Heir to Sevenwaters (20 page)

Muirrin’s lips tightened. “Father said the nursery was to be kept locked up,” she said. “Mother wanted to go and look. He told her he’d ordered the place closed until he decides what to do.”

“I have the keys,” I said quietly. “Please, Muirrin. It will only take a moment.”

In silence, she followed me along the passageway and waited while I unlocked the nursery door. There was no sound from inside. I took a deep breath. Perhaps the sticks-and-stones baby really had been conjured from my imagination and my shock at Finbar’s sudden disappearance. The cradle was not creaking and jerking now, but completely still. We walked over and looked in.

The blanket had been kicked aside again, but the changeling was not thrashing about. It was sleeping, curled up with a twiggy thumb in its mouth. Its mossy cheeks seemed more hollow than before, its eye sockets more shadowed. I was seized with an urge to bend down, wrap the blanket around the little creature and scoop it up in my arms. I made myself stand still as Muirrin bent over, looking carefully.

“I . . .” She hesitated.

“What?” I said, knowing from her tone what was coming.

“It’s a clever copy of a child’s form,” Muirrin said, “but not real, Clodagh. Not even real in an uncanny, eldritch way. If you tried to pick it up, it would fall apart into twigs and leaves. What a cruel trick! Why on earth would someone go to such lengths? Imagine if Mother had seen this! You must make sure the door stays locked. We can’t risk her coming in here, and she will if she gets a chance; she can’t really believe that Finbar’s gone. I’ve had to put Orlagh on door duty so she can’t go out on her own.” She looked at me sharply. “You still think it’s real, don’t you? Clodagh, you’re deluding yourself. Look, this is just a bundle of bits and pieces.” She reached down and took a sliver from the changeling’s leg, a slip of birch bark the length of my little finger. “See?” she asked, and moved to throw the fragment onto the dying fire.

“No!” I shouted, snatching it from her hand. Whether in response to my cry or to the wound it had suffered, the changeling’s pebble eyes snapped open, its limbs twitched, and it began a harsh wailing. “You’re hurting it!” I put the slip of bark back as close as I could to the place it had come from. The cries were escalating. I rolled the blanket around the tiny creature so it was swathed tight; its whole body was vibrating, making the cradle shiver. I patted its back rhythmically, longing to pick the child up and comfort it but not prepared to take that step while my sister was watching me.

“Leave it, Clodagh!” Muirrin’s sharp order was like a blow. For her to speak to me in that tone was a first; one of many for today. I took my hand off the child and backed away from the little bed. “Come out now, and lock the door behind you,” my sister added.

As I retreated to the door the tone of the crying changed, becoming so woeful it made my heart ache. The compulsion to take the infant from its cradle and hold it was so strong I had to force myself to walk out of the chamber. How could I let something so small and helpless be abandoned to the dark and chill and loneliness of that room at night? And what about food? How long could a newborn infant survive without nourishment? Perversely, it seemed to me that those who had taken Finbar would at the very least be making sure he got milk. When the Fair Folk abducted human children it was not generally to harm them, but to raise them as their own. They would steal human women to use as wet nurses. If they had left one of their own infants in my brother’s place, wasn’t it important for us to provide for that child if we wanted Finbar to be well treated?

“You don’t believe me,” I said as I turned the key in the lock. Once the door was closed I could not hear the forlorn sobbing. But in my head it still went on.
Touch me! Feed me! Love me!

“I don’t know what to believe,” said Muirrin slowly. “I know you believe in what you’re seeing, Clodagh. I know you wouldn’t make it up, not even if it was to cover something improper. Yes, I heard about Cathal. Eithne made sure of that by announcing to all and sundry that she’d seen the two of you behaving like lovers. But I can’t view that bundle of rubbish as a child. Father’s going to send for Conor. He could be here in a day or so. As a druid, surely he will be able to tell us what the sticks and stones really mean and what we should do with them.”

Not if the Fair Folk have decided I’m the only one who’ll be allowed to see the changeling properly
, I thought. “Yes, I suppose that is sensible,” I murmured. As Muirrin returned to Mother’s quarters, I went off to my own chamber, where I sat on my bed and cried.

The day of Finbar’s disappearance there was no formal supper at Sevenwaters. The search continued until the light faded and made hunting in the forest impossible. Men rode in and out at various odd hours. The kitchen people fed them with little need for my intervention. Muirrin’s blunt assessment had been right. I, who had thought myself such an indispensable part of this household, was not really needed at all.

It didn’t matter about supper, since I had no appetite. Nonetheless, I did go down to the kitchen, just to make sure the folk who had remained on duty took a little time for their own rest and refreshment. While I was there I filled a small jug with today’s fresh milk and took it back to my chamber under a cloth.

I sat there waiting for a long time, long enough to be fairly sure our serving folk would all be abed. Father would be awake somewhere, just as I was, worrying, planning, asking himself whether there was anything he could have done to prevent this disaster from overtaking his household. Perhaps Johnny would be with him. Muirrin would have given Mother a sleeping draft. I was unlikely to encounter anyone on the short walk from my chamber to the nursery and back again. I prepared an excuse, just in case—that I had lost a favorite shawl and thought I might have left it in that chamber.

Candle and key in one hand, jug in the other, I crept along the hallway, where a single lamp burned to illuminate the darkness. The key turned soundlessly in the lock thanks to the oil I had applied earlier. The sound assaulted my ears the moment I opened the door: gulping, gasping, more desperate than before, but also weaker. The changeling was fading. If I did not act now, it might be dead by morning.

My grandfather, my father’s father, had known all about looking after plants and creatures. He’d saved many a newborn calf or lamb that another farmer would have abandoned as too weak to be worth the bother. I’d learned a lot at Grandfather’s knee, and it seemed to me that what would work for a lamb would work for a baby just as well. I set the jug on a little table. Finbar’s things were scattered around the floor after my frantic search earlier. I retrieved a square of fine muslin and set it by the jug, with one corner dipped into the milk. I went to the cradle and picked up the changeling.

He was very light, far lighter than the warm, solid form of my baby brother. His little twiggy mouth was wide open, the cries pitifully scratchy. As I held him against me he began a frantic scrabbling, his hand gripping a fold of my nightrobe, his head turning against my body, his strange mouth open as if to seek his mother’s breast. The tone of his cries changed as I moved to sit by the table, murmuring to him all the while, “There, there. It’s all right, I’ll look after you.”

I held him against me with one arm while I moved the milk-soaked corner of the cloth to his mouth. It was awkward; holding him was not at all like holding Finbar, who had generally been a warm, relaxed bundle with no apparent wish to fight me. The changeling was almost frenzied. I squeezed a few drops of milk between his lips, praying that he would drink.

He sucked; he swallowed. A blissful silence spread across the chamber, and I allowed myself to breathe. I dipped the cloth again, my mind racing ahead to work out ways of escaping the notice of my family, Muirrin in particular. If I could get in here a few times a day, I could keep him alive until I managed to convince someone he was real.

A hideous choking sound came from the changeling’s lips. His back arched violently and I nearly dropped him. “Hush, hush, what’s the matter?” His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his mouth was gaping, his body was possessed by shuddering spasms. “Oh, gods, what’s wrong? What did I do?”

Acting on instinct, I put the baby up against my shoulder. A moment later he was sick, the small amount of milk he had taken spewed out violently onto my nightrobe and the floor beneath my chair. The changeling gasped and hiccupped, then, after a brief silence, began to cry again, a feverish, starving cry:
Feed me!

I would not try the milk again. Human babies thrived on it, but it seemed that uncanny ones did not. Holding the child in my arms, pacing up and down the short length of the nursery chamber, I whispered my thoughts to him, hoping my voice would help calm him. “I wish Deirdre was here. It wouldn’t matter if she didn’t believe me; I just want her to listen. We always listen to each other. I want to tell her everything, but I can’t mind-call, not now. There’s what Cathal said about her, and the odd questions she asked when I talked to her yesterday. Everything’s changed. Everything’s turned upside down and I hate it. I hate that look of judgment on Father’s face. I hate not being able to feed you, you poor little thing. What is it you need? What can I give you?”

The changeling’s cries eventually dwindled to an exhausted whimpering. I sat down again and let the infant suck the end of my little finger—I had seen Nuala using this trick to pacify one of her babes and thought it worth trying. The changeling’s lips were not soft and damp like those of a human infant, but dry and brittle. My finger hurt. I let the baby suck on, since he seemed to derive some comfort from it.

“You need a name,” I told him. “You should have a handsome, fine one, a name that shows you deserve the love any baby gets, even if you look a little . . . unusual.” I considered the patchy black hair, the greenish hue to the cheeks and brow, the barky, leafy, twiggy body. I wondered if I should try to dress the little creature—did changelings get cold? The fire was out now, and the chamber was far too chilly for a human child to thrive in. It would feel wrong to put him in Finbar’s clothes.

The candle I had carried here illuminated the ashes on the hearth, the hangings stirring in the draft. To stay in the nursery all night would be to take an unacceptable risk of discovery, though there was a pallet in the corner where Finbar’s nursemaid had slept. If I did not want the baby to freeze to death, I was going to have to take him to my own chamber. My heart sank. How long could I keep him hidden there, even supposing I worked out how to feed him? This was crazy; it could only end in sorrow.

The baby released my finger and turned his head toward my breast. I felt his awkward form, all hard lines and angles, relax against me with a shuddering sigh. “I’m going to call you Becan,” I murmured. “That has a strong sound to it. It’s a survivor’s name.” It was not possible to tell if the changeling was a boy or a girl, but as he had been substituted for my brother, I assumed he was male. “Sleep now, little one. Sweet dreams.” I hummed an old lullaby I half remembered, and saw the shadowy lids gradually drop down over the pebble eyes. Safe in my arms, Becan slept.

When I judged that he was deep enough in slumber not to wake awhile, I slipped out of the nursery and carried him along the hallway to my bedchamber. I had to leave him there, nestled between two cushions, while I returned to the nursery to fetch my candle, jug and cloth, and to make sure the door was securely locked. Back in my own room, I set up a makeshift hiding place behind my storage chest, lining the area with a blanket and setting the cushions at either end. It would not serve for long. A maidservant would come in, or one of my sisters, and the secret would be out straightaway. Besides, if I could not feed Becan he would not survive long. By the time he woke again I must have something else ready to try.

I lay on my bed, wide awake, my mind full of the shocks, confusions and sorrows of the day’s events: my baby brother, so tiny and new, out there in the forest somewhere with none of his own people to comfort him; Mother with that dead look on her face, her joy wiped away in an instant; Father cold and severe, as if I’d suddenly turned into a different person, one he neither liked nor trusted. And Cathal. He was the most puzzling element in all of this. Earlier it had seemed as if Father was accusing him of being party to my brother’s abduction in some way. I hadn’t been mistaken in that; Aidan had heard it too, but Father had cut off his protest. Could it be true? Could Johnny, whose ability to assess a man’s true quality was almost legendary, have been harboring a traitor in his band?

It was easy enough to believe that Cathal’s kiss had nothing to do with a sudden surge of feeling for me, but was part of some kind of plot. He had made his dislike of me quite clear since our first encounter. He had been marginally friendlier lately, but nothing beyond that. I recalled Aidan’s words after that fight:
He wants you for himself
. But that was nonsense. If Cathal liked me, he wouldn’t keep reminding me of my faults. A man like him would not be too shy to declare himself. Perhaps that kiss, which I had enjoyed more than I should have, had indeed been contrived as a distraction. But even then, I knew nobody could have slipped past in the time it had taken. No human, anyway.

Where was Cathal now? Why had he disappeared in precisely the circumstances that would indicate guilt? He was too subtle a man, surely, to draw attention to himself in such a way. Perhaps he would be back in the morning, having been on some perfectly legitimate business, and it would turn out he had nothing to do with all this. I found myself hoping he would return and provide a good account of himself. I didn’t like the man, I didn’t trust him, but I didn’t want him to be a spy or a kidnapper either. I tried to banish from my mind the shadowy figure that might or might not have been there that night in the courtyard, the odd disappearance on the way up to the Pudding Bowl, the inscrutable warnings he had given me. It was too hard; I could not put it together in any sensible way.