The Phantom Queen Awakes (15 page)

“Just so. Still, terror will make men do
barbaric things. No doubt they felt it was her life or
theirs.”

“Well, that does seem likely, but still, I
can’t help despising them for it.”

“Me, either.”

“If you want a horse for a sacrifice, I’m sure
I can get Tingyr to give you one.”

“My thanks, but it wouldn’t do any good, even
if I could find a blasted priest willing to get off his behind to
work the ritual. The men on shipboard offered the Dark Goddess a
human life, and despite the nasty way the Moon priestesses spoke to
me, I did glean that a human life is what She’ll
demand.”

Nevyn returned to Dun Cannobaen in a foul
temper. Seeing Evy, oddly enough, only fed his bad mood, simply
because she looked well and strong, a good stone heavier, with rosy
cheeks and glossy hair. She should be looking forward to a long
life, he thought. Those cursed cowardly priests! But she still
looked on the world from some great distance away. Although she
smiled from time to time, no answering spark flashed in her eyes.
Whenever anyone spoke to her, she was as courteous and as reserved
as some great lady making her way through a foreign
court.

As the winter settled down over the dun,
keeping the Cannobaen light burning became the center of everyone’s
life, from the chamberlain who held his authority from Lovyan
herself down to the lowliest forester who brought in a mule-load of
firewood. Evy worked in the kitchen, scrubbing pots and chopping
turnips, doing whatever the cook asked with her unvarying
politeness and complete lack of interest in the life around her.
She rarely spoke, or so the cook told Nevyn, even though she was
learning how to speak Deverrian remarkably fast and
well.

“She told me once that she was born in
Cerrmor,” Nevyn said. “So she probably had a child’s knowledge of
the language before she was taken away. I don’t know how she ended
up a slave in Bardek, though some very poor people have been known
to sell their daughters to slavers.”

“Huh!” Cook hefted a cleaver and glared over
the blade. “Just let that lot come around here!” She laid it down
again. “Poor little mite! She never laughs, never weeps. Ye gods,
at times I’d swear she was asleep, but she keeps right on working.”
She shook her head. “Mayhap it’s the baby, but I’ve never seen a
lass taken quite this way.”

“She seems to want the baby, though,” Nevyn
said.

“True spoken. That’s the one thing that brings
life to her eyes, like, mentioning the baby. It kicked her a good
one the other day.”

“Did it now? Her time must be drawing near,
then.” And my time to save her, he thought, is nearly
gone.

On a day when pale sun broke through the
clouds and made the rain-washed stones of the dun shimmer, Evy and
the cook’s young daughter went outside to the ward to fill storage
jars with well water. Nevyn climbed the catwalks up to the top of
the dun wall where he could get a bit of fresh air and keep the two
lasses in view. Anyone who saw him would have thought he was lost
in thought, just from his slow walk, his hands clasped behind his
back, his head bent as he paced back and forth on the wide stones,
but he was studying Evy. When he opened his second sight, he could
see her aura, a pale greenish gray like the tarnish on silver. It
wrapped tightly around her body ― except over her womb. The aura of
the child within glowed a pale gold like a lantern inside a basket,
strengthening its mother’s own aura at that point.

After all the months of decent food, rest, and
even companionship, her aura still flickered at the point of death.
Yet she’d never displayed the slightest symptom of a disease. Nevyn
remembered an odd bit of lore he’d picked up in Bardek. None of
their learned masters of physick would have spoken about the aura,
since none of them had studied dweomer. However, one master had
talked to him about “the vital force”. It could be drained from
below by the body, Master Hanno had said, or from above, by a
disturbance of the soul.

That night, after everyone in the dun but the
lightkeeper had gone to bed, Nevyn retired to his chamber just
above the women’s hall. He lay down on his bed, crossed his arms
over his chest, and summoned his body of light, a man-shaped
creation of bluish-silvery astral substance, joined to his physical
body by a silver cord. When he transferred his consciousness over
to it, he could see with astral eyes, a far more powerful dweomer
than the etheric second sight. All around him the stone walls of
the dun glistened black. Outside the window the air pulsed with
flecks of silver light, and the stars had grown huge and swollen,
hovering over the earth.

Nevyn drifted out of the window in his chamber
and sank down until he came to one of the windows of the women’s
hall. He could pass right through the oxhide covering and sail
across the hall, where the wooden furniture and floor covering of
woven rushes still gleamed with traces of the red-brown vegetable
aura that their materials had extruded in life. Evy had left the
door of her little chamber open. Nevyn drifted in, took up a
position at the ceiling, and studied her sleeping body. What he saw
shocked him so much that he nearly snapped back to his own body in
the chamber upstairs.

He steadied himself in his body of light, then
sank down a few feet in order to see more clearly. He could barely
discern her aura and that of the child through the black astral
tangle around her. Like a huge cloud of thorns, black spiky lines
surrounded her and dug through the greenish glow of her aura into
her flesh. With sharp tendrils they grew into or perhaps out of her
etheric double, binding her round, imprisoning her in a web of
darkness, sucking life and light from her aura and from, or so it
seemed, her very soul. The ritual had netted its prey for the Dark
Goddess, sure enough.

Nevyn left the chamber and floated back to his
physical body. He glided down the silver cord, reunited
consciousness and flesh, then banished the body of light. For a
long while he lay still, thinking over the vision. He had seen his
defeat, and it sickened him. He could never banish those black
forces without harming her. If he went back to the astral to strip
them away, her life-force would gush out and bleed along with them,
just as pulling a barbed spear out of a warrior’s side will rip out
his life by making the wound ten times the worse.

At length he got up and went over to the
window; he pulled back the oxhide covering and leaned onto the
sill. Although the winter air bit him with cold fangs, it was a
clean thing, natural and pure, unlike what he’d seen in the chamber
below. He wanted to scream his frustration into the wind and fill
the sky with curses. Instead he took a deep breath and calmed
himself. With the physical cold of the night air came the touch of
another sort of chill ― an omen warning, that somehow Evy herself
presaged ― something. As usual, the omen flickered in shadow rather
than displayed itself in plain light. Somehow, some time, perhaps
soon, perhaps years away, something or someone related to her would
come his way, and it would bring more evil with it.

“My curse upon whoever did this to her!” Nevyn
said to the wind. “Blow him evil! May he rot in the lowest
hell!”

Distantly he heard ravens, cawing in what
sounded to his ears as triumph, though they rarely if ever flew
during the night. With a snarl Nevyn stepped back and let the
oxhide flap down over the window, shutting out the cold and their
chatter both.

Not long after, on the shortest day of winter,
when a storm raged around Cannobaen, the cook and the groom’s wife
helped Evy deliver a baby boy, as small and delicate as his mother,
but healthy withal. When they brought Nevyn in to have a look the
pair, he saw life in Evy’s eyes for the first time as she smiled
down at her newborn, whom she named Mor, meaning ‘ocean’. Over the
next few weeks, however, as her strength returned from the
childbirth, her reserve returned with it, except when she was
nursing or otherwise tending the baby.

“He’s the one joy in her life,” Cook told
Nevyn. “My daughter’s fair taken with the lad, too. She tends him
when Evy’s about her work.”

“But otherwise―”

“Ye gods, Evy goes about as if she’s
half-dead, the poor mite!”

That’s because she is, Nevyn thought, but
aloud he merely voiced a few platitudes about time and the healing
of wounds.

Yet though time passed at Dun Cannobaen, Evy
grew no stronger. In late spring, about the time when Evy’s son Mor
was eating his first solid food, Lady Lovyan and her retinue
returned to Dun Cannobaen for an extended visit, riding in late one
damp afternoon. Gwerbret Tingyr would join her, she told Nevyn, to
take the sea air, once he’d adjudged the spring crop of legal
cases.

“He’s not well, Tingyr,” Lovyan said. “I’m
glad he’s coming here, so you can have a look at him.”

“He won’t listen to me,” Nevyn said, “no
matter what I advise him to do.”

“You’re right, of course, but at least I’ll
know what’s wrong. That will be some comfort.”

They were sitting at the table of honor in the
great hall just before the dinner hour. A servant lass brought them
a basket of fresh bread, a tankard of dark ale for Nevyn, and a
silver cup of Bardek wine for Lovyan.

“Welcome back, my lady,” the lass said with a
curtsy.

“My thanks.” Lovyan favored her with a smile,
then turned in her chair to glance around the great hall. “Ah,
there’s Cook’s daughter with a baby. His skin is so dark! Is that
little Evy’s child?”

“He is, my lady.”

Omen cold gripped Nevyn with icy hands.
“Where’s Evy herself?” he said.

“Taking the lightkeeper’s dinner up to him, my
lord.”

Taking the dinner up a hundred and fifty
slippery steps at twilight ― Nevyn shoved his chair back, leapt up,
and ran out of the great hall. He charged across the ward,
scattering dogs and servants as he ran, darted out the gates, and
raced to the foot of the tower. The omen-cold made him shiver, but
Evy was already coming down, swinging an empty dinner-pail in one
hand, walking slowly, carefully, step by step. When he looked up at
the sky, he saw three dark bird-shapes wheeling just under the pale
gray clouds, but they were too distant for him to identify them as
ravens. He waited, his heart knocking and raging in his chest,
until at last she gained the ground and safety.

“Is somewhat wrong?” Evy said to him. “You
look ill, my lord.”

“Naught of the sort.” Nevyn let out his breath
in a long sigh. “I’d just as soon you let someone else take the
lightkeeper’s dinner up to him after this, however.”

She cocked her head to one side and looked so
sincerely puzzled that he felt a flare of hope. Perhaps she’d
decided to live, after all. Perhaps he could find some way to help
her.

In the morning the rain broke. The storm
clouds began to clear when a strong south wind blew in, driving
them off to the north. Nevyn got a bowl of porridge for his
breakfast and took a seat near one of the windows of the great
hall. A manservant pulled up the oxhide cover and let a shaft of
sunlight fall across the table.

“Most welcome, that is,” Nevyn said. “My
thanks.”

The servant smiled, then hurried away to speak
to the chamberlain. When Nevyn glanced at the staircase, he saw Evy
just coming down the tight spiral of the iron stairs. The cook’s
young daughter came after, carrying the baby for her, and that act
of kindness doomed Evy. In a flash of fear Nevyn shoved back his
chair and stood just as ravens shrieked outside the window, three
long raucous cries. Startled, Evy took a quick step back and missed
the stair. Without making a sound, she tumbled from the high spiral
of the stairway and fell with the crack of bone against iron and a
hard grunt of breath as she hit the floor.

Cook’s daughter screamed. The baby began to
wail and sob. Nevyn rushed over, but Evy lay dead on the stone
floor, her head twisted at an impossible angle. Blood oozed through
her dark hair. She had hit her head and broken her neck in one
swift blow. The Goddess was merciful, Nevyn thought, such mercy as
the Dark One has.

“No doubt she felt very little,” Nevyn told
Lovyan that night. “She must have died in an instant.”

“It’s still very sad,” Lovyan said. “What
about the child? Can we find him a wetnurse?”

“Cook says he’s old enough to survive on
porridge and boiled milk and the like now.” That’s why the ravens
held off for all these months, Nevyn thought to himself. They knew
they couldn’t let the lad die of hunger.

“Well, a wetnurse would be better, at least to
feed him once a day or so.” Lovyan paused to wipe a few tears from
her eyes. “If you ever find out who worked that spell over our poor
castaway, I’ll have Tingyr arrest and hang him.”

“That would gladden my heart, indeed. But to
all intents and purposes, Lovva, she came to us from the
Otherlands, and now, alas, she’s gone back there to
stay.”

****

Afterword

The material that I have shaped, over the
years, into the
Deverry
novels has always had a life of its
own. ‘The Lass from Far Away’ really should have been part of the
revised
Daggerspell
in order to lead into the revised
Darkspell
. I did the revisions back in the late 1980s.
Unfortunately, ‘Lass’ didn’t make an appearance until 2008, a bit
on the late side to fit into my plans. I make no pretence of
understanding why or how these things get written, except to point
out the obvious, that fiction doesn’t proceed from the rational
part of the mind.