Metro Winds (42 page)

I see his surrender in the loosening of his bunched muscles a split second before he retreats, and in moments he is gone, and the pack with him.

I want desperately to see the woman's face, for there was something familiar in her voice when she cried out. But she has her arms around the red-gold dog, her face buried in its soft thick pelt, and now my son has dragged himself to the black wolf lying on the ground, her red blood soaking into the sand beneath her.

The red-gold dog comes to nuzzle at her with him, whining and pawing, but the black wolf is still and silent. The red dog lifts its head and howls and howls.

I do not know how to understand what I am seeing.

In my agitation, I let a strand of hair fall into the scrying bowl and the vision ends.

I sit on my heels for a long time in the tower room, cursing my clumsiness, for the scrying bowl will offer only one vision between a sunrise and sunset, but there is nothing to do but to go down. I long to go out and find my son, but I dare not, for if I intervene in any way during the testing, save to carry out certain specific tasks, the princess spell will fail. I run my mind over all that I have seen, and decide my son must have been hurt defending the woman against the pack, whereupon the princess candidate and her dog then defended him in a queer reversal of tradition. I cannot imagine how the black she-wolf came into it, and I pray that neither her actions nor the interference of the red dog have weakened or destroyed the princess spell that is being woven.

I think of the black she-wolf's eyes growing dim as her blood rushed out, and tears start fiercely to my eyes, for she saved my life and now she has died defending my son, yet I do not know why she helped us.

My thoughts circle back to my son and I wonder fearfully about the extent of his wounds. It terrifies me that he might now lie near to death, but I cannot allow myself to give way to my longing to find him. I tell myself his attempts to rise were full of energy; I tell myself I would know if my son had died.

Cloud-Marie finds me standing and shivering at the bottom of the steps and she clucks and chortles with dismay and, can it be, irritation? I want to laugh at the thought, for I have never known her to be anything but utterly gentle and patient. She wraps me in a blanket and makes me sit down in my chair. She mops my cheeks and makes me drink water. Finally, helplessly, she begins to stroke my hair.

I watch her in the mirror on the wall. I seem to see her stroking the hair of an old woman whose tear-wet face is pale as snow, her eyes wide and dark with despair. I picture a field of deadly white flowers where I might go and make a bed. But I know I cannot leave Cloud-Marie alone, no matter what has happened to my son.

Angry at my helplessness, I order myself not to be a witless fool. I do not know the boy is dead. Likely he is hurt – even badly hurt, but he will heal and he will return to me. And suddenly I am shocked to discover I do not care if he comes to me as a wolf. I think of his ferocious beauty as he raced through the wilderness and know that he is my son and I love him, whether he be wolf or man. Only let him live!

If he fails in this last hunt, I will set him free in the Wolfsgate Valley and each day come to the tower and evoke the scrying bowl to watch him. I will see him hunt his food and in time he will take a mate and sire cubs. He will join the wild pack and perhaps a day will come when he will challenge its leader and become a wolf king.

I sign to Cloud-Marie that I want to lie down and she helps me to my bed. She takes off my slippers and covers me over. One eye watches me with anxious love while the other floats peacefully towards the window. Its calmness sooths me. All this hot bright pain will pass, it seems to promise.

I close my eyes and will myself to sleep.

I do not sleep.

I find myself remembering the relief and exhaustion I felt when I finally gathered the strength and will to rise unsteadily to my feet inside the Endgate, wondering where I was and who might dwell there.

I had made my unsteady way along the lane to a cobbled yard, where lamps with flickering flames cast enough light for me to see that the imposing building I had seen from afar was a vast, elegant mansion. There was a fountain in the midst of the yard where water fell in an endless glittering cascade from the tilted greenish-gold jug of a greenish-gold woman. This stood directly before a set of wide marble steps leading to a beautiful carved door, and as I gazed at it, I thought of the man Ranulf, telling me locals were permitted to pass through the private grounds of the property owned by the lady from the walled garden.

It was no garden I had trespassed upon, and yet I was suddenly certain that the door in the wall was the Endgate he had spoken of, bidding me find it and pass through. I seemed to feel the pressure of the armlet above my elbow, as if it were the hand of a man encircling my flesh and, ushered forward by that faint pressure, I mounted the steps. It was impossible that the armlet had not been dislodged during all I had endured since passing through the Wolfsgate Valley. I did not then know that my husband's mother had bestowed a magic upon the thing that ensured it could not be removed except by a direct act of will. I reached the top of the steps, wondering if the armlet was like the red dancing shoes in the faerie story, which had to be chopped off along with the feet in them to prevent them dancing their wearer to death. But when I tried to remove it, the carved ring came off easily and sat light and innocuous in my palm.

I shook my head at my foolishness and slipped it into my pocket, hoping that its return would win me some kindness in the form of food and a chance to wash and tend my grazes and cuts. At the very least I would be free to pass through this property unhampered once I had brought the carved ring to its mistress. There was no question in my mind that it must be done, for the giving of the ring had begun the strangeness that had taken me over, and so to end it the ring must be delivered. This was absurd reasoning, but I was trying to hold belief and unbelief in my mind at the same time. Even as I planned to fulfil my promise to the turquoise-eyed Ranulf, I strove to convince myself that all I had endured was a vivid hallucination brought on by a fall or perhaps some sort of bite or fever that had come on me when I fell asleep under the hedgerow.

Certainly I had no intention of speaking of wolves and mountains or strangler trees and huge red birds to the lady of this house, or to whomever answered her door. I meant only to say I had hurt myself passing through her garden, in an effort to deliver the armlet as I made my way to an appointment. That missed appointment with the fussy archivist seemed to have occurred long ago in another life, and I longed to return to that rational life. I felt that delivering the armlet would deliver me back to it, to normality.

I gazed at the enormous door and hesitated. It was so ornate and imposing that I found myself afraid to knock. I was about to turn away and seek some less intimidating door at which I might humbly present myself when rain began to fall with the same sudden violence as in the moments before I had passed through the Wolfsgate. Even as I wondered at the coincidence, I heard the rumble of thunder. I told myself it would not matter if I got wet. The rain would wash off the fetid reek of the bog. (What bog, my mind asked fiercely.) But thunder rumbled again and the rain seemed to grow heavier, hammering down on cobbles, walls and roof with a cacophonous racket that extinguished any possibility of thought. I knocked at the door, but no one came, and I was forced to accept that my knock had been too feeble to be heard. Reluctantly I turned my attention to the great beast head that was the door's knocker and discovered that the only way to lift the brutish thing seemed to be to put my hands inside its maw.

I might have baulked at that, but now the wind was blowing icy rain into the alcove. Gritting my teeth, I reached into the maw of the metal knocker and encountered a smooth grip. With a grunt of effort I raised the head of the beast high and withdrew my hand to let it fall. A sharp pain made me gasp as a single dolorous thud shook the door and the step under me. I had a vision of the sound reverberating though endless shadowed halls and tapestry-hung rooms with cold stone fireplaces. Looking down at my hand, I saw several long jagged scratches welling beads of blood. Only when I bent down to peer into the maw of the knocker to see what had cut me did I notice that the beast's teeth had been sharpened to razor points.

Appalled, I stepped back, wondering uneasily what sort of person had a doorknocker with sharpened teeth. It did not occur to me that I had entered a world where it was mandatory to offer blood when one first seeks entry to any house.

I heard a sound from within and imagined a plump, kindly housekeeper who would take pity on my wet and bedraggled state and sympathise in broken English. She would tell me that her mistress was out for the evening, or better still, had gone abroad for some time. Then she would usher me into the kitchen to dry myself. It would be a vast, warm, cavern of a chamber smelling of fresh-baked bread and hot stew and she would press a thick towel into my hands and cluck over my wetness as she sliced bread and bade me eat. So enthralled was I in imagining the housekeeper that I could almost see her plump motherly face creasing into a smile as she insisted I try some lemon tea cake she had made – the sort of face I had wished my own mother had offered to the world and me, instead of her thin intelligent face with its small, wary blue eyes.

The door opened suddenly to reveal a ravishingly beautiful woman in an old-fashioned but clearly ruinously expensive evening gown, under the hem of which bare, pale feet peeped out.

‘Yes?' she said languidly.

‘Ah . . . it is raining,' I said, stupidly dazed. She was, after all, the first faerie woman I had ever seen and I had not yet learned to defend myself from the natural glamour of her kind. She made no response to my absurd pronouncement, save to open the heavy door enough for me to slip through the gap. I hesitated only a second, and stepped through into an entrance that could have served as a hall for meetings, it was so large. The roof was too high for me to see it, for the only light in the place seemed to be candles in holders set along the walls. Blackout, the rational part of my mind suggested, or perhaps the owner of the mansion was eccentric enough to prefer a less modern form of lighting. Certainly it gave the place atmosphere.

The barefoot beauty led me from the hallway along a passage, the milky white marble floor of which was softened by a beautiful plush oriental runner. Her bare feet made no sound but I did not dare to walk on the rug in my filthy shoes, so I flapped awkwardly along beside her. The hallway brought us to a large chamber where a magnificent tapestry hung. It was the only thing in the room and it was exquisite. I embroidered myself, and despite everything that had befallen me, longed to examine it closely, but my guide had drawn ahead of me, and so I made haste to catch her up.

I had it in my head that she was leading me to a kitchen or perhaps a laundry where I could wash, but instead she opened a door to a small, exquisite parlour where a very beautiful older woman sat working at a tapestry draped over an antique wooden frame. The woman gave me a searching look, and if I had not been shivering with cold, I would have trembled at the way that haughty, pale blue gaze seemed to peel away my skin and look inside me.

‘You have come,' she said, peculiarly.

I could only nod and this seemed to be enough, for the older woman turned back to her embroidery, bidding the young beauty bathe my hurts and my person. I thought she meant I should be taken to a bathing room, but the young woman bade me wait, saying that she would return with water and ointments. Then she drifted away leaving me standing there, dripping on the flag-stones. The older woman flicked a look of irritation at me and bade me stand by the fire so that my clothes could dry. I flushed, for her tone told me she had decided I was a fool.

There was a deep, comfortable chair before the hearth, but I could not sit in it, wet and filthy as I was. Instead, I drew out its wooden footstool and sat gingerly on that, facing the flames and trying to marshal my wits so that I could make some sensible responses when she began to demand some answers. But her whole attention was bent on her tapestry. I watched her needle stab in and out swiftly, half hypnotised by the rhythm until my eyes began to close.

I started awake when the other woman returned wheeling a trolley. She set a large bowl on the flagstones by the fire, then began to fill it with steaming water from jug after jug. When the bowl was half full, she bade me bathe and she would go and get me some dry clothing. I ought to have been embarrassed at the discovery that I was expected to strip off my filthy clothes and stand naked in this room, with its mistress working at her tapestry, but since her cold blue eyes had already stripped my skin off, I simply took off my outer clothes, hesitated, and then stripped off my sopping underthings, all the while keeping my eyes on the older woman. She did not lift her head.