Her intent was to discover how the King’s new bedmate had snapped the curse. The kind of work required – an investigative charm that would penetrate time – was so far from her usual style that she feared even to assay it, and twice she summoned daemons to question them about how they would manipulate the aether in such a way.
It was dull, detailed work and summoning daemons was far more exciting even if it was cold – working sky clad in an autumnal castle had its own risks.
One of those risks was that her focus on the task might blind her to other truths. She placed a sigil on Plangere, mostly meant to remind her to watch him more carefully if he moved too quickly.
She placed a sigil on her distant son Gavin – and did so three times in as many days – and saw her working dispelled each day.
‘Gabriel,’ she said aloud, but she didn’t press the matter.
On her fourth day, her husband summoned her by means of her son Aneas, who knocked and coughed repeatedly, being a polite young man who knew perfectly well what his sorceress mother might be doing on the far side of a closed oak door. She put on an ermine-lined gown and threw a light casting over the floor to protect – and cover – her scrawls, and opened the door.
‘Yes?’ she said, leaning on the door frame.
Aneas bowed. ‘Pater needs you,’ he said. ‘There’s an Imperial officer come.’
She nodded and slipped her feet into bright red leather slippers. Behind her, a dull grey moth flitted across a sunbeam and landed inside the hanging silver lamp of Morean make that dangled from a heavy iron chain in the middle of the room.
The moth caught her eye and she raised a hand and killed it with a thread of green light. Its death created a rainbow spectrum of swirling motes, like dust.
‘Oh, Richard!’ she said with delight. ‘I didn’t know you cared.’ She smiled.
The Castle of N’gara – Bill Redmede
Redmede woke to find Bess curled around him, her head in the crook of his shoulder, and he remembered their coupling of the night before.
She awoke as she felt him move. Her eyes popped open, and she sat up.
‘Damn me,’ she said. She was naked under the blankets, and she suddenly shivered, pulled her shirt out of the chaos and pulled it brusquely over her head. ‘Got to piss,’ she murmured, and walked away, pulling her hose up as she went.
Redmede began to roll the blankets, fighting a barrage of conflicting thoughts. The air was damp and promised rain. His people needed to get under cover before winter came, whatever else the Wild might have in store.
Why on earth had he bedded Bess?
He got the blankets rolled tightly, and found the ties so hastily discarded the night before and tied them tight. He passed the leather strap through the bundle.
Why had he never bedded her before?
He took a long pull from his water bottle and went to piss himself, and wondered where the irk had got to.
He turned and all but ran back into the middle of the camp – except that it wasn’t really a camp, but a huddle of survivors gathered around one big fire. A few men were up and armed, but most were merely gathered tight together.
Redmede started giving orders, and three more fires were started, wood was collected, blankets were rolled. Men saw to their weapons, such as they were. After the fight the day before, they were shockingly low on arrows.
Nat Tyler spat. ‘We’re about done, Bill,’ he said, conversationally.
Bill scratched at the beard he’d grown. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We need food and a strong place.’
‘I can provide both, yesss. For an ally.’ The irk was suddenly right there. Mounted on a great stag with golden horns and golden hooves, it towered over them.
Redmede fell back a step. ‘You-’
‘My people came and fetched me, man. But I do not forget a ssservicsse. Never. Come feassst in my hallsss. It isss a true invitaissshun.’
Redmede tried to remember anything he’d heard about the fey folk and their ways, but it all fled his mind when he looked into the irk’s ancient eyes. So he turned to Tyler.
Tyler whistled soundlessly. ‘Free to come and go again, Fairy Knight?’
‘Yesss. My word upon it, mansss.’
Redmede looked at Tyler. ‘A lifetime of war has taught me never to trust anything more powerful than I am.’
Bess pushed forward and gave the irk a surprisingly good curtsey. ‘Tapio!’ she said. Her delight was evident.
Indeed, in the grey light of an autumn dawn, the irk looked like a hero of legend. He wore an elegant red surcoat, a belt of links of worked gold like wild roses, each petal enamelled, the centres of jewels. He had flowers – real ones – like a chaplet in his hair, and his enormous blue eyes filled his angelic face. Only the tips of his fangs and his ears and overlong fingers gave away his inhuman origin.
‘The fairy knight has offered us refuge,’ Tyler said to Bess as she rose from her curtsey.
‘We should take it then,’ she said. ‘My lord – will you succour our wounded men?’
‘It would be my dearessst pleasssure, lady.’ The irk bowed. It was riding a giant stag without a saddle or a bridle, and had a lance and a bow in extravagant sheaths hanging behind it across the animal’s withers.
Bess smiled.
‘Bill thinks it might be a trap,’ Tyler commented.
Redmede shrugged. ‘I don’t trust lords of any kind,’ he said.
‘You ssshould lisssten to your lady-love,’ sang the irk. ‘Often it isss the female who hass the greater wisssdom. My love isss often all that keepsss me from folly.’
Bess and Bill looked at each other and said ‘Lady-love?’ aloud in the same moment. Bess blushed. Redmede coughed. Tyler flushed and spat.
Bess grabbed at Bill’s arm. ‘You have no choice,’ she whispered fiercely.
Redmede pursed his lips, then bowed – as if doing so hurt him – to the irk lord. ‘My- My lord, if you will give us leave when we wish it, and succour our wounded, I would be-’ He took in a deep breath. ‘I would be in your debt.’
The irk’s mount took two silent steps towards them. ‘Fear isss the beginning of wisssdom, in the Wild,’ he said. ‘You would haf done better to sssave your dissstrussst for Thorn.’
Redmede nodded. ‘Aye,’ he admitted.
A day later, he felt as if he’d lived in the irk’s castle for half his life, and some of his brother’s stories – and other tales mothers told children – were well explained.
The irk’s hold was not like a castle of men.
A great finger of land curled out into the body of a huge lake, and all along the finger of stone and earth, huge trees stood like cathedral spires among pillars of rock that appeared at first to be natural. Along the forest floor, hundreds of wigwams stood like oversized bundles of brush gathered by a giant and dropped almost at random. The huts seemed crude from a distance – mere stacks of twigs – but they were cunningly woven with grass mats hanging inside the walls of brush that, on close examination, were grown a-purpose, so that each hut was a single plant, or bush, or tree. The innermost layer was made of heavy rugs of carefully felted wool from the great sheep that wandered free in the woods. Every cabin had a stone hearth – most of them sat on living rock. A few had chimneys like human buildings, and others had only a smoke hole. There were sheep and goats everywhere, and the forest floor of the whole peninsula alternated pine needles and cropped grass. Every building had a carefully wrought door matched to the shape of the structure – all were organic, and none perfectly straight. Indeed, in the whole of the hold, there was not a single line that was entirely straight.
All of them, save a very few, were full of irks, who lived in an indolent comfort that Bill envied. They seemed to tend the sheep and goats as a hobby rather than as work, and parties went out to gather rice or Wild honey to hunt or dance – he saw them come or go, and the products of their labour appeared – a bucket of honey, a dead doe, a basket of kale.