Juliet Marillier - Heart's Blood

I was falling asleep as I read. I glanced out the window, wondering if Anluan was in the garden again, but there was no sign of him. A light rain had begun to fall; the grayish green fronds of chamomile and wormwood bowed down under its gentle persistence. I turned my gaze back to the page, where Nechtan set out a dispute over access to a particular grazing area. My eyelids drooped.

I woke with a crick in my neck and an uncomfortable awareness that I had been sleeping with my head pillowed on my arms for quite some time—the light in the library had changed, and my body was aching with cramps. Sitting up, I realized I was no longer alone. Anluan was standing in the doorway to the garden, watching me. Under the scrutiny of those piercing blue eyes, I wilted.This was not a good start.

“You sleep soundly,” he observed.

“I’m sorry. I was awake most of the night. It was cold. And . . .” No, I would not tell him about the flight from Market Cross and the exhaustion that was more than physical. I would not speak of the nightmares. “Thank you for putting it away, Lord Anluan,” I added. “The mirror, I mean.”

“Mm.” He still had his eyes fixed on me.Their look had become wary, puzzled, as if he was trying to work out exactly what sort of creature I was. “Not Lord, just Anluan. We don’t use titles in this household. You’d best get on with your work.”

“Yes, I . . . May I ask you a question, Lord . . . I mean,Anluan?” Did this chieftain really mean me to call him by his given name?

“A question.What question?” His tone was less than encouraging.

“I was told—the others told me, over supper last night—of certain . . . presences, in the woods. I was warned of the same thing down in the settlement, and I thought the folk there were exaggerating, the way people do sometimes, to tell a more entertaining story. But it seems it’s true.”

Anluan regarded me, and all I could read on his uneven features was a profound desire to be somewhere else. After a long pause he said, “You like to talk.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, taken aback.

“You find it easy to talk.”

“Not always.” Cillian used to wait until Ita went out somewhere. He would only hit me in private. I was accustomed to being so frightened that I couldn’t move, let alone speak. I had despised myself for staying mute and frozen as he hurt me, but the little voice inside me, the one screaming No!, had been drowned out by the terrified hammering of my heart. After I told Ita the first time and she wouldn’t believe me, after I learned she was blind to the bruises, I never tried to tell again.“But . . . it would be useful if you could answer some questions for me, since you are the only person here who can read and write. If I’m to make sense of these records . . .” My voice trailed off; his expression was becoming more distant with every word I spoke.

“The task is simple enough,” Anluan said, not moving from his stance by the door. “Sort, read, translate.Your job is unrelated to these tales and rumors.What is your question?”

“It is . . . I . . . you say, tales and rumors .” Tension coiled in my stomach, a familiar sensation. “Is it not true, what the others said about the strange beings in the forest?”

The crooked mouth went into a tight line. I had angered him. I felt myself shrink down, although he had not moved.“What does that matter?” Anluan snapped. “Can you do this work on your own or can’t you?”

I made myself breathe. It’s not Cillian. Be calm. Speak up. “I—I—” My voice was a feeble squeak. I cleared my throat and tried again. “I can do it on my own, yes, though possibly not by the end of summer. If you could help—if . . .” I clutched my hands together; he would think me a halfwit if this was the best I could do.“It would help if I knew which was Nechtan’s script,” I managed. “I noticed he used two different hands, one for Irish and one for Latin, or so it seemed.”

Anluan wrapped his good left arm over his weak right one, under the cloak he seemed to wear even indoors. “The documents from the chest, those I placed on the table for you, are all Nechtan’s,” he said, his tone marginally quieter. “Yes, he used two styles. Conan had an Irish hand similar to his father’s, but you’ll find his script less even. Irial’s writing was informal and much finer. He preferred a narrow quill.” Then, with a cursory nod, the chieftain of Whistling Tor was back out the door into the garden, leaving me to my labors.

Weighing up the odd conversation, I considered it a small victory that he had given me a useful answer to my second question. Nechtan, Conan, Irial. There were three records to be found here, four distinct hands, and only one set of documents to be translated. I could speed up the job considerably by sorting all the loose leaves first, storing them in an orderly fashion and making a catalogue as I went. Not so hard.

I set to work once more, leafing through the records and trying by guesswork to put them in chronological order. It was only when I heard Fianchu barking somewhere outside that I realized I had been staring at the same sheet for some time, while my mind wandered over Whistling Tor and its extremely odd chieftain, a man who was not only one of the rudest I’d ever met, but who seemed incapable of carrying on a normal conversation. What ailed him? The crooked face, the damaged arm and leg would stop him from conducting such physical activities as were expected of a man in his position: hunting, riding, fighting. Did he also have some impairment of the mind that skewed his perceptions and made him susceptible to sudden bursts of ill temper? I recalled a young man known as Smiling Seamus, back at Market Cross. The tale went that the midwife had dropped Seamus on his head soon after birth; whatever the cause, he had grown up different from other folk, slow to learn, almost like a child, but amiable in temperament. Anluan was the opposite of amiable. And he was a scholar. On the other hand, some of his utterances were almost like a child’s, oddly direct, as if he saw the world through simpler eyes than most. There was certainly something strange about him, something not quite right.

I made myself get up, stretch and walk around the library. I needed to tackle this a different way or I’d make no progress at all. Gritting my teeth, I swept the contents of one of the bigger tables into a pile at one corner. Then I began working my way through them, picking up each little book or scroll or parchment sheet, wiping off the dust with a fold of my skirt, reading a few lines, then setting the piece in the appropriate group. The work table soon held three piles of material—Nechtan’s, mostly loose leaves of deteriorating parchment, spotted brown with age and, where folded, falling into pieces; his son Conan’s, a far smaller heap; and a group of documents whose writers I could not identify. Many of these were in Latin; I glimpsed the words diabolus and mysteria and shivered. Somewhere in here there might be a key to Nechtan’s unusual activities, the ones of which the local priest had so disapproved. Somewhere he might have written more about the experiment, the army he intended to summon or conjure, the immense power he would then be able to wield against his fellow chieftains. And somewhere there might be a link with the family curse and these mysterious beings that Anluan didn’t want to talk about. That was foolish of him, really. Here I was with his family records, after all. If there were dark secrets in the history of Whistling Tor, wasn’t this library the likeliest place to discover them?

I did not make a pile for Irial. The notebooks of Anluan’s father were already collected on their own shelf in a corner of the library. When I opened the covers of one or two, I saw that the lover of plants and their lore had written the year and season on the front page of each. Irial’s books were not dusty. Someone had wiped the leather covers clean and set the volumes vertically, with stones at either end to hold them in place. Above the neatly organized books, a bunch of dried flowers and foliage in a jar and an unlit lamp shared their own shelf, and on the flagstoned floor in front there was a woven mat, its colors darkened with age and wear to a uniform purple-gray. The area was almost like a shrine.