The ancient fir that stood sentinel over Niamh’s grave had borne silent witness to a few of the spring and autumnal rituals the witch performed when she lived. Imogen thought it fitting the tree watch over her mother’s body where it lay buried beneath black earth and a mound of stones.
Niamh had died a week earlier, and the daffodils she so admired spread across the forest floor in a vast white and yellow tapestry. Imogen set a spray of the flowers atop the grave and bowed her head.
“It’s very quiet now, Mother. I miss you.”
As if in answer, a zephyr wind smelling of rye and apple blossoms blew across her shoulders, fluttering the tendrils of dark hair that had escaped her plait. A fanciful indulgence it might be, but she liked to think Niamh’s spirit lingered where her body rested, if only to greet Imogen when she visited the grave each day.
Some might think it strange that she came each afternoon to sit by the grave and talk to a pile of rocks, but Imogen didn’t care. Niamh had been her only companion her entire life, the one person who shared conversation with her. Her grief was still too fresh to give that up now, even if Niamh never replied.
Imogen fished in her apron pocket and pulled out the journal her mother had given her the night of her death. She kept it with her these days, reading it, as promised, during spare moments between chores and in the evening just before bed. The journal revealed a Niamh Imogen had never known or imagined.
The ground beneath her was dry and sun-warmed as she sat down cross-legged next to the grave and removed her gloves. Imogen liked to read here best, with the spirit of her mother close by and her memories revealing themselves in a flowing scrawl of faded ink.
Recipes for elixirs occupied the pages alongside lists of spells and commentary on the politics of the Berberi court. The spells and recipes were familiar. After hours of lessons and singing repetitious songs with ingredients and chants as lyrics, she knew them by heart.
But it was her mother’s observations of the vagaries of the aristocrats that captured Imogen’s interest. Astute, observant Niamh; she’d been less than impressed with the shenanigans perpetrated by spoiled, entitled nobility.
Imogen had gone wide-eyed at the discovery that Niamh had once been the pampered mistress of King Varn, and she blushed as she read those entries. Niamh waxed poetic and graphically about Varn’s physical prowess.
He is a fine man, the king. Strong shoulders and hair like the sun at Solstice. I see the women of court eye him. He’s a prized stallion and not just for his wealth and power. If they only knew the man was hung as well as the biggest stud in the royal stables.
“Honestly, Mother, was it necessary to write it down?” Imogen had muttered to herself and quickly skimmed the pages containing Niamh’s descriptions of bed play. Her sharp, no-nonsense words echoed in Imogen’s mind.
“The coupling between a man and a woman is as natural as it gets, Imogen. There’s no shame to it, nor should it be whispered of furtively in the dark. That way lies ignorance and stupidity.” She had blithely ignored Imogen’s red face and proceeded to tell her in detail the mating rituals of man and woman.
It was years since that conversation, and Imogen still squirmed in embarrassment. Her mother explaining in her blunt fashion the way a lover should treat his mate was one thing, reading about such very personal experiences something else entirely. She fluttered those pages through her fingers until she reached the section she’d stopped at a day earlier. This entry was different and far more intriguing.
There is a man in my house. Or half a man at least. Poor creature. I stumbled upon him behind the bailey, hidden by the old rowan near the eastern wall. I thought him a half-rotten corpse, dug up from a shallow grave by an opportunistic scavenger. Then it spoke. Sweet gods, I nearly pissed myself.
Imogen worried her lower lip with two fingers, eyes glued to the page.
I almost left him there. My magic is of earth and seasons and growing things. I don’t truck with the black mages of Westerwall, and this deathless horror facing me is surely the creation of one of these mages.
Imogen paused in her reading. The irony of Niamh’s statements struck home. She wondered if the woman had ever reread these passages in her later years and thought to herself how strange it was that Death in another form resided in her house and had been raised at her knee.
She returned to her reading and Niamh’s account of bringing the man into her house and placing him in one the guest rooms where servants dared not visit. Planning and secrets and the need to keep down servant gossip made for good reading and Imogen was absorbed by her mother’s descriptions of her patient.
He rarely speaks. I think the suffering is so great, it’s too much effort to talk. I cannot help but watch as his body is slowly made whole by unseen hands. He must have been burned at some point, for it is ashes, still smelling of the fires, which swirl into the room and cast themselves upon him, becoming healthy flesh.
Imogen’s skin prickled at the imagery her descriptions evoked, and the hairs at her nape stood on end at the next entry.
I found a bone outside his door this morning, scorched black in spots. I don’t know how it got here without being noticed. I didn’t dare touch it, only opened the door and walked away. When I came to check on him in the afternoon, he had regained an arm.”
Another entry referenced the Tineroth pendant.
This magic is old. Old beyond the memory of our books and scribes, even beyond the knowledge of the Primus mages. A key and a map to vanished Tineroth. There is truth in every legend. I didn’t refuse the gift, though I have no desire to wear this strange bauble, nor any reason to seek this mad king’s help. He speaks little even now, but his eyes…I will be glad to see him go back to whatever so desperately calls him.”
Imogen rubbed her arms. She promised Niamh she would read her journal. She’d made no promise to seek out Cededa of Tineroth. Her hands, ungloved now, looked innocent enough, and she held them up, watching as sunbeams streamed between her fingers. Not until Niamh’s death had she ever touched another living person with her bare hands. Her affliction might have been easier to shoulder if it was limited to her hands, but death flowed in her veins. Could this king, immune to the very thing that cursed her, truly help?
The light had grown so weak, Imogen had to squint to see the writing. She closed the book and rose from her place. The flowers resting atop the grave waved their petals at her in the gentle breeze, as if to bid her farewell for the evening. Imogen lifted the book and gazed speculatively at the burial mound. “Who is this woman I’m reading about, Mother? She is a stranger to me.” Only the creak of the fir’s limbs and the growing chorus of frogs peeping answered her. She returned the book to her apron pocket and trudged back to the house.
Her dinner that night might well have been a bowl of mud for all the attention she paid to it. Niamh’s history, in the time before Imogen was born, read like the legends she’d filled her ears with in childhood. Lover of one man, savior to another. What had brought her so low in her later years?
Her gaze drifted to the box that still housed the Tineroth pendant. It rested back on its shelf undisturbed. Imogen had left the pendant alone, still unnerved by its odd abilities to come alive at unexpected moments. Her growing curiosity overrode her wariness, and she retrieved the box. Left unlocked by Niamh’s spell, the lid opened easily, revealing the pendant. A metallic wink greeted Imogen, and she carefully lifted the bauble by its delicate chain and held it aloft.
It swung from her fingers, silver catching the candlelight so that it shimmered. At some point, after Imogen dropped it back in the box, the pendant had again reconfigured itself. The serpentine knotwork was now a lacy filigree that reminded her of crossing paths and roads that led to endless loops.
She eyed it closely. Keys bore many designs, especially magical ones. Set within the hidden spot of a wall or inserted into a decorative urn, any lock might open with the key made to match it. But a map as well? That was more of a puzzle, and Niamh’s journal had yet to reveal that small secret.
The pendant half rotated one way and then the other on its chain as Imogen admired its new shape. Except for the eerie propensity to shift and writhe, the key was a thing of beauty, made to catch the eye of woman or man. Despite her misgivings and coaxed by an urging she couldn’t explain, she slipped the chain over her head.
The silver lay warm against her breastbone, and Imogen wondered anew at the magic that made something so delicate in appearance feel so weighty. Wanting to see how the pendant looked on her, she opened the blanket chest at the foot of Niamh’s bed and pulled out an ornate hand mirror.
Backed in silver decorated with curving designs of scrolls and roses, the mirror had been an endless source of temptation and at least two swats to the backside when Imogen was growing up. Using it to play pretend-I’m-a-queen had consequences.
Niamh, usually generous to a fault in accommodating her only child’s wishes, had been uncharacteristically territorial with the mirror and had punished Imogen for sneaking it out of the blanket chest. She’d never explained her possessiveness, and after a second paddling and early trip to bed without supper for her transgression, Imogen lost any desire to ask why. Now, years later, with Niamh’s journal to enlighten her, she suspected the mirror had been a treasured gift from King Varn.
She lifted the glass and eyed her reflection. Hers was a forgettable face and one only Niamh had seen as it actually was. Strong enchantments fooled everyone else into seeing an old woman who might have been Niamh’s mother instead of her daughter. Imogen looked beyond the pale skin and brown hair to the pendant resting against her collarbones.
A truly lovely piece. She traced the new design with one finger, waiting to see if the pendant would do as it had with Niamh and wrap a silver tendril around her knuckle. It didn’t move but sent small vibrations across the surface of her skin.
Imogen jerked her hand away as silver threads of lace suddenly unraveled and spread across her chest like a contagion of climbing ivy. Imogen’s admiration turned to terror, and she cried out as the metal strands slithered up her neck and over her shoulders beneath her shirt. The mirror fell from her hand, shattering glass across the floor as she clawed at her skin.
The crawling feeling halted just below her jaw, and her flesh stung where her nails had torn at the metal tendrils. “Oh gods,” she breathed. “What is this? What is this?” She ran her hand over what was now a filigreed collar and came away with a bloodied palm.
Heedless of the glass crunching beneath her shoes, she wrenched the door opened and stumbled outside—only to be greeted by a world gone topsy-turvy. What should have been a blanketing darkness that concealed anything beyond the weak corona of light spilling from her open door, was instead a shimmering miasma of illumination, as if thousands of fireflies swarmed the clearing around the cottage and the dark forest beyond.
Imogen gasped and blinked. Surely, she’d been made either blind or mad by the parasite encircling her neck and shoulders. But no amount of blinking diminished the lighted mist, and like the pendant, it began to take a defined shape. Vaporous, it coalesced into rigid lines that widened to create a single brightly lit path leading straight into the heart of the forest.
She backed into the house and slammed the door. The action dulled the brightness from outside but didn’t shut it out. The illuminated path started at the tip of her toes. Imogen took two steps back and the path followed, moving where she did as if tethered to her feet.
Imogen breathed hard, grasping for a measure of calm and some small understanding of what just happened. Oh gods, why did she have to put on that cursed pendant? “Foolish, Imogen,” she snarled. “How could you be so stupid?”
A tingling spread, sliding across her neck and shoulders, and she whimpered. The collar was growing again. She touched a spot below her neck and shuddered. The metal was gone, leaving in its place raised scars that mimicked its design. The tingling remained, not painful but unpleasant in a crawling, prickling way. Imogen bent and retrieved a shard of the mirror.
Sure enough, the reflection confirmed what she’d felt. The metal no longer shone as bright silver markings. Instead, it had melded into her skin, becoming part of her, leaving only a decorative scar marred by blood and scratches.
It was in her. Her heart banged against her ribs. Dear gods, whatever that thing was Niamh had received from the Tineroth mage-king, it had come alive and invaded her daughter. The thinnest thread holding Imogen’s panic at bay snapped. A high whine grew in her ears, and her vision narrowed to a single point that blurred with tears. She ripped at her clothes and her skin, weeping as she tried to claw the pendant out of her body.
“Get it out!” she shrieked to the silent walls. “Get it out!”
From a far distance, she thought she heard Niamh’s voice, stern, calming. “Stop it, Imogen.”
Respect and obedience for her mother came as second nature, and Imogen immediately halted her frantic dance of wounding and mutilation. She breathed hard, swiping at the tears dripping down her cheeks, leaving blood smears behind.
“Mother?” she called feebly. Silence answered her, but that one moment, when Imogen was sure she’d heard Niamh’s voice, broke the terror’s hold on her.
She inhaled slowly, regaining a measure of calm. The sharp pain of the scratches on her neck cleared her head a little more.
“One problem at a time, Imogen,” she told herself and set about heating water and laying out clean towels on the table. A bottle of lavender oil joined the supplies and soon she sat down at the table, hissing her misery each time she cleaned one of the scratches on her neck or chest and applied the oil.
The scratches, though painful, weren’t deep, and she’d been careful to clean them thoroughly, despite the discomfort. She had every faith in the lavender oil she’d extracted last summer. Lavender was a good wound healer, and Niamh had sworn by its medicinal properties.
The mirror still lay in pieces on the floor, shards reflecting the gold-lit path that still ran from Imogen’s feet and passed under the cottage door. A dull ache settled in the pit of her stomach. “Mother, if you rise from the earth this night to redden my backside for my carelessness, I won’t be in the least surprised. I am so sorry.”
She stood, cleared the table and set to sweeping the floor clean of the mirror’s remains. The strange tingling under her skin had lessened but also expanded to other parts of her body, an ever-present reminder something now shared space with the curse inside her. Revulsion surged into her throat, carried on a stream of bile that she fought down with effort.
A key and a map to vanished Tineroth.
Niamh’s flowing script replayed in her mind’s eye, and Imogen paused in her sweeping. How did one find a city that had vanished thousands of years earlier? She glanced down at her feet and the luminescent path. One looked with ensorcelled eyes.
She groaned and rested her forehead on the tip of the broom handle. “Ah, Mother. You might have warned me.”
The pendant wasn’t the key or the map to Tineroth. She herself was. It had only served as the trigger to activate a spell, one created by a mage-king and given with his blessing to an unwitting witch who’d bequeathed it to her unknowing daughter. Imogen’s disbelief in the Undying King’s ability to break her curse didn’t matter now. She had to seek him out simply to extract his nasty little artifact from her body and restore her eyesight to normal.
A simmering rage settled in her already queasy stomach, and she wielded the broom against the pile of broken glass as if it were a weapon. “Just wait until we meet, Sire. The second you get this thing out of me, I’m going to make you eat it.”