On Tollswitch Hill Stories from the Averraine Cycle

On Tollswitch Hill

Stories from the Averraine Cycle and more

By Morgan Smith

Traveling Light Publications

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On Tollswitch Hill

By Morgan Smith

Traveling Light Publications

On Tollswitch Hill

It began with a pig that escaped.

She was laughing, but it wasn’t funny, not really, because down in the yard, there was a sack of grain split open and spilling into the dirt, and a bushel’s worth of turnips getting smashed to bits underfoot, and they could ill afford the losses. But the sight of all those men, in their once-bright festival shirts, scrambling in the mud as they vainly leapt onto the squealer and missed?

Well, what else could you do but laugh?

It was a mistake, that laughter. The villagers remembered it, in the dark of winter, when the frost-sickness came. They began to whisper among themselves when the spring rains were scant. The whispers turned to mutterings as the days began to shorten again, and when an early frost made the harvest lean and Aideen’s best milker dried up, they weren’t just talking anymore.

They took her out to the end of the long meadow to do the deed; there was a good oak tree there to hang her from. Two men held her angry husband back and stifled his weeping protests, and then, in the morning, they cut her down, and the bravest among them buried her in the middle of the ruined temple their ancestors had used to go to up on the hill, back when the Mother liked her worship among the stones, instead of in the fields and groves.

He killed himself, the husband, another hanging. That was unsettling, but then, married to a witch, he would be doing odd things, wouldn’t he? They buried him up there on the hill beside her, and they never spoke of what they’d done, or that place even, forever after, except sometimes in hushed tones and with the warding signs. It hadn’t been a place of theirs to begin with, and now it seemed a little more otherly, a little more fell. They never went there.

It was a good many years, though, before the real trouble began.

***

Kenzie wasn’t ever what you’d call a happy man.

His mother had always remarked he was the kind of boy who could see clouds rolling in on the sunniest day, and she wasn’t far wrong.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be happy. It was just that every time he thought about any activity, his mind instantly began to imagine what could go wrong, and all his potential pleasure in life was extinguished.

So the moment his father began explaining what it was he wanted Kenzie to do, his first instinct was to list in his mind the various discomforts his proposed journey would entail, and what dangers he might face along the way.

Curiously, what might be happening in a tiny, isolated village, and the possibility that rumours might, in this one instance, prove as true and as calamitous as they hinted at, did not in any way figure into this.

He assumed only that he would, for the foreseeable future, be consigned to flea-infested beds and indigestible suppers washed down with sour ale, limited to the dullest of companions, possibly for weeks on end, and that there would be no thanks or reward at the close. It did not once cross his mind that the village itself was anything more than an uncomfortable stopping place where he would have to lecture a few yokels on the unwisdom of exaggeration and letting tall tales get out of hand.

But he was also not the sort of person who shied away from any assigned task, nor was he in the habit of arguing with his father. He gathered up his spare shirts and a couple of books, he packed an extra-thick wool overtunic and his least worn-out hunting boots, he ordered the castle cook to assemble some basic travelling provisions and, together with his servant, Galen, saddled up and left Issing Keep the following morning, on the grounds that the sooner he got on with this, the sooner he could be home again.

Probably home to convalesce from the ague or the squits he’d undoubtedly catch, but at least he would be home.

***

When you rule over the many, when you’ve become accustomed to a certain power, and when you’ve had a few years to get used to not merely respect but instant obedience, it’s a hard thing to come up against a sudden, immoveable stubbornness.

She had tried reason. She had tried cajoling and flattery. She had tried guilt and bargaining.

She was down to threats, because by now she was furious.

“We’ve given you everything, Roisean. Everything. All the Talent in the world would be useless to you, if we hadn’t taken you in and taught you how to use your gifts. How dare you throw this back in our face! If you do this, I warn you, there will be no turning back. Our doors will be closed to you.”

Roisean only nodded.

She’d said very little, this last hour or more. But that little had amounted to “No” and nothing much else, and for the life of her, Dalriega could not remember anyone who had said this to her so unequivocally and so adamantly for so long, in years.

And then, when she’d waved Roisean away with an imperious gesture of dismissal, she sat, still fuming, because the chit hadn’t even had the decency to slam the door in anger behind her, and she began, in her mind, to enumerate all of the ways in which Roisean had always been the most infuriating student. So sure of herself, even from the start! So quiet and self-contained that even her earliest teachers had been unable to tell if she was listening to them at all.

But then she reflected on the fact that they could ill afford to lose Roisean. True Dreamers were incredibly rare – there hadn’t been one studying on the Holy Island for three generations, and despite extensive reading of the Chronicles, Dalriega had never found an account of there ever having been one so skilled, let alone as gifted, as Roisean.

Ah, well, she’d put things right in the morning. After devotions, she’d talk to her, and explain why it was so important for her to stay and serve the Goddess in the way the Blessed Mother of All had obviously intended. She’d think of some compromise for the girl, so that staying would seem the more prudent and desirable choice.

But in the morning, Roisean was nowhere to be found, and it was another full day before Dalriega, Most Reverend Mother of Braide, discovered that the girl had boarded the last ferry of the evening, back to the mainland, and from there, utterly disappeared.

***

Kenzie hadn’t bargained on a pack of outlaws.

They came out of the woods and onto the road with a terrifying suddenness, and it had only been their horses’ good sense that saved them. Both had shied and bolted, skittering down the road a good half-mile before he and Galen had been able to rein them back under control.

By then, the pack-pony was long gone, swallowed up with their attackers into the forest, and leaving the two of them gasping for breath on the longest, loneliest stretch of unused and uninhabited road his father’s lands could boast of.

It was only to have been expected, in Kenzie’s opinion. His estimation of the perils of this journey had been wildly optimistic, even given his low expectations. The food in some of the taverns had been more than inedible and they had run through all their emergency provisions in a shockingly short time. There had been more nights spent benighted between villages, camped out under the unforgiving stars, than he had imagined possible, and Galen’s horse had gotten a stone lodged in one hoof, which had kept them kicking their own heels in a tiny, nameless hamlet for three full days.

And now this, he thought, savagely hauling on the reins. His clothes, his books, his warmer cloak, all gone, and they still hadn’t arrived at that misbegotten village that had decided to draw attention to itself for no good reason.

It was then that he saw the woman.

She was standing in the middle of the road, perhaps thirty yards away, and her head was tilted off to one side, as if she were listening for something more than merely the sounds of the forest. As the two men drew near and Kenzie opened his mouth to call out to her, she held up an authoritative hand, demanding his silence.

He was so astonished that he obeyed the gesture without thinking, before his consciousness of his station in life reminded him that he was the one to give the orders.

At least, that is, to unknown women wearing coarse, brown, woollen gowns suited to the lesser classes, standing on roads that belonged to his father.

Before he could reassert his borrowed authority, she sighed, shook her head and turned to face him.

“You’re a bit late on the road, aren’t you?” she said.

She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t even pretty, not in the way that the girls his mother kept trying to introduce him to were. And yet…

There was something about her that held his gaze, and left him still speechless, instead of taking charge of things as he had meant to do. Behind him, he heard Galen, sucking in his breath in a prelude to an angry reprimand, but whatever harsh words he meant to say died on his lips.

The wind whipped through in a sudden, angry gust that howled mercilessly through the trees, like an incoherent scream of anguish. The leaves and dust swirled up like towering giants, the nearer branches crackled and whined as if they were babies being torn from their parents’ arms, and then everything darkened, before sinking back into utter stillness.

***

They weren’t, as it happened, all that far from their destination. If Kenzie had any questions about why this lone woman had been standing in the middle of a deserted road, they had been driven out of his mind by that strange wind, coupled with his own intensely renewed desire to get to Toll, talk the inhabitants out of their make-believe and to go home again.

The woman walked beside them as they struggled on, that last mile or so, and although she answered his occasional questions with perfect amiability, he found that he knew very little more about her, in the end, than he would have had he not spoken to her at all.

Her name was Roisean, she had come from the north, up near Dungarrow, and she was bound, as he was, for Toll. The why of her journey was opaque, largely because Kenzie was reluctant to mention his own mission. The more he thought about what his father had said about the place, the more high-handed and officious, not to mention pointless, his errand sounded, and he was suddenly conscious, too, of wanting for the very first time in his life to be liked, even just for a little while, for himself and not his birthrank.

Toll did not have an actual inn or guesting place. Like so many of the places he’d arrived at on this venture, the local watering hole was just a ramshackle addition to the ordinary dwelling of the woman who acted as reeve for the area.

She seemed distinctly unenthusiastic about his arrival, which did not surprise him. She was even less pleased when he commandeered that communal space as his own quarters, and, because Roisean seemed unable or unwilling to make her own arrangements, the loft above the small tithing-barn for her. She had stood all unheeding while he explained to the reeve who he was, and why he was there, more or less, but he wasn’t sure, even now, that Roisean had been listening to that conversation. Her mind seemed to be very much elsewhere.

He had sent the reeve out to assemble the villagers, after she had grudgingly produced some ale and some dry, coarse bread for them. If he could put the fear of the Lord of Issing into them, so that they at least kept their idiotic superstitions to themselves, he’d be happy enough to call it a job well done.

His father, however, had been a little more explicit about what he wanted. Lord Raghnall was, by habit and temperament, an uncomplicated and straightforward man who liked getting to the bottom of things. He had told his son to find out what lay at the heart of this sudden emergence of a tale of soul-stealing and child murder. His father had seemed to be of the opinion that some outside force was at work, some person from some other place who must have stirred things up.

“Country folk,” he’d said. “They’re a gullible lot, but they haven’t enough imagination between them to have dreamed this up on their own. And it’s interfering with trade. Scared half the farmers down Alindor way from bringing their cattle up this year, seeing as how they’d have to herd them through not three miles distant from Toll. Took ‘em out to old Hamish on the coast instead. Can’t have that.”

Less than a candle-mark later, though, Kenzie began to have serious doubts about his father’s rendering of the problem, and of his own ability to give them a firm lecture that would squash their yobbo pretensions down enough to turn this back into a purely local stupidity.

To at least seem to be fair, and to get them on his side, he had asked, in a studiously neutral tone, for the headman and a couple of the more prosperous-looking farmers to explain the situation to him. This had proven to be difficult.

They weren’t at all forthcoming. In fact, they made low-voiced comments that said they did not want to discuss this. That seemed odd. If their purpose was to draw attention to themselves, to aggrandize a hamlet whose only claim to fame was that very occasionally, for a reasonable price, they helped locate stray cattle on their way to the market at Mynedd, one would have expected them to be eager for the chance to widen their scope, so to speak.

Instead, they muttered that “there weren’t no hope for it” and that “least said, soonest mended”.

Kenzie pointed out mildly that it would be a lot sooner mended if they told their liege lord’s representative and only son what needed mending. This did not improve things at all, and he began to feel slightly irate.

He felt a tug at his sleeve.

“Ask them if they perhaps no longer care for their children,” Roisean said.

He didn’t need to; they’d all heard her, for all she hadn’t raised her voice much above a whisper. And it worked, after a fashion. One of the women slipped to her knees and began to wail, in a high, keening voice, about poor Caed, and that opened the floodgates.

They showed him the graves, small things, not more than an arm’s-span long, the pair of them. Between sobs, the mother of Caed told how the boy, an impossibly sweet child without fault or blemish, apparently, had been found, cold and stiff with wide-open eyes, out at the edge of the long meadow one morning.

“He was witched, your worship. He was witched and no mistake. Didn’t he know better than to go about alone in the dark, now? And what would he have done so for? There weren’t nothing in that meadow for him, poor laddie, on such a cold, moonless night.”

And then there was the carpenter’s wife.

The door to the carpenter’s house was low; Kenzie had to duck down to enter, and there she was, huddled by the hearth, filthy and drooling, those vacant eyes staring out at nothing. He felt sick, as much from the smell of her as from the sight, but he managed to keep outwardly calm, much calmer than he felt.

It was Roisean’s reaction, or her non-reaction, perhaps, that upset him the most. She leaned toward the woman, her face nearly as blank and expressionless as the afflicted one’s, and touched that waxen cheek, all the while whispering something he couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t quite hear.

And the woman slumped, eyes finally closing, and her head lolling down towards her breast, as if she had fainted.

What in the nine hells was going on here?

Kenzie pushed his way out of the cottage and past the villagers, and once more out into the cooler, fresher air, he sucked in a few lungfuls of air, desperately trying to clear his head.

This was not what he’d bargained for, back in Issing Keep. This was not at all what he had expected to find, and now the loss of his pack pony and more especially, his books, was revealed as a truer disaster than he’d imagined only a couple of hours before.

He’d chosen them with casual care: one, his copy of “The Histories” had been purely for his own pleasure, but the second one, Theofrancia’s “Arcanium”, had seemed to him the very thing with which to combat idle and ignorant superstition. With judicious quotations and readings, he’d expected to surmount and refute any superstitious or spurious tale these yobboes would have offered as proof of their wild stories.

It was a book he knew almost by heart. He’d always been fascinated by Theofrancia’s reasoned, temperate discourse, his careful detailing of the true nature of otherworldly and malignant occurrences, and how to contain or defeat them, and he’d assumed that Toll’s bit of make-believe would not have held within them the essential details that would have been present in a true Curse or Haunting. He would have pointed out the lack of evidence, the absence of concrete facts and their corresponding emanations, and shown these uneducated peasants that they could not go around making up stories out of whole cloth and disrupting other people’s livelihoods or peace of mind just to garner a little fame and attention.

But that poor woman in the hovel behind him had thrown this to the winds. It was, as near as he could tell, a textbook case of diabolical and verifiable evil afoot – and somewhere in the “Arcanium”, he was sure, was the remedy, now lost to him.

The glosses of the rituals and spells had always been the part of the book he’d paid the least attention to, partly because they were somewhat incomprehensible, but more so because he had thought them useless. Perhaps long ago, the countryside had been mired in little evils, or prone to such things as malevolent spirits, and needing common remedies, but in this day and age? Such things were the stuff of fireside stories for children. Such things were the stuff of the long-dead past.

He pulled in another deep breath, and as he did, the world began to right itself. The shadows that had clung to its edges faded, and the sunlight seeped in and once more he disbelieved.

But not for long.

He became aware that Roisean had emerged from the cottage, and that the villagers were giving her a wide berth. A very wide berth.

They didn’t seem frightened. At least, they didn’t seem more frightened than they’d already been, and their fear wasn’t directed at either Kenzie or Roisean. In fact, they seemed very much in awe of her, and respectful – far more respectful than of him. It was vaguely annoying.

She said, again so softly he had to strain in order to catch the words, “Ask them to tell us how it began.”

And again, he did not need to, because she might as well have shouted it, and bit by bit, the story came out of them, unwilling though they were to speak the words. The witch. Her man. The burials, in a place they’d thought would be safe.

“We must go and look,” she said. She said it unwillingly. She said it the way she had said everything else so far, in a resigned tone, as if she’d known exactly what the answers would be before she’d asked. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he began to form not so much a picture of what she was, but an idea of that picture. It was more or less the most unnerving thing in a suddenly unnerving world.

Kenzie wanted to say that looking at more graves was the one thing he particularly did not wish to do. He wanted to say that it was unlikely that a five-year-old burial site would answer any questions. He wanted, actually, to get on his horse and ride out into the dusk back to the next little hamlet, or even further, to forget he had ever heard of Toll and its tale of witches and ghosts and death.

Since that was not possible, given his father’s instructions, and since he could not think of a single reasonable alternative, he merely nodded and suggested that this was a task best left until morning.

Roisean gazed searchingly at him, and then, to his eternal relief, agreed.

***

It was the blackest of nights, and yet he could still see the tree, a deep darkness against the deeper darkness. And something else, beyond the tree. Something of beauty, something silvery and fey…

He could hear the soft whine of hempen rope against the uneven bark. He could smell the fear from his own body.

He opened his eyes, only to see Roisean leaning over him, her eyes glittering like stars.

He rose when she drew away, and he followed her outside, into the cold, leaving Galen still snoring in the corner. He felt that building excitement, the anticipation of pleasure, he thought he knew, now, why they were here, and he was glad, even if it was only because he was well-born, because she was very lovely.

She walked on past the tithing barn which surprised him, but he followed her still, out along the path and past all the small houses and their chicken runs and sheep pens, and through the little stile-gate, along through the hayfield and into the long meadow, till they came the tree.

And then suddenly he was in a kind of stone sanctuary, open to the sky, but walled, even so. Like a well, but above the ground, and the woman ahead of him turned suddenly, with a smile of welcome on her bloated corpse face, and she loosened the ties at the throat of her silken gown –

He woke, with a start, on the hard ground of the ale-room in Toll, with the morning sunlight streaming through the doorway.

The reeve seemed more resigned to their presence now; she unbent enough to add a dollup of plum jam to the bowl of porridge she served him, and even smiled a little when he thanked her as courteously as he might have thanked his own mother for a treat. But then she scuttled away, back into her kitchens, and although he dawdled as long as he could over his bowl, at long last he could not put it off any longer and he went out into the yard, where Roisean stood, patiently waiting for him.

Galen didn’t like it. Kenzie couldn’t tell, anymore, if this was because of an inbred, peasant fear of the supernatural and the weird, or if Galen just did not like Roisean (he had muttered, the evening before, several slightly spiteful remarks about her high-handed ways), but he now came up with so many excuses as to why he should not accompany them to the field as well as an almost endless list of chores he needed to see to that, eventually, Kenzie lost his temper and ordered him to shut up and get a move on.

This was unlike him. His mother had taught him to treat all people with a certain respect, especially when it came to servants, because, she said, everyone had a purpose and a job in life, and deserved to be honoured for it. She had been backed up in this philosophy by his father, who frequently pointed out that it was a great deal harder to lead people if they were disinclined to follow, and that nothing improved that inclination more than appreciation for their continued loyalty.

His outburst, being so rare, had an effect. Galen did shut up, and he did follow them, out along the path through the village and up into the fields, although when they came to the long meadow and the oak tree, he remained uncharacteristically silent.

There was little to see here. It was a big tree, and old, with its roots grown up out of the ground in huge twists of woodiness, and its shade had prevented even the smallest of shrubs from encroaching too near, but that seemed quite normal.

“What did you see?”

He almost jumped out of his skin. Not “What do you see?”

No, that wasn’t what she’d said. How on earth did she know about his dream?

Or was that his imagination? Galen coughed, meaningfully, and both he and the woman rounded on him.

“You can see where they hung her from,” he said, a bit grumpily. They’d had to ask him, outright, several times, what he was on about before he would answer them. He was still nursing a grudge, thought Kenzie. Well, he’d apologize, later. And sincerely, too, because for the last five years, he’d spent more time with Galen than anyone else he could think of, and Galen had always been sympathetic and loyal, more than a servant, really. A friend, almost.

But now he looked up and could see what the man meant. There was a mark on one sturdy old branch, only an inch or so wide, a long mark, where something had rubbed hard against the bark.

It looked as if there had been a rope straining against it, certainly.

But not as if it had been there for very long.

Not for five years.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t protest when Roisean began walking past the tree and towards the hill beyond. They followed her, reluctantly, but they did follow, almost as if they couldn’t help themselves.

Just as the crest, she stopped. There was a circle of stones there, an irregular straggle of toothy projections, mottled and gray, and nothing seemed to grow here save withered grasses and the occasional dusty thistle-bush.

He couldn’t see any trace of the graves from where he stood, but even as he began to step forward, he felt Roisean’s hand on his arm.

“Not inside the circle.”

He watched as she walked the full edge of the circle. At one point, she stopped, head tilted to one side, as she had stood yesterday on the road, as if hearing something no one else could, and she reached forward with one hand, almost, but not quite, touching one of the rocks.

When she came back to where the two men stood, she looked worried. But she said nothing to them, only turned and began walking back the way they’d come, and after a moment, they followed her.

***

“She knows more than she’s saying,” Galen said. “She needs to tell you what she knows, too. You’re the one that’s in charge.”

“Am I?” Kenzie had spent a full hour coaxing Galen out of the sullens, and now he almost regretted it. Galen seemed to want him to take some kind of action, without seeming to grasp how dangerous that might be. Of course, Galen hadn’t spent three years studying his Theofrancia, and he seemed not to have figured out why Roisean knew so much about this. Kenzie might have enlightened him, but he was more preoccupied with other questions.

If the Holy Ones at Braide knew about this, then why was Roisean so reluctant to declare herself as the Mother’s representative and deal with the problem? Indeed, why had the Reverend Mother not sent word to his father that they were aware and prepared to handle it? And why did she seem to feel that he had some part in all this? She seemed to be waiting for him to do something or say something, and he could not, for the life of him, think what that something might be.

Or why.

***

He dreamed again, that night. Behind the vision of the trees, he could hear the sound of forlorn wailing, on and on, insistent and doleful, like an animal caught in a snare.

At least this time he knew he was dreaming, and he woke before the woman turned back to him, but in spite of this, he was more frightened than before. He was shaking and sweating, and when he opened his eyes, he nearly cried out because there was Roisean, bending over him, looking concerned.

But it wasn’t still the dream. He knew this because she whispered something to him, words that sounded like “Be at peace” or something like that, and touched his arm, and it was all too real, so that when she rose and headed towards the door, he followed her with no trepidation at all.

Outside, he saw that the villagers had gathered already, standing together in a close clump, but they moved aside for Roisean, and he saw what their bodies had concealed.

The reeve lay in the dusty yard, her mouth still open on a soundless scream, eyes wide and glaring and dead.

“What the – ?” he said and stopped, because he didn’t have the words to encompass this.

“The witch,” said the headman. He sounded tired and defeated.

“This,” said Kenzie, to no one in particular, “has got to stop.”

“Certainly,” said Roisean. “And you and I,” she paused, “You and I must go up to the hill and stop it.”

He would have liked to say that this was madness. He would have liked to point out that he was in no way qualified to stop any of it, always supposing he knew what “it” was. He would have also liked to have added that she was free to go where she liked, but that he wasn’t bound to follow, but when he looked into her eyes, so fathomless and deeply green (how did anyone have eyes so green?) the words died a-borning, and he merely nodded, dry-mouthed and fearful, and unable to marshal a defense.

And so, once a couple of the villagers had brought a hurdle and carried the reeve’s body into her home, and then dispersed back to their own places, still muttering about witches and curses and hauntings and evil, he followed Roisean back out into the fields and up the hill once more.

It was very quiet. Even the night’s breeze had stilled, there was only the sound of their own breathing, and nothing whatever to be seen.

“What is it,” Kenzie asked, finally, “What is it that you expect me to do? I am no holy one, to ward against these – these – whatever these things are.”

Roisean shook her head.

“You’ll know, when the time comes,” she said. “You have the knowledge. I am just a vessel here. But you dreamed, and dreamed true, and you know, deep within you, what you must do.”

“H-How do you know what I dreamed?”

“I dreamed it, too. I dreamed this not a month ago, and have dreamed it every night since. I dreamed you, my lord, and that is all that matters now.”

He could have protested. He should have protested. He ought, he thought suddenly, to tell her how wrong she was, or simply to turn and walk away, back down into the village, but he found he could not do any of those things.

And so he waited with her, in the moonlight, but for what, he did not know.

It began as a sliver of greyish mist, rising up between the stones. It hovered near to the ground, at first, but it drew itself together, slowly, and rose up into the form of a woman, dark and cadaverous, in a glittering silk gown.

She looked distinctly un-peasant-like.

And Kenzie finally began to think about some of the things he could recall reading of. Not witches, and not ghosts, not exactly, according to Theofrancia, but those poor priestly souls who had once been caught in the backlash of an unbelievable surge of Power, and had by that force – not to mention the binding spells that had gone completely awry – been locked inexorably into now-dead wells of power.

Terrible things, these creatures had become, mad and vengeful, but left to themselves, not particularly powerful anymore. They fed on violence and death, but their range was small, and they needed others to work through, so that as long as their places were shunned, they did little harm.

He understood, now, just a little, what the villagers had done. They’d broken those bindings, just enough. They’d fed the creature imprisoned here with just enough of an unchained spirit of death to give her power, power to go beyond her circle, and with each subsequent death, she’d grown that power just a little more.

Presumably, he thought, Roisean knew how to close that circle again, and presumably she needed his help, else why were they here?

But just as he began to ask her what it was he should do, Roisean stepped into the circle.

There was an unholy scream of triumph, as the incarnated priestess grasped Roisean’s arm with a yellowed, taloned hand. He saw how Roisean flinched, he saw the droplets of blood begin to form and he could have wept, because her faith in him, still plain on her face, was so incredibly, completely misplaced.

He wasn’t a holy one – he’d told her that.

He wasn’t some legendary free mage. He wasn’t even a minor Talent, like the midwife back at Issing, who could still the birthing pains for whole minutes at a time, so that long births didn’t exhaust young mothers.

He was just a slightly bookish boy who was supposed to be learning how to lead and govern people. Apparently, this wasn’t a skill that was doing any good for anyone now.

The Incarnate smiled at him.

“Pretty boy,” it said. “Pretty boy, come and save her!”

Her voice didn’t match that terrifying body. It was melodious and sweet, almost enchantingly so, and for a moment, he didn’t really grasp the sense of her words, and he began to take a step forward.

“My lord – No!”

Galen? What was Galen doing here?

But there it was. Galen was there. He was white as a linen sheet on washday, and trembling, but he was there.

The thing in the circle howled with rage. Roisean was struggling, pulling herself and her captor to the very edge of the stones. He could have stretched out his arm and touched her.

“Kenzie, think. Think of what this thing fears!” Roisean gasped this out, straining, because the creature was pulling back, trying to drag her back towards the circle’s centre.

He almost screamed in frustration. He had no idea what she meant. He had no idea what she wanted him to do.

Not enter the circle, that was certain. He looked over at Galen, who, like Roisean, seemed to be quite sure he had the answer to this.

Galen said, very softly, “It is nearly dawn.”

Dawn. Theofrancia said a lot of things about the dawn. A powerful time.

Kenzie pulled his wandering thoughts together. Now that he’d had time to consider it, now that he knew what this place was, he remembered that Theofrancia had described these wights in great detail. He’d delineated all the points of power, and their weaknesses.

Memory. It was the only thing he had left, and it wasn’t going to do much good, because he hadn’t bothered to memorize anything useful.

“The Septentrional Angle is always to be feared by these Apparitions of the Sanguinolent, for it is there that their bindings hold the greatest of their life-force collected. Only cross them here with the ladye bright, and you can bind them unto cold earth forever, an you have the Power.”

Nice words. Why did those old writers have to speak in riddles, instead of telling you plainly what the answers were?

Dawn. He thought probably if they got to full sunrise without freeing Roisean, that this would be all over, and lost forever. He tried to think what else Theofrancia had said about these things.

A shard of light was growing along the base of the hill, inching slowly upwards. There was just the tiniest crescent of the orange sun showing at the edge of the field below.

Septentronial Angle. He looked along the edge of the circle and saw that one stone was paler than the rest, almost glowing white. He moved towards it.

The thing moved, too. They were very close. If it reached out a little further, it could have touched him, grabbed at him, drawn him, too, into that place.

But it dared not, he realized, because Roisean was pulling hard, pulling towards the edge of the stone circle, pulling that thing with her. The blood was welling up along her arm, pooling on her hand, it was going to drip onto the ground any moment now, and he had that hollow laughter of that thing ringing in his ears and he could not think what would happen if that blood ever touched the ground.

If only he was a free mage or a holy one, and could summon that “ladye brighte”. He could just barely remember skimming over the description of the spell used to create light, and also how he’d smiled, because who believed that anyone, even a great Talent, could just summon light out of nothing?

“Although,” said Galen, quite conversationally, “Actually, I think it is the sunlight, real or equipollent, that does the trick.”

And then Kenzie, without really thinking, just moving now, saw that the Incarnate’s arm had come very close to the edge of the circle, was almost brushing against that invisible line. He reached out and grasped it and pulled, hard, tumbling backward into Galen and the tiny patch of sunshine that had opened up around them.

All four of them fell into the light.

***

Afterwards, for a little while, Kenzie thought that all of it was only a dream.

He had hit his head on the ground so hard that he blacked out for a moment, and when he opened his eyes again, and his head had cleared, there were only the three of them, blinking in the clear, bright morning.

Roisean stood a little apart, brushing away the dust on her gown, and Galen was bending over him, with a concerned look, and he saw that one of the stones, the pale one, had toppled a little sideways.

“Are you all right, my lord?” Galen sounded frantic. His eyes were wild and questioning, and he did not look at all like a man who had the slightest comprehension of what had transpired. Well, neither did Kenzie, not really, and already, in his mind, the whole thing was slipping away, fading around the edges, and he couldn’t quite remember, now, what it was he had wanted to say.

So, instead, he sat up, muttering that he was fine, really. When he looked at Roisean, he blushed, and wondered why he felt so awkward. She was just an ordinary woman, after all, and not particularly pretty.

But when he stood up, he looked over to the stone circle, and he saw the three drops of blood, still wet and gleaming, and when he looked at Roisean again, she just nodded a little, and he shivered, even though the morning sunlight was so warm, but he could not think why.

Indeed, his strongest memory of Toll, forever after, was that they’d killed and roasted a suckling pig, to celebrate the end of the terrors they’d been through. It was the best meal he’d had in weeks.

***

In later years, when he had cause to visit the Holy Isle because his wife had a niece who was studying there, he was granted a brief audience with the Reverend Mother, who was as worn and as old as he was, but with the clearest green eyes, and they smiled at each other and talked of ordinary things.

####

The Dead of Midnight

By Morgan Smith

Traveling Light Publications

The Dead of Midnight

We marched into Gosset in pretty fine style, considering that we weren’t, and hadn’t ever been, devotees of close-order drill.

Mind you, we’d had a week at the fortress at Glaice to rest up, mend our kit and suck down some decent ale before a pleasant day of strolling cheerfully along old, familiar terrain to our new posting, and no one objected when Tighe reined in, organized us back into tidier lines and pointed out that first impressions might, this time, actually count.

We kind of agreed. When you’ve been a unit that supposedly needed to be “rehabilitated”, when you know full well that most people will still stubbornly believe in the old reputation of a garrison known for its overall disgracefulness, you occasionally have the urge to prove them wrong. We might claim we knew our own worth, and screw the world and their uninformed opinions, but deep down, well, we wanted a little respect. We’d been through hell and back, and lived to tell the tale, and some of the best-trained troops in Keraine were unable to say the same.

They were building a new granary off a little ways west of the green – you could see the black, scarred earth where the old one had burned down last summer – but apart from this, it was well-kept and peaceful-looking. Just what Commander Olwen had promised us, when she announced the transfer: easy duties in pleasant surroundings to give us a bit of time to train back up, and a kind of reward for past services.

For Tighe’s sake, then, we made an effort to look efficient and disciplined, marching fairly decently along with only a surreptitious inventory of the two taverns, and fetching up at the keep’s gates, still more or less in two lines.

There was a guard on the gate who took the packet of orders without any sideways glances, and another who ushered us into the open courtyard inside, and then the captain was summoned into the hall, leaving us to water his horse and our two pack-ponies.

The soldiers here were glad to see us, of course, since our arrival meant that their own transfer would be imminent. Just why they were eager to leave seemed obvious, I guess. Gosset isn’t a prestigious posting. There were some bandits preying on merchants along the North Road that they had to keep in check, they said, but not much else. They didn’t know where they’d be going next, but they didn’t seem to care.

We looked at each other, trying not to be obvious. We used to think like that. Now we thought a little boredom wouldn’t come amiss. Soldiers only think they want excitement till they get it.

***

The local lord was kind of nervous, like. That was Tighe’s take on it, anyway. The rest of us didn’t meet him in the flesh, so to speak, until a few days later. We’d seen him from a distance, of course, a lanky man with a shock of dark hair, but we were busy settling in, going out on a few desultory patrols just to get used to the terrain, not to mention visiting both taverns and passing judgment on them. The Three Geese was merely passable as far as the ale went, but got high marks for accepting our rowdiness with cheerful grins, while the Toad on the Green had better beer but seemed a bit sedate for common soldiers.

After a more business-like patrol, this time well into the hills, we came back to find Lord Daric standing in our barracks, looking around.

It isn’t done. It just isn’t. A troop has little enough to call their own, and even great lords bow to the convention that says they should ask for permission before they cross that threshold. Daric wasn’t even a great lord. He was just the minor vassal who paid for his holding by hosting the Queen’s troopers while we made sure that travelers heading north went their way unmolested.

But we said nothing. We didn’t know how long our stay here might be. There was no point making trouble right at the start, and we reckoned that Tighe could drop a word in his lordship’s ear about not wandering into our barracks, if this wasn’t some kind of one-off emergency visit.

“Oh – er – sorry and all that,” he said to no one in particular. “I was just making sure everything was, ummm, you know, comfortable. Got everything you need?”

He was edgy. All the while he spoke, he was glancing into the corners of the room, his eyes skittering around like a startled foal, and he couldn’t seem to keep his hands quite still. They fluttered nervously at his sides, then swept up to brush away at the side of his face, then back down to twitch a little at his sides again.

“We’re fine, sir,” Tighe said. He hadn’t been captain very long, and the habit of deferring to others still lingered a bit. It was no bad thing, said Ari, our troop second. Being polite to the gentry might save you trouble later on, when you needed to put your foot down. A surprise attack, as it were.

Lord Daric nodded. His eyes made one more sweep around the shadowy edges of the barrack-room and then he nodded again, not to anyone in particular, and then he just sort of wandered out, as if he had forgotten us entirely.

“Addled,” Ari muttered, but under his breath. “Why us? Couldn’t we get stuck in with a sane one for once?”

Tighe shook his head. “He’s grieving, so I hear. The younger brother, he says Daric’s wife died, all sudden like, not a moon’s turn past, poor woman, and the lord’s still in shock.”

Ari scratched his head. “That’s odd. No one down the village mentioned a word.”

“Well, it’s old news to them. Likely it isn’t on their minds, what with the spring planting and all.”

“Yes, but…” Ari’s voice trailed away.

“No business of ours, is it?” Tighe was firm. He had a lot on his mind, I guess, still trying to make himself think like a captain. We were cheering for him to make good. We’d lost our last captain to promotion, and while we were pleased for her, the last thing we had wanted was some fresh-faced, inexperienced young lordling taking us over and trying to make us parade-ground quality. Tighe might not have been well-born or even trained to command, but he was someone we knew, someone who had been through the worst with us, someone we could count on.

At table that night, I found myself watching Lord Daric out of the corner of my eye. Tighe might think his oddness was down to grief. I wasn’t so sure. I remembered how my father had been, when my mother’s last pregnancy took her. I remembered how he’d been when my old granddad had gone, too. Something, somehow, just didn’t ring true.

He was still distracted. When the meat came, he looked down at his plate as if he could not think what it was that was in front of him, and then he looked up, staring fixedly into the rafters.

His brother, Saidear, was beside him, whispering at his ear, and drawing Daric’s attention back to the thin slices of chicken, and urging him to sip at the mug of ale. Even when Daric was seemingly recalled to the present, Saidear looked worried and watchful, and hardly took his eyes from Daric.

I wondered why I hadn’t noticed all this before. I’d taken six evening meals in this hall, and it seemed I had barely even looked at the man whose keep this was. That was why, I thought wryly, I was destined to remain a simple squad leader at best. This was why I would never make troop second, let alone captain. Tighe and Ari – they might not always say much, but they watched for things. They kept their minds on soldiering, and me? Well, I was willing to put my mind to it, but only if I was told to. Bridget nic Faille, family pariah and disgraced Queen’s soldier, was not what commanders are made of.

***

It was Ari, of course, who got us the dirty details. This is what troop seconds are for, I reckon; besides keeping the rest of us in line, they do that scut-work and gossip-mongering a captain can’t be seen to do.

So Ari went down to the Three Geese and flirted outrageously with the tavernkeep’s aging wife and then offered to share with the pair of them a flagon of some honey wine they had from a beekeeper up Ys Tearch way. Once they’d made some inroads into that, while faking an intimate knowledge of past local events he did not actually have, he enticed them into giving him far more than just the bare basics.

It had all begun innocently, if tragically, enough.

She’d been much younger than Lord Daric, and very pretty, although it wasn’t really a love-match for either of them. She was the youngest daughter of a widowed northern merchant who depended on traders coming up the main road to survive long enough to fill his warehouses, and having an alliance with the man who made that possible had seemed a useful thing.

The marriage had, at least on the surface, been a happy enough affair. Caronwyn hadn’t been much good at running the household, but she sewed fine seams and had a sunny, easily contented nature, although she had struck the villagers as a trifle odd, in that she had been partial to running about the woods barefoot in the early mornings, and she had been rather bizarrely squeamish about eating meat, especially if it was even the least bit bloody. Still, she seemed kind and goodhearted and willing to try, at least at first.

After the first year, though, she began to change somewhat. The folk said at first that this was natural, that she was leaving her girlhood ways behind, that the cares of the keep that she tried hard to fulfill were wearing her down. She was less lighthearted, at any rate, and she seemed to avoid company of any sort save that of her husband.

Then she got pregnant, and it all got very much worse.

It takes some women that way. The ordinary tiredness and the new-mother sickness hits them hard, and they get fractious or prone to ill fancies and bad dreams, and it seemed that for Caronwyn, it was doubly hard, because her swollen ankles and growing belly ended her dawn-lit rambling.

Saidear, who had trained at the Holy Isle at Braide, prescribed healing draughts and herbal tonics, but the symptoms didn’t abate. She seemed painfully thin, and all her youthful sparkle died away, till she became only a faded shadow of the girl she’d been. The servants reported that she wept, silently and often, and seemed not to care about anything, not even the life she carried, and that she spent most of her days alone, locked up in her room.

It’s a tale grown stale with the telling – every old biddy by the fire has a version to scare the younger women into frightened respect.

Except this time it was a little different, because of the manner of Caronwyn’s death, and then, of course, the hauntings.

***

“You aren’t serious,” I said.

“I’m telling you what they say,” Ari was a bit grumpy about it. I didn’t blame him. “The lord’s seen them. Her, I mean. And that’s why he’s so spooked.”

The end was bloody. Caronwyn had seemed to be rallying, she’d started coming down to hall for the evening meal again, although she still only picked at her food.

On the third night, she’d sang a little for them. Whatever ailed her, it hadn’t affected her voice, and when she’d finished the “Lament of Cadeyrn” there wasn’t a dry eye in the hall. She’d gone up to bed, then, and her maid had clearly heard the bar drop, locking out the world.

In the morning, they just thought she was sleeping late. She’d done so a time or two before. But noontide came and went, and not a sound was heard. No answer came from the gentle knocks, nor from later, heavier poundings. Finally, Daric had ordered the door broken down.

Even leaving aside days of gossipy exaggerations, Ari said, the facts were clear. The alewife at the Three Geese had been one of the women summoned to the keep to help wash and shroud the corpse; she’d seen the wounds, and Ari said he didn’t doubt her description completely – she was still a little sick at the memory. Caronwyn had had several frenzied stabs to the body and her throat had been slashed. The sheer amount of blood had been horrifying.

Murder. That was the first and most logical thought.

Except the door had been locked all night.

Lord Daric had knocked, and then tried it, wanting to kiss her good night, when he’d come up some little time later. His brother had been with him, and they hadn’t heard a sound from within. She must have already been asleep, they thought…or dead, even then.

They decided she must have gone mad, and done it herself. There wasn’t any other explanation, the alewife said, conveniently overlooking the fact that there had been no knife, nor any other weapon found that could have been used to make those cuts.

And there it might have rested, if little Nyx, the farrier’s son, hadn’t seen the lady, walking across the green at dawn, like she so often had, one full seven-day after they’d laid her body in the cold winter ground. The lord had been like a wild man when he heard it, hauling poor Nyx into his hall and questioning him, and it had become apparent that the boy wasn’t the only one who’d seen Caronwyn’s sad shade. Daric couldn’t hide his own guilty knowledge – he saw her everywhere, seemingly.

“Mother of All,” Colm said. He’d been in the middle of sewing a new lacing onto his boot when Ari had started the tale, and halfway through, he’d just stopped, dropping the leather onto the floor, and listening open-mouthed and disbelieving. We’d all been like that. It was quite the story. “So we’re to be haunted now?”

“Don’t be daft,” Tighe said. “This is just country yobboes, making their lives more exciting.”

“Well, but you saw the lord,” said Ari. “There’s something here – he’s all to pieces. He thinks he sees his dead wife larking about the keep – I believe that part of it, anyway.”

I thought that was the least interesting feature of this, and I said so.

“The point is, how did she die? It seems to me that everyone’s worrying about the ghost because it stops them from thinking about the rest of it.”

“Maybe,” said Tighe. “But how is that our affair? We’re here to keep the roads safe, not go chasing after dead pregnant ladies who like to stroll about in the dawn. She isn’t harming anyone, is she?”

“No-o, I guess not. But if she didn’t kill herself, then there’s a murderer on the loose. You don’t think that concerns us?”

“She must have done it herself,” Ari said. “She must have. We’re talking country folk here, Bridget. They wouldn’t know what was what in a month of feast-days, and I bet they didn’t look too hard for that knife. It could have rolled under the bed – it’s likely still there. The alewife says they locked her chamber door the day they buried her, and no one’s been in since, on Daric’s orders. The door was barred from inside that room from dusk till noon, so how could anyone have gotten in and killed her, and then gotten clean away with the bar still dropped?”

I didn’t know. But it itched me. I could almost hear our old captain telling me in a firm voice that the dead don’t walk. I needed to believe that.

***

Officially, according to Tighe, we didn’t know word one about any of this, and we were ordered to keep out traps shut and go about our business. If and when the lord asked for aid, then we’d see. Till then, we were here to patrol the roads and chase bandits.

Over the next few days, though, it became apparent that Gosset’s placid, prosperous surface was only that: a surface. Underneath, the village was seething with worry and fear and spite.

You know how country people can be. It doesn’t really matter how far apart or unrelated their mischances are: they link them up into a chain of misfortune and cry “Curses!” at the first opportunity. From Issing to Ys Tearch, they’re likely all the same.

It hadn’t taken long before every possible bit of bad luck, from last year’s raids by the Camrhyssi to a hen gone broody, were laid at the ghost’s door. What with Daric’s increasingly strange manner, people began to wonder if the ghost was trying to tell someone something: something about Daric and her death, and the talk was turning ugly.

He was now the pack-pony on which every evil could be laid. They weren’t saying it outright, but they thought him a dreading and an ill wind, and they wanted him gone. And judging by his current state of mind, I thought that Daric probably would have agreed with them.

It was just after midnight, when my squad was coming off a guard-shift on the walls, that I saw her.

She was just how I’d pictured her, standing in the little alley that ran between the bakehouse and a little walled garden. A girl, still, bloody and pale, balancing awkwardly against the weight of her belly, and she looked full at me, hands outstretched, and then she turned and pointed up at the keep.

I gasped and then I stumbled, my heart pounding, but when I got my balance back, all I could see was Colm’s face, frowning at me, because my mis-step into his back had knocked him forward, too.

“Sorry,” I said. He just shrugged. I looked past him. The alley was deserted. Whatever I’d seen, and I clung to the notion that it had been a trick of imagination and midnight, because it simply could not have been real, it was gone.

I squinted up at the keep. There were two windows roughly in the direction she’d pointed to, but both were mere arrow slits. Don’t be stupid, Bridget, I thought. The dead don’t walk, and they don’t point out architectural details, either. You were dreaming on your feet.

Still, it was a long time before I could sleep, unable to shake the feeling of guilt and foreboding that my momentary fantasy had given me.

***

I wasn’t wrong about my misgivings, at least.

Just as we were coming in from a day’s march along the road, to let any thieves know we were there and watchful, we were met by the Toad’s stable-boy, out of breath and wild with excitement. There was trouble in the village and Lord Saidear wanted us to get there quick.

“All right, all right,” Tighe said. “We’re practically there, ain’t we?”

“Shift your lazy butts,” he added, more for form’s sake than anything else, because we were already falling into our lines. We could tell this was serious.

Out on the green, quite a crowd had formed. A noisy, angry crowd. We could hear them halfway down the lane. And at the centre of this knot of yelping villagers, Lord Daric was standing, his head bowed and his shoulders drooping, the very picture of resignation and defeat.

The gist was easy enough to pick up on, despite the confusion. He was cursed, he had driven his wife to suicide, he was a witch who had by some nefarious pact with demons brought evil down onto them, he should hang for his sins.

His brother was beside him, which might have been the only reason Daric wasn’t dead already. Plainly, Saidear was at a loss himself, though, torn between family loyalty and his own suspicions. And that was odd, really. You’d think that someone trained by the holy ones at Braide would have a firmer grasp on how these things work, and not fall back on ignorant superstition.

Tighe made an attempt to be diplomatic about it all. He tried talking to the village headwoman, but she was so hysterically distraught that every word she hurled at him was flecked with spittle. Then he tried to get Saidear to calm them down, but the man seemed unable to raise his voice, and finally, Tighe snapped.

“HOLD!” He roared it out, in a voice not even we twenty, who knew him best, had ever heard him use before. It was the loudest thing I think I’d ever heard come out of anything human.

It worked. Everyone present just stopped, some of them mid-harangue, and stared at him.

“Right,” he said. “Now, then. We’ll take this in a lawful, orderly fashion, if you please. If you’ve something to say, you’ll have your chance, but you will not,” and here he paused and glared around at every one of the villagers, “You will not string anyone up without a proper looking-into, and my bloody say-so, or I’ll have your guts for garters. Do I make myself clear?”

The tension was easing off now. A few of the folk, especially those more at the edges of the crowd, were beginning to step a little away, as if to state that they, at least, had not been a real part of this, and even the headwoman stayed silent.

“The captain’s right,” said Saidear. “We should look into this properly. I can see people in the hall, and you can tell me –“

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” Tighe said, and the firm confidence in his voice was a surprise to him, I think, as well as to us, “Beggin’ your pardon, but you cannot do that. It would not be lawful, being the man’s brother. As representative of Her Majesty, and adding the fact that we arrived after these doings, my troop and myself are best placed to look into this. As I’m sure you’ll agree.”

There was a moment of slightly uncomfortable silence. The villagers didn’t like it. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? No one likes strangers taking charge and looking through the midden-heap.

Lord Saidear blinked, then swallowed. “Er,” he said. But Tighe met his eyes confidently, surrounded as he was by twenty fully armed soldiers. He was a captain in the Queen’s army, and birthrank be damned. He held the dice in this game.

“Yes,” said Saidear, reluctantly. “Yes, of course. The thing must be done properly.”

Back up at the keep, Lord Daric’s state did not improve. He huddled on the chair he’d been led to, still muttering under his breath, and his eyes wild with fear.

“Bridget, get him some wine,” said Ari.

“I can,” Saidear began, but Tighe waved him back.

“We’ll need you here sir. We don’t know the folk – it’s for you to tell us who’s reliable and so on. And you were there. If you could just go through that night’s events…”

By the time I got back with a full wine-cup, Saidear was trying, at Tighe’s urging, to remember just who was in the hall that night and who might have left it after Caronwyn had gone upstairs.

I went to Lord Daric. He’d fallen into a sort of quietness, almost a trance, and didn’t seem aware of anything. Certainly not me, at least. I had to shake his shoulder to get his attention so I could hand him the cup.

His fingers touched mine, and he stiffened suddenly and looked at me, and I swear, for that instant, his eyes were clear and sane and terrified.

He said desperately, “You’ll help me, won’t you? She wants you to.”

The cup slipped and hit the stone floor with a crash, shattering the moment. Daric turned his head away, and fell to muttering something I couldn’t quite catch.

The rest of them were staring at me. I shrugged.

One of the servants came and began to clear the mess, and another went to get more wine, and for the next hour, Tighe tried to get a sense of just what had happened the night Daric’s lady had died. He talked to her maid, he talked to Nyx, he talked to everyone he could think of, and none of us were any the wiser.

The alewife’s tale had been surprisingly accurate, except that Ari was wrong about the search for the weapon that had killed her. Saidear had made them search very thoroughly indeed, and there was still some resentment on the servants’ part, because he hadn’t been terribly tactful about it.

You could see why her death had bred so much fear.

“I think,” I said diffidently, when Tighe had exhausted these avenues, “I think the answer might still lie in her room.”

“Her room?” No one thought that made the slightest sense.

“She was a little fanciful, wasn’t she?” I went over to where Daric still sat, off in his own little world of torment. “She was, wasn’t she, my lord? She liked wild creatures, and songs, and poetry, didn’t she?”

He dragged his gaze to mine with effort. “What? Oh, yes, poetry. She used to write it sometimes. Things about springtime and night stars…so pretty…”

I looked at Tighe. “She wrote things down. She was that kind of girl. Maybe she wrote down what was happening to her.”

“Nonsense,” said Saidear. “She liked poems, I grant you, but she wasn’t at all bookish.”

“She wrote me a love poem,” Daric said, wistfully.

“This is idiotic,” said his brother. “He’s out of his wits. And he needs to rest.”

I caught Tighe’s eye, and shook my head a little. For a wonder, it seemed he understood.

“Mayhap,” he said, slowly, “Mayhap if we leave it for now, then things might look clearer come morning.”

“I’ll take him up,” Saidear said. “He’s exhausted.”

“Well, as to that, sir, we’ll see to his well-being. Colm, your squad can take him to his room. Check it thoroughly, and stay with him. No one’s to be with him but us. I won’t have an execution ahead of a trial, if you take my meaning.”

The evening was a tense one. When I went up with my squad to relieve the others, Colm was at the chamber door with Lord Saidear, who had a mug of something in his hand.

“Orders are orders, sir.”

“Surely your captain didn’t mean for those orders to apply to me. I’m his brother, for Goddess’ sake. Now let me through.”

“Problem, sir?” I asked.

“I’m just bringing Daric an infusion. The poor man can’t sleep unaided these last weeks, and tonight, of all nights, surely, he will need some respite. But this oaf,” he nodded contemptuously at Colm, “seems to think I am not permitted to minister to him.”

“Well,” I said, carefully, “That’s a soldier’s lot. We don’t interpret our orders, we just follow ‘em. Worth our pay-packets to go against them, no matter how foolish they might sound. But I can certainly take the drink in to him, if you like.”

He looked, for a moment, as if he would argue the point. But then he made a conscious effort to control himself, gave a harsh little laugh, and handed the mug to me.

“Mind he drinks all of it,” he said. “He needs some ease, poor man, and sleep’s his only refuge, nowadays.”

I waited till he was on the stairs before I even looked at Colm. We both grinned.

“Overbred bastard,” he said, cheerfully. “Came up like he was the high mucky-muck of something, all ‘my boy’ this and ‘ho, soldier’ that. And he’s wrong about those herbs or whatnot. His lordship’s been sleeping like a babe this last hour or more.”

“Aye, well, we won’t wake him, then. Go on, you lot. There’s roast mutton and new bread they’ve kept back for you.”

I knew it was coming. At midnight, Ari brought his squad up, and Tighe was with them. The rest of my squadmates headed for the stairs, but Ari’s look told me my night’s rest wasn’t going to come so easy.

“What do you think, Bridget?”

“Why are you asking me? I’m as much in the dark here as anyone.”

“Come on, Bridget. Don’t play the yobbo with me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I don’t know why you want my opinion, anyway.”

“Because this is what you’re good at.”

“What?” I said, caught off-guard.

“Puzzles,” said Ari. “Puzzles, and twisty things, and how people think. You’re always working out what’s underneath the words. Remember when you said they’d make Diarmuid captain because they hoped he’d fail? And then Ruan as good as admitted after that they’d had bets going? No one else but you would have seen it.”

“Yes, but this isn’t anything like that.”

“Still, you have some ideas about this, don’t you?”

I did. But I couldn’t explain any of it to them.

“I just think that tomorrow morning we should look in Caronwyn’s room. And I think Daric should be there.”

They looked at each other, then back at me. They weren’t happy. Well, and I wasn’t too joyous myself. I wasn’t sure about any of this. I could be wildly wrong about everything.

***

The one thing I know about life is that things never turn out the way you expect. A day that starts off looking fine can end in a thunderstorm. A length of cloth that shines in the market place might look like sackcloth in candlelight. You can keep house for your old Da for years and one day he ups and marries a woman who drips poison in his ears and he ends up disowning you. You just never can tell.

So I didn’t try to hope for too much. I could make my assumptions and my guesses, but I knew it was just as likely to come to nothing as not.

Saidear wasn’t at all in favour of our plan. It was only through sheer stubbornness and persistence that Tighe managed to convince him into handing over the key to Caronwyn’s room, and he was more than agitated when we said that Daric must come up with us.

“He’s in no way fit for this.”

Truthfully, he had a case. Daric, despite sleeping fairly well without his herbal infusion, looked haggard and ill, and still very twitchy. He sat staring into his cup, not drinking, not paying any attention at all to the arguments swirling around him.

But Tighe, Goddess love him, was a country boy at heart. He wasn’t loud, or insulting or high-handed; he was just dogged and patient and unmoving. Like an ox. And like any farmer facing an obstinate ox, the opposition was worn down eventually into acquiescence.

Finally, with Caronwyn’s maid and the keep’s steward as witnesses, we trooped upstairs. Saidear insisted on coming as well, “to look after Daric, because Goddess alone knows what this will do to him”, but it wasn’t until we were at the door and Tighe was fitting the key into the old iron lock that Gosset’s lord roused himself and began to protest.

I put out my hand to him.

“It’s all right,” I said. “She won’t mind.”

The castlefolk were hanging back. They’d either seen what was in there, or heard enough lurid description, that they were less than eager to get a view. When the lock squealed into openness, and Tighe pushed the oak forward, it was only us three and Daric and Saidear who were close enough to look in.

“Don’t go in,” I said, urgently. “Don’t let anything be disturbed.”

Tighe looked at me in surprise. What else were we here for? his expression said, but I ignored him. If there was an answer here, I didn’t want to miss the signs.

It had been weeks gone by, now. They’d shuttered up that narrow window against the cold, and the maid had tidied things as best she could. You could still see the stains on the floor, though, no one had done much about that.

There was a lot of dust, which was to be expected. I breathed a sigh of relief, because if there hadn’t been dust, my theories would have come to nothing.

“Look,” I said. And they did.

There was a small chest against the far wall, and it was open, its contents spilled roughly onto the floor and scattered about. Daric moaned. It was all pretty gruesome, really.

I turned and grabbed the maid’s arm and pulled her over.

“Was it like that when you left it?” She shook her head.

“Well, so?” said Saidear. “I mean, if there’s some witchery to this, it isn’t unlikely something eldritch could get in here.”

He seemed pretty calm for a man whose brother’s life was on the line.

“Oh, I don’t think there’s anything witchy about this,” I said.

Ari said, “No, Bridget’s right. This wasn’t done by magic. This was done by something wearing shoes and walking.”

We all followed his gaze. You could see the footprints. They started at the wall beside the bed, and they tracked plainly through the dust on the floor, straight to the little chest. You could even see where someone had knelt there, rummaging through poor Caronwyn’s things, making sure she’d not left something incriminating behind.

“I wonder,” said Tighe, “What’s next door to this?”

“A linen cupboard,” Saidear said, contemptuously, but he was pale now, and his breathing wasn’t completely even. And Daric: Daric was looking at him as if he’d never seen him before. And maybe, in a way, that was true.

I walked across to the wall where the footprints began and ended. It didn’t matter now. We had witnesses for that, and if I could just figure this out, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

It was not really that well-hidden, if you were looking for it. Just a small depression in the stone, about the size of my little finger. I pushed, and the stones began to move, sliding inward so slowly.

And Lord Saidear decided to make a run for it.

***

They say the old tales are the best tales. This one was old enough, certainly, and balanced on the most common of little sins, jealousy and greed. But it was too raw and ugly for the sadness to be in any way a familiar fireside entertainment.

The narrow passageway didn’t go far. It ran behind the linen cupboard to Saidear’s chamber on the other side, and there it also let into an equally narrow set of steps that went down into the butteries. Maybe long ago, servants had used it to bring wine up to the lords and ladies of an evening, but it had fallen into disuse and been forgotten. Daric certainly had not had the slightest notion of its existence.

Saidear didn’t get far. Colm had been stationed with his squad at the foot of the stairs, and I don’t think he minded at all that Saidear resisted and that he had had to black the man’s eye. I should have liked to have done it myself.

He’d always been jealous. His brother got the holdings, the lordship, and eventually, the pretty young bride, and then, it seemed, an heir to cut away at any hopes he might have had.

He didn’t admit to it, but I guessed that Caronwyn’s lassitude and sadness had been the result of those “tonics” he’d brewed up for her. Daric’s rambling wits, ghostly sightings and hysteria certainly were; the keep’s cook took one sniff of the drink that we hadn’t given to Daric the night before, and turned pale with fear and anger. She knew her herb-lore, and she was shocked at the concoction.

“It’s the Goddess’ own luck he didn’t die from that,” she said, and spent the next hour fussing over Daric as if he were a toddler.

He needed it. The shock of discovering that his brother had murdered his wife and was preparing to get him hanged for the deed was almost too much for him. But after a week or two, it seemed that time would heal him somewhat.

***

I went out to her grave. They’d laid her out on the hillside, near a big rowan tree, which seemed fitting enough for a girl who’d liked to wander the hills at dawn.

I told her I was sorry. That I knew it was too little, too late. I hoped the Goddess had a care for her, a better care for her than her older sister had had.

And then I begged some leave, and went home, one last time.

####

The Finding Charm

By Morgan Smith

Traveling Light Publications

The Finding Charm

There’s a rule that you don’t leave a charming brew unattended in the middle of the Making. It’s a good rule, and Glynnis had never broken it before, and certainly she never did so again. And because she never knew what it was that Keeley had done, she was never completely aware that she had, in fact, broken the rule at all. As far as she knew, Keeley had sat stirring the pot all widdershins, as she’d been told, and no harm done at all.

But there it was: right in the middle of brewing up the ingredients, Glynnis discovered she was clean out of dried violets, and left the girl to mind the pot while she went out to the woods to retrieve a handful of wild petals.

The flowers turned out to be somewhat elusive, it took a full half-glass to locate enough that were unblemished, and by the time she’d returned, the damage had been done. Not that she ever knew that. How could she have?

Keeley, left to her own devices, had still been in that state of unreasoning panic.

What would Anyon think? What would he do? He had already been angry with her at the betrothal feast, because she’d made that stupid comment about his mother’s nettle soup. If he found out she’d lost the silver ring he’d given her, he was bound to be livid, and who could blame him?

She’d watched as the witch had carefully measured out the distilled wormwood and the corpse-dust. She’d asked questions, not because she understood or even cared about these things, but because asking and listening served to stop her anxious mind from worrying over the problem.

“Ashwood, that’s for retrieval. The fur – it really should be squirrel hairs, but badger’s what I’ve got. It’s not as strong, of course, but it’ll do. And willow – willow always finds things.”

And then Glynnis had gone off for the violets, and Keeley, without any distractions, began to worry anew.

The witch hadn’t taken her plight very seriously, to Keeley’s mind. In fact, she’d seemed a wee bit amused by it all. How was Keeley to be sure that the witch was doing all she could to make this charm work properly?

That badger hair, for example. She’d only put in three or four of them, even after saying that it wasn’t so strong.

She thought about Anyon. So muscular and handsome, and those deep-set brown eyes. All of her friends had swooned over him, but it was her he’d picked, in the end. Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as some, but Anyon seemed to think she was. And he laughed a lot at her jokes.

They’d made such plans, too. Her father was gifting her with a full five acres of good farmland as a wedding present, and Anyon and she had talked over all the things they would do with it, how they’d make it prosper.

Well, Anyon had talked it over, anyway. He’d been pretty certain about what would work and what wouldn’t. She liked that about Anyon, that certainty. It felt like she would never again have to work overhard at understanding things, because Anyon was good at explaining and knew his own mind so well. It was comforting.

But he had a bit of a temper. And if he found out that she’d been so careless as to lose her betrothal ring less than a seven-day after the feast, well, she didn’t know what he’d do. He could not find out. He mustn’t.

And so she’d come here to Glynnis, desperate to get the ring back, no matter what it took.

Keeley stirred the pot. She was staring blindly at the shelf where the jars and boxes of the witch’s spellstuffs were stored. Three badger hairs. That could not possibly be enough.

It was the work of an instant to reach up and pull down the jar with the blue-glaze streak. Only another instant to drop three more hairs into the brew, and to put the jar back. And then, because surprisingly, she really had been concentrating on the witch’s words, she opened the box containing the powdered remains of willow bark and dumped a handful of that in as well.

When Glynnis came in, Keeley was still carefully stirring the pot. She handed back the iron spoon, and watched as Glynnis added the violets. The pot bubbled gently, giving off an aroma of woodlands and damp earth that was not unpleasant.

The Finding Cord had been readied first thing, an intricate knotting around a large wooden bead that Glynnis had told Keeley would centre the charm. Now she lifted the arrangement carefully, wound the cord onto the neck of the spoon, and lowered it into the pot.

There was a hissing sound.

Glynnis raised her eyebrows slightly, but then shrugged.

“Fresh petals,” she said. “Always noisy.”

It wasn’t long after that Keeley emerged from the cottage, blinking in the sudden sunlight, with her Finding Charm stowed safely in the pouch under her skirts. It would work best after dark, when the moon was setting, Glynnis had told her. All she needed to do was to go to the places she might have lost the ring at, and watch the bead. It would glow, the closer she came to the ring.

Easy-peasy.

She stayed awake that night, in a fever of anticipation and dread.

What if it didn’t work? Oh, but it had to. It had to, because if it didn’t, she would lose him, she felt sure of it. Anyon would break off their betrothal, and not only would she have lost her beautiful red wool shawl, which she had given Glynnis in payment for the charm, but she’d be the laughingstock of the village, and probably never marry and her life would be ruined and her heart would break.

The charm would work. She lay there, repeating this over and over in her mind, desperate to convince herself, until she was quite sure that everyone was deeply asleep. Then she crept out of her bed, and pulled out the charm. It lay on her palm, doing nothing.

In the big, open room that served the farmhouse for everything from kitchen to dining hall to living space, she cast around. She had still had the ring when she’d made breakfast four days ago, and the bead gave off no glow of any kind when she passed it over the hearth. It remained a simple globe of smooth wood when she hung it over the flour bin. It was still dull and lifeless as she moved over every corner of the room.

She slipped out the door. The bead remained dormant all over the yard, as she retraced every step of that day, and it was still inert when she went through the sheepcote and the chicken-run.

Her heart sank. This was what she had been dreading. If the ring hadn’t slipped from her finger during the normal household chores, then she had lost it when she’d gone to pick brambleberries in the woods below the stream, a good half-mile away from the farmhouse.

It wasn’t that Keeley was particularly fearful of the woods. She’d been in and out of them all her life, gathering firewood, picking berries, or just walking through on her way to the lake where her brothers sometimes went fishing.

But that was in daylight. She’d never walked under those trees in darkness. It seemed…mischancy.

But even as she confronted this new fear, the bead – well, it didn’t exactly do anything. But it felt as though it was trying to – it felt as though it were tugging at her. Telling her something. She made her way along the path and into the trees, and by then it was glowing. Only faintly, but clearly a glow, a kind of greenish cast of light on her palm.

The glow got stronger the closer she came to the bramble patch, and when she stepped off the path and towards the place where she’d sat filling her basket four days before, it lit up like an emerald, so brilliantly that it illuminated everything for several feet around.

The light caught on a tiny spark at her feet. One little circle of silver, caught on an exposed root of the bush beside her. She bent and picked up the ring, and just as suddenly as it had begun, the glow died, and the woods lay quiet and dark around her.

Her heart, which had lain like a heavy stone inside her for over three days, was suddenly light as a feather, and the sick queasiness of her stomach that had killed her appetite was miraculously gone. She slipped the ring back onto her finger and stood happily in the darkness in a state of quiet, utterly joyous and serene.

And then the bead began to glow again.

Faintly, barely, just the merest haze of greenness. She might have not even noticed, except for the tugging at her heart, just as it had tugged at her when she’d thought about the brambleberry patch.

She might have ignored the tug. Certainly she meant to, because she had her heart’s desire, and all was right again in her world, and there was nothing more that she wanted from the Finding Charm.

But then she heard it.

The sound of laughter. Giggling, actually, and then the rumble of a male voice that she recognized.

She moved, without conscious thought, in the direction of the tugging, and the bead began to glow even more brightly, until she had gone past the bramble bushes and past the trees beyond, and to the edge of a little clearing, drawn by the sound of voices she knew quite well.

“Ah well, this’ll be the last time, then.”

“Why should it be?”

“You’ll be married.”

“That, my dear, is business. I never confuse business with pleasure.”

They were so intent upon each other, Anyon and Cait. Cait. Her friend. The girl she’d poured her heart out to. The girl who’d told her how happy she was for her, who was now standing naked to the waist and pressed against Anyon like moss on a tree-root, and his arms all around her, moving like snakes. They didn’t see Keeley at all.

At least, not until she starting screaming obscenities at them.

***

Becan had become headman of his village almost by chance, really.

He wasn’t the wisest man in his village, but he wasn’t unlearned or a fool, either, and his father had been headman before him, but he hadn’t really wanted to be headman. It just sort of happened, and he went along with it, because he was used to doing things that way.

He did know a thing or two. Years ago, he’d actually gone as far as the big fair at Davgenny, and stayed for a full seven-day, and because of that, he was considered to be more worldly than most. He was known to be a man who kept his wits about him, a watchful sort of fellow who probably knew more than he let on about things.

And when he went out one day gathering firewood and found an odd-looking wooden bead wrapped in knotted string, he actually did know what it was, more or less. He’d seen bits and bobs like it before. He scooped it up and put it in his scrip, thinking it wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone would casually drop, and that sooner or later, someone was bound to mention they’d lost it.

No one actually did, and what with one thing and another, Becan forgot about it, until late summer, when his best ram went missing.

The whole village turned out to help search. Becan had grazed his sheep in the meadows alongside the lake, everyone did, and since the ram had sired a number of very fine lambs for all of them, it was held to be a village problem.

Airic, who had bargained with Becan to have the ram tup his best ewe in exchange for three bushels of oats, was especially concerned. He was owed that tupping, in his mind, and he was inclined to be troublesome when thwarted. Becan liked to avoid trouble, wherever he could.

But although they scoured the most likely places, the ram seemed to have disappeared entirely.

It was then that Becan remembered the bead. He’d known it was a Finding Charm, right off the hop, and he had guessed that Glynnis would have made it. He might even have asked her about it, except that she had died that spring, before ever he had found the thing.

Even so, he understood vaguely that it might no longer be in working order. He had heard somewhere that those charms were usually only good for a single Finding, which made sense, because how could you sell more than one if it could go on finding things forever?

Remembering the bead, and locating it still in the bottom of the leather bag didn’t seem to be hugely useful to him, and it was another day or so when, out alone, still searching the hills for his ram, he finally pulled the thing out and gave it a try.

It was incredibly gratifying, considering that he didn’t have the slightest idea how these things really worked, when the bead immediately began to turn a bit greenish. When he moved to the west, the glow died. When he moved back to where he’d been standing, it resumed the colour, and when he moved east, the glow strengthened.

And Becan, not being a fool, caught on.

The bead led him across the low hills and up into the beginnings of a ravine that wound up into the mountains, and there, on a rocky shelf above a long scree of tumbled stone dotted with nettles, his ram sat, looking no worse for wear.

It took Becan a good hour to find a safe route down for the ram to follow, and a few anxious moments where it seemed both he and the ram might fall and come to grief in this wasteland, but eventually he managed it.

Home again, and sitting up long after his wife had gone to their bed, he pulled the bead out and looked it over. Whatever it had been made to find originally, he felt sure it hadn’t been just for errant livestock. Would it work again? Probably not, he thought, but he put it back into his scrip, all the same.

But the charm tugged at him, now and then. When his wife misplaced things, he could feel it – a kind of gentle pull at his heart – and he’d wait till he was alone, pull out the bead and dangle it in the places he thought the lost items might have got to, and he was – or rather, the bead was – always right.

When Rutha’s youngest girl went missing the next spring, Becan went with everyone else to search for her in the woods, of course, but almost as soon as he could, he drifted away from the others, desperate to pull out the charm and oddly reluctant to admit its existence to anyone else.

The bead was very green, brilliantly green, and he looked up to see the girl, asleep beneath an ash tree not ten man-lengths away from him.

Lucky, said the villagers. And such keen eyes, said his wife, proudly. He’s got the knack, his old da said, down in the tavern, the night after.

Becan said nothing at all.

The harvest that year wasn’t as good as they’d all hoped, but they were an organized, thrifty folk, and they agreed that in times like these, it was important to stick together. To help each other along. They decided that if each family put an equal amount into the granary against it being, potentially, a hard winter, then no one need go truly hungry, and there would be seed for all come springtime.

It was a good plan. Everyone liked it. They said so.

The winter did prove to be a bleak one, and it lingered. Most years, it wasn’t so very many seven-days past Midwinter before the snows melted and the villagers could eke out the dwindling stores with the first tender dandelion leaves, the green shoots of nettles and cattails, or the early wild asparagus.

But this year the snows were deeper, the frosts more chilling, and the winter seemed in no hurry at all to leave.

“We’re lucky,” said Becan’s da, “that we decided to put so much by. That Cait, with all those youngsters to feed – she’s at her wits’ end, I shouldn’t wonder. We’d best be doling out the barley sooner rather than later, Becan.”

He could not have told anyone why he felt so reluctant. He could not have told himself why, because he didn’t have any reason to feel anything but pride in his village’s forethought. He had no idea why every time he thought about the granary, his heart sank, and the bead tugged at his heart.

Well, not until, along with all the other households, he went to open the granary up to apportion out the grain.

The disaster was as complete as anything could have been.

Instead of the neat rows of grain sacks that they had tallied and marked onto the sticks (sticks that were still in Becan’s hand, in fact) there was simply an empty barn.

The shock left them silent, all of them.

But not for long.

It was slightly amazing, the way perfectly amiable people can turn into raging demons in a heartbeat.

The men yelled. The women yelled, too, except for the ones like poor Cait, who just stood weeping, because his old da had been all too right about the state of Cait’s larder.

“Stop it!” Becan rarely shouted, but he shouted now.

It didn’t help. He’d lost control, and the accusations were flying thick and fast. Fingers were being pointed every direction, even his.

“Wait, wait, there’s got to be an explanation!”

“I’ll say there’s an explanation,” Airic said. “You’ve stolen our grain.”

“Not me.”

“Then who? I say we look in your sheds, that’s where it’ll be.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Rutha. “He wouldn’t, Airic. Why should he?”

“Well, someone did. The barley didn’t get up and walk off on its own!”

“No,” Becan said. “You’re right about that. Everyone’s buildings must be checked. But don’t you all go off in a rage. We’ll do this right and proper. We’ll have justice where it’s due.”

The search turned up nothing. Becan hadn’t expected it to. Inside himself, he could feel the tug of the Finding Charm, but he pushed that away. It occurred to him that, as tough as the next few weeks might be, this wasn’t a mystery he wanted to solve.

The people rallied. Those farmers who still had some stores decided they could put together a bit here and there, to see the poorer folk through a few more days, at least, and the anger, having found no target, went from a boil to a simmer.

But this was a short term solution. Becan knew his village wanted more, expected more of him. They wanted a culprit and a punishment, and they wanted their hard-won grain back, and they wanted it sooner, rather than later.

He resisted the tug as long as he could. He had a feeling that if he gave in this time, he would regret it all the rest of his days, but the urge proved too strong for him.

On the third day after they’d opened the granary doors, he went out into the yard and pulled out the bead. He held it in his hand, and walked where it led him, along the side of his cattle-byre and over to the little dairying shed.

Inside, although the shed was empty of all but the most basic of equipment, a pail here, a scoop there, the big churn still in its corner, the bead shone out like a deep green beacon.

He pushed aside the rush matting that covered the floorboards. He saw the outline of the hatch. Underneath, he knew, was a kind of cellar. Cool, even on the hottest summer day. His wife put extra milk and butter there, now and again.

He didn’t even bother to open it. He turned back to the door, instead, because she was standing there, arms crossed, looking defiant.

“Why?”

“Do you know how much money we could make, when the traders come through this year? We’d be the richest folk in the village. We could go up to the fair. Stay in a proper inn, buy what we liked, for once. And with coin to spare. Why shouldn’t we? We do everything for them, and never a word of praise or thanks. They owe us.”

In the end, he found a way to make excuses, he made up a tale, he quieted the rumours and the recriminations. It wouldn’t last, he thought. Someone is bound to see through it, start asking questions, but no one said much, at least not in his hearing.

In the late summer, though, he made a deal with a trader heading south, and left her there, to continue the pretences and do what she liked. And he dropped the charm somewhere along the roadside and tried not think about it ever again.

***

Bards are always popular people in taverns.

Everyone appreciates a good song and a strong baritone, and when it’s paired with a fair countenance and good manners, well, no one wants to seem ungrateful, and Donal had not often gone to bed hungry or thirsty. His friends in the inns and taverns all over Keraine made sure of that.

And when, in winter, his cloak seemed too threadbare, or when he talked, perhaps, about moving on, the innkeep of whatever place he was at that time favouring always found some second-hand finery or a bit of coin to keep him hanging around a few more days, because Donal brought in the customers.

Eventually, though, he always moved on. He liked new faces, Donal did, and he liked telling tales of wonders he’d seen, and he knew, instinctively, that the excitement would wane, if he stayed long enough for his stories to get a second hearing.

He’d stayed longer in the town below the fortress at Glaice than he’d meant to, that year. There’d been a girl, and while Donal wasn’t one for betrothals and so on, he’d found himself momentarily toying with the idea of a settled life.

Her mother put those thoughts to rest, though, in no uncertain terms, and so, on a bright summer afternoon, Donal found himself walking along the road north, not entirely as much at peace with himself or his life as he was accustomed to being.

It wasn’t so much the girl herself, he thought, although she’d been pretty and funny and appreciative of his talents. It was that arrogant assumption that he wasn’t good enough for her that rankled. Just because his pockets weren’t filled with coin.

Although, he mused, it might be nice to have money. Lots of money. Just to show that old battle-axe of a mother that she’d missed a good chance by sending him off like that. Donal, as he walked, began to imagine the scene, not unlike one in an old ballad he knew, where a girl spurned a man because she thought him poor, but he had turned out to be the long-lost son of a king…

It was at that particular moment, just as Donal was truly enjoying the vision of the hardhearted mother realizing her grievous error in judgement, when a trader’s wagon came around a bend in the road at an injudicious pace, and nearly ran the bard over.

Only an outraged cry of warning at the very last moment alerted Donal to his peril, and he looked up, panicked, and – arms flailing – tumbled off the road and down the slope, knocking himself out cold in the process.

Donal never knew whether the wagoner had stopped or not. It was possible that, having looked over the edge and suspected that Donal was dead, the trader had fled in terror of being named in a crime. It was equally possible that the driver had not stopped at all.

Donal had no way to know, because it was a considerable time before he regained consciousness. The wagon was long gone by then, and it was well past sunset.

Fortunately, he had often spent his nights out in the open, and he did, at this point, possess a decent cloak. He sat up, gingerly fingered the tender bump on his forehead, and decided that getting back to the road was a task better left for daylight.

Still, his present location was not a good place to sleep. It was rocky and uneven, and he was reminded of another old tale, where a man benighted on the road was led astray by wandering wights, who took him down into a faerie-mound, and when he’d escaped, near a hundred years had gone past in an eyeblink…

He looked about, but in the dark, it was hard to tell if anywhere else was going to be an improvement. This was a time when those imagined riches might have come in very handy, he thought, because then he’d have been snug in some nice room at an inn, instead of marooned on the road.

It would be nice, he thought, to just find money, lying around. A little pile of faerie-gold, there for the taking. Solve all his little problems, that would.

It was then that he noticed something odd.

The rocks seemed to be glowing. No, that wasn’t right. Something in the rocks was glowing. He stood up, a little shakily, and stumbled over to where it all seemed to be coming from.

There, trapped between two big boulders, there was a glowing bead wrapped in braided twine. Donal recognized it at once.

A charm. A charm of Finding, but what was it doing in the middle of bloody nowhere?

How does someone lose a charm of Finding, anyway?

He reached down and slid his fingers into the space. The charm slipped easily from its place and rolled onto his palm.

He felt the urge to move. Over the rocks. Why? He couldn’t tell, but he wasn’t in the habit of resisting his impulses, and the whole thing was so strange, like one of the tales he recited for the credulous bumpkins in small village alehouses, he couldn’t have stopped himself even had he wanted to.

More rocks to clamber past. Bits of bushes forcing their desperate way between cracks of stony ground, all taking on the cast of the green light in his hand.

He nearly fell over the bones.

The glow of the charm was now incandescent, and what had once been a ribcage looked like green arcs of light in the night. The skull, too, like a big green stone, half-buried in the dirt, and the bits of fingerbones scattered across an old, rotting bag, like little green jewels…

And then he noticed the gold coins.

There were an awful lot of them.

He sat down, very suddenly, and did not move, because the light that had guided him was suddenly gone, dowsed out completely.

He sat, looking at the very faint glimmer of the coins in the moonlight.

A dream, he thought. I must have passed out again, and I’m dreaming this, and in the morning, I’ll still be at the bottom of the hill below the road, and everything will be exactly as it was before.

He closed his eyes. His head still hurt, which was annoying. The least the dream could do is skip the pain, he thought. It seemed unfair, since in the morning he would still be poor old Donal, who would need to find somewhere to sing for his supper.

It seemed like only moments later that he woke. The sun was shining, though, well above the horizon, he could hear birdsong, and for a moment, he couldn’t remember anything past a moment of seeing a wagon barrelling around a corner of the road and heading straight for him –

He was not at the bottom of that roadside slope.

The skeleton was still only inches away. The coins gleamed in the daylight.

The charm was still clutched in his palm.

***

Months later, when he looked at his wife’s growing belly, Donal couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Somewhere, deep inside, he’d found a streak of hard-headed peasant pragmatism he had never known he possessed. He’d bought himself a few things, sure, but when he’d gotten back to Glaice, the first thing he’d done was find the most successful and honest trader he knew, and with that woman’s sage advice, invested the bulk of his coins in goods that would bring a high return.

And then, having suddenly established himself as a shrewd and successful man of property, he’d looked around and discovered that he still rather liked that girl, and he wasted no time gloating over her mother’s chagrin, but put his efforts into convincing both of them that some bards could make good husbands.

He’d remembered, just before turning to make his way back to the road, saying whatever he could recall of the Rites for the Dead over the bones, thanking whatever shade might still be clinging to them for his gift, and leaving the Finding Charm there in the dirt.

He’d sung too many songs about curses and greed, after all, not to heed the warning.

***

Normally, he never went near the man-places. They were dangerous, and there was little there that he wanted, and they stank of men, who had the sharp sticks that sang in the air and hurt you.

But the winter had been long and he was hungry, starving, desperate, even, and so he ventured closer than wisdom dictated, alert to every sign and scent, looking for anything that might be food.

Just at the bottom of the hill, well before he reached the long man-place, he stopped, caught by a feeling of enormous yearning. Somewhere beneath his paws, a thing knocked against him, round and hard.

Play with me.

The fox scrabbled at the stones and bones. The thing rolled out, gleaming in the moonlight.

Play with me.

He nosed at it and it moved away, a little. He pushed at it again, and this time it spun off along the slope, down into the brush. He scampered after it, back into the trees, but before he could pounce, he caught the smell of something little and lively.

There, crouched under the roots of an old oak tree.

In moments, the rodent was his. His first good meal in days.

Over the next few turns of the moon, he returned occasionally to that place. Each time, the little thing on the forest floor got him to push it about, and every time it came to rest, the fox found something good to eat.

Until one day, when he came by, not starving, quite, but still hopeful of decent prey, the thing was inexplicably gone.

###

Skin Deep

By Morgan Smith

Skin Deep

Based on an old Scandinavian folktale

This story first appeared in the anthology “Fantastic Beasts”.

In the village of Anhof, the alehouse was filled to bursting, and not one man in five could hear himself think.

The problem of the king’s eldest son was well-known, of course. The curse was held to be a famous one, although, since not a single villager here had ever ventured farther than to the yearly market held at Liffing, only five miles east, it is unclear what their definition of “famous” might have been.

This characterization, moreover, did not deter them from recounting to each other the sad tale of the king’s feckless queen, who had not seemed to be able to bear any children for some years after the marriage was solemnized and had, in the end, resorted to seeking out a certain wise woman who lived high up in the mountains, and who was known to have strange, arcane powers in such matters.

The charm’s instructions had seemed quite clear. The queen was to eat two onions, while standing in a sacred grove in the full light of the turning moon, and then walk backwards three times around the carved, hogbacked stone in the grove’s centre. After which, she was under strict instruction to make her way back to the castle, speaking to no one, and to join her husband in their bed.

In due course, the queen had given birth to twins, and that was when the stories split apart. Had she eaten the onions peeled or unpeeled, and had the witch withheld this vital detail? Had she inadvertently uttered a word, sometime between the carefully enacted ritual and her bedchamber door?

The more charitable held to the view that the witch had purposefully not said whether the onions had to be peeled or not, and that if a woman stubbed her toe and swore under her breath as she walked past the guard at the door, it would be unfair of anyone to be cursed, since she had not spoken those words to any being but herself.

The mean-minded said that it was just like the woman to have not managed a simple task without error.

It did not, in the end, matter too terribly much to anyone what exactly had gone wrong. The point was, something had.

One of the boys was pronounced as everything a king’s son should be. He was utterly unblemished, had the requisite number of fingers and toes, and he looked out upon the world, from the very first, with a clear and untroubled gaze of lambent blue.

The other, the elder – well, for a long time, the adage “least said, soonest mended” was held to be the wisest course, especially if one wanted to avoid arrest and consignment to a dungeon.

But people will talk. Late at night, in the alehouses, a traveling tinker might mutter a word or three. A couple of shepherd boys might murmur to each other what that tinker had said. And down by the river, when they went to do the washing in the spring, the women might relay what little they knew.

A monstrosity. Scaled and serpentine; fanged and taloned; and dangerous, most of all. It demanded raw flesh at every mealtime – no, not merely raw: living flesh. A Great Wyrm, some whispered, but wingless, and with legs, able to walk and to speak.

And to kill: his strength was almost immediately legendary.

Not a man, and yet with a man’s clear intelligence, and, as the years went by, with a man’s desires, apparently.

At first, it had been sorrowfully hoped that the aberration would not long survive. After all, babes with deformities did not frequently live much past the first months, even when they were not an utter abomination. Later on, it was merely an existence to be carefully ignored, both out of kindness and self-preservation.

And then, just as the king had concluded a very worthy betrothal for his younger son, the problem had reared its scaly head and demanded that the rule of law be respected. It was not to be born, said the elder royal offspring, that the ancient statute requiring the younger son remain single until the elder had been safely married off be set aside. He would not countenance this. He could not.

He demanded his bride.

And so, where once the tale had been a slightly pleasurable if somewhat terrifying matter for discreet gossip, it now formed a material and immediate problem for every merchant, farmer, or craftsman in the country.

***

In a well-appointed throne room, decorated with embroidered hangings depicting various hunting scenes, and laid with a floor of alternating black and grey slate flagging, the king was harassing his counselors for an answer to this most pressing dilemma.

Strewn about the floor was a veritable snowfall of parchment sheets. All of them had been copied out in perfect, ornate hands, and all of them bore impressive seals and ribbons.

And all of them, in the most polite and courteous of words and impressive phrases, couched amid expressions of sincere but heartfelt regret, contained at their hub, a simple word.

No.

No, they would not, for any amount of gold plate or trade concessions, send their royal daughters to be wedded to the eldest son of King Ranwulf. Nor would they allow the child of any prince, duke or earl to be sacrificed in this endeavor. Indeed, or so the king saw, reading between the lines, they would not attempt to suborn any lesser or especially impoverished member of their nobility or gentry to immolate their daughters in this cause.

Just, no.

“Well,” said one counselor, clearing his throat, “Well, we shall have to think of something else.”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, while everyone tried to think of what “something else” might consist of.

“Perhaps,” said the queen, diffidently, “someone might be found among our own people? Oh, I know,” she said, catching her husband’s impatient glare, “We can’t expect any of the nobility to reconsider. But it might be that some of the – er – less well-to-do might attempt it? For a price?”

Ranwulf opened his mouth to object, and then snapped it closed again.

She was right, really, and he knew it. What place had family pride in this? Prince Lind certainly did not care. He had never placed even the slightest value on his family’s honour or ancestors.

From the start, Ranwulf had known that his son’s demand for a wife had been born of bitterness, resentment and malice, and the outrage that was his eldest son had, moreover, made it plain to all of them that his enormous strength and stamina, not to mention his poisonous fangs, would be put to terrible use should he be thwarted. He had said a great many things, some of which had been naked threats, but the one thing he had not said was that he expected a royal bride.

Just a bride.

Two days later, the proclamation went out.

***

In Anhof, as elsewhere, the king’s words were greeted with disbelief.

The queen’s original suggestion had, as was to be expected, been modified by unanimous consent to form more than a request.

It was, in fact, more of a decree than a proclamation. Having come to the sticking point, the wise counselors had transformed her idea into an edict requiring each and every community to forward, with haste, one eligible, unmarried female to the capital, there to be presented to His Royal Highness for inspection as a prospective bride.

The wording was careful, but not a single villager in Anhof, at least, was in any doubt. Theirs was not to reason why. Theirs was to sacrifice some girl – any girl – on the altar of the kingdom’s future.

And there wasn’t a cursed thing they could do about it.

The proclamation did not spell out any details of the retribution in store, should they fail in this endeavor. It was unnecessary to do so, since the villagers’ imaginations could supply prospects far more terrifying than any open words could have done.

It had induced consternation, of course, and fury, and no little anguish.

How could they send a child of theirs into certain and horrific death?

How could they not?

And, in a scene repeated in every corner of the realm, names were slyly, or diffidently, or ruthlessly offered up.

All of which, in Anhof, had the natural effect of causing more discord and heartache than any other local dispute ever had. The tanner was accused of trying to settle old scores. The blacksmith claimed that Weaver Elspeth was merely trying to clear the field for her own daughter to marry the reeve’s son, by suggesting that the smith’s eldest was admirably suited for a life at court.

It was a set of quarrels that went long into the night.

The trouble was, though, as the alewife eventually pointed out, name who they might, there was no guarantee that the woman selected would be a willing participant.

“You can put a mule to harness,” she said, sagely, “but even with the whip, there’s no saying they’ll pull your wagon, is there?”

This had the unlooked-for effect of silencing everyone. In their minds, they suddenly, separately, tried to imagine telling some girl – not their own daughter, of course, but some girl, any girl – that she had been singled out to save their village’s skin by being sent off to an unspecified but obviously bloody fate.

“Perhaps,” said the reeve, “Perhaps one of them would consent…willingly?”

***

On the following morning, when every unmarried woman, flanked by her family, had assembled themselves on the village green, and when they had listened to a rather pompous speech begging them to consider the future of those families if not the entire village, the reeve was met, not unexpectedly, by a nervous silence.

No girl in Anhof had come unprepared.

All of them had known beforehand what would be asked.

All of them, in their suddenly virtuous hearts, had resolved that this was the one time where their parents’ impassioned plea or stern order must be respected.

All, perhaps, except one.

Katya was not the sort of girl that anyone ever took much notice of.

She was neither pretty nor plain. Her hair was unremarkably brown, as were her eyes, and her height was neither so tall as to occasion questions about “the weather up there” nor so small as to be referred to as “the little one”. She wasn’t outspoken or quarrelsome, and no one, if they thought of her at all, which was seldom, had ever said she was bold or courageous.

She was simply a nonentity, even in her own family, where the only time she was noticed was in the event of an omission of some chore or task being performed, and even then, her mother frequently had to think hard to recall her name.

It was no wonder, then, that when her daughter stepped calmly forward and said, in confident, untroubled tones, “I’ll do it,” Katya’s mother, for several seconds, did not react at all.

Moments later, as a sort of relieved and grateful sigh flowed out from the gathered folk, her mother’s brow wrinkled slightly in an effort to collect her thoughts and said, rather disjointedly, “No – no. You mustn’t.”

It was too late. The reeve had grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her forward, and the blacksmith’s wife was patting her on her shoulder with approval. Several of the people present made shift to comfort the grieving mother, but this was a short-lived effort. Katya’s mother watched as the carter helped the girl into his wagon, in great haste to be off before the chit thought better of her offer, and merely asked fretfully if anyone knew if Katya had fed the chickens that morning.

The deed was done. Anhof’s future was saved.

***

Katya, if she had thought about it at all, had thought merely that at least she would get to see a real city before she died. The reeve, as an inducement, had mentioned a sum of actual coin for the courageous sacrifice, in order that she might buy some new, fashionable clothes and present herself nicely before her doom. This alone might not have been enough to sway her, but with the mention of an additional payment to the girl’s family, and the hint of future considerations, coupled with the fact that she was well aware that not only were her marital prospects in Anhof virtually nil but that her continued existence formed a bit of a block to her three younger siblings’ chances as well, had induced her to step forward.

But in addition, Katya had noticed that even quite ordinary happenings that Anhof was witness to had the habit of becoming massively exaggerated, sometimes to mythic proportions, and that consequently, it was more than probable that the tale of the first-born prince’s deformities had been embellished and added upon so much that the reality was very likely quite benign.

This belief stood her in good stead through the four-day journey to the capital, where she was installed at a hostelry known to the carter, although she had had to jog his elbow twice to remind him of why they were there, and a third time for him to belatedly recall her name during the introductions.

In the morning, after several repeated questions and a recounting or three of why she was here, she was directed to a good seamstress and various other merchants and began to array herself for the upcoming ordeal.

If she had had dreams of elegant finery, these had by then been put to rest.

The city was cold – much, much colder than Anhof. Damp winds rattled her bedchamber windows, and chill fog dogged her steps as she went down the crowded streets to consult with the recommended dressmaker. She couldn’t stop shivering, her nose was permanently red, and by the end of her first evening in the city, the tips of her fingers had started to turn blue.

Instead of the shining silks and gossamer skirts of her imagination, she had chosen heavy linen and serviceable woolens: layer upon layer of them, from unfrilled drawers and a number of scratchy petticoats to two high-necked gowns, a close-buttoned jacket, an oversized shawl and a demi-cloak with a fur-lined hood. She bought thick wool stockings at a stall at the end of the road, sighed over a pair of thin kidskin gloves and paid a quarter of their price for roughly-knitted mittens instead.

In fact, so consuming was the need to somehow, finally, get warm again, that it was not until the appointed morning arrived that Katya really gave her future very much thought.

By dint of three requests the night before and another in the morning, they had brought her some hot water to wash with, and she gritted her teeth and slipped out of her nightdress, trying to not to notice the gooseflesh her skin had become.

She began to dress: first her old shift, then the new underthings. All the petticoats, and the thick socks over top of her old, much-darned ones. Both gowns and the jacket came next, and, after slipping her feet into her new boots, she wrapped the shawl, muffler-like, around her shoulders.

She didn’t bother to look in the mirror. Her vague dream of beautiful clothes lifting her finally out of the limbo she had always occupied had lost out to her desperate need to not feel as though icicles were stabbing her all day long. If she had been offered a funeral pyre, she would have jumped in without a thought.

She arrived at the castle gates on foot, since she hadn’t been able to catch anyone’s attention long enough to bespeak a carriage, a cart or even a tinker’s wagon. The wind had reddened her cheeks and she had acquired a case of the sniffles.

Even then, the enormity of her choice failed to sink in.

There were plenty of other girls here, and not all of them were weeping or looking frightened. Not all of them had the look of potential spinsters, resigned to their sacrificial fate. Some of them had apparently weighed the fireside whispers against the possibility of becoming a princess and decided the risk might be worth it. These girls looked well-to-do. They looked excited and confident.

They looked warm.

Katya shivered and drew her cloak more closely around her, huddling into the fur of the hood. Inside, hopefully, there would be fires lit, or charcoal braziers, and the windows shuttered against the chill. She wished they’d get on with this.

The King and Queen came out onto a balcony, and waved graciously. After that, an old man in a dark blue cloak came out and made a speech of thanks, which Katya heard very little of. The wind had picked up again and was blowing the words away.

Finally, the first hopeful bride-to-be was led inside, while the rest of them, commoners all and therefore not worthy of civilized comforts, waited in the courtyard.

Katya’s toes turned icy.

There was a sudden scream of anguish, and then a fearful silence.

A guard appeared and motioned to the next girl in line.

***

The mood in the courtyard had changed. A few of the more confident ones had tried to leave, but the gates were locked and guarded. Several girls had fainted. Many were weeping in terror, and even the ones who, like Katya, had maintained their composure, looked more than apprehensive.

But despite her outward calm, Katya was fighting a rising wave of fear. It seemed the rumours had not lied, not this time, and she had, in a moment of vanity and recklessness, doomed herself.

The line moved her slowly, methodically, inexorably, to her fate. She had lost whatever false courage that had propped her up through the last few days, and she was now not even slightly different than any of the other frightened, despairing girls who had thrown caution to the winds here.

And she was still very, very cold.

And then, suddenly, as if by magic, there was no one in front of her, and a stony-faced guard had grabbed her wrist and was pulling her up the shallow steps and pushing her through the great oaken doors.

***

Her first thought was that for royalty, they were certainly stingy with even minor comforts.

Her second thought was that rumour had, in this instance, actually been kind.

There was only one small brazier in the room, and beyond that lay the most horrific of sights.

He was coiled up, an enormous snake of a man-thing, iridescent scales shimmering in the pale light from the two lamps set on a table beside him. He was watching her with those cold, unblinking eyes, as black as coal, and she could hear her own breath rasping in her throat as she fought down a scream.

He opened his mouth to reveal long, yellowed fangs, dripping with ichor, and then she really would have screamed, just like the others before her, but she had no breath for it. All that came out of her was a sort of kittenish meow of grief and panic. She shut her mouth and swallowed very hard.

For a moment, they looked across at each other, silently, and as that moment lengthened, Katya became aware of something rather astonishing.

He saw her.

He was looking directly at her, which was a somewhat unusual occurrence for her. Most of the time, people’s eyes tended to take her in as a peripheral afterthought, immediately discounted as being of no interest or use to them, but Prince Lind’s eyes were most assuredly and unwaveringly on her.

He saw her.

Not as simply the next offering in this deadly performance of tragedy, but as a single, unique being.

He saw her.

It wasn’t that she found her courage, real or false, at that point. It wasn’t as if she felt any relief – quite the reverse, because she could read in his eyes that she was not, even so, precisely a person to him. She was prey, she was a toy, she was a weapon in some battle she did not even begin to understand, and this frightened her far more than his actual appearance.

It was just that being noticed was so new and alien a concept that her fear took a small step backwards to make room for a new sensation: that of curiosity.

“Er,” she said, licking her lips. “Er, how’d’ye do, Your Highness?”

The man-thing uncoiled and slid away from the stone chair it had been resting on.

“How do I do?” it asked, and its voice was just what she expected, a sibilant hiss, replete with menace. “How do I do? I do what I like and I do it very well.”

“Oh,” said Katya, faintly. She had just barely managed not to take a giant leap backward when the serpent-thing slid forward, but it had taken every ounce of willpower not to, and now, as he came just a little closer, she could not think why she had not run screaming from it.

Except that it seemed that that was what he was waiting for.

She was a country girl. She knew what snakes were like. They waited till you moved, before they struck.

She held her ground.

“Tell me,” it said, “tell me why you aren’t hammering on the door, begging to be let out? Why aren’t you screaming? All the others did so.”

“It’s colder out there,” said Katya, after a moment. “It ain’t warm in here, but at least I’m out of the wind.”

The noise it made then was unnerving, the hiss intertwined with a rattling, clacking sound that echoed around the empty stone walls. It was a second or two before Katya realized that the man-thing was laughing.

She grinned back and stepped up to the brazier.

The mirth was short-lived. Prince Lind looked her over once more. The snake’s tongue flicked out between the fangs.

“A pity,” it hissed. “A pity, since this is not the way the game is played, my dear.”

Game? She thought. What game? But she knew, instinctively, what it was he sought.

Hadn’t she played that same game, all her life long, with her mother, her father, her siblings, her entire village? That moment of victory, when through her persistence they finally, wholly and completely, acknowledged her existence, and were, however briefly, ashamed.

But then, no one’s life had been at stake.

She reached out her hands toward the warmth of the brazier, trying to think of some way to delay. If no scream came, mayhap someone would come to see what was happening? It was just barely possible that they might, and that they might then try to save her.

A frail hope, but this was now all she had.

She leaned closer to the only source of heat and said, as evenly as she could, “Surely, there’s no hurry about it, though? I mean, you could let me warm up, at least.”

It made that revolting laughing sound again.

“Just as you like,” it said, with mocking courtesy. “Shall I get you some wine?”

She watched in fascination as it slithered to the table and filled a silver cup from a crystal flagon, watched as the thing slid back toward her and held it out.

She took the cup, repressing a shudder as her fingers came into contact with those dry, hardened talons and papery skin, and managed a bleak smile of thanks. The thing drew back its lips, revealing those terrible fangs once more.

She was aware that he knew precisely what she was doing. She was aware, moreover, that her weak little stratagem had amused him. Her heart sank. All her gambit would do was buy her a few more minutes of life.

“You must tell me, of course, when you are comfortable,” the Prince said. “Meanwhile, what shall we do to pass the time?”

“Well, you seem to like games, Your Highness. Mayhap we could play one?”

The black, unwinking eyes narrowed.

“A game…,” it mused. “Indeed, a game should be played. But for what stakes? Ah, no, my dear, not that. I fear I must disappoint you, there. But you say you wish to be warm? Let us play for your clothing, then. I will dice you for every stitch you stand up in.”

Katya blushed. It was an outrageous suggestion, even for a peasant girl, but even while she registered the humiliation, her mind was racing.

“But what will you forfeit, my lord? It hardly seems fair, if you will not spare me, that you should not lose something, even so.”

“I never lose,” said the Prince.

“So you say,” Katya said. “But still, if I must shed my clothes, then you should shed something as well. Your precious skin, perhaps?”

For a moment, she thought she’d gone too far. Her heart thumped loud inside her chest; she thought for certain he must hear it.

But then came that rattling laughter, once more.

“Touché, my dear. I do salute you. Very well. I wager my skin against yours. Shall we begin?”

***

It was extremely fortunate for Katya that two years before, a mania for playing Hazard had swept her village. It was not clear who had introduced them to this game of the high-born, and even yesterday, Katya would not have counted knowledge of the game in any sense an advantage, since her father had lost three fat geese and a bushel of barley to its lures before her mother had put a stop to his participation.

But at least, when the Prince announced his preference, with another hideous smile and a flick of that impossibly disgusting tongue, she felt reasonably confident that she could manage to play without having to ask too many questions. She understood the rules.

The Prince’s assertion that he never lost held some truth. She was forced to give up her cloak and her shawl and then her jacket, in very short order.

But on the fourth cast, she called a main of eight and nicked with a twelve, to the surprise of them both.

There was a moment when it occurred to her that he might not honour the stakes. Indeed, why should she have thought that he would play fair at all? She shrank under his infuriated gaze, but then, he hissed out what seemed to be a sigh, and stepped a little away from the table.

There was a sort of trembling in the air, a vibration that rocked, ever so slightly, the stone floor beneath her feet, and then an odd, tearing sound as the shining scales at his throat seemed to part and fall away. The Prince straightened up and shook himself, and the snakeskin slipped to the floor with a clanking sound.

He won the next two throws, and Katya took off her first gown, and her shoes.

But then she won again, impossibly, because he threw the main he’d called on a chance, and then there were two piles of scaly skins lying in heaps beside her carefully folded things.

He had, even after the first loss, played with an indifferent, careless air, and she could feel his amusement hanging about her. Now, though, he was playing in earnest. He barely looked at her, concentrating his eyes wholly upon the game, but she didn’t mind that. He might be watching the dice, but his attention was utterly on her. It was a most novel thing, and despite knowing that no matter what happened, she was still doomed, she was actually enjoying herself.

After she lost her second gown, she was shivering visibly, although she was trying very hard to control it.

Prince Lind muttered a curse, and got up to slide the brazier closer to her side.

“Th-thank you,” she managed, between chattering teeth.

“Don’t imagine I do it for your benefit,” he hissed. “It’s monstrous distracting, all that shaking. You want to keep your mind on the game.”

A red flannel petticoat joined the clothing on the floor before she won again. This time, when Lind sat down again, it occurred to her that he seemed different.

Smaller.

He called a main of five. The cubes flipped up and through the air and tumbled down.

Eleven. Another skin lost.

She kept her eyes down. The last thing she wanted now was to anger him. At any moment, he might tire of this, and then…she swallowed, and pushed the thought away.

They’d been at this for ages. Why didn’t someone come to see what was happening? Why wasn’t the guard bringing another victim in here?

She lost another petticoat and her new woollen socks.

The Prince refilled their cups, and clinked his against hers in a sort of half-exasperated salute.

And then she won again.

He got up again, this time very slowly. The snake-tongue flicked out again, and the dark eyes seemed almost to devour her in a fury, but he stepped past her and this time the trembling was real, she could feel the stones rumbling and the walls were shaking and he cried out so loud, she thought he was dying.

It was somehow more terrifying than anything else about this terrifying day. She could hear the roar of an unholy wind whistling past her ears and there was a red mist rising, like a spray of blood, and a high, keening whine, as if there was some small animal caught in a trap.

Katya fell to the floor, her hands over her eyes, and wept in terror.

***

Somewhere, from very far away, there was a voice, asking her in desperate tones, if she was all right. Begging her to say she was, to say anything, to please be all right.

From even farther off, there was a frantic thumping of fists on wood.

And then a strong arm was around her shoulders, and a man’s voice was whispering “Hush, now, love. It’s all right. I swear it.”

Katya pulled her hands away from her face and looked up into deep brown eyes.

Eyes that saw her, and only her.

Below those eye was a straight, aquiline nose and a tender mouth, and his arms tightened around her shoulders.

The pounding on the door grew more agitated and frantic.

She looked at the man holding her. Behind him lay five snake-like skins and half of her own wardrobe. One of the wine-cups had fallen from the table and lay on the floor beside them.

“Wha- what happened?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered. “In truth I don’t, but – oh, my love, whatever it was is down to you!”

She sat up, suddenly very aware of his arms and her half-dressed condition, and blushed a deep red.

The pounding was now joined by some shouting.

Prince Lind – well, she assumed it was still Prince Lind, although how he could have become so transformed was not something she could grasp, not in her present state – Prince Lind seemed disposed to ignore the rising clamor outside the room.

“You have a name, I imagine?” he said, smiling down at her. “I don’t mind telling you it’s going to be deuced awkward introducing my bride if I don’t know her name.”

“I – oh, you cannot be serious,” she said.

“Why not, my love? Why should the Prince not marry the loveliest, bravest, smartest woman in the realm? What else could be more fitting?”

“But I’m just – I mean, I’m only…” her voice trailed away, in awe and disbelief.

Because Lind still saw her, all of her, and only her.

Because beauty is not only skin deep.

###

Discover other titles by Morgan Smith

A Spell in the Country

Flashbacks (an unreliable memoir of the ‘60s)

Casting In Stone

The Plague Village

No Good Deed

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