Wild Magic (32 page)

Her betrothed, on the other hand, had apparently watched her make her progress to the dais with trepidation, and such had been his relief at the northern king’s choice of another woman for his bride that he had straightway sought out the Earl of Stormway and asked if he might call on his daughter on their return to the isles. To have any man smitten with her was a novelty to Breta, but rather than console her, it prompted in her an even greater despair in the impenetrable minds of men. However, for all that he was twelve years her senior and going thin on top of his big pink head, there was little she could really object to in him as a suitor. Ever since that heart-striking moment when she had seen Ravn look into the pale woman’s eyes at the bride-taking and watched there and then as he fell in love – like a diver plunging from a cliff – she had lost all her hope in the world. And so when her father had come to her with Brin Fallson’s proposition she had merely shrugged and acceded. If she could not have the one man she wanted, then she would give herself up to the first man who asked for her and damn the consequences.

But even though she tried hard not to think about it, the imminent prospect of the bedding was atrocious.

Once the feast was over, the bride and her betrothed would be led from the hall amid immense ribaldry and merriment, and be bound together in the best guest chamber, tied hand to hand and foot to foot (with a certain amount of room to manoeuvre) with the blue and green cords that symbolised the marriage of sea and land, woman and man, in Sur’s eyes. They would not be untied until the sun was at its highest point the next day.

Breta shuddered and moved to take her unwanted seat of honour beside her love’s new queen, whose task it was by tradition to pass the evening giving the wed-maid her best womanly advice. To have the wife of your heart’s desire giggling in your ear as to the best way to please a man – how to touch him
here
and
there
, and lay your lips just
so
– would have been quite unbearable; the one consolation of the evening, Breta thought, was that the pale woman had no conversation, barely said more than a couple of words at the best of times, and was hardly likely to confide secrets to her. She nodded politely to the Rose of the World, and sat down.

The Rosa Eldi smiled briefly, then her eyes dropped to the blue wedding cords tied loosely about Breta’s waist and suddenly, with a great flash of memory unlike any she had ever experienced, remembered her own wedding night – the crowds, the noise, the raucous laughter, the bawdy songs – and the look in Ravn’s mother’s eyes as she had tied the traditional first knot. She had known a kind of fear then, which had nothing to do with the wedding itself, but all to do with the unpredictability of being amongst too many people over whom she had little or no influence: for it seemed her charms had but small effect on women.

And remembering this moment, the Rosa Eldi felt uncomfortable again. There were too many people here, and she had the disturbing impression that they were all watching her and speaking about her just out of earshot. She kept catching little snatches of their conversation; but even when she concentrated, could not capture them whole. ‘Night and day,’ she heard; ‘Four months now’; ‘should have taken the Fairwater girl’ and then, most clearly of all, ‘if she will not breed, he’ll have to take another’. But the gaze of the forbidding Lady Auda was the most unnerving thing of all.

The King’s widowed mother had tonight been seated – by some horrible error, or by her own contrivance – directly opposite the new queen, and her eyes seemed always fixed on the Rose of the World, who felt those chill, violet eyes on her every minute they were in each other’s company, and instinctively knew this regard for what it was: the possessive dislike of one woman for another who had usurped her position. Auda sat there gaunt-faced and shrivelled, a queen-spider fallen on hard times, her dark, white-streaked hair bound severely back into an elaborately knotted coif, her lips pursed so tight it seemed her face might sink suddenly inwards on itself. She radiated a regally compelling disapprobation; and the new Queen of the Northern Isles knew she was at all times the focus of her enmity.

In all the time that the Rosa Eldi had been in Halbo, Auda had uttered barely three sentences to her.

The first, on the evening she had set foot inside the Great Hall after landing on Eyran soil but moments earlier, had been: ‘If you think your whorish nomad tricks will hold my son, you are sadly mistaken.’ The second had been the traditional words with which a man’s mother passed her son into the care of another woman, and hissed between bared teeth. After which Auda had taken to her chambers and refused to share a table, a room or even a breath of the same air with her son’s new wife. And the third, a few weeks later, had been only after Ravn had ordered that the Lady Auda’s chambers be refreshed with new Circesian hangings and rugs, which necessitated the removal of all her furniture and the lady herself, and under this ploy, had persuaded her down to his solar, where, with Ravn’s big hands cupping his mother’s as she grasped the Rosa Eldi’s crushed fingers, had been muttered under duress: ‘Welcome to Halbo, my son’s wife.’

The last part of the greeting, ‘and my queen’, had gone unspoken and the Rose of the World had watched as her husband lost both the heart and the courage to press the point.

Since that time, Ravn had insisted on his mother’s presence at all public occasions, and she had complied with pressed lips and a haughty demeanour, watching and watching the Rose of the World, and had never addressed her directly again.

Tonight she looked especially sour, though there was a gleam in her eye. A little while after the repast had been served, she leaned forward suddenly past her son and, without any polite acknowledgement of her daughter-by-law’s presence, spoke across her to address the Earl of Shepsey, who was seated at the Queen’s right hand.

‘Back still playing you up, Egg?’

Egg admitted that this was the case, but that he ascribed his condition to his age and a draughty chamber. He started to include the new queen in this conversation by asking whether she found the castle chill, when Auda spoke over him.

‘Well, it will take no less than sorcery to amend your age.’ She gave the Rosa Eldi a pointed stare, and when this failed to provoke a response, launched into a lengthy treatise on just which herbs he might add to his bath for ameliorative effect. ‘And make sure you test the temperature of the water before you get in: too cold and the muscles will seize; too hot and you’ll just make it worse.’

Egg thanked her.

‘No magic, that,’ the former queen said loudly. ‘No nomad fakery required at all: good old-fashioned Eyran methods will do the trick every time.’

The Earl of Shepsey looked uncomfortable, but Ravn was intent on a conversation across the table, and if he heard his mother’s barb, he gave no sign of it.

Auda made further remarks on the subject to a lady on the opposite side of the table, and then called her maid, an equally poisonous creature called, for no apparent reason, Lilja (for she resembled no lily, but rather a burdock, being both wide and dark) and made requests that she ‘pass the wine by that woman’s platter’. Lilja did so, awkwardly jostling the Rosa Eldi’s shoulder as she retrieved the flask. The Rose of the World looked around, startled, but the moment had passed. A few minutes later, Auda raised her voice. ‘Bring me a spoon that is untouched by that woman’s hand!’

Quiet fell across the top end of the hall. Even Ravn heard this.

‘Mother,’ he said, his voice edged with warning.

Breta Bransen, seated on the old queen’s right, silently passed her own spoon to Auda with a frown. She had no love for the woman who occupied Ravn’s bed and all his thoughts, but such rudeness was a blight on an evening which was already sorrowful enough.

Auda took the spoon from her without a word. A little later, she beckoned Lilja to her and whispered something in her ear which caused the serving woman a sly smile and to hasten off.

‘You’ll be wanting babies straight away,’ the old queen now addressed herself to Breta, who coloured. ‘Not getting any younger, are you, girl? Left it a bit late getting wed, though. What are you now – twenty-three, twenty-four?’

Breta nodded grimly.

‘The same age as my boy. I always suspected you might have had a bit of a soft spot for him,’ Auda went on mercilessly. ‘And why on Elda he wouldn’t take you or another like you, Sur only knows. Good stock, I told him you were, just what the kingdom needs: a fine Eyran bloodline and a sturdy set of hips: you’d give him all the babies he could want to save his throne; but he’s always been a fool for a pretty face, and now he’s got himself a wife looks more like a skinny white serpent than a proper woman. Still, I’m sure he’ll learn his lesson the hard way: men always do.’

Breta stared helplessly along the table, her cheeks flaming, but the subject of this tirade was currently feeding his new wife with a morsel of chicken from his own plate and was oblivious to his mother’s remarks. She tried to think of something to say to the old woman, but was reprieved by the return of Lilja Mersen bearing a new pitcher of the bitter dark wine they pressed from the grapes grown in the chalky valleys around Fairwater. At Auda’s gesture, goblets were filled around the table; but when Lilja came to the new queen’s shoulder, she stumbled and cried out a great curse. Wine splashed all over the Rose of the World – over her hair, which still lay smooth and unbound like any maid’s, spilling over her shoulders – over her pale robe, and over the ermine stole, which soaked up the liquid greedily, turning it an ugly, sodden red. Little runnels of the wine ran unchecked down the Rosa Eldi’s white flesh, to disappear in dark runnels beneath the embroidered bodice into the milky space between her breasts.

Conversation ceased.

Auda gasped; and looked stricken. Her eyes went wide, as if shocked at the clumsiness of her maid. Then she leaned across the table and grasped the Rosa Eldi by the wrists so tightly that the pale woman cried out. But rather than uttering any word of apology, instead she declared: ‘Blood will come from the South, and mar the snows of Eyra; white skin will gape and run red. Sorcery has risen: wild magic all around. Fire will fall on Halbo. Hearts will wither; many will die.’

Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she fell sideways in her chair.

If it had been staged, Breta Bransen thought, having watched the interplay between Auda and her hand-servant, it was beautifully done. Even so, it was surely incumbent on her as the one closest to the old queen to enquire as to her health. ‘Are you well, my lady? Can I help you in some way?’

But the old woman neither stirred nor spoke. Curious, Breta took up her hand in her own large grasp. It felt limp and frail, the pulse beneath her fingers beating as light and as fast as the wings of a moth trapped under the skin there. And still Auda did not move. She looked across the table in some distress, but the King was intent first on the damage done to his wife’s costume, and then to that done to her composure; for when the old woman had uttered her pronouncement, the Rose of the World had gone still as stone, her green eyes had become huge and she had begun to tremble from head to toe. It was Brin Fallson who came quickly to the old queen’s side, who lifted her head and peered beneath her quivering eyelids and declared that she had fainted and must be removed to a place of comfort and quiet.

Breta watched as the man to whom she would be bound – tonight and beyond – took considerate charge of the situation, sent a boy to fetch the King’s own healer, dispatched servants to stoke the fire in Auda’s own hearth, and to lay out for her there food and wine of which she might partake when she recovered sufficiently, and carried the old woman from the room as carefully and lightly as if she had been a child; and thought for the first time that after all she might not have made such a bad bargain for the rest of her life.

The feast had been brought swiftly to a close; drinks supped up, food left for the dogs. The married pair were seen off to their room with rather less ceremony and high spirits than would usually have been expected. Lacking a living mother, Breta had been forced to ask the Rosa Eldi to tie the first knot – a figure-of-eight for eternity – and through it thread the ends of the blue cord that would bind her right hand to her partner’s left; but the new Queen of the Northern Isles had never knowingly tied a knot in all her life, and Breta was forced to make the initial working for her, then explain the path the cord must follow thereafter. It had felt less than auspicious.

Her father tied the green cord to Brin’s wrist and then turned to his daughter. He squeezed her hand as he made the intricate knot, and dropped his normally booming voice to a whisper: ‘He’s a good man, my dear. He won’t hurt you.’

Breta felt tears prick her eyes, but she nodded quickly and kept smiling as the King stepped up and blessed her with a kiss on the forehead and the final knot – usually a complicated affair involving a double-sailmaker’s and Sur’s anchor, for good wind and safe ground – but in this case a simple sheepshank finished with a hitch, which he completed in barely two seconds, before running after his own swiftly departing wife.

The Rosa Eldi felt an unaccustomed pain gnawing at her temples. The blood beat there, hot and angry – if blood was what flowed inside her. She had begun to wonder. Since Virelai had stolen her away from Rahe, since they had left Sanctuary in that tiny boat, with her locked in the oak casket in which the Master used to keep her hidden, she had drifted as if in a dream, taking little notice of the world or the people around her: it was all too confusing, too strange. She took little notice of time passing, either. Life had been better when they had travelled with the nomads, for at least then Virelai had been unable to sell her body to any man who wished it: no money passed hands amongst the Wandering Folk themselves, though several of the men had asked whether she might wish to spend some time with them. But Virelai had seen them off angrily when he had seen there was no profit to be made from their interest, and she had been left to herself. Just before they arrived at the Allfair the daughter of the old seer – Fezack Starsinger’s girl, Alisha, who had sometimes shared her body with Virelai – had come to her one morning and asked if she had need of a charm against conception. And when the Rose of the World had asked what she meant by this, Alisha had laughed and shown her the little pouch of dried herbs she wore about her neck. ‘Like this: toadflax and chervil and Creeping Gilly. Wear one of these and you’ll not need to worry about babies.’