He placed his hand over the sun. The edges of his fingers glowed red-orange and he smiled.
A breeze blew and the reeds hissed all around him. An alien scent rode on the breeze. It drew his attention away from admiring his glowing fingers. He recalled every smell ever, though many had no name and simply came with images, moments cut out of a dark dough and scattered. This one was new, strangely sweet, like wildflower honey.
At that moment the sun went into eclipse, or had it begun to set? His hand was just his hand again, held up against darkness. He lowered it.
A strange shape sat upon a beast right beside him, silhouetted black against the sun. The shape seemed to have two heads. He squinted, but that didn’t help. Odd spikes festooned the figure and the horse it rode; but he saw immediately that it wasn’t a horse. It had a snout too long and too sharp, though it pawed the ground as impatiently as a horse. It carried its rider out of the sun’s way, and brightness flared into his eyes again, making them tear up. The air tinkled musically. The sweetness enveloped him and the bees making it buzzed within his brain, realigning his thoughts. Two tiny things like bats dove and flitted about the silhouette.
Thomas sat up, wiped at his eyes, streaking dirt across his cheek like some warrior Pict preparing for battle. He was no longer staring into the sun.
Peering down upon him was the most extraordinary woman he had ever seen. She wore a green cape, the hood fallen back to reveal her resplendent red hair beneath a pointed cap. The beast was revealed now to be a stallion of pure white bedecked in a fine blue-and-gold caparison. How had he seen it differently? It also observed him coolly, but he hardly noticed that. The second head belonged to Onchu, who was seated behind the woman on the stallion. Onchu’s expression was as dull as if he was asleep with his eyes open.
“Onchu changed his mind about fishing with Baldie,” Thomas said aloud without noticing. “Why?”
Something like invisible fingers seemed to prod and push at his head, creating a pressure not unlike what he felt just before a fit struck. But no storm raged through him. Instead the bees buzzed about his thoughts again.
“Majesty,” said a deep voice. Thomas followed it to a retinue of two men on their own horses behind her. Knights in black armor. They had plainly crossed the river together. “Shall we—?”
“No, Ađalbrandr,” she answered. “Look at him. Poor broken toy, and such a pretty one, too. What a waste. I wonder, should we swap him for this other?” Odd that her cherry lips didn’t move as she spoke, though the words rang in his head, clear as New Year’s bells.
The Queen of Heaven, he thought, but could not remember where he had heard the title. Was it a song? Wasn’t someone playing a hurdy-gurdy?
She smiled then with the magnanimous pity of a monarch, and in that smile lay her decision that would change her world and his in ways unimaginable. She would not take him in place of the other boy, but instead leaned down and brushed her long, slender hand across his face. Her blood-dark nails traced his forehead. His whirling, buzzing thoughts slowed, stilled. Desire plucked at him.
For the first time in his life, Thomas experienced a silence inside himself.
One thing was clear. “Onchu changed his mind about—”
“Shhh.” The lady shushed him with the sound of the reeds. Urged him to lie back in the grass again and sleep. To her retinue she said, “We will leave this one. Let him forget we passed. I’ve snatched his puzzle-thoughts from him.”
He did lie back as commanded, but neither slept nor forgot. He could see in his mind the fifty-nine silver bells woven into the stallion’s mane, and the twelve stars along the reins, the way the shining barding across its forelock poked up as if the horse had horns, just as he could see the odd gold shape of the lady’s eyes, which made him think of both buttons and spiders—the way her six pupils seemed like a circle of pinpricks within her bright irises. She pulsated with desire. He wanted to go with Onchu. They went everywhere together.
The bells tinkled as she rode off.
The other two passed beside him, and like her they each crossed the ball of the sun; and as they did, they changed. Spines as sharp and polished as thorns projected from their silhouettes. Their mouths became fanged, and the beasts upon which they were seated turned into things carved from dark skeletons but not of horses. He had never seen anything like them, and was too awed to be terrified. Close by came the gray riders’ thoughts, matching the cold regard in their eyes—they wanted to kill him, nor cared that he saw their true nature. But their queen had been clear in command, and they passed him by, becoming men and horses again.
He watched them, upside down, riding toward the black alder, until the swishing tall grass hid them.
He lay still awhile longer, wondering about things, his thoughts assembling in ways new to him, in orderly patterns. The great roar of the world had quieted, letting him perceive his thoughts before he spoke them. Eventually he arrived at a troubling question that brought him to his feet: Why hadn’t Baldie been with them, too?
By what new instinct he couldn’t say, Thomas walked down to the strand of pebbles and small rocks where his brother and Baldie had crossed the river. The big stepping stones out in the water led to a path up the opposite bank. They always fished in the same spot, across the peninsula of woodland.
As he stood there, a long wooden pole swept past. Pulled along by the current, it clacked against the stones in the middle of the stream, rotated, and slid between them. It was unmistakably Onchu’s dapping pole, tied with strips of leather at the handle and the juncture in the middle.
Floating along the river as if in pursuit of it came a bundle of rags, but soon enough he identified a forearm, the back of a head, legs. The rags became a body.
He waded in. It was icy cold, the water. He jumped from stone to stone to intercept the body. It floated up beside him and he squatted, grabbed onto a sleeve and tugged.
Baldie rolled over like a log. Faceup, his blank eyes stared wide as if beholding something terrible in the sky. There was no wound, no blood to be seen. Sodden and heavy, he was too much for Thomas, and the current had its way, prying the body from his chilled fingers into the main channel, and dragging Thomas in with it.
He splashed, choked, hammered the surface with his arms, finally clutched onto the big stone again and pulled himself back to safety.
By the time he could look, Baldie was well down the river, a flowing clutch of rags again.
Thomas managed to work from stone to stone and finally washed himself up on the pebbly strand. Crawled out and lay, gasping.
Pressure filled his head again, streaks of lightning fractured his sight. He heard his voice as he always did—as if it was another’s: “A teind for hell, they arrive, they take, all greenwood their enchantment!”
He mewled and rocked and rocked on the strand. Unlike every riddle he had ever babbled before, this one opened to him like a flower. His thoughts quieted, coalesced around it.
The knights had killed Baldie to take Onchu. But why, and where were they going? No war hereabouts, no fighting. No village, no habitation on that path, in that direction, either. Only the old abbey, and they were no monks. They arrive, they take. Fifty bird calls trilled on the wind, like tinkling bells. All greenwood . . .
Thomas jumped to his feet and ran.
II. The Teind
The riders easily outdistanced him, but the moist soil made their tracks easy to follow—three-toed hoofprints belonging to no horse he’d ever seen. It seemed reckless, as though the lady and her knights did not care if anyone saw or followed after them.
He’d thought it was the new abbey under construction toward which they headed; but once they’d forded the Tweed, they diverted east, and east was the graveyard and Old Melrose, as people were already calling it—the six-hundred-year-old abbey ruin where the Cistercians used to live. It was a holy site and had been one for a long long time, before there were even monks. Who had said that? Someone speaking to his father, once upon a time when he was younger, because people would say anything in front of him, he didn’t matter. But look how he did now!
He jumped with excitement as he ran along the path. Look how he was able to sort things that he’d seen and heard!
There was a war in the south—a king named Stephen and a queen named Matilda, but they weren’t married to each other. Didn’t like each other. How was that important to know? He could not remember, if ever he’d known, couldn’t even be sure that the war was something current or yet to come.
Some things remained jumbled and obscure after all.
Up ahead on a bend of the river and near the bridge to Ercildoun lay the ruins of Old Melrose. He would be upon it soon.
