Juliet Marillier - Hearts Blood

“We cannot be certain of that,” said Rioghan. “And because we cannot be certain, the risk of attempting it would be too high.” He looked at Anluan. “Any appearance by the host would give Lord Stephen his justification for moving into the region by force. He could claim to be ridding the locals of a peril that has threatened them for generations.”

“It is premature to speak of such possibilities.” Anluan’s tone brooked no argument. “We can plan only as far as this meeting or council. I presume they intend to hold it down in the settlement. I cannot go down there. That would endanger the local folk and the people of the wider district. And I will not allow de Courcy’s emissaries to come up here.”

“Anluan,” I said, “you can’t let Lord Stephen walk in and take everything.”

“If you have a solution, Caitrin, you should set it out for us,” said Muirne.

I drew a deep, steadying breath. “Magnus,” I said, “how long is it since the host was off the hill? How long since they crossed that boundary line?” Nechtan’s accounts, and Conan’s, were strong in my mind: the destructive rampages, the rending and maiming, the carnage and death.“It’s some time, isn’t it? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty?”

“We won’t discuss this further,” Anluan said sharply. His face was suddenly ashen; his jaw was set tight.

In the silence that ensued, Magnus looked down at his platter. Eichri and Rioghan pretended to eat. Olcan went over to check the dog. I could feel Muirne’s eyes on me.

“But, Anluan—” I began.

“This is irrelevant!” Anluan snapped. “The host cannot be allowed to leave the hill. Not under any circumstances. That means I don’t leave the hill. Didn’t you hear me, Caitrin? I said we won’t discuss this!”

After a moment, I said, “You think if you don’t talk about a problem it will go away?”

“I could save the Tor and its inhabitants at the price of the settlement and all who dwell there.” His voice was icy; his fingers clenched themselves around a goblet from which he was not drinking. I struggled to see in him the man whose courage and gentleness had so touched me after Cillian’s attack. He’s afraid, I thought suddenly. He wants to fight this, but he believes he will fail everyone. He believes he will destroy all he cares about.

“What would your choice be, Caitrin?” he went on. “Would you preserve the fortress and its wretched chieftain, not to speak of the household of loyal retainers, at the price of a few hundred men, women and children, a few farms, a few cottages? We could save the region from Norman rule. Let the host loose beyond the confines of the Tor and it should send Lord Stephen and his men away screaming. Or he might march in with more men than even the uncanny army of Whistling Tor could combat. Either way, there wouldn’t be many folk left alive when it was all over.Which way would your choice lie?”

I rose to my feet. “It’s not my choice,” I said, making myself breathe slowly. “Excuse me, I’m going to bed.” I touched a taper to the fire and lit a candle. I gathered up the bundle I had left on the bench earlier: the remnants of Emer’s gown with Róise tucked inside. “It seems to me that what’s needed here is a display of leadership.”

Anluan stood up. I saw him clasp his hands together to still them, the left hand around the right. All was silence. Even Fianchu’s chewing had ceased. As I went out the door, the chieftain of Whistling Tor addressed my back.

“You expect too much of me,” he said, and I heard no anger in his voice now, only bitter sorrow. “I am no leader.”

You are, I thought as I walked through the empty rooms and deceptive passageways of the fortress, averting my gaze from a mirror in a corner, another on a wall, a third propped at a drunken angle atop a broken stool. You can be, if only you will believe in yourself.

I opened my bedchamber door to find the ghost child waiting inside. Her eyes went straight to the bundle I carried.

“All better now?” she asked.

“I’ll show you.” I unrolled the ruined gown, took out the mended doll and set her on the pallet. “I’ll make up a bed for you here, on the floor. I think you’ll be warm enough.” I busied myself laying out a cloak and a blanket, and rolling up a gown for a pillow. When I turned to look at the child, her little features were full of such longing that tears sprang to my eyes. She was kneeling beside my bed, gazing into Róise’s embroidered face. One skinny finger stroked the very edge of the new skirt I had made for the doll.

“If you want, you can hold her.”

She gathered Róise tenderly into her arms; rocked her as gently as any mother might a precious infant. She sang a whispery lullaby. “Oo-roo, baby mine ...”

“We’d have been warmer in the kitchen,” I said, talking mostly to quiet my own restless thoughts. Anluan’s bitterness had unnerved me. His mood slipped from sun to shadow with little warning. A chieftain was at a great disadvantage if his capacity to act was at the mercy of such a volatile temper. What if Muirne was right and he could not change? “At least there’s a fire down there.”

The child’s eyes went wide, startling me; the little body became rigid. “No! No fire!”

“It’s all right, hush, little one.” I went to her, crouching to embrace her. “There’s no fire up here. And the one in the kitchen is a safe fire, on the hearth. See the nice bed I made for you.Would you like to tuck Róise in?”

She snuggled under the meager warmth of the blanket, the doll clutched tightly to her breast. “Sing me a song,” she said.

It was the last thing I felt like doing. “All right, then. Close your eyes.” I sat down on the floor beside her, hugging my shawl around me and wondering if the others had continued the discussion without me. I made an attempt at the song about the lady and the toad, leaving out the rude parts.The girl lay motionless, lids closed, long pale lashes soft against pearly skin. How cold she was! It was as if winter’s breath had touched her deep inside.

I had reached the last chorus when I saw a flickering light out on the gallery and heard footsteps approaching. Magnus appeared in the doorway.

“Just checking that all’s well.” His eyes widened.“Got company, I see.”

“I’m fine, thank you, Magnus. I’m sorry I walked out.”

In the dim light, I could not read his expression clearly. “No trouble. Olcan said to tell you he’ll send Fianchu up. I heard you had a different kind of guard on the door today.”

“Who told you?”As far as I knew, nobody had been here while Cathaír was on duty.

“Word gets about.They all knew about it: Eichri, Rioghan, Muirne.”

“Magnus, I’m sorry I upset Anluan again. I just wish he would ...” My voice faded. Anluan had good reason to be angry with me. I wanted things to be different. I wanted him to be the man I had seen in the courtyard facing up to Cillian. Now, in the quiet of the bedchamber, it came to me how unrealistic that was. What he faced now was not a mob of bullies. It was a Norman lord, with all the power and authority that implied. It was the formidable force of men-at-arms such a lord was likely to have at his command. What did I want: that Anluan should perish, taking the folk of forest and settlement with him, simply to prove to me that he could be a man? “He told us not to discuss it,” I said miserably. “But I can’t think about anything else.”

Magnus folded his well-muscled arms. He had not advanced beyond the doorway. “We’ve weathered a lot here, you know. Terrible times; sorrowful times. I never thought I’d say this, Caitrin, but maybe this really is the end.Whistling Tor’s got no men-at-arms, it’s got no resources, it doesn’t even have the trust of its people to fall back on. He knows what he should do, but the risks are high. Step off the hill, even for the time it takes to walk to the settlement and attend a council, and he puts everything he cares about in jeopardy. Suppose he does that, and defies Lord Stephen. Then he’s committed to armed conflict. Where’s his army?” He waved a hand out towards the forest. “He’s only got them, and we know what happened when his ancestors tried to lead them into battle.”

“There must be a new way of looking at this,” I said. “I refuse to believe there’s no solution.” But then, hadn’t Anluan accused me of having persistent hope, hope that saw possibilities where there were none? “Magnus, if Eichri and Rioghan can go beyond the hill without dire consequences, doesn’t that mean the others could do the same, given the right conditions? Eichri just offered to go to Criodan’s, which is quite a distance from Whistling Tor.”

“Eichri and Rioghan are different.”

“But they weren’t always different. If they could change, why can’t the rest of them change?”

Magnus looked bemused. “With enough time and the will to do it, I’m prepared to admit that might be possible. We have less than a turning of the moon.”

I glanced down at the child on her improvised bed. I thought of the look in Cathaír’s troubled eyes as he’d marched back to the forest with his head held high. “All Anluan needs is for them to stay on the Tor while he goes to the settlement for a meeting,” I said.

“And what would you have him do when he gets to this meeting? Threaten the Normans with a fighting force of twenty villagers wielding pitchforks?”

“It sounds foolish, I know. But maybe, if he took that first step, the people down there would think better of him. And it’s not as if Lord Stephen himself will be here at full moon, along with his fighting men. Mightn’t Anluan have time to rally support in the district?”

Before Magnus could comment, Fianchu came bounding into the bedchamber and went immediately to the child. He turned a few circles, somehow managing not to step on her, then lay down gently beside her. Her uncanny cold did not seem to disturb him, but then, just as she was no ordinary girl, he was no ordinary dog.

“I’ll leave you in peace,” Magnus said. It seemed our discussion was over.

“Good night, Magnus.”

“Good night, lass. In the morning, maybe we’ll see this with fresh eyes.”

A fine, persistent rain fell over the towers and gardens of Whistling Tor, pooling in corners, trickling down stone walls, making me shiver as I walked between living quarters and library.The heart’s blood plant had put up three flower stems; the oaks were clothed in tender green. I counted the days as they passed: twenty days until the Normans came; nineteen, fifteen ... Not only was that time looming, but so was the first day of autumn. I had been hired only until then.

The spinning of my mind was unbearable. I tried to keep it at bay with work, plunging into my task with a feverish energy. Anluan spent much of the time shut away in his quarters. I would see him occasionally in somber conversation with Magnus or Rioghan, but he hardly spared me a glance. He did not come to the library; he did not sit under the birch tree in Irial’s garden. Muirne took him his meals on a tray.

At night, when my troubled thoughts kept me awake, I went out onto the gallery and looked across the courtyard. In the dark of the moonless night, Rioghan paced up and down in his nightly ritual. Across the pond and beyond the pear tree, I could see the glow of Anluan’s lamp. I whispered to him. “Why won’t you talk to me? I thought we were friends.”

I missed him. I missed the little glances he would turn my way; I missed his awkward conversation; I missed his crooked smile. Even his bouts of ill temper would be better than this absence, this silence. It extended to the rest of the household as well; I deduced that Anluan had ordered them not to discuss the looming crisis with me. I wanted to help him, to talk to him, to be a listening ear. But on the rare occasions when I happened to meet him crossing the courtyard or pass him in a hallway, he looked so grim and distant that I could hardly bring myself to speak.

I needed more time. The documents might still reveal a way of banishing the host forever and freeing Anluan from the curse. If there were no host, he could build ties with his neighboring chieftains. If there were no host, he could become the leader he was born to be. Then maybe he would have a chance of standing up to the Normans. If only I could find a counterspell. Fifteen days left.

Morning after morning, I was in the library as soon as there was light enough to read by, and stayed there until almost suppertime. In the evenings I worked in my bedchamber, making an Irish version of Irial’s margin notes on vellum pages I had cut and sewn into a tiny book. I had pored over everything the library contained in Irial’s hand, but this record remained incomplete. If there had indeed been two years between Emer’s death and her husband’s, some of Irial’s writings must be missing. Or he had ceased to keep this record for a season or so before his own demise. He had become too sad to set pen to page, perhaps. His last note read:

Day five hundred and ninety-four. The leaves of the birch, spiralling down, down. A lark’s pure notes in the endless sky. Is there a sleep without dreams?

Reading this, I thought not of forlorn Irial but of his son, and I considered the nature of love. I had once watched Anluan in the garden and seen an enchanted prince trapped in a dark net of sorcery. But this was no prince of ancient story. Anluan was a flesh and blood man, with a man’s virtues and flaws. The wounds Magnus had once spoken of, the hurts left on him by the past, were as much part of him as the limping leg and uneven shoulders.They made him the man he was.

I imagined the warmth of his body pressed against me, his face close to mine as I leaned over him to guide the quill. I considered how much it hurt to be shut out; more than it should, bearing in mind that I was a scribe hired for a single summer. I knew that whatever happened, leaving this place was going to break my heart.

My translation of Nechtan’s documents now covered a sizable pile of parchment sheets. I stored them between polished oak boards that Olcan had prepared for me, with a leather strap to keep them together. Between the long days of work and my constant anxiety, I grew thinner. My gowns hung loose on me. On the rare occasions when I looked in a mirror—generally by accident—and it gave me back a true reflection, I did not see the rounded, rosy person whom Eichri had called a lovely lady from an old tale, but a pallid creature with dark smudges under her eyes, brow furrowed by a frown, hair scraped back under a practical head-cloth. I recalled Nechtan’s cruel assessment of his wife: Soon, very soon, she’ll be a hag. I wondered what had happened to poor, well-meaning Mella after her husband’s great experiment went so disastrously wrong.

I had not expected to be lonely, but I was. Most days the ghost child kept me company, sitting on the floor in the corner where Irial’s books were kept, playing mysterious games with Róise. Cathaír had taken it upon himself to guard the entrance to my bedchamber through the daylight hours, and Fianchu kept guard at night.

In the evenings the household still gathered, without its leader and his shadow. But suppertime was not what it had been.We were all despondent and troubled. Olcan and Magnus exchanged a word or two about the work they planned for the next day. Rioghan sat silent, without his usual sparring partner, for Anluan had at last given Eichri permission to visit Saint Criodan’s. My appetite was gone. I ate only because I knew I must.