II. The Teind
The riders easily outdistanced him, but the moist soil made their tracks easy to follow—three-toed hoofprints belonging to no horse he’d ever seen. It seemed reckless, as though the lady and her knights did not care if anyone saw or followed after them.
He’d thought it was the new abbey under construction toward which they headed; but once they’d forded the Tweed, they diverted east, and east was the graveyard and Old Melrose, as people were already calling it—the six-hundred-year-old abbey ruin where the Cistercians used to live. It was a holy site and had been one for a long long time, before there were even monks. Who had said that? Someone speaking to his father, once upon a time when he was younger, because people would say anything in front of him, he didn’t matter. But look how he did now!
He jumped with excitement as he ran along the path. Look how he was able to sort things that he’d seen and heard!
There was a war in the south—a king named Stephen and a queen named Matilda, but they weren’t married to each other. Didn’t like each other. How was that important to know? He could not remember, if ever he’d known, couldn’t even be sure that the war was something current or yet to come.
Some things remained jumbled and obscure after all.
Up ahead on a bend of the river and near the bridge to Ercildoun lay the ruins of Old Melrose. He would be upon it soon.
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.