A Rush of Wings, page 21
“I know we’ve been at odds,” Liam said. “I know you and I look at the world and see it in different ways. But what you’ve been doing on my behalf, and for Duncan and Finn and Gawen? To me that’s an act of God. Complete and perfect, like you were the first time I saw you. I don’t care how you’ve gone about it, or what craft you’ve used—there’s God in your hands, and in your work. I’m only sorry I haven’t told you sooner. Because I know you, Enna, and even if I’m hard on you, I know you’d never do a thing out of wicked intent. What you did today had no malice in it. You were an instrument of mercy, however it may feel.”
“Sometimes intent doesn’t matter,” Rowenna said, wrapping her arms around herself, to be smaller, and to ward off the nighttime chill. “All that matters is what you’ve done.”
Brushing past him, she carried on up the hill, toward the castle and the chapel graveyard choked with nettles. This time, Liam let her go.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the moonlit chapel graveyard, Rowenna looked down at her hands and sighed. Scabbing blisters and still-bloodied cracks ran across her palms and between her fingers, stretching past her wrists halfway to the elbow. They were better than they had been, though, and now here she stood, about to do damage again.
Reluctantly Rowenna went to the largest clump of nettles. She tore stalks up by the roots until her arms buzzed with pain and sweat ran down her shoulder blades to the small of her back. It felt, as ever, like penance. Like the only hope she might have for absolution, and so even as her half-healed hands split open and bled, Rowenna continued her work.
Rowenna, Rowenna. The wind worried at her, twining through the headstones. Take care, take care, dark-hearted girl. Something wicked this way comes.
Rowenna shook her head to clear it. Something wicked had already come, but it had been from within, not without. All those years, her mother had been right. She was unfit to wield her own craft. She was as dark and dangerous and treacherous as the monster that had stolen Mairead’s life.
Kneeling, Rowenna tied a bundle of nettles together with the whip-thin upper section of one stalk. She moved stubbornly on to the next patch as the wind tugged at her. There’d be no going back to the hut tonight without everything she needed to finally break her brothers’ curse. It was time to see this work over and done with.
“What are they for?” Torr Pendragon asked mildly, and at the sound of his voice, Rowenna snapped upright. He’d appeared from God only knew where and sat on one of the tumbledown headstones, holding a half-eaten apple. It was their first meeting all over again, and if Rowenna had known what she did now, she’d have taken her family and run to the ends of the earth before falling into his clutches.
“You know they call them witchnettle,” he went on. “I’m surprised you’d risk being seen gathering them. You seem very reluctant to do anything else out of the ordinary, at least when I ask it of you.”
Torr got to his feet, tossing the apple aside. He went to Rowenna and took one of her hands in his own, turning it over to look at her ravaged palm. Rowenna stared at him with wide dark eyes as the wind soughed and sighed about her.
I could end you now, she thought. I could force the wind down your throat and turn everything inside you to blood and tatters, and I would be a hero. Not a soul in the Highlands would do other than thank me.
But the sick memory of how it had felt to end Hugh MacArthur’s life lay at her center and kept her from reaching out to the eager breeze. Within, she was still miles from land, still floundering in that endless internal sea, and she had not truly drawn breath since she’d used her craft to kill.
“I wonder about you, swan maiden,” Torr said, his voice laced with concern. “If you’re really the saint I’d hoped for after all, or if, like all the others, you’re just a common hedgerow witch.”
Rowenna flinched as he traced slow circles across her palm with one finger. “I have a task for you, little swan. One final chance to prove the Lord is with you, and that you’re fit to have a place at my side.”
Torr raised his head and glanced over to the arched graveyard entrance. “Would you bring her ladyship in?”
Rowenna watched as a dozen guards entered the graveyard. In the midst of them walked Elspeth Crannach.
At first, it seemed to Rowenna that the older girl had her head down and her hands clasped out of modesty. But as she stepped out of the shadowed archway, Rowenna caught the glint of metal shackles around her wrists and neck, and the thick iron chain that bound them together.
“Do you remember what I told you about witches?” Torr said to Rowenna as he motioned to the guards to push Elspeth toward them. “I said there are worse things in this world. What is it I named as the first?”
Rowenna could not answer, but Elspeth gave her a voice. Torr’s mistress tossed her head with a clank of iron. She shook the long loose hair back from her face and answered with a single biting word.
“Rebels.”
Rowenna stole a look at Elspeth. Every other time she’d seen the girl, her self-control had been flawless. But now the chains that bound her were made of metal, rather than duty and self-possession, and though her beautiful face was marred by spreading bruises, Elspeth Crannach’s discipline had turned to fire.
“Yes,” Torr said, a scowl darkening his face. “Rebels. And for all the kindness I’ve shown you, my lady, you proved to be a rebel and a traitor after all—the very things I cannot abide.”
By the time he turned to Rowenna, his usual smile was back in place, though she knew it now for what it was—a wicked and deceitful thing. “So. Here it is then. A chance for you to prove your true nature, swan maiden. I will not force your hand again—I want to see you choose. To show your mettle. Here is my mistress, disgraced and guilty of the worst sort of treachery. Of plotting my death, and planning to use you as the knife in her scheme. Whatever happens, she’s already dead on her feet. But you—you have a great opportunity, and a grand chance.”
Rowenna swallowed. The wind played about them, rustling the witchnettle, murmuring Rowenna’s name as it waited for clear instructions from the girl it had baptized with seawater the day of her birth.
“You see, I’ve grown tired of waiting for you to find your courage and your calling,” Torr Pendragon said. “I won’t hold off any longer. Unless you do as I bid, and kill this rebel who stands before us, she will burn. She’ll walk to the stake tomorrow, and if you disobey me, when she goes, you’ll go with her.”
Rowenna looked from Elspeth to Torr, and the wind stirred her black hair. She knew there would never be an end to this. That if she did as she’d done with Gawen’s father, letting Torr push her into violence she’d never craved, that there’d always be someone else. And to claim she’d been made to act as a weapon was no absolution. Not when it was in her to refuse.
So in the deep places of her spirit, where her darksome craft dwelled, Rowenna made herself heavy and dropped like a stone. She sank through the lightless sea until her feet touched bottom, and there, with all the crushing weight of her own power bearing down upon her, Rowenna called the wind.
Blood willingly given is what’s needed for warding work, Elspeth had taught her. Either the making or breaking of it.
And had Rowenna not bled willingly for weeks now?
The wind came readily, whirling about her at once. She curled her blistered and bloodstained fingers, gathering the wind, beckoning it to her. Elspeth’s face went pale as she sensed the scope of Rowenna’s power—the depth and darkness of what she’d become—and Torr smiled to himself in a satisfied way.
That smile faded, however, when Rowenna turned her full attention on him. She could feel the subtle nature of the ward that protected Torr—the weft and warp of it, the delicate way Elspeth had bound it together.
Summoning her wind, Rowenna threw it at Torr. It roared across the graveyard, and he stood unmoving, with a pitying smile on his face, because Rowenna’s power could not touch him through the protection of his ward.
But it was not Torr himself Rowenna had sent the wind and her power against. Elspeth had once been a marvel in her power—she’d built a wall and a ward of infinite grace and complexity. Rowenna’s craft, by contrast, was neither delicate nor complicated. It was a straightforward, furious thing, a knife and a hammer and a cudgel. A bludgeon that could not be withstood. The air shimmered, pulsing and warping as Rowenna’s wind beat itself at Elspeth’s creation. Over and over her power battered that clever and beautiful thing, slipping in at the chinks, relentlessly taking advantage of any and every weakness.
Though it seemed a lifetime, only moments passed before an audible sound of rending and tearing filled the air. Joyous and ruthless, Rowenna’s craft shattered Elspeth’s work as if it were an edifice of glass. And in the absence of a ward, the wind threw Torr six feet, pinned him among the overgrown weeds, and slithered down his throat.
It took only that brief moment of panic for Rowenna to teach Torr more than he’d ever taught her. For the first time in his treacherous life, he knew a brief foretaste of death, schooled by Rowenna’s craft.
Then she drew back her power.
Reluctantly the wind returned to her, twisting around her ankles like a friendly cat. Torr gasped and choked, color flooding his face. The white of his left eye had gone blood red, and when he fixed his gaze on Rowenna, there was a hatred she’d never seen there before. It chilled her, and yet at the same time, set triumph to singing in her bones.
He would never treat her like a plaything or a pawn again.
“Take them both away,” Torr rasped furiously. “Lock them up and ready a pair of stakes. Oh, and give the witch a bed of nettles to wait on, since she loves their touch so.”
Guards converged upon Rowenna and Elspeth, and neither of them fought—Elspeth because she already stood in chains, and Rowenna because she refused her own darkness.
Refused to be, at the last, what her mother had feared, and what so many believed or wished her to be.
* * *
Not a breath of wind could reach the dungeons beneath Inverness Castle, which had been there since long before Torr Pendragon came north and expanded the old fort that topped the hill. It smelled of earth and mildew and rot in that place belowground, where not a scrap of sky or sunlight was visible. There was only the gutter of torchlight and occasional groan of a prisoner, though Rowenna could see no one from within her cell. She could, however, see the guard station, next to the narrow stairway that led up and out of the labyrinthine prison corridors.
The floor of Rowenna’s cell was carpeted with the nettles she’d gathered in the chapel yard. Shivering, she cast about herself. At the far side of the cell stood a bucket for waste and a small clay pitcher of fetid water. Taking the pitcher, she sat down and began to work. If it came to it, she’d die at this undertaking—at the task of trying to set her brothers and Gawen free. But she’d need a miracle to see it done. Though she had her nettles, the three finished shirts and the fourth, which was still incomplete, were all hidden away in the hut by the river. And she had no spinning wheel. It would take an act of God for Rowenna to finish her work now. Or at least, of a servant of his.
Perhaps she could speak to the latter, though, if she bided her time.
Rowenna could not soak the nettle stalks, nor afford to waste a drop of precious liquid, so she stripped the leaves, then poured water into the palm of one hand. She ran her damp palm along the length of the stalk, until it was wet enough to split apart, revealing the fibers within.
Soaking nettles like that was slow and agonizing work. Hours crawled past, and by the time the last stalk lay split on the cell’s stone floor, Rowenna was too afraid to look at her palms for long. She’d done more damage than ever before, and dampened the final few stalks as much with her own blood as with water.
Spreading the nettles out across the floor, she gathered up her skirts and peeled her stockings off before beginning the task of breaking the fiber free. It was nearly a relief to feel the pain transfer in part from her hands to her feet, and she listened absently to the sound of the guards’ low voices as she trod back and forth, back and forth.
Rowenna was on her knees pulling flax free of the broken nettles when the door to her cell opened again. A guard set down a plate with a small heel of dried bread and a raw turnip on it, and shook his head at her.
“Filthy witch,” he muttered, and Rowenna was sure she looked the part. The sweat had dried on her after her work in the graveyard, her hands were a mess of blood and torn skin, and her feet were all over blisters. But she carried on gleaning nettle fiber until it lay in clouds about her, ready to be spun.
Panic set in for a moment then. With no spinning wheel and no drop spindle, there’d be no way to process the fiber into yarn. Rowenna drew in a deep breath and shut her eyes. She let the burning pain in her hands and feet rise up like purifying fire and clear the cobwebs of exhaustion from her mind.
In the darkness of her own making, she heard the guards more clearly. The night had worn on into day and back to night again as Rowenna worked, and they were about to change over. The newest warden muttered away about the weather.
“… night’s black as pitch,” he said. “Fog’s come in off the river, too. Watch yourself out there—it’s cold and dark as midwinter.”
As Rowenna overheard them, she felt the band around her throat loosen. It was well past midnight then, and she was free to speak. Scrambling to her feet, she hurried to the iron door and rattled at the bars with raw fists.
“In here!” Rowenna shouted. “I’m in here, and I haven’t confessed, and I want a priest.”
“Going to be a long night for you,” the guard heading off duty said. The night warden stumped over to Rowenna’s cell door and squinted at her through the bars.
“You’re the witch?” he asked dubiously.
Rowenna nodded. “Aye. But I’ve changed my mind about it. About the devil. Whatever I’m meant to have done wrong. I want to confess, but I’ll only do it to one priest.”
“They told me you were mute,” the night warden said, and Rowenna shrugged. “We’ve got a priest already, who hears prisoners’ confessions. You can say your bit to him.”
“No,” Rowenna snapped. “I won’t confess to just anyone. Down at the wharves there’s someone who writes and reads messages for hire. He’s trained for a priest, and I know him. He’s called Liam Winthrop—have him fetched here so I can say my bit. And tell him… tell him I need to finish what I’ve started. He’ll know what that means.”
“You don’t give the orders here,” the night warden grumbled, beginning to turn away. “Make your confession to our prison priest, or you won’t be making it at all.”
Rowenna snaked one ruined hand through the bars of the cell door and snatched at the warden’s shirt.
“I will curse you,” she swore to him, all her sharpness honed to a razor edge. “I will set a fire in your bones that never burns out. Your every waking moment will be an agony, and sleep will offer no reprieve, because each night when you lay your head down, your dreams will be filled with the deaths of those you love most. You will never know an instant of rest or comfort again, because you denied me this one thing I’m asking for, so that I can unburden myself before I die.”
As Rowenna raged, the distant wind, shut out of the prison by a thick door at the top of the narrow stairs, screamed at the hinges and slammed itself against the impenetrable studded oak.
The guard blanched, and Rowenna heard a resigned voice come from the cell beside her.
“She can do it, you know,” Elspeth said. “She nearly killed Torr Pendragon last night. I shouldn’t like to cross her, myself.”
“I’ll send a page,” the night warden muttered, and when Rowenna let him go, he hurried out of arm’s reach.
“I want to confess to her priest too,” Elspeth called after the warden. “I know the one they send down to the prison. He’s a pig with wandering hands and loose lips. Witch, can I be shriven by your priest?”
“Of course you can,” Rowenna answered.
The warden hurried to the top of the stairs, calling for a page, and Rowenna turned back to the puzzle of her spinning.
She scrabbled about among the broken pieces of nettle stalk before finding one that was longer and smoother than the rest, with a notch scored at the top where it had only snapped halfway. Rowenna took a few strands of her precious fibers and tied a loose bit of stone to the bottom of the nettle stalk for a weight. It would be unwieldy and cumbersome and difficult to work with, but it would serve her for a drop spindle, at least.
In the absence of a chair or a cot, Rowenna got to her feet, leaned her weight back against the wall, and began to spin. The resulting yarn was lumpy and uneven, stained rust red in places by her hands, but it was all she could do under the circumstances.
Rowenna spun, and spun, until the cell around her blurred and her fingers moved through habit rather than conscious will. With half her mind she saw the dungeon below Inverness Castle, and with the other, the wild places of Neadeala, where Mairead stalked across the moors. She looked more monstrous now, and less human. Her face was all angles and sharp edges, her mouth a stark scarlet line. Rowenna watched with a dim, muffled horror as Mairead followed after Cam. Her father sobbed as he walked, occasionally calling for his lost children. But they were all gone away, off in Inverness breaking their own curse, and Cam was left alone with his. Mairead’s uncanny eyes gleamed in the moonlight as he stumbled. The monster in Rowenna’s mother’s skin surged forward.
“Enna.”
In her cell, Rowenna jerked back to full consciousness, dread resting in the pit of her stomach. Her makeshift spindle was still spinning, the nettle fiber nearly gone, and skeins of yarn lay untidily at her feet.
“Liam,” Rowenna breathed.
Her oldest brother stood at the foot of the prison steps, and the night warden eyed him skeptically. “You don’t look much like a priest.”
Liam rose to the occasion at once, giving the warden a long-suffering look. “Do you think priests are born in cassocks? It’s two in the morning.”
