Margaret, do you see the leaves? They flutter, falling. See, they light about you, red and yellow. I am spelling this in leaves. When I had eyes and hands, and hair as red as leaves, I was Thea. My mother fed me to her crows, she burned my bones and scattered them; my braided hair she keeps. I am wind and memory who spells this; Thea who is spelled is stone. My mother got me gazing in her glass. Her raven held it up and told her: what I tell you, you must do. Undo, the sly moon said. And so she did, undid. Annis was herself her glass, and I her shadow, A and O. She saw me in the stony mirror, naked as a branch of thorn. Devouring, she bore me, as the old moon bears the new, itself again. But I am left hand to her right: not waning, but the childing moon. The dark has eaten me; I bear it light. I cloak myself in leaves, I fly. The wind unspells this.
I will spell this in the sliding water on a web. At my birth, the Necklace had its rising, Annis’ chain of stones. But they do give it other names above, that Elsewhere it had set. The Skein, they call it in the Cloudish tongue; in Lune, the Misselbough; that cloud of stars we name the Clasp, they call Nine Weaving, or the Clew. So I did write when I had hands and learned to cipher and to spell. When I had eyes, I saw another heavens through her glass, another world. I walk there now and gather lightwebs, plucking them from thorns of night; I spin them in a skein, a clew. The dark is labyrinth, but not the maze I thought I knew. I wander like a moon. See, Margaret, how the heavens dance, they dance between my hands. When I had eyes, I thought my seeing bound the stars; I knew the Cup, the Hallows Tree, the Ship, as if my naming them were law. There is another law. The stars are messengers; their shining comes from far and farther still, from hearths long cold. Walking, I have seen the hearths beyond the stars, like ashes on a dark hill. But the stars that travel, they are dark and bright, like travellers with scarves of light, like beings newly blown of crystal, each a single note, nightblack, and rayed with burning silver. Their moving is their voice; they do not speak, but dance. Ah, now the drops of water slide away. The web is shaken bare.
I tell this in the frost, the rime. I am not for my mother's necklace. Margaret, have you seen it? It is strung with stones, all flawed: some round as waveworn pebbles, others long and sharpedged. They are souls, the souls of witches, cold long since: the eldest of them ash these nine thousand years. Witches turn themselves to stone. Their gaze is glass. But they are isolate, unknotted souls: they dance by one and one. The necklace is an eidolon, a ring that never was. The souls are gathered on one string, as shadows of the starry Chain. That cord is time; the knot is Law. It is a place. I lay there once, a white ground where the blood is spilled, a place of bones and coins. All witches came there, bent on darkness; none had met. They spelled in blood, cast bones; they spoke in tongues of fire. There are witches still in Lune, on Law. Yet none is living that could read the word my ashes spelled; nor find the nine bones that I left.
Beyond the circle of Whin's light, the sea moves, sleepless in its heavy gown. She walks beside it slowly, toward, away. And to her, from her, endlessly it shifts the longways of its slow pavane. Within her candle's burr, sparse flakes of snow blink, vanish. There is nothing there to see. Salt rime and shingle. Sea wrack. Stones, a curve of jetty, tumbled in a storm. Sticks and weed. They stir. A wave? They draw breath, harshly. The lantern swings and halts.
In the dark, a white face, staring: a man, all bone and shivering, three-quarters drowned. “Who's there?” he tries to call. Whin sets the lantern down. “A journeyman,” she says. “A traveller.” He sprawls against the stonework, tangled in an iron ring; the next wave frets at him, the next. His coat is gone, his head and feet are bare. A stranger out of Lune, thinks Whin. Uncloudish. Yet he bids her by her calling. “Ashes?” At his throat he wears a skin bag, smaller than a purse. His hands are white past bleeding, bruised; he signs to her, take this. She fumbles with the knots, she bites at them and tumbles out his hoard: cold rings.
"Will you tell a death?"
They are silver and endless on her hard brown palm. White stones like frost. A knot of blood. “Could yer not sell them?"
"None would take. No ship. They—"
"Throwed yer over? I see yer to hang."
He shudders. “It is not my passage that I seek."
"A fire,” says Whin. “And drink ye. I'd not shift stones for yer grave."
She squats beside him, lugs him further up the strand. Stripping off his icy rags, she laps him in the old coat, black as nightfall, stiff as death. He'd not starve yet. She leaves him hallowed in the lantern's fleet.
There's wood enough, but sodden. Whin flings the heavy, takes the dry stuff, salt with frost. She stacks it, leeward of a quain of rock; strikes, kindles, drives her iron for the can. Waiting for the blaze, she chafes the stranger, lays him naked to her breast: blue hands, bruised feet, his starved and wrinkled cock and balls, his belly, slack against his spine, until the blood runs shining, sheeting on his dazed white face. The fire leaps. A boy, for all his haggard look. His eyes are sunken, shut; his beard is soft. Not twenty. Younger than herself. She lays him, not ungently, on the stones.
"Not sleep,” he whispers. “Tell."
"Drink.” The ale in the can's hot; she stirs a slurry of meal in, a scrape off her knuckled ginger. Strong. She holds it to his lips.
"Tell."
Whin drinks. “I will then.” She turns the cold rings on her hand. They are silver and endless; they are night, moon, mourning. They would weigh her down. Whin sees the pale boat waiting and the soul that bellies in the dark wind, quick with death; the telling is the shroud that stays it, that the soul can journey. Let her go.
It's what I is. Death's midwife.
And she sets the first ring on.
O death. She sees the wheel hurled downward, burning, and the scattered crows. She sees a white wrist circled with a braid of burning hair, a bluenailed hand; it casts, it casts a blackness on the stony ground. Shards of witchglass, ashes of bone.
And she herself is scattered and restrung. She is the crowd of bone, the dead soul's stringing, and her voice.
Whin's hand is beating, beating on the earth. She sings.
It's in an outland tongue at first, a dancing driving lilt, a skirl and keening; then the tongue's her own. There are pools in the river, and the river calls him. All white in whiteness where it rises; swift in running, deepest where the red leaf eddies in the pool. Whorl and headlong, she sings the river's journey: glint and shadow, dint of rain, the running to the downfall and the shivered bow of light.
No more.
Even as she wakes from trance, the ring is ice, is water. Gone.
She sees the fire, sunken into embers; sees the drawn face staring. Far beyond, the sea shifts, turning its sleepless bed. Far gone.
"The child,” he whispers.
Ah. The child. Whin presses at her eyes until the red's green as leaves, new leaves. Ashes. Ashes. See, the crows at the furrows wheel and fall, they tear at—No. Leave off. That were back and elsewhere. A long draught of the caudle, slab with standing. Raking back her hair, salt-fretted with the roke and sweat, Whin slips the small ring on her hand.
And there is nothing. Whiteness. Round she turns, and round; she stumbles, groping for a gossamer, a clew. No thread, there is no thread. A creak of wood. A ship? And then a lalling nowhere, like a woman at her wheel; but small. Arms crossed before her face, Whin blunders at the mist. It reddens and dissolves; it dances. And she's in an empty room. She sees a cradle overset; she sees a tangle of bright silks. In the roar and crackling of thorns, she sees a burning doll, its blind face like a poppyhead, the petals like a cry.
"The child?” His voice is sharp with fear.
"Not dead."
He shuts his eyes. “Ah."
Whin slips the small ring up her finger, rocks it with her thumb. Not dead, she'd swear it. How? Not born?
But where is here? The world is white now, greying like a ghost. Are they now lost in what she'd sung? Whin stares a moment, mutely; then she turns her palm and raises it. It fills with snow. She tastes the water in the hollow of her hand, the salt and sweet.
Bending to the man, she brushes him; she touches eyes, mouth, heart. “Thou sleep."
A girl is reading in a garden where no flowers grow. It is formal and mathematical, a maze, an abstract of the heavens done in yew and stone. A garden made for moonlight and for winter, changeless but for sky and snow and drifting leaves: a box of drowned green light. It is autumn now. The fountain's dry; the stone girl weeps no more. Her lap is full of leaves. The lawn is grey as gossamers with rime. The living girl's dishevelled, in a cloud of breath; she's hunched against the cold in woven velvet, wadded silk: old finery, too thin. Leaves light on her. She holds her book aslant to catch the light, and peers through cracked spectacles: “...one king's daughter said to another...” Her breakfast's in a napkin: cake, an orange. Costly, alien, aglow. Round she turns it in her cold lap, cradles, sniffs. Straying from her hood, her tangled hair is pale red, light through leaves; her tumbled gown is stormcloud blue. Her slipshod feet are wet. Softly as she's come, she cannot hide her track: her feet, her draggling skirts have torn the hoarfrost, tarnishing. You cannot read her face: an egg, a riddle. What is it lives within a maze, within a wall, within a hedge of thorn? And on an island, not a winter's day in riding round. Yet she's never seen the sea.
A bird cries. Margaret? Startled, she looks up and round. The orange rolls unheeded from her lap. There, back of her, a black bird flutters to the earth, as ragged as an ash. Its cry fades like a cinder, glows and fades. Bearded, it regards her with its black eye; hops and drags a mirror in the wounded frost.
Ah, Margaret, it was cold in Cloud, the wandering. I mind a night of frost, a white hag on the hillsides; it was all ways white, whatever way we turned. Kit bore a lantern that he dared not light; my mother's crows have eyes. Round we turned like children in a game; like tops, still giddy, lest we fall.
Here's not yet dark, he said. And none to light our heels. I hear that Will the piper's to the hedgehogs’ shearing.
A cup, I said, to drink their health.
A game, said he. Wilt thou have Aprons all untied? I'll show thee. Or Cross my river to Babylon.
Light words. But doubtful mind, I thought: elated, ill at ease. What should he with this bird of paradise? I was no hedgeling to be coaxed and whistled; yet had lighted on him, haggard to his hand. Brave plumes. And trailing jesses of another's leash.
Thy candle's quenched, said I. Will I light thee another?
And willing, said he. Wouldst bear it then?
And go the lighter for't.
Then soberly he said: the bridge is drowned. I know not the way.
We stood. And all the trees beyond us like a crowd of bones. No stars. I'd never gone by night, without to see the stars. And in my mind I saw what I'd undone: my mother's chain of stones, the clasp of winter from my throat. Her chain of witches’ souls. I saw them in the mist, the others in the game, caught out, cast out. They stood like stones, but clearer than the coldest night: in each, a dark witch rayed with blood; in each, the wintry stars. In the last, like an altar stone, there lay the image of a woman sleeping, with the hooked moon at her heart. She was the fell they stood upon, her hair unwreathing in a coil of cloud. This cloud. I am braided in her hair, I said, as if my mother lessoned me; and then recalling me, I touched my throat, all bare but for a scarf.
That chain was my knowledge. I put it off with my undoing and I walked unstarry in that mazing whiteness: unwitch, unmaiden and unwise. They say the moon does so. But I was never maid—ah, Margaret, thou'rt full young to see, but thou must see. Thou know'st my mother got me in her glass. And so I was as left hand to her right. I was her make in all things hidden, and I knew as I was known. Ah, but never with an other, I had never been unknown; nor seen, as through a cloud, the hearth and shadow of another's soul. My love, we got thee all unknowing, out of cloud.
But now your breath clouds the glass: too near, you gaze too near. And so see no one in the mist: a whiteness, waning with your breath. Oh, I am all undone. My mother loosed the knot long since; she laid the chain of me aside. The soul slipped by her. White in whiteness: what I am is white.
"So yer run off wi’ a witch's daughter?” said Whin. “Were yer mad or what?"
"Dazzled,” said the man at last, and softly.
"And t'lass?” A silence, long enough so that Whin thought he slept.
"Ah. No witch. In the end."
Kit stood. Whatever way he turned was white, as white as nowhere.
"Thea?"
"Soft,” she said. “Catch hold."
Among the standing shapes of stones, a stone put back its hood and turned. He saw her, Thea, looking back at him, her curled hand at her throat. Stumbling in the mist, he caught her and he took her cold true hand. The lantern of her hair was grey. With hag, he saw: it ghosted them. Brocaded both alike: his russet and her raiment stiff and fine with it. Her face was muffled in a scarf, the whitest at her lips. His hair, when he put it from his eyes, was hackled with frost. “Where's this?"
"Cloud,” said Thea. “Is there earth?"
"I know not,” he said. He looked about, bewildered, at the mist. “How came we here?"
"By ship."
He remembered; or had dreamed the like. They were in her mother's garden, in among the stones like hooded watchers and the labyrinth of yews. ‘Twas dusk and shadowless, the maze, the stones configured as the starry sky. They were playing at a game with lanterns? Hide fox, and all after. How the errant star of her shone out, now there, now elsewhere in the dark. Their lamps conjoined. He saw her, still, but as a light is still, still dancing in his eyes. He kissed her—ah, it drowned him deep, that kiss. In her, his soul translated, like a tree of fire, burning in her bluegreen dusk. Come away with me, he said, now ardent, now amazed, the words like Perseids. To Cloud. And let thy mother—
Nothing. He remembered nothing, like a sleeper waked. Cold moonlight, musty straw. A jangling, as of keys. The dream had troubled him with joy; he wore the stone of it, both bright and heavy, at his heart.
He said, bemused, “My lady sent for you. ‘Twas in her closet."
"I had found a door,” she said. “The sky has doors."
"And locks?"
"'Tis done. Undone."
He saw a little image, clear as in a dream: a string of stones cast by, like blood spilled on the hoary earth.
"But how—?"
"Thy fiddle was the ship."
Dismayed, he halted. “What?"
"'Twas wood of Cloud. It played the wind behind us."
"Ah,” said Kit, and rubbed his eyes. Salt wind: it stung. “I gave it thee. And would again, were't all the sinews of my heart.” And yet remembered nothing of the gift, the journey. Ship? As in a waking dream, he saw the sail of sky, bluegreen against a darker sky, all riddled with the stars. He saw the lantern at the mast. Their hands together at his lips were salt. “What tune?"
"Light leaves on water."
"Ah, it played that when its leaves were green. Waked wood.” Still unsteady, his voice. That shock of severing still white, which at a thought would bleed. And so he laid light words to it, like cobwebs to a wound. He knelt to mend his lantern. “Here's a fret. ‘Tis out. And I've left my flint and steel.” He grimaced ruefully. “And come to that, thy book, and all. Hadst thou nothing thou wouldst take?"
"There was not time. The door stood open."
Suddenly he stood and said, “We've done it, then?"
"We do,” said Thea. “Grammar."
"Ah,” said Kit. “How the old crows’ beaks will clack. Canst see them at their feast? Here's bones.” And hopping on the ground, he cocked an eye at her, with such a glance of balked fury that she laughed aloud.
"The crow and her marrow, they quarrel for the glass." Then gathering up her skirts, “Let's on,” she cried.
"What way?"
"Any way. Away."
"All Cloud's to choose."
"I know. To where the fiddles grow."
"And shake the tree? I'll play no windfall, for the green are sharp."
"But we must cross a river by the dawn."
Round they turned like children in a game, and in and out among the stones. They called and bantered, dizzy with unlawful joy. Kit fell. His lantern slid away, it skated from his grasp; then he was up again, bruised and laughing. “Hey!” Then seeing her a-shake with cold, he sobered. “Canst thou make us fire?"
"No,” said Thea.
"Nor can I,” he said. “I doubt we'll starve then, but we find some cotter's hearth.” He cast his coat round her, crazy with the ice. “Or a tinker's camp. And chaffer for his russet coat.” A mantle of the starry sky. Her gown was thin, the color of the bloom on sloes, embroidered as the Milky Way: light shaken out, lace dandled. Not for travelling, he thought. A gown for walking in her mother's hall, from glass to glass. And it would snow.
"So this is Cloud,” he said. “'Tis like a tale of witches, well enough by the fire. Once afore the moon was round, and on a night in Cloud ... Hast kindred here?"
"None,” said Thea, “in this world. But hast not thou?"
"In Lune I had.” He bent for the lantern. “We'd best on."
The night was uncompassed. Far off, they heard an endless rampage, not a shuttle but a reel of sound, cloud spinning into ice.
"What's that?” she said. “'Tis like the sea unmeasured."
"A river,” he said. “Houses?"
So they set out for it, stumbling into brakes of thorn and bogs and pitfalls, snagged and mired. They went blindly, now toward and now astray. The roar grew louder in the dark. The hills re-echoed with the rush of it, behind, before, and everywhere. Above, a nightcrow cawed, once, in its coaly voice. An omen. Thea stilled.
"What is't?” said Kit.
"The clouds have eyes."
"An I had my fiddle, I would play them to sleep."
On the hills, the foxes yowled and yelped, as if their blood ran green. An eerie sound, that keening. Thea shivered.
"The hills have tongues. They wake."
"They wed. I'd light them with a dance.” And wheeling backward, sliding—"Oh!” cried Kit. She caught his jacket as he stepped on nothing, on the brink of tumbling in a foss.
"Now what?” said Kit. “I'm for a glass castle and a bout with goblins. Or a ghost, or what you will. As we've tumbled in a winter's tale.” He sat among the lashy thorns and rubbed his shins. “Ah,” he said, and fumbled in his pockets. “Here.” She felt a handful of nuts. “From thy mother's table, as I passed. We may sit and crack them while the crows take counsel."
"Or match them with a goblin, shell for soul."
"Unless he'd like a gingernut?"
"To cross his river?"
"Aye.” Kit rose. “'Twill narrow upstream, far enough."
In the dark beyond the river, there and gone, they saw a fire.
Kit caught at Thea's arm. “A light. A house?"
"A torch,” she said. “It moves."
"Thy mother's horsemen?"
"No. They bear no light."
He said, “Belike some lantered shepherd. Or a fiddler from a dance."
Stumbling toward the light, he called out, “Hallows!"
An answer, lost in tumult.
"Hey! Where's this?"
"Crawes Brig,” called the voice. “Wait on.” They saw the wavering fire and the world made round it, swayed and ruddy. On the farther bank, a roughclad knarry shape held up a torch. It shuddered in the little wind. They saw the wolf-black water, snarling white; they saw the way, from stone to stepping-stone to span, the lighter as they leapt. A clapper bridge, a cromlech. They met on the span. “Here. Gi's that.” The stranger took the lantern, thrust the torch in it alight, and latched the door; then hurled the brief end, whirling fire, in the beck.
They stood within a burr of light that brindled in the rushy dark. There was no other where. The stranger stared at them with long dark eyes, quirked mouth. Kit saw the hunch of shoulders bearing up the jangling pack. A traveller, he thought, a tinker or a tain by kindred: breeched and beardless, swart and badgerly of arms. And grey as any brock: with winters or the hag, he knew not. By the small harsh voice, a woman, so he guessed.
"Yer late abroad,” said Brock. “Come on."
The candle wavers. Ah, thou frown'st, as if my shadow fell across thine elsewhere. I will spell this in the margins of thy book. Mine, once. See, Margaret, here the leaf's turned down where Perseis gave up. Her grave is Law. But I see thou read'st her spring, her journeying. The lady speaks:
Another world. I dreamed not of greenwood nor of crowns of May; nor thought on bread, sweat, childbed. Only I would not be Thea, and my lady's cipher. So I saw my chance: a bird in hand, a passager; an occultation of the Nine. I took.
Poor Kit. Wood with love of me. He mourned his fiddle; I do rue it now. His soul and livelihood and all. And yet he had of me a greater thing, unwitting. Not my maidenhead. Whatever ballads tell, ‘tis nothing, anyone's. An O. That which annihilates all else. No, Margaret: the game is toyish, but the stakes are souls. My love, we ate each other back and belly, and the heartstrings: which are music, which are gut.
Ah, now the candle gutters. I am leaping; I am shroud and smoke.
I snuff.
"Here,” said the traveller. She stooped and they followed through a thicket of ice. The candle woke in it a flittering of lights; it chimed and rattled as they passed beneath it. “Rimes,” said Thea, half aloud to Kit. “Glass castle,” he whispered. “Did I not say?” Before them was a tumble of stones: hall fallen into hovel; a sill and dark within. At the door, the traveller stamped the clods from her boots. She set the lantern down; the fire made room. She turned in the doorway and said, “Walk in, awd Moon."
Kit caught her rime, though not her meaning. “Wi’ broom afore, to sweep the ashes from the door,” he said, as if they came a-souling at the empty house. He plucked at Thea's sleeve. “Go on, love, ‘tis thy piece."
She turned her small moon's face on him. “Will there be oranges?"
"Thy lapful."
"I know not the words."
So Kit chanted, “Cold by the door and my candle burns low, so please let us in, for it's shrewd in the snow.” He bent and bustled all around her with his broom of air; so they went in.
"Here's guising,” said the traveller. “A sword and a bush."
Kit answered lightly. “So it ever was."
"Then let's to yer bout and have done wi’ it. Smick smack, and up flies wren."
Thea lifted her face, bright with mischief. “Ah, but you must hear us out; you've bid us in. You must hear Moon's verses, since she's crossed your door."
The traveller looked them up and down: the tousled lad, all beak and bones; the girl in outlandish clothing, with her hair like braided fire. “Out o thy turning. If thou's Moon."
"Out of thy sphere, if thou'rt fire."
"Out of my depth,” said Kit. “As I am drowned."
They clapped themselves and shivered. Dry within. No straw nor muck; but hay and heather, cut and heaped. Kit turned to and helped the stranger drag some branches to the hearth. It was bare enough, that ruin: a hovel for the lambing shepherds or the lasses binding broom. Kit whispered to Thea, “As for cakes and silver, we may bite old moon."
The traveller lit a fire with a stump of juniper. It burned with a sharp smoke, curling; then was firestruck, its every needle cast in gold, consuming. By its light, they studied her, a little smutchfaced woman, dark and watchful, in a coat of black sheepskins, singed and stained about the hem with ashes and blood. She wore grey breeches and a leathern cap. Her hair was unbound about her shoulders, roughly shorn across her brows; a few strands plaited narrowly with iron charms. She crouched by the fire and stirred it with her knife. “My forge is drowned,” she said. The bough had fallen all to flinders, and the berries glowered in the ashes. “Get yer warm,” she said, and quirked her chin at them. Then she stood and rummaged in her jangling pack, and went out.
They looked at one another, huddling by the fire. All the spanglings of the ice, their winter finery, had faded. There they sat in draggled clothes, ungarlanded, unwed. Bare strangers. By the wall where the bed had stood, a timeworn carving showed: a woman with a pair of shears, but what she sheared was gone. “I feel like a ghost,” said Kit.
"How? Shadowy? Thou'rt blood and breath."
"Uncanny on this ground. And you?"
"No dwelling spirit. They do haunt; they have a bloodknot to this earth. A tale. And mine is all before me, all unmoored."
"An elfin, then."
"A waif. A soul unborn, and calling on the wind. Their tale is nothing: only, they are cold without, and would come in."
"I'd let them in,” said Kit, “And warm them.” White and shivering, her wisp of spirit. And a glass between their souls. He longed to take her in his arms: so small and cold and straight, so quick of mind. A candle and its light, he thought. And then: the fire was his. To have the daughter of so great a lady run away with him—'twas beyond all marvels. And a flawless maid. A dazzlement. A goblin in him danced, exulting; knocked at his breeches. Ranted on his grave. He knelt. “Thea. If thou wouldst—"
"Hush,” said Thea, as they heard the traveller's goatshod step. They sprang apart, a little awkwardly. The fire had flushed them, that was all; the wind had tousled them. The traveller walked softly toward them, and turned to Thea with a cup.
"Here's to thy turning."
"With my heart,” said Thea, with answering gravity. She took it in her hands and drank. “Oh,” she said, and turned to Kit. “Do they not say in Cloud, hallows wi’ thee?"
"And wi’ thee,” he said, and drank. It was milk, still warm. “Ah,” said Kit, bemused. “Your lambs drop early, shepherd."
"Twa and twa,” the traveller said. “T'ane black and t'other white.” She drank. “And all me ewes give cheeses turn themsels."
"Cup and all?” said Thea.
The traveller smiled at her, small and sharp. “At tree, it were. They'll have left it for Ashes."
"Oh,” said Kit. “I see.” Though he did not.
But Thea, pinning up a braid, said, “Ashes?"
"Shepherds. They do wake her from her mother dark."
"Ah, Perseis. I know that tale."
"It's what I do,” said the traveller. “Walk out and see."
Kit caught at straws. “You're late abroad."
"Been hunting craws. To mek a soulcake on."
"But where are your dogs?” said Thea.
"Whistled home.” She unhooked an aleskin from her pack, and teemed it out in a stoup. She pulled her knife from the fire, glowing, and she plunged it in the ale. “Ye'll be starved,” she said. “Walking."
"Wanting bread,” said Kit. “If you can spare."
"As for that.” The traveller undid a rag and a knot and a clump of heather, and held out her scarred brown hand.
Kit saw a handful of stones, black scrawled with white, white scribbled over with a sort of wintry runes, like stars and their ascendants, prophecies of light. “I know this tale,” said Kit. “You'll be wanting a bit of salt next. For the soup."
"What thou will,” the traveller said. She chose a stone and thirled it with a pin and blew: a whorl of sun, widening, muddled with the ale.
"Eggs,” he said, bewildered.
"Aye,” said she, and tossed the shell away and broke another and another still, and stirred the pot. She teemed the ewe's milk in.
Kit raked through the embers for the few flawed shales of night. White, like the moon in flinders. Black, with a sleave of stars. Were they owl eggs, then? Or nightingales? “It's eating music,” he said ruefully.
"O breve,” said Thea. “Do they so in Cloud?"
"With bacon. Do we not in Lune?"
The traveller stirred the caudle round, with a race of ginger, knuckled like a witch's hand, a slurry of coarse sugar and a scrape of nutmeg. A pinch to the fire; it sparkled. “Wha said they'd hatch birds? Wha said they'd sing?"
"In Law,” said Thea, “they do not."
So grave? Kit glanced at her, and pulled a fool's face, innocent. “They say the Lunish witches eat owl pies."
"Crack bones and craunch marrow, aye,” said Thea. Fire and shadow on her face. “But of late they've grown dainty and will nothing coarse: venture on a junket of maidenheads—"
"Ah, that slips down,” said Kit.
"—with a boy for a bergamot."
The traveller dipped her finger, tasted. “Aye, but seek as they will, their cupboard's bare. They may beg for't."
"They've sails,” said Thea. In the silence, they heard the wind rise from the north and west, from Law.
"I's keeled for them,” the traveller said. They looked at her, and at the eggshells, all shivered on the ground but one that whorled about the ale, and sank. “There's all their shallops."
"Will they follow so?” said Thea softly.
"But if their sails are souls, and all their riggins of thy hair."
"'Twas never cut,” said Thea.
"Ah,” the traveller said. “Reach to.” They passed the caudle round and drank in silence. From her pack, the traveller shared out a bannock, spread with curds and new sweet cream. As round as the moon it was, and a little charred beneath. Ah, thought Kit, here's some hob goes supperless, and all the kitchen in a cludder with his sulking on't. He gazed at Thea, silent by the hearth. Her eyes were elsewhere.
Slowly, she unwound her scarf, unclouding heaven. Ah, but she was crescent, she was moonrise, even at the verge of dawn—O hallows—even to the rose.
But not for him, this glory. Bending toward the traveller, she held the scarf: a light silk woven of the sky, it seemed. He'd thought of it as grey, but it was shining, warped with silver like an April morning. Rain and bow. She laid it in the outstretched hands. Kit watching saw it fall on them, and thought their earthgrained furrows would spring green.
"For thy spell,” she said. “A sail."
The traveller looked slantwise through her rough dark hair, her long black eyes unglittering. “A soul.” It shifted in her hands, turned silver and a flowing dark, like cloud before the moon. And cleared then to a moonless dark. The stars ran through it still like rain. “Well, I's a rag on every bush, they say.” She wafted it and caught it crumpled, bunched it in her pack all anyhow. “It's cawd without, thou knaws."
Thea said, “It would not keep me warm."
"It's thy petticoats are musty. Do them off."
"For thy breeches,” Thea said. Kit looked at her, her bare throat white as thorn, her face alight. Her breasts—buds in January, whiter than its snow. No lad. She stood and paced, as he had seen her by the whiteskied windows of her mother's tower. Of darkest blue, her eyes, the night in which her fires burned. She turned on the traveller, fierce and cold. “Or thy cap or anything, thy hammer and thy sooty brat, so my mother would not see me in her glass."
"Break t'glass."
"It will not break, the moon. It goes with child unflawed, and of itself. And being full, itself devours, lighter of the dark. It gazes and it gnaws. I want to get back of it."
Kit looked at Thea, like the heavens’ cold bright bow; and saw the dark that bent, that held her. There were walls he could not see.
The traveller held her gaze. “There is a door, they say."
"Then I would out of it."
He saw her fury; though her hair was braided close, she blazed as whitely as a falling star. He felt his spirit rise to her. Arrow to her bow. “Love, let me in."
She turned to him. “Crack the glass and I will."
It was his heart that cracked; but like an acorn, that the oak might spring.
He slipped the ring from his finger. “Thea. Love,” he said. “With my heart, ‘tis what I have.” His mother's ring of tawdry silver, black with years. A riddling posy.
Thea turned it round and read. "Lief wode I fall, an light wode spring. Or this way, look: I fall and light: would spring leafwood." Round again: "Anne Lightwode: spring leaf. Would I fall?" She looked to him and smiled; she slipped it on her finger.
O the falling star. ‘Twas in his hands.
The traveller, watching as she would a play, took out her bacca and her bit of black pipe. “Key's under bush,” she said. “Look well to yer locks."
And still Kit stood amazed.
"As for yer guising.” The traveller undid her pack, and pulled from it a heap of leaves; she shook it out and there were sleeves to it, and dangling buttons made of horn. It was a coat in tatters. “Craws weren't having it,” she said. “What's ta'en is anyone's."
"Is there a hat to it?” said Kit, recovering.
"And feather,” said the traveller. She swung the coat round Thea's shoulders. It hung to her heels.
Kit grinned. “Ah. Wilt thou go for a ranting girl?"
"Aye, and bid them stand,” the traveller said.
"Here's purses full,” said Kit.
"I'll nothing but thy ring,” said Thea, whirling round on him. “Or will it come to swordplay?"
"Wouldst kill me naked?"
"And would die beside thee."
He reeled her in. “And then I rise."
"Oh,” said Thea. “'Tis my part. And I am of out it."
"So I am in,” said Kit, and caught her by the coattail, laughing. “Turns,” he said; so she let him try it on. He flaunted in it, up and down. He looked all mischief, with his leafish face. And in the flaycraw's voice, the fool's, he said, “I'll riddle thee. What leaves and still it stands?"
"A tree,” said Thea. “Turns?"
The traveller shrugged. “For either, as it likes you. And if she's a lad, I's shears."
Thea rounded on her. “Where?"
"No,” cried Kit, dismayed. “I beg thee. Not thy hair.” He'd not yet seen it down, not played with it undone. It would unravel like a fugue. He thought of all the braided strands of it, the bright and somber and the burning strands, the viol and clarion. “And yet...” His token glinting on her hand: he dared. “I'd have a lock of it, sweet witch, for journey's sake."
"In knots, as witches sell the wind?"
"Aye, knotted: for undone ‘twould quicken stone."
A parry and no promise: “Thou wouldst thaw my lady's glass?"
"Like April snow. And all thy combs would flower, leafless, from the wood, and make of thy undoing, crowns of May.” A tendril, like a wisp of fire, twining by her cheek: he traced it, marvelling. So cold, so bright and cold.
Not fencing now: the blade itself: “Wouldst braid thy gallows? Wear it?"
"Nearer than my breath. I'll knot my soul in it.” It burned in him already, bright in every vein: a tree. He took her in his arms. “And being strung upon my bones, ‘twill play the same tune still, for sun and moon, and all the starry hey to dance."
Her lips were colder than the moon's, and soft. He felt him falling in a drift of snow, bedazzled, over ears. Her lap, he thought, she lulls them in her lap. Moon and stars. He saw the burning bush. He saw the bird of her, flown up amid her branches—that he could not take. He shook himself, remembering the traveller's eyes, and shrugged the greatcoat off. “I'll go no more a-guising. ‘Tis the fiddler's turn to dance."
"To pipe and drum,” the traveller said.
Thea and the traveller took the coat between them, lofting it and laying it upon the springing heather, so it made a bed. They stood at head and foot of it, as in the figure of a dance; the traveller spoke.
"What thou gets here, thou mun leave betimes."
"I must bear it,” Thea said.
"And will."
"Undone and done."
The traveller crouched and tweaked a corner of the coat aside, tucked something in, and rose. “What is ta'en here, cracks t'glass. What is tinder s'll be ash. Go lighter of it, intil dark.” She flung a pair of shears on the makeshift bed. They lay there open, like a striding stork. She turned and gathered up her pack. “I's off."
They saw her go. They lay together on the coat, of leaves as deep as hallows. After a time, unspeaking, they undid her hair, and went into another night.
O the dark. Thou hear'st not, Margaret. I will tell this to the darkness.
I would not be Thea: so I did, undid. The thing of naught. Ablaze and all unhallowed in that night, I cracked the glass. Blasphemed my lady, that was Annis. That was all myself. Of my own will, I overset her holiest of laws; I broke her will of me, her mirror and her chain. Set Cloud for Law, and darkness for her glass. Blood in the stone's place, the place of secrets. Rose for thorn.
The traveller came to the stones. They stood looking out on darkness, on the bare white shoulder of the fell. That knowe is Law. The sky was starless; yet they mirrored in their O that constellation called Nine Weaving or the Clasp. The wintry mantle they had pinned was gone. Softly, she went in and out among them with her dying torch. All doors are hers; but these stood open. There was no one where the girl had been. The torch went out. The traveller turned among the empty stones, toward morning, sunwise.
Ah! cried Brock. She saw the falling star, now, nowhere, in the wintry sky. Her seeing sained it. Wheeling round, she dropped the black end of the besom to the earth, ashes on the frost. She snuffed the wind. It was rising, high above the earth. The sky had flawed with stars, with scarves and spanglings of light. Her eyes were good; she told the eight stars in the Nine, and one beside. It danced with them. The ashes told its name.
Beyond her lay the long bare fells, rimewhite, unwhitening. Through patches of the fading snow there pierced a greener white of snowdrops, that do spring in Ashes’ wake. Her flowers. Drops of Milk, the country folk do call them, Ashes’ Buds. They bring the light with them returning, rising from her mother's dark: all seely innocence. Yet they are death to pluck; and yet they must be gathered, woven for her crown by earthly hands. By Ashes. Not herself, but in her stead: a lass each winter who must wear the burden of her name, her silence, walking in her sleep. That godhead lights on whom she chooses: Ashes for her sake, her shadow, souling in a coat of skin. Her winter's lyke.
As Brock walked on, she passed a windbare thicket leaning all one way, and saw the curled green shoots of bracken, green amid the scrawl of last year's leaves; she saw the tassels of the oak unbraiding. Saw the selving wood. A hare loped by her, giddy with the moon; she slung no stone at it. It danced in a dizzy spiral. At last she came to where the Clew was caught, like sheep's wool, in the branches of a leafless thorn. Nearer to the earth there hung a garland and a tattered coat, cast by. And at its roots, asleep in winter's lap, there lay a greenwhite girl. Brock bent and sained her, touching eyes, mouth, heart with ashes. Until the dawn she watched by the sleeping girl.
Thea slept and she was kindled: all within her side the star became a knot of stars, a congeries, a cloud, a soul. It waked within her turning sky. Her hair unwreathing was the red of dawn.
Kit woke to see his new-made lover squatting naked in the ashy coat, her shorn hair flickering about her skull. So white, her goblin face. So young. What have I done? he thought. O dark, what is she doing? On the hearth lay the long sheaf of her sundered hair, not fading like shorn grass, but fiery. Bright as bracken in the rain, as bright as copper molten in a forge, a riverspill of fire on the muddy stones. She was burning it, strand by strand. Crouching, she stirred the embers with the shears.
"No,” he said. “Thea."
The child witch turned to him. White as frost, as frail. Blood and ashes on her thighs; the tuft of small fire that a breath would blaze. All naked but the coat of skin. She rose and held a ring to him, white-gemmed, as if she gave away her tears. She spoke in a child's imperious voice. “Go your ways. You have well served me."
Coldstruck, he stared at her. The eyes saw no one. Mad?
She crouched again, to riddle through the ashes with a rusty sieve.
He caught her. Sharp and soft, a thornbush deep in snow. Like branches she recoiled, and all her witchcraft fell away, like snow, like scattered snow. She crouched amid the shards. “Not done,” she said. “I was not done."
Kit knelt beside.
"Thea. Love. Wake up.” He stroked the hackles of her hair, so cold, so cold. “Thou'rt dreaming."
In his arms, she changed, thawed, cleft. His goblin rose.
And afterward, she slept at last. Lying watching her, the slight moon, turning always from his gaze, he saw a fireglint beyond her: a long strand of her hair, caught shining on a splint of wood. The last. He ran it through and through his hands. He saw the girl in the wintry garden, turning back to call him on; he saw the lantern of her hair. Again and yet again, he played the fugue of its undoing. Heartstrings. Not for burning. With his fiddler's hands he wound it round and round, and tucked it safe beside his heart.
"Gone,” said Kit.
Whin said nothing; she could see it still, or the ghost of it: a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. Like stolen fire. He'd wear it to his grave. Beyond, she thought. Would string his stars. She shelled another mussel for the broth, another; tossed the leavings on the heap. Clack. Click. Clack. At last: “And wha'd take that and leave rings?"
"Crows. Her mother—I betrayed her. In the end."
Whin cracked and thumbed another mussel. Knife-edge and morsel. Weed. “Ah. Craws wi’ beards."
Kit turned his face. Not yet, thought Whin. And yet he'd tell.
Wet underfoot. Burnt moorland or bare stone; bracken, bent or tussock: all were underlaid with squelch. “A world warped with water,” Thea said, and wrung her coat skirts. Water curling from the cloud, like raw wool from a carder's combs. White water at a ford, frayed out, like torn lace at a roaring lad's throat. Fine icy water in the air. “At least,” said Kit, “it's not raining.” He did not say: we cannot lie in this. “There'll be a barn,” he said. But now he could not tell if they were climbing, if they'd come this way before. Bright and brighter blazed the rust of bracken in its mockery of fire. The color of her hair, the color of desire, flickering on nothing, on the barren moor. Could water burn?
Her face turning back at him was like the moon from cloud; he leapt to it, it hooked him through the heart, the bone-caged heart.
"Look,” said Thea, beckoning. “A walker on the hill.” She called out, “Stay, thou shepherd!” And she ran. Kit ran after, calling, “Wait.” And there was no one there: a waystone, squatting in the bracken like a hussif at her hearth. Thea touched the stone, her face between dismay and laughter. “See, she looms. ‘Tis her weather."
"Hush,” said Kit. “I doubt another day she brews.” And fumbling beneath his pocket flap, he found a bit of bread, their last, and left it in a hollow of the stone. “There, awd lass. For a skein of sun."
And to Thea, “There'll be houses, wait on. We can barter and lie snug as hobs. Curds and barley straw."
"What way?” said Thea.
When they turned from her, the stone was fogbound, roofed and walled with cloud; they saw no way. “Away,” said Kit. “'Tis all one.” They heard the clank and rattle of a sheep on stones, a bird's disconsolate cry. And then a tap, a tapping, gathering like rain: a hammer on a forge.
"A fire,” said Kit.
And stumbling, sliding down a track, they found a trod, stones driven edgewise for laden hooves; a wall, a fire in the mist. They tumbled from the old girl's lap, as if they'd been shaken from her apron, out of cloud and into rain.
And out of rain and by his fire sat a tinker at his work, his anvil driven in the ground, his lean bitch skulking by his side. A sere man, spare and shaggy, like a twist of tobacco. His dog, the mingled grey of ashes, smoke. He'd a tussy of coney skins hung to his tentflap; a jangle of saucepans and riddles and shears.
"How d'ye do?” said Kit, doffing his drowned hat. “Well, I hope, sir."
"What d'ye lack?” said the tinker.
"A knife,” said Kit. “A cookpot. And a flint and steel. That blanket."
Clink! went the hammer on the rounding can. “A good cloak, is that. Awd bitch whelped on yon cloak. What d'ye give?"
Kit unfolded Thea's starry mantle.
The tinker eyed the velvet shrewdly; pinched a fold with black nails. “Molecatcher, ista? Owt else?"
"A glass."
An eyebrow. Then a shrug. “Gi's here.” He ran his thumb round the frame of it, tilting his eye at them; considered; spat. “Done."
Kit knelt to bundle the stuff. A good knife indeed, well-hefted, sharp. “Yon road?"
"Goes longways.” The velvet cloth had vanished in his pack. “And there's folk and not. Dogs."
"What honest work for strangers?"
A shrewd glance at Thea: draggled silk and drab russet, and a started vixen's brush of hair. “Whoring. Thieving."
Kit flushed. “Not while I've breath."
"Brave words to starve on. There's begging o course. Any trade in yer hands?"
"I could fiddle—” Kit began. And turned his palms up ruefully.
"And I could ride pillion, if I'd a horse and a whip."
Thea slipped the rings from her fingers. “Would these not bring us silver? For a crowd and a bow?"
"Aye, and a dance on the gallantry. Wha's to say they's not been thieved?” The bright eyes slid sideways at Kit. “I can see yer not to drown."
"They're not—” said Kit, and stopped. They were.
But Thea held a ring up, flicked it shining at the heather's roots. “If thou'd not stoop for it, then let it branch and bear silver."
There it lay. He looked at her, and spurned it with his toe. A swift unwreathing, a flicker in the grass and gone. A silver snake. “I'd keep dark yon bits o tawdry,” he said. “There's folk'd cut throats for less. Thy stockings. Or a game or nowt.” Thea nodded. “And if thou's a lad, thou doff thy hat, see. More to't than pissing upright.” Then he bent to his camp and ferreted, set out a horn cup and a handful of coarse grey salt, a charred bird bound in herbs. “Hovel top o't trod."
"Thanks,” said Kit. “My thanks. Hallows with ye."
"Sneck up,” said the tinker.
Thea bowed.
As they started off up the trod in the closing rain, he called after. “If it's a fiddle thou's after, thou ask at Jack Daw."
"The fiddle. Ah.” Kit gazed at the fire, pale in the wintry sun. No more than shaken air. “'Twas my father's. So my mother said. Of Cloud, as he was.” He bit his lip. “I tell this badly."
"So yer no one's brat?” said Whin.
"Hers. Lightborn, we do say in Lune. We grow, like missel, in the air.” His face was bright; then dark. “She died."
Whin drank, and passed the cup. A white bird tilted on the wind.
"Mine uncle—I was prenticed clerk. And fiddled at the wakes, and chafed."
"So yer went a-begging of a witch?"
"I was ta'en. By her servant."
"Ah."
"Coming from a dance,” said Kit. “On Hare Law."
"And yer went with my lady's huntsman? Mad as a March hare, thou is."
"Drunk,” said the fiddler, ruefully. “And thought I was in love."
Cold, toward moonrise, and the stars like rosin. Whirling. Not so drunk, he'd thought, but flown with fiddling. Ah, he'd never played so well as with Ned Hill, his serpent coiling in and out, and with Tib Lang's rowdy pipes and reed flute. They'd all the earth and heavens dancing to their tune, and half of Kempy Mag's great barn. Like hedgers laying thorn, they'd worked; and by some passing spell, their hey was quickset, green even as they wove, and flowering. A garland for a queen of May. That lass—ah, well he minded her, that straightbacked girl in green, triumphal, with a comet's tail of hair. In and out the mazes of the dance, he glimpsed her, arming with this shepherd and that scythesman, but fencing always with his tune, his air her make. As the music ended, she bowed to it: no partner but the air. His air. He lowered his bow and watched her as she coiled her tumbled braid, the bone pins in her soft stern mouth. The swift stabs. His heart. “Wed,” said Tib drily. “Next month, to yon lame blacksmith. Get thee drunk."
And he had.
Five sets and six pints later, there was that other lass, at his elbow as he tuned. A brown girl, filching pears and russets; a green chit, all unripe. She'd a brow like a bird's egg, flecked and flawed, and mocking, shrewd grey eyes. “Why d'ye pull those faces, playing?” she'd said. “Toothache?” So he'd had to eat his hunch of Wake-bread, to show her he cared not, and had won a tiny leaden pair of shears, amid the crumbs. A mayfly toy. “They'll serve you for the wars,” she'd said. “With a needle for spear.” Afterward, he'd found a lady apple in his pocket, flawless, with a leaf.
He'd idled when they'd paid him, talking random, looking sidelong at the door until the girl in green went by. She'd turned at the threshhold, going, with a glance, half mockery and half challenge. Then he'd packed his fiddle up and walked on alone.
Not drunk. Unbounded, that was it: with darkness after fire, sky for rafters, silence for the stamp of boots, the clatter, and the clack of tongues. Light with love. As light as the Hanged Lad, Jack Orion, setting sidelong in his belt of sparks. Toward dawn, it was. As late as that? Well he defied his master's clock. Kit bowed to the skyclad fiddler, and doffed his hat, calling out, “Measure for measure, lad. Will I outplay thee?"
He walked on over Hare Law, his head a muddle of tunes, bright lasses, bowls of lambswool. Cross my river to Babylon. His nose sunk in froth. A bright and a dark head glancing up at him, then ducking low to laugh. His russet coat, Tom's old one turned, scarce worn. New buttons to it. ("Here's a flaycrow in a field goes bare,” the brown girl said.) Ginger and marchpane. A leaden shears. The green girl whirling at his bow's end. Out of sight. Ah, still he played her over in his head.
Had passed the branching in the road long since. By Crowcrag, then, the gainest way. That striding bass. Mall's Maggot. Syllabub and damson cheese. Dull wool bales in the morning—ah, his head. Sand. Goosequills. Figures on a page, untallied. In and out the hey, and couples for another dance. Nine eight and longways. Silver in his pocket, ninepence, that made seven and a bit, near enough for Askwith's Atomie of Starres. For ribands—No, a carven glass. With verses round. A comb. New strings, though, call it six and coppers. All the broken cakes. And at the end of Nine Weaving, how the green girl raised her candle to him, like a sword, and blew it out. An apple with a leaf. And again, the tumbled braid, the coiling hands. But they undid; the long skein fell for him alone, unbraiding like a fugue about her moonwhite body.
He was on the high ground now, a puzzle of white stones.
"Lightwood?"
Whirling round in a blaze of stars, Kit saw no one. His coat-skirts settled; he felt the soft bump of his pocket, crammed with cakes, against his thigh.
Stars still dancing.
He'd heard no rider; saw no horse. Yet on the road stood a horseman, spurred and booted: a stranger. Soberclad but richly, like a servant in a great house; yet outlandish. “Master Lightwood. Of Askrigg?"
"Sir?” When he stood the room spun, candlelight and dancers, whin and stars.
"I heard you fiddle at yon hobnailed rout."
"Ah.” Had he seen that back amid the dancers? With the brown girl? With the lightfoot grizzled farmwife? Or with the lass in green?
"Small recompense among such folk."
Broken cakes. Lead trinkets. “They've ears."
"And so my lady has. And jewels to hang in them. She sends to bid you play for her. A wedding."
"Have you no fiddlers in far Cloud?” This was not going well.
"None of note."
Kit stood. Some wind, toward the morning, twangled in his fiddle strings.
"Nor time to further send. ‘Tis by this next moon. I will bring you.” A glint of silver. “Come, a handfast. To wet the child's head."
"Thought you said it was a wedding?"
"All the same."
"Ah,” said Kit wisely. “'Twas ever thus. Brought to bed, either way.” The stars were fading, paling to the east; he could see the long rise of Hawker Fell. “Little enough dancing for the bride,” he said. “And the bairn his own piper."
"Brave company,” the stranger said. “Here's one will look for you.” He held a bone hairpin in his dark-gloved hand. “By this token, you are bid."
Kit took it in his hand, bemused. “Did she give—?"
"Is't yes?"
"Aye, but—"
Then the horseman sealed his bidding with a cold kiss, full on his mouth. Tongue, teeth, and all. Kit knew no more.
The wind is braided in my lady's hair.
Margaret. As thou sleep'st, a storm is rising. Ah, thou hear'st it, even in thy dream of Cloud. But thou art fathomless, thy sleep is ocean. Cowrie'd by thy cheek, thy hand curls inward, closing on the dream that spills away like starry sand. A shutter claps. The hangings of thy bed conceive; the clawed rings inch and jangle. Nearer. On thy coverlid, thy book, left open, stirs. The leaves lift, turning backward in the tale. Unwintering. Again, the dead girl turns and speaks; she plays in greenwood, in the spring of hope.
How cam'st thou by thy book? Dost know? I tell thee, there are rare things in thy bower, which is all thy world. See, that orange by thy pillow. Pith and bittersweet and curving. And when broke, a puzzlebox of sweets. Thy bedgown, of an antick fashion, rich but sadly tarnished with the salt. That rod of shrewd whalebone, that also I felt. Thy comb. And not least, the drowsy wine they gave thee. Aye, the physick and the cup.
All tangled in her seine.
But seldom now.
I have seen my lady with her braid undone, all naked in her glass.
Here's a knot, says Morag with the comb.
Thou do. Undo.
Another.
Seven. And no more.
And with each knot, the wind rose, howling, and now and now the lightning slashed, it winced and slashed, and then the clouts of thunder jarred. By the sixth, it was beyond all noise: one lightning, and a judder in the bones. And when the waves broke—It was Annis falling. It was burying alive in shards of sky.
I have seen ships cracked like jackstraws.
I have found things, walking by the sea. A coffer, cracked and spilling cinnamon and mace. A virginals. A bacca pipe, unbroke. The Nine of Bones. And sailors: drowned and shattered, drowned and frozen, trodden into sand. And some that Morag finished. I have found an orange lying by a tarry hand.
Thea blew her nails and huddled, pinch-faced. Kit rubbed his legs and sighed. So much for begging. Stones for breakfast and a long draught of Cloud ale; stones in shoes; dog's music at the last three farms; and brats at the packbridge with a hail of clods. And now they'd tumbled down a scree. He'd go home if he knew where home was. They were nowhere, halfway down a fell, and sliding from its bony knees. The tops were hid in dour cloud. “Here's kites,” said Thea. Higher up, they saw a shepherd, stooping with his burden of a creel of hay. His crouching, prying, flying dogs made bow-knots of a bedlam of sheep. Querulous and unrepentant Maudlins all, a-burst with bastard lambs, and fellowed with their doting Toms, the crazed and kempy wethers and the horn-mad tup. All trundled to fold. “On dirty toes,” said Thea. “Same as us."
To the north, they saw the bruised sky blacken, and the bentgrass flinch and shiver in the rising wind. “Coming on bad,” said Kit, standing. “We'll lay up.” Even as he spoke, the snow came, like a fury of ghosts.
Nowhere.
"Hey!” cried Kit. Stifled. Gloved hands of snow laid hold of him, clapped eyes, mouth, ears. Seen out by February's footmen, to a ditch and crows.
"Hush,” said unseen Thea. They could hear the sheep rattle and the shepherd call.
"Way here! Way here, Maddy. Come by, Gyp."
Kit caught hold of Thea's wrist, and scrabbled up the hillside toward the voice. Not far, they'd not get far in this. “How far—?” bawled Kit.
A lean ghost, swathed in sacking. “Get by, thou bloody fool! Down dale."
"Where—?"
"Dog'll tek thee.” Something like a hollybush leapt the wall, already chiding at their heels. The shepherd called after, “Thou ask at Imp Jinny."
Down along an outcrop, rising into drystone wall; crook left, and down a stony track between two walls, out of wind; past the shepherd's pony, like a dejected chimney brush, beside his sledge of hay. The black bitch saw them through the gate.
Trees, low and windbent, lapped and laden with the ghosts of leaves; a lantern at the door, that turned their branching to bright webs.
"Hallows,” called Kit, and beat muffled hands against the door.
"Will Shanklin?” called a woman's voice. “Owt wrong?” The door opened. A small-faced strapping woman, knitting furiously. Sharp and brown as a beechnut, with a beech's frazzled foliage, an old tree's knotted hands. Blue as speedwell, her eyes. She looked them up and down. “If it's guising, yer a bit few. And late."
"Have you a barn?” said Kit.
"I's a fire,” said Imp Jinny. “Come in and keep wind out. I can see lass is dowly."
They stamped and dripped and stared. A low room, bronzy with peat smoke, heaped with apples. Sweet and poignant with their scent. And not low after all, but racked and raftered, hung with anything to hand. Bunches of potherbs, besoms and birdsnares, shears and riddles and a swift of yarn. Swags of old washing—smocks and aprons—kippered in the air, as stiff as stockfish. Lanterns and pruning-hooks, ladles and rushlights. Strings of eggshells. Legs of mutton. Riddlecakes hung out to dry. A ball of thorn twigs, trailing ribands and old holly. Jinny ducked beneath. “Mind urchin,” she called. A tiggy drank snuffling at a dish of milk. “Been at wort and gets to singing. Now then, thou rantipole. Mend tongue. Or I'll peg thee out i't apple trees, as a souling for t'birds.” She nipped down a sallowed petticoat from under the thack, took a jacket from a kist, and bundled them at Thea. “Get thee doffed.” She measured Kit with a glance. “Crouch up to't fire. Y'd look a right mawkin in my petticoats."
"Thanks,” said Kit.
"Not at all. Thowt it were foxes at my ewes in lamb. Dropped a stitch, I doubt. Tea. Y've tea i’ Lune?” Jinny swung the kettle over the fire; she scrabbled out leaves from a bright tin, painted gaudily with wrens and garlands. “Stockings and all, that's right. Peg ‘em up. Lad can tek blanket. Now then, there's cock broth. And a tansy after."
Deep bowls of it, fork-thick with leeks and barley, fowl and carrots; Jinny broke them shards of oatcake for to sop the rich broth.
They ate. The snow pummeled at the windows; their clothes dripped and reeked. Imp Jinny walked to and fro, knitting and muttering and squinting at her heel, in a fury of pins: as thrawn as if her yarn were nettles and all her kindred swans. Born half a sleeve behind and not caught up. You'd think she knit them at the stake. “Purl and plain. Meks three. And—craws eat it!” She knit badly, Kit saw; the yarn snagged on her roughened hands, the stocking bunched and spiralled.
"Mistress Imp?"
Jinny turned, twanging with laughter. “And thy name's Kit Catgut. Imp's what I do. Graff apples to crabs. Hast etten Nonesuch? That were mine. And Sheepsnose, out o Seek-No-Further. And I's no Mistress, neither. Langthorn Joan's Jinny. Jane Owlet. Awd keeping pear's what I is. Warden. I'd eat dryly.” The old hands crooked and looped and darted. “So yer out Lune? How came yer by Cloud?"
Kit, muffled in her patchwork quilt and downheeled slippers, tried for manly. “Seeking work."
"Can you do owt?"
"Undo,” said Thea.
"What I can,” said Kit.
Jinny pursed her lips. “Work. Well, there's threshing to Swang Farm. A rough gang for lasses; but there's straw and stirabout, and happen a few coppers. Got a knife?” She hefted it and tried the edge. “Aye, that's good.” She gave it back to him. “Ye could try yer hand at binding besoms. Up moor.” She was setting the heel now, storklegged with aggravation. “Come March, ye could clap eggs for Ashes. Do ye not i’ Lune? No? Well, I'll set yer i't road on it. Craws!” Her ball bounded away; Kit caught it. “Thou keep petticoat."
"Ashes?” said Kit.
"Eh well, there's always Ashes. Or there's never spring. Gangs out wi’ guisers.” The Horn was rounded of her stocking; she sighed. “And byways, there's a barn up Owlriggs, void and dry. Ye could lig there for a piece. While lambing, anyroad."
"Many thanks,” said Kit. “How—?"
"Shake snow from me apple trees, I doubt they'll crack. Lilt me yer fiddle tunes. I like a tune. Can't make, but I graff words til ‘em."
"Ah. D'ye know this?” Softly, Kit sang through Nine Weaving; then clapped into Jenny Pluck Pears and The Magpie's Bagpipe. No great voice, but a true.
At his knee, by the fire, Thea crouched and set the cradle rocking to the rhythm of the dance. Full of skeins, it was.
"Soft,” said Jinny sharply. “Do ye so i’ Lune?"
"Do what?” said Thea. “Here's an ark for the urchin."
An odd blue glance; the needles stopped. “Rock empty cradles."
"No,” said Kit, dismayed. “Moon turn from it."
Thea said, “I know not what it is. For bread or what?"
"I see,” said Jinny. “Out Lune of Lune.” She stilled the cradle with her hand. There was a wooden rattle laid in it, a tumbling, turning wren; a doll like a darning egg, a poppyhead unfaced with years; an acorn whirlywhorl. Undone, it spilled a marble in her palm. “That were Het's."
"Your lass?” said Kit softly.
"Imped out,” said Jinny. “She were left by ragwell. Anyone's.” She whorled the marble; smiled. “I'd've never such a lass. Wick as thistledown."
"Ah,” said Thea. “She would braid of her mother then, the moon. I see thine orchard bears the Misselbough."
Jinny turned to Thea, puzzling. Something rueful; something awed. “So thou'rt Ashes still. Poor lass.” Almost, she touched the girl's thin cheek; but went to feel her clothes instead, turned smock and stockings by the hearth. “When I were Ashes—"
"Not a lad?” said Whin.
"What?"
"Her bairn that died."
"Drowned,” said Kit. “A lass. She said."
"I see. Go on."
Jinny peeled a bowl of russets, broadlapped by the dozing fire. They watched the long curls falling from the bright knife, the brown hands; they smelled the sharp juice spring. “When I were Ashes—forty year ago, and more—I kept back what I got. Oh, aye, come Kindle Night, they'd rived at me and mocked me, for I'd not had maid nor man. Unploughed. Waste o darkness, they'd said. Said nowt would spring of it. But what I'd hid weren't brat, nor siller, nor a gallop on another's hobby. Sitha, when I'd put on Ashes coat, I'd turned and wondered at glory o't world. All turning and endless. Stars and seed. They caught me up i't dance, threadneedle. See, it's endless, yet there's first and last. Same as like a spindle falling, thread and whorl. Same as peel.” And one long rose-moled spiralling fell flawless from the knife. “And I see'd how things go on by dying. How they're born o fallow. That I kept."
They crossed a watersplash at dawn. The sky had put away its stars, undone the clasp of winter from its throat. It stood, white and shivering, all bare before the sun. No rose: a sudden glittering of frost, a lash of shadows, long and sharp against the fell; and there, where the water sprang, the reddening scratches of the alders. “Withies,” said Kit. “I'll cut, an thou bind them."
Clumsy with cold, they set to work with knife and twine. The day clouded up. The water brawled. A field away, a boy went huddling in his outworn jacket, toward the lambs. Kit called to him, “Where's this?” but he ran away. The sheep ran too, all which ways down the moor, their rumpling fleeces heavy with the frost. They slowed from a trotting to a trundling, with their stilted lambs beside them, slowed and stilled and cropped. Kit saw the boy again, up lawside in a scud of stones, his hair as white as hawkweed. He peered from behind a sheepfold. Kit swept him a bow, and he ducked.
"Do you steal children?” Thea said.
"Some run away with me,” said Kit.
They sat among the bare wood by the waterside, and ate what they had begged. It was scant enough, cold scrag-end and a lump of pease. A sup of bratted milk. There was twopence in his pocket and his trade in Lune, his fiddle for a ship and wracked, a witch's stolen daughter by his side. My lady's malison on both. He looked at Thea, silvered by the cold fine mist. He'd waked sometimes to see her watching, silent as the moon. He knew her changing face, her dark and bright; he saw and he desired her as he would the reachless moon. Her soul was elsewhere, even as he lay with her, amid the bright leaves burning.
Jumping up, Kit looked about the lashy wood. “It's almost spring,” he said. “Here's blackthorn out.” It flowered from its bare sticks, white as souls. He gathered twigs of it, the bonniest of all. It twisted, green and sinewy; he'd use no knife. He made a garland of it for her leaf-bright head: a crown too sharp to wear.
Cross and cross between the ash pegs driven in her crucks, old great-armed Imp Jinny told out her threads. Nine skeins unwinding, drawn as one, and dancing in their creels; then down and down, from hand to peg and to and fro, until their measured ending. Eight of wool; the ninth of moonlight, turning on its reel of dark. She was making a warp.
The fire was of thorn. It caught the sway and draw and crooking of her arms, and glinted in the scissors at her waist; it cast a creel of her in shadows, cross and cross the room. Our cage is shadows and ourselves.
As Jinny told her warp, she sang, no louder than the rasp of wool, the crackling of the little flame.
"O the broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair..."
Cross and cross, nine threads. That's one.
"I have lost a sheath and knife that I'll never see again..."
And loop and nine. That's two.
"And we'll never go down to the broom no more."
Kit remembered the kitchen in her mother's hall, stoneflagged and cavernous; the table, scoured saltwhite as a strand to windward, heaped with wrack of bloody game. Ah, piteous, their eyes, and taunting now, with acorns rattling in his gut. Blackcock and moorhen, ruffled and agape. Wet heather on a red hind's flank. The lean and louring hounds rose hackling at him, girning with their grizzled lips. They suffered him to pass; but watched him, crouching on their bones or pacing, silent but for rattling chains. Scoured as it was, the kitchen stank of them, of hair and blood and ashes, dust of pepper and old damp. On the great gaunt dresser, fishwhite pewter dully stared. The fire whirred and reeked. And Morag squatted with a hare to gut, limp and lolling in her bloody apron. Madam? I am sent to bid you to my lady. In her closet, she did say. The log fell in; the shadows jumped. And perhaps Morag twitched at her high shoulder, like a preening crow; or it was shadows, or his smoke-stung eyes. She rose to meet him, knife folded in her apron, capped and barbed. I come. Formal and contemptuous, as always. Sheathed. Ah, but where were all the servants in so great a hall? Who scoured and who swept? And he bethought him, late and suddenly: roe deer? On that stony island? What had come of his wits, not to marvel? Yet venison they had at table. No fish but eel pie, not a herring. Nothing salt. Nor sodden, come to that. He saw again the haunch of meat, the charred and shining spit withdrawn, the rusty cauldron tilted by the hearth. The fur and flesh.
"Love? Who provisioned in thine hall?"
"Morag."
"Strange fish she caught."
"Gulls,” said Thea. “Thou and I."
"But venison?"
"Ah. She hunts."
The witch rose twirling, turning in the air to raven. Or to ravenwise—a something quilled and barbelled, clawfoot, but a woman to the fork. Thrice round the broch she flew, in widening gyres, over scar and thornwood, sea and skerry, tethered by my lady's will. At farthest of her swing was landfall, rust and desolate. The bracken stirred. She stooped.
Margaret. Do you sleep now?
I will tell this in the moonlight sliding.
In my closet, Morag clasped the necklace round my throat. Cold souls, all witches, dead long since; cold hands, that late had plucked and foraged in the hare's blue eager flesh. Untwisting it about my breast, she pinched me with her bloody nails. Is't ripe? And then the long robe on my shoulders—ah, but it was soft as snow, as sleeping in a drift of death. My mother keeps it still. ‘Twas woven with the stars at Annis’ wake: night sky and moonless, shading through the blue, bluegreen of twilight, seen as through the branches of the thorn. And naked else.
No sun, but at my fork.
The old crow held the glass. My lady waits.
I come.
And in her high unarrased room, from glass to moondark glass, my lady turned and paced. Her iron casket on the table was unlatched. At her throat, she wore the stone it held: no soul, but Annis’ self, the true and only shard of night. The seed of Law.
I stood, as I was taught.
She turned and gazed at me. Bare as April.
I had not yet bled.
My lady, said I, to the stone. I knew its touch, ah, cold against the skin, and colder deeper still. Within. I knew her famished eyes.
Her time comes, said my lady to her woman. By this moon. The souls?
Two are kept, said Morag. I have seeled them for the hunt. A mort in milk, a maid in blood.
And the third?
Is come. Seed full. A pretty piece, the huntsman says.
Shall have his fee.
My mother touched my chin. Come, Madam. So she loosed the knot, undid the bright coil of my hair; she bid me to her table.
Whin slept. Lying silent by her, Kit woke long and heard the clash of the sea. He saw its pale thrums shine and ravel. Moonset. Darkness then, the wavebeat of his heart. He counted. Nine for a secret. There was something he'd not told.
That first night in the mist there was a third in bed with them. Half waking in the dark, he'd pulled her down on him, had murmured, fledged, had entered—ah, not Thea's air and fire, but the lap of earth. His grave. The spade bit deep. He saw the wriggling in the new-turned earth; breathed in the scent of earth and ashes, and of heather wet with rain. Still deeper. There, he touched a stirring, soft as moleskin, soft and dusk, and there, the quick and glistening neb. And at the very deep, a something, thrawn and wet: the root of dark, its flowering.
The cards. I had forgot them, slid between rough stone and worm-gnawn panelling, behind the kist. You puzzle at them, at this book of scattered leaves. Know thou, they are Cloudish magic. Not my lady's art, but tawdry: a sort of cantrips that their wiling beggars use. Hedge sortilege. I had them of a witch—a windwife or a sailor's whore, I know not. Cast up. Still living, when I'd hauled her on the sand, a-twitch and broken, like a windwracked gull. She'd signed: Take. Keep. A box, a book of spells? Skin bag and oiled silk. I slipped it warily within my skirts: forbidden hoard. And then came Morag with her stone.
I hid them. From her avid and contemptuous, her pebble eyes, her prying hands: myself I could not hide. And all that winter of my threshold year, I looked not thrice at them. My lady basilisk had work. In the waning of the ashen moon, she called me down, in cold stiff cloth of silver and an iron busk, to look upon the last of three set dishes for my maiden feast. A banket of souls. There were two laid up in store, like picked meats from the cracking of a gilded nutshell bark: a child scarce old enough to call a virgin, the betrothed of an outland king; her nurse. Like cage birds fattening, like haggards, leashed and belled. I'd fed them with my hand. Had toyed: which I repent. A poor mad glowering girl; a woman, silent, spilling milk. I'd tasted of their souls, their essences: green quince and bletted medlar, quiddany and musk. And now the third, but lately come: a hare, caught kicking, from the huntsman's bag. A handful of brambles, green and flowering and all. Leaf and prick. I saw a beardless boy, astonished, ill at ease in country boots. He bowed to me. I took him up.
Thou turn'st the Hanged Lad on the gallantry; the Hare reversed.
I see.
Is't riddles, then? A sort of stars?
Go on. But soft now, I am at thy shoulder.
Ah, now thou hast them spread, in knots and gatherings and changeful congeries, across the nighted boards. Just so. They bear the names of earthly tales turned starry, as the Tower, and the Crowd of Bone, and all the figures of the moon and sky. What Imp Jinny called the wood above. And thou art lost in it. Thou hast no clew to wind thee through the mazes of that dance, unfellied and unfretted night. No windrose nor no wheeling Ship. O Margaret, I have read their painted book, an abstract of the airy world. But thou, thou know'st no tale of them, amazed as if thou mansionless looked up at heaven, saw its stars unstrung and scattering like a box of beads.
I will tell this in the cards.
Here's a black wench with a cap and anvil; see, she hammers at a fiery heart. That card doth signify that errant star which some call Mercury. But they do call her Brock. She's a cutpurse of great bellies, and does lighten them; a picklock of maidenheads; a thief of souls. On Whinnymoor she lurks, and bids the silent traveller stand; takes nothing of him naked, but a coin, a clip. Those waifs that shiver, dance and shiver on the moss, in nothing but their own brief souls, she laps in her rough jacket, earth and bone; she slaps them squalling into breath. She is death's midwife and her go-between, the third in marriage beds. Her clip is kindling. Twice did she sain me, doing and undoing: at the door where thou didst enter, love, and at the jagg'd rift of my going hence.
Here's Burnt Eldins. Burd Alone. She tosses up her golden ball outwith a hedge of bones. Its leaves are hands of children flayed, imploring. She is youngest of the Nine, those stars whose rising into dawn doth mark the stone of winter's death. I had the tale of Imp Jinny, how she winds the clew and finds her sisters locked up in Annis’ kist. How she sets them free. That card I never drew.
Nor this: Nine Weaving. Eight are painted, bending to their wintry task. Ah, they blaze in their imprisoning. From their tower spills their endless web, the green world and that other, woven with a mingled skein.
And here's the Rattlebag, turned tail. It shows a lad, whiteheaded as a weed; he claps the crows that flacker from his field of corn, all rooted in a sleeping man, a sheaf whose binding is a belt of stars.
And turn, and he's the Hanged Lad, brave in winter, mid a winnowing of stars.
The Crowd of Bone. That fiddle that the old year plays of Ashes, of her bones. ‘Tis strung with shorn red hair. Ah, it burns thy fingers, thou dost let it fall.
And Ashes. Not her smutched and tangled guise, as black as holly-blotch, that waif in tattercoats that walks behind a wren's cold corse: that is not Ashes but her mute. This Ashes dances lightfoot, and at every step a green blade springs. Her hair's like fires that the May lads leap, a-whirl in wind. Far far behind her is an O, a crow's eye or a cracked bright glass. Her end. But for now, she's walked away from Annis’ glass, her eye of winter, out of that tale into this.
It was windy, with a clouted sky. The farm stood foursquare to the heavens, stonebuilt, with a line of trees to northward bending all one way. They danced. There were catkins on the hazels, taws of light, like whips to set the sun a-spin. Kit sneezed. There was pollen dusted in his hair and on his jacket, nebulas of bloom; he sleeved his face with Pleiades. “No geese,” he said. “There's a comfort."
"I'll go this time,” said Thea, peering through the hedge with him. They saw a drying yard, windriffled, up against the plainfaced farmhouse. There were two girls playing in the yard. They'd tied a rope to an iron ring in the housewall. One turned, the other skipped and sang. “My mother went to feed her crows, turn round and call them in...” The rope made rainbows in the plashy air; it slapped, slapped, slapped the stones. An unbreeched boy ran shouting with a whirligig. It flackered like a rising bird; it caught the sudden light. He tumbled in the mud. A woman in a cap and clanging pattens came out, a creaking wicker basket at her hip.
Kit and Thea slipped through the hedge. “Hallows with ye,” he said, and bowed. His back was urchined out with brooms.
The woman nipped the small clothes up. She was rosy with the wind, and round-armed, with wisps of grey-brown hair straggling from her cap. “Here's a rade o scoundrels,” she said to the peg box. “A-ligging and a-laiking, while us poor folk go to work. Well, I's counted shirts."
"...one for t'rider and one for t'horse and one for t'boatman, for to row me across..."
The boy was crouching by a puddle, frothing his toy in it.
Fiercely, the woman pegged the washing out: smock, petticoat, shirt, breeches, smock. All dancing in the wind. Kit tweaked the breeches by the strings. “Here's thy chance,” he said to them. “Do as I would."
"Huh,” said the woman, but her shoulders quirked. “Would yer go to be hanged?
"Not I. And yet die bravely in a dance,” he said.
Another woman looked out through the door. “Eh, Bet, what's to do?"
"A tain and his tally come a-begging. Lunish folk. Got besoms."
"Has they pins? We's short.” She came out on the doorstep, flapping her apron. She was small and crumpled, with a smear of soap on her brow. Looking at the travellers, up and down, she said, “If it's guising, yer a bit few."
"A sword and a bush,” said Kit.
"And late."
"The ways are very muddy,” said Kit.
"And our shoes are very thin,” said Thea.
"When's Lightfast i’ Lune, then? Come May?” The woman with the basket looked at Thea. “Where's crown? Is t'wren in yer pocket, then?"
"Under her apron,” said the woman at the door.
"Whisht,” said the other. “Ista lad then? Or Ashes?"
"Turns,” said Thea. “Whichever comes in next. Burnt Eldins."
"Aye well, if it's Eldins, yer first foot,” said the woman at the door, relenting. “Not see'd Arrish lads as yet.” Quirking at Kit: “What's he?"
Kit turned and shrank and darkened. The witch looked out through him, and cocked her shrewd black eye. Muck, said her mincing, and grubs, said her peck. Watching, Thea felt a thrill of uneasy laughter. He had Morag to the very nails. “The blood I brew, the bones I crack, I bear the childer on my back.” The little girls watched, the rope slack, their faces uncertain. He clawed his hands at them and waggled.
The brown girl's thumb went in her mouth; she clung to her sister's apron. But the little dark one said, “Yer not a witch."
"Who said?” He swung the little dark thing in the air, and clapped her in the empty basket, shrieking delight.
Thea rounded on him, ranting in high style. It was her turn for Burnt Eldins; she had the coat. “Wha comes on stones?"
"Awd Crowdybones."
"What's that ye've got?"
"I's getting eldins for to boil me pot.” Lantern and thornbush, like Mall-i'-th'-Moon.
"Wha's give thee leave to cut my wood?"
"Me glass and me riddle, they told me I could."
"All but nine, they may not go:
"That's eight."
Thump, went the basket. Thump. And the girl peeked out, with her hair all tumbled, rough as juniper, her eyes as blue.
Thea whirled on her heel. “Burnt Eldins is youngest of all of the nine, I see by her stockins you've hung on the line."
"I's not been etten yet,” said the girl. “It's all right, Tilda. Thou can look."
Kit crouched malefically. “Blood and bones, I'll crack, I'll crack, and fell and hair will patch me back. Eyes to me ravens, and breath to me bread, and fat for a candle to light me to bed."
Thea drew her sword of air.
"Take a broom,” said Kit softly. “Plays better."
"Ah. Right then.” Thea cleared her throat and struck a penny-plain bold stance. “Wha brings thee down but Hallycrown?” Turn and turn, they rimed.
"My tower's where thou'lt never find."
"They's left me a thread, and I walk and I wind.” Round in merrills in the mud, she trod.
"I's ower t'riddles and back o Cawd Law."
"They's spinned me a clew and I's under thy wall.” Thea ducked the clothesline.
"I's snecked t'door, thou shan't come in.” All a-twitter.
"Brock turns locks and lifts thy pin."
"What's within but mirk and mist?"
"But I's a sun frae Mally's kist.” She upraised a withered apple-john.
"Here comes my ravens to peck out thine eyes."
"And here comes my chopper, for to make ‘em mince pies."
Once, twice, thrice they clashed and down fell Morag in the mud. Kit clutched his heart, turned tipple, kicked his heels and croaked. Tilda giggled uncertainly. Thea snatched the child from the basket, and Kit spun it round with his foot. Down went the child in it. Thea spoke.
Kit whispered to the child, “Hang on.” He jumped up beside Thea and they took the handles of the creel. They hoisted it between them and they swung it, one two three, and whirled it round.
"Now Tilda's turn,” said the child when she'd got her breath.
"Thou gut yon fish,” said Whin. “It's that and slawk."
Kit turned from the bitter bright morning. Salt in candle flame: it sparkled. “Ah?” Carefully, from rock to driftwood, rock to rock, he hobbled back to the fire, took the knife in stiff hands. “What's this, a dolphin?"
"Herring,” said Whin. “Filched it. They'll blame cat.” She prodded at the pot of seaweed, doubtful. “So, where got yer that guising? Not i’ Lune."
"Imp Jinny. Said it might get an egg or two."
"Thin wind for thieving, March. All green and mockery.” Whin clapped the lid to. “Wants a whet to it, does slawk. Verjuice or owt.” She swiped the ladle with her finger, licked it. “So yer kept them rings."
"And who'd buy them?” Kit's hands were glittering with blood and scales. “Who'd make change? As good sell orchards in the moon."
"Spatchcocked, I think,” said Whin. She took the fish. “Salt enough."
"There were two left. For the—for the child, she said. Her portion. Those you took.” He rubbed his fingers dry in sand. “One spent, one tossed away in scorn. Three ta'en by—ruffians. And one she gave away."
"Did she, then?"
"To a boy. A whitehaired starveling boy. A scarecrow."
"Oh,” said Whin, so poignantly that Kit knelt up by her.
"What is't then? At thy heart?"
They came by a ploughed field, pricked with the new green corn. A crow lad with his clapper cried, he clacked his sticks and cried, “Ban craws!” The cold wind shook his rags. The crows took up into the air. It was a brash day, bare and windy, with a sky of curds and whey. Thea stood in the furrows, watching; Kit stood by her. A stone's throw away, the birds swirled and settled, like a fall of ashes, calling out. Their voices glowed and faded like the sparks from the anvils of war.
Kit said, “He cries them barley."
"They defy him,” said Thea. She was gazing at the sky. The clouds went swiftly. “Crows, that's all."
Cracked pepper, and a salt of smaller birds.
Hoarsely, hauntingly, the boy took up his chant.
Kit took up a stone and flung it in the birds’ midst. They shrugged derisively; they hopped a little sidelong, pecked. He ran at them, lickering his coat and crying, “Craws! Ban craws!” He clodded them with earth. Huffed as dowagers, they ruffled in their black; they snapped their well-I-never beaks. “Sod off!” yelled Kit. They rose and scattered in the wide grey sky; went silver and were gone.
Turning back, triumphant, he saw Thea, pinched and shivering among the furrows. He clouded over. They'd had nothing all that day; she could eat nothing when they had, but picked and spewed. Coarse provender, he thought: no stomach for't. And it was cold and muddy in the lanes, her shoes were worn—ah, not her slippers, cast away in ruin. These were new old shoes, clodhopping country boots, ill-sorted with her rags of Lunish finery. And dearly they had cost her purse: her silver comb. Now he saw how odd her clothing looked, how tattery. Half tinsel and half drab. He'd thought of it as hers. Herself. How strange that started brush of hair, that boys cried Vixen! At. Cried whore.
Seeing him forlorn, she clapped and called to him, “Oh, bravely done."
He grinned and wiped a sword of air and sheathed it. “My turn for the boy,” he said. The coat flapped windily.
"I'll be Ashes, then; I'm tired of Eldins."
Kit came and held her. “Ah,” he said. “Did I tell thee? I dreamed it hailed moonseed. ‘Twas full and it split."
"What sprang of it? Witches?"
"Children,” he said. “All naked as the moon, and shining, as they were made of sky. They danced."
Thea looked toward the barley-white boy, still crying. Further on, the ashes fell. “What then?"
"A woman caught them in her apron."
"And then?"
"I woke,” said Kit. “And seeing thee, forgot.” There was straw still in her hair: a garland. They were wed each day. Remembering, he plucked it out and gave it, lightly, to the wind. Then turning with her gaze, he saw the boy. “Poor lad, it's weary work, alone wi’ crows."
Thea said, “Shall we play, and let him play?"
"I'll not hang ranting from a pole, even to please thee.” He grimaced fiercely, knotting up his brows. “But I'll play thee a tyrant rarely, or a crone or what thou wilt."
"'Tis a strange play: we clap and they go."
"But an ancient play,” said Kit. “The first true gallant of the part was Tom o Cloud, who claps the shadows from the sky.” He'd taught her all of that: the names which country folk did give—Awd Flaycraw, Jack Orion—to the sprawl of stars she'd called the Gallows Tree. A bookish name. “Wilt play it naked, then?” said Thea.
"With a sword,” said Kit. He sang the old tune from the masque, the woodwo's brag:
They were walking toward the crow lad's coign. The earth by the headland was scratched with mazes, glittering with shards of hoarded glass. The crow lad blew his hands and stared. His coat was rags of sacking and his shoes were mud. His hempwhite head was bare, in a ravel of rope-ends.
"Hey, lad, would thy master hear a play?"
"Has dogs. And sets ‘em on."
And a stick, thought Kit. And lays it on. He saw the wary face and wincing shoulders. The bruises. The boy stared back unblinking. He had eyes as green as hail. Kit found the last of what they'd begged, a sadcake and a scrape of fat. “Here's for thy piece,” he said. The crow lad snatched it fiercely and he bit, he crammed. Kit waited. “What's thy name?"
"Called Ashlin."
"And thy kin? Who keeps thee?"
"No one,” said the boy. “I's lightborn."
"So am I,” said Kit. “We two are Mally's bairns.” He saw a bright child made of azure falling, rolling naked in the dust. They come to dust. The woman in his dream turned elsewhere, as her lap was full. And still the lightborn fell: so many for the world to waste. Not all of them, he thought to say. Not ours to come.
But Thea said, “And I am darkborn."
"See'd,” the crow lad said.
"But he and I go longways, out of Law.” She looked about. “Her eyes?"
"Stoneblind. Off elsewhere, anyway."
"But if they follow—"
"I's a sling o stones. What I do."
Thea looked long at him. “Wouldst do it?"
"Owt I can."
Kit caught his breath, leapt in with, “Who's thy master, lad? I'd have a word with him. Wouldst come with us? Art fast?” He turned to Thea, bright with indignation, mischief, pleading. “He could play the boy."
"Got work. Hers,” the crow lad said, and becked at Thea. He glanced at Kit's coat. “I see yer ta'en already. Go yer ways."
Thea said to the boy. “Is it fast, then?"
"Clap and done.” He spat his hand; they shook.
Kit stood bewildered, like the child in the basket, whirled round in their play. Thea touched his arm. “Soft, love, ‘tis a game we play.” To the boy, she said, “What then?"
"Seek hallows."
"What way?"
"Gang wi’ t'sun."
"How far?"
"While it's hallows."
Thea stretched her hand out, with its tawny ring. A turn and flick, and it was bare: she held a scrawny orange. “For thy noon."
The crow lad caught it and he tossed it in the air. He laughed, looking up at it, his bright hair scattering day. “What's ta'en is anyone's.” Kit saw it fall.
"I'd an Ashes bairn,” said Whin. Her turn, gazing through the fire, chin on close-hugged knee. “And left him. Naked as he came, for owt as found him. Craws or kin.” And in a raw voice, small and wretchedly, she cried, “They would've cut his throat.” Still raw. As if a horny hand, a sailor's or a drystone waller's, cracked and bled. “Me mam and her gran would. For t'harvest. Starving earth, I is."
Kit said softly, “Was he yours, the crow lad? D'ye think?"
"I knaw not. Like enough, I doubt.” Whin rocked the small ring on her fingertip. “I cannot tell my blood."
"Ah,” said Kit. The fire shifted, sighed.
"Thowt it were guising, being Ashes. When I ta'en her coat. And I laughed that I were chosen out of all, that I could take owt I willed. Whatever lad. So long as I did play her part, walk earth until she waked. So long as I kept nowt."
Kit looked for the child in her, as black as he was white. Broad cheekbones and a mournful lip, her long AEgyptian eyes. “And you would still be Ashes. If you'd kept the boy. Still hunted.” Coverless as hares.
"What I is, is Ashes. Same as earth is earth. Her coat that she put on. And when I's doffed, I's done with, breath and bone. No giving back.” Whin leaned from shadow into shying light. “I could ha’ kept him, see."
The rain fell, water into water. After a time, Whin stirred the embers. “Blood or no. For his sake, for thy kindness, thanks."
"All mine, a hundredfold,” said Kit. “He saved us. For a time."
Margaret, see. Bright Hesperus, the moon's epitome, hangs at thy window. Perseis her lamp. When I was Thea, I did love that star, her winding journey through the maze, the quickset stars. ‘Tis lucent, there: a brilliant toy, a plaything from a mage's baby house. Burnt Eldin's bauble. Canst thou catch? Let my lady set her hedge as thick as gramarye, as high as ravens cry, the light will in at it.
In April of that wandering year, I spied a comet. In the Crowd of Bone it hung, toward Ninerise, in a thaw of fleeting snow. I waked and saw it, like a pearl dissolving in black wine; I drank that cup, light full of thee. And thou didst leap to it.
I knew then that I went with child.
Thea turned at the waystone, calling. What she said was blown away. And still she turned on the hillside, at the twelve winds’ nave; the fellies of the wheel were hills. “What's that?” said Kit, coming breathless behind.
"Those folk. Here's all their petticoats away."
It rained, a hill beyond them and a hill behind: a cold fine windy rain. From the ragwell, where they stood in light, they saw the stormdark clouds onsailing. They were tall and tattery, their skirts of ragged silver draggling heedless through the hills. Then the thorn tree shivered in its rags; the spring winced light, it puckered with a sudden doubt. The sky darkened and a hail came on: small hail, but sharp and green. Kit cowered from it. Thea ran to it and whirled about, catching hailstones in her hands. They filled them, greener as they massed, bluegreen.
"Come back,” called Kit. “Hey, Thea?” And he came a few steps, blindly, in the shattering of the hail. How it danced and it daunted, how it hissed and rattled on the ground. It beat him blind, it stung. “Hey!"
"Catching souls,” she called.
As sudden, it was past. The hill was white: a spring made glass, the sky made soul and shattered. Slateblue to the eastward, slashed with rain, the heels of storm rolled onward. All above, the lift was blue. He shook himself. Thea's head was haily crowned; it glittered when she turned. Her neck was bare. She flung her hoard of stones away. They scattered on the earth like seed. Cold seed, he thought. No crows would take. A cloud away, a rainbow sprang. It spanned the storm. She clapped her wizened hands and laughed. “Do you turn and I'll dance to it."
Somewhere up Owlerdale they sheltered from a passing rain with tinkers in a hedge. Two women, old and young, with baskets of fairings: cowslip tossy-balls and bunches of bright ribands; toys and tawdry. Kit spread them his coat. The blackthorn was tarnishing, the white in bud. The younger of their chance-met company was breaking buds of it, to whet her bacon; the elder thumbed her cards and smoked. Rain and blackthorn fell.
"That comet,” said Kit to Thea. “Ah, but it grows bright and bonny. Like a dandelion gone to seed and drifting."
"Whose clock?” said Thea. “And whose breath?"
Still wandering. It preyed on him, that wan and random look.
"Craws!” said the younger, counting wares. “Dropped whirlywhorl I't road."
The elder pointed with her pipestem. “Pick it up, then.” There it lay in a puddle, gaudy and forlorn.
"I'll get it,” said Kit, leaping up. Gallantry, perhaps; or smoke of shag. It mingled with the tinker's hair, smoke and piraling like old man's beard.
The younger bit her bread, then turned and offered it to Thea, all but her thumbpiece. Cold fat bacon and wild garlic.
Pinched mouth and shake of head.
"I cry you mercy,” Thea said. “A toothache."
A shrewd eye, like a stormcock's. “What did yer bite, then?"
But her aunt held out her pipe. “Here. Have a pull at me bacca. ‘Twill dill thy pugging tooth."
Thea twisted, spewed and spat. Lay weeping.
"Ah,” said Baccapipe. “Can read thy fortune wi'out cards."
And Bread-and-Bacon kicked her heels and sang, ” ... when me apron were low, Ye'd follow me after through frost and through snow..."
"Whisht.” The old one wiped Thea's mouth, felt her brow and wrist and belly with rough concern. “Not far gone, I'd say.” She quirked her chin at Kit coming. “Does he—?"
No.
"And do yer—?"
No again.
"Knowst mouse-ear?"
"Where?” said Thea.
"Ninewood. Up Ask ways, a two three mile.” She pointed over the hills. “Grows in among thorn."
And the younger sang again, blithe as a cuckoo that calls, Not I! At the nesting wren: ” ... but now that my apron is up to my knee..."
"Sneck,” said the elder.
Too late. Kit had tumbled. On his face, like wind in whitebeam, danced and paled his feelings: joy, awe, terror, tenderness, despair.
"Thea?” He knelt and wreathed her in his arms. “Canst walk? Can I get thee aught?” he said foolishly. “From anywhere, the moon.” He could not see her face. He thought he could feel the child; he saw it in his mind's eye, like a little comet, still travelling and trailing light: a seed-moon tumbling over and over through the air.
Now, Margaret, thou begin'st to wind. Slipping from thy bower, soft and warily, thou try'st the latch: my lady and her crow keep watch. Not always, thou hast found. The gore-crow hunts; my lady sleeps, but as the sun in Thule, riding on the rim of darkness. She but wets her lip in Lethe cup. Yet she sleeps. Locks and spells she's set on thee, and cage on cage: thou walk'st within a tower, in a maze, within a wall hedged round with thorn, encompassed in a bitter sea. Her lean hounds prowl the courts and coverts, and her huntsman wards the gates.
And further, they do keep thee innocent, they blanch thee, as a gardener doth a white root under stones. Thou art bedazed and physicked, purged, pinched, bled, stayed, examined, spied on. Whipped.
Yet they do not lock thy door, within so many locks. Nor mew thy seeking thoughts.
They slight thee, for thou canst not be dead Thea, thou unwanted wast her death; disdain thee for thy meddled blood. In their contempt is all thy hope. Thou art a dish that likes them not; they have no stomach for thy soul. Unconsidered, thou art half unseen, a sparrow in a wintry hedge. Whatever thou art let to find is all inconsequent, is haws.
Thou turn'st the key and slip'st.
Doors and doors. An arras and a winding stair.
Ah, these rooms I never saw. Thy journey, Margaret. Not mine.
Only to the next room, and the next.
Locked.
Nothing but a box of nutmegs.
Spectacles, in this, that make thy candle swerve and loom. Old iron. Rats.
A lock made like a witch, that bares her secrets to the key. That watches, mute and venomous. Not there.
In this, a heap of books, sea-ruined. Mooncalf'd bindings, white and swollen as a drowned face. Warp and white-rot, skin on skin. Down thou sit'st and try'st to pry the boards, to turn the bleared and cockled pages. Here, a drawing of a hand, anatomized. A riddle in geometry. A fugue of spiders.
And behind a faded arras—ghost of roses, greensick blue—a bright dark closet full of wonders and of dust. A mute virginals. Thy fingers press the slack and clatter of its keys, unclose its fretty soundboard, gnawed and rustling with mice. The lid within is painted with brief garlands—violets and wood anemones—as if the music dreamed them in the dark. Spring flowers thou hast never seen: thy fingers, wond'ring, trace. They pleach the silk of scarves, as sheer as iris; trace the windings of a table carpet, blood of nightingales and cry-at-midnight blue. Thou strok'st a jar, round-bellied—blear with dust, yet lucent underneath—of china, blue and white as clouded May.
"So y'd not've been at leap fires, then,” said Whin. “Being heavy."
"And light.” Kit had seen them, other years, in Lune. Had begged the wood for them, from door to door:
He'd danced with the highest: brave lads and bold heroes, and the lang tangly girls. Whirled higher, still higher, for the claps and cries, the eyes admiring or awed or scornful. Afterward, for clips and kisses. For the darker thing. By one and one, they'd pinched the embers—ah, another in thine hair. Thy shirt. By twos, had slipped away. He had lain on the dark hills; had made of charred petticoats, green gowns.
"No,” he said. “No, we went to the greenwood. To get leaves."
"O,” said Kit. “I drown.” He stood in heaven, in the place where all doors lead. That wood was deep in flowers of the inmost curve of blue, the blue of iris her embrace. Her eye within her rainbow, as the moon within the old moon's clasp. And Thea walked in that unearthly floating haze of flowers, amid the leafing trees, knee-deep in Paradise. It was the heart; and yet at every further step, ‘twas this. And this beyond. Each blue, the inwardest embrace, the bluest eye. An O annihilating all that's made.
The blue became his element, his air: he dove.
He saw a falling star beyond him. Thea.
Then ‘twas past. He scuffled through old beech leaves, brushed by nettles. Stung himself and swore. Close by, he whiffed the green stench of a fox. He turned. A bluebell wood, the bonniest he'd ever seen. Young slender beeches. Holly, celandines, and wood anemones. And Thea gathering leaves, green branches.
Where she walked was heaven still.
He lay in sky, and watched her, errant in the sky below. She'd slipped from her tumbled smock, stood clad in sky. He saw the crescent of her, white and glimmering: in the dark of moon, the moon. That other sky she walked was on the verge of green, bluegreen, and turning deeper into blue. Beyond the new leaves, it was dusk. The trees were pointlace yet, or bare or budding out: an airy seine. A star hung trembling in the air, like water on a leaf, about to fall, unfallen. And the moon within his orbit, gilding as she set.
By a thorn tree, at his side, she sat and wove a garland in her lap. A knot of May.
Drowsily, he said, “We munnot sleep."
"Why not?"
"The morn will be the Nine. Wouldst see them rising?"
"Ah,” said Thea, “but I am no maid."
He touched her small round belly. “Yet thou bringest may. A branch.” The rank sweet scent of thorn hung faintly on the air; the petals fell, as if the moon unleaved. “Shall we set a hedge of them, a hey of girls?"
"And call it Lightwood?” Thea said.
Kit said,
In another, rustic voice, he answered, “'Aye, ‘tis where the bushes harry birds. I dare not for the owls go in."
Thea said:
"Go on,” said Kit.
"Oh,” said Thea, “but I've left the book in Lune."
"Thou hast the way of it."
"By heart."
"And by thy heart.” He wreathed his hands about their child, and spoke the woman's part:
And darting kisses in her neck, he said, “What think'st thou, for our lass, of Perseis?"
"Not Eldins?"
"Ah.” Kit laughed softly for delight. “Will there be nine?"
"Less one,” said Thea, bending to her wreath.
Whin said, “Did yer not guess what she twined?"
"No,” said Kit. “I was a fool."
Why d'ye pull that bitter little herb, that herb that grows so grey...? Ah, she'd pulled those leaves alone. “A man."
A silence. Somewhere in the wood, a bird poured silver from a narrow neck. Thea stirred. “Kit?"
"Hmm?"
"Does it end so?"
"Which?"
"The tale. With Annis turned to stone."
"At sunrise? Aye, and it begins."
"There was another tale,” she said. “About the moon in a thorn bush."
"Malykorne."
"What's she?"
"The Cloud witch. Annis’ sister, some do say. Her bed's where the sun is waked. He sleeps the winter there."
"And now?"
"Wakes wood."
"Ah."
Darkness and the moonspill of the may. Green is nowhere, it unselves the wood. As lovers are unselved: not tree embracing tree, but one. But wood. A riddle, he thought drowsily. Within a wood, another wood, a grove where grows no green; within a moon, another moon, and nowhere to be seen. A bird in the dark leaves answered, but he never heard. Two, two eyes, the owl cried out. Of tree, of tree, of tree. Kit slept.
I will tell this in the dark. That crown I wove for thee. And on May Eve, of all unseely nights: that nadir of the wake of Souls, and darkness’ dark of moon. Unhallows.
Ah, love, I had despaired of thee.
I was unwitched. Thou knitting reeled up all my powers, left us naked to my lady's malice. Soul and body, I went heavy with thy death. My great kite belly would undo us all. And so I did, undid. I would not have thee bloodfast, earthbound, for my dam to take. Nor turn thee Annis, stone within my stone.
Toward midnight, turning, Kit awoke and saw a fireflash amid the low woods, heard a brash of leaves: and there in the glade he saw a kitlin fox, a vixen dancing like a flake of fire in the wind.
He turned to Thea, shook her softly. “Hush, love. Look."
She woke and saw. He felt her at his side turned cold as hailstones. “Kill it,” Thea said.
A stillness. “What?"
"I am heavy, I can do no spell. Now. Quick."
And still he watched. The patter of the paws was quick, like rain on leaves. A clickety vixen. April in its veins. It danced like a burning leaf, the aftercolor of the greenblue sky.
"What harm in it?” he said. “The pretty kitlin."
"Eyes,” she said.
They turned and flashed, a deepsunk dazzling green. The fire was green.
She said, “It wears the fox's fell."
He'd heard no bark. No fox was ever so still, so fiery. None scented of green thorn. He rose, unsure. A stone?
But it was gone.
He turned back and saw Thea, huddled naked on the ground. He bent and wrapped her in her scattered clothes, for fear of eyes, of lairing eyes. Cold in his arms, she cried, “No witch. I am no witch. I cannot meet her in the air."
Kit said, “Who'd harm thee? I would keep thee. I would try.” A hopeless tenderness consumed him, like a candle swaling in his bones. “It's what I'm for."
She twisted from him. To the child in her, she cried, “My blood is thy undoing."
"'Tis my blood as well,” said Kit. “I do not use thee."
Thea said, “But I use thee. Poor fool, have you not seen? Thou wert my cock-horse, that I rid away."
No ship, no ship beneath him, and the cold wave's shock. Salt-blind, he flailed at her. “Then find thyself a jade to bear thee, and another when he's flagged. Any stick will do to ride on."
Silence. Her cheek went paler still. His hands unclenched. At last, softly, she said, “And to burn, at need. The slower, being green. I would not watch thee burn.” She turned her face from him; he saw the white neck, the tumbled quenchless hair. “I am thy death."
And rising, naked in her smock, she ran. He followed blindly, pushing on at hazard through bushes and briars. Heedless of their lash, he scrambled onward, deeper in the wood. The wood was endless. Thea? Further on, he saw her glimmering; then white in whiteness, she was gone.
His heart turned snow.
When I got thee, I had not yet bled. Nor will now, being air. That bower and that bed of state, my lady dressed for Annis, all in hangings of deep crimson velvet, rich as for the progress of a queen, though in her exile. Not that blue and meagre hag, that bugbear Annis, that doth stalk the fells of Cloud; not she, that winter's tale, that dwindled bloodfast crone: but Annis, air and dark made crystalline, before her fall.
I was born thirteen, as thou art now; I saw the Nine rise and the Gallows wheel and set an hundred enneads of times; and at thirteen, I lived a year, and died.
My lady did conceive, create me green and virgin for her sorcery; but kept me for herself. Her study and her moving jewel, her toy, her book. The pupil of her eye, that she did dote upon, so year by year put off the consummation of her art, for lessoning.
For play.
In her conjurations—often in her storms—my lady witch would gaze in me, the glass that Morag held: bare April, but for winter's chain. Herself was January, all in black and branching velvet, flakes of frost at neck and wrist. Come, Madam, she would say. Undo. And then undo my coil of hair, unbraid it through and through her hands. Lie there, my art. And still would gaze, devouring my stillness, as the eye drinks light. I shivered in her admiration. Then, only then, her wintry hand would touch, her cold mouth kiss; and quickening, the witch would toy and pinch and fondle, aye, and tongue her silent glass, till she, not I, cried out and shuddered. Cracked.
Cried out: her jewel, her epiphany, her nonpareil; her book of gramarye, her limbeck and her light. Her A and O.
And yet not hers.
Know you that the stone my lady wears is Annis, shattered in her fall and vanished, all but that cold shard of night. Her self that was.
That moment of her breaking, time began. Light wakened from its grave in her. Unbound, the moon did bind her to that sickled and disdained hag thou see'st, that ashes of herself: the witch. Time chained her to this rock. And for a thousand thousand changes of the moon did Annis brood on her disparagement, the lightwrack of her Law. She sought to gather up her flaws of night, anneal them in her glass: that glass from which she drew me, naked and unsouled. Her self.
With me, my lady did enact her fall: the cry and shattering. And with each reiterated crack, her glass would round itself, quicksilver to its wound. But not her soul. My brooch of nakedness did pierce her, bind her bloodfast to her baser self: that hag who eats children.
That was not what she designed.
She had made me for the stone. The seed of Law. And on the morrow of the night I fled her would have wound the stair, unlocked the bloodred chamber, set the stone within my womb. Bred crystal of my blood. That stone would turn me stone from inward, Gorgon to itself, until—
And then he saw her. Moonlight. ‘Twas the moon had dazzled him. No more. Light fell, leaves shifted. Thea stood agaze. Stone still and breathing silence. Hush. Look, there.
He turned. A clearing, silver as a coin with dew, and tarnished as the moon's broad face. And in that O of light, like Mally-in-the-moon, a-bristle with her bush of thorn, he saw an elfish figure, to and fro. A child? (A tree afoot?) Not ancient, though as small and sickle as the old moon's bones: a barelegged child. A branching girl. They do get flowers of a hallows eve. Alone?
A lash of thorn whipped back and welted him. He sleeved the salt blood from his eyes. He blinked and saw her, not in leaves but rags: the ruins of a stolen coat, perhaps, a soldier's or a scarecrow's, or a lover's run a-wood. Mad Maudlin's, that was Tom's old coat. It fell from her in shards, as stiff as any bark with years. There were twigs of thorn in wilting flower in her hair, down, eggshells, feathers. Cross and cross the O she went, not getting branches: walking patterns to herself, as furious fantastic as a poet in her bower, her labyrinth her language. Then a start, and back she skitted, ticklish as a spider on her web, to tweak some nebulous chiasmus. A hussif of trees.
Daft as a besom, he thought. Poor lass.
But Thea said to her, “Is't hallows?"
"While it is. Thy time's to come.” The green girl scrabbled in her rags, howked out a pair of crooked spectacles and rubbed them in the tatters of a leaf-red cap. She perched them on her nose. A grubby girl, with greenstained knees, scabbed knees and elbows. As she turned, Kit saw her crescent body shining through the rags. A downy girl. He stirred and her seeing mocked him: a fierce howlet's face. All beak and eyes. “Shift,” she said. “I's thrang."
But Thea said, “I am what you do."
"Ah,” said the girl. “What's that?"
"Undo."
The girl glanced at Kit. “I see thou's done already what thou can't undo.” He felt her elfshot eyes. Her breasts were April, but the eyes were January, haily, and the tongue a cold and clashy March. Scathed, he felt himself, dishevelled in his raffish coat, with moss and toadstools in his hair. Leaves everywhere. And ramping after Thea, like a woodwose in a mumming. Mad for love.
There was nothing for it but to play the part. Her glazy eyes decreed. “Poor leavy Tom,” he said. “Remember Tom his cup. He sees the craws at bones; they rouse the kittle wren, cock robin, and the tumbling owl."
Then he cared not for the hoyden; Thea touched his lips. “Softly. ‘Tis her wood."
Kit looked about. There was no moon. The light was may. He saw the whiteness, heaped and hung about the branches, like all the petticoats of some untidy dreaming girl, a tangly lass who kept her bower. What she knew and drew had thorns.
"Come in,” said the green girl, loftily. “Mind souls, I's flitting."
In was out. He saw the whitethorn petals fall and flitter as he passed: no wall or window else. Within was dark and waste. Thea, bending, took up a clumsy garland lying half-made on the ground. Kit saw the ashes of a fire, cold out; a crackpot, tipsy on its one leg, canted over. It was full of dry leaves.
Beyond her hedge—scant sticks, blown papers—lay the cold bare hills. The wind was smoke-edged.
"Fires on the hills,” said Thea, shivering.
Sticks to burn vixens. Kit saw the whirling bodies, higher, leaping higher. Heard the cries. They would dance on every hill by dawning, round from Law to Law again, to close round Annis in her stone. The kindling was the hey.
The girl snecked air behind them. “Aye, they wake, and then I wake."
Thea said, “Are you their mistress, then?"
"They's no one's minions,” said the girl. “Here's spring.” It welled up through the leaves, a little constant twirl of silver, spilling secretly away. She cleared it with her heel, and crouched and filled her gnarly hands. “Thou's dry,” she said to Kit. He drank of them, her hands within his hands. He tasted earth. “Cloud ale,” she said. “Dost like of it?” He nodded, mute. She took him by the shoulders, light, as if she shook him out, her cloak of leaves. “Lie there. Wake wood."
And he was leaves. Brown leaves of oak, the lightfall of a thousand hallows. He was galls and tassels, traceries of veining; he was shards of acorns, shales of light. His lady's cups. He was turning earth, and through him sprang the starry flowers of the Nine. His earth had made them green. No tongue, all eyes! the witch commanded, and the eyes were myriad, were stars of earth.
As giddy as a god, he laughed.
"S'all we do?” said the witch to Thea.
"As you will."
They worked together, plaiting thorn and blackthorn in a garland. Round they turned and bound it, plashing branches in and inwards, as an O, a lightlashed eye. It made a crown too sharp to wear. For which? There was a glory in their laps, of quince and almonds, nettles, violets and goat-haunched catkins, all a-didder and a-dance.
"It turns,” said the witch. “Turns O."
"O's naught,” said Thea, with the garland in her lap.
"Or ay and anywhere, as swift as moon; or what thou will. O's tenfold."
Thea bent to her braiding. “If it were?"
"It quickens,” said the witch. “Comes round. What's past is nowt til it, and all's to come."
Odd and even went the witch's fingers, in and out. Wood anemone and rue. She wove them in the nodding garland: eyebright and nightshade, cranesbill, crowsbane, and the honeyed primrose, ladysmocks, long purples. Turning, it was turning autumn: now the leaves they wove were red and yellow, fruited: haws and hazelnuts and trailing brambles, rowans, hips, and hazy sloes.
"That untwines,” said Thea, of a mouse-eared herb. “I plucked it."
"Aye,” said the witch, weaving in. “Wilta taste of it?"
"And wane?"
"And bear thysel, burd alone. Walk or wake, as thou wist."
Thea bent. “I am bound to them. My lady and this child. If I do bear it, I am hers; if I do not, I am herself."
"Allt same. Thou's moonfast."
Thea said, “I am uncastled. Will you keep me?"
"Where? I's nowhere."
"Here."
"Is nowhere. Hey is down, and there's no hallows i't green world. I't morning, I mun walk and Annis wake."
"Then I am lost,” said Thea. “For my art is lost."
"Thou's bound as she is, rounding winter in thy lap. It will be born, I tell thee, and i't sickle o't moon.” The witch tossed the tussymussy in her lap. “So mowt it be."
Kit watched them whispering secrets, close as moon and dark of moon, in one another's arms. They wove one burr of light. He saw the clew of stars in Thea's lap. He saw the witch's spectacles were frost; they faded as he looked, they trickled down and down her cheeks. He heard an owl's cry echoing, her windy laugh. He saw the green hills leap with vixens, blown like flames from hill to hill. When the wheel comes round, ‘tis sun, he thought. He saw the blackened moon, the cavey moon, as slender as a share of bannock. Riddle cake. He thought the green witch bade him eat. It tasted sweet and bitter, of his dreams. His share was burnt. He saw a stone and a thorn tree, deep in green embrace. The moon was tangled in the leavy thorn, its roots its rimy crown. The stone was straked with lichens, of a bloodrust red; a crazy garland at its crown, aslant.
Split the stick, and I am in it, sang the wren. I rise.
I crack the stone, said the starry flower. I will crack where I take root.
He slept.
And so I waked that night, and whispered secrets with my sister moon. With Malykorne, that is my lady Annis’ other face and elder: light and dark of one moon. Her cradling and my crescent self, still turning from my mother into light. And thou within me, braiding blood. A clasp of witches.
I had no heart for thy undoing.
I am stone, said I. My lady's eidolon. How came I by this flaw?
Thy soul? The green witch laughed. Her glass were clouded.
Did you—?
Stir fire up? Not I.
I thought on thy begetting. Brock? Did she meddle?
Bloodroot i’ thy lady's cauldron. Ashes i’ thy cup. The green witch drank. What's done is done. Yet being kindled, thou might leave thy spill.
Kit slept beside us. Why did I not leave him sleeping, let him grieve and live?
I tell thee, I could not, remembering how coldly I had culled him, out of all the bloodborn kenneled in my lady's dark. All in silver, I'd come down to view my prey, I'd held the candle to his dazzled face. Yes. He would do, I'd thought; yet stilled the triumph in my glance. My lady and her crow did watch. They'd uses for his soul and seed, designs of thrift and sorcery for bone, blood, fell and eyes. Ah, make no paragon of me—myself had marked him for my own false ends. His fiddle for a ship to bear me from that nighted isle; his cock to crow away her spell. ‘Twould do, I judged. So one might heft a stick, a sling of stones, at need: to use, to cast away. He bowed; and as my lady bade, I offered drowsy wine to him, a draught amazing to the mortal sense. We'd toy with him before we slew.
Is this the moon? said he, and gazed about the hall. Awe and mischief in his face. I've seen her owl and her ivy bush, but never tasted of her cup.
I bit my lip, so not to laugh. All solemn then, alight with love, he drank to me. I saw him: tousled, sleepless, downy. He had brushed his twice-turned coat, as if he went not to his death but to a dance. Poor fool, thought I. And all unknowing, I was changed by him. His innocence his spell.
And so that green Unhallows eve, I waked by Malykorne and chose: to stay with Kit, to bear thee, for what end might come.
O Margaret, I was stark afraid. Of travailing, of birth. Of dying—ah, most bitterly; but more than death, I dreaded Annis in myself. Her stone I had averted; but the dark witch was in grain. I'd seen her in my lady's glass: bloodnailed and insatiate, the blind hag on the road. I was afraid of being her, of slaying what was not myself. Of whoring. Not the act—for I was schooled to that—but the devouring. Cold fire, turning sticks to Ashes, Ashes into Annis, endlessly: herself herself engendering.
Yet where thou wast, there Annis could not be. That secret did the green witch tell me, softly in mine ear: thou wouldst keep hallows in that place of blood, that O thine everywhere, thy keep; though I went naked to my lady's sky. And so I brooded thee, as doth a child its candle, lighting her the way to bed. Yet all about there lay the shadows of thine inward fire, the fears that winced and flickered in my brain. Of need and frailty and lumpishness. Of losing Kit, the fear of losing him. Of love.
"Craw's hanged!” cried the grey cock.
Kit woke. Gone? A something slipped from him, a ghost returning at the pale of night. It will not stay, that tide. The pale boat rides the mirk and shiver of that burning flood; it slips the moorings. Gone. Yet curled against him, Thea slept. Cap and acorn. They were lying by a scanty thicket, on the open hills. Not day yet, neither moon nor sun.
He heard a thump and twitter in the wood, a wild free scuffling and calling. Out from the greenwood burst a rout of guisers, clad in tattercoats and leaves.
"Hey is down!” they cried.
Children.
Thea hid her face, but she was laughing; Kit caught up their scattered clothes to lap her.
They'd a girl to play small music—hop and twitter, like a small bird on a briar—all but lost amid their charm. She'd a wheedling pipe and dowly drum. Another, a long lad, bore a garland of whitethorn with a dead crow swung from it, wryneck and agape. It dangled, claws upward, wings clapped wide and stark. Round it, in and out, there ran a thrang of boys and girls. One, crowned in oakleaves, clashed horns with another clad in holly. Lagman and tangling, walking in his sleep, a small boy gaped and swayed and staggered under all their jackets.
"Brant!” they cried. “Come in, here's game."
Not last but alone went a dark and clustering girl in torn russet and green crown; she bore a staff, and wore a fox tail jauncing behind.
"Craw's hanged!” she cried. “Get up!"
A stripling in petticoats swept round the lovers, whirling light and away. His skirts were singed with leaping fires. His broom was budded out, as if he'd swept stars with it. “Here's nest on ‘em,” he said. He poked at them and kittled them, left smears of pollen and of ashes.
"Hey!” cried Kit, sneezing, laughing all at once.
The others thronged. “We's late. They's been and done."
Undone.
The girl with the music played Cuckoo! On her little pipe
"My bout at broom? Yer said I could."
"Sneck up, thou mardy, or I's leave thee here for bears."
"Clartarse."
"Neshcock. Tell our dad of thee."
"Gi's a box,” said another. “And we'll gang away."
Kit fumbled in his pockets, found a halfpenny. “Here's to your fires."
Brant bit, she pursed it. “And to yers. Where's riddle?"
"Here,” said another. “In my apron."
They'd a round loaf of barley bread, with a face baked into it: a leafy glazy green man, scored and bossed on it, with clove-nailed eyes. Brant broke and shared it out with all. Kit took, and Thea. All tore it from within, the soft warm crumb; they left the crust of the green man, his face, for the last. At his end, a small boy took the heel, he pinched the raisins from the eyes. Round he went, guising in his mask of crust. Now crouching, now on tiptoe, peering round. A solemn mischief.
"I see you,” he said to Kit. “You don't see me."
Then that, too, was devoured.
Whin tugged at Kit's long cotted hair; she eyed his salt-rimed straggling beard. “Time you was clipped."
"Day,” said the woman. The sheep leapt, yellow-eyed and glaring, from between her knees. The fleece fell, the light sheep staggered giddily away. “Where yer bound?"
Kit said, “Thwaite. Is this the road?"
"We's all up here,” said the woman with the shears, broad-backed, rosy, swathed in sacking. In the fold, the penned sheep blared and jostled.
"Oh,” said Kit, looking round at the row of clippers kneeling or bending to their work, at the lappers and catchers, and the boy at the gate. Beyond them, it was cloudy, the hills hooded in morning.
"Way!” Behind him, a gangling lad brought on another ewe to clip, half-riding her. He threw her in the woman's lap. Her shears bit deep in the heathery wool; they scrunched and sang. “Walking on?"
Kit said, “Anywhere."
"If's a bite and a sup yer after, there's work. Can yer catch ‘em? Can yer whet?"
"I'd think so. But..."
The woman peered at Thea. A dishevelled girl, and silent. Like a tinker out sleepwalking. Hair like flakes of fire. The gown had been good, was tattered as lichen. It was undone at the waist. “Not so lish as yer were, is't? Can yer lap?"
"She's lapped,” said a clipper.
Another sheep sprang away, a vengeful crone. Kit shielded Thea. “'S all right, she's been down afore,” called a man. “Rigged ower."
"Pay ‘em no mind,” said the woman. “Fourpence and all found?"
"Done.” Kit laid by his pack and jacket, and plunged into the throng of clamorous sheep.
"Hey up! Gi's a slipped ‘un."
"Hey! Mind awd Sukey. She's gone on yer, like."
"Lovesick."
"Hod on, lad."
An old ewe cannoned into Kit. Down he went, embracing her for dear life, slathered, laughing. He got her somehow to a shepherd's lap. The man knelt on her head, grinning.
Kit felt his bones. “By, she's a brave ‘un.” He grinned at Thea, but she stood, looking out at the hills.
"Come on, then,” said a lapper.
Thea gathered wool. There were loose locks everywhere. Two women stood at a board and hurdles, lapping fleeces. They plucked away the clarty bits—odds, bobs, and daggles by the tail—and threw them in a sack. They spread each fleece out, dark side up. Then they folded in the legs and rolled it up, dark outward inward, with a twist of the neck-wool drawn out and wrapped round. As they worked, they gossiped; but at every fleece, they said, “A soul, a sark. Out light, in dark."
Thea packed the fleeces in creels. Kit wrestled with the crones. The shears crunched on, inexorable; the light sheep skipped away. The lappers set riddles. “What rive at one another allt day, and lie in one another's arms all night?"
"I give up,” said Thea. “Moon and her dark?"
"Wool combs."
From below, a long way off, came a girl, knitting beside a laden pony. A shepherd and a brisk black dog brought new sheep, down from the summer moors. They shone, brightdark and heavy as the thunderbreeding clouds.
The girl tied her pony, unlading hoggins, frails, and creels. She brought round a tray of cheesecakes, round and golden. “Noon."
Gooseberries and news. “Grey mare's foaled. A lad, and he's piebald. Mistress? Yer Bet's been and thrawn one o yer good siller spoons i't beck, and me and Doll has fished it up. Young termagant.” She sleeved her rosy face. “Oh, and a stranger come, asking at one Lightwood. Said he were an Outlune fellow, brown and beggarly, and ganging with a whey-faced breeding wench. A vixen.” She stared at Thea. “There now! And that clotpoll of a crow lad sent him on up Houlsyke way. Will I fetch him back?"
"No,” said Kit. “I thank you."
A blue-eyed shepherd looked to westward. Thunder. “Doubt he'll have tumbled i't hag by now."
Thea bit her seedcake. “Well done, my little page."
Whin's duckstone skipped and slapped across the waves. “Eight.” She turned grinning. “That caps."
"You've nimmed all the smooth stones whilst I lay and slept.” Kit's flicked once and sank. Still clumsy.
Whin turned out her pockets with a clattering flourish. “Halves.” Stoop and flick. Three. “Yer still won't beat. I's worked at it.” Still with her back to him, looking out at the bare green sea, she said, “Bairn's father."
"Ah?” Kit sorted through the stones.
"It were guising. I never see'd his face.” Five. “So I see'd him a'where."
"A stranger.” One with a leaf in it, too fair to cast away. And this ill-shapen. Ah, this would do. Four. “Yellow hair?"
"As chimneysweepers.” A lad at leap fires. A thief at the gallows. Had he smiled, remembering her cries? A false love. A fiddler. A stranger with a scythe.
Sweetness of green hay. Midsummer. Endless dusk. And still the mowers, mothpale in their shirts, strode on. Kit watched the coil, recoiling of their backs, the long sweep of their scythes, in unison, and so enlaced that not a blade of grass between them stood. They struck and strode, advancing like the white edge of a wave: whish and tumble and the intricating arcs of edge. A long wave, standing with the sun. It stood; the flowers fell and withered with the grass. No sea, but slow green fire, kindled by the sun his kiss.
And after came the bending girls, to strow the grass. They'd not take rake to it, still green in bride-bed, bleeding from the scythe. Rakes to the lapcocks; but straw girls to the swath, to shake and strew the hay in handfuls, east and west. Lay lighter that way.
The hay's the dance.
In Kit's long row, they raked and turned the fading flowers: matrons of a day, and sunburnt. Tossed and tumbled, all their brightness turned to breath of summer. Sweets compacted. He'd made hay since he could walk. He knew the dance. Scythe it and strow it, then to rakes. And turn and turn. Lapcocks to the hobs to windrows; windrows to the sledges. Crisp and blue.
And in among the cocks of hay, the lovers courted, striplings and hoydens, clip and cuff, like hares. Boys battled, whirling hay. And one to another, the straw girls sang: the grey-eyed girl behind him, tall and soldierly and brown; the elfin brat before.
Kit turned and gazed at Thea, in among the girls. Ah, lovelier than ever, fading. Inward turned, to sweet. His lass was growing thin and heavy. Bending to the grass, she strowed it, sun and moon. Skirts dovetailed, and her bare legs scratched. Her bright hair tumbled on her neck. Still white as thorn, her throat, her brow; no sun could burn them. Thea tossed her wraiths of flowers in the air, looked up and round within their falling. Whorl within whirlwind, slow and fast. Move still, still so. O my heart. Let it be now ever, at the solstice of my love. The blade but newly struck; my heart still standing. Yet will fall. Her blade's herself.
The long wave slowed, against the steepening shingle of the dark. And now the grass was ocean; slow and slower lagged their wading steps, their oars, against that tide. The lads cried challenges, lashed on their fellows, flagging, flagging with the sun; the lasses raked and sang:
One voice above the rest rang out, triumphant, hoarse:
The scythes struck on, against that tide of dark. Against the quenchless lap of earth, the grass that stood and shivered. Stood.
Up from Imber Beck came Kit, not spilling what he held. Deep pools and dappling, the rush and plunge of bright quick water on the stones. He'd washed him clean as dawn, walked naked in his old clean shirt. Grass at his ankles, wind stirring in his wet-combed hair, already lifting from its douse. A sparkling dancing day, a drying day. A day for playing hob. Wild thyme and trout, he thought: he'd lie and tickle.
He came to Thea, sitting in a circle of great stones, on one had fallen, at the green hub of the wheel of Cloud. Its nave, whence it breathed. Old stones, they were, and worn fantastical: wind-gnawed and water-cavey, flawed and rippled with the frosts. White stones, whorled with mosses. They'd not mown here. Would not: had left them whitelands to the wandering sheep.
Thea swung her heel and sang, like any shepherd's lass.
"A lovegift,” said Kit, and held it out.
A cup of rushes, lined with cool green leaves of hazel, wet with dew. And brimmed with raspberries, most perfect ripe: as soft as foxes’ paws, and with their prick. Their flowers wreathing round. A dowry for a queen of Elfin.
"Ah,” said Thea. All her face alight with joy, as he'd not seen her. Taking them, she kissed him lightly on the wrist, just where his pulse beat blue. Where it was scratched with gathering, had beaded with bright blood. Love's bracelet. “Bravely won."
For that he'd pick them naked, from the inward of the thicket out. By Cockridden and by Childerditch, he would, were the brambles backside of the moon.
"Does it like thee, love?” he said. “That cup of imbers?"
"I shall give them to my eldest daughter,” said Thea. And she ate.
Ah, Margaret, that was firstborn of my spells, my new-created magic. I will tell it in thy blood, in time. Nine drops. No more.
The field was called Crawcrooks. High and aslant the fell it lay, a stony piece, the last to harvest. They had reaped them all: Burnt Ridding, where the oats were lodged, the Light End and the Long Dark, and round by Mawkins Hey, by Brockholes, Beggary and Witchy Slang, the Whirl Ing and the Wren Graves, and out by Owler Hag. A nine day's stint.
Kit bent to the sheaving. The barley stood white. When he closed his eyes, he saw it glittering still, but awned with violet black. It scarred his eyes with light. Another sheaf, a knot of straw. He swam in it. Straw bristled up his shirt-tail, down his neck. His arms and legs were torn and welted, scarified with straw. Weeds nettled; stubble pierced. Sweat sidled and stung. He ached with stooping, beaten down, astounded by the clangor of the sun. He thought it screamed at him, defiant; looking up, he knew it for a hawk. A stunning and a brazen noon.
Before him went brown Madlin, Ailie Whinlaw, Kat and Bartlemy and Noll Ned Hewlin, with laggard Ciss to trail the rake. They moved breasthigh against the barley, all arrayed in its armor of light. Crouching, they cut it, striking off with their sickles: moon against sun. In their wake lay the barley, shorn and withering. Kit gathered it in armfuls, tying them with bands of straw that Thea twisted of the greenest corn. Beside him and behind worked Gib and Nick Scarrow, sheaving and stooking. No one spoke. The sun quelled them. Still he heard the rasp and rustle of the knives in corn.
The barley was one element, of sun, earth, wind, and rain. A hoary world. Time stilled. Before him rose a whirring and a clack of wings: a covey clattering away. He saw a scutter and a lop of coneys, and at his feet the fumblings of a dawstruck mole. A-sway on the nodding corn, the gressops leapt and chirred. He saw the plash of poppies falling, and the blue-eyed blink of cornflowers, clean petticoats of bindweed. He saw the scurry of the denizens laid bare to light: whitespinners, jinny-long-legs, harvestmen. He felt the sooty velvet of the smutched ears of slain corn, black as my lady's mask. In the sundered corn, he found a mouse's nest, two short ears bound together in a daddle of straw, as deftly plaited as any kirn witch on a stack. There were ratlins within, rosebald, but willowing out with a fuzz. They blindly wormed and squeaked. No dam. No help for it. He stuck it like a bauble in his sunburnt hat, and bent to work.
Then Ailie cried, “Whet!"
The bottle went round, hand to hand. Kit stood and eased his back. Looked first to Thea. He stared out beyond the barley at the whiteleached sky, the moorland bruised with sun. He turned. All below him and behind lay fields, a piecework stitched with drystone walls. He saw the hardwon ploughlands, pale and stooked, all glittering as a card of pins. Beyond lay fold and fallow, and the tilting meadows, green with aftermath, called fog. Above, stood only sheepwalk, cropped and stony, and tumbling becks. He thought of throwing down his glove and lying naked in the rush of water.
"Noon,” said Ailie.
They'd an hour's halt. By ones and twos, they turned down the field, past the morning's thraves, sheaf leaning on sheaf, with another as henge. The men went flapping their shirts, their breeches with the knee strings undone. The women swung their sickles, in their broad hats and kerchiefs, their kilted petticoats, all urchined out with straw. Kit waited. Last of all came Thea, roundbellied in a borrowed apron, walking slow. Her hat was wreathed with poppyheads, how quickly bare: a few bright curving petals clung. He saw with a pang how sore her hands were, torn with spinning bands; how white her face. He said, “Thou wert to rest."
"Where's the penny, then?” she said.
He bent and stuck the mouse nest in a stook, carefully. It would not stand, being toppling heavy. “There's time. Shall we lie by the water?"
She looked up at the fellside. “I'd need wings."
"Rest then. Will I fetch thee water?"
"Kat's gone."
There was ale in the hedge. The reapers passed it round and drank; they sprawled and panted in the grass. Beneath an apron thrown over a hazelbush lay Madlin's baby, naked in a little shirt, beside his sleeping childish nurse. The cloth had been dabbled, for the cool; had long since dried taut, tented out on sticks. The shadows of the leaves moved lightly, dappled on the bairns. The baby waked and watched them, purse-mouthed, puzzling at air. “Ah,” said Kit, crouching, all alight. The pretty poppet. Madlin wiped her mouth, undid her freckled breast. The little quaily brat set to with jugging. Ciss's Jacky played at the field edge, making pisspies in the dust.
They ate their baggin: curds and onions and the odd green bite; oatcake, cheese and ale. Kit had got brambles from a hedge for Thea. They were green and seedy, like eating broideries of beads; a few, as red as beaded blood: the needle's prick. Nothing else yet ripe. But there were crowcrooks on the moor; the sleeping girl had picked her apronful. Her mouth was stained with them. They had them for their afters: mistblue and midnight berries, tart, and bursting winy on the tongue.
Off by the beck, Kat and Bartlemy were wading, splashing. They leapt and clashed like kids. He snatched at what she flaunted, held high out of reach; Kat lashed him with a bunch of whins. Whoop! cried the boy, and under he went. They saw her ranting on the stone, as gleeful as a goblin. Up he came behind her, and he caught her by the petticoats. A splash like young dolphins.
"By dark,” said Ailie, squinting at the glinty stubble and the dwindling standing corn. “Later n'r last year, by a farthing moon."
"It's coming on storm, I doubt,” said Gib.
"We's have it done by then. Kirn and all."
Ciss said, “Is't witch or wench this year?"
Ailie looked crows at her, but thumbed her sickle. “As it falls."
The sickles lay about the grass, a halfyear's moons. A reiving wasp came on, and darted at the fruit. Ciss shrieked and cowered in her apron. Sibb in the hedgerow woke, saying, “Is't won yet? Mam?” Kit fanned Thea with his rushy hat. She was whitefaced, and her burning hair was flat with sweat. The red hair rode her like a demon.
Ailie said, “Yer want to be lying down."
Madlin put her baby to the other breast. “Are yer lighter by Gossamer? When is't?"
At Hallows. They would never speak so in the harvest field; Kit knew that much. “Toward Lightfall,” he said.
"When's that i’ Cloud?"
"The Nine stars’ setting, that we call the Clew,” said Kit. “Nine Weaving?"
"Cob's Web,” said Ailie, nodding.
Nick Scarrow said, “I’ Slaith, we call ‘em Jack Daw's Seed.” His teeth showed whitely in his sunburnt face. He was a hireling stranger; he walked the harvest north. A marish man. He'd said they reaped with scythes there: not creeping women, but a sweep of men.
"Aye, they's a queer lot, out Law,” said Gib.
"Cunning wi’ tools.” Nick fleered at Thea's belly, with a sly and sidelong glance at Kit. “Will I thresh her for thee? Got a flail."
Hewlin sniggered.
"Aye, brock i't middle,” said Ailie. “It hangs."
Kit said nothing, twisting straws. Nick shrugged. “Then hang her from a pole for t'crows. I seen yer crowland mawkins, out i't rain. A waste o seed.” He sauntered off upfield, to sleep under the hedge. Kit threw away the knot of straw. Toward Whinside, the sky had turned; it shook like foil in the heat. The corn was yellower: not glinting now, but glowering. The sun was in it, brighter as it shrank.
Thea slept, and Madlin. Gib snored and Hewlin whistled; Ailie span hemp. The bluemouthed child made towns of pebbles. Ciss held Jacky in her lap and sighed. “At kirn feast, at Lowerstell, last year, they'd a fiddler til't dance."
Kit felt a whitecold sickle at his heart. The fear had grown in him that all the cunning of his hands was lost with Thea's art. He never spoke of it; he dreamed of ships. “Will he be coming?"
"Not up here, he won't. Up Annis’ arse."
Ailie said, “Not for thy sake, Mistress Lightheels."
"Never mind,” Kit said. “Do you rant, and I'll keep measure."
"Wi’ yer tongue?” said Ailie. “Or have yer browt a pipe?"
"Packed away,” he said soberly. “And the drum is broken."
Ciss went on, “A new tune? I do love a new tune."
"One I've made,” he said. “The oldest in the world."
Ailie let her spindle fall, the coarse grey thread spin out. “There's Daw's awd crowd wants nobbut catgut. If y'd turn a penny. Hanged on a nail these ten years since."
Kit's heart leapt up.
Ciss poked at the stubble. “There's not,” she said. “There was a beggar come, asking would I cross his palm. He telled my cards."
"No art i’ that,” said Ailie. “Thy fortune's i’ thy fork.” Down fell the spindle. “Wha tellt thee it were thine to give?"
"Caggy awd thing, wha'd want it?” Ciss pouted. “And I never turned me back, but when pot boiled ower. Asides, there's nowt else missed, I counted spoons and all. And I's to journey til a far country, and wed a stranger on a dapple horse.” She turned to Kit. “Happen if yer see him ont road, yer could ask for it back. A tinker fellow like a white craw."
Before he'd framed an answer, Kat came running down the fellside, with her long legs twinkling, bare and scratched. There was gorse in her hair. She'd forgotten the water jugs; but grinned, holding out a great bunch of white heather, haws, crawcrooks. “For t'kirn."
Ailie took and laid it by her sickle, in its curve. “'Twill a’ to do."
"So it better. Pains I taken wi't. Is there owt i’ yon poke?” Kat rifled for her share of bread and bit it, grinning. “Bat's sulking. He's soused."
Kit watching thought he guessed the riddle. In Lune, in Askrigg, he had seen the images of bristling corn in kitchens down the dale, tied up with rags, with flowers dried to dust. The last sheaf was the Witch, they said; they gave her to the wrens to peck, at Lightfast: so the old year ate of her, to make it new. He said, “In my country, they do bind the Witch with rowans."
"Does they?” Ailie said.
Kat wrung her skirts. “I'd not wonder. For it's red and all."
The Witch was eaten, and in turn she ate. Long since, the old wives said, they'd slain a child for her, an Ashes child: each spring a fall. They said the Old Witch lulled him in her lap. Kit knew her cradle songs. And still in Lune the countryfolk kept law: they stoned the wren and burned his crown, sowed blood and ashes with their hoarded seed, to slake the Witch. Kit saw her, squatting in the corn, with her tangled shock of hair, her scrawny shanks and long toes; her cheeks were of the reddest grain.
"O’ course,” said Ailie. “Them outland folk is strange. I's heard they shear owls."
Kit looked at Thea sleeping. He said, “There is a tale in Lune. They say the barley is the black earth's daughter, shut all winter in her dark. She rises. So they say."
Ciss said, “They's witches all i’ Lune, Gib says."
The spindle fell.
Kit closed his eyes. He saw the Maiden rising, running from her mother's ancient dark. A green girl, dancing in the wind; but long strings tethered her, white-wiry, to her mother's womb. They held her, ripening to stillness, caught and cut. Three servingmen with knives of stone, her mother's minions, struck her down; they beat her with their flails. Her lover looked for her among the sheaves. He took each Perseis in his arms, and she was Annis, hoar and silent. On her face, the shrouding spiders scurried at their work. They told her death in inches. So he laid her out amid the lykes of straw. His eyes were dry. But she was lighter of the sun, their child. He saw it, in its swaddling bands of straw, unslain. Kit saw it, even through his lidded eyes: a glory and a dazzlement. He slept.
Ailie glanced at him, scraw-boned as a rabbit, in his hempen shirt. “'Twill a’ to do,” she said.
To Luneward did they reap the Witch. Here in Cloud, his elsewhere, they did say the corn was lying in the Witch's lap; she combed his silver hair and he did sleep. And then her cronies crept on him, they cut him off at knee. Not one before another: all at once, they slashed. Not I, said each crone to her other. Nor not I. ‘Twas she, my sister slew him. They were each and all the moon, his end: her sickle shearing and her millstone trundling round, her old black cauldron gaping for his bones.
They shared him out as riddlecake, as round as the wheeling sun. They drank him and he made them giddy: for the turning of the sun is in his cup. As they drank, they played old bone games on their knuckles: moon reaps sun; sun mazes moon; and moon again wakes sun. They waked him through the winter and they scattered him: the earth his grave, his lap. His last sheaf was the Flaycraw. They hanged him on the Gallantry, to blacken in the wind and rain, to cry the crows. And so his green seed sprang.
Crows called in the harvest field. The bluemouthed child looked up. White crows. They dazzled in the sun; then fell like cinders, black. She watched. She looked around her, squinting. They were all asleep, her mam and all. She bent to her play again, moved pebble in their maze. The black crows quarrelled in the corn.
Kit woke hard. He saw crows rising in the field. His cheek was creased with straws; his arm, asleep where Thea lay on it. Drowsy and heavy, drenched with sleep, he rubbed his eyes and roused her. Ailie called them to the field. It shivered in the little wind; the dazed corn shook, it dazzled. To the east, the sky was sultry dark. They drank and hastened.
As Kit went to field, he met Nick Scarrow loitering by a stook: a burnt man, blue-eyed. He held a reaping-hook and smiled. “Word's out ont road,” he said. “Thy Lunish piece. Wilt keep her when she's dropped yon brat? I's a mind to chaffer."
"Crows eat thee,” said Kit.
"Crows gat me,” said Nick, and slouched off.
Kit slashed with a fury at the rankest corn. A neck, he thought. A neck. “Come up,” called Ailie, so he fell to binding, furthest out. He saw that Thea went among the women, safe enough. The work unknotted him, it combed. The women called and answered at their reaping, keeping measure.
Wha knocks at stone?
Poor Peg alone.
What's poor Peg lack?
A rag t'her back.
For salt and bread to lay her dead.
And candlelight to gan by night.
And what's she beg?
A shroud to lap poor Tom.
Poor Peg.
They were cutting in a long slow spiral now, coiled inward on the standing corn. They went sunwise.
Here, said the green witch. I am here.
And gone. She ran with a rustling, greenfoot. Slower now. She was heavy with the sun, he'd catch her. Then he took her in his arms. She turned, and she was hoary, spidery with years. A blue-eyed, bearded hag, ca'd Crawcrooks.
Now you can lay me down and love me, said the Witch. If you will.
So he did and he was rooted in her. He was Cloud. His name was Nightless and Bare Bones, Dearbought, Come by Chance. To the east, they called him Babylon, he bowed before the wind as Wiselack, Slobeard, Urchins Hey. To the south, his names were Long Nap, Little Knowe, Leap Hedges; to the west, Sheer Ash, Jack Nackerty, and Nine Tree Crowd; to the north, they reaped Cold Hallows, Hanging Crows, Hobs Graves. The cold wind played on him, the old tune always.
Then the slight moon and the dark of moon, the whitefaced breeding moon, came round him, bound him with their wreaths of straw. Their sickles ringed him like a running wheel. Then all at once, they slashed.
A clip! they cried. A kiss, a clip! He toppled in their arms.
"And so they ate thee,” said Whin. “All but bit t'wren had, and there's an end."
"No,” said Kit, smiling. “They did but taste.” Kisses and a crown of poppies. Hurts and cream. A sweet mouth, blue with berrying; a shrewd mouth, taking sweets. And Ailie's warmest of them all and fierce, the brooding of a merlin's breast. Then he clouded. “No, ‘twas Thea that the moon ate."
Autumn. Moving on. No work. The purple of the moors had gone from froth of jam to fleasblood, then from bruise to black; the trees, from blaze to ruin. Rimefrost on the swiddened heath took place of gossamers. The bracken and the bents were smithwork, smoldering in mist, and glinting, brazen in the strike of sun. And barren. While Kit could, he'd gathered haws, hips, brambles, sloes and rowans. Bags of nuts, his pockets full and Thea's apron. And one October afternoon, he'd found a milky way of mushrumps, penny buns, spilled out amid the leaves. They'd had a bit of mutton fat, just then. A feast. Their meal was long since giving out, their poke thin-flanked and dusty. It was poaching now. Hares, moorhens. Snared and spatchcocked. Aye, he'd looked at sheep, dared not. Not yet. He dared not hang and leave her.
Then it came to thieving. Which he did repent; yet cared not. Scant enough scourings up here on Ask Moor. Back of beyond. A wary and a sken-eyed folk, who cracked doors on long noses, clapped shut. High barred windows, hurtling dogs on chains. He'd eyed geese, but got none. Filched trifles. Neeps and kindling and blue milk. Odd stockings. A smock for Thea, that he'd had to crack, left cat-iced in a drying yard. Handfuls of oatmeal. Eggs left for hobs.
Thin beggary and thinner shoes. More eyes, more spies, more calling crows. More canting fellows on the road who turned and stared and mocked. Their bold-eyed trulls, who called at Thea, crying out, Brave rags with us. And hiring for thy hobby-horse. And then a broadside flapping at a crossroads: Lunish runagates, it said. A kitfox and her cull. So they'd left the high road for the hags and thickets, laying up on the moors, in folds rough-thatched with heather, ruined barns. And moving on.
Thea had changed: all bones and belly, swollen fingers. Swollen buds, yet flagging, fretted and embrowned. A side tooth lost with knitting bones. Younger and older both, she seemed: a crone who danced her poppet on her knee and lulled it, and a wizened imp. Great belly and her scabby knees, her cracked and bluenailed hands. Nor mortal, neither, but a changeling, with that pinched white face, that goblin's shock of hair. Yet her bonefast beauty stayed.
She was—not happy, no. Ecstatic. Danced like chestnuts on a shovel. Slept scarce at all. Since harvest, so he'd thought her sunstruck. Moonsick then. Now still, now restless as a cat in pattens, to and fro. Thrang as Throp's wife, and at nothing, all hours of the sun and moon. Waking and working. So she called it, her work. Poor lass. As good brew ale in eggshells.
"Is't witchcraft?” he had asked.
"Riddles,” Thea said.
He saw her, crouching in her ragged smock, intent on patterning. Ah, hallows on us, but she'd made some wondrous things. All fleeting, left behind to wind, rain, earth, as soon as made. Unharvested, unheld. She scattered.
Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones. A living hazel branch, lapped all in poppy petals, blood and branching. Leaves picked and shaded in a long streak on the earth: from green through fire to dead black; from ashes to greenwhite. Twigs in a round rattle. Labyrinths of leaves, bark, foxfire punk; or drawn in rime. Spirals of cracked pebbles, scratched white with another. Cubbies of sticks. Snailings and green horns of leaves, or burnished brown as copper: stitched with thorns and plaited in one endless coil and spiral, nestled in the earth. Leaves laid round nothing, bright and brighter toward the O. The same, with pebbles, white and whiter round abyss or origin.
One day he'd found her wading in a beck for more smooth stones, her apron full. In frost. Wet through and blue and shivering. And would not come with him until he'd waded in.
A night and day spent weaving stalks, an airy web of them, infilling all the crook and curving of a great low bough.
And in brief snow, a ball of it, built round and pierced by sharp small living wood. A ball that rolled its own maze, green laid bare; that rounded on its journeying.
O ever and alas, my Thea. O my dearest girl, my love.
Stark mad.
Ah, Margaret, I did make new heavens of the earth. Cast out of that cold sky in which my lucid soul was stringed, I did undo myself, redo: not Thea of the braided hair, but tangly Thea, tattery Thea, Thea of the grubby knees who crouched and plaited in a tinker's petticoats. I was inventing a new magic, for the old was lost with my virginity, with my immortal maidenhead. Oh, I was changing, changing fearfully; yet rounding with thy whiteheart self was Thea: we were sisters, twinned like cherries on a stalk.
O that was ragged bliss, that autumn. What I put my hand to, twisted of itself. Beyond astonishment, I did and did. Would lie but barely in the white of dawn. Wake new-inspired. Rise and work, outdoing what outdid the last, and of that latest making least again, transcending old with new. O Margaret, had I but lived, I would have lived so still: that whirling joy, that weaving steady hand.
Carriwitchets, Kit would say.
He'd come and go and bring his hard-won sticks of firing, his stock of provender, prigged rags; would sit and watch. Would coax me, bid me eat or sleep. I felt him sometimes at my shoulder: awed, exasperated, fearful. Dawning with delight. He kept the horn of leaves until it crumbled into dust.
I worked in what I had to hand, could gather. Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones. All found, unbound and scattering after. I was profligate as frost, as fern. As autumn, lavish, that does set a tree, a wood of trees, ablaze: a thousand thousand tongues to speak one word. As curious as nature's self, whose rarest work is secretest, embow'ring stars within bright clouds of stars, and seed in seed.
It was the raspberries began it.
In that cup of imbers did I spell thy blood: nine drops that would unbind my lady's will of thee. Set time going in her very stronghold. Yet I made no breach for thee in her shrewd hedge, but set a riddle for thyself alone. I would not have thee ride another's soul away. Walk barefoot, bloodfoot, if needs must: not use another creature, no, not Morag's dog, as I did Kit.
For the rest, ‘twas winding spells, thyself thy clew. End and journeying and end, all rounded in a ball. Thine A and O.
Yet was I naked to the sky. I had no studied craft, no witchery, against my mother's furies, that would fall and rend. No roof.
In weaving of the garland, I had whispered secrets with that seely witch, that green unhallowed Malykorne. No hallows until hallows, she had said. As she, so I would be unhoused until her sister waked and hunted. Annis. If I could but win to Hallows—
So it came to stones. I strove, as Kit did, only to go on, to live and keep us until then. I had a garnet ring to stand for thee, that was a child's. I wish thou couldst have had it. Eight stones clustering about a ninth, a knot of seeds of blood. Much like the pomegranate I once found, that split and spilt within my hand. The riddle ring for Kit. And for myself, a ring like rain on gossamer, like cobwebs bright with dew. Nine Weaving. With my absence in't, the stone of Perseis I'd lost. Not wandering, but a falling star: astonishing and gone.
Her rings were woven in her fantasies. Her trash. One slid along a blade of grass, a small ring for her fingertip, a knot of drops of blood; another dangled from a scarlet thread, like rain in gossamer.
"Thea. Are there others?"
"Three. I have them safe.” And showed her hand.
She would not give them over, though he begged and ranted, reasoned and cajoled, ah, coaxed her as he would a moonsick child to leave her toys. Her babywork. Alas, her wits waned even as she rounded. A greensick girl, and breeding. “Thou'rt worn, dear heart, beyond thy strength. Shouldst have a featherbed, a woman by thee. Physick."
"Wilt take them of me sleeping?"
"No,” he said. “Not ever.” And he came and knelt by her, he stroked her urchin head, he rubbed her nape. Inside his shirt, thrice-knotted round his wrist, the serpent of his cunning sleeked and shone. What's done is done, he thought. I rue me of that cheat. “Ah, that undoes."
He wanted her assent.
"For thine own sake, Thea."
Silence. And the twist and glittering of toys.
"Aye, scatter stones at scarecrow brats, leave none for thine own child."
Thea sat back on her heels, smudged her brow with her muddy wrist. “Ah, it comes."
Or softly, with his hands clasped round her belly. “Plum and stone.” A rippling, as the round girl dived, down-dolphined in her eggshell ocean. “Sweet my love, thy lass wants nurture. Curds and cream. And swaddling. Thou hast not a clout for her."
At last, beyond all patience, starved and crazed with fear for them, he cracked her fist, uncurled her fingers from her hoard. Stone inward, she had worn them. Wore their imprint still, like Annis’ kiss.
She had not cried out. He stood appalled; yet could not stay at that: put down the rings, caress the stone-bruised hand, so rudely forced. Could not undo.
"Thea?"
"As it must be."
He went out.
The door was warped with rain, white-molded. Margaret pushed until it gave upon an empty room, a tower that a storm had wracked. Bare muted walls, smashed glass; and in the naked window, for the first time, sea-blink. O. For a time she gazed at it and wondered; then she turned. Naught else but a daw's nest down the chimney, scattered sticks and trash. She bent and stirred it; she unwove. Smashed eggshells. Sticks and mutes. A key. A pebble. And a bent black ring. She thumbed it, rubbed it in her apron, peering at the outworn letters. This way and that in the wintry light. All gone but a word. Lightwode.
A voice in the air said, “Margaret."
That voice she knew; had heard it, ravelled with the wind, the sea. Not always. Since her doll was burnt, her dark-browed lulling nurse—O Norni—taken to her death. ‘Twas now and nowhere, like a gossamer, at first: a glint and gone. Was now her galaxy. Her ground. As tangled in her thought as roots in earth, that flower seldom, yet inhere. But never until this aloud. Is't you?
"Thy daemon. Thou hast found the last, the lost star of the Nine, and overlooked. The one too quick for the eye."
Dusk. Late autumn, toward Hallows. Headlong on the road between Cold Law and Soulsgrave Hag, Kit hurtled. Three rings clenched in his right hand, thrust deep within his pocket; shame and fury at his heels. He knew not where he went. To Annis. Or to town. What town? Blind desperate, and pinched with argument and care, intent as a cat at kindling, he knew not where he was. The same place, always, the faster he ran. Round went the millstone, and over turned the wheel. No bread, she has no bread. I had to. Anything they'd get. Bread, firing. One now, the others one by one. Bread, firing, a baby's coats. Ah, fool, a flock of sheep, a sheepwalk. Fell and mutton, fleece and milk. He saw their lass run barefoot on the sward. Red hair, like fires on the hills. And round again: no bread.
He was at the crossroads before he saw the gang. A cronying of crows. Too late, he was among them. A slouching spade-faced man, whiteheaded, all in black, greenblack and broken swagger, like a swung cock at a fair. A gallows poll, that head, like hemp unravelling. Three trulls a-dangle at his heels. They fleered at Kit; they jostled. Cawed. A black mort, with a blue and scornful eye, her breasts at her kerchief bare and bruised. “Here's game,” she said. “A goslin,” said a pale and sluttish drab. Pissed petticoats and trodden shoes. And Maudlin-drunk, or mad. He swung. A ranting, taunting, roaring girl, a striding and a ride-moon doxy in a soldier's cap and feather, with his long sword buckled at her side. Red shoes.
Tighter still, he clenched his hand. His knife. He'd left his knife.
He made to pass by.
"Lightwood?"
Kit walked on.
"Heard tell thou was asking at Jack Daw.” Almost, he turned. “For a fiddle."
Daw had it out for him; he drew the bow. And at that wauling sound, Kit's soul was snared. He turned and looked. Old and curious, far older than his own had been; rubbed shining as a fallen chestnut, newly split from its green burr. It had a carven woman's head. He yearned for it. A trade, he told himself: not bread but years of bread. A livelihood. He slipped two rings from off his fingers, deep within his coat; held out a third. White-gemmed. Like fleeces heavy with the dew. “Fair trade."
"What's this? Cuckoo-spit?” said Daw. “That, thy long knife, and a knock at thy vixen. I's a fancy to red hair."
"White-faced bitch is breeding,” said Cap-and-Feather. “Maggot spied."
"She's a tongue,” said Black Mort. “Can use it."
Jack Daw fleered. “I like a brave bellyful. Stir pot wi’ my flesh hook and mek brat dance."
Kit spat. “Crows eat thee. Cock and eyes."
"They do,” said Jack Daw, smiling.
Kit tried to shoulder past, but the doxies mobbed him, like crows at an owl by daylight. Jack Daw plucked at the fiddle. “Thou has strings for it, and all.” His fingers at its neck and belly. “Owt else in yon placket?” Kit's face gave him away. He knew it. Daw twanged a string. “Done, is it? Say, two rings.” He watched hope flicker. “Two rings. And thou serve yon nest o crows—ah, they gape for it. Now. Here. I like a play."
"No,” said Kit. “No more."
The drabs were all about him, taunting, lifting up their petticoats. White belly and black joke. Craws wi’ beards. Against all his will, Kit felt a stirring. And a sickening. Hobthrust rose and danced. He stared. A black scut, and a shitten fleece. Old ling. Rustbrown, and the red blood trickling down by her knee.
A cruel hand caught his wrist, bent backward. Wried his arm round his back until the socket started and the cold sweat sprang. No breaking Jack Daw's hold. Sinewy as yew, he was, inexorable. The voice was wasp honey. “Come, then. A bargain. For t'sake o that night's game thy dam once gave me. Salt and sweet, insatiable. A blue-eyed witch.” Doubt and horror. Daw touched his cheek, mock gently; bent and whispered in his ear. “How cam'st thou by my face?” Kit swayed. In that brief slackening, the old man knocked him backward, winded, to the ground. Cap-and-Feather pinned his arms and Daw knelt on his shoulder, set a knife across his throat. “Where's thy vixen earthed?"
Clack! goes the old year and the new year tumbles down.
Kit turned his face. Shut his lips.
"By my lady's name, it will go ill with thee."
Skirts about her waist, the Black Mort straddled him; she squatted and undid his breeches flap. “Here's a knocking i't cellar. Here's a bird flies up."
Pissabed danced wildly, she whirled and wobbled in the road, like a slowing, sleeping top.
Cap-and-Feather chanted. "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds..."
"Caught i't furze,” said Black Mort. She spat between thumb and fingers. Laid on.
Kit gasped.
"Although he is little, his family is great..."
"Wring it neck,” said Pissabed.
"Darkmans and glimmer,” said Jack Daw. “My lady bids. Then do."
A voice from somewhere cried, “Hang craws!"
"Craws!” answered from the hills. And all the dogs of Soulsgrave took it up.
"Cut,” said Jack Daw. “Prig and run."
Crack! Blind lightning blast, a whirl and burring through his skull.
No more.
Kit woke, rolled naked in a ditch. Fiddle's wracked, he thought. Where's here? Himself was lash and scratch and throbbing, ice and fever, and a dizzy thud behind his eye. Dragged through whins, he thought. And tumbled down a bank. That green girl at my bow's end. At the dance. That horseman? His hand moved gingerly. No, his good hand—one was lame. Cracked bagpipes in his side. A broken crown. Wet blood on his mouth. Not his. From Cap-and-Feather. From her other mouth. Remembering, he retched and strangled. Nothing in his gut to puke.
Nothing left.
No clothes.
No rings.
And at his wrist, no braid of Thea's. Sharper still than all his hurts, he felt that ring of absent fire.
Gone.
Whin said in the dark, “Went naked back?"
"I robbed a scarecrow of his coat.” A clear night mocking him. The Hanged Lad ranting on Cold Law. As naked as himself. They'd left him with one broken shoe, in haste. Derision.
"So yer done that. Ta'en rings."
"I did."
"Lost braid."
"I did.” That desperate searching in the dark. He'd had a crazed hope it was somehow lost, not stolen for an end. That he would find it, tossed aside as naught. In a small voice, he said, “I didn't tell her. That I had it. That it was gone."
"Round thy wrist? Had she not see'd it?"
"No. I thought. We'd not—we hadn't lain together. Not since harvest.” He would not force her crazy innocence, not take his will of her. And yet he had.
Long silence.
"At the stones,” said Kit. “At Imber Beck. That kiss she gave me was the first time. Of her will.” He drew one ragged breath. “That other, freely. Not her love.” He was crying. “One other time. The last. I never knew it was. I never knew."
Waking in the night. Hard ground. And Thea with her back to him, within his curve, and cradling his hand against her breast. Like a child her doll. He felt his ring there, on a thread; he felt her quick heart tap and tap, like a branch at a windowpane; he felt the round drum of her belly thud and kick. She smelled of smoke and Thea. Not asleep.
She spoke, not drowsily, but low. “Kit. I do love thee. Know that."
Blood in my lady's place. Blood on her smock. It would not come out.
Margaret hurried through the dark and winding hallways, down toward her room. No sanctuary there, no more than in a hare's slight form, the impress of her crouch; but licit. Blood, suddenly. A spattering of drops, no more. Herself she'd washed and washed, no trace or tinge of it was left. Flung the water from her sill. But her smock. Would find her out. Bury it? The dogs would out. Burn it? No fire but in my lady's study. Up the chimney? Blood will out. Ah. Cut herself and mingle. Knife. She had a knife.
Softly now. She lifted the latch.
Morag and my lady waited with a rod of juniper. “Straying, and thy book undone. Come, Madam."
Margaret curtsied, rose. “My lady."
"Closer, girl. I am no basilisk."
The hand with its great ring held the face: a sere unshaking hand; a white face, like a scrap of paper to be written over, like a mirror to be filled. “There is something of my daughter in you."
"Aye, the whore,” said Morag.
"Alike in straying,” said my lady. Still she held her gaze. “Chastise her."
"Thy vixen, Madam.” And when Margaret made no move, the servant took her bedgown, pushed her smock to her armpits. Held her wrists and bent her back across the kist, her new breasts and her belly all disclosed, a gibbous moon. Thrust her legs apart.
Slow blood.
My lady spoke, a cold still fury in her voice. “And who undid that knot?"
Morag said, “Not art, I'll warrant, but the worm in her. Your glass is carrion."
"Is of my adamant. A blank, but that I grave her with my icon and my law. And offscum else: yet will transmute."
"Or spoil, as did her dam. Your poppet. Waiting on the stars."
Whiter still, my lady's face. “It will be done, and presently. By this moon's dark."
A catechism then.
"What was thy mother?"
"Your daughter,” Margaret said.
"A whore. Which is?"
She knew not. “One who strays?"
"'Twill do. Puts carrion in Annis’ place. Which is?"
"We name it not."
"That errant part, wherein thy mother did betray me."
"Crow's fee,” said Morag, pinching. “And the vixen's earth."
Margaret endured. The crow's contemptuous, efficient hands; my lady's avid eyes. And even in her dread and terror, sick with shame, she thought, Like Thea?
Then the rod, and no more thought.
They left her on the floor, amid the fallen needles, the scattering of twigs.
My lady turned at the door. “It is time thou learned thy glass."
A key snicked in the lock.
For a long time she lay weeping in her dabbled smock. Blood with hidden blood.
No voice. She heard no voice.
Kit hurried, huddled in his flapping coat. It would snow by dark. Black moor, white sky; but knit, the whiteness tangled in the ground as rime, the blackness branching up as trees. A scant wood, leafless now. Sloes, rowans, all gone by. Firing. He bent to get sticks. It still was light; but stiffening towards dusk. Ravenwards. And Thea waiting, pacing in their roofless shieling, by the ashes of a hearth. She made cairns of stones. She did and she undid. He dared not leave her; they would starve without. No sticks to burn; no bread. A handful of dampish meal, half acorns, bitter as the wind.
The braid was gone. He saw it glinting everywhere.
There. In that bush. He stumbled toward it.
Gone.
He stood. He would have wept, if he'd remembered how. It was all too much, too much. He stood. Dazed, cold, defeated, sleepless, starved, lightheaded, lousy. Fizzing with lice. His feet recalled him, white cold, wet; he'd blundered. Cat ice.
Looking down, he saw a tump in the marshy ground: a spring, turfed over, housed with three great stones. Kneeling, he touched the lintel of the low door, lichened; found the blind runes graven in the rock. Help us, he said to darkness, spinning out a thread of silver. Lighten her, my love. He touched the water. No one. In the wood beyond, a stormcock sang. No solace here. He rose. On a tree hung knots of rags, frayed, faded to the blue of a winter sky. Another sky, some other now or then, caught here. And in among the ravellings of sky, a rag of iris. Thea's scarf.
Kit. Margaret. Ah, you do not hear me. She is gone until her time comes round; she cannot let you in. No hallows anywhere. Not yet.
At the corners of their shieling, raised on cairns, Kit saw her barricade: spiked crowns and spirallings of ice, frail caltrops. Morning stars. He dropped his sticks and ran. From wall to ashes, wall to wall, he found her, pacing and clenching. Blood on her lip. Then something wrenched her, as a laundress would a rag.
"Thea. How long—?"
She caught his sleeve, his coat, as on a breaking ship. Another wrench and shudder. “Kit.” Like burning wax, her face: it warped and ran. Almost Thea leapt from it, as flame from a candle, blowing out. “Undo it."
"Love?"
"Undo the knot,” said Thea. “That braid you took of me. Undo it."
Still he stood.
"To let the child be born. I cannot lighten else. I cannot meet them."
O sweet hallows on us. “Gone,” he said.
"What?"
"Taken. Gone."
"Ah no.” A great cry, twisting.
"Thea—"
She whirled on him, white-fiery. “Run. Now."
"I'll not leave thee. I will not."
"For a woman's help. I die else.” Wrench and leap. “Now. Get thee hence."
He turned at the threshold. “O my heart's love."
"Go."
No time, no time.
He ran.
Whin dreamed of ravens. An ill-chancy dream, an omen. Then a telling. A trance. She saw a girl still barely living, filthy, naked on the icy ground. Her childbed. Saw the stubble of red hair, the new milk seeping from her breasts. The glazing eyes. A witch stood watching her, a corbie perched upon her hand. She stroked its beard, she ruffled it; it preened the bracelet at her wrist, of braided fire. Ah, the sweetest morsels for my chuck, my Morag, said the witch. The crow's fee and the eyes. Down it flapped, it picked the tidbits. Still the girl breathed, the blood ran, the death cry rattled in her throat. Then the witch called down her crows. They clustered at the bloody womb. They tore.
Whin woke yelling.
Still Kit slept on. He twitched and whimpered. Whin sat up and shook with rage. She cursed the raven and the witch; she cursed the knife that loosed the child, the braid, the shears that cut it. Cursed her master mistress Brock who had entangled her in this atrocity, to see and see and see. Change nothing.
Then up she got, and ran down to the shingle, to the water's edge. She'd drown the soulbag, wash the ashes from her face. Walk inland. She would be no more death's journeyman. Running, she tore her rings off, death by death, to hurl them in the sea.
Brock stood between salt water and the strand. “I'd not do that,” she said.
"Could yer not have let her live?” cried Whin. “Not see'd to it that she went wi’ child, smick smack, afore she'd much as bled? Thou meddlesome. And all for nowt. A tale of Ashes."
"It's done, and long since done,” said Brock.
"And nowt to do wi’ me."
"And all to do.” The sea swashed, swashed. “There's bairn."
O thank hallows. There, a woman with a lantern. Hale and canny, she looked: brisk, in pattens and a hood. Kit caught her apron. “My lass. Please. Needs a woman by her.” And she raised her candle, looking through him with a smile would scoop apples, a shankbone smile—I know two of that—and turned away. Up the fell.
He ran after. “Pity on us. For the love—"
Another crossed the trod. A sonsy girl, a goosedown girl and slatternly, who bore a flat candlestick, as if she tumbled up to bed. “Miss—? Can lead me to a midwife? My lass—” She blinked and giggled, turned away.
Another and another still. All with candles, all the girls and women of the dale end, lating on the hills. Now there, now elsewhere in the cloudy dark, as if they danced Nine Weaving. Round they turned like children in a game, a-bob and wheeling, in and out, through bushes and through briars. They were seeking with their candles—lambs at Hallows? Birds’ nests? They were sought.
Hide fox, and all after.
As in a dream, Kit ran from one to the next, imploring, and they turned from him. None would speak. They shook their heads: some smiling, some pitying or shocked or scornful; some averting their eyes.
A weeping man, half naked, in a Bedlam coat.
One tossed a coin.
A knot of them, their backs turned. Gossips. Blindly, hopelessly, he touched a sleeve. “I beg of you—” A stone. A ring of them, like crones in cloaks. But one stone turned, the hood fell back. It was a woman with a darkened lantern, waiting, gazing out: like a sailor for landfall, like a scryer at eclipse. He was a gull at her masthead, a dog at her skirts: no more.
Down the fell, a light went dark. Another, upwind, and a girl knelt, doing up her shoe latch, looking round. And yet another, pinning up her hair. All waiting.
One by one, the candles all went out.
But one.
A child this woman, sheltering a dying candle in a tin. She brooded fiercely on it, willed it. In its doubtful glow, her face was rapt and shining. Awed. Her first time on the fells? Her flame lurched sideways, righted, leapt again. The last?
From up the fell, a voice called, Ashes! We's Ashes!
O the last. As her candle flickered out, she whirled for joy.
Another and another voice took up the cry, like vixens, greenfire in their blood. Hallooing to the dark of moon. Ashes! They were running now, a rout of women, whirling torches in the kindled dark. And still the child wheeled, giddy, in among the stones, the only silence. Ashes!
And alone, but for the ragman. She took to her heels.
I tell this to the air; yet I must speak.
My mother fed me to her crows, she burned my bones and scattered them; my braided hair she keeps. By that bright O of fire did she call me back from life to Law; by those shrewd knots torment me. She would not undo. Seven weeks she watched me naked, travailing from Hallows until Lightfast eve; then Morag's knife did let thee crying from my side, and I was light.
Margaret knelt and pried a stone up in the hearth; she dug. From under it, she took a ring, a clew of thread. A key.
Turning back from the stones, Kit saw the fire at their fold and ran, calling, stumbling on his whiteblind feet. He saw the ravens falling from the sky. One, another, turning women as they fell. They were clear as night, and starless; where their wings beat back the thronging air was cloud and fire. As they touched the earth, it whitened, widening from their talons of the frost. They shrank as small as stones.
Kit fell. A thrawn hand caught him, and another, and a throng. Horned feet kicked through him like a pile of leaves; they scattered him like sparks. “Out!” he cried and struggled, held and haled. A torch was thrust at his face. There were witches all round him: men and crones, in black and rags of black, and goat fells, stiff with blood. They bore a cage of thorns and withies, hung with bloody rags and hair, with flakes of skin: the palms of children's hands, like yellow leaves, a-flutter.
Empty.
"Here's a fool,” said one, a warlock.
"A soul,” another said. A hag, all pelt and bones. The soulstones clattered in her hank of hair, with knops of birdskulls, braided through the orbits.
"A soul, a soul,” the guisers cried.
Kit fought against their hands. “You let me go."
"You let us in,” they chanted. “Let us in your house of bone."
And a man like a staghead oak, a blasted tree, cried, “Room!"
A tall witch with a great black fleece of hair flung back came striding through. It was a man, pale and sneering in a woman's robe, his strong arms naked to the shoulders, dark with blood. Death's midwife. Or a blasphemous Ashes?
"Annis!” they cried. “Annis wakes."
He prodded Kit with his staff. “What's this? A blindworm?"
"For your breakfast, my lady."
"For your bed."
"'Tis Ashes’ bawd."
The stick against his throat had silenced him, half strangled him. He saw a black wood rising; it was leaved with faces. Thronged with crows.
"Bags I,” said a voice.
The crowd parted. Kit saw a figure in a leathern cap, a coat of matted fleece. Ashes of juniper, a cloud of ashes at his eyes and lips. It whispered in his ear. “Thou's not to die for her,” said Brock. “Thy lass did say."
"No,” he tried to say. His mouth was full of ashes, he was blind with snow.
"Now,” said Brock. “An thou will.” And kissed his mouth.
He felt a tremor, a wind in his bones. She covered him like snow. Beneath the sway of stars, he felt the green blades pierce his side, the awned heads bow and brindle in the reaping wind. A sickle gathered him, a sheaf. Time threshed. His chaff was stars, his bones were blackness, strung and shining. A sword, a belt of stars. A crow called.
Then he knew no more.
Hallows morning.
Kit awoke on the hillside in the falling snow, all white and shades of white, but for the black unkindly stones. After a time, he could stand, could hobble. Halt and dazzled with the snow, and inch by crippled inch, he made his way back to their shieling. Knowing what he'd find. Dread knowing.
Gone.
And more than gone. Pulled stone from stone, and torched and trampled in a great wide circle, salt with snow. Cold out. All her toys.
"Go,” she'd said. And so he'd gone.
He would have died for her.
He fell to his knees where their hearth had been, the ashes at the heart of ashes. Nothing left: all taken, lost, betrayed. But there, a something like a wren's dulled eye, its dead claw, in the snow. A ring. Not hoarded, so not lost. He scratched for it, and found the other; turned them in his fingers. Blood and tears.
Margaret knelt amid cold ashes, drawing mazes on the hearth. They'd left no book to her, no ink, no candle: whips of juniper to gaze on, and the drowsy wine. My lady's glass, which was black adamant: she could not break.
And so she did what she had left to her: undid. Ate nothing they had given her, but dwindled out an orange she had kept, a heel of bread; drank snow from her window sill. She worked by scant starlight at the puzzle of her cage. Scrawled figures with a stick of charcoal; rubbed them out, redrew them, all in black upon the hearthstone, what was white with snow without: the labyrinth of yew and stone. If she did journey, she could not rub out.
So then: for her door, she had the jackdaw's key; then came the maze she would unriddle and the hedge of thorn, the wintry sea. The world. Beyond that, she could see no way. A ship? But only to have touched the sea, washed Morag from her skin; to glimpse a world unbounded by my lady's walls. She set herself to reach the sea. The garden was configured as the starry sky; that much she knew, had read her book beside the white girl crowned with leaves, with leaves and flowers in her stony lap. And water running down and down her face: it wept for her, who could not weep. Bound Ashes, in a box of yew.
She knew now what she was; what she was for. A hole to fill, said Morag truffling. Naught else. Yet had my lady smiled and pinched. A limbeck. See, how sweetly she distills. Had kissed: how scornfully, and yet had lingered. It was almost a caress. The bracelet burned against her skin. I have sent to fetch thee a rare dowry. Dishes for thy maiden banket; jewels for thy chain. Thy first shall be thy father's soul.
For a long time afterward, Margaret had sat, and turned and turned the hidden cards.
O the Nine, ah yes, the Nine would come and carry her away. She heard the clatter of their wings; she saw them, children of the rising light, like swans. Her heart rose up. Being mute, she could not cry to them; they lighted, children as they touched the earth, but a glory of their wings about them, like a snow. Sister, come with us, they said. I will, said Margaret's heart, but have no wings. No ship. And turned it up: that Ship whose mast is green and rooted, flowering as stars. And then bright Journeyman, the thief.
A rattle in the keyhole. A black stick on the floor. She'd risen to it, curtsied, with the cards behind her: all in haste. But three had fallen from her lap like leaves; their tales had withered at my lady's glance. See, thou hast overlooked the Tower. That takes all. The witch had stooped for it, mock-courteous, and held it to her branching candle; dropped it burning to the floor. And which next shall I take? Thy cockboat? Or thy nest of geese? Her gaze schooled Margaret's; they would bind her if she flinched. Thy choosing, Madam. It will make a game.
The Hare. My lady's wrist was bare, no braid.
Aha, the Master Lightcock. Thou'rt seed of his, didst know? Shall watch him burn. And my sweet crow shall have his stones, to bait her dogs withal. Then she had signed to Morag with the box. Undo.
And after they had gone.
It seemed that someone else took over, swift and secret, while the old lost Margaret sat, dreaming in a drift of cards. Thou timorous, thou creeping hodmandod, she thought: thou snail that tangles in her trail of dreams. Draw in thy tender horns? Thou liest between the thrush and stone. That other self, herself, had thought of riding, light a horseman as the moon; her mantle of the flying silver, fleeting on the wind. But now her new shrewd voice said, Shoes and stockings, stout ones. In that room with the sea-chests. Thou needs must walk. Will need the way.
And so she sat, and drew what she remembered of the labyrinth, the doors.
"No ship,” said Kit. “When thou didst come on me, and take me up from drowning, there had been no ship. No storm. I'd gone in after her."
"I know,” said Whin. “But thou was not to follow her. Thy lass did spell for thee."
"Not drown,” said Kit. “I know. I am for hanging in yon braid. That I did twist myself."
"What for?” said Whin. “Thou's never telled."
"To hold fast.” Kit clasped his hands, unclasped. “Ah, not to Thea—what I loved in her I held like moonlight in a sieve, I riddled rainbow. ‘Twas a falling star, that nowhere is and yet is light. No, what I braided was a face she turned to me, a mask: that lady who did run away with me, did overturn her fortune for my sake. Mine own. The moon that turned and turned from me, yet bent within mine orb. Thought I. So kept that vanity, that she did shear. At first.” A silence. “And after, I would keep myself, as I had thought I was. Would be. That Kit who called down witches with his airs. Not Thea's bow-stick, but a one who played.” He bit his lip; looked up. “And she owed me a fiddle, I did tell myself. No matter; yet it rubbed. And at the last—moon blind me—I could not endure to tell her of my folly."
Whin passed the cup. “What now?"
"If not for Thea's sake, yet I will die, as all must die. And I would live ere then.” A something lightened in his face. “And see our lass."
Asleep. Thy cards lie scattered on the floor, in knots and wheels, and painted gatherings. I cannot turn them. There, the Ship and the Rattlebag, the Hanged Lad and the Nine. Burnt Eldins. Ashes. And the Crowd of Bone: that fiddle that the old year plays of Ashes, of her bones. They strung it with her long bright hair. Itself and all alone, it sings, its one plaint always: of her death. Sings truth in riddles.
In a tale, thou Margaret wouldst brave my lady, even in her glass. Wouldst find my nine bones that were left; unbraid my hair and string the fiddle for thy father's hand to play. And thou wouldst dance to it, his daughter and my death. And down the witch would tumble, burning, in her iron shoes.
But I have sung my tale. Unstrung myself. Have told out all my thread but this, the endknot: they were always one, the braid that bound us and the strings that spoke.
Thou canst not hear the ghost now, Margaret: thou art child no more.
But thou art Margaret, thyself: no witch's blade can rive that knot intrinsicate we knit for thee, of love and pain. Thou art the daughter of my heart's blood and my soul. Bone of my bone, and heartstrings of my heart. To Kit I would restore thee: not his fiddle but my heart, translated. Not for him to play, but thou to dance for him, to sing thine own tale always, light and dark.
"So,” said Whin. “Yer off."
They stood by her coble, sunk in snow to the black rim, as a mussel shell in sand. A white morning, toward Kindle Wake.
"I'll set thee on,” said Kit.
Together, they dug out her boat and laded it; they pushed it down the blackweed shingle, salt and frost, to the water's edge. A wave crisped his boot. But only one. The tide was turning outward.
They clipped hard, clapped back and shoulder.
Kit said, “Thou ask at my daughter."
"And thou at my son,” said Whin.
"I will that. Farewell."
Then they pushed her black coble into the sea. As it slipped, Whin leapt the gunwales; locked oars. It rode the swell, it hove. The next wave took her out. Kit watched from the shore. Whin rowed easily, strongly, turning only just to check her heading. Luneward. And to Law.
So they parted.
Kit took up his scant gear, new and raw. A knife, a cloak, a cookpot, and a flint and steel. Grey worsted stockings and a harden shirt. A stone in his pocket, with a leaf on it. He set out on his journeying; turned inland, in the snow.
I am walking, to the knees in earth: long-toed, reaching, rough of knees; gnarled wrists knotted, flowering at fingers’ ends. They see, though I am blind. White, wet, my petals fall and fleck—like moons, like childing moons—my cold black bark. My lap is full of snow. In winter do I bear the misselbough, the Nine, entangled in my crown.
I was Ashes.
I am rising from the dark, and rooted; I am walking from my mother's dark.
My green leaves speak in season, in their turn, unfolding word by word till all is green and silent, lost in green, unselved. The green is wordless, though it spells the earth, it sings the wind. Rooted, I dance, unbraided to the wind. And then by leaf and leaf, I turn, take fire and prophesy. They spill, a tale of leaves, of endless leaves. My green is no one, everywhere, as wood as love; my age is selving. In my nakedness, I crouch and listen.
See, where I am split, my belly seamed. A curved blade caught me; I was reft. Yet I do bear, I ripen, plum and stone. They hang, my sloes, world-dark as winter nights, abloom with souls. They fall and sunder, worm and root.
I stand among a grove of girls. A garland, woven all of Ashes.
Touch my bark and I am elsewhere, though my lyke is earthfast, here and now. Break wood and I will burn. Do you see me? Now and nowhere, turning nowhere, telling light. But I am not my tongues. I rise with my sisters, woven in our dancing, scarved in light. We are pleached in an endless knot, an alley, in a cloud of stars: a hey as white as hag.
All ways led upward: not a door would let her to the wicket gate, the garden, to the maze that she would solve. She'd brought the clew to measure it; had sopped her manchet in the drowsy wine to brave the dogs withal. A hard frost glittering on snow: she'd hoped to leave small trace. Thin shoes, no mantle. She had only what was hidden left to take: the key, the clew, the ring. Her ravaged cards. Nine burnt.
No door. And higher still. A window? Could she get a wren's-eye view of it? Could draw it then. Thou mole, she thought. 'Tis black of night. Moondark, so my lady and her raven hunted souls, and thought she slept. How long until they came to wake her? Found her gone? Dread struck her like an ice-axe to the shattered heart. Go on, she said, in darkness. All among her shards. Old mole. ‘Tis nowhere here. Get on. Lightless, breathless with enormity, Margaret wound the stair.
She pushed through a last door, out onto the leads in snow. O heavens. Round she wheeled, within the greater wheel of stars.
The wood above.
That she had forfeited. Pasteboard and precious tawdry, turned celestial. All burning, unconsumed.
She'd never seen the stars at once; had learned them from her slit of window, from my lady's iron hoops, her brazen spheres. Her stones that hopped from perch to wire, dish to wire, like a cage of singing birds. But these were glorious: they flamed amazement in her eyes.
Giddy with the sky, she turned, until her breath had blinded her. Then she wiped her glazy spectacles, and stood and stargazed.
Knot by shining knot, she made them out—the Nine, the Hallows Tree, the Ship—yet wondered even in her wonderment. But why a Ship? Why not a ladle or a swan? Why not bare stars, themselves? And why Nine Weaving? There are stars in clouds of stars, as if I breathed on frost. And which is the lost star of the Nine, amid so many? She looked for the sisters, jumping edgewise in her slanted sight. Ah, she wished for those spectacles she'd found and left, that made the candle huge. They tangled in and out of focus, in a country dance, a hey. Five, a cloud of silver, three, four. Gone again.
And one bright planet threading through the maze. Like a knife round an apple, all askance. Or like a lantern through a labyrinth. O yes. Clasped hands flying to her lips: she bit them, so as not to cry out loud for joy. And ever after, when the Nine were named, she tasted rime on rough wool, and the oil of orange in her nails. Yes. The garden was the quickset stars. The key was errant: Perseis, and in her night house, at the wake of Souls. The Crowd of Bone. Those stars ascendant at her mother's birth.
She saw the way.
Down and round she ran, still downward with the falling spindle of the stairs, that twirled the heavens to a clew of light. That other chain, the necklace that she wore, broke loose in running, whirled and scattered on the steps. She left it as it fell. As later, in the time to come, she would outrun the world of her begetting, scatter it behind like leaves: her glass would crack my lady's heavens, would unstring the stars.
Margaret ran on.