Sabledrake Magazine
February, 2002
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The Woman in the Water
A story in the world of MageLore
Copyright © 2001 By Christine Morgan
“My father drowned my mother. My stepmother hexed my father to death. My uncle saw her hanged for a witch. Will you marry me?”
Sophia, in the act of pouring mead from jug to mug, spilled it onto the cloth laid out on the sloping riverbank. The honeyed liquid spread in the exact color of the leaves of the amberwood trees. She paid it no mind as she looked at the man who sat, regarding her so steadily with his dark eyes, on the other side of the basket from which she’d been setting up their meal.
“What?” she whispered. “What did you say?” For it made no sense, none of it. Except for the final few words, and given how little else she could believe of what had come before them, she wasn’t sure if she dared believe she’d heard those either.
“Don’t you know?” Cuthbert Winthorpe asked. His laugh was bitter as the dregs of cold tea. “You’ve been how long in Amberdale, and you don’t know?”
“I know that your parents died when you were young,” she said carefully. “And that your uncle Reginald had the raising of you thenceforth. What else must I know?”
“You’ve never seen the graves? No one’s told you the tales?”
“Cuthbert, you’re frightening me. Is this some joke? For if it is, and I did hear some mention of marriage, you’d be unkind to play tricks on me.”
He clasped her hands, which were small and white in his callused grasp. At his uncle’s insistence, he’d been tutored in swordplay and archery and all the habits and hobbies befitting a knight. That training showed in the breadth of his shoulders, the fine structure of his arms and chest tapering like a wedge to his trim waist and hips.
“I love you, Sophia,” he said. “I have since your father brought his family here, when you were a gangly girl of ten. I remember how you looked that day, all dressed in pink like a spring rose, with your hair in braids and scabs on your knees and elbows from chasing your brother up trees and down gullies.”
She blushed and dipped her head. Her hair, no longer braided but falling in loose black ringlets, tumbled over her shoulders around a figure that was neither gangly nor scabbed, not half so buxom and rounded of hip as most of the women in Amberdale, but, she believed, appealing in its slenderness.
“I want nothing more,” he went on, “than to have you for my wife, and make a family with you.”
“Cuthbert--” Her heart fluttered fast as any bird’s wing.
He stilled her by pressing a finger to her lips. “But I want you to know the truth before you decide. I will understand if you say no. Hear me out, Sophia.”
“I will,” she said. “Yet . . . to say that your father . . .”
“I saw it happen,” he said. “They’d been picnicking, you see, just as we are today. I was with them. I couldn’t have been more than four, but I was there. I can still see my mother, so fair and smiling. We ate, and I played on the shore, tossing stones into the water, as they sat on the grass.”
Cuthbert glanced upstream and a haunted look darkened his face like a cloud over the sun.
“You needn’t tell me this if it pains you,” Sophia said.
“Their voices turned cross. I had heard them argue many times before, seen my father cuff her or give her a slap, and thought nothing of it except to think that when I was older, when I was bigger, I’d stop him. I wouldn’t let him hurt her. I’d defend her. The love of a son for his mother, you understand?”
She nodded.
“These things were in my mind in an abstract way as I threw stones, but then I saw a fat duck paddling along, and all that mattered was how pleased and proud everyone would be if I caught it for our supper. I picked up the stoutest stick I could find and crept through the reeds. I looked back to see that they’d stopped their arguing. My mother was packing away the picnic, my father was undressing for a swim. Neither of them looked my way, so I went on.”
He let go of her hand and ran his fingers through his blond hair, fretfully. It was a child’s gesture, that of the child he’d been. As if he was not so much recounting this memory as reliving it.
Sophia didn’t want to hear any more. She knew that Paula Winthorpe had drowned when her son was little more than a baby, and that Cuthbert the Senior had succumbed to an illness shortly after taking his second bride, and that she, too, had died young . . . but she did not want to hear that there was anything else to these tragedies than the accidents they seemed. She would have closed her ears if she could.
“The duck saw me.” Cuthbert chuckled, but it sounded more deranged than merry. “It came at me quacking, feathers flying. I slipped in the mud and took a peck on the knee before I could scramble to safety. When I emerged from the reeds, muddy and crying, I saw both of my parents in the river. They were . . . I tried to tell myself that it was some game, that Father would let her up any moment. I could see her hair. Bright yellow, like daffodils, like sunshine, floating on the surface in a tangle. I could see the bubbles bursting up. I could see her hands, flailing, clutching. And Father, his face a goblin’s face, red and creased and snarling.”
“Cuthbert, don’t.” Sophia touched his arm. He was trembling, as was she. “Please. No more.”
“He held her under,” Cuthbert said as if she hadn’t spoken. “Until the bubbles stopped, and her hands . . . her hands fell limp. At last, he brought her up. Her eyes were open. Her mouth, too, and the water came streaming from it. She was in her shift. Her gown and shoes were on the bank. Father began to weep. He wept as he held her, and carried her to shore.”
“Gods,” breathed Sophia. Yet there seemed none of the gods in this.
“I ran to him as he set her on the grass. What he told me then, as she looked at me imploringly with those dead eyes, was that she’d gone swimming first. While he dozed. She’d gone out too far, caught her foot in the crevice of a log, and drowned before he could reach her.”
“He lied to you.”
“He lied to everyone, and was believed. Even I came to think I might have seen wrongly. I was only four. And perhaps, somewhere in my mind, was the fear of what he might do to me if I spoke out.”
She drew him into her arms. He came woodenly, leaning against her with his words muffled in her hair. She felt the wetness of his tears on her neck.
“In time, I made myself believe it. For fifteen years. But down deep, it was always there. The truth. Hidden but there. Like a body beneath the surface that finally rises. I knew that if I was ever to marry, I had to face that truth and warn my bride.”
“Warn? Why? It was so long ago.”
“But it could be in me, don’t you see? Whatever was in him that made him strike her, made him kill her. Because he loved her, Sophia, I know that he did. Yet there was this evil within him that he could not control.”
“There is no evil in you, Cuthbert.”
“How do you know? I have his eyes, I have his height, I see his face in the mirror and mine in the portraits of him when he was young. Why not this, too?”
“You have your mother in you, too,” Sophia said. “That makes you your own man, not a copy of your father. And it was your uncle who brought you up. What of his influence?”
Cuthbert stiffened in her embrace. “My uncle. My uncle, who led the murders of sixteen women?”
“How can you say such a thing? As he is a knight, I suppose he must have killed before. In battle, far off in Hachland and across the sea. But war is not the same as murder.”
“I’m not speaking of war. I’m speaking of sixteen women, here in Amberdale. My stepmother was among them.”
“I thought she died from a fall,” Sophia said warily.
“Oh, indeed.” Again, he uttered a deranged chuckle that made her want to flee from him. “She fell, yes, she did. Through the trap with a bang and a clatter. She would have fallen a bit further had the noose not caught her up with her toes still dangling.”
“Why ever would your uncle do such a thing?” She thought of Reginald Winthorpe, her father’s dearest friend. Noble knights of Blackmoon both, in their glossy black armor. Guardians. Stalwart defenders. It could not reconcile with what Cuthbert was claiming. “I cannot believe he’d harm the innocent.”
“But they weren’t. Innocent, that is. Not in his eyes. Their graves, their lonesome graves set apart in the far corner of the graveyard . . . have you never seen them?”
“I don’t frequent the graveyard,” Sophia said, making a quick warding sign against ill luck lest she draw the notice of Haarkon, feared god of the dead.
“He was away when my father remarried,” Cuthbert said. “Loisse, my stepmother, was as unlike my mother as the night is unlike the day. She was pale as the moon, with hair like sable, and her voice was as smoke.”
Sophia felt, quite ridiculously, a sharp twinge of jealousy.
“My father was determined to win her,” Cuthbert said. “Initially, I was angry and felt that he meant to replace my mother, but Loisse was so different from her that I soon stopped feeling thusly. She knew so many stories, fabulous stories. Our house was a home again once she was there. For a time.”
“You truly think she did something to your father?” Sophia recalled what he’d said, but it was too incredulous. Hexed? Had that been the word he’d used? Hexed? In this day and age?
“Uncle Reginald believed so. My father died, you see, only a year after the wedding. And if you don’t think me mad already, you’ll be sure to after this - he took sick the very day after he first struck her. I was under the stairs that day with my toy soldiers, unseen by them. I thought she’d be contrite. As Mother had always been. But Loisse . . . she drew herself upright and looked at him squarely, and told him never to dare lay hands on her, else he’d regret it with his very life.”
Sophia wondered that any woman would have the courage to gainsay her lord and husband. The church of Galatine instructed obedience . . . but then, the church of Galatine also instructed men to honor and respect their wives.
Cuthbert had pulled up his knees and sat with his arms around them, just as he must have once say with his soldiers and wooden horses and ships scattered about. “He rarely shouted, for that would have roused the servants. But he hit her again in a fury, and seized her by the hair, and hurled her against the wall. When she fell, he retreated to his study and stayed there all the night, not emerging even for dinner. I waited in a terror until Loisse got up. I thought she might find me and be cross, but she went to her room without a word.”
Adopting his pose for herself, the warmth of the summer afternoon touched with a winter’s breath that came from within, Sophia waited for him to go on. Something stirred in her memory, something from when Reginald Winthorpe had come to her father’s house many years past, seeking his aid and the aid of their brother knights . . .
“Was it witchery?” she asked in a quivering hush.
“Father fell ill the very next day,” Cuthbert said. “No one had reason to think it was anything other than sickness.”
“You told no one what you’d overheard?”
“I didn’t dare. Not until Uncle Reginald came home. He suspected from the start that there was witchery afoot. He thought Loisse had enchanted my father into wedding her in the first place, and was certain she must have had something to do with his death.”
“Witchery,” Sophia repeated, and glanced skittishly about as if the surrounding woods might suddenly reveal terrible things even on such a bright and sunny day. “If it were so, then he had to act. The teachings of Blackmoon proclaim all sorcery is evil work, and the knights are sworn to fight it, root it out, destroy it.”
“He did a fine job,” Cuthbert said. “He, your father, and the others he brought. Loisse was the first, but it spread like a contagion among the townsfolk. There were accusations, there were trials, and in the end there were hangings, stonings, and a burning. But do you know what there wasn’t, Sophia?”
“What?” she hardly dared ask.
“A shred of proof against any of them. If they had this evil power, why had it never been found out before? Why did they not use it to save themselves? You were not here then. You did not see the knights. My uncle was like a madman.”
“Cuthbert! How can you say such a thing?”
“It was so! He raved that he’d risked his life in foreign lands, fighting to eradicate foul magics, and all the while it had been festering here in his very home. He would have scoured all of Amberdale with fire, if that was the only way to be sure of ending it.”
She looked around again at the wooded hills, green and gold beneath the clear blue sky, and saw it all in ashes with the blackened stumps of the amberwood trees jutting up and the river turned to soot. Saw the village as charred timbers, and the corpses of men and animals smoldering where they lay. Yet even such a terrible vision must be preferable to allowing the taint of witchery to live on. Was it not?
“It haunts me,” Cuthbert said. “I view this violence from which I’ve stemmed, and live in dread that it will arise in me. I love you, my dearest Sophia. I would be the happiest of men if you would be mine. But I’d sooner die than harm you. Think on it. Think if you could bear to be with me, knowing all this. Think on it, and give me no answer until then.”
Cuthbert stood. His eyes, so dark, shone with unshed tears. He gazed down at her where she sat with her skirt spread about her and her hair loose, and she gazed up at him while the blowing boughs swayed behind his head. She gathered her legs to rise, meaning to embrace him and give him his answer now, but before she could move he’d spun and walked away from her.
She called to him. He did not pause, only strode into the dappled shadow of the trees and vanished from her sight.
**
Winthorpe Hall was still and dark, disturbed only by sleep-sounds and the skitter-squeak of a mouse falling prey to a kitchen cat.
Sophia, in a nightgown that billowed about her like mist, made her way silently down the stairs. After so many years with this as her home, she knew all their creaky points and took it as a matter of course. Yet she’d hardly known even the surface of this place’s secrets, if Cuthbert’s story was to be believed.
His tale had kept her tossing and wakeful, and on the occasions when she did slip into a thin sleep, she found it fraught with nightmares. Chief among them was the river, with Paula Winthorpe’s white hands rising pleadingly from it, reaching for a rescue that never came. She dreamt also of a boy cowering beneath the stairs - these very stairs! - as a dark-haired woman stood tall in defiance of her husband.
Paula’s face was known to her from the portrait hall, but no likeness of Loisse was among the Winthorpe ancestors. In the dream, seeking a face for her, Sophia’s uneasy mind had put her own features beneath that sable hair. It was this last which had woken her in a cold start, and brought her from her bed at an hour when all the valley slept.
This should have been the most joyous day of her life. The man she’d loved since she was a girl had asked her to be his wife. Yet that joy had been clouded, and although she was loathe to admit it even to herself, doubts had been planted in her mind.
Could the potential for violence be in Cuthbert? And if so, could she in good conscience trust herself and her future children to such a man?
The graveyard.
He’d asked her if she hadn’t seen the graveyard. If there was proof to be had, it may be there.
Sophia left the portrait gallery, where she’d been staring at Cuthbert the Elder’s face in hopes of discrediting the strong resemblance ‘twixt father and son. She glided like a phantom to her room, and quickly changed into more suitable clothing.
Dressed, with a cape to offset the cool night air, Sophia descended again and exited Winthorpe Hall by the side servants’ door. A mingled sense of adventure and terror filled her as she scurried into the dark copse surrounding the house. It was one thing to venture this way by day, in the company of Cuthbert and her younger brother, but altogether different in the black and purple labyrinth of dark.
The black moon, nearly invisible against the sky for those who did not know where to look, was a thin crescent in the west. The white moon, past full but still large, sailed among the treetops like the bellying sail of a galleon, striking off to exotic ports of call. It lent her light enough to see by, and she hurried toward the village trying not to give in to alarm at each strange bird cry or snapping of twigs.
Amberdale’s village clustered on this side of the river. A bridge spanned at the mill, and on the far side the cleared fields and pastures were painted with the moon’s pale beams. Boats bobbed gently by the docks, and in the topmost window of the town hall’s bell tower, a single lantern gleamed.
She did not go through the center of town, lest she disturb dogs whose barking might wake their masters, but followed the edge until she came to the church of Galatine. Its whitewashed boards seemed to glow, and the golden scales above the double doors were silver-gilt under this frosty light.
The graveyard lay behind the church, at the edge of a thick stand of forest. The sextons kept it neat and well-tended, paying particular care to the large stone tomb that housed the remains of generations of Winthorpes. The entire area was bordered by a tidy fence.
Yet there, at the very back of the cemetery, she spied another fenced-off section not nearly so well-kept. As she moved closer to it, she saw that the boughs of nearby trees hung and drooped over it, and that wildflowers and shaggy grasses had encroached on the graves.
Set apart from the others were several monuments, plain, lacking the carvings and adornments that graced so many of the rest. These, stark in their simplicity, bore only names and the dates of birth and death. The dates of birth varied widely. The names were all women’s. The dates of death were all within a three-day span.
Sophia swallowed a cold, gluey lump that had risen in her throat. She searched for a gate and found none, and surmised that the fence had been built after the burials were done, with no expectation that anyone would need or want to enter. She clambered cautiously over for a closer look.
Loisse Winthorpe, read one of the markers. Not entombed with her husband, as she should have been, but cast aside in this far corner.
How much of Cuthbert’s tale did this find make true? Sixteen women, some old and some young, all dead within three days of each other. One could argue that there might have been sickness in the village. But if that were the case, how would there come to be sixteen women dead, and no men? No infants? Few aged?
Unwanted images tried to encroach upon her imagination. Hangings, Cuthbert had said. Stonings. A burning. That last, she could see most clearly. A post amid blazing stacks of wood, the figure of a woman bound and screaming as the smoke gusted against her and the flames licked hungrily ever higher.
“If they were witchery-women,” she breathed, “then it was the right and only thing to do.”
No proof, he’d said. Not a shred of proof.
But surely the knights of Blackmoon would never launch an unwarranted attack of that nature. This was not some foreign land, some pagan place of strange gods. This was Amberdale, squarely in the center of the Bannerian Mountains, at the heart of the civilized Northlands. Witchery had been outlawed, forbidden, forgotten, centuries ago.
Sir Reginald must have believed the accusations were just. He wouldn’t have come to her father, to his fellow knights in the order, unless he was convinced. It wasn’t as if he’d lashed out in blind vengeful grief over the death of his brother.
Was it?
Sophia looked at the graves, but those terse inscriptions offered no answers. She was afraid to say anything more aloud, lest a ghostly voice should come from beneath the earth.
The hooting call of an owl, sounding uncannily like a woman’s voice, brought Sophia back to herself with a stifled cry. Clutching the sides of her cape tightly about her, she hastened to the fence and fled the cemetery.
**
The wedding of Cuthbert Lord Winthorpe and Lady Sophia Fellesley was held when autumn turned Amberdale to fire and shining gold.
In a few houses, families with daughters or sisters of marriageable age grumbled that their young liege should take a wife not born to the valley, but these grumblings were generally good-natured and made with wry resignation - hadn’t they all known this was coming, since the day Sir Arthur Fellesley had brought his children to live in the manor?
Sir Reginald Winthorpe presided over the revelry held following the simple service. The great doors of the hall were opened to everyone. Feasting, music, dancing, mock-tournaments of jousting and archery, and a troupe of gnomish tumblers and jugglers summoned all the way from Gnome Keep to the north filled the days.
The groom cut a handsome figure, in his breeches and doublet of forest-green and his cape lined with cloth-of-golf. The bride, garbed in snowy white with a wreath of dried flowers crowning her midnight tresses, was radiant as any bride could hope to be.
By the sparkling eyes of the newlyweds on the following morn, the wedding night had been glorious as well, albeit in a much more private way. Talk soon turned, buzzing with anticipation, to when they might see an heir to Amberdale.
Yet a year went by, the seasons turning in their colors like gems in a jeweler’s display. Diamond-white winter as the snows came, rose-quartz and pale peridot spring, emerald and citrine summer, and around to topaz and ruby autumn again. And still, Sophia Winthorpe remained as slender as a willow reed. Much jesting was made at the young lord’s account at the tavern, inquiries as to whether he was eating of the right fare, and to these, Cuthbert responded with keen wit and humor. At first.
When a second year had gone by with no news of an impending birth, the wags and jesters saw the genuine distress of the lord and lady, and silenced themselves. All in due time, they said to one another over garden fences and mugs of ale. They’ve no need to rush. Though we all do know how important family has always been to the Winthorpes.
In the third year, tragedy befell the house on the hill. Sir Arthur Fellesley, longtime brother-in-arms of Sir Reginald, was gored by a boar during a hunt, and died of his bleeding before his companions could bring him to the church, where the healing powers called upon by the priest might have saved him. A child born into such a time of mourning, the townsfolk said over more of those mugs of ale, would be unlucky. Best that they wait.
By the fifth year of their marriage, a pall of sadness had fallen over the manor. The many rooms had never seemed emptier, and when all was quiet, the servants swore they could hear the very walls sigh in melancholy, the very floors moan in despair that they were not pattered by tiny feet.
Six years passed, and then seven. Rumors began to circulate that Sir Reginald, he who had orchestrated this match in the first place, was petitioning his nephew to set aside Sophia and take a new wife, some hale and fertile village girl. But Cuthbert, it was said, would have none of it, and a maid reported hearing him say flat out to his uncle that if heirs were so vital, why had he never married? The resultant argument nearly brought the two to blows.
The tenth anniversary of Cuthbert and Sophia’s wedding was celebrated with a week of feasts and parties, with guests attending from as far off as the western shore of Hachland. Cuthbert had made great strides in his business over the decade, establishing a brisk trade in amberwood and dramatically increasing not only his own fortune but the wealth of all Amberdale. He devoted himself to it, and although it was evident he still cared deeply for his lovely wife, their continued childlessness drove a wedge between them.
They took to sleeping in separate rooms in the eleventh year of their marriage, and by now it was a certainty that one, or both, were barren. Some wondered, though very discreetly, if there might not be more to it than a simple case of inert seed, or lifeless womb. They wondered, in whispered conversations to each other, if it might not be some form of punishment . . . or witchery curse . . .
As discreet as these rumors were, Lady Sophia was not deaf to them. She’d heard more talk, not only from Sir Reginald now but from many a concerned relative, encouraging or even begging Cuthbert to put her aside.
The prospect drowned her in dread. She knew that her brother, who had spurned the knighthood to establish a smithy in Amberdale, would take her in. But how could she live in this valley as a cast-off wife? As a spinster aunt doomed to live out her years alone, playing nanny to her nieces and nephews while the man she loved wedded and bedded some buxom apple-cheeked girl able to give him all the children he could ever need?
As that eleventh year drew to a close, she became aware that Cuthbert had stopped vehemently protesting all such propositions, and had begun to listen to them, with a glum but thoughtful mien.
**
Spring had come to Amberdale, but winter had not ye
It fully released its hold. Patches of snow still lingered in places where the sun was slow to touch, and the buds of the leaves were curled tight in little green nubs like polished beads of jade. The light was warm when it chanced to fall directly onto the skin, but the breeze coming down from the mountains was brisk and chilly.
It was market-day, first market of the season, and all of the servants had been given a holiday to enjoy it. They’d headed down to the village that morning in a buckboard, maidservants and manservants and Cook and all, having left a cold midday meal waiting in the dining room. They had their purses fat with their Wintersfest bonuses and went in high spirits.
Cuthbert had persuaded his uncle to ride with him to Echostone Valley. So it was that Sophia, having declined to join them, had the house to herself.
She looked in the polished steel mirror over her dressing table, touched her face, marveled at how the pretty girl of seventeen had become a woman of twenty-eight, and one with premature lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She combed her fingers through her hair, looking for strands of white, but so far none were to be found.
Twenty-eight. And she knew from the eavesdropping that had become a habit of self-preservation in recent years, that it just so happened there was a tidy little manor on the way to Echostone. A tidy little manor in a township called Shady River. The man who owned it was not noble, but a merchant of considerable wealth, and his daughter had just turned sixteen.
Fire-haired, they said she was. With skin like cream and a fine, full figure. The eldest of six, so the bloodline was clearly fertile, they told each other with much noddings of heads, and approval.
Sophia drew a deep breath and exhaled it in a lengthy sigh. She wore a simple skirt and blouse, much as she had on the day Cuthbert had asked her to marry him. Her hair was down in loose waves. She carried a white cloth, and a basket.
The river was swollen and rushing between its banks with the force of the melt and runoff. The spot where she and Cuthbert had picnicked was underwater, so she walked upstream until she found a pleasant grassy slope. A fallen tree lay partway out into it, the water frothing around it in a foamy white churning.
She spread the cloth and sat down, and watched the water as she nibbled at meat, bread, and cheese. When this small meal was done, and with a cup of mead to fortify her, she began undressing down to her thin shift.
The touch of a toe to the icy river shocked her, but Sophia stepped in regardless. She shivered as she waded deeper, to her knees, to her thighs. The current tried to sweep her legs from under her. The fabric of her shift was clammy, creeping higher as it absorbed the water.
To the waist, and her legs and feet were numbed but for a tingling beneath her skin. To her waist, yes, so that the river could freeze the already frozen wasteland within her. Teeth chattering, holding her hands aloft and seeing that her arms were pebbled with gooseflesh and her fingernails were turning a dusky blue, she pressed on.
The current caught her as the water reached her breasts. Sophia stumbled and fell, immersed to the scalp in sudden bitter cold. She was swept away. Something slammed across her midsection like a blow from a dwarvish warhammer, coughing the air from her lungs. The tree. The fallen tree. She had been driven into it and was trapped.
Her hair streamed forward in long black ribbons. Her shift fluttered pale around her hips. As her chest began to burn for air, she told herself this was what she’d come to do and she must simply relax and take in the substance of the river to become the substance of herself.
Her throat, her jaw, her every breathing passage were locked and rebellious despite the agonizing need of her lungs. She clawed at the slippery, sodden bark. Her hands found no purchase. She pushed against the tree, thinking to free herself enough to slip over or duck under and be washed away in the tumult, but could not.
White-hot fire flared in her chest, offsetting the bone-deep chill of the water. She fought the tree, fought the river. In that moment, the life she’d been so ready to leave now seemed more exquisitely precious than anything.
Her mouth opened and she tasted the river. It flooded her mouth, painfully cold against her teeth. She spat but more forced its way in, and up her nose as well. It would overwhelm her, fill her lungs, and then she supposed a muffling darkness would carry her down into death.
In a last, desperate effort, Sophia thrust her hands skyward. She knew how they must appear, those white and pleading hands waving for help that would not come, just as Paula Winthorpe’s must have done.
Except other hands closed on hers, and began to pull with steady strength.
Sophia’s head broke the surface. She choked, gagging on river water, breath whistling in thin shrieks. Her body was limp. She did not resist as she was towed to shore and laid out on the damp earth. The hands that had held her pushed hard on her back. Water was forced up and out, spewing from her and making her vomit up the small lunch she’d eaten.
At last, shuddering uncontrollably and soaked and half-frozen but nonetheless alive, Sophia rolled onto her side and peeled her eyelids open to see her rescuer.
**
“Drink this, you poor dear,” Hannah Goodchylde said, pressing the mug into Sophia’s shaking hands. Steam rose in fragrant curls from it.
Sophia did not need to be invited. She sipped at the hot tea, feeling the warmth spread welcomely through her limbs. A wool blanket draped her bare shoulders. She sat as close to the fire as she could get without burning herself.
When the tea thawed her innards, and cleared her head, it occurred to her to wonder why the miller’s widow had brought her to a cave instead of taking her into town, where the Goodchylde house with its many gables and eaves stood amid graceful beechnut trees. Once she’d wondered that, she looked in bewildered astonishment at the blanket, the fire, the chair, the tea . . . the trappings of comfort and home that filled this sandy-floored nook in the rocks. All manner of herbs and roots hung from braided cords that had been strung between the walls, and natural shelves held pots and jars of unknown content.
Across from her, humming as she wrung trickles of water from Sophia’s shift, the widow looked over and smiled. Hannah Goodchylde was a plump and grandmotherly thing - grandmotherly indeed; her seven surviving children had thus far given her a dozen grandchildren. She wore sensible clothes and her soft grey hair was tucked in a neat bun.
“What are you doing in this cave?” Sophia asked. “What am I doing here?”
“You needed to be someplace warm, and right quick. I didn’t think you’d care for being half-dragged through town like a gunnysack and all.”
“No. But . . .” She gestured around, feeling foolish.
Hannah’s eyes crinkled merrily. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll answer mine first.”
Sophia agreed, and proceeded to tell out her entire miserable tale of how she’d come to be seeking to drown herself on a lovely spring day.
“Fair enough,” Hannah said. “This cave is my little refuge, when I need an escape from the demands of my family. My sister and I, and some of our friends, brought these things up one by one, in secret, to make it homey.”
“I thought . . .” Sophia chuckled weakly at her own folly. “I thought for a moment you meant to tell me you were a witchery-woman, and this was where you cast your spells.”
“Nonsense.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
Her eyes no longer crinkling, no longer mirthful, Hannah looked directly at her and said, “That’s a bit further upstream.”
“Oh.” The meek sound hardly seemed to come from her own lips.
“Though it’s the name ‘witchery-women’ we find objectionable,” Hannah said. “We’re . . . well, priestesses, I suppose.”
Sophia could only stare at her, nonplussed.
“Maiden, mother, harlot, and crone,” intoned the elderly woman. “Surely an educated young lady like you has heard that before.”
“Part of it,” she agreed. “Maiden, mother, and harlot - the three goddesses. Helia, Tarana, and Talopea.”
“And crone,” insisted Hannah. “Lestra the wise, Lestra of the moon, Lestra of the magic.”
The warmth of the tea could do nothing about this new chill. Sophia huddled into the blanket and regarded Hannah with wide eyes.
“Of course, of all people I shouldn’t expect the daughter of a Knight of Blackmoon to know about that.” Hannah looked piercingly at her, with a quick flash of anger like light glinting on a blade. “They’ve all but destroyed us in their superstition and fear. Driven us into hiding. Yet where has Blackmoon been to hear your prayers, child? Where was Blackmoon to save your life?”
“I . . . I should be going.” Sophia started to rise, but she was clad only in the blanket and her shift was now hanging to dry.
“No need of that. I’m not cross with you, Sophia Winthorpe. I want to help you. No one in the valley likes to see your misery. You might not be a local girl, but you’ve been here since you were small and our lord loves you well. I’d like to help.”
“No one can help.” The urge to flee had passed, and she subsided into her place by the fire again. “I thank you for saving me, because once I was in the act of it I realized I did not truly wish to drown. But the matter that led me to the river remains, and cannot be helped.”
“Oh, no? And if I told you otherwise? If I told you that I could see to it you were a mother by Wintersfest?”
“What are you saying?” Sophia cried. “How can I ever be a mother?” Understanding came in a spreading, dawning horror. “You can’t mean . . . some vile potion or spell?”
“Most assuredly, I don’t,” Hannah said peevishly. “Potions! Tsk! That is what you’d think, isn’t it? Stumpwater ointments to make bruises fade, nasty elixirs to put iron back into a man’s loins, amulets and good-luck charms and other such rubbish. Good gods!”
“Pardon,” apologized Sophia. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I can see that for myself. Though as I should explain, we do dabble in such folk remedies from time to time. Those things have their uses, but that’s not where our true power lies. Our power comes from Lestra, just as the priest in the village can ask Galatine for healing or the gift of knowing when a man speaks truth or lies. Lestra can bless you with your dearest wish, Sophia, and bring you the child that you so desire.”
“How?” It emerged as a bare whisper, and a lifetime of ingrained upbringing and tutelage clamored in protest that she’d even be entertaining this conversation. She should be gone from here at once, and bring news of this to Sir Reginald straightaway.
“Come with me,” said Hannah. She offered Sophia a loose white gown, sleeveless and nearly as immodest as a shift, which she took from a chest by the wall. “I’ll show you our sacred spring.”
Telling herself that she had no other choice with her shift still drying, telling herself that she was only humoring the widow and that no harm came from merely listening, Sophia donned the gown. She walked barefoot over sand, following Hannah by the fluttering light of a candle, down a tunnel leading deeper into the mountainside.
A passage branched to her left. In the fleeting glimpse afforded as they passed, Sophia saw a chamber of inky blackness where painted white moons hung in all their phases. Her breathing sounded loud and harsh in her ears.
Daylight bloomed ahead, somehow clean and white and pristine. Hannah ducked her head and emerged from the opening, Sophia close behind.
She was awestruck by wonder and stopped where she stood. The mouth of the passage was a cleft in a rock wall, which curved in a nearly perfect circle like the interior of a castle tower from which the roof had been removed. The floor of this space was all river-smoothed rocks, except where flat pale slabs had been set into it like stepping stones. At the center, round as the moon, was a spring.
The water, its surface unmarred by so much as a stray leaf or insect, rippled serenely. It overflowed into a rill that passed beneath a bridge of white rock. This bridge was not made by cut and mortared masonwork, but looked as if it had been shaped as easily as a potter’s hands shaped clay. Beyond that bridge, a gap in the stone wall led off into a mossy grotto.
The spring . . . the slabs all around it, a dozen of them, evenly spaced . . . the enclosing walls with natural niches stained by soot and caked with melted wax. It was a worship-place as sure as any hilltop ring of standing stones sacred to bright Helia.
Hannah set her candle into one of those niches. It was unnecessary now, for the day was still strong, though, oddly, no direct beams of sunlight seemed to reach into this secret place. “This is Lestra’s pool,” she said. “When the sky is dark and the moon is right, the face of the goddess can be seen in the depths, and when the time of year is right as well, Lestra speaks.”
Part of Sophia rediscovered that urge to flee. The rest was held, fascinated.
“They tried to take this from us,” Hannah said. “They came with their accusations and their torture, and walled up the creek further down where it flows into the hills. They set traps and deadfalls to catch any they might have missed in their crusade. They never knew, the women never told, of the passages and the caves.”
“The sixteen?” asked Sophia. “In the graveyard?”
“Some of them were our sisters. Some had no knowledge of us at all.”
“Loisse Winthorpe --”
“Yes. My younger sister, in blood and in faith.”
“Did she curse her husband?” The question burst from her in desperation.
“She may have done,” said Hannah with an air of unconcern. “If so, no man deserved it better.”
“I want no part of this. Please. Take me back.”
“We can go, if you wish. Or we can stay, and you can bathe in the spring and ask Lestra’s favor. I was once like you, Sophia,” she said just as Sophia was about to beg to leave. “I was close onto thirty and thought myself doomed to be childless forever. But, then, I was brought here.”
Sophia knew the rest - seven children, a bounty of children. The temptation welled up sure as the water from the earth. It meant defying everything she’d ever known of good and evil, turning her back on her father’s faith, spurning that which she’d always held true.
She looked into the spring. Although the moon was nowhere in the sky, for a moment she saw or fancied she did a face in the depths. A wise, lined, evaluating face, stern and yet not without compassion.
A blink, and it was gone, and she thought instead of Cuthbert. Of the lonely years that would await her if he set her aside, perhaps for this buxom red-haired girl from Shady River, perhaps for some other. The slow passage of empty years, growing older and finally dying with no mark, no memory of her, left on this world.
This world, yes, but what of the next? What of the fate that would be waiting for her soul, once she’d left this body behind and gone on? How would Galatine judge her, when her soul was set upon the golden scales of balance?
Below her, far below, in the shadowy clear depths of the spring, the woman’s face reappeared. It was more than a suggestion of an image. She saw Paula Winthorpe, and her own mother, and Loisse, and herself. And every girl and woman she’d ever known.
Sophia closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest, took a filling breath, and plunged into the water.
**
Ashcroft Winthorpe was born late in the autumn, as the first rimes of frost began to appear. He had his father’s blond hair and his mother’s fine features. Although he was an only child whose upbringing was forever colored by diligent, even zealous protectiveness on the part of his parents, he grew to an advanced age in hale good health.
Along the way of those fourscore decades, he married and sired six children, and the people of Amberdale shared a final sigh of relief in the knowledge that whether misfortune or curse, the onus on their lord’s family was at long last lifted.
**
The End