Chapter 37 Anassa
I run on unsteady legs, my head still spinning from the ale, from my night with Claret, from Shakespeare finding us.
I’ve barely climbed aboard the carriage when a throng of people rush outside the pantry door into the courtyard, running after us.
Ugly, angry faces, casting grotesque shadows in the stillborn day’s thin light.
They carry torches, knives, even the odd pitchfork.
Everything feels surreal, like it’s happening to someone else.
Claret’s ‘hiyah!’, the crack of her whip as she rallies up the horses, Shakespeare’s needless admonitions to ‘hurry up!’, my own frantic breathing, and the loudest voice drowning all our background chorus.
Kind hostess Mary, screaming.
‘My brother, ye bastards, what did you do to my poor wee brother!’
‘Get down from the carriage and face yer justice,’ another man yells and no, I don’t believe we will be doing that.
Suddenly my vision of Mary’s teeth yesterday, with all these red threads cut between them, makes the most macabre sense.
A vision from the Fates; a warning that our lives would be shorn short if we stay here.
‘Ye witch, I should have known you were the devil’s, with those hands of yours! You cast a spell on me, didn’t ye?’ Mary, again.
My gaze flies to my wraith-stained fingers. The accusation is so ludicrous I’d laugh, but the stone she throws at me next isn’t. That thing almost gets me in the head, but instead pulverizes on the carriage’s roof, showering me with dirt and gravel.
The horses neigh, alarmed. ‘What was that?’ Shakespeare asks.
‘They’re throwing rocks at us, hurry!’ I explain, hoping he can hear me over the pandemonium as Mary takes it upon herself to bellow at him, ‘Damn your soul, Kit Marlowe, may the devil take you and your bitches!’
I don’t know whose soul we just damned, but Claret must have cracked her whip because the horses, old as they may be, do pick up the pace.
We’re clean out the gate now, and Mary’s left behind, her eyes I thought so gentle flashing with such hatred that I flinch.
She truly is her brother’s sister; that’s how Crinan looked at me when I said the word ‘Gruoch’.
I shake my head, focusing on the present danger.
Some of the men still run behind us, knives flickering in the torchlight, pitchforks casting shadows long like skeletal fingers, almost touching me.
Thom closes in, torch at hand, the other hand grabbing the carriage for purchase.
Well trained, efficient, soldier-like. He manages one knee up when something snaps in me.
Ruthlessness rises, guiding my movements.
‘You’re not getting in this carriage,’ I grunt. I kick him in the head, my borrowed – well, now stolen – boots crunching his nose. I find this brings me satisfaction.
I even smile a feral smile that should make Claret proud.
He falls back, his face a bloody mess, the other men gathering around him, forgetting to keep chasing us.
The distance of the carriage grows. We’re getting away, and by the looks of him, he knows it too.
‘Ye filthy whore,’ I think he means to say, but his words come out all jumbled, nasal.
Yet I don’t have time to celebrate my victory.
Because, with the hand not currently occupied by the bleeding of his nose, Thom throws his torch at me. ‘Burn, witch,’ he says.
The torch lands next to me on the carriage, its oiled cloth sending its juices down the wooden surface.
The fire licks its new environment, finds it tasty, spreads fast. Too fast. If I don’t do something, the whole carriage will go up in flames.
I imagine Claret’s cloak, her hair, glowing like a bloody candle while she screams and melts and blazes, leaving only ash behind … No.
I take off my cloak and try to smother the flames, using my body as an extra weight.
Smoke, so much smoke. I cough, my eyes watering, but keep at it.
I hear sizzling, smell scorched hair, and realize my fingers – ‘the devil’s fingers,’ Mary had called them – are wrapped around the torch as it finally flickers, then dies.
And they don’t hurt at all. No flaying off of skin.
No white-hot pain. It’s like they’ve already been touched by so much horror, so many screeching shadows, they have become impervious to any further harm. My indomitable fingers …
I want to laugh, but I’m afraid Claret will hear me, worry I’ve gone mad.
Instead, I stay unmoving for a long time, lying over my cloak on the floor of this almost-singed carriage, while the smoke subsides and the wheels keep squeaking and the horses gallop and the road takes us away from death. For now.
It must be past noon by the time Claret deems it safe enough to stop.
No one seems to be chasing us, but we’re all too terrified to risk it.
She leads us on a side path, flanked by thick trees on either side, where we’ll be as hidden as we can be.
My legs shake something fierce as I get down from the carriage, headed straight for Claret.
She has untied the horses and led them to a little stream ahead, to drink and catch their breath. Those poor beasts have served us well.
Claret looks as exhausted as I feel, half of her curls escaping from their pins, her oh so kissable lips pressed together in a thin line. And she’s also, crucially, alone.
‘Where’s Shakespeare?’ I ask, looking around. ‘Did you manage to dispose of him while you were driving?’
It is a jest, but it does not land well. Her eyes flash almost yellow. ‘Because that’s what I do, isn’t it? I kill people. Kill, kill, kill, stab, stab, stab, spill their blood until there’s nothing left?’
‘No, Claret, I –’
‘He’s fine. Shakespeare or Marlowe or whatever else you call him. He’s gone over there into the woods to relieve himself.’
I nod, unsure of what to say. Our night together at the barn already feels a distant dream, the chaos that ensued engulfing everything.
I don’t know how to navigate the stars between us, not when they burned so brightly, aligned so fully, changing the fissures of my world forever.
I’m left with old words for feelings so new they squeal like baby birds.
One wrong move, and I might suffocate them.
Claret looks at my hair. ‘I knew I smelled fire before …’ She takes a singed strand between two fingers. ‘What happened?’
I tell her, then, about Thom and his attempt to get into the carriage, and how I kicked him in the face, and how he threw the torch at me.
At us. With every sentence, the knot between my ribs unravels, my body inching closer, yearning to feel the roundness of her shape, the warmth of her skin.
I reach out with my devil’s hands and cup my demon’s face, leaning down until our lips are but a feather apart.
‘If I should let us burn, it won’t be by the torches of a mob,’ I mumble.
‘Not when we make such exquisite flames, you and I.’
‘Exquisite, huh?’ she asks, the tease, as if she has to ask, as if she didn’t spend the night bringing me to the brim of bliss with her kisses, her touches.
I push her back against the carriage, falling into her kiss like it’s a knife. Her lips part at the same time as mine, her tongue darting in my mouth eager to claim me, mould me, melt me –
A rustle, in the trees ahead. Footsteps.
We part haphazardly as Shakespeare approaches, and if he’s half as smart a man as I have known him to be, he won’t ask.
He won’t need further explanation than our flushed faces.
Still I look at him, ensuring that he sees the challenge in my gaze.
That whatever delusions he may harbour of me acting only as he wrote me should die a painful death if they haven’t already.
The man sighs, as if our closeness, my bond with Claret, inconveniences him.
But, to his credit, he stays silent. Instead he takes out a bundle from his pouch, wrapped in fabric.
‘I think we all need to eat something. I packed this for our trip yesterday, when Mary was still amenable.’ He sits on the ground by the carriage, urging us to do the same, and unwraps the cloth to reveal a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, some ham and apples.
My stomach gives a violent rumble at the food, but I don’t feel embarrassed because both Shakespeare and Claret have already dived into the bread, tearing it apart.
We’re all so hungry we make short work of our meal, eating in silence.
Shakespeare takes out a flask and passes it around, and I’m surprised to taste aqua vitae, like the drink Shepherd served us.
After we’ve all drunk our share, Claret only taking the smallest sip and coughing before handing the flask back to him, I decide it’s time to strike.
‘How did you find us?’
‘In the barn? Well, I searched everywhere else –’
‘Before, in that forest. With that … man.’
I don’t say Crinan’s name. We’re all still shaken by his sister and her men, hunting us.
Shakespeare takes a big gulp of his drink, as if trying to bide his time.
‘Well …’ he starts, looking at us both with an expression that’s both tired and wary, ‘what you must understand is that this doesn’t happen often.
Ever. Stories crossing into each other’s world, escaping …
Shepherd holds all the keys for a reason; she maintains the order of that place. What you did –’
‘What we did was choose another path,’ Claret states, matter-of-factly.
‘I see that now.’ A pause, as if he wants to say more, to comment on the kiss he interrupted, on the way he found us tangled up this morning.
Another sigh. ‘But at what cost? Shepherd’s kingdom is only safe for its inhabitants as long as her power is undisputed.
She fights a constant battle to keep that world safe from the wraiths, to have it be a resting place for characters before they pass on to their next adventure. ’