the broom. It leapt, in long shards of coldfire, onto the liquids and onto Eardith, and slowly, the all-pervasive stench of death and wickedness that had filled our nostrils began to ease.
Still muttering her strange words, she set the broom aside and lit the oak branch from the candle. Being so spring-young and green, I wouldn’t have bet on its catching hold, but it did, it smoldered a sickly yellow in the dim light, and Arlais laid it, gently, tenderly, onto Eardith’s cold breast.
It flamed up suddenly, quickly, brightly orange-red, and then, just as suddenly, collapsed into ash.
Her voice rose in a final, still incomprehensible invocation, and then she leant over and blew the ash away, and I could feel it now, the sense that whatever evil had invaded this place was gone, banished, fled.
Not that it mattered. It still wasn’t a place I wanted to be. Not now, not ever again.
Arlais agreed.
“You should collect your things, if they weren’t touched.” she said. “We can’t move her ourselves, but it should be safe enough now for some others to move her body. And soon. The cottage, well, I don’t know. It should be burned.”
I found and righted the ladder that went to the little loft above. It was mine, insofar as anything in this place had belonged to me, shared with the strings of onions and garlic, bunches of dried herbs and a couple of hams gifted from grateful villagers for a healing or a safe birth.
I didn’t own much, and because I had never properly decided to stay, I had continued to mostly live out of my saddlebags. All I really needed to do was to collect up a few odd bits like my whetstone and a pair of bone dice, stuffing them blindly in on top of my spare shirts and tunics, to roll up my winter cloak and pick up my shield from the corner, and I was done.
Chapter Nineteen
From almost the first moment we were back at the manor, Lady Ilona took charge, and I, for one, was thankful for it.
She was visibly shocked and she was truly grief-stricken. She was grateful and full of praise for whatever it was that Arlais had done - they used some strange and unfamiliar terms in discussing it - and mixed in with Ilona’s praise was a slightly perplexed, querying note. She seemed heretofore not to have been aware that this sort of lore was precisely what Arlais was expert in, but she herself, Ilona said firmly, was the only person who was capable of dealing with the body and its disposal, and she needed to be sure that things were done properly.
It was what Eardith would have wanted, she said, sadly.
Arlais merely nodded and fell silent. She had been so obviously exhausted after the ritual that we hadn’t been sure she would make it all the way back to the keep, and now she seemed barely able to stand on her own. With Birais’ authority backing him and under Ilona’s direction, Owain assembled a small party to do the heavy lifting, and we three were left behind to sort ourselves out.
First, we had to deal with Lady Delwen. She was clearly upset, and not merely at the news of Eardith’s death, or even the little that had already leaked out regarding the circumstances. There was now the difficult prospect of trying to find a place for me to sleep. She’d given away Eardith’s room that morning to the pair who had bunked in with Guerin, on the strength of her understanding that Eardith would be happier at home now that all these formalities were done.
Her distress was further compounded by the fact that sometime between yesterday and today, Owain or someone had obviously explained to her exactly who I was, and she was trying to think back to see if she had ever been less than courteous to me.
She hadn’t been, insofar as I was likely to notice, and I tried to tell her that. I also pointed out that I was quite happy to bed down in the hall with the guards and the servants, but she seemed on the verge of tears at this, until I looked at Arlais, standing a little apart and lost in thought, and said,
“Arlais - that is, the holy one’s had a shock, she shouldn’t be alone. If she’s willing, and there’s a spare pallet, I can share her chamber.”
Arlais roused at the sound of her name, blinked, and said, “Oh. Yes. That’s a good idea,” in a tone that suggested she hadn’t really heard a word. Guerin smiled mirthlessly at both of us and picked up my shield and my cloak where he’d dropped them. I grabbed my saddlebags, and we herded her towards the stairs.
Once in her room, Arlais did collapse, more or less. We got her as far as the bed, where she curled into a ball and began to tremble uncontrollably.
“Wine,�
� said Guerin, firmly. I nodded.
While he was gone, I set my cloak and my shield into the far corner, and leaned my sword against it. Arlais was still shaking, and her breath was coming in little, hiccuppy jerks, but all I could think of to do was to cover her with a wool blanket and hope that Guerin got back soon.
When he reappeared, it was with two servants, one manhandling a straw pallet and another carrying two coverlets. It took a few minutes to get it sorted out. The servant in charge of the bedding seemed bent on being more than ordinarily inefficient about it, and the one who had carried the coverlets stood in the middle of the room, staring in fascination at the sight of a holy servant of the Mother reduced to quivering jelly.
We got rid of them, finally, and Guerin poured out the wine, handing one cup to me and taking the other to the bed, where, in the same low, soothing voice he’d used with Shadow, he coaxed Arlais first into a sitting position, and then, to drink some of the wine.
I opened my saddlebags, hunting for a clean shirt and my spare tunic.
I’m not a neat person, as a rule. In the beginning, I had owned nothing, of course, at least nothing that needed taking care of, and at Gorsedd, my clothes were collected and cleaned by others. If I dropped them carelessly on the floor, they got folded and laid back in my clothes-chest for me, and the very worst was that the servant might complain to Lady Ilona, and I would be asked to try not to be so inconsiderate. At Dungarrow, the servants did not complain, or if they did, it wasn’t to anyone willing to press the point directly.
At Eardith’s cottage, of course, I’d been a kind of guest, and mindful of being there on sufferance and determined not to be a burden, I had done my own washing as best I could and as rarely as I could get away with. I had been careful about not leaving any visible mess that could inconvenience my benefactor, but I was still careless, and somewhat clueless about the niceties: I never bothered to do more than stuff my things willy-nilly back into the saddlebags.