They won’t let me go mad, she thought. They won’t leave me down here for a nineday.
But maybe they already had. Maybe she had been here for a month. A year. Maybe her hair had turned gray and Roderick was married. A father dead of old age. Maybe her madness was in clinging to hope, in pretending she hadn’t been here for very long at all.
She tried to re-create time by counting heartbeats or tapping her fingers. She tried to measure it by her periods of hunger, and how much food and water remained. She preferred to keep her eyes shut rather than open. With them shut, she could pretend things were as they ought to be, that she was in her bed, trying to sleep.
Of course, she had mostly lost the difference between waking and sleeping.
Her only consolation was that she had begun to hate the darkness. Not to fear it, as she first had, or capitulate to it as Sister Secula surely meant her to.
No, she loathed it. She plotted against it, imagining how she might strike a light in its ugly belly and kill it. She searched through the meager supplies, hoping to find some small piece of steel, something that would make a spark against stone, but there was nothing. Of course there wasn’t. How many girls had they put down here, over the centuries? How many must have thought of the same thing?
“But I’m not another girl,” Anne muttered, listening as the sound of her voice filled the place. “I’m a daughter of the house Dare.”
And so, with great determination, she stared at nothingness and imagined a single point of light, banishing every other thought. If she couldn’t break the darkness in reality, she could at least do so in her heart. She tried, and maybe she slept, and she tried again. She took the idea of light, her memories of it, and squeezed them together between her eyes, willing it to be real with every fiber of her being.
And suddenly it was there—a spark, the tiniest of points, no larger than a pinprick.
“Saints!” she gasped, and it vanished.
She wept for a little while, dried her eyes, and with greater determination than before, began again.
The next time the spark appeared, she held it, nurtured it, fed it all of the membrance of light she could find, and slowly, hesitantly, beautifully it grew. It grew to the size of an acorn, then as large as a hand, and it had color in it, and spread like a morning glory opening its petals. She could see things now, but not what she had expected. No walls and floor of stone, but instead the rough bark of an oak, twining vines, a spray of yellow flowers—as if the light was really a hole through the wall of a dark room, opening into a garden.
But it wasn’t a hole; it was a sphere, and it pushed away the darkness until there was none left and she stood not in a cave, but in a brightly lit forest glade.
She looked down and could not see her shadow, and with a skip of her heart knew where she was. She also knew her madness must be complete.
“You’ve come without your shadow,” a voice said.
It was a woman, but not the same one she had seen before, that day on Tom Woth. This one had unbound hair of fine chestnut and a mask carved of bone polished very smooth. Its features were fine and lifelike, and her mouth was not covered by it. She wore a dress of golden brown silk embroidered with interlaced braids and knots of ram-headed serpents and oak leaves.
“I didn’t mean to come here at all,” Anne told her.
“But you did. In Eslen you made a pact with Cer. It took you to the Coven Saint Cer and now it brings you here.” She paused. “I wonder what that means?”
For some reason, that simple question frightened Anne more than the darkness had.
“Don’t you know? Aren’t you a saint? Who are you, and where is the other woman, the one with the golden hair?”
The woman smiled wistfully. “My sister? Near, I’m sure. As for me, I don’t know who I am, anymore,” she said. “I’m waiting to know. Like you.”
“I know who I am. I’m Anne Dare.”
“You know a name, that’s all. Everything else is a guess or an illusion.”
“I don’t understand you.”
The woman shrugged. “It’s not important. What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
“You came here for something.”
Anne hesitated. “I want out of the cave, out of the womb of Saint Mefitis.”
“Easily done. Leave it.”
“There’s a way out?”
“Yes. You found one way already, but there is another. Is that all?”
Anne considered that carefully for a moment. She was probably mad, but if she wasn’t …
If she wasn’t, she would do better this time than she had the last.
“No,” she said firmly. “When your sister abducted me she said some things. I thought they were nonsense, or that I was having a dream. Praifec Hespero thought so, too, when I told him.”
“And now?”
“I think she was real, and I want to understand what she said.”
The woman’s lips curved in a smile. “She told you that there must be a queen in Eslen when he comes.”
“Yes. But why, and who is ‘he’? And why tell me?”
“I’m sure you asked those questions of my sister.”
“Yes, and she answered with nonsense. I was scared then, too scared to demand better answers. Now I want them.”
“You can’t always have the things you want.”
“But you—she—wants me to do something. Everyone wants me to do something. Act one way instead of another, go to a coven, promise this or that. Well, here I am! If you want something from me, explain it or stay out of my dreams!”
“You came here this time, Anne, of your own free will.” The masked woman sighed. “Ask your questions. I’ll try to be more helpful than my sister. But you must understand, Anne, that we are far less masters of ourselves than you are, however you might feel. A dog cannot speak like a man and a cloud may not sound like a lute. The dog can bark, the cloud can thunder. It is how they are made.”
Anne pursed her lips. “Your sister said that Crotheny must not fall, and that there must be a queen in Eslen when your mysterious ‘he’ comes. At the very moment she told me that, my mother the queen was nearly killed. Did she know about that?”
“She knew.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“What good would it have done? The attempt on your mother was over before you returned to Eslen. My sister told you what you needed to know.”
“She didn’t tell me anything. Who is this man who is coming? Why must there be a queen? And mostly—mostly— what must I do?”
“You’ll know when the time comes, if you only remember what she said. There must be a queen. Not the wife of a king, you understand, but a queen paramount.”
Anne’s jaw dropped. “No. No, I didn’t understand that at all. But still—”
“You must see that there is a queen, Anne.”
“You mean become one?”
The woman shrugged. “That would be one way.”
“Yes, an impossible one. My father and mother and brother and all of my sisters would have to be dead … before …”
For a moment she couldn’t go on.
“Is that it?” she asked, feeling cold. “Is that what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t tell me that! Tell me something real.”
The woman cocked her head to the side. “We only see need, Anne. Like a good cook, I know when the roast needs more salt or a bay leaf, whether it needs to stay on the spit for another bell or not.”
“Crotheny is not a roast.”
“No. Nor is the world. Perhaps I am more like a chirgeon, then. I see a man so wounded and infected that parts of him have begun to rot, and the worms, growing bolder, begin to devour what is left. I feel his pain and disease, and know what salves he needs, where fire needs to be put to the wound, and when.”