Jorg keeps moving, fending off trees with his hands, colliding with whatever’s in his way. He says he’s been poisoned.
“I can’t clean them,” he said. And he showed me his hands. It looks as though he’s rubbed the skin off.
I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I’m cracked through and filled with poison.”
He scares his men and he scares me too. Of all of us I am the one his eyes avoid the most. His eyes are red with crying but he doesn’t cry now, just a kind of dry hacking sob.
My great aunt got a madness in her. Great Aunt Lucin. She must have been sixty, a small woman, plump, we all loved her. And one day she threw boiling water over her handmaid. She threw the water and then went wild, spouting nursery rhymes and biting herself. Father’s surgeon sent her to Thar. He said there was an alchemist there whose potions might cure her. And failing the potions, he had other methods. The surgeon said that this man, Luntar, could take out pieces of a person’s mind until what remained was healthy.
My great aunt Lucin came back in a carriage two months later. She smiled and sang and could talk about the weather. She wasn’t my great aunt Lucin any more but she seemed nice enough, and she didn’t scald any more maids.
I don’t want that for Jorg.
Jorg has told his men to kill me, and some of them seem ready to do it. Rike looks keen. But Sir Makin has said Jorg doesn’t know his mind and they are to leave me alone.
Jorg is saying he needs to kill Sareth too. He says it’s a kindness. He’s insistent. Kent and Makin had to wrestle him to the floor to stop him running back to the castle to do it. Now he’s lying in the dirt watching me. He keeps telling me what they do to men in his father’s dungeons. It can’t be true, any of it. It makes me sick to hear. I can taste vomit at the back of my throat.
Jorg soiled himself. Half the time he seems to see something other than the forest about us. He watches nothing, stares with great intent, then screams, or laughs without warning.
He’s been talking about our baby. I still call it ours. It feels better than saying it was Friar Glen who violated me. He’s been saying he killed it, even though it’s me that carries that sin, me that will burn for it. He says he killed the baby with his own hands. And now he’s crying. He still has tears then. He’s bawling, snot and forest dirt stuck to his face.
“I held him, Katherine, a soft baby. So small. Innocent. My hands remember his shape.”
I can’t hear him speak of this.
I have told Sir Makin about Luntar and how to reach Thar.
This is what Jorg said when they dragged him away and tied him to his horse:
“We’re not memories, Katherine, we’re dreams. All of us. Each part of us a dream, a nightmare of blood and vomit and boredom and fear. And when we wake up-we die.”
When they led his horse off, he shouted at me, but it seemed more lucid than what he said before.
“Sageous has poisoned us both, Katherine. With dreams. He puts his hands into our heads and pulls the strings that make us dance, and we dance. None of it was true. None of it.”
I walked across the fields to the Roma Road and followed it toward the Tall Castle until soldiers found me and escorted me back. I’ll say back. I won’t say home.
As I walked, Jorg’s words ran through my head, again and again, as if some of his madness had got inside me. I kept thinking of the dreams I’ve been having. It seems to me I’ve heard Sageous called the dream-witch before, but somehow that fact faded away, became unimportant. It wasn’t that I forgot it, but I stopped seeing it. Just as I stopped seeing that knife I took to stab Jorg with.
I’m seeing it now.
The heathen has been in my head. I know it. He’s been writing stories there, on the inside of my skull, on the backs of my eyes, like he’s written on his skin. I will need to think on this. To unravel it. Tonight I am going to dream myself a fortress and sleep within its walls. And woe betide anyone that comes looking for me there.
The soldiers brought me in through the Roma Gate into the Low City, across the Bridge of Change, the river running red with sunrise. I knew something awful had happened. All of Crath City held quiet as if some terrible secret were spreading through the alleys like poison in veins. Shutters-opened for the dawn-closed as we passed.
Up in the Tall Castle the dull tone of a bell rang out over and over. The iron bell on the roof tower. I’ve been up to see it, but it’s never rung. I knew it had to be that one though-no other bell could make such a harsh, flat toll. And in answer a single deep voice from Our Lady.
I asked the soldiers but they would say nothing, wouldn’t even guess. I didn’t recognize the men, only their colours, not castle guards but army units drafted in for the search.
“Has he killed his father?” I asked them. “Has he killed him?”
“We’ve been hunting for you all night, my lady. We’ve heard nothing from the castle.” The sergeant bowed his head and pulled off his helm. He was older than I had imagined, tired, swaying in his saddle. “Best let the news wait to tell itself.”
A cold certainty gripped me. Jorg had killed Sareth. Throttled her for taking his mother’s place at Olidan’s side. I knew they would take me to her body, cold and white, stretched out in the tomb vaults where the Ancraths lie. I bit my lips and said nothing, only let the horses walk away the distance that kept me from knowing.
We came through the Triple Gate, clattering, hooves on stone, grooms on hand to take the reins and help me dismount as if I were some old woman. The iron bell tolled all the while, a noise to make your head ache and jaws clench.
In the courtyard someone had lit a myrrh stick, a thick wand of it smoking in a torch sconce by the windlass. If sorrow had a scent it would be this. We burn them in Scorron too, for the dead.
From the window arch high above the chapel balcony, between the pulses of the bell, I heard keening. A woman’s voice. My sister had never made such cries before, but still I knew her, and the fear that had sunk its teeth into me back at the Roma Gate now twisted cold in my gut. The sounds of hurt, as raw and open as any wound, could not be for Olidan.
44
Four years earlier
I went to see my grandmother in her chambers. Uncle Robert had warned me that she wore her years less well than Grandfather.
“She’s not the woman she was,” he told me. “But she has her moments.”
I nodded and turned to go. He caught my shoulder. “Be gentle with my mother,” he said.
Even now they thought me a monster. Once I’d sought to build a legend, to set fear among those who might stand against me. Now I dragged those stories behind me into my mother’s home.
The maid showed me in and steered me to a comfortable chair opposite the one Grandmother occupied.
Of all of them, my grandmother had the most of Mother in her. Something in the lines of her cheekbones and the shape of her skull. She sat hunched with a blanket over her knees despite the heat of the day. She looked smaller than I remembered, and not just because I was no longer a child. It seemed she had closed on herself after her daughter’s death, as if to present a smaller target to a world grown hostile.
“I remember you as a little boy-the man before me I don’t know at all,” she said. Her eyes moved across me, seeking something familiar.
“When I see my reflection I feel the same thing myself, Grandmother.” And the box at my hip, in a velvet pocket now, felt too heavy to carry. I don’t know me at all.
We sat in silence for a long minute.
“I tried to save her.” I would have said more but words wouldn’t come.
“I know, Jorg.”
The distance between us fell away then, and we spoke of years past, of times when we were both happier, and I had my window onto the world that I’d forgotten, and it was good.
And by and by when I sat beside her feet, knees drawn to my chest, hand clasping wrist before them, that old woman sang the songs my mother had played long ago, as she had played them in the music room of the Tall
