Chapter One #2
(Dear reader—in that time, men rarely took full-body baths, though they still practiced a little daily hygiene.
Washing the face, hands and underarms using water and soap was a common morning routine for most people.
Priests and monks, on the other hand, were often required by their religious rules to bathe only a handful of times a year and some religious communities viewed strict mortification of the flesh and avoidance of all worldly “vanity,” which unfortunately included bathing.
The problem was that there were so many types of religious people around—bishops, priests, monks, abbots, nuns and friars.
They were everywhere, stinking up the crowded streets and walkways and any room they entered.)
At any rate, my uncle had a plump, red-cheeked, good-natured wife who kept a clean and orderly house, and he enjoyed a good business in a lane off the narrow, dense and prosperous thoroughfare called Shambles Street, so his home was convenient for me to stay there.
Shambles Street was crowded with people as a general rule, but on this night, no one was about and this narrow lane off it was almost totally deserted—as it had been the night before last, when I’d thought I was followed home.
It was a near moonless night on that occasion, too, because of the dense cloud cover.
It was much like this one, come to think of it, right down to the hint in the air of the mist and impending snow.
Stray, fat snowflakes swirled through the night air, like they were doing now, and I’d thought snow would be carpeting the ground by morning.
I had been in Jorvik for several days on this visit, but I was leaving soon to go back on my trade route, which would lead me not to the Northumbrian markets but to those in Mercia and Wessex, as well.
While I wasn’t yet prosperous enough to have my own home and shop like Leofric, I hoped to do so one day and was working hard to achieve that goal.
And I had another secret goal that I also hoped to achieve—to expand my trade to the Elven Market in Otherworld.
My mortal mother had sworn that I had mixed blood, Faery on my father’s side, which meant that I might be able to travel between the realms of the mortal world and that of Otherworld, the land of the Fae, whenever I needed to.
However, my mother had been unreliable at best and even if she’d been telling the truth—a big “if”—I wouldn’t have been in that realm since I was a small child. I certainly knew nothing of its rules.
If, however, what she said had even a grain of truth, then I needed to find out if I could visit the fabled Svartálfheim and the busy trade markets of the Dark Elves who lived in Otherworld.
It was a famous and prosperous market, said to be bustling and welcome to all Fae creatures—except of course, for the Light Elves of the Quendi Forest. They were perennial enemies of the Dark Elves, and the frequent truces between the two never seemed to last too long.
If there was even a chance my mother had been telling the truth about my bloodline, however, and my grandmother had certainly believed she was, then I wanted to explore the possibility one day and try to find a portal to go there and perhaps, after learning more about that world, I could make my fortune there with my trade goods.
The main drawback was that as far as I’d been told, none of the Fae could be completely trusted. They were capricious creatures.
They weren’t the only ones. My mother, who had called herself an “enchantress,” told anyone who would listen that she was descended from Morgen le Fey, a healer and priestess from the Isle of Avalon.
My mother’s name, according to her, was really Niamh, and she would answer to no other.
Of course, most of that was lies and the rest was madness.
Her real family said her name was Wulfhild, or Hild for short, and she was not descended from anyone in particular, despite her claims. Her mother, my beloved grandmother, who would certainly be in a position to know about her birth, was a little cagey about it.
My grandmother told me that my mother’s madness and wild, reckless behavior probably stemmed from her father.
My grandmother had promised me over and over through the years that she would tell me one day who my mother’s father, my grandfather, had really been.
It was always “someday,” for my grandmother though.
It wasn’t until I was fifteen, and my grandmother was near death from the “white plague” or consumption, that she finally confessed it all.
My mother’s story about my own ancestry had been no less far-fetched and wild.
She had told me often that my father was not just a Faery, which would have strained belief enough.
No, she had gone further and proclaimed that my father was one of the “Kings of the Faeries.” She had even named me Braden, an old Irish name that she’d heard somewhere and greatly admired.
She said it seemed “noble” to her and sent that message to my father.
The name traditionally meant something like “prince,” from what my mother said, but then she said a lot of things, most of them nonsense.
There was no word for “prince” then, but the idea of me actually being any kind of heir to a throne was highly unlikely, like her claim about me being half-Faery, seeing how plain and ordinary I was, with nothing at all exceptional about me in those days.
My hair was a sort of washed-out, straw color, with some even brassier yellow hair mixed in—an ugly color, I’d always thought.
And I had green eyes in certain lights, like the Faeries were supposed to have, though mine were more hazel to be honest. In short, I was a long way from having any beauty, and I never knew why she had decided to stick to her story about my “Faery father” so vehemently.
The truth about my mother was that she was “moonstruck,” a term coined from the popular belief in those days that a person's erratic behavior was dictated by the phases of the moon. The word “lunatic,” from a similar source, also comes to mind.
According to her wild stories, she had strayed into Otherworld as a young woman, while she’d been gleaning herbs and picking berries and flowers for her potions she claimed to use for healings.
Once inside this deepest, darkest part of the forest, she said she had been lured into a Faery Ring and then stolen away by those Faeries to the home of the Faeries’ Lord, a man she called King Callum.
My grandmother told me she had gone missing for over an entire year around then, though the family had searched for her everywhere.
My mother had never been able to reliably account for that missing time.
This Faery king had kept her with him for a while, or so she told me later, intrigued by her wild, extravagant beauty and amused and enchanted by her strangeness, (again, according to her) and her fantastical and implausible stories of being an enchantress and a healer.
Her fair skin, long, vibrant red hair, along with eyes that were a dazzling and unusual shade of summer-grass green probably hadn’t hurt her chances of the king keeping her one bit.
But her “Faery lord” had predictably cast her aside once she’d been reckless enough to get pregnant and then had the audacity to actually carry his illegitimate child to full term.
One of her serving women had taken uncharacteristic (for a Faery) pity on her.
She had taken my mother back to the portal that would take her home to her world again, after the king angrily abandoned her and cast her and her baby aside.
Thus, she was able to make it back home and find her family again. That was her story, anyway.
The family had indeed taken her in when she turned back up and tried to care for her, but she had tragically died a few years after her return, having decided one day to string flower garlands around the tree trunks of the willows by the Ouse River.
To mark the scene? To memorialize the spot for some arcane reason known only to herself?
It was hard to say what her motives had been.
She and I had often lain beneath those trees, their uncut branches waving gently in the breeze, like her long, luxurious hair.
There she would dream and sing softly to herself, curling long strands of her hair around her fingers, while I chased the dragonflies and damselflies, rarely catching any of them.
My mother had been found floating face down in that same river—and whether she had fallen in accidentally or had jumped in to take her own life, no one could say.
(Dear reader, that’s not strictly accurate.
I could have said, and I did try to tell them that she had spread her arms and fallen in deliberately.
But public opinion was that I was only five years old, and far too traumatized and young to know what I was saying.
Too ill, as well, because of what she’d done to me before she’d taken her dive into the river.
She had first tried to take me with her by attempting to carve my heart from my chest. Because she loved me, or because she wanted to get back at her “Faery lord?” by killing his son?
Or perhaps she meant to take my heart as a sacrifice to the Dark Lord, as the woodsman who saved me claimed.
He’d said she was chanting to some devil the entire time.
It was hard to say. I remember her shouts and screams about how I deserved to die.
How I needed to because of how “evil” I was, but not much else about that awful day.
Still, I’d somehow survived the entire thing and could assert that her death had absolutely been a deliberate choice on her part after the woodsman thwarted her plans.
It’s surprising, though, how very few people believed a traumatized, half-dead five-year-old.)