Wild Magic (33 page)

Even then, the Rosa Eldi had been puzzled. Did the herbs repulse children, as the scent of an orange seemed to repel a cat? Alisha had clapped her hands together and laughed. But when she had seen that the pale woman meant the question seriously, she had questioned her further. Did she have her normal courses? And when this, too, was met with incomprehension, Alisha had done a bit of explaining, about the tides and the moon and the movement of blood around a woman’s body, and how the womb prepared itself anew each month ready for a man’s seed to take root there. The Rose of the World had frowned and replied, ‘I have no blood,’ before turning and leaving Alisha standing open-mouthed outside the door of the wagon.

Now she wondered if that statement were no more than the simple truth. She had learned rather more about the world in the intervening months. It had been four moon-cycles since Ravn Asharson had taken ship with her from the Moonfell Plain, four moon-cycles during which he had spilled his seed in her nightly, and often several times in a day. And yet her belly remained as flat as a plate, her waist as neat as ever. Girls at the court who had wedded and bedded their men since she had arrived in Halbo already bragged of their fertility and gone around showing off the growing curves of their bodies. She had learned to prevaricate with the women who discreetly asked to take her linen for washing by telling them she liked to see to her own things. But from the snippets of conversation she had overheard even tonight, tongues were beginning to wag. And the Lady Auda would only become more insistent as time went on.

‘Babies to save his throne,’ she crooned to herself, though she did not fully understand the old woman’s import.

‘What did you say, my dove?’

Ravn had entered the chamber silently behind her: she whirled around, her hand flying up to her mouth.

‘Who am I?’ she asked then.

It was a question she had not needed to ask him in some weeks. Ravn crossed the chamber, caught her gently by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length where he could see her face clearly by the light from the wall sconces.

‘You are the Rosa Eldi, the Rose of the World, the Queen of the Northern Isles and of my heart.’

Usually this quieted her; but not tonight.

‘And am I not enough for you?’

Ravn frowned. ‘What do you mean? You are all I have ever wished for, the most beautiful woman, the most perfect wife any man – any king – could want.’

‘But you need babies to save your throne.’ She said it without intonation, let the words make their own sense to him.

‘Babies to save my throne? Ha! Children from you: babies to seal my succession; babies to stop the wolves circling.’ He grinned at her, his teeth white amid the close black beard. ‘What are you telling me, my love?’

She could not help but mirror his expression: it was an automatic response.

His whole face lit up. It was as if someone had started a fire inside him: his eyes blazed with expectation, with sharp, uncontrolled joy. Golden candleflame reflected in his dark irises, softened the hard planes made by his cheekbones and long jaw. He flung his head back and released a great laugh into the vault of the ceiling.

The Rose of the World watched this sudden outpouring of delight with a sinking heart. Whatever it was she had asked he had misunderstood: but now she had the gist of it, and it was too late. When he enfolded her in his arms and carried her tenderly to the bed, she could think of nothing to say to him. When he undressed her with undue care and ran his hands wonderingly down her concave flanks, she merely smiled and smiled. But when he laid his head on her belly and slept there without touching her further, water began to leak from her eyes. She blinked them furiously, jolted from this sudden access of emotion by the sheer unfamiliarity of the sensation. The tears ran down her face and into her mouth. They were hot and salty, unexpected.

Then she remembered something.

It was nebulous and impossible to place; but it was a memory, nevertheless. She stood staring down at a great rock-choked chasm. Dust was still settling, and there was a dull, distant booming sound beneath the noise of the falling rocks. She remembered a physical pain in her chest, a sensation in her throat as if she had swallowed one of the falling stones herself, a painful prickling at the eyes, and then the same hot, salty water gathering and spilling. Dust had covered her feet. It was red and fine. It clung to the hem of her white robe. Her feet were bare. A drop of water fell, as slowly as a feather, splashed down onto her foot, leaving a white mark amongst the red. And then a rough hand had pulled her away, and she had stumbled blindly, her eyes hazed by the first tears she had ever wept.

Sixteen

Survivors

Only about half the crew of the
Snowland Wolf
, the finest ship Morten Danson ever built, made it back to Rockfall.

Tam Fox was lost; and so were Silva Lighthand and Min Codface and half a dozen of Elda’s finest tumblers and acrobats, whose skills counted for nothing in the depths of that swallowing sea. Bella, the Firecat, and two of the other women survived, along with the tumbler, Jad; and the shipmaker on account of whom the entire expedition had been formed. One of the ship’s boats remained intact; the rest of the survivors clung to the broken mast and bits of floating timber until they were hauled aboard it by Urse, a new gash marring his already-spoiled face. Katla Aransen had sat in the bow for hours, even after Urse and one of the male acrobats whose name she had never known took an oar apiece and rowed away, shivering and scanning the choppy waves for any sign of the mummers’ leader, her brother and new sister-by-law, Jenna Finnsen. Despite the evidence of her own eyes – for the last time she had last seen Halli and Jenna they had been inextricably bound together by their handfasting cords and were being swept over the side of the vessel – it still seemed impossible to believe they had drowned. And Tam Fox had such life force, such a power of personality and physique that he could surely not have perished. She saw, for a second, his face above her in the darkness, his braids swinging wildly and his eyes shining in the moonlight, and then shut her eyes and pushed the image away.

They rowed for three days without sustenance. On the second day it rained and they turned their faces up to the sky and drank whatever they could catch.

The rowers changed places every few hours. Saltwater blistered their palms. Some of the women cried, but the sound of their weeping left Katla feeling hollowed out, empty. She gripped her oar and stared at the grey waves and felt nothing. Was she so unnatural? In the space of a few minutes she had lost her beloved brother, her friend and – she had no idea how to think of Tam Fox. So she tried not to think about him at all.

For Jenna, she felt curiously little: seeing her brother grieving over her silly inconstancy seemed to have diminished whatever friendship they had once had. Memories of Halli, however, washed around her: the sea reminded her of him – it was his element. A hundred times, more, they had rowed out of the harbour at Rockfall in the little wooden faering Aran had made for Halli when he was six. They had fished around the skerries and further out, where they were not supposed to venture. They had brought back mackerel and pollack, and occasionally, after something of a struggle, some big seabass. He had once caught a garfish and, as the strangely beaked creature flapped madly around in the bilges, had leapt into the water in sheer panic just to get away from it, leaving Katla to grab the thing, remove the hook from its mouth and be rid of it. Except, of course, that instead of simply casting the fish back in, Katla had waited for Halli to surface once more and had thrown it right at him. It had caught him neatly on the head. She could still remember the wet slap of it, Halli’s anguished howl, the great splash he had made as he dived away from the snapping creature. He was such a strong swimmer, he’d got halfway back to Rockfall before she’d been able to turn the boat around and overtake him. She grinned at the memory of it, at Halli’s furious face, at how he’d pulled her overboard and made her swim home; how they’d dripped into the hall like a pair of drowned cats, only to be scolded by their mother for ruining the new rushes she’d laid that afternoon.

‘That’s more like it, girlie.’ Urse leaned across and patted her knee. ‘See the bright side. They’re with Sur now, and we’re still living and breathing his air.’

She smiled bleakly, unsure as to which was the preferable state. Some while later they encountered a fishing vessel netting in the seas around Cullin Sey and were taken aboard and carried under full sail back to Rockfall.

Of the rest: sailing into the home bay, where the two shipyard barges were already moored; the faces of the folk gathered at the quay, curious as to why two great timberloads should have arrived ahead of the faster vessel; staggering into the hall on Urse’s arm; her mother’s wailing, Aran’s silent, black-browed misery, Fent’s pale-faced shock, the unnatural quiet of the steading as everyone tiptoed around, not knowing what to say, she remembered blessedly little, but drank a pitcher of milk, promptly threw up, and slept like a dead woman for the best part of two days.

‘It should have been me,’ Fent said for the ninetieth time. ‘The seither’s curse was meant for me, not Halli.’

Katla was bored with hearing him, tired of talking about it; she felt frayed and exhausted. Fent had made her describe the creature’s attack, their defence, the capsize and the aftermath so many times now that the sequence of events was beginning to take on a false shape in her mind, as if somehow in the retelling he were stealing the truth of it away from her, jealous of her crucial role. It was almost as if her twin craved some part of the drama he’d been absent from, was trying to claim some part of it for himself. ‘You can’t really believe that. It’s just superstition.’

‘Katla!’ He looked appalled. ‘Don’t say that: if you say such things you’ll bring disaster on our heads for sure.’

‘What greater disaster could there be? Truly, Fent, it was just a great narwhal or something like, and much bad luck. There was nothing anyone could have done differently.’ She picked up a piece of wood and hurled it across the pasture for Ferg, but the old hound merely watched the arc of the stick with mild interest and then sat down heavily to lick his parts. He had not left her side since her return, and his mute presence had been of greater comfort to her than any amount of words or human contact.

‘But what about the barges?’ he persisted. ‘Surely they would have witnessed the attack.’

‘The
Snowland Wolf
made a stop on the journey back,’ Katla told him, tight-lipped. She wasn’t going to be drawn into describing the passage of
that
night, not to Fent. Misgiving fretted at her, a sharp little pebble rolling around and around her skull. Irritated and impatient, she pushed it away. ‘The barges sailed on before we left: they wouldn’t have seen a thing.’

It had been curious how everyone else’s memory of the sea-creature had varied, as if they had been attacked by a dozen different beasts. Even on the ship’s boat, within hours of the incident, their memories of what had occurred had begun to veer away from what Katla herself recalled. And from there, the entire episode had taken on its own life; as the survivors added their own details, and these were embellished by the listeners and passed on in a subtly (or not-so-subtly) different version to folk from other settlements and visiting traders, to women at the market or travellers passing through. She had overheard Fotur Kerilson telling the eldest of the Erlingsons that the
Snowland Wolf
had been overturned by a freak wave, and knew that Urse – whose version up until recently had been circumspect in the extreme – must have struck up acquaintance with the old man; but Stein Garson would have it that the ship had been attacked by a shoal of merwomen wreathed in weed and skulls, come to add to their dwindling collection of sailors and fishermen. After all, there had been many months of fine weather now, and no ships lost from the isles since the
Eider
went down off Fail Point.

For her part, she could see little point in fuelling speculation by adding her own bizarre observations of the thing to the fireside tales; and no one but her appeared to have noticed its eyes. As the days wore on she had begun to think this particular detail had been her own misapprehension, some trick of the light, or of her own devising. But then she remembered the weird energy she had sensed in the wood of the ship and the waters beneath its keel, the absolute certainty she had had on first sight of the thing that it was no natural creature, and she was overcome once more by a terrible sense of doom. She found herself increasingly unable to shake the feeling that there was something wrong in the world, something warped and out of true, and that some aspect of that wrongness had chosen to manifest itself to her, and in the process had taken her brother, his betrothed and Tam Fox, as well as half his troupe. It was this very sense that made her so abrupt with Fent now: he had pressed on a wound too close to the bone.

She watched as her twin walked moodily away, kicking stones out of the turf as he went. He always hated it when she refused to join in with his games; and becoming a man had not improved his temperament. Halli had acted both as shield and arbitrator between the two of them, doing all he could to prevent their disputes turning too hot or violent. She wondered what it would be like at home without him, and found she could not dwell on that thought at all.

Instead, she found her mind nagging at another matter, one that was beginning to torment her a little more with each day that passed. She had tried ignoring it, but as soon as her day became quiet, on waking or just before she fell asleep, it would be back with renewed force. Turning her back on the dwindling figure of her brother, she headed back towards the hall. Nearing the enclosure, she saw a familiar figure sitting outside. It seemed her grandmother had had enough of the company of the other women and had dragged her big carved chair outside to make the most of the warm weather. She sat there with her face turned up to the sun, and the golden wash of light smoothed out her accumulation of lines and wrinkles so that she looked more like her daughter than a woman of her own advanced years. A yellowed bone comb lay in her lap, her hands curled idly to either side of it. At her feet was heaped a mound of the oily, brown wool which grew so profusely on the Rockfall sheep.