answer for them since High King Arthur did not. The land and the people needed her and she must answer that need.
“I’ll try,” she whispered, and Mag touched her lightly on the arm.
“That’s my good and brave girl,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t fail us.” Something on Mag’s side of the fire rustled, and she handed Elfrida a folded leaf full of dried herbs.
They weren’t what the ignorant thought, herbs to bring visions. The visions came when Elfrida asked for them—these were to strengthen and guard her while her spirit rode the night winds, in search of answers. Foxglove to strengthen her heart, moly to shield her soul, a dozen others, a scant pinch of each. Obediently, she placed them under her tongue, and while Mag chanted the names of the Goddess, Elfrida closed her eyes, and released her all- too-fragile hold on her body.
The convent garden was sodden, the ground turning to mush, and unless someone did something about it, there would be nothing to eat this summer but what the tithes brought and the King’s Grace granted them. Outside the convent walls, the fields were just as sodden; so, as the Mother Superior said, “A tithe of nothing is still nothing, and we must prepare to feed ourselves.” Leonie sighed, and leaned a little harder on the spade, being careful where she put each spadeful of earth. Behind the spade, the drainage trench she was digging between each row of drooping pea-seedlings filled with water. Hopefully, this would be enough to keep them from rotting. Hopefully, there would be enough to share. Already the eyes of the children stared at her from faces pinched and hungry when they came to the convent for Mass, and she hid the bread that was half her meal to give to them.
Her gown was as sodden as the ground; cold and heavy with water, and only the fact that it was made of good wool kept it from chilling her. Her bare feet, ankle-deep in mud, felt like blocks of stone, they were so cold. She had kirtled her gown high to keep the hem from getting muddied, but that only let the wind get at her legs. Her hair was so soaked that she had not even bothered with the linen veil of a novice; it would only have flapped around without protecting her head and neck any. Her hands hurt; she wasn’t used to this.
The other novices, gently born and not, were desperately doing the same in other parts of the garden. Those that could, rather; some of the gently-born were too ill to come out into the soaking, cold rain. The sisters, as many as were able, were outside the walls, helping a few of the local peasants dig a larger ditch down to the swollen stream. The trenches in the convent garden would lead to it—and so would the trenches being dug in the peasants’ gardens, on the other side of the high stone wall.
“We must work together,” Mother Superior had said firmly, and so here they were, knight’s daughter and villien’s son, robes and tunics kirtled up above the knee, wielding shovels with a will. Leonie had never thought to see it.
But the threat of hunger made strange bedfellows. Already the convent had turned out to help the villagers trench their kitchen gardens. Leonie wondered what the village folk would do about the fields too large to trench, or fields of hay? It would be a cold summer, and a lean winter.
What had gone wrong with the land? It was said that the weather had been unseasonable—and miserable —all over the kingdom. Nor was the weather all that had gone wrong; it was said there was quarreling at High King Arthur’s court; that the knights were moved to fighting for its own sake, and had brought their leman openly to many court gatherings, to the shame of the ladies. It was said that the Queen herself—
But Leonie did not want to hear such things, or even think of them. It was all of a piece, anyway; knights fighting among themselves, killing frosts and rain that wouldn’t end, the threat of war at the borders, raiders and bandits within, and starvation and plague hovering over all.
Something was deeply, terribly wrong.
She considered that, as she dug her little trenches, as she returned to the convent to wash her dirty hands and feet and change into a drier gown, as she nibbled her meager supper, trying to make it last, and as she went in to Vespers with the rest.
Something was terribly, deeply wrong.
When Mother Superior approached her after Vespers, she somehow knew that her feeling of
“Leonie,” Mother Superior said, once the other novices had filed away, back to their beds, “when your family sent you here, they told me it was because you had visions.”
Leonie ducked her head and stared at her sandals. “Yes, Mother Magdalene.”
“And I asked you not to talk about those visions in any way,” the nun persisted. “Not to any of the other novices, not to any of the sister, not to Father Peregrine.”
“Yes, Mother Magdalene—I mean, no Mother Magdalene—” Leonie looked up, flushing with anger. “I mean, I haven’t—”
She knew why the nun had ordered her to keep silence on the subject; she’d heard the lecture to her parents through the door. The Mother Superior didn’t believe in Leonie’s visions—or rather, she was not convinced that they were really visions. “This could simply be a young woman’s hysteria,” she’d said sternly, “or an attempt to get attention. If the former, the peace of the convent and the meditation and prayer will cure her quickly enough—if the latter, well, she’ll lose such notions of self-importance when she has no one to prate to.”
“I know you haven’t, child,” Mother Magdalene said wearily, and Leonie saw how the nun’s hands were blistered from the spade she herself had wielded today, how her knuckles were swollen, and her cheekbones cast into a prominence that had nothing to do with the dim lighting in the chapel. “I wanted to know if you still have them.”
“Sometimes,” Leonie said hesitantly. “That was how—I mean, that was why I woke last winter, when Sister Maria was elf-shot—”
“Sister Maria was not elf-shot,” Mother Magdalene said automatically. “Elves could do no harm to one who trusts in God. It was simply something that happens to the very old, now and again, it is a kind of sudden brain- fever. But that isn’t the point. You’re still having the visions—but can you still see things that you want to see?”
“Sometimes,” Leonie said cautiously. “If God and the Blessed Virgin permit.”
“Well, if God is ever going to permit it, I suspect He’d do so during Holy Week,” Mother Magdalene sighed. “Leonie, I am going to ask you a favor. I’d like you to make a vigil tonight.”
