The Lass from Far Away

Eldidd, 1060

Katharine Kerr

You ask me if the gods truly exist. Consider this: human hands make a glass vessel, then fill it with mead. Does the bit of Rhwmani glass have power in itself? Of course not! Yet the mead will make many a strong man drunk.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

On a summer morning she walked out of the sea onto the beach near the town of Cannobaen. Water trickled down her pale brown face and oozed from her straight dark hair. Her thin linen shift stuck to her body, all skin and bone except for her swollen stomach. For a long time she stood, merely stood on the hot sand and looked at the cliffs with bewildered hazel eyes. With a sigh she sat down and continued studying the cliffs as if they might tell her what to do.

Some yards down the beach, black rocks jutted from the ebbing tide. With their long blue skirts tied half-way up their thighs, a woman and a half-grown lass were clambering over them to harvest the bright green seaweed, as fine and sleek as a horse’s mane, that grew below the water line. The younger paused, straightened up to rest her back, and looked idly around her.

“Mam,” Olwen said, “there's a castaway come out of the water.”

The older woman balanced her basket of laver weed on one hip and looked where the younger pointed.

“By the gods!” Cobylla, the soapmaker’s wife, said. “You’re right enough. I’d not heard of any ships going down. Let’s go see what we can do for the poor thing.”

When they gained the dry beach they paused to untie their skirts, then slogged across the hot soft sand. Although they called out greetings, the lass never turned her head, not even when they reached her.

“Look at her!” Cobylla said. “Starved and exhausted, poor thing.” She handed her basket to Olwen, then knelt in front of the lass. “Here now, lass. Let’s get you to safety.”

The lass raised her head and looked at her. Flies were crawling across her cheek. Cobylla reached out and flicked them away.

“From the look of her,” Olwen said, “she doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. Here, her skin’s brown. She must be from Bardek.”

“You’re right enough, and I’ll wager she only speaks that nasty strange tongue of theirs. You’ve got the water bottle. Hand it over.”

The bottle, made of leather boiled in wax, hung from a thong at Olwen’s kirtle. She untied it, shaking it to judge how full it might be. At the sound of sloshing water the lass jerked her head around to stare, her cracked lips half-parted.

“Now she understood that sound well enough,” Olwen said. “She must be near dead from thirst.”

Cobylla took out the stopper and handed the bottle to the lass, whose hands shook so badly that she nearly dropped and spilled it. Cobylla grabbed it, then helped her hold to her mouth. The lass drank in long gulps, pausing only to gasp for air, until the bottle ran dry. When she let go the bottle, she whispered a few words. Although Olwen knew no Bardekian, she could guess that they added up to “my thanks.”

“Well, now.” Cobylla got up, shaking her head. “We can’t leave her here.” She held out a hand.

The lass hesitated, then slowly reached out and took the proferred hand. Cobylla pulled her up only to have her stagger and nearly fall. When Cobylla put an arm around her waist, the lass leaned against her.

“She’s trembling, poor little thing,” Cobylla said. “She’ll never be able to reach the town.”

“I’ll run on ahead and fetch one of the men,” Olwen said. “She’ll be easy to carry, I wager. She’s so thin.”

Olwen, however, found help nearer to hand than back in Cannobaen. She crossed the beach, climbed the decrepit wooden stairway that snaked up the cliff, then at the top paused to catch her breath. A wild meadow crowned the cliffs with tall grass, stretching a good half a mile inland. A dirt road meandered through the meadow, and some yards along it Olwen saw a mule, tethered and grazing next to a big pile of canvas packs.

“The herbman!” she sang out. “Now this is a bit of luck!”

At the sound of her voice the herbman himself appeared, rising from the waist-high grass where he’d been kneeling. In one hand he held a trowel made of silvery metal and in the other, a clump of little green plants trailing muddy roots. He was a tall man with ice-blue eyes, an untidy thatch of white hair, and frog spots thick on his face and hands.

“And just why am I such a lucky sight?” he said. “Has someone been taken ill?”

“Indeed, good Nevyn, or stranger than ill,” Olwen said. “My mam and me, we were a-gathering of the laver weed, and there was this castaway, come out of the water. She’s half-dead, poor thing.”

“Ye gods! Here, I’ve not heard of any shipwrecks.”

“No more have I. It’s a strange thing.”

Nevyn tucked his trowel into the pocket of his muddy brown trousers, then walked with her to the edge of the cliff. Down on the beach, Cobylla had managed to get the lass to the foot of the stairs. When Olwen called out, Cobylla looked up and waved.

“She can’t climb,” Cobylla yelled up. “She’s much too weak.”

As if to prove the point, the Bardekian dropped to her knees on the sand with the suddeness of a sack of meal falling from a wagon.

“Here, hold this.” Nevyn handed Olwen the clump of herbs.

The old man trotted down the steps with a vigor surprising in one his age. When he reached the women below, he picked the lass up as easily as if she’d indeed been that sack of meal. He said a few words to Cobylla, then carried the lass up the steps while Olwen watched, amazed. Cobylla followed more slowly, puffing and panting all the way. At the top Nevyn set the lass down in the grass; she stared up at him, seemed to be about speak, then merely stared the more. Nevyn turned, reached down, and gave Cobylla a hand up over the edge. Cobylla put her laver basket down and began to wipe her sweaty face on the wide sleeve of her dress.

“Well, it was lucky, all right,” Nevyn said to Olwen. “That I was here, I mean. You have my thanks for rescuing this poor child.”

“Why?” Olwen said. “Is it that you know her or suchlike?”

“I don’t. It’s just that she’s very near death.”

“I did wonder about that.” Olwen was about to ask more, but she glanced at Cobylla and found her mother waving a frantic hand behind Nevyn’s back. Olwen knew that wave; it meant hold your tongue or get a good slap for disobeying. Still, she couldn’t resist one more question. “She comes from far away, doesn’t she?”

“Very far,” Nevyn said. “Hand me back those herbs, and I’ll just be taking them and her both back to the dun with me.”

Olwen and Cobylla stood together and watched Nevyn saddle and fetch his mule. Although the canvas packs looked bulky, close up Olwen could see how lightly they sat on the animal’s back. She held the mule’s lead rope while Nevyn lifted the lass up and settled her behind the pack saddle. Olwen got her biggest surprise, though, when Nevyn spoke to the lass in the strange language: Bardekian, it had to be, because the lass answered him readily enough.

“Just telling her to hang on tight,” Nevyn said to Olwen. “My thanks again, and we’ll be off.”

Nevyn strode away, leading the mule through the grass toward the road. The lass clung to the swaying canvas as the mule picked its way over the uneven ground.

“It’s a good thing you held your tongue.” Cobylla whispered. “I’d not have you prying into old Nevyn’s affairs.”

“What? Why not?”

“Why not, she says, and her my own daughter!” Cobylla rolled her eyes heavenward. “The old man’s a sorcerer, that’s why! Ask too many questions and get changed right into a frog, most like, or somewhat else nasty.”

“So that tale’s true, Mam? I’d heard it, but — “

“I’ve had it on the best authority, from Lady Lovyan’s own maid. And would the noble-born be sheltering a common old herbman in their dun and treating him like a lord? Of course not! But Nevyn always takes our lady’s hospitality when he’s in Cannobaen, doesn’t he? So, well, then, there you are!”

By this time Nevyn and his laden mule had reached the dirt road. Olwen stared, her mouth slack as a half-wit’s, as they turned onto it, heading west, an ordinary old man leading an ordinary brown mule — but then, there was nothing ordinary about the lass from far away, and he had spoken to her in her own strange tongue.

“Come along,” Cobylla snapped. “Let’s get along home. We need to get this laver into brine before it shrivels in the heat.”

Although Olwen followed her mother, she looked back every now and then until at last, Nevyn and his mule had passed beyond her sight.

o0o

Some miles west of town, Dun Cannobaen stood near the edge of the cliffs. In most ways it was a typical Deverry dun; a high stone wall enclosed a ward, cluttered with sheds and pig-styes, stables and a smithy, while in the middle rose a squat round broch tower. At the moment, a dragon pennant fluttered at the top of the broch to show that Lady Lovyan, wife to Gwerbret Tingyr of Aberwyn, was in residence. Outside the walls, however, rose a marvel: a slender tower some hundred and fifty feet tall, wound round by a flight of stone steps: the Cannobaen light. At night a lightkeeper tended a fire on top of the tower to warn ships of the dangerous shoals just off-shore.

Bardek merchant ships came close to wrecking themselves on those shoals even in good weather. In the winter, when the Cannobaen light guttered and turned faint in the driving winds and rain, a ship that left its departure too late in the year would come to grief, generally losing all hands. One summer storm had swept over Dun Cannobaen just a few days past, but fortunately the light had held steady, and no ships had foundered, not as far as Nevyn knew. The lass clinging to the pack saddle presented something of a mystery.

When Nevyn led his mule through the dun’s gate, a page came running, followed by Lady Lovyan’s youngest son. Lord Rhodry Maelwaedd hovered on the edge of manhood, a slender lad turned positively thin by a bad illness the winter past. Although he had the typical Eldidd coloring of raven-dark hair and cornflower blue eyes, he was unusually handsome, almost girlishly beautiful with a blush of tanned skin over his high cheekbones. He bowed to Nevyn, then stood staring at the lass.

“A castaway,” Nevyn said, “or at least, she came out of the sea this morning. It looks like you’ve been taking the sun.”

“I have,” Rhodry said, “just as you ordered. Here, shall I carry that poor little lass inside for you?”

“I can carry her myself.” Nevyn tossed him the leadrope of the mule. “You might stable Old Brown here for me. Just leave the packs on the pack saddle. I’ll fetch them in a bit.”

Rhodry may have been noble-born, but like everyone else in the dun, he did whatever Nevyn told him to do. The page hurried off to find Lady Lovyan. Nevyn lifted the Bardekian lass off the mule’s back, then carried her inside to the great hall, a round chamber filling the entire ground floor of the broch. On opposite sides of the hall, a group of tables stood by a hearth, a battered and chipped cluster of plank tables and benches by the servants’ and warband’s hearth, a nicely polished table and chairs at the honor hearth.

At the servant’s hearth a shabby lass stood stirring a simmering kettle that held stew from the smell of it. Too rich, Nevyn decided, for a patient who had starved for several days. He carried the lass over to the table of honor, set her down on a chair, then strode over to the opposite hearth.

“Is there breakfast porridge left?” he said.

“Always, my lord,” the servant said.

“Fetch me a bowlful, will you? But water it down. It needs to be very thin.”

When Nevyn returned to the table of honor, he found the castaway sitting in the straw on the floor.

“Here!” he said in Bardekian. “Wasn’t that chair comfortable enough?”

“I can’t sit there.” She whispered so softly that he had to lean over to hear her.

“You were told you had to sit below any free man or woman?”          She nodded.

“What’s your name, girl?”

She never answered, merely stared at the straw on the floor. Nevyn would have continued questioning her, but Lady Lovyan was coming down the winding stairway in the center of the great hall. This stairway was a piece of dwarven work, and something of a marvel in itself, a tight spiral of iron rather than the usual stone.

Although she’d grown stout over the years, Lovyan was still a handsome woman with just one thick streak of gray in her dark hair. That morning she’d dressed in blue, with a kirtle in the blue and green plaid of Aberwyn round her waist. She stood by the chair at the head of the table of honor and considered the lass, who kept her gaze firmly on the floor.

“So this is our castaway?” Lovyan said. “The poor child!”

“She is,” Nevyn said. “She’s utterly exhausted.”

“No doubt.” Lovyan paused to sit down, smoothing her dresses under her. “We had that one bad storm, but I certainly haven’t heard of any shipwrecks. She comes from far away, doesn’t she?”

“She does,” Nevyn said. “Bardek, in fact. Fortunately I know their language. I studied physick there some years back.”

“Fortunate, indeed!         Do tell her she’s safe here.”

“I already have. She’s either too drained to speak much, or she’s simply not willing to tell me her name. Huh.” He paused to consider the problem. “Now, if there wasn’t any shipwreck, she may have simply fallen from the deck or even jumped. I do know she was a slave. There’s a brand right there on the back of her neck.”

Lovyan winced with a little shudder of disgust. The lass sat stone-still between them on the floor, her hands clasped in her lap and her gaze fixed on the empty air. When Nevyn opened the second sight, he could see that her pale grey aura hung shrunken around her — except in one location. Around her swollen belly flickered light of a silvery-blue.

The servant hurried over, carrying a wooden bowl. She curtsied to her ladyship, handed Nevyn the bowl, and scurried off again. Nevyn inspected the bowl — lukewarm oat porridge, liberally swirled with butter and thinned with boiled water — then knelt beside the girl.

“Can you swallow a spoonful of this?” he said in Bardekian. “It’s very smooth and should go down easily, even with your mouth so cracked and sore.”

When he held out a full spoonful, she turned her head away.

“Come now, surely you must be starved after being in the water for so long.”

She neither moved nor spoke.

“You’re with child.” Nevyn brought out his best weapon. “Do you want your child to die?”

She jerked her head up.

“I won’t hurt you,” Nevyn went on. “No one here is going to turn you over to your master. You’re escaping from slavery, aren’t you?”

At that she looked up and turned toward him. When he held out the spoon again, she took the mouthful. Her lips moved as she chewed the food and swallowed it.

“No,” she spoke at last. “Not escaping.” She smiled, but there was something terrifying in that smile, her thin lips drawn back from strong white teeth, her eyes far too wide and unblinking. “There’s no escaping now.”

“Well, we’ll just see about that! If they come looking for you, they’ll have our ladyship’s troop of soldiers to deal with.”

Nevyn offered her another spoonful, which she took. When she held out her hands, he gave her the bowl. She continued eating, but slowly, carefully, pausing between each bite.

“Why won’t you tell me your name?” Nevyn said during one of these pauses.

“I have no name.”

“Come now, surely they must have called you something!”

“Before, I was Evy.”

“Before what?”

She took another spoonful of the porridge and looked away. Nevyn waited, but she held to her silence until she’d finished the porridge. She handed him the bowl and spoon.

“Thank you.” She folded her hands in her lap.

“Do you want more water?” Nevyn said.

“Please.”

The page, all goggle eyes and curiosity, brought a tankard of water. She held it in both hands to drink in cautious sips.

“Now, you won’t be able to eat much at one time for a few days,” Nevyn said. “But I’ll make sure you get plenty of food. We don’t want you dying, after all.”

“Oh, I’m already dead.” She looked at him, then began to laugh, a high-pitched hysterical giggle.

When Nevyn grabbed her by the shoulders, she fell silent, but her eyes once again grew wide with terror. An animal in a trap, Nevyn thought. His own eyes began to ache until at last she blinked and released them both.

“Why did you say that?” Nevyn made his voice as soft and gentle as he could.

She turned her head away, then lifted the tankard again and resumed drinking. Nevyn stood up with a shrug.

“I’d be hysterical, too,” Lovyan said, “if I’d been adrift at sea for days.”

“So would I, most like,” Nevyn said. “But I think me somewhat stranger’s at work here, my lady. I’ve got an idea of what it might be, but I hope to every god that I’m wrong.”

The dun’s servants normally slept out in the stables or in front of one of the hearths in the great hall. Considering how frail Evy was, Lovyan decided that she should sleep in a little storeroom off the women’s hall on the second floor of the main broch, a tiny wedge-shaped space, but it would do. A page carried up a straw mattress; one of Lovyan’s serving women gave the girl an old dress of hers. Nevyn found a big earthernware pitcher and filled it full of fresh water to place beside the mattress on the floor.

“I want you to drink as much water as you can,” he told Evy. “There’s a chamber pot over in the curve of the wall for you to use when you need to.”

The lass nodded to show she’d understood. She was sitting on the mattress, with the faded blue dress billowing around her, her legs crossed, her arms tight over her chest, as crumpled and crouched as if she expected him to suddenly turn and strike her. Nevyn glanced around the chamber, which smelled of dust and mildew, and saw a narrow window covered by an ox hide pegged to the wall. He took down the hide to let in fresh air and a sliver of sunlight.

“Thank you.” Evy’s voice took him by surprise. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

“Most welcome.” Nevyn left the window and knelt at the foot of the mattress. “Will you tell me how you came to be in the water?”

She considered for so long that he assumed she’d say nothing, but at last she caught her breath with a gasp and spoke. “They threw me in for a sacrifice.”

“Because of the storm?”

“Yes. The waves grew so big, and the sky — oh, it looked like night, so dark and close the clouds were. The captain said the ship was doomed, but some of the sailors, they said they could turn the Veiled Lady aside if they gave her a sacrifice.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “A bone for the bitch, one of them said.”

“And they chose you for the sacrifice because you were a slave.”

“Yes.”

“I saw where they branded you, on your back where it wouldn’t spoil your face. They used you as a whore, didn’t they?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Please don’t tell the archon,” she whispered. “She’ll throw me out.”

“You mean Lady Lovyan. Don’t worry. She understands what men do to the women they own, and she’d never blame you. They were going to sell you to a brothel in Abernaudd?”

“No, in Cerrmor. But the storm drove us off-course. I was so ill by then, with the ship tossing around and the waves — oh, they came right over the deck, and so cold! I thought it would be better to die than to go — to go where they were taking me.”

“You’d never been in a brothel before?”

“I was, yes, in Myleton. But this one in Cerrmor — I was born there.” She raised her head and looked straight at him. Her eyes flickered briefly with defiance and life. “A man killed my mother there. I didn’t want to go back. So I thought, better I go to the goddess now.”

“I see. Did they do some sort of ceremony?”

She nodded, looking away wide-eyed, as if she saw it all again, the careening deck of the ship, the sail flapping helplessly in the wind, the waves breaking and foaming as they ran across the fragile planks, the terrified men chanting what spells and charms they knew. Nevyn could imagine the scene all too well.

“One of the passengers said he knew how to do it. They were going to drag me up to the bow, but I walked. Do you see? I wanted to die, just then. I walked with them, and I lay down where they told me to lie.”

“I understand.”

“They were going to bind my hands, but then this big wave came and just swept me away. I thought I was going to sink and die, but the waves kept tossing me up into the air.” She paused, trembling, and raised her hands to clasp her face. “That’s when I saw her.”

“The Veiled Lady?”

She nodded again. “She came walking on the water, so big her head touched the sky, and she was turning and turning like she was dancing. All her veils spun around her, and they were black.”

A cloud? Nevyn wondered. A waterspout, perhaps, off at a distance? Or had the terror of the men onboard and the lass in the water evoked the image of the Bardekian death goddess?

“And that’s when I saw the wood floating toward me,” Evy went on. “It was old and gray, part of a broken ship. I didn’t realize that till later, you see, when I had time to look at it. But she brought me the wood, so I climbed onto it. She went away then. And so the storm passed, and I drifted, and days and days went by, I think.” Her voice trailed away. “Maybe only three days.”

“It couldn’t have been many more than that, or you’d have died of thirst.” He smiled and turned his voice soothing. “But you didn’t, and now you’re safe.”

Behind him something rustled, something moved. Nevyn looked over his shoulder and saw birds settling on the windowsill, three big ravens, their black plumage glittering with blue in the summer sun. He felt his blood run cold.

Evy cried out. “Safe? No, never that, never again!”

Nevyn got to his feet and turned to face the Three.

“You can’t have the child,” he said. “It wasn’t dedicated to you.”

The answer came to his mind without sound. We know.

Nevyn turned so cold that he shivered and swore under his breath. With a cascade of croaks and caws that sounded like laughter, the three ravens leapt from the sill and flew, still shrieking. As they climbed into the sky they seemed to merge into one huge raven, then vanished. Behind him Evy began to weep in great gulping sobs.

“She sent her birds,” she stammered. “I belong to her, and she’ll never let me go.”

“We’ll just see about that! There must be a way to break the curse. Maybe she’ll accept a horse instead.”

She choked back her sobs. Next to her on the floor lay her old rag of a dress, still crusted with salt in odd patches. She picked it up and began wiping her face on a sleeve.

“I’ll have to think about this,” Nevyn went on. “I’ve learned some strange lore over the years.”

Evy smiled, though her eyes stayed so blank and lifeless that he knew she doubted him. Since he doubted himself, Nevyn said no more, merely left the chamber to let her sleep.

That night he consulted with other dweomermasters he knew, scrying them out for mind-speaking through the fire in his chamber, but no one knew how to break such a ritual spell. When Nevyn contacted Nesta, a dweomerwoman who lived in Cerrmor, she told him that as far as the guilds knew, no ship had gone down in the recent storm.

“If one had,” Nesta said, “the guild would have heard of it, especially one bound for Cerrmor. News like that travels fast.”

“So the goddess accepted the sacrifice. Or so the crew of that ship’s going to believe.”

“There had to be a man of some power onboard that ship,” Nesta went on. “Ordinary sailors can curse and pray and beg all night in a storm, but their ship goes down despite it all.”

“That’s true spoken. The lass mentioned a passenger.”

“Huh! I wonder what sort of man he was. Not one of us, I’ll wager.”

“Just so. He seems to have worked some sort of rite with power behind it, for a certainty. I was wondering if the priestesses in a Moon temple could undo it.”

“I doubt if they’d want to. Once their goddess has spoken, they wouldn’t dare interfere.” Nesta hesitated, and he could feel her thoughts scurrying this way and that. “The goddess isn’t known for letting anyone out of a bargain.”

“Unfortunately, you’re right. And the lass went willingly enough at the time. Hence the ravens, I suppose.”

“I’d say so, truly. I doubt me if there’s aught anyone can do, though it aches my heart to admit it.”

It ached Nevyn’s as well. He found himself remembering a Moon-sworn priestess he’d known back in the years of the civil wars that had once torn the kingdom apart. Nothing that he’d said or done back then had changed her mind and her grim wyrd one jot. Yet, he reminded himself, perhaps things would be different with this lass. He had four or five months, he reckoned, until the baby was born, to figure out a remedy.

Late into the night he consulted his books of dweomerlore but found nothing to help. He did string some beads and little packets of herbs onto leather thongs. If she believed that they’d turn aside evil, the belief would give her strength to resist the curse upon her, even though they had no dweomer power of their own. What counted now was bringing her mind back to the land of the living.         In the morning, when he gave Evy the charms, she accepted them as politely as she’d accepted everything else, but from her flat little voice he could tell that she didn’t believe in them.

“Once we go back to Aberwyn in the autumn,” Nevyn told her, “I’ll consult with the priests and priestesses there about lifting the curse.”

Evy sighed and looked down at her handful of charms. “When I die,” she said, “will someone take care of my baby?”

“Of course, but I’m not going to let you die.”

She merely smiled. Before he left her chamber, he insisted she wear the charms. She slipped them over her head and let them dangle with all the enthusiasm of a dutiful child swallowing a bitter medicinal.

Over the next few days, Evy grew stronger, thanks to decent food and rest. At that time, a lord who supported a great many servants gained prestige. Gwerbret Tingyr had many faults, but miserliness was not one of them. Lovyan had so many servants at Dun Cannobaen, her summer residence, that none of them worked very hard. All of them took an interest in the lass so miraculously saved from the sea, particularly when her pregnancy became common knowledge. Their small kindnesses acted as further remedies, giving Evy reasons to want to live, or so Nevyn could hope.

The little town of Cannobaen had heard her tale as well.         

One foggy day Nevyn came out into the ward to see Rhodry lounging against the wall by main gate and talking with Olwen, the soapmaker’s daughter. Rhodry was smiling at her in a way that boded ill for the lass’s virtue while she giggled and glanced at him sidelong. With a sigh Nevyn strolled over to speak with them. Rhodry straightened up and arranged a solemn expression. Olwen looked modestly at the ground.

“Come for news of little Evy?” Nevyn said.

“I have, my lord,” Olwen said. “My mam was wondering how she fared, and so is half the town.”

“Ah, I see. Well, she’s doing very well, remarkably well, in fact, considering what she suffered. I have hopes that her baby will be healthy enough to live despite it all.”

“That’s splendid, my lord.”

“So it is. Now run along, and tell your mother that I’ll give her any news the next time I ride down to town. No need for you to walk all the way up here.”

“My thanks, my lord, I’m sure.” Yet Olwen looked bitterly disappointed.

Nevyn waited until she’d left, waited in fact until she’d got out of earshot, then turned on Rhodry.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rhodry said with a squeak in his voice.

“Do you?” Nevyn said. “Then I suggest you remember that a common-born lass like that has little to look forward to in life but a good marriage, and if you trifle with her, it’s not likely she’d ever get one.”

“I do know that. I — uh — I’ll take it to heart.”

Rhodry made him a bob of a bow, then turned and hurried away, breaking into a trot, then disappearing around the side of the broch at an all-out run. Nevyn made a mental note to speak with Olwen’s mother next time he went to Cannobaen about more than the state of Evy’s health.

o0o

With the first chill of autumn, Lovyan packed up her retinue and returned to the gwerbretal dun in Aberwyn. Although Evy and most of the other servants stayed behind, Nevyn travelled with her ladyship. He wanted to ferret out information about the ritual that had bound Evy to the dark aspect of the goddess. She of the sword-pierced heart, she who sees the world with the eyes of night — at times she seemed to look out of Evy’s eyes as well.

By that time Aberywn had grown large enough to shelter several holy temples. Nevyn visited them all. The priests of Bel told Nevyn that they knew nothing of such women’s matters. The priest of Wmm did know of the ritual, but he assured Nevyn that its details lay hidden, even from the scholar-priests on the Holy Isle of Wmmglaedd. Nevyn could practically smell the fear oozing from the various holy men when they spoke of the Dark Goddess. The priestesses of the Moon, who most likely knew a great deal, sent him brusquely away for daring to question their goddess’s doings.

“No help, no lore, naught,” Nevyn said to Lovyan. “A useless lot, these priests.”

“So it seems.” Lovyan paused for an exasperated sigh. “I’m shocked at those sailors, I truly am. Most Bardekians are such civilized people.”

“Just so. Still, terror will make men do barbaric things. No doubt they felt it was her life or theirs.”

“Well, that does seem likely, but still, I can’t help despising them for it.”

“Me, either.”

“If you want a horse for a sacrifice, I’m sure I can get Tingyr to give you one.”

“My thanks, but it wouldn’t do any good, even if I could find a blasted priest willing to get off his behind to work the ritual. The men on shipboard offered the Dark Goddess a human life, and despite the nasty way the Moon priestesses spoke to me, I did glean that a human life is what She’ll demand.”

Nevyn returned to Dun Cannobaen in a foul temper. Seeing Evy, oddly enough, only fed his bad mood, simply because she looked well and strong, a good stone heavier, with rosy cheeks and glossy hair. She should be looking forward to a long life, he thought. Those cursed cowardly priests! But she still looked on the world from some great distance away. Although she smiled from time to time, no answering spark flashed in her eyes. Whenever anyone spoke to her, she was as courteous and as reserved as some great lady making her way through a foreign court.

As the winter settled down over the dun, keeping the Cannobaen light burning became the center of everyone’s life, from the chamberlain who held his authority from Lovyan herself down to the lowliest forester who brought in a mule-load of firewood. Evy worked in the kitchen, scrubbing pots and chopping turnips, doing whatever the cook asked with her unvarying politeness and complete lack of interest in the life around her. She rarely spoke, or so the cook told Nevyn, even though she was learning how to speak Deverrian remarkably fast and well.

“She told me once that she was born in Cerrmor,” Nevyn said. “So she probably had a child=s knowledge of the language before she was taken away. I don’t know how she ended up a slave in Bardek, though some very poor people have been known to sell their daughters to slavers.”

“Huh!” Cook hefted a cleaver and glared over the blade. “Just let that lot come around here!” She laid it down again. “Poor little mite! She never laughs, never weeps. Ye gods, at times I’d swear she was asleep, but she keeps right on working.” She shook her head. “Mayhap it’s the baby, but I’ve never seen a lass taken quite this way.”

“She seems to want the baby, though,” Nevyn said.

“True spoken. That’s the one thing that brings life to her eyes, like, mentioning the baby. It kicked her a good one the other day.”

“Did it now? Her time must be drawing near, then.” And my time to save her, he thought, is nearly gone.

On a day when pale sun broke through the clouds and made the rain-washed stones of the dun shimmer, Evy and the cook’s young daughter went outside to the ward to fill storage jars with well water. Nevyn climbed the catwalks up to the top of the dun wall where he could get a bit of fresh air and keep the two lasses in view. Anyone who saw him would have thought he was lost in thought, just from his slow walk, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bent as he paced back and forth on the wide stones, but he was studying Evy. When he opened his second sight, he could see her aura, a pale greenish gray like the tarnish on silver. It wrapped tightly around her body — except over her womb. The aura of the child within glowed a pale gold like a lantern inside a basket, strengthening its mother’s own aura at that point.

After all the months of decent food, rest, and even companionship, her aura still flickered at the point of death. Yet she’d never displayed the slightest symptom of a disease. Nevyn remembered an odd bit of lore he’d picked up in Bardek. None of their learned masters of physick would have spoken about the aura, since none of them had studied dweomer. However, one master had talked to him about “the vital force”. It could be drained from below by the body, Master Hanno had said, or from above, by a disturbance of the soul.

That night, after everyone in the dun but the lightkeeper had gone to bed, Nevyn retired to his chamber just above the women’s hall. He lay down on his bed, crossed his arms over his chest, and summoned his body of light, a man-shaped creation of bluish-silvery astral substance, joined to his physical body by a silver cord. When he transferred his consciousness over to it, he could see with astral eyes, a far more powerful dweomer than the etheric second sight. All around him the stone walls of the dun glistened black. Outside the window the air pulsed with flecks of silver light, and the stars had grown huge and swollen, hovering over the earth.

Nevyn drifted out of the window in his chamber and sank down until he came to one of the windows of the women’s hall. He could pass right through the oxhide covering and sail across the hall, where the wooden furniture and floor covering of woven rushes still gleamed with traces of the red-brown vegetable aura that their materials had extruded in life. Evy had left the door of her little chamber open. Nevyn drifted in, took up a position at the ceiling, and studied her sleeping body. What he saw shocked him so much that he nearly snapped back to his own body in the chamber upstairs.

He steadied himself in his body of light, then sank down a few feet in order to see more clearly. He could barely discern her aura and that of the child through the black astral tangle around her. Like a huge cloud of thorns, black spiky lines surrounded her and dug through the greenish glow of her aura into her flesh. With sharp tendrils they grew into or perhaps out of her etheric double, binding her round, imprisoning her in a web of darkness, sucking life and light from her aura and from, or so it seemed, her very soul. The ritual had netted its prey for the Dark Goddess, sure enough.

Nevyn left the chamber and floated back to his physical body. He glided down the silver cord, reunited consciousness and flesh, then banished the body of light. For a long while he lay still, thinking over the vision. He had seen his defeat, and it sickened him. He could never banish those black forces without harming her. If he went back to the astral to strip them away, her life-force would gush out and bleed along with them, just as pulling a barbed spear out of a warrior’s side will rip out his life by making the wound ten times the worse.

At length he got up and went over to the window; he pulled back the oxhide covering and leaned onto the sill. Although the winter air bit him with cold fangs, it was a clean thing, natural and pure, unlike what he’d seen in the chamber below. He wanted to scream his frustration into the wind and fill the sky with curses. Instead he took a deep breath and calmed himself. With the physical cold of the night air came the touch of another sort of chill — an omen warning, that somehow Evy herself presaged — something. As usual, the omen flickered in shadow rather than displayed itself in plain light. Somehow, some time, perhaps soon, perhaps years away, something or someone related to her would come his way, and it would bring more evil with it.

“My curse upon whoever did this to her!” Nevyn said to the wind. “Blow him evil! May he rot in the lowest hell!”

Distantly he heard ravens, cawing in what sounded to his ears as triumph, though they rarely if ever flew during the night. With a snarl Nevyn stepped back and let the oxhide flap down over the window, shutting out the cold and their chatter both.

Not long after, on the shortest day of winter, when a storm raged around Cannobaen, the cook and the groom’s wife helped Evy deliver a baby boy, as small and delicate as his mother, but healthy withal. When they brought Nevyn in to have a look the pair, he saw life in Evy’s eyes for the first time as she smiled down at her newborn, whom she named Mor, meaning ‘ocean’. Over the next few weeks, however, as her strength returned from the childbirth, her reserve returned with it, except when she was nursing or otherwise tending the baby.

“He’s the one joy in her life,” Cook told Nevyn. “My daughter’s fair taken with the lad, too. She tends him when Evy’s about her work.”

“But otherwise — “

“Ye gods, Evy goes about as if she’s half-dead, the poor mite!”

That’s because she is, Nevyn thought, but aloud he merely voiced a few platitudes about time and the healing of wounds.

Yet though time passed at Dun Cannobaen, Evy grew no stronger. In late spring, about the time when Evy’s son Mor was eating his first solid food, Lady Lovyan and her retinue returned to Dun Cannobaen for an extended visit, riding in late one damp afternoon. Gwerbret Tingyr would join her, she told Nevyn, to take the sea air, once he’d adjudged the spring crop of legal cases.

“He’s not well, Tingyr,” Lovyan said. “I’m glad he’s coming here, so you can have a look at him.”

“He won’t listen to me,” Nevyn said, “no matter what I advise him to do.”

“You’re right, of course, but at least I’ll know what’s wrong. That will be some comfort.”

They were sitting at the table of honor in the great hall just before the dinner hour. A servant lass brought them a basket of fresh bread, a tankard of dark ale for Nevyn, and a silver cup of Bardek wine for Lovyan.

“Welcome back, my lady,” the lass said with a curtsy.

“My thanks.” Lovyan favored her with a smile, then turned in her chair to glance around the great hall. “Ah, there’s Cook’s daughter with a baby. His skin is so dark! Is that little Evy’s child?”

“He is, my lady.”

Omen cold gripped Nevyn with icy hands. “Where’s Evy herself?” he said.

“Taking the lightkeeper’s dinner up to him, my lord.”

Taking the dinner up a hundred fifty slippery steps at twilight — Nevyn shoved his chair back, leapt up, and ran out of the great hall. He charged across the ward, scattering dogs and servants as he ran, darted out the gates, and raced to the foot of the tower. The omen-cold made him shiver, but Evy was already coming down, swinging an empty dinner-pail in one hand, walking slowly, carefully, step by step. When he looked up at the sky, he saw three dark bird-shapes wheeling just under the pale gray clouds, but they were too distant for him to identify them as ravens. He waited, his heart knocking and raging in his chest, until at last she gained the ground and safety.

“Is somewhat wrong?” Evy said to him. “You look ill, my lord.”

“Naught of the sort.” Nevyn let out his breath in a long sigh. “I’d just as soon you let someone else take the lightkeeper’s dinner up to him after this, however.”

She cocked her head to one side and looked so sincerely puzzled that he felt a flare of hope. Perhaps she’d decided to live, after all. Perhaps he could find some way to help her.

In the morning the rain broke. The storm clouds began to clear when a strong south wind blew in, driving them off to the north. Nevyn got a bowl of porridge for his breakfast and took a seat near one of the windows of the great hall. A manservant pulled up the oxhide cover and let a shaft of sunlight fall across the table.

“Most welcome, that is,” Nevyn said. “My thanks.”

The servant smiled, then hurried away to speak to the chamberlain. When Nevyn glanced at the staircase, he saw Evy just coming down the tight spiral of the iron stairs. The cook’s young daughter came after, carrying the baby for her, and that act of kindness doomed Evy. In a flash of fear Nevyn shoved back his chair and stood just as ravens shrieked outside the window, three long racuous cries. Startled, Evy took a quick step back and missed the stair. Without making a sound, she tumbled from the high spiral of the stairway and fell with the crack of bone against iron and a hard grunt of breath as she hit the floor.

Cook’s daughter screamed. The baby began to wail and sob. Nevyn rushed over, but Evy lay dead on the stone floor, her head twisted at an impossible angle. Blood oozed through her dark hair. She had hit her head and broken her neck in one swift blow. The Goddess was merciful, Nevyn thought, such mercy as the Dark One has.

“No doubt she felt very little,” Nevyn told Lovyan that night. “She must have died in an instant.”

“It’s still very sad,” Lovyan said. “What about the child? Can we find him a wetnurse?”

“Cook says he’s old enough to survive on porridge and boiled milk and the like now.” That’s why the ravens held off for all these months, Nevyn thought to himself. They knew they couldn’t let the lad die of hunger.

“Well, a wetnurse would be better, at least to feed him once a day or so.” Lovyan paused to wipe a few tears from her eyes. “If you ever find out who worked that spell over our poor castaway, I’ll have Tingyr arrest and hang him.”

“That would gladden my heart, indeed. But to all intents and purposes, Lovva, she came to us from the Otherlands, and now, alas, she’s gone back there to stay.”