The Stumpwork Robe (The Chronicles of Eirie 1) (9 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Adelina and Kholi lay side by side, the drizzle making a shushing sound on the canopy of the pavilion.

‘Ana is very quiet.’ Kholi offered the few words into the ambience.

‘It will do her good to rest. She’s had momentous times.’

‘She’s a sweet thing, Adelina, but she is not world hardened, is she?’

‘You’re so polite, Kholi.’ Adelina laughed, a throaty chuckle. ‘Naïve, young and immature are better words. And fragile. There is a brittle shell to her, as if one more tap will be all it will take to smash it to pieces. She just seems to have been unable to rationalize all that has happened to her.’

‘And why should she? The death of a parent, then the assault, let alone her mother's actions. I think you expect too much.’

‘Maybe. But that is what causes her fragility and she lurches from one bad idea to another. Running from her home, joining up with the Faeran. Aine! I have tried to impress upon her the dangers of Others and she almost laughs in my face. And all the time, Liam gets closer and closer to her. Her life now depends so much on her growing up very fast. And to be honest, she has no one but you and I to teach her. She certainly won’t return to kith and kin.’

‘Is it so bad that she has him as a friend?’

‘A friend?’ Adelina scoffed. ‘He wants her as a plaything. Mark my words. And what happens to a Faeran plaything, Kholi? Tell me that.’ Adelina poked Kholi in the chest, whereupon he grasped the offending fingers and kissed them as she tried to wrap herself in a robe.

‘Don’t be so hard on him, Adelina. I believe there is something deeper than play in his eyes. Amusing, isn’t it? That a mortal should so ensnare an Other?’

‘Ah, my Kholi, you’re such a romantic. Amusing, you think? To hell with that. If only it
were
amusing it would save a lot of angst, we could just sit back and watch.’ Adelina continued as they walked to the van, ‘But just say you are right and he does care for Ana. Even so, in my heart I feel a doom if they continue on such a path, an intuition. And you
know
you can’t deny Travellers’ intuition; we have a reputation for it. As Ana’s friends I think we must do all we can to protect her and teach her to protect herself.’ She raised her foot to step into the van.

‘Then you had best teach her about every single unseelie being in the whole of Eirie.’ Liam’s voice punctured the air behind them.

Kholi’s face split into a grin that vanished faster than water on the Amritsands as he looked at Adelina’s face. Disgruntled to see the subject of her dislike standing before her, she was furious when the subject of her concern walked out from behind the black clad body.

‘Ana! We thought you were in bed. Where have you been?’ The Traveller swung around in a blaze of copper to Liam, letting him have the benefit of her ferocity. ‘What have you done?’ Her gaze intimidated, daring him to play the next move.

Ana fired back. ‘He saved my life, Adelina.
That’s
what he has done. So get off your high horse with him because you weren’t around to save me. You were busy making love to Kholi.’

Adelina flushed red at Ana’s bald argument. For a moment she was tempted to shout the chit down.
How dare she? Am I her keeper?
She stood for a moment as she dwelled on this new friendship, this relationship, its obligations.
But then yes, maybe that is exactly what Kholi and I are. By default.
She looked at Ana through eyes that had closed to slits.
Perhaps not the
innocent little lamb we imagined.
But then raised her eyebrows and shrugged, a temporary peace. ‘So what happened?’

The story of the dunters was related and the part Liam had played in returning Ana to her fold. Kholi, to underline what they had just heard, recounted a poem:

‘Invidious rust corrodes the bloody steel

Dark and dismantled lies each ancient peel.

Afar, at twilight gray, the peasants shun

the dome accursed

where deeds of blood are done.’

‘Oh exactly!’ Ana shuddered. ‘I shall never look at the
ruhks
on a
shatranj
board again, I swear!’

Adelina busied herself preparing breakfast and then sat beside the Liam whilst Kholi and Ana harnessed the animals and packed up the encampment. ‘It was fortunate you were there. One wonders whether you actually left us at all yesterday.’ She spoke quietly, no look passing between she and he but she felt the air around them bristle.

‘I did. But I returned.’ He offered nothing more to explain his comings and goings and she hated not knowing.

‘You have saved her twice now.’

‘Indeed.’ Liam’s eyes betrayed little at all as they gazed back at Adelina.

It was as if Ana’s flagrant support of him in the face of the Traveller’s dislike added grist to his mill and she could see he was determined not to let her disturb his equanimity. She worried on though, like a dog with a bone. ‘Once more and you are within your rights to demand your forfeit. It is the way of the Others, is it not?’ Acid tainted her voice.

‘Yes. It is the way.’

‘Shall you then?’

Liam sighed, ever the bored dilettante.
‘Well, Adelina, that depends on two things. Firstly that Ana should need saving. And secondly, that I should want to call in the forfeit.’

‘Oh come now, I’ve seen the way you look at her. There can’t be any doubt.’ Adelina’s voice held a touch of scorn.

‘You may think so.’

She ground her teeth. Still
no point to her, not yet anyway.

***

And so, my friend, for I think you are that now you have come this far with me, you can see how the game began to sharpen, that Liam and I had truly sized each other up. And he was good, so good!

But you and I, we have come to the end of this latest book. Conceal it in its hiding place and seek the little Raji man with his hand upraised and curled as if to hold something. He of the striped red and yellow silk pantaloons and the red fez.

I shall tell you something. Ana made him. It breaks my heart to see him because he reminds me of her and of Kholi. You see, Kholi Khatoun had told us the story of Aladdin’s Lamp and Ana decided to make a stumpwork Aladdin and of course she used Kholi as the model. Although I must say Kholi is... was... much more beauteous.

You will notice I speak in the past tense about him. Remember that. It is why I sigh and cry as I tell you to gently remove the little fez and feel inside for another book. It is a red one. Red silk. Red, the colour of marriage in the Raj...

Chapter Fourteen

The journey took on a domestic rhythm for Ana as she gathered food, cooked and cleaned. Then as they travelled along the tracks and trails of the Barrow Hills, she would take her own sewing basket, a gift from her mentor, and assist in basic embroidery.

The Traveller had unfolded a length of rose coloured taffeta and cut it into the pieces of a gentleman’s vest and she and Ana were now working a design of fruit and beetles down the lapels on either side. The beetles of course needed intricate skill beyond Ana’s simple expertise but she was quite able to stitch the beautiful fruits and leaves Adelina required. Many an hour was spent in quiet contemplation of wires, silken threads and needles. But sometimes the two companions sat together on the van’s wide step, embroidery lying in a heap by their sides, watching Ajax’s vast bay rump swinging from side to side, their eyes straying further afield to stare at the men in their company or to admire the scenery. Both activities engendered feelings of contentment.

It was almost possible to forget Liam was Other. He had not disappeared since the episode with the dunters and he set about chores just like a mortal, complaining if the animals were un-obliging or if he was hungry, delighting in the food given to him at meals, telling stories of his travels. He removed any mystic references in the telling and he chatted in a typically masculine way with Kholi about horses and races and money. It was indeed believably normal.

Adelina and Kholi slept in the pavilion at night, Ana slept in the van and Liam, by his own preference, slept rolled in a swag under the night sky and by the fire. If it drizzled in the evening, he would roll his swag under the van and sleep there. For the first time in a long while he was content. This night he lay gazing at the diamond light playing in the heavens. Beside him the fire crackled in a desultory way, sparks drifting skywards. From the pavilion came the sound of whispers and Liam could not help listening to what he presumed would be the mortal language of love.
Rather disturbingly, it proved otherwise.

‘I tell you, Kholi, I am still concerned. There’s something about him...’

‘Hush now, Adelina. You don’t want him to hear.’

She lowered her voice further and Liam stood up and crept closer to the pavilion. ‘How many stories do I have to tell you about the Faeran to convince you he is no different.’

‘Quite a lot it would appear, sweet one.’ Kholi’s dry response brought a faint curve to Liam’s lips. By the spirits that woman was a worthy adversary! He thought of the game of possession that had begun all this. Pawns on a board and possession. After all, in essence that was all that
shatranj
was, a game of possession. He listened again as Adelina ploughed on regardless of Kholi's sigh.

‘Then have you heard what happened to the Baron of Pymm? He was married to the one love of his life and the day before their wedding anniversary, he rode out into the Forest of Fenian on Pymm to find white fritillaria that he knew the Baroness adored. He rode for two or three hours and became thirsty, so stopped by a Fenian rill to drink. As he sipped the cold, clear water, a Korrigan appeared and you no doubt know Korrigan are Faeran cousins. She was beyond beautiful and brought all her persuasion to bear. The Korrigan claim the lakes, streams and fountains are all theirs and this beauty demanded payment for the Baron's drink. The price was that he should sleep with her. He
, being desperately in love with his wife, refused outright and the Korrigan cursed him as he rode away, dooming him to his death within three days. He laughed as he left and the Korrigan cursed his wife as well. And so, do you know what happened?' Adelina's voice had become more audible as she spoke with passion. 'He choked, poor man, on a fishbone at his anniversary banquet, and the distraught Baroness succumbed to a broken heart not long after and was buried next to her husband.’

‘A sad story, dear one.’

Adelina take a huge breath.
‘My
point
is
that the Korrigan is symptomatic of the rest of the Faeran - selfish, cold and infinitely dangerous.’

‘Adelina, I can see you may be right. I had heard vague rumours of the Baron’s death. But I do think we would be hasty to attribute such mannerisms to Liam as he has done nothing yet of which we can accuse him. Time will tell, don’t you think?’

Liam heard Adelina humph and he returned to his place by the fire. She was right of course. The Korrigan
had
damned the Baron to an early death, it
was well known. Part of him couldn’t give a fig for the lovelorn man, but a tiny part of him wanted these mortals into whose lives he had inveigled himself, to trust him just a little, maybe to like him... to believe that he could never act as the Korrigan had done. He wrapped himself in his swag and lay back. From the van came the sound of Ana’s tiny music box, its exquisite tune tinkling out into the night air. It sounded like a Faeran gittern and he was dragged, much against his will, to remember the people he tried so hard to banish from his life.

Liam was a second son. One would think that under normal circumstances
being a second son is an undemanding thing; there is no inherited sinecure so there is no pressure. Not so for Liam. Born into a noble Faeran family, the family must bear itself in a certain way. If that wasn’t enough, his brother had vanished as a babe. Nothing was said but Liam had heard malicious talk. His mother had partaken of one of the eldritch progressions through Eirie, those that the mortals called a
rade
. Tired of the demands of pregnancy followed by a babe, desperate to play, she had been determined to join this progress. And so against her husband’s orders she had gone, stowing the infant in one of the panniers carried by the musicians’ horses.

In the beginning she had been quite resolute; feeding the child, seeing to its needs before her own; all the things a good mother should do. But the Faeran are selfish and soon she began to neglect the infant in favour of good times. This little babe, Liam’s sibling, was placid beyond belief, rarely crying. Thus the mother all but forgot about it. Which culminated most sadly in the babe being left behind one day as the progress continued; a common enough event amongst the Faeran, for self-indulgence often caused children to be misplaced. Liam’s father was wrathful and searched fruitlessly for the child but it truly seemed to have vanished into thin air. In a fit of rage and to the mother's despair and horror, he got another child on her almost immediately.

It is well known that all Faeran have banes, be they met at fifty years or five hundred. If they did not considering they are immortal, the world would be over-run with these exceptional people. It was the mother’s misfortune that her bane was her second son. She died in childbirth, mourned only by her mother. The heartless husband cared only that he had another son to carry the family name. This babe was Liam and his father, to make up for the dilatory behaviour of the mother, would watch the son like a hawk. As Liam grew older, he felt like prey; tracked and trapped. And so as a grown man he would disappear as often as his father’s back was turned. He would wander the mortal world of Eirie, seeking some amusement and compensation to give his life the dimension he believed it lacked. He strayed from Faeran for long periods, disinterested in the fecklessness of his peers and on his return he would engage in a fruitless and often violent brawl with his father over nothing and everything. Most recently he had stayed away longer than ever, distance proving a panacea to his ills. On this last return, he found that his father had met his own bane. A moth alighting on the man’s hand had left some of its precious wing dust behind... and that, by virtue of its poisonous qualities, did for his father. Unusually, because in Faeran there are no moths, only butterflies.

Liam walked away from his father’s death with no sense of love
or loss distorting into grief. Which was why he felt such prodigious amazement at the sensations he was experiencing in the mortal world. He endeavoured to see things through mortal eyes, pushing his senses to experience everything in the mortal way. The extremes, from pain to love, were almost masochistic. He reveled in them. For to be a Faeran was surely to have one’s senses dulled forever by excess.

And here was the nub of it and why he wanted to keep Ana in his sights. She fascinated him. Her dark pensiveness in the face of loss, her excitement at travelling, her innocent disgust at the sex so lately enjoyed in camp, it set a fire in Liam’s soul. Flames
that were fanned further by Adelina’s blatant opposition. It was akin to the perfect game. He was leading two down, with the added excitement of removing Bellingham from the board. Come the third move and Ana required rescue again, he would indeed call in the forfeit.