Anne Kelleher - Silver's Bane

The wicce-women exchanged surreptitious glances with each other and looked pointedly at the druids. Kestrel cleared his throat and the others flapped their robes and shifted from foot to foot. They’d all failed miserably last night, and they knew it. Shouts from above momentarily distracted her, and she peered through one of the huge holes in the outer curtain wall to see a speck of dust emerge from the eastern road leading out of the forest. A rider, she thought, coming fast. Someone else had survived Samhain. She saw that Kian noticed as well, but he went on with the task at hand. There were not many hours of daylight left. So she too turned back to Kestrel. “Well?”

Kestrel linked his hands together beneath his capacious white sleeves and cleared his throat again before he answered. “The bards are studying the druidic verses, my lady, and the elder brethren have been in the groves since early this morning, interpreting the trees. To be sure, however, these are arcane matters, the learning encoded so as not to be easily understood by the uninitiated.”

“I’m not asking to understand, Master Druid. I just want to know how to protect us. Can we count on the dead?” But the only answer was the flap of the mourning banners from the towers. Someone—probably Mag, or maybe even Kian—had seen to that.

“They came because it was Samhain and they could,” whispered a corn granny. “We can’t count on them again, til next Samhain.”

Cecily immediately looked at the women, but it was impossible to know who had spoken. “Will they come back?”

The painful silence was broken by Kestrel’s snort. “They don’t know any more than anyone else.”

“What about the goblins?” Cecily asked again. “Will they come back tonight?”

“At Imbolc,” blurted Mag this time.

“The blood of the new lambs will bring them. Our magic can hold them back til then, but come Imbolc, ’tis druid magic that’s needed.” Another granny spoke up, from somewhere behind Mag. The words were followed by a hawking cough, and a green gob shot through the air, landing with a loud smack right in front of Kestrel. He startled back, and Cecily caught the flash of red Lacquilean leather under his heavy woolen robes. Serves him right, she thought. What sort of fool would wear such finery in a mess like this? An answer ran through her mind unbidden: One who thought it easily replaced. But they’re not likely to be readily replaced, thought Cecily, even as she dismissed all thoughts of Kestrel and his boots.

Kestrel’s lips quirked down as his eyebrows arched up. “There you are, ask the wicce-women,” Kestrel sniffed. “They seem to know all about it.” He turned away, waving a hand back and forth in front of his face, as if the very smell of them offended him. Cecily looked down at the bubbled green slime glistening in the sunlight and felt nauseous herself.

But she couldn’t let that deter her. “Please tell me what you can. Anyone. Please.”

It was the women’s turn to exchange glances, to shuffle restlessly beneath shawls and skirts, like a motley flock of roosting broody hens. They ranged in age from women who looked no older than the oldest of her foster sisters, to the most wizened of crones.

“Please,” Cecily said again. “Whatever you think might help.”

Kestrel coughed.

It was the druids, Cecily knew. The druids looked down on the wicce-women, and their magic was considered something less, because, as the grannies said, they carried their magic in their hearts and not their heads, and certainly not in arcane verses in half-forgotten languages, or obscure symbols slashed on the limbs of trees.

“They’re laughing at us, Your Grace,” Mag sniffed back and folded her arms across her ample bosom. Kestrel claimed that she had sabotaged a Mid-Winter ritual one year by deliberately adding dream-bane to the required mix of herbs. Unable to achieve the necessary trance, the druids had stormed off in a huff, and the rite itself disintegrated into a riotous festival, which culminated in a fight in which several of Donnor’s knights had nearly died. This alone was not so unusual, but the druids were expected to help keep the order, and so Donnor had blamed the druids. And thus the druids, never among the most favored of the inhabitants of Gar, for even the lowest considered himself the equal of the Duke, fell a few more points in Donnor’s grace.

But Donnor was dead. “I don’t think there’s much to laugh about,” replied Cecily.

The speck on the horizon had resolved itself into a rider, who entered the ruined gates with a look of glazed exhaustion. He barely cleared the wrecked gatehouse when he slid to the ground, even as his horse collapsed. Cecily saw guards and two women scavenging amidst the rubble run to his side, even as Kian leaped off the walls and hurried over, calling for water. Let it be from Donnor himself, she thought. Let that shade have been nothing but a trick of the light. Let us all have been wrong.

But she knew in her heart such hope was only futile. She saw Kian glance at her over his shoulder as he swung the rider up into his arms, and understood he’d seek her out as soon as he could. Followed by the women, he took off in the direction of the summer kitchens.

“Please,” she said again.

There was a long silence and another gust of wind brought a blast of reek. “They come three times a year,” said a low, hoarse voice. “Three times…three times…three times, the gates between the worlds swing wide.” The voice quivered, as if some tremendous amount of energy was being repressed. The women parted, and a small, pudgy granny with hair like dandelion wisps stood rocking on her feet, as her hands twitched up and down before her. “Three nights…three times…three nights…our magic cannot hold. Three times our magic cannot hold.”

“Three times? And when—what three times are those?” Cecily prodded. She glanced at Kestrel and the other druids, hoping they had the sense to hold their tongues. They appeared to be paying close attention. The druids were all trained to remember. Many of them could repeat, word for word, conversations that had taken place before them decades past.

But the granny shook her head with closed eyes.

“At Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasa.” It was another voice, softer this time. A woman with the face of a turtledove and a shawl the color of a robin’s breast eased around Mag. She was chewing a wad of cud-wort that she shifted from cheek to cheek as she spoke. “At Beltane, the sun’s too strong and the light holds them back. But at the other three—only druid magic can hold them back.”

Cecily glanced at the druids. That was the problem. The druids didn’t seem to know what exactly their magic was. “What about the other times? The rest of the year?” The granny visibly quailed, and even Mag wouldn’t meet Cecily’s eyes. “Mag, please.”

Mag huffed. “Do you have any idea what they say about us?”

Cecily drew a deep breath. She looked at the women’s worn, guarded faces, their shoulders broadened and bent, their hands rough and callused. She knew what was said about the wicce-women—that they wanted men for only one thing, that at the dark of the moon, they did unspeakable things to make the corn grow. “You don’t have to reveal anything. Just tell me if you think there’s something you can do.”

Mag nodded shortly. “We think there is.”

“Can you be sure?”

“Our hearts tell us to be sure.” She met Cecily’s eyes steadily.

“Do you really think it will work?”

“We believe that it will.”

“They don’t have any idea it will work at all,” interrupted Kestrel. “Whatever ‘it’ is. That’s the whole point, my lady, and that’s what makes corn magic such a lot of nonsense. They don’t know—they base their knowing, such as it is, on no authority. No verse or rune guides them, no teacher even teaches. It all just comes to them in a flight of fancy. Or in a puddle of that weed they chew.” He sniffed, and immediately pressed his own oil-soaked wad of linen to his nostrils. “The corn grows. The sun shines, and the rain falls. There’s nothing to say their rituals work.”