Haunt Me Still (7 page)

AS WE NEARED
the foot of the stairs, we heard a strange, almost inhuman keening, and every hair on my body rose. Ducking back into the hall, we found that most of the company had drifted off to their rooms and the lights had been dimmed. Those who remained had gathered at the french doors, thrown wide open to the night. The sound was drifting in from outside.

Among them was the white-haired woman who’d been so nervous about the curse, Effie Summers…another of the witches. She was looking back at us, her mouth shaped into a long narrow “o” of fear; a low, whining sob laid a line of guttural bass under the strange song filling the air.

“Effie,” said Lady Nairn, “what’s happened?” Gripping my wrist, she drew me through the room.

Shaking her head, Effie pointed at the doors.

I eased forward to look outside. The moon had set, leaving the night sky awash in stars. The pines ringing the house seemed to scour the horizon as they swayed in the wind. On the lawn below, candles marched in a flickering circle, and in its midst stood a woman.

No—a girl. Lily, her dress rippling in the wind. Slowly, she began to raise her arms skyward, and I realized that the keening was swelling from her throat. At her feet lay what looked like a small gleaming fountain. I stepped onto the balcony, squinting through the darkness. It was a mirror, laid on the grass.

.

Behind me, a voice cracked into prayer. “
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name.
” Gripping her cross before her, Effie sank to her knees. Beside her, Lady Nairn raised one hand to her mouth and went still.

On the lawn below, Lily swayed a little. Her arms, still rising, had reached shoulder height, the long sleeves streaming behind her. Still singing her wordless song, she began to spin.

“
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
…,” Effie growled.

Lily’s spinning quickened, her feet stamping the ground.

All along the front of the house, other windows were thrown open, filled with dark figures staring into the night. Still others, I realized, were gathering in the hall behind us.

“
Deliver us from evil,
” whispered Effie. “
For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
”

Down on the lawn, Lily noticed neither Effie nor the gathering crowd. Her voice had lost all contact with individual sounds, stretching into an inhuman whine, a moaning of wind or of ghosts. Arms stretched high over her head, she was spinning so quickly that she’d become a blur.

Holding the cross out before her, Effie suddenly rose and strode to the balustrade, lifting her voice with all the wrath of a prophet. “
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!
”

A gust circled the lawn, rattling the windows, and most of the candles went out. With a great cry, Lily flung down her arms and fell to the ground. For a moment, there was no sound but the wind roaring in the trees. Her face taut, small flecks of foam caught at the corners of her mouth, Effie turned to Lady Nairn. “Thou shalt not suffer—”

Lady Nairn rounded on her, cutting her off. “
Effie!
”

She blinked. Her voice had dissolved to a dry whisper. “This is what comes of allowing satanic rituals under your roof.”

“Wiccan, not Satanic,” said Lady Nairn shortly. “There’s a difference. As for ‘allowing,’ I wasn’t consulted, and, technically speaking, she’s not under my roof.”

Still clutching the crucifix, Effie was panting a little. “Pray for her,” she said quietly. Turning around, she glimpsed the gathered crowd, scanning it from one end to the other. “
Pray for her,
” she said again. “
Pray for us all.
” With one last glance of reproach at Lady Nairn, Effie stumbled back through the room, the crowd parting to let her through in silence.

“Puts the ‘effing’ in ‘complete effing lunatic,’” said Jason as she disappeared through the door. Around him, the silence splintered into nervous laughter.

Down on the lawn, Lily stirred. Lady Nairn had seen it, too. “Exhibitionist little fool,” she said under her breath. “If I ever get my hands on Corra ravensbrook, I’ll bloody well throttle her.” She glanced at me. “Meanwhile, if you run across Ben, tell him I want to see him. And that blasted knife.” With that, she hurried out.

So much for seeing the drawing of the original knife,
I thought with irritation. And who the hell was Corra ravensbrook? Not knowing what else to do with myself, I wandered back up toward my room.

“Kate,” said Ben as I reached the top, and I stopped as if I’d run into glass. He was perched on a sofa in a small sitting room just off the landing. He’d changed back into jeans and a sweater. Resting his chin on both fists, he was staring at a low table before him.

I went to the doorway and stopped again. Sybilla was nowhere to be seen. He rose. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re a colossal bastard, you know that? You should have told me.”

“I tried.”

“You should have made sure.”

“Fair enough.” He eyed me in silence for a moment. “Look, I didn’t know you would be here, or I wouldn’t have come. I won’t stay.”

“Surely we can both act like professionals for the length of one weekend,” I said stiffly.

“In that case, you want to take a look at this?” He motioned toward the table in front of him. On it lay my knife, his BlackBerry, and a pad of paper crossed with a line of bold lettering. He’d transcribed the runes from the knife onto the paper.

I crossed the room and looked down at the pad:

“You read runes, Professor?” His old nickname for me, from my roots in academia, though I’d left the ivory tower for the theater long before I’d achieved that exalted status.

“Two r’s, a couple of slanted f’s, and some butterflies,” I said shortly. “In other words, no.”

“Thank God for Google,” he said, handing me the BlackBerry. On the Web, he’d pulled up a table of runes and their modern equivalents. In spite of myself, I was interested. Staring at the small screen, I lowered myself onto the arm of the sofa. “The f’s turn out to be A’s,” he said, “and the butterflies are D’s.”

Letter by letter, I translated the word into the modern roman alphabet, and he wrote them in large block letters beneath the runes:

RIADNADR

“Make any sense to you?”

I shook my head. “Couldn’t even tell you the language.”

“Bloody useless. Don’t you at least know a bona fide professor of runes we can call?”

“Past midnight?”

“How about Eircheard?” asked Lady Nairn.

I jumped. She was standing right over us. Next to her stood Sybilla, in jeans and a jacket, her hair floating about her face in wild ringlets. She was impossibly, preposterously beautiful. I could have throttled her.

“Is that it?” Lady Nairn asked with a glance at the knife.

I nodded and Ben held it out to her, but she just stared, as if it might bite. It was Sybilla who reached for it in the end, her fingers drifting across Ben’s.

“Eircheard is a professor?” I asked.

“He’d find that amusing,” said Lady Nairn. “No. He’s a swordsmith. Which means he actually
uses
runes, in addition to studying them.”

“What does it say?” asked Sybilla, looking wide-eyed at Ben. “That,
bella donna,
is what we’re trying to figure out.”

Bella donna
? I got saddled with “Professor” and she got “
bella donna
”? Okay, so it meant “beautiful lady” in Italian. Like it or not, that was accurate. But I had a sudden savage jolt of pleasure that “belladonna” was also the name of an ancient and potent poison.

Lady Nairn touched my arm. “It was Eircheard who made the stage knife. The one you saw downstairs. My husband let him refit an old byre down the road into a smithy, and took the knife in payment. Eircheard researched it for months, poring over every bit of knowledge he could glean about the knife William Nairn found on the hill. He must know as much about it as anyone.”

“Do you think he made this one?” asked Ben.

Lady Nairn tapped her chin with one finger, thinking. “Do you know, I believe a late-night visit to the gallus Eircheard is in order.”

“I’ll come too,” announced Sybilla.

The house was quiet and dark. On the lawn, the candles still stood in Lily’s circle, though their flames had long since blown out. Leaning at crazy angles, some of them had spilled wax onto the grass.

It was one of those startlingly clear nights of late autumn, hushed as if waiting. A faint scent of woodsmoke, thin as a dim memory, haunted air otherwise clean and crisp. Something about the star-scattered depth of the blackness overhead squelched small talk. I tried not to notice Sybilla holding Ben’s hand.

We stepped quietly down the drive, footsteps crunching on the gravel, and into the road. With the hill looming over us, we turned left, skirting its steep slopes. Five minutes later, we came to the road that we’d driven in on the night before, leading off around the hill to the right. Crossing it, we stayed on the lane, which plunged straight ahead into thick woods on either side.

We heard the smithy before we saw it, the rhythmic clank of steel hammering steel gradually separating itself from the measureless moan of the trees.
Clang, clang, clang.
Pause. And then again.

I glimpsed lights through the branches, and then the trees fell away. In the midst of a wide field sat a low stone building with only three sides; the fourth was open, like a doll’s house, to the Scottish elements. Inside, the forge glowed white, yellow, and orange in the night. Eircheard, in a leather apron, gloves, and goggles, was hammering a long rod of white-hot steel against an anvil.

We strode up to the edge of the smithy. Though the night was crisp and the building was entirely open at one end, the heat coming off the forge made the whole place uncomfortably warm. “Eircheard,” called Lady Nairn, but got no answer through the hammering. With every stroke, bright burning flakes of scale scattered around the anvil like falling stars, as if we’d walked unawares into the midst of some creation myth, watching a squat god forge new constellations for the deeps of space. “Eircheard,” Lady Nairn called again. Still no answer.

Taking the knapsack from Ben, I drew out the knife, brushed past Lady Nairn, and slid it onto the anvil alongside the long piece of steel he was shaping into a sword. The whorls and curls in the finished blade undulated like a living thing in the firelight. For a split second, the hammer stilled in midair before clattering to the ground. Pulling me close, Eircheard wrapped an arm around my neck. Something flashed in his other hand, and I felt the prick of cold steel against my throat.

“Where’d you come by that blade?” he demanded.

A GAINST MY BACK
, I could feel Eircheard’s chest heaving for breath, the dry skitter of his heart. He gave me a quick shake. “
Where?
” he growled.

Before I could answer, Lady Nairn stepped into the light. “Not from me,” she said.

“fegs,” said Eircheard, dropping me so quickly it almost felt like a shove. “It’s yourself. Why didn’t you say so?” Tossing his knife on a large round table, he stared at it, panting. Then he turned to me. “Saw the knife, lassie, not yourself. Thought you’d taken what wasn’t yours to take. No harm done, though, eh?” He extended a meaty hand, now empty.

Still dazed, I shook it.

Ben had seized the rune-engraved knife from the anvil the moment Eircheard grabbed me. With a nod at him, Eircheard pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his brow, beaded with sweat. “I’d still like to hear where you came by that blade, though.”

“On the hill,” said Lady Nairn. Behind her, Sybilla was pale. The handkerchief stilled in the middle of Eircheard’s face. He peeped out from under it. “Dunsinnan Hill?” When Lady Nairn said nothing, his glance slid to me.

“I fell asleep. It was there when I woke.”

“You ken it’s a fairy hill?”

I nodded.

“Then you’re either gallus, lass, or goamless. Foolhardy, or just plain foolish.” He shook his head, thrusting the handkerchief back into his pocket. His eyes flashing, he thrust out his other hand. “Let’s have a wee look at it, then.”

Ben glanced at Lady Nairn, who nodded. Reluctantly, he set the knife in Eircheard’s hand.

Eircheard moved so that the blade caught the firelight better. Pulling off his goggles, he drew a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from another pocket and shoved them on his nose, which he put right down near the blade. He looked, I couldn’t help thinking, like some young, ginger-bearded Santa Claus.

His eyes locked on Lady Nairn, his breath exhaling in a long, whistling sigh. “I’d like to say I made it, but no. I’ve made another very like it, but mine has no runes. Nor an edge, neither.”

“Edges can be honed,” said Lady Nairn softly, “and runes can be added.”

“So they can,” he replied, “but the pattern in the blade is forged into the steel in its making and cannot be changed. And that pattern’s not mine. You ken your own, see, like you ken your own bairns.”

“Can you read the runes?” asked Sybilla.

He ran a stubby finger down the center of the blade. Almost a caress.

“We tried,” I said, “but all we came up with was RIADNADR. Which I can’t make heads or tails of.”

Eircheard cocked his head, his eyes suddenly twinkling, the way they had when he’d teased me before dinner. “So that’s what the delegation’s about it, is it?” His gaze rested on me. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve used Norse instead of Anglo-Saxon runes, but other than that, you’ve got the tail—the last half of the word—right. It’s the head, I expect, where you went wrong. The first three letters are worn, see, and you missed some strokes.” Handing me the knife, he went to a workbench and rustled about, returning with a rag and a can of some kind of grease. As the four of us leaned in around him, he dipped the rag into the grease and passed it over the bright surface of the blade. As if he’d revealed invisible ink, other lines appeared, faint but there, so that

became

In other words, he explained, RIA became BLO, so that the inscription read not RIADNADR but BLODNÆDR. “runic shorthand,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “for
Blod Nædder
. Blood Adder.”

“Blackadder’s vampire brother,” quipped Ben.

Eircheard looked up in reproach. “You can say ‘Blood Serpent’ if it’ll keep you from laughing like a daftie at what’s not funny. Likely it’s the knife’s name. A common kenning—poetic metaphor, that is—for ‘sword.’” He ran a finger along the back of the knife. “Makes sense. It’s a classic Sassenach shape, this. Called a
seax
. A single-edged short sword or long knife, often with this angle along the back. Terrible fierce cutters, these are.” He glanced up at Ben. “Nothing funny about the damage they can do.”

“Whoever made this knife,” I said slowly, “must have seen Lady Nairn’s.”

“Or the dig notebook,” said Lady Nairn.

With a grunt, he limped into the shadows at the far end of the building and rummaged about, returning presently with a roll of photocopies on oversized paper. Dropping it on the table, he thumbed through the pages and drew one out, unrolling it and weighting its corners with an old coffee mug, a small hammer, and two twisted bits of steel. It was flecked with burn marks and ringed with coffee-cup stains. “Working copy,” he said sheepishly, smoothing a hand over the stains, as if he might wipe them away. “Never left this building.”

The drawing was life-sized, delicate lines done in pen and ink, and though the ink had faded a bit, it was a near photographic copy of the knife in my hand. The runes were smudged, as if someone had rubbed them out. But the pattern in the blade was remarkably exact.

“But that’s a drawing of this knife,” I said slowly, “not the other way round.”

Eircheard sat down suddenly, running a hand over his bald head. “So it is, lassie, so it is.”

Lady Nairn frowned. “That drawing was made in 1799. Are you suggesting that this is an eighteenth-century knife?”

A grumble of dissent rose from deep in Eircheard’s throat. “Cannot be,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s pattern-welded, like I said. A process that was lost for centuries before archaeologists and smiths put their heads together in the twentieth century and worked it out again.” He touched the knife with one finger, as if it might disappear. “So you see, it’s either under a hundred years old, probably well under—or nigh on a thousand.”

The fire had cooled from white and lemony yellow to richer oranges. In the silence, the whole room seemed to flicker. The knife, too, seemed to be flickering.

“So if it’s the original of these drawings—” I swallowed hard. “Then nigh on a thousand would be right.”

I stared at the blade, its strange markings exactly mirrored in the drawing. “That’s impossible,” I said slowly. “Isn’t it?” for a moment, all of us stood in a circle staring down at the knife.

“Could a blade survive that long in this condition?” asked Ben. “Still bright, still holding an edge?”

“I don’t ken of any,” said Eircheard. “But I don’t ken any reason why one couldn’t, were it taken care of properly. Not on a Scottish hill, mind. Or
in
one, at any rate. Our hills are a wee bit damp, if you haven’t noticed, and damp’s no friend to a bonnie bright blade such as this. But taken care of—well, steel’s wonderful strong stuff.”

The heat of the forge was suddenly making me dizzy. The battle in 1054 had pitted Macbeth’s Scots against Malcolm’s invading army of Sassenach Northumbrians—a combination of northern Anglo-Saxons and Viking mercenaries. Had one of them carried this knife?

Nigh on a thousand years old.
I found myself staring at a corner of the drawing. In a fine copperplate hand, someone had written a few lines of description. I read them aloud:
Black hilt of fine-grained wood. A polished steel guard. Barbarian inscription down the center of the blade, and another around the hilt.

I looked up. “Another inscription?”

“Well, now,” Eircheard said, stroking his beard. “I’d forgotten about that.”

I picked up the rag and dipped it in the oil, brushing it around the metal ring at the base of the hilt, where it joined the blade. Very faintly, runes appeared, running around the perimeter in an unbroken ring. No beginning, no end—not even any divisions between words. “It’s a round,” said Eircheard softly. “A phrase that begins and ends with the same word or syllable. But on the blade, see, that word’ll only be engraved once. So that the phrase runs round and round in a never-ending circle. Strong magic, that was thought to be.”

Pulling a pad of paper toward him, Eircheard turned the knife slowly until he found a word he recognized and began transcribing, first dividing the runes into words and then putting them into the modern alphabet:

He bit his lip, concentrating. “
Buto
plus an abbreviation for
thætte,
‘Except that,’” he murmured. “Northumbrian dialect. Then you skip to
bith,
or ‘is,’ negated by
na ne,
or ‘not.’ Then
nawiht,
‘nothing,’ and
a,
or ‘always.’” He scribbled out the whole sentence in block letters:

EXCEPT THAT WHICH IS NOT NOTHING ALWAYS

“Sounds more Eeyore than warrior,” said Ben.

Eircheard ignored him. “Like I said, it’ll make a phrase that begins and ends with the same word. Let me think….” He sat staring at the blade, his fingers rubbing his temples.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said after a few minutes, his breath coming out in a long whistle. “It’s
bith.
” Hunching over the pad, he wrote out another line, rearranging the words:

BITH NAWIHT A BUTO THÆTTE NA NE BITH

“What’s it mean?”

It was Sybilla who’d asked the question, but it was me he looked at as he answered it. “Nothing ever is but that which is not,” he translated.

“Begins and ends with ‘not,’” said Ben. “I like it. It’s even a round in modern English.”

The whole smithy seemed to be rising, spinning around me. “You know it in its shorter form, lass, no?” Eircheard asked softly.

I nodded, and my throat moved, but no words came out. It was Lady Nairn who spoke, her voice no more than a dry whisper. “
Nothing is but what is not.
”

Ben frowned. “Sounds familiar.”

“It’s Shakespeare,” said Lady Nairn. “It’s
Macbeth,
” I said, the words seeming heavy, slow, impossible, as they floated away from me.

Sybilla glanced at all of us in turn, frowning. “But I thought you said the knife was a thousand years old. How can it quote
Macbeth
if it’s a thousand years old?”

“It can’t,” I said. “It would have to be the other way around.”

“Runes can be added,” Lady Nairn said again, her voice harsh as a crow’s.

“In Old English verse?” shot Eircheard. “Complete with alliteration, correct stress, and decent meter? Possible, not likely.”

I ran a hand through my hair. “But that means swallowing the notion that Shakespeare not only marched up to Scotland and saw this knife, but that he could read Anglo-Saxon—in runes, no less. It’s absurd.”

The blade winked mockingly in the light.
Nothing is but what is not.

Eircheard went to a cupboard, where he drew down five mismatched tumblers and a squat, wide-shouldered bottle of single-malt Scotch. “A blade called Blood Serpent, ringed with an unbroken verse about the intertwined web of being and not being—that’s a blade that has killed plenty,” he said as he splashed a finger of amber whisky into each glass and shoved them around the table. “But Ben’s right. The inscription doesn’t read like a warrior’s thought.” His eyes met Lady Nairn’s.

“It reads like magic,” she said.

He nodded. “I think you’ve found a ritual blade. Never seen one, mind you, but there are whispers of them in the old stories. If that’s the case, maybe it wasn’t this blade that Shakespeare somehow knew. Maybe it was the ritual it was used for.