Jan Siegel - Witch’s Honour

‘Mabb,’ said Fern, relaxing slowly. ‘I see. I suppose she…Of course, I know what she wants. Tell her it isn’t here, and it’s not mine anyway. It’s held in trust, tell her, a sacred trust. It’s not a thing to be stolen or bartered. Say I know she will understand this, because she is a true queen who appreciates the value of honour.’

‘Who’s Mabb?’ asked Gaynor, sotto voce .

‘The queen of the goblins,’ whispered Fern. ‘Not much fairy in her, so I hear.’

‘ Does she appreciate the value of honour?’

‘I doubt it, but I’m told she responds to flattery. We’ll see.’ She raised her voice again. ‘What’s your name?’

The goblin pondered the question, evidently considering whether it was safe to answer. ‘Humans call me Skuldunder,’ he conceded eventually.

‘Well, Skuldunder,’ said Fern, ‘since you’re here, and it’s a special occasion, will you have some champagne?’

‘Is it good?’ The goblin scrambled down from the shelf and approached warily, radiating suspicion.

‘Have you never stolen any?’

There was a shrug, as if Skuldunder was reluctant to admit to any shortfall in his criminal activities.

Fern took another glass from the cupboard and half filled it. ‘Try it,’ she said.

The goblin sniffed, sipped, grimaced.

‘We will drink to your queen,’ Fern announced. ‘Queen Mabb!’

They drank, solemnly. When Fern judged their visitor was sufficiently at ease she left him with Gaynor and went to her room, returning presently with a small quilted bag, unzipped to show the contents. ‘These are gifts for your queen,’ she told Skuldunder, ‘as a gesture of friendship and respect. I have heard she is a great beauty.’ Fern uttered the unaccustomed lie without a wince, ‘so I have chosen presents to adorn her loveliness. These coloured powders can be daubed onto her eyelids; the gold liquid in this bottle, when applied to her fingernails, will set hard; in this tube is a special stick for tinting her lips. There is also a hand mirror and a brooch.’ She indicated a piece of costume jewellery in the shape of a butterfly, set with blue and green brilliants. ‘Tell her I honour her, but the Sleer Bronaw, the Spear of Grief, is something I and my people hold in trust. It is not mine to give up.’

Skuldunder nodded with an air of doubtful comprehension, accepting the quilted bag gingerly, as if it was a thing of great price. Then he drained his glass, choked, bowed clumsily to the two women, and made an awkward exit through a window which Fern had hastily opened. ‘I don’t think it will dematerialise,’ she said, referring to his burden. ‘I hope you can manage…’ But the goblin had already disappeared into the shadows of the street.

‘What was that all about?’ Gaynor demanded as Fern closed the window.

‘The Sleer Bronaw is the spear Bradachin brought with him from Scotland when he first came to Dale House,’ Fern explained. ‘It’s still there, as far as I know. I believe it has some mythic significance; Ragginbone thinks so, at any rate.’ Bradachin, the house-goblin who inhabited her family’s Yorkshire home, had migrated from a Scottish castle after the new owners converted it into a hotel. Ragginbone was an old friend, a tramp who might once have been a wizard and now led a footloose existence in search of troubles he could not prevent, accompanied by a faithful dog with the mien of a she-wolf. ‘It’s unusual for something like that to be left in the care of a goblin, but Bradachin knows what he’s doing. I think. You saw him use it once, remember?’

‘I remember.’ There was a short silence. Then Gaynor said: ‘Why would Mabb want it?’

‘I’m not sure. Ragginbone said someone had offered her a trade, but that was a long time ago. I suppose she must have latched onto the idea again; he says her mind leaps to and fro like a grasshopper on speed—or words to that effect. Anyhow, none of the werefolk are focused in Time the way humans are.’

‘It was an interesting start to the New Year,’ Gaynor volunteered. ‘A goblin-burglar.’ She gave a sudden little shiver of reaction, still unused to encounters with such beings.

‘Maybe,’ said Fern. ‘Maybe—it was a portent.’

When the bottle was empty, they went to bed, each to her own thoughts.

Gaynor lay awake a long time as two-year-old memories surfaced, memories of magic and danger—and of Will. Somehow, even in her darkest recollections, it was the image of Will which predominated. There were bats—she hated bats—flying out of a TV set, swarming around her, tangling in her hair, hooking onto her pyjamas. And Will, rushing to her rescue, holding her in his arms…She was waiting behind a locked door for the entrance of her gaoler, clutching a heavy china bowl with which she hoped to stun him, only it was Will—Will!—who had come in. Will who had escaped and come back to find her, Will beside her in the car when the engine wouldn’t start, and she switched on the light to see the morlochs crawling over the chassis, pressing their hungry mouths against the windscreen. Will whom she had kissed only once, and left, because he had too much charm and no hang-ups, and he could never want someone like her for more than a brief encounter, a short fling ending in long regret. ‘He’s your brother,’ she had said to Fern, as if that settled the matter, the implications unspoken. He’s your brother; if he breaks my heart it will damage our friendship, perhaps for good. But her heart, if not broken, was already bruised and tender, throbbing painfully at the mention of Will’s name, at the sound of his voice on a machine. Ulan Bator…what was he doing in Ulan Bator? She had been so busy trying to suppress her reaction, she had not even thought to ask. She knew he had turned from painting to photography and abandoned his thesis in mid-stream, ultimately taking up the video camera and joining with a kindred spirit to form their own production company. Whether they had any actual commissions or not was a moot point, but Fern had told her they were working on a series of films exploring little-known cultures, presumably in little-known parts of the world. Such as Ulan Bator, wherever that might be. (Mongolia?) And what the hell was a yurt? It sounded like a particularly vicious form of yoghurt, probably made from the fermented mare’s milk to which Will had alluded.

Gaynor drifted eventually into a dream of bats and goblins, where she and Will were trapped in a car sinking slowly into a bog of blackberry-flavoured yurt, but a morloch pulled Will out through the window, and she was left to drown on her own. Fortunately, by the next morning, she had forgotten all about it.

Fern stayed awake even longer, speculating about Mabb, and the goblin-burglar, and the spear whose story she had never heard, the ill-omened Spear of Grief. She remembered it as something very old, rust-spotted, the blade-edge pitted as if Time had bitten into it with visible teeth. It had no aura of potency or enchantment, no spell-runes engraved on shaft or head. It was just a hunk of metal, long neglected, with no more power than a garden rake. (Yet she had seen it kill, and swiftly.) She wondered whose tears had rusted the ancient blade, earning it its name. And inevitably, like Gaynor, she slipped from speculation into recollection, losing control of her thought and letting it stray where it would. She roamed through the rootscape of the Eternal Tree, in a world of interlacing tubers, secret mosses, skulking fungi, until she found a single black fruit on a low bough, ripening into a head which opened ice-blue eyes at her and said: ‘You.’ She remembered the smell of fire, and the dragon rising, and the one voice to which both she and the dragon had listened. The voice of the dragon-charmer. But the head was burned and the voice stilled, for ever and ever. And her thought shrank, reaching further back and further, seeking the pain that was older and deeper, spear-deep in her spirit, though the wound, if not healed, was all but forgotten. Now she probed even there, needing the pain, the loss, the guilt, fearing to find herself heart-whole again for all time. And so at last she came to a beach at sunset, and saw Rafarl Dévornine rising like a god from the golden waves.