She wept into his shoulder, but didn’t seem sad at all. When they drew apart, he saw her blood staining the linen, and it caused him to recall Innes’s abandoned mattress.
She asked what he was thinking. He could not explain about his sister. Instead he answered, “I thought you considered me an animal.”
“I . . .” She lowered her eyes bashfully. “Sometimes I say too soon what I’m thinking.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“Yes, but then you fell,” she replied. “I saw a gentleness in you when you slept and then woke that reminded me of someone I knew.”
“Your soldier?”
She nodded. “There’s also a sadness in you, corresponding to mine.” Again, he thought of Innes but didn’t want to speak of her just now, else get pulled down into the darkness in himself.
“Well, as to the falling, ’tis more a malady than a gentleness.”
“You belittle yourself. You volunteered to help your neighbor. His daughter speaks your name with adoration.”
“Sìleas is twelve years old,” Thomas protested.
“Ah, so she’s marriageable, then.”
“You would tease this poor dumb beast.”
She did laugh now. Her voice was like tiny bells. In that instant he recalled the fifty-nine of them woven in the mane of the Yvag queen’s steed, and he might have slipped into dark melancholy then if Janet hadn’t said, “You should know that sometimes a beast is exactly want one wants,” as her hand stroked him hard again. In her laurel-green gaze was something he’d never seen before in any woman’s eyes, and he willingly let it devour him whole.
After that time he slept again, waking to the sound of her moving about in his house. Dressed in her linen shift, she had built a fire in his hearth in the center and was stirring the pottery crock that she had just removed from the hot stones on which he cooked. He smelled oat porridge. Naked, he walked to her. On his table, he saw that she had rolled out and baked a flat oval of bannock. How had he slept through all of that? Sheer exhaustion after so many nights of hunting his enemy, no doubt.
She sensed him and turned, smiling. He drew her to him. They kissed. She pushed him back. “If we do, your porridge will grow cold.”
“After, then.”
She took a wooden bowl and spooned porridge into it. “Trading one appetite for another?” she teased.
He chuckled. It was the truth.
They sat and ate together. He had a jug of cider made from her father’s apple trees, and rather than ale they drank that. The meal was more breakfast than he normally ate. He considered asking her about the miller who wanted her hand, but decided he was better off not poking that bear. Right now they were together in here and the outside world could stay out.
And then she asked him, “So where were you when I arrived last night?” and the outside world gained entry.
He had been wondering since he woke what he would tell her. Waldroup’s ghost was nowhere to be found to advise him, leaving him to rely on his own instincts, stunted as they were from trusting no one other than his mentor, and nobody at all since Waldroup’s death.
For all they had survived—the many battles fought, the dozens of accidents that could befall masons working lewises and balancing on scaffolds, not to mention foolhardy sidetrips into other worlds—the last thing that should have felled Waldroup was an ague, what the monk who tended to him called an acuta febris.
Waldroup seemed to know that he would not survive the illness. Thomas never quite admitted it: His mentor was so strong, so wise, and always a step ahead of his enemies in battle, that it was inconceivable he could be overcome by anything smaller than an army.
He lay upon a feather-filled bed in one of the four bays of the firmaria, his eyes darkly ringed and lips cracked and sticky with spittle. There were hours now where he didn’t recognize Thomas, and periods where he babbled about trees that moaned and monsters who wore people like gloves. He insisted that he was already dead because he floated now “upon clouds, and isn’t that the final proof?”
The monk seemed to pay none of it any mind, explaining, “Many a man thinks he’s in the clouds because of the bedding here, the likes of which he’s never known. It’s quite common. Pray for him, my son. Prayer is the best medicine.”
Thomas had to hope there was no skinwalker stalking the aisles of the small tapestry-cordoned infirmary who might understand ravings the monk dismissed. He pretended in the monk’s presence to be equally uninformed and baffled by it.
Then, on the last day, Waldroup regained clarity awhile. “The devils didn’t get us, did they, Tom?” he said. “We kept ourselves out of hell, we did. And you have to keep clear of them hereafter without me.”
“I won’t be without you, Alpin. Look how better you are than yesterday.”
Waldroup closed his sunken eyes, sighing. “Don’t trust no one never. Even the most decent of folk—especially the most decent. One misspoke word and they’ll have you in their net, little brother. They got all the power, all the time to use it.”
“Right, I know, I know that.”
“You keep your own counsel.”
“But you’ll counsel me, Alpin.”
He sighed again; it came from deeper in his throat. He said,“These clouds,” then went still. For a minute, Thomas didn’t truly comprehend the change. Waldroup had fallen asleep again, that was all. A few moments later, the monk returned, patted his shoulders, and recited something solemn in Latin. Then he knew.
And ever since, Alpin’s capricious shade had counseled him, a voice in his ear that came and went, as if he, Thomas, were striding through invisible, folded, haunted layers of the world; otherwise, he had in all respects kept his own as promised. But here in this moment with Janet, he knew two things: First, that he would marry her, and, second, that he would have to trust her with the truth of himself if he did, starting with his adventures of last night, for she would need to know all that must never be spoken of. If she was to join her fate to his, then it must be in the full knowledge of who and what he was, and of the danger he presented.
He only wished he knew the scope of that himself.
XVII. The Christes Maesse
The most amazing thing about her, Thomas supposed, was that Janet Cardden did not flee for her life from “mad Tom” once he’d told her his story. To his own ears as he jabbered away, he sounded like a raving moonstruck idiot: the Queen of Elfland snatching his brother as teind (a debt or tribute of some sort, a tenth of something, the nature of which he still barely understood and neither he nor Alpin had ever entirely worked out), and monstrous things that breathed through holes in their sides crawling out of graves and crypts, trees that moaned and spoke, a stone that fit in his palm and sliced open the world—it was a mad concoction of magics well before he got anywhere near the admission that his own father was no longer human, but an Yvag lich who had helped capture a new teind, a girl this time, the very night before while he watched from hiding and could do nothing to stop it because it was his father and how could he bring himself to shoot down his father?
He showed her the ördstone while he explained what it did, but dared not demonstrate it for fear of creating a new entrance for the Yvag that would forever after lead right inside his house. He held it out on his palm, where it glittered, revealing the strange lines and symbols he could not decipher, but whisked it away when she reached for it, fearful suddenly that the touch of it might affect her the way the other stones had unbalanced Waldroup. All the while, he felt sure that his refusal to demonstrate or let her touch the stone only provided her with ample proof that he was indeed insane.
Perhaps Janet did not believe him that first morning, although she humored him—but then that’s what one did with a madman. However, four days later the news of a missing girl from a Carterhaugh farm reached the Carddens. She’d vanished on the night Janet had slept in Tàm Lynn’s bed. Her family claimed they’d heard a strange music in the night that must have put them all to sleep, and in the morning when they awoke, their daughter, who had been sleeping in their midst, was simply gone without a trace.
