This is a dream.
Here is a moment of realisation.
She is sat by the grave and she imagines the crying is his, the child’s, the tiny body buried in the grave.
Her boy.
The grave is under a tree. The old woman, the wise mother as she calls herself, buried the child. She strung bright rags and straw hobby dolls around the grave to keep away the hedgings, left him here where the grass grew thickest.
“Here again, girl? You spend too much time here, and you don’t eat enough. The wound will sicken again if you do not eat.”
“Why didn’t you leave him out, for Xus to take?”
She steps: one, two.
“There are older ways, girl. That poor child had barely taken a step from Xus’s palace, he needed no priest to guide him back.”
“He waits for me there.”
“Torelc cannot enter Xus’s dark palace so time has no meaning for the child. Don’t be in no great hurry to follow him.”
“I …”
“Quiet, girl.” That sudden, urgent, word. She listens. The wind moves through the trees: “Shh, shh,” it says. The old woman shuffles across the clearing to her. Crouches.
“But—”
An old hand covers her mouth. She can feel the bones through it, thin as flying lizard skins. The woman smells of earth and cooking.
Voices.
Men.
Someone running. A shout.
Adran.
The old woman stares into her eyes.
“Stay here, Merela, and say nothing. Do nothing. Let me handle this.”
Adran breaks from the forest, eyes wide with fear, and she runs toward them like a young mount seeking the safety of the herd. From behind her come two men, dressed like guards: boiled leather, chained skirts, boots. Hard eyes. The ap Garfin crest scarred into their tabards. They stop at the wood’s edge. Staring at the three women.
“I’m sorry,” said Adran.
The old woman stands.
“You had to run somewhere, girl.”
The men are staring at Merela.
“It’s her. The trader girl. The one whose corpse vanished. There’s a fine price for her body.”
She tries to curl up, make herself small. The old woman strides forward. She seems energised, suddenly taller, suddenly younger.
“These are my daughters, the light one from my husband and the dark one is why my husband left. You have no business with them.” The men exchange looks. One of them narrows his eyes. “I am a healer. If you have aches and pains tell me and I will soothe them. Otherwise, be on your way.”
The smaller of the two men, not much smaller, they are both big and terrifying—skin ingrained with dirt that twists and reshapes itself into hedging, scowls.
“Could be that’s true,” he says.
“Could be,” says the bigger one.
“But as I think it, we take her to the blessed anyway, just in case. And what she says, healing? Well, that sounds like sorcerer talk to me.”
“Landsmen pay well for sorcerers,” says the bigger guard.
“Aye.” He grins. “Seems to me we can only lose if we walk on, old woman. Seems to me if we stay, we make a fair amount of coin.” His sword slides from its sheath with a noise like a lizard hissing a warning.
“Walk on,” says the old woman.
“Lie down to be tied, old girl,” says the smaller guard. “It’ll only hurt more otherwise.”
“Walk on,” she says, and in those two words Merela hears a world of warning she can barely believe. This old woman, this poor, bent old woman in the woods, manages to make herself sound dangerous. If Merela were not so scared she would laugh.
“That a threat, old girl?”
“A polite request.”
The men do laugh this time.
“Last warning. Stand aside.” He walks forward, draws back a fist.
Dies.
She moves so quickly the girl can barely follow: from out of the cloud of rags that is her skirts comes a knife. One thrust to the throat. Blood. A cascade of it. The second guard goes for his blade and before he can draw it she is there. Impossible. She moves in a blur. One moment standing where the blood flows and the next up against the second guard with her blade in his guts, one, two, three quick thrusts and he falls to the floor, gasping his life away.
As she watches she feels something inside her move—not the child, the child is gone, but something. Adran stands, mouth open, staring at the guards. But she, Merela, does not stand. First she crawls, then she scrambles to her feet, stumble-running to the old woman. For the first time she isn’t thinking about pain; she isn’t thinking about Vesin; she isn’t thinking about their child. She is only thinking about the voice inside her, the small, quiet voice that sparked into existence at the moment the old woman moved. At the moment the old woman killed. When she is stood in front of the old woman she doesn’t know what to do. She is on the cusp, the edge, teetering on a precipice, standing in the darkness but feeling like she can step, can fall upwards into something she wants, something she needs. The words come.
“How did you do that?”
“I sorrowed and I trained,” she says. And her eyes are hard and black, like a hunting lizard’s. “You have sorrowed. Now, would you like to train, daughter?”
Merela’s mouth is dry, her hands grasp at something invisible, slowly opening and closing. She looks at the two bodies, one gone to Xus’s dark palace, one choking his way there.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, Wise Mother.”
“No, now you must call me ‘Master’.”
Here is a moment of realisation.
And behind her, carved into the tree, is the name she had chosen for the dead child that brought her here: Girton.
This is a dream.