The Rising, page 16
21
Blythe left the house under cover of the shadowed dawn. Tomas had told her not to go, to do her work here in the house, where it was safest, but she couldn’t bear that. How could she raise her hands to the trees, to the sky, when she was under a low roof in a house that stank of guttering fires and whatever Cecily was making in the kitchen?
She couldn’t take it seriously, despite the looks she’d seen in the eyes of those who had stood there on the church lawn and bid her take care and the dark premonition she’d felt at the sight of them. What would they do to her?
Blythe shook her head. They would do nothing. They wouldn’t dare. The Wilde’s weren’t overly powerful in the district – it didn’t pay to draw too much attention, that wasn’t their way – but they had one of the bigger houses and more land than many, even if much of it was wooded. Tomas kept a tight fist on the finances, so that most didn’t know all their security, but even so.
Tomas was careful to work their land himself. He acted not as a lord, but as a tiller of his own fields. A farmer, prosperous for certain, but a farmer, nonetheless. Without sons to work beside him, he had to employ help but that just brought them pity for her childlessness, nothing more, and men were always glad of extra work.
The first birds woke with the rising sun and opened their throats. Blythe ducked under the trees and gave a whistle, low and clear. She stood waiting, then, when she heard the answering call, she straightened and carried on to the stream that wound its way deep in the woods, between the roots of the oldest trees.
No one came here to these woods. They had a reputation of being shadowed. Unwelcoming. Perhaps spirits wandered between the trees, half-seen forms. The villagers of Wellsford muttered of the faerie, lurking there to steal the unwary away.
All of which meant that Blythe could walk between the trees unaccosted. Particularly at this hour when the day was neither begun nor the night done. She paused on the path and closed her eyes, reaching with her fingers to feel the charm she’d spun in the air, to keep strangers away from Wilde Grove land.
It was still intact, and she reached out with her spirit to strengthen it, using her will and her own energy to make it shine, setting into it the vision of all being repelled who came this way, suddenly uncomfortable, itchy to get back to their own homes, out of these woods.
Blythe turned and took a different path, satisfied that her wards held strong. A silent stirring of the air had her looking upwards and she smiled, holding out her arm.
The owl landed upon her outstretched sleeve, tucking her wings to its side, and smoothing her tawny feathers.
‘Have you had a good night’s hunt?’ Blythe asked the bird quietly, stroking her feathers. The owl blinked at her then swivelled its head to look along the path.
Blythe brought the tawny owl to her lips and dropped a kiss upon the feathers of her head. ‘Away with you to your bed,’ she said, and smiled when the bird launched herself from her arm and was gone in seconds on her silent wings.
The stream could be heard before it was seen and Blythe took a deep breath of the cool dawn air, calming her mind. She reached out and touched the mossy side of an oak, smiling at its serious wood and sap conversation.
‘Leah?’ she said, arriving at stream’s edge.
‘I’m here,’ the girl replied, stepping out from between the trees.
‘Good,’ Blythe said, nodding at the sixteen-year-old. ‘We’ve much to discuss, but first – shall we greet the day?’
Leah glanced around her, a frown upon her features.
‘What is it?’ Blythe asked. ‘The wards were strong where I passed them. Were they not along your pathway?’
‘They seemed untouched,’ Leah said. ‘But I’ve heard talk, after what happened at the church on Sunday.’
Blythe shook her head. ‘That,’ she said. ‘It was a farce, all of it. I choked, and no one came to my aid.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, not wanting to admit that the event had unsettled her. ‘Still,’ she said. ‘We’d best hurry things along, I think.’
That word came into her ears again. Hissed at her. Witch.
Leah stared at her, face pale. Blythe didn’t like the look of her. ‘Is it something to take seriously, do you believe?’
‘You know how it is in the village,’ Leah said. ‘Word takes flight like it has wings. From one mouth to the next.’ She shook her head. ‘And since Agnes’s baby.’
‘I tried to help that baby like I’ve done so before with others,’ Blythe said, furious at the turn of matters. ‘Like I did my very own.’ She peered with the first glimmers of the rising sun through the trees and examined Leah. ‘Aye,’ she said, straightening. ‘You think there is cause to be concerned.’
It was a statement, not a question, but Leah answered anyway.
‘I think you can’t be too careful at the moment.’ Her light brown eyes moved around the streambank. ‘You will be followed, I think. If not this day, then soon. We ought not to come out here for this purpose.’
‘I will not hide my face from the Goddess,’ Blythe hissed, suddenly furious with a mixture of fear and desperation. ‘I will not turn from the trees and the sky and the ground beneath my feet.’
Leah shrank back, but she said nothing.
Blythe took a deep breath and looked out over the stream where the sun was touching it in isolated spots that turned the burbling water to diamonds.
‘How am I supposed to continue to teach you if we cannot come out here to do what is necessary?’ she asked, her jaw locked.
‘I should move in,’ Leah said, her voice barely more than a whisper over the noise of the stream. ‘We should bring that forward. My mother will miss me, but not so much that she won’t be glad of one mouth less to feed, and a share of my wages.’
Blythe nodded, then held up a hand for the girl to be silent. She tipped her head back and listened, closing her eyes, the better to hear with her ears and her spirit.
Birds.
Her owl tucking herself into her nest, great eyes closing against the rising sun.
A vole in the undergrowth.
Something larger, the footsteps of a deer.
For a moment, the shade of something else, someone. But it was just a glimmer, a shimmer, and Blythe looked upon it for a moment, then dismissed it as one of the faerie. The boundaries between the worlds were thin here.
It was part of her job to keep it that way.
But there was no person. No human. No one from Wellsford ducking their head under the branches, sneaking where they ought not.
Not today, at least.
She nodded again, then spoke to Leah. ‘Let us greet the day then. The sun strengthens, and we will shortly be easily seen.’ A sigh, unsettled. ‘Should someone desire to look.’
Leah nodded, slipping off her shoes. She took a deep breath and held it, let it out slowly, but she couldn’t relax. It was three days since Sunday, and the rumours were flying. A fleeting presentiment settled a moment upon her, and she shivered under it rather than from the chill of the stream water about her ankles.
Things would not go well.
And another thought on top of that one.
Had she learnt enough?
Not nearly enough, she knew, as she closed her eyes and set the world to spinning around her.
* * *
Morghan stood, the water of the stream around her ankles, the skirts of her tunic hiked up in her belt, free of the water flow. She took a breath of air that tasted of water, of memory, and forced her eyes open, forced herself back to her own time.
Here was the truth: she travelled so easily now. As though unlatched from any particular life, any particular time. She’d become so adept at stepping from one world to another that…
That what?
She shook her head, her long hair draped over her shoulders. That wasn’t it. She’d always been adept at walking between the worlds. Stepping from here to there. From the woods of Wilde Grove into the Wildwood of the Otherworld.
This was different, this slipping and sliding. This was more than before.
Morghan lifted her hands and the sun, puny in the sky as it was, caught her golden hand in the light. This was what had been done to her, that day in the realm of the Fae Queen, in that small stone temple, a knife across her wrist, a new hand. One that shone in the light.
‘Follow the pincushion,’ she murmured, and a slight smile twisted her lips at the memory of Ambrose’s story. What had the words been?
‘I will give you a pin cushion to guide you. This you must throw in front of you and follow whithersoever it goes.’
It made as much sense as anything, she supposed, and looked again at the golden hand glowing from her right arm. It felt no different, and she knew it looked no different for those looking with ordinary sight, but in her eyes, it glowed and gleamed, even as she flexed fingers that felt flesh and blood.
Her mind loose and flexible, she let it muse and wander. Ravenna had shown her the past destruction of the Grove. Morghan flicked her gaze up at the trees, seeing them as they had been that dreadful day, their limbs burning in a great conflagration. She heard, for a brief moment, the echoes of their screams.
And now there was Blythe Wilde, once Lady of the Grove – for too short a time.
Morghan looked down at her feet, bare beneath the clear, eddying water, conscious that she stood in almost the exact place that the other woman had done, four hundred years ago in the past.
Where she herself had stood, all those centuries ago, when she was Blythe.
Difficult times, she thought. Difficult times were upon Wellsford. The balance, always delicate, was disrupted.
Blythe Wilde, Morghan thought once more. The Lady of the Grove who had not made it past her death.
Morghan tipped her head forward and took a breath, knowing what was to come over the next few days or weeks. Knowing how much the coming would cost her.
Still. Was that not her purpose? To keep the way? To maintain the balance? To be unafraid of death, even of pain?
She straightened again.
‘Blessed stream through sacred land,’ she murmured into the cool air. ‘You have tumbled down through these woods and these hills for hundreds of years. You have heard the prayers of my ancestors and my sisters and brothers. You have born witness to conversations and kept secrets. I honour your long memory and your song.’
She raised her face to the sky, and inhaled deeply, thinking of Blythe, who once stood on this very spot, and what must come next, for them both. Morghan let go of the breath she held and stepped a foot into the Otherworld, seeking that place there that was hers, that was home to her, that soothed her.
So, she stood in water there too, her feet on the stony shore of a lake, trees crowding around the beachline to dip their rooted toes into the clear water. She looked down at her feet under the water, and turned, stepped dripping into the loosely wooded clearing behind her. This was her place. Her place where she could breathe and be, from which she could step back and forth, which she could conjure with the merest thought, and walk through any part of her day both there and in the physical world.
The air was scented not with the woods that grew around Wilde Grove, with their oaks and birch, but with the clean astringent freshness of pine. Morghan walked up the short slope from the lake with its tiny island out from the shore and stepped into the coolness of the trees.
She hadn’t come here often the last few years, and she stopped on the soft and familiar ground to look around. All was just the same, just as she’d left it, just as it always was. Something stirred in the trees, a movement in their shadows and Morghan’s breath caught.
‘Amara?’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Movement again, and a golden mountain lion padded out of the trees and over to her. Morghan dropped to her knees and reached for the cat, and then the cat’s head was on her shoulder, heavy and warm, and the big cat was twisting around, almost sitting in her lap.
‘Amara,’ Morghan repeated, and there was that catch again in her throat, even as her heart pounded. ‘How I’ve missed you.’
The cat climbed from her and stared instead at her with her eyes of flecked amber.
Morghan bowed her head. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I will come more often.’
She didn’t know how it worked; indeed, Morghan often reflected upon how little she knew about how much of it worked, but here, in this place, she could still find Amara, the cat that had walked lifetimes with Grainne.
Grainne herself was not to be found in this light-dappled clearing where the breeze smelt of conifer trees and far-off snow. Morghan had used to bring her here sometimes, when the nights were too hard and too long for her, when all the hurt Grainne had been through as a child had threatened to catch her up and overwhelm her. Morghan had brought her here too, shards of her retrieved, to heal, to sleep, curled up in nests lined with soft feathers, to rest and grow strong again.
But she’d not come here so often herself since Grainne had embarked on her long voyage from this life to the next. Loss, even with the knowledge it was neither total nor permanent, was still difficult, and here Morghan felt her heart ache all the stronger for the one she’d loved through so many lifetimes.
She stood up, brushing needles and mulch from her clothes, and nodded. It would be good to come here again, to draw strength for what she knew she would soon be going through.
And likely, she’d need somewhere to bring Blythe, when it was time.
The cat gazed at her, then yawned and turned, wandering off amongst the trees, flicking her long tail, and Morghan drew breath, braced herself, and stepped back into Wilde Grove again.
In the water of the stream, Morghan knelt down, feeling the cold shock of water around her knees, soaking her almost to her thighs. She dipped her hands in the stream, scooped up a palmful of water and let it run down over her face.
‘I hold myself in bond to you, water, earth, sky,’ she said. ‘I walk in balance between you, world to world to world.’
Bowing her head, Morghan listened a moment, hearing whispered voices from the past in the song of the stream, hearing one word repeated over and over.
Witch, the stream hissed. Witch.
Morghan took a deep breath, held it, let it out. ‘By sky and root, through all worlds,’ she said, paying attention to the familiar words so that she was sure of them, not saying them merely by rote.
‘From each birth to each death, my life dedicated, my service offered.’
22
Erin came clattering down the stairs and stopped dead at the bottom to stare at the raven. It perched on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and stared unblinkingly at Erin.
‘How did you get in?’ Erin asked slowly, taking her gaze reluctantly from the bird to scan the room quickly. None of the windows were open, were they? Of course not, she was only just home, and they would have been closed when she left. She swivelled back to look at the bird.
‘What do you want?’
The bird sat and looked at her.
Over on his cushion, Burdock whimpered. He didn’t mind so much when the birds stayed outside in the trees like birds were supposed to. But he wasn’t so happy when they came inside and sat around looking at his stuff in his home. There was a biscuit still in his bowl, left over from breakfast, and Burdock thought about it warily – the bird wasn’t going to steal it, was it? He didn’t trust it one bit, no matter that it smelt of wind and trees and magic.
‘This is absurd,’ Erin whispered, still standing at the bottom of the stairs, still eying the bird. ‘You can’t keep me a prisoner here.’
The raven lifted his wings and spread them wide for a moment, beating them against the still air of the kitchen before tucking them back against his sides, the feathers smoothing.
‘You can’t.’
Burdock whimpered and Erin glanced over at him. He sat on his cushion looking nervous and miserable.
‘It’s all right, Burdock,’ Erin said, making an effort to sound convincing for the dog.
But that was something she hadn’t thought about, wasn’t it? What to do with Burdock if she really did plan to go running off and leaving all this behind. Her mother certainly wouldn’t welcome him, if she was thinking of going back there.
‘What am I thinking?’ she asked, speaking to herself. She shook her head. ‘I can’t leave.’
There was Burdock.
There was Stephan.
There were all the things she loved about Ash Cottage, Wellsford.
Wilde Grove.
There was everything she’d been working for. Kria – if she left now, what would that all have been for?
The bird stared at her and she peered back at him. How had he gotten in the house?
Erin edged around the table and the chair with the bird on it, making for the front door. She opened it and held it open.
‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Outside.’
Burdock got up from his bed and slunk reluctantly out the door, head down, tail tucked between his legs.
‘Burdock,’ Erin called. ‘Not you,’ she said. ‘I meant the bird.’
Burdock looked back at her, confused. She’d said outside, hadn’t she? He was a good dog. He knew that word.
Erin shook her head. ‘Come back here, boy,’ she said.
Burdock turned around, crept back into the house and sat back down on his cushion. He thumped his tail against the floor, twice, hopefully.
Erin closed the door. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I lost my temper.’ She wasn’t entirely sure who she was talking to. Maybe herself. She rubbed her knuckles on her jeans. Glanced down at herself and felt suddenly ridiculous. She looked so…. normal.
And she wasn’t warm either. She should get the fire going.
Make a proper cup of tea. Soothing lavender. Sit down and be sensible.
Erin shook her head. She wasn’t ready to be entirely sensible. The injustice of it all still burned inside her.
‘I’m not going back to the care home,’ she said.
