CHAPTER 22
Hreodwater, England
Up on the green, they had lit the fires, and the witches were dancing.
The heat was glorious. The willow structures that had gone up over the last few days—the mammoth, the stag, the wolf—were impressive enough when they were just clever wooden frames, each about twenty feet high.
They came alive in the fire, though. In the swirls of sparking ash, the wolf looked like it was breathing.
Avelyn smiled into the light. He’d loved this when he was little.
In other parts of England, there were such things as morris dancers.
They were sweet, just ordinary people with bells tied to their calves and sticks in their hands, which they would sometimes clock together in a friendly sort of way.
They always struck Avelyn as being a memory of something older and weirder; and that older and weirder thing, he would have been willing to bet his life, was Hreod witch-dancing.
The dance was supposed to frighten away the King’s nightmares.
It was no light clip of sticks and a happy chink of bells.
Sinister and lurching, the dancers wore dark costumes made of pheasant feathers and charred deer bones, and when those staves slammed together, the noise was a thunk that you could feel through the ground.
Each spin and leap—and God, but they looked like they could float—chimed the silver bells, a warning to stay out of the way.
Heavy drums kept them in time, and the unsettling drone of the pipes.
By the salt light and the effigy fires, it could have been conjured from a fever dream.
It was midmorning, just after a Mass where, once again, the bread and the wine had transformed.
The reaction today had been quieter—everyone had almost expected it—but Avelyn wasn’t sure he liked the new solemnity any better than the explosive joy from yesterday.
He’d been glad to get away. Just as Jericho had said, people were starting to treat anyone with a halo differently.
Cliques were forming, groups of disciples who thought Reyes’ way of praying or thinking would help bring on a cure, or Fabian’s, or Annunciata’s.
Annunciata kept saying she had nothing to say, but people stayed close by anyway in a polite but implacable comet tail.
Reyes, Avelyn noticed, was loving it, doling out advice every fifteen seconds.
Fabian was giving his no-women lecture to a cluster of rapt nuns who Avelyn hoped would be ashamed of themselves soon.
The Korean sister and the Peruvian bishop had made friends and, sensibly, seemed worried about saying anything at all, even though people kept taking silver-clad pictures of them both and exclaiming.
Avelyn hadn’t expected Jericho to come up to the surface to see the fair, but he had.
Avelyn was worried it was an effort to win the sort-your-life-out contest from last night, and although Jericho seemed all right—the crowds and the smoke and the market stalls made it all feel less exposed, perhaps—Avelyn didn’t like the idea of leaving him to it, which he was going to have to do soon.
After he had shown Annunciata how to fast-bowl a beanbag at the coconut shy, and after she’d won a coconut with a military overarm shot that earned cheers from a group of spectating Hreod boys, he leaned closer to her.
“Listen, I need to go and speak Hreod to some people soon, but—don’t tell him I told you this—but Jericho has agoraphobia.
I’m worried he only came up to win a fight with me, and he’s, you know, eventually going to have some kind of nervous collapse.
If you see him looking a bit . . . not okay .
. . would you take him back down to An El? ”
Annunciata tapped him with the coconut. “He’s a grown man, so. I’m sure he knows when to take himself.”
“Sorry, have you met grown men?” said Avelyn, looking back, because they’d lost Jericho.
Jericho had stopped to say hello to an escaped piglet.
It was black and soft and it ran up to him like a puppy, squeaking joyfully.
It had a blue ribbon on. There was a Show Pig competition on the next green; people here were intense about that.
It would be followed by the even more intense pig racing.
She gave Avelyn a patient look. “This is the same grown man who’s now cuddling a piglet?”
“We have range,” he said.
“Hah,” she said. “All right, I’ll keep an eye. But you’re not off right now?”
“I’m gearing up to it,” he admitted. “I hate everything, have I mentioned that? I hate Hreod, I hate Hreodwater, and I fucking despise mining clans.”
“Don’t go then,” she said more gently. “As you say, it’s probably nothing. Jericho’s not worried.”
Avelyn looked back to where Jericho was still talking to the pig, and didn’t say that he had another theory about why Jericho had come up above: so he could keep an eye on Annunciata.
“I just want to make sure,” he said. “Something’s going on in the deep. It would be stupid not to talk to someone.”
“You need a drink first,” she said. “Jericho! Time for wine.”
There was already a queue for the mulled wine stand. Jericho came to wait with them, looking relieved at the prospect of being drunk.
Avelyn wanted to touch his ribs to ask if he was all right, so he shoved both hands into his pockets instead.
He took a deep breath.
“I shouldn’t drink anything else. I’m going to go and see Lady Hringen,” he said.
“No, what about Irish courage?” Annunciata protested.
Jericho looked down at him like an interested swan.
“I drank a lot yesterday, I’m honestly a bit fragile now,” Avelyn said. “Hreod men aren’t supposed to drink—I think we’ve been bred to have an intolerance to it. I can’t keep up with an Irish person, I’d die.”
“Boo,” Annunciata said. “Down with the matriarchy. Boo.”
“Hold on, Lady Hringen?” said Jericho, and Avelyn saw him hunting for a diplomatic way to voice his alarm. “Is it not possible that she might . . . not . . . be completely delighted to see you?”
“How come?” Annunciata asked, whippet quick.
Avelyn held his breath, getting ready for the torrent that was about to ensue.
“I was—look, this sounds different to what it was, okay? I was sixteen and she was fortysomething. It’s not what it is on the Outside, it’s more like a job in diplomacy, it’s like being an attaché at someone else’s embassy.
My grandmother negotiated the contract—”
“They were engaged,” Jericho provided.
“Aaaah.” Annunciata grinned.
“She’s the closest I have left to family,” Avelyn said, trying to sound brisk. “She might consider it an obligation to help me. I think it’s the best chance I have for getting any sort of answers. And—how do you know?” he asked Jericho, feeling set upon.
“Everyone knows. The Hringen and the Brocken are incomprehensibly rich,” Jericho explained to Annunciata. “It was as close to a celebrity wedding as we get here. Very big scandal when it fell through.”
“Why did it fall through?” Annunciata said.
“I ran away to Rome with an insane Welshman,” Avelyn said, defeated.
“Sound.”
They were at the front of the queue.
“Oh, hello. Three, please,” Jericho said to the wine seller.
The wine seller ignored him. “I’m not serving that,” she told Avelyn in Hreod, as if Jericho wasn’t there.
She was a big, solid Harkta, as tall as Jericho, about Avelyn’s age.
He recognised her vaguely. “It’s not real, take it back down the mine where it belongs.
And anyway, a young man like you shouldn’t be drinking. For shame.”
In his soul, something was wagging its tail in the hopeful way of a Good Dog who had hardly murdered anyone at all recently, not even Fabian, and had done a wonderful job of making everyone forget that Father Li had rescued it when it was a puppy and told everyone it was harmless, even though it was, if you looked properly, now really quite big and grey.
“Oh, come on. It’s the fair. Please?” he said, so nobody could say he hadn’t tried being sweet first.
She folded her arms, which showed the bear tattoos.
Wag wag wag.
Avelyn looked her dead in the eye and said the first few lines of the Roman ritual in Latin.
She leaned back, alarmed. “What was that?”
“The nailed god has cursed you.”
“What!”
“Three, please,” Avelyn said. He didn’t want any wine, but the urge to be annoying was overriding that.
“Take the curse back,” the wine seller said nervously.
“Apologise to Jericho,” said Avelyn, “and I will.”
“I’ll tell the grandmothers,” she snapped, but she sounded worried.
“Do that,” said Avelyn, feeling much more cheerful about the world than he had a few minutes ago. “But I expect they’ll tell you not to be rude to the witches of foreign gods.” He let his eyes tick past her shoulder, as if something unnerving was behind her.
She pushed three cups of wine into their hands and didn’t take any money, though Jericho was holding out the right change, a palmful of amethyst pennies.
“Does that lady think she’s cursed?” Jericho demanded as the three of them moved away.
“N . . . o?” said Avelyn. Technically it was true. Nobody in Hreodwater thought they were cursed. They knew they were.
“If she ends up in my surgery with a femur fracture, I will make you help!” Jericho said indignantly. “It will properly ruin your morning! People take curses seriously here, I really think—”
“You don’t think she maybe a little bit deserves a femur fracture?” Avelyn said, just to see if he could make Magnificent Murder Jericho come out again, because he wanted to show him to Annunciata.
“No, what are you—nobody deserves—I tell you what though, I don’t think men should immediately curse women who annoy them,” Jericho tried.
Avelyn took a breath to point out that the relations between men and women were different in Hreodwater to most Outside places, but Annunciata patted his shoulder in a This one’s for me kind of way.
“Jericho, true equality is admitting when someone’s an arsehole whoever they might be,” she told him firmly, and Avelyn beamed, in love with her.
Jericho sighed and cast another anxious look back at the horrible wine seller. Avelyn wondered what it would be like, to be so cripplingly lovely that you worried about people even if they were raging pricks. Dreadful, probably. He was much happier in the curses and femur fractures camp.
He gave them the extra cup of wine. “Anyway, you two take this extra one, drink it for me. I have to . . . go and see someone I didn’t marry.”
“Can we watch?” Annunciata asked. “Are you going to curse her if she says no?”
“Curse you in a minute,” Avelyn grumbled.
“Ah—Avelyn,” Jericho said.
“If you can look me in the eye and tell me she doesn’t deserve to be cursed—”
“No,” Jericho said. His tone was different, and Avelyn realized that he wasn’t talking to the endlessly gentle, easily flustered Jericho now, but the one who took crossbow bolts out of priests as calmly as he swept floors.
“Lady Hringen holds a grudge. If you go down the mine with her, be careful. She will leave you behind if anything goes wrong.”
“Goes wrong,” Avelyn said slowly. “How do you mean?”
“The injuries the miners have,” Jericho said. “Something is down there, something is happening that shouldn’t be, and Lady Hringen is . . . I don’t think she wishes you well. Be careful.”
Avelyn looked up into his eyes and found no trace of a joke or exaggeration. Perhaps it was the fires, but there were more of those lights in his irises than ever.