VIII. Innes
Waldroup was snoring in the brewster’s, completely unaware that Thomas had stolen out the back, through the barn, and between the buildings. He strode swiftly across the high street, up the hill, and out of the town. All he wanted was to see his sister and to know she was safe—at least that was his rationale for sneaking off on his own.
Innes had never been the least attracted to Baldie. Of that much Thomas was certain. He knew of no discussion between his parents on the subject of her marrying into the MacGillean clan, either, though admittedly they might have had discussions where he wasn’t present, in body or in mind. There could have been plans to marry her to one of the older MacGillean boys. The union would have been considered a good one for both families, not a step up but certainly a doubling of holdings, of prominence. In truth he—the idiot son whom everyone dismissed—knew nothing of that, did he? It wasn’t as if his opinion would have been solicited. Nobody had ever planned to marry him off to anybody. Even the Church wouldn’t have him. Still, his parents had no reservations speaking of that in front of him; why would they not have spoken of such a profitable union? But Innes? Innes had been quite obsessed with another boy entirely.
He had to find out the truth.
The home of clan MacGillean, northwest of the town, was a square stone keep on a motte built inside a rectangular palisade wall with towers at the corners and an entrance that was a single large gate with a drawbridge over an enclosing ditch. To his knowledge, the bridge had never been raised. As a child in his brother’s company, he had spent days and nights inside the walls and in the keep. It was the first stone keep he’d ever seen—every other castle he knew had keeps made of wood. It had recesses in its walls with holes above them, so that fires could be lit in every room, not just in the center of the great hall. As a result of all the burning for warmth, he smelled the castle long before he reached it.
Baldie and Onchu had shown him secret entrances in various rooms and led him along subterranean passages and into chambers, sometimes to see if they could lose him, because such dark mysteries were what boys invariably sought out. Once, the two of them had locked Thomas in a dark cell deep below the tower (there were three), but when he didn’t scream or cry, they’d let him out. It was useless trying to frighten someone without enough sense to know they ought to be scared.
An escape tunnel led under the palisade and ditch to a small mound overgrown with saxifrage east of the house; only he, his brother, and Baldie had seemingly ever set foot in it. No one had ever attacked the MacGilleans; no one walked the ramparts at night. No one used the tunnel. He saw no reason to claw his way in through it now. Instead, he crept through the gate, then pressed to the shadows of the palisade, and stood awhile to observe the yard. The stables and byre were at the far end of it, against the north wall. Not far from there stood a hall, workshops, and barracks. Close by stood a kitchen hut, and beside it the well where, presumably, Baldie’s father had fallen in.
Smoke drifted out the holes in most of the roofs. The moonlit yard itself lay abandoned, still; no one appeared to be walking the parapet or manning any of the towers.
Shutters and sheets of parchment covered the windows in the small buildings and those of the keep. It was a drafty old keep, colder than any of the houses in the town if the fires weren’t tended, even though its walls were almost as thick as the abbey’s. He ran across the yard, then dashed up the steps of the motte. At the top he turned and watched the walls and yard. Nothing stirred.
The main door was not locked, but it groaned and shuddered at his touch. It had always been creaky. He pressed it open only enough to let him slide through. He stood still again, listening for footsteps, for any sound that he had alerted someone to his presence. They might think a wind had pushed at the door, or perhaps some ghost was creeping about. How many people would be in the keep as opposed to the other, warmer buildings across the yard?
He hurried up the first flight of steps, which led to a gallery above the empty, uninviting ground floor. The entrance had a trapdoor that could be dropped and bolted in an attack. The gallery contained windows overlooking the entrance that Baldie claimed were for shooting down at any enemy that made it through the doors. Beyond the gallery stood the great hall.
It was dark, all torches extinguished; the low fire still burned in the shallow hearth, but its heat was being drawn out through the hole above it. Shadows danced like goblins over the walls and hangings. Someone had tended to that fire sometime within the last hour, but he saw no sign of them. He crept into the smoky hall.
Years earlier, Onchu and Baldie had picked him up and tried to stuff him up into the hole that overhung it. But the exhaust holes were hardly more than slits, and he’d hung from one of them instead, perfectly content to be smeared with grease and soot, again frustrating his tormenters. Now he crossed to the projecting slab of stone and crouched to warm his hands over the low flames. He could see his breath in the air. He recollected the layout of the other, chambered floor above.
Warmed, he rose again, ready to move, when there came a pounding at the door below. Fast as he could he scampered across the room, past a table that could easily seat a dozen, and behind a large decaying tapestry that hid one of the secret passage entrances. He had just ducked out of sight when, overhead, footsteps thudded across the beams. Someone spoke down below. Apparently a servant had been sleeping there. Somehow Thomas had missed him.
He knelt, and squinted through a section of the tapestry all but devoured by moths; the remaining threads made it like observing activity through a dense screen.
Shortly, the servant ushered someone up across the gallery and into the hall. Cautiously, Thomas drew the edge of the tapestry aside.
It was the alderman, Stroud.
“Thank you,” the alderman said to the servant. “I shall wait here for your master.”
The servant had hardly taken a step to go fetch him when Baldie appeared. He was fully dressed and wearing a heavy robe against the chill. Given the footsteps above and how quickly he’d arrived, it did not seem he had been sleeping.
The servant bowed before him and then hurried to the hearth, tossing two more logs onto the fire. Thomas drew farther back behind the tapestry, almost flat against the wall so that no hint of him would be visible.
The servant began poking at the crackling logs, and the flames jumped. The room grew brighter. Baldie called out, “Leave us!” The servant laid down the poker and scurried away like someone who’d been kicked before for not moving fast enough. Baldie’s voice was that same raw croak as at the abbey.
He and the alderman crossed to the long dining table and sat down at one corner. The alderman said, “Two men are in the town, masons they claim to be, one an apprentice who seems to know of you and Innes in a way that concerns me. He is perhaps fifteen. Dark-haired, lightly bearded. I’m told he reacted strongly to your names.”
“You think it’s he?”
“It is just possible, though he wore his cap all the while and never babbled nor suffered a fit. By description he sounds too steady and too young for him, but we cannot be sure. And you mentioned there was someone among the laborers at the abbey.”
“Memory too vague to offer proof. More a whiff than a recognition. How does yours come to know our Innes?” asked Baldie. “When might she have made a mason’s acquaintance?”
“It’s claimed he encountered her last summer upon a path to the abbey and was smitten by her beauty. Perhaps he walked through the town and down to the river? No one would have noticed.”
Baldie shook his head. “I think it improbable he could have met her. We’d bound her to us before summer—before even we dispatched the last MacGillean brother.”
“But she did pass from here to her family home on occasion. She did travel through Ercildoun.”
“Twice, but since the arrival of the changeling, the glamouring, she’s remained spellbound to her chamber. No, I think we do not believe this story as it’s being presented.”
“I thought as much, too, Elgadorn.”
“So it must be he, else he’s a puppeteer.”
“If not one of these cutters, might he have sent them to test our vigilance? It seems—”
Baldie shook his head. “You’d give him the wits for subterfuge. He’s hardly any wits at all. The Balthair knew him very well.”
The alderman made a gesture of bewilderment. “Then, we are confounded. A boy too young to be him, asking after your wife, probing. Mayhap someone from this household has said something—one of those you dismissed? And, yes, we know you dismissed them early, but still, if even one gleaned some hint of the changeling before we placed the nurse . . . Thinks me we’ve no choice but to meet these two before they return to the abbey and share their story further.” He made a gripping gesture with his fists. “We must twist the truth from them.”
Baldie considered a moment before asking, “Where and when?”
“The bowyer says they intend to go south tomorrow. And here’s an irony—it’s your bow they’re collecting.”
Baldie smirked lopsidedly, as if one side of his mouth was not working. “We believe the Balthair wants it back. Clearly, they’re thieves.”
“Clearly. They’ll certainly take the corpse road across the river to the old abbey ruin. They brought nothing with them—no provisions or travelers’ packs—so they must be returning to the new abbey site. They’ll have to pass our spot.”
“We shall bring reinforcements,” said Baldie. “Whatever their story, well, it won’t matter once they’re on the other side. Just two travelers waylaid by the road. Who will even notice? Come spring, they’ll be forgot.”
The alderman closed his eyes as if imagining it. Then the two of them rose and left the hall.
A minute later, the rusty groans and thunder of the main door closing below echoed up the circling stairwell. Thomas waited behind the tapestry until Baldie had walked past the hall again and up the stone steps to the third floor. The servant did not reappear to stoke the fire, which burned brightly now in the empty, smoky room, giving off some measure of heat. Overhead, footsteps clumped about once more, and then there was silence.
For a moment he relived the experience of creeping up the hidden passage to the corridors of the upper floor and going from chamber to chamber in search of his brother and Baldie. Directly overhead was the patriarch’s dwelling, a large room comprising great beams and uprights and a huge curtained bed. His wife maintained a separate, smaller chamber—or rather, she had—across the hall. He knew the secret way up, through the wall, but all would be pitch black in the passage and he had no torch to guide him. Besides, it would dump him in the patriarch’s chamber with Baldie. That was not where he wanted to go.
Thomas stole out from the tapestry and across the gallery. He watched down below for any sign of the servant, but there was no one. He guessed the servant might have exited with the alderman. He climbed the stone steps fast, bent low, slowing as he reached the second floor, his eyes at the level of the narrow corridor floor. The doors hung closed on each side.
He stepped into the corridor, waited, then crept along it until he arrived at the point where the patriarch’s door was to his left, the uxorial chamber to his right. There was nothing for it. If Innes was spellbound to her room as Baldie had described, then she must be in there and not with her husband.
Pressed to the door, he tried to hear over the roar of his own heartbeat in his ears. Nothing. If she screamed or was possessed, then in a moment he would be running for his life. But he had to know.
Cautiously, he pushed down the handle of the door and eased it open. Firelight played upon the walls of the room as it had the great hall, though in a far smaller, shallower fire pit. The narrow windows were covered in parchment, but the smoke was drawn out through them, leaving the upper part of the room thick with it, like a fog.
Although the alderman had mentioned a nurse, he hadn’t counted upon her sleeping at the foot of the bed.
Was it Innes under the bedclothes and furs? It must be. Still—this nurse was an unanticipated problem, surely another enemy.
He cast about for something to subdue her. He had brought nothing, no weapon.
A small log stood upright beside the little hearth, ready to be added to the fire if needed. He crept to it and took it with him to the bed. At the foot, he stood, hefting the log, but unable to strike the sleeping servant, a thick-bodied girl of perhaps twenty. She might have been the second woman in the group that visited the abbey—he couldn’t be sure. What sort of misplaced chivalry kept him from striking this creature? He did not know, and had no time to consider it. He leaned in close and whispered to the nurse.
Before she was entirely conscious, she sat straight up, saying “M’lady?” and Thomas clubbed her with the log. She fell against the footboard and slid back into her own small berth. One arm dangled out of the bed, and he gingerly laid it back across her, then set down the log.
When he turned, his sister was sitting up and staring wide-eyed. She hadn’t screamed yet, but she looked about to.
“Innes,” he said. He moved slowly, unthreateningly along the bed, and had the presence of mind now to remove his cap. His shaggy dark hair spilled out around his face. He reached toward her. “Sweet sister.”
He knew his voice was changing, deepening, but she replied with “Thomas?” A question, yet she seemed to know—her expression wondrous—and he hurried to embrace her then and let her see his face clearly.
She reached out, and he took one of her thin hands, pressed it to his lips, looked into her darkly sunken eyes. The smell off her was unwashed and sickly. Her cheeks that had been full and flushed were tight upon her bones and waxy pale. Her dark, matted hair hung lank. It was as if she were being kept in a pigsty.
Innes studied him just as intently, no doubt seeking the signs of her brother, who ought to be older than she, not to mention simple-minded, unlikely to sneak successfully into any room or move with any grace or skill. Yet in the end she broke into a wide smile and said, “It is you, isn’t it? Oh, my dear Tommy.” She clutched him to her and he embraced her. His fingers counted her ribs. “Where have you been? Is Onchu alive, too?”
He sat upon the fur. “He’s been taken.”
“Taken?” Her expression shifted in confusion. “Then he is with God?”
“No. The elven took him while he was fishing.”
Her expression flowed then from doubt to judgment: He was still her mad brother, who spoke in riddles that rarely made sense. He could not let her settle upon that conclusion.
“I know that Baldie claims he saw us drowned, but it’s not true. He was the one who drowned; I saw him, Innes. Onchu was taken by the elves’ queen. When I tried to chase them—I would have brought him back!—something happened to me, and three years passed me by as if I didn’t exist. I can’t explain it.”
“Balthair drowned?”
He nodded furiously. “I know how it sounds. Men in Ercildoun told me how he came back alone with his story of both of us dead.” Her glimmering gaze held his, rapt. “I’m not a ghost, Innes. And I didn’t drown Onchu.”
“But how is—how is he alive, then?” She gestured at the door.
“I don’t know. But he is in league with Alderman Stroud, who helps the elven select their victims. He was on hand the day they took Onchu. I saw him plain.”
She looked away from him then, her brows drawn together. “The alderman . . . He took an interest in the family after—after you and Onchu were gone. He consoled Mother, gave her a potion to calm her. He’s been advising Father ever since. It was he who made this union with Balthair. And they meet often, the two of them. I hear them.”
“They’ve met just now below. The alderman intends to take me on the road this morning, as he did Onchu. You mustn’t tell Baldie that I was here.”
“But Thomas, Mother and Father need to know you’re alive!”
He shook his head. “No. You can’t—” he began, but lightning shot through his head and he pitched against her. Heard his own voice recite: “Who am I, brings calamity like weather? Best you don’t know me, else drown in the torrent, your blood or theirs.”
In the spangled darkness that followed, the pressure retreated slowly, until he became aware of his body again. The words stayed with him for once. It was himself he’d described, he was sure. He brought calamity: on Alpin, on Innes if anyone knew he’d been here, on the masons at the abbey if the alderman thought for a moment he’d shared any stories with them. He smelled Innes in the linens pressed to his face. Her hand was stroking his head and she was shush-shushing him as if he was her child.
He pushed up onto his elbows. Had he shouted the words? He twisted about to watch the door, but nobody opened it, and Innes said, “It’s all right, Tommy.”
“No, it’s not. I imperil everyone here. If Baldie learns you’ve spoken with me . . . You can’t tell him. Nor Father and Mother, not yet. It would put you all at risk now.”
She dropped her fingers from his hair. “Sweet brother.”
The servant at the foot of the bed moaned vaguely.
“I need to be gone. I don’t want to hit her again.”
Innes held his forearm tightly in her small and bony hand. “When will I see you next, then?”
“Let’s learn first what the alderman has in mind for me.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead, whispered in her ear, “I’m so very sorry for the loss of your child, but promise me you won’t die because of it. Live to make another.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She said, “But what are you saying? He’s not lost. He’s there, Thomas.” She pointed to a cradle across the room past the nurse’s bed. “Little Dougal.”
He rose and looked at her, at the cradle, at the nurse, who did not stir. Uneasily, he crossed the room.
“Is he sleeping?” Innes called softly. “He’s so good and never cries at night.”
Thomas bent over the cradle. In the firelight he saw it quite clearly and it saw him as well. The changeling.
He gasped and drew back.
One green-black creeper emerged from the misshapen bundle of sticks and twigs, and slid up over the edge of the cradle as if to reach him. The eyes were holes between the woven twigs.
The nurse groaned and her head lolled.
Thomas backed away from the cradle, turned to his sister.
Spellbound to her chamber. Was it the room itself, glamoured for her? She had no way to know and could not tell him. No doubt Baldie had put it about that her baby had withered and died, and that she was mad in her grief. People would give a madwoman a wide berth. But his parents? How were they kept away?
If the room was glamoured for anyone who entered . . . then how was it that he saw true? He could not fathom the magic, but knew without doubt that the thing would shortly alert the elven servant when she came to her senses, and Baldie as well.
He could not remain another moment. “I will come back,” he told Innes. “I promise.”
He ran to the door. Innes reached for him, called to him. He shushed her and opened her door. For an instant the flames in the hearth fluttered, painting her drawn, wet face fearfully against the darkness. He took with him that final image of her and of the vegetative thing beyond her rising up out of its crib.
Something thumped in the patriarch’s chamber, and he flew down the corridor, the many steps, and out the ancient door. If anyone saw him scurry across the yard and set off at a dead run for the dark distant myth of Ercildoun, they didn’t raise an alarm or race after him. His sister wasn’t mad, but she would be if Baldie and Stroud had their way. Whereas, he, a ghost, could do nothing here but escape.