The Last Stitch (The Chronicles of Eirie: 2) (14 page)

Chapter Twenty Three

The girl sat frozen, completely i
mmobile except for her head, her arms glued by her sides. She was pale, a spasmodic shudder shifting her shoulders, her eyes darting in the direction of every noise and her head turning. Phelim concealed himself under a willow with its trailing, leafy branches, standing amongst the elongated leaves of the spatterdock lily that reached to his waist. He was captivated by what he observed - by the girl’s smooth face and by her comely shape. She was dressed in the dark fustian of the Marshes, a pair of tight breeks tucked into eelskin boots and a seaweed green short tunic over all. A broad black ribbon anchored her silver hair to her forehead and the bulk of the beautiful swathe hung down her back and curled at the bottom. In the river breeze, tendrils blew about her face but she was unable to wipe them away. She turned her head into the zephyr to free the strands and turned back again, all the while an element of anxiety and tremulousness shadowing her face.

Phelim parted the willow fronds and slid his eyes over her fine visage with its moulded cheekbones. Her brown eyes reminded him of chocolate and her lips trembled as she surveyed her predicament. And as he continued to examine this ripe young thing, a mist began to trail around his shoulders and arms and a waft of something malicious slipped up his veins and into his soul and heart.

He jerked back, the willow sliding from his fingers, turning to source the unseelie thing that darkened his very existence to such damnation. But there was nothing. Just a ray of light from a willow-strangled sunbeam leading to his hidden position amongst the branches.

Nothing else.

No spirit, no shade - no shadow.

Phelim of Merricks, son of Ebba, sucked in his breath as he stared at the space behind him. He should, like any other living thing, have a shadow. But the grasses and plants lay naked. No darkness there, no shape, nothing to anchor his mortal body to the ground of the real world. Because Phelim wasn’t mortal and needed no earthly anchor, he could exist in two worlds. As the horrible realization filled half his mind, the other half laughed… a wicked, sadistic sound and the darkness that had entered his veins solidified.

The girl heard the laugh and looked in the direction of the willow, her breath coming in sharp little gushes. Around her the birds stopped singing, the air filled with expectation.

Phelim’s eyes focused completely on the girl and he could almost feel his pupils dilating to vast ebony saucers so that he knew, should she look into them, she would be in his sway and unable to deny him anything. The thought excited him, giving him a sense of power.

His mind filled with sweet, beguiling words the better to woo her and his body hardened and stiffened with fierce desire. He took a step forward and crunched a twig and the girl uttered a strangled yelp as sharp as the snap of that broken branch. The air by the riverbank filled with the
frisson
that is Other as Phelim appeared through the willow, the delicate branches trailing over his shoulders along with the eldritch mist. The fear in her eyes goaded him, for Phelim had become any or all of the Ganconer, the Far Dorocha, or the Dark haired Man.

But as the girl uttered a more piercing cry
, a miniscule part of the half-time mortal’s soul opened up and conscience crept out to stake a toehold in the struggle threatening to rent Phelim’s mind apart.

He knew
what she would see: a tall man whose dark hair curled on his collar, a carved face filled with the intent of seduction, a mouth desirous of kissing. His eyes pinioned her to the spot like a fish on the end of a knife and she squirmed, longing and fear intimately entwined. But she could not move, trapped in the mesmer like bait on a hook.

Phelim heard her cry... that part of him that vaguely remembered being mortal and disgust at his hard sexual needs, sympathy for her fear, pity for her misplaced desire welled up into a miserable fount. He moaned, fingers crushing into the hard palms of his hands as the Far Dorocha walked on, whispering precocious and daring love-talk.

The girl watched him with trepidation. She wanted him but she feared him and the expectation created trills of desire. She heard his words, uttered with such cunning devotion as he approached and she lusted like a thirsty mortal craving water and all idea that she could die from such surfeit melted from her willing body.

But within Phelim, a battle raged.
Gratification or not.

His heart ached and with a final effort, he grabbed the Far Dorocha by the neck and squeezed to the point of extinction. His body softened, the se
xual urge shriveling, shrinking; disgust pushing back the darkness.

Tears of realization fell down the girl’s trembling cheeks as she watched the mist dissolve from Phelim’s shoulders, his shadow stretching away from his toes as he slumped to his knees, sweat beading his forehead.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, birds beginning to chirrup again. ‘I wouldn’t hurt you.’ He wafted his hand and her frozen lower limbs loosened. She wrapped her arms around, protecting herself from what might befall her as he continued in an anguished voice. ‘You should not be here on your own.’ He turned his face away as he spoke.

‘Are you the Ganconer?’ She kept her distance but there sounded the faintest wistful tone as she asked.

‘The Ganconer?’ Phelim could hardly bear to mouth the name.
No, I am not the Ganconer, he is far from here. You will never meet him.
‘My dear,’ he tried to explain. ‘The Ganconer is like every Faeran male who would seduce a mortal woman. If I am desire, then maybe I
am
the Ganconer, I might
be
what you desire.’ He could hear the words falling from his lips but could scarce believe them, as though his mind and his voice were two different people. ‘
Every
Faeran male is desire. If you see us we can beguile you to the point of death. Tell your friends to beware or they shall be weaving their shrouds by nightfall.’

‘But you didn’t touch me. Why? Am I not attractive?’ The hurt face begged to be stroked and the man in front of her took further steps toward her.

He smiled and sighed. ‘
Muirnin,
you are lovely. Too lovely to waste your life on a Faeran dalliance. Lovely enough to belong to a mortal man who will cherish you as his wife and the mother of his children until you are old.’

She looked at him with longing and turned away, but stopped momentarily as if to thank him although she no doubt knew to offer gratitude to an Other was to offer offence of great magnitude. Instead,

‘I know who you really are.’ She gave him a grateful smile. ‘You’re the Red-Haired Man. I see it in your locks now the sun shines; there is the faintest wine-coloured tint here and there. Is it not true that you warn us against your race in the most altruistic way? That you lead us to safety from what harm could befall us, warn us against the Faeran way, bless us so that we shall not be abducted?’

Phelim heard the Lady’s words;
the Dark Haired Man and the Red Haired Man - you shall meet them on your journey.

‘
Beware,’ he warned. ‘Dusk approaches. If you want to avoid my brother the Dark Haired Man who is the chiefest abducter, and who is silent and powerful and cruel, then you must hasten to your home. Begone now.’ He turned his back and walked to the willow, casting himself invisible as he passed into the waving shade, only to turn and watch the girl in secret.

She stood looking to where he had disappeared, rubbing her forehead and shaking her head, but hearing a horn blowing far away, she turned and hurried toward Ferry Crossing and Phelim’s most immediate destination, her words flying behind her.

‘
I met the Love Talker one eve in the glen, He was handsomer than our handsome young men.
’

Silence swallowed the rest of her poem and birds filled the space with
prettier music.

Chapter Twenty Four

The girl’s descriptive verse had pricked every part of Phelim. The Dark haired Man… the Ganconer. If he had not battled the monumental darkness of desire that had been blood to his body, then the girl would have lain with him. Faeran would say it was not rape because she would have wanted it as much as he but Phelim knew she would have been befuddled and beguiled and at a complete disadvantage. Afterwards she would have remained numb to anything but the fantasy of love, her desire eating away at her body and mind as she searched every face for that of her Ganconer. Deprived of satisfaction and gratification, she would pine, becoming listless, refusing to eat.

Sadly she would, in her wiser moments, realize she was fading and choosing death with love rather than life without, she would spend night after long, cold and loveless night weaving her shroud and laundering it with a basin of bereft tears, ever alert to every noise should the Ganconer return to her door. But the Ganconer never returned and many a girl had pined to death, white skin and sharp bone.

Phelim closed his eyes at the image of what he had so very nearly caused, utterly cogniscent that the path of the Dark-Haired Man, the Far Dorocha, was the path of damnation. His legs trembled with weakness as if he had trod for years all over the world and his scalp almost split apart from his head as if an axe cleaved it, so great had been the battle with his Other side. He rested, slumped in the willow’s womb-like shade.

This then had been his coming of age. The girl saw him as Faeran, with all the attributes and abominations mortals believed Faeran could possess. He was struck dumb.
No longer of the world of men. How has this happened so quickly?
It was as though Ebba had opened a weir-gate when she had told him and all of his previous life had sluiced away.

And what would she feel now? Would she still love him as the son she had raised? And the Merricks people? They would despise him and be afraid, he was sure. His man’s heart, twenty-eight years of age, cracked a little. The girl had stared at him through eyes that were cautious and unsure. This was how it would be - everyone distrustful.

How angry he was. Angry at himself, angry at the girl, angry at Fate which had contrived to throw a large stone into the calm pond of his life and set up a thousand uneasy ripples. Turning him into the very antithesis of what he wished to be.

Fulsome, woody silence surrounded him, pressing down on his neck and shoulders and he heard the sarcastic snickering of sprites amongst the undergrowth. He thought of the girl and sought to follow her to her destination to see her safe but decided to give her a few moments to get ahead as he didn’t want to alarm her. The mocking whispering became louder as he waited and he spun around, fury filling his veins. Fate now stretched before him, illuminated and gilded in the gaudiest way by all the wretched tales he had ever heard of Faeran from mortal lips. A never-ending lifetime of loneliness, an infinity of being misunderstood.

His experiences of the past few days erupted into a fount of angry melancholy as he struggled against his predicament. The unwanted knowledge of his ancestry, leaving his home, the death of Lhiannon - too much too soon, even for a man of his age. So much of his life had been spent comfortingly in the knowledge, the surety, that his days would be spent like other men; working, laughing, eating, sleeping, crying even, but all shared within the close circle of the Merricks demesnes. The awful belief that such communal warmth was now lost to him forever, for it was, they would never countenance an Other living in their midst, it cut him to the very quick of his soul. He picked up a fallen bough and with a rising crescendo of roaring, flung it into the shrubbery, occasioning a shriek from whoever dwelled there.

The souls burned cold and with no comfort into his side.

Unwillingly and with no excitement and with the knowledge he had no choice, he followed in the girl’s footsteps.

Adelina and Gallivant had reached the outlying steading of a Marsher. Known to the hob to be a kind man of understanding, the hob prevailed upon Adelina to ask for a secret stabling of their mounts.

‘How do you know this man to have such integrity? Surely all mouths become indiscreet with money?’ She was leading Ajax by a loose rein along the narrow towpath at the side of one of the many shaded rivulets that laced through the Marshes. Gallivant and Bottom followed, the donkey snatching at sweet mouthfuls of river-grass, a long seed head hanging out of his mouth like the pipe of some grizzled old landsman.

‘I know of the integrity of the house, Adelina. He has had dealings with Others before and trusts us as we trust him.’

She had noticed the hob had become ever more serious of late, dour and crisp, so that she wondered if they had exchanged persona. But he had contrived her escape so she could do nought but listen and prevail upon by his advice.

She left her horse at the edge of the path and proceeded along a raised walk to the door of a house per
ched four square on thick piers over the water. At her knock, a rosy face answered and a bewhiskered mouth smiled when she politely asked for stabling. ‘Course I got room for your beasts and they’ll be well hid. It’ll be for the best. Come with me.’

She followed the Marsher back along the walkway to the towpath and gathering Gallivant and the rides on the way, made for a solid barn with wide swinging doors and positioned on an isthmus of land between rivulets. Myrtle and blackwood and skeins of marsh moss hid it from prying eyes. Inside stood a solid gentleman’s hunter that nickered pleasantly from its stall. Two stalls stood empty, the third of the four-stall barn filled w
ith a toffee-coloured house cow that broke from contented chewing of a wad of hay to turn and low at them, her eyes fringed by thick lashes. The Marsher trotted back and forth with arms of feed and pails of water. ‘Stick ‘em in the stalls. They’ll be safe while you do your business and when you’re ready, come back and they’ll be waiting.’

‘It’s very good of you, but I’m not sure how to p...’

Gallivant reached in front of Adelina and passed over a small clinking black bag. ‘That’s to be going on with.’ He smiled a serious, ‘business is business’ smile.

Adelina looked at the hob curiously. Just where did he get that from, the money and the manner?

‘Nay.’ The fellow passed the jingling bag back. ‘Pay me when you’re done. I prefer it that way. There now, look at that, they’re very happy.’

And indeed the two animals had pushed n
oses deep into the meadowsweet hay and betrayed no concern whatever as their owners left with the Marsher.

‘I don’t know how long we’ll be.’ Adelina shook hands with the man who reminded her a little of Buckerfield.

‘If you follow that path’, the Marsher pointed north, ‘that’ll get you to Ferry Crossing in next to no time.’ He looked at the sky that was beginning to darken. ‘And not a moment too soon. Now winter approaches, the nights are drawing in very hasty. Alright then, be off or the bogeys’ll get you in the dark.’ He waved as they moved away. ‘Cheerio.’

Their feet echoed on the hard timber planks of the boardwalk. In single file, passing the occasional journeyman walking in the other direction, they proceeded carefully for there were no protective handrails on either side. I’d not like to travel the walkway in the dark, thought Adelina, despite the lighted lamps placed every few feet. She looked at the dark green depths to either side and fancied she saw the leering faces of fuaths of all kinds, male and female.

‘Well, Threadlady,’ the hob spoke from behind, sensing her unease. ‘You wanted to go to Veniche and you must pass through the Marshes to do it.’ It was his turn to be acerbic. ‘I just can’t see that this little escapade will accomplish
anything.’

‘I want to see Lhiannon, hob, to know she is safe. I owe it to her because she tried to keep
me
safe. Besides she gave me your friendship, I am obliged to her for that if nothing else. And I’ve told you before, I have this feeling that all who know me are...’

‘Fated to die, I know, I know. Sink me woman, it’s ridiculous. And I fail to see how you being near the Gate, which I might add is another problem, is going to help with anything. Adelina, forgive me, but you
are
mortal and will be more of a hindrance than a help with this quest Lhiannon must carry out. Other business is best left to Others, trust me.’

‘Well pardon me for caring, hob.’ Adelina muttered under her breath. She strode along, bigger steps that caused Gallivant to trot to keep up. ‘And
sink me,
why is me being near the Gate another problem?’ She mimicked his tone as she posed the question. Behind her she heard a tired sigh and slowed down.

‘It’s not exactly you being near the Gate that’s the problem, Adelina. It’s... oh, it’s that I don’t exactly know where it is in Veniche. No one does except the Faeran. So you see, this whole thing is a bit of a wild goose chase during which you lay yourself open to discovery and, let’s not be coy about this, death because we will never find Lhiannon
, I’m sure. If Severine chances upon you, she will snuff out your flame,’ he blew a breath out sharply, ‘just like that.’

He stopped and she halted as well and turned around carefully because she didn’t want to overbalance into the arms of the Nicker. She took a step toward the hob and hugged him. ‘You’re right, I know. But Gallivant, I have been such a victim and I think to myself of all whom I loved and who have displayed such outrig
ht courage. I must be brave too. And if I could just know Lhiannon is still alive it would lift my spirits beyond the pervasive grief that I live with. Please try and understand.’ She took his slim hands in her own and squeezed them. ‘Look at it this way if you like. I am a woman and a mortal into the bargain, so nothing much I say is going to make any sense, is it? We are not regarded by Others as the most clear-thinking bunch, are we? But I can tell you this - I am aware there may be danger and if you can bear with me knowing that I might be your poison as much as anyone else’s, then I would rather have none but you by my side and at my back.’ She smiled the golden smile that so charmed Buckerfield and had brought Kholi melting like butter in the sun, to her side.

The lights along the boardwalks lit up Ferry Crossing, little golden will o' the wisps,
delicate, pretty and enticing. The lamplighter proceeded through the unusual town calling ‘Light time, night time’ and children circled around him like moths to the flame. Yellow patterns shivered and wavered on the water that meandered through the Marshes. In places undisturbed by the dancing night airs, one could look down and think a depository of topaz or bullion lay below the surface. It could be a trap for the unwary, thought Adelina, designed to draw some negligent, greedy mortal into the waters of the Pealliadh or the Addanc and from there to their deaths. She shivered.

To her left and right, boardwalks led to four square wooden
buildings on thick wooden stumps and with skillion rooves and finials which in daylight would have revealed the carved shapes of marshbirds. And by way of an address, that is how one found one’s way in Ferry Crossing - to the House of the Swan, the House of the Egret, the House of the Moorhen and so forth.

Gallivant led the two of them to the Inn of the Thrush, a comfortable hostelry on the seaward side of the town and whose rooms overlooked the broad s
weep of the laguna. At night, one could look to the north over those waters and see a hazy aura of light cushioned by the horizon… Veniche, its glow beckoning and enticing.