She must have regretted her momentary lapse, because she was full of sour grimaces and frowns for a few days, and did no more than grunt when I asked a question of her. But one night when I was struggling to brush my hair, she took the brush from my hand and said brusquely that it would be better to comb out the snarls first. I had been very surprised and a little bashful, for even as a child my mother had insisted I brush my own hair. When I had not managed it quickly enough, she ruthlessly cut it short. I had kept my hair short since, but in Faerie, I had grown it as my husband had desired, and something in the air had made it grow longer and more lustrous than ever it had done in the real world. Princess hair, I thought it, and I had liked to brush it, though there was eventually so much of it that my arms always ached.
That day, Yssa combed and then brushed my hair with long strokes, and as I watched her through half-closed lids, I saw a smile flicker about her lips, as if the act gave her as much pleasure as it gave me. I wanted to say a dozen things, but I held my tongue for the longest time, wanting nothing to disrupt the sweetness of this moment of surrender.
So I saw it and so it was.
I never did learn exactly what had happened to Yssa, for I liked her too much to intrude upon her sorrow by asking open questions. Once she said something that let me guess she had fled from family trouble, but I never probed for more information than she offered. Even when we became close as sisters, Yssa would freeze and withdraw if I asked any question about her past, and I learned never to do so. Yet I was curious and speculated endlessly about what had happened to her whenever she made some comment that seemed to refer to what had hurt her so.
Once, she said fiercely that there was no bond deeper than a blood bond. Another time she asked suddenly and very seriously if I had such a bond with someone in my world. She had to explain that she was asking if I had a sister or brother, and I had shaken my head, saying I was an only child to elderly parents who seemed more than anything else slightly startled to have got me. Certainly they had shown no desire to have another child. I went on to tell her, because she seldom asked me questions or showed any interest in my past, that when I had fallen in love with a married man they had disowned me with such alacrity I felt they welcomed my misbehaviour. I was surprised to see pity in Yssa’s eyes, and that night she had insisted on dressing my hair in a special elaborate style that must have made her arms and fingers ache. Yet her hands were very gentle.
I loved Yssa, but it was not until my son was born that I understood what she had meant by a blood bond. Coincidentally she fell pregnant soon after I did, to a faerie lord who had come to visit my husband. She had met him at a ball I had made her attend with me at the Summer Palace, and they had become lovers that same night. The next morning the beauty I had sometimes glimpsed had blazed in her and I guessed at once what had happened.
‘You have fallen in love!’
A complex mixture of elation and sorrow crossed her face, but she nodded and a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she said shyly, ‘I understand now why a woman might give up everything for love, and go mad at the loss of it.’
I did not understand her words, but I guessed they alluded to her past and asked no more. Yet it gave me joy to see her so radiant, for all I thought her lord a vapid dandy with an inability to focus on anything save himself, including his wife. Of course he wed her when she told him she was to bear his child, because children are rarely born to pure-blood faerie folk and they are greatly valued.
At first her faerie lord was happy in her pregnancy because he was so pleased to have fathered a child, but his interest in her and in his child waned as the months passed, and when she swelled and became inaccessible to him, he found other pretty portals more appealing.
Yssa was desolate, for unlike me she was not entirely enthralled by the baby growing in her. Then came the night she went into labour. I had given birth a week or so before, and I was nursing my precious son as I waited for her to bear her child. Unlike my labour, which was swift and only briefly painful, hers was long and full of many agonies. This surprised me, for I had thought a faerie would give birth with ethereal decorousness, all flowers and glitter instead of blood and screams. I wondered aloud if all faerie births were so hard, and the faerie crone who tended her said, ‘No more than all mortal births are painful.’ She was not in awe of me, for it was she who had birthed my son, and suddenly she said, ‘It goes deeper with some than others and that can make a difference. You withheld nothing in the birthing of your child, but this one would keep some part of herself separate from it.’
My friend was beyond hearing her words, but our voices must have penetrated the haze of pain, for suddenly she shouted out the name of a woman – Alzbetta – begging her forgiveness and swearing she would find some way to help her. Then she screamed until foam flecked her cheeks and hoarsely willed her body to rid her of the child and of the love she had borne its feckless, fickle father, cursing both. There was a hail of rain against the window glass and I shivered, for in Faerie, curses are not just words.
‘Can’t you use magic to help her?’ I whispered to the crone, hours later, for Yssa was grown pale as milk and there was a greenish shadow about her mouth and a feverish glitter in her eyes that made me fear for her.
The faerie midwife gave me a keen look. ‘I could try, but it would be dangerous, for there is a kind of primitive but powerful magic in birthing that will truck no other kind.’
My son stirred at my breast and I looked down at him and felt a fist of love close about my heart. For a moment it seemed that I could not breathe, for the joy I felt was so deep it was akin to pain. Then there was a grunting groan from the bloody birthing bed and I looked up to see the midwife lurch forward and reach for the baby being born.
Few children are born to faerie folk, and many are not fully formed. No one knows why, but the children are loved no less than a complete child. Yet my friend looked at her child only once, and bade the crone take the baby away. I came to Yssa and held her hand and told her I loved her, and promised she would grow to love her babe as I loved my son. I could not conceive that a mother would not love her child as I did and so my concern was all for my friend, rather than for the child. Yssa wept then, as I had never heard her weep, and told me that the child was misconceived. I held her close and called her sister and kissed her and said I would speak to my husband and see what he could do.
She drew back from me so quickly that she wrenched herself from my embrace, breasts heaving above the bodice of her bloodstained nightdress. Her pale blue eyes looked silver as she said, ‘Ask him nothing, for he will be no more use to me than my own lord was. I am done with men. I should never have allowed myself to be distracted from my oath. Now I must atone.’
‘What oath?’ I cried, but she would not answer. I stroked her hair until she slept and then I went to feed my son. I fell asleep with him in my arms and when I woke, I saw a tiny silver feather by my side. It was a magic Yssa had, to limn small objects in silver, and she had done it to many tiny objects to please me. As soon as I saw the feather, I knew she had gone. I could not believe she would go without saying goodbye, and I was not surprised to find that she had left the child behind. It was only when I went to the nursery to look into its cradle that I realised that aside from being physically deformed and mute, Cloud-Marie was a girl. That was a shock, for having a boy I had been unable to envisage any other sort of child.
There was a tiny silver shell on the baby’s pillow. I took it up and then I took up the baby. It opened its strange little cloudy mismatched eyes and I was surprised at the strength of the tenderness that I felt for the tiny deserted scrap.
An hour later, the midwife crone came and looked astonished to find me nursing my companion’s child, with my own sated son sleeping in his cradle beside me. But then she shrugged and said why not, for I had milk aplenty. No more was said of it, and by the time my husband returned from his latest quest, a long one lasting more than a decade, our son and Cloud-Marie were bot
h twelve, and I told my husband coolly that the girl would replace Yssa as my companion when she was older. I did not tell him that she was Yssa’s daughter. In truth, I am not sure he had ever seen her.
That night, when Cloud-Marie has gone to bed, I return to the tower chamber and gaze into the scrying bowl again. My son is lying in long dry grass watching his chosen from the clearing. She is standing with her back to him and me, facing the entire wolf pack arrayed behind the enormous grey alpha wolf. If I had not known him by his size, I would have known him by the bald burn scar on his flank. The girl holds her knife in one hand, point down, and the metal-shod staff in the other. Her arms are bare and strong and her hair, which hangs loose down her back, is not blonde, as I thought, but a silken fall of silver hair. I am close enough to her now to see that I was right; her figure is too ripe to be that of a young girl. I tell myself I care not what her age is; if she is my son’s chosen and can save him, I will welcome her. But why is he behind her, instead of defending his princess?
She steps towards the alpha wolf and my heart jerks to see a deep, bloody scratch on one of her arms. The grey leader growls and gathers himself to leap. I bite my lip, willing myself to be still and silent, for a vision is like a bubble that may burst at an ungentle breath.
The grey pack leader, poised, gives a low growl and bares his teeth in a ferocious snarl. There is blood on his muzzle.
He leaps, but the woman, lithe as a girl, spins away with astonishing balletic speed and strikes at him with her staff. Then, hair flying, she spins and strikes again with her knife, but the grey wolf has leapt back.
My son moves his head to follow their movements, and I wonder again at his inactivity. Then I notice the black she-wolf is standing between him and the woman, also facing the pack. I have no doubt it is the same she-wolf who saved me, and when she shifts her weight slightly, moving into a crouch, my heart leaps into my throat, but she does not move. It is the enormous, muscled pack leader who leaps, and it is only when my son whines that I understand he has not moved or attacked because he is wounded.
The grey wolf twists in the air so that his leap brings him past the woman and closer to my son. I see at once that this was intentional, for now the woman is off balance and too far away to strike with knife or staff. But instead of taking advantage of this, the grey wolf lunges towards my son, lips peeled back from his teeth in a terrifying snarl. Before he can reach his quarry, the black wolf attacks him and drives him back with a ferocity that is shocking to see. Clearly the grey wolf did not expect the attack from the she-wolf. Nevertheless, though she is a female, he joins battle with equal ferocity, and for a moment the two wolves are locked in a deadly struggle of jaws and teeth and claws. Neither wolf gives quarter, and the she-wolf is courageous and relentless, but the pack leader has the advantage of weight. Yet, unexpectedly and without warning, the grey breaks away and again leaps for my son. I do not understand why he is so intent on reaching him, for he is clearly badly wounded, and it is the candidate being tested who is his proper quarry during the trials.
My son struggles to rise, seeing the grey wolf coming for him, but he falls back with a high yelp of pain.
Again the black wolf intervenes, tearing at the exposed flank and hind leg of the pack leader. He turns on her and again they engage, biting and clawing at one another, and sending out a bloody spindrift over the pale sandy earth. They break apart and the grey leader attacks again at once, going for the black she-wolf’s throat with open maw and murderous determination. She manages to evade him, but instead of attacking her he tries to get past her, and once again she attacks his rear. Snarling with frustration and rage, the enormous grey turns and they circle one another. To my dismay, I see that the she-wolf is limping and dripping blood.
The grey leader leaps once more, and this time the she-wolf moves too slowly to evade him. His teeth close on her throat and she gives a long, strangled howl of pain that is cut off suddenly by a horrible crunch. Even as the black she-wolf falls limply to the ground at the pack leader’s feet, a streak of red comes from behind my son, and to my amazement I see the woman’s red-gold dog attack the grey wolf. She is far smaller than he, but she is quick and brave and fierce and even as he snarls and snaps at her, the woman is there by the side of her dog. With a ringing battle cry, she strikes hard and accurately with the metal end of the staff, then slashes with the knife, opening a deep wound in the grey wolf’s chest. He yelps in pain and hunkers down, snarling at the woman and the dog, but together they are bright and terrible and formidable and the battle with the black she-wolf has clearly taken its toll.
I see his surrender in the loosening of his bunched muscles a split second before he retreats, and in moments he is gone, and the pack with him.
I want desperately to see the woman’s face, for there was something familiar in her voice when she cried out. But she has her arms around the red-gold dog, her face buried in its soft thick pelt, and now my son has dragged himself to the black wolf lying on the ground, her red blood soaking into the sand beneath her.
The red-gold dog comes to nuzzle at her with him, whining and pawing, but the black wolf is still and silent. The red dog lifts its head and howls and howls.
I do not know how to understand what I am seeing.
In my agitation, I let a strand of hair fall into the scrying bowl and the vision ends.
I sit on my heels for a long time in the tower room, cursing my clumsiness, for the scrying bowl will offer only one vision between a sunrise and sunset, but there is nothing to do but to go down. I long to go out and find my son, but I dare not, for if I intervene in any way during the testing, save to carry out certain specific tasks, the princess spell will fail. I run my mind over all that I have seen, and decide my son must have been hurt defending the woman against the pack, whereupon the princess candidate and her dog then defended him in a queer reversal of tradition. I cannot imagine how the black she-wolf came into it, and I pray that neither her actions nor the interference of the red dog have weakened or destroyed the princess spell that is being woven.
I think of the black she-wolf’s eyes growing dim as her blood rushed out, and tears start fiercely to my eyes, for she saved my life and now she has died defending my son, yet I do not know why she helped us.
My thoughts circle back to my son and I wonder fearfully about the extent of his wounds. It terrifies me that he might now lie near to death, but I cannot allow myself to give way to my longing to find him. I tell myself his attempts to rise were full of energy; I tell myself I would know if my son had died.
Cloud-Marie finds me standing and shivering at the bottom of the steps and she clucks and chortles with dismay and, can it be, irritation? I want to laugh at the thought, for I have never known her to be anything but utterly gentle and patient. She wraps me in a blanket and makes me sit down in my chair. She mops my cheeks and makes me drink water. Finally, helplessly, she begins to stroke my hair.
I watch her in the mirror on the wall. I seem to see her stroking the hair of an old woman whose tear-wet face is pale as snow, her eyes wide and dark with despair. I picture a field of deadly white flowers where I might go and make a bed. But I know I cannot leave Cloud-Marie alone, no matter what has happened to my son.
Angry at my helplessness, I order myself not to be a witless fool. I do not know the boy is dead. Likely he is hurt – even badly hurt, but he will heal and he will return to me. And suddenly I am shocked to discover I do not care if he comes to me as a wolf. I think of his ferocious beauty as he raced through the wilderness and know that he is my son and I love him, whether he be wolf or man. Only let him live!
If he fails in this last hunt, I will set him free in the Wolfsgate Valley and each day come to the tower and evoke the scrying bowl to watch him. I will see him hunt his food and in time he will take a mate and sire cubs. He will join the wild pack and perhaps a day will come when he will challenge its leader and become a wolf king.
I sign to Cloud-Marie that I want to lie dow
n and she helps me to my bed. She takes off my slippers and covers me over. One eye watches me with anxious love while the other floats peacefully towards the window. Its calmness sooths me. All this hot bright pain will pass, it seems to promise.
I close my eyes and will myself to sleep.
I do not sleep.
I find myself remembering the relief and exhaustion I felt when I finally gathered the strength and will to rise unsteadily to my feet inside the Endgate, wondering where I was and who might dwell there.
I had made my unsteady way along the lane to a cobbled yard, where lamps with flickering flames cast enough light for me to see that the imposing building I had seen from afar was a vast, elegant mansion. There was a fountain in the midst of the yard where water fell in an endless glittering cascade from the tilted greenish-gold jug of a greenish-gold woman. This stood directly before a set of wide marble steps leading to a beautiful carved door, and as I gazed at it, I thought of the man Ranulf, telling me locals were permitted to pass through the private grounds of the property owned by the lady from the walled garden.
It was no garden I had trespassed upon, and yet I was suddenly certain that the door in the wall was the Endgate he had spoken of, bidding me find it and pass through. I seemed to feel the pressure of the armlet above my elbow, as if it were the hand of a man encircling my flesh and, ushered forward by that faint pressure, I mounted the steps. It was impossible that the armlet had not been dislodged during all I had endured since passing through the Wolfsgate Valley. I did not then know that my husband’s mother had bestowed a magic upon the thing that ensured it could not be removed except by a direct act of will. I reached the top of the steps, wondering if the armlet was like the red dancing shoes in the faerie story, which had to be chopped off along with the feet in them to prevent them dancing their wearer to death. But when I tried to remove it, the carved ring came off easily and sat light and innocuous in my palm.