Haunt Me Still (9 page)

“Including you?”

“Among others.”

“What do you want to see?”

She shrugged. “Same as everyone else. My first love. My future.” Her eyes met mine. “My parents.”

I took a deep breath but said nothing. There was nothing useful I could say.

“I heard you lost yours,” she said in a small voice. “What happened to them?”

I sighed. “They were diplomats. A small plane and bad weather in the foothills of the Himalayas. A lethal combination. I was fifteen.”

Her eyes were growing glassy. “Better than the motorway outside Preston.”

In the fireplace, a log disintegrated in a shower of sparks. “There’s no good place for it.”

Her voice shrank. “They were driving home from visiting me down at school.”

I locked my eyes on hers and held them. “It wasn’t your fault, Lily.”

After a moment she shrugged. “I
know
that. Lots of expensive therapy.” She gave me a watery smile and looked away. “But sometimes it’s hard to feel it. When did you stop missing them?”

Was this it? Was this why she had sought my company? A toxic combination of guilt and longing. Poor kid. No wonder she was acting out. “Never.”

She looked back sharply.

“Only, the hurt loses its sharpness, gradually,” I said more gently. “And other experiences collect and change the balance of things. It doesn’t go away. But it does become bearable. Does that make sense?”

“Thank you for not saying it will all be fine.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Did I tell you that you look nice in that dress?”

I’d followed her to the door. Having entirely forgotten what I was wearing, I looked down and saw Lady Nairn’s peacock-blue silk. “Thanks. Your grandmother lent it to me.”

“It was my mother’s.”

I looked up, aghast. What the hell had Lady Nairn been thinking? “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

She smiled. “It’s okay. You look a little like her. Besides, she’d have liked you. I like you, too.” Squeezing me in an impulsive hug, she opened the door and pattered off down the hall.

And I like you,
I thought, staring after her.

I was turning back into the room when I heard another door open and glanced back. Sybilla emerged from Ben’s room in a flame-colored kimono. Seeing me, she nodded, her eyes sly with triumph as she swayed silently down the hall. As if the flames from her kimono had brushed me with kerosene, I felt waves of heat sweeping around me, the blue silk disappearing in a whoosh of yellow and red, my skin liquefying, melting into puddles at my feet.

I looked up to see Ben standing in the doorway, watching me, his face a blank.

I CLOSED THE
door and shut my eyes, squeezing Ben from my thoughts.

Imagine Shakespeare coming through with a troupe of traveling players,
Lily had said.
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?

Now,
that
would make your bloody play interesting.

That was the understatement of the season.

Her notion echoed the Nairn legends but one-upped them.

It was plausible, or at least possible, that Shakespeare had at some point come north. It was plausible that had he ever glimpsed a real magical rite, some hocus-pocus current during his lifetime, he would have slipped it into a play. But a survival of some pagan sacrificial rite, kept alive by a secret line of priestesses?

That was entirely fucking preposterous.

Except for the knife gleaming on my table.

A knife that was, according to Eircheard, a thousand years old.

Nothing is but what is not.

It would make sense of the manuscript’s disappearance, I thought. Had anyone recognized it for what it was, it would have been deemed demon worship in those days.

Which made hash of putting such a thing in the script in the first place, even if he had it at his fingertips. Why court such disaster with a king who fancied himself both a target and a skilled hunter of witches?

And in any case, he wouldn’t have had such a thing at his fingertips, because it didn’t exist. It couldn’t.

And besides, a cook wanting paper to line a pastry tin or start the day’s fire made equal sense of the disappearance…. Except that in 1911, Ellen Terry had written about evidence that the manuscript still existed.

Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.

I looked out the window, willing day to come. But the moon just hung there in the west, a wide teasing smile in the night.

Suddenly exhausted, I slipped the knife in its scabbard under my pillow and fell instantly to sleep.

I woke with a shriek to find myself on my knees in front of the mirror, the drawn blade in my hand. I dropped it, and it fell to the deep-carpeted floor with a soft thud.

I scooted back, staring at it as I might stare at a snake.

It must have been five minutes before I could move.

What was it Eircheard said about blades that had killed?
Some of them grow to want more. Blood, I mean.

When I finally dressed, I walked in a wide circle around it. Only at the last minute could I bring myself to touch it. I couldn’t just leave it there, after all, lying in the middle of the carpet.

I threw a towel over it, scooped it up, deposited it in the bottom drawer of the dresser, and shoved a small pillow on top of it. And then I fairly ran down the stairs.

We’d been told to gather in the hall at six-thirty sharp, ready for a brisk walk. Auld Callie, who lived in the village on the other side of the hill, was meeting us at the top. Everyone else had wandered in by 6:35—except Effie Summers. A check of her room revealed a bed that hadn’t been slept in. “I thought I calmed her down enough to at least stay the night,” said Lady Nairn in irritation.

“Gone off to pray for all our sins,” said Jason.

“God knows you could use it,” snapped Sybilla.

Ten minutes later, we left without Effie.

In the gray light of dawn, the hill was quiet. In wellies and an old green Barbour jacket, Lady Nairn led the way. The rest of us straggled behind her in a long line. Laughter rippled up the hillside. It was hard to reconcile this slope, quietly drowsing, with the menacing creature that had loomed over us in the night, much less the mist-shrouded nightmare I’d traversed yesterday afternoon.

The Fort of the Nipple. The Stronghold of the Goddess.

The only goddess around this morning was Sybilla, who looked as if she’d just walked off a ralph Lauren shoot, with high caramel-colored boots, khaki trousers, and a short tweed jacket that fit so well it appeared to have grown on her. She’d pulled her thick curls back into a ponytail.

Why couldn’t it have been her,
I thought savagely,
whom I saw dead on the hill, instead of Lily?

I strode forward to catch up with Lady Nairn. “I had a talk with Lily last night,” I said, panting a little. She’d meant it when she’d said the walk would be brisk. “After everyone went to bed.”

“Oh?”

“I hadn’t realized she was Wiccan.”

“Wiccan, my foot,” said Lady Nairn, stabbing the hill with an ivory-handled walking stick. “She’s read a few books. Lit some candles. Had that ridiculous tattoo incised into her wrist.” She looked sideways at me. “If she’d done that on my watch, it would’ve cost her a month of Sundays in grounding, but that was when her parents were still alive. Did she show you the book?”

“If you mean
Ancient Pictland,
yes.”

She snorted. “Wretched woman. Here Lily is, having barely outgrown Harry Potter, reaching for something else in the weeks after her mum and dad died. Lights upon Corra ravensbrook.” She said the name as if it were poison in her mouth. “Next thing I know it’s Corra this and Corra that. Equally fictional as Potter, you know, but a lot less amusing. And pretending to be
history.
”

We’d reached the base of the final summit, and she stopped to rest, letting the remainder of the company catch up a bit. “She has glamour, though. I’ll give her that. In her prose, at any rate. No idea what she looks like.”

She gave me another sideways glance. “
All was delusion, nought was truth.
One might be able to forgive it as a dram of piss-poor scholarship and a whole damned cask of wishful thinking, except that it’s not—
she’s
not delusional. It’s deliberate. She’s making money, hand over fist as I understand it, off people who are…are reaching out for something. And more than the money, I suspect, she’s feeding on their admiration. Which makes her, in some ways, frankly vampiric. I’m not coming from the same place as Effie, you understand. I’m not equating what ravensbrook does—or Wicca proper, for that matter—with demonic evil. I’m speaking about misleading vulnerable people, many of them still half-children. A much more mundane, infuriating, and hard-to-pinpoint evil. You can’t exorcise it. You can’t prosecute it. You can just hope the child comes to her senses.”

We crested the summit and stood watching the straggling line of people below. Beyond, the sun slowly crept across the valley. “It’s not that people shouldn’t yearn for something more. Especially young people who are hurting, like Lily. It’s that Ms. Ravensbrook offers easy, pat answers. Recipes, really.” She turned and wiggled her fingers, her voice taking on the witchy tones of a Disney fortune-teller. “Take a pinch of dragon’s blood, add a little nakedness under the full moon or the dark of the moon, and throw in nine knots in a red thread, and
poof,
you will tap your true power. And find wealth and happiness, too.” She sniffed. “It doesn’t work like that. No religion works like that.” She stopped again, hands on her hips, the walking stick jutting out at an awkward angle. “If you want the truth, I suspect Ms. Ravensbrook isn’t much of a Wiccan herself. Probably a bored housewife.”

She took a deep breath and forced a smile on her face. “Apologies for the rant. You hit a sore spot, as you might have guessed by now.” The others were catching up, filing into the bowl of the summit in ones and twos.

“You said she feeds on her readers’ admiration,” I said. “How?”

Lady Nairn groaned. “She has a Web site, with an e-mail address. You can write to her. So Lily did. Or does, I should probably say.”

“They have a regular correspondence?”

“God, no. Or I
would
be ballistic. But I know Lily’s written to her more than once. And that she’s responded. Wouldn’t surprise me, you know, if Lily’s antics on the lawn last night were Corra-directed.”

“Why?”

She looked out over the valley below. “I’ve read a little about Wicca myself. And what Lily was doing, it was sloppy. Maybe that’s just a teenager improvising. On the other hand, Lily also improvises her clothing. That should give you a good indication of her style in general.”

“Sloppy” was not a word that went with her fashion statement. “romantic,” one might say. But not “sloppy.”

Lady Nairn pointed northwest across the valley. “Birnam Wood. Right about there.”

What had drawn Sir Angus there?

Behind me, I heard shouts of laughter. Ben and Sybilla were playing some private game of tag. Bright-eyed and golden, Sybilla was running, I realized with sudden misgiving, straight toward the pit where yesterday I’d seen Lily lying dead. Or thought I had.

Glancing back like some eager Daphne luring on her Apollo, she did not see the hole opening just in front of her. Ben shouted, and she caught herself right at the edge. She looked down, and her mouth opened wide in surprise, and then horror; a cry caught in her throat. A swarm of flies rose around her like dark thoughts, and Sybilla took one step back and simply wilted.

Ben, already running, reached her first, catching her mid-faint. “
Jesus God,
” said Eircheard. Behind him, a scream rose in waves of panic.

I knew before I got there what they were seeing. A naked young woman, strangely bound, with her throat cut. Surely the body by now beginning to decay. Steeling myself, I walked forward and looked down into the trench.

But there was no body, naked or clothed. There was only blood, curdling from red to brown, filling the trench like a shallow bath. Next to me, Lady Nairn’s face was taut with revulsion. “
Blood will have blood,
” she murmured.

April 30, 1585
Dirleton Castle, Scotland

THE COUNTESS HAD
the English lord shown up to her in her private aerie in the old lord’s hall, a circular room beneath a vaulted dome high in one of the oldest towers of the castle. The servants were terrified of the place, thinking it haunted, and she’d made no effort to combat that fear, finding it useful. She was content, up here, to be served by her old nurse and one faithful manservant, both of whom would die for her.

Lord Henry Howard was dark of complexion and stealthy in demeanor, a battle between disdain and hope permanently etched in his face. On one finger he flaunted a signet she recognized: a phoenix. The emblem of Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots.

It was both unmistakable and deniable, and she admired its combination of cleverness and discretion. For it was unsafe, most decidedly unsafe, to carry a token pointing to Queen Mary, the king’s mother, who’d been forced to abdicate the throne of Scotland in his favor when he was thirteen months old. Eighteen years ago, that had been, or nearly so. Long imprisoned in England and persona non grata in Scotland, the queen remained a focus of rebellion in both kingdoms at once.

“A true king of Scotland would not balk at delivering real support to the rightful queen of England,” said Lord Henry. Setting down his wine, he rose to go. “The throne, of course, must belong only to Stewarts, and of royal blood.” He cleared his throat. “Such a king, the queen would back.” He looked at the countess with mocking eyes, but hers could be as cold as his were.

He had left soon after, and she’d watched him go with a coolness that belied the froth boiling in her blood.
Stewarts of royal blood:
It described both herself and her husband, another Jamie Stewart, older and braver than the pigeon-hearted boy who occupied the throne. And yet a man whom she had, more or less, under her thumb.

The message, of course, had been from Queen Mary.
Support me, and I will support you.
Or at least,
I will not contest you, if you can win and hold the crown.
The countess had little sympathy for the queen languishing in comfortable imprisonment in a remote English castle. The woman had just signed her son’s death warrant, so badly did she want a crown—and not the Scottish one, which she had always thought beneath her.

It was less the queen’s ruthlessness than her incompetence, however, that irritated the countess. For it was the countess’s misfortune to have been born with the capacity to rule that Mary lacked but a lineage that gave her no real road to power: Her Stewart blood, though royal, was bastard, and through the female line. Even so, in her youth in her father’s Highland strongholds, she had listened more than once as old powers of darkness decreed that one day she would be a queen. She had exulted at the thought, even at the age of ten or twelve, and she had been doing her best to help fate along ever since.

Now she went to a chest and pulled from its velvet wrapping a dark mirror. This she fixed to the end of a long leather strap hanging down from the apex of the dome, allowing it to twirl a little, this way and that, over the center of her worktable.

She had taken the mirror, long ago, in payment from the English wizard Dr. Dee. Unknown to her parents, who thought she was frequenting warehouses full of the world’s silks and jewels, feathers and spices, she’d spent that cold February in Antwerp working her fingers to the bone, helping Dr. Dee copy a rare manuscript of angelic magic. But when she had finished, he’d refused to pay the price they’d agreed upon: knowledge. She’d wanted teaching: to learn the Great Art. What he offered, in the end, was a purse of silver. As if she were a whore. She, an earl’s daughter.

She’d burned the pages she’d copied one by one till he was on his knees and weeping. And then she’d tossed the rest into the air above the hearth. As he hurried to pick them up, she’d taken the mirror and left.

She did not know what it was made of, or who had made it. It seemed a work of magic in itself. But she’d taught herself to scry in it. Quite a feat, as Dr. Dee had told her it was known to show fire and blood to those who could not wrest it to their will.

At a nod, the old nurse banked down the fire, moved one chair near to the table, and left. Palms down on the table, the countess sat still before the dangling mirror, gazing obliquely at its surface, barely brushed by firelight and moonlight, letting her mind touch upon Lord Henry and then drift. Letting the question form and shift like clouds:
Is he the one? Is he the man who will make me, at long last, a queen?

Clouds misted the surface of the mirror though she knew there were none, or few, in the sky. And then they dissolved and she saw, quite clearly, a face with dark half-moon brows and a high forehead. A pointed chin. Delicate features and pale skin. What made this face arresting was a luminous, yet precise, quality of eye.

A young man, barely more than a boy. The king’s age, or thereabouts. Perhaps a year or two older. He was not a face in her mind, she realized suddenly. He was a reflection of flesh and blood, caught in the mirror.

She turned, and he froze, caught stepping from the space between tapestry and wall. He’d thought her sleeping, perhaps, or entranced. How long had he been there? How much had he heard and seen? The consequences of treason, which the conversation with Lord Henry most certainly was, were unspeakable. The consequences of witchcraft, which is what the mirror-gazing would be counted, were worse.

If he’d run, she’d have called the guard and had him killed before he could say a word. But he stepped out and bowed with a brash flourish and a flush in his cheeks that was oddly beautiful. One of the English players, she saw.

Young, expendable, and eminently unbelievable in his word against the countess, a favorite of the king.

She summoned him forward with a crook of one finger, and obediently, he came. Diane de Poitiers had been only a year or two younger than she when she’d first seduced her king, twenty years younger than herself. This boy, common though he might be, looked to be the same age, or thereabouts, as James. Hitching the king to her skirts as her lover was not, at present, the likeliest road to consolidating her power, but the countess believed in keeping all roads open. A little practice with a boy would do no harm, and it might cool the sudden burning in her blood.

She ran a finger down his cheek. He trembled under her touch, and not from fear. She untied one lace of his plain doublet, and then another. Saw a sardonic brow half-lift. He would neither fight nor flee, then. But would he rise?

She was down to his fourth lace before his hand closed around her wrist, and he drove her back against the wall, the tapestries billowing out from the force of it as young, strong hands slid up around her.

He pulled her back to the table, clearing it with one arm, lowering her on her back before him. Even now, in the twilight of her beauty, she knew she was resplendent, showed to best advantage in low firelight and candle flame. She let him watch, savoring for a moment the appreciation in his eyes, and then, beneath the dark mirror now swaying above them like a pendulum, she pulled him into her.

She saw, once, much later, their reflection in the mirror. A beast with two backs. She said as much, under her breath, and he looked up and laughed. And then they rolled to the floor.

She lost count, after a time, of the rising carillons of pleasure that beat through her blood at the insistence of fingers and lips, eyelashes and tongue. He was a master of tension and release. He was not, as she’d thought, inexperienced at love.

As the first traces of dawn lightened the horizon, even he lay sated and spent. Standing at the window, she could see the Beltane fires kindling in the distance on the low rises that passed for hills in this flat land bordering the sea. The preachers could thunder all they liked, but even when the farmers listened to them quaking in fear, when it came to the fertility and well-being of their land, their crops, and their herds, they feared to break with tradition more. No matter how pious they might be at other times, on two nights of the year, Samhuinn and Beltane, they kept stubbornly to the old ways. Older, in fact, than all but a very few could possibly imagine.

There was a knock at the door. She nudged the boy with her foot, and he grunted and pulled himself behind a tapestry. A messenger stood just outside, the sheen of sweat from a hard ride still glistening on his face. “My lady,” he said with a quick bow. “The king comes here tonight.”

She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth in her excitement. “Madness,” she said under her breath. “You’re mad to say it.”

“The plague has broken out in Edinburgh; His Majesty rides hence with His Lordship, your husband.”

As she dismissed the man, a wild surge of elation coursed through her. By nightfall, the king would ride under her battlements, but if she had her way, he would not ride out again. At least, not this king.

The king is dead, long live the king.

She hardly noticed as the player picked up his doublet and, with a sly smile, bowed and left.