Chapter 14
At least there have been no more visitations, not that I can sense, no more offerings left on the doorstep either as gifts or lures, no more sense of a pursuit when I enter the woods.
I wonder if the presence of the summer husband is what keeps the other thing (or things) at bay – the strangeness of the one repelling the other.
I would make new wards if I knew what might lurk in the shadows, but I don’t.
Not specifically, and while oft-times general protections keep all manner of creatures out, there are some that exist by their own rules – and one needs to know those rules before one can guard against them.
No visitations, no, but when I do manage to slumber (to stop my ears to muted whispers and sighs and moans from the attic room above – how glad I am she refused to move into the spare bedroom opposite mine) I begin to walk in my sleep.
Not something I’ve done in a very long time, and I hate it.
Hate the sense of being out of control, of a tiny part of my mind rebelling.
Sending me awry unconsciously while not sharing the rest of the plan with me – the motivating desire buried deeper than I can access.
Or perhaps that part of me simply knows that I’d say no.
The first night, I woke at the foot of my bed, reaching for the door handle. I stared at the windows, the night-darkened glass, searching for I-didn’t-know-what. Putting it down to a one-off, my mind disturbed from the events of past days, I returned to bed.
The second night, I woke at the front door, my hand on the key to turn it. My eyes flew open; don’t know what woke me. I wonder if it was the cold metal of the key, the sensation enough to shake me from my trance.
The third night – tonight – I wake only when my foot touches the waters of the Black Lake. I’ve not been here since the night when the god of the hunt went by.
Weeks before Rhea arrived, before the day I was trapped in the penitents’ path, on a full moon I went to the Black Lake because curiosity had gotten the better of me once more.
Despite the number of years since I fled, I still wonder about the kingdom I left behind, those who remained, the others who did not.
The acts I committed then, in my youth when I knew no better but should have – no.
When I did know better but chose to act otherwise because what I desired, what I pursued, moved me more strongly than right action.
Or perhaps I thought it was right, then.
Those nights, perhaps once every few years, I have gone to the Black Lake to use its undisturbed surface as a scrying mirror, to watch the entire city spread across the smoothness of the water, to seek that face I…
When I want a greater vision than that offered by the scrying mirror, that is where I go.
And that night, curiosity struck keenly, disguising herself as grief, perhaps – or perhaps she truly is grief, perhaps that’s her truest name – and I crept along the hidden paths to find the liquid obsidian waiting for me.
Using the Black Lake for this purpose is foolish and difficult – it demands too much blood, really, another reason not to do such a thing except years apart – but there are days when the yearning to see it all, the whole broad spectrum of the city (what’s become of it – what will become of it) is too much and I’m willing to pay that red price.
I’d only just sat by the shore, begun to open the cut in my forearm when the crashing of something in the undergrowth reached me.
Horses and stags, unearthly shouts of men who no longer belonged to the earth, and howls of wish-hounds and hunting dogs.
Too soon the noise was upon me and the leader of the hunt reined in – yet he was alone.
All that noise of a gaggle of hunters and mounts and pursued beasts?
Here there was just this one being; as if the cacophony that accompanied him was a memory only. A ghost of itself.
Beneath the moon sat half a man upon a skeletal beast. When I say “half a man” I mean not the top or bottom halves, but the left half, the sinister side; somehow staying on that saddle, somehow remaining on his bony mount.
And the substance of him flowed and shifted like smoke, sometimes forming the other half of him so that I gained an impression of how he might look if whole, but the right never stayed, only blew back like smoke from a fire, was swallowed once more by the left, and any impression I’d had was quickly gone, as if the memory could not remain.
I’d heard tales since childhood of the one who led the hunt – or the ones, for such stories travel across countries, across seas, of a man or woman who leads the pack; there’s more than one master or mistress of the chase – but I’d never seen such a thing before.
Not in any other place I’d lived or travelled, not in any other forest I’d traversed, and not in this vast forest in the two decades I’d lived here and roamed its byways.
Had heard histories and recountings, certainly, about how men had joined the chase at the hunt-master’s invitation and in the end found the quarry to be their own wife or child; or men who’d run when confronted by the riders and hounds and been driven off cliffs or into mires; of women who’d been taken away on the saddles of otherworldly beings and never heard of again; of children who’d either charmed or been harmed by the leggy wish-hounds, adopting them as pets or becoming food for the beasts depending on their nature.
Always a tale of a band, yet there was a single creature.
The rider before me stared and stared for an unbearably long time as if he knew me, and when he at last made to urge his mount forward I did the only thing my mind could grasp at and leapt into the Black Lake.
Whatever dwelt there could not be worse than the thing that stalked back and forth on the bank while I swam down, down, a’down holding my breath until I thought my lungs would burst into a flame fit to burn water.
When the moon passed behind a cloud, I surfaced far out, did my best not to gasp for air, not to swallow it greedily so the sound of it would travel back to what sought me on the shore.
And I stayed in that lake for hours because the master of the dark hunt did not leave until dawn threatened, pale streaks across the sky, and then the rider finally wheeled his horse and plunged away into the green to escape the day.
And I was aware all that time, or so much of it that the difference doesn’t matter, of something else in the lake with me.
Beneath me and circling, never visible and never making contact, but I knew it was there.
I knew it was there – mer, kelpie or other water-horse, mari-morgan, wicked jennie, rusalky, nelly longarms, merrow or water-bull; all aquatic, malign or mischievous in varying degrees – but it was still preferable to that bizarre and fractured dark thing that had lurked.
Death by them would be quick, or I might even defend myself as only I could.
But that thing waiting, beneath the trees, pacing back and forth?
Whatever came from it would be slow. Somehow, I knew that.
I remember, now, the cold of the water when I finally climbed out, the chill of my soaking clothes and hair as I walked, the forest floor against my naked feet because I’d taken off my shoes to begin the ritual and left them when I’d taken to the water.
And they were no longer waiting for me. I spent days in bed – it was at the end of winter, unseasonably warm, and the reason I’d survived the plunge into the lake – but I’d caught a bad chill and it was only the medicinal tisanes of my own making that made me well again so soon.
But tonight? How did I get back here? How long did I walk so far in my sleep?
I remember the odd sense of the water against my skin, soaking through the fabric of my trews and cloak. I grasp now at the skirt of my long nightgown and find it… not entirely wet.
Not wet.
I pinch my upper arm, hard.
Wake at the sharp pain.
I’m standing knee-deep in the pond in the front yard of my holding. There’s no moon except a crescent sliver, the rest swallowed by the night. Nothing more than another sleepwalking episode. How far might I have gone, though?
‘Mehrab!’ Rhea’s voice comes to me from a long way off. Grows louder. ‘Mehrab! Mehrab! Are you all right?’
I’m shivering and shaking despite the humidity of the night, the warm wind blowing through the crops, the trees, rattling the doors and roof of the barn, making the rose bushes dance, the bells in the field jangle.
Suddenly my joints ache, and the fog rises in my brain and I can barely remember my own name.
My temperature rises, rises, rises and I feel like I’ll burst into flames, that there’s a fire beneath my skin. And, above all, I feel old.
Rhea helps me back inside and I don’t have the strength to push her away, no matter how much part of me wants to. The only thing I’m certain of is that this sleepwalking is not natural; it’s a summons, a pull, and I must do something about it.
* * *
In the morning, I’m stiff and sore, as if I’d run a league but there’s no chill this time, no sign of anything lingering.
When I come down to breakfast, I find it already prepared.
Rhea has made porridge, sweet and buttery the way I like it, she’s brewed a strong dandelion tea, and there’s bread cut thick and being toasted over the fire.
One of the new raspberry jams is waiting, as is a pat of butter.
‘Thank you,’ I say and sit. Through the window I can see the summer husband already at work digging a new garden bed in the potager.
‘How are you feeling, Mehrab?’ Her careful tone irritates me more than it should, as if I’m a frail old woman, with one foot in the grave. I pause before answering, gather the threads of my temper and tie them tightly together.
‘I am perfectly well, Rhea. Ridden by the mare of night, is all. Dreams of old days and faces long forgotten. A life lived very differently.’
‘Where were you born, Mehrab? I can still hear, ever so slightly, a trace of an accent. Only on certain words, and only when you’re tired.’ The change in topic is welcome, the subject not so much.
That stops me in my tracks. It hadn’t occurred to me that the girl might observe me the way I do her, cataloguing each glance and gesture, giggle and twitch, seeing what’s repeated, habitual, until I can almost predict her actions, her questions and replies.
It does occur to me that I’ve underestimated Rhea.
That I should be more careful. That I should have some respect for her – she might not be the idiot child I predicted.
‘Not here,’ I say shortly. Then relent, ‘In a country to the west, far over the sea. And I left a long time ago and don’t wish to discuss the matter any further. ’
‘But you were like me. On the run – that’s why you left your home and family?’
Home was my suite of rooms in the palace, the grand villa I was awarded for services rendered to the royal family.
Family? My mother and sister I’d long ago lost track of, left behind in the slums by the harbour when I ascended, stolen away by my mentor.
And that mentor? The high sorceress, in a country where we were tolerated far better than elsewhere (here-where); she was the closest thing I had to true family, I suppose.
She wasn’t always kind but there was always a reason for her cruelty, and that I understood.
But she kept me safe and fed, she taught me the magics I know today, helped me develop the power that took me to the heights of wealth and influence (and down to the hollows of the earth once more); she taught me enough to know how to experiment with my other forms of magic.
How to make my reach exceed my grasp, and how to regard all failures as a means to learn.
She was the one who’d instructed me on how to leave – who’d warned me always to be prepared for the day the sky falls in, as it inevitably will, to varying degrees – which meant I was ready the day the walls were breached, and the beautiful city began to burn. When I—
No. Don’t think about that.
‘I was like you, yes. No more questions, Rhea. Not now. Not today.’
She obeys, though I can tell she doesn’t want to.
But she keeps busy, pottering around the kitchen, cleaning up after herself before sitting down opposite me and eating her own bowl of porridge (This one is juuuust right).
I stare out the window for a good few long minutes, my mind untroubled in the quiet of the cottage.
I become so relaxed that it takes me a moment to realise someone has materialised out of the forest, at the mouth of the path that leads to Berhta’s Forge. I stand so quickly my chair tips over.
‘Rhea. Someone’s here. Hide Arlo. And yourself for good measure.’
‘What will you—’
‘I’ll distract them. Hurry – out the back door, not too far into the woods, and don’t leave the border of the holding.’ I head for the front, hoping we’re quick enough.