Black Spring

  The following day she seemed much improved and even managed to be pleasant to her husband. We judged that she was well enough for my mother to return to the Red House, but by evening her wits began to splinter again. For a short time she thought she was in her childhood bedroom at the Red House, waiting for Damek to come and play with her. I dealt with each incident as it arose, pressing down my fears. I suspect that I was protected by my ignorance; Lina’s mental disorder was not so different, after all, from some of her ravings when she was a young girl, and I treated her as I had then. Their difference in quality I put aside from my thoughts, just as I did not permit myself to believe that her illness might be fatal.

  You can guess the pattern of the following days. Our hopes rose and fell with each hour: at one moment, she would seem to be recovering, while the next would bring a relapse. Most of the care fell on me, in part from my own inclination, but also because I was the best at soothing her deliriums. We set up a bed in her chamber so I could sleep there, in case of any emergency during the night hours. Although she asked for Damek every day, she didn’t insist: it was enough for me to say that he would come later. I think even Lina knew she was too ill for such a meeting. Sometimes I glimpsed Damek outside when dark fell, keeping his vigil in the freezing wind, although no one else saw him. I didn’t attempt to speak to him, and he never accosted me. I assumed he had his own means of obtaining news.

  After that first day, Tibor scarcely spoke about his wife at all. He would make a brief formal visit in the morning and then leave the house to supervise the building of his outsheds, which he was anxious to finish before the snows came. Certainly, Lina gave him little incentive to stay with her; once, she had made so plain her disappointment that he was not Damek that he turned pale with anger and stalked out of the bedchamber. It seemed to me that, aside from the disturbances caused by Damek, he was repulsed that she appeared to be, after all, the witch that rumor had claimed. I confess a small part of me despised him for it and thought less meanly of Damek as a result.

  Tibor’s mother arrived two days after the birth, and my mother then returned to the Red House, although out of her anxiety for Lina, she visited almost every day. The presence of Mistress Alcahil meant an extra pair of hands in the household and cheered Tibor, which gave me one less person to worry about. Understandably, she was curt with Lina, even though her actions were always benign; I think word had reached her of Lina’s indiscretions. Once, after she heard Lina speaking of Damek, she went so far as to observe to me that it would be no bad thing if Lina died. She crossed herself as she said it and apologized after, but she was angry on behalf of her son, and I could not blame her for that. I was sorry, because I liked her and knew her to be a generous soul. It was neither her fault nor Tibor’s that they found themselves in their present distress.

  A week passed in this way, seeing neither an improvement nor decline in Lina’s health. Most of the time she was lucid, although she regarded her physical incapacity with impatience. Sometimes she would struggle out of bed, claiming she was well enough to go for a walk, only to find that she could barely reach the door without her knees buckling. Her lucidity was punctuated by periods of delirium during which she lost the sense of her surroundings, but these always passed swiftly. The doctor was concerned by her lack of improvement but counseled patience. I think he was puzzled, as against all expectations she had developed no fever and he could find little explanation for her mental distraction.

  As the days passed, my thoughts kept turning to the Wizard Ezra’s words to me on the morning of the birth. I couldn’t but wonder whether he had placed a curse on her. I said my thoughts to no one, but clearly my mother feared likewise. Without saying anything to me, she had placed fresh sprigs of rowan above all the windows as soon as she arrived in the house and sprinkled the thresholds with salt, and I saw her checking the cold iron that was routinely set over all Plateau doors, to ensure that a wizard could not enter without invitation. She also placed a silver teaspoon beneath Lina’s pillow, as silver is commonly supposed to be a means of warding off the evil eye. From my time at the palace, I knew that silver is in fact useless unless smelted by a wizard, but I felt strangely moved when I saw this humble piece of cutlery and left it there, as a talisman to hope.

  On Sunday, after a few days of clear skies, the snows started. When I opened the shutters, the house filled with a diffuse golden light, so dull it scarce illuminated anything, and I saw heavy yellowish clouds lowering over the plains. At noon the first flakes spiraled down, and by evening a cover of snow had turned the world white. It was a light fall, but the first of many to come. Mistress Alcahil had now to decide whether to return home to her village, a distance of some ten miles; if she did not leave soon, she would be forced to stay with us for the winter. I didn’t know whether I would prefer her to leave or stay. On the one hand, my duties in caring for Lina took up much of my time, and more help in the house was very welcome; on the other, since her arrival, I could not but notice that Tibor’s attitude to Lina had changed from confusion to hostility, a transformation I attributed as much to his mother as to Lina’s own behavior. Mistress Alcahil now regarded her son’s marriage as an unambiguous disaster.

  I still, perhaps foolishly, held out hope for the couple. I was troubled that neither Lina nor Tibor had shown the smallest interest in their daughter. Lina’s condition argued some excuse, but I urged Tibor to go down to the village to see Young Lina. I had made two visits myself and saw that she was a bonny babe, with a shock of black hair and dark, surprised eyes. I think I was the only one of that household to feel any motherly inclinations toward the poor little mite. I thought she was beautiful and hoped that the sight of his child would reignite Tibor’s affection for his wife. Perhaps fearing the same thing, Mistress Alcahil always found an excuse not to go.

  However, the coming snows forced the question. The following day dawned clear, and Mistress Alcahil decided to return home while she still could. I assessed the household staff and decided that if we employed a cook, there would be sufficient help for winter: all the autumn bottling and preserving and smoking had been completed, and our cellars and storehouses were well provisioned for the coming cold. Thus it was that Mistress Alcahil, myself, and Tibor found ourselves in her carriage to the village, to forward our various ambitions: we would look in on the babe (whom I was careful always to refer to as Tibor’s daughter); I would engage a cook, since I knew of a widow who would be glad of the work; and Mistress Alcahil would continue her journey home.

  Even Tibor’s mother was not proof against the charms of a newborn and despite herself dandled the babe and exclaimed over its likeness to its father. As I said, she was a generous woman, if soured by circumstance. To my disappointment, however, Tibor remained stolidly indifferent: he regarded the child almost with dislike and barely concealed his impatience to get away. We left the wet nurse’s house and walked along a small alley back to the carriage, which was waiting in the square. By bad chance, as we exited the alley, Damek and Tibor almost collided. Neither said a word to the other, merely stepping back in surprise, but the glance of hatred between the two fairly crackled the air. I don’t think Mistress Alcahil even noticed the encounter: she didn’t know Damek from Adam and was in any case already hurrying toward her carriage, exclaiming against the cold. Once the farewells had been made and the carriage rumbled off, Tibor sighed heavily.

  “Well, Annie,” he said to me with unaccustomed directness, “my life is a bad joke. My mother says that if I had any honor, I should kill my wife.” He stood in black abstraction, twisting his hands. “I am not sure I have that much honor,” he said at last. “How could I kill Lina, even knowing what she is? I pray every morning that she will be dead and save me the trouble. If she does not die, what then? Do I let that black-hearted thief take her away? Will that wizard curse me, for being married to a witch? What shall I do?”

  I was so taken aback that at first I had no idea how to answer him, yet he demanded an answer, as he
spoke from the fullness of his heart.

  “Mr. Tibor, I don’t know how to advise you,” I said. “But surely there has been enough death in this village already, without you adding to it.”

  “I know you are on Lina’s side,” he said. “But even you must acknowledge that she is a faithless whore. She has deceived me in every way, and I cannot forgive her. And yet I still think of her with a soft heart and wish that she might love me. My mother says she has bewitched me.”

  He looked so forlorn that I forgot myself and took his hand. “God save you, sir,” I said. “You have a good heart. Let’s have no more talk of killing! I’m sure things will work out for the best.”

  “God moves in mysterious ways, eh, Annie?” He squinted up into the sky. “I wonder what I’ve done, that I should be so punished.”

  Again I had no answer, and there was a short silence. “Well, there’s one comfort,” he said, and laughed bleakly. “And I can find that at the bottom of a glass.”

  He went off toward the tavern, and I followed him with my eyes, feeling sorry for the whole mess. In truth, I could see no way out either, although I could not hope as he did for Lina’s death. I began to wonder if it would not be best, after all, if Lina went away south with Damek. If Tibor would not kill her to save the honor of the Alcahils, his father might. And even should the Alcahils decide to spare her, there was the threat of the Wizard Ezra, whose ill-intentions I didn’t doubt and didn’t dare to guess. Yet Lina could not travel south in her present condition, even if she agreed to leave (which was doubtful), and in any case soon the roads would be impassable. Winter was on our heels, and I did not know how we would survive it.

  I made my errand, engaged the cook, and walked back to the manse with a heavy heart. When I arrived, I found that Lina was out of bed and, with Irli’s help, had bathed and dressed. She was seated on her window seat, looking down over the snow-clad path that led to the house. As I entered her room, she looked up and smiled cheerfully.

  “So, has that bitch gone at last?” she said.

  I demurred at her expression, and she laughed at me. “You know whom I mean, Anna. Don’t get all prim with me. I thought I should burst if that woman were here any longer. If looks could kill, I’d be dead a thousand times! I swear she has been all but pulling the iron down from the doors.”

  I didn’t answer, except to confirm that Mistress Alcahil had, indeed, left for her own house. “On her way, she and Mr. Tibor went to see your daughter,” I said pointedly. After my gloomy thoughts that morning, her mood was grating. “I wonder that you haven’t asked after the poor child.”

  “You’d tell me if she fared poorly,” said Lina. “How strange, to think I am a mother now! If it weren’t for how bad I’ve been feeling, I’d swear it was a dream.”

  “It’s not a dream, Lina, and it were well you woke up,” I said. “If you are feeling as well as you look today, you might give some thought to what you should do now. Your husband tells me he ought to kill you, since you and Damek have so smirched his family honor, and the Wizard Ezra is out for your blood, and Damek is stalking about Elbasa looking like murder. I swear, I do not know which way to turn.”

  “Kill me?” Lina stared at me with the purest astonishment. I could have slapped her. “How could Tibor think to kill me?”

  “If you don’t know, Mistress Lina, then I do not know how to tell you.”

  “You are in a bad mood, Anna!” She contemplated me for a moment and then turned back to watching the pathway. “Are you jealous?”

  “Jealous?” said I. “Jealous of what?”

  “I suppose you wish you had men fighting over you?”

  The pure cattiness of this remark took my breath away. I addressed the back of her head — I knew she could feel my gaze, although she would not turn to face me — and let her know that envy was the least of my complaints. I was weary to the bone. Not only did I have to attend to the running of the house; I had spent nearly all my waking hours nursing her, worried sick about her health, and on top of that had been dealing with Tibor and his mother and with Damek, not to mention the wizard. And this, I said, is the thanks I get for my trouble.

  I would have gone on, but Lina silenced me. Her voice was cool: she seemed not in the least agitated, and there was something in her posture that made the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  “Listen to me, Anna,” she said. “I am well. I am tired, but I think I am recovering. The birth was nothing to what I have suffered before. I feel clearer in my head today than I have for, oh, for months and months. Maybe for years. Since that first moment the pains started, I understood that my body has always been at war with itself, that I have always been at war with myself, but at last this morning I am at peace. And all these days I have been thinking. I am not a fool, whatever you think; I know perfectly well that bitch wants me dead. Tibor couldn’t kill me, even if that woman poisons him against me, but now that she is gone, perhaps he will think of me gently again.”

  “He says that you have betrayed him in every way and that he cannot forgive you!” I said.

  She made an impatient gesture, continuing her contemplation of the view outside her window. “Oh, that,” she said. “Of course he will forgive me.”

  I feared, rather than wished, that she was right: the complacency with which she spoke of her husband angered me. “But what about Damek?”

  “Damek will learn to respect me,” she said. “I have not had the strength to deal with him these past days, and I am glad he did not come, no matter how I long to see him! He speaks so easily of betrayal, he who abandoned me and left me alone for so many years! And he knows I am married in the sight of God, and he also knows that nothing I can do can betray the friendship between us.”

  I sighed for her folly and blindness. “I doubt that Damek will see it that way,” I said.

  “He will,” she said. There was a steel in her voice I had not heard before, not even when she was a young girl. “He will learn that I am not a pile of gold, to be won and held and used — for that is how he thinks of me, Anna. He has always wanted to own things! No one loves money more than Damek — Tibor’s just as bad, in his own way. I swear I am tired of men. Why can neither of them love me unless they can jingle me in their pockets? The way they both behave, they’re no better than that pig Masko.”

  I listened to her in mounting astonishment. “That is the way men are,” I stammered.

  “That is the way men are!” As she mocked me, I pictured her scowl. “And I suppose that is the way women are, too, and they become petty tyrants in their turn, like Mistress Alcahil, bullying their husbands and sons! And so we all chip each other to pieces, until there is nothing left save a pathetic pile of rubble, and that’s where the king puts his throne and lords it over all of us! Anna, sometimes you are so stupid. Who makes these laws that bend us out of our proper shapes? Why should men be like that? Why should I? I won’t be beholden to those laws anymore. I swear before God that from now on I will be myself, and myself only.”

  She turned to face me, and I felt an unreasoning fear thrill through me, like a flood of icy water through my veins. Her eyes were blazing, and I thought that her skin was shining, so that the shadows fled the room. She laughed when she saw the expression on my face.

  “Yes, Anna, I am a witch. At last I understand! All these years I have been so afraid of myself, and why? Because everyone wants me to be afraid, because they cannot face the pettiness in their own hearts. They have crippled me and forced me into a vise, so I am all bent over like a blasted thornbush. But there is nothing to be afraid of. I will stand up straight. I will fear no longer!”

  I stared at her, not knowing what I thought, and yet despite my own fright, I cannot deny that part of me delighted to hear her say such things. It was like standing in a keen breeze that blew away cobwebs from all the secret corners of my mind. “But you can’t stay on the Plateau, then,” I said at last. “What of the Wizard Ezra?”

  “He cannot hurt me,” she sai
d. “He fears me. And rightly too. He always knew I was more powerful than him. That’s why he took away my powers, and why he doesn’t want me to have them back.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said dubiously. I reflected that if she lived openly as a witch, it wouldn’t be just Ezra out for her blood: the entire wizarding tribe would declare war on her, and the king himself would draw up her death warrant. “It would be well to be cautious, all the same.”

  “Of course I’m right.” She laughed and the light inside her faded, so that she seemed shrunken, an ordinary woman sitting in the afternoon dimness. “And never fear: I will be cautious. I just wish I were not so tired. But that will pass, as everything does. And then I will live my life, as I choose.”

  In that moment, such was her certainty, I almost believed her.

  While these events were occupying my mind to the exclusion of almost everything else, the villagers were turning their attention to the Red House. Perhaps they felt that the dramas at the manse were, at least temporarily, at a pause and could be safely left to be gossiped about another day. Also, I was careful not to feed the rumors, protecting my mistress as best I could from calumny, and the main actors had no incentive to talk freely about their private business. Beyond malicious speculation — of which, admittedly, there was no shortage — there was not much profit to be had from the tangled affairs of Lina, Tibor, and Damek. Such was not the case with Masko, whose bullying of his servants meant that he inspired no loyalty and who was, to say the least, indiscreet in his words and acts. As a result, his most private affairs were discussed over every kitchen hearth in the village.

  His chronic ill-health was common knowledge, and I was not the first to connect it with Lina’s youthful curse (which was also widely known and had been given new currency by her recent change). Much hilarity was had at Masko’s expense when one of his visiting women let slip that he was impotent, and the intimate nature of his boils was a standard joke. I had more reason to dislike Masko than most, but I could not hear these obscene speculations without discomfort and sometimes found myself feeling almost sorry for him. Even before winter came, he was almost completely alone: his gaming friends deserted him in his illness, and my mother and Kush were, in the end, the only servants who remained in his employ.