The Burning Time (30 page)

“But then … then … what was left of that face … started smiling. Those swollen slits of eyes fluttered open, and she started smiling. She called out.
‘Look!’
she cried, ‘
The petals! In leaf and bloom and fruit, all at once! Look!’

“Then, in a clear voice strong above the crackle and roar of the blaze, she began singing,

“The flames started wreathing her body. Her hair caught fire. She be changing into a living torch in front of my eyes. Still, she repeats the last line. But this time she sings

—and dies. Simple. Like a child dropping off to sleep.”

Helena sat up on her stool as straight as her twisted back would permit, her head held high.

“That is what became of Petronilla de Meath.”

Only the
tac tac tac
of the little wren’s pecking for crumbs broke the silence. But Helena sat as if refreshed, her face radiant with the reflected serenity of that other, long-ago-lost face.

She sat that way until a sound she had never heard before shattered her reverie.

It was an unearthly sound. Small as a far-off echo at first, it was rising, growing nearer.

It was an inhuman sound.

It was coming from Alyce Kyteler.

THE SOUND WAS ALIVE
. It was struggling to be born.

Harsh, guttural, it was roiling inside the belly of Alyce Kyteler—deep in the belly of what a moment ago had been Alyce Kyteler, in the belly of what now was a creature crumpling from its stool to the floor. The creature hunched there. Then she dropped to all fours. She writhed, trying to crawl. She crouched, squatting, her fists pawing and beating the stone floor. Her head swung from side to side, the face swiveling slowly to stare at Helena. The mouth grimaced, spasming from an O to a grin to an O again, tongue lolling.

The sound was clawing up from the creature’s belly. It was rattling from her breast, her throat, her mouth.

“Ngeh,” she said. “Gegghhk. Gahgh.”

The sound was ripping its way through her, rupturing tissue, scraping vocal chords, talons forking blood tracks in its wake.

The sound clotted and chunked, and the creature grunted and gagged. The sound whined and whistled through her, and she groaned and hissed with it. It became a watery crooning,
and she wept and drooled. She gibbered as it heaved and ebbed, to rise and heave again. Blood vessels bulged on the creature’s throat with the effort to spew it. She gibbered as it chattered through her teeth, drizzled from her nostrils, leaked from her eyes, slobbered from her mouth. She felt it pop and gush from her womb, her bladder, her bowels. It oozed across her tongue, her spittle tasted brassy. It hummed and droned along her limbs, twitching and shuddering her to its rhythms. The scream possessed the creature. The creature became the scream.

Then, crouching on all fours, the creature threw back her head, her jaws stretched wide—and the long curling breath-riding arc of it slimed free of her and crashed into the air. A newborn raptor in first flight, it keened a wild glad grief as it soared. Swooping, it bashed against the walls, howled at the ceiling, shrieked along the floor, shrilled its echoes at the hearth, moaning up the chimney to peal its death-knell dirge into the night. Trapped, the scream mourned at the door and wheeled, circling the room, a raven cawing, keening, beating its huge wings in claps like struck gongs of bronze. The creature was sliding toward darkness. Her head hit the stone floor yet still she could hear far off the scream circling, keening, clanging its wings until, dizzy with no air to ride now, the scream swooped, descending, dwindling, wheeling down one last high long wail of loss. The creature reached out her hand,
but slid into darkness before touch could restrain her. Whimpering soft then, the scream drifted down trembling to light on her outstretched wrist where, breath short in feathery gasps, it folded its great wings and bowed its fierce head, and knew itself, finally, as love.

An outline shimmering in the firelight was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. It had a shape like a face. It was human. It was bending above her.

A familiar face, coming into focus. Helena! Helena Galrussyn. Helena Galrussyn was bending over her, glittering tears falling from her grey eyes, falling and falling. Helena was holding her hand. Helena was stroking her head, murmuring something.

Slowly, the wood-beamed ceiling above Helena’s face returned, flickering in the light from the hearth. Then the walls, dancing with shadows thrown upward. Then the cold stone floor beneath.

Slowly the room came back.

Helena half-pushed and half-dragged Alyce closer to the hearth’s warmth and slumped there on the floor beside her, holding Alyce propped against her breast, partly in her lap, as she might hold a child.

The two stayed this way, in silence, their faces turned toward the flames.

After a long time, Alyce wet her lips, swallowed, tried to speak. Her voice was hoarse from the scream, low, croaking.

“All these years,” she rasped. “All these years I betrayed her. By believing she had betrayed me. All these years.”

“You dinna betray her. You dinna betray anybody. You dinna
know
.”

“I
should
have known.”

“Petronilla dinna
want
you to know.”

“I should have thought it through. She sacrificed herself for me, Helena. She suffered the tortures meant for me. She died the death meant for me.”

Helena shifted her position. She propped Alyce up, half sitting, against the rungs of a stool. Then she leaned back and regarded her with a tinge of disappointment.

“We each of us be having our own suffering, m’Lady,” she said mildly. “We each be dying our own death. She dinna sacrifice herself for you.”

Absent-mindedly, Alyce realized that her lip was bleeding. She licked away the blood.

“She dinna do it for you,” Helena repeated softly.

Alyce turned to Helena, her cheeks flushed from the fire.

“Sara. Of
course
. How could I have.… It was all for Sara. The lies in the letter, the taking of the Moon Crown and the
Lunula and my cloak and the horse—all for Sara. The refusal to name others, the defiance, the willingness to die—for Sara. For the legacy of a better kind of world she wanted to leave Sara.”

“Nae.” Helena frowned. “T’was all for Sara but the last three.”

“What?”

“Not the last three. The ones you said.”

“Which … I do not—”

“Once she knew Sara safe away with you, there be naught she could do for Sara. Not anymore. Not ever. She be making herself let Sara go, like she be making
you
let
her
go. Not naming any others—that she be doing for
us
. For me. For Eva. For Robert. Aye, for your son Will—and for whosoever of the others she thought be taken. She gave us our lives, aye, that she did. But she dinna die our deaths for us. We each be doing that for ourselves.”

“I do not understand.”

“I know.” A keen look. “I know you dinna understand.”

“Help me understand, Helena.”

“I believe Sean Fergus—blessed be that man, wherever he’s got to—could have saved her life. By a good lie or whatever—and I do think there be such a thing as a good lie. When truth-tellers lack all power to be heard, a good lie mayhap be the only thing to tell. I believe Sean knew he could save her life if she let him, and I believe he will always carry that knowing as his own cross. I believe Petronilla could have lived, in prison,
as did I —if you call that living. And mayhap even get free years after, when I be freed. Mayhap have come with me and this night we two both be rapping at your door together.”

“Then … why … I still do not—”

“I be saying that after six floggings even the Bishop dinna dare more torture to get her to name us. I be saying she knew Sara safe away and she knew the rest of us would not be burnt. I be saying she
knew
she could be saved from the stake. And
still
she dinna recant. Still she dinna want their sacraments. Still she defied ’em.”

Alyce winced and leaned forward, trying to read Helena’s face.

“Now that … t’was not for you, m’Lady. Not for us. Not even for Sara.”

“
Why
then? Such a waste! For what?”

Helena frowned with surprise at Alyce.

“Why, for herself.”

Then she sat back, wrapped in the satisfaction of her certainty. It was soft, warm, vast, merciless. It filled her with triumph. Her face was luminous with it.

“For herself alone,” she repeated.

Alyce Kyteler’s hands lay motionless in her lap—open, as if by an act of faith, as if the empty, upturned palms held a gift beyond claiming.

There was another long silence.

Then Helena spoke, gently.

“In a way, t’is harder for you, I think—all this. We
lived
this story—through days and weeks, months, even years. But you meet the whole tale in a single night’s black hour.”

Alyce, returning from her thoughts, lifted her head.

She began speaking, and her voice grew stronger with every word. She sat up straighter. Her eyes were wet, but they flashed with a glint of their old iridescence.

“Petronilla de Meath,” she said, caressing each syllable.

She got to her knees. Then, with a hand out to ward off Helena’s aid, she struggled to her feet.

“Petronilla de Meath,” she said again. “She shall not be forgotten, this poor little—no. This magnificent woman. This—Initiate, this Wiccan. This
amchara
.” She bowed her head in humility. “This … Priestess.”

Alyce threw back her shoulders and stood, tall, fierce. Her gaze penetrated the walls of the house, seeing far out into the night. She was speaking to the past, to the mounds of the ancestors in distant Eire. She was speaking to the future. She was speaking to herself.

“The courage Petronilla de Meath struck on the forge of fear must not be forgotten. She may seem lost to us, as Eire may seem lost to us. But she is ever ours as Erin is—greenling isle of glens and mounds afloat in white sea-foam, there in the West where we can go no longer … not until we drift westward home with our own dying, as does the sun returning home from exile every dusk. Petronilla de Meath must live in our
lore, in all our days’ memories, in all our nights’ dreams—as the land, the homes, the customs we were forced to leave still and always live in our days’ memories and nights’ dreams. The snow’s crunch at the Brigid Sabbat in the wintry blue light of Imbolc. The bright vernal Equinox. Beltane’s swollen buds and lovely riotous lust. The great Solstice of summer and the year’s Longest Day. The first-harvest fires of Lugnasad. Autumn’s crisp Equinox flaming the trees red and gold. The solemn dark frosts of Samhain and the Otherworlds. And the longest night of all, the Winter Solstice, the Black Sun, the Day Outside the Year.”

Helena recognized the intensity before her. She strained to rise in its presence, the dazzle of a High Priestess. Alyce reached out to her. Helena grasped that strong hand and was pulled to her feet in one fluid motion.

“The Forms pass, the Circle remains. Petronilla de Meath is free now, and unafraid. She shall live,” Alyce went on, pressing Helena’s hands between her own, “in our breathing in and breathing out, as does the Eight-Spoked Wheel that Turns the Year. She shall flow through our lore as do the holy springs of Erin, the rivulets, rivers, and wells. And this I swear in the Name of She Who is Nameless: that wherever this story is told, silence shall be shattered, secret pain made visible, and terror thaw from hearts wintered with fear. This Magick has Petronilla de Meath given us.”

In the glimmer of fading embers, the faces of both women glowed. No innocence there, only resolve. They embraced.

Then Alyce was no longer a High Priestess, merely a woman wearing a sad, crooked smile.

“We will talk again tomorrow, Helena. There will be time now—years—to talk. To heal. And to marvel at the strange clarity of Her ways.… But tonight you shall sleep in a soft warm bed with clean linen and a goosedown quilt. And every night thereafter, for all of your life. Come upstairs, rest now.”

Limping, Helena followed her old mistress out of the kitchen.

“We will look in at Dana for a moment, quietly, so as not to wake her,” Alyce said, a mother’s insight in her whisper. “Then, in the morning, what a surprise she shall have, what bliss for you both! I have told her stories about you, and Sysok, and Old John. She has always said, ‘My momma will come for me one day. I know it.’ ”

A sob broke from Helena. It bent her double, suddenly, like a blow to her breast.

“Hush, dear, hush,” Alyce said. “Perhaps … we must take this joy of reunion morsel by morsel, like food after long starvation. Else it may crack our hearts and kill us outright. Come. Tonight you will see her sleeping, perfect as a faerie child. Then, tomorrow, you shall hold her and play with her as long as you like, hour after hour. And again, through the
next day. And through the luxury of the next, and the next. And you shall rest and eat and sleep, and become well and strong again. Welcome … my friend. You are home now.”