21 #3
The ancient fae woman stepped up beside him, leaving her goats cropping grass. She was the Keeper, Braithe had said, the protectress of Arthur’s tomb. If she had another name, no one had mentioned it.
She had probably been tall at one time, long ago. Now she was bent, her thin shoulders sloping. Idhri was at least a head taller, so that she had to peer up at him as she leaned on her staff. Her clouded eyes narrowed against the bright sunlight, and he wondered if she could see his face.
He gave a small cough, thinking he should speak to her, but not sure what to say. He finally said, “Thank you for helping Braithe to reach the priestess.” He knew that the two of them, the Keeper and Braithe, had combined their magic to project the image of the pavilion to Priestess Morgana.
The Keeper tilted her head as she watched him. Her voice was high and thin. “You need help, too, boy. Need help.”
He said, taken aback, “Do I, grandmother?”
She gave a wheezy chuckle. “Grandmother. Grandmother. I like this name.” She picked up her staff in her fist and gestured with it. “But you need help, and I will help you.”
Idhri gazed into her seamed face, bemused. “I don’t know how you can help me,” he finally said. “But it’s kind of you to offer.”
She grinned at him, showing bare gums where most of her upper teeth had been.
Braithe said she lived by herself out here, with only her goats for company, but she seemed as content, as pleased with her life, as anyone he had ever encountered.
Her goats were happy, too, and they never strayed far from her.
It charmed Idhri to think that the little black goats were keeping the Keeper.
She said, “Bend down to me, lad. Half-blood, aren’t you? That’s a hard path, but you are a brave, bright boy. You will find your way. Bend down, now, so I can reach you.”
He had no idea what she intended, but he did as she asked, bowing his head before her.
With her staff in one hand, she reached up with the other.
As she pressed her fingers against his forehead, he held his breath.
Her fingers were dry and ice-cold. He tried not to shudder at the sensation of her touch.
He had to breathe, finally, but he didn’t straighten until she lifted her fingers.
She had stopped smiling. She said, her creaking voice somehow sounding regretful, “Perhaps you will think my help was a gift, lad, but perhaps not. Perhaps not. You may not thank me.”
“I—I don’t know what—” he stammered, and then it happened.
It was the moment he had dreamed of. The change in him he had longed for. The healing of whatever was broken in his head.
The curtain in his mind pulled back abruptly. Completely. All at once, in a great rush, Idhri remembered everything it had been hiding from him.
He cried out and staggered down from the pavilion, holding his temples between his palms. Braithe said, “Idhri? What’s wrong?”
He heard her voice, but it was muffled, as if she were calling to him from a long distance away.
The recall had come in a massive surge that felt like a mountain collapsing over his head, an avalanche of memory.
He was blinded, suffocated by it, and he bent forward, bracing his hands on his knees as he struggled to cope with the images pouring through his mind.
He remembered being tiny, so little his mother carried him everywhere, and he recalled the sweet scent of her as he snuggled beneath her chin.
He was a toddler, just learning to walk, making his mother laugh, which made him laugh, too.
He was a young boy, clinging to his mother’s soft hand as they walked down a dirt lane.
He was slightly older, picking berries at her side on a hot afternoon.
He remembered looking up at her, his pretty young mother, with her slender waist and long dark plait trailing over her shoulder.
Her name was Ainslie, an old Lloegyrian name.
The berries were sweet, at their best when they were still warm from the sun.
They had a home of sorts in the woods, two rooms with a disintegrating roof of branches and poles.
In the nearby village women would sometimes give Idhri a biscuit.
He and his mother lived mostly outdoors, though they slept inside their hut.
Ainslie cooked their meals over a fire, and they foraged for food every day.
There was a man in some of the memories, tall and thin, his hair and eyes even darker than Ainslie’s. His eyes tilted up at the corners, like a cat’s, and when he was angry they glinted yellow, like the dandelion flowers Ainslie used in cooking. He was often angry.
The man was Skye, a younger, slightly less sour version of him, but clearly recognizable.
Sometimes he brought things for them to eat, fish or partridge or some kind of meat he wanted Ainslie to cook for him.
Everything displeased him: Ainslie’s voice, the way she cooked, the state of their improvised house.
He shouted at Idhri—whose name wasn’t Idhri at all, but Willem—and when Willem cried, Skye slapped him to make him stop.
He slapped Ainslie, too, or worse. He often disappeared for long periods, though she begged him not to leave.
Ainslie brought Willem to the White City once when he was still very young, six or seven perhaps.
He remembered being hungry many times, and he thought that was why his mother, somehow, found her way to fae country, and to the White City, in search of Skye.
She found him in the house Idhri now knew as the guesthouse.
They stayed one day, but when night fell, Skye told Ainslie she would have to go, and leave Willem behind. She said she would not.
That was a miserable memory. Skye struck Ainslie with his fist, knocking her down, bruising her cheek.
He shoved her out the door, shouting that she should never have come, but now that she had, he would keep Willem.
Ainslie hid herself somewhere in the lane.
She waited there all night, and when Skye went out in the morning, she waited for the servants to come for the breakfast trays and she slipped inside behind them.
She seized Willem’s hand, and they ran. It took them three days to find their way back to the hut in the woods. They were still hungry when they reached it, dirtier than ever and without hope.
Willem grew, and Skye didn’t visit. It became more and more difficult for Ainslie to scratch out a living. Her family would have nothing to do with her, although Willem remembered once being at Ainslie’s side when she begged her father for help, and he shut the door of his house in their faces.
Ainslie and Willem had nothing but what they could find in the woods or along the lake, or what they could beg for. Or steal. It was the only way Ainslie knew for them to survive, and Willem knew no better.
All of it was hard. There were a few happy moments, but most of the memories were painful. Ugly and sad and unhappy. The last was the worst of all, and it was the one that brought down the black curtain in Idhri’s mind.
By the time he was twelve, Willem had grown taller than his mother.
By then he was looking down into her face instead of up.
She was not so pretty as she had been. Her hair was salted with gray, and her slenderness had become emaciation.
Her face bore the lines of hard living. Sometimes she found work as a laundress or a kitchen maid, but the jobs never lasted.
Idhri had grown strong, chopping wood for their fire, hauling water.
Once in a while he picked up odd bits of labor in the village, but people had grown wary of him.
They stopped giving him work to do. He guessed the people in the village suspected him—rightly—of stealing.
It didn’t seem to matter that he only stole what they couldn’t do without, eggs or bread, shoes for his constantly growing feet, a pair of leggings that might reach his ankles.
He yearned for the day he would be old enough to really help his mother, to find a job that would give her an easier life.
He never thought of Skye except to be glad Ainslie had not let Skye keep him in fae country.
His final memory before the breaking of his mind was of an autumn morning, when the cool sunlight shaded from gold to bronze as it filtered through the turning leaves of the holm oaks.
Willem had never expected to see Skye again, but that morning he appeared without warning, as he always had.
As if no time had passed. Unlike Ainslie, he looked strong and healthy, his back straight and his hair as black as always.
Ainslie cried out when she saw him approach through the woods. She dropped the mending she had in her hands and stood, her head hanging, as he strode toward her. When he was within arm’s length he stopped. “You’ve let yourself go,” he said.
Willem was standing beside the pile of firewood, an axe in his hand.
Ainslie said, “I haven’t been feeling well.”
Willem blinked. She hadn’t told him she was feeling ill. He hadn’t noticed until this moment how delicate she looked. Her eyes were hollow and her body so thin it seemed her bones could barely hold together. Her hair had grown thin and dry, the ends breaking off before they reached her shoulders.
Skye said, “You look like an old woman.”
Ainslie took a step back, away from him. “I am only human,” she said, but without much energy. She kept her eyes on the ground. “You know that, Skye. You have always known that.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ve come for the boy,” Skye said.
Ainslie roused a little at that, lifting her head and pressing her hands together. She took one small step toward Willem, helpless tears beginning to stream down her face. “No,” she said, weakly at first, then crying out in desperation. “No! Skye, he’s all I have!”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. It doesn’t look like you’ll be long in the world.”
Willem gripped the axe tighter. “I stay with my mother,” he said.
“No. You’re coming with me.”