He watched in mute wonder and fear as Caewen prepared her magic. She boiled the noxious leaves and twigs up with several unwholesome looking things taken from the shelves of the cottage. When the fumes were so thick and oily that they were nearly choking, Caewen lifted the pot off the hearth with an iron hook and carried it outside to where the body lay. It was now getting on towards late evening and the shadows had deepened and lengthened. Stars were appearing in the velvet blue-black above the world. From where they stood on the side of the mountain the whole world looked divided between rolling hills of darkness and star-studded emptiness above.
While Caewen worked, the boy decided to take himself away from her potion-working for a moment. He paced through the garden of mosses-and-stones, looking at there sleepers, and worrying to himself about the white ghaists. As yet, there was no sign of them. Even that worried him. It felt to him as if they had been called off, like dogs called back to a master. His wandering path took him back, eventually, to Caewen. She was working in the darkness. Dapplegrim sat like an unhappy heap of shadow behind her, hurring and harruming to himself. The sounds came out half like a human voice-clearing, half like a horse-snuffling.
She had set the pot down to cool. The boy moved neared. The steam that blew off the surface of the potion looked like twists of skull-faced spirits to him. He could feel a strange radiance coming off it too. It made the hairs on his neck and arms prick up.
“I really don’t think you should do this,” muttered Dapplegrim as Caewen knelt down and stared at the brew. Ignoring him, she took out three of what remained of her candles, and set them into a patch of bare soil. He left them standing unlit for now. What she did next shocked the boy into open-mouthed staring. Drawing her sword, she cut the head off the withered corpse of the seeress. She did it expertly, with two clean slashes. As the head rolled free, Dapplegrim muttered louder and Caewen shot him a dark look. “I must do what I must. We’ll give her a proper burying after I’m done. What happens to a body after a person’s spirit has left the world of heartbeats and breaths… it doesn’t matter to the departed spirit. It really doesn’t. This is clay now.”
“It certainly matters to some spirits. And those are the sort of spirits that tend to come back for revenge. Hur.”
“Yes. That’s true enough. Corpses can walk of their dead owner’s will, though that’s a rare thing.” Though she sounded as if she were trying to be icy-willed as she spoke, her voice still had a tremble at the fringes. She picked up the severed head and placed it in the circle of unlit candles with a more reverent air than she had used with the neck-hacking.
Caewen took the pot and poured about half of the liquid into the mouth of the head. Of course the liquid just splashed through the open throat and spread out, soaking the ground. Caewen spoke as she did this: “I wet your tongue. I wet your gullet. I wet your lips.” Then, she drank the rest of the contents herself. “I wet my tongue,” she said. She immediately looked unwell. “I wet my gullet. I wet my lips.” The weeds the boy had collected were not considered edible by anyone he had ever known. They’d likely make a person very sick. They could kill a person. Especially if that person were already unwell. She looked at him then, and her eyes looked pale and strange. “Child, fetch me a brand from the fire, please.” After a pause she added, her voice strange. “Be careful not to burn yourself.”
He moved at once, and did as she asked, bringing back a stick of wood with one end glowing red hot. Caewen took it and lit the candles using the brand. “I give you light. Light from flame. Flame from your own home and hearth.” She took her knife and cut a hank of her own hair, then burnt it in a candleflame. “I give myself light. Light of that light. Flame of that flame.” Then she started singing in a low, whisperous voice, using a language the boy did not recognise. Now and then, her voice grew louder and then she said in the common oft-tongue they had been speaking, “Old shade, hear me. Old shade, fear me. Old shade, here to me.” She chanted again in the strange language, and swayed as she knelt before the head and candles. Her swaying grew deeper and deeper as she sang. Again she repeated the line, “Old shade, hear me. Old shade, fear me. Old shade, here to me.” And then again. On that third incantation of the line, a rush of air arose; the shadows all about seemed to suffuse with inks until they were blacknesses; a feeling of strange coldness swept over the boy.
A frail voice twisted out of the severed head. “Who calls me back? Who calls my bitter shade?”
“Caewen of Dossel.” Her voice was eerie. It didn’t sound like Caewen at all. “Called also Caewen Turniper. Who, in the long ago naming of my people is Caewen Damerhame.”
“What business have you disturbing the dead? Let me go back to silence and to sleep, Turnip-Grower.”
“I have a right to ask. You have a duty to answer. We have avenged your murder, and you owe we the living a boon now.” She took a deep breath, saying rapidly, “I have the business of great worry, and the business of revenge if your shade deigns to listen. By the ancient rites and the ancient laws, I will ask of you questions, and you will answer truthfully. Because that is how it is, and has always been.”
“Truthfully, aye,” said the thin voice. “Though you may not like my answers. Few enough ever did.”
“Was it the witch we met here who killed you?”
“Aye. A sorceress. She is dead now. I feel her spirit alongside mine in this place of shadows. She wails so. I think she is angry at you, but she cannot get at you. She had not that power in life or death. But… best you not call that one back with your foolish little hedge-magics and village charms. She will not chat pleasantly.” Cold, amused laughter followed.
“Why did she kill you, O’ Seeress?”
“At the behest of Athairdrost, Witchling-Prince of Sorthe. She put a question to me, but I would not answer. She came to me with many others, some of whom had power. They killed me trying to make me speak.”
“And why was she disguised as you?”
“They masked her with my guise to discover if anyone else might come asking the same question. Athairdrost is desperate for the answer, and he is afraid that others are already seeking it.”
“What was his question?”
“A perilous one.”
“You are to answer me truthfully.”
“I did,” whispered the voice with a curl of laughter after it. “What will you do? Throw a tantrum?”
“I see. Then I will ask the question that I came here desiring to know: who and what is the Winter King? Is he some magician of bleak magic? A servant of the Lords and Ladies of the Twilight Lands? A servant of Old Night herself?”
“Ah. Now that is a question. He is not a servant of the Twilight Masters, for he is a Lord of Twilight, come south in his physical form.”
“That’s not possible. The Beshadowed Ones cannot walk in mortal lands. They cannot walk in sunlight. They cannot.”
The ghost-voice sounded angry. “Do you want the truth or do you want to argue with an old dead woman? All the old stories are wrong. For the Lords and Ladies of Twilight it is dangerous to leave their realm, yes, for on mortal soil they can be killed. And this is thrice-so for the Winter King, for he has undertaken certain rites that make him more vulnerable again. But the Winter King has grown tired of long years in the loneliness of the north. He has come south, with his court of spellbound warriors, and sad kings, and sorrowful wizards, and he has made a fortress at Sgaoth, the Merriment of Shadows.” She paused as if she were drawing a breath, perhaps out of habit. She hadn’t been dead very long. “The four princelings of Sorthe are not fools. They’ve thrown their alliance in with the Winter King, though if they could worm out of it, I think they would. The Witchling-Princes of Sorthe do not like being vassals to anyone, not even one of the Lord-Leiges of Dusk. A Monarch of Twilight. A Get of Lady Night. They chaff under his gaze, but they bicker also, and compete to please him too, for they know there is great power in him, and if he moves to rule all the Clay-o’-the-Green, then the Princes of Sorthe think they might be great kings in his gloomy house. And more than one of them has thought about there perhaps being a solitary high king in Sortheland and not four princes.” If it were possible for a ghostly voice to betray a smile, she did at that moment. “But it seems like you are very close to the other question. The question that Prince Athairdrost was so desperate to get the answer to.”
“What does Prince Athairdrost want so badly that he would kill you for it?” said Caewen.
“That will do, I suppose, as questions go. I wondered if you were his servants, and though the veil between worlds is gauzy and thick, and though I cannot see you clearly, I do not think you are the sort of beings he would have for agents. I have enough of a sense of you now, in our little back and forth. Athairdrost has a piece of a carven horn. He wants the other piece badly. Oh, so very badly.”
“A horn, like for blowing?”
“No! Listen to me. Listen! A piece of horn. Or a piece of antler, perhaps? I do not know what beast it was sawn from. It has letters writ all over it in a tongue more ancient that you can dream of. On it is writ one of the last, perhaps the very last of the Old Great Spells: magicks that were writ down when the world was so young that all people had to write on were walls of caves, and mudbrick houses, and shoulder-bones of deer, and antler, and sea-ivory. An Old Great Spell can only be spoken and invoked once. They are world-making spells. World-changing spells. There is an unborn bit of the world in that spell, and whoever casts it will determine how it comes into being.
“And where is the other piece?”
“I do not know in preciseness. Last I glimpsed it in visions, it was buried in a hoard of pearls and silver that was so long untouched that the silver had all gone black with age. Athairdrost is hunting the other piece of the horn, hunting everywhere. I think his master the Winter King wants the whole spell, unspoilt and mended, and he wants it desperately too, and expects that it will be handed to him when whole. Athairdrost keeps the piece he has on his person at all times. It is of terrible importance to him.”
“What of the white warths? The white women in the hills? They pursued us, but they are gone now.”
“Ah. Those are Athairdrost’s little ghosts. He set them to watch the ways north. They are reporting back to him now. He will know of you soon enough, if he does not already. Be assured of that. The White Writhen are dangerous to face, but they are not invulnerable. Go to Baght Town, track east until you find the River Rushing, follow it north to the pool of the bones and voices. You will find more answers there, and you may find Athairdrost himself–if you are lucky, on a night when some some other poor soul of a creature is unlucky. Time is slipping. I feel the place of shadows tugging at me, and my deathly rest is calling me. Have you more to ask? Be quick and ask, or let me go. Speaking whilst dead is wearying.”
“No. Thank you,” said Caewen. “Thank you, thank you and thank you thrice-three times. I have kept you overlong in the world of the living.” She turned to where the boy was standing beside Dapplegrim. “Assuming neither of you have questions?”
“No,” said Dapplegrim.
“I… I guess I do. Lady Seeress? May I ask a question?”
“Yes child. It is your right. The magic is old and true. It is you who killed my killer. Ask, and I will do my best to answer.”
“How should I best find out my own name?”
“To yourself be true.” The voice dwindled and wisped away, like smoke blown on a wind, like a candleflame going out. The presence, the feeling of awful coldness and the strange sense of being watched from every direction at once, it all ebbed away and was gone in a puff. Then, they were alone again, the three of them in the night garden with the three candles, a dead body, and brew-stained earth. Caewen immediately fell forward, caught herself on her palms, and retched up the contents of her stomach. The boy ran to her, and did his best to help. It was good, the he supposed, to get rid of thew poisons–though it had been sitting in her stomach for a good few minutes. The vomit smelled truely vile. When she was done, Caewen curled up and lay shivering on her side, like a sick toddler. The boy touched her brow. She was feverish and looked as weak as a sick child too.
Dapplegrim shook his head. “We learned a lot, but that was very, very stupid of her. We won’t be going anywhere for a day or two at least.” More gently he said, “Caewen, can you get up?”
She nodded.
“I can help her inside,” said the boy. “There was a bed in the back room. She can sleep there and I’ll sleep beside the fire in the hearth-room.”
“And I’ll rest my bulk across the front door and not sleep at all. I don’t think it would be good to have any chance visitors tonight, or for several days hereafter.”
The boy helped Caewen up. She leaned on his should all the way to the house. Although a great deal of important things had been said, and the ghost of the dead seer had been if not exactly friendly, then certainly helpful–there was only one thing standing out in the boys thoughts. To yourself be true. To yourself be true. What did she mean? He was so small, he was hardly noticeable, let alone heroic. And he felt so afraid all the time–afraid of the white ghaists, afraid of strange creatures in the night, afraid of this witchman-prince, Athairwhatever, too now. He wasn’t very bright, and he wasn’t very fast either. And not strong yet, not like his father at any rate. He might grow into that though, given smithing ran in his family.
But, right at this moment: if he did act true to himself, he’d run away at the next sight of danger and earn himself names such as he didn’t want to think about. The shade’s words felt like a terrible, crushing, heart-destroying curse to him, and they rattled through his brain even as he helped Caewen up the little wooden steps and through the door. He could think of nothing worse than being told that he was to be himself, and nothing bigger, or better or more… more… well… more anything. He felt a wetness prickling his eyes, and that just made him feel guilty and self-indulgent. Caewen was near-dead from exhaustion, and maybe the whole of the world was in danger too, and here he was feeling sorry for himself because someone had told him that he was only ever to be himself. And as for their other problem… Winter King… Winter King. What could they possibly do about a Lord of the Twilight Lands walking in mortal flesh? Even the boy knew what that meant. One of the twelve blood-born children of Old Night and Chaos was at this moment standing on mortal soil in a flesh-made form. All the old tales claimed that such a thing was not even possible. He felt a shiver of wonder and fear just thinking about it.