“Husband.”
He turned at Janet’s call. He had walked blindly past the well where a mere two hours earlier he had shivered, horripilated, and scrubbed himself clean. She closed the distance now.
“What is it?” she asked. “Your father?”
He told her, railing at the abominable things inhabiting the widow, the magistrate, but most of all his father. His eyes brimmed with tears, his rage boiling over. In that moment she placed her hands on his face and kissed him long and deep, as if she could draw the venom out of him; and somehow, miraculously she did. She must have felt him relax and let go. He threw his arms around her. “It’s taken him away as surely as if he’d been marched through the green fire like all the teinds,” he sobbed. “Everything he was is gone.”
She let him wring himself dry. Then she spoke calmly. “You’re as furious as a lightning storm, as you should be. But now, for my sake and your child’s if not your own, please come back inside. If you disappear, if you go and kill some of these vile creatures, you tell them everything, and their suspicions will stick upon you as upon a target. They will all know, Tàm, and the consequences will ripple out.”
He stood silently. Did not say that he’d been foolish to think he might have a life like any other’s with her—a life full of hard work, harvests, and love. But he thought it. He regretted too late having pulled her into this. “I don’t know how to pretend, go on and not take revenge for what that monster has done to my father. What all of them did to my sister. My whole family. And that poor girl from Carterhaugh—who’ll avenge her?”
“If you die, you take no revenge at all, but you set them upon me and your child. Even if you strike and then flee as you did before with your friend, we’ll be left here to pay for it. Tàm, you can’t avenge everyone they’ve ever taken. How many would that be? Hundreds? Thousands? What if they’ve been here since the very beginning?”
He answered that someone had once told his father how Old Melrose was built upon a spot supposed to have magic, some sort of power, long before the monks arrived, that ancient rituals had been performed there on that spit of land. There had been a maen hir there, tall as a house and covered in ancient script. They had not been specific as to what rituals; nor did they say what had happened to that massive stone. It certainly wasn’t there anymore, though plenty of others stood scattered across the landscape. Thomas had been an idiot child when he overheard the conversation, and now suspected it was nothing more than a local legend that had grown and changed shape over time, decades; it made him wonder, though, when the fae and the elven had first been spoken of, where the idea of these occult and magical creatures had come from if not from the intrusion of the Yvag and those flitting little monsters of theirs. His thoughts, wandering off into speculation, lost their fury. Janet replied that her father had cast that spot in a similar light although his stories of Old Melrose seemed gathered from dozens of sources.
He smiled at his wife for having listened to and calmed him. He asked her if she had met the unholy trio.
“I did. The woman acts inebriated. Magistrate Baggi grins and wheedles and would be everybody’s friend. All three of them have a lecherous nature in common, and probably have their way most of the time because of their status if not their powers of persuasion, which serves to explain everything. Those who are used to giving orders expect to be obeyed. I also met a few other folk who know your father but nothing of the elves, and who insist your mother’s death unhinged him—that he wasn’t at all like this before it.”
“Then you doubt their unnaturalness because there are other versions?”
“Oh, to the contrary, husband. They are like three psalteries plucked exactly so, ever in tune, so perfectly so that every note, word, and gesture plays false. The magistrate’s wife is so terrified of him that she will hardly speak, and the widow, though she declares herself drunk, her eyes are not bleary. They shift and take in everything as coldly as a falcon might.”
So, she had seen what he had. He saw also the wisdom of her advice. He took her by the hand to return to the keep, but she pulled him up short.
“How do they choose? They selected those three people out of everyone.”
“You answered that yourself. Their status gains them great influence. No one is possessing a simple farmer or a shoemaker.”
“But how do they realize their possession? Are they demons or ghosts, are they earwigs dropped in the sleeper’s ear? What alchemy lets them steal the souls of the living?”
He shook his head. That was a question he had as well, a riddle he had never unraveled. How did they take over his father or the alderman before him, or Baldie, who was dead when they invaded him? For a long time he and Waldroup had thought that everyone they inhabited must have died, leaving an empty shell, but that meant the Yvag either waited about for the person to die or they effected such a demise first, which seemed too complicated and clumsy a process. And, anyway, some small part of Baldie had lingered within.
“I think it would be worth finding that out before you kill your leeches,” said Janet, and he saw in her expression as much fury as he had felt before she calmed him. “It would end all of this if we could build a keep around our souls.” She was certainly right. There must be a method. A poison imbibed, or a spell cast. Otherwise, they would simply have reached out and taken up residence in him and Alpin instead of confronting them.
He closed his arms about her and just stood there awhile, gathering peacefulness in her embrace. Then he let Janet lead him back to the festivities of the Epiphany. In all the tumult, no one seemed to have noticed their absence save Cardden, who patted Thomas on the shoulder and beamed at him. “Young love,” he declared wistfully.
The rest of the evening, Thomas did his best to avoid the three Yvag skinwalkers by remaining at his wife’s side.
XVIII. Morven & the Riddles
By the time their daughter, Morven, was born, Thomas had suffered half a dozen fits or more. Of these, many had occurred while plowing or up on the shieling, and whatever he might have uttered was lost forever. Even if he heard himself, he had nothing to write the words upon.
Three happened in Janet’s presence.
The first took place in their house where Thomas and the Lusk twins were stuffing bound thatch into the new, extended rafters—the boys up above and Thomas on a ladder inside. He said, “Janet,” then slid off the ladder and collapsed. She ran to him, and knelt, propping up his head. The boys looked down through the open roof as Thomas twitched and then suddenly, jerkily, began reciting. It lasted for only a few moments, and then he lay relaxed as if sleeping. Janet propped his head on some of the thatch, and told the boys to come down for the time being, all while reciting the riddle silently to herself. She had only to reach for her stylus and ink on the table above to write it out on a piece of parchment.
“I will serve when bent
To the will of my master,
Then I find my mark.
Upright I am unstrung.
Say my name.”
The boys came in the door. Kester Lusk asked what he’d said, and she repeated what she had written. The boys listened, looked at each other. Then Filib asked, “Does it mean Tàm’s bent to the will of your father, miss?”
“Possibly,” she quickly replied, and left it at that. There would be no more work done on the roof that day, and she sent the boys home with pandemayne bread she’d purchased the day before from the baker in Roxburgh, as payment for their time.
Later, alone with Thomas, Janet read the words and said, “It’s nothing to do with my father’s will, is it? It’s your bow it’s describing, isn’t it?”
Thomas nodded. “Sometimes the riddles warn of something coming. But most times, like this, they’re like guessing games. What am I? Who am I? Name me. Some of those, I’ve never known what they’re about. It’s as if my mind’s teasing me with questions to challenge me. Makes no sense, but why should it? My mind has never ever been sensible.”
A second seizure struck one evening, following in the afterglow of their lovemaking when Janet was some months pregnant. She sat above him, and watched as his eyes rolled back and his body stiffened, then spasmed and jerked. Through clenched teeth, he said:
“So long as the Great Thorn Tree stands,
Fair Ercildoun shall keep its lands.”
Foam flecked the corners of his mouth. But almost at once he returned to his senses. Knowing his own symptoms all too well, he asked what he had said.
They easily unraveled that riddle. The Great Thorn Tree of Ercildoun was well known to everyone. The riddle seemed to be a simple prediction of a time far in the town’s future, as the tree was currently sturdy and healthy. But how the town might lose its lands, they could not fathom.
The third fit struck him down mere moments after he had held his daughter for the first time. Sìleas and Mrs. Lusk had been there for the birth, which had happened without complications. Sìleas had stayed after to help. Janet, exhausted from her labor, was holding the baby at her breast.
