Mrs. Martin tactfully withdrew to speak to the girl in the school uniform. Csilla wondered if that was Susanna Martin. They were about the same age, although Csilla wondered why anyone would mistake Susanna"s picture for hers. They didn"t look that much alike. But perhaps they would be friends?
"This is my brother, Professor Kert"sz." He didn"t look like Csilla"s idea of a professor. Her father had always worn a jacket and tie, even to the grocery store. This man"s overalls had gra.s.s stains on the knees.
Professor Kert"sz held out his hands. Without thinking, she put her hands in his. "Csilla, I"m sorry to bring you such bad news when we"ve just met. Your father has been arrested."
Csilla sat down abruptly on one of the stones. Mrs. Mad"r knelt beside her. "Oh, my dear. I"m so terribly sorry."
A crack was opening inside her. She could feel it open, and everything was falling inside it: her grandmother"s gingerbread, her father"s jackets, which always needed mending, the city of Budapest. The night itself was falling into the crack, and Csilla thought, We"re all going to fall in, all of the Tnd"r.
There were whispers around her, as the story spread. "Yes," said Professor Kert"sz, turning to the people around the fire. "Antal Szarvas has been arrested. This is, of course, the worst news I could have for you. But I am also sorry to say that we have been unable to locate his ma.n.u.script. We believe there were two copies, his personal copy and another that he was sending us. We searched his apartment after his arrest, but the police had already been there. We found nothing, and we do not know if the second copy was sent. I can"t tell you how sad I am to have a colleague in danger. To have lost Queen Gertr"d"s stories is a double blow. Translating them into English would have been the most significant work of my life."
"We haven"t lost her stories," said Mrs. Mad"r.
From the darkness into which she had fallen, Csilla suddenly saw what seemed to her like a flicker of light, bringing her back to the stone she sat on, and the forest. "My grandmother was queen of the Tnd"r?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Mad"r. "Your grandmother was our queen. If she had told you, it would have put you in danger."
In the blankness of her grief, Csilla thought, I wish people would stop trying to protect me.
Mrs. Mad"r looked at the people around the fire, ordinary people who looked like farmers and teachers and librarians but were, it turned out, not ordinary at all. "This is Csilla Szarvas, Professor Szarvas" daughter and Queen Gertr"d"s granddaughter. She knows where the second copy of her father"s ma.n.u.script is located." Csilla heard the people around the fire whisper to one another.
"What do you mean?" she said. "I don"t know anything about a second copy. I just know about the one he was typing."
"Csilla," said Mrs. Mad"r, "don"t you understand? You are the second copy-or rather the first copy, because what he was typing was really the second. You know all the stories that your grandmother knew-she made sure of that. We couldn"t understand your father"s message-was he sending us his daughter or his ma.n.u.script? It turns out he was sending us both." Mrs. Mad"r put her arm around Csilla"s shoulder. "But don"t think about that right now. Just keep getting stronger. We"ll try to help him, I promise. Even in prison, we"ll try to help him and bring him out. We"ll never stop trying."
The people around the fire were turning to each other, talking. She heard a pipe begin, and then a drum. But Csilla could not stand, and she could not speak, because her father might be dead already, and who cared about a bunch of stories that were probably, anyway, a bunch of lies? Even the White Stag.
"Csilla, there is someone I want you to meet." Mrs. Mad"r squeezed her shoulder and then stepped aside.
The woman who stood before her was so small, no taller than Csilla herself, and so slender. Her bones were like the bones of birds. She was so pale, like white stones at the bottom of a stream. Her skin was wrinkled, all over her cheeks and around her eyes. She looked infinitely old, but the hair that hung over her shoulders was as green as gra.s.s.
"Drink this," she said in an accent so strange, so ancient, that it seemed to echo from a thousand years in the past. As the honey wine burned her throat, Csilla felt the crack in her chest . . . not close, but ease.
"Csilla," said Mrs. Mad"r, "I told you that the Daughters of the Moon were dead. That is what we would like the world to believe-the Tnd"r have been feared enough, and an almost-immortal ancestress might convince even the twentieth century that we are the witches we were once thought to be. But this is Ibolya, the last of the Daughters of the Moon."
"Welcome, child," said Ibolya. Her voice sounded like the whisper of leaves overhead. "You have lost so much, we have all lost so much. That is why you must help us find ourselves again." She turned to Mrs. Mad"r. "Show her, Queen. Show her what we are doing here, in this new land."
"Den"s," said Mrs. Mad"r to her brother, "I think we can begin."
It was a song Csilla"s grandmother had never taught her, and it sounded as ancient as Ibolya herself. Mrs. Mad"r sang the first verse, then Professor Kert"sz joined in, then the others, one by one, until even Mrs. Martin was singing. Csilla watched firelight flicker on the singers" faces.
First came a doe, with its fawn. They looked at the firelight and the circle of singers before slipping away again into the forest. Then came a fox with a mouse, its dinner, hanging from its jaws. Then a porcupine curled into a ball by the base of a stone, like a small stone itself. An owl swooped over the fire, adding its cry before it flew off into the forest. And the forest around them was growing. Csilla could feel it, the thickening of trees, the flowing of their sap. The ferns uncurling fronds, sending their spores floating into the air. Moss climbing the tree trunks, covering the scars where there had once been saws.
Ibolya put her hand on Csilla"s shoulder. It felt as light as a dry leaf. "Someday, this forest will be like those I knew in my youth, so long ago, and the Tnd"r will care for it. Perhaps this new world will be better for us than the old. And perhaps we will restore what has been damaged. That is what we are, my child. That is what is means to be Tnd"r." Then the Daughter of the Moon slipped silently into the trees, so that for a moment Csilla wondered if she had actually been there. But she was still holding the cup of honey wine in her hand.
One by one, the singers stopped, and she could hear the forest around her, the sounds and silence of the night.
"Csilla," said Professor Kert"sz from the other side of the fire, "will you tell us one of your grandmother"s stories?"
No, she started to say. What did the stories matter? All they did was show how often the Tnd"r had lost. How often they had hidden, slept on straw, begged for sc.r.a.ps of food. But the stories had mattered to her grandmother and to her father, and they mattered to everyone here. She could see it in their faces, all the faces in the firelight looking at her, waiting. Susanna Martin nodded, as though to say, go on, I know you can.
"Shortly before Istv"n was to be crowned king of Hungary," said Csilla, "one of his huntsmen came to him and said, "I have been hunting in the forest and have seen a marvel: a stag as white as snow." So Istv"n determined that he would hunt the stag. He set out in the morning with his retinue, but he soon lost them and rode on through the forest alone. At noon, when he was growing hungry, he came to a glade, at the center of which stood a woman with skin like milk and hair as green as the leaves of an oak tree. "Lady," he said . . ."
Around her, the forest listened.
WINTERBORN.
Liz Williams
We watched as the drowned woman walked through the palace of Coldgate. Her hair was a sodden ma.s.s; her skin as white as birch bark, mottled with blue shadows. Damp footprints appeared behind her, and swiftly vanished again.
"She isn"t the first," Oldmark said to me.
"So you said in your letter." That"s why they"d come to me, after all, and I had to confess it was flattering. It"s not easy building up a reputation in a city as big as London, crammed with weather-readers, wind-listeners, earth-healers. And river-speakers. Not easy, especially if you are a woman, and young.
You"d think having a queen on the throne, in this year of our Lady Sixteen Hundred and Two, would make a difference. But then again, Aeve wasn"t entirely human, and perhaps that made a greater one.
"You see, Mistress Dane-" Oldmark broke off. For a courtier, he seemed to have some difficulty in expressing himself.
"You may call me Mistress Isis, if you wish. We"re to be working together, after all. And I"ve seen the drowned before, you know. Part of my job is to find the bodies of those who have been unfortunate enough to meet their deaths in the river."
"I suppose you work princ.i.p.ally with the Thames?"
"Yes, but also with the Wye, the Tyne . . . And I grew up on the banks of the Severn, near the Welsh border at Lydd"s Ney. That was where I first found I could river-read."
Midnight in summer, the soft stars above, and a child staring at a woman standing on the river sh.o.r.e, her hair weed green, the ghost of water swirling round her. "My name is Severna." A genius loci, a spirit of place, a G.o.ddess, once, when the Romans were here. And she told me what I was and what I would be able to do. Later, I came to Oxford, then London, moving eastward as the power of Aeve"s throne grew, with triumphs over the Spanish, the French.
"Do you think this is to do with the Thames?" Oldmark asked. The woman was gliding through the wall. A moist stain showed briefly in her wake, and then there was nothing.
"I"m not sure." Some mages pretend to know everything, all bombast and certainty, even if they couldn"t tell you whether it was day or night. This would not, I knew, be the right tack to take at Aeve"s court: the queen had half-faery blood, could smell out a lie as easily as if it were a rat under the floorboards. She hadn"t kept her throne for ninety years for nothing. It was hard to explain to Oldmark, but this did not feel like the genius loci of the Thames: Thamesis, that bearded, weedy, silty presence, a spirit old when the first hunters had come to his sh.o.r.es, before history began.
"Can you find out?"
"I believe so. Tell me, Lord Oldmark, what is the lowest point of Coldgate?"
Oldmark thought for a moment. "It would be the cellars, where we keep the ale. They say the foundations date from the days of the Romans. I do not know whether that is true, but certainly there are a great many steps leading down to the cellar . . ."
"Please take me there, Lord Oldmark, and I will see what is to be seen."
He was right about the steps. I counted forty, leading in an arc down into the musty depths of the cellar. The floor was made of flags, a glossy gray stone. The cellar smelled of wine, of moss, of rivers. Oldmark left me in a small pool of light cast by a candle; when he had gone, I blew the candle out and stood alone in the dark.
At once, the drowned were all around me, sensing my presence as they might sense the spirit of water. I felt a chill breath on my face. Damp fingers trailed through my hair.
"Hush now," I said, softly so as not to frighten them. "I don"t mean you harm." The spirits of the water-dead are rarely hostile, tending rather to a fluid sadness, and they must be treated gently.
One of the spirits floated into view, releasing her own phosph.o.r.escence, a green-pale glow. A girl, only a little younger than myself, with a purple mark around one eye.
"Who are you?" I asked. I put ritual weight behind my words, speaking in the Tongue of Water rather than my native English. "Why are you here?"
At the sound of the Tongue, her face grew still and slack, and I felt a little guilt at that. "My name is Sarah Mew. I was told to go with the others and wait for the boat."
"Which boat is that, Sarah?" Had she been left on the sh.o.r.e, been taken by the waves? But she answered, "The boat that is coming. The one that leads the fleet."
"Sarah, you must tell me what you mean. Which fleet?" It struck me that, for all her mention of the future, she might still have been speaking of the past: one of the interminable skirmishes with the Spanish navy off the sh.o.r.es of Albion, for instance.
"The fleet that is coming," she whispered. Her drowned face contorted with the effort of speech: she was enspelled, I saw, and my own magic was trying to counter that which had been placed upon her. And that other magic was stronger. I felt it sweep through the cellar like a tide, washing her away. She spun through the dark air and through the wall, no more than flotsam, and was gone. I was alone in the cold chamber.
I went slowly back up the stairs and found Oldmark. He was standing disconsolately by a window, staring out at the rain streaking down the leaded panes.
"Mistress Dane! Is everything well?"
"I am well, Lord Oldmark, but I"m afraid that I have some bad news. I have spoken with the drowned. They tell me of a fleet that is coming, a fleet of ships, and from the magic that was placed upon the spirit with whom I spoke, we face considerable danger. This was not an ordinary spell. It swept my magic away; only now is it beginning to creep back." This was true. I could feel it starting to seep into my soul again, refreshing its parched ground.
Oldmark blanched. "Danger! From which quarter?" "I could not say." This, on the other hand, was not true. In that moment when the tide had caught the spirit in its grasp, I"d sensed something distinctive, familiar-a mossy greenness, a sudden dank and earthy taste in the air. The magic of Aeve"s cousin and mortal enemy, the Queen-under-the-Hill.
Faery magic, then. No surprises there. But Aeve would not be pleased.
The queen wanted me to find out more about the fleet. This time, she spoke to me herself. I was granted audience in the great hall of Coldgate, myself on bended knee, head bowed, Oldmark fidgeting off to one side, and the queen-in the quick glimpses I got of her-sitting upright on the carved stone throne, her skin the whiteness of the stone itself, lending her a statue"s look. Her hair was the pure blood-red of faery, her gaze a slanted green. She did not look to be a hundred years old, but then, in terms of her own family, she was little more than a girl.
"You look afraid," she said, when I hesitated in the course of my explanation. "Are you?"
I saw no reason to lie. "Yes," I told her. "I am afraid of the magic of under-hill." Of your relatives. Of your relatives. Old magic, root-and-briar magic, coiling and twining and dragging you down into earth and dreams . . . I"d chosen the river rush, after all, or been chosen by it. I wanted something clear and clean. Old magic, root-and-briar magic, coiling and twining and dragging you down into earth and dreams . . . I"d chosen the river rush, after all, or been chosen by it. I wanted something clear and clean.
"You are wise, then," Queen Aeve said. "Tell me. Can you find out more, or are you too afraid?"
"I am afraid, but I will do as you ask."
I felt, rather than saw, her smile.
"You"ll be rewarded," was all that she said, but she did not say how.
If you want knowledge, of magic as well as rivers, you need to go to the source. The Thames rises near Oxford, the city where my mother was born, and in its early stages it is called the Isis: hence, my name. I took my mare from the royal stables at dawn the next day and rode west, setting a hard pace across the chalk hills and the beech groves, until we saw cream-gold towers in the distance and Oxford lay before us.
They"d let me study here, a great favor, since I am a woman. Not officially, of course, but sub rosa sub rosa, lessons taken in a shadowy cell at the back of the Bodleian library. I had been granted this as a result of my grandfather, cleric and scholar, endower of a college that was already three hundred years old. I had learned a great deal about rivers, about the sea, in this land-locked, placid city in the middle of the wheat-pale hills.
Now I skirted the city bounds, stopped at an inn overnight, and continued west until I came to a stone by the side of the road that showed the way to Seven Springs. The grotto lies high at the Cotswold edge, river-birth carving limestone into palaces and caverns. When I arrived, early on the morning of the second day, there was no one there. A light mist was spiraling up through the branches. Beech mast and acorns crackled under my boots, and the cave-mouth lay before me, so enveloped in the white exposed roots of the beech that it was hard to tell where wood ended and stone began.
I was glad to be alone, but it also made me afraid. Not good, I thought, to be up here in the hills, the kingdom of faery. The G.o.ddess would protect me, or so I believed, but who ever really knew? I remembered walking along the Severn sh.o.r.e, looking westward to the black line of the Queen"s Forest and beyond that the dusk-blue hills of Wales and the line of fortress castles, magic-warded. The court of the Queen-under-the-Hill lay behind that iron band. Aeve"s cousin, Aeve"s rival, and a long enmity between the two thrones of Albion, one dark, one-or so Aeve claimed-the province of the Light.
Sometimes even a dim light can illuminate, if the shadows are dark enough.
Time to face my own darkness. I lit a candle and stepped inside. Water-breath, and presence: not the green deep presence of Thamesis himself, but the Riverine Isis, delicate, a cat-soft whisper in the shadows.
"My Lady?" No reply, but I didn"t expect one, not straight away.
I walked deeper into the temple, as far as the first spring, and held the candle out over black water. I could see my own face reflected in the dark mirror of its depths: I did not look like myself, but older, the woman I would one day be. And behind that, overlaid, was another face that was not myself at all.
Reflected flame flickered. I said, "I spoke to a ghost, and she told me of a fleet. There was magic in it, from Under-Hill. I need to know where the fleet will come from."
No answer. I stared into wet fire, beginning to think that this, too, would be withheld. Then the lips of my reflection moved, although I myself had finished speaking.
"Watch for the Lowlander," the reflection said. "Watch for the midnight moon."
"Who is the Lowlander?" I asked, though I thought I already knew: the Dutch considered that they had a claim to the throne of Albion; there had been incursions, and almost certainly there were spies.
The face was silent and still. A ripple of water, caused by a breeze that I did not feel on my skin, eddied across the surface of the black pool. The chamber grew colder; I was gazing back at myself alone. Though the candle still flickered in my hand, in the water, the flame was no longer to be seen.
I made an offering of cyclamen to the wall shrine, placing the white flowers before the black face of the Riverine Isis, and walked out into the day. The sun was rising, gilding the mist and causing the trees to drip. An insubstantial landscape, luminous, half-real. I rode back to London, thinking of the Dutch.
The queen was of the same mind as myself, Oldmark told me. A Holland spy had been arrested in the grounds of Lydgate Palace only a week before. There had been a diplomatic incident, only half-resolved, and the Dutch court was threatening to raise penalties on shipping.
"It would not surprise anyone," Oldmark said, "to learn that there is mischief afoot in that quarter."
"But why involve the dead?" I asked. "And why was there under-hill magic present?"
Oldmark looked uneasy. "I do not know. But an alliance between the Lowlands and Under-Hill would be a sorry thing. There have already been rumors that the Queen-under-the-Hill courts the Spanish, and you know that there are political connections."
I did know; I nodded. "I wish I"d been able to find out more," I said.
"I am certain that you did your best," Oldmark replied.
But that night, the drowned came over-ground.
I was roused from my sleep by distant shouts. The sound was coming from the direction of the palace gardens. Accommodated in the servants" wing as I was, it took me a little time to throw on a robe and make my way through a maze of pa.s.sages to the front of the building.
They were coming out of one of the fountains, an endless procession of white-faced, green-haired spirits. Some of them were decomposing away, just as their bodies had done: These were the ghosts of those who had lain long in the water, so long that it had seeped into their souls to rot and stain.
Oldmark appeared beside me, almost as white faced as one of the spirits.
"What are they doing?" he whispered.
"I don"t know." The procession of ghosts was heading toward the water-stair, the gates that led down to Thamesis. Toward and then through, disappearing into-it must be-the river. Gesturing for Oldmark to stay where he was, I opened the French doors and ran down the steps to where the ghosts walked.
Sometimes they can"t see you. To them, you are as vague and shadowy as they are to you, and perhaps as terrifying. But when I put out a hand, with the fluttering of a spell, one of the spirits turned his head.