Chapter 2
Two
My life slowed to a halt while I looked after the only mother I knew. Eamon could have afforded a servant, were he not so miserly, but there was no one else I would have trusted with Mairi’s care.
No dowry had there been for Bess Grieve, the youngest of eight bairns, most of them already out of the house.
No apprenticeship either, save for the lessons I had learned at Mairi’s side.
Those I now used tending her. I would feed her rosemary for clarity and willow bark for the pain.
I tried to walk her around the room we had curtained off downstairs, because the light hurt her eyes and she could not climb the ladder to the loft.
Even while I helped her, I could tell she leaned on me too much, that her good side worked too hard, and her stricken side worked not at all.
Mairi had her good moments and her bad ones.
Days when she called me her cuckoo, though only when no one else might hear, for it was a secret shared between the two of us.
She squeezed my hand, and I delighted in the warmth of her skin, but despaired over the weakness of her grip.
Other days, she did not recognize me, nor the members of her own family.
She screamed that she was surrounded by strangers, imps, and even demons, foul invaders who had made their way into her home.
I did wonder then if she saw the shadow fae on the walls.
Oh, how I wished to say to her: “On your Bess, too, this birthmark blooms like a rose at the side of her throat. This is her red-gold hair, her eyes the color of marshland, her figure so plump and full. There is nothing in me, of me, that has not come from your daughter.” Or perhaps I could have said, “Bess lives. She is safe in a world where there is no hunger or cold and hardly any time.” But how could I be certain?
I left Faery as an infant and had no recollection of it.
All I knew of Faery came from what the brownie said.
At the very least, I wished I had told Mairi, “You have imagined nothing. I am not your Bess, but an imposter wearing her skin.” Would this have given her comfort, kept her from doubting what her eyes told her was true? I cannot say, for as a proper changeling, I held my tongue.
Faery-struck, Mairi had been. Faery-healed, she never would be. At least, not by my hands.
Eamon was too miserly to pay for a doctor to look in on Mairi, and the nearest cunning folk were in Peebles, half a day’s walk away. But her grateful customers came by with gifts for Mairi and the household, as well as remedies they hoped might help.
Our neighbor Ailsa brought over a small pouch filled with rich soil. “From me father’s grave,” she said to my puzzled face. “You do put it over the elf-shot wound, and she will be good as new.”
I tried to conceal my scowl. “She was not elf-shot.” I would most certainly have seen.
Ailsa ignored me. “Why, I remember how she set my Robert’s leg. Can hardly see the limp anymore, and ’twas thought he’d never walk again. God bless her, Mairi Grieve.”
Bile curled in my throat, as it always did at the mention of the Christians’ lord. Too close to kirks and bells and crosses, that subject was, and we fae have no part of any of it.
“Have ye considered a pilgrimage to Saint Triduana’s Aisle?” asked Duncan Smith, whose broken thumb Mairi had once treated, so it bent nearly as well as it had before.
I raised my eyebrows. Mairi could barely make it around the room, and he expected us to go to all the way to Restalrig?
Duncan must have sensed my thoughts, for his cheeks turned red. “The holy well, then. At Carterhaugh?”
At this, Mairi stirred in her bed, thrashing about wildly, and stared like one crazed. Even Duncan, large as he was, stepped back, afraid.
“I willna go,” Mairi growled. “Not to that place. The guid neighbors live there. They took her, my bonny little Bess.” Tears rolled down her face. “All I tried to do was protect a . . .” She trailed off, staring blankly into the distance.
Protect who? I pulled the covers around her, cooed softly, and tried to comfort her.
My bonny little Bess.
When she said those words, I needed comforting myself.
In the end, Mairi caught a great fever, and Eamon summoned the priest to pay her a call.
This alone pulled me away from Mairi’s bedside, for he would hang a cross about her throat, speak to her many prayers, and generally perform such rituals as would drive a fae like me away.
I did stir the pottage on the hearth, and listened while he and Eamon spoke.
“This is only to be expected,” the priest said. “That this dread disease should take her. She attempted to thwart God’s will.”
I had to stop myself from spitting on the floor.
“I pray He will have mercy on her,” Eamon said, not even bothering to stand up for his wife’s honor.
“Aye,” said the priest. “Mayhap she can work her sins off in Purgatory. I fear it will not be long now.”
How did he come here and speak of Mairi thus?
Naught of evil was in her, nothing of sin or pride.
I had known her to go to a home riddled with scourge, where the doctors and priests feared to venture, with no regard whether the family could even pay.
And if, in that scourge-riddled family, three of the seven survived, and Mairi herself came home with only a bit of ague, it was counted as God’s mercy, and none of Mairi’s doing. They took her for granted, they did.
If only I could learn to heal so well.
I glared at the back of the priest’s head, noting the little shadows playing across the walls. Would that the wisps led him astray in the forest, and he never set foot in our cruck house again. May his food have no savor and his nights be lacking in sleep.
I was only half-fae, with no magic of my own; my thoughts affected him not at all.
The priest pulled back the heavy curtain around Mairi’s bed. His pointed nose gave him the look of a raven pecking at a corpse. Then he bowed his head, folded his hands at his breast, and began to pray.
Nausea gripped me; my head clenched, and the skin around me seemed to grow too tight. I pressed my lips together that nothing of blasphemy, no scream of pain, would erupt forth.
Finally, he finished praying, and I thought with relief he would be on his way. Instead, he raised his beak-like nose and stared at me with his beady little eyes. “Bess Grieve,” he said, voice thin, nasal, and disapproving. “I do not recall seeing you at chapel this Sunday.”
Nor ever, I added silently. Yet I could not answer thus or betray my fae nature. I lowered my head and stared modestly at my lap. “I am easily overlooked.” It was no untruth, for I was plumpish and plainish and wont to keep quiet.
“Aye.” The priest stood and walked over to me, his eyes passing across my body and making me itch. “I am surprised to find ye still living here, lass. Are ye not a woman grown?”
I was. Eighteen now, a ripe fruit growing rotten on the vine.
“Bess has been looking after her mother,” Eamon told him, the closest he had ever come to speaking in my defense. “She has been a good helper to her all these days.”
My heart lifted in my breast, though Eamon wished only for the priest to think we were a godly house. Yet I had been Bess for eighteen years, and this need for his approval was hard to break.
The priest sniffed. “Not too good a helper, I should hope. We did tolerate Mairi Grieve for the lives she brought into the world and the baptisms she performed. But her healing was a prideful act that challenged the will of the Lord. I would not have your daughter follow in her footsteps.”
“She will not,” said Eamon, eyes boring into me. “Is that not right, girl?”
Not follow in Mairi’s footsteps? How could I make such a promise, when the only moments of pleasure I had ever known in this life were at my mortal mother’s side?
When she took me out to the family garden and taught me the name and use of every plant?
When we visited the ill and injured together, and she taught me everything of compassion I ever knew?
She had taught me as an apprentice, but she treated me like her child. How could I put all that aside?
The priest and the man I called father were both watching me. With my head bowed, I quietly said, “I do swear, while I walk this earth, Bess Grieve shall not follow in her mother’s footsteps.”
I could not speak them false, but they did not comprehend the truth of what I said.
The mourners filtered in and out of the house throughout the day and into the evening.
Near suppertime, my sister Sorcha took my place at Mairi’s bedside, freeing me up to prepare the evening meal.
I served the gathered kinfolk with the gifts of food that had been brought to us all day long, fed myself, and even went up to my bedroom for a bit of rest. As night fell, I came to stay beside Mairi’s body again.
The others drank to forget their problems, to remember the deceased, and to celebrate her life, but I sat alone in quiet contemplation.
Let them all think it was prayer. I merely waited for the moment they retired.
Mine are a twilight people, and when night falls, we come truly alive.
I sat on my stool, the room dim around me but not fully dark.
Outside, the wind battered at the shutters, and the cold February air crept in beneath the doorframe, so that I pulled my shawl more snugly around me.
The pottage still simmered over the hearth.
The house settled, vermin crawling inside the walls.
My skin thrummed with energy. And still, I waited.
A clay cauldron fell from the rafters and clattered to the floor.
I started and hissed out a “Shh.”
Eamon’s snoring stopped briefly, then resumed.
Muffled cursing came from inside the cauldron.
To mortal eyes, it would seem empty. Only fae sight would notice the spindly limbs that emerged one after another and pushed themselves upright, followed by a shaggy, dun-colored head.
For a moment the brownie stood there like a tortoise, with the heavy clay cauldron for a shell.
Then she shrugged it off and bustled towards me.
Morven, the household brownie, my only connection to the realm of the fae.
I put a finger to my lips. “Do not wake them.” I gestured upstairs.
Morven waved this off, bright eyes peering through her mop of hair.
“That lot have been drinking all day, and human senses are dull besides. I’ll not wake ’em, niver fret.
” She tugged on my arm, paying no mind to the corpse I was seated beside.
“Can ye not feel it? Imbolc today. The Veil is grown thin.”
“Imbolc,” I repeated. One of the four times a year when the Veil between the mortal and fae realms lay open, and one might cross to the other side.
Imbolc sang through my veins, made all my hairs seem to stand on end.
My pulse quickened even during this time of grief when my sorrow knew no bounds.
“I had forgotten. I was too caught up in preparing Mairi for her funeral.”
I glanced down at the body. So impossible to believe it had once been a living woman, full of kindness, full of knowledge, full of love.
Not my true mother, I knew that. But she was the closest thing I ever had.
I swallowed hard, my eyes tracing every angle of her face. Stroked back her greying hair.
Morven snorted. “Ye think it’s gonna get up off that bed on its own?”
“Morven!” Warmth flooded my cheeks. “Christians think the Devil will creep in and take her body.”
Morven tilted her head at me. “And do ye hold such beliefs?”
“Of course not.” I wasn’t as superstitious as a human. “But Mairi did. And I owe her much.”
“She canna see ye now.”
I entwined my fingers and stared down at them.
Mairi was gone, never to walk these green hills again.
Whether she had moved on to work off her sins in Purgatory, as the priest said, whether her spirit lingered or was vanished and gone, it was not on me to know.
When we of Faery die, our empty flesh feeds the earth, our mother, but our spirits simply vanish.
For all I knew, that was true of the humans as well.
“Maybe she can.” I looked up at Morven through my teary eyes. “Maybe somehow, though she is gone and dead, her body no longer moves, she can still see me. She can still know?”
Maybe the dead remain with us, their love and deeds caught up in our memories, long after their flesh is gone.
Morven hmphed, and I had the sense she was raising an eyebrow, though she was far too hairy for it to show. She started her sweeping with a vigor born of the Imbolc energy, humming tunelessly as she did.
She was right. Mairi Grieve was long gone, however much I might wish it otherwise.
But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.