Darkwitch Rising (5 page)

He stared at her, hardly able to reconcile the Ecub he had known in his two previous lives with this beautiful, sexual creature.

“For the love of England, man, how long are you going to stand there and think about it?”

He laughed. “Ah,
there
speaks Ecub!” He put his hands gently about her waist, pulling her towards him, and this time when he kissed her, it was no chaste peck on the cheek. His hands slid upwards to her breasts, and Ecub tipped back her head so he could run his mouth down her neck.

“Cornelia once told me,” Marguerite said, laughing a little breathlessly now as he lowered his face to one of her breasts, “how good a lover you were.”

He laughed, then let her go and stood back a little as he stripped away his clothes. “Now you can judge her truthfulness for yourself, Ecub.”

She leaned forward, putting the palm of her hand flat against his mouth. “My name is Marguerite. We need to be careful.”

Naked now, he pushed away her hand and pulled her back to him. “Not this afternoon,” he said. “Not here.”

I
think I puzzled the entire parish of Easthill; I know I certainly puzzled my parents. What was this child, they thought, who seems so unchildlike? I remember lying in my cot, a baby only a few months old, and
knowing
. Remembering all that had gone before. This life, praise all gods who lived, I
remembered
. I would not repeat Caela’s mistakes.

I think I distressed my mother with my un-babyish gaze. I recall her leaning down to study me, bewilderment all over her honest, lovely face. I didn’t cry, I didn’t burble. I rarely laughed.

I watched.

My father, a local vicar, insisted I be named Noah. He’d wanted a son, desperately, and the disappointment of a daughter was not enough for him to abandon his cherished name. In any case, he loved me despite my femineity, and I loved the name. Noah. Survivor. I hoped it boded well for the future.

So I grew through my childhood, puzzling everyone who beheld me. I took part in no children’s games; I played no mischief; I did not cry; I rarely laughed (who could laugh, remembering Asterion’s
grip on my flesh, and his taunting words, “Not God’s Concubine at all, but
mine
!”)?

I learned to read faster than any child hitherto, and displayed an uncomfortable knowledge both of Greek and of Latin.

How could my poor parents have known I drew on the knowledge of two previous lives to aid me in traversing this one?

My mother faded away when I was four. I felt sadness for her, but more for my father who had loved her dearly. He continued another nine years, writing his sermons in the sunlit front room of our parsonage, distributing the parish poor relief as best he could, and all the while lost in puzzlement at his strange, unsettling daughter.

Poor father, what would he have felt if I had said to him one day over our lonely supper table, “Father, I am far more than just Noah Banks, daughter of Parson Banks of Easthill. I am Eaving, mother goddess of this land, inheritor of more troubles and sorcery than you could possibly imagine.”

But I could not say that. I merely watched as he, too, faded away. He died in the early summer of 1646, peacefully and gently: that, at least, I could grant him. He had tried, and I had loved him in my own way.

I was given into the care of Bess Felton. Mistress Felton was…oh, I suppose she was the local parish “goodwife”. She concerned herself with everyone’s affairs, which could be a great irritant, but she aided and advised and was a comforting presence. I certainly did not mind when she bustled me away from my father’s grave into her own home (the parsonage could no longer be my home, for my right to its comforts died with my father).

I could not long stay there, for Bess had a husband and five children, all packed into a three-roomed
cottage, but Bess made me welcome and as soon as I was seated before the grate, began to make plans to ensure my future.

How, Mistress Felton? Can you keep me from Asterion’s grip? Can you show me the twisted path I must endure if all is to be well
?

“We will write your mother’s cousin,” Mistress Felton said firmly, by which I understood her to mean
I
would write, as Mistress Felton knew no more of the alphabet than I knew of childhood playfulness and innocence. My mother’s second cousin, Anne Carr, was the wife of William Russell the Earl of Bedford, and reigned as the chatelaine of Woburn Abbey, one of England’s great houses. All of Easthill had shared in my mother’s pride in her second cousin’s position; the parish viewed this tenuous link with the aristocracy as a personal achievement for every one of its inhabitants.

Surely, Bess Felton thought, Lady Bedford could find room for one small child amid all the Abbey’s chambers.

So Mistress Felton set me to composing a letter, which she dictated, and I tactfully reinterpreted in my written words, and which we sent on its way.

Six weeks passed, then came a reply. Lady Bedford would be glad to have me as a companion. A textile merchant, a certain Samuel Bescamp, would be passing by Easthill in a week or so and I was to ready myself and a small bag of possessions to sit atop Bescamp’s cart of fabrics for the three-day journey to Woburn Abbey.

Thus it came to pass that, having endured Mistress Felton’s embraces and tears, I found myself one bright Wednesday morning sitting on a pile of bolts of woollen cloth atop Bescamp’s lurching cart. Bescamp himself sat at the front of the cart, with his apprentice beside him. I had little in the way of
possessions with me: a small canvas bag with a change of underthings, a shawl against the chill, a cloak against unexpected cold, a clean apron, and a carefully knotted cloth which held my greatest possession—a gold and ruby bracelet.

It amazed me that this bracelet had survived three thousand years. I’d worn it as Cornelia, spoiled princess of Mesopotama. I’d worn it also as Caela, unloved wife of Edward the Confessor. And here it was again. Still gleaming, its joints sharp and tight. I’d found it two autumns ago in the parsonage’s small orchard. As I walked underneath an apple tree, one of the summer’s fruit fell to the ground before me. The apple split open on impact, and inside lay the bracelet.

I’d sighed, deeply (the land was not going to let me forget), then bent to retrieve it. My greatest challenge from that point on had been to keep it from prying eyes (how could the daughter of a poor country parson explain such a fabulous jewel?).

I wondered if I might ever find a chance to wear it in this life.

We were passing through some of the most beautiful of England’s countryside and, whatever this life might hold in store for me, I could not help but enjoy the chance to commune with the land. The summer’s rural activities were well under way: men swung scythes in line through meadows, laying out the winter’s hay for their livestock; women raked and tedded; children herded geese and ducks; the land
sunned
, for I cannot think how else to describe it. The land lay underneath all this activity, and enjoyed the day as much as I did.

There was little other traffic on the lanes and byways through which we passed: several farm labourers, a country wife or two, a stray pig grunting happily to itself as it trotted down the road. I was so
relaxed I think I may have been drifting towards sleep when the sound of heavy footfalls roused me to full awareness.

I looked first to Bescamp and his apprentice. They showed no sign of hearing the footfalls, for they sat relaxed at the front of the cart, conversing in low tones.

I looked behind me—and my entire body tensed.

Running up the road behind the cart, his long strides eating the distance between us, came Long Tom.

My instant gut reaction was to think:
dear Lady Moon, here comes trouble!

Ah, I loved Long Tom, surely I did, but his presence signified nothing but woe. None of the Sidlesaghes had yet appeared to me in this life; that Long Tom did so now meant that life and trouble were waking about me.

Yet what else should I have expected? The death of my remaining parent, my removal from the village of my birth into a far more aristocratic household and, last week, the appearance of the first of my menstrual cycles for this life, meant that I now grew into something far larger and darker than mere womanhood.

My inheritance. All of it. Troubles and joys both.

“Eaving,” said Long Tom on a grunt as he grabbed at the back of the cart and hauled himself in.

Bescamp and the apprentice took no notice. Magical appearances in the back of their cart were beyond their perception and experience of life, and so Long Tom’s visit passed by unnoticed.

“Long Tom,” I said gravely.

Long Tom settled himself atop a carefully wrapped bundle of silks and studied me. “You grow prettier with each passing life.”

“My appearance was of concern to my parents, for they, of fair aspect themselves, did not know from where they bred this darkness.”

Long Tom extended one of his long arms, and his fingers lifted a braid of my dark brown hair. It had glints of copper through it, and it glowed as it caught the sunlight. Together with my pale skin and my, as always, dark blue eyes, I knew I was an arresting sight.

“Is it time?” I said, and I am afraid my voice shook slightly.

“No.” My braid fell back to my shoulder, and he withdrew his hand. “There are years to pass yet before Asterion calls. But I have come—”

“My womanhood is upon me,” I said, referring to the beginning of my menstrual cycle.

Long Tom nodded. “It is time to talk, you and I and this land.”

I bowed my head.

“Eaving,” he said, very gently, “there can be no errors in this life.”

I laid my hand on my belly. Asterion’s imp rested in there, waiting. It had caused me no trouble, not yet, but I knew it was a lethal nightmare, just waiting to be woken at the call of its master.

If only I had not succumbed to Asterion’s sorcery in my last life. If only…if only…

“I remember you saying to me one night in the last life, when you took me underground through the Game’s strange twistings,” I said, “that there were many possibilities for my future lives, and that in one of them I would be Asterion’s whore.”

“In this life,” he said, his voice horribly expressionless, “you shall achieve that.”

I closed my eyes, trying not to succumb to the horror.

“You cannot escape it,” he continued.

I lifted my hand away from my belly.
Thank you, Long Tom, for that piece of comfort
.

“Eaving, you
must
contend with it.”

Ah, to hear that put so baldly
. “And thus I will,” I said, my voice a little harder than I’d meant.

“Good,” said Long Tom. “I am here for both land and Game. I am here to tell you what must be achieved this life.” He paused. “Old wounds must be healed. All of them.”

Now he had caught me unawares. “Old wounds?”

“The wounds caused during your first life: not those caused only by you, but those caused and suffered by everyone caught in the Game.”

“The wounds between Brutus and I,” I said, “and the suffering caused when Genvissa murdered my daughter.”

“Aye,” he said, “and your murder of Genvissa and
her
daughter.”

I closed my eyes briefly, my conscience stinging at the memory.
Cornelia, standing atop Og’s Hill, driving the knife into the heavily pregnant Genvissa’s neck as she was about to complete the Game with her lover, Brutus
.

“Brutus’ murder of his father,” Long Tom said.

“
I
cannot redeem that!”

“You must facilitate it. You must encourage it.”

“And Coel’s murder?” I said.

“That wound has been healed.”

Of course. In our last life Coel-Harold took the life of Swanne, who was Genvissa-reborn. “He and Brutus healed the rift between them in our last life,” I said. “They became friends, and shared respect.”

Long Tom nodded. “Wounds can be healed,” he said. “They
must
. Matters must be righted between you and Brutus, between you and Genvissa-reborn, and between Brutus and his father, or no one can move forward.”

If I did not heal the rift between Genvissa and myself, then she would never hand to me her powers as Mistress of the Labyrinth. And if Brutus could not heal the guilt and tragedy of his own father’s murder, then neither could he move forward into what he needed to become.

“Wounds must be healed,” I said. “What else?”

“The stag must be raised.”

I drew in a sharp breath. “Is it possible?”

“Yes. He was bred in this land, this life.”

I found I was trembling, and I clutched my hands tightly together. “Where is he?”

“In exile. But he will return.”

I nodded. “If the stag is to be raised, then I must learn the dances and intricacies of the labyrinth. I must become the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

He nodded. “But neither of these tasks—the raising of the stag, and the handing to you of the powers of Mistress of the Labyrinth—can be accomplished if the first is not achieved. Old wounds
must
be healed, Eaving. They must, for Asterion is growing powerful beyond measure. Give him another life beyond this one, and if you don’t have the weapons and power needed to destroy him, then he will best you…”

He stopped, and took a moment to compose himself. “There is one more thing,” he said.

I closed my eyes briefly. I was not sure if I wanted to hear it.

“Eaving,” he said, “you have been reborn. The Stag God shall rise. There is one more who shall walk again.”

I considered his words. I was still so much the novice as Eaving. When I had been Caela I’d lingered in unknowing for years, and once I had known who I was, and accepted it…well, then I’d died all too
soon. There was still so much for me to know…to remember…

“Who?” I said, hoping Long Tom would just tell me.

“The Lord of the Faerie,” he said. “The one the peoples venerate as the Green Man.”