The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (47 page)

“You go out riding when we’re in our room,” Clarette said. “You go every time it’s a long afternoon.”

I set the book back down. How could she know that? The window in their room faced east, and I always left from the west side of the house.

“You’re going to be leaving us,” she said.

These words astonished me. “What a strange thing to say! Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“And Mr. Quent is always gone,” Clarette went on in a low voice. “We’ll be here all alone.”

“All alone?” Chambley said, looking at his sister with worried eyes.

“No, not alone,” I said to him. “I have absolutely no intention of leaving Heathcrest.”

“But you
will
leave,” Clarette said.

“That is nonsense.” My voice was sharper than I intended, but I was tired—tired from the cold, tired of being treated so strangely that day. “Surely I know my own intentions better than anyone.”

“It doesn’t matter what you intend to do,” Clarette said. “You’re going to be leaving.”

This was too much. I struck a hand against the table. “How can you possibly know such a thing, Clarette?”

Her dark eyes flicked toward the window. The curtains moved outward, then sank back. Despite the fire the air turned cold. In a swift motion, I rose and crossed to the curtains, throwing them back. The window was ajar.

A gasp escaped me. With a shaking hand I pulled the window closed, latching it, then turned around.

“Go to your room!”

Chambley shook his head. “But we haven’t finished our reading.”

I pointed to the door. “I said go!”

Chambley’s lips trembled, but Clarette seemed almost to smile. She clasped her brother’s hand, then led him to the door. As they went, she bent her head toward his.

“I told you,” I heard her murmur.

I wanted to shout at her, but a heaviness came over me. As they left I sank into a chair and laid my head against the smooth wood of the table. She was right. I
did
want to go. I wanted to go back to Invarel, to Whitward Street, to my sisters and to you, Father. I wanted to go home.

The candle sputtered as it burned low. I rose and cast a look at the window, but I saw only gray outside. Then I went to see if Mrs. Darendal needed any help with supper.

N
O, THAT CANNOT be.” I heard Mrs. Darendal’s voice as I neared the kitchen. The words were spoken in a hush, but such was the effect of the slate floor and the high ceiling of the hallway that I could hear as if I were standing beside her.

“Aye? An’ if that ain’t the case, then what else can it be?” I recognized Jance’s thick country accent. I halted outside the doorway.

Mrs. Darendal’s voice rose over the noise of chopping. “Perhaps there were dogs on the loose.”

“It weren’t dogs. Ranuff Brint went to Deelie’s place and saw the prints. He said its paws were as big as his hand all splayed out. There aren’t no dog
that
big.”

“And had Mr. Brint come from the inn when he observed this? I know he is often there.”

I could hear Jance’s scowl in his voice. “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but he weren’t the only one who saw those prints. They’re saying it was a greatwolf.”

The sound of chopping increased in volume and rapidity. “There hasn’t been a greatwolf out of Torland in two hundred years. It was something else that took that cow.”

“Aye, and what would that be, then?”

The sound of the knife ceased.

“What is it?” came Jance’s voice.

“I thought I heard something. I was mistaken.” The sound of chopping resumed.

I waited in the corridor, counting my heartbeats until I reached a hundred, and then entered the kitchen. Jance was just in the act of putting on a coat of oiled canvas. He nodded to me, then passed through the back door. Outside, the gloom had darkened further.

“Did you find the butter?” I asked. “I left the pot in the larder.”

“Low Sorrell is a long way to go for butter.” Mrs. Darendal picked up another onion and wielded her knife against it. “Where are the children?”

“In their room.” I expected her to ask why we were not at study. She only kept working.

I went to the stove and heated the kettle for tea. As I watched, waiting for it to hiss, I thought of what Miss Samonds had told me.
Ask Mrs. Darendal…. She can tell you what happened better than I can….

But tell me what? Why the tree had burned? Or why the folk in Low Sorrell had made a sign against ill luck and curses when they saw a woman with eyes of green?

A thought occurred to me, something I had been too cold and dull to realize before. Miss Samonds had said that her nephew, the farrier, was one of the few sons born to a granddaughter of Rowan Addysen. That meant his mother had to have been an Addysen. And her cousin had been…

“Mrs. Quent,” I said.

Behind me, the knife clattered to the table. I turned around.

“She was an Addysen, wasn’t she? Mrs. Quent.”

Mrs. Darendal picked up the knife. It gleamed in her hand. For a moment I half fancied she would brandish it against me. Then she resumed chopping vegetables.

“Her name was Gennivel Addysen before she became Mrs. Quent.”

I took a step closer. “And she was a granddaughter of Rowan Addysen.”

“I suppose she must have been.”

“The folk in Low Sorrell acted very queer when they saw me. Do you have any idea why?”

“I imagine they thought it was odd that someone had ridden all the way to their village on a day such as this.”

“No, that wasn’t it. They made a sign with their hand when they saw me. A sign against curses. Do you know why they’d do that?”

Still Mrs. Darendal said nothing; the knife flashed as she worked. Ever since I came to Heathcrest, the housekeeper had been reticent, hardly willing to speak to me. I had always thought she simply disapproved of my intrusion, but it was more than that.

“Miss Samonds said you could tell me what happened to the tree on the Cairnbridge common.”

Mrs. Darendal set down the knife. “You want to know about the tree on the green, do you?”

“I do.”

“You
think
you want to know, Miss Lockwell. Do you really?”

I didn’t know what these words meant. I
did
want to know. “It has to do with my eyes. That’s why they acted so strangely in Low Sorrell.”

“They’re simple folk there,” Mrs. Darendal said. “They don’t put on airs, and they don’t pretend not to see what’s before them. They’re country folk, and they don’t forget things quickly.”

“You seem to know the people of Low Sorrel well.”

“I was born and raised there. And I never thought I’d leave. I never wished to, but when Mr. Darendal made me an offer, I could hardly refuse it. He had just come into his father’s land outside Cairnbridge.” She looked out the gray window. “Who was I to refuse that? And I thought him kind and more than handsome enough.”

I watched her, fascinated. The words were soft, even tender. “You loved him,” I said.

She glared at me, and her words were hard again. “What does it matter if I did? He’s been gone near twenty years. He was a fool, and what do handsome looks and a kindly way matter then? Why he thought he had to go there that day, why he couldn’t leave it to others—to
her
own people—I don’t know. But he took up an ax, and he—”

Her lips pressed together in a tight line. I should have gone, should have left her alone with her memories. Instead, I moved another step closer. “He took an ax—to the tree, you mean. The tree on the green.”

For so many months I had lived in dread of Mrs. Darendal and her ire; I had sought always to stay out of her way. Yet at that moment it was her eyes that were alight with dread. She retreated a step.

“Aye,” she said in a low voice. “To the tree.”

“And others went there.” A peculiar energy came over me, like the lightning that precedes a storm. “They brought axes with them, like Mr. Darendal. I saw the ax heads there, rusting in the grass. They brought torches as well. But why?”

Mrs. Darendal took another step back, but the table was behind her; she could go no farther.

“What happened to Mr. Darendal that day?”

The housekeeper shook her head, leaning back against the table.

“Why did they go to the green in Cairnbridge?” I made my voice sharp. “Why did they burn down the tree?”

The housekeeper struck the table behind her with her palms. “Because the witch had gotten to it!”

A piercing scream rang out. For a moment I thought it a woman’s scream. Then Mrs. Darendal glanced at the stove behind me, and I remembered the kettle.

Now it was I who retreated. I snatched up a cloth and used it to pull the kettle from the stove. As its noise dwindled, I lifted a hand to my brow; my head throbbed. At last I dared to look at her. Her expression was hard once more; the knife was back in her hand.

“The witch?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you, Miss Lockwell? You are from the city, but you have read the histories, I am sure. Have you never heard of a Rising?”

“A Rising,” I said faintly. Suddenly it was difficult to draw a breath.

She gave a grim nod, then went back to her work. I thought she would say nothing more to me, that our conversation was over. I started to leave the kitchen.

“She was an Addysen as well,” Mrs. Darendal said.

I stopped at the door and turned around. “The witch?”

“Aye. Now get your tea, Miss Lockwell, and sit down.”

I did, and then I listened as the housekeeper spoke of what had happened on the green in Cairnbridge nineteen years ago.

L
OW THUNDER RUMBLED as I entered the front hall. According to the almanac, night would not fall for two more hours, yet I could hardly see to find my way. The only illumination came from the occasional flashes of lightning, which sent shadows scurrying and made the heads of stag and boar on the walls shift and move as things again alive.

I sank into one of the horsehair chairs. Another flash of lightning cut through the gloom, as sharp as the knife Mrs. Darendal had wielded as she spoke of what happened to the tree in Cairnbridge—the gallows tree, she had called it.

Long ago, the tree on the common green would never have been allowed to grow. That was the first thing she had told me. In the country, it was the custom to plant no tree within four furlongs of a stand of Wyrdwood, and it was less than that from Cairnbridge to the patch of ancient forest that had stood on the hill to the north of the village.

But it was only a little less than four furlongs, people had said—surely very near to four—and the patch of Wyrdwood was small, no more than three hundred paces all around the wall that enclosed it.

Even so, had it not already been a great tree by the time people settled again in Cairnbridge, it would have been cut down. However, the county had been all but devoid of population after the Plague Years. For over a century the village had been empty of people, its fields fallow, and in that time a seed had taken root on the common green.

By the time people returned to Cairnbridge, the tree was already a great thing, spreading its branches across the common field, providing shade on long afternoons and acorns to roast in the cold depths of a greatnight. Nor did people entirely recall the reasons for the old customs. So it was that the proud oak had been allowed to grow until its branches reached over the entire green, and no one ever thought of the little stand of straggled trees that stood on the hill to the north.

Yet the ancient trees of the Wyrdwood sink their roots deep, and over long years the slender fibers might travel far beneath the ground. A few of them must have finally reached the New Oak on the commons nearly half a mile below, twining with its roots, merging with them. All the same, nothing might ever have come of it. Only then…

Where the two men came from, no one knew for certain.

They were drifters. Some who spoke to them at the inn said they had been driven off the land they had occupied when it was enclosed by an earl for his private hunting ground, in one of the counties nearer to Invarel. With nowhere to go, they had gone westward, to places enclosure had not yet reached, and with no good work to do, they had taken to drinking. They had come to the inn at Cairnbridge early on a short day, and by that evening they had been thrown out and told to be on their way.

What happened then no one witnessed, but it could be guessed well enough. As they stumbled from the village in the dusk before a greatnight, they had come upon a young woman riding home. Being rough, and drunk, and full of hatred, they had accosted her. The woman fled, but the men overtook her, dragging her from her horse and away from the village, up a hill to the north. Until they came to an old stone wall.

Again lightning cut through the gloom, and I shuddered. Had the men used her ill? Perhaps they had, or perhaps they had only tried. Either way, the result was the same. The young woman had cried out for help.

And the Wyrdwood had answered.

Perhaps she had not known she was a witch. Or perhaps she had fled toward the wood with purpose. It did not matter, at least not for the two men. By the time people from the village came up the hill with torches, they found the pair swinging among the branches, hung by lithe green switches braided around their necks.

By then the great oak on the commons was burning. However, the tree was not destroyed without terrible cost. In contact with the trees of the Wyrdwood, the oak on the green had heard her call just as they had. It had lashed out with no warning, taking two men as they stepped from the inn and strayed near the green. It had taken three more who had tried to free the first two from its branches. For, in the witch’s blind fury, they were no different from the men who had accosted her.

The folk of Cairnbridge might have forgotten the old ways before then, but they remembered them quickly enough that night. The bell on the village church rang out; men answered the call with ax and fire. They hewed at the hard wood of the oak, threw oil against it, and set its branches alight, until it became a column of flame a hundred feet high. Thus the great old tree was brought down—but not before it took two more men and hung them high in the gallows of its branches.

One of those men was Mr. Darendal. Seven men in all were killed in the Rising that night, in addition to the two drifters who met their end in the Wyrdwood on the hill.