Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (48 page)

Brief light and whitely fallen snow. Ashes that was Margaret sat wrapped in the old quilt, with Jack Daw's stolen pack spread out before her on the floor, in knots and wheels and magpie cronyings. The cards were old and terrible; the coat had given them. Assigned them: they were something she must need. Warily, she turned and puzzled at them, at the underside of light. Not baneful in themselves, she thought, no more than fire was, or night: but rank with their master's witchcraft, steeped in black sorcery. They scented of him, of his sex; of smoke as from a fire of flesh and bone; of earth as grave. They were tallowy with handling. Yet the bite and dazzle of his blade was in them, and his rancor: the very paper of them buzzing like a wasps’ nest. And they felt in some way implicated, tied. As if by turning them, he'd tugged at something: at a leash of hounds, at jesses or a bridle bit; a barbed hook in a bloody mouth. As if he spurred destiny or hawked with fate. Caught fish.

The cards were not her pack she knew, but shadows of them, disconcertingly unlike and like. Strange mirrors of the old devices. Strange guises of the sun and moon; new emblems for the stars. By the constellation, this she held would be the Nine: not drawn as sisters in their tower, bending to their starry web; but as stones of crystal in a coffer, iron bound: as fragments of the shattered heavens, with the stars still captive in their shards. Eight of them: one lost.

Here, in a cater of cards, were half the burnt stars all at once: an ill trick. The Huntsman and the Tower; the Hound and the Swift, still reeling off the lives of mortals. It was painted as a child with a whirligig, running heedlessly, enchanted with his toy. Before his dazzled eyes there lay abyss: a race of water and the great wheel of the mill of bones.

Cinque and sice. The Poppyheads, the Hare. That crone in the stubble field, who crouched and scrabbled at the clodded earth. Were they all of them her tale?

Here, the Ship: but furled of sail and battered, heeling over in a tempest on a woodcut raging sea. A tiny figure, wreathed in picted flame, fell burning from the masthead. Far and leeward lay a louring shore, all wolfish rocks: toward which the Ship was driven. It would break. And on that island stood the Tower in epitome, as in the pupil of an eye.

And here, the Hanged Man, and the avid crows: but each with Morag's face, with women's bodies naked to the fork. White bellies and black—

That she turned as if it burnt her fingers; turned it back, to look on Morag's cold envenomed eyes, her talons and her beak. Her body, as a dreadful mirror of her own: what she might be. What Ashes in the stubble field had urged on her. She could not bear to look; she had to know. The next and then the next. The Scythe. Old Slae, from the trial. She flinched. And turned again, and shut her eyes and scrabbled up the pack. No more. But the image burned within her eyes, black, white, ablaze, as if she'd gazed on lightning: Ashes lying with her secrets agape to the kneeling Sun. Not the worst, not yet. What she dreaded was the Crowd of Bone: to see her mother's endless death.

Abyss and origin.

Shuddering, she dipped her sullied hands in water, wiped them on the Ashes coat. She knelt back on her heels, remembering how in darkness she'd imagined
sky
: a garland of the light, wreathed round with sun and moon, a netted caul of stars. A world no wider than her brow.

And this—blasphemy of stars. This crown of hellebore and nightshade.

It was all too much for her, too much. The wayless heavens and the weltering earth. Vertiginous. Her cosmos cracked and shivered like an egg; her child's true body changing fearfully: untrustable, estranged. She wept now for the dark, the prison of her childhood, for her nutshell full of ghosts. Her realm. Furled and shivering, she mourned the old bright stars of innocence: the wood above, unleaving. Bright cards in a darker place.

Margaret, do you see the leaves?

She looked up in sudden wrenching hope.
Thea?
No one there: the shadow of a memory of a voice. She bowed beneath a piercing desolation.
Gone.
Her mother's whispering voice: the guide, the Ship-star of her nighted sky. Far gone, the paradise of Norni's lap. Not hers by right. She thought of Imbry and her namesake. Of her shadow sister who was dead, whose milk she had stolen, whose cradle-place she had usurped. Of her doll that Morag burnt to ashes: as a Scarrish witchery, she said. But lied. All of them gone: her mothers and her sister and her cradle of stars. And she had no tongue to cry.

I am Ashes of myself.
No answer.

White uninflected light. The fire sinking.

No,
she thought:
I am braided of them, of their voices telling. I am what they made. They made me to go on.

And she remembered a small thing lying in the palm of her hand, as round as a hazelnut, shining as a moon: their lives within her life.

With a fingertip in soot, she traced the crossed curves of the sky, of Ashes's rune, on the hearthstone. As she bent, her charms jangled: it was braided in her hair, with others, over and again. Time and memory. They crossed in Ashes.

She could not speak; but she could tell.

She called her cards to mind. On the floor of hardpacked, limewashed earth, she laid them out in memory, Lykewise: the Ship, the Swans, the Nine. The Crowd of Bone, transcending death: unsilenced. She upheld, outspread her hands, as if she took the string of silk from Norni's fingers, overturn and undergo. Almost she felt the ghostly hands that mirrored hers, upholding: give and take. She began.

Thea. I am telling this in Stars
.

"This one,” said Norni, holding out the string of silk. And in and out, her fingers flicked, enweaving web. She spoke the riddle as she wove.

"A tree,” said Margaret watching. They had played this game.

"So in Cloud they call it,” said her nurse. “They are few in Scar. I had seen none, but their bones cast up in storm.” She tugged and it vanished. “I had a comb of tree."

"But you'd seen it in the stars, the Tree?"

"Nightlong in winter, and the worm at its roots.” She was threading Margaret's hands. “Ringman there. And under. So."

"Imbry's made of tree.” The doll lay in Margaret's skirts, handworn and faceless. “I think she walks there, in the Wood Above."

"And over. See, it grows."

A web between her hands, between their faces. Another riddle. “Is it stars?"

The comb was tangled in the nightlong hair: no planet but a rune of stars. It sang amidst the ranting of the witches:
lully lullay.
Whin knew it for a Scarrish soul, a witch of the Unleaving. It was bone. Not carved but caught in it, as one anatomy of soul, one sentience. It shivered at her thought, all spine. Still telling of the seventh witch, Whin raised that story like a wind, magnificent, to drown her secrecy. Her stormcock's cry was lost in what it prophesied: what it called was tempest. It unskied the hall and vaulted it with lightnings, heaped hailstones to the knee. Unheeded in my lady's trance of ecstasy, Whin touched the windcomb with her spirit.

And she's in an empty room. She sees a cradle overset; she sees a tangle of bright silks. In the roar and crackling of thorns, she sees a burning doll, its blind face like a poppyhead, the petals like a cry. Still swayed by a turmoil in the air, a tumult barely past, the loomstones swing and clack. And further, running further in the pathless dark, a child is crying out.

Kit's lass's bairn; my lady's daughter's child.

A nurse, she would have had a nurse,
thought Whin. Her mother slain, they must have set her to a stranger's breast: her comfort, her unleaving. Aye, a witch, to fat the bairn on power. Milk of sorcery. Which suckled dry, was then a hindrance to my lady's governing: so quenched. So nothing, to my lady's mind and Morag's. After the unruly grief, the discipline of grief, their pupil should have thought no more on her, than on her last year's leavings. But that nurseling was a mortal child; her nurse a witch of Scarristack: they'd memory and will. Their art was not of Annis’ kind, nor any she could sense. It held no power, save what lay between them, child and tender. Not of law but love.

There are snags in the riverrune of story, that unravelled let it run.

Softly, softly, Whin undid the comb, and millennia of night slid free, unbraiding of its knots. One strand, but only one: the souls in it ran down like stars of water stilling from a thorn; like blood. A thaw in the winter, a silence in the storm.

And of itself the comb begins to tell, the song to sleek the endless nightfall of my lady's hair. There is a far voice answering, as if they work from hand to hand; as if a skein of yarn is winding in a clew. The cradle-tide of story rocks between them, nurse and child: Ashes to Ashes, then and now and then.

They tell the Annis witch asleep.

The ravens came at barley, flying from the east. They broke the mist and saw the black cliffs sheer beneath them, flint-flaked with a yell of birds; they saw the steep green rising, and the maze of stones, man-set, a moorweb. They saw sheep, and knew the blackfaced ewe was dying; saw the dead lamb at its fork. They saw a woman by a stone house, grinding at a quern. They stooped. One sat on the rigpole, the other on the wall, crying hoarsely to its make. They'd spied her out. She banned them; they flapped and rose, derisory, and called. A third came wheeling from the law, unmoonwise. Something fell into her lap, a small thing, like a grain of corn: a milkwhite stone. A sort.

Siorvar rose heavily, for she bided her nine moons; she went in, stooping at her low skin door. Her work was doing and undone, and all to do. She would ask her weaving what the stone forespelled; though her blood knew. By the hearth stood her loom of whalebone, warped and weighted down with stones, all sea-thirled: cracked or cloudy, black and white and red. This, green as hailstorm but undying, Tharri Thrasi's dam had found, between the water and the land; that, nightblack with the stars’ long swirl on it, had caught between the sea and sky: Pirr, climbing with a strayed lamb on her back, had found it, brought it landward in her mouth. Look, the moon's egg, she had said: that winter brooded it, breasthigh in snow. That round blue rock had drawn a call of whales behind it, flinching on the shore. The stone called sunwise was the eldest, drowned at hallows, found at lightfast burning on the waves.

Slowly, she began to weave. She'd warped the moorit and the shaela threads, in the pattern called the shoal of seals. But as she wove, she saw a strange thing growing in her web.
Tree
, she said, and named it in the Cloudish tongue. Her own had none. She's seen its bones, like an old man's wracked with winters, lying on the shore. The bones of Cloud, they called it, Mallywrack. She knew the rime. She spoke it as she wove: “No fell, but full of bones..."

She will sleep this while,
the witchcomb said of Annis.
Go.
Whin took to owl-wise; she rose in spirit, circling to the north, to Scarristack of the unleaving stars.
Bring me my arts. I hid them ere I left.

At hallows eve, the windwife saw the owl and greeted her: swift, softer than a fall of snow, and sharp as frost to kill. It came from the north, from the eye of the witch, at dusk as the fires leapt. She felt a pang, as if the beak and claws had torn her, and she knew her time. By moonset, hallows day, beside the bare loom in the straw, she bore her daughter. Imbry, she named her, whispering; and saw the cloudblue on her sealdark eyes, her father's eyes, like sky on rockrent water.

Towards lightfast, Siorvar dreamed of fire. A woman, wreathed in fire, riven like a stone. Waking, she saw the moon through the wind-eye, waning; heard the breathing of her bairn, happed soft in eiders, lying at her breast. She touched the dark head, sleeping. New and wise, she thought: the old moon in the new moon's arms, that bore it and was born of it, the lighter of its dreams.

She rose, and going to the kist of tree, took out her eldmother's comb. It was carved of sealbone, spiny like a hake's back, toothed on either side, called rime and rune. She unbound her hair. It fell about her, long as winternight, unstarred; and with the runeside of the comb, she combed it, and began to rime. Far north, she woke the stonewitch, sleeping in a coil of cloud and wind. She combed the cloud and skeined it, rimed a ring about the owling moon: a burr of frost, a broch of ice, a storm against the fire-bringing ship.

But softly as she sang, the wind rose in the roof, the loomstones clacked. At that, the baby woke and cried; the milk came starting to her breasts. “Hush, ba,” she said, and took her up. “Ah, hush thee, by thy father's fell.” She nursed. The cloud spell slid away, it spilled and spilled away in mist.

Whin saw the pale ship, rudderless, unmasted, make its landfall on the witch's isle. She saw a fire in the mist, the lantern at the soulship's prow: it shrank as it came onward, seemed a man. The huntsman, with his straw-white hair, the color of a bladesmith's forge at full, and he the knife. He bore a round thing in his hand: a wren's cage, but of iron, hung with strips of mortal skin. Still bloody, some of them, and others ghostly dry. All knowing, whispering. Lightfast and alone, he stood before the witch's sill. He stamped.

Now,
said her heart's tide, running seaward. It ravelled on the Teeth, it broke: a perturbation and a cloud of sand. Siorvar woke aghast. Still Imbry slept within her skincoat, brooded by her heart. The stone of milk within each breast thawed, wept. The bead of fire in the nightlamp welled. She drew the windeye's fell aside. Grey shadowless. The dream had been otherwise, ablaze. She saw it still within her eyelids: a skin boat, dip and dazzle on the sun's road, winking into dawn. But it was Lightfast: there would be no day. A paling in the dark, no more, the shoulder of a sleeper waked and turning in his earthy bed. The sun lay long in Ashes, in his winter grave.
The Lyke Road is his dream,
she said, remembering old Pirri's telling, with a pang. She held the babe so fiercely that she woke and squalled. For the last time, she suckled her and cleansed her and bound her to her breast. Then rising, the windwife roped her burden to her back.