“I’ll take this door, my lady. Broc’s on the other, with the dog. Let me open up for you.” He pushed the library door and it swung open; the inner bolt had not been fastened. “Where do you want this light?”
“On the shelf, here in the corner. If Muirne comes into the garden, call me straightaway. She has the answer, I’m certain of it.”
“Muirne?” Cathaír sounded less dubious than Eichri. “She did come in here a lot, while you were gone. Dusted shelves. Moved things about. Looked at the books.”
My heart was as cold as the grave. I swept an armful of Irial’s notebooks from their shelf and set them on a nearby table. Fumbling in my haste, I began to turn pages, not taking time to read anything fully, for there was no time—
stay alive, please, please
—but scanning them for words that might jump out at me: sudden onset, breathing, speech, gray-blue, poison, antidote . . .
One book, two books, three . . . There were poisons here, but not the one I wanted. There was blue-gray, but that was only the description of a leaf. My hands were sweating with fear; my body was clammy. My heart was knocking about in my breast. My stomach had tied itself in knots. Irial’s spidery writing blurred before my eyes. Five books, seven, nine . . .
“Any good?” Cathaír had stepped inside the door.When I glanced up, pain lanced through my neck. I had barely moved for . . . how long? Too long.
“I can’t find it!” My voice cracked. “I can’t find anything! And it’s not just finding it, it’s making the cure and giving it to him, and I’m running out of time!” I seized another book, started to flick through the pages, knew I was close to losing the ability to understand the words before me.
“My lady,” Cathaír said, his tone diffident, “they’re saying you think Muirne did this. Gave Lord Anluan the poison.”
“That’s what I think, yes.That she can read.That she knows plants and their uses.That she gave it to him, and that she’s hiding so I can’t make her tell me the antidote before he dies.” Herb of grace; comfrey; wormwood. Meadowsweet, mugwort, thyme. This was useless, useless. I should go back and hold him, cradle him. At least I would be there to say goodbye.
“It’s just that . . .” Cathaír hesitated.
“Go on.”
“If it’s her, Muirne, you might want to look in the stillroom—you know, that little place next to the garden wall. That’s where she goes at night. Irial used to do his work in there, his brewing and concoction. Since he died, nobody’s gone in; nobody but her.And she loves those little books, the ones you have there.Those are the ones she looks at when she comes to the library. Holds them against her heart as if they were children.”
I was out in Irial’s garden before he had finished speaking.The door to the low stone outbuilding was bolted, as always.That would be no barrier to Muirne. She could probably walk through walls. “I need you to open this for me,” I said. “Quickly. And I need you to help me search. It’ll be a small book like those others.” Irial’s sad margin notes had been numbered up to five hundred and ninety-four. But he had outlived his wife by two years, and that was more than seven hundred days. Unless he had stopped writing them, unless he had lost the will to write at all, somewhere there was another journal.
Cathaír set his boot to the stillroom door. The timbers parted, the chain fell loose, the bolt came tumbling out of the stone wall. I peered into the dim interior.“Hold up the lantern,” I said, stepping inside.There was a wrong feeling about the place, something I could not quite identify. I had expected old, musty things, tools stored and forgotten or the crumbling remnants of Irial’s long-ago botanical work. But the stillroom was perfectly tidy. A millet broom stood in a corner; a duster hung on a wall. Candles were ranked on a shelf. There was a workbench with crucibles and jars, some holding objects I could not identify.A mortar and pestle stood beside a rack of knives and other implements that gleamed darkly in the lantern light. Bunches of herbs hung from the roof. At one end of the immaculate room was a pallet, and on it lay a small lidded box.
No books in sight. “She must have it here somewhere,” I muttered. “Look everywhere, Cathaír. It’s here, I know it. Here but hidden.” I grabbed the blanket that lay bunched at the end of the pallet, the only untidy note in the whole room. I shook it out; nothing there. I reached down the back of the bed. Nothing at all. I crouched to look underneath, while Cathaír worked his way along the shelves, picking things up and setting them down. A bundle of rags lay on the floor, under the bed; I drew them out. Familiar somehow, but what were they?
“Baby!” The little voice spoke from the doorway, and a moment later the ghost girl was crouched beside me, gathering up the pathetic heap, trying to hold the pieces together, pieces that were white, like Róise’s face, and violet, like the little veil I had made to cover the doll’s ruined hair, and brown, like the skirt that had been shredded and destroyed in the quiet of my bedchamber. Threads of woollen hair; tattered fragments of a smiling mouth embroidered with love.The child stood clutching her violated treasure to her breast. “All right now, baby,” she whispered.
Cathaír squatted down beside the girl, and while his eyes were as wild and shifting as always, there was something gentle in his manner. “Little sister,” he said, “have you come in here before?”
“Mm,” she murmured, but did not look at him. Her head was bent over her ruined baby.
“Is there a book here?” the young warrior asked.“Does the lady in the veil have a special book hidden away?”
A silence.
“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice as calm and kindly as Cathaír’s, though a scream was welling up in me. “If you know where it is, please show us.”
A little hand rose; a finger pointed to the box on the bed. It was much too small to hold a book, even a tiny one, and my heart sank anew, but I lifted it and unfastened the catch. I opened the lid to see my mother’s embroidered kerchief, folded precisely. Under this was a strange assortment of little items: a strip of bright weaving in shades of violet and purple; a decorative buckle from a lady’s shoe; a striking cloak-fastener of silver and amber.
She’s kept a trophy from each of us
, I thought.
From each of those she hated and thought to kill. From each who took a beloved chieftain from her.
“What’s that at the bottom?” Cathaír asked.
“It’s a key.” A thin thread of hope at last. “What does this open?”
The child shrank into herself, perhaps frightened by my desperation.
“Please,” I said more quietly.“Please help me. Lord Anluan is very sick; we have to save him. Do you know what the key is for?” I lifted the embroidered kerchief and spread it out on the bed. “You can put the baby in this and wrap her up safely.”
The child placed her pile of scraps in the middle of the kerchief and watched while I tied the corners together, two and two, making a neat bundle. “The mirror,” she murmured.
“Mirror?” There was an odd note in Cathaír’s voice, and when I looked up I saw him put a hand to his brow as if in pain. “What mirror?”
Abruptly, the girl began to cry. “My head hurts,” she whispered, picking up the kerchief bundle and holding it against her breast.
Not this; not now, oh please . . . “
Hold fast, Cathaír,” I said. “I need you. We must find this book.” From outside, in the garden, came sounds of folk cursing, wailing, shouting.
The young warrior staggered, thrust out a hand, gripped the bench and straightened. He pursed his lips and whistled a few desperate notes:
Stand up and fight . . . men of the hill . . .
“That
mirror,” sobbed the ghost child, and pointed.
It was old, corroded, revealing nothing at all save the crusted debris of long neglect. It stood against the wall at the back of the workbench, screened by a row of jars. As I moved them aside their contents stirred in an unsettling semblance of life. I lifted the ancient mirror away and there, behind it, was a wooden hatch with a keyhole.
“
Dauntless in courage . . . united in will
,” sang Cathaír, and other voices joined in from outside the stillroom, men’s deep tones, women’s higher ones.
“Swing your swords proudly, hold your heads high . . .”
I turned the key; I opened the door.
“Books,” said Cathaír, breaking off his song. “Here, let me shine the light for you.”
Two books, one the same as Irial’s notebooks, the other even smaller. I opened up the first on the workbench and saw the familiar spidery script and delicately rendered illustrations. “This is it,” I said, slipping the other book into a pocket of Gearróg’s cloak.
Quickly, quickly . . .
I began to turn the pages. Some kind of journal entry, not related to herbs at all; a poultice for earache in children; a discussion of various herbs that might be used to alleviate grief . . .
I found it about halfway through. The poison brewed with precise quantities of dragon-claw berries, ground and steeped in a strong mead, then strained through gauze and left to stand for seven days.
The onset is rapid
, Irial had written.
First comes a graying of the skin, followed by shortness of breath, loss of speech, then unconsciousness leading to death in little more than an hour.The antidote is . . .
“
Heart’s blood,” I muttered as I ran across the garden with the book in one hand. Folk dodged out of my way—many had been waiting as I searched. “I should have guessed. Curse Muirne! Cathaír, I need someone who can help me brew this.”
I reached the corner where the herb grew. I fell to my knees; Cathaír held up the lantern.The circle of light bathed the soft gray-green leaves of the comfrey bush and showed, beneath it, the dried and withered remnants of the heart’s blood flowers. Only two.
One handful of finely chopped petals
, Irial had written.
As fresh as possible
.
“It has to work, this must be enough,” I muttered, reaching across to pluck my pathetic harvest. Around the garden the song rang out, more confident now:
“Brothers together, we live and we die!”
Rioghan had tutored them well. He had taught them hope in the face of despair.
“I will help you.” It was the wise woman of the host, she with the moon tattoo on her brow. Her features were calm, but I saw pain in her eyes; the frenzy, it seemed, touched each and every one of them.“You need other herbs?”
“Dried flowers of lavender—there’s a bunch hanging in the stillroom. I’ll run ahead to the kitchen.” Back into the library, the quicker way, through the darkened space and out the other door, surprising the old warrior, Broc, who stood roaring out the song with his hands gripped tight as ancient ivy around his spear. Fianchu barking, racing ahead of me as if he knew just what had to be done. Cathaír coming behind me, desperate to keep me safe, fighting the pain.The kitchen full of folk, the fire glowing, Orna’s friend Sionnach lifting a steaming kettle. Orna herself in the doorway, and coming in after her the wise woman, a sheaf of dried lavender in her hands. She had been quick.
“One of you chop this as finely as you can. One of you shred the lavender blooms. Orna, we need . . .”The look on her face halted me.
“He’s still alive,” Orna said quickly. “But we haven’t long. What is it we’re brewing?”
“Life, I hope. It’s an antidote to what I think he was given—simple enough, just these two plants made into a tea.”
“Have you a precise measure for this?” asked the woman of the host. “Heart’s blood is a perilous herb. Give him too much and it will carry him off forever.”
“Two cups of water, just off the boil.” The remedy was burned into my mind; I could see every stroke of Irial’s writing.“One handful of finely chopped heart’s blood petals. Two handfuls of lavender.” I looked at the scant harvest of heart’s blood. “I don’t know if this is enough.” Terror welled up in me. That Anluan should die for want of a single flower . . .
“Half quantities,” said Orna, taking a knife from the bench and coming up to the table. “You can’t expect a man barely conscious to swallow two whole cups of this stuff. It should be enough, don’t you think?” She glanced at the spectral woman.
“It will suffice, I believe.”
“Let’s do this, then. Sionnach, don’t put that kettle back on—didn’t you hear what Caitrin said? Just
off
the boil.”
“Did Muirne come?” I asked shakily, realizing the task had been taken out of my hands. Orna chopped; the wise woman measured; Sionnach poured the hot water into the jug. Outside the singing went on. I hoped the sound would not carry as far as the Norman encampment, or the surprise attack would be no surprise at all.
“Wretched tune,” muttered Orna, but her tone was good-natured.“I’ll be hearing it in my sleep. I can even hear Tomas singing. Fair enough, I suppose; we’re one and the same now. Men of the hill. And women.”
“She did not come,” the ghostly woman said. “The girl in the veil. If you achieve this, if you cure him, she will fear you more than ever.”
“Fear?” I echoed, started. “Muirne fear
me
?” But there was no time to ask more. Eichri was at the door.
“They’re saying you found it. The antidote. Is it true?” He sounded desperate; a faint rattling sound told me he was trembling.
“We’re bringing it now,” I said. “He only has to hold on a few moments more.”
Dear God, don’t take him from me . . .
“
You’d want to make haste,” Eichri said.
The wise woman passed the jug into my hands, carefully. It was so hot I almost dropped it. Orna snatched a cleaning cloth from a peg and helped me wrap it around the jug. “By the time we reach the tower,” she said, “it will be cool enough for him to drink.”
Sionnach had fetched a clean cup. We walked out of the house and across the courtyard, and as we passed the song dwindled and faltered and ceased. Eyes were on us from all around, the stricken eyes of those who still battled the enemy that sought to poison their thoughts; the frightened eyes of ordinary folk whose world had changed forever. I wanted to run, to fly, to be at Anluan’s side this moment, but I held the jug, his salvation within, and I walked as if on eggshells, step by careful step.