The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic

Jettisoned



Deirdre Counihan





This story has the most ancient setting in the anthology and takes us back to the Bronze Age around the year 2300 BC. It’s easy to imagine that people back then were unsophisticated, unimaginative and crude. But this was the time that the Pyramids were built in Egypt, and Stonehenge in Britain. There is increasing archaeological evidence to show that those who lived in Bronze Age Britain led very sophisticated lives, and that their ability to understand and resolve problems was no different to ours today. The author brings out some of these points in a note at the end of the story.

Deirdre Counihan was born at the ancestral home of the gunpowder plotter Guy Fawkes – Farnley Hall – a link to a later story in this anthology. She trained as a book illustrator and also has an MA in Gender Studies. She has had a busy art career, specializing in archaeology and fantasy, and was co-editor of the magazine Scheherazade.





A great gull, lit white against the hectic slate grey sky, soared screaming in horror up past the sharp green of the eastern headland and then arched smoothly out across the dark expanse of the swollen river down below them. The bird headed majestically back again, still screaming in terror, over the western cliff where Grizzel stood hunched and shivering in her shawl, clutching the baby Niav against her shoulder.

She could not take in what had just happened.

One minute they had been there, her brother Diarma and his dear Befind, happily trying out Artin’s new masterpiece, the next minute there was nothing but the lonely speck of their apple basket still swirling in a grey sea circle where the boat had been sucked down. No mast, no sail, no Diarma, no Befind, no Artin – all three of them gone, in an instant!

The fool, the fool. What had he done? She had hoped that it had simply been more clowning around. There had clearly been much mirth earlier, with Artin demonstrating how to work a sail, but the frantic scramble amidships that she had just witnessed could only have been a real fight. Poor Diarma must have guessed and lost his temper – their family failing – and now they had capsized. He had killed them all. Poor Artin would never find his young wife and little Niav had lost her parents.

Grizzel teetered as near the edge of the cliff as she dared, gingerly following the tidal surge inwards round the curve of the cliff, all the time holding tight on to the baby as much for reassurance as for safety. She felt the soft breathing against her neck. Surely, surely, there must be something?

It took slow steps to negotiate the hummocked grass of the steeply sloping clifftop. One missed footing and they could both be hurled into the sea, so far below them – but she tried to watch the swirling grey waters for even the tiniest scrap of hope.

Once she was safely on the bouncing turf of the path that led down to the river’s edge, she started to run. The smudge of a dark head could be seen, bobbing through the current’s swirl, in along the river – could they still be breathing? Would they whirl in on the tide or would the river catch hold and swirl them out to sea again? Grizzel knew the way the river could run.

Faster and faster over the grassy hillside, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t trip and let fly the baby too, her whole family gone in one fell swoop. She could see a body – whichever one it was – still being tossed along the western side, trapped by the current. A sudden glimpse of yellow and she knew it was Befind – might she wash in where other people sometimes had – and yet survive?

Now Grizzel was speeding over the well-trodden route along the river bank. She almost slipped on a patch of slime, and baby Niav let out a yowl of protest which turned into a full-blown spate of yelling. Grizzel’s breath was agony and there was a taste like dried blood in her mouth. “Please be alive, Befind, please be alive!” Surely someone from the village would still be around? There had been so many people there to see them off.

And Befind did wash in where the others had. Among the dark green reeds, Grizzel saw the crumpled shape, still recognizably Befind by the tatters of her yellow tunic. She was slumped half-in, half-out of the great, grey bowl of the headless snake-stone.

Leaving the yelling Niav firmly wrapped in her shawl between two rocks and well above the waterline, Grizzel waded over to the huge stone bowl. Befind’s beautiful face was almost under the blood-stained water – her long auburn hair floating in tendrils around her. What irony to drown in her own blood, if somehow she had managed to survive the onslaught of the waves.

Standing with feet wide apart to get some purchase among the squelching mud and the reed stalks, Grizzel yanked Befind out of the hollowed stone in a promising trail of bubbles and dragged her up the bank. To the background clamour of the baby’s yelling, Grizzel worked hard to force some life back into its mother. “Can’t you hear her? You can’t leave her, Befind, what would she do!”

A great blood-soaked cough – and Befind’s eyes flickered open, only to close again. Grizzel wouldn’t let her go. “What were they doing? Had Diarma seen?” She sat Befind roughly against a flat-faced rock and placed baby Niav firmly at her mother’s breast. The yelling ceased.

Befind’s eyes flickered again. “This is where Seyth …” she murmured, letting the baby nuzzle.

“Yes, yes – we are where we found Seyth washed in,” Grizzel almost screamed in exhaustion and grief – she could see that she was losing her.

Befind was stroking the baby’s tiny hand. She raised her head and looked across the river as though trying to focus for one last time on the image of the eastern headland and the mound of the Sacred Howe that she had betrayed for love. “I told them the bung …” she whispered through the blood, and with a final racking sigh, her head dropped forward on her breast.

Beating back the tears, Grizzel bent over them, knowing she would discover the worst, that Befind was dead. She found that baby Niav had her hand curled firmly round the shaft of her mother’s sacred barra which, miraculously, was still held secure by its snakeskin strapping to the blood-soaked belt at Befind’s waist.

“So much for its sacred power!” thought Grizzel contemptuously. “What good has it done Befind to make it worth her spiriting it away? What good would it do this poor infant either!”

And then the villagers arrived.

***

Niav picked her way to the top of the cliff-path, wiping away angry tears. A single pure white gull swooped and soared against the leaden clouds as she surveyed the familiar skyline from where the dark beast-like headland jutted out over the northern sea on her left, across the deep grey expanse of swollen river-mouth down below her, and on to the stately beauty of the sacred headland far to her right, with the wedge-shaped Sacred Howe in silhouette.

Maybe it should have been her sacred howe by now; who was she to say? Lower down the ridge, the ancient house that had been home to her mother and grandmother – and the countless grandmothers before that – stood out among the patch of smaller huts that clustered around it like so many limpets. Niav felt cheated, her Aunty Grizzel had lied to her – suddenly this was an unlovely world. The soaring gull did not impress her. She stood hunched and shivering in her shawl at the clifftop, gazing sourly up at it.

The replying scut of bird lime, which just missed, was somehow not a coincidence.

“I am not going to blame her for not telling me,” she told herself as she glowered out over the grey sea, trying to fight her anger. “It must be terrible to have your brother scraped off a rock and then brought home by his greatest enemy, particularly if he could then look smug about it.”

Was she fooling herself? Hadn’t she a right to have been told a long time ago? She wasn’t a baby, and, if there was some mystery about it all, it was a mystery that belonged to her. She was just so used to Aunty Grizzel’s moods – but maybe there should be limits. She couldn’t just throw those eggs away. It would be wicked to let them go to waste on a whim. And it was just a whim. Gloom, doom. People listened to Aunt Grizzel quite enough as it was. Being expected to act as fledgling to the local wise-woman really could be depressing if they treated you like a baby the next minute.

It had been a beautiful, sun-kissed morning and the rain, so far, was holding off. Niav had come down to her special spot by the river in search of bull-rush roots. Aunty Grizzel seemed in real need of sweetening up, and the roots, after a short spell shoved among the hot ashes, were the sweetest thing she knew.

They had told her it was meant to be a bad place, an unlucky place where unfortunate things were washed in, but there, amid the gentle rustle of the reeds, at the very centre of the great, headless snake-stone bowl, Niav had discovered an impeccable nest, exactly placed, holding six perfect eggs, and not a guarding parent in sight – almost a miracle.

But then cousin Kyle, that vermin, had ruined everything. He hadn’t just burst through the rushes and spoiled the perfect moment, he had told her something utterly unforgivable – that this, her favourite place of all places, was where the body of her mother, Befind, had been found washed in “all bloated like so much bladderwrack!” And she had never, never known. No one had even so much as hinted.

Of course she threw an egg at him – and it did not miss.

She had held herself firm, while he crashed his way back through the rushes trying to wipe the egg yolk from his eyes. She didn’t cry. Not only had she collected up the remaining eggs and packed them neatly in the basket, all carefully bounced out with moss as she had been taught, she had even gone grubbing for a respectable bundle of roots as well.

Unsurprisingly, the last thing Niav got when she reached home laden with her unexpected goodies was gratitude or congratulations.

“They will be bound to have gone rotten. Why else would they be left for you to find so easy?” Aunt Grizzel said sourly, after one glance at Niav’s basket.

She had tossed her long wavy hair from around her shoulders and swept back towards the weaving-hut. The beads of her many-rowed jet necklace all flashed in a shaft of sunlight – she was a good-looking woman and everyone acknowledged it.

“Perhaps something got the parents – a fox or something. I don’t know!” said Niav, trailing behind her in exasperation.

“Can’t have been anything with any sense, or it would have eaten the eggs as well. No, they are bound to be bad. Get rid of them, I’d say.”

“The egg I chucked at Kyle was just fine! I had a good sniff at what was left of it.”

“What a waste, then,” growled Aunty Grizzel. “Is that what you’d prefer me to say instead? And how did poor little Kyle offend you this time, Madam?”

Niav bit her lip. There had to have been a reason for her Aunt not having told her something about the snake rock. “Is it true my mum was washed in down by my snake rock?”

“Yes, she was. And—”

“Was she all bloated – like a blown up bladder – and blue and green?”

“No she was not. Befind was as beautiful as she always was. I wonder whose lively imagination that was? Pity you didn’t chuck two eggs.”

“And my dad?”

“No, he came in up by the Beast’s Paw”

“Was he all bloated?”

But Aunty Grizzel just looked away. “Diarma floated in quite a while later …”

Niav had stood outside the weaving-hut as Grizzel started to pick through the basket of wools. “It’s all going wrong,” she growled, standing back from the loom to check the colour match of her new skein of wool. “And this one’s wrong too. It’s dyed a much deeper colour than last time – nothing’s going right today – something’s in the wind for sure.”

“A bit of deeper tone will just make the pattern more interesting,” said Niav, trying to maintain a cheerful front in spite of how she felt. She could see little difference in the shade this time, but Aunt Grizzel was much more aware of colour subtleties than she was, than anyone was – a real artist. “I think maybe I will just go for a walk on the clifftop – don’t worry, I will be back before dark. I will leave the eggs on the cool-shelf, and there are some sweeties in the basket too. We can roast them before we eat – that’ll be nice.”

“Don’t go too far then. I think there is rain brewing …” Aunt Grizzel was clearly not for a moment taken in by Niav’s attempted nonchalance. “Like I said, the sea threw your Pa back on to the rock by the Beast’s Paw. Lurgan went out in his coracle and brought him home – such a dutiful man, your Uncle Lurgan.”

***

Now Niav looked down at the dark swirling river. Was there truly something in the wind? She wouldn’t have cared to say.

But, suddenly, picked out by a moment’s hectic beam of sunlight, something was scudding in fast ahead of the dark storm clouds that swirled around the eastern headland.

A smallish craft, desperate to make landing before the skies broke – Niav caught her breath in a sort of wondering ecstasy as she made out the symbol clearly painted in brown and yellow, wings picked out in white, right across the square leather sail. A bee. It must be Artin. It had to be Artin. Why did he always swirl in on the bow of a storm? Artin the Smith, maker of dreams, who had returned from the dead. People said that he had defeated the mighty Sea God in an epic battle, and some folk even went so far as to say he was somehow the Sea God himself; but he would only smile and say that he served a power far, far greater than that of the waves, or any other force of nature.

No wonder Aunt Grizzel was acting up. In her few years of conscious observation, Niav had noticed that her aunt was particularly prone to her nonsense when Artin was in the offing – almost like some people’s dogs sensing that their owners were coming before they walked up over the horizon – uncanny! Perhaps this was the time when she might pluck up the courage to try to discover why.

Originally when she had seen her aunt so twitchy, she had thought that it might just be a general dislike of strangers. However, she had soon come to realize that that would be completely ridiculous. Though the strangers always made a reverent visit to the Sacred Howe on the east bank, the chief reason that brought them from far and wide to their river mouth was the trade with the artisans on the western bank. The strangers understood the quality of their weaving and pottery and in particular the value and beauty of their magic black stones – jet.

Jet wasn’t merely something for making jewellery, it had very peculiar magical properties too. It was very rare – a stone, but as light as wood and as warm as wood to touch – even though it came out of the ground. When you polished it against sandstone it would show you reflections of a sunless, secret magic world. If you rubbed jet with woollen cloth, it could be made to pick things up. The fumes from burning jet could be used to test virginity, and they could even be used to drive out snakes. All the headless stone snakes which could be found dotted everywhere about the valley – though few of them were quite as large as the special one where Niav had found the eggs – were often pointed out as proof of this. But why such things were so was really still a mystery, even to the people from the river mouth, though of course they would be the last people to admit it.

Jet could be quite dangerous as well. Though you could collect jet along the sea and river shores, the best jet was mined – often dangling, from an exposed cliff face. This had to be done with caution; if you were not careful, you might awake the hidden spirits that lurked in the rock faces. If they were treated wrong they would get angry and the ground around the mines might burst into fire – to show the spirits’ power and spite – and be of no use to anyone, unless, of course, you were trying to dispose of an unwanted serpent.

People like Uncle Lurgan (and her long chain of grannies stretching back into the past) on the eastern bank inherited the job of taking care of the right ceremonies for this sort of thing. It was time someone explained to Niav how and why she had lost this right when she ended up on the west side of the river.

No, Niav appreciated that her people were very special, and had been chosen by the gods because of their artistic talents and shrewd business sense, and not only for their wisdom and piety – so why this strange divide?

Aunty Grizzel summed the dilemma up. Of all the people who lived on the west bank, she was the most talented, on top of which she could look really beautiful. She might be shockingly failing in piety but she was also amazingly and universally accepted to be wise. For her, not liking strangers just for the sake of it would be particularly unlikely.

But it wasn’t all strangers, she had eventually realized; it was the group of strangers led by Artin.

Looking down at the small, blunt-prowed boat, with its steering oarsman making purposefully towards the eastern shore, Niav remembered another thing said about jet: it could keep away dogs. Aunt Grizzel disliked dogs almost as much as she seemed to dislike Artin – and there was another bit of nonsense.

Kyle had a big half-sister called Estra (she was Uncle Lurgan’s daughter but not with Kyle’s mother, Aunty Helygen. Estra’s mother had died when she was a baby). Estra could tell the most gripping stories – particularly ghost stories. There was one peculiar tale about the very first time that the people of the river-mouth had been visited by Artin. Niav didn’t know how long ago this was supposed to have been. On the few times Niav had seen Artin, he always seemed to her to be quite young.

“It was a really wild evening,” Estra said. “All the boys were up on the west cliff watching the sunset and then the sky opened and the rain came lashing down. Everyone started dashing down the pathway to get home but suddenly they saw this slip of a boat leaping from wave to wave, driven in by the storm. But it never made the harbour and crashed in under the east cliff – as boats do – and it was sucked clean under, all in a second.” Then Estra put on her creepy story voice. “Everyone was stunned. There in front of them, something horrible and dark was fighting its way in through the surge and it leapt ashore – a great black dog – and they all watched it limp out of the water and clamber, really slow, up the path by the east cliff. It seemed to have injured its back left leg.

“But the next day, they found Artin (just a boy) lying out on the hillside with a horribly mangled left knee. The bodies of the other strangers floated in all white and bloated after that.”

Niav was so taken with the story that she had told Aunty Grizzel.

“Now that must be a very old version of Artin’s first arrival – I wonder where Estra got that from?” she laughed.

“But it’s so weird – almost as though Artin’s something evil. Estra’s an idiot – she talks rubbish.”

“You’re happy enough to listen to her. She’s just got a vivid imagination. Poor child, with her mother being drowned like that – you of all people should be a bit more understanding.”

“But I’m not creepy and try to stand too close to people, or say I have got magical powers because my mother was some wise-woman!”

“Well, you could if you wanted; besides, Estra’s poor mother, Seyth, was a wise-woman – where she came from.”

“But Artin’s not like that. And Uncle Lurgan almost worships at his feet …”

“Yes, nauseating, I know. But in the early days, everyone over there thought he was the spawn of Evil – couldn’t ship him over to this side quick enough, forget hospitality! Your Uncle Lurgan decided that the nursing might be better done by your mother and father and me rather than him and Aunty Helygen – a delightfully backhanded bit of recognition.”

Niav knew she had a lot to learn about the feud there had been between Uncle Lurgan and her father Diarma – even after he was dead. Things she had a right to know. But what a story! There must have been something in it, because Artin still walked with a limp to this day. And her parents really had nursed Artin the Smith – amazing!

But how strange, too, that story of the black dog. She knew there were tales of living black were-beasts – but more like cats than dogs – out there on the northern headland, but certainly not the east cliff. Imagine that though – Artin lying there in their hut, possibly even where Aunty Grizzel slept now.

Artin had hair the colour of honey and eyes the shade of new-dug peat. His smile was like dark sunlight and when he spoke to you, they said, he made a special moment for you all your own – a special place in time where you would understand, and know the way to go. But Niav herself had only seen him from afar.

“Artin took a long time to recover from the knee injury. Your father designed the first of those famous decorated wooden leg guards Artin always wears – we padded it out with moss to protect the shattered knee.

“He insisted on giving your mum and dad something for their kindness, though of course as healers we made a point of never asking for payment. So we were the first family that Artin showed how to tame bees, since we were fellow magical practitioners, so to speak.

“I think it started to restore your mum’s good name; Shamanistic integrity, as it were, after eloping with a smelly weaver-dyer – from the west bank, like your dad – who had unsuitable ambitions of being a wise man and healer, too.”

It was difficult for Niav to take in exactly what this must have meant, such a long time ago, when Artin was only an injured boy and not almost a demi-god. These days Uncle Lurgan seemed to see himself, somehow, as Artin’s representative when he was not there (which was most of the time). She couldn’t understand why Aunty Grizzel found the whole thing so ridiculous.

“What else can one do?” Aunty Grizzel smiled. “Yes, times do change, Artin had lost everything, but wanted to show his gratitude. He persuaded your mum to let him join me in learning how to make jet beads. He was a stranger and it is meant to be a secret but they let him. That’s Artin for you. We would sit polishing them for hours on those flat shards of sandstone. You know what it’s like, all the dust and oil getting up your fingernails. He was very good at it.”

It was around this time too, apparently, that Artin had made the decorated sandstone plaque that was kept propped high up on the weaving-hut wall, tucked in among all the rugs and shawls that hung there for traders to haggle and bargain for. It showed the mountains and his home valley far away across the world. These days quite a lot of people, both local and visitors who had reached the river mouth by sea – and sometimes even overland – looked on it as a sacred object, and offered Aunty Grizzel the most amazing trade goods for it, but she simply laughed and said it should stay where he had left it.

“It was just a way of him practising decoration before we let him loose on the jet,” she told Niav. “But it’s a nice design – I’ve used it for I don’t know how many rugs since then.

“But he wanted to return to his own family – poor boy. He had at least six brothers and as many sisters and he was the youngest of the lot, so he missed them terribly. He had a mysterious young wife, too, called Orchil. She was somewhere else, he said, and she was in danger. He was desperate to get to her.

“Everyone, on both banks, rallied round and helped him build a new boat – to his design of wood, of course; not a skin coracle like we were used to, or even a dug-out tree trunk like the people from the north – poor Estra’s mother included – will insist on travelling in.

“We were not at all impressed with her and her boat. While our little community was graced with her presence, she tried hard to convince us that it was much the superior water-craft – and look where it got her, poor woman.

“Do you know the very first thing that you do when you are making one of those dug-outs? You wouldn’t believe it,” Aunty Grizzel scoffed. “You bore a big hole in the bottom to the thickness that you think your boat should be. Then you start hollowing the whole thing out from the top – it takes forever – and when you finally reach the original hole you made, you know it’s finished.”

“But won’t it sink if it has a hole right through it?”

“Exactly. However, you bung the hole up. But when you need to beach the boat, where we, of course, would be able to turn our coracles over to dry, a dug-out is too heavy – that is when you pull out the bung to drain it.

“So, you can imagine that no one round here had any intention of trying their hand at one of those, but they did their best to help Artin to make the sort of craft that he was used to. They are obviously excellent boats, you have no idea of the distances they voyage or the weather they battle through. You never know if the strangers are lying, of course, but I don’t think they often are – they all say much the same things.

“Anyway, you try stitching planks together with osiers and caulking it all with moss and resin – that’s how they make their boats – I expect you have worked that one out. It’s very tricky. But that’s Artin and his folk all over, isn’t it? Everyone was very eager to help, but it took months of experiment.”

But when it had finally been tested, Niav knew that that had been a tragedy. Father and Mother she had been told, were out in the boat with Artin, and everyone was watching from the river’s edge (with only young Aunty Grizzel minding new baby Niav back at home) and the boat had gone down at the river-mouth; only Artin’s decorated knee protector that her dad, Diarma, had made had been washed in on the sands.

What happened after that? Niav was unsure. She now felt she might have been told a pack of lies. Little details started to add up. Memories of hearing people mention that it was when Artin came back about three years later, with a new boat, a new band of brothers, a new knee-guard and a welter of new magical ideas, that many people had started to feel that maybe Artin really must be some sort of miracle-worker or even a god.

Niav couldn’t help feeling, from spending so much time with dear cousin Estra, that this was how the myths began. At the moment, what she wanted was the truth.

So what had it been? Time and time again, through all the years that Niav could remember, he had come whirling in, always on the brink of a storm; Artin the Smith – smoke and magic, golden metal and golden honey. They said he gave so much and had taken so very little in return, but now she wasn’t sure.

Suddenly the skies opened and Niav dashed headlong down the ridge to tell the world.

***

“And how many did he have with him this time?” Aunty Grizzel was trying her best not to sound interested, as the rain pelted down on the turf of the roof and filled the drip-gully to overflowing.

“I think there were at least four of them, maybe five. One may have been a woman. I’m not sure. The light wasn’t good.”

“Five, that’s handy, five eggs. You could give those eggs as a guest-greeting.”

“I am sure those eggs are not bad,” said Niav firmly.

“Then that’s all right, isn’t it? Anyway, they are beautifully packed.”

***

Artin the Smith and his companions anchored their boat at the deep part by the eastern shore where the boys used to jump in from the rocks at sunset if no strangers were visiting. Next day the new arrivals were rowed over to the settlement on the opposing shore in a shoal of coracles reverently manned by a respectful escort of eastbankers – so that Artin could set up his furnace for the duration among the smells and grime of his fellow artisans on the western bank as he always did.

Artin smiled when Niav, standing at the gate of their compound, handed him the basket of eggs. It was the closest she had ever been to him. He passed it back on to one of his brothers directly behind him, who was collecting up all the gifts from the people of the west bank as they made their progress, and putting them into a hamper.

Uncle Lurgan was there in the crowded background, but trying to look in charge – as if you could with such a stupid beard and sandals, not to mention the hat (surely he didn’t imagine that it made him look intelligent and wise). Aunty Helygen stood, drooping on his arm like some scrawny willow. They had even brought cousins Estra, Kyle and the youngest, Canya. They all looked very clean. Niav supposed there hadn’t been room in the family coracle for the hound as well – a pity, since apart from Canya it was quite the nicest member of the family.

Canya was exactly what a cousin ought to be. Niav felt really cheered by the sight of her and they grinned at each other. People often told Niav that if she wanted to know what her mother, Befind, had looked like, she only needed to take a glance at Canya – and that was a strangely comforting thing to know.

Suddenly Niav’s spirits lifted. The tension of all the frantic preparation that Aunty Grizzel had pretended wasn’t happening was over. Things would be fine. Surely Artin would somehow know if the eggs were bad or not? He’d just know?

Aunty Grizzel was beside her, simply radiating beauty, and with a smug smile on her face. She had on her jet necklace and a woollen shawl so subtly woven and dyed that it looked like something that had burgeoned in the forest – not made by human hands at all. Needless to say, there was a woman in Artin’s party and Grizzel had heard as much, instantly, from her contacts on the east bank.

“Did you tell my bees that I was here too, Grizzel?” Artin laughed into her eyes.

“Of course,” she smiled sweetly. “I tell the bees everything.”

“Well now you will be able to tell them that this time I have brought Orchil, my wife, to meet them too.”

The new woman wore a long blue cloak and her hair was shining, jet black, but her skin was very pale, like new-chipped quartz. She stood behind him, between the two other men. She had great dark eyes, but she scarcely looked up at Grizzel at all, only down at her child, a raven-haired toddler, who slept quietly in a side-sling at her hip, his thin white legs dangling against her.

“And this is our son, Fearn.”

***

So Artin and his brothers (for it turned out the second man was another brother) set up their bothy where Artin’s people always did, and soon Niav could hear the bellows of his furnace working like the breathing of a giant beast, and smell the woodsmoke curling from his fire of alder-logs, drifting down towards them.

People from the local countryside sped to and fro across the river to visit Artin on their western bank. They brought him their broken tools and broken lives and went home smiling.

On the third day Artin himself came limping down to the weaving-hut. His wooden knee greave was decorated with swirling pokerwork patterns like the rising sun. He made a polite visit to the beehive, smiled sweetly at Niav and then turned his attention to Aunt Grizzel.

“Orchil, my wife, is unhappy. I would like to give a gift to her.”

“A nice rug might remind her of home,” said Grizzel sourly.

“No, not one of those. That was never her home. What I had in mind were those beads I fashioned.”

Grizzel’s hand leapt to her necklace. “No!” she said.

“They were not made for you.”

“I strung them.”

“But they were not made for you.”

“Because of you we lost my brother and my brother’s wife. If we gave the beads to anyone, it should be to my niece here, Niav.”

Artin and Niav exchanged a glance and he raised one perfect eyebrow.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a rug after all? They come from your design, you know,” said Niav shyly “This blue one is lovely,” she added, pulling one out from the pile laid ready for trading.

But he settled instead for a saffron-coloured belt with an arrow-shaped jet fastening like the one on Grizzel’s necklace. Niav had woven it and she dimpled in pleasure.

She watched Aunty Grizzel holding Artin in animated conversation as they walked past the friendly, long-nosed pig that snuffled at the water-trough, and wove their way through the browsing flock of small-horned, dark-coated sheep till they reached the thorny compound hedge; then she slammed the gate after him. What on earth had all that been about?

***

Niav was troubled in her sleep; she kept waking to hear murmurings as Aunty Grizzel moved about the hut and finally went out on some night emergency – though she was back in her bed in the morning.

The next day the news spread that Artin’s wife had died in the night. She must have been a bit more than unhappy. Had she even seen her new belt?

“Three rough men can’t care for an infant!” declared Grizzel to everyone’s astonishment except Niav’s. The two of them walked up to Artin’s bothy through the dry grass.

The little boy Fearn was not exactly an infant – a grave child, with his thumb in his mouth. He had his mother’s hair and his father’s eyes. He knew what was going on all right – not the first death he had seen, Niav felt sure.

She and Grizzel stood by him while the three men dug the grave beneath the alder tree, brothers in looks, brothers in action. All three of them, shirts laid aside as they navvied, had a white mark on their brown backs, in between the shoulder-blades, where the sun had refused to tan them. Artin’s mark was the clearest and most symmetrically defined, like the wings of a great bee, or a double-headed axe.

No wonder people thought of him as one of the chosen.

“Under the alder,” remarked Grizzel to no one in particular. “It was alderwood he used for his confounded boat that stole my family away.” Niav winced at the pain in her voice. Weren’t things bad enough?

“Of course he would, alder doesn’t rot. It’s just a tree. You use it yourself for your dyeing: most of the greens, and the gold – and the red too. Is that somehow an insult to my dad and mum as well? I never heard anything so daft.” Symbols were all very well, but Niav felt her aunt could get a bit carried away sometimes.

“But never blue,” Grizzel went on as though Niav hadn’t said a word. She was watching the three of them bundle poor Orchil, wrapped in her cloak, into the readied grave. “I wonder what caused such unfairness? Bastard!”

Surely Aunty Grizzel must have meant that last word for fate – never for someone like Artin?

***

The people of the river-mouth were amazed, and deeply honoured, that when Artin The Smith and his brothers sailed away to the south, Fearn came to stay with Grizzel and Niav.

Uncle Lurgan took great exception to this and came storming up to their compound. He stood there, seething in his sandals, his wisp of a beard jutting in thwarted dignity while poor Aunt Helygen stood wringing her hands tearfully behind him.

“What that child is entitled to is a solid family life with us. He needs the proper preparation for his future. I am sure it would never have occurred to Artin that we would arrange for anything else!”

Aunty Grizzel stood there as majestic as a cedar, and as impervious. “He didn’t mention it.”

“Poor soul, he would be so grief-stricken. It must have slipped his mind,” ventured Helygen. “There needs to be a responsible man in his life, like an uncle, for support.”

“He isn’t short of real uncles,” Grizzel replied. “I can’t remember that sort of offer ever being made by you for your real niece, Niav here.”

Niav’s heart almost stopped beating at the horror of the suggestion.

But it was eventually settled that Uncle Lurgan would take on the role and duties of Fearn’s foster father. The only consequence as far as Niav was concerned was that Estra, Kyle and Canya ended up with more frequent crossings of the river in order to allow all the children “plenty of time together”, and Fearn and Niav would often go over to the big family hut on the east side of the river.

“You have a perfect right to go there,” Aunty Grizzel said cheerfully. “Rather more right than they have, if you want to be old-fashioned about your inheritance.”

It wasn’t too bad. What Uncle Lurgan felt he would gain by all this was unclear to Niav, though Aunty Grizzel seemed to have a pretty shrewd idea.

“He and Helygen probably hope that Fearn will end up with one of their girls,” she said. “It’s probably Estra, she is the eldest. Besides, Lurgan has developed the notion that Estra has inherited huge magical ability from both him and her mother, that wretched Seyth. I can’t say I’ve noticed.” Then she ruffled Niav’s bright hair. “If we have an extra mouth to feed, I can do with any help I am offered. Besides,” she laughed, “Fearn can always refuse. He is not daft”.

That didn’t help explain Aunt Grizzel’s sudden sense of friendship – even duty – to Artin, when only a few days earlier she had seemed to be suggesting that he might have had something to do with the deaths of both of Niav’s parents, not to mention that of his own poor wife, Orchil.

Kyle and Estra had to be endured, but Fearn seemed a tolerant child, if self-contained. However, spending more time with her younger cousin Canya was a real joy. Canya was pretty and clever and kind, and her voice was clear as a blackbird and smack on the note and you could suddenly find yourself singing in harmony with her without having planned it at all.

But cousin Estra was a problem. She could be so obsessive about things. All the river-mouth children liked to go beachcombing together in search of bits of jet, and the tiny snake stones that were small enough to turn into saleable jewellery, but Estra was always contriving ways of isolating Niav from the rest of the group because she wanted to be “special friends” with her. Niav found this most annoying, but frantic complaints to Aunty Grizzel fell on deaf ears.

“Nothing very special about poor Estra,” was all she would say.

This seemed a bit harsh on Estra, who was the best of the three girls when it came to learning things from the two aunties. Helygen was not only a superb herbalist, she was incredibly house-proud and a consumate cook. Niav found she had a lot of catching up to do to be level with her cousins. Her aunt was also very conscientious, strict about care and safety with her herbs and potions with five children around, and a very good teacher too; extremely patient – not as erratic as Aunty Grizzel.

Uncle Lurgan would be out with the boys and the great dog, caring for the flocks, but was also responsible for their instruction in the skills of hunting and tracking. Niav and Canya would have loved to do this too, until Fearn told them how Lurgan managed to surround even that with endless ritual.

With Aunty Grizzel all three girls now learned the skills of spinning and weaving. Lurgan would probably have disapproved had he known that Grizzel also tried to hand on everything that she had learned from Niav’s parents, even letting them take a try at scrying in the smooth stone water-bowl that was kept in pride of place on the dresser beside her little drum and the ritual rattle.

But Estra continued to be a real trial for Niav. She was convinced that there must be some sinister magical connection in the way that both their mothers, Seyth and Befind, had died in the clutches of the river and so, equally, this should make an important bond between the two of them. Niav found all this very upsetting. She wondered if her own nagging worries about her parents’ deaths would seem equally crazy if she were to talk about it in public. She certainly didn’t feel ready to haul everything out in the open for a loud-mouthed idiot like Estra to pull to bits and put together again, almost certainly all wrong.

In the end she decided to try to see if anyone besides Estra felt poor Seyth’s death was anything other than a dreadful accident. It was the least she could do before dismissing Estra as annoyingly cracked in the skull. Since Estra, whether she liked it or not, was her cousin, she thought it only fair to ask people on both sides of the river what they thought.

She spoke to women rather than men because she didn’t think it was the sort of thing men would feel they should be concerned about. Everyone seemed sincerely touched that young Niav was taking such a charming concern in her cousin Estra’s tragic past. Niav felt almost ashamed.

The house-proud ladies on the eastern bank saw Estra’s mother, the Lady Seyth, as an amazingly beautiful wise-woman, and they had almost woven her tragic ending into a romantic legend. As they saw it, Master Lurgan, the son of their wise-woman (Niav’s grandmother) had gone off into the West on an “axe-quest” – something that devout young men did not do enough these days. He had returned to his mother’s deathbed to bring a polished axe of superb quality, to everyone’s universal approval. To all of them, it made some recompense (with respect) for the distress that they had all felt when his sister, Mistress Befind (Niav’s poor mother), had chosen to disregard her birthright and throw in her lot with a weaver on the other side of the river.

Shortly after this – and even better – Lady Seyth, who had encountered Lurgan while on his questing, had fallen so deeply in love with him that she had deserted her own people and gone in search of him, bearing their new-born child. Such a beautiful thing – and they had all had every hope that she would be their new Lady.

This failed so completely to fit in with Niav’s vision of Uncle Lurgan that she could barely keep a straight face. Besides, what about poor Aunt Helygen – where did she fit in? But for the eastbankers, Helygen was not part of the story – everyone moved on to the terrible tragedy of the drowning. They were all sure that poor Lady Seyth, a stranger to their river, had simply misread the currents on a stormy day – and nothing more.

Attitudes on the west bank were very different. There, it seemed to be generally felt that her uncle, Lurgan – who, if she didn’t mind them saying so, was somewhat given to religious extremes – had taken it into his head to go off on the weirdly outdated custom of an “axe-quest”, leaving his intended bride, poor Aunt Helygen and his terminally ill mother to wait for his return.

He had no sooner arrived home, to bore them all to death with the stories of questing, than a most unattractive and self-opinionated young woman calling herself Lady Seyth had arrived, in one of those unwieldy dug-out canoes with a baby girl that she claimed to be Lurgan’s (though it looked nothing like him or any other members of his family). Lurgan had actually seemed on the verge of setting Helygen aside, when one torrential afternoon, the fool of a wise-woman refused to listen to everyone’s advice not to attempt a crossing, misjudged the river currents, and, very sadly, drowned.

Bemused, Niav finally sought Aunty Grizzel’s casting view on the matter; she was particularly condemnatory. “Dreadful woman! She would spout esoteric moonshine at you by the hour, but Lurgan was convinced she was a ‘great mind’. Your granny would have died laughing if she hadn’t already been dead. Poor Helygen, to be subjected to all that; she is such a brilliant herbalist and a really caring soul – not that I need to tell you.”

“But where was Estra? Why wasn’t she drowned too?”

“That is the appalling thing! That bitch, Seyth, had left Estra for Helygen to look after, as though she was her minion, while she swanned over here to get some unnecessary fiddle-faddle for her “work’. Poor young Estra, I am afraid, shows every sign of becoming another exhibitionist like her mother. Clear your mind of it. Nothing or nobody murdered Seyth – it was just an accident.”

Totally deflated, after all her busy questionings, Niav wondered if, equally, maybe, nobody had murdered her parents either.

But then how was it that Artin the Magician had re-emerged, and such a long time later, when you would think that a cripple like him should have been sucked into the stormy seas beside them? No wonder people wondered if he wasn’t some sort of godling. And why had Fearn’s mother died suddenly like that? And, particularly … why was it that Grizzel did not seem, any longer, concerned to know?

So, in spite of her own worried imaginings, Niav concentrated on trying not to lose her temper with Estra. She tried to feel sorry for her, because Aunty Grizzel clearly did, and Aunty Grizzel was not a one to suffer fools gladly. But she couldn’t come to terms with the way that Estra obsessed so about what she seemed to consider were their exclusive rights to magical power.

To Niav, if, as a result of her family background, she ended up more able to help other people stay lucky and well, that was a gift she was happy and honoured to share. But if it came to some inbred right to dominate people and the forces of nature, just because you could, that was where Niav, very firmly, drew her line in the sand.

But Estra’s next, worrying, foray into the worlds of imagination concerned the sacred “barra” or wand of power. Obviously every self-respecting wise woman would be expected to have one.

“We have to have barras!” Estra solemnly announced one afternoon as the three girls were busily engaged in collecting the latest harvest of wool that the sheep regularly rid themselves of in the thorny field hedges. “We have a great heritage, you and I, Niav, a mystic bond, I sense it! This river – it’s malevolent. It wants to steal our powers! We have to join forces to face the river out. I know we can do it!”

“I think you have to wait for your barra to find you,” countered Niav nervously, plucking out of the air a vague memory of something Aunt Grizzel had once mentioned. She had the greatest respect for the raging majesty of their river, but she doubted that it would waste its time on the rantings of two little girls.

Where on earth had this latest notion come from? Some puzzled questioning finally made Niav suspect that someone had mentioned to Estra that both her own mother, Seyth, and Niav’s mother, Befind, would have had their barra with them when they died.

Somehow Estra had turned this obvious fact into a cosmic conspiracy, and Niav noted to herself that their mothers’ barras hadn’t proved much good against the power of the river. But still, she began to wonder what had happened to her mother’s barra.

Had it been in their family a long time? Could Lurgan have told Estra as much, and made her feel that it should really have come down to her, his eldest daughter, because Befind had abandoned her birthright and should never have taken it away?

Aunty Grizzel, for once, seemed to think this was perfectly probable “Poor child, nobody likes her. She simply wants to feel special in some way. She will grow out of it, I expect.”

“Did Mother’s barra belong to Granny as well? Would I have had it?”

“I dare say it did – and possibly a whole string of grannies before that. It would have come down to you, in due course; certainly not to Estra, anyway – things like that would go down female relatives, and her mother was a complete stranger. Besides, it sounds as though she had also thrown away whatever birthright it was she claimed to have had – from wherever it was she came! It’s just Estra’s nonsense. Try to distract her on to something else. If either of you two is meant to have a barra, it will emerge when the time is right.”

But it was her mother’s death, not her mother’s mislaid barra, that most concerned Niav. However, month followed month, and year followed year, with Artin showing not the slightest sign of reappearing at the river’s mouth. There could be no chance of Niav (even if she had managed to approach him at all) questioning him successfully about her parents’ tragedy. Artin seemed to be the most elusive of men – if he was just a man.

However, for all the other people who awaited him in the valley, the legend of what Artin was and the things he’d said and done seemed to simplify and became easier to understand – mainly because Uncle Lurgan was so assiduous in keeping his interpretation of Artin’s teachings alive in people’s minds.

“You know,” Aunty Grizzel observed, “there are times when I doubt that Artin would recognize a word of what he is supposed to have said at all.”

As for Artin’s boy, by now everyone loved Fearn for himself as much as for the memory of whose son he was. He was found to be astonishingly creative even by local standards and determined to try his hand at mastering any skill that the people on the western bank would let him learn – besides what Lurgan tried to teach him over on the eastern side.

The bees liked him too and he helped to take over the care of the hives – as might be expected of someone who has been used to the mysteries of smoke and magic – and the honey yield prospered.

He missed his own family, of course, but he did not seem unduly surprised that he had been left behind. He could wait. He had seemed a silent boy, but Grizzel and Niav gradually came to appreciate that it was more the case of him knowing how to be silent in many different tongues.

His mother had not come from the same homeland as his father, and they had lived in another place entirely – and then there was the mixture of languages that the sailors spoke which was almost a language in itself. That was why understanding the people of the river-mouth had presented no problem to him at all. He could cope with Kyle’s insipid attempts at bullying him and Estra’s flurries of melodrama, and he really appeared to like Canya just as much as Niav did – he particularly seemed to delight in music just as they did.

Once he had been shown how to cut a set of pipes from his mother’s alder, and saw the sap run as red as blood, he told Niav that he felt that Orchil was still alive, waiting for Artin too, and smiling down on him as he played.

Niav and Canya would sit enthralled, watching the dappled sunlight fall across Fearn’s bare brown back – clearly marked with his father’s white protective wings – as he sat, poised on the great rock that his father and uncles had placed beneath the shadow of the alder branches before they left. It seemed so magical a place that the girls were sometimes too in awe to sing.

Occasionally the visitors to the river-mouth included Artin’s kin. They always made a point of giving small gifts to many of the children, not only Fearn.

Once, Niav was smilingly given a lovely greenstone bead, on a soft white leather thong, that looked almost as special as Uncle Lurgan’s quested axe. But when Niav ran home with it to show Aunty Grizzel, she looked quite bemused. “That’s a very valuable thing to give a little girl – mind you, don’t flash it about when there are traders around.”

“But why give it to me?”

“Don’t forget your mum and dad saved Artin’s life – maybe it’s time it was remembered.” She went off to look for Artin’s brother and came back very quiet.

However, if Fearn begged him (or whichever other brother sailed in to the river-mouth) for news of his father, they would only smile and say that he was an amazingly busy man these days.

Every time they came, Niav felt that she would like to sail away with them and search for him too. Every girl would. How tragic it had been, everyone said, that such a beautiful man should have been reduced to limping his way around like that.

“Oh, it doesn’t notice when he is lying down,” Aunty Grizzel scoffed. “That’s the way they wish they could have seen him; besides, time passes and he won’t be looking quite so beautiful now.”

Niav would try not to be put out by such sacrilegious observations. Aunty Grizzel was endearingly eager to shock, and Niav was determined to try and seem grown-up enough to be treated as her assistant and not just her niece. She tried to show an educated interest in Artin’s injuries, and remarked how wonderful it was that he was able to give so much time and careful advice to people, when he must, surely, be in such acute pain. Had Aunty Grizzel any notion of what drug he might be taking to manage it?

“The same thing that gives him all his visions, I should imagine!” was all that Aunt Grizzel would reply – why couldn’t she try to be serious sometimes?

But that was the trouble – she was. Aunt Grizzel always saw right through her, however hard she tried. The memory of Artin represented her masculine ideal, in spite of all her mixed suspicions about him otherwise. Even though she knew that most young girls of her age were already expected to be looking around, no one else that she met, even visiting young traders, ever seemed to come up to his standard. Her aunt was tolerant and did not pressure her, but she was obviously starting to get concerned about Niav’s future happiness.

“You will become a broken-hearted wise-woman like me, if you don’t watch your step, child,” she chided her, not unkindly. “There are six lads at least that I can think of who are trying to run after you. Don’t you notice? Don’t you care? Do you want to spend your best years with a sarcastic bitch like me?”

“Oh, I’m quite fond of you really,” smiled Niav, unmoved. “And, besides, Fearn can be fun to be with too.”

She loved being with Fearn – something about the way their minds seemed to set one another’s off, always something to make, something to do; why give that up to be with the spotty youths of her own age?

One day, not long after a visitation of a couple of uncles, Fearn was sitting pensively on his rock. “You know,” he said, “I think that, this time, my uncles were trying to tell me that maybe I’m old enough to look under my rock.”

“Why, what’s under your rock?” said an astonished Niav; it was a vast thing and had taken both of his uncles and his father to get it set in place there, she remembered.

“Oh, he buried something for me underneath, to dig out when I was older. It needn’t be difficult. There are ways of moving big rocks that would simply stun you. People round here probably know, but they don’t seem to feel the need to do it. I doubt if there will be many future changes, either, with your uncle Lurgan smothering any new idea that tries to raise its head.

“Where we lived when I was little, they hefted rocks all over the place when they were feeling religious – it was quite exciting. Still, there is a lot to be said for the way you have things here. You let the children make themselves useful, beachcombing.

“Where we were, they’d have had me down a mine at the first opportunity – Orchil insisted on taking me away at the first mention of it; I prefer sunshine – so did she. But I can remember the amazing things they used to do and my uncles explained to me how they could be done. Maybe we should give it a go.”

“We? What have I got to do with it? Surely it’s meant to be your stone to prove your stupid manhood or something.”

“Look, it took the three of them ages, they were sweating away all night to shift it by brute force. Wouldn’t a couple of kids managing to do it – using my brain and organizational skills – prove my manhood?”

“Prove your bloody-mindedness possibly – I don’t know; it isn’t exactly my problem.”

“Well, I’d like to give it a try.”

Fearn demonstrated the method of using a lever, supported by a second stone, to prize up a smallish boulder. Though Niav had used slats of wood to loosen the odd flagstone in her time, she had never realized about using the smaller stone to help. She was impressed to discover quite how large a rock it was possible for two youngsters to move on their own with a proper-sized lever. However, in the end they called in the aid of Kyle, Estra and Canya who turned up unexpectedly.

All five of them were flung, laughing, on their backs as the mighty block was finally shifted to one side to reveal an intriguing cavity, lined with what looked like river-pebbles packed round a long, well-preserved leather sack.

Fearn knelt down and pulled it out.

With a muffled clang of metal on the stones, Fearn dragged it over to the others and squatted down to loosen the draw string and peel the bag open.

There was a long soft leather case, with a strap almost like a quiver for arrows, and about the same size, but heavy – a solid strip of metal. A bone handle protruded from the top, wound round with a tight string of what might be human hair – raven black, with gold plaited in. Gently, Fearn slid it out of the casing. It was coated with grease and came out easily.

“That’s got to be the biggest knife I have ever seen!”

“But it’s not flint …”

“No, it’s bronze!” breathed Fearn incredulously.

It was the biggest blade of bronze any of them had ever encountered, slender as the finest arrowhead or dagger, but longer than any piece of flint that they could imagine in their wildest dreams. It was ridged down the centre, widening where it plunged into the bone handle. The blade shone, softly golden in the bright sunlight.

Gingerly, Fearn touched the leading edge with the tip of his finger.

“Youch, that’s sharp.”

“You could whistle through a patch of reeds with that one!”

“Reeds, my eye – that’s for killing people!” observed Kyle with relish.

***

Fearn, Niav and Canya were busy displaying the new discovery to Aunty Grizzel in the sunshine outside the weaving-hut. She was looking down the blade with obvious admiration – after Fearn had demonstrated what damage he could do to a discarded mat – when Kyle, Estra and a sweating Uncle Lurgan came puffing up the path.

“What in the world are you thinking of – letting him loose with that thing, Grizzel!” he remonstrated. “Surely you don’t imagine that his father will have intended him to retrieve it in such a haphazard, unorganized way. It’s for a man to win in manly ceremony – not for children to play with. If I had known of its existence – and I cannot imagine why I was not informed of its potential discovery by one of his uncles; at least, if Artin understandably would not yet be expecting the time to be ripe – I would have put Fearn into training, composed a suitable ritual … Really, it’s unforgivable!”

With quite astonishing speed, Lurgan had retrieved the scabbard from its resting place across a wool basket, plucked the dagger from Grizzell’s unsuspecting grasp, and belted off back down the path to the river.

To Niav’s surprise, it was Kyle who dashed fiercely after him, followed by Fearn, and they attempted a tackle half way down the steep road. Lurgan broke free from them with unexpected speed and skill and Fearn fell heavily on his back. Kyle made a grab at Lurgan’s kilt and almost had him down, but only got smacked severely in the lip for his pains. Lurgan was away in the coracle as fast as lightning.

The three girls came tearing down the hill to find the two bewildered boys stranded on the bank.

Kyle was not allowed to cross the river the next day and Estra and Canya ruefully told Niav and Fearn that their parents had had the bronze blade securely hidden away by the time they reached home.

The five children – who so nearly bordered on not being children – were completely bereft. Aunty Grizzel was quietly furious. For once, Niav and Canya agreed with Estra in hoping that Aunty Grizzel would have decided to pour a few appropriate libations to deities who might take an active interest.

***

It was a pivotal moment, the point at which childhood dreams came to an end. In respect of Estra and Canya, in particular, Helygen decided it was time for them to concentrate on adult occupations – they must knuckle down and think of the future. Kyle and Fearn were kept apart for almost a week.

Estra, like Niav, was perfectly content, in fact most enthusiastic, to take up an adult role in helping with the family’s responsibilities for care and healing, but they both had trouble with trying to pretend that any of the local male talent raised the faintest flutter in their breasts. One would not have known what Canya felt about any of her young admirers; she was incapable of being unkind to anyone, so never voiced her feelings to anyone on the subject.

Kyle and Fearn were a different matter. Niav felt that Fearn was quietly seething – she did not know when he would break out, but she knew it would be well-planned when he did. In due course, Fearn built his own, small hut, further up the ridge, but still had a way of turning up at meal times, or bringing his washing along to be dealt with alongside theirs. However, his bed – on the right-hand side of the fire – that had been Diarma’s before him, remained empty.

Kyle was a mystery. He stayed at home, but he seemed bewildered that he had attacked his father. He didn’t come over to the west bank so often. Maybe he had never expected Lurgan to take the action he did. Maybe he feared that Fearn might feel betrayed by him and take appropriate vengeance – in other words, maybe he remained the suspicious, if slightly larger, stoat that he always had been.

***

No one could have suggested that, down by the river, there was any lack of opportunity within the seasons of the year for young persons to show their interest in members of the opposite sex.

Winter and summer, there was a whole succession of ceremonies to celebrate life, death, and, with special reference to the young, fertility. Even in the heart of winter, two hazelnuts, representing a would-be pairing, could be placed side by side in the embers. If they burned together slowly, it was said to bode well, but if one was seen to pop away across the ashes from the other – things were not held to be so good, and much laughter would result. Niav never had a nut which would stand still, while a Canya nut would smoulder away next to any suggested candidate. Niav never heard of anyone placing an Estra nut in the embers at all – maybe they would have been too nervous.

As spring arrived and the catkins on Fearn’s alder tree sprang into life, the boys and girls put strips of bark with their own signs on into adjoining bags. All the girls dreamed of drawing Fearn, all the boys dreamed of drawing Canya. No one ever gained any sign that they were likely to get satisfaction.

Eventually, even Niav had to acknowledge the fact that she had followers. She found it difficult to separate the image of these young suitors from the little boys that she used to watch silhouetted against the sunset as they dived off the flat rock by the traders’ landing point. She agreed to be courted by the least offensive of her suitors, but was very unsure about it. She had sincerely never realized that she was so sought-after. Aunt Grizzel started piling things up as bride-gifts.

***

So, one fragrant bee-hummingly radiant afternoon while Aunt Grizzel was busy, dealing with a difficult birth along in the settlement, Fearn came to find Niav in the weaving-hut.

“Are you going to get betrothed?” he asked.

“I expect so; don’t you like him?” said Niav.

“No, he’s fine. It’s just that I think I should be going to find my father. But I would like to know that you are settled before I do.”

“How could you find him? He could be anywhere.”

“Oh no! I know where we came from. I don’t forget things.”

“But you came in a boat. You don’t have a boat. Are you going to build one?”

“No, I don’t need to. Mother came from a headland in the west. It’s called ‘The Place of the Great Worm’ – all the smiths get their copper there. I will just wait for him to arrive. Anyone could go there on foot if they wanted to, but ore and suchlike are heavy stuff, so metalworkers go by boat – you must have realized that. I only need to follow the setting sun; it’s perfectly simple.”

“You are going – just like that?” Niav stared at him wide-eyed.

“Well, I came to say goodbye. It’s more than he did.”

“But we always expected him to come back.”

“Did you now?” said Fearn. “How little you knew him.”

“You were only a toddler – how could you have appreciated subtle nuances like that?”

“But I was not stupid. Small children are not always stupid. Besides I get much more information out of my uncles than they think I do. Or maybe they are just testing me to sort out how much I can work out for myself. Anyway, I aim to leave tomorrow.”

“What about your blade?”

“Oh, I plan to be getting my blade.”

Niav could just imagine the scene – oh to be an insect on the Lurgan family wall! “And what about Canya?”

“What about Canya? She could have anyone she wants, why would she want me? Besides, Estra would take it very badly. You know as well as I do that that’s who Lurgan proposes to pair me off with. I do not propose to come in the way of anything that Estra feels she is entitled to – it could ruin your life. Best to be elsewhere, I feel.”

“How perceptive of you. Well if you are so sure, what can I say?” Then she paused for a moment – if she didn’t ask him now she never would.” I need to know something about Artin that you might be able to help me with.”

Fearn raised a perfect eyebrow.

“It’s about the death of my parents. You seem to be able to remember a whole lot more than a toddler might be expected to, so it’s worth a try. I am told it was a good three years after my parents were drowned that your father reappeared like magic and people started to suspect he could be a demi-god. He never seems to have told anyone how he got away, or, if he did, there is some reason why no one one will tell me. Did you ever hear him talk of an escape, or maybe he said someone tried to kill him …?”

Fearn pondered for a minute. “Maybe – but I don’t remember details. Someone did try to kill him – but he went back and faced them out. In other words, yes, but I don’t know if it was here. He can make himself unpopular all over the place I am told.”

“Surely he wouldn’t have brought both of you back here if it was dangerous?”

“My mother is dead, my father is gone – end of story!”

Niav was stunned – all these years and he could have been harbouring doubts and terrors just the same as hers. “We are probably both being as daft as Estra,” she said, almost crying. “So that is that then. Is there anything I can give you to remember me by? I take it you won’t be back either.” Niav felt blank inside.

Fearn smiled, a smile like dark sunlight, and for her alone. “Now just imagine me,” he said. “With my hair the colour of honey, and, if you wish it, a crippled leg – though, as Aunty Grizzel pointed out, that wouldn’t notice if we were lying down. Or maybe think of me as him, reflected deep in jet – just to say goodbye to him, you understand – because, quite honestly, I don’t think he is going to come back this way, and I would like you to be happy for once, if only at second best.”

***

When Aunty Grizzel found them hard at work in her bed, she laughed till she wept. “Children, children, I do hope I am interrupting you before a truly delicate moment. Oh, but if you could see yourselves!” she cried. “A beast with two backs – and four wings! Really Niav, didn’t you think – couldn’t you guess? I hope nothing irretrievable has happened yet?”

“When would I get to see my back? Why did you never tell me?” screamed Niav in unbelieving shock.

“I’m going tomorrow,” laughed Fearn, who undoubtedly had been aware of the hidden interest of Niav’s back. “I don’t suppose there is anything that I can do for you, too, before I go?” He paused as he did up his belt.

“Arrogant bastard, like father like son!” yelled Grizzel. “We didn’t want my poor brother to know. So many years of marriage and no child – what else was your poor mother expected to do, Niav? Taunts of infertility get anyone down – men and women alike – and particularly when you are meant to be a healer.”

“Exactly – I’m sure that my father was merely trying to repay the hospitality that he had received – I’m told that it’s his way,” countered Fearn, still laughing as he laced up his right moccasin.

“Viper!” retorted Aunty Grizzel, flinging the nearest thing to hand – a wooden milk dipper, which Fearn avoided with a backward leap that took him smacking into the dresser and nearly dislodging Aunty Grizzel’s heavy scrying bowl. The drum and rattle bounced noisily across the earthen floor.

“Well, Niav,” Grizzel sighed, suddenly looking her age, “When I delivered you and saw that birthmark, your mother and I thanked our stars for you being a girl. For the normal reasons of decency, it would probably remain well hid, if we could only steer you past the baby stage. I know your mother had reassured Artin as much. I don’t know which one of them had had the bright idea in the first place – mutual lust is my suspicion, but then I’m over-suspicious by nature.

“Anyway, between us we were coping very well till one morning my brother Diarma popped his head into the hut just as we were bathing you. We didn’t think that he had noticed anything.

“That was the same day they had planned to go out testing that wretched boat. The whole village was there to see them off. At the last minute your mother decided to go too, and handed you to me to take home. But I went up to the west cliff so that we could watch. Even with them that far out, I noticed a tussle of some sort. Then the whole boat capsized and I thought them all gone forever. Who could have blamed my poor brother if he had seized a chance to push Artin in – but some people lead a charmed life. Abusing hospitality seems a family failing round here.”

“But it doesn’t make me the bastard!” hissed Fearn, now silhouetted in the doorway. “My mother loved him, you know, and she loved me, and once upon a time my father loved her! She was his wife! But you wouldn’t give up the beads he had made for her when he still pined for her and his distant home. Even after you had to thrust his love-child in her face! Eggs – she threw them at him, all of them – and they were rotten too! I forget nothing!” said Fearn with a terrible matter-of-factness.

Grizzel had seized the broom. Niav had finished scrabbling around for her scattered clothes. “Get out, you bastard’s bastard. You leave now, not tomorrow!”

“Yes, perfect timing, into the setting sun!”

They harried him down the cluttered compound, tripping up on hay-rakes and buckets and panicked livestock, past the weaving-hut and the herb garden and stumbling through the clutch of hives. The last they saw of him, he was running, screaming, towards the river, followed by a cloud of bees.

Grizzel dusted off her palms and walked sedately back towards the well. She undid her jet necklace, held it for a moment catching the sunlight and then, pushing the well cover aside, she dropped it clattering down the shaft.

***

Aunty Grizzel sat down on the bed and put her head in her hands. Niav suddenly remembered how tired she must be – she had been called out at crack of dawn on a blisteringly hot day.

“Was the birth all right in the end?”

“Yes, she should be fine – but she has lost a lot of blood.”

“And the baby?”

“Two boys!”

“Well, you thought it might be twins. Now you lie down. I will get you a nice camomile tea and then start the meal – at least I will know how many to cook for this time!”

At this, astonishingly, Aunty Grizzel burst into tears. Niav had never known her to cry real gulping tears, not in her whole life – she was more used to Grizzel comforting hers.

“I should not have done that,” said Aunty Grizzel shakily. “That was a beautiful thing and I should have given it to you long since – my stupid temper, why must I do these things!”

“Your necklace? Why on earth to me? Maybe it should have been buried with Fearn’s mum, and anyway, didn’t you help to make it?”

“I only helped Artin to string it and, we were making it for Orchil, Artin’s much-loved wife – he planned to take it to her when he sailed away, but of course that never happened. I have never had any right to it. It should have been yours because poor Orchil wanted you to have it. Don’t you have any memories of my going out the night she was dying? Artin came back to fetch me.

“When Artin came down to see us at the weaving-hut, it was to get medicine for her as much as the necklace, but most importantly she had wanted him to bring the pair of us back with him to the bothy.

“But the fool failed to handle it right. For all his magic, Artin can be bad at asking for favours that he really cares about – he ended up picking a quarrel with me. That is why the poor woman threw the eggs at him in desperation (and they were fine, by the way – Fearn remembered that wrong). She knew that she was dying. She was afraid Fearn would be put to work in the copper mines and she wanted him taken somewhere where that wouldn’t happen to a child, and he could be safe till he was old enough to travel round with Artin.”

“Couldn’t they take him to all those relatives up in the mountains Artin carved?”

“That is a very long journey – she didn’t think there was time, and she was right. Believe me Niav, Orchil was every bit as wonderful as Artin had always told me that she was, and she could not have been kinder. She said Artin trusted me, and neither of them mentioned my brother Diarma at all. Being asked by her to care for Fearn was an honour. She didn’t begrudge your existence in the least. She felt you could be the daughter she would never be able to have, and she wanted the necklace to go down to you.”

“Then why all the wretched secrecy?” said Niav in a tired voice.

Grizzel studied her for a moment. “Didn’t I explain clear enough just now? Your parents were respected as healers. My brother Diarma was a great man – your mother and I would not have had him shamed, even after death. I could not bear the thought of Lurgan’s gloating if he had known of my brother’s betrayal. What angered me most was your mother’s stupidity choosing a partner to make her baby with who came from a family that carried such distinctive features. It isn’t as though she didn’t know. Artin’s brothers had been very busy for years round here – why do you think they doled out so many presents? But that green bead is special – and Artin’s intentions were clear. I should have told you then.”

Niav was wide-eyed, remembering some of the other children who had received gifts.

“Quite,” Grizzel said drily, seeing her face. “But I think cousins would have been all right. Let’s face it, everyone is a cousin of someone else round here. We didn’t know you might meet any actual brothers then. But I was very angry with your mother Befind – not to her face, but angry.” She recounted her finding of Befind on the beach. “I couldn’t tell anyone what I thought I had seen my brother do – could I? I could only get nonsense out of Befind. I told everyone she had been dead, but she wasn’t.”

“But she did say goodbye to me?” Niav was crying too. “What was the nonsense?”

“Yes, she said goodbye, and she was still beautiful. She said something inconsequential about Seyth’s death. You see, her corpse had washed in by your snake stone too, and it was she and I that found her. Your Mother was blaming the bung of her stupid dug-out boat again, still living in the past – ridiculous last words for a woman like her to go out on – better to say nothing.”

By the time Niav made the tea Aunty Grizzel had fallen asleep.

It seemed a bit pointless to do any cooking. Niav went out into the sun-kissed evening and walked on past the well to see if the bees had settled down.

Niav hadn’t heard the necklace hit the water and she knew how long it should have taken; they regularly registered the depth of water with her dad’s – no, Diarma’s – knotted string which still hung by the door. She knew the level was way down and that the roots could snag things.

“Well, should I?” she asked them.

The bees didn’t say “No.”

She shifted the lid right over as far as possible and gave the bucket rope a couple of extra twists round the hitching post for strength. With a last look at the darkening sky, she let the bucket drop right down to the water level and swung herself over the edge.

Once she got past the stone lipping, encroaching roots glimmered through the wattle that lined the earthen walls, and the air smelled cool and moist like leaf-mould. Down she swung and down, and still no luck. She was just giving up hope in the semi-darkness when she spotted something that spun and glittered just near the waterline. It was terrifying reaching down that far but with a frantic grab that almost made her lose her hold on the rope, she got it. The jet necklace.

As she tried to regain her breath for the long haul up, the unearthly stillness of the well was shattered by a furious Aunt Grizzel, who, having guessed what she was doing, was yelling at her down the shaft. Niav almost let the precious necklace slip, but just in time she grabbed it back and knotted it firmly in her belt. The climb up was going to be hard and she started to feel the first drops of much needed rain. Up above, Aunty Grizzel continued shouting at her in a most unhelpful way.

“Why, you could have died down there and never been found till the water went rotten … and where would that have got anyone?”

Niav had succeeded in getting herself almost walking up the well wall, finding her footing in the wattle, when, unnervingly, her foot snagged itself through some slimy loop of root. It was exhausting trying to pull herself out, as the rain pelted harder and stung her eyes. She leaned down and managed to haul the root loose from the well wall, but it stayed clinging to her foot. She simply couldn’t shake it off. As she swung there in the semi-darkness, it seemed not to want to let her go. It was not a root at all, but a longish, flexible wand of wood – partly snapped, but encased in what seemed to be plaited strips of snakeskin that had twisted themselves most successfully round her ankle.

“Would this be what I think it is?” challenged Niav, as she finally hauled herself over the lip of the well and waved her unexpected trophy in the face of an equally furious Aunty Grizzel. “Something else you should have saved for me?” It had to be her mother’s missing sacred barra.

***

The rain beat down on the roof-turf during a long night of recriminations, but the next day, as Niav and her aunt were enjoying their bread and honey in the freshness of reconciliation and a sun-and-birdsong morning, a raging Kyle came crashing his way up from the river.

“Where is that arsehole Fearn?” he roared at his bewildered relatives. “He has killed Father!”

***

Grizzel and Niav were still completely bewildered as they fought to row their coracle across the swollen river, Niav with her newly mended barra at her belt.

“It must have been an accident. That thing is sharp and Uncle Lurgan had no right to have taken it.”

“Calm down. We will see exactly what has happened when we get there,” panted Aunt Grizzel, looking at the new patch of dark cloud moving in from the north. “That could be another downpour – I don’t fancy getting trapped on the east side if we turn out to be unpopular.”

“They might not even let us in – there isn’t much reason why they should.”

“Interesting that it was hidden in Helygen’s ‘Dangerous Herbs’ basket all this time. I wonder how Fearn found out?”

“I told you – when he came to say his goodbyes yesterday, he seemed to know where the blade was, and he intended to get it. But I just don’t see how it would have been hidden in there. I know the basket was kept well out of our reach in the roof beams – but it’s not as though she didn’t winch it down often when she was teaching us; all those neat little jars securely sealed. We have used it lots of times. I never got a hint of anything concealed in it.”

“Poor Kyle – he is shattered. He may have got that bit wrong. They have had a long night.”

“I hope he doesn’t find him.”

They beached the coracle and headed up the hillside. Lurgan’s hut – the ancient home of Niav’s family – was a large, thatched, almost square building with the significant feature these days of having more than one room. It stood slightly set apart from the other buildings – a venerable place. Today it was in turmoil, or as near to turmoil as the east side ever got. Several of the assembled lady mourners gave a slight gasp as Grizzel and Niav arrived in the doorway.

Estra seemed to be the one in charge. After a moment’s hesitation, she hurried over to greet them, gliding effortlessly through the milling crowd of well-wishers in an impressively dignified way. She ushered them over to where her mother was sitting, placed formally before the dresser, hunched among a huddle of her cooing and sobbing neighbours next to the wattle bier, suitably draped in his second best cloak, where a very clean Uncle Lurgan had been laid out in his finest kilt and cape in the light from the door. His dead fingers had been bent around his hard-won greenstone axe, and they had even given him his hat. Niav had always seen Uncle Lurgan’s hat as the symbol of his pomposity; now it somehow seemed fitting and almost stately. His hound lay sleeping, slumped beside the bier, as if he knew his master would never wake.

Poor Aunty Helygen looked up at them as they came in. Niav could have sworn she saw her eyes flicker at the sight of the barra at her waist, but she didn’t say a word. Grizzel didn’t seem to register this at all and ran over and folded her in a warm embrace. Helygen clung to her, sobbing fiercely.

Estra left them to it and drew Niav over to the comparative privacy of the woman’s section of the hut. “I am so glad you’ve got here,” she whispered. “However did you find out? The river seems to be running very high – who managed to tell you?”

“Kyle came storming over to us – whatever happened?”

“You haven’t seen Fearn?”

“Not since late yesterday afternoon. If someone stabbed your dad, Fearn hadn’t got the blade then – so when on earth did this happen? Kyle was pretty difficult to get any sense out of.”

“Kyle wasn’t here. He came home just as Father breathed his last. The rest of us were, though. We heard them shouting outside and then Dad came staggering in. It was definitely Fearn, I’m afraid. Whatever came over him?”

Niav gave Estra a brief account of yesterday’s revelations.

“Fearn’s your brother!” Estra almost shouted, her mask of composure cracking for a moment. “And your barra – it seems it’s found you too,” she observed with unconvincing brightness, resuming the whisper.

Niav felt a distinct chill at the odd, widening sparkle in her cousin’s eyes – just as she used to look when she put on her creepy voice and told them all some fearful story. “Oh, your barra will be making itself known to you any day now, I am sure,” said Niav hurriedly. She had no intention of divulging anything about her journey down the well to Estra, who would no doubt construct some completely unwelcome significance from it. Niav did not want yesterday’s simple recovery of two misplaced items to become some esoteric legend of questing for her heritage in the deep.

“Fearn’s your brother!” This time it was Canya, who had stumbled in from the curtained room at the back.

“Oh do go back and lie down, Canya,” said Estra, all concern. “She really isn’t well at all,” she whispered, turning to Niav. “You know the way traumas always go right to her stomach.”

At this point, one of the east-bank ladies came hovering, for Estra’s guidance over something. Probably Grizzel wanted to look more closely at Lurgan’s body. “Your mother says it’s all right dear but …”

Estra swept off with her without a second’s hesitation.

***

Canya was very pale, and she had clearly been crying her eyes out. Niav suspected it wasn’t simply her father’s death that had brought her to this state. Niav had no recollection of traumas going to Canya’s stomach at all. She was the most equable person she had ever met, and she had been amazed not to find her there bustling about and looking after everyone.

“Whatever’s the matter Canya?” she said, holding back the curtain to the inner room and settling her down on the nearest stool in there, while she drew up another. “Now tell me all about it.”

She could not help noticing that Aunt Helygen’s herb basket stood open at the table’s end – the long pulley-rope leading up towards the gloomy ceiling.

At first, Canya simply cried, holding her head in her hands. Then at last she looked up at Niav. “I do keep being sick,” she said, ruefully.

Niav made a huge leap of reasoning. “Did you tell Fearn?” she asked.

Canya burst into tears again. “No,” she said quietly.

“Well?”

“I didn’t think Fearn would want to know. He could have anyone. I decided to try giving myself something to help things along a bit. So I winched down Mother’s herb basket.”

“What? The Penny Royal?”

Canya nodded, “It’s what Mother always seems to recommend.”

“For heaven’s sake! How often have you been doing this sort of thing?”

“Only ever Fearn.”

“How long has that been going on?”

“No, no, you don’t understand. It was only the once!”

Well that explained a lot – it could be that she, personally, had had a lucky escape the day before if he was that fertile! “And?”

“Everyone was out. I winched the basket down; Mother is always so careful, but I am afraid I was so nervous, I let it down in such a rush that it hit the table with a huge crash. I was sure I must have broken something, but it was all all right – only the matting she uses to pad the bottom had come dislodged …”

“And you found Fearn’s blade.”

“That made me change my mind; I thought that when I told Fearn about the sword, we ought to have a proper discussion about what to do. It wasn’t just my baby after all. He had a right to know. So I tidied everything in the basket, and winched it back to the roof.

“I was just trying to decide where to hide the blade, when I heard Father and the boys coming home down the hill. I rammed the blade up into the reed roof-lining – near the door as a temporary hiding place – just as they came in with the hound bounding all over the place. But I managed to whisper to Fearn about finding his blade. He wasn’t able to pull it out of the thatch again with Father and Kyle there, so he said he would come round and collect it yesterday evening – I had thought there might be a quiet moment then.”

“And it all went wrong?”

Canya started crying again. “I keep being sick. Obviously Mother and Estra started asking me questions – well, they are professionals and needed to check I hadn’t eaten something bad. But you can’t hide much from them. I didn’t expect them to be quite so angry when I told them it was Fearn’s. I really had no idea they intended Estra to marry him – did you?”

“Aunty Grizzel did.”

“But Estra doesn’t like boys – I didn’t think she felt like that about Fearn.”

Niav laughed. “She doesn’t understand what ‘like that’ means. No, it’s all about her mystic power being fused with his.”

“I am starting to see that now. I had no idea she was so serious about it, or that Father and even Mother were too. It seems completely mad. Mother was determined that I get rid of the baby, she didn’t want me to tell Fearn, and she particularly didn’t want Father to know.

“At that point someone else called at the door and Mother had to go and see to them. She told Estra to winch down the herb basket and mix up the dose. She was horribly firm, not like she was my mother at all.

“Then things got even worse, because Fearn arrived. He had some bee stings – I see why he hadn’t come to you and Aunty Grizzel about that now! He wasn’t like my Fearn at all either.

“I treated the stings for him and then he told us, by way of thanks, that he was going. Just going! I couldn’t say anything to him about our baby, and Estra was standing there, calmly mixing the Penny Royal to kill it.”

“But how did your dad get stabbed in all this?”

Canya put her head in her hands again as she tried to get it straight. “Mother came through from talking to her visitor and, while she had her back to the door, I tried to make sure she and Estra were looking my way – I said something about bee stings; Fearn took the moment to slip past Mother and grab his blade from by the door – it was the least I could do.

“But Father came in through the door and saw what Fearn had in his hand. It was just terrible – Father tried to grab the blade, but there was a scuffle and Fearn got away. There seemed to be a deal of blood, but the wounds did not seem much to me – it was mainly his hands. Mother and Estra rushed about trying to see to it all. You know the way Dad liked to be fussed over. In the end they had him lying back. He said all the stress had gone to his stomach and then spotted the drink standing on the table.

“‘What’s that for?’ he said.

“‘It’s mint tea, dearest,’ Mother said. ‘Poor Canya has been feeling a trifle bilious.’ Then he said that that was just what he needed, and poor Mother reached over and gave it to him to drink down.”

Niav was starting to get even more frightened and confused. “Well I suppose Penny Royal could be called that – it is a sort of mint, after all.”

“There is no way it should have killed him. I don’t think those wounds should have killed him either. I don’t understand anything any more.”

The two girls sat in the back room listening to all the ritual moanings and comings and goings in the rest of the hut.

“I think Aunty Grizzel will be trying to get a look at the wounds,” said Niav quietly. “We don’t want to believe Fearn killed him any more than you do. Let’s try and go through exactly how he died – as though we were in one of Aunty’s lessons, shall we?”

“He complained of the bitter taste – well, Penny Royal would taste bitter. But then he said there was a burning in his mouth, and a numbness; that’s when Mother wrapped him in a blanket – she thought it was the loss of blood, but it got worse, it was spreading all over. He said he couldn’t see. Then he started to have terrible stomach pain and he vomited everywhere.”

“That would be when Kyle came in.”

“Yes, and Mother started screaming about the blade having been in the herb basket. She thought that Fearn must have spotted it while his bee stings were being seen to. I could see Estra was furious – she looked at me as though she would like me to turn to ash. She must have realized that it was probably me that gave Fearn the blade.”

“But that doesn’t sound like Penny Royal poisoning. We both know what that sounds like – both Aunties have described it often enough – Wolfsbane! Oh Canya!” cried Niav leaping up to hold her. “You must be terrified. It must have been in the drink Estra mixed for you!”

“That, or on the blade – could it have come into contact with it in the herb basket? Maybe it even got into the Penny Royal somehow when I let the basket crash down like that, but I did check everything very carefully. I have been sitting here trying to sort things out in my head.”

“We will have to get you out of here, whatever happened. Is there anything small you feel you have to take away with you? Be quick – they mustn’t suspect you of anything odd.”

“Just my beads and my best shawl.”

“I think they’d wonder about that shawl – it’s so big. Promise we will give you another three times as nice.”

While Canya went to the back of the room to rescue what items of jewellery she couldn’t live without and secreted them away, Niav took a judicious glance into the contents of the herb basket. All Aunty Helygen’s careful little herb jars were correctly sealed – whoever had doctored the Penny Royal with Wolfsbane must have done it deliberately.

Niav delved gently down to the matting at the basket’s base and pulled the rest of the matting up from what was left of its stitching. No root of Wolfsbane snuggling anywhere. But there were two smallish things, neatly wrapped in fine white leather. She unfurled them to reveal some water-stained bits of wood, not unlike large stoppers from a jar. One of them had a bit of string threaded through a piercing near the top.

She held them in her hand for a minute, puzzling over exactly what they might be. Then her heart almost stopped at the realization.

“Ready!” whispered Canya, and Niav frantically pushed the two bits of wood into her scrip.

“I am escorting you out to the midden because I’m a bit worried about you and we will insist that Aunty Grizzel comes too.”

Their obvious urgency convinced Aunty Grizzel that she had to do what they asked. Once outside the hut, Niav took one glance at the sky and she was even surer that what she was doing was right.

They dashed down the hillside to the river, launched the coracle and paddled desperately for the western shore. The sky opened over them as they headed up the bank. Glancing back through the downpour, they could see no sign that anyone from the other bank was looking for them yet.

***

“Would you like to explain?” asked Aunty Grizzel politely as she stoked up the fire and the rain thundered down out in the compound. “Shall we make a nice cup of tea whist we are drying?”

“Not mint tea for Canya, I’m afraid,” said Niav. “Any kind but that!”

“Oh poor Helygen! Let’s hope she never guesses that it must have been her hand that gave Lurgan what killed him,” gasped Grizzel, once the two girls had explained to her what must have happened. “You are right, those wounds that Fearn gave Lurgan should never have endangered his life – I simply could not understand it.”

“How terrible if she were to realize that Estra meant to kill me – Estra is mad and we have left poor Mother with her,” said Canya, starting to cry all over again.

“Yes, Fearn got it right when he said that it could ruin your life if you came in the way of anything that Estra felt she was entitled to,” Niav said. “I wish I knew if he was talking about his life or yours. He didn’t know that you were pregnant – no one knew what had happened between you. He may have felt that it was safest for you if he removed himself from endangering your life before things got really serious.

“But I’m sorry – when it comes to Aunty Helygen, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.” Niav delved into her scrip and produced the two mysterious bits of wood. “You might recognize one of these at least,” she said, holding them out to Aunty Grizzel.

When she saw the piece with the leather cord through it, she started to shake. “I bored that hole and threaded it through,” she whispered.

“What is it?” said Canya, mystified.

“I think you will find they are the bungs from boats. The one Aunty Grizzel is looking at is the bung from the boat that my parents made with Artin.”

“I remember now, Lurgan and Helygen putting the apple basket and the rug over where the bung-hole would have been,” said Grizzel. “Maybe the rug was shoved so firmly into the hole that it took a while for the water to start coming through – they were quite far out. There was I assuming that she dwelt somewhere in the past, but what your poor Mother was trying to say to me made solid sense … I wonder if Artin realized that all along? He would take a huge delight in their fear that he might have known. I wonder if it was just Helygen that time or if it was both of them and that’s why Lurgan changed his tune? So your father Diarma and Artin were not fighting – they were struggling to try to block the hole. Maybe my poor brother never realized he had been betrayed – I do hope so.”

Now it was Canya’s turn to shudder. “And the other bung? Whose boat was that from?”

“Why, that would be the bung from the dug-out boat that Estra’s mother thought so highly of. I can’t honestly say that I don’t understand Aunty Helygen’s feelings there. But how is she going to feel about Estra now that your dad is gone? He was her reason for doing everything. Helygen’s a brilliant herbalist. If we have been able to work out that the drink that Estra mixed for you was something stronger than Penny Royal, once she is over the shock, Aunty is bound to realize it too. She knows the symptoms of Wolfsbane better than we do. Estra tried to kill you – the last thing your mother intended, I’m sure. Then the potion killed your dad, and it was poor Helygen who handed it to him. If she is the sort of person who likes to keep reminders of previous times – when perhaps, she meted out ‘justice’ as she saw it – I wouldn’t want to be in Estra’s shoes for anything!”

“And what about Kyle and Fearn?”

“Well,” said Aunty Grizzel. “If they haven’t killed each other yet – and before they do – I think we should try to reach them. I think you need to find them, don’t you. How good a tracker is Kyle, would you say, in all honesty?”

“Not amazing, but how will that help us?” said Canya.

“Oh, Kyle has no idea where Fearn is heading, but I think Niav knows where he will have gone, don’t you Niav?”

“He said he would head into the setting sun.”

“Well then, first light tomorrow, you both head West and let’s hope that you reach them in time.”

“But what about you?”

“What about me? What have I got to lose?” Aunty Grizzel smiled. “At least this time I won’t get left holding the baby.”