Chapter 2
It’s still early spring and there’s a nip in the evening air so I build up the fire in the sitting room.
Fenna takes the long sofa (a tapestry of roses and unicorns, many cushions, not exactly comfortable but I imagine a novelty for someone who’s constantly travelling), and I my usual wingback chair with the knitted rug rolled into the curve of my back for support.
Aching joints, tired muscles and creaking bones have become my constant companions in recent months.
Them and the hot flushes, periodic forgetfulness and the rage.
The spectacular all-consuming fury that comes over with little warning – as it did in the forest this morning – at the slightest frustration of my wishes.
I know it’s the changing of my life’s seasons, shifting me to autumn.
It happens to us all, women, but I don’t have to be happy about it.
There are things I do not miss, like the red flux and its attendant pains and risks.
No children will come from me, and I might no longer turn all heads (I’m vain enough to have enjoyed that), but there are benefits to passing without notice.
I’m not done yet, not with life; I no longer bleed, and my blood is my own now.
I read once of an old woman mourning her loss of beauty, her youth.
Written by a man, he put words into her mouth, and grief, had her wail that she was a swan swallowed by a dragon.
That the dragon of old age with all its folds and scales and ruination had devoured her loveliness, that swan trapped inside.
This I’ll tell you: I had youth and sufficient looks and the influence that comes with them – yet all are fleeting, ephemeral.
But the other thing? The power that lives inside, that can’t be seen except by my actions and my will?
That power’s eternal. That’s the power of the dragon.
The dragon didn’t swallow the swan but rather came forth from it, has a power the swan could never wield, a fire that would singe feathers and roast tender meat.
Some days I envy young women their looks and grace, but I have dragon-fire and no one can take that from me, neither by injury nor time nor the hand of man. I know which I’d rather have.
‘What was that?’ Fenna’s looking at me over the top of her mug of warm honeyed rum; I hope I wasn’t talking aloud. The habits of living alone can sometimes be incompatible with company.
‘Muttering. Sorry. Too long on my own, must remember how to be a proper person.’
‘Were you ever that?’ She laughs and farts as she does it.
I wave a hand to dispel the stink. ‘Probably not. And did you die at some point?’
She snorts, then sobers. ‘Sometimes I feel that way, I get so tired.’
‘How much longer, do you think? Doing what you do?’ I’ve known Fenna for twenty years, she was the one who guided me here when I needed help, and she’s a good decade older than me at least. When I had to hide…
she doesn’t know all of the details and nor should she ever, but she knows enough.
That I was on the run, that I couldn’t risk being found and, even then, she was helping women like me. ‘Will your apprentices continue?’
‘There’s two or three I might rely on.’
‘So few?’
‘Many have been lost.’ She sighs, continues, ‘The women I help are dangerous or seen as such. They’re pursued so viciously and anyone aiding them is at risk.’
‘Yet no one’s betrayed you?’
‘My girls. My apprentices… Those who’ve been caught have taken their own lives rather than be dragged to the church prisons and tortured.
’ She grins. ‘And they’ve taken as many god-hounds with them as they can.
I hear, in the aftermath, what happens – whether it be fire or flood, or a concealed knife.
Somehow, I always hear.’ She closes her eyes briefly.
‘And I’m not the only one. There are others who walk the paths and gather our lost girls. ’
The girl, Rhea, went straight to bed after dinner, sulked her way to the small attic room that’s kept for guests and the occasional refugee witch.
She said barely a word to either of us, managed to mutter thank you when the shepherd’s pie was served, but not much more than that.
I clear my throat, eyes lifting skyward.
‘What more do you know about this one? A flammable suitor, you said?’
‘Insistent and flammable. All I know is that the father made the match, and the girl was not amenable. And the suitor thought to convince her…’
‘Ruin her for anyone else?’
She nods. ‘Her mother knew about her daughter’s talents, also knew enough to be able to contact a Visiting Sister.
They got her out of the city, and onward.
’ Fenna shakes her head. ‘She’s not said much but I fear the father would have handed her over to the church to save his own hide and reputation. ’
The Visiting Sisters are so-called, for what man takes an interest in a woman’s relatives unless they’re there to cook or clean or bed him?
Thus they pass beneath notice, dismissed as easily as women’s words are as gossip.
Unofficial, whispered, a thread and a lifeline.
For a long time unsuspected, until recent years.
‘She passed through more than two dozen hands, an atlas-worth of towns and even more villages, walked through forests untravelled, along rivers to break the scent if – when – they come with dogs, and spells were laid in her path to send any pursuers astray. All before she came to me. The trail’s as broken as it can be. ’
I shake my head, a little morose. ‘You can’t vouch for the quality of those spells or the ones casting them.’
‘Mehrab, if you doubt everything and everyone, you’d never help anyone. You may as well give up and lie down, waiting for death.’
‘We’re all just waiting for death.’
‘Gods, you’re cheery! What happened?’
I pause, poking at the tender spot inside me, the prideful part. ‘In the woods, today. I chased a hare, deeper than I’ve ever been. The creature disappeared, but I found – was caught in – a trap. Cut as a penitents’ path in a clearing – held me like a cobweb holds a fly.’
‘So far out?’ She shakes her head. ‘Did you see anything?’
‘No. But I felt something, some awareness of me.’
‘How’d you escape?’
‘Rage. I’d thought to try and re-carve part of it, dig the channels so the magic flowed differently, but I threw a tantrum instead, stabbed my dagger into the earth at its centre.’
‘Iron?’
I nod.
‘Odd. Odd place to set such a trap. The hare – ordinary or otherwise?’
‘Couldn’t tell you. Didn’t seem anything peculiar about it, but how can one tell a shifter-witch from its animal shape?
The whole point’s that they’re indistinguishable, so unless you see one mid-change…
’ Or you can get your hands on it, feel its bones and being.
I shrug. ‘But it moved fast, and I followed longer than I usually would have.’ I think back to how I felt, to the searing hunger as I ran.
‘But I wanted the damned thing, I wanted to catch it, kill it, a burning desire all out of proportion with anything I’ve ever felt’ – or in a long time, at least – ‘and so I kept going. The usual aches and pains didn’t stop me. I felt… younger.’
And I only realise these things now. Now that I examine them – the arrival of my unexpected guests distracted me from considering earlier – and if Fenna and Rhea had not been here would I have given the incident in the forest further thought?
Or would it have drifted off, the spiderweb thread of memory dissolving?
‘Something laid long ago? The trap? Forgotten and unsprung?’
‘Until me.’
‘Until you.’
‘Cannot say. I’ll avoid that part of the woods in future.’ I sigh. ‘And where to next for you, Fenna?’
She shakes her head. ‘I think north. There’s word that the Darklands have changed – rumours trickling down that the Leech Lords are gone. Gone in one night, so they whisper.’
‘How? Who might have done that?’ I frown. It seems unlikely. Too great a thing to have happened, quickly or otherwise.
‘I know. Hence my going north. I’ll see the Briars in Silverton first, maybe they know something.’
I nod. Ructions in the Darklands, traps in the forest, a new fosterling.
This morning the world seemed so simple, hidden here deep in the woods.
Nothing and no one to bother me. Then: that hare crossing my path.
Me, filled with the lust of the hunt, the certainty that if I didn’t take that creature for the stew pot then starvation would be upon me.
Yes, my snares have been empty; yes, the offerings from the village have been fewer – but it’s the start of spring, there’s less need of me, no colds and agues at the moment.
Soon, however, birthing will begin and I’ll be called.
Hunger is not so close to me – in the cellar are bottles and barrels of preserved food – starvation is not anywhere near. Why was I so sure it was?
I don’t share these questions – don’t need anyone deciding that living out here is affecting my mind, that aging is taking my faculties so soon. These thoughts are my own and I’ll keep them to myself, at least until I have answers.
‘Ah, well,’ I say. ‘We’re not strangers to strangeness.’
‘No, we are not.’ She sniggers. ‘But speaking of strange…’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘To the west, there’s a great kingdom – years ago the ruling family was overthrown, all slaughtered, it was thought.
But now…’ Fenna waves a finger at me, making sure I’m listening – ‘Now comes a princess, her face all scarred, claiming to be of “the blood”. Now comes the princess who was hidden and forgotten. Now comes the one who will claim her throne and restore the family line.’
And I try so hard not to react. I try to freeze my limbs and my features, to not stiffen in my chair, to not gasp or cry out.
I try not to show that this has any effect on me, on this day which has been filled with outlandish things.
I needn’t have bothered. Fenna’s not paying attention, she’s draining her drink; she’ll want another soon so I force myself upwards, go to the kitchen and heat more honeyed rum.
My hands shake as I do so, listening to her chatter trickle through the doorway.
The tale told often for years, then as those years grew longer and further from the source, told less and less.
A tale that travelled quite a distance – the savagery of the slaughter, the flames that rose over that city of renown, the losses sustained, the riches gained, the new rulers never quite able to keep hold of the crown and replaced by successive pretenders over and over.
The latest one the longest lasting, a wielder of sword and whip, the most brutal yet.
And now, a princess, her face all scarred…
I shake my head. Not my story. Nothing to do with me. I let her words wash over me, pretend I cannot hear. I will not think on it.