Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (2 page)

And it was so good to be out of that filthy cottage! Birds sang from every branch in the woods. Crocuses and hyacinths bloomed in the sun, lilies of the valley in the shade. One day I bathed in a forest pool, longing for Joan Campford’s strong yellow soap. I washed my clothes as best as I could. With the little shaving knife
in my boot I shaved off my tangled beard and cut my hair. Then I lay naked under the strong sun while my clothes dried and, weary from such unaccustomed exertion, fell asleep.

And dreamed.

Darkness—

Cold—

Dirt choking my mouth—

Worms in my eyes—

Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

I was dreaming about crossing over. But the dream crossing brought me not to the Country of the Dead, which I had promised never to visit again, but rather to John the Small’s disorderly cottage. Mrs John sat at the table, shelling nuts I had brought her, popping nut meat into little Jemima’s mouth. The baby slept in its ramshackle cradle. For once, the cottage was quiet.

All at once, another presence entered the dream, although not the cottage. A shadowy presence … No, not even that. A grey whisper, somewhere between a scent and a sound … It was vague but unpleasant. Perhaps Mrs Johns felt it, too. For in the dream she stopped shelling nuts, her hand suspended in the air, holding a broken black walnut, and her eyes stared. At me, even though I was not in the cottage.

A long moment spun itself out.

Then I woke beside the forest pool and the sun had gone behind a cloud, leaving me shivering and cold.

I dressed in my still damp clothes. The dream had been so mild compared to those I once dreamed, so why did it leave me uneasy? That unpleasant whisper in my mind … no, not even a whisper, merely a vague stirring of … what? A faint animal scent, a nearly inaudible sound. Trivial things, nothing to make me afraid. Not I, Roger Kilbourne, who had caused a battle to be fought and a
savage lord to die and a queen to burn. Who had killed the sister who once haunted his dreams.

Late afternoon shadows, long and deep, slanted over the cottage when I returned. Robbie, Ned and Bets screamed from atop the roof, where they played some game that threatened to topple them all into broken bones. Matt, too little to climb to the roof, had to remain below and bellowed at this foul injustice.

Inside was just as noisy. John the Small had not returned from wherever he’d gone, but Jemima cried and pulled at her mother’s skirts and the baby wailed. In the middle of this din, Mrs John was a single point of stillness. Not a muscle of her face or body moved as she faced me across her dirty table. Her grey hair straggled around her face. Fear filmed her eyes.

‘Ye maun go now.’

‘What?’ I said, inanely.

‘Ye maun go.’

‘I—’

‘Ye did not say what ye be. Now you maun go.’

What ye be
. She could have meant anything. A
hisaf
. A murderer. The former palace fool. Of all the things I could have said, I blurted, ‘How did you know?’

‘Go now.’ And then, ‘I have me bairns to think of.’

‘I’m … I’m no threat to your children, mistress.’

‘Go.’

She was implacable. She handed me a packet: my waterbag, Tom Jenkins’ two knives, what smelled like food wrapped in leaves. And all the while her eyes held mine and I saw in them not only resolution but fear. It was the fear that decided me. These people, however crude and slovenly, had saved my life. I could not bring fear to them, not even when I believed there was nothing to fear. I took the packet and left.

But at the doorway I turned to try one last time. I must
know. I said, ‘Was it … did you … did you happen to fall asleep this afternoon, mistress? To … to dream?’

‘Go now.’

I went. From the roof top Bets, giggling, threw a pebble at me. This struck Robbie and Ned as a great idea and they scrambled to dig more stones from the thatch. There were none so they threw the thatch itself, and it was in a hail of straw that I left the cottage and set my feet upon the track down to the valley below.

2

In truth I was not sorry to go. It seemed to me that I was strong enough now for the journey or, if not, would soon become so. I had youth on my side; in another two months I would turn eighteen. And the weather had turned. When I tired, I could build a fire and stop for the night.

Exhaustion came earlier than I thought, before the thin track from the cottage had even joined a proper road. Sitting before my fire, eating the hard bread and harder roots that Mrs John had sent with me, I thought about her fear. The country people, not sophisticated enough to have abandoned the old ways, often believed in soul arts and
hisafs
. But that did not mean that they could recognize them. The only ones I knew of who could do that were women with talent in the soul arts themselves. Sometimes they didn’t even know they possessed such untutored talent, like Princess Stephanie. Sometimes they knew they did not but longed for it, like Queen Caroline. Sometimes they made of their talent a weapon to fight the war against Soulvine Moor, like Mother Chilton. The web of these women stretched across The Queendom, the Unclaimed Lands, Soulvine Moor itself. And Mrs John must be one of them, in some minor and untaught way. She had recognized me as a
hisaf
.

But only after I had dreamed of crossing over. It was through dreams that my sister Katharine, now more than merely dead, had terrorized little Stephanie and me. Through dreams Katharine had even killed Stephanie’s
attendants. But my sister was gone. And I would never cross over again.

I banked my fire and put Mrs John from my mind. For me, the battle against Soulvine Moor was over. I was journeying to Maggie. Again and again I pictured my arrival in Tanwell. I would tell Maggie I loved her, that I had been a fool not to know it sooner. She would cry, perhaps, and I would hold her and kiss her fair curls and lay my hand on the bulge of her belly that was my son. Then, afterwards …

I fell asleep smiling, happy to breathe in the sweet night air instead of the fetid cottage. I was journeying to Maggie.

However, the journeying was harder than I expected. I had not yet got back my full strength. The next day I had nothing to eat but some early strawberries. At the first farmhouse I came to, one cleaner and more prosperous than John the Small’s, I was able to buy some food and rest in the barn. So I continued for a few more days, and I felt my body return to itself.

But then the weather changed. Cold rain woke me before dawn. With sleep no longer possible, I set out walking, grumpy and shivering. The sun had risen unseen behind grey clouds when I came, sodden and weary, to the first town of The Queendom that I had encountered since last autumn. The village lay at the base of a series of steep hills, with a small river on one side. Abruptly the road to the east had broadened from a rutted track to a hard-packed surface. Cottages appeared like those in prosperous market towns, with fenced kitchen gardens and well-tended sheep pens and scrubbed front doors. On the river was a mill. An inn, the Blue Horse, stood on the main road.

But the road was filled with screaming people.

I gaped, confused, as a young man rushed from one
cottage, an old woman from another. The man dashed through the pelting rain and pounded on the door of another dwelling, but the woman stopped in the middle of the road and just stood there, as if too bewildered to move. I went up to her and touched her shoulder. She screamed and leaped away from me. Two of the other people pouring into the street rushed up and a man seized me.

‘Is it him? Is it
him
?’ He shook me roughly, like a terrier with a rat.

‘No, be ye daft, this one’s got but one hand!’ Someone said behind me.

The man let me go and ran to another cottage. As soon as he opened the door, screams poured out. The old woman still slumped motionless in the rain, her face a mask of dripping grief. I grasped her arm.

‘Mistress, you should go inside.’

She looked at me but I knew she was not seeing me but rather some horror. All at once her knees buckled and I caught her. People continued to rush past, but none came to her aid, or mine. The woman sagged against me, a dead weight on my good arm. I could not leave her there in the mud of the road so, not knowing what else to do, I pulled her towards the shelter of the nearest cottage.

The door opened directly onto a kitchen with a stone floor, trestle table, herbs hanging from ancient beams. The room was jammed with cottagers, grouped around something I could not see on the hearth. A middle-aged woman spied us and elbowed her way through the moaning people. ‘Mother! Thank you, lad, she was … it is ….’ The woman began to cry. But she took her mother from me and eased her onto a settle before turning back to me. ‘It is the shock … we … so many of them!’

So many of what?

I said as gently as I could, ‘What has happened here, mistress? I just arrived on the western road, looking for an inn …’

She nodded, distracted, and then abruptly focused her attention on me. ‘The western road? Did ye pass anyone?’

‘No.’ Few travelled in the rain, and fewer still from the western mountains.

‘You are certain? You didn’t see a big man with a black beard and green eyes?’

Green eyes
. My spine went cold. ‘I passed no one. Was … was someone like that here?’

‘Yes. He – all the poor infants – oh!’ She put her fist to her mouth and began to sob.

I elbowed my way through the crowd, which had begun to turn ugly.

‘—find him and—’

‘—can’t have gone far—’

‘—get Jack and Harry and Will and—’

The men began to pull away, organizing their hunt. A few glanced at me suspiciously but looked away as soon as they saw my one hand. The women continued to cry, their murmurs between sobs, almost incoherent. But I caught one word:

‘—witchcraft—’

I pushed to the front of the crowd.

On the hearth sat a young woman, her face gone numb with grief, holding a baby in swaddling clothes. I thought at first that the baby was dead, so motionless was it, its blank eyes staring at nothing. But then I saw that the child breathed. All at once the mother shook it, crying, ‘Wake up! Wake up, Neddie! Oh, wake up!’ She shook the baby harder, until an older woman stepped forward and stopped her.

‘There, Mary, leave off, it does no good, my dear—’

The girl crumpled, sobbing hysterically. The older woman took the infant from her. Another woman sat beside the girl, who in her wild grief shoved her comforter away.

‘
So many of them
,’ the woman on the road had said to me. I turned to the nearest person, a small fierce woman with red curls under her faded cap. ‘There are … there are more babies like this in the village?’

‘Aye, five of ’em, all under a year old.’ Her gaze sharpened. ‘Do you know anything about this, lad?’

‘No,’ I said, trying to look stupid, ‘unless … could it be plague?’

Of course it was not plague: wrong season, wrong symptoms, wrong victims. The red-haired woman’s interest in me vanished. It should not have.

I was the only person who understood what we all looked at it. No, that was wrong – I did not understand it, not at all. But I had seen it before: the blank stare, the inability to be roused, the breath without active life. I had seen it all my life, but not here, not in The Queendom nor in the Unclaimed Lands nor in the savage western mountains.

In the Country of the Dead.

Seven infants alive but not alive, five in the village and two more on outlying farms. By evening the local men, their hunt turning up nothing, had returned to take what comfort they could in the taproom of the Blue Horse. The rain had stopped but a dank chill outside made the innkeeper build up the hearth fire until it roared. Or perhaps it was a need greater than mere cold.

I had taken one of the small, clean, comfortable rooms upstairs, had paid for the luxury of my first hot bath in months, had slept off my weakness all afternoon, had
eaten a hearty dinner. Now I sat at one of the taproom’s long trestle tables, a tankard of ale in front of me, as the villagers came one by one to the room.

‘—cannot console her anyway, so thought I might as well hear what news to—’

‘—no change in little Bess and—’

‘—wanted me out of the way so she can—’

But their excuses for leaving their grief-drenched cottages did not last long. These men had spent all day searching sodden fields and woods for something they did not understand. They had found nothing. Faces tight, eyes hard, they turned to me.

‘Ye say ye saw no one on the western road, lad?’

‘No. No one.’

‘What’s yer name, then?’

‘George Tarkington.’

‘Where do ye come from?’

‘From my uncle’s farm in the high hills.’

‘And what be yer business in Rivertown?’ This from the roughest-looking of the men, who wore a
gun
strapped to his back. Had the blacksmiths of The Queendom learned in the last months to make
guns
and
bullets
, or had this one been taken from a savage soldier in some local skirmish before the invaders left The Queendom? I had been away since autumn; there was so much I did not know. The cottager eyed me suspiciously.

But I have had much practice both in lying and in looking innocent. ‘I’m travelling to Fairford. My—’

‘Where be this “Fairford”?’

‘Near the capital. My uncle died and left me our farm. I sold it to Samuel Brown and now I travel to live with my other uncle, my mother’s brother. He will apprentice me as an apothecary.’

‘Yer old to be an apprentice.’

‘I know,’ I said humbly, ‘but there is little else I can do.’
I raised the stump of my left arm. I could feel tension ease around the table.

‘So the sale of yer uncle’s farm is where ye got the money to travel?’ another man asked. This one had a more kindly expression.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, if ye go on spending it on hot water for baths ye won’t have much left for yer apprentice fee.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It was only this once. I had such a chill from the rain.’