Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
I am not a mother, nor do I think I shall be.
Certainly, I was not then. Had not even come close.
I healed only: my job to protect, to treat, and to cure.
Yet there has always been in me something most protective of the young ones.
They are like striplings in a dense forest, struggling to reach the sunlight so they can grow.
Like the mother tree, when the world seeks to stunt her saplings’ growth, I will heal and sustain them, that they live to grow strong and reach the sky.
I am not meant to be parent to only a few or one, but to look after all.
Whatever it may cost.
The baron’s son Malcolm was likely to be struck down before his prime.
The young lord had received much of the same treatment as his mother.
The doctor of medicine had taken his urine and his blood, assessed which humors of his body might be in excess or far too little and dosed him accordingly.
The priests murmured and prayed around him, huddling together in his darkened bedchamber like bent-over gnomes.
I had them removed before I visited the boy.
They lingered in the hallway and muttered under their breaths in protest. What if he should die under my ministrations; what guarantee was there then for his immortal soul?
There is never any guarantee for an immortal soul. I had watched Mairi’s body all night and saw no soul fly up to Heaven, and none stolen away by the spirits as she had feared. Her flesh was empty, meant for the worms and to feed the land. Dead meant dead, as far as I could tell.
I shared none of this with them, of course.
It fell to the baron to silence the priest’s protests. “She has saved the life of the baroness,” he said, “and Sir Douglas as well. What the cunning woman wants, she shall have.” His brows lowered. “For now.”
My welcome was conditional; never could I be allowed to forget.
He dares . . . ? My fingers curled as if into claws; I breathed deep to still the faery magic wakening in my veins.
De Lyne’s face softened, and he spoke almost like a loving father. “This is my only son and heir. There is nothing I would not try to preserve his life.”
Only son. Long years of pain hid in those two little words.
A wordless noise came from the end of the hallway, and my shepherd king turned to descend the stairs. I could read the sorrow in his limp shoulders and drooping head.
I would have run after him, to soothe and comfort him, distract him from his father’s thoughtless words.
I wanted to grab the baron by the front of his rich, velvet tunic, and scold him for treating his own flesh and blood so.
But to do that, to be for one moment distracted from my purpose, threatened everything Thomas and I had built together.
The baron had made it perfectly clear: Thomas could not be his and mine as well.
To keep Thomas mine required this: that Malcolm his half-brother must live.
I said nothing, but stepped inside Malcolm’s chamber and closed the door behind me.
The room was dark and seemed modest for a baron’s boy.
Heavy tapestries hung upon the walls, gloomy, unskilled depictions of child saints.
The stench of incense assaulted my senses; it did not repulse me, as did crosses and prayers, but I could not help wondering if the priests thought their God had little sense of smell.
And in the middle of the room a high bed stood shut off from the world by thick curtains. I drew the curtains open, not too far, to look at my new patient.
It surprised me to find a baron’s boy—his pride, joy, and future heir—still only a boy, dwarfed by the enormous bed in which he lay.
He might have been the youngest Douglas boy, lying there so fragile in his illness, or Glenna Baker’s younger brother.
A skinny boy of around twelve, he had his mother’s pallor and light-brown hair, but curls like my shepherd, matted down with sweat from the fever.
I could picture Thomas at his age, sleeping on a bare pallet only, if he had even that much comfort. My poor love had been booted from the nest before reaching Malcolm’s age.
I could not begrudge Malcolm his father’s love, only regret there was too little of it to go around.
The boy had been slipping in and out of consciousness for days, the priests had reported.
When he awoke, his murmurings made little sense, and they were given to believe Satan had taken the boy’s wits.
Little food had he eaten this fortnight, and none of what he took could be kept down.
He struggled to breathe as well, and must be bathed by others, like a wee bairn.
When I put my hand to his wrist, his heartbeat was alarmingly slow.
I should have been called to see him long ago. Never had I been summoned to a bedside when it was too late. There is a first time for everything, I suppose.
This will not be it.
The thread around my heart tugged, speaking of my bond with the shepherd king. I would not let this boy die. I could not let this boy die. My bond with the shepherd rested upon this.
Malcolm had suffered under this illness for so long, I knew not what I could do for him.
The priests and learned doctors would point at me and say, “See? Her skills were worthless after all.” If I was so lucky.
They might also name me heretic and blame me for his death.
Never would they admit Malcolm’s demise resulted from their delay, had naught to do with me at all.
“I could do nothing,” Mairi would say, when she had been summoned to her patient’s bedside too late, when even the strongest theriac could no longer be of any help. “We had run out of time.”
I am a woman of Faery. We do not always heed the call of time.
Would you command the very seasons? Amadan had asked me, when I overturned his autumn and brought back lovely spring, if only for a moment.
Could I do it again?
The saints in the tapestries appeared to mock me. I could not perform miracles, after all. Why should I even try?
Then I saw them, cast upon the wall by the dim candlelight. Strange, shadowy figures, pointed of ear and nose, twisted of fingers and limbs.
My shadow fae.
Somehow, despite the crosses, the iron hinges and doorknobs, they had made it here to me.
If I can perform no miracles, magic will have to do.
“I am glad to see you, my friends.” For I took them as a sign. The self inside me who might cure Malcolm’s illness was not the cunning woman, or not the cunning woman alone.
He must be saved by a woman of the fae.
I placed a hand upon the lad’s chest, trying to summon the rich greenness I had felt in Carterhaugh, the stirring of life beneath my fingers as it enveloped the Dark Fool’s flesh. I felt only the cloth of Malcolm’s tunic, his halting breaths. There was no magic there.
“Of course not,” I muttered aloud. That would have been far too easy. And what good would it have done anyway? The boy might as easily die in spring as in the autumn. Turning the season would change very little about his fate.
The shadow fae watched me soundlessly, as if they sensed the answer lingered right on the tip of my tongue.
It did. What I needed was not to manipulate time, but to stop it completely.
Almost I felt I had done so before. When I let my seeming slip, the day I first met Thomas. When I faced down the wolf. Maybe time had not really stopped, but it felt like it had. If I could recall that sensation, I could do it again, on purpose.
Only in this room, and only to stop the progress of Malcolm’s illness.
I could reverse nothing, I did not know how, yet some ancestral memory told me I could stop everything.
And if I stopped everything, then my inner cunning woman could appear.
I would brew a truly potent theriac, such as need years to mature.
The one I had made was fine for his mother, who was not nearly so far gone.
Malcolm needed a much stronger treatment.
More than merely mortal healing. He needed the magic of the fae.
And so, I did not reach then for Mairi Grieve’s knowledge, but pulled back into my own fae gifts.
The lightning ran beneath my skin as I recalled the slipping of my mortal guise, how the world around me grew utterly still, if only for a moment.
This time, I needed it to last longer than that.
I gathered thyme from the garden, wild celery, and rue.
I cut a lock from my own hair, braided it together with my gathered herbs, and made a little poppet. An ugly thing, but it would do.
“By oak and ash, by the spirits of forest and garden, by the blood of Mab inside me, I conjure you,” I whispered, and the shadow fae danced upon the walls.
“A pocket of Faery I summon, in the bowels of this human keep. In this room alone, time shall have no dominion. By my will and the powers of nature, so shall it be.”
The spell caught in an instant. The room grew brighter than the candles alone would have made it, and the shadow fae left the wall, scurrying madly across the floor and up Malcolm’s bedposts.
The hairs rose on my arms and legs, a shiver running across my skin like the feet of the shadow fae themselves.
Familiar scents teased my nose, though I could not name them.
Something of flowers, something of ancient moonlit rites and holy blood.
My spirits lifted, as though a thousand iron scales had fallen from my body.
As if, at last, I had finally come home.
Is this what it would be like, I wondered, if I should give up on my shepherd king and go back to Faery?
This is the power that would spread from my fingers, trail behind me when I walked.
The lightness alone was intoxicating and made me quite giddy.
If this was how even a tiny pocket of Faery felt to all who went there, no wonder mortals got trapped there, long beyond their expected lifetimes.
It would take much to remove me even from this one room.
I looked to Malcolm’s bed frame, the wood so cruelly cut down and carved up for mortal comfort. A tiny sprout had grown from the bedposts and curled towards the sleeping lad.
It heartened me and brought forth a prickle of fear as well. What if someone should see?
I would order that none disturb the boy. He needed his rest. De Lyne had said I was to have everything I asked for.
Malcolm did not move. Did not stir. Did not even breathe. Yet I had clearly caught him mid-exhalation, for his body arched upwards in an aborted cough, and a curl on his forehead sprang up, as though from his exhaled breath.
I had done it. Stopped time.
There was a knock upon the door.
My heart seized in my breast. “A moment only,” I called out, my voice too high as I tossed the little poppet beneath the bed.
I had not thought this through. What would anyone think if they came in to see Malcolm thus?
Gently I pushed down on his shoulders, trying to get the lad into a more relaxed position.
He would not budge, and I did not wish to break him.
I pulled the blankets up to his chin to conceal his painfully disturbed flesh. “Sorry I am, lad,” I whispered.
“There is someone to see you, mistress,” a servant called from the other side of the door. “At the front. He will not pass the iron gates.”
Someone of Faery, it must be. I glanced at the shadow fae, but they scurried under the covers and into the corners of the room, blending back into the shadows. They had not needed to cross the threshold, nor even pass the door to this room, so I believed.
Who else of Faery knew I was here?
Amadan Dubh.
Overlong fingers, meddlesome and threatening. A voice curving around me like a serpent entwining round its prey. My nostrils filling with scents of moss and loam and profane desire.
A heaviness fell upon me, the weight of the words I had given him. A promise I had made.
Around me I felt a pressure, like shards of glass touching but not yet pressing into my flesh. One wrong move and I would bleed.
It is too soon. But the sensation now surrounding me proved this falseness of this assertion.
Glenna Baker was about to give birth.
And Malcolm about to die. If I did not treat him. And if any should enter here and disturb his slumber—nay, the very slumber of time itself—what would happen to me then?
I had given the Fool my word, which we of Faery never break.
“I will see him,” I told Gib. “But the lad is not to be disturbed. He needs his rest now.”