Damaris stepped down from the coach on to the cobbles of Skelfeld marketplace.
The last weeks had been hard. She had written her acceptance to Father Gedney who had replied with delight without saying too much; had given her resignation to Miss Edwards who had been regretful; had explained to Mary Elaine that she preferred the "small" life of the dale to the delights of Hull, which Mary Elaine had not understood; had sent a farewell letter to James, which Mary Elaine had not understood, either; and while doing all of that, had had to see the school term through to its end, until finally it had all been finished at last and she was free to leave. She had taken the first coach she possibly could and now here she was. She looked around at the familiar gray stone buildings and sighed with the weary pleasure of having come this far, of being so close. She would stay tonight at the inn and tomorrow hire a cart to take herself and her trunk and bag the last few necessary miles to Gillingthwaite. What would happen then, she did not know and at this particular moment she did not care. It would be dealt with as it came. She had done enough for today. Only Father Gedney knew she was coming back to the dale. There was no need to hurry toward the rest.
But later, standing at the window of her room in the inn, she found that despite the day's travel and everything that had gone before, she could not rest. It was early June and twilight would last far into the evening. She could see other people in the street – couples and families strolling, enjoying the evening. There was time enough for her to go out for a walk to ease her restlessness, and gathering up her cloak and purse, she did.
She had never spent enough time in Skelfeld to have acquaintances there, but in the general mellow mood of the evening people smiled and nodded and wished her good evening, and she smiled and nodded back. She did not know much of the town beyond the marketplace and was surprised when a long curve of street brought her in view of a tall-towered church that somehow seemed familiar. She walked on toward it, was nearly to it before she realized it was not the church but its tower that she knew. Coming down the dale toward Skelfeld it could be seen from a mile away, sign that the journey was nearly done. She came to the churchyard wall and stood gazing up at the tower’s blunt shape against the darkening sky and thought about how well it would serve as a marker on one of the Old Ways. Except how would you find a track through Skelfeld? she wondered and idly walked on along the wall and around to the church’s west end.
There she found her answer. With unaccustomed straightness, a street ran due westward from the churchyard’s gateway. Damaris guessed that years upon years ago, when Skelfeld was a much smaller place than it presently was, that street might well have been the main way into the town. Through the centuries, with the growth of the marketplace where it was, the heart of the town had shifted, and the main road with it. Here, what had been the main road had become only a modest street running between modest cottages, curving away at the town’s edge into no more than a country track between stone walls and open fields. From where she stood Damaris could see those fields. Could see, several of those fields away, a clump of trees standing alone in the middle of one of them.
She stood for a long moment, looking at that clump of trees. Around her, the long twilight was drawing on to dark at last. It was time she turned back to the inn and her bed there. Instead, her back to the church, she went forward, following the street toward the open countryside. Beyond the last of the houses, where the road curved to the right, she found there was a stile through the stone wall there, and a field path beyond it, running toward the clump of trees perhaps a quarter mile and three fields away. Damaris looked behind her at the church and its tower, considering. Despite her day's travel she was not tired. She suspected she would sleep poorly even if she returned to the inn. The night was warm and clear, and though the moon was only a thin, wasted crescent almost to setting behind the westward hills, the stars would give more than enough light by which to walk.
She stepped over the stile and started toward the trees – and home.
The dying moon had long since set and the stars were wheeled a fair distance across the sky when she stopped beside another stone wall along another field and gazed around her. Despite the miles she had come, the markers along the track had not failed her yet. From the first clump of trees outside of Skelfeld, she had been led on by gaps in walls, other stands of trees, another church tower, a pond, a tumulus, a straight piece of road, and once the back of a barn that lay flat along the line of the track at the edge of a farmyard where a dog had been loudly indignant at her passing. To judge by the black shape of the hills against the sky, she was well into the dale, though exactly how far she had come she could not have said. Her first exhilaration of daring had long since quieted. She was simply, quietly happy. She would be tired when it was done, and she suspected she would be hungry sooner than that, but for just here and now she was still infinitely glad that she had come.
Ahead, across another pasture, there was another tumulus – a mound raised over a burial made so many hundreds of years ago that no one remembered why or for whom it had been made, only that once upon a time it had been a sacred place and so was left as it was. Trees grew from it but someone kept the underbrush cut away. She thought it would serve for a place to sit a while and rest before she went on.
She was two thirds of the way across the field, in the wide open, when she began to think that there were more than trees ahead of her. The trees' narrow trunks rose straightly, set wide apart. Beyond them the sky showed as a lesser darkness. Against that, among the trees, a shadowed shape had moved.
Damaris slowed, saw the movement again, and stopped, not afraid yet but wary. Who else was out tonight?
The shape moved forward, out of the trees, and began to descend the slight rise of the tumulus. Someone on horseback. A man.
At that hour, in so lonely a place, she should have been afraid but no fear stirred in her. She waited, a certainty beginning to grow in her as she watched him approach, and long before his face was clear in the starlight she knew him.
"Kellan."
"Damaris," he answered. He dismounted as he spoke, and Damaris went forward and into his arms. For longer than she had any sense of, they simply stood there, holding to each other, being together enough for them both, until he bent his head and she raised her own, to take his kiss and give hers back to him. That would probably have gone on for longer than it did, but Kellan’s horse pushed its head impatiently at his back, nudging him ungently off balance. Kellan shoved the horse's head away with one hand and kept hold of Damaris with the other as they stepped a little apart, a little laughing.
"I felt your coming," he said. "A little after sunset. So I came to meet you."
"It was you I was coming to. Did you know that?"
"I didn't dare to know it. Not until you said my name just now."
"But how did you know to come this way?"
"I'd be hard put to imagine you strolling along the road in the middle of the night. Even you have more sense than that."
"Oh, assuredly. Wandering across strange fields in the dark is ever so much more sensible," she laughed.
"You knew how to find the Way. Just as I did," he said, and they kissed again before Kellan took her by the hand, caught his horse's reins with the other, and asked, "Do you want to ride or shall we walk?"
"Walk. For a little while." Damaris wove her fingers with his. "While I grow used to you being here."
"I've been here all the time," he pointed out.
She squeezed his fingers in answer and they turned back the way she had been going and went on, hand in hand through the silver-shining darkness.
Later they rode together, Damaris on the saddlebow in the curve of his arm. They talked or were silent as the mood took them. After a time she finally thought to ask him about Gweneth's baby.
"She's due now any hour she decides to arrive," Kellan said. "If my luck is compounded tonight, she’ll be born while I’m gone, and I'll escape having to hold Nevin's hand through it all."
"Poor deserted Nevin."
"Father can hold his hand. Keep them both from being in the way. I’d rather hold your hand."
Dawn had barely begun to color the sky as they came along the outer edge of Gillingthwaite and past St. Cuthbert's. Remembering the day she had stood by the Lady Stone wondering if the break in the cliff pointed toward the church tower, she asked, "Could we go to the moor before we go home? Could we go to the Lady Stone?"
Kellan was silent a moment before asking, "Are you sure?"
They had talked of various things, the little they had talked at all, but never about the one thing. As yet, Kellan could only guess how much had changed in her, for her to be able to return. This could be her way to show him how deeply she was ready to accept Thornoak’s secrets with a whole heart, that her fear and clinging to ignorance were gone. Her running away had brought her full circle back to where she had begun, to where she needed to be, and with Kellan's love strong around her and no more fear in her, she said steadily, "Yes."
"Then we will," he said. "We've come all this way by the Old Way. We should finish it out. We'll ride up to the foot of the scar, leave the horse there, and go the rest of the way on foot. That should be a goodly way to complete the magic."
"We seem to have made enough magic already," Damaris murmured, nestling her head against his shoulder. She was beginning to feel her own weariness. "But yes, that’s what I'd like to do." And afterward they would walk down to Thornoak by the familiar way, surprising everyone at breakfast.
They tied Kellan’s horse in the woods at the foot of the scar and began to climb the faint path that led up through the break in the cliff to the moor above. Behind them to the east the sky was full of light; even among the trees they had little trouble finding their footing on the path and they climbed steadily, not hurrying. The path would bring them out at the scar’s top near a track that ran below the moor’s crest toward the Lady Stone. From there the walking would be all easy, but the path was not, and near its end, Kellan stepped aside to help Damaris up a last steepness, handing her past him to go ahead the last few yards. She came onto the level at last and, short of breath and freed from watching her feet on the uneven path, she raised her head to the sweep of moor and sky above her. And gasped.
Rather than the clear, brightening sky of dawn she thought to see, she was confronted by a black roil of clouds climbing rapidly up the sky, carried on what had to be a powerful wind
"Kellan, look!" she exclaimed.
Beside her, he already was; was saying, "That’s a storm will be on us in minutes, it’s coming so fast. Better we go back into the woods. We won't make home even if we run. Down the scar, among the trees, we'll be as sheltered as may be."
In the time it took him to say that, the blackness had mounted more than two handsbreadths higher up the sky, was sweeping toward them faster than a horse’s gallop. Lightning forked viciously across the darkness, the thunder coming not even a gasp’s length later. Kellan was right – they needed to take shelter. But instead of giving way to his pull on her hand, Damaris stayed where she was, held by a crawling along her nerves that she had never felt before, and she heard herself saying, her voice sounding curiously flat even to her own ears, "It's coming too quickly. There's–" Her voice hardened into certainty without her knowing why. She only knew. "There's something wrong."
"I know. I can feel it," Kellan said sharply. "But you shouldn't be able to. You've not been trained to it."
"I don't need to be trained to feel something as strongly wrong as this is!" she flung back at him. Then, as lightning cracked lengthwise across the black clouds and thunder rolled after it, Damaris cried, "Look!" pointing to where, on the crest of the moor, the Old Woman reared its darkness against the turmoiled sky, with beside it a woman standing, her dark skirts and pale hair streaming in the wind, her arms out-stretched in seeming greeting to the storm. Damaris’ cry of, "Virna!" was ripped away by the wind that at that moment came down on her and Kellan, staggering them both a few steps backward as it lashed the tops of the trees along the scar into a flailing that matched the writhing clouds now filling nearly half the sky.
"It’s Virna!" Damaris shouted, the only way to be heard over another massive rolling of thunder. "It’s Virna bringing this down on us!"
"Go into the woods!" Kellan shouted back. "I'll try to stop her!"
"You can't!" Damaris cried.
But he had already left her. Head down, he was fighting his way into a run against the wind. Desperate that he not reach Virna alone, Damaris went after him. Hampered by both the wind and her long skirts, she was fatal yards behind him as he came to the slope upward toward the Old Woman, and she was beginning to sob with knowing she would not overtake him in time when a woman’s voice called out – strong enough to be heard even over the wind and thundering – "Kellan!"
There was enough command in that voice to stop both him and Damaris and turn them around to see Aunt Elspeth just come from the path down to the dale. She, too, was fighting her skirts, and like Virna and now Damaris, her hair was blown free from its pins, was loose in the wind. But more than that gave her a wilder look than Damaris had ever seen on her. To be here now, she must have felt the storm coming well before Damaris had and come to meet it.
"It’s Virna!" Kellan yelled, pointing toward the crest of the moor. "She’s brought this! She's come back and she’s called this storm!"
Coming toward them, Aunt Elspeth said, "I doubt she's ever been far away. She's been waiting for now, when Gweneth's baby is being born."
Damaris understood instantly: Gweneth, caught in the pains of childbirth and terrified by the storm, might all too horribly cause her own death and the baby's.
Kellan turned again toward Virna, the wind tearing at him as he shouted, "We have to stop her!"
But Aunt Elspeth's voice rose with a strength that matched the rage sweeping down the sky around them, ordering at him, "Leave Virna to me. Go to the Lady Stone."
"You can't go alone!" Kellan shouted back.
Staggering to him through the wind, Damaris caught hold of his arm. Whatever he did, she would go with him, even knowing that neither he nor she was any match for Virna if Virna had the power to call up a storm like this. Aunt Elspeth likewise knew as much and ordered, "She'll destroy you, Kellan, and Damaris with you. Take Damaris to the Lady Stone. Keep her and you alive. Virna is nothing you can help. She's mine."
It was command and demand together, with no room left in it for her to be disobeyed, despite she had in all this while not looked at either of them, all her heed fixed on Virna – who had turned, Damaris saw through the storm-darkness, to face down the slope at them. Overhead, the lightning was nearly continuous now and the thunder with it. One instant more Kellan hesitated. A bolt crashed across the sky so close above their heads that Damaris flinched closer to him, crying out, averting her face from the glare.
He wrapped her in his arms, his head bent to hide beside hers, and when they looked up, Aunt Elspeth was past them, going up the slope towards Virna, into the teeth of the wind with her head high and her raised hands moving in some manner of pattern.
"We can't help," Kellan groaned. "We’ll only hinder. Come." And together, holding each other up against the wind, they ran and stumbled over the heather and then the close-cropped grass of the Place, almost to the Lady Stone when the rain and a new fury of wind drove down on them. Instantly soaked through cloak and dress, Damaris stumbled, shoved off balance by the wind and tangled in her skirts, so that it was Kellan who brought them the last yards, dragging her with him to fall together against the welcome unyielding of the Lady Stone. It gave no shelter from the wind-driven rain or the strike and crash of the lightning and thunder, but Damaris slid down the stone to crouch at its base, clinging to it, with Kellan crouched over her, putting himself between her and the storm, his arms outstretched around her to hold them both closer to the rock.
"Kellan," she tried to say, but his face was turned over his shoulder into the storm, and in her mind she could feel him reaching through the wind-driven rain and lightning glare toward what must be happening on the crest of the moor, lost now behind the pouring rain. Had Aunt Elspeth reached the crest through all the storm’s force surely turned against her?
She had. Even as Damaris doubted, she felt her aunt there, just as she felt Kellan reaching his mind toward her, and without thought about it, Damaris buried her face against his shoulder, shielding herself as much as might be from the storm, to let her turn her own mind in on itself and gather from it all the strength and anger that she had – the strength of her love for Aunt Elspeth and the dale and everyone in it; her anger at Virna's hatred and Virna’s senseless desire to hurt and destroy. She gathered together her love and her anger and flung them outward toward her aunt, silently crying out in her mind, Take them! My hatred and my love and all the strength I can give. Take them and make them a weapon against her!
Lightning jagged and thunder crashed through the darkness, seeming to shatter the storm, ripping its fury out of it for one torn moment; and in that pause of wind and rain, Damaris raised her head from the shelter of Kellan's shoulder and saw Virna still standing beside the black shape of the Old Woman, with Aunt Elspeth facing her from perhaps fifty feet away. Their bodies were braced, their hands raised toward each other, and in the gap of almost-stillness Damaris could hear the raw viciousness of Virna's voice throwing words into the air and Aunt Elspeth remorselessly answering back against whatever Virna was wishing upon her. Then a new fury of wind and rain swept down on everything and they were gone and there was only Kellan and herself, crouched tightly to each other and the Lady Stone, faces hidden, and Damaris’ eyes tight-shut so that she did not see the sky split apart in a lightning so huge and near she felt it more than heard it as it smashed her into unconsciousness.
The grass beneath her cheek was soaking wet.
That was the first thing she was aware of.
And then that everything was quiet except for the idle pattering of an easy rain around and on her.
And then that something heavy was lying on her. She struggled a hand free and pushed her straggled, sopping hair away from her face. Beginning to remember why she was lying there, she opened her eyes and saw that the weight across her was Kellan, lying motionless. She had time to be afraid before her searching fingers found that the pulse in his throat was still beating. That gave her strength to fight her wet skirts and his body enough to shove him off of her; let her struggle to her knees and bend over him and wipe his muddied face with the least dirty edge of her cloak, saying his name until he stirred with a small groaning and opened his eyes.
Just as dazed as she had been, he gazed up at her blankly, until suddenly memory returned and he struggled to sit up. Damaris helped him, and when he had, he took hold of her by the arms, his eyes searching over her to be sure she was unhurt before gathering her to him in an exhausted, clumsy embrace.
She was not ready to let go of him when he drew back and said, "Mother."
"I don’t know," Damaris answered, and he stumbled to his feet, drawing her up after him. There was no way to tell how long they had been unconscious, but the storm was now no more than dull clouds and fading rain, with no wind or even distant thunder. In the immense stillness they looked toward the crest of the moor, toward the Old Woman. The two women were gone.
"No," Damaris said, her voice hushed to match the quiet. "There. She's there." Pointing to a huddled shape that must be Aunt Elspeth, not standing now but on her knees as if she had been driven down to them.
There was no one else, only the Old Woman apparently as unmarred as it was unmoved by the fury there had been around it.
Holding to each other, Damaris and Kellan struggled up the slope. When they were nearly to her, Aunt Elspeth raised her head and slowly, painfully, drew herself a little straighter, to look at them without speaking until they had knelt down on either side of her. Then she sank sideways into Damaris' arms, her eyes closed, her face white and drained of all strength. But she was alive, and when Kellan took hold of her hands with both his own, she opened her eyes and whispered, "Not hurt. Only exhausted. Only that."
"We'll take you home," Kellan said gently.
"Virna." For all its faintness, there was still command in her voice. "See to her first."
Kellan exchanged a look with Damaris but rose without saying anything and went toward the Old Woman. When he was gone, Aunt Elspeth closed her eyes again and, still leaning against Damaris, whispered, "I felt your strength come to me at the last. Kellan's, too, but yours most strongly. I was losing against her. She'd grown very powerful. I would have lost without what you gave me."
With no answer to that, Damaris held her more closely and began to rock her, comforting them both.
Kellan returned, his face now as white and drained as Aunt Elspeth's. To Damaris' question, "Virna?" he only answered, "Dead. The lightning found her. She's–" Sickness twisted his mouth and he shook his head, unwilling to say more. Instead he stooped and gathered Aunt Elspeth into his arms and turned for home.
Uncle Russell met them at the edge of the moor, coming up from Thornoak. The strain of having to let his wife go out to a battle he could not fight either for or with her was etched into his face, making him look far older than Damaris had ever seen him. He touched his wife’s cheek, and at her answering half-smile – she was too weak for more answer to his silent asking – he said with aching relief, "You’re alive," and took her from Kellan, to hold her close, not looking away from her face as he said, "The baby is born. She and Gweneth are fine. Both of them are fine."
An hour later, changed into a dry dress of her aunt’s and her tangled hair combed out, and looking forward to the breakfast that was almost ready, Damaris went to stand outside the front door, alone for a moment. Slates torn from the roof were lying broken in the drive. The gardens had been battered and there was a window broken, but nothing was harmed that would not mend or grow again. The sky was as clear as if there had never been a storm, the green reaches of the dale were spread out before her, and behind her in the house Aunt Elspeth was in bed asleep, with Uncle Russell sitting by to watch her, and in another bedroom Gweneth and Nevin probably hovered over their new daughter, together and needing nothing else just now.
All of that was to the good, but none of it the true heart of Damaris' deep contentment as she stood there. Without looking around, she held out her hand as Kellan came up behind her, and when he was beside her, she leaned her head sideways against his shoulder and he kissed the top of her head. Neither of them needed words just then, both of them knowing that she was free now, by sunlight or moonlight, without fear or lies, to go into this life of her own choosing, here, where by the strength of her own heart she had proven she was meant to be.
In so many more ways than one she had at last come fully home.
Margaret Frazer is the award-winning author of more than twenty historical murder mysteries and novels. She makes her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, surrounded by her books, but she lives her life in the 1400s. In writing her Edgar-nominated Sister Frevisse (The Novice's Tale) and Player Joliffe (A Play of Isaac) novels she delves far inside medieval perceptions, seeking to look at medieval England more from its point of view than ours. "Because the pleasure of going thoroughly into otherwhen as well as otherwhere is one of the great pleasures in reading."
She can be visited online at http://www.margaretfrazer.com.
Beginning in the year of Our Lord's grace 1431, the Sister Frevisse mysteries are an epic journey of murder and mayhem in 15th century England.
The Novice's Tale
The Servant's Tale (Edgar Award Nominee)
The Outlaw's Tale
The Bishop's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)
The Boy's Tale
The Murderer's Tale
The Prioress' Tale (Edgar Award Nominee)
The Maiden's Tale
The Reeve's Tale (Minnesota Book Award Nominee)
The Squire's Tale
The Clerk's Tale
The Bastard's Tale
The Hunter's Tale
The Widow's Tale
The Sempster's Tale
The Traitor's Tale
The Apostate's Tale
In the pages of Margaret Frazer's national bestselling Dame Frevisse Mysteries the player Joliffe has assumed many roles on the stage to the delight of those he entertains. Now, in the company of a troupe of traveling performers, he finds himself double cast in the roles of sleuth and spy...
A Play of Isaac
A Play of Dux Moraud
A Play of Knaves
A Play of Lords
A Play of Treachery
A Play of Piety
A Play of Heresy
Available Now as Kindle E-Books
Neither Pity, Love, Nor Fear (Herodotus Award Winner)
Strange Gods, Strange Men
The Simple Logic of It (A Bishop Pecock Tale)
The Witch's Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)
The Midwife's Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)
Volo te Habere...
This World's Eternity
Shakespeare's Mousetrap
The Death of Kings
The Stone-Worker's Tale (Sister Frevisse Mystery)
Winter Heart (Sister Frevisse Mystery)
Heretical Murder (A Bishop Pecock Tale)
Lowly Death (A Bishop Pecock Tale)
I want to herald all the work my editor Justin Alexander did to make Circle of Witches possible. He advised, suggested, cajoled, and debated with me, helping me make it a better story than it was before. Without him, it would have stayed on my computer. Many, many thanks, Justin.
Thanks to my beta readers: Colleen Riley, Helena Mestenhauser, Mark DiPasquale, Sarah Holmberg, and Gretchen Noordsy.
Cover Photo: Woman with Black Hood - Oliver Sved
Cover Design: Justin Alexander