Quintspinner (2 page)

She owned only one item of any value–its real worth was known to only a few–and she manipulated it with her fingers, breathing slowly and deeply, willing the visions to visit. There were many things that she wanted to know. Things that had been asked of her by others. Things she needed to know for herself. The visions would come–they always did. The visions would tell her.

Something pushed into the edge of her thoughts. An intrusion. An unbidden presence challenged. She tilted her head. No, not challenging.
Seeking.
A faint pulsing energy … growing stronger. She caught her breath and began to tremble.
A Spinner? Why
now? Had the time truly come to prepare a successor?

The suddenness of the first vision’s arrival made her gasp. This time there were horrific flashes–terrifying and grotesque clips of violence and pain–and she whimpered as they slammed through her mind. It was not the first time that the visions had touched her with fear but now they announced that the inevitable would soon be forced upon her.

William would never forget the last day of his life as he knew it.

He was being attacked for the first time that morning. The rough grip clutching him dug into his shoulder and shook him hard. His heart bolted into a sudden pounding frenzy.

“William! Wake now!” The voice was shrill and pierced his sleep. His eyes shot open and focused on the face hovering above him.

His mother. Even in the dim pre-dawn light, he could see a deep furrow of worry lacing her eyebrows together. Her lips were pressed into a narrow frown and he couldn’t quite read the emotion fueling her painful grasp on him.

Worry or anger?
It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be good.

“C’mon lad! Up with you. Your father and brother didna’ return from the pub last evening–still drunk as mice in the dregs of a brandy barrel, I ‘spect–but that’s no relief to Millie, will it be, with her bag near ready to burst, nor to those of us needin’ kindling to have kept the flame tucked overnight. Sometimes I curse the day John Robert discovered his dammed drink!”

His confusion at being woken well before sun up was quickly replaced with alarm. Not home? Neither one? William wearily struggled to sit up on his straw-filled mat. A tangled lock of sandy colored hair swung down into his face and he tucked it behind his ear. He recognized his mother’s angry use of his father’s proper names.

“Bring us wood and dung as fast as you can, lad, and I’ll set to save what embers I can. Your sister will start the milkin’. Quickly! Off with you now!”

He could hear the strain in her voice. His Da’ not home? Nor Johnny? His mother’s worry was well placed then. His father would never have left the evening milking undone. At the very least his older brother, John, would have been sent back to help do the chores. And no wood for the overnight or morning fire!

He quickly slid both feet into the boots lying on the floor beside him. The worn leather had molded to his feet like a second layer of calloused skin. Throwing his woolen tunic on overtop of his night shirt and trousers, he quickly lashed it around his waist, and called out.

“Lucas! C’mon boy, let’s have a look.” From a woven floor pad, the grizzled hound lifted his head in response to his name, but the relative warmth of the house called more strongly to his arthritic joints than his master’s voice, and he merely yawned and laid his head back down upon his front paws. “Fine then, you old fart! Stay here while I go looking.” Lucas simply closed his eyes and exhaled a contented sigh. William didn’t blame him. The dog was nearly as old as William was now and the past winter’s ache had settled and stayed in his bones. Being allowed to stay inside was a special treat. Giving his dog a fond scratch between the animal’s ears, William pulled the tunic’s hood up over his own head, and stepped through the hut’s doorway into the chill of the damp air.

An urgent lowing greeted him as he strode the few steps it took to reach the livestock shed’s doorway. Running footsteps from behind told him that Abbey was already on her way to milk the cow. For a heartbeat William felt a pang of guilt for his little sister. The cow’s bag would be swollen hard and the animal would be more miserable and uncooperative than usual. Millie was calmer with a female’s handling of her teats at the best of times, it seemed to him.
Probably comes from having the same kind of equipment, and knowing how to handle ’em without harm.

William trotted silently further down the rutted path, its surface having been torn into parallel troughs by years of foot traffic and cart wheels. Anything useful as kindling had long since been picked clean near the buildings. His keen eyes gradually adjusted to the dim pre-dawn light. He preferred to find branches and twigs to burn, rather than to have to return with an armful of dung from the cowshed. Although the manure burned slowly and gave off decent warmth, its smoke was thick and noxious.

He was closer to the village than to his home by the time he came across anything worth picking up. Skirting around the edges of the underbrush that lined both sides of the path, he gathered a small armful of dried twigs. They would burn up in no time, he knew. He continued to scour the bushes deeper into the underbrush in hopes of discovering a few decently sized branches.

Just a bit more and I’ll have enough to make the porridge fire, anyway.

He realized it was the wrong time of year to be finding much dead wood. Everything was leafed out and no limbs on the trees or bushes were dry enough to have been shaken down by wind passing through the thickets and forest.

Scrambling out of the underbrush he clutched the twigs and a few skinny branches to his chest. Reaching the road once more, he stumbled in one of the ruts and pitched forward onto his knees, dropping his kindling. An intense bolt of pain shot through his leg as his kneecap cracked against an exposed cobble rock. William ground his teeth together in quiet agony.

Goddamn these ruts! Where in the hell are Johnny and Da’ anyway?

Still on his hands and knees, he lifted his head and glanced down the road. Something off to the side glowed eerily white, lying in an area of dark trampled grasses. He squinted in the semi–light and cursed the rut again for being the cause of his knee pain.
Damned stupid stumble–

William strained his eyes on the strange discoloration ahead, his knee pain immediately forgotten.

What the hell is that?

A branch! A large friggin’ branch!

He struggled to his feet and fixing his gaze on it, lurched towards it. Living at the edge of the forest as his family did, William knew the different woods on sight, and he also knew their properties–which smelled sweetest when burning, which was strongest for fences, and which wood was flexible enough for bows. Even so, in this dim predawn gray, he could not place from which kind of tree it was. The shape was unlike anything that he was familiar with. He kept his eye on the precious branch as he hurried onward. Upon reaching it, he bent down and froze in mid-reach.

Not a branch.

Wood, yes to be sure, but it was the splintered remains of a broken club, its shattered end darkly stained. William’s nostrils flared as the faint metallic scent wafted up from the dark patch of grass.

‘Heme’ they had called it in the slaughter shed. “It’s the heme ‘o the blood what gives the smell,” his father had once told the boys. Johnny had declared that he smelled only the pigs’ shit, but William had been blessed with a sense of smell more keen than most, and to him the warm blood smelled vaguely like the hot metal in the blacksmith’s shop.

“You’re part wolf, I swear,” his father had declared. “Ya’ see and smell things the rest of us can’t. Whatever use that will come to though, I can’t declare.”

William held the broken club to his nose and sniffed. It was the heme alright. Alarmed, he threw it down and it landed with a soft wet thud onto a saturated piece of cloth lying in the crushed grass. William bent closer and peered at the spot. His stomach lurched.

Da’s cap!

Wet with the heavy morning dew. Wet with blood. It laid in the grasses as though already part of the earth.

Oh Jesus! It can’t be!
His heart hammered in his chest as cold panic washed over him.
Oh God! Wha–what happened?
His father was a large man. Determined. Stronger than most.
What could possibly have gotten the best of him?

William dropped onto his hands and knees, oblivious to the shrieking pain in his knee. His stomach was heaving. The burn of the bile in his empty stomach filled his mouth and his shoulders hunched high under his ears as he heaved, choking and spitting.

Then suddenly, horribly, his eyes came to rest on a calloused pale hand protruding from the tangled roots of the hawthorn bush beside him, the broken wrist bent at an odd angle, the entire arm awash with blood.

Oh Christ Almighty!

William strangled a cry in his throat and his stomach heaved anew. The dry heaves tore at his insides and he gasped for breath. The curl of the fingers, the shape of the broad thumb, so much like his own–

Dear God! Let him be alive!

Jerking his head up from the sight of his grisly find, William scanned the area around him. His breath came in ragged gasps.
Am I alone? Oh God! Lucas! I need you here, boy! Who did this? A club? It wasn’t an animal! Bandits? Are the attackers still around?

Self-preservation instincts took over. Seeing no one and hearing only his own blood roar in a frantic whoosh in his ears, William reached out for the protruding fingers.

“Da’?” he whispered in the semi-darkness. Clasping the cold finger, he shook it as though to wake its owner. The hand was already stiffening in death.

“Da
’
!” William’s silent scream was punctuated by the whoosh in his head. His breath came in burning gulps as he reached out and parted the bushes. His eyes travelled from the hand, up the bloodied forearm, to the body, then upward to the face. His vision blurred with hot tears.
Oh Da’ –

The words died in his throat. The sightless blue eyes were not his father’s.

The roaring inside his head increased to a high pitched squeal. He felt his thoughts spinning, spinning, as he sank mercifully into blackness. The void sucked him down into nothingness, away from the terror of his discovery.

His head dropped with a soft thump onto the cold chest of his brother’s stiffening corpse.