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
