Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

I: Changeling

Rothesay fled.

Panic and Rage warred for mastery of her. Of the two, Rothesay favored Rage. Fear churned in her belly, cold and sickly till she feared she would vomit as she ran. Much better to turn, face down the peril, fight back in fury’s lively blaze. But an unaccustomed push from good sense, seldom her close companion, kept her flying now, for they were five men grown, the chieftain of the holding and his sturdy carls, and she was alone and not yet seventeen.

They meant her no harm, so to speak: the whoops and cries ringing in the budding woods were more merry than cruel, and they laughed as they pleaded for her to stop. Ordinarily the Harrowater men left her well enough alone, partly for the temper, and fists, of her foster-brother Alrulf, and partly for awe of old Padriag-na-Clure, whom they called a wizard and Rothesay called master. Ordinarily, they did not surprise her alone in the forest, and themselves half-drunk with new ale, either. She planted a thin hand on a dew-slick fallen trunk, vaulted lightly into a patch of greenbriers, and wished on every scratch and runnel of blood about her ankles: I wish I had more power than they do! I wish I had any power. . . .

She wanted to be angry, wholly angry and not afraid. She wanted the power to send them flying from her, to make her fury matter. She did not want civility, not now: she wanted their fear, so abject they would never presume to affront her or her sisters again; so deep that they would stand away from her in awe when she walked in the town. She wanted to be older, and stronger (bigger—no; she was quite tall enough, thank you, albeit a little more flesh to her bones would be nice). She wanted an arsenal of spells to make her a force to be reckoned with throughout the Fergubragh coastland and beyond; but Padriag had not (yet?) taught her anything usefully offensive.

She leaped from a grey rock, and slid more than ran down the slope below, upon a thick blanket of old leaves treacherous with dew. She was not flying blindly: she knew the Forest behind Harrowater well. They did, too, of course, if not better; but the one place she might possibly hide was not far away.

Down the tumbling defile, cutting up and out by the three oaks, and over the next stiff fold: there it was. She did not stop for a view. They had been toying with her, savoring the chase, careless of her path, but now they guessed and redoubled their speed, though she heard the disbelief in their cries.

Here was the haunted peerie-hall, or so folk called it, High Court of the Little People of Peria, built into the flanks of Deorgan-hill where ancient beeches grew strangely gnarled. Its bracken-hung entrance moved about queerly, it was said, and changed size, being sometimes a black maw to swallow a giant, sometimes a tough squeeze for a stoat, and sometimes not to be found at all, not even if one had marked the spot with banners. Not that many tried. Colder tales than peerie-magic whispered about the hill: ravens flocked there in unusual numbers, and more than one sober carl had seen, and heard, a great black dog with eyes of flame baying on the hilltop under a merciless white moon. And the Lord of Death Himself was said to walk the hill at times, and watch the darkening world.

Rothesay did not know if Padriag believed in any of the Great Ones—or in the little ones, for that matter. But neither did he disbelieve, and a mild I’ve-never-met-one was thin armor against time-honored terror. The villagers feared to go near the hole, Rothesay among them. But outside, she knew she was in trouble, whereas inside, she only might be.

There: the dark mouth of the hill gaped hungrily before her, girl-high, and she dived through, tumbling in a bruising somersault onto smooth flags. Rolling wildly back onto running feet, she crashed straight into unyielding stone. Reeling, she found emptiness to her left and blundered into it, following the labyrinth wherever it went, so long as it was away from the men. A muddle of voices echoed after her; out of it, she heard one phrase ring clear: “—be outbraved by a girl?” She blundered faster.

All at once, walls and floor dropped away, and she pitched forward into the blind dark, down a few steps, to land with a clatter amid a litter of hard, poky objects. She froze, stifling a groan, listening. No spectral hands grabbed at her out of the cold and musty silence, no bodiless voice demanded her business. Only the light behind her own eyelids moved in the blackness, and, as her heart slowed, she heard again the distant murmur of voices.

She sat up cautiously. Things scraped metallically on the stone floor. Recovering some of her wits, she flexed her hands as Padriag had taught her, felt for the powers, and held a bit of pale magelight in her palms.

The vaulted room was larger than her whole hut. A great mound dominated the opposite half of the circle, an untidy heap of objects topped by some sort of chair. No sign of another exit, nor any sure place to hide. She thought fast.

Quickly she loosed her braids and teased them into a rakish mess. Her errand in the woods this morning had been spring foraging for her family and for Padriag; festooning her arms with the pokeweed from her sack, she started back up the stairs and into the echoing passage. A little thought turned the magelight a deathly blue, and she set it to glow upwards from just under her chin. She worked up a drool and foam about her mouth, assumed an expression of horror and agony, and began to moan—very realistically, like someone who has just pitched face-first into a pile of hard poky things.

She heard the voices ahead falter and fall silent. Rounding a turn, she saw their leader, Fil the Blackhand, chief of the Harrowater branch of Clan Dunhaldring, frozen and gaping at the apparition drifting apparently bodiless out of the gloom. With a little concentration she brought her hair up, floating, and sent tendrils of it reaching towards them. The men stepped back. She crept forward a little faster. They jumped backward, stumbling, bumping into one another, and one of them, young Solla, she thought, the braggart of the village, tripped and fell with a shout. Rothesay extinguished the magelight, and, thoroughly spooked, the men bolted. She heard Solla scramble to his feet and stagger after them, fear feeding on fear.

She followed them silently till they were back outside and arguing angrily, fearful and ashamed of their fear. Fil wanted to try again; the others said he was mad, but they were going to go get their ducks and then a bowl, or two or three, more like, of the new mead at the hall.

Fil objected desperately, “But what about the girl?”

There was a pause. Rothesay, child of the strange noblewoman who had died on Harrowater’s shores so many autumns ago, might be an outsider, but she was their outsider, one they had defended more than once against cousins from Outing and Faldghyll. Decent human feeling, even for a whore’s fosterling, demanded some kind of rescue effort. Afraid they would try, Rothesay loosed a long, hoarse howl. She meant it to be a shriek of the bloodcurdling variety, but her throat, tight and raspy from her panicked flight, let out only a rough bellow unexpectedly low-pitched, weird and grating. Then there came a thudding of feet pounding away through the undergrowth, and the silence of solitude.

She glared out after them, but a great glee welled up in her: she had made them run. She thrust her fists skyward in a rush of triumph, cracked her knuckles on the low stone ceiling, and chuckled ruefully over the torn skin and showered weeds. It occurred to her that inventiveness was a kind of power, and one she could claim. Maybe she could come home from this hole and wrap herself in its dark dread and mystery: then see if men would dare trouble her again! Presently satisfied that they were well and truly gone, she lifted her chin, pulled her spine to regal straightness, and mocked their fear by boldly making her way back to the vaulted room, guided safely by magelight now a warm, familiar gold. She looked about, with proprietary interest.

The chair atop the heap was almost a throne, with a small heap of its own on the seat: a helm of strange and fierce device, the teeth of a skull within gleaming palely in the middle of age-blackened armor. Under the ancient warrior’s ruined feet, the mound itself was a pile of armored bodies—his last foes, she guessed from their irreverent disarray—armored, but not armed: to prevent their challenging him after death? So this was a barrow of some kind, and no peerie-hall at all. She looked about interestedly for ghosts and was disappointed to see not a flicker of a spectral aurora. Ghosts troubled her not at all; there were a few about town she knew well, to say nothing of Padriag’s cohabitants up in the old Sferan villa, and she would have liked to know who might haunt here, and what they would reveal. Had she dreamt this was a burial-hall, and not the gateway to the peerie-realm, she would have visited years ago. She tossed her head in disdain for ‘common knowledge,’ and vowed she would not fall victim to it again!

A sword lay by the old warrior’s feet; small jewels glittered on its scabbard. His own weapon, probably; and her heart leaped. Her brother Alrulf was handsome, strong and young—and poor. A sword of his own, now: he could go far with that, a lot farther than being a lowly hayward, in thrall to his own clan, tending other men’s cattle and struggling to earn a place his mother’s lack of standards had otherwise denied him. A sword would give him a seat in the clan council, a voice equal to old Fil’s, maybe even—she hardly dared think it—make him one of King Kelmhal’s own hearthwards. She picked her way over the bones and armor and gathered it up, half-afraid it would vanish into dream. She made a shy, respectful bow to the warrior’s remains, prayed for his spirit’s rest, and begged his blessing. It’s for a good man, she wanted to tell him; but all in silence, reluctant to break the breathless, ancient stillness. Then she drew the blade, to see how it had survived the years.

A soundless thunderclap slammed the breath from her, pain like fire seared her whole body as though every muscle strained to its limit and beyond, tearing her asunder. She never noticed the floor hitting her.

∞∞∞∞∞

Rothesay’s eyelids fluttered open—she could tell because she could feel them, light as nervous butterflies—but to no purpose: she could see nothing. Her ribs hurt, as from falling on hard poky objects like ancient armor, and she remembered where she was. She sat up sharply, and swayed far forward, banging her nose on her knees. Startled, she summoned the magelight again, with giddy hands that seemed to have a life of their own, and stared about her. The old bones lay quietly.

Other than bruises, she felt now no pain at all; she felt marvellous, with that tremblingly weightless sensation that usually followed upon overexertion. I wonder what I’ve been up to? She eyed the sword warily where it lay on the cold flags. It made no answer.

It was an exquisite piece of metalwork, of plain and flowing lines, beautiful and compelling—and steel, iron forged to imperial temper. The Geillari were swiftly learning the art of ironmaking, but as yet, King Kelmhal alone among the Dunhaldring bore anything like this prize: sword or spearhead, knife or axe-blade, his clansmen wielded bronze. She had seen the king’s sword, the steel like water under the sun, once a year at the harvesttide festival; she had never before seen iron, though she knew it was supposed to be black, like charcoal, like the Lord of the Earth Himself. She glanced up, round-eyed, at the slumped skeleton on the throne. Who could he have been, rich but crownless, buried with respect but without splendor? No memory of what history she had learned of Padriag suggested anyone, though, to be sure, Padriag’s version of history touched more heavily on the ebb and flow of wolf-dynasties and the lordship of beech and willow, than on the seasons of men.

She took up the crackling, brittle scabbard, looking for a hint. Padriag had taught her a spell, her favorite to date, for opening one’s mind to the story of an object; but nothing much came to her now, a trace of ancient violence and perhaps shame, but beyond that, only a queer and starry silence, like nothing else she had ever felt. Frowning, she looked in the usual way. There had been a writing, embroidered on the once-black leather amid flowery tooling; she could make out few of the fine letters, and not enough to spell words in any of the languages Padriag had taught her. More interesting, though, was the large medallion dangling from the buckle by a knotted thong: two serpents, lichenous bronze and blackened silver, looped, knotted, each biting the other’s tail: the kalasin, an ancient symbol and she knew it well. What was different was the blossom nestled in the center of the coils, five petals translucent in seashell delicacy.

Sferan this old hole certainly was, by the grace and elegance of every line from chair leg to helm to stitchery, to say nothing of the steel; and so, very old: Dunhaldring had dwelt in this land fully two centuries now. Today, anything Sferan brought a pretty price among the Geillan conquerors. With what she might find in here, she realized with a dawning thrill, she might pay her foster-family’s kin-debt, no, make them one of the wealthier families in the clan! She bounded up, heedless of bruises, meaning to sift through the remains for whatever she could carry away before word could spread, and others rifle her hole. But instead of coming up neatly on light, lissome feet, she found herself flying, as it seemed, entirely weightless—weightless until, flailing madly, she crashed into the bones.

She lay very still, while the bouncing and slithering subsided -- in the dark, for her magelight had collapsed again -- and she marvelled at this curious rebellion of her body, where every command was smoothly obeyed with tripled or quadrupled effect.

It was the sword, she supposed: that—blast—had thoroughly addled her. A fine gift for a beloved brother! Where there was ancient wealth, of course there would be powerful magic as well. She made light yet again and crept back to it, without attempting to stand, not yet ready to face up to whatever curse she had loosed.

She stared steadily at it. There had been voices, before she woke; only a shred of a memory of a dream of voices remained; but one of them had been—its. She thought it looked back at her, now, watchful, waiting; but then, she often thought many wild things, she chided herself, and she was certainly not now at her clearest. Then she drew a breath, screwed up her face and all her courage, and, shivering, grabbed the hilt again.

Nothing happened.

She lifted it gingerly, and disappointment crushed her. It was much too light for a real sword. It had been perhaps a ceremonial sword, a shell of burnished tin and not steel at all, buried with the warrior in token while the real one passed to his heir—or his vanquisher. No wonder she had felt no emanation of its history. She sheathed it; then, cringing, drew it again. There was no blast. It was fine. And it looked nice. Let Alrulf decide for himself if it were wholly junk, or if it might be traded away for something useful: a cloak, maybe, or an axe.

She stood up and swayed, and decided against trying to take out anything but the sword and the pendant just yet, she felt so queer. Stumbling awkwardly out into the sweet air, she found that it was nearly sunset. The whole of the day gone! The family would be worried, worried and hungry: with Thyrne married, and Elflin and her beloved Mina buried two winters ago, the three littlest ones looked to Rothesay for mothering, and here she was two miles from home and their supper half in her sack and half spilled across the threshold of some forgotten Dragon-lord’s forgotten tomb. She wrapped the sword in her tattered once-green cloak and staggered homeward under the trees, not dizzy, but giddy, feeling no earth under her feet, yet so careful that she tripped only twice and caromed off only one tree-trunk.

Over the shoulder of Deorgan-hill she climbed, hurried through Dead Man’s Hollow, and finally breasted the ridge and looked down on the little fingerlet of the sea, narrow and straight as if cut by some unthinkable harrow, to which the village owed what renown it had. Brown stone cliffs, mast-high, shaped a channel only a few feet less slender than a single slender fishing boat of the north-coast folk, so that it seemed little more than a long step, for a leggy fellow, from one cliff to the next. Rothesay slithered down through the bracken to the sea-path at cliff’s edge to the west gate, and the rope bridge beyond.

To her right, a tall grey stone in the likeness of Sorche, Lady of Fire, gazed with a cryptic smile into the flaming West; to her left, Ges the Silent, Who was Death, with stars for eyes watched the world unmoved. From this height she could see also north to the cliff head, and the standing figures there of Maolin the Earth-lord and Dere, Night. Sferan names, Geillan tradition. Rothesay dropped a spray of sassafras at the feet of each western guardian—the honors at the Lady’s feet greatly outnumbered those at the Lord’s, but Rothesay answered to a strong sense of fairness—and swayed over the bridge into Harrowater. Almost at once she met the eyes of one of the brown-robed brethren, come from King Kelmhal’s seat at Dunford to bring word of some foreign holy man they called a Prophet; sad and reproachful eyes. Averting her own, she climbed carefully down the path cut in the landward slope of the hill and hurried through town. Padriag ignored these new founts of human wisdom as cheerfully as he ignored the old, and though she herself was curious to know more about the whole business, just now she felt altogether too queer and anxious to be safely home.

Home, on the far side of the village, was a wattled gray bulk huddled where beach ran out from under stumpy dark trees, beyond the east-stones of Kavin of the Air and Mór the Lady of Knowledge, beyond the huts even of the edgelings, those remnants of the older lords of Peria who had not retreated before the invader. Drat! The east end needed thatching worse than ever. She had meant to tend to that this morning, and surprise Alrulf by having it patched before he came back. Instead she had spent the last couple of days painting a border of knotted rose-vines about the door and window. She was very proud of the result—but she was going to regret it in tomorrow’s rain. The ragged wicker door dangled open from someone’s recent passage, and she smelled soup.

Pushing in, she was greeted with a joyful squeal. Matkin, Thyrne’s little son, not yet a year old and already running, caught sight of his foster-aunt and fled coyly back to entangle himself in his mother’s skirts, squealing with laughter.

Thyrne, eldest of Anie’s mixed brood of many fathers, started up from the soup pot as the truant oiled in and hunkered down on the only chair, a block of Sferan marble against the mud wall, as though hoping to blend into it.

”Whera you been—?” she began in rough Sferan, her curt tone changing to wonder as Rothesay slid the sword into view. The little ones, Brannar, Meryth, and Persli, crouched over their bowls, stopped eating to gape. Matkin, uninterested, and finding that his aunt had forgotten to chase him, bobbled eagerly back to her and demanded to be picked up by pounding on her knees.

“It’s for Alrulf,” Rothesay said unnecessarily, and unsteadily.

Thyrne bent a fierce searching gaze upon her, on the draggled hair and the scraped knee and torn trousers (men’s gear, Alrulf’s castoffs: she had long outgrown the hand-me-downs of any woman for miles about), and the face unusually pale under an amazing collection of smudges. Dropping the soup ladle, she dunked a corner of her apron in the water jug and applied it vigorously to the smudges. Rothesay submitted with the patience of a kitten; but presently she found herself trembling all over, and then thinking of the chase and the barrow, the sword and the bruises, the priest and the thatching, and not least the magic that shook her limbs and that had robbed her of the day, began to cry.

Thyrne squeezed her shoulders hard. “Roshi—? Someone has been awful to you?”

‘Being awful’ was family language, remnant of their childhood speech, for the harassment attendant on being a whore’s get. Drawing a shuddering breath, Rothesay patted her sister’s hands and launched a marginally coherent recital, not helped by Thyrne’s plying her with soup, bread and question, nor by discovering she was ravenous.

“Uh!” Matkin commanded, raising his arms. “Uh!”

“He means ‘up,’ ” his mother prompted.

“I speak fluent Baby,” Rothesay admonished her gravely.

“So pick up him!”

“I don’t want to—” Rothesay began uneasily.

“You?”

Rothesay waved the jibe away impatiently. “I’m afraid to. . . . Ever since I woke up, I’ve felt so strange: as though I were made of soap bubbles, and everything else were, too, for that matter. Just walking, I push myself over. I’m afraid if I pick you up, love,” she said to Matkin, who grinned toothlessly, “I will up and toss ’ee right through t’ roof!”

“Not to be silly, look you,” said Thyrne. “Pick up him—hurt he’ll be in heart if you neglect to spoil him.” Thyrne, proud woman, disdained her native Geillan tongue and spoke instead the Sferan, as if she were a woman of rank in the clan. She did not speak it well, being also too proud to mingle with the edgeling folk, but tried to pick it up unobtrusively from her young sisters, who were not.

“Better a broken head than a broken heart,” said Rothesay, her cheer beginning to recover, and, dispelling a sniffle, gathered up the joyous Matkin, very carefully. “Soap bubbles,” she said to Thyrne through his wild brown fuzzy hair, by way of confirmation.

Thyrne snorted, having no patience with mystery. “Half starved you are, is all,” she said, refilling Rothesay’s bowl. “Ah—be all right here, then, will you?” she inquired worriedly. “I’ve to get back to Mat, of course—I left his supper him, but he would have me home the night. . . .”

“Oh, aye,” Rothesay replied airily, and keeled over onto the hard dirt floor.

Thyrne jumped up with a gasp. Meryth shrieked. “Roshi!” yelled Brannar, leaping up and over her bowl in one move. Startled but unhurt, Matkin scrambled off her chest and batted her in the face. Rothesay burst into giggles.

“Oh—!” An outraged Thyrne snatched up her son, to restrain herself from kicking Rothesay in a tender spot. Brannar cheered, laughing too. “Bad as she is, you,” Thyrne snapped at her.

“We’ll be all right,” said Rothesay, gathering herself back onto her seat, unable to smother a grin. The joke worked a tonic in her veins, driving out dread.

“Huh!” Thyrne wrapped up in her shawl; Matkin stuffed some of it in his mouth. She paused in the doorway and glared thoughtfully at her uncanny sister.

They were little alike: Thyrne, blonde as sunshine and sturdy as oak, her hard blue eyes about on a level with Rothesay’s bony shoulder, was in every line a child of her father’s race. Rothesay was little more than a loose plait of long willow-withies, with eyes green as a whole forest, and her dark hair shone with a queer wine-colored light. Only Padriag remembered the mother well enough to note the daughter’s striking likeness; most folk looked on her queer coloring, her improbable height, and especially the unearthly androgynous beauty of her face and supposed her to be fairy-sired after all, as the dying mother had claimed. Now they wove stories about her, and dressed her in the cloths of their fancies. They said she had a ‘way’ with animals: the orneriest pig in the sty would make a fawning fool of itself at her approach, and the king of the badgers ran at her bidding to keep her and her sheltering family from starving, be the winter never so cold. This was so much nonsense, of course. The only thing about pigs was knowing how to scratch where they itched, same as with people; and there was no such folly as a ‘badger king.’ Badgers were matriarchal.

Thyrne had long ago ceased heeding, or arguing against, the stories, and only worried that the bratling’s scrawniness would keep her from ever wielding a proper spear, and who would wed her then? Neither had she any love for Padriag; still, mage’s apprentice was better than whoreling, and might yet win her some honor. “Well, never thought I’d say it, but—take yourself off t’ auld wizard, first thing the morning. Mind me?”

“I mind,” said Rothesay meekly. She glanced back at the three littlest sisters. “Thanks.”

Thyrne grunted a retort and hobbled out with her son and her limp, both in their way her trophies of war.

Later, Rothesay snuggled with her little sisters like kittens on a single pallet beside the smoldering fire. She and Cherusay had been refugees from a court of some kind: misty scraps of careless infant memory glimmered with traces of bright silks and burnished mail aglow in the light of candles countless as stars: Daria across the Dragon Sea, said Padriag; sister and subject-realm of the immense power Peria once had been. Now Daria’s castaway listened to the high soughing of the wind through the tattered thatching, and sighed. The roof would have to wait.