Rhiannon (34 page)

“And you see now why we must let the reeve know straightaway, and tell him also of the plans we've got in place!” Jonah interjected, pounding one fist repeatedly into the other hand as he spoke. “The eyewitness testimony of a simple woodland child will never be enough to bring accusation against the earl's house. Since no one of higher rank was witness to the thing being done, the murderers themselves must make confession within hearing of the law.”

“We think Reeve Clap will endorse our plan and will conceal himself nearby when the party of suspects comes to your chapel,” Thaddeus concluded, more mildly. “We also believe your mother will wish to help him, now that a witness has given us true hope.”

Jonah had a tease in his eye. “In other words, get set, Rhia, as it may soon rain frogs.”

Rhiannon swallowed, and she must have looked some shaky because Thaddeus leaned close and took her shoulders in his hands, as though to steady her.

“Rhia?” he said, speaking near her face. “You are at the heart of this, and there are dangers at every turn. If Leonard and the others sense our suspicions and feel a trap closing, well, the blade of a concealed knife is quicker than any of us may be able to move to stop it. If this doesn't sit well, you must now say it.”

Rhia looked back at Thaddeus, but she was thinking of Jim, of his brave smile and laughing eyes, and of the downy hair of his unmet little grandson.

“I can do it,” she whispered, extending her hand above the hermit's concealed heart.

Jonah and Thaddeus reached to place their hands upon hers and they bobbed them once, twice, thrice to set a seal upon the thing.

Beltane Eve is a time of no time, when the earth holds its breath and the seven sister stars called Pleiades rise just before dawn to dance on the red horizon. Things shimmer in the distance and dissolve when you run close. Things call to you from behind your back, and when you whirl around quick to hear, they turn out to be memory voices of those long gone. The veils are thin at Beltane between the world of men and the world of faeries, and the faeries oft bend human things
their
way.

After she'd left Jonah and Thaddeus the night before, Rhia had crept exhausted to her bed and immediately begun dreaming a deep and birdy dream. In it she flew above churning waters and was blown about by the updrafts of spouting whales. Her feathers were shiny black and her wingspan wide. She was free and happy, but right before dawn, as the Pleiades began their Beltane dance, Rhia's dream took a sudden dark turn. For then her birdy self looked down upon the green sea just as a boat capsized and went under with its crew. She heard screams melt away to the fearful silence of still water. She saw the bubbles of those last breaths arise into the air, and when they burst they splattered salt water that burned her feathers.

Rhia woke at that and sat straight up, her breath coming fast. She pushed her damp hair from her face, for she'd found that in her sleep she'd been weeping tears that only humans, never birds, may weep.

With more effort she pushed the haunting shreds of the dream back as well, trying not to dwell upon it as she hurried into her clothes to gather seeds. She bent to kiss Daisy as she left, noting how Daisy snored a miniature version of the hardy snores of Granna's, then she moved the sleeping tortoise aside with her foot and slipped down the ladder.

The pallet Granna and Mam shared was still lumpy with shapes, so Rhia grabbed the seed pouch and hustled quietly outside to splash her face. She then awaited Gramp, though after some moments, there was still no sign of him. Strange, his tardiness.

“Will you come along, Gramp?” she groused, tapping Mam's cross upon her chin. “I am nervous enough without a game of hide-and-seek to begin this fraught day!”

No Gramp, though, so her best course was to go on, leaving him to catch up.

There was dewy mist, a strange and flickering sort that comes when flowers open themselves wide and let their essences, their flowery souls, fly out to change places with another's for the day. Granna said that on dawn of Beltane Eve a lily might fly to a peach blossom and trade essentials with it, and the lowly dandelion may become essentially a red rose for a day, with the rose essence clothed in humble dandelion garb. By May Day, all would have swapped back, ready for the picking, having learned a thing or two from living in another's skin.
If
flowers may learn, or remember
what
they learn. Granna didn't claim to know, and Rhiannon certainly wouldn't claim to know, either.

“I don't know much about
anything,
in fact,” she mused as she walked to bluff's edge.

For years she'd longed to be grown and treated as such. But this morning she was homesick for her childish days, when Beltane was a time of watching costumed revelers dance the streets, led by the town's massive, rollicking hobbyhorse with his yellow corn teeth. That hobbyhorse was merely a costume for three folk to wear, but she'd believed he was real and enchanted, then. And she'd looked forward for weeks to seeing the beautiful white-clothed Queen of the May ride upon her snowy horse from the faery kingdom, and to watching the glowing bonfires grow higher and higher and wondering if they'd eat up the very sky.

She'd wanted to be grown, and got her wish. And now she knew the Queen of the May was a local girl with a glittering white wig upon her head. What knowledge was that? What
use
was there for it?

She knew as well about the tricks boys will play upon girls at Beltane, or knew it as hearsay anyhow, from Thaddeus and Jonah. She supposed girls might play tricks upon boys just as readily when they got a chance, but she wasn't thinking of that as she walked to the bluff to gather seeds. She was stewing the evening's plans through her head, wishing she might be that saggy hobbyhorse, or Lucy the cat. Wishing she might be a child again, with only light, childish thoughts.

She would avoid Mam today, that was one thing for sure. Let the reeve come up and handle Mam if he could, but Rhia herself would just lie low ere Mam sensed what was afoot and confronted her with it. She'd get the seeds now, then stay with Sally until time to go down. She gulped hard at that thought, for the time to go through with this thing approached so very quickly!

Then all of a sudden, something shifted. Whether of light or whether of sound she couldn't quite tell, but it was enough to make Rhia stop in her tracks near the windbent and scrawny orchard trees, holding her breath. “Gramp?” she dared to whisper.

The mist flickered, the little white buds of the scrawny trees quivered. The rising sun went loop-de-loop with cloud so that shadows chased across the pathway. The grasses crackled as small animals awoke, or mayhaps it was faeries running rampant.

Then Rhia heard someone singing with the sad and haunting voice of a mermaid. The sound came from the very edge of the bluff, or mayhaps from the sea beach far below it. That sweet voice was filled with such longing that it drew Rhia nearer, against her better judgment. She'd all her life longed to see a mermaid, and Beltane
was
the likely time for one to come ashore, but she felt the strings of her nerves might plain snap today if this most enchanted of voices issued from some unheard of monster. Who'd truly seen a mermaid to know? Not even Granna.

And so she crept along the last of the pathway on tiptoe, holding her breath. The song was in an olden language Rhiannon did not know, or elsewise a mermaid language. Her hands felt numb as she pushed aside the branches of willow that hung low over the pathway's end.

But it was
Mam
that stood at the very edge of the lip of high stone that overhung the bluff! The sea wind made a sail of her green cloak. Her arms were filled with woodland flowers, which she threw, one by one, to the waters. The wind tossed each of them for a while, then let them fall to the waves, abandoned playthings.

Rhia, scarcely breathing, would have gladly watched forever without a sound to break the spell. But Gramp sat upon his holed rock, squinting and all puffed up, and presently he noticed Rhia and craned his neck in her direction. Mam turned then. The hood of her green cloak framed her face, and her eyes, meeting Rhia's, were red with crying.

“Rhiannon?” she said in a breathy, windy way. “Did you know that your da and your grandfather died on Beltane Eve? I don't believe we ever thought to tell you that.”

She turned back to the sea and threw another red poppy to the careless wind. Dozens of birds circled silently above the place in the water where Rhia's da had drowned when the whirlpool had opened twelve years before. Rhiannon walked quietly over to stand beside Mam, closer to the edge than she would have dared to go without her. She lifted a corner of Mam's cloak to shield her own shoulders from the wind, and Mam shrugged so that more of the cloak went to Rhia.

“Coln was of the water,” Mam whispered, handing Rhia a flower to throw. “Like my father, he could not sleep unless he heard the sound of the sea nearby.” She looked at Rhia. “You were so young, not yet three. How well do you remember him, daughter?”

Rhia's throat ached. “I remember his black hair, and the way he picked me up and whirled me around, then held me to the sky so that I laughed myself breathless.”

Mam smiled and looked again to the sea, nodding.

“He marveled that you were not afraid of that, that you laughed when you might have cried. He took you out in the coracle every fine day. He would have made you a fisherman, with my da's willing help. You'd have grown up with thumbs all fin-pricked and your own black hair smelling of brine and being yourself afeared of nothing in the world, just as he was. But instead we've kept you airborne up here, your granna and I. We've likely been selfish, keeping you so close. I was just so very afraid . . .”

Rhia gasped. “Mam! I believe this morn I
dreamed
of my father's death, and awoke crying seawater tears.” She frowned then, fully realizing what Mam had just said. “But you're the bravest of
any
one and
never
afeared, Mam,” Rhia said quietly. “Everyone who knows you says it.”

Mam didn't answer at first. “Afraid of but one thing,” she finally whispered.

She took Rhia's arm and turned them away from the treacherous lip of rock, walking them back from the edge a bit so the wind was lessened, then wrapping the cloak closer around them both.

“You were singing the old songs, weren't you, Mam?” Rhia got the nerve to ask. “The songs of enchants and lost loves Granna has kept, the ones you say are not fit for Christian ears and right out blasphemous in these modern Christian times?”

Mam blushed. “Coln loved to hear me sing them, and this once a year I sing them to him,” she admitted. “God may forgive me for such a thing, as He's a just God, and a forgiving one as well.”

“Your song brought the birds this dawn, didn't it, Mam? Which might show that—”

Mam cut her off, stepping in front of Rhia and taking Rhia's shoulders in her hands.

“Daughter, we have other things to speak of. I know all about your plans for this night, Rhia. The monk and Sir Jonah skulked away to town some time ago, and I glimpsed their departure as I gathered blossoms for your da. When they saw me watching from the woods, Thaddeus came running, his face all contorted by his conscience at work. He confessed every word of your plans to me, Rhia. You mighta known he would not wait for Almund to come and do it for him.”

Rhia slapped her forehead with her palm and heard herself make a little squeal like a mouse caught in Lucy's claws. “
Please
, Mam! Don't bid me stop!” she begged. “If you had but seen Jim's baby grandson! If you'd felt his downy hair! I
must
do this, and do it well, though to do it well I need your blessing upon it. Please!”

Mam pulled Rhiannon close and wrapped her arms tight about her, pressing her cheek against Rhia's wild hair. She stared over Rhia's shoulder to where the birds still circled above the waters, then Rhia heard her whisper, “You see your girl, Coln? Do you see the strong-willed daughter you've left me with?”

Presently Mam stepped back a little ways and reached to touch the little cross about Rhia's neck. “I must hear what Almund has to say about it,” she said, quietly but firmly. “And I've told Thaddeus that some trusted deputy must come up with the reeve to escort you down the trail, then he must stay at a distance behind you even when you've met Maddy. You will
not
proceed one step without him following behind as guard, do you understand, daughter?” She raised her eyes to Rhia's and demanded, “
Do
you, Rhiannon?”

Rhia nodded, though privately she had doubts about this part of the thing. She'd never yet seen anyone keep up with Maddy, deputy or housemaid, friend or jilted foe.

Without another word, Mam raised and kissed the cross that now hung on Rhia, then kissed Rhia on both cheeks. “Stay and gather your seeds, and have a thought and a prayer for your da and grandda,” she said simply. She turned to walk home with bowed head and slow step.

Rhia stayed. As she'd been told to, she gathered her seeds and thought her thoughts.

 
Sir Jonah, Almund Clap, and his best deputy, Holt Yeoman, arrived upon the bluff shortly after midday. Rhia noted that Jonah had costumed himself for the trip he'd made to town that morn in bits and rags left atop the bluff by previous tenants. He'd tied a yellow bandanna about his face as some field workers will do, and his hair he'd gathered under a black woolen watch cap, where it bulged, doubtless wishing to break free in all its glory. All in all, this conglomeration of clothing made him a good disguise.

Granna, Mam, and Rhia had been nervously awaiting their arrival, trying to stay busy stringing herbs for drying. Young Daisy hovered just outside the house, sensing from the tight silence within that something big was afoot, though she knew not what.