“A fox,” John said, the word catching in his throat.
“A fox. Our symbol. With the athame … power over life and death.” She laughed quietly, which interfered with trying to breathe. “Except now … Now it’s death for me.”
“Mother, please—”
“You will have the power of life and death, John. You will choose. They have … betrayed me … They think we’re … small and weak and helpless … easy to kill … Are we easy to kill, John?”
“No,” he whispered.
“No. The athame will let you … decide … They are going to take it away, but you will get it back.”
“How will—”
“I will make them agree … bargain … Briac. Briac Kincaid. Say the name.”
“Briac Kincaid,” he said softly.
“He was with others just now, so I think there will be … witnesses. I’ll make him promise … educate you … if you ask. Once you take your oath, he must tell you … anything you want to know. Anything, John. But you must take your oath. And be strong enough to get it back.”
“What is my oath?”
“It will make sense. The book … I know more than they do … Both.” She was smiling. “As precious as the dagger in the right hands. I will have to give him this book now, but you must find it again, and also … We’ve written … A thousand years … I am so close …”
She had to stop. He could see her breathing, but it didn’t seem to be doing her any good. The puddle of blood was getting wider. He wondered how much blood one body could hold. Finally she continued, “Your oath and our athame, the one with the fox. Promise me …”
“I promise,” he said.
“Say it again, John.”
“I promise. My oath and our athame, the one with the fox.” His tears were coming freely now. He could hear them hitting the wood beneath him.
She let the athame settle on the floor next to her. Her chest was rising and falling quickly. “You mustn’t be scared to act.… Be willing to kill.…”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s necessary … to live … for money sometimes … as I did to get us Traveler … Those are small deaths … There will be bigger deaths … to repay them for this …” She gestured at the wide pool of blood spreading around her. “Do what has to be done. At no man’s mercy, do you understand?”
“Yes.” His voice was small.
“Our house will rise again, and the others will fall … as they should have done long ago.” Her voice was getting quieter. It was only a whisper as she said, “Close your eyes.”
“Can’t you go to hospital—”
A vibration started in the room, low and penetrating. John could feel it in his stomach.
“Coming now …” Catherine said, her own eyes closing. “No matter what you see … don’t make a sound. Tell Maggie what happened …” She trailed off, and it looked to John like she had fallen asleep. Then she stirred. “John, promise me. Not a sound.”
“I promise.” He whispered the words.
Catherine smiled.
John wiped his eyes with his hand, and he saw in the dim light coming through the slots that his sleeve was now red. His mother’s blood must be caked on his cheek.
The vibration grew steadily, filling the space around him. Then, from nowhere, there were voices. Several pairs of feet walked across the living room floor, though the front door had not opened. The vibration faded, allowing him to hear the voices of two men. One was strange and slow, the other rough and quick. He could not see their faces, but one stopped between the bench and Catherine, and John was treated to a view of the man’s boots—thick, old leather with heavy soles and metal tips. They were, he thought, the boots of a killer.
The other man’s legs and feet were across the room, hard for John to see. But there was a third pair of shoes nearby, much smaller, made of an old-fashioned soft leather. These shoes looked like they might belong to a girl, but the figure who owned them never said a word, only knelt on the floor, its back to John, and began to tie up his mother’s wounds. This small figure turned its head once, and John got a glimpse of two eyes beneath a leather helmet. He was worried those eyes had seen him, so he shut his own eyes tight, hoping that would make him invisible. He could not stop himself from crying. He wrapped an arm around his face to muffle the sound.
A man’s voice was demanding, “Where is it?”
His mother was answering. Her breathing was harsh, but otherwise her voice was gentle. “There. You can break into the safe, which will destroy it, or you can make me a promise … before these witnesses.”
John heard a new voice, another man’s voice, from across the room, low to the floor.
“I am your witness, Catherine,” the voice said. The words were strained, as though the speaker were in great pain.
John dared to open his eyes for one moment, in hopes of seeing who had spoken. He glimpsed a large figure with red hair lying on the floor, holding his chest as though badly injured. Then the smaller figure stepped directly in front of John. The girl again. He closed his eyes tightly and pressed himself against the back of the hiding place.
His mother spoke for a while, so softly John could not make out the words, and then there was a high-pitched whine, growing louder, and a crackling. The sound was terrible and he pressed his hands over his ears. After some time, John opened his eyes for a moment and saw colored light dancing around the room. Then he closed his eyes and tried to make himself as small and quiet as he could.
It was not until many hours later that he finally crawled out of the bench and out of the empty apartment with the bloody floor. From there he made his way back through London to Traveler, a seven-year-old boy without a mother and with a heavy promise weighing him down.
CHAPTER 24
MAUD
They were playing prisoner’s base. It was Maud’s turn to run out from the line of children into the town square with one of the boys chasing her. With a squeal, Maud took off through the mud. Glancing back, she saw her pursuer was the tall boy with the limp, Michael. Michael was still very fast, even with the bad foot. He had invented a kind of swinging run, and because he had long legs, he was keeping up with Maud just fine as she plunged through puddles and across the deep ruts made by carts.
The other children, all fifteen of them, began to spread out through the town square and the alleys leading off it, each chaser trying to touch the one he chased and claim a prisoner for his team.
Maud’s seven-year-old legs were moving as quickly as they could, which was not quick enough through the mud and animal dung on the lower side of the square. The skirt of her dress, which had once been a very light color, was now covered in muck and bits of the leaves that were blowing all over the town on this autumn morning.
Risking a look behind her, she discovered the boy with the limp had stopped. He’d lost a shoe in the mire and was trying to get his foot back inside it without stepping onto the ground. Maud ducked into an alley, ran ten paces, then moved sideways into the tiny passage that led back behind the alehouse. There, she crept along the wall, her back pressed into the stone.
She heard the boy’s footsteps coming down the alley. She tried to keep her eyes closed, thinking that would help her go unnoticed, but she couldn’t resist a peek when his steps got close. Michael ran right past the opening to her tiny passage.
“Maudy, where are you?” she heard him call out from farther along. “You’re out of bounds! The prison yard ends here.”
Maud smiled, moving deeper into the small back alley. It would lead her to another street, and from there she could make it back to her base without being captured—and all while staying in bounds.
“Maudy!” the boy called again. “Be fair!”
His voice was farther away. He had continued up the main alley. He would be too far away to catch her when she came out the other side.
As she edged her way down the dim and muddy corridor, her nose filled with the smell of animals. On her left,
the tiny passage let into a stone courtyard at the back of the inn, where several horses were tied up. The place hadn’t been shoveled out in weeks, and the smell was overpowering. Maud snuck past the opening to the enclosure, intending to slip into the darker passage beyond, but something caught her attention.
At the rear of the inn was a room with its wall right up against the back alley. A shutter over a window was partly open, and she could hear voices inside, arguing.
“Do not think you will change the Old’s mind,” one voice said. “There have been Youngs before you, yet I am still here.” Maud was intrigued. The man’s voice sounded cruel, which scared her, but it also sounded foreign, which was interesting. He was speaking her language, but he had a funny way of doing it.
“You cannot stop me from talking to my own master,” another voice said. This one was much younger. “We have both taken the same oath.”
“Oath!” the older man said, almost spitting out the word. “Stretched, I am. Since years too long to count.”
What does he mean by “stretched”? she wondered. Was this man long and thin? Had he been put to the rack? Maud’s curiosity got the better of her. She crept closer. By standing on tiptoe, she could look through the crack between the shutter and the stone wall. It was dark in the room, almost as dark as the tiny alley where she was hidden, yet she could just see the faces of the two men. One older, the other one young—hardly even a man yet. But neither looked like he had been stretched.
“You were with a woman,” the young one said. “I saw you. In the upstairs room.” The younger man also had a funny way of talking. He didn’t have an accent, like a foreigner might, but there was a slowness to his voice, as though he had thought everything out ahead of time, and now the words were falling out of his mouth in a steady way.
“No one cares what you saw,” the older man said.
“We stand apart from humanity, so our heads are clear. It is our oath. The Old will hear of this.” The younger man moved as if to go out into the horse yard, but the older man stepped forward, blocking him. Even though their voices were slow, their movements were so fast, Maud could not figure out how they had gotten across the room so quickly. She had to shift her feet ever so slightly in order to keep the two of them in view. A small knot of wood had been knocked out of the shutter, and by moving to her left, she could see them through its jagged hole.
“The Old will hear nothing,” the older man said, his arm across the door that must lead to the stable yard.
“Let me pass,” said the younger one.
“You pass when I permit.” There was something shiny in the older man’s hand that had not been there a moment before. Maud thought it might be a knife, but how had it gotten into his hand so quickly? She realized the younger man also had a knife in his hand. Like magic, the weapons had appeared.
“What happened to the Young before me?” the younger man asked, his knife held up against the other man’s knife, his eyes searching the older man’s face. “That was your doing.”
“Was it?” the older man asked. “You were not there. The Old was not there. Who can say?”
The knives struck out. From where Maud stood, it looked like a blur of many arms, with flashes of light from the blades winking at her again and again. One knife seemed to disappear into the younger man’s chest.
Then the younger man was falling to the floor. The older man had a hand around the boy’s back, to help him settle to the ground without making a lot of noise.
When the younger man was lying on the floor, he whispered, “I have written it down. All of it.” His voice was so quiet, it took Maud a moment to understand what he said.
The older man shook the boy roughly by his shirt. “What did you write?” he asked.
“Many things about you,” the boy said, even more softly than before. “Others will know what you are …”
The older man shook him harder.
“Where?”
A smile crossed the boy’s lips, but no more words came out. He was staring up at the older man, and somehow Maud understood that the boy was not breathing anymore.
Maud gasped. In her short life, she had seen several dead men. In the winter, beggars would sometimes freeze in the town square or out on the road. But she had never seen a man die before. Realizing immediately that she had made too much noise, Maud slid down the wall as fast as she could, to remove her head from view.
Hardly a moment had passed before the man was there, right above her. He had crossed the room in the blink of an eye, and he was standing against the shutter. She could hear him breathing.
The shutter swung open. Maud closed her eyes, trying to become invisible, pressing her whole body against the wall, as if she could squeeze herself into the stone. There was a wide windowsill beneath the shutter. She could feel it above her head. Was it wide enough to hide her body from the man’s view? She was not sure. She could feel the wet mud on her skirt and on her arms, making her into little more than a dark blur in the dim alleyway. Maybe she would be hard to see.
All at once the man was gone from the window. Maud didn’t wait to find out what he would do next. She scrambled to her feet and pressed on through the tiny alley, so narrow here she was forced to walk sideways. In her haste, she knocked over several buckets by a pig trough behind the butcher’s shop next door, setting off a terrible racket of clanging metal and squealing animals. Maud ran then, terrified the man was after her, the close walls scratching her arms as she went.
At last, she came out onto a wider lane, rather full of people. This street was so muddy, it swallowed her feet to the ankles, but she hardly cared. At the bottom of the lane, she turned and was relieved to find the town square as busy as she had left it. She lost herself among the men and women milling about in front of the butcher’s shop and hauling carts toward market stalls.
As she passed in front of the inn, a hand grabbed her shoulder. She turned, and with a jolt of fear found herself looking up at the man she had seen in the back room. He wore a long cloak over his shoulders now, but his face was the same.
“You,” he said to her.
Maud could not move. She expected a knife to appear suddenly in one of his hands.
“Fetch me water,” the man said. “I will wash.”
The man had taken her for one of the serving girls at the inn. He was not going to stab her. She wrenched her shoulder out of his grasp and ran off through the square.
A moment later, a hand grabbed her again. Making a fist, Maud turned and swung at her attacker. She hit Michael, the limping boy, square in the face. He fell backward, into a deep, muddy puddle.
“I got you fair, Maudy. You’re my prisoner!” he said as he slipped around in the mud and tried to get back to his feet.
“All right,” she agreed, relieved to see her friend. “I’m your prisoner.” She took Michael’s hands and helped him up.
Together they walked toward the top of the square, where most of the children were gathering for another round of prisoner’s base. The limping boy walked her triumphantly back to the others—he had returned with a prisoner and did not much mind that she had struck him in the face.
Weeks later, when she had begun to put the inn and the men with knives from her mind, Maud was marched out of her house to greet an honored visitor. She had been scrubbed quite clean in a tub of warm water that morning, and she was now wearing a fancy and rather uncomfortable dress into which her mother and maid had forced her with great difficulty. Her hair had been braided and tied with ribbons.
Maud’s father was a cousin to their lord, the baron, and her family lived in a large stone house at the top of the hill, overlooking the village. Though Maud often snuck away to play with the villagers’ children, she knew quite well she was not one of them. Maud could read, for instance, something few of the village children were ever likely to do.
It was because of her education, she sensed, that she was now being sent away with this visitor. It was the year of our Lord 1472, and it
was quite ordinary, being sent away. Her older brother was gone to the monks right now, receiving his education, and her other brother was a squire to their cousin the baron, who lived in the castle on the hill beyond the wide river, which she could see in the distance.
Girls were often sent to serve great ladies in distant places, but this visitor was obviously not a representative of a great house. He was dressed in a simple robe, like a monk, which was tied at his waist. Over this he wore a long cloak, which seemed to contain a large number of interior pockets, all stuffed with objects whose strange outlines could be glimpsed through the cloth. And he was old. Being seven, Maud did not know how old, and she didn’t trouble herself too much to wonder—it was enough to note that he had long hair streaked with gray, and a beard that reached past his neck.
Maud’s father was affectionate with no one and was feared by all members of the household, herself included. Yet he was treating this old man in the simple robe like visiting royalty. Servants were called to fetch wine and food, a bed was offered, then more wine.
The old man responded to these suggestions politely, yet he waved off everything but a plain meal. All of his attention was fixed on Maud as she was introduced to him. His eyes were the best part about him, she decided immediately. His eyes took her in all at once—they saw not just her clothes and shoes and hair, which were, after all, her mother’s doing, but something more, something inside her. His face was very serious, but those eyes of his were smiling.
At first, Maud refused to go with him and was both shocked and pleased to see deep embarrassment on her father’s face. The old visitor did not argue with her. Instead, unexpectedly, there was a flower in his hand. She had not seen how it came to his hand, but there it was, like magic, and he was presenting it to her.
Maud was unsettled for a moment—but only for a moment. The flower smelled sweet, and the man placed it behind her ear. Before she knew it, she was walking down the road with him, a small pack of her belongings slung over the man’s shoulder. When she looked back, she saw both of her parents at the top of the road, looking after her as she walked away. Her father usually spent a great deal of time being angry about Maud’s behavior, and this was the first time she had observed him being proud of her.