But there he was. And I found out, after I’d taken the walk to the privy by night a couple more times, that while he was in the outhouse he wasn’t sleeping, he was curled up muttering to himself, same as in Mathuin’s lockup. I didn’t look in on him, because that would be breaking an unspoken rule about privacy. But I knew he’d be crouched down at the back, in a corner, trying to be invisible. Trying to shut out the bad things, to keep the shadows at bay. The nonsense words were like a spell or charm. An incantation. Fill his mind with them, and he need not hear Slammer crashing his stick on the bars or yelling insults. He need not hear Poxy or Dribbles or me screaming as we were beaten, or worse. Even here, long days and longer miles from that hellish place, Grim’s nights were full of those sounds and sights. He hadn’t slept at night in that place. He’d kept the darkness away with his relentless exercises, and when he hadn’t been doing those he’d been talking to me. When I’d been asleep, when everyone had been asleep, he’d probably kept on talking anyway, until morning came.
Once I’d worked this out, I wished I hadn’t, because it meant I had to find a solution, and I didn’t much like the only solution that presented itself, which was that I should invite Grim to sleep in the house. There were two parts of me arguing with each other and I couldn’t shut up their voices. One said, He didn’t ask you for help this time, so you don’t need to do anything. He’s never complained about the outhouse. The other said, You were in that place too. It turned you upside down and inside out. He helped you escape and now he’s mending the house for you. You owe him. And the first voice replied, to my shame, I never asked him to do either of those things.
It ate away at me until I had to do something. But I needed to go carefully or I’d only make matters worse.
We were sitting by the hearth – the fire burned well now he’d unblocked the chimney – as evening shadow spread itself over the wood, turning the green and brown quilt of daytime to a soft blanket of purple and grey. Grim had made rabbit stew with dumplings, one of the best meals I’d tasted for a long while, and I waited until we were finished eating before I asked him.
‘Grim?’
‘Mm?’
‘Must be cold in that outhouse.’
A pause, then, ‘Roof over my head,’ he said. ‘Not complaining.’
I drew a couple of long breaths. ‘You don’t sleep, though, do you?’ I asked, hoping this would not send him back into silence.
‘Never did sleep much. Once, maybe. Long time ago.’
‘Mm. You need your rest. Working so hard.’
A silence; Grim stared down at his clasped hands. ‘Keeping you awake, am I?’ he said eventually.
I found myself wishing he would shout at me, berate me for my selfishness, point out that with him slaving away on my behalf the least I should do was give him a proper place to sleep. His patience made me angry; it filled me with a guilt I had no room for. Wasn’t this hard enough already, when my own nights were haunted by Mathuin? ‘Might almost be better if you were,’ I found myself saying. ‘My dreams don’t make the best company.’
A grunt was all the response I got. But I was used to him, and I knew it was no dismissal, but an acknowledgement that he understood. Which annoyed me even more – I didn’t need understanding, I didn’t want folk making allowances for me, I just wanted them to go away and leave me alone so I could make quite sure I didn’t forget the only thing that really mattered: making Mathuin pay for his crimes. Getting through the seven years so I could ensure that happened. Not wasting my anger on the folk who came to my door seeking love potions and cures for the pox and poultices for boils in awkward places. Not wasting it on Grim. Saving it for the man who had destroyed my life, and who would keep on doing the same to other folk until I stopped him.
‘Thing is,’ said Grim, and his voice was just above a whisper, ‘I don’t do so well on my own. At night. Day’s all right, sun shining, work to do, and you’re in and out of the house.’
I said nothing. I heard how hard it was for him to admit this.
‘Loneliest place in the world, sometimes, that place of Mathuin’s,’ Grim said. ‘Even with the noise, the screaming, Frog Spawn going on and on with his list, and Slammer . . . A fellow could be in there, with all that around him, and feel like he was at the bottom of a well, in the deep of a pit, somewhere nobody would ever find him. Night time, worse. Even when Frog Spawn was quiet, even when the guards were off sleeping, I could hear it. See it. Everything. All the things, from the first day, they never went away. Not for a single heartbeat.’
I nodded, though Grim was not looking at me, but into the fire. I didn’t remind him that we were out now, and safe, and that those things were gone. ‘You could have killed Slammer or Tiny,’ I said. ‘Any time they had you out of your cell, you could have done it in a moment.’
A long silence, then he said, ‘Thought of it. A lot. Before you came I might have done it. They’d have made an end of me, after, and it would all have been over. Different when you came. If I’d done that, you would have been on your own.’
There was nothing to say to this. Nothing at all. I’d have survived without his hulking presence in the cell opposite. I’d have managed without his voice measuring out the hours of night. My anger would have kept me alive. But he had made a difference. The big ugly fellow who’d insisted on calling me Lady even when I was lower than the low had been . . . not a friend, because a person like me didn’t have friends, but . . .
‘Maybe it’ll go away one day,’ he said, lifting his head, looking over at me. ‘Do you think? When we’re old folk?’
Suddenly I wanted to cry, which was beyond ridiculous. ‘We’re old already, the two of us,’ I said. ‘Old inside. Old and tired.’
‘Thing is,’ said Grim, ‘when I did sleep, it was because you were there across the way. Knew I had a job to do, a reason not to string myself up and make an end of it. A reason not to attack Slammer and get myself killed. Still got a job to do, only . . .’
‘Only you can’t always remember that when you’re on your own at night?’
‘That’s about the size of it. Big soft fool, I am.’
Words came to my lips, words I knew would hurt him terribly, although they were the truth. Some part of me, a long unused part, stopped those words before I could say them. ‘Grim. We’ve seen so much, the two of us, we’ve been through so much, it’s stupid to concern ourselves with what folk might think if we both sleep here in the cottage. If being able to see me when you wake in the night will mean you get proper rest, then we’d better make sure you can, for now at least. There are two beds; we’ll use them. Only one request: you might make some kind of screen, so we don’t have to do that whole silly exercise of one holding up a blanket while the other gets dressed in the morning.’
‘You wouldn’t be wanting folk to think badly of you,’ Grim said, but I had seen the change in his eyes, the dawning hope. ‘Wise woman and all. Doesn’t seem quite right.’
‘They can think what they like. Why would I care? If they choose not to make use of my services because they think I’m a woman of easy virtue, that’s their problem.’
‘What about the prince? Oran of Dalriada? If what he said was right, about the cottage being his to let us live in or not, he might take it into his head to throw us out.’
‘I doubt a prince is going to take a personal interest in who shares the local healer’s sleeping quarters. He’ll surely have weightier matters on his mind.’
‘An idea,’ Grim said. ‘I could keep my bedroll out in the lean-to. It’s dry now I’ve mended the roof and put in the new door. Bring it in last thing at night, put it out first thing in the morning, before anyone’s here but the two of us.’
‘If that soothes your finer feelings, Grim, by all means do so.’ It’s not an invitation to creep into my bed in the middle of the night, I thought of saying, but decided it was unnecessary. We were beyond w
eary, the two of us; worn out by what had befallen us, sickened by it. If anyone were to creep into anyone’s bed, it would not be because of the desire a man feels for a woman, or a woman for a man. It would more likely be the terror of an infant waking from a nightmare and reaching for the comforting familiar.
‘What?’ I said, sensing Grim’s eyes on me.
‘You were smiling.’
‘Don’t assume anything from that. Disturb my sleep and you’ll be straight back into the outhouse.’
He kept on at me about Oran, Prince of Dalriada, and the time the fellow had come riding by with his serving man and stopped to talk. That was the day I’d made sure I wasn’t home, since I’d had no desire for people of his kind to ask me for help with their aches and pains. How was I to know the fellow owned the cottage and the land around it, as far as the eye could see? When I’d watched them ride up, what I’d seen was wealth, privilege and power. I’d seen a man like Mathuin of Laois, and I’d slipped off into the woods before he could start asking awkward questions. Before he could impose his will on me or ask me for something I wasn’t prepared to give. I loathed his kind. They were all the same. Too much power made people arrogant and unfeeling. It turned them cruel. It blinded them to right and wrong.
Time passed and this prince didn’t favour us with another visit. Nor did he send one of his lackeys to ask why I hadn’t done as I was bid and come to report. Maybe he was impressed by the job Grim had done to the old dump of a place. Maybe word had got back to him that I did an adequate job of providing what folk needed when they were sick or hurt.
As for Conmael and his folk, there was neither sight nor sound of them, though I couldn’t walk far into Dreamer’s Wood without feeling the presence of the Other. Maybe the fey weren’t there right now, but something was; something old and strange and powerful. I was careful, gathering herbs or bark or mushrooms, to do it in the right way, with words of thanks. Each night I set a crust of bread and a cup of mead on a flat stone outside the back door. Grim never said a word about that. He went into the wood too, for fuel or other materials, but he came back out as quickly as he could. Perhaps he said his own words of thanks. I never asked.
There came a spell of unusually warm weather, a touch of summer in late autumn. The plants in Grim’s garden patch spread their leaves to drink in the sunlight, the birds sang in the fields, and I took it upon myself, in the absence of folk seeking my help, to wash a number of filthy garments while I had a good chance of getting them dry. Grim carried buckets of water from the well; we heated it one pan at a time, over an outside fire, and I scrubbed until my shoulders ached. Grim helped me wring out the clothing and hang it on the line, then headed off to a job he’d promised to do for Scannal the miller, loading sacks of flour onto a cart and taking them somewhere.
Nobody was around, so I took the opportunity to have a good wash myself, using the remains of the hot water. Once dry and dressed, I tried to restore order to my wet hair. That day when Grim had cut it seemed a long time ago. Now there were strands down to my eyes at the front, and the rest of it was all over the place. Generally I avoided looking anywhere I might catch sight of my own reflection, but I got the odd accidental glimpse in a pool or bowl of water, and the woman I saw was not only aged beyond her years, she was unkempt. I could ask Grim to do the job again, of course. It had felt good, the day he’d hacked off the whole stinking mess of it, as if I was shedding some of the foulness of Mathuin. But winter was coming, and if I had to meet up with the prince of Dalriada sometime, it might be better if I wasn’t near-bald. So I combed my hair and let it dry in the sun. Soon it should be long enough to tie back out of the way.
I was starting to chop vegetables when I heard the scream. A woman’s voice, coming from somewhere in Dreamer’s Wood. ‘Help! Help!’
Curse Conmael and his wretched agreement. And why did Grim have to be away just when I needed him? I threw things into a bag, slung my shawl around my shoulders, put on my boots, stuck a knife in my belt. I ran out the back door and into the wood, because I’d made a promise and I had no choice.
The screaming had died down to be replaced by other sounds: men’s and women’s voices, horses neighing, a shrill yapping. Seemed a whole party of folk had made its way into the wood without my hearing a thing earlier. Had I been so absorbed in my bathing that I had missed them entirely? What if this was an attack, a fight? What if I showed myself only to end up the way I had in Laois, accused of a crime and shut up to rot in a cell?
I hesitated under the trees. The woman was not calling for help now. Did that mean I need not announce my presence? Could I turn my back and slip quietly away home?
Too great a risk. I could not afford to get it wrong. I walked forward. The voices were coming from down by the pool; I could hear folk moving about. And now I was close enough to see them. A number of men dressed in uniform colours of grey and blue, someone’s escort, most likely. A number of horses, saddled and bridled, but tied up as if the party had stopped to rest. And there on the edge of the pool, people clustered around something on the narrow strip of level shore. Someone was sobbing.
I broke into a run, and as they saw me several of the men laid hands on their weapons.
‘I’m a healer,’ I said, not caring if my annoyance showed. ‘I live nearby. What has happened here?’
Several people spoke at once, some of them babbling in distress; I could make nothing of it. The small crowd parted, letting me through to where a young woman lay prone, unmoving. A man was kneeling beside her, trying to revive her. Another woman – not much more than a girl – sat hunched over, a short distance away. Where the others were weeping, wailing, trying to offer explanations, this one was quite silent. Under the cloak that was draped over her shoulders she was wearing only a shift, and it clung damply to her body. Her dark hair hung in a drenched tangle over her narrow shoulders and her face was parchment-pale. It was a warm day; perhaps a swim had seemed a good idea.
‘I’m a healer,’ I said again, squatting down next to the man. ‘My name’s Blackthorn. Is she breathing?’
He shook his head. I put my fingers to the woman’s neck, but even before I touched her, I knew it was too late. Her features had a shadowy look that was all too familiar. This was an empty shell, the spirit flown. She’d been young; perhaps no older than her dark-haired companion.
It had to be said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I rose to my feet. ‘I can’t do anything for your friend. She’s dead.’
There were gasps of shock from the ladies; one of them looked as if she were about to faint. Under the circumstances, unhelpful. I noticed, then, that one of the men was also soaked; he was stripping off his tunic, while one of his friends stood waiting with dry clothing. The man kneeling beside me had turned pale. An older man brought a blanket, which he laid over the dead girl. He helped the other fellow to his feet.
‘A sad accident,’ the older man said to me. ‘Thank you for coming to help, even though it was too late.’ To the fellow in the wet clothing, he said, ‘Eoin, you did your best. She was already gone.’
I glanced at the shivering girl and decided there was a further requirement for my services, whether I liked it or not. ‘This lady seems cold and distressed,’ I said to the older man, who seemed to be in charge. ‘My house is not far away. It’s warm there. She could rest awhile, get dressed in privacy . . . I could provide a restorative draught.’ I glanced at the body under its blanket. ‘You’ll need to make some arrangements.’
The man opened his mouth to answer, but the girl spoke first. She was a comely thing, small and pale, her face delicately formed and her eyes of an unusual deep blue. That fall of dark hair, when dry, would add to her beauty. ‘How far – how far is it to Winterfalls?’ Her voice was shaky.
‘To the village? Not far.’
‘To Prince Oran’s residence.’
I should have realised where they were heading. There was the fine clothing, the
silver on the harness, the substantial escort. ‘Just beyond the village. You could be there very quickly.’
‘Lady Flidais,’ put in the older man, ‘with your approval, I’ll send a couple of men on ahead and let the prince know what’s happened. I’m sure he will want to ride out to meet you. You’ve had a terrible shock. If you go to the healer’s house, you can wait for him in comfort. If you wish, of course.’
Lady Flidais looked up at him. For a moment her lovely face looked quite blank. ‘What . . .’ she began, then her voice faded. She cleared her throat. ‘What about . . . Ciar?’
‘We will stand guard, my lady, until the prince arrives. I’ll have a couple of the men make a stretcher to carry her to Winterfalls.’
‘Oh,’ said Lady Flidais, as if she had barely understood. ‘Yes.’
Under other circumstances I might have slapped her cheek to break the trance, but I refrained. ‘My lady,’ I said, ‘you need warmth and rest. I’m Blackthorn, the local healer.’ I doubted very much that she’d heard my name earlier; she’d looked as if she was taking in very little. ‘My cottage is close by. If your attendants can collect whatever you need, a change of clothing, your personal items, we’ll walk there now.’
The girl seemed unaware that she was only half-dressed, and wet besides. One of her women was fussing with a brooch, pinning the gaping edges of the cloak together before the men-at-arms could get too much of an eyeful. While they organised themselves I spoke again to the older guard. ‘Is the prince expecting you?’ Not that it was any of my business who or what Prince Oran was expecting, but if his visitors were going to get themselves drowned more or less on my doorstep, I wanted to be sure no responsibility would attach itself to me.