Haunt Me Still (8 page)

“religious rites have longer lives and a wider reach than any single object used within them. If you found a thousand-year-old chalice engraved with a line from the Latin Mass, should you infer that someone who’d quoted the Mass in English yesterday, or four hundred years ago, for that matter, had seen that particular cup? Or only that they both knew some form of the same rite?”

The fire in the forge had cooled even further, to a simmering red that brought the pattern of the blade to life. It seemed to writhe and undulate, coiling and uncoiling like the creature for which it was named.

“What ritual would require such a blade?” Sybilla’s eyes glittered.

He shrugged. “Hard to say.” He poured out another splash of whisky and wiped his forehead with his arm. “Neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Celts were shy about sacrifice, though. There’s a roman account of Celtic priestesses dressed all in white, moving through sacred groves dispatching victims with sacred blades, cutting their throats and letting the blood run into a cauldron.” He drained his glass, sucking the last drop of whisky through his teeth. “Like I said, I haven’t seen a ritual blade. But I’ve handled a fair few that’ve seen hard use in battle. Something strange happens to blades that have drunk a fair lot of blood. They wake. Not quite alive, but, still—sentient, somehow. And some of them grow to want more. Blood, I mean.” for a moment, there was no sound between us save the guttering of the fire. Then, from the back of the smithy, came a shrill cry. We turned to hear a grating sound floating in through a narrow window high up in the wall. The noise grew into a rumbling, rattling slide like a sudden fall of rock and then faded to silence. For an instant, no one moved. Then Eircheard and Ben sprinted out of the open front and around the corner toward the rear of the building. Snatching up the knife from the table, I followed close behind. A stack of crates and pallets under the window had collapsed in a heap that was still groaning and settling. Just beyond, what looked like a small shed clung to the back wall. The door was ajar.

“Come out, you wee rotten scunner,” growled Eircheard.

Inside, nothing moved.

He yanked the door open and shone a flashlight inside, revealing a bedroom, neat as a monk’s cell and as small—barely big enough for Eircheard to lie down in. It was empty.

“Can’t’ve gone far,” said Eircheard.

Ben turned and shone the flashlight about the area around the back of the smithy. Patiently, he and Eircheard began scanning the ground for clues.

They’d just disappeared around the far corner, heading into the field beyond, when something caught my eye off to the right. Someone moving stealthily back into the woods that divided the smithy from the hill, and from Dunsinnan House.

If I yelled, the intruder would take off. If I waited for Ben and Eircheard, or went to fetch them, the intruder would be long gone.

My grip on the knife tightening, I slipped into the woods in the wake of the shadow.

The woods turned out to be a stand no more than ten feet thick, after which they opened up again. At the edge of this clearing, I paused. It was not a work of nature. It was a carefully shaped circle, lined on the inside with a ring of immense old beech trees, the last of their leaves rustling like dry paper. Inside the trees hunched a circle of standing stones. Not as tall or as massive as Stonehenge. Lumpier, somehow. Older and less refined. And in the darkness, far more powerful. A brooding, ancient power.

Wind swept through the treetops. I glanced up, watching them bend and lash against the star-scattered circle of night overhead, their moaning rising from a low murmur to the howl of an oceanic gale. Leaves floated downward in large, eddying flakes, as if the sky were snowing darkness. I shivered and drew my jacket closer around me.

When I looked back down, a figure stood in the center of the stones. The silhouette, black on black, of a woman from an earlier century, her long hair and gown stirring in the wind. A dry hiss left her lips, and she began to glide toward me.

THE BLADE
in my hand burned with a cold fire; it seemed to buzz at a pitch so low that I felt rather than heard it, as if it were resonating with some strong source of energy. Backing a few paces, I turned to run, but her arm whipped out and gripped my wrist. I yelped, but only a squeak came out.

“It’s me, Kate,” she whispered. “
Lily.
”

Lily alive, or Lily dreamed and dead? My heart thudding hard in my chest, I slowly turned around.

Her face was pale in the faint light, her wide-set eyes large and dark. What had looked like the gown of a renaissance lady resolved into a coat with a tight bodice and long flaring skirt. Above the coat, her throat was a pale column, unmarked.

“Do you think it’s true?” she asked in a low voice. “Do you think that’s a ritual knife?”

I glanced down at the dagger and then back up. “How much did you overhear?”

“All of it.” She grinned sheepishly. From over at the smithy came a shout. “
Kate!
” It was Lady Nairn.

“Damn,” said Lily. Her grip on my arm tightened. “Please don’t tell her I was here. I’m already entry A-one on her shit list.”

I was staring at her wrist gripping my arm. On it was a small tattoo I hadn’t noticed before. A delicate five-pointed star. A pentacle, the symbol of witches—of Wicca, the neo-pagan religion of witchcraft.

Lady Nairn called again. “Please,” whispered Lily, her eyes pleading. “I won’t tell a soul.”

Fifteen going on twenty-five,
Lady Nairn had said of her. In the days following my parents’ death, I’d been very like her. Unpredictable and a little wild. But she was, at heart, a good kid. “Go on, then,” I said with a wave of the hand.

She flashed a wide smile. “Thanks. You’re awesome.” She dashed across the circle, in the direction of Dunsinnan House.

In a bright, evil flare the image of her body, bound and naked on the hilltop, flashed across my mind. “Lily,” I said, stepping after her. At the far edge of the clearing, she looked back. “You’ll be all right?” I asked, feeling suddenly both frightened and foolish.

“No worries. We’re practically in the back garden. Besides, we’re too bloody far out in the sticks for a bogeyman to bother in the first place.” And then she was gone, her passing barely stirring up a rustle amid the deep bracken.

I was turning to head back to the forge when a voice whispered out from the woods at my back.
Why did you bring the dagger from that place?

I whirled. “Who’s there?”

Another voice snaked from the right.
It must lie there….

And a third voice came from the left.
Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.

The wind tossed in the trees, and I thought I saw shadows glide in toward the stones as all three voices spoke at once:
She must die.
…

Gripping the knife close, I turned slowly about.

“
Kate!
” This time, it was Ben’s voice. Flashlight beams criss-crossed the night, and footsteps pounded across the field toward the woods.

Thirty seconds later, a flashlight beam strafed the clearing. Eircheard and Ben crashed through the trees in its wake.

Ben took one glance at the knife and looked up at my face. “Are you all right?”

“Someone was here.” I swallowed hard.

“What happened?” asked Eircheard.

I shook my head. “Nothing. Voices. I saw nothing but shadows.”

Ben was scanning the ground around the stones.

“Kids,” said Eircheard with contempt. “At a certain age, the village kids love to scare themselves silly telling ghost stories in the circle. Make a night of it, they do, by heading over to snoop about the forge. A few of them, you can see their eyes all starry with dreams of lame smiths forging magic rings and dragon chains. Most of them, though, are just idling, hoping to see me burn the place down, maybe the woods with it. Sodding little pyros.”

“Not kids,” I said. Lily had been here, only moments before. Was I sure of that?

I looked at Ben. “They were the same voices I heard on the hill this morning.” That time, there had also been a body.

I told them what I’d heard, thinking through the words as I did.
Why did you bring the dagger from that place? It must lie there….
Lady Macbeth’s cry to her husband after he’s killed the king, with the dagger made singular. “Put it back,” was the gist of it.

Auld Callie’s words exactly.

But the voices had stolen Sir Angus’s words, too.
Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.

All in all, a fairly clear message: Drop the dagger, go after the manuscript—or whatever it was that Sir Angus had been after.

Who would need to tell me that in the guise of ghosts in a stone circle? And tack on a death threat, besides.

She must die.

Who must die?

“Jesus,” said Eircheard. “No, not kids.”

Lady Nairn and Sybilla walked into the clearing. “A stone circle,” cried Sybilla, clasping her hands in delight. “I knew it. I
knew
there was a place of power hereabouts.”

“Everything all right?” asked Lady Nairn. “I’d like to go to Birnam Wood,” I said.

She looked from me to Ben and Eircheard and nodded. “I’ve organized a reading of the play on the hill at sunrise,” she said. “To begin the celebration of Samhuinn. We’ll head to Birnam directly after that.”

It would do. It would have to.

Sybilla was standing in the middle of the circle, swaying a little. “The knife belongs here,” she said. “I can
feel
it.”

Irritation suddenly overwhelmed me. “The stone circles of Britain—and I am assuming this is one of them—are Neolithic,” I said crossly. “Stone Age. The druids were Iron Age Celts. And if Eircheard is right about the knife, it’s late Anglo-Saxon, which makes it medieval, at least five hundred years after the fall of rome. So where that knife belongs is anybody’s guess, but it isn’t here.”

Sybilla wasn’t fazed. “It’s a sacred knife, and this is a sacred place.
It belongs.
”

I gave up. “I’m heading back to bed.”

“High time we all followed suit,” said Lady Nairn.

At the smithy, Eircheard gave me a leather scabbard for the knife, and then we made our way back to the house in silence. Orion the hunter, his star-studded knife at his belt, was just rising into the southeastern sky. To our left, the hill seemed to lean down over us, heavy with menace. Or maybe it was just mockery.

We said good-night to each other at the upstairs landing. Sybilla’s hand lingered on Ben’s arm in unspoken invitation, but he discreetly disengaged himself and walked me down the hall. Just outside my door, he stopped.

His clean, slightly spicy scent sped through me until my whole body ached for him.

Nothing is but what is not.

“Hide it,” he said with a glance at the scabbard in my hand. “Are you okay with that? Or would you like some help?”

“I can take it from here, thanks.”
Bastard.

He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. “Good-night, Kate.” Turning the corner, he walked ten feet down the corridor. Lady Nairn had given him the room right next to mine.

In that, I thought I saw the long hand of Athenaide.

Just inside my room, I leaned back against the door, wondering whether I was about to cry or scream. In the end I did neither, splashing water on my face at the sink instead.

A small fire was burning cheerily in the fireplace; the luxuries of life with a staff, I thought. Toweling off, I sank into one of the armchairs before the fire and drew the knife out of the sheath, watching it ripple in the light. My outburst in the circle had left me shaken. Not just because it had been childish, but because for all that my facts were right, it was Sybilla who had hit, however messily, upon some truth. Not about the knife, but about the place. There
was
something strange about that circle in its clearing in the woods.
A place of power
, she’d said. And she was right. I’d felt it too. But I wasn’t as sure as she was that the power there was entirely benign.

She must die,
the voices had chanted.
Who must die?

The phrase was Shakespeare’s, I was certain of that. But not from
Macbeth.
On my phone, I pulled up the Web and entered the words into a Shakespearean search engine.
Othello, Julius Caesar,
and
Henry VIII,
came the answer. Spoken about Desdemona, Portia, and Queen Elizabeth.

I frowned. It had been an old jest between my mentor roz Howard and myself that my auburn hair, dark eyes, and the tiniest hint of a hook in my nose made me look like Shakespeare’s queen, in her days as a princess. It was a jest that Ben had kept alive. But the voices couldn’t have known that. Could they?

I clicked on
Henry VIII,
pulling up the phrase in its context.

Lily,
I thought raggedly. They hadn’t threatened me;
they’d threatened Lily.
And I’d let her walk out of that circle alone.

I stood up, filled with sudden dread. I had no idea where her bedroom was. On this floor, I thought. I had to find it—and her—if it meant knocking on every door in the goddamned house. I was already striding for the door when I heard a quiet tap from the other side and flung it open.

LILY STOOD
in the hall in loose flannel pants and an old black Belle and Sebastian sweatshirt, a book and a small wooden box under her arm, her face bright with excitement. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had an idea, and, well, I saw your light on, so I thought I might as well run it by you.” She bounded into the room. “You aren’t angry with me, are you?”

In my confusion, I felt as if I’d been bounced by Tigger. “for listening? I would’ve done the same thing at your age. Maybe at my age.”

“I’m not normally so nosey. Only, I saw the knife out on the terrace before dinner, and afterward I heard you talking about it in the little sitting room, and I was so curious…. Is that it?”

It lay where I’d left it on the table, shining in the firelight. “Yes.” Setting the book and the box on the table, she caught it up, hefting it in her hand.

I glanced at the book. The cover showed a tall stone standing alone in a green field under lowering clouds, a single bright ray of sun illuminating the scene. It was titled
Ancient Pictland,
by Corra ravensbrook. Using both hands, Lily began waving the knife in slow motion, almost like she was doing Tai Chi. “Do you think it’s really a thousand years old?”

“I don’t know.” How could it be? How could it
not
be?

.

“It’d be really cool to use this in the festival, don’t you think? for the fight between the kings.”

“for a stage fight?”

She smiled. “You heard Eircheard. It’s a ritual knife. And it’s an old ritual we’re staging.”

“Lily—it’s a
real
knife. An edged weapon.”

“I know. But it’s a king-sacrifice we’re staging, just like the one that killed Macbeth.”

“‘Staging’ being the operative word.”

“It would be
authentic
.”

“It would be insanely reckless,” I said incredulously. She was from a theatrical family, for heaven’s sake.

“You know Eircheard and Jason are taking those roles? If anyone could handle a real knife, it’d be those two.” She gave me a wicked smile. “And there’d be those who’d be happy enough if Jason came out a little worse for the wear, I can tell you that. It’s one thing for Sybilla to have been asked to be the Cailleach; she’s been a member of the Beltane fire Society—the festival organizers—since long before she hit the big time. It was idiotic, though, when Jason was cast as the Winter King. That role has always been cast from members of the fire Society before. Like Eircheard as the Summer King. Amateurs who really care about the show and the myths behind it. But Sybilla wrote a big check, and voilà, we’re saddled with Jason. Bit uncomfortable, now that they’re not speaking. On the other hand, there’s no speaking in the show, either, so maybe their feuding won’t matter a toss.”

She blew a strand of coppery hair from her face. “But I’m in no position to complain, or even say ‘I told you so,’ because I’m an exception to the rule myself. Too young, you know. Gran pulled some strings for me.”

Holding the knife tightly, she raised both hands toward the ceiling, as she had out on the lawn. “I’d like to be the Cailleach one day. Ever so much more than Lady Macbeth. I mean, the Cailleach’s, like, the real thing, isn’t she? It’s her show. She chooses the champions who will be kings, and she sets them against each other. They’re fighting for the right to marry her, at least in her young person of the Bride, as much as anything else.”

She brought her hands down to her hips. “Do you know what the name ‘Dunsinnan’ means?”

“No.”

She marched over to the windows. I’d drawn the curtains wide, letting the windows frame the hill. “fort of the Nipple,” she said with a flourish. “
Dun
means fort in Gaelic, and
sine
means nipple. You can’t really tell from this side, but next time you drive in from the main road, have a look. The whole hill looks like a woman’s breast.” She threw open the middle window and leaned out into the night. “Weird name for a military hill.”

I had my doubts, having met a few of Ben’s friends. Some of them were capable of seeing breasts and penises in the void of outer space. But I held my tongue.

“The archaeologists all say that the ramparts on the hilltop are the remains of an Iron Age hill fort…but there’s no evidence of that. I mean, buildings, yes. But not of a fort or castle specifically. And it doesn’t seem, militarily speaking, the best place around. I mean, the hill just to the east, the King’s Seat, is higher. So if the point is really male and military, like all the histories say, don’t you think you’d build your fort next door?”

Privately, I doubted her expertise in judging suitable spots for fortification from an Iron Age perspective, but it didn’t seem the right time to point that out.

“But they didn’t.” Pulling back inside, she turned and hopped up to sit on the sill. “for over a thousand years, the stronghold was on Dunsinnan. Which would make all the sense in the world if it were less a fort and more, say, a
spiritual
stronghold. Especially given its shape and the stone circle at its base.” She crossed her arms in triumph. “I think it was a temple complex.”

She was looking at me as if daring me to disagree. As I made no move to shout her down, she went on. “There are records, you know, of Macbeth coming here to consult with witches. But, like, change that title to ‘priestesses,’ and you’ve got a Stronghold of the Lady. The great Goddess worshipped in this land for millennia before the coming of Christianity…. I’m not talking about
Scot
land, mind you.” Her nose wrinkled in contempt. “The Scots are newcomers, invaders from Ireland.” She threw her arms wide. “This—the whole of central Scotland—was Pictland, the kingdom of the Picts. That’s what the romans called them. The Priteni, they called themselves—or something like it. Their actual language is lost. Celtic, but closer to Welsh than Gaelic, apparently. In any case, it’s where we get the word ‘Britain,’” she said proudly. “Dunsinnan—or the stretch of country from Dunsinnan to Scone—was once the spiritual center of Pictland, the land of the Priteni. The spiritual center of
Britain.
Ground zero for Goddess worship, right here. How cool is that?”

How much of this was being regurgitated from Corra ravensbrook, whoever she was? No matter—Lily was clearly very taken with her version of history. If I wanted her to consider another viewpoint—a sane one, say—I’d have to proceed with caution. “But isn’t Dunsinnan where the battle was?” I asked aloud. “The great battle between Malcolm and Macbeth in 1054? Sounds military to me.”

She shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first battle fought at a temple. Think about it: Malcolm’s army came down from Birnam, just this side of the river from Dunkeld, where his grandfather had been the lay abbot. Even then, way back in the eleventh century, Dunkeld, see, was a bastion of Christianity.” She jumped down from the sill and began to pace before it. “Don’t you see? They weren’t just fighting for the throne, Malcolm and Macbeth. It was a holy war. A Christian crusade against the old faith. Against the Goddess. A war to enforce Christianity and disinherit women. To banish the old Pictish ways that properly belong to this place.”

She pointed at the book with the knife. “That’s where ravensbrook’s so interesting. The usual Wiccan stuff—well, it tends to be airy-fairy. All about how gentle and good Wicca is, in tune with the earth and the natural rhythms of life, you know? Which is fine—more than fine. But the old Goddess religion, it could be
fierce
. It didn’t just pay lip service to the notion that death is a part of life. It embraced that fact fully. If you know what I mean.”

I frowned. “You mean sacrifice?”

“
Blood
sacrifice,” she said with teenage relish. “Sacrifice of the king. There are a lot of stories about king sacrifice, you know,” she babbled on, “the Samhuinn fire festival among them, but they weren’t always just stories. Corra says the myths are memories of old rites.”

She held up the knife. “According to Eircheard, this is a ritual knife. And it’s also the knife that killed Macbeth.
King
Macbeth.” for a moment, we both stared at the firelight and moonlight playing on its surface. “Ergo, the knife killed Macbeth in a ritual killing.
Macbeth was killed as part of a ritual sacrifice of the king.
” She let one finger stray across the runes on the blade. “I mean, what is a ritual knife
for
but ritual?”

Who was this Corra ravensbrook, I wondered again. The ideas of king sacrifice she seemed to have planted in Lily had been discredited among academics long ago. A growing number of neo-pagans, especially the more intellectual sort, dismissed much of it as wishful thinking. But Lily, I realized, was in no mood to hear the voice of reason.

“Seems like rotten timing,” I said mildly, “to slice up your leader and feed his lifeblood to the gods just when you’re on the run, looking for a place to make a last desperate stand.”

“King sacrifice would never have been common. Performed only in times of great need, to settle some extraordinary debt with the gods. And what greater need than the destruction of your whole civilization?” She grinned. “Hey, apocalypse threatens, you’ll do anything. Reason goes right out the window.”

It was the most sensible thing she’d said in some time. I sighed. “All the old histories say that it was Macduff, fighting for Malcolm, who killed Macbeth and set his head on a pole. Not priestesses. Even Shakespeare used that part of the story.” It was one of his most blunt stage directions:
Enter Macduff with Macbeth’s head.
So preposterous that it was a dicey moment onstage: Audiences had been known to laugh.

Lily waved off the authorities. “And who wrote those histories? Monks! Christians. Busily writing the Goddess and her priestesses out of existence. I imagine Macduff found the pole, all right, and took it up as a trophy, waving it about. But it was the Celts, not the Christians, who worshipped heads. Decorated their sacred spaces with them. Submerged them in wells, boiled them in cauldrons, believed they could speak. It would have been Macbeth’s own people who wanted his head as a talisman. By taking it, I reckon Macduff ripped the heart out of whatever will to fight they had left. A sort of grim Capture the flag, if you like.”

“If you’re right, it didn’t work out any better for them than for him, did it?”

“No,” she said sadly, “not much.” She crossed the room and set the knife back down on the table and stood with her hands on her hips, staring into the fire. “He was the last Celtic king. The last king of the Priteni. But because of him, not everything was lost.”

She was starting to make Macbeth out to be a Scottish King Arthur.

“The old religion survived, you know. It just went underground. Really deep. Especially in places like this. Out in the sticks now—think what it would have been like in the eleventh century.” She turned to me, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “So…imagine Shakespeare coming through with a troupe of traveling players. Imagine him glimpsing, somehow, a rite preserved from the old days by women descended from the priestesses of the ancient Pictish Goddess. What would he do with it, do you think?”

Presupposing all her ridiculousness was true, I knew exactly what Shakespeare would have done with it. He was a magpie, a pack rat, when it came to plot, borrowing and stealing from everywhere. And magic made good theater. Spectacular.

“He would have written it into a script,” I said quietly.

“Now,
that
would make your bloody play interesting,” said Lily.

No,
I thought,
that would make it explosive.
It was titillating enough to suggest that he’d put in a real spell or some rite of casting a circle—at least one that people once thought was real. But those could be found on the pages of grimoires and witch-hunting manuals. They weren’t entirely lost. Putting in a rite of sacrifice preserved from an otherwise lost pagan religion—hell, if we were talking about the Picts, it was pretty much a lost civilization—that was something else entirely. Never mind the obvious fascination for Shakespeareans. Every neo-pagan, every Christian, every scholar of Britain’s history, every journalist who wanted to sell papers or airtime, would be salivating over it.

I cleared my throat and said aloud what a responsible adult ought to say. “That’s a lot of ifs.”

“And one cold, hard, thousand-year-old piece of evidence,” she said with shining eyes.

Nothing is but what is not.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, “even if he got it wrong—painting something as evil that wasn’t, really—I’d still want to read it. I’d even forgive the irritating old git for tormenting every school-kid in modern Britain, just for preserving it at all.” She turned to me. “So, what do you think?”

“That I need to think.” I felt as if she’d just gone after me with a baseball bat.

Picking up the wooden box she’d brought along, she opened it. Inside was something covered in black silk. “I brought my tarot cards,” she said. “Want a reading, while you think?”

I glanced over at the clock. I’d have to be up in three hours. “Could I take a rain check on that?”

She jumped up. “Oh, Lord. So sorry. You’ve got to get up for Gran’s early morning hike up the hill, haven’t you?”

“You’re not coming?”

She snorted. “Let’s see.
Macbeth
and a cold walk up the hill, or my warm bed and a nice morning’s lie-in. No bloody contest. But I don’t think you have a choice. So of course we can do it later…. Just as long as you let me corner you at some point. I bet your cards will be really interesting. Besides, you’ll like my deck. It’s a
Macbeth
deck.”

She started for the door. “Lily—what were you doing out on the lawn tonight?”

Halfway across the room, she stopped. “Charging the mirror.” The mirror that had been in the middle of her dance. “What does that mean?”

She sighed. “I’m trying to learn to scry. To see things in a mirror. But you have to learn how to empty your mind first. And also charge your mirror. Fill it with energy. Kind of like you’d charge a mobile phone, but the energy’s different. Natural. Mostly, you charge them with moonlight.” She turned back with a mischievous smile. “Like I said, Goddess worship had to go underground. But it never entirely died out. Not through all the battles, not through all the burning years. And now, it’s coming back. People are returning to the old ways.”