Something Red (35 page)

“May have killed? And eaten . . . ?”

She looked away from him. “Must—must have killed; and they having killed, they eat.”

“And at the Ely Fair . . . ”

“Herself knew at once, when she met him, and touched him, what it was with him. She brought him back to himself then, as she has brought him back now: with her singing, and the amulet, and the drink.”

“The singing brought him back as well?” said Hob. “I thought it was the drink; or it might be the drink and the amulet, working together. The singing as well?”

She took the cramoisy gown from his hand and folded it, and then held the perse up against herself, looking down at it.

“Sure, the singing, that was a song of power, and didn’t it let Herself approach the Beast; there was little Jack left in that Beast, I’m thinking, and that little far down.” Nemain looked away, a little somber. “And there’s another thing, that they’re not knowing as we are, when they are
in that way, in that animal way, and they’re not always remembering who is their own, and who is not. When Herself drew nigh, she could bind it with the amulet, and then ply it with the drink to start the change back; but did she falter in that song, it’s we who’d been destroyed, all of us, and Jack all unknowing what he’d done till he awoke to himself.”

“And what did Herself sing over that drink, that it had such power?” asked Hob.

“I have not learned it yet myself; that will come to me when I’m ready.”

“And will I learn it?”

“You will not, nor any man; it is not something for men to know,” Nemain said, but she said it kindly.

“But Vytautas cast spells and glamours,” Hob objected.

“This drink, this singing, is that which Herself had from the Great Queen; whatever that smiling spalpeen may have used, it was not this drink, nor this singing,” said Nemain, getting angry all over again at the thought of the Lietuvan doctor, so that Hob thought it prudent to praise the perse gown, and the way the blue-gray color chimed with the green of her eyes, and so to slide away from the subject of Lietuvan sorcery.

CHAPTER 24

B
UT ON A NIGHT SOON AFTER
, attending Molly while she sat at Jack’s bedside, most of the castle asleep and the wind moaning around the corners of the keep, he pestered Molly with questions about Jack and his strange affliction.

“What sort of Beast is it that Jack becomes, Mistress? It is not a bear, nor a fox, nor a wolf . . . ”

Molly sat by a low table with a basket of carded wool from the castle stores, a distaff and spindle and, next to a small jug of the
uisce beatha,
a fired-clay mug from which she sipped from time to time. All women, from high to low, spun thread when time presented an opportunity; it soothed the hands, it freed the mind, and fine thread was always welcome. Molly was deft at it, as she was at so many things, even when she took strong drink.

“It is a Beast as the Fox was a Beast; ’tis some sort
of shapeshifter, but Jack’s after bringing it back from pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and ’tis some Southron Beast. I have never seen the like, not before, not since, but it can be dealt with as are other shapeshifters. It is my thought that there are those who can shift their shape, but what shape they choose, or that chooses them, may be different from land to land. Some become wolves, what we call a
coinríocht,
a werewolf; some become bears, and so on.”

“Like the berserkers, Mistress? You said the Northmen kings used them; how could they control them?”

Molly took a deep draft of the mug, then picked up her spindle.

“It is my thought that those cruel Norther sea-kings used them as another of their weapons, with the priests of Odin to control them, though they are a weapon that can turn in the hand: sometimes they fall to killing friend as well as foe, and I believe they were not well trusted.”

Molly attached a leader thread to the spindle, a stick with a wooden disk attached to the bottom for weight, then attached the leader to a bit of wool that she teased from the roving, the batch of unspun wool. She took another sip from the mug, and then rolled the spindle along the swell of her thigh, imparting a spin to the leader thread. Then she held the spindle up, the spin reversing as the weight hung free, imparting a spin to the carded wool, hooking the fibers into a thin strong thread.

“Or else the sickness was in among them, and it being brought on by the fury of battle. There are those that can control it somewhat, but mostly when it comes on them, it comes, and there’s nothing they can do: they must have their blood, their meat. It’s more often at night, and more often in moonlight, but by no means always. One skilled in the Art can control them, to some extent, someone like Vytautas.”

“Or like yourself, Mistress?”

She did not say anything for a moment; she concentrated on drafting out another piece of wool from the batch of roving, her dexterous
fingers moving speedily, albeit with care. At last: “Like myself. And that is not to be spoken of outside this family.”

A bit later Molly sent him to the stone basin to draw a pitcher of water. While the chill water was burbling from the wall, Hob suddenly thought back on her words: he heard her again saying “this family.” He considered this as he waited for the vessel to fill. In a little while he began to hum softly to himself.

B
ACK IN THE SOLAR
, Hob sat again to listen. The pitcher of water stood beside Jack’s bedside; the fire crackled, so hot that one side of Hob’s face was uncomfortable and he kept shifting to ease it. The firelight played about Molly’s face; her hands, strong and deft, flashed in and out of shadow as she spun the whirling spindle and teased wool from the batch. After a while she spoke again.

“I think that Lady Svajone could control herself while in the monastery: she was just after killing and eating before they stopped there. That poor monk. Brother . . . Brother . . . Athanasius, Brother Athanasius. And further, I think she was of no mind to have any doings with us, or rather I think Vytautas would have advised against us, against Nemain and myself. He cast a glamour on us the moment he sat down at that table, that we would not perceive her for what she was, nor he for a wizard. Nor I nor Nemain expecting it, not in the midst of the monastery; and we sitting there like lambs, all unawares. Once it has taken hold, well, isn’t all our judgment flawed from that very moment on. But still, caution would have advised him not to trifle with us.”

She paused; the wool had separated from the thread. She cursed in Irish, softly; then she pulled up a bit more wool from the batch in the basket, reattached it to the line on the spindle, resumed spinning. Hob watched, partly entranced from the repetitive motion.

“He would have been wary: he would have regarded the monastery as a kind of trap, and all those warrior monks, and we with them.”

“But, Mistress, the castle is also a kind of trap, and all those knights and men-at-arms, and you with them.”

“Aye, but by then she was desperate, and the storm growing—they could not leave in that, even they would die of the snow and the cold—and the hunger growing in her, and the moon strong. She had to change, and they had to hope for the best.”

The spindle whirled, sank; she twirled it again against the curve of her thigh; then let it hang again. Thread built up in a coil about the spindle. The fire spat, crackled; golden ash fled up the flue.

“Here is how I’m seeing it: they passed the inn, wanting to be away from us, and crossed the Dawlish, and headed south, and the bandits did not encounter them. Then they found the way sealed, where the land had slid down from the mountain, and she being able to wait no longer, she slew the masons. She would have sworn blood oaths against harming her Lietuvan grooms and servants, they being her countrymen, and her needing them in any case; and of course that vile doctor and those two blond lapdogs were the three of them her paramours.”

“All three, Mistress?” To Hob’s dismay, his treasonous new voice broke into a squeak on the second word. He still had enough of Father Athelstan’s influence left in him to be genuinely shocked. “But how could you tell?”

“I could tell, I could tell. Once you broke Vytautas’s hold upon my vision, I could tell, by the memory of the way they moved around her. And I could smell them all on her corpse; I could smell her on Vytautas and the others, dead though they were.”

“Smell!” blurted Hob, staring.

“Can a crow smell a corpse half a league away? You would be surprised at the senses the Crow Mother grants me, when She wills it.”

Hob gave a kind of mental shrug, exhausted by wonder piled upon
wonder. There was no question of doubting Molly. He was silent, and after a bit she resumed.

“Now she is sated for the moment, feeding on the masons in the woods, away there by that great slide, but her time is waxing, it will be days before it wanes, and she comes back to the inn. Osbert’s Inn has a kind of fame. It is isolated, the villagers retire in the evening, there is human meat confined in a kind of pen, and she and her people can be away again before morning. Also there is Osbert’s storehouse. That was a great riddle to me, that some Beast or berserker had slain all within, and yet would be human enough and cunning enough to seek gold for its purse, for they are ever confused and helpless when they change back: their minds are still somewhat the same as a Beast’s for a while, and an animal does not understand treasure.”

She put the spindle on her lap for a moment, keeping her place on the tongue of roving she had teased out. She took up her mug and drank off a couple of swallows; put it down; wiped at her eyes, which had begun to tear a bit as the strong drink made its influence felt. She picked up the spindle again.

“But it was Vytautas who directed the looting of Osbert’s gold. Think you: they must travel and travel through strange lands, and gold buys many favors, and they far from their holdings, and having no way to enrich themselves, save that Vytautas and her pets follow in her wake, like scavenger birds, and despoil the slain. So they maintained themselves.”

Hob sat and listened, enthralled. The night hour, the chill late-winter wind outside, Molly’s quiet voice, gave the chamber a sheen of enchantment. Even the mug, made of brown iron-rich fired clay, decorated with rampant lions that the potter, adding a touch of copper to the clay, had rendered in green, even this humble mug seemed to glow in the firelight; and Molly’s tumble of gray hair seemed wrought of iron and silver in the gleam of the flames.

“It was her cry we were hearing that day at Osbert’s Inn, and she ranging the nearby woods. When they’re seeing us make the rounds of the walls, they’re quick to withdraw into the forest for a few days, fearing to engage us. The night after we left, and ourselves camping by that little ford over the Dawlish, she struck, and killed all within the inn, like a stoat in a rabbit warren.

“The next day they were away south again, and they took the second path to Dickon’s Ford, for I think they were aware of us at all times, and where we were, and Vytautas seeking always to avoid us. He was a man of power, and when she was in her human guise, I could detect nothing of her nature, nor yet of his, and all because of the glamour he had cast upon Nemain and myself in the monastery. But he knew me, and Nemain, knew us for women of power, and he feared us, and mayhap he sensed the Beast in Jack, although I had thrust it down, far down.”

She paused and put her spindle in her lap again. She picked up the mug, but paused with it halfway to her lips, looking into the fire with blind eyes, retracing the position of the two caravans, hers and Lady Svajone’s.

“So they’re passing us in the forest, and we returning with poor dying Sawal, and it’s then that Nemain and I were feeling that something was in the west, or
should be
in the west, but could never sense nor see them for the blindfold of moonlight and spellcraft that Vytautas had bound about our eyes. They forded the Dawlish and set off east on the castle path, and we yet at the inn, discovering her handiwork.”

She finished the mug; exhaled heavily; put the mug down with a thump. Immediately she poured some more of the
uisce beatha.

“Mistress, I could not move when the doctor had cast his spell, but you spoke and you slapped him, and you silenced him. And he could not break your spell when you slapped him, nor say a word. How comes that, Mistress?”

“I was ready for him, as I was not at the monastery. And mind, it’s
the men are stronger than the women when iron or stone must be lifted and carried, but it’s the women who are stronger in spellcraft: so the world is arranged.”

The fire settled, the smaller branches transformed into ash and ember; two large logs were still licked about with flame. A cold draft skittered along the floor, and Hob shifted a bit closer to the fireplace. Another thought occurred to him.

“Mistress, why did you not throw your dagger at the Fox, as you did in the hall? Surely you could have hit its eye?”

She laughed. “You remind me of Nemain, when she was younger, questions upon questions. Nay, you remind me of myself, one who must know everything. It’s a way to gain power, that asking, and not the worst thing in the world. In the hall I must convince Sir Jehan that I was all that I claimed, and not some traveling beguiler, as he was coming to believe. The dagger cast, the chess, the harping, all those were to this end, to preserve our sanctuary here, and besides, he was after offending me, and myself thinking it time to bring him up short.”

She sighed. “But to throw steel at a Beast . . . they’re hardly noticing it, betimes: iron will not bite, it does not do them great harm. They are best destroyed as animals destroy each other, living body to living body, as those Templar destriers trampled Jack’s assailant Beast.

“There is another reason, as well: before even we left the solar, I was after beginning Jack’s change, and casting him at the Fox by spell and instruction. When we encountered the thing, away there in the upper gallery, Jack’s course was set, and having cast him at the Fox, I had yet to bring him under control again afterward, and back to himself, works of power. To work power with a bloody hand is to chance failing in the spell, and that would have been death to us all. And besides, I swore that Jack would be my weapon, and it is peril to go back on words like that, words of high purpose: it is itself like working power with a bloody hand.”