When a star falls, we do say: the Nine are weaving. Look!The Road's their skein, that endlong from the old moon's spindle is unreeled. Their swift's the sky. O look! says Margaret. The children of the house gaze up or glance. The namesakes. Look thou, Will. Look, Whin. They stitch your daddy's coat. The twins, still whirling in the meadow, seem as heedless as the light, as leaves. Now one and now the other one, they tumble down and down the slope, lie breathless in the summer grass. His mantle's of the burning gold, says Whin; and Will, His steed is January. I'm to have his spurs.
Bright-lipped in her bower of meadow, imber-stained, small Annot gazes. She is like bright Annot fled; is like herself. I've counted seven for the Ship. Like cherrystones. I've wished.
What Nine? says Tom.
Why, sisters in a tower—see yon smutch of silver, where it rises? Back of Mally's Thorn?
He studies. Aye. And stars in it. Like kitlins in a basket.
Their house. It is a nursery of worlds.
Is't far? says Annot. Can I walk there?
Not by candlelight, says Margaret. 'Tis outwith all the heavens, sun and moon. I'll show thee in my glass. But she is elsewhere now, remembering the Road beneath her, and the heavens that her glass undid. Remembering the Nine, the sisters at their loom of night.
And now, as once they ever did, they cast the shuttles, swift as memory, to and fro; they weave the green world and the other with a mingled skein. Leafgreen, light and dark, the lifeblood, and that other thread too quick for seeing. All that's fleeting is their weft: the wind in grass, the wavespell where it meets the rippling sand. Cloud shadow on the corn. They weave the spindrift and the wreathing snow, the whorl uprising in the fallen leaves, the spiring of the flame. Whatever's here and gone. Breath, body, and that I that wakes to dream—sleaved out, as light in rainbow ravels into air. What they do undoes.
But Ashes tells the warp. My lady's daughter—aye, herself that walked the longways out of winter—she, and all that wear her coat. Free maids, that weave their thread with bones.
We are storied in their web. Not held: our shadows, not our selves inwarped. We dance above it, like the light on water, like fireflies aslant the summer grass.
Grey-cloaked, the skein of sisters wind the stair. Nine lanterns halo them, now mingling, now distinct; and in and out, like dancers in a dance. Wicksilver. At the sill, the eldest turns and lifts her candle, beckoning. Light spills through her fingers, stills her face. She draws her hood to shadow it. Without a word she turns from earth and swings the sightless door. No stair. And yet they mount on a spiral of sky, as if the faultless air were crystalline, were cracked. One by one, still climbing into air, they—
Sisters?
Rose and faded.
Air.
Earthbound, Margaret stood amid a silent throng, cloaked grey as ashes, emberless. The dancers banished from the dance, the earthfast stars. They look still toward morning and can find no stair.
O sisters.
Cold as stone, as silent.
Margaret woke amid a circle of grey stones and saw the spring stars fading into morning. Last and fairest, rising at the hem of day, she saw bright Perseis amid the Nine, with sleighting Brock, all tangled with a wraith of moon. One glyph: a riddle beyond rede, a rune of light. The stars at her nativity, her second birth. It dazed and dangled, like a cobweb set with dew; like a snarl of stuff from a celestial workbox. Her clew.
She gazed until it drowned in light.
A bird spoke, sleepily. And only then, she saw the wide world tilted at her feet. She was standing at the twelve winds’ nave: the fellies of the wheel were hills. All round her, shade beyond shadow, dusk and blue, lay Cloud. Too great to compass: she had never been unwalled. She laid a hand, a cheek, against rough stone to steady herself. O, she thought giddily, it is the sky below. She knew the charted heavens as she did her A and O; she had no map for this bewildering earth, but turned about her for a bearing. All unskied. She saw—not one Road but an interlace, an eddering of light. A maze. She saw a wood unrooted, floating in a lake of sky, of blue beyond the rainbow's edge. She saw a spark of fire like a falling star: a harbinger, a brand. The Sun is in the Thorn at Ninerise. Sun? In turning, she had lost her north. No stars. But counter to her whorling sprang a pale of fires on the hills, a wheel of suns. Even as she swung about, their light was swallowed in a nothingness, a chill white mist. At once she was lank with it, spangled and amazed.
Behind she heard a clank and rattle, and a horned thing sprang away. Startled, she cried out and reeled from it. And now a stone had shifted, dwindling. Standing in her way, it crooked a knee to her, it spoke.
"My lady?"
Stone still. All about them, fires dying on the hills.
Before her stood a small crookshouldered person in a coat and breeches, all in deadleaf brown. He bowed to her as to the new moon, louting low; then raised his shining, streaming face, his hair in ratstails. He spoke again in the old tongue, haltingly.
"My lady?"
"No,” said Margaret, appalled. “No."
He flinched. He had a waning look, this apparition. “Lady, by this hand, if I offend you..."
Still as a candle, gathering her will to run; then startling. “That?"
A grey ghost blaring in the mist.
"Ah. That. A sheep: no fellow.” Still his bended knee to her. “Have you no company beside, no rade? No others of your folk?"
All about them, fires dying on the hills. A huddle of grey stones behind.
"They leave us,” he said softly. Then, “How came you from this hillside?"
Waking? All behind her and before was cloud. They stood within a burr of morning, now and here. A bubble. “Oh...” Now she saw his broad hat wreathed in flowers, violets and wood anemones, as fair as any painted book. But real, as blood is real, or feathers.
Gently, warily, he took the garland and held it out to her. She made no move. He crowned her unbent head, so carefully she felt no touch but green. Stepped back and swept another bow. “I bid you good morrow, lady. Hallows with ye."
Caught with flowers, she thought. Spellbound.
Turning to the quick of day, he spoke as to himself: “...his fury's in the fall of leaf. Then scatt'ring of his wits, poor Tom lies naked in the slough, and shakes against the frost and February of his desolation. Being wood, the spring's his ecstasy, o'erspilling dark. His dreams do prick him and he flowers."
A hill aside of them—O marvellous—a blade of sunlight glinted like a sword unsheathing, raised in accolade. It slashed the silver to a sleave of rainbow. Mantle and scarf. It struck a flowering tree to mist and dazzle. A wonder: a cloud full of thorn. The birds woke shouting with joy.
And it was all too much, too much. The air was full of voices clamoring, hail-sharp; the light, white-fiery, furious: a glare as of unbroken lightning or the blinding of unbodied snow. A dazzlement, a tempest—
Thea? Did you know all this?
And still he touched her not, and still she felt his garland like a crown of hail.
She stirred and shivered.
He did off his coat and held out it to her. “It strikes cold at first,” he said, in Cloudish now. I thank you, no, she said, with palm out-turned and bended knee; yet glanced at him, her hand against the doubtful sun, the water running down her face. They were of a kind, she saw—like sister and like brother—but his squirrel-red hair was faded. There were tufts of grey in it and squinches round his hazel eyes. “No place for a lass here alone.” He gestured at the circling smudge of fires, at the revels. “They do make green gowns."
They?
"That bring the summer in."
In memory, she turned a card, now lost: the Rainers. Grave but joyful came a band of nymphs, the deer-legged votaries of Annis, who leapt and clashed with long braids flying, dark and fiery and fair. Still children. Cold as April: moon-cold crescent girls. On a pole wound Maywise with ribands, they bore the loveliest of garlands: hoops fixed crosswise in an orb, wound with ivy, crowned with flowers, trailing tendrils like a thyrsus. In it hung a Lady made of grass, a rake of grass blades in her hand. Reaper to herself, the mower mown.
Just then the grass bowed and darkened in a flaw of wind; white petals fell. A cold bright rain drenched down and drifted on. Stunned and shivering, Margaret raised her eyes to watch its ragged skirts retreating, grey and gleam. As if the squall had rubbed away the tarnish of the night, the hills were green. They ran with silver: tumbling becks and falls.
A voice on the hill cried, like an ember falling. “Craw's hanged!"
And voices echoed, hallooing. “Craw's hanged!” The rout was coming now, by twos and threes, running down from the fellsides: toused and tangled, carrying great boughs of green. No silvery maids. Rough lads and rantipoles, a sort of vixens and a sloth of bears. “Hey's down!"
No cover.
"Back way,” said the stranger. Downward, sheer. The path was no more than a sheen on grass, a flaw like bruised velvet. She wondered he could tread so nimbly in this hail of light. Skidding and stumbling, she could manage her water-heavy skirts, no more. Fell, slathered to the knee and scraped, yet shying from his proffered hand; went on. The flaw became a runnel, the runnel a trod, deep-sunken in the hillside, set thwartwise with stones. On either side, a foam of flowers, wild and delicate and rank. Deep hedgerows. Thrawn trees, shock-headed, throwing roots across her path. At a stile, she looked back. Oh. It pierced her heart with green, this world. This spring. The stones were out of view, as vanished as the morning stars, the rainbow ravelled into cloud. That door, that bridge were gone.
Sheer morning. Now the drystone walls turned hedges, the trod to churned mud. They came through intakes to an onstead, barn and byres and a cross-winged hall. In the courtyard, at the studded door, she balked. Locks and keys again, another cell? In from all this ruthless beauty, into easeful dark?
As she wavered, the revellers came down on them like rooks that mob a daystruck owl. Clawed creatures, raucous and hilarious, flown with ale. They clustered and they cawed. Margaret shrank against the wall, hands crossed before her face. Her fellow set hand to his hilts; yet spoke them fair enough, if sharp.
"Here's silver for your sport. Away and dance.” He cast a handful, scattering and shining.
But they cried, “In, summer! Let us in."
Like daws: and she a thing of glass. Here's pretty. If she fled them, they would hunt. Eyes fixed upon the stranger's back, she fought her panic down. Here's patterning. A covert in his coat. Green leaves brocaded in the deadleaf silk, half seen, and peering broideries of flowers, white and violet. A spring upwelling.
Some at back were elbowing and gawping; whispering behind their hands. Thou ask. Nay, thou.
A man doffed his broad hat, civil enough. “Morn t'ye, Master. Catched a hare?"
Wary; yet his fence was words. “I hunt not by the dark of moon."
"Then ye mun bring a candle,” said a woman. “And t'moths will fly to it."
And another wench called out to Margaret, “Singed thy petticoats?"
From the back of the rout, a taunting voice said: “Singed his petticoats, more like."
White hand on the sword hilt. “Go your ways. Here's naught of your concerning."
"Nay, by yer leave, sir,” said a woman, “our discerning's May. We bear it; ye mun bid us in."
"And if she bear it, then ‘tis luck,” said another with a rainwet garland on a staff, and shook it so the poppet danced. The water on the leaves rained down on Margaret. “Here's green to halse ye and this hall."
And half the revellers began confusedly to sing, a clash of carols.
But a high voice, hoarse with chanting, sang, “Me petticoat is lost, I left it at me granny's..."
A marrow-deep bass took it up, “But I'll fetch it back i't morning..."
"Peace, all on yer.” In the doorway stood a woman in a cap and pattens, tall, ungarlanded, a box of bonefire in her hands. Down the long dark hall behind her stood another door, wide open to the silvery green. Bobbing, they swung to her, silenced. Keys at her belt. Was her courtier and captor huntsman to this lady? Margaret sank into a deep obeisance. A girl tittered. “That'll do,” said Cap and Pattens, and quirked her chin upward. Margaret rose. Pattens turned to the men and maids. “Cold by t'door; come, speak thy piece.” And at her beckoning, the garlander stood forth, rosepink with audience, wind-wantoned, petal-patched. They spoke their verses, turn and turn.
"How far have ye wandered?"
"By moonwise til morn."
"What got ye by moonlight?"
"What's yet to be born."
"Out o frost, fire; and ashes to thorn."
"Halse ye and this hall!” the May girl said, and shook her garland, so the lady danced within its orb.
"In, summer!” cried the throng.
And the doorkeeper swung it wide. “Hey's down.” Another quick upward nod, and two or three blown girls went lingering to the byre and kitchen. “Nowt here nobbut rain to sup. Good ale within, and banketting. Come yer ways.” Giggling and straggling, turning to stare, they obeyed, the hoarse voice and her tipsy swain last of all.
When they'd all gone in, the woman with the keys turned to Margaret and the stranger. “Cold by th’ door, Master Grevil.” Still he stood, with a face like the morning, doubt and glory. “Clapping craws? Here's fire within. Sack posset.” He roused and they followed through the long cross-passage open to the kitchen garth, and into a high dim hall, arch-timbered. Rather gloomy, with a dank and doggish air. The fire was out, the hearth swept bare.
"Mistress Barbary,” said the man, and set his prize forward.
Unheeding both, the woman knelt at the hearth. From her pierced earthen pot, she took a heap of embers, and rekindled the fire. “Tind ashes, take light.” She sat back on her heels and watched it blaze, then rose, brushing her apron. A woman neither young nor old, close-grained and workworn as the haft of a rake. More tarnish than silver.
"Stockins,” she said to the man. He shifted, dripping. There were puddles at his feet. “Gan up and doff yersel, Master. Lass'll not melt."
"Mistress Barbary,” said master to maid. His voice shook with awe, with triumphant terror. “See.” He looked at Margaret as if he'd picked her like a flowering branch. As if she were made of snow. Of lightning. “Is she not? What think you?"
The woman looked her up and down: tawdry finery. Smutched face and draggled petticoats, clagged feet.
"I'd get her dry."
So many faces, and all strange.
Garlands askew and singed petticoats. Faces glowing and heavy-eyed, giddy with waking or sullen with ale. Twigs of heather caught in frazzled plaits; a flecked breast starting from a pair of stays, tucked in with absent hands. New-bladed beards. A pair of startling blue eyes gazing from a mask of ashes. A wreath turned round and round in work-rough hands, between great gawking knees. Her kind.
O brave new world.
She was dizzy with the scent of it. Ale and woodsmoke and wet sheep, sharp sweat and wilting flowers.
Windows open to the green and rain.
No Master Grevil in his deadleaf jacket, when she turned to look; no passage to the door. Past all the thronging bodies, thick as bees, there lay a hearth and fire.
Down one long wall stood a dresser, crowded with plate: pewter and blue china, a few fair days amid the grey and gleam. It was dressed with green boughs, flowering and sleeting down, from bud to bare twig.
Laid out on a board were ranks of round dishes, white and gold, pranked out with knots of violets. A year of moons laid out in bowls of curds and cream, a moon of suns in frumenties and tarts. Gallipots of sweet spicery, a dish of sorrel and salmon. Hare pasties. Honeycomb. Margaret swallowed, lightboned suddenly with want. A quiddany of quinces, apricock marmalade. Green cheeses. Cakes and ale.
All untouched. They were waiting; all but a child in a feathery flat bonnet, half under the table with a black dog, licking a bowl. His elders had a rarer dish to sup.
Two breathless maids bore in a kit of syllabub, afoam; they set it on the dresser, slopping over in their haste, swiping up. They kicked off their mucky pattens with a scuffle and clang, unkilted their skirts, all agog. “Is't ower?"
"Not until thou's come, Doll Kickpail,” called a man.
Mistress Barbary whist them with a glance. “Craw's hanged and world's ended,” she said dryly. “Would yer finish wi’ a jig?” She turned to Margaret. “Hey's down, this morning o't year. Come yer ways in."
That dance she knew: not these words, but their tune, the cadence of ritual. My lady had schooled her well. Margaret dropped a deep slow curtsey to the room.
When she rose, they were gaping. One or two horned their hands.
Barbary took a loaf with a green man's face baked into it, within a plaited wreath of bread. Clove eyes and sunburnt cheeks. Not a wood god, but the Sun in grain. She broke a piece, and held it out to Margaret. “Hallows with ye."
Margaret, hesitant, broke bread, and murmured, “And with you."
And at that, at last the household stirred. The Sun was torn to pieces, hand to hand, and devoured by a rabble of rantsmen. A gabble rose. Barbary stalked to the fire and set the kettle on.
The nine-day's wonder began.
Margaret sat dripping by the fire in a crowd of maids and men, her cup filled, her ruined finery appraised with rue and wonderment.
"Silk tiffany and cloth o silver. She mun be a princess o Lune."
"Prigged petticoats,” said a sharp-faced man. “I doubt she's nobbut a tinker's lig-by, feigning daft. She'll wait while we's abed, and slip t'latch til him."
"Take silver and gold."
"Burn hall about our ears."
A maid scoffed. “That ‘un? Couldn't catch moths wi’ a candle."
A hind in a garland of wilted ivy, a great tawny man, drank deep. “What I think, is she's some great lord's lightborn. She were put to nurse..."
"Wi’ a bear?” said the piper, bag and chanter by his knee.
"Wi’ a vixen,” said the taborer. “And braids of her nurse."
"...wrapped I’ yon petticoats. There'll be a mole on her."
A hind nudged his neighbor. “Eh, Jack, will we look for't?"
By the hearth sat a fair girl, untousled, brooding on a bowl of dainties like an ogress on a fondling child. She shook her head. “Sad ruin o velvet."
"Like a tinker out sleepwalking."
"Ashes?” said a wispy child, and blushed in confusion. “Not Ashes, but..."
"Ashes I’ May? Thou noddy. Imbers I’ January.” The scoffer drained her mug and held it out.
The ale went round again. The rain beat. The parliament of birds went on, owl and raven, wren and grouse.
"I knaw,” cried a sonsy lass, “'Tis that lady left her lord and featherbed to gang wi’ AEgyptians. In and out of a song."
"And wha'd tumble yon mawkin?” said a blackavised young man.
"Blind beggars,” said a dark girl dancing. Cat face and clustering curls. “See at me. I's getten red shoon."
"Should have yon silver mantle.” The young man glanced at Margaret, half mockery and half appraisal. All intent. A trig, dry, thirsty fellow, like a wasp on a damson. “As good hang it on a flaycraw as yon whey-face and ginger."
"Nay, a lady'd thee and thou us. See'd her bobbing at Wick Billy, same as a lord."
"Well, she didn't fall I’ last rain."
"She did. Out o't moon."
"D'ye not see her bare toes? Mad Maudlin, lating after Tom o Cloud."
"Clarty feet, aye, but not hyself. Soft as my hand."
"Soft as thine head."
A hale old blue-eyed shepherd quavered: “His naunt"—he quirked his chin at his master's hall—"were stolen at her handfast. Away wi’ t'fairies. They's gey fond o green fruit."
Barbary brought Margaret a dish of curds and cream and set it in her lap. Margaret tasted. Sharp-sweet and dowset, bronzed with nutmeg. And syllabub, ladled from the frothing bowl, and spangling on the tongue. O my. And buttered toasts. A banquet of rarities, and no enjoying it. As well eat honey in a hive.
All about her, they buzzed and pinched and pried and gazed.
"Happen she could be,” said the shepherd. “I's heared folk gan there and back, and no more changed than delf in a dunghill."
"Cracked delf,” another said.
"And painted."
"I thowt t'fair folk was fair."
"Thowt they was green. And lived on cresses."
Behind her, surreptitiously, a wench pinched salt on her.
"See'd her flicker,” said a gangling lad. “Try toasting-fork, it's iron."
"Hey, Crook Tom, thou minds t'awd Mistress Grevil?"
"Dead. Aye, dead and tellt.” The shepherd drank. “She'd not be walking."
"Nay, but her sister that were lost, young Mistress Annot. Were she russety?"
The shepherd pondered, deep in his mug. “Aye, she were an Outlune vixen, same as this. Airs and graces."
"What, this hedgebird?” sneered the sharp-faced man. “Beggar's velvet."
"A mooncalf."
"It's a changeling, I tell ‘ee."
"A by-blow."
"A drab."
"Set her on shovel, and awa’ up t'chimney."
Margaret cowered on her cutty stool. But Barbary was speaking, not over or behind, but to her. “How came you by Law?"
Darkness. She remembered nothing but abyss and roaring. Salt sting on her lips. Closing her eyes, she saw a storm-changed beach, a coffer, cracked and spilling cinnamon and mace. A shivered virginals. She saw an orange lying by a tarry hand. Bewildered, she said, “I was shipwrecked."
They howled.
"Drowned, by Dawcock!” cried the fiddler. “Here's a mermaid or a swan."
"Mind thy fingers, wench, he'll have ‘em for fiddlepegs."
"What I say, she's a selkie. So what yer do, see, is yer fold her fell up in a kist. So's she can't swim away."
"If she was a selkie, she'd be bare as a needle."
"If she's seawrack,” said a fattish fellow in drabbet, “then she's waif and stray. So finder keeps her, and he cracks her open."
The kitchen boy looked up. “My gammer see'd a ship once,” he said. He licked his thumb dreamily, a shine of honey on his sooted cheek.
Mistress Barbary spoke. “Aye, but what ship? And what sea?"
Margaret saw the Lantern at her mast, the milkwhite shining of the Skein, the river and the road of death. The room swung. She fixed on the grey eyes as on a horizon. “I know not."
"What do they call you?"
By no name. Crows’ meat. Hole to fill. “Thou."
Someone giggled. “Not sharpest knife I't drawer."
"Hold thy clap!” said Barbary. Turning back, “Are you honest?"
"Please you?"
"Do you lie with men?"
"Madam, I know none.” If Barbary saw else, she said nought. Held Margaret's gaze and nodded. Then turned. “Dolly Jack, Jack Handsaw, Nick—if any on yer game wi’ her, I s'll turn thee out ont road, bare arse and beggarstaff."
The sharp-faced man looked innocent. “By kit's catgut, her vixen is as safe wi’ me as wi’ t'master.” Two or three laughed maliciously. One whistled a snatch of song.
But now the maids were clinging and wittering and twisting their aprons. “She's not staying here, is she? In our bower?"
"She'll elf us locks by night."
"Pinch us in our beds. Black and blue."
"Thou can pinch hyself I’ bed well enough, Hob Ellender,” said Barbary. “And thou, Cat Malison, if thou'd comb thy hair, she might tangle it.” She turned to the company. “And hasn't she broke bread wi’ us? And eaten salt?” Back she turned to Margaret, shivering by the fire. She held out her bunch of keys. “Will you break nowt nor take nowt, nor call craws down upon this hearth? Swear it.” The old tune.
Margaret touched cold iron to her brow. “I swear."
"Then have thy keeping o this household, fire and fleet, until next hallows and a day."
Margaret curtsied again, rather shakily. The room roared and dizzied. The last of her command was crumbling, clods from pale roots.
"Come up, then.” Barbary took up a jug and aired linen, and led her away.
Behind them, a girl called out to the company, “Well, I's for a jig. Clap us intil it."
Margaret followed her new mistress across the stone-flagged passage: back though the hall, where dogs and embers drowsed and mumbled on the bones of winter; through a low, dark room, half workroom and half parlor, full of snips and snaps of leather, bales of fleeces, glints of brass. Up a winding stair of oak. They came to a high room open to the rafters, panelled, with a stripped and shrouded bed. Swept bare. A bower once; a garret. There were planks in the roofbeams, thick-starred with apples drying, hung with bunches of greyed herbs, sweet and bitter. “T'awd mistress were an Outlune woman. Kept her stillroom.” Turning cattycorner, Mistress Barbary undid a low door, like a cupboard in the chimneystack.
"There."
A low bed with a faded patchwork; a joint stool; a candlestick. Another blurred and faded patchwork at the window, made of glass and green and rain.
Barbary set the jug of water on the sill.
"Will I undo thee?"
Here too. Margaret shivered, waiting to endure. She dreaded what the sharp-eyed servant must see: the welts and bruises of her flawed virginity, the blood-dabbled smock. The cards. O hallows, would she find the cards?
"Here's a knot,” said Barbary, softly. She let fall her hands. “Get on,” she said. “And wash thysel. Thou's mucky. Bed's clean.” She turned and rummaged in a kist.
A sleeve fell, stiff and heavy as a scab. Another. Spoils of dead queens drowned. Broideries rebroidered, trailing snarled and ravaged threads. Past mending. Rags of lace like last year's February. Waist and stomacher; petticoat and stays. Her sullied shift. A strange world, Cloud, she thought: all changing. Cloud and water, moving in the air; the sky unstayed. As if she laid aside the bands of heaven. Naked, Margaret dove into the coarse clean smock wrapped round the stone bottle. Warm. Tears started at the touch of it. So strange and light. So strange. She blinked them back; poured out the water for her hands and feet.
"Take these.” Margaret turned. Barbary shook out an jacket and petticoat, ink-blue, the blue of midnight. Wool. “Her waiting-maid as were. Mek three o thee. Thou pin it up.” She bent to the welter of tumbled clothes and gathered them. “That's as fine linen as ever I see'd, yon smock. Moon'll blanch it."
Gone.
No lock on the door.
Margaret stood at the window, looking out at the green. Thea? Cold here. Not the changeless cold of Law, but sudden. Kind unkind. No answer. They would hunt her. In a storm of ravens, in a shadow at the door. She must keep watch. Keep silence on her birth. She shivered. Colder here than in my lady's tower. Bone-cold. And she ached. How long had she been travelling? Turning back the quilt, she wrapped herself and huddled on the bed. A long road out of Law. For all her will to wake, she nodded.
Hush, ba, sang the wind.
Norni?
Here and nowhere. A remembrance. In their tower, Norni rocked an empty cradle by a fire of bone. At her knee, small Margaret held a tangle of bright silks; she saw a pale boat, rocking on a river of bright milk. Imbry's ship. Her sister's. Milk-twin and mother, child and nurse, they wove her journey between them, skein and song; made cradles in the air, of air. Then came a wind in the door, a rattling. The fire crouched and leapt.
Margaret started awake—keys jangling? No. She drew breath. No. Wind in the ivy. Wind. Her heart slowed, steadied. Soft featherbed. Small rain. Unmooring, she remembered leaves blown backward in a vanished book, untelling winter. At the story's spring, she slept. But in the ease of driftedness, her mind still crouched at ward, a cloud full of thorns.
"The morning Starre doth lie this daybreak in the Thorn," a later Margaret, turning from her glass, will write, "wherein she joyeth most, her Pleasaunce and her Powre; Slae now falleth back and Hulver upriseth..."
In the green dark of another morning, Annot rose. She laid aside her mantle and her gown of black for petticoats of green, May mourning; mirrorless, she combed her leaf-red hair, and as she braided it all down her back, she sang beneath her breath. ” ... and a thought come in her head to run in the wood ... “ She left my lord's ring and my lady's baubles—though she traced the earrings with a finger, half-regretfully: her chains became her well. She left her needle in her work, too nearly done: the one unfinished sleeve. ” ... to pull flowers to flower her hat ... “ A smock to be bedded in, a shroud. Too fine for the greenwood, to sully and snag. But she wore her old ring that had been her grandam's, her namesake: that she kept.
An Lightwode. And she turned it round on her finger. Wode I fall?
She'd cast cavels for this chance; bid Ashes for a tale. And happen she'd return a maid among her maidens all, green-garlanded, enchained; or happen she'd be lost forever. Lost like Perseis, to wander barefoot in the wood above, the sky; and bloodfoot on the Road. She had the tale of it by heart; had played it, most pathetically, before her bedpost and a velvet bolster and a brace of crooked chairs. But thou art mazed, sweet fool. The wood is dark. And I th’ moon's daughter in these rags of cloud Shall bear thee light...?
But now, this morrow, was no play, but Ashes’ telling. She must gang to the greenwood, to keep tryst with a—What? A witch? A ghost? A daemon lover? All in silver and sable, fair-faced like the earl of Law. And at the thought, she laughed. Thou greensick girl, thou gowk. To put thyself into a song. And yet imagining his hand on her, imperious—he asked of her no leave—she blushed, as if half naked in a flaw of snow she'd drunk burnt wine. And shivered, hackled down her hause-bane with the thrill of it, ablaze with swallowed sun. Aglow with it and giddy. Drunk: and yet athirst.
Tell me a ship. I would away.
And Ashes turning in a clack of runes: Thy ship's i't forest. Unleaving.
Unfelled?
T'keel's of thy laying. O’ th’ new moon, that will round wi’ travelling. Thy mast's o't tree.
What moon?
As thou may. Thou must til t'greenwood, til t'thorn; and break thou ae branch of it, but ane, and call on—
Ashes? Air.
The birds had wakened, giddying. The night bled pale. She blew her candle out; and with it, all unknowing, she was past. Away like fire into air: but for a waft of honey and a wisp of soul. And in her bed, foreshadowed, unforeseen, another Annot slept, and dreamed her journeying. Long since. And yet to come: the O implicit in the origin, the new moon in the old, infurled; the rounding of the endless ring. Lief wode I fall—forever and again, the seed, root, flowering—an light would spring.
Far far in the greenwood, in the dark leaves of the wood, the owl cried out for her. Two, two eyes. And echoing, the small birds’ plaint: Of tree, of tree, of tree. Forever: yet they bid her haste. No time. She had a tryst with story.
The child dreams. She is cradled in the moon's lap, who with gnarled hands combs her sleep, undoes the ravels of the hag-rid night. Her sleep is long as wind.
A small voice, like a fire of leaves: She braids o her mother.
And another, like the crackling of frost: Aye, as left hand to this right. And Lightwood?
Of his root.
As wind is braided with the flying leaves, so her sleep with falling stars. They speak through her in tongues of leaf. A braid of birds, she thinks. She's falling upward now, slow-wheeling through a hail of stars. They sain her, touching eyes, heart, mouth.
"Thou wake."
She's lying on the black earth in a drift of light. Looking upward, she sees bare wood and moonless night. No stars. Two cummers huddle on the ground beside her: a dark one, hulked in sooty sheepskins; and another, hung with tatters, like a tree that keeps her wintry leaves. That one bends to her with glinting spectacles; the other raises her with tarnished hands. Moving, this one jangles, like a tree hung with ice. “Time thou was waked."
So light. So strange and light. Her head is starless.
"How—?"
"Thou made thee a trance,” says the leaf-witch.
She does not ask, Where?
"Wood above. Thou's come by unleaving."
She's lost her shoes along the way.
The dark one holds a wooden bowl to her. “Thou drink.” A caudle of new milk. The child drinks deep of it, of dreams. It goes round.
From her lap, the leaf-brown other takes a barleycake, round as the honeyed moon. “Thou eat,” she says, and shares it out. The child takes. It is warm. “Is't bread?"
"A riddle,” says the leaf-witch.
And the dark one: “Barley. Thou break."
And so she does. The bread is hallowing. But in her share is something small and stony-sharp: a ring. A knot of seeds of blood. She turns it over in her hand; she holds it out to them. “I don't..."
"That were thine,” says Brock, the dark witch. “And will be."
"Will you keep it for me?"
"Till I won't,” says leaf-brown Malykorne.
And Brock says, “As I will."
The child looks from one to the other. Malykorne holds out her long hand for the ring. “Mind thee, thou mun come for it."
"Will I know the way?"
"Thou knaws by th’ moon,” says Malykorne. She's pulled a long thread from her ravelled sleeve. Round her finger and her thumb, and in and out, she's wound it in a clew of light; she's done and done. “There's thy journey.” A knot and a sleave, unbraiding starlight. Light as thistledown: she huffs it from her palm.
"Time is,” says Brock. “I'll set thee on.” Jangling, she doffs her coat of skins, and laps the child in it. “Cold in but thy bare soul.” Ah, but colder still in Ashes’ fell, in bone and blood. Stone cold. Then stirring, like a hive in winter; warm and fusty, with a tang of iron like a dying forge. Her blood rings like a new-struck nail. Brock touches the child's brow with her ashy hand. “What do they call thee, lass?"
By no name. “Thou.” Crows’ meat. Hole to fill.
"Thou's left that,” says Malykorne. “Behind thee."
She looks back. Far far behind her is an O, a crow's eye or a cracked bright glass. A world, no bigger than a stone in someone's ring: she scries it in her hand. A child sits reading in a wintry garden, in a whorl of leaves, unfallen, walled about in glassy innocence. No flaw. A bird cries. Margaret? The child looks up; the leaves fall, scattering. Time runs. Unspelled, she spells in them her spring and fall, her journey.
Margaret lay amid a brangle of stars: their argument. Unselved: at once the riddle and unraveller, herself the key. But even as she knew the tale of it—so nearly understood—she woke to birdsong, lay bewildered by the light. The east looked down on her, dispassionate, the moon a white jug in its hand.
"Thou's o'erslept thysel,” said Mistress Barbary. “Happen thou's weary, travelling.” She set the jug down by the bedside. “Get thee washed afore it keels."
Rising barefoot and tousled, Margaret made her courtesy.
"Be still wi’ yon bobbery. Thou's not a-guisering.” A shrewd look. “Brought up til it? Well, it won't do here. Folk think it mockery."
A careful nod.
Barbary went on. “Happen as thou's a stranger, thou won't know ways o't hall. Master's Master Grevil. Bartolemy Grevil. He studies—Thy neck—And I keep house for him. Joan Heron's Barbary.” Her arms were full of clothes. She ducked her chin at them. “Thou's gentry, so he'd have it. So thou lies abed i’ feathers. Gets thy water carried up.” She laid down her bundle on the joint stool, unfolded a smock. “And goes t'finer for't. But for a’ that, thou's a chit: so under governance. Thou does what thou's tellt."
Comb in hand. “Madam, at your will and his."
A look, an upward nod.
Bodies and petticoat. The servant shook them out. “His naunt's, these'd be. Sisters out o Lune, they were—oh, ‘twould be forty year agone. Damaris, his mother were, t'awd master's Mistress Grevil, and young Annot.” Stockings. Gown. “'Tis all else mourning.” Fine falling bands, but out of starch; a bitter tang to them, of wormwood. Mistress Barbary pinched the folds. “Outlunish stuff. Still plainer than thy frippery. But I's set thee to furbish it. See thy skill at thy needle."
"Madam, I know not the art of it."
Almost startled. “No? And they says t'fair folk's witches at their needles. Fine as frost.” She took the empty jug. “Dosta want doin up, or owt? No? Quick then. Glass in t'awd mistress's chamber"—the apple room—"if thou mun prink. Breakfast i't kitchen."
At the door, she turned back.
"And what shall we call thee?"
A deep breath. “An't please you, Margaret."
Grave approbation. “A good workday name. Wears well."
The maids were all at breakfast, sitting round the table with bowls of porridge and shares of oatcake, mugs of ale. Margaret stood at the sill, combed and braided, very soberly clad. Forlorn. She heard a whisper: “Noll's fey.” A nudge and a titter, a spurt of mirth silenced, like a kettle lid clapped to. At Barbary's nod, they all rose. They turned and bobbed to her, prim as pats of butter. And the little kitchen boy stood up and bowed solemnly, his hand to the hilts of his ladle.
"Good morn t'ye, lady,” he piped.
Margaret curtsied: measure for measure.
"And the dog said bow-wow,” called the dark girl. A smirk round the table, cut off by Mistress Barbary's glance: butter and knife.
Herself rose and beckoned Margaret to her side. “Here's Master Grevil's ward. She's called Margaret; and by bread and salt, she's o this household."
"Halse ye,” they muttered, round the board.
"Hallows,” said Barbary. “Table's laid for thee.” Horn spoon and wooden bowl. Shyly, Margaret came and sat among them, folding herself small. Scrape and clatter, they took up their knives, and set to with a will. Eyes like shoe-nails. A stithy of tongues. She did as they did: sipped the strange bitter stuff, spooned up the salty mess of porridge. Glanced covertly. Five maids: the sly dark girl and the pale demure one, cheek to chin and whispering; a pair of sonsy country lasses, frankly curious and tucking in, with elbows well squared; and down at the foot of the table, a wispy, bewildered girl, spoon in the air and gazing. Only five. And the kitchen boy. Round as a hedgepig and as rough and dawdling. The swags of green had withered.
Barbary looked round the table. “Cat got yer tongues? Ye clatter quick enough when there's work toward."
Dark deftly licked her spoon. “An we'd cream til our porridge, then cats would have our tongues."
"And welcome,” said Barbary. She becked her chin at the dark girl. “Now then. Yon malapert is Alys Kyteler..."
"Cat Malison to thee."
"And her gossip's Nell Blanchett."
"Hob Ellender."
"Cat's Paw,” said one of the sonsy girls, scornfully. “Always i't cream."
"And here's Will Shanklin's daughters from up Owlriggs.” The country girls. “Nan and Doll."
"Doll Kickpail and Nan Slutswool."
Barbary pointed her knife at Spoon-in-the-Air. “And yon mislaying clashpot is Susannah Hawtrey."
"Morn t'ye,” said the girl, and blushed.
"Sukey Bet Suckathumb."
"Sleeps wi’ a babby."
"Who won't dust i't master's study?"
Awe and trembling assertion. “In his babbyhouse..."
"Thou goslin. ‘Tis a cupboard."
"...there's ghosts."
"Dead things,” said Doll.
"So there's not, nobbut kickshaws,” said Nan. “Won't eat thee."
But, “Mammysuck,” jeered Cat.
"Enough o that, Mistress Lick-Luff-and-Wash-Whiskers.” Barbary turned to the smutchy kitchen boy, round-eyed and agape. “And yon's Will Constant o Seventrees. Wick Billy."
"Cause he's slow."
He bobbed again.
"Shepherd's outwith, and t'men afield. They's nowt o thy concerning. Nor neither thine, Doll Draggletail.” Barbary looked round the table. Bowls scraped and mugs empty. Crumbs.
Nan said, “Is she Mistress, then? Being one o't Grevilry."
"Just Margaret.” But Barbary looked doubtful.
A poor shorn sort of name, said their faces.
Margaret set down her bowl. “...of Nine Law."
Uneasy respect for that, a shadow of awe.
Barbary rose. “Time we was to work. Thou, Margaret. T'master waits on thee. In his closet, he did say. Cat, Ellender, bedmaking. See they's aired. Nan, Doll, cheeses. Hens, Sukey."
Dark and fair caught Margaret by the dresser.
"Here's t'King's daughter o Elfland.” Cat made a pretty leg and Nell a courtesy. They blocked the doors at either end. “My lady Nine Law. Your servants.” All sincerity, caress: but with a sting in it, a spider in the cream. “What's come o yer siller gown? Tousled?"
"Turned arainwebs. Dead leaves."
"And my lady turned Margery Daw."
No getting by.
"Here's a dance. My lord Grevil's Maggot."
"For as many as will."
"Thinkst thou the dance can dance?"
"Wi’ a fiddler afore. Will play on her."
"Thou, Magpie!” A pinch. “Mind thee, I's counted spoons."
"And what if she's prigged them? If she would she may. She's Noll Nuttycrack's toy.” Nell smiled. “Will keep her in's babbyhouse."
"His grasshop that he leashes wi’ a silken hair."
"His bait. For t'pike to snap at."
No rise.
"Dost knaw Noll Grevil, what he is?” said Nell to Margaret.
Silence.
"He's a man-witch. Will learn thee to talk."
"Will slit thy tongue."
Margaret was sent up as garnish to a dish of marrowbones and a leathern jug of ale. Barbary led her through the hall and a wainscot parlor, beeswaxed and a little wormy, up a doglegged stair. She knocked with her elbow. “Here's breakfast and t'lass."
A little panelled room, low-ceilinged, looking out on ghostly trees. All white: she could not tell what was flower, and what fog. Master Grevil sat writing in a jackdaw's nest of ink and papers, book on open book. He wore a sober suit of mole-gray and nutgall brown, with many buttons; his linen very plain and fine. There was a little creature like a plume of fire on his shoulder, tuft-eared and pinchfaced; absently he fed it bits of crumb with inky fingers. His daemon? As he rose and bowed to her curtsey, it rode him, chittering and scolding. He glanced at Margaret's quenched and braided sobriety, and sighed. From a green child to a greensick girl.
"Hempen hampen! Is the imp not vanished with her suit of clothes?"
"We do stay her with cream,” said Barbary. “Would you set her at brewing? At spinning?"
"Neither as yet. You may leave us."
"You'll be wanting more candles?"
"Anon."
He beckoned Margaret forward. Wary of the scolding imp, she came a step or two, and stood with downcast eyes that missed nothing. Books. Hundreds at least. What titles? Crusts and bones. An ape-headed cittern. A flute. Nutshells. Lees of wine. His table was covered with long folios and odd scraps of paper, written over in a thorny hand: scrawls, blotches, crossings-out. A drawing. Stars?
He saw, in her still face, her sidelong gaze. “The Nine."
"Please you, sir?"
"The stones. Where I found you, on Law. We do call them Nine Weaving, or Fiddler and Hey."
The sky below. “Are they always there?"
She'd puzzled him. “Before this hall. Before this world, I doubt. Do stones walk?"
Are the stars made earthfast? But she spoke no answer.
He began again, as dancers in a set dishevelled, on the proper foot. “You slept well? And have broken your fast? I would have you comfortably bestowed."
"Well. I thank you, sir."
"You may call me Grevil. I am master here. Low Askwith Hall.” A hesitation. “Cloud."
Again she made her courtesy. “Master Grevil."
"Have you a name?"
"Margaret, sir."
"No other? Of what birth?"
"None."
"What? Did you grow like missel, in the air?"
"Like stone, I think, sir. In the earth."
"A cold lap for a nurse,” he said. Took up a stone from a heap of writings; set it down. “Yet flowers spring of it.” And again, that rueful measure in his voice: “That legion of the grass that withers, all untold.” He looked at Margaret. “So, Mistress Mouldwarp. I would hear your traveller's tale, your history of dark. Are there manors then beneath our wandering sheep? And courtiers of chrysoprase? Are all their midwives miners? For my nurse did say ‘twas all a maze of gallantry, of music and of light."
She thought of the cracked virginals, the scuttling dark; but answered gravely. “None that I have heard."
"Are you not of that quality? Those folk that we call Unleaving?"
Her turn to startle. “Unleaving? Is that not a country of the air? The Wood Above?"
"Aye, those northern stars about the Ship that never set.” He turned the outward of his hand to her, to show his ring. “Of old, my family took it as device: the Ship and Tree, whose ever-autumn is the sky. That fair folk live about its roots, ‘tis written in philosophy. They fleet as do its leaves the stars."
"But I am none of theirs."
"I see,” he said regretfully. “By daylight, you are someways earthier than first I saw, of none such subtle stuff. You breathe.” A sideways smile. “Mistress Barbary will have it that you sneeze."
He shuffled through his papers, held one out. More drawings. “Grey Wethers at Askrigg.” Another. “Long Meg and her Daughters at Imber Lap.” She studied them.
"What think you?"
"As images? Most curious."
"But of the stones?"
"I know not."
"Some say they dance at Ninerise, when they hear the fiddler. And others, that when stones hear, they may dance. ‘Tis said they are foxcastles, strongholds of a greener world. I think—I think they are knots between this world and another. Here. There. And one long seam, the Lyke Road, that we all must walk.” He traced it with a finger; looked sidelong at Margaret. “But few of us backward."
She bent still closer to the leaves of drawings. “Sir. Here, where ‘tis written Scar Fell, what place is that?"
"You can read?"
As if he'd asked, Can you breathe? “And cipher."
"Can you write?” He pulled up a lionheaded chair, set a half-scrawled leaf in front of her, found and mended a pen. “Copy that."
She bent to her task. Qu'y: Whether Earthfasts at Tinding bee of lunish Stone or no?
"An antick character,” he said, bemused. “Where...?” He caught himself.
"Sir?"
Turning to the window, he looked out. “'Tis a history,” he said, “of Cloud its ancientry, high Cloud. There are remnants of it, that in custom and in vulgar memory, the common tongue, yet live.” Still his back to her, his arm raised to the windowframe, his brow to the glass. “A kind of monument."
"A book?” He turned round at her voice. Her face now one astonishment. “You've made a book?” As if he'd said, I wrote this tree.
Pink to the ears now. “Pieces of one. That is, ‘tis matter for a book...” He gestured at the table, helplessly. “...but in a sort dispersed."
Leaves scattered through the study. “Is there aught I can do?"
"I would not burden you."
She remembered kitchen talk. “My keep would burden you. Like ... a grasshopper.” (She imagined a dwarfish fiddler all in silken green.) “Is there no work I could do?"
"Would you grovel in the ashes? Scrape trenchers? I'd not have you prey to these kitchen cullions and their hobbyhorses,” he said fiercely.
"I am not schooled in kitchenry. But I can write. Would you have me copy for you?"
He relented. “Would it not weary you, to read this crabbed philosophy?"
"It is tales to me. New worlds."
He picked up her copy, studied it aslant. “'Tis an Outlune hand, and somewhat straggling in the character. But fair enough. ‘Twill serve.” He bent and scrabbled in the litter on his table for a silver coin; held it out to her. “So then: fair copy of foul papers. And thy wage is..."
"I ask none."
"Come, you are a Cloudishwoman now. When I say five, your word is seven."
"Then ... might I read of your library?"
"And welcome. But that is—no, not fire and fleet, but air. What other?"
They had locked her in the dark, too often. “Candles?"
"Nine a week. Of wax. Brock's penny and a bargain. Clap?"
When she took his cool, dry, inky hand, it shook a little—doubting on her flesh?—then clasped.
"Here, as you write, we may talk at whiles, we grasshoppers. If we are burdens on the harvest, we at least may sing.” He sat down caterwise to her, spread open one stout folio, as if to work; but walked and twirled his compasses, up and down the page, and up and down. Stalk and pirouette and stalk. He looked up at last at Margaret. “Tell me. How came you, threadneedle, out of Law?"
Beyond the wood lies nowhere. For a time, the witches walk through wreathed and drifted light; but that grows scanter, fading into rime. Is gone. They're on black moorland, climbing.
"A shrewd wind,” says Malykorne.
"Aye,” Brock says. “Colder, by and by,"
No moon, thinks Margaret, stumbling on. She sees unmeaning stars above her, scattered, like a broken chain of stones. And at her feet, stark nowhere. Mist and hag. They travel out of Law, unmazed, unislanded. No walls, she thinks, and shivers, awestruck. Yet a road: they walk the set stones of a trod, meet standing stones like hooded travellers, far seen and seldom come upon.
"No lantern,” she says. “How is it we travel?"
"Dark o't moon,” says Malykorne.
At a waystone, they part. There are coins on it, worn silver, lying in a shallow like a stoup. Brock chinks them, pockets. “I's off."
"Ah,” says the leaf-witch.
"I's a tryst,” says the dark witch. “Wi’ a traveller."
"Your coat...?” says Margaret, and makes to doff it.
But the dark witch shrugs. “Best keep that whiles. Thou's colder than I s'll be.” And jangling, she lopes away.
"Coming?” says the leaf-witch. “Farther back than onward.” Margaret twists up her skirts and follows. The witch walks no straight path, from stone to stone, but wanders all askant the bushes, plucking lightwebs from the thorns. Margaret strays after. Apronless, she stuffs the pockets of the coat. Light stuff as thistledown; drifting as dreams. As wiry. She keeps close at the witch's heels: so vast a dark.
They go on.
"Oh,” says Margaret, halting. “Oh, it's lost.” On the fellside is a naked child, a waif that shivers, dancing on the moss. All naked as the moon.
The leaf-witch turns, glances. “Not yet."
Margaret stands. “Is it ... dead?"
"Unborn."
"Can you not comfort it?"
"Would have it so? His mam will die of him."
Still Margaret lingering, gazes, and still the waif-child whirls and shivers. Now she sees his bare feet bend no stem, nor break the blind ice of the hags. He dances open-eyed, unseeing. Naked: turning in a flare of silver, he's unclouded of his flesh. And for a moment, like a falling star, she sees him burning and unburnt with cold: as clear as adamant, aethereal, skyblack. Like crystal fiery from the blast, new-blown. It is the living that consume; this spirit holds: a glass that gathers in its bent the scattered stars, new-spells them in a soul. A child with child of its ascendants, great with light.
A trembling naked child.
"Far to go,” calls Malykorne beyond her. Dark. She hurries after.
There are children back of Law. She scries them, cold as star-shot and as clear against the coalsack hills. That whirling, solitary wraith. A crouching child that scrabbles at the earth with bloodless hands, and weeps. A ranting ghost. And cowered in a thornbush by a silent beck, two sisters, wreathed in one another's arms. Like cherries twinned and rounding on a single stalk; like moonstones budded of a seed, ingeminate. One sky between them, and a single dream: a hooked moon at their hearts, re-echoed stars. As Margaret makes to pass, she sees one sister tinge with dawning, and her lifting hair, as if by wind; the other still lies dark.
The leaf-witch touches her cheek. “Come, lass. Farther still."
She lets herself be drawn. Stumbling in a waking dream, she thinks the lightwebs weigh her down; she thinks the leaf-witch draws her by a heartstring, ah, it tugs her by the ribs. Thorns pluck at her and thrawn roots trip. No coin. She tries to turn her pockets out, to pay her fare in light; but they are empty. She has gathered nothing.
"Here."
Where? she thinks, half-waking. Wading to the knee in drifted leaves. No wood. She sees a thorn tree by a tumbled wall, unleaving. All but leafless; yet there spills from it an endless tale of leaves. In her half-sleep, she could spell them, all the stories of a world. The wood above.
"In hallows,” says the witch.
Beside the hawtree stands a hulk of tumbled stone. A fold once, or a shieling. Roofless huddle and a sill. The leaf-witch draws her in and laps her in a ragged patchwork. Of the leaves, and patched with sky? Of cloud and heaven, clouted with the leaves? In tatters now, however made: outworn undone. There's a needle rusting in the ravelled stuff. It pricks. She sees faint traceries of silver, patterns of a half-remembered sky: an earth unquilting of the stars.
"Light down wi’ thee,” the leaf-witch says. “Wake wood."
Margaret sleeps.
In his study, Grevil waked and read. He turned the pages over, written in that childish careful hand. “Of Leapfire, and the like Observances...” Fair copy: she had set herself to make pleached alleys of his plash and thicket. He could see her as she bent to work: the inky fingers and ill-fortuned hair, pale sorrel, wisping from its plaits. A child. A runaway. But of what kindred? By her carriage, gently born, and kitted like an antick queen (dragged backward through a hedge); yet knew—or feigned to know—no more of courtship than a tinker's brat. An innocent. No witch, he'd swear it. Nor an elfin, by her inky hands. A changeling that the folk had blinded of her memory? Yet spoke the elder language, offhand, like a poet or a Lunish mage. The language of the dead.
"Of Leapfire..."
But beyond the page he saw a daylit fire, pale, a troubling of the air; he saw the dreadful gardener with his rake. He sweeps the way for Ashes, said the voices at his back. His hand was in a colder hand; his new coat that was leafgreen yesterday crowblack, as if the fire had burned it. Black amid black skirts behind him. Through the tangled smoke, he saw the swirl and fall of birds, of leaves like birds. Of ashes on the wind.
All souls.
The air was full of stories, silent voices that would speak.
A something cold and gentle brushed him, and another, cheek and chin. A flurry. Eyes, mouth, heart: all ice. His mother snowed.
In his free hand, the flowers wilted in the bud. He cast them to the ground, as he was told.
Lyke to the earth's lap, lightly on the Road.
Long after, he had asked the women, spinsters in the sun and gleaners, Ashes all: What unleafs in the Unleaving? And the blue-eyed witch woolgathering had said, All souls that's not been tellt. Her apron full, she'd plucked the tendrils from the thorn. If thou didst know their tongue, they'd tell thee allt stories o't world.
He'd writ it down.
Aye, prick it out, the witch had said. An thou were cloven, thou might hear. But thou's an inch too many for yon sprights. At cockcrow, they's away.
Alone of all the living, Ashes—any woman in her turn—could hear, translate the spirits, wind their stories into shrouds. And being told, the stories of the dead unbound them. Ropes of snow.
And still untold they thronged him, struck him whiteblind with their wings of snow. They beat against the portals of his soul. The dead. Their silence was their song, was time.
He looked again at Margaret's page.
A revenant?
An earthly nourice sits and sings, and ay she rocks an empty cradle by the hearth. She's spelling to her sea-drowned daughter, Imbry that she bore, to bring her to her landfall, to the shore of Cloud; as she has spelled these seven years. In Law is timeless, neither sun nor moon will ever be: and every breath is drawn a new bereavement and a hope. Her milk child, listening, lulls to sleep.
But at a sound elsewhere, the sleeper woke, was Margaret, remembering that her nurse was gone. Was taken: for those Scarrish arts she practiced. That she taught.
Cloud now.
Unbounded; yet bereft. The consolations of her cell—her nurse's touch, her mother's ghostly voice—were gone. No comb nor candlelight, no cradling play of string. No lap. No leaves—Ah, Margaret, do you see them fall? No tale.
Herself alone: then she would voyage.
Clouded from the view, bright Journeyman plies onward, slyest of the wandering stars. She's rising. She is never risen, ever at the brim of Law: dusk-diving, whelming in the wave of light. Her dance is with the sun; she dares it. Thief, they call her, and the Ferrier, whose River is the starry Road: her lading is of souls.
Coatless, Brock crouches by a fire of weed. Beyond it, there is nothing but the drub and hishing of the waves, the glint and fading of the shingle; and her boat, drawn up and laden. She awaits the tide.
In Grevil's study by the guttered candle lay a map of all the heavens; on it, like the unknown constellations of a dream—of course—there stood an empty wineglass and a pair of compasses, a flute, a quill, a congeries of nutshells and a knife, the twire of lemon peel it cut. A Vanitas. There lay the pages of a manuscript, emended in the writer's hand. The moonlight fell aslant, moved on. Across the heavens retrograde, towards dawn, there ran a scuttling scrying mouse. Unlike a falling star, it paused a moment, scenting marrow; and was gone. The still-life and the text remained.
"...two roads to a Life, as figur'd in the starry Sky, recross'd: the Lyke Road and the Zodiack, the river and the Mill it drives, the hallow'd and Profane.
"That one we call the Sun's road, that we tread with him, the slow wheel of the Year. So that company of Players that we call Brock's Journeymen doth lie a night at this Sign or at that in turn, as doth the Sun in his Houses: at the Keys, the Coffer, at the Harvester, the Hind, so many Inns. Then rising, they pack on.
"There is an Other road that is our dreams, their Play. It is what Ashes tells. From what Green room we know not, the Soul is call'd; and enters at that Crossroads where the Fiddler and the Witches meet. Their Scene is at the soul Spring in the roots of Thorn: as Countryfolk do say, in Mally's yard. So in a myriade of myriades of Lives one Comoedie is play'd: we play, disfiguring in turn the Fool, the knott of Swords, the Lanthorn-Bearer; brave the Ravens and the Scythe. How long's the Lyke Road? says the riddle: just as long as thou draw'st breath; however long, too brief. We die in Ashes’ lap, wherein the Sun is born."
By the third of her allotted candles—they were dwindling—Margaret read. I bid thee goodnight, Mistress Barbary had said withdrawing: so she studied, waking nightlong with the dark, to bathe in it, renew herself. The day astounded her. It was—a clamoring of light, a forge, a chariot with fiery wheels, with horses fire-shod. A sea. And she an inland creature, of the underworld, bred up in darkness like a pot-blanched plant. Unbalanced with the light, she marvelled how these Cloudish creatures swam in it; stood, walked the dizzy earth. She staggered through their working hours, timesick, daunted by the bright and battering sun.
But now the failing day was quenched, the channer of the birds died down. Oblivious, she read until the candle crouched and flared. She startled. No one there. A wind had risen, that was all. The rain had stopped.
She knelt up on the bed, her finger in her place; twitched back the curtain.
Fire pooled and eddied in the quarrels of glass, that tilted it, now this way and now that, as on a choppy sea. Night wavered. Not the moon but her own face, pale amid the trees, looked in.
She bent and blew the candle out; then pushed the casement wide.
O heavens.
Stars. Thick as sparks from a fire of juniper. At first, a dazzlement, a shock of ecstasy: but even as she stood, her mind, swift-sorting, strung the patterns. Arm in arm, knee deep in apple trees, she saw the Witches on the Road. They looked as Norni drew them in the ashes of the hearth, in secret; like her card, but glorious. The fire-folk. One had a wisp of cloud for scarf, the tatters of a cloak of rain; the other swung the new moon at her hip, a budget with a star for coin.
And looking, Margaret laughed for wonderment: but silently. She'd learned that first of all, to make no sound, betray no vestige of her mortal blood. She sat back on her heels and rocked herself for joy and terror. And the household slept. No crowd of them ran out, half-dressed, to marvel at the city in the air. Look, look up at the skies! O look. So this was ... commonplace? What gods were they in Cloud, to leave such jewels scattered in a farmyard? Were they careless of their wealth? Or cunning? Did they mean to trap her, catch her gazing at forbidden stars? A thief of light. She shook with it. But even as she waited, shivering, for the sound of keys, the cold wind in the door, she thought: So little of it. But a strip of sky above the trees, a hem of petticoat. She would see more. And if they punished her, she would have seen.
No coal nor candlelight betrayed her. Soft as shadow now, she slipped into the greater room, the loft. She listened at the stairhead. Nothing but the wind in branches and the settling of the boards. No keys, no clattering of feet, no stench of butchery and fear. But she could smell the pears and apples on their slatted boards, like wine but sweeter far; could feel the buzz in them of prisoned summer, like the ferment in her blood. Could almost feel the tree in every timber, singing in its nailed captivity. Could feel the stones.
Barefoot on the wide bare boards, she stole to the farther window, clambered on a kist to reach the sill. Drew breath; and then undid the shutter, swung the glass.
Unleaving.
Norni's stars, that came not under Law, true North; and Thea's, painted in her cards: the Ship, the Ladle, and the bright Swan, barely risen, skimming low aslant the trees; the Lantern and the Knot of Swords. The Crowd of Bone that sang her mother's death. Ablaze. But not as painted: wheeling in a deepless sky, the Ladle spilling, and the great Ship overturned. I spoke them truly; I am shipwrecked. And again she laughed, astonished, through her tears. O I am drowned.
"Here,” said Grevil, turning from his inlaid cabinet. “Here's elfshot. This—” He held a leafshaped blade of flint, no bigger than his thumbnail, white as salt. “—from Imberthwaite. It struck a tailor as he sat a-fishing. He was never at home in this world again. They say. His widow afterward did say he heard the bridles in his dream and followed."
He laid it on the page beside his drawing: like, but as the light to shadow.
"And this—” he said. Another, sharp as fire, gold as honey, wave-knapped. “This lay buried in a barrow mound. A thousand years, may be; or ten, a myriad. Perchance it lay in dark when first my lady's Ashes rose; slept still when she did wake."
In dark. She turned it over in her hand: so light. Small substance; all intent. He answered what she did not ask.
"An ashing. A tale of one who bore it. A map for journey after death. Like this—” He slid another and another drawer to show his curiosities. A coin, a shard of pottery, slip-glazed; a bear of ivory; a bone. “Like this—” He touched the gold ring at his ear. “—that will be mine.” He looked at her. “We go not into dark untold.” No emphasis, perhaps, on we.
Another drawer. He turned a jewel that was in it, of an owl-eyed deity. Of gold: the earth could mar it not. He bent his face from her, as if the telling were a secret, inmost of his heart. His hands that held a pen, a blade with skill, shook ever when he spoke.
"It is mine argument that men do write the map of heaven on this earth, in stone, in history, in myth; but that the heavens write it in ourselves, in earth.” Again the sliding in and out of drawers. A leaf in stone; a pebble, water-thirled; a thumbling skull; a shell; a dragonfly. “That earth itself is ashing for the great world's soul."
The Nine their book, she thought. 'Tis writ in wind, in snow; and that he cannot keep.
Now Grevil smiled. “A star appearing in the Anvil, they do say, was Tharrin's soul. A comet: for the which he ever wore his hair unbraided, so was caught by it. He hanged in riding out to hail his star, so he did fall with its return.” He bent. “Now these—” This drawer was full of hailstones, rattling.
Witches’ souls. Faint malice in them still. She looked away.
"'Tis said that witches do instone themselves—and others, aye. They draw their enemies by name, to braid them in their hair. To hoard.” A click of pebbles as he raked through them. “They say my lady's crown is souls."
He could not know.
Shut and open. And this other drawer of ships, and each no bigger than a shell: as if a fleet were wracked in it. “Ah, these are pretty toys."
But Margaret stood elsewhere, in a storm of memory. As if a key had turned, a cabinet stood open, now she saw a white bed in a tower, and a book, its leaves blown backward in a wind. Her keep. But I ran, she said. I am not locked in it. And reason answered: it is locked in you. Box in box. Another storm: and Norni crouching, combing, by the bead of fire in a lamp, to bring the boat ashore, bring Imbry's boat...?
"...in Scarristack. They call them soulboats there. They brim them full of oil, and set them burning on the sea, ‘tis said, to bring the dead to the Unleaving. As we walk the Road.” He was all alight with it, imagining. “But see now.” And he held to her a pebble scrawled and flecked. She took it; it weighed nothing in her hand. Not stone but eggshell.
Now she looked to him. “'Tis light."
"An owl's. And this a wren's—” He looked at her aslant. “So small a thing to hatch the summer. This now is a raven's; this—ah now, this beauty is a gyrfalcon's. It was taken of a nest atop a scar, ten fathoms fall on rock.” At that, she looked at him, his scholar's bent, his hands. Catching at her disbelief, he said, “There is one climbs for me. He giddies not.” And smiling now, “And this a nightingale's.” To her astonishment, he whistled softly, like a bottle, narrow-necked, of crystal, filling up up up. Jug jug wit wit. “Thou gravity. There's asking in thine eyes. What wouldst thou know?"
"Wherein the music lies."
"Ah,” said Master Grevil. “'Tis not in breaking it. That way is only slip and shivering. Here's glair in one hand; in the other, but a shell, as silent as thyself.” She bent her head. “Aye, Mistress Mumchance, thou.” He set the egg down in its nest of wool. “But verily, her music's in the stars. They say the nightingale sings nightlong in the wood above. In the Unleaving."
"I have read no little of the stars; but I know not this constellation."
"Ah, it stands not in the heavens, but the heart. Did I not say the sky is written in our souls? In our cosmography?” He traced the inlay of the cabinet, the flowers and the fruit of wood. “I have heard a nightingale in Lune, but long ago. In Gallwood, in the fellows’ grove.” He looked far inward, reminiscent. “Quis quis quis, it sings; and, Cuius? Cuius? cries the owl."
Then shaking off his melancholy, smiling, he unlocked the inmost door.
"But here..."
Bright faces: portraits set in frames of ebony and gold and ivory, as small as coins. More precious still. Hand hovering, he chose.
Not this, the sad-eyed man: like Grevil in his look but greyer, all in black, a branch of almond in his hand. He sat in shadow in this very study. At his back, beyond the open window, lay his garden, greener than the sea, as fathomless. But he would dive no more.
Nor this, the young man standing in a field of barley, holding in his open shirt a chain, a something on it—what? a ring, a soul? another picture?—curled within his hand, unseen; nor yet his other self, his sister-twin by moonlight, at her music: sickle to his scythe. A glass unlooked-in at her back gave back the viewer's gaze in little, like the moon; it pupilled.
None of these, but two girls, side by side, a little elder than herself. He held them at his heart a moment; turned them. “This"—the fair one—"was my dearest mother, she who died when I was young.” He did not look at Margaret. “I think my heart died with her.” I am sorry, she would say; but knew not how. “And this—” As fair a maid but russety. Unsweet. The limner's brush had caught the mischief in her face: a stirring like a little wind that whirls the leaves in autumn, sets them all a-dance. “Her sister Annot, that was lost.” A silence, but for wind in leaves, the birds. “She heard the bridles ring."
Barbary herself brought up the master's cup, leaving Margaret to poke and puzzle at her square of linen. At her heels, the clack of tongues began. Deft Ellender shook out her master's shirt, laid stitches in the band. “Not silk,” she said. “Like some folk traipse about in.” Margaret bent to her work. “He's nobbut backend gentry. Madam, now, his naunt—well, his mother come o high great folk."
"Up north,” said Nan, and rummaged in the basket. “Here's tearing o sheets."
"Broad lands,” said Ellender.
"And empty,” said Nan.
"Her towers stand high,” said Cat.
"Allt better to look down on thee,” said Nan.
Cat flounced: no quashing her. “She's a ring til every finger, and a hawk til her hand. I see'd."
"Me and Bess Imberthwaite, we did her chamber,” said Nan. “Orris til her water jug and sugar til her sack. Her fires laid wi’ bark o cynament."
"I brock her stillery,” said Doll, and sighed. “All glass it were. She had her waiting-women beat me."
"Two on ‘em,” said Nan. “And but to dress her. We was not to wash her stockings even."
"Cloyed wi’ gold they were,” saidCat.
And Ellender: “We was not to meddle wi’ her coffers."
Sukey looked worried. “Was I there?"
"In thy cradle, thou goslin."
"Or she'd have made soap o thee. Suke-fat and violets."
Nan bit her thread. “Happen three year since she come a progress here.” She glanced up at the door; spoke lower. “She given our master a rare good fretting: would he wed? And would he wed?"
"Were it a brave young lady?” said Doll. “I would we'd a mistress."
"Here's a fray,” said Ellender. Folding back the master's shirt, her darns adorning it like snow on snow, she took a needleful. “I'd rather serve his aunt."
"Put gold til her hair,” said Cat.
Nan snorted. “Swill her piss-pots, more like."
Ellender bent closely to her needlework. “I'd study."
The wind in leaves troubled her. So many, thought Margaret. So many on the Road, still travelling. Untold. She lit her candle, took her cards; but they—her Wood Above—had withered. Tale on tale, they fell from her. Unleaving. Even spelling out the cards, she stopped; she squared them. Like and like. But she would have the naked sky.
Up she knelt, undid the shutter: but the light seemed bitter as a frost, a wind of snow of stars, sharp-sided at her eyes. Inimical as Imbry's sea. Against the storm, she crooked her arm before her face. This sky now was too great for her: it stopped her breath. She fumbled with the latch to shut it out.
But Margaret had yet another sky, within her, not without: her toy, her consolation in the dayless dusk of Law. Hands curved about an emptiness, a space of air, she held the sky in thought: a crystalline of air, aethereal. A glass of smoke, in which the embers of imagination swirled and rose, unburned and burning still. Upfalling to the wood above, they leafed, inlaid it with their fire. They flew, swift scattering, as dancers to their set. All there, the bright remembered stars. Did not her mother's mother set them in the sky? A beat of silence; then as one, they turned. Scarce breathing with the poise of light, she held them turning still. She set the errant stars a-dance.
Whorl within wheel, she turned with them in mind, kept measure. Swift now, with their joyous tumbling; slow and slower, with the cradle of the summer stars. She swung in them. She spun sun and moon like jackstones, all a-jangle; swept and caught the five stars in her hand. Again she tossed her golden ball; and in its falling, all was changed.
Within was outward. She dove dolphin-backed amid the river of light, her sinews braided with light; and down and downward, into shadow. There was something that she dove for, glimmering: a bright ring blind with darkness, buried at the sill of dark.
She slept.
Margaret wakes to a rattle of rain on thack-stones, in a reek of down-driven smoke. Night still? A rushlight dips and dances. No sky. Black thatch above her and a taws of hazel in the rooftree, all a-bloom, that powders her with dust, a sift of sunlight. By the hearth, the witch sits wide-lapped, combing wool; a loom of her in shadows mocks and mows. Margaret hears the soft scritch of her wool combs and the embers hissing. Cards? There, pillowed at her cheek. And tangled in her braid, the ring. All there. She lies, lapped in nothing but a ragged patchwork, rough as a nettlebed, and all holes.
Rooftree...?
Before she can speak, the leaf-witch answers. “Unleaving. We's out o't Road."
"Here?"
"Now."
Margaret sits up in the rough blanket and looks round. No moor. The witch's fire leaps and cowers in a hovel; or a hedge. The roof is plashed and eddered of the living thorn; the walls are tumbled stones. She lies in leaves on leaves, and lightwebs, downy as a cuckoo's nest, and vexed with twigs. O wonderful, most strange! A branch has flowered in the smoke. Of blackthorn, though she has no name for it: wood flowering in stars, whitenaked as the Nine.
And yet the starry sky is thack, the hedge a hovel, hung and flung about with crazy oddments. A tipsy cauldron, canted over in the leaves. A riddle and a rusty shears. A crook. A rattlebag. A garland, withered on a nail. But why? A ladle. Broken eggshells. Keys. What locks? A cratch full of wizened apples. A cage with no bird. A sheaf, unthreshed and sprouting, and a wormy wooden cup. On a shelf at her bedhead sits a green cheese by a whorl and spindle, wound with flax; a sickle, bound in straw. A cracked and unstrung fiddle, with a blindfold head. And up in the rafters hangs her own draggled petticoat, flimsy as frost, with a spider measuring the rents.
"Her coat,” says Margaret, remembering the dark witch. Had she lost it?
"Off ranting,” says the leaf-witch. “She'll have doffed her, breeks and all.” She bends to her rovings.
And the witch. Not ancient as she'd seemed on moorland: ageless, fierce. A green girl in the husks of autumn. Gnarled hands and moon brow, shining cheek and chin; owl nose and peaked red cap. Straggles of her hair hang loose about her shoulders, mingling with the webs, now grey, now dark; her spectacles cast imps of light about the ceiling, glint and flitter.
"Nine,” says the witch. “And one.” She lays down her combs. “Not risen yet?"
Margaret makes her dishevelled courtesy. “Could I help?"
"Thou?” The witch is dishing up a cold green mass from the cauldron; she raps the ladle on the bowl. “Thou'rt as much use as a cat i’ pattens. Here. Get it etten."
No small task. Struggling with her bowl of nettles and a broad horn spoon, Margaret chokes and swallows. “My thanks."
"Muggarts,” says the witch. “For thy blood.” She draws herself a horn of ale. Sleet falls hissing on the hearth. The witch drinks. “Dost knaw where thou's bound, lass?"
"Away."
"And wha's thou, when thou comes to it?"
No one. “A daughter?"
The witch looks shrewdly at her. Not my lady's gaze, avid and contemptuous; yet Margaret flinches, tallying her self: a coffer cracked on vanity, a windegg. A mole. Bruised privities and rifled heart. Green ignorance. “I can learn."
"Aye,” says the witch, and passes the horn. “Thou's yet undone."
The drink is bitter, heartening. “Could I not stay here?"
"What's here? Now and nowhere. Thou's for t'Sun's road."
"The world?” O the dread of it, the great unknowing. “An I must."
"And how will thou keep thee, goslin? Knit nettles? Shear owls?"
"I know not."
"What canst thou?"
"Cipher. Read and spell,” says Margaret. “Cast figures of the stars."
"Aye, canst thou? Riddle me: what's i’ this house?"
Round she looks, and up and down. And round: she's giddy suddenly with ale. No sky in here. And come to that, no in nor out, no window nor a door. There's nothing but a clutter here of ... Oh! “Houses.” And she laughs for sheer wonder. Oh, I see. The houses of the Sun: the Keys, the Coffer, the Riddle and the Shears. And yes, the stations of the soul's long Road: the Lantern and the Scythe. And there, the place of her begetting, in her mother's secrets, in the Crowd of Bone. Unleaving. “Stars. All the heavens."
"At thy birth,” says the witch. “When thou comes to it. I s'll have stood thee as gossip.” Dizzy with Cloud ale, her godchild only gawks. “We's kindred, sitha. Thou's daughter to my sister's daughter that's herself, that's one wi’ me. So thou's me.” She beckons back the horn, and drinks to Margaret's puzzlement. “A souling!"
A courtesy.
Down with the horn. The witch bustles. “There's an ashing for thee that I's kept."
"I thank you, but—"
"That's to be seen. T'ashing's what thou will; and what it wills, thou is to be.” She huffs the dust from a great kist; opens it on mice and fragments. “There was books.” She turns a smirched face on Margaret. “And which is thine?
Is it the ale? For there's a mischief in her now, an imp of curiosity. “If I were you, I'd have your spectacles,” she says; and waits her death by owls.
The witch laughs until the leaves upwhirl around her and the spiders fold and fall. She turns her owlglass eyes on Margaret; tsks and rubs them in her cap. “Here's joy o them,” she says; and sets them on her sister's daughter's nose.
And there is nowhere. Round the scryer turns and round: but there is nothing anywhere. No ground, no sky, no feel nor footing. Not a sound. All white in whiteness: a Cloud of unknowing.
"See? Thou can't see but I has my spectacles.” The leaf-witch takes and folds them, bow on bow; she tucks them in her petticoats. “I's keep them for thee while thou learns."
It is raining fiercely now, the hall unhousing into mud and thicket, the branch lost in branches, glassy with sleet. The cauldron sunk in mud. The witch bends and smoors the fire. Ashes now. Half light: a cold and clashy dawn. “There now. We's half-moon late.” And answering no spoken word. “For t'Nine. They keep back stairs.” She flings a sack on her shoulders, sets a basket on her hip.
"Coming?"
Margaret follows.
Small rain. Margaret waked from stalking dreams, toward dawn. So brief these summer nights: the house would be astir by four. Still dusk within, though, in her westward room. Even held aslant above her head, to catch the tide of light, her pages blurred. Even to her night-tuned eyes. She rose and lit her stub of candle at her tinderbox. Ah, that was brighter. Kneeling up, she slipped her hand between the wainscot and the wall, drew out an old tin candle box with all her hoard in it. A pack of cards, some lost; a tarnished ring; a pair of broken spectacles, the glazes fallen from their twisted frame.
She wondered at that last; remembered nothing but a fragment of a dream: a glint and flittering of light, expectancy. A journey. But she'd found them in her pocket, tied about her waist, that morning of her Cloudfall. Hers? But how? A puzzle in perplexity. She sat on her counterpane and turned the bits of glass like mooncoins in her hand, unspent. She held one to her eye, and saw her candle swerve and loom. Further and further out, until the flame dispersed. Mere fog. The other glass? Dwindled it: a spark. Would two at once be clear? A chord of glass? She made owleyes of thumb and finger, with a glass in each. Hand before hand, as if she sighted at a needle's eye. Not that way. This? She moved them in and out, as if she slid a sackbut, peering at the candle.
It leapt at her. A furl of flame. Astonished, she flinched. But the candle was still there on the sill, unmoved. Her hand unburnt. ‘Twas but its seeming came to her. A fetch. She laughed in wonderment. O my.
Again. “Come, fire.” And it flew at her bidding, like a hawk to her hand. A tassel. She held it, warped and haloed, in the glass. Let go.
Again.
Of its own, it guttered and went out.
Stalking and wheeling about her little room, she scried things. Her book, like a great moth to a candle. Her jug, like the moon.
She turned her gaze beyond her window, at the green fields of the sky below. Come, fold. It lighted. Here, to hand. And when she loosed it, far away. No stone within its puzzle lost. And not a blade of grass left bent. Come, fell. Who'd seen a hillside curtsey like a wave? It moved, removed. Come, thorn. Who'd seen a tree in leaf unroot and fly? Alight, without a ruffled leaf? Who'd seen a walking wood? And if a thorn, why not the Thorn? Why not the Sun and Moon?
Long since he'd dreamed of Annot; yet Noll saw her, stitching at a cloth he knew was heaven. Black on white, for it's the back side of the sky. She's taught him that, to read the the grammar of the stars. Strange constellations, yet he knows them all and their ascensions—see, the Owlet and the Urchin, garbed with fruit, the Bear with its bright honeycomb. They two have made them all, the stories of the sky on earth. They've made Unleaving. Now she unfolds another breadth of heaven, saying, Here's room to fill. What wilt thou?
A mermaid with a glass. A tyger.
Her bright needle flies. Yet all the while he fears the hinderside of heaven, where the ravens are. The Wood is white on black; white leaves that fall from soulwhite branches. Ah, they've stayed too late—Annot?
Grevil woke, half smiling, half in tears: for Annot, for the child she left. For the child she was. And puzzled: when did she wear spectacles?
Later Margaret sat with Grevil at his book. Rain as ever, and the soft scratch of their quills. Dip and scribble, pounce and tap. Her thought was elsewhere. She'd need a sort of conduit for light, a pipe. A roll of parchment? No. Heavier. Stiffer. She would need to fix the glasses: so. And so. Covertly, she looked about the room. A flute-case, a map-case. But he'd find them gone.
Outside the window, the gardener weeded and sang. “Hey, we to the other world, boys..."
In the widow's loft by her closet, there were older woodwinds: a reedless bombard, a shawm. An hautboy in a leathern case. ‘Twould do.
"Sir?"
"Eh?” Deep in time. Down the long pleached alley of his pear trees—long since winter-felled—his father walked, abstracted. White bloom falling on his bent head, his black doublet. A green thought in a green shade.... But the lass was speaking.
"In your lady's bower, might I handle the instruments?"
"That old virginals? ‘Tis lumber. What, to play upon?"
"...there, the Man i’ th’ Moon drinks claret...” sang the gardener.
"To study."
"As you will."
And the glasses fixed with sealing-wax?
Thou creeping mouse, she thought. Thou wainscot. Nibble at thy master's substance? Lumber. Trash. Curled within her nutshell mind, she smiled. Translation.
Broadlapped, Barbary sat shelling peas; they rattled in her bowl. The door stood open to the green and rain. She sang:
A pod of green sisters, a push with her thumb. Another shale. Out in the wet grass, under the apple trees, Doll chased the sidling ducks, crying, “Dilly, dilly, come and be killed."
From her bed, Margaret drew the moon down through her glass, as round as a drum-head. Tabor to her pipe.
A toy. Her glass was nothing here, thought Margaret: a swift horse hobbled that would run, a falcon seeled and mewed. Through her casement she could see but the skirts of heaven, draggled through the hills. And all above, unseen, the mystery and the wheel of heaven. Time's mill turning in the river of the Road. She must get out to it, beneath the naked sky. Must see.
But how? Not through the hall, past the slumbrous dogs, that at a step would rouse and hackle, rising stiff-necked from their bones. But go she must. Bent meekly to her master's book, or working under Barbary's eye, she brooded on her ways and means: with her stripped quill wrote ciphers of her flight; wound wool and longings in a single clew; weighed salt and stars equivocally. She made her wavering stitches with a double thread, of linen and desire, a piercing and a pull the knot did stay.
Window? Here the mullions were too closely barred; and there, the sills too high; from that other casement, she might drop, but never scrabble up again. She needs must come and go; and not be missed. No tower here to climb. Why had they no towers, when they had such skies? But at the foot of her winding stair, beside it in the wainscot, was a narrow door, a sort of stillroom cupboard, and at back of that, a doorway, giving on the orchard. Locked of course. Her key from my lady's tower would not fit; she looked with covetise on Barbary's ring. She missed a clear night; and another, anguishing.
Then on a grey wet afternoon, no hope of going out, by day or night—cloud muffled her chagrin—she set aside her hopeless needlework to climb her winding stair. No comfort in her narrow lodge, nor in the high chamber. Cold hearth, stripped bed, a dwindling store of withered apples: all familiar now. She blew upon the quarried glass; traced patterns in her fading breath. Pinched lavender and balm and borage for the scents. Turned back then with a winter pearmain in her hand.
Now atop the great cupboard, pushed under the eaves, she saw a small chest, like a workbox. Climbing on the chair, she hauled it forward, got it down. Then kneeling in among the lumber in the apple loft, she wiped the dust from it, put back the lid. Folded linen. Nothing strange in that. A needle still in it, half bright, still tethered to its trail of jetty silk: unfinished work. She shook it out, and turned it over in her lap. A smock. So nearly done: it wanted but a sleeve. It was broidered all with rainbows, arched from cloud to weeping cloud, as she had seen them now; but all in black on white. A sort of book, she thought. A spell? She puzzled at it. After tempest, see, I come and go. That much she could read. Snails, butterflies. I carry my house with me; and, I light where I will. Flowers, but she knew not what they meant. Urchins. Shan't. And in the empty room, she smiled. A ship—the Ship—for it was masted with a branching tree, and leafed with stars. Unleaving.
For a space she sat and wondered, with the journey in her lap. Then lifted out the inlay with its skeins of silk, its thimble, silver-gilt, and its pillow of pins. Under that, another inlay with some pretty toys of horn and ivory, silver and delf—charms from a yearcake, had she known. A wad of paper, which unfolded was a ballad sheet: a woodcut of a ranting girl in cap and feather, sword a-swash. No more. Yet something shifted, rattled. With her nail, she lifted out a panel, shrunk with time. A key.
And Barbary called up to her, to bring her wardens from the loft.
Ghosted to the shoulder in a fog of flour, Barbary thumped and flicked her rolling pin; she pinched her coffins round. She glanced up at Margaret, wavering on the sill. “All this while for pears? Thou's walked til Babylon and back.” Beckoning, the mistress turned them in the frail and pinched. “Sleepy. But will serve.” Margaret, turning, tethered to her key and glass, was on nettles to be gone, but Barbary stayed her. “Wait on, and I'll look thy stitches ower. I's just hearing Suke her tally.” She turned to the child at the window, knitting.
"Twelve winds, eleven trees, ten sleepers. Say me what nine is."
Sukey puzzled at her wool. “Please you. This heel's all amux."
Ellender, trip-trapping to the dairy, said “It's cloven."
And Cat, “Is't for goats?"
"Monkeys. Same as in thy glass,” said Barbary. “Let be.” And to Sukey, “Thou's counting, sitha. Look. And let thy fingers mind.” Down fell the parings, and she pricked and pranked the pies. Leaves, lattices, a running wheel of hares. “And nine?"
"Nine's for't nine Sisters in a kist o sky."
"Aye, and eight?"
"I could say you three."
"No doubt."
Her needles in a dreadful knot. “Eight ... eight's Brock's keys and locks. Seven's for t'rainbow? No, seven's th’ Ship."
"Thou minds what they sing at Elding?"
"Oh, I mind me. An it's songs, I remember.” And she sang in her small voice, like dew on a cobweb, clearer than her clouded self: “The sail's o th’ siller, the mast's o th’ tree..."
"I's get thee a fiddle to thy school, and thou shall dance thy gramarye. And six?"
"Six for a Swordknot,” called Wick Billy from his corner. “And down falls t'Sun."
"Good,” said Barbary. “Say me what five is."
He rubbed his nose, all smutched with silver tarnish. “Pies?"
"Nay,” said Sukey, pink with assertion. “Five's for't Wanderers. Within and out, and roundabout, and cross t'River twice. And four's—no, twelve were t'winds—four's for't Gallantry where Summer is hanged. And three's for his Fiddlestrings, and t'stars in his Bow."
"Good. Margaret?"
Startled, she could make no tale but, “Madam, I was not so taught."
"No?” said Barbary. “They's strange ways i’ Babylon.” She unstopped the oven, raked the embers out. “So then. Twa's for't Ravens that bear our souls away."
A chain of stones that broke in running, whirled and scattered on the steps. Elsewhere. A hail of souls.
"And twa's for't Witches that came hither from hence, and bound my lady Moon to't wheel. Set winter turning."
Bound? Was that in Grevil's books? And hence and hither, never was and now, changed places in her head. Turned inward outward like a glove. It giddied her.
Lifting up her peel of tarts, all gilded with egg, Barbary slid it into glowering dark. “And twa's Leapfire and Lightfast, that's ever at odds, t'ane and t'other, for't mastery o't year. Winter get Summer, and Sun against Sun.” She sealed the oven door. “But light and dark is one Moon. And her daughter's Ashes."
"Five for the wandering stars,” said Grevil. “So I heard it from my nurse.” He thought a moment, smiled, and spoke.
"Well enough,” said Margaret. “But they come not in a row, like Jack-a-clocks; but foot it in and out, like country dancers. Cross and cross.” Still gazing inward at her sky, that would be outward—O but soon, but even by the morrow. If the door unlocked. There was a glory in her, toward an end: an arrowing. The key hung next her body like the Swan down-diving on the Lyke Road. And the dance was in her, all ablaze. All the conjugations of the planets swift as language, swift as song: a carolling. Now rising, now retiring, at morn, at eve; swift, still; dim, dazzling; before, behind, and turnabout. Now here and nowhere. Tumbling in the sky. She laughed within, as if the key unlocked her. But bending to her page, she spoke most soberly. “They do vanish from the sky at whiles—at random, it doth seem; but never from the dance."
"Do they so?” He tried his pen. “I know them but by chance regard. O look, ‘tis Hulver. See, he rises back of Arket's byre. And, Sets, another saith.” He looked not at the room but elsewhere, at a sunlit garden, faraway. “We played a masque of planets at the university, before the lord of Perran Uthnoe and all his kin. ‘Twas for his wedding there to Lune, his eldest daughter."
"Were you Hulver?"
Grevil laughed. “Nay. Hulver had a leg; and much ado to get his lines. Our master striped him well for it. Yet he did leap—ah, thou hast never seen it bravelier. And sang like all the stars at morning.” On the lawn, the shadows fell. “He was Cloudish, of great family. There was hope of him; but on his going hence to keep his term—as I did not—his ship was lost.” He scratched a pattern in his margin, like a knot of hedges.
Margaret knew not what to say. “Is't written? I would read that play."
"'Tis in the elder tongue—but there now, thou art learned.” Now he looked at her, all at once shy and challenging. A mischief in his face. “I made the verses.” Scratching, scratching. “In a sort, the play did garner praise: ‘twas thought satyrical by those who slept through it.” He'd drawn a little cloud of asterisks. “I enacted Talith, of the Nine: for whom I'd writ a colloquy.” And now a creature in the maze, goat-footed. “Then to rouse the sleeping fellows from their after dinner, comes an antimasque, a dance of woodwos; and so enters Perseis, pursued by Slae: as in the tales."
"Are there tales? Of planets? Of the Nine?"
"Many.” Grevil gestured at the heaps of paper, spattering ink. “Hast thou not seen them? In this very book?” He looked about at the disorder. “So. In time, thou wilt, if we untangle. Of the boy who took Journeyman's boat to go a-fishing in, and caught his father's soul. Of Perseis, of course, that was the youngest of the Nine, earthfallen..."
"Is she not?” said Margaret. “Still a star?"
All in gold and violet, his starry cloak flung back, bright Hulver waits his cue. Stands tiptoe, all the stars a-tremble in his crown. On wires, so they nod his deity. His staff is tipped with light. On stage, the great astronomer, the greybeard, owl-eyed, has piped his invocation to the planets. See now the Players’ Lamp, Ox-Turning Journeyman who mocks the nighted traveller ... Noll Talith holds the book unopened, mouthing word for word. His own and meaningless. How strange that his delight in scribbling should have lit so many candles, branch on branch. The bursar has unlocked his hoard: the ends to go to poor deserving scholars. In the hall, it is dizzying: a blaze and roar, a fire fed on words. In this brilliant artificial night, the astronomer lies down, composing his woolgathered beard, to dream. But here in the withdrawing room, their Law, the real are half shadows: a confusion of stars and satyrs. On the table lie the shepherd's weeds the god will borrow of Tom o Cloud, his broad hat and his budget full of stars. A comet's tail of hair adorns the statue of a long-dead scholar. Wigless Perseis, her train of silver-gold tucked up to flaunt her kidskin thighs, her suit of nakedness, is dicing with the satyrs; Slae, a shy lad, paces, muttering his entrance; Morag, sticky-fingered with nimmed sweetmeats, has ado to tie her beak. Three of the Nine are playing mumble-de-peg; one reads, oblivious; four cuff and bicker like a huske of hares. And Master Wilton goes among them, finicking, exhorting, pinning up. Seemly, seemly, you goddesses. And, Mark the caesura, Master Slae. But to Hulver, he says only: Thy dance is deity. O'erleap the night.
The viols and the hautboys ravel out their braided music. Hulver coils himself to leap. And at the threshold of the stage, a star falls, chiming, from his crown. Noll runs to pick it up, to pluck his sleeve. Too late. The sackbuts call him. He ascends.
Far in the night, Margaret crept down the winding stair, and tried her key in the orchard door. It fit; and with attending to the lock—an owl feather oiled, from her bundle of pens—it turned.
She dared not, yet she must. The glass was in her skirts.
Softly now, she slipped the latch, stepped out among the inky trees. She stood a breath, dissolving in the sound of the river and the scent of green; slipped into it, as water into water, night in night. And ring on broadening ring, she felt the pupils of her soul enlarge. Still stood, attuning to the wider dark. No cell, but shadow to the far horizon. From beyond, there blew a little wind that set the wood astir, that shook the watery leaves. They spattered down on her, small drops of rain. Waked circles to the shore of night. Greywhite on grey, she saw the rabbit on the lawn that stilled and shivered, twitched and stilled; she saw the trembling of the grass. The boles of trees were paler than their leafage, ghosted by the waning moon. A wraithlike blue, limned in lichens, and the burden of the mossblack leaves. An owl belated spoke. So bounteous a dark. When she was brimmed with it, so that a drop would overspill her silence, she looked up.
A star.
One only in the rifted cloud, adrift before the moon; and blotted ere she raised her glass. But there, a dappling of stars, swift-clouded by the shifting heavens. Round she turned. And there and there, a glint of sky, like glimpses of a body in a ragged smock, a shoulder fire-moled, a blue-dark breast. Like islands in the rush of tide, still drowning in the rack. Silently, she called on them, O stay. And heedless ran after, through the gate with its stone boys, round the drowsy manor to the upward road. No thought, no longing but to see the open sky, away from the hulk of chimneys and the crowding trees.
Irresistibly, she was drawn to the hilltop and the ring of stones. There the sky would come round again, she half-believed. Envisioned: as a lantern that doth make a world about it, or a silver glass that she had seen in Law that drew a ship from a swirl of colors, as a wick draws fire out of puddled oil. It was the focus. Round it all the riddled heavens would be drawn together in their perfectness, still turning in their wheel of fire.
So she ran, but only to the turning in the hedge, the stile; and there she halted, and she sleeved her face. Looked down at her plashed petticoats, her bare legs striped with grass. Looked up again. No use. The hill was steeper than her onset, and the dark too fleeting for her ardor. Already there were voices in the leaves, a charm and bickering, an endless even plaint. The night was in half mourning, turning back the veil of cypress from its brow. No tint of morning yet—unless in shadows were a ghost of green?
But see-saw, see-saw in the hedgerow, like the hinges of the rusty sun—dull vaunt of day—a cuckoo sang its mock.
They were all at breakfast in a flood of sunlight. From the doorway, she was dazzled. “Thou's late abed,” said Mistress Barbary.
"Cry you mercy,” said Margaret, curtseying. “I slept ill."
"Aye, ‘twas a feather in her bed,” said Cat. A smirk and elbowing, all round the board. Wick Billy sucked his spoon and goggled.
"Didsta now?” A long considering look.
"Indeed but scantly.” Not at all. She'd slipped through the wainscot door as the house was stirring; made frantic rough amendments to her draggled clothes. She dared not drop her eyes; but Barbary's, she thought, missed nothing in the searching light: the stiff-dried petticoat, the damp shoes, rudely scraped.
"Happen thou wants physicking. Thou's have a dish o mugworts to thy supper."
The maids wried their faces. Margaret dipped her submission.
"Come, break thy fast. Quick now. Here's all to do."
Barbary turned to the others. They rose to her nod, in a flurry of napkins. “Day."
Margaret sat, and cooled her cheeks with a long draught of buttermilk. Her porridge was stiff in the bowl.
Barbary was already up and clattering; called over her shoulder. “T'master's rid out til Summerlaw; but thou's weary o thy book, I's warrant."
Seeing Margaret's dismay, the maids overcrowed her.
"Here's out o thy book,” said Cat.
"Nay, there's moonshine i't almanac,” said Doll.
"At turn o't moon will be our shearing,” said Nan, lordly. “And Hob Hurchin's to pipe."
Ellender smiled. “And Tam Sledger's to dance wi’ Is Oddin. All night."
Nan tossed her head. “He may please himsel. And what he's brewed, may drink."
"Clip ale,” cried Doll. “'Twere brewed this Hallows past. And cakes."
"And delicates,” said cat-sleek Ellender. “Dowsets. Curds and cream."
"Thy tongue's to turn it,” said glowering Nan. “Thy face would posset milk."
Doll galloped on. “Twelve hundred's to be sheared, says Tom. Then fall to dance."
"Last year I's etten nine cheesecakes,” said Wick Billy, unstopping his spoon.
"And were sick on thy long-coats,” said Cat. “Thou pollywog."
Sukey, clearing dishes, looked up at Barbary. “An't please you, mistress, will Marget be t'lady at feast?"
"What, yon gowk's egg?” said Cat, “Is she to queen it?"
"What's she?” said Barbary. “Kit Crowd's mother?"
"Madam Mim there. Margery Daw."
"And why not?” said Barbary. “'Tis not a part that begs discernment.” Secure in her ministry, though a cloud of May-fly ladyships should fleet away, she unlocked the spice cupboard. Nutmeg and ginger, saffron, pepper and cloves. A spar of sugar.
"Who is't then? Tell us.” A nest of gaping beaks about her. “Have ye choosed?"
"Nan's eldest,” said Barbary. A toss of the head. “But Cat Clapperdish is boldest.” A caper and a clap. “Doll's bonniest, and likest to a gimmer-lamb.” A squeak. “Nell's nimblest—aye, she'd keep her shoes fair in a sheep-dub, an she trod upon another's loaf. And Suke—"
"Nay, I couldn't.” Twisting her apron.
"Suke's our piper's daughter and may call his tune."
And she set them all to work.
Margaret, stoning raisins for a century of tarts, heard them singing, to and fro in the long low kitchen, rolling out paste for the cheesecakes—thin as tiffany—and raising coffins for the warden pies. Sad tales of the deaths of maidens to a set of tunes would make a widow skip; and mirth in a doleful key, modal and minor and elegaic:
Ah, but it had a dying fall, as if the petals were a thought embrowned, even in the blooming.
Margaret had faded from the room. Thought only of the silent dance, the dancers all in cloth of air, of darkness but for scarves of light, faint silver, and the flashing of their crescent feet. They wore the seven planets for their diadems, bright fire at their hilts. Unmasking, they did put aside their brief eclipse. The sun, moon, stars cast off their mantles of the cloud; took hands about the pole. I was but out of measure with the night, she thought. Ill-timed. But if I go before full dark, wait midnight at the stones?
The Fiddler raised his bow.
Toward midnight. From her window, Margaret saw the stars of summer westering: great Hulver in Ashes and the Scythe sunk deep in grass. Past moonset of a cloudless night.
Time.
With her starglass hidden in her petticoats, she crept down the winding stair, unbarred the wicket in the door, and slipped like shadow into shadow. Breathless with expectancy, she trysted with the Nine. At the sill of heaven, on their Law. She walked as soft as if the moon were owling her, as if the Raven at her back could spy. Death's daughter's child, she feared nought else, no ghost nor witch nor traveller. How brief this summer's night: an island in the rising tide. Even now, it glowed with intimations of the dawn, not stark midnight but owlgrey. Scarce dark enough to see the Lyke Road, faint as foam above her head. She met no stranger but a started hare.
On Law, the greycloaked sisters huddled, sparser than in memory. Her master and Barbary did say they walked. And here, here only was a flawless prospect of the east; as if the circle of the stones were built as frame to it: night's lantern that the east would kindle. Through it, she looked eastward to the harbingers: the Fool, the Knot of Swords. Toward Ninerise. Soon. She wiped her starglass, fogged with gazing. In and out, she walked the maze of shadows, turning Nineward always in her restless hey. Barbary's song was braided through her mind. A summoning:
A star? Still naked-eyed, she gazed until it dazzled. Yes. A knot of stars. She waited as they rose; she bowed and raised her glass. Come, Nine. They swirled to her, a skein of swallows—O a crowd, a dazzlement. At once her world was cracked, fell shining. What new stars were these? Dark sisters dazzling. As if her seeing were a breath that kindled, blew the ashes of the sky to embers.
Now Margaret dreamed no more of journeying. Against her night-closed eyes, she saw as through her glass: a coin of sky that trembled, fogging even with her careful breath. A vision circumscribed and yet enlarged: bewildering, glorious, aswarm with stars. She walked starblind, like a traveller in a snowstorm, in the whirl and sting of revelations.
Lying in the dark, on Law, she told the Nine, with pebbles, great and little, on a stone. A henge within a greater henge; a mirror of the smallest, highest of all. A spiral she could cover with her nail. Eighteen. Nineteen. A gemel? Twenty-one. At dawn, she swept them up like jackstones.
It was all to learn again. Not chains and carcanets of stars, but a scattering of stones, unset. She sifted for them, as for diamonds, in a drift of silver sand. There, the Owl's Eye, unblinking; there, the Tabor at the Fool's knee; the Clasp in the Necklace like a clew of light, woolgathered, wound about a spindle of thorn. Torn fragments of a text she'd read in full, an alphabet ungrammared. Notes of music played by one and one that made no harmony.
But there were stranger things to see in heaven.
She'd begun to write them down on scraps of paper: a mouse's nest of them behind the wainscot, with her sketches and her notes.
"Hulver in my Lady's house. He hath a train of Boyes about him, lillywhite: small Starres within his Orbe that dance attendance."
* * O * * * O * * * * * * O *
Remembering, she smiled; then bent the closer to her page.
"The Moon in my Glasse is old.” She stopped there. Light enough to blow the candle out, to play at sleep before they waked her. Light enough to write by, and a stub of blacklead: she went on. “Happely she doth go disfigur'd, in the guising of a crone, as Ladies walk abroad in Maskes. If it be not for the sake of Modestie (for all may gaze on her), then perhaps ‘tis Vanitie: though she fear not being Sunne burnt, yet she may be Winter chapt. Or else there is a Cloudiness within my glass, a sorte of Cattaract or web. Or else with looking nearly on her radiance mine Eyes be witcht. But she is flawed of Face, like one unpolisht with the Smallpox, who doth white herself to Seeme the fairer...” Looking up, she saw the moon itself, of lucid gold, of honey, melting on the tongues of morning, in the blue of air. Her light transmuted into song. “...yet she wanes."
Grevil walked out beside his meadows, lifted dazzling from their douse. They glittered in the wind, white aureate. A water green, wave green beneath. Blue undershadow, and the sweetness of the mingled flowers. Fine hay, but if ... (No hailstorm, blackrot: he had paid the charm.) Still green but golder, eastward to the rigg, his stripling barley stood, as yet unbearded. At a rippling in the grass like a running hare, he turned. A skylark shrilled its swiftlinked spiring music; but no bird rose. He followed.
"The Road,” she wrote, “is made of Travellers.” Her book was stitched of gathered leaves, no bigger than her pack of cards: the left hand to its right. She wrote as in a mirror, backward: not in Cloudish nor the old tongue, which her master somewhat knew, but in her cradle tongue, in Norni's language—and in Scarrish runes. No words for half what she would say, so she'd made them up: starglass. Slantstill. Notes, conjectures, observations. Reckonings and sketches. Margaret dipped her pen. “...faint Starres and numberless. The Nine...” Eyes shut, she saw a swarm of stars. “...if they bee Sisters, they are many as an Hive of Bees. What Honey they do make of Ayr and darknesse, I know not. If they be not Nine, I know no Tale of them; and if the Heavens be untold—"
No more. The stars were fading as she gazed, the brief night bleeding into dawn. So brief a night that none had risen, nor had set, but waded to the knee in half-light, dreaming, deep as mowers in a field of grass. All the bright, unlearned stars of summer.
Margaret looked down from the heavens’ Law and saw the figure of it standing on the earth. The heavens’ rune of stars was mirrored, backward, in the ring of stones. But even that had changed. Like stars in her glass that crowded, riddle beyond rede, the stones had thronged with fainter stones. New monoliths. The glass has vexed my eyes, she thought, and rubbed them. Half-light still. But now she saw the new stones were a knot of men and boys, bareheaded, silent. Waiting.
In the bush where she lay, a bird woke, chirred sleepily. None answered.
But the hele-stone walked. It strode from northward, from the wind's eye, with a naked blade: a tall pale moonwitch in a stormcloud of hair. My lady? No. Margaret drew a sharp-edged breath. No witch: her image in a bleared glass. A knife-blade eidolon. Thou mole. ‘Tis but a bugbear witch, a shadow on a wall. No woman even, but a guiser, all in stone-grey, ashes on his head. A man-witch played the part. He wore a hawk-nosed, faintly smiling mask, small atop his lean long body, smaller still amid his storm of hair; he bore a scythe.
The others hailed him, louting low. Crooked knees to him, bowed shaggy heads. Crouching, Margaret shrank, and stared him out of part. No witch. A ropy, ravelled fleece; a mask of bone. A man. What's that but shank and tallow? But a wick for an unseely fire. Whet! Stone on steel rang. Thrice and thrice, the guiser edged his blade. Slow tinder to that spark, he changed. The witch was in him, sightless as a fire by day: a shaking of the air. He shrank, annealed and vitrified by power. His reek of hair rose billowing. Cold fire. Margaret shivered in its blast. There are witches still on Law, said memory. The bloodstones in my lady's chain. Her crows. Lie still. They hunt what flees them.
Now his daemon roused herself, she mantled in his body. Stalking long-toed in the grass, she turned, now this way and now that. The men stood still as poppyheads; she trod a maze among them, fox and geese. And yet whatever way she turned, her blind mask bent on each of them, it rode unmoving in the rack of time. She danced: the old moon, with the new moon in her arm.
Then all at once, she swung her scythe. And open-armed, the man she struck at leapt the blade. Blazed up, as if he were invulnerable as flame. A challenge. At his cry, his fellows wakened from her spell. In and out amid her trance, they slipped and shadowed, at her very heels: like birds that brave a taloned hawk. Like hares amid the standing corn. Again the witch struck, higher; and another dancer leapt. Bare legs, a bladeswidth from the naked steel. They danced with death. No music but their measure and the wind of her knife. No spell but their serpentine. Always, at the back of it, the rune of blood, unspilled.
The hay's the dance.
By turns, they leapt the scythe. Now high, now low. Stiff men and wary; lightfoot and limber. Stag leaps, goatish capers. A lop and tumble, like a hare. A wallow, like a weltered porpoise; a bogged heave like a sheep. Mute cockcrow. All in silence, quickening toward dawn.
With every swing the light rose and the shadows lay in swaths, as if the moonhag sheared the dark.
By one and one, the men fell back, dropped out. Now three still danced with her; now two. A crowblack fellow and a ragged boy, whiteheaded as a weed. And on this swing, the scythe flashed for the first time, glinting like a gull's wing. The dark man sprang and cleared it. Blood? Petals from a crown of poppies, lighting after him. As if her blade had rent the sky. He grimaced.
The boy's turn. Barely made. He staggered as he lighted.
Now the man's. He waited, coiled as a crossbow. Sprang. It was splendid. For the first time, they cried out. A sun! A sun!
Swift now, the scythe flashed all about the witch, re-echoing about her like a pyre of lightning, like a bonefire kindled of the moon. It blazed amid the whirl and fury of her hair. Too bright for leaping. Yet the boy jumped, his white head flaring in the risen sun.
He fell like thistledown, to silence. Dazed, unhurt. No man called to him, nor clapped his shoulder. He got up, dusting his torn jacket. Shrugged.
The witch let fall her blade. Her hair drooped mournfully like smoke in rain; her robe clung, dark with sweat, against her body; clung and parted to disclose the naked man. Uncharred and unconsumed. Still passionless, the bone mask smiled. She beckoned to the sullen boy. He came to her; the moonface bent. A kiss. An accolade. And it was ended.
They were scattering to their labors, silent as they came.
Margaret hid.
He passed by her, the witch, long after all the rest. Burrowed in the underwood, she saw him, weary and dismasked, unwitched by daylight, with his bundle of guising. He stank of sweat and sorcery, green rank and acrid as a fox amid the thorns.
The brat lay like windfall in the grass beneath the ragtree, bruised with birth. He puzzled at the light, the leaves, the dappling of their shadows, doubling as they fell. When Brock came by, the boy was sleeping, nearly covered up in leaves. No fox, no crow, no witch had found him, cradled in the old moon's lap. His blood was not to spill. Not yet. And yet the earth would have him. Crouching by the thorn, she lifted him. He scented of his mother, blood and milk. The down about his head was white as barley. Naked as he came. Piss-wet. She sained him, eyes, mouth, heart; she happed him naked in her coat. Soul in earth in air in fire. He woke and wailed. “Here's a bagpipe that plays of itself,” she said, and danced him. “Here's a thirst.” Will Starvecraw, she named him. And off she strode with him to be the Sun.
Grevil's study was all shade, a box of drowned green light. Beyond the open window stood the orchard, deep in grass, downsloping to the water-meadows that lay white and shorn. The air was sweet with hay.
Grevil laid aside his flute. As if in Arcady, he'd loosed his bands, laid bare his wrists and throat. A sultry morning. Not a bird. As he studied, he ate cherries pensively, with ink-stained hands. The bowl was wreathed with dragons, blue and white. A rarity, but clouded now, a little crazed. Beside it lay a pair of ivory compasses, a bundle of blunt quills. Drawings of the stones at Askrigg and at Imber Lap.
Margaret at his side was elsewhere, by a river overhung with trees. Ash Beck. The wood above, said dreaming. Here's the Lyke Way in thy glass. She stood barefoot in the pebbled shoals, and watched the endless seine and shiver of green fire. What the Nine are weaving. Light in leaves. It flickered down and down the river, dazzling and a-dance. A riddle in the rune of light. If stars ... She waded out into the shallows, in the glint and dapple of the stream. It sang. A slow leaf fell to touch its shadow, rising from the air. Rimed. Drifted, eddying; was whirled away. She stooped and flicked a pebble up the stream. It skipped and started, skipped and sank. And at each leap—O wonderful, beyond all hooping—worlds began. As in her glass, enhaloing and interlaced. A skein of stories.
She was happy; and in shadow.
And yet more worlds, unbidden, came. There. And there. Outspreading. How—? Ah, rain. She heard the pattering on leaves. The river dimpled with the dint of rain. Rings wakened. Crossed and fretted and recrossed, until all the beck was one grey breadth of cockling silk. She lifted up her face. Unweaving rainbows—
The red squirrel called her back with scolding.
All gone but the travelling, fading at the limb of thought. Map falling stars...? she thought. Sleave skein? All writ in water. Gone.
Whisk, her master's squirrel, flounced from table to book-press, book-press to sill, chittering. The birds in the ivy racketed and slanged. She tipped the sanded page. “Your pardon, sir. Go on."
But her master was gazing out the window, a bob of black cherries on his hand like rings. Margaret followed his glance, puzzled. A cat in the currant bushes. Cheesecloths, sweetening in the sun. A mower, scything in the orchard grass.
O I am slain, thought Grevil. I am grass.
Burnt brown as a warden pear, his shirt laid open to the waist. At every stroke, he strides, he wades through downfall. O brave, the tyranny of youth.
Hard as a green pear, hid among leaves.
Soft as a sleepy pear, brown-sweet and bruising. Butter to the knife. Rough skin, the russeting. The bite of blue-veined cheese.
Brown warden of the trees. That mocks and vanishes.
At dawn. The brush of branches, wet against the face. Further. White as bloom.
Coming down by halflight over Nine Law, dazed with stars, Margaret never saw the boy till he called out. She started, casting wildly for a way to run. Sheer rock fall: not up there. Slough and hag behind her. No. Swift stony water: a long leap. She wavered. And the boy before her in the heather, watching.
"See'd a hind leap yon water. Not i’ petticoats,” he said.
Margaret faced him warily. He was crouched in a cave of bracken, paunching a hare with a streak of knife. After a moment, she knew him: the whiteheaded boy, the leaper of scythes. The moon's thrall.
"I saw you jump,” she said.
Setting had dwindled him: no leapfire, but a starveling boy. As black in grain as a goblin, imp-ragged, stunted as a scrog of thorn. Half naked, but for sharded rags. His hawkweed hair, that sunstruck was a burr of light, was clagged and sallowy, a ravel of rope-ends. He stank, beneath the reek of blood. He looked at her with cool eyes, green as hailstones.
"I see'd thee skulking. If my lady heared on it, he'd lesson thee."
His lady: the man-witch in robes. Not Annis. “He knows naught of me."
"He could. Thou's awd Noll's fey."
"Master Grevil? Do you know him?"
He stripped the fell from the flesh. “Knaw him? Aye, toyed him for a jacket but two days since."
Puzzlement.
"Jigged him. Danced his dawcock.” Blue bone-end, luminous. Raw meat. He looked sidelong at her, mocking. “Thou sloe, thou greenery. Dost knaw what I mean?"
Coldstruck, suddenly she did. “You cheaped yourself."
Now he bent, straking his worn blade in the grass. “'Twas he ‘at spilled, not I.” He tied the hare, leg through leg. “Cried out. I driven him."
With a cold qualm, she remembered Morag's hands on her: contemptuous, efficient. “Let me go.” She gathered up her skirts to get past him.
"Odd on.” As if he'd caught her by a trailing leash, she turned. “I see'd thee, owling after stars.” There was something in his blood-creased, blacknailed hand. He held it out: a snail shell, whorled and brinded. Tenantless. A coal of fire, it seemed: as if he could blow and it would brighten on his stithy. Night and firelight. A house. A heavens. “Bonny, in't?"
With her hands behind her back, she stared. Said nothing; stayed.
"Called Nine's Bower. Same as stars."
A hand before a candleflame; wreathed hair. A dream? A candle in a cloud of stars.
He closed his hand on it. “Yon hall.” He quirked his chin. “Thou's in and out like t'cat. Hunting t'moon."
"So?"
"Eggs.” He tossed the shell to her. It lay in the heather at her feet. “Milk. Meal. They's a kist full and ower. Thou could leave ‘em by Owlstone, nights."
"They'd be missed."
Impish suddenly, he grinned at her. “Thou say it's for hob."
No stars. No going out: rain beat down sullenly, ran swirling down the muddy cobbles of the yard. No candles left to read by. Restless, Margaret paced the attic by her room, beneath the bare planks, apple-stained. Gaunt comfort in that. The wind seethed in the heavy branches, bowing, blotching out the sky. At last, she sidled down her stair, and crept across the smoke-damp hall. There'd be rushlights in the kist; she'd nim a handful of them, tell her cards. In the passage by the buttery door, she halted, listening. A voice rose and fell in the kitchen, in the cadence of a tale.
"...so, on a winter's night, the moon's spindle near full..."
Margaret crept nearer, peered round the door. A covey of the maids sat by the fire, all at work; it was Barbary who spoke.
"...a lad come reeling ower hill, a fiddler frae a dance..."
Caught.
A maid glanced at another, smirking. Needles prinked.
Barbary knit on. “Pricked thysel, Ellender?"
"O no,” said the fair girl. “But that Meg Magpie is skulking i't cupboard."
"Stealing cream."
"Turning it, more like."
"None less for thee.” Barbary called to Margaret, “Come ben, if thou's a mind to hear."
Still Margaret havered on the sill. The brindled creature by the hearthstone yawned at her. Great elfstone eyes, sleek ash-and-ember flanks. Cruel teeth.
Doll's voice sharpened with disdain. “Not flayed of a kitlin, ista? Pretty puss."
"She hunts,” said Margaret.
"So she is made,” said Barbary, “as Tib to prattle and Tom to lie abed.” Heads bent demurely. “And mice i't buttery I'll not abide.” She beckoned Margaret with her chin. “Blue skein wants winding. Ont dresser."
But as Margaret edged in, there came a stamping in the hallan-end, a wind in the door. “There now,” said Barbary, setting by her wool, and rising. “There's Hob.” And bundle in apron, she slipped through the screens. They heard the mutter of a man's voice and the clang of pattens. Gone out. Through the door came such a fresh wild scent of earth and water, such a rush and a tumult of water and air, that Margaret nearly turned and ran out to it. Could not, before their eyes.
By the smoky fire, the maids unbent their tongues.
"That'll be fox amid geese,” said Nan wisely.
"Tinkers i't barn."
"Filching eggs."
"Firing hay."
Doll said lusciously, “That craw lad's been about. Skulking."
"What's he?” said Margaret. “A spirit?"
Nudge and smirk. “Aye, one o Noll's feys,” said Ellender.
And Cat, “If thou gang to't Hallinwood, he'll gi’ thee a green gown."
"Get mooncalves on thee."
"Goblins.” Whispering. “He disn't have a soul."
"Nor a shadow."
"He'll creep in at window, Suke, and steal thine."
"There now. That he won't,” said kindly Nan. “Not without thou call him in by name. And he hasn't none.” And to Margaret, “He's nowt. Nobbut beggarly. He were an Ashes brat."
"He should ha’ been dead."
"Bled back to't earth—"
"But she hidden him away, his mam."
"So he's nowt."
"Nameless."
"And she's Ashes ever."
Low-voiced: “Any man's."
Sukey Bet uncorked her thumb. “Our mam says he's Mall's basket."
They hooted.
"So he is. Hallyborn. So we's not to clod muck at him. For Ashes sake. And she's gi'en him our Dad's awd shirt when he's begged, and bread.” Twisting her apron, pink with unwonted emphasis, she said, “And so Mistress Barbary has. So there."
"Ned's awd stockins,” said Wick Billy from down amidst the muddy shoes. He lay there on his belly, dreamily, pushing them about like boats in water, like wagons afield. “I knaw where t'Mistress has ganged."
"Thou disn't."
"I do. Cuddy's getten bellywark. Green imbers, he's etten. And she's ganged wi’ a drench.” And he bent with his wisp of straw to Nick's great haywains, Margaret's stout cobles, down at heel with clambering.
Clack! went Barbary's pattens on the sillstone. In she came and snecked the door. Shook out her spattered apron; settled her cap. “Here's a clattering of tongues. Do thou make up t'fire, Nan; and Doll, thou scrape sugar. We'll a posset ere we go.” Bidding Margaret to her knee, she slipped the blue skein on her hands; and winding up her ball of yarn, began her tale where she had left:
"...a fiddler frae a dance. He heard no bridle ring; but in his road and cross his way there stood a horseman, all i’ black..."
It was clouding to the eastward even as the Nine would rise. The stars were winking out, dissolving in the moon's spilt whey like salt. No glimpse of Journeyman; but Perseis and Hulver lay conjoined. No more this night, thought Margaret. She would in, and write her notes, and rise the earlier. And yet she lay in the cradling heather, gazing at the earth asleep. Asleep.
The curtains of her journey billow out, raingrey, and wrought with stars. Her bed's a book, a ship. Is time. The leaves lift, turning backward in the tale. Unwintering. The clawed rings of the curtains...?
Were a nightjar in the heather, churring, changing to a cuckoo's mock. She started up. No bird. That white-polled boy.
"Catched any?"
"I'll away,” said Margaret, rising, with her glass behind her.
"Dark yet,” the crow lad said. “If thou's bent on play."
"'Tis my work and I have done."
"What, is thou moon's shepherd? Is all thy stars in lamb?"
"I wonder that,” said Margaret. “So I wake."
"Thou madge-owl,” he said, but absently. Turning gazing at the sky, he was silent a space. “Moon's driven them to fold.” He bent to her, all prickliness turned thistledown. “Ayont this knowe. Will I show thee?"
"I must away. They'll be stirring."
"Sun's abed. They'll not afore it, being swinked."
"The mowing...” But she wavered.
"Hay's in,” he said. “Yon field's t'last. But see thou.” Softly at her ear. “Come. A pretty flock o stars, and all a-maze i't grass.” Coaxing still he drew her on, still turning backward toward the cloud-lapped east.
"There now."
"Oh!"
A cloud of stars. Of wandering stars, Perseides astray. Aglint and giddying. Now there, now elsewhere, in and out, like candles in a maze. A dance. Down-drifting like a scarf of light, silk gauze and silver, spangling, that wafted to the grass and tumbling slowly rose, unravelling. Rebraiding, cross and cross. A net and what eluded it. Ah, there, the cloth of heavens of her dream, but wrought on nothing, on the air itself.
And airy as a conjuror, as grave as any mage, he swept his arm at them.
"Here's t'Sheepcrook; here's t'Black Dog, at Fiddler's heel. Yon's Riddle. Yon's Lantern at t'Ship's mast. And t'Ladle and t'Vixen Dancing.” His hand like a pale moth. “Yon twa bright stars is Witches. Sheath and Knife. There's Smith at her stithy. That's t'Owl, waking wi’ her one eye open, and Brooch in her claw. That's Sickle and that's Straw, but some call it Thread-Needle or As-Many-As-Will. That's Ewe and that's Shears. There's Fold."
"Fiddler?"
"Aye, to play for t'guising. Didsta fall i’ last rain?"
Margaret considered. “Perhaps I did."
His naming made no sense: ‘twas spring and winter all at random. A jugglery.
"Does they like thee, yon hey o stars?"
"Not stars,” she said. “Slow comets. Planetary. See, they err."
"Owlet.” He stooped and combed the grass; and turned to her. Moonspill through his fingers. She could see his sharp face shadowed by it and the will o wisp of his hair. He showed a little flinching creature in the cave of his hands. Against cracked nails and callus, earth-ingrained, she saw its scrawling shadow and its moonleaf greeny glow, that seemed no part of it. That scarce indwelt.
Spill and shadow. She bent, scarce breathing, to observe the thing. A chimaera: a grubbish creature and a lamp of soul.
"What is it?"
"Lateworm.” Triumphant. Nonchalant. He opened out his hands and whiffed. Away. “Thou goslin. They foretell."
"Can you read them?"
"Aye.” That scornful glee. “That grass will fall."
So I've drowned, thought Grevil, turning upward to an endless green. A roaring in his blood. No breath. And far far above him, wavering, an eye of light. I've fallen through the Sun's eye, fallen burning from the mast.
He looked to where the crow lad waded, naked as the Fiddler, in the shallows of the beck. Against the stream. O let me keep this moment ever, ever at the sunstill—only but to gaze. Unleaving. How he bent, like wind in barley; how he stood. Burnt brown as Tom o Cloud, oak brown to where the leaf turned flower, to the softness and the stirring. And his white head burning in the sunlight, in a flare of silver. Like a comet, perilous and beautiful. What Till hath writ on Comets. What Antoninus saith. Ah, now the pyets in his head began, the rumour in his ears. See now, t'King o Lune is dead.
"Lad?"
"Aye. Again?” But he came and crouched by Grevil, naked still, and plucked his tousled shirt. Unscarred, unbeaten since his boyhood—Madam's cruelties were of the spirit—Grevil would not strip beside that flawlessness, that damage. He himself was marred, but only with the keeping, like a wanfine vintage, musty with his age and ink. He traced the downless cheek, the collarbone.
"Not over and again, but ever."
Grevil's hand went to his coatskirts, to his pocket, to his purse; spilled out a something glittering on his palm. Sun's face looked up at sun.
"Eh,” breathed the crow lad, and bent to it.
A mask, no broader than his thumbnail, bearded with the corn.
"Is't coin? Or what?"
"An ashing."
"Whose?"
"Thy forebears.” Grevil turned it in his hand. The face, not kingly but a stripling youth, scarce bearded, seemed to smile. “A digger found it in yon hill by Imberthwaite they call Unleaving; not in my time but my father's father's, and ‘twas ancient then. As old as Mally's shoon, my nurse would say.” He touched the bright hair. “Thine."
Grevil saw the light go out of him. “They'd hang me for it."
"Why? ‘Tis no one's but the earth's, as thou art."
"You knaws me, what I is. I's Ashes’ brat, I's nowt.” He pulled his rags of shirt on, and his breeches. “When I's dead, I's craws’ meat. And there's none sall tell me."
Grevil put the bright thing in his pocket; stood and took him by the shoulder. “Thy tale is written in my book: how Ashes is thy mother and thy soul is Cloud's."
"Burn it.” Now he kindled: not with love but dread and fury. “That's not for yer grammary. Yer fool. If he—"
But If was swallowed. Almost he had struck his elder, clawed him by the ears: the Master Grevil who could have him hanged. He'd had him by the cock and stones a quarter of an hour since; had jigged him. That was business; this was insolence.
Gently Grevil took the work-rough hands between his own, unclenched the fists. He thought he knew the cause. “No craft in spelling: I do swear it by the Road. I am not the first to write of Ashes and her son. Thou art in a crowd of such."
Still sullen. “Crow lad's what I is. There's nobbut t'ane."
"No, lad. No. For all men die: yet that is not the only tale. Thou art thy own self, and thy tale is thine.” Soft, soft now as a snail's horn, stalk and eye: the apprehension of his soul. Not lust but tenderness. Once more his hand delved in his pocket; once more the golden face smiled upward at the sun. He closed it in the crow lad's unresisting hand; he kissed his mouth. And softly, even as the boy had turned, the elder spoke. “Know that I do love you. Will."
As if it burned, the crow lad flung the gold from him. As swift as starshot, tumbling in the sun, it flew, fell sparkling in the water: where it lay.