The Swan Kingdom (18 page)

My groping hand had grabbed hold of something as I came down, and the skin of my palm now exploded with searing pinpricks of pain. I instinctively stifled a curse of pain as I nursed my burning hand and looked up.

All around me and halfway up the stone formation they grew: vivid green nettles, their tips decorated with tiny purple flowers and an impressive display of long spiny needles. Dazed, I stared at the plants, thanking the Ancestors I had not cried out when I touched them.

The nettles were wanton’s needle. My task, it seemed, had officially begun.

I trudged back to the cottage in the fading light, trying to ignore the incessant, hot throbbing of my hand. I tried to ignore it as I cleaned out the old cooking pan and as I searched for carrots and potatoes in the wild kitchen garden behind the house. I tried to ignore it as I sliced up my vegetables and mushrooms using a sharp knife I had found wrapped up in the bottom of one of the packs and fried them over the fire, and as I ate the delicious savoury mess out of the pan.

By the time I had finished my supper and prepared for bed, my left hand had turned a frightening purple, my finger joints swelling until the knuckles were like smooth, round berries. My palm, which had taken the brunt of the stings, was twice as fat as normal. The places where the stings had gone in were a nasty, oozing purplish-black colour. It felt as though I had thrust my hand into a fire.

What was worse, I could not even cry with the pain as I longed to – no noise, the book had said. So my eyes watered silently as I lay down on the cushiony moss and reeds and awkwardly spread my cloak over myself. The book said it would be terrible, I reminded myself. It said it was almost impossible – and if both my hands swell up like this, then it surely will be. But I have no choice.

My lecturing did no good. The pain was too intense to ignore, and I could not sleep. Near dawn the pain began to subside a little, or perhaps my fatigue numbed it for me, and I fell into a troubled doze. I dreamed uneasy dreams. My brothers flew through a midnight sky, then landed on a white stone tower where they rooted and bloomed, turning into glorious roses. The tower itself begin to branch and twist until it was a white, barren tree glowing with my brothers’ vibrant flowers; and their petals fell and became white feathers once more, and the shining feathers washed together and turned into a pale, frothing sea that whispered my name in Gabriel’s voice…

I emerged from sleep to find my hand back almost to its normal size and colour, and a pair of skylarks singing good day to me from the windowsill. I looked down at the remaining redness of my hand and wondered, uneasily, if I had helped the healing along in my sleep. The tides here were so strong that even my unhappy dreams could have been enough to call on the enaid. Surely that was not allowed. I could not have ruined things before they had even begun!

As I sat there dithering, I remembered something. The book had set out clear rules: I must harvest the nettles by hand and knit or weave them into tunics for my brothers, and so long as the task endured I must not utter a sound in either pain or joy. It had said absolutely nothing about workings being forbidden. I could assume that charms should not be used to ease my pain … but the spell had not said any such thing.

I had a choice. I could follow the rules with unquestioning obedience; and if, as in this case, there were no clear rules to guide me, I could invent new rules for myself, just to make sure that I did not accidentally transgress.
Or
I could think about the rules I had been given carefully, do what was required of me, and at the same time use every way available to make the task quicker and easier.

Looking back, I saw a pattern to my childhood behaviour, and knew what I would have done a year ago. I followed rules. Not unquestioningly, perhaps; but eventually, inevitably, I did what I was told.

As a child I had acceded to my mother’s hushing about the nature of my gift, even when I desperately wished to know more. From what Angharad had said, it seemed Mother had deprived me of something I needed to know; but I had never questioned that Branwen was right. After she had died, I had let Father go after the beast, despite knowing that nothing good would ever come of his finding it. There were spells and charms I could have used to soothe and placate him, but I had let him do what I knew what wrong, because it never occurred to me to stand up to him.

Later, when I had awoken in the cart with John, I had done what was expected of me and obeyed my father’s wish that I go to my aunt. If I had not done this, if I had just
thought
, I could have talked to Angharad much earlier. And when Rother and Isolde had come to Aunt Erian’s house to take me back, I had simply accepted that I must go with them, even though it meant leaving behind someone so precious to me. I squeezed my eyes shut against the prickle of tears. Yes, the last event had been influenced by Zella’s spells, but if I had only struggled, questioned…

I looked down at my hand. How long would it take me to knit the tunics if I had to do it with hands like hams? Each day that went by, Zella drained more life from the Kingdom. Each day, my brothers were trapped, Ancestors knew where, between this world and the next.

That settled it.

Decision made, I closed my eyes and reached into the air around me for the enaid. It swirled and broke over me and I absorbed it, carefully feeding it into my hand. It is more difficult to heal yourself than another, for no one can see inside their own body; and sometimes, if you are tired or badly hurt, the effort it takes is more harmful than the injury itself. But Midland helped me along, and soon I looked down on a freckled hand that showed no signs of swelling or redness. For the first time I noticed that my work-worn hands had a certain beauty of their own. I smiled at the thought and got up, startling the birds on the windowsill into flight.

I washed in the icy water from the well, dressed, combed and rebraided my hair and breakfasted well on what was left of my supper from last night, thinking all the while about the task I had to complete. I looked thoughtfully at the leather sacks I had brought with me. My hands were small enough that I believed I could make myself a pair of gloves from one of them. Much better than collecting the wanton’s needle entirely unprotected. I emptied both bags and found the small wooden box containing two fine needles and several reels of thread which Olwyn had given me. Then I got out my knife and began hacking away at one of the bags.

It took me several hours, and by the time I was finished I was beginning to wonder if it was even worth it, I had stabbed myself so many times. I thanked the Ancestors that the leather was worn so thin and soft, or I should never have managed to get a needle through it at all. The result was far from pretty, and resembled mittens more than gloves. I wouldn’t be able to strip, knot or weave the nettles in them, but they would do for harvesting the plant. I tied the gloves carefully to the girdle of my dress with a leftover bit of leather.

Then I took the other empty pack and hitched it over my shoulder, setting out to look for lady’s hook, ammemnon flowers and redroot. These plants, when steeped in hot water, drained and mashed together, formed a powerful salve which Mother had applied to nasty burns. The sweet-smelling medicine stopped blistering and numbed the skin – just the thing I needed to help me work swiftly on my brothers’ tunics.

At this time of year lady’s hook and redroot were easily found, but the tiny yellow ammemnon flowers were more common in the Kingdom than Midland – again I missed Gabriel, who I knew would have been able to tell me just where to look – and so the rest of the morning had passed before I returned home and began mixing up the salve. I had no bowls to store it in, but Olwyn had left one of the jars of pickled vegetables in my pack, and the thick, rippled glass was miraculously unshattered. It would mean eating nothing but the jar’s contents for my midday meal to avoid waste – not a task I relished – but the solid, sealed container was worth it. I tied the herbs I did not use with strips of petticoat and hung them from the ceiling to dry. While preparing the plants and mashing them, I channelled every charm for healing, soothing, cooling and renewing that I could think of, hoping they would infuse the salve and make it more effective. By early afternoon the salve, an unpleasant greeny-brown colour, was ready. I scraped as much of the mixture as I could into the little box which had held the needles and thread and put it into the remaining leather sack. Then I went out to gather wanton’s needle.

I had a good sheaf of the accursed things when I headed home, and several stings on my forearms. The spines of the nettle sank deep into my skin if I so much as brushed them, and the gloves were too short. I had no more leather to make gauntlets, so I would simply have to be careful. Despite the heat I put more of the swept-out rubbish into the fire and took the nettles and hung them, tied with the last of the petticoat strips, from the mantelpiece, so that they would dry more quickly.

By evening I was ready to begin stripping them into their individual tough strands of flax. I had to take my gloves off for this, but luckily the heat had crisped the spines so that most of them could no longer stick into my skin. Less luckily, the fibrous stuff of the nettles was razor-sharp. My hands were soon criss-crossed with fine bloody lines.

After some experimenting, I found that I could braid several pieces together, and then tie two more braids to the top and bottom of the first, and another between the second two, to make a square frame, within which I could weave more pieces of the nettle flax. These squares could then be sewn together with some of the finer strands to create flat panels, and the flat panels would become tunics. It was not a pretty, skilful form of constructing the tunics, but for someone who had never trained as a weaver, it was quick and relatively easy.

I was constrained by the size of the nettles themselves as to how large I could make these squares; wanton’s needle was not a tall plant, and so the strands of flax were not long enough to make any square bigger than the span of my hand. It would take at least ten squares to make the front of one tunic and if I was to give each tunic sleeves, which I reasoned it was best to do, then it would take more than two dozen squares to make each tunic. It took me that whole first evening to get halfway through the first square.

By the time I finished my evening’s work, my skin was beginning to throb and blister. I washed my burning hands in well water and sat down with one of my needles to laboriously pick out the few spines which had escaped the heat of the fire. Finally I applied more of the salve. I dared not use too much enaid, because, like all things, charms if used too often lose their effectiveness, and I did not want to develop a resistance to my own spells. So when the pain in my skin was reduced to a sullen throb, I had to be content.

Over the following weeks, I grew adept at drying the confounded nettles quickly, at stripping them into flax, and at knotting and twisting and braiding them. I also grew adept at digging the spines from my hands, bandaging the cuts from the flax with tiny strips of cloth, and mixing up greater and greater quantities of salve. The moon waxed, waned, waxed and waned again, and summer’s heat began to make the nights in the cottage unpleasantly humid. In time, my fears about my own resistance to magic proved true. Despite my sparing use of them, the small charms became ineffective, and the salve and gloves were the only protection I had.

Once the charms stopped working, the combination of blisters, swelling and cuts soon created unpleasant scarring, especially on my fingers, which gave them the claw-like look of advanced age. The scars were dead to all but the most extreme pains, and so their cushioning presence on my fingers actually made knitting the tunics easier. But the masses of scar tissue lessened my fingers’ mobility, causing most other tasks to become more difficult.

One of my greatest unhappinesses in those days was that I could not make the progress I wished on the tunics. I had to forage for all the food I ate, for windfall firewood and kindling since I had no axe, and I had to keep the cottage clean and my own single dress and cloak in good repair. In order to reduce the time spent looking for food, I devoted a few days to clearing out the kitchen garden and the herb patch, and they provided some staples for my diet. Nevertheless, I still had much less time to devote to the tunics than I wished. I found that my rate had stabilized at about two squares a week and rarely did I manage more than that. I chafed at my own slowness, and at the thought of all the long weeks ahead.

As the blackberries ripened on their thorny bushes, I finished the first tunic. It had taken me sixteen weeks to complete, and as I looked at it, I had to tense all my muscles to stop myself from flinging it into the fire.

Sometimes I thought I saw swans in the sky. I might glimpse a flash of snowy white through the trees, or a reflection of bright black eyes in the well as I leaned over it. Sometimes I dreamed of my brothers, but never in their human form. They always came to me as great white birds. And though occasionally I heard their voices, their words carried haunting echoes of lapping water, rushing wind and the music of wingbeats, so that at times I could barely understand them.

Whether these things were real or mere imagination I had no idea. I had no idea if the visions should offer me comfort or despair. I liked to think that my brothers were with me. But it was their human faces that I yearned to see, and I didn’t know if I ever would again.

And yet, even as I worried and fretted about my brothers’ fate, other thoughts refused to leave my mind. Despite my own stern, internal lectures, despite knowing I would probably never see him again, I could not get Gabriel out of my head. Sometimes I thought I was going a little insane with my longing for his company, his voice … his touch.

One evening I dozed off by the fire and dreamed of him riding on a pale horse through a forest very like my own, in the twilight. He was alone, and his face was sad. It hurt me to look at him when he was not smiling, but I could not tear my dreaming eyes away. I woke to a strange restlessness, a hot, achy feeling in my body that lasted all morning, and then subsided into listlessness for the rest of the day.