XXXI. Glamouring
There were beams overhead, and tapestries hung against the walls; a fire burned brightly in the hearth he had helped build, that ventilated through a hole above it in the stone wall, the same as in his own house. Had he dreamt everything in the grip of the seizure? Any moment Cardden was surely going to lean over and say, “You had a fit, son.” He’d lived through all this before . . .
Turning his head, he spied Janet asleep in a high-backed wooden chair beside him, a fur pelt pulled close around her. The firelight played over her, the face he adored, but strained now, hollowed and lined with years lived in his absence; her hair was striped with white. Her hands looked dry and cracked, the nails short, broken—years of working the fields and tending the sheep without him.
Not a dream then, not any of it. She had called his name as he tumbled off the Yvag beast; she had brought him back to himself from a spinning storm of madness worse than all the lightnings and fits and riddles combined. Had he really transformed like that? He peered beneath the blanket.
The images in his head, the sensation of his body contorting, swelling, stretching—he was amazed anyone could offer a way back from that maelstrom. But of course his Janet had.
He saw that he still wore an Yvag’s armor. That memory was real, too. All of it. They would be coming after him. Might be here already. He mustn’t be found with Janet, mustn’t be found here. And Morven—where was his daughter? She wasn’t in this room, here in Cardden’s keep. But how many years had gone by? She could be a wife herself by now.
He sat up. There was no time to waste. He should be on his way right this minute, before they were all caught together.
His body ached as if his skeleton had been pulled out and stuffed back in, but he’d slept off his exhaustion. How long? He went and knelt beside his wife, touched her hand. She flinched and her eyes opened, focused upon him. “Tàm,” she said, and tears flooded his eyes: A voice he’d never expected to hear again, so much love in his name when she said it.
They clung together in the firelight, one body never to be sundered. “I never gave up,” she whispered against his face. “I knew you would find your way home.” She kissed his forehead.
“No, and I never gave up, either. When I was allowed to think at all, it was of you and Morven.”
“And Sìleas?” she asked quickly.
“Sacrificed.” He explained how the Yvag pilgrims had caught her on the way to their house and assumed she was Janet. There’d been nothing he could do to spare Sìleas: They were making his wife their teind, making him watch, as a punishment for his opposition.
“Had I breathed a word, I’d have lost you and Morven, and they still would have murdered Sìleas.”
“Their kind are about e’en now,” she said. “Filib and I have seen them. Kester, too. But they’ve not come inquiring after me.”
“On the other side they all believe you are dead. The new skinwalkers would believe that, too.” He glanced around then, asked, “Is your father here?”
She shook her head sadly. “Dead four years. This is our home now, Tàm. I’m the landlord.”
“A woman of importance and influence.” He grinned. “And the house I built?”
“Filib Lusk and his family live in it. Kester’s in the one you repaired for them. It’s never fallen down.” She tried to smile with him, to lighten the reunion.
“They’re like to seek me there first. Filib’s sure to be in danger. They will make him tell. Sooner or later, they’ll put it together.”
She stroked his hair. “He knows. People have come up to him and Kester over the years, inquiring after Tàm Lynn. Some of those might be harmless, but they’ve been cautious. They don’t know what happened, that the house, the land was given them by the landlord, my father, and that the previous tenant vanished. They both have kept faith with me all this time while I watched for you, Filib most of all. Watching for your return, we witnessed the new helpers of the elves delivering their tithes. We learned who to be wary of. Filib was on hand tonight when I caught you. Between us, we made sure nothing leads from Old Melrose to his house.” She eyed him sidelong. “Your beast leaves strange tracks.”
“Straight to here?”
“No, I kept to the heights, the rockiest parts. If anything, they will think you rode to Jedburgh. After that I descended to the Teviot shallows, and stayed in the river until we were close.”
“What did you do with the beast?”
“He’s in the stables. He was passive and easy to manage once I had this.” She held out the ördstone.
He let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t lose it, then. Did I seal up the opening?”
“Filib. We’ve watched their opening and closing it enough times; he simply copied what he’d seen.” She passed the stone to him.
“Then, if they haven’t come through already, maybe we do have a chance,” he mused. “Taliesin might be able to keep up the illusion I’m still in my cell for days, perhaps even weeks.” He had to have been glamoured somehow. Nothing else could explain the guard’s reaction, or that of Teg the little hob calling him “captain.” A changeling gone mad, then. Taliesin had said “one in a hundred” became unhinged. How long would it take the Yvags to realize none was missing? How long to find the slain creature on the path? And then how long before someone thought to look in the prison? Every hour, every day’s delay in Ailfion, could give him days, weeks, maybe months here.
“Who is Taliesin?” asked Janet.
Instead of trying to explain, he looked at her a long while in silence. He did not have to reach far into his memory to find her, then to blend that memory of her with Janet now, compressing—or trying to—the distance in time. Changes large and small, he smoothed as best he could. Then, his voice tight, he asked, “How long have I been gone?”
“Nineteen years almost to the night.”
“Jesu. Morven, is she . . . ?” He looked overhead, as if he might see through the beams.
Janet bowed her head. “She’s at the Abbey of Our Lady of Fontevraud.”
“A nunnery?”
The question seemed to deliver a blow to Janet. She sat again.
He realized how accusatory it had sounded. He hadn’t meant it that way, had he?
In a voice thick with grief she explained how the night they came for him, she took Morven and fled as far away as she could, exactly as he had stressed, across the water to friends of her father in Lussemburgo. She refused to stay with them for fear that, should she be caught, they would suffer as well. She moved into a small house in Brittany for a time. Someone had mentioned the abbey, and she made inquiries. Her father wanted her home. His health at the time was not good. He wrote her assurances that no one had come looking for her at all. She decided to return home, but because there remained a remote possibility that her father himself might be turned, she first placed Morven in the abbey. “It’s a—a good place,” she said, “and she’s safe there away from me.” But the tears running from her eyes told him the true toll this decision had taken on her.
He said, “No, you made the right choice. They wanted her as much as they wanted you. They would have turned her into one of them—too horrible to imagine.” He had imagined it enough for them both.
She wiped furiously at her cheeks. “When I returned,” she said, “I learned that a magistrate named Baggi had died the same night you were taken. He’d melted like a candle in a tavern in front of a dozen onlookers, who spread at least that many versions of the story. Most everyone concluded he was a witch and the devil had claimed him.”
“Not my father, then,” he interjected. “He didn’t perish.”
