He slowed his step and walked on through the trees with more care. The Queen of Heaven might not like it if he intruded. Maybe she had descended to reward Onchu for looking after him. His brother certainly deserved a reward, just for all the times he’d stood for Thomas, defended him. There were so many people who couldn’t tolerate his weakness, his confusion. It seemed to make them angry or afraid. He didn’t understand why. He asked for nothing from them, yet they accused him of being a demon or of being guided by demons, which was funny in its way, since guided was something he definitely wasn’t.
Ahead stood a thicket of downy birch, past which he saw the first of the sixty-seven grave markers along the north side of the old abbey. It was a small rectangular building with no door in its doorway and half its roof thatch rotted and gone, nothing like the majestic structure that would be built to replace it. Dozens of circular stone huts in various states of decay dotted the rocky ground beyond it.
He could not see the Queen of Heaven yet, but he could feel her, the pressure in his head so like the storms that lashed him before a riddle fell from his lips.
Crouching low, he worked his way from marker to marker, some misshapen and grown over with moss, others covered in lettering, none of which he knew how to read. He reached a stone on a small knoll and peered over the top of a gravestone.
The two knights sat on horseback still. Around them stood seven people on foot. They weren’t monks. The five men wore doublets or tunics rich with embroidery. One of them he recognized from Ercildoun—an alderman named Stroud, distinguished by his dark beard and the scar that interrupted it on his right cheek, who had come to his father’s hall many times. The two women wore crowned wimples and long satin gowns of blue and gold respectively. People of wealth, they all appeared to be.
In the center of their loose circle, both the Lady and Onchu sat upon her horse as if basking in their admiration.
Thomas took to hands and knees to steal closer still, behind one mossy stone that looked as worn and ancient as the ruins.
The people on foot closed in upon the horse. They gathered to one side of it, reached up. Hands grabbed Onchu’s leg, arm, his shirt. They pulled him down among them. They made an excited noise that seemed to emerge from inside Thomas’s head, a weird chirring as if fierce beetles were crawling out his ears. He could not help swatting at himself, the sensation was so overwhelming.
The Queen uttered a command, but her words were foreign and queer now. He could not see Onchu between the people, but it was clear he was the object of their efforts as they worked, buzzing like a hive of bees—only not bees, not anything he knew or understood.
After some minutes, the noise abruptly stopped and the people backed away. Onchu, upright, stood naked in their midst. He didn’t move, nor seem at all self-conscious as he’d been the one time that Innes caught them swimming naked. Then, Onchu had covered himself with his hands. Now they hung loosely at his sides as if being naked no longer mattered.
The Queen made another statement Thomas didn’t understand. Strange that he’d comprehended her words before without difficulty but could not decipher the strange noise she made now.
The alderman strode up in front of the Queen and her horse. He raised his arm high above his head. His fingers held something dark and about the size of a small skipping stone from the river. Onchu and Baldie skipped stones on the Ettrick all the time. This one twinkled.
The alderman brought his hand straight down, and where it swept, the air seemed to sizzle with green smoke. The smoke became a kind of fire that spread, eating away from the center outward, becoming a circle. It was like nothing so much as a great round Catherine window—like the great round hole where the window would go in the new abbey. The green edges continued to flicker like fire, but the circle contained something other than the view of the old ruin now. Two creatures stood on the far side, black in polished armor, spiny, and with yellow eyes. They looked the way the mounted knights had against the disk of the sun. It might have been an illusion, but the two seemed to stand at the head of two lines, which receded into some foreign distance, into eternity for all Thomas could tell. Seven tiny creatures like dragonflies or bats darted in and out of the opening.
The six besides the alderman closed ranks to either side of Onchu and together they all paraded toward the circle. Onchu walked under his own power, if sluggishly. The Queen and her knights followed, the whole of it seeming like a great ceremony.
Why Onchu had agreed to go with them, Thomas could not fathom, but it wasn’t—could not be—a good thing. He stood up and jumped over the low marker. He needed to bring Onchu back home.
The three horses carried their riders into the circle.
“Wait!” Thomas shouted.
Alderman Stroud swung about, shocked until he saw who had yelled.
“Stop!”
The alderman smirked and stepped through the circle after everyone else, then turned and for a moment simply stared at him as if too astonished to react.
Thomas ran for all he was worth, weaving around the stones, straight at the man. He didn’t have a weapon, but then he’d hardly thought how he intended to rescue his brother. The alderman went down on one knee to cut the air upward on a diagonal even as Thomas sprang.
As the alderman rose, the circle collapsed toward a single seam, and Thomas merged with it, halfway through. The world around him flung green jewel shapes—lozenges, diamonds, shards—flickering facets shifting into new sharp-edged forms too fast for him to comprehend. They coalesced, flared bright as the sun. The great roaring of a tempest filled his head, searing voices, shrieks and shouts. Green turned to red, the roar rushing over him as if he was drowning in a sparkling, spinning ocean of blood, while sun and moon whirled and whirled and whirled about him.
Then the colors burst and hurled him away like an angry child throwing a cloth doll. Out of the glare, he flew back into the world again, struck the nearest grave marker so hard that it tipped halfway out of the ground; he flopped behind it, insensible.
The seam was gone, leaving not a trace upon the air.
After a while, when nothing moved, the birds began to sing again. Thomas heard nothing. The sun, no longer whirling, steadily descended. A dragonfly lit on his cheek, considered his eyelash for a moment, and then flitted away.
III. Waldroup
“Hey, little brother. Hey, wake up now.” Hands shook him gently.
“Onchu,” he muttered, then tried to reach out.
“Is that supposed to be your name or mine?”
He opened his eyes. A bearded face he didn’t know grinned down at him, features fluttering in torchlight. It’s nighttime. With that he realized that what he thought inside he no longer had to say aloud; he could contain thoughts, keep them to himself. He recalled all at once inhumanly long fingers that played across his head, seeming to pierce his skull, the sensation so intense that he wiped a hand across his face to see if there was blood from the sharp nails. None, but his body shivered as if beset by an ague. The stranger looked concerned. It was an expression Thomas had beheld most of his life, mainly in response to something he’d said, but right now it didn’t matter.
He sat up, clutched at his side where it twinged, and stared past the man. Green fire. Gone, everything was gone, everybody. Onchu, too. His eyes welled with tears.
“Boy, what is it?” The man twisted to follow his gaze.
He shook with weeping, tried, then sobbed, and tried again to explain. “Queen of Heaven. She’s took—she’s took Onchu.”
The bearded man’s expression furrowed, which puckered the scars across his cheek and forehead. His gaze shifted to the tilted gravestone beside them, and he grunted with apparent understanding. “That so, little brother? Then I am most sorry for your loss. Which one is his?”
“No,” he answered, wretched and despairing. He rocked back and forth, put his hands on his head. How was he to explain? “She took him,” he said again. In his head he heard the voice of a neighbor, Mrs. Duncanson, speaking of someone’s stillborn baby: “Not lost but gone before, poor dear.”
“Gone,” he managed. “Gone before.” He shook his head. It was impossible to tell it. She had taken Onchu and left him behind, when it should have been him. He tore at his hair, slapped himself, unable to sit still until the man stabbed the torch into the ground, then grabbed his arms and anchored him in place.
“Go ahead and rage, boy. Get it out, but not by harming yourself.”
The strength of those arms kept him in check, kept his hands at his sides while he kicked and twisted and yelled, until finally his fury broke, leaving him empty in his weeping. The man knelt patiently, as if he’d nothing else to do in the world. He wore a light tunic and loose, checked trousers. A satchel lay beside him, made of heavy cloth and patched in a few places. A cord was tied to the points of it, front and back. It must in some manner unfurl. Thomas’s interest in it carried off his misery. The man hesitantly let go of him, and he wiped at his runny nose and wet face.
“Your family live hereabouts?”
