Trampoline: Stories

A Crowd of Bone
Greer Gilman

< Page 1 > | < Page 2 >

Thea looked toward the barley-white boy, still crying. Further on, the ashes fell. "What then?"

"A woman caught them in her apron."

"And then?"

"I woke," said Kit. "And seeing thee, forgot." There was straw still in her hair: a garland. They were wed each day. Remembering, he plucked it out and gave it, lightly, to the wind. Then turning with her gaze, he saw the boy. "Poor lad, it's weary work, alone wi' crows."

Thea said, "Shall we play, and let him play?"

"I'll not hang ranting from a pole, even to please thee." He grimaced fiercely, knotting up his brows. "But I'll play thee a tyrant rarely, or a crone or what thou wilt."

"'Tis a strange play: we clap and they go."

"But an ancient play," said Kit. "The first true gallant of the part was Tom o' Cloud, who claps the shadows from the sky." He'd taught her all of that: the names which country folk did give -- Awd Flaycraw, Jack Orion -- to the sprawl of stars she'd called the Gallows Tree. A bookish name. "Wilt play it naked, then?" said Thea.

"With a sword," said Kit. He sang the old tune from the masque, the woodwo's brag:

Orion wears a coat of sparks
And starry galligaskins
But men may see what man I be
Without my first dismasking...

*

They were walking toward the crow lad's coign. The earth by the headland was scratched with mazes, glittering with shards of hoarded glass. The crow lad blew his hands and stared. His coat was rags of sacking and his shoes were mud. His hempwhite head was bare, in a ravel of rope-ends.

"Hey, lad, would thy master hear a play?"

"Has dogs. And sets 'em on."

And a stick, thought Kit. And lays it on. He saw the wary face and wincing shoulders. The bruises. The boy stared back unblinking. He had eyes as green as hail. Kit found the last of what they'd begged, a sadcake and a scrape of fat. "Here's for thy piece," he said. The crow lad snatched it fiercely and he bit, he crammed. Kit waited. "What's thy name?"

"Called Ashlin."

"And thy kin? Who keeps thee?"

"No one," said the boy. "I's lightborn."

"So am I," said Kit. "We two are Mally's bairns." He saw a bright child made of azure falling, rolling naked in the dust. They come to dust. The woman in his dream turned elsewhere, as her lap was full. And still the lightborn fell: so many for the world to waste. Not all of them, he thought to say. Not ours to come.

But Thea said, "And I am darkborn."

"See'd," the crow lad said.

"But he and I go longways, out of Law." She looked about. "Her eyes?"

"Stoneblind. Off elsewhere, anyway."

"But if they follow -- "

"I's a sling o' stones. What I do."

Thea looked long at him. "Wouldst do it?"

"Owt I can."

Kit caught his breath, leapt in with, "Who's thy master, lad? I'd have a word with him. Wouldst come with us? Art fast?" He turned to Thea, bright with indignation, mischief, pleading. "He could play the boy."

"Got work. Hers," the crow lad said, and becked at Thea. He glanced at Kit's coat. "I see yer ta'en already. Go yer ways."

Thea said to the boy. "Is it fast, then?"

"Clap and done." He spat his hand; they shook.

Kit stood bewildered, like the child in the basket, whirled round in their play. Thea touched his arm. "Soft, love, 'tis a game we play." To the boy, she said, "What then?"

"Seek hallows."

"What way?"

"Gang wi' t' sun."

"How far?"

"While it's hallows."

Thea stretched her hand out, with its tawny ring. A turn and flick, and it was bare: she held a scrawny orange. "For thy noon."

The crow lad caught it and he tossed it in the air. He laughed, looking up at it, his bright hair scattering day. "What's ta'en is anyone's." Kit saw it fall.

*

"I'd an Ashes bairn," said Whin. Her turn, gazing through the fire, chin on close-hugged knee. "And left him. Naked as he came, for owt as found him. Craws or kin." And in a raw voice, small and wretchedly, she cried, "They would've cut his throat." Still raw. As if a horny hand, a sailor's or a drystone waller's, cracked and bled. "Me mam and her gran would. For t' harvest. Starving earth, I is."

Kit said softly, "Was he yours, the crow lad? D'ye think?"

"I knaw not. Like enough, I doubt." Whin rocked the small ring on her fingertip. "I cannot tell my blood."

"Ah," said Kit. The fire shifted, sighed.

"Thowt it were guising, being Ashes. When I ta'en her coat. And I laughed that I were chosen out of all, that I could take owt I willed. Whatever lad. So long as I did play her part, walk earth until she waked. So long as I kept nowt."

Kit looked for the child in her, as black as he was white. Broad cheekbones and a mournful lip, her long Ūgyptian eyes. "And you would still be Ashes. If you'd kept the boy. Still hunted." Coverless as hares.

"What I is, is Ashes. Same as earth is earth. Her coat that she put on. And when I's doffed, I's done with, breath and bone. No giving back." Whin leaned from shadow into shying light. "I could ha' kept him, see."

The rain fell, water into water. After a time, Whin stirred the embers. "Blood or no. For his sake, for thy kindness, thanks."

"All mine, a hundredfold," said Kit. "He saved us. For a time."

*

Margaret, see. Bright Hesperus, the moon's epitome, hangs at thy window. Perseis her lamp. When I was Thea, I did love that star, her winding journey through the maze, the quickset stars. 'Tis lucent, there: a brilliant toy, a plaything from a mage's baby house. Burnt Eldin's bauble. Canst thou catch? Let my lady set her hedge as thick as gramarye, as high as ravens cry, the light will in at it.

In April of that wandering year, I spied a comet. In the Crowd of Bone it hung, toward Ninerise, in a thaw of fleeting snow. I waked and saw it, like a pearl dissolving in black wine; I drank that cup, light full of thee. And thou didst leap to it.

I knew then that I went with child.

*

Thea turned at the waystone, calling. What she said was blown away. And still she turned on the hillside, at the twelve winds' nave; the fellies of the wheel were hills. "What's that?" said Kit, coming breathless behind.

"Those folk. Here's all their petticoats away."

It rained, a hill beyond them and a hill behind: a cold fine windy rain. From the ragwell, where they stood in light, they saw the stormdark clouds onsailing. They were tall and tattery, their skirts of ragged silver draggling heedless through the hills. Then the thorn tree shivered in its rags; the spring winced light, it puckered with a sudden doubt. The sky darkened and a hail came on: small hail, but sharp and green. Kit cowered from it. Thea ran to it and whirled about, catching hailstones in her hands. They filled them, greener as they massed, bluegreen.

"Come back," called Kit. "Hey, Thea?" And he came a few steps, blindly, in the shattering of the hail. How it danced and it daunted, how it hissed and rattled on the ground. It beat him blind, it stung. "Hey!"

"Catching souls," she called.

As sudden, it was past. The hill was white: a spring made glass, the sky made soul and shattered. Slateblue to the eastward, slashed with rain, the heels of storm rolled onward. All above, the lift was blue. He shook himself. Thea's head was haily crowned; it glittered when she turned. Her neck was bare. She flung her hoard of stones away. They scattered on the earth like seed. Cold seed, he thought. No crows would take. A cloud away, a rainbow sprang. It spanned the storm. She clapped her wizened hands and laughed. "Do you turn and I'll dance to it."

*

Somewhere up Owlerdale they sheltered from a passing rain with tinkers in a hedge. Two women, old and young, with baskets of fairings: cowslip tossy-balls and bunches of bright ribands; toys and tawdry. Kit spread them his coat. The blackthorn was tarnishing, the white in bud. The younger of their chance-met company was breaking buds of it, to whet her bacon; the elder thumbed her cards and smoked. Rain and blackthorn fell.

"That comet," said Kit to Thea. "Ah, but it grows bright and bonny. Like a dandelion gone to seed and drifting."

"Whose clock?" said Thea. "And whose breath?"

Still wandering. It preyed on him, that wan and random look.

"Craws!" said the younger, counting wares. "Dropped whirlywhorl i't road."

The elder pointed with her pipestem. "Pick it up, then." There it lay in a puddle, gaudy and forlorn.

"I'll get it," said Kit, leaping up. Gallantry, perhaps; or smoke of shag. It mingled with the tinker's hair, smoke and spiralling like old man's beard.

The younger bit her bread, then turned and offered it to Thea, all but her thumbpiece. Cold fat bacon and wild garlic.

Pinched mouth and shake of head.

"I cry you mercy," Thea said. "A toothache."

A shrewd eye, like a stormcock's. "What did yer bite, then?"

But her aunt held out her pipe. "Here. Have a pull at me bacca. 'Twill dill thy pugging tooth."

Thea twisted, spewed and spat. Lay weeping.

"Ah," said Baccapipe. "Can read thy fortune wi'out cards."

And Bread-and-Bacon kicked her heels and sang, ". . . when me apron were low, Ye'd follow me after through frost and through snow..."

"Whisht." The old one wiped Thea's mouth, felt her brow and wrist and belly with rough concern. "Not far gone, I'd say." She quirked her chin at Kit coming. "Does he -- ?"

No.

"And do yer -- ?"

No again.

"Knowst mouse-ear?"

"Where?" said Thea.

"Ninewood. Up Ask ways, a two three mile." She pointed over the hills. "Grows in among thorn."

And the younger sang again, blithe as a cuckoo that calls, Not I! at the nesting wren: ". . . but now that my apron is up to my knee..."

"Sneck," said the elder.

Too late. Kit had tumbled. On his face, like wind in whitebeam, danced and paled his feelings: joy, awe, terror, tenderness, despair.

"Thea?" He knelt and wreathed her in his arms. "Canst walk? Can I get thee aught?" he said foolishly. "From anywhere, the moon." He could not see her face. He thought he could feel the child; he saw it in his mind's eye, like a little comet, still travelling and trailing light: a seed-moon tumbling over and over through the air.

*

Now, Margaret, thou begin'st to wind. Slipping from thy bower, soft and warily, thou try'st the latch: my lady and her crow keep watch. Not always, thou hast found. The gore-crow hunts; my lady sleeps, but as the sun in Thule, riding on the rim of darkness. She but wets her lip in Lethe cup. Yet she sleeps. Locks and spells she's set on thee, and cage on cage: thou walk'st within a tower, in a maze, within a wall hedged round with thorn, encompassed in a bitter sea. Her lean hounds prowl the courts and coverts, and her huntsman wards the gates.

And further, they do keep thee innocent, they blanch thee, as a gardener doth a white root under stones. Thou art bedazed and physicked, purged, pinched, bled, stayed, examined, spied on. Whipped.

Yet they do not lock thy door, within so many locks. Nor mew thy seeking thoughts.

They slight thee, for thou canst not be dead Thea, thou unwanted wast her death; disdain thee for thy meddled blood. In their contempt is all thy hope. Thou art a dish that likes them not; they have no stomach for thy soul. Unconsidered, thou art half unseen, a sparrow in a wintry hedge. Whatever thou art let to find is all inconsequent, is haws.

Thou turn'st the key and slip'st.

Doors and doors. An arras and a winding stair.

Ah, these rooms I never saw. Thy journey, Margaret. Not mine.

Only to the next room, and the next.

Locked.

Nothing but a box of nutmegs.

Spectacles, in this, that make thy candle swerve and loom. Old iron. Rats.

A lock made like a witch, that bares her secrets to the key. That watches, mute and venomous. Not there.

In this, a heap of books, sea-ruined. Mooncalf'd bindings, white and swollen as a drowned face. Warp and white-rot, skin on skin. Down thou sit'st and try'st to pry the boards, to turn the bleared and cockled pages. Here, a drawing of a hand, anatomized. A riddle in geometry. A fugue of spiders.

And behind a faded arras -- ghost of roses, greensick blue -- a bright dark closet full of wonders and of dust. A mute virginals. Thy fingers press the slack and clatter of its keys, unclose its fretty soundboard, gnawed and rustling with mice. The lid within is painted with brief garlands -- violets and wood anemones -- as if the music dreamed them in the dark. Spring flowers thou hast never seen: thy fingers, wond'ring, trace. They pleach the silk of scarves, as sheer as iris; trace the windings of a table carpet, blood of nightingales and cry-at-midnight blue. Thou strok'st a jar, round-bellied -- blear with dust; yet lucent underneath -- of china, blue and white as clouded May.

*

"So y'd not've been at leap fires, then," said Whin. "Being heavy."

"And light." Kit had seen them, other years, in Lune. Had begged the wood for them, from door to door:

Sticks to burn vixens,
Stones for the crow,
Clips for us green lads
And girls, as we go.

*

He'd danced with the highest: brave lads and bold heroes, and the lang tangly girls. Whirled higher, still higher, for the claps and cries, the eyes admiring or awed or scornful. Afterward, for clips and kisses. For the darker thing. By one and one, they'd pinched the embers -- ah, another in thine hair. Thy shirt. By twos, had slipped away. He had lain on the dark hills; had made of charred petticoats, green gowns.

"No," he said. "No, we went to the greenwood. To get leaves."

*

"O," said Kit. "I drown." He stood in heaven, in the place where all doors lead. That wood was deep in flowers of the inmost curve of blue, the blue of iris her embrace. Her eye within her rainbow, as the moon within the old moon's clasp. And Thea walked in that unearthly floating haze of flowers, amid the leafing trees, knee-deep in Paradise. It was the heart; and yet at every further step, 'twas this. And this beyond. Each blue, the inwardest embrace, the bluest eye. An O annihilating all that's made.

The blue became his element, his air: he dove.

He saw a falling star beyond him. Thea.

Then 'twas past. He scuffled through old beech leaves, brushed by nettles. Stung himself and swore. Close by, he whiffed the green stench of a fox. He turned. A bluebell wood, the bonniest he'd ever seen. Young slender beeches. Holly, celandines, and wood anemones. And Thea gathering leaves, green branches.

Where she walked was heaven still.

He lay in sky, and watched her, errant in the sky below. She'd slipped from her tumbled smock, stood clad in sky. He saw the crescent of her, white and glimmering: in the dark of moon, the moon. That other sky she walked was on the verge of green, bluegreen, and turning deeper into blue. Beyond the new leaves, it was dusk. The trees were pointlace yet, or bare or budding out: an airy seine. A star hung trembling in the air, like water on a leaf, about to fall, unfallen. And the moon within his orbit, gilding as she set.

By a thorn tree, at his side, she sat and wove a garland in her lap. A knot of May.

Drowsily, he said, "We munnot sleep."

"Why not?"

"The morn will be the Nine. Wouldst see them rising?"

"Ah," said Thea, "but I am no maid."

He touched her small round belly. "Yet thou bringest may. A branch." The rank sweet scent of thorn hung faintly on the air; the petals fell, as if the moon unleaved. "Shall we set a hedge of them, a hey of girls?"

"And call it Lightwood?" Thea said.

Kit said,

Let no man break
A branch of it, for leavy Tom doth wake.
And keep his lash of girls ungarlanded.
That wood is hallows.

*

In another, rustic voice, he answered, "'Aye, 'tis where the bushes harry birds. I dare not for the owls go in."

Thea said:

But thou art mazed, sweet fool. The wood is dark,
And I --

*

"Go on," said Kit.

And I th' moon's daughter in these rags of cloud
Shall bear thee light.

*

"Oh," said Thea, "but I've left the book in Lune."

"Thou hast the way of it."

"By heart."

"And by thy heart." He wreathed his hands about their child, and spoke the woman's part:

The lady goes with me.
For that her star is wandering, I name
Her Perseis...

*

And darting kisses in her neck, he said, "What think'st thou, for our lass, of Perseis?"

*

"Not Eldins?"

"Ah." Kit laughed softly for delight. "Will there be nine?"

"Less one," said Thea, bending to her wreath.

*

Whin said, "Did yer not guess what she twined?"

"No," said Kit. "I was a fool."

Why d'ye pull that bitter little herb, that herb that grows so grey... ? Ah, she'd pulled those leaves alone. "A man."

*

A silence. Somewhere in the wood, a bird poured silver from a narrow neck. Thea stirred. "Kit?"

"Hmm?"

"Does it end so?"

"Which?"

"The tale. With Annis turned to stone."

"At sunrise? Aye, and it begins."

"There was another tale," she said. "About the moon in a thorn bush."

"Malykorne."

"What's she?"

"The Cloud witch. Annis' sister, some do say. Her bed's where the sun is waked. He sleeps the winter there."

"And now?"

"Wakes wood."

"Ah."

Darkness and the moonspill of the may. Green is nowhere, it unselves the wood. As lovers are unselved: not tree embracing tree, but one. But wood. A riddle, he thought drowsily. Within a wood, another wood, a grove where grows no green; within a moon, another moon, and nowhere to be seen. A bird in the dark leaves answered, but he never heard. Two, two eyes, the owl cried out. Of tree, of tree, of tree. Kit slept.

*

I will tell this in the dark. That crown I wove for thee. And on May Eve, of all unseely nights: that nadir of the wake of Souls, and darkness' dark of moon. Unhallows.

Ah, love, I had despaired of thee.

I was unwitched. Thou knitting reeled up all my powers, left us naked to my lady's malice. Soul and body, I went heavy with thy death. My great kite belly would undo us all. And so I did, undid. I would not have thee bloodfast, earthbound, for my dam to take. Nor turn thee Annis, stone within my stone.

*

Toward midnight, turning, Kit awoke and saw a fireflash amid the low woods, heard a brash of leaves: and there in the glade he saw a kitlin fox, a vixen dancing like a flake of fire in the wind.

He turned to Thea, shook her softly. "Hush, love. Look."

She woke and saw. He felt her at his side turned cold as hailstones. "Kill it," Thea said.

A stillness. "What?"

"I am heavy, I can do no spell. Now. Quick."

And still he watched. The patter of the paws was quick, like rain on leaves. A clickety vixen. April in its veins. It danced like a burning leaf, the aftercolor of the greenblue sky.

"What harm in it?" he said. "The pretty kitlin."

"Eyes," she said.

They turned and flashed, a deepsunk dazzling green. The fire was green.

She said, "It wears the fox's fell."

He'd heard no bark. No fox was ever so still, so fiery. None scented of green thorn. He rose, unsure. A stone?

But it was gone.

He turned back and saw Thea, huddled naked on the ground. He bent and wrapped her in her scattered clothes, for fear of eyes, of lairing eyes. Cold in his arms, she cried, "No witch. I am no witch. I cannot meet her in the air."

Kit said, "Who'd harm thee? I would keep thee. I would try." A hopeless tenderness consumed him, like a candle swaling in his bones. "It's what I'm for."

She twisted from him. To the child in her, she cried, "My blood is thy undoing."

"'Tis my blood as well," said Kit. "I do not use thee."

Thea said, "But I use thee. Poor fool, have you not seen? Thou wert my cock-horse, that I rid away."

No ship, no ship beneath him, and the cold wave's shock. Salt-blind, he flailed at her. "Then find thyself a jade to bear thee, and another when he's flagged. Any stick will do to ride on."

Silence. Her cheek went paler still. His hands unclenched. At last, softly, she said, "And to burn, at need. The slower, being green. I would not watch thee burn." She turned her face from him; he saw the white neck, the tumbled quenchless hair. "I am thy death."

And rising, naked in her smock, she ran. He followed blindly, pushing on at hazard through bushes and briars. Heedless of their lash, he scrambled onward, deeper in the wood. The wood was endless. Thea? Further on, he saw her glimmering; then white in whiteness, she was gone.

His heart turned snow.

*

When I got thee, I had not yet bled. Nor will now, being air. That bower and that bed of state, my lady dressed for Annis, all in hangings of deep crimson velvet, rich as for the progress of a queen, though in her exile. Not that blue and meagre hag, that bugbear Annis, that doth stalk the fells of Cloud; not she, that winter's tale, that dwindled bloodfast crone: but Annis, air and dark made crystalline, before her fall.

I was born thirteen, as thou art now; I saw the Nine rise and the Gallows wheel and set an hundred enneads of times; and at thirteen, I lived a year, and died.

My lady did conceive, create me green and virgin for her sorcery; but kept me for herself. Her study and her moving jewel, her toy, her book. The pupil of her eye, that she did dote upon, so year by year put off the consummation of her art, for lessoning.

For play.

In her conjurations -- often in her storms -- my lady witch would gaze in me, the glass that Morag held: bare April, but for winter's chain. Herself was January, all in black and branching velvet, flakes of frost at neck and wrist. Come, Madam, she would say. Undo. And then undo my coil of hair, unbraid it through and through her hands. Lie there, my art. And still would gaze, devouring my stillness, as the eye drinks light. I shivered in her admiration. Then, only then, her wintry hand would touch, her cold mouth kiss; and quickening, the witch would toy and pinch and fondle, aye, and tongue her silent glass, till she, not I, cried out and shuddered. Cracked.

Cried out: her jewel, her epiphany, her nonpareil; her book of gramarye, her limbeck and her light. Her A and O.

And yet not hers.

Know you that the stone my lady wears is Annis, shattered in her fall and vanished, all but that cold shard of night. Her self that was.

That moment of her breaking, time began. Light wakened from its grave in her. Unbound, the moon did bind her to that sickled and disdained hag thou see'st, that ashes of herself: the witch. Time chained her to this rock. And for a thousand thousand changes of the moon did Annis brood on her disparagement, the lightwrack of her Law. She sought to gather up her flaws of night, anneal them in her glass: that glass from which she drew me, naked and unsouled. Her self.

With me, my lady did enact her fall: the cry and shattering. And with each reiterated crack, her glass would round itself, quicksilver to its wound. But not her soul. My brooch of nakedness did pierce her, bind her bloodfast to her baser self: that hag who eats children.

That was not what she designed.

She had made me for the stone. The seed of Law. And on the morrow of the night I fled her would have wound the stair, unlocked the bloodred chamber, set the stone within my womb. Bred crystal of my blood. That stone would turn me stone from inward, Gorgon to itself, until --

*

And then he saw her. Moonlight. 'Twas the moon had dazzled him. No more. Light fell, leaves shifted. Thea stood agaze. Stone still and breathing silence. Hush. Look, there.

He turned. A clearing, silver as a coin with dew, and tarnished as the moon's broad face. And in that O of light, like Mally-in-the-moon, a-bristle with her bush of thorn, he saw an elfish figure, to and fro. A child? (A tree afoot?) Not ancient, though as small and sickle as the old moon's bones: a barelegged child. A branching girl. They do get flowers of a hallows eve. Alone?

A lash of thorn whipped back and welted him. He sleeved the salt blood from his eyes. He blinked and saw her, not in leaves but rags: the ruins of a stolen coat, perhaps, a soldier's or a scarecrow's, or a lover's run a-wood. Mad Maudlin's, that was Tom's old coat. It fell from her in shards, as stiff as any bark with years. There were twigs of thorn in wilting flower in her hair, down, eggshells, feathers. Cross and cross the O she went, not getting branches: walking patterns to herself, as furious fantastic as a poet in her bower, her labyrinth her language. Then a start, and back she skitted, ticklish as a spider on her web, to tweak some nebulous chiasmus. A hussif of trees.

Daft as a besom, he thought. Poor lass.

But Thea said to her, "Is't hallows?"

"While it is. Thy time's to come." The green girl scrabbled in her rags, howked out a pair of crooked spectacles and rubbed them in the tatters of a leafred cap. She perched them on her nose. A grubby girl, with greenstained knees, scabbed knees and elbows. As she turned, Kit saw her crescent body shining through the rags. A downy girl. He stirred and her seeing mocked him: a fierce howlet's face. All beak and eyes. "Shift," she said. "I's thrang."

But Thea said, "I am what you do."

"Ah," said the girl. "What's that?"

"Undo."

The girl glanced at Kit. "I see thou's done already what thou can't undo." He felt her elfshot eyes. Her breasts were April, but the eyes were January, haily, and the tongue a cold and clashy March. Scathed, he felt himself, dishevelled in his raffish coat, with moss and toadstools in his hair. Leaves everywhere. And ramping after Thea, like a woodwose in a mumming. Mad for love.

There was nothing for it but to play the part. Her glazy eyes decreed. "Poor leavy Tom," he said. "Remember Tom his cup. He sees the craws at bones; they rouse the kittle wren, cock robin, and the tumbling owl."

Then he cared not for the hoyden; Thea touched his lips. "Softly. 'Tis her wood."

Kit looked about. There was no moon. The light was may. He saw the whiteness, heaped and hung about the branches, like all the petticoats of some untidy dreaming girl, a tangly lass who kept her bower. What she knew and drew had thorns.

"Come in," said the green girl, loftily. "Mind souls, I's flitting."

In was out. He saw the whitethorn petals fall and flitter as he passed: no wall or window else. Within was dark and waste. Thea, bending, took up a clumsy garland lying half-made on the ground. Kit saw the ashes of a fire, cold out; a crackpot, tipsy on its one leg, canted over. It was full of dry leaves.

Beyond her hedge -- scant sticks, blown papers -- lay the cold bare hills. The wind was smoke-edged.

"Fires on the hills," said Thea, shivering.

Sticks to burn vixens. Kit saw the whirling bodies, higher, leaping higher. Heard the cries. They would dance on every hill by dawning, round from Law to Law again, to close round Annis in her stone. The kindling was the hey.

The girl snecked air behind them. "Aye, they wake, and then I wake."

Thea said, "Are you their mistress, then?"

"They's no one's minions," said the girl. "Here's spring." It welled up through the leaves, a little constant twirl of silver, spilling secretly away. She cleared it with her heel, and crouched and filled her gnarly hands. "Thou's dry," she said to Kit. He drank of them, her hands within his hands. He tasted earth. "Cloud ale," she said. "Dost like of it?" He nodded, mute. She took him by the shoulders, light, as if she shook him out, her cloak of leaves. "Lie there. Wake wood."

And he was leaves. Brown leaves of oak, the lightfall of a thousand hallows. He was galls and tassels, traceries of veining; he was shards of acorns, shales of light. His lady's cups. He was turning earth, and through him sprang the starry flowers of the Nine. His earth had made them green. No tongue, all eyes! the witch commanded, and the eyes were myriad, were stars of earth.

As giddy as a god, he laughed.

"S'all we do?" said the witch to Thea.

"As you will."

They worked together, plaiting thorn and blackthorn in a garland. Round they turned and bound it, plashing branches in and inwards, as an O, a lightlashed eye. It made a crown too sharp to wear. For which? There was a glory in their laps, of quince and almonds, nettles, violets and goat-haunched catkins, all a-didder and a-dance.

"It turns," said the witch. "Turns O."

"O's naught," said Thea, with the garland in her lap.

"Or ay and anywhere, as swift as moon; or what thou will. O's tenfold."

Thea bent to her braiding. "If it were?"

"It quickens," said the witch. "Comes round. What's past is nowt til it, and all's to come."

Odd and even went the witch's fingers, in and out. Wood anemone and rue. She wove them in the nodding garland: eyebright and nightshade, cranesbill, crowsbane, and the honeyed primrose, ladysmocks, long purples. Turning, it was turning autumn: now the leaves they wove were red and yellow, fruited: haws and hazelnuts and trailing brambles, rowans, hips, and hazy sloes.

"That untwines," said Thea, of a mouse-eared herb. "I plucked it."

"Aye," said the witch, weaving in. "Wilta taste of it?"

"And wane?"

"And bear thysel, burd alone. Walk or wake, as thou wist."

Thea bent. "I am bound to them. My lady and this child. If I do bear it, I am hers; if I do not, I am herself."

"Allt same. Thou's moonfast."

Thea said, "I am uncastled. Will you keep me?"

"Where? I's nowhere."

"Here."

"Is nowhere. Hey is down, and there's no hallows i't green world. I't morning, I mun walk and Annis wake."

"Then I am lost," said Thea. "For my art is lost."

"Thou's bound as she is, rounding winter in thy lap. It will be born, I tell thee, and i't sickle o't moon." The witch tossed the tussymussy in her lap. "So mowt it be."

Kit watched them whispering secrets, close as moon and dark of moon, in one another's arms. They wove one burr of light. He saw the clew of stars in Thea's lap. He saw the witch's spectacles were frost; they faded as he looked, they trickled down and down her cheeks. He heard an owl's cry echoing, her windy laugh. He saw the green hills leap with vixens, blown like flames from hill to hill. When the wheel comes round, 'tis sun, he thought. He saw the blackened moon, the cavey moon, as slender as a share of bannock. Riddle cake. He thought the green witch bade him eat. It tasted sweet and bitter, of his dreams. His share was burnt. He saw a stone and a thorn tree, deep in green embrace. The moon was tangled in the leavy thorn, its roots its rimy crown. The stone was straked with lichens, of a bloodrust red; a crazy garland at its crown, aslant.

Split the stick, and I am in it, sang the wren. I rise.

I crack the stone, said the starry flower. I will crack where I take root.

He slept.

*

And so I waked that night, and whispered secrets with my sister moon. With Malykorne, that is my lady Annis' other face and elder: light and dark of one moon. Her cradling and my crescent self, still turning from my mother into light. And thou within me, braiding blood. A clasp of witches.

I had no heart for thy undoing.

I am stone, said I. My lady's eidolon. How came I by this flaw?

Thy soul? The green witch laughed.

Her glass were clouded.

Did you -- ?

Stir fire up? Not I.

I thought on thy begetting. Brock? Did she meddle?

Bloodroot i' thy lady's cauldron. Ashes i' thy cup. The green witch drank. What's done is done. Yet being kindled, thou might leave thy spill.

Kit slept beside us. Why did I not leave him sleeping, let him grieve and live?

I tell thee, I could not, remembering how coldly I had culled him, out of all the bloodborn kenneled in my lady's dark. All in silver, I'd come down to view my prey, I'd held the candle to his dazzled face. Yes. He would do, I'd thought; yet stilled the triumph in my glance. My lady and her crow did watch. They'd uses for his soul and seed, designs of thrift and sorcery for bone, blood, fell and eyes. Ah, make no paragon of me -- myself had marked him for my own false ends. His fiddle for a ship to bear me from that nighted isle; his cock to crow away her spell. 'Twould do, I judged. So one might heft a stick, a sling of stones, at need: to use, to cast away. He bowed; and as my lady bade, I offered drowsy wine to him, a draught amazing to the mortal sense. We'd toy with him before we slew.

Is this the moon? said he, and gazed about the hall. Awe and mischief in his face. I've seen her owl and her ivy bush, but never tasted of her cup.

I bit my lip, so not to laugh. All solemn then, alight with love, he drank to me. I saw him: tousled, sleepless, downy. He had brushed his twice-turned coat, as if he went not to his death but to a dance. Poor fool, thought I. And all unknowing, I was changed by him. His innocence his spell.

And so that green Unhallows eve, I waked by Malykorne and chose: to stay with Kit, to bear thee, for what end might come.

O Margaret, I was stark afraid. Of travailing, of birth. Of dying -- ah, most bitterly; but more than death, I dreaded Annis in myself. Her stone I had averted; but the dark witch was in grain. I'd seen her in my lady's glass: bloodnailed and insatiate, the blind hag on the road. I was afraid of being her, of slaying what was not myself. Of whoring. Not the act -- for I was schooled to that -- but the devouring. Cold fire, turning sticks to Ashes, Ashes into Annis, endlessly: herself herself engendering.

Yet where thou wast, there Annis could not be. That secret did the green witch tell me, softly in mine ear: thou wouldst keep hallows in that place of blood, that O thine everywhere, thy keep; though I went naked to my lady's sky. And so I brooded thee, as doth a child its candle, lighting her the way to bed. Yet all about there lay the shadows of thine inward fire, the fears that winced and flickered in my brain. Of need and frailty and lumpishness. Of losing Kit, the fear of losing him. Of love.

*

"Craw's hanged!" cried the grey cock.

Kit woke. Gone? A something slipped from him, a ghost returning at the pale of night. It will not stay, that tide. The pale boat rides the mirk and shiver of that burning flood; it slips the moorings. Gone. Yet curled against him, Thea slept. Cap and acorn. They were lying by a scanty thicket, on the open hills. Not day yet, neither moon nor sun.

He heard a thump and twitter in the wood, a wild free scuffling and calling. Out from the greenwood burst a rout of guisers, clad in tattercoats and leaves.

"Hey is down!" they cried.

Children.

Thea hid her face, but she was laughing; Kit caught up their scattered clothes to lap her.

They'd a girl to play small music -- hop and twitter, like a small bird on a briar -- all but lost amid their charm. She'd a wheedling pipe and dowly drum. Another, a long lad, bore a garland of whitethorn with a dead crow swung from it, wryneck and agape. It dangled, claws upward, wings clapped wide and stark. Round it, in and out, there ran a thrang of boys and girls. One, crowned in oakleaves, clashed horns with another clad in holly. Lagman and tangling, walking in his sleep, a small boy gaped and swayed and staggered under all their jackets.

"Brant!" they cried. "Come in, here's game."

Not last but alone went a dark and clustering girl in torn russet and green crown; she bore a staff, and wore a fox tail jauncing behind.

"Craw's hanged!" she cried. "Get up!"

A stripling in petticoats swept round the lovers, whirling light and away. His skirts were singed with leaping fires. His broom was budded out, as if he'd swept stars with it. "Here's nest on 'em," he said. He poked at them and kittled them, left smears of pollen and of ashes.

"Hey!" cried Kit, sneezing, laughing all at once.

The others thronged. "We's late. They's been and done."

Undone.

The girl with the music played Cuckoo! on her little pipe

"My bout at broom? Yer said I could."

"Sneck up, thou mardy, or I's leave thee here for bears."

"Clartarse."

"Neshcock. Tell our dad of thee."

"Gi's a box," said another. "And we'll gang away."

Kit fumbled in his pockets, found a halfpenny. "Here's to your fires."

Brant bit, she pursed it. "And to yers. Where's riddle?"

"Here," said another. "In my apron."

They'd a round loaf of barley bread, with a face baked into it: a leafy glazy green man, scored and bossed on it, with clove-nailed eyes. Brant broke and shared it out with all. Kit took, and Thea. All tore it from within, the soft warm crumb; they left the crust of the green man, his face, for the last. At his end, a small boy took the heel, he pinched the raisins from the eyes. Round he went, guising in his mask of crust. Now crouching, now on tiptoe, peering round. A solemn mischief.

"I see you," he said to Kit. "You don't see me."

Then that, too, was devoured.

*

Whin tugged at Kit's long cotted hair; she eyed his salt-rimed straggling beard. "Time you was clipped."

*

"Day," said the woman. The sheep leapt, yellow-eyed and glaring, from between her knees. The fleece fell, the light sheep staggered giddily away. "Where yer bound?"

Kit said, "Thwaite. Is this the road?"

"We's all up here," said the woman with the shears, broad-backed, rosy, swathed in sacking. In the fold, the penned sheep blared and jostled.

"Oh," said Kit, looking round at the row of clippers kneeling or bending to their work, at the lappers and catchers, and the boy at the gate. Beyond them, it was cloudy, the hills hooded in morning.

"Way!" Behind him, a gangling lad brought on another ewe to clip, half-riding her. He threw her in the woman's lap. Her shears bit deep in the heathery wool; they scrunched and sang. "Walking on?"

Kit said, "Anywhere."

"If's a bite and a sup yer after, there's work. Can yer catch 'em? Can yer whet?"

"I'd think so. But..."

The woman peered at Thea. A dishevelled girl, and silent. Like a tinker out sleepwalking. Hair like flakes of fire. The gown had been good, was tattered as lichen. It was undone at the waist. "Not so lish as yer were, is't? Can yer lap?"

"She's lapped," said a clipper.

Another sheep sprang away, a vengeful crone. Kit shielded Thea. "'S all right, she's been down afore," called a man. "Rigged ower."

"Pay 'em no mind," said the woman. "Fourpence and all found?"

"Done." Kit laid by his pack and jacket, and plunged into the throng of clamorous sheep.

"Hey up! Gi's a slipped 'un."

"Hey! Mind awd Sukey. She's gone on yer, like."

"Lovesick."

"Hod on, lad."

An old ewe cannoned into Kit. Down he went, embracing her for dear life, slathered, laughing. He got her somehow to a shepherd's lap. The man knelt on her head, grinning.

Kit felt his bones. "By, she's a brave 'un." He grinned at Thea, but she stood, looking out at the hills.

"Come on, then," said a lapper.

Thea gathered wool. There were loose locks everywhere. Two women stood at a board and hurdles, lapping fleeces. They plucked away the clarty bits -- odds, bobs, and daggles by the tail -- and threw them in a sack. They spread each fleece out, dark side up. Then they folded in the legs and rolled it up, dark outward inward, with a twist of the neck-wool drawn out and wrapped round. As they worked, they gossiped; but at every fleece, they said, "A soul, a sark. Out light, in dark."

Thea packed the fleeces in creels. Kit wrestled with the crones. The shears crunched on, inexorable; the light sheep skipped away. The lappers set riddles. "What rive at one another allt day, and lie in one another's arms all night?"

"I give up," said Thea. "Moon and her dark?"

"Wool combs."

From below, a long way off, came a girl, knitting beside a laden pony. A shepherd and a brisk black dog brought new sheep, down from the summer moors. They shone, brightdark and heavy as the thunderbreeding clouds.

The girl tied her pony, unlading hoggins, frails, and creels. She brought round a tray of cheesecakes, round and golden. "Noon."

Gooseberries and news. "Grey mare's foaled. A lad, and he's piebald. Mistress? Yer Bet's been and thrawn one o' yer good siller spoons i't beck, and me and Doll has fished it up. Young termagant." She sleeved her rosy face. "Oh, and a stranger come, asking at one Lightwood. Said he were an Outlune fellow, brown and beggarly, and ganging with a whey-faced breeding wench. A vixen." She stared at Thea. "There now! And that clotpoll of a crow lad sent him on up Houlsyke way. Will I fetch him back?"

"No," said Kit. "I thank you."

A blue-eyed shepherd looked to westward. Thunder. "Doubt he'll have tumbled i't hag by now."

Thea bit her seedcake. "Well done, my little page."

*

Whin's duckstone skipped and slapped across the waves. "Eight." She turned grinning. "That caps."

"You've nimmed all the smooth stones whilst I lay and slept." Kit's flicked once and sank. Still clumsy.

Whin turned out her pockets with a clattering flourish. "Halves." Stoop and flick. Three. "Yer still won't beat. I's worked at it." Still with her back to him, looking out at the bare green sea, she said, "Bairn's father."

"Ah?" Kit sorted through the stones.

"It were guising. I never see'd his face." Five. "So I see'd him a'where."

"A stranger." One with a leaf in it, too fair to cast away. And this ill-shapen. Ah, this would do. Four. "Yellow hair?"

"As chimneysweepers." A lad at leap fires. A thief at the gallows. Had he smiled, remembering her cries? A false love. A fiddler. A stranger with a scythe.

*

Sweetness of green hay. Midsummer. Endless dusk. And still the mowers, mothpale in their shirts, strode on. Kit watched the coil, recoiling of their backs, the long sweep of their scythes, in unison, and so enlaced that not a blade of grass between them stood. They struck and strode, advancing like the white edge of a wave: whish and tumble and the intricating arcs of edge. A long wave, standing with the sun. It stood; the flowers fell and withered with the grass. No sea, but slow green fire, kindled by the sun his kiss.

And after came the bending girls, to strow the grass. They'd not take rake to it, still green in bride-bed, bleeding from the scythe. Rakes to the lapcocks; but straw girls to the swath, to shake and strew the hay in handfuls, east and west. Lay lighter that way.

The hay's the dance.

In Kit's long row, they raked and turned the fading flowers: matrons of a day, and sunburnt. Tossed and tumbled, all their brightness turned to breath of summer. Sweets compacted. He'd made hay since he could walk. He knew the dance. Scythe it and strow it, then to rakes. And turn and turn. Lapcocks to the hobs to windrows; windrows to the sledges. Crisp and blue.

And in among the cocks of hay, the lovers courted, striplings and hoydens, clip and cuff, like hares. Boys battled, whirling hay. And one to another, the straw girls sang: the grey-eyed girl behind him, tall and soldierly and brown; the elfin brat before.

Kit turned and gazed at Thea, in among the girls. Ah, lovelier than ever, fading. Inward turned, to sweet. His lass was growing thin and heavy. Bending to the grass, she strowed it, sun and moon. Skirts dovetailed, and her bare legs scratched. Her bright hair tumbled on her neck. Still white as thorn, her throat, her brow; no sun could burn them. Thea tossed her wraiths of flowers in the air, looked up and round within their falling. Whorl within whirlwind, slow and fast. Move still, still so. O my heart. Let it be now ever, at the solstice of my love. The blade but newly struck; my heart still standing. Yet will fall. Her blade's herself.

The long wave slowed, against the steepening shingle of the dark. And now the grass was ocean; slow and slower lagged their wading steps, their oars, against that tide. The lads cried challenges, lashed on their fellows, flagging, flagging with the sun; the lasses raked and sang:

You must kiss her and embrace her,
Till she causes your heart to yield --

*

One voice above the rest rang out, triumphant, hoarse:

For there's never a faint-hearted soldier
Can win on a battlefield.

*

The scythes struck on, against that tide of dark. Against the quenchless lap of earth, the grass that stood and shivered. Stood.

*

Up from Imber Beck came Kit, not spilling what he held. Deep pools and dappling, the rush and plunge of bright quick water on the stones. He'd washed him clean as dawn, walked naked in his old clean shirt. Grass at his ankles, wind stirring in his wet-combed hair, already lifting from its douse. A sparkling dancing day, a drying day. A day for playing hob. Wild thyme and trout, he thought: he'd lie and tickle.

He came to Thea, sitting in a circle of great stones, on one had fallen, at the green hub of the wheel of Cloud. Its nave, whence it breathed. Old stones, they were, and worn fantastical: wind-gnawed and water-cavey, flawed and rippled with the frosts. White stones, whorled with mosses. They'd not mown here. Would not: had left them whitelands to the wandering sheep.

Thea swung her heel and sang, like any shepherd's lass.

"A lovegift," said Kit, and held it out.

A cup of rushes, lined with cool green leaves of hazel, wet with dew. And brimmed with raspberries, most perfect ripe: as soft as foxes' paws, and with their prick. Their flowers wreathing round. A dowry for a queen of Elfin.

"Ah," said Thea. All her face alight with joy, as he'd not seen her. Taking them, she kissed him lightly on the wrist, just where his pulse beat blue. Where it was scratched with gathering, had beaded with bright blood. Love's bracelet. "Bravely won."

For that he'd pick them naked, from the inward of the thicket out. By Cockridden and by Childerditch, he would, were the brambles backside of the moon.

"Does it like thee, love?" he said. "That cup of imbers?"

"I shall give them to my eldest daughter," said Thea. And she ate.

*

Ah, Margaret, that was firstborn of my spells, my new-created magic. I will tell it in thy blood, in time. Nine drops. No more.

*

The field was called Crawcrooks. High and aslant the fell it lay, a stony piece, the last to harvest. They had reaped them all: Burnt Ridding, where the oats were lodged, the Light End and the Long Dark, and round by Mawkins Hey, by Brockholes, Beggary and Witchy Slang, the Whirl Ing and the Wren Graves, and out by Owler Hag. A nine day's stint.

Kit bent to the sheaving. The barley stood white. When he closed his eyes, he saw it glittering still, but awned with violet black. It scarred his eyes with light. Another sheaf, a knot of straw. He swam in it. Straw bristled up his shirt-tail, down his neck. His arms and legs were torn and welted, scarified with straw. Weeds nettled; stubble pierced. Sweat sidled and stung. He ached with stooping, beaten down, astounded by the clangor of the sun. He thought it screamed at him, defiant; looking up, he knew it for a hawk. A stunning and a brazen noon.

Before him went brown Annot, Ailie Whinlaw, Kat and Bartlemy and Noll Ned Hewlin, with laggard Ciss to trail the rake. They moved breasthigh against the barley, all arrayed in its armor of light. Crouching, they cut it, striking off with their sickles: moon against sun. In their wake lay the barley, shorn and withering. Kit gathered it in armfuls, tying them with bands of straw that Thea twisted of the greenest corn. Beside him and behind worked Gib and Nick Scarrow, sheaving and stooking. No one spoke. The sun quelled them. Still he heard the rasp and rustle of the knives in corn.

The barley was one element, of sun, earth, wind, and rain. A hoary world. Time stilled. Before him rose a whirring and a clack of wings: a covey clattering away. He saw a scutter and a lop of coneys, and at his feet the fumblings of a dawstruck mole. A-sway on the nodding corn, the gressops leapt and chirred. He saw the plash of poppies falling, and the blue-eyed blink of cornflowers, clean petticoats of bindweed. He saw the scurry of the denizens laid bare to light: whitespinners, jinny-long-legs, harvestmen. He felt the sooty velvet of the smutched ears of slain corn, black as my lady's mask. In the sundered corn, he found a mouse's nest, two short ears bound together in a daddle of straw, as deftly plaited as any kirn witch on a stack. There were ratlins within, rosebald, but willowing out with a fuzz. They blindly wormed and squeaked. No dam. No help for it. He stuck it like a bauble in his sunburnt hat, and bent to work.

Then Ailie cried, "Whet!"

The bottle went round, hand to hand. Kit stood and eased his back. Looked first to Thea. He stared out beyond the barley at the whiteleached sky, the moorland bruised with sun. He turned. All below him and behind lay fields, a piecework stitched with drystone walls. He saw the hardwon ploughlands, pale and stooked, all glittering as a card of pins. Beyond lay fold and fallow, and the tilting meadows, green with aftermath, called fog. Above, stood only sheepwalk, cropped and stony, and tumbling becks. He thought of throwing down his glove and lying naked in the rush of water.

"Noon," said Ailie.

They'd an hour's halt. By ones and twos, they turned down the field, past the morning's thraves, sheaf leaning on sheaf, with another as henge. The men went flapping their shirts, their breeches with the knee strings undone. The women swung their sickles, in their broad hats and kerchiefs, their kilted petticoats, all urchined out with straw. Kit waited. Last of all came Thea, roundbellied in a borrowed apron, walking slow. Her hat was wreathed with poppyheads, how quickly bare: a few bright curving petals clung. He saw with a pang how sore her hands were, torn with spinning bands; how white her face. He said, "Thou wert to rest."

"Where's the penny, then?" she said.

He bent and stuck the mouse nest in a stook, carefully. It would not stand, being toppling heavy. "There's time. Shall we lie by the water?"

She looked up at the fellside. "I'd need wings."

"Rest then. Will I fetch thee water?"

"Kat's gone."

There was ale in the hedge. The reapers passed it round and drank; they sprawled and panted in the grass. Beneath an apron thrown over a hazelbush lay Annot's baby, naked in a little shirt, beside his sleeping childish nurse. The cloth had been dabbled, for the cool; had long since dried taut, tented out on sticks. The shadows of the leaves moved lightly, dappled on the bairns. The baby waked and watched them, purse-mouthed, puzzling at air. "Ah," said Kit, crouching, all alight. The pretty poppet. Annot wiped her mouth, undid her freckled breast. The little quaily brat set to with jugging. Ciss's Jacky played at the field edge, making pisspies in the dust.

They ate their baggin: curds and onions and the odd green bite; oatcake, cheese and ale. Kit had got brambles from a hedge for Thea. They were green and seedy, like eating broideries of beads; a few, as red as beaded blood: the needle's prick. Nothing else yet ripe. But there were crowcrooks on the moor; the sleeping girl had picked her apronful. Her mouth was stained with them. They had them for their afters: mistblue and midnight berries, tart, and bursting winy on the tongue.

Off by the beck, Kat and Bartlemy were wading, splashing. They leapt and clashed like kids. He snatched at what she flaunted, held high out of reach; Kat lashed him with a bunch of whins. Whoop! cried the boy, and under he went. They saw her ranting on the stone, as gleeful as a goblin. Up he came behind her, and he caught her by the petticoats. A splash like young dolphins.

"By dark," said Ailie, squinting at the glinty stubble and the dwindling standing corn. "Later n'r last year, by a farthing moon."

"It's coming on storm, I doubt," said Gib.

"We's have it done by then. Kirn and all."

Ciss said, "Is't witch or wench this year?"

Ailie looked crows at her, but thumbed her sickle. "As it falls."

The sickles lay about the grass, a halfyear's moons. A reiving wasp came on, and darted at the fruit. Ciss shrieked and cowered in her apron. Sibb in the hedgerow woke, saying, "Is't won yet? Mam?" Kit fanned Thea with his rushy hat. She was whitefaced, and her burning hair was flat with sweat. The red hair rode her like a demon.

Ailie said, "Yer want to be lying down."

Annot put her baby to the other breast. "Are yer lighter by Gossamer? When is't?"

At Hallows. They would never speak so in the harvest field; Kit knew that much. "Toward Lightfall," he said.

"When's that i' Cloud?"

"The Nine stars' setting, that we call the Clew," said Kit. "Nine Weaving?"

"Cob's Web," said Ailie, nodding.

Nick Scarrow said, "I' Slaith, we call 'em Jack Daw's Seed." His teeth showed whitely in his sunburnt face. He was a hireling stranger; he walked the harvest north. A marish man. He'd said they reaped with scythes there: not creeping women, but a sweep of men.

"Aye, they's a queer lot, out Law," said Gib.

"Cunning wi' tools." Nick fleered at Thea's belly, with a sly and sidelong glance at Kit. "Will I thresh her for thee? Got a flail."

Hewlin sniggered.

"Aye, brock i't middle," said Ailie. "It hangs."

Kit said nothing, twisting straws. Nick shrugged. "Then hang her from a pole for t' crows. I seen yer crowland mawkins, out i't rain. A waste o' seed." He sauntered off upfield, to sleep under the hedge. Kit threw away the knot of straw. Toward Whinside, the sky had turned; it shook like foil in the heat. The corn was yellower: not glinting now, but glowering. The sun was in it, brighter as it shrank.

Thea slept, and Annot. Gib snored and Hewlin whistled; Ailie span hemp. The bluemouthed child made towns of pebbles. Ciss held Jacky in her lap and sighed. "At kirn feast, at Lowerstell, last year, they'd a fiddler til't dance."

Kit felt a whitecold sickle at his heart. The fear had grown in him that all the cunning of his hands was lost with Thea's art. He never spoke of it; he dreamed of ships. "Will he be coming?"

"Not up here, he won't. Up Annis' arse."

Ailie said, "Not for thy sake, Mistress Lightheels."

"Never mind," Kit said. "Do you rant, and I'll keep measure."

"Wi' yer tongue?" said Ailie. "Or have yer browt a pipe?"

"Packed away," he said soberly. "And the drum is broken."

Ciss went on, "A new tune? I do love a new tune."

"One I've made," he said. "The oldest in the world."

Ailie let her spindle fall, the coarse grey thread spin out. "There's Daw's awd crowd wants nobbut catgut. If y'd turn a penny. Hanged on a nail these ten years since."

Kit's heart leapt up.

Ciss poked at the stubble. "There's not," she said. "There was a beggar come, asking would I cross his palm. He telled my cards."

"No art i' that," said Ailie. "Thy fortune's i' thy fork." Down fell the spindle. "Wha tellt thee it were thine to give?"

"Caggy awd thing, wha'd want it?" Ciss pouted. "And I never turned me back, but when pot boiled ower. Asides, there's nowt else missed, I counted spoons and all. And I's to journey til a far country, and wed a stranger on a dapple horse." She turned to Kit. "Happen if yer see him ont road, yer could ask for it back. A tinker fellow like a white craw."

Before he'd framed an answer, Kat came running down the fellside, with her long legs twinkling, bare and scratched. There was gorse in her hair. She'd forgotten the water jugs; but grinned, holding out a great bunch of white heather, haws, crawcrooks. "For t' kirn."

Ailie took and laid it by her sickle, in its curve. "'Twill a' to do."

"So it better. Pains I taken wi't. Is there owt i' yon poke?" Kat rifled for her share of bread and bit it, grinning. "Bat's sulking. He's soused."

Kit watching thought he guessed the riddle. In Lune, in Askrigg, he had seen the images of bristling corn in kitchens down the dale, tied up with rags, with flowers dried to dust. The last sheaf was the Witch, they said; they gave her to the wrens to peck, at Lightfast: so the old year ate of her, to make it new. He said, "In my country, they do bind the Witch with rowans."

"Does they?" Ailie said.

Kat wrung her skirts. "I'd not wonder. For it's red and all."

The Witch was eaten, and in turn she ate. Long since, the old wives said, they'd slain a child for her, an Ashes child: each spring a fall. They said the Old Witch lulled him in her lap. Kit knew her cradle songs. And still in Lune the countryfolk kept law: they stoned the wren and burned his crown, sowed blood and ashes with their hoarded seed, to slake the Witch. Kit saw her, squatting in the corn, with her tangled shock of hair, her scrawny shanks and long toes; her cheeks were of the reddest grain.

"O' course," said Ailie. "Them outland folk is strange. I's heard they shear owls."

Kit looked at Thea sleeping. He said, "There is a tale in Lune. They say the barley is the black earth's daughter, shut all winter in her dark. She rises. So they say."

Ciss said, "They's witches all i' Lune, Gib says."

The spindle fell.

Kit closed his eyes. He saw the Maiden rising, running from her mother's ancient dark. A green girl, dancing in the wind; but long strings tethered her, white-wiry, to her mother's womb. They held her, ripening to stillness, caught and cut. Three servingmen with knives of stone, her mother's minions, struck her down; they beat her with their flails. Her lover looked for her among the sheaves. He took each Perseis in his arms, and she was Annis, hoar and silent. On her face, the shrouding spiders scurried at their work. They told her death in inches. So he laid her out amid the lykes of straw. His eyes were dry. But she was lighter of the sun, their child. He saw it, in its swaddling bands of straw, unslain. Kit saw it, even through his lidded eyes: a glory and a dazzlement. He slept.

Ailie glanced at him, scraw-boned as a rabbit, in his hempen shirt. "'Twill a' to do," she said.

To Luneward did they reap the Witch. Here in Cloud, his elsewhere, they did say the corn was lying in the Witch's lap; she combed his silver hair and he did sleep. And then her cronies crept on him, they cut him off at knee. Not one before another: all at once, they slashed. Not I, said each crone to her other. Nor not I. 'Twas she, my sister slew him. They were each and all the moon, his end: her sickle shearing and her millstone trundling round, her old black cauldron gaping for his bones.

They shared him out as riddlecake, as round as the wheeling sun. They drank him and he made them giddy: for the turning of the sun is in his cup. As they drank, they played old bone games on their knuckles: moon reaps sun; sun mazes moon; and moon again wakes sun. They waked him through the winter and they scattered him: the earth his grave, his lap. His last sheaf was the Flaycraw. They hanged him on the Gallantry, to blacken in the wind and rain, to cry the crows. And so his green seed sprang.

Crows called in the harvest field. The bluemouthed child looked up. White crows. They dazzled in the sun; then fell like cinders, black. She watched. She looked around her, squinting. They were all asleep, her mam and all. She bent to her play again, moved pebble in their maze. The black crows quarrelled in the corn.

Kit woke hard. He saw crows rising in the field. His cheek was creased with straws; his arm, asleep where Thea lay on it. Drowsy and heavy, drenched with sleep, he rubbed his eyes and roused her. Ailie called them to the field. It shivered in the little wind; the dazed corn shook, it dazzled. To the east, the sky was sultry dark. They drank and hastened.

As Kit went to field, he met Nick Scarrow loitering by a stook: a burnt man, blue-eyed. He held a reaping-hook and smiled. "Word's out ont road," he said. "Thy Lunish piece. Wilt keep her when she's dropped yon brat? I's a mind to chaffer."

"Crows eat thee," said Kit.

"Crows gat me," said Nick, and slouched off.

Kit slashed with a fury at the rankest corn. A neck, he thought. A neck. "Come up," called Ailie, so he fell to binding, furthest out. He saw that Thea went among the women, safe enough. The work unknotted him, it combed. The women called and answered at their reaping, keeping measure.

Wha knocks at stone?

Poor Peg alone.

What's poor Peg lack?

A rag t' her back.

For salt and bread to lay her dead.

And candlelight to gan by night.

And what's she beg?

A shroud to lap poor Tom.

Poor Peg.

They were cutting in a long slow spiral now, coiled inward on the standing corn. They went sunwise.

Here, said the green witch. I am here.

And gone. She ran with a rustling, greenfoot. Slower now. She was heavy with the sun, he'd catch her. Then he took her in his arms. She turned, and she was hoary, spidery with years. A blue-eyed, bearded hag, ca'd Crawcrooks.

Now you can lay me down and love me, said the Witch. If you will.

So he did and he was rooted in her. He was Cloud. His name was Nightless and Bare Bones, Dearbought, Come by Chance. To the east, they called him Babylon, he bowed before the wind as Wiselack, Slobeard, Urchins Hey. To the south, his names were Long Nap, Little Knowe, Leap Hedges; to the west, Sheer Ash, Jack Nackerty, and Nine Tree Crowd; to the north, they reaped Cold Hallows, Hanging Crows, Hobs Graves. The cold wind played on him, the old tune always.

Then the slight moon and the dark of moon, the whitefaced breeding moon, came round him, bound him with their wreaths of straw. Their sickles ringed him like a running wheel. Then all at once, they slashed.

A clip! they cried. A kiss, a clip! He toppled in their arms.

*

"And so they ate thee," said Whin. "All but bit t' wren had, and there's an end."

"No," said Kit, smiling. "They did but taste." Kisses and a crown of poppies. Hurts and cream. A sweet mouth, blue with berrying; a shrewd mouth, taking sweets. And Ailie's warmest of them all and fierce, the brooding of a merlin's breast. Then he clouded. "No, 'twas Thea that the moon ate."

*

Autumn. Moving on. No work. The purple of the moors had gone from froth of jam to fleasblood, then from bruise to black; the trees, from blaze to ruin. Rimefrost on the swiddened heath took place of gossamers. The bracken and the bents were smithwork, smoldering in mist, and glinting, brazen in the strike of sun. And barren. While Kit could, he'd gathered haws, hips, brambles, sloes and rowans. Bags of nuts, his pockets full and Thea's apron. And one October afternoon, he'd found a milky way of mushrumps, penny buns, spilled out amid the leaves. They'd had a bit of mutton fat, just then. A feast. Their meal was long since giving out, their poke thin-flanked and dusty. It was poaching now. Hares, moorhens. Snared and spatchcocked. Aye, he'd looked at sheep, dared not. Not yet. He dared not hang and leave her.

Then it came to thieving. Which he did repent; yet cared not. Scant enough scourings up here on Ask Moor. Back of beyond. A wary and a sken-eyed folk, who cracked doors on long noses, clapped shut. High barred windows, hurtling dogs on chains. He'd eyed geese, but got none. Filched trifles. Neeps and kindling and blue milk. Odd stockings. A smock for Thea, that he'd had to crack, left cat-iced in a drying yard. Handfuls of oatmeal. Eggs left for hobs.

Thin beggary and thinner shoes. More eyes, more spies, more calling crows. More canting fellows on the road who turned and stared and mocked. Their bold-eyed trulls, who called at Thea, crying out, Brave rags with us. And hiring for thy hobby-horse. And then a broadside flapping at a crossroads: Lunish runagates, it said. A kitfox and her cull. So they'd left the high road for the hags and thickets, laying up on the moors, in folds rough-thatched with heather, ruined barns. And moving on.

Thea had changed: all bones and belly, swollen fingers. Swollen buds, yet flagging, fretted and embrowned. A side tooth lost with knitting bones. Younger and older both, she seemed: a crone who danced her poppet on her knee and lulled it, and a wizened imp. Great belly and her scabby knees, her cracked and bluenailed hands. Nor mortal, neither, but a changeling, with that pinched white face, that goblin's shock of hair. Yet her bonefast beauty stayed.

She was -- not happy, no. Ecstatic. Danced like chestnuts on a shovel. Slept scarce at all. Since harvest, so he'd thought her sunstruck. Moonsick then. Now still, now restless as a cat in pattens, to and fro. Thrang as Throp's wife, and at nothing, all hours of the sun and moon. Waking and working. So she called it, her work. Poor lass. As good brew ale in eggshells.

"Is't witchcraft?" he had asked.

"Riddles," Thea said.

He saw her, crouching in her ragged smock, intent on patterning. Ah, hallows on us, but she'd made some wondrous things. All fleeting, left behind to wind, rain, earth, as soon as made. Unharvested, unheld. She scattered.

Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones. A living hazel branch, lapped all in poppy petals, blood and branching. Leaves picked and shaded in a long streak on the earth: from green through fire to dead black; from ashes to greenwhite. Twigs in a round rattle. Labyrinths of leaves, bark, foxfire punk; or drawn in rime. Spirals of cracked pebbles, scratched white with another. Cubbies of sticks. Snailings and green horns of leaves, or burnished brown as copper: stitched with thorns and plaited in one endless coil and spiral, nestled in the earth. Leaves laid round nothing, bright and brighter toward the O. The same, with pebbles, white and whiter round abyss or origin.

One day he'd found her wading in a beck for more smooth stones, her apron full. In frost. Wet through and blue and shivering. And would not come with him until he'd waded in.

A night and day spent weaving stalks, an airy web of them, infilling all the crook and curving of a great low bough.

And in brief snow, a ball of it, built round and pierced by sharp small living wood. A ball that rolled its own maze, green laid bare; that rounded on its journeying.

O ever and alas, my Thea. O my dearest girl, my love.

Stark mad.

*

Ah, Margaret, I did make new heavens of the earth. Cast out of that cold sky in which my lucid soul was stringed, I did undo myself, redo: not Thea of the braided hair, but tangly Thea, tattery Thea, Thea of the grubby knees who crouched and plaited in a tinker's petticoats. I was inventing a new magic, for the old was lost with my virginity, with my immortal maidenhead. Oh, I was changing, changing fearfully; yet rounding with thy whiteheart self was Thea: we were sisters, twinned like cherries on a stalk.

O that was ragged bliss, that autumn. What I put my hand to, twisted of itself. Beyond astonishment, I did and did. Would lie but barely in the white of dawn. Wake new-inspired. Rise and work, outdoing what outdid the last, and of that latest making least again, transcending old with new. O Margaret, had I but lived, I would have lived so still: that whirling joy, that weaving steady hand.

Carriwitchets, Kit would say.

He'd come and go and bring his hard-won sticks of firing, his stock of provender, prigged rags; would sit and watch. Would coax me, bid me eat or sleep. I felt him sometimes at my shoulder: awed, exasperated, fearful. Dawning with delight. He kept the horn of leaves until it crumbled into dust.

I worked in what I had to hand, could gather. Sticks, stalks, leaves and stones. All found, unbound and scattering after. I was profligate as frost, as fern. As autumn, lavish, that does set a tree, a wood of trees, ablaze: a thousand thousand tongues to speak one word. As curious as nature's self, whose rarest work is secretest, embow'ring stars within bright clouds of stars, and seed in seed.

It was the raspberries began it.

In that cup of imbers did I spell thy blood: nine drops that would unbind my lady's will of thee. Set time going in her very stronghold. Yet I made no breach for thee in her shrewd hedge, but set a riddle for thyself alone. I would not have thee ride another's soul away. Walk barefoot, bloodfoot, if needs must: not use another creature, no, not Morag's dog, as I did Kit.

For the rest, 'twas winding spells, thyself thy clew. End and journeying and end, all rounded in a ball. Thine A and O.

Yet was I naked to the sky. I had no studied craft, no witchery, against my mother's furies, that would fall and rend. No roof.

In weaving of the garland, I had whispered secrets with that seely witch, that green unhallowed Malykorne. No hallows until hallows, she had said. As she, so I would be unhoused until her sister waked and hunted. Annis. If I could but win to Hallows --

So it came to stones. I strove, as Kit did, only to go on, to live and keep us until then. I had a garnet ring to stand for thee, that was a child's. I wish thou couldst have had it. Eight stones clustering about a ninth, a knot of seeds of blood. Much like the pomegranate I once found, that split and spilt within my hand. The riddle ring for Kit. And for myself, a ring like rain on gossamer, like cobwebs bright with dew. Nine Weaving. With my absence in't, the stone of Perseis I'd lost. Not wandering, but a falling star: astonishing and gone.

*

Her rings were woven in her fantasies. Her trash. One slid along a blade of grass, a small ring for her fingertip, a knot of drops of blood; another dangled from a scarlet thread, like rain in gossamer.

"Thea. Are there others?"

"Three. I have them safe." And showed her hand.

She would not give them over, though he begged and ranted, reasoned and cajoled, ah, coaxed her as he would a moonsick child to leave her toys. Her babywork. Alas, her wits waned even as she rounded. A greensick girl, and breeding. "Thou'rt worn, dear heart, beyond thy strength. Shouldst have a featherbed, a woman by thee. Physick."

"Wilt take them of me sleeping?"

"No," he said. "Not ever." And he came and knelt by her, he stroked her urchin head, he rubbed her nape. Inside his shirt, thrice-knotted round his wrist, the serpent of his cunning sleeked and shone. What's done is done, he thought. I rue me of that cheat. "Ah, that undoes."

He wanted her assent.

"For thine own sake, Thea."

Silence. And the twist and glittering of toys.

"Aye, scatter stones at scarecrow brats, leave none for thine own child."

Thea sat back on her heels, smudged her brow with her muddy wrist. "Ah, it comes."

Or softly, with his hands clasped round her belly. "Plum and stone." A rippling, as the round girl dived, down-dolphined in her eggshell ocean. "Sweet my love, thy lass wants nurture. Curds and cream. And swaddling. Thou hast not a clout for her."

At last, beyond all patience, starved and crazed with fear for them, he cracked her fist, uncurled her fingers from her hoard. Stone inward, she had worn them. Wore their imprint still, like Annis' kiss.

She had not cried out. He stood appalled; yet could not stay at that: put down the rings, caress the stone-bruised hand, so rudely forced. Could not undo.

"Thea?"

"As it must be."

He went out.

*

The door was warped with rain, white-molded. Margaret pushed until it gave upon an empty room, a tower that a storm had wracked. Bare muted walls, smashed glass; and in the naked window, for the first time, sea-blink. O. For a time she gazed at it and wondered; then she turned. Naught else but a daw's nest down the chimney, scattered sticks and trash. She bent and stirred it; she unwove. Smashed eggshells. Sticks and mutes. A key. A pebble. And a bent black ring. She thumbed it, rubbed it in her apron, peering at the outworn letters. This way and that in the wintry light. All gone but a word. Lightwode.

A voice in the air said, "Margaret."

That voice she knew; had heard it, ravelled with the wind, the sea. Not always. Since her doll was burnt, her dark-browed lulling nurse -- O Norni -- taken to her death. 'Twas now and nowhere, like a gossamer, at first: a glint and gone. Was now her galaxy. Her ground. As tangled in her thought as roots in earth, that flower seldom, yet inhere. But never until this aloud. Is't you?

"Thy daemon. Thou hast found the last, the lost star of the Nine, and overlooked. The one too quick for the eye."

*

Dusk. Late autumn, toward Hallows. Headlong on the road between Cold Law and Soulsgrave Hag, Kit hurtled. Three rings clenched in his right hand, thrust deep within his pocket; shame and fury at his heels. He knew not where he went. To Annis. Or to town. What town? Blind desperate, and pinched with argument and care, intent as a cat at kindling, he knew not where he was. The same place, always, the faster he ran. Round went the millstone, and over turned the wheel. No bread, she has no bread. I had to. Anything they'd get. Bread, firing. One now, the others one by one. Bread, firing, a baby's coats. Ah, fool, a flock of sheep, a sheepwalk. Fell and mutton, fleece and milk. He saw their lass run barefoot on the sward. Red hair, like fires on the hills. And round again: no bread.

He was at the crossroads before he saw the gang. A cronying of crows. Too late, he was among them. A slouching spade-faced man, whiteheaded, all in black, greenblack and broken swagger, like a swung cock at a fair. A gallows poll, that head, like hemp unravelling. Three trulls a-dangle at his heels. They fleered at Kit; they jostled. Cawed. A black mort, with a blue and scornful eye, her breasts at her kerchief bare and bruised. "Here's game," she said. "A goslin," said a pale and sluttish drab. Pissed petticoats and trodden shoes. And Maudlin-drunk, or mad. He swung. A ranting, taunting, roaring girl, a striding and a ride-moon doxy in a soldier's cap and feather, with his long sword buckled at her side. Red shoes.

Tighter still, he clenched his hand. His knife. He'd left his knife.

He made to pass by.

"Lightwood?"

Kit walked on.

"Heard tell thou was asking at Jack Daw." Almost, he turned. "For a fiddle."

Daw had it out for him; he drew the bow. And at that wauling sound, Kit's soul was snared. He turned and looked. Old and curious, far older than his own had been; rubbed shining as a fallen chestnut, newly split from its green burr. It had a carven woman's head. He yearned for it. A trade, he told himself: not bread but years of bread. A livelihood. He slipped two rings from off his fingers, deep within his coat; held out a third. White-gemmed. Like fleeces heavy with the dew. "Fair trade."

"What's this? Cuckoo-spit?" said Daw. "That, thy long knife, and a knock at thy vixen. I's a fancy to red hair."

"White-faced bitch is breeding," said Cap-and-Feather. "Maggot spied."

"She's a tongue," said Black Mort. "Can use it."

Jack Daw fleered. "I like a brave bellyful. Stir pot wi' my flesh hook and mek brat dance."

Kit spat. "Crows eat thee. Cock and eyes."

"They do," said Jack Daw, smiling.

Kit tried to shoulder past, but the doxies mobbed him, like crows at an owl by daylight. Jack Daw plucked at the fiddle. "Thou has strings for it, and all." His fingers at its neck and belly. "Owt else in yon placket?" Kit's face gave him away. He knew it. Daw twanged a string. "Done, is it? Say, two rings." He watched hope flicker. "Two rings. And thou serve yon nest o' crows -- ah, they gape for it. Now. Here. I like a play."

"No," said Kit. "No more."

The drabs were all about him, taunting, lifting up their petticoats. White belly and black joke. Craws wi' beards. Against all his will, Kit felt a stirring. And a sickening. Hobthrust rose and danced. He stared. A black scut, and a shitten fleece. Old ling. Rustbrown, and the red blood trickling down by her knee.

A cruel hand caught his wrist, bent backward. Wried his arm round his back until the socket started and the cold sweat sprang. No breaking Jack Daw's hold. Sinewy as yew, he was, inexorable. The voice was wasp honey. "Come, then. A bargain. For t' sake o' that night's game thy dam once gave me. Salt and sweet, insatiable. A blue-eyed witch." Doubt and horror. Daw touched his cheek, mock gently; bent and whispered in his ear. "How cam'st thou by my face?" Kit swayed. In that brief slackening, the old man knocked him backward, winded, to the ground. Cap-and-Feather pinned his arms and Daw knelt on his shoulder, set a knife across his throat. "Where's thy vixen earthed?"

Clack! goes the old year and the new year tumbles down.

Kit turned his face. Shut his lips.

"By my lady's name, it will go ill with thee."

Skirts about her waist, the Black Mort straddled him; she squatted and undid his breeches flap. "Here's a knocking i't cellar. Here's a bird flies up."

Pissabed danced wildly, she whirled and wobbled in the road, like a slowing, sleeping top.

Cap-and-Feather chanted. "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds..."

"Caught i't furze," said Black Mort. She spat between thumb and fingers. Laid on.

Kit gasped.

"Although he is little, his family is great..."

"Wring it neck," said Pissabed.

"Darkmans and glimmer," said Jack Daw. "My lady bids. Then do."

A voice from somewhere cried, "Hang craws!"

"Craws!" answered from the hills. And all the dogs of Soulsgrave took it up.

"Cut," said Jack Daw. "Prig and run."

Crack! Blind lightning blast, a whirl and burring through his skull.

No more.

*

Kit woke, rolled naked in a ditch. Fiddle's wracked, he thought. Where's here? Himself was lash and scratch and throbbing, ice and fever, and a dizzy thud behind his eye. Dragged through whins, he thought. And tumbled down a bank. That green girl at my bow's end. At the dance. That horseman? His hand moved gingerly. No, his good hand -- one was lame. Cracked bagpipes in his side. A broken crown. Wet blood on his mouth. Not his. From Cap-and-Feather. From her other mouth. Remembering, he retched and strangled. Nothing in his gut to puke.

Nothing left.

No clothes.

No rings.

And at his wrist, no braid of Thea's. Sharper still than all his hurts, he felt that ring of absent fire.

Gone.

*

Whin said in the dark, "Went naked back?"

"I robbed a scarecrow of his coat." A clear night mocking him. The Hanged Lad ranting on Cold Law. As naked as himself. They'd left him with one broken shoe, in haste. Derision.

"So yer done that. Ta'en rings."

"I did."

"Lost braid."

"I did." That desperate searching in the dark. He'd had a crazed hope it was somehow lost, not stolen for an end. That he would find it, tossed aside as naught. In a small voice, he said, "I didn't tell her. That I had it. That it was gone."

"Round thy wrist? Had she not see'd it?"

"No. I thought. We'd not -- we hadn't lain together. Not since harvest." He would not force her crazy innocence, not take his will of her. And yet he had.

Long silence.

"At the stones," said Kit. "At Imber Beck. That kiss she gave me was the first time. Of her will." He drew one ragged breath. "That other, freely. Not her love." He was crying. "One other time. The last. I never knew it was. I never knew."

*

Waking in the night. Hard ground. And Thea with her back to him, within his curve, and cradling his hand against her breast. Like a child her doll. He felt his ring there, on a thread; he felt her quick heart tap and tap, like a branch at a windowpane; he felt the round drum of her belly thud and kick. She smelled of smoke and Thea. Not asleep.

She spoke, not drowsily, but low. "Kit. I do love thee. Know that."

*

Blood in my lady's place. Blood on her smock. It would not come out.

Margaret hurried through the dark and winding hallways, down toward her room. No sanctuary there, no more than in a hare's slight form, the impress of her crouch; but licit. Blood, suddenly. A spattering of drops, no more. Herself she'd washed and washed, no trace or tinge of it was left. Flung the water from her sill. But her smock. Would find her out. Bury it? The dogs would out. Burn it? No fire but in my lady's study. Up the chimney? Blood will out. Ah. Cut herself and mingle. Knife. She had a knife.

Softly now. She lifted the latch.

Morag and my lady waited with a rod of juniper. "Straying, and thy book undone. Come, Madam."

Margaret curtsied, rose. "My lady."

"Closer, girl. I am no basilisk."

The hand with its great ring held the face: a sere unshaking hand; a white face, like a scrap of paper to be written over, like a mirror to be filled. "There is something of my daughter in you."

"Aye, the whore," said Morag.

"Alike in straying," said my lady. Still she held her gaze. "Chastise her."

"Thy vixen, Madam." And when Margaret made no move, the servant took her bedgown, pushed her smock to her armpits. Held her wrists and bent her back across the kist, her new breasts and her belly all disclosed, a gibbous moon. Thrust her legs apart.

Slow blood.

My lady spoke, a cold still fury in her voice. "And who undid that knot?"

Morag said, "Not art, I'll warrant, but the worm in her. Your glass is carrion."

"Is of my adamant. A blank, but that I grave her with my icon and my law. And offscum else: yet will transmute."

"Or spoil, as did her dam. Your poppet. Waiting on the stars."

Whiter still, my lady's face. "It will be done, and presently. By this moon's dark."

A catechism then.

"What was thy mother?"

"Your daughter," Margaret said.

"A whore. Which is?"

She knew not. "One who strays?"

"'Twill do. Puts carrion in Annis' place. Which is?"

"We name it not."

"That errant part, wherein thy mother did betray me."

"Crow's fee," said Morag, pinching. "And the vixen's earth."

Margaret endured. The crow's contemptuous, efficient hands; my lady's avid eyes. And even in her dread and terror, sick with shame, she thought, Like Thea?

Then the rod, and no more thought.

They left her on the floor, amid the fallen needles, the scattering of twigs.

My lady turned at the door. "It is time thou learned thy glass."

A key snicked in the lock.

For a long time she lay weeping in her dabbled smock. Blood with hidden blood.

No voice. She heard no voice.

*

Kit hurried, huddled in his flapping coat. It would snow by dark. Black moor, white sky; but knit, the whiteness tangled in the ground as rime, the blackness branching up as trees. A scant wood, leafless now. Sloes, rowans, all gone by. Firing. He bent to get sticks. It still was light; but stiffening towards dusk. Ravenwards. And Thea waiting, pacing in their roofless shieling, by the ashes of a hearth. She made cairns of stones. She did and she undid. He dared not leave her; they would starve without. No sticks to burn; no bread. A handful of dampish meal, half acorns, bitter as the wind.

The braid was gone. He saw it glinting everywhere.

There. In that bush. He stumbled toward it.

Gone.

He stood. He would have wept, if he'd remembered how. It was all too much, too much. He stood. Dazed, cold, defeated, sleepless, starved, lightheaded, lousy. Fizzing with lice. His feet recalled him, white cold, wet; he'd blundered. Cat ice.

Looking down, he saw a tump in the marshy ground: a spring, turfed over, housed with three great stones. Kneeling, he touched the lintel of the low door, lichened; found the blind runes graven in the rock. Help us, he said to darkness, spinning out a thread of silver. Lighten her, my love. He touched the water. No one. In the wood beyond, a stormcock sang. No solace here. He rose. On a tree hung knots of rags, frayed, faded to the blue of a winter sky. Another sky, some other now or then, caught here. And in among the ravellings of sky, a rag of iris. Thea's scarf.

*

Kit. Margaret. Ah, you do not hear me. She is gone until her time comes round; she cannot let you in. No hallows anywhere. Not yet.

*

At the corners of their shieling, raised on cairns, Kit saw her barricade: spiked crowns and spirallings of ice, frail caltrops. Morning stars. He dropped his sticks and ran. From wall to ashes, wall to wall, he found her, pacing and clenching. Blood on her lip. Then something wrenched her, as a laundress would a rag.

"Thea. How long -- ?"

She caught his sleeve, his coat, as on a breaking ship. Another wrench and shudder. "Kit." Like burning wax, her face: it warped and ran. Almost Thea leapt from it, as flame from a candle, blowing out. "Undo it."

"Love?"

"Undo the knot," said Thea. "That braid you took of me. Undo it."

Still he stood.

"To let the child be born. I cannot lighten else. I cannot meet them."

O sweet hallows on us. "Gone," he said.

"What?"

"Taken. Gone."

"Ah no." A great cry, twisting.

"Thea -- "

She whirled on him, white-fiery. "Run. Now."

"I'll not leave thee. I will not."

"For a woman's help. I die else." Wrench and leap. "Now. Get thee hence."

He turned at the threshold. "O my heart's love."

"Go."

No time, no time.

He ran.

*

Whin dreamed of ravens. An ill-chancy dream, an omen. Then a telling. A trance. She saw a girl still barely living, filthy, naked on the icy ground. Her childbed. Saw the stubble of red hair, the new milk seeping from her breasts. The glazing eyes. A witch stood watching her, a corbie perched upon her hand. She stroked its beard, she ruffled it; it preened the bracelet at her wrist, of braided fire. Ah, the sweetest morsels for my chuck, my Morag, said the witch. The crow's fee and the eyes. Down it flapped, it picked the tidbits. Still the girl breathed, the blood ran, the death cry rattled in her throat. Then the witch called down her crows. They clustered at the bloody womb. They tore.

Whin woke yelling.

Still Kit slept on. He twitched and whimpered. Whin sat up and shook with rage. She cursed the raven and the witch; she cursed the knife that loosed the child, the braid, the shears that cut it. Cursed her master mistress Brock who had entangled her in this atrocity, to see and see and see. Change nothing.

Then up she got, and ran down to the shingle, to the water's edge. She'd drown the soulbag, wash the ashes from her face. Walk inland. She would be no more death's journeyman. Running, she tore her rings off, death by death, to hurl them in the sea.

Brock stood between salt water and the strand. "I'd not do that," she said.

"Could yer not have let her live?" cried Whin. "Not see'd to it that she went wi' child, smick smack, afore she'd much as bled? Thou meddlesome. And all for nowt. A tale of Ashes."

"It's done, and long since done," said Brock.

"And nowt to do wi' me."

"And all to do." The sea swashed, swashed. "There's bairn."

*

O thank hallows. There, a woman with a lantern. Hale and canny, she looked: brisk, in pattens and a hood. Kit caught her apron. "My lass. Please. Needs a woman by her." And she raised her candle, looking through him with a smile would scoop apples, a shankbone smile -- I know two of that -- and turned away. Up the fell.

He ran after. "Pity on us. For the love -- "

Another crossed the trod. A sonsy girl, a goosedown girl and slatternly, who bore a flat candlestick, as if she tumbled up to bed. "Miss -- ? Can lead me to a midwife? My lass -- " She blinked and giggled, turned away.

Another and another still. All with candles, all the girls and women of the dale end, lating on the hills. Now there, now elsewhere in the cloudy dark, as if they danced Nine Weaving. Round they turned like children in a game, a-bob and wheeling, in and out, through bushes and through briars. They were seeking with their candles -- lambs at Hallows? Birds' nests? They were sought.

Hide fox, and all after.

As in a dream, Kit ran from one to the next, imploring, and they turned from him. None would speak. They shook their heads: some smiling, some pitying or shocked or scornful; some averting their eyes.

A weeping man, half naked, in a Bedlam coat.

One tossed a coin.

A knot of them, their backs turned. Gossips. Blindly, hopelessly, he touched a sleeve. "I beg of you -- " A stone. A ring of them, like crones in cloaks. But one stone turned, the hood fell back. It was a woman with a darkened lantern, waiting, gazing out: like a sailor for landfall, like a scryer at eclipse. He was a gull at her masthead, a dog at her skirts: no more.

Down the fell, a light went dark. Another, upwind, and a girl knelt, doing up her shoe latch, looking round. And yet another, pinning up her hair. All waiting.

One by one, the candles all went out.

But one.

A child this woman, sheltering a dying candle in a tin. She brooded fiercely on it, willed it. In its doubtful glow, her face was rapt and shining. Awed. Her first time on the fells? Her flame lurched sideways, righted, leapt again. The last?

From up the fell, a voice called, Ashes! We's Ashes!

O the last. As her candle flickered out, she whirled for joy.

Another and another voice took up the cry, like vixens, greenfire in their blood. Hallooing to the dark of moon. Ashes! They were running now, a rout of women, whirling torches in the kindled dark. And still the child wheeled, giddy, in among the stones, the only silence. Ashes!

And alone, but for the ragman. She took to her heels.

*

I tell this to the air; yet I must speak.

My mother fed me to her crows, she burned my bones and scattered them; my braided hair she keeps. By that bright O of fire did she call me back from life to Law; by those shrewd knots torment me. She would not undo. Seven weeks she watched me naked, travailing from Hallows until Lightfast eve; then Morag's knife did let thee crying from my side, and I was light.

*

Margaret knelt and pried a stone up in the hearth; she dug. From under it, she took a ring, a clew of thread. A key.

*

Turning back from the stones, Kit saw the fire at their fold and ran, calling, stumbling on his whiteblind feet. He saw the ravens falling from the sky. One, another, turning women as they fell. They were clear as night, and starless; where their wings beat back the thronging air was cloud and fire. As they touched the earth, it whitened, widening from their talons of the frost. They shrank as small as stones.

Kit fell. A thrawn hand caught him, and another, and a throng. Horned feet kicked through him like a pile of leaves; they scattered him like sparks. "Out!" he cried and struggled, held and haled. A torch was thrust at his face. There were witches all round him: men and crones, in black and rags of black, and goat fells, stiff with blood. They bore a cage of thorns and withies, hung with bloody rags and hair, with flakes of skin: the palms of children's hands, like yellow leaves, a-flutter.

Empty.

"Here's a fool," said one, a warlock.

"A soul," another said. A hag, all pelt and bones. The soulstones clattered in her hank of hair, with knops of birdskulls, braided through the orbits.

"A soul, a soul," the guisers cried.

Kit fought against their hands. "You let me go."

"You let us in," they chanted. "Let us in your house of bone."

And a man like a staghead oak, a blasted tree, cried, "Room!"

A tall witch with a great black fleece of hair flung back came striding through. It was a man, pale and sneering in a woman's robe, his strong arms naked to the shoulders, dark with blood. Death's midwife. Or a blasphemous Ashes?

"Annis!" they cried. "Annis wakes."

He prodded Kit with his staff. "What's this? A blindworm?"

"For your breakfast, my lady."

"For your bed."

"'Tis Ashes' bawd."

The stick against his throat had silenced him, half strangled him. He saw a black wood rising; it was leaved with faces. Thronged with crows.

"Bags I," said a voice.

The crowd parted. Kit saw a figure in a leathern cap, a coat of matted fleece. Ashes of juniper, a cloud of ashes at his eyes and lips. It whispered in his ear. "Thou's not to die for her," said Brock. "Thy lass did say."

"No," he tried to say. His mouth was full of ashes, he was blind with snow.

"Now," said Brock. "An thou will." And kissed his mouth.

He felt a tremor, a wind in his bones. She covered him like snow. Beneath the sway of stars, he felt the green blades pierce his side, the awned heads bow and brindle in the reaping wind. A sickle gathered him, a sheaf. Time threshed. His chaff was stars, his bones were blackness, strung and shining. A sword, a belt of stars. A crow called.

Then he knew no more.

*

Hallows morning.

Kit awoke on the hillside in the falling snow, all white and shades of white, but for the black unkindly stones. After a time, he could stand, could hobble. Halt and dazzled with the snow, and inch by crippled inch, he made his way back to their shieling. Knowing what he'd find. Dread knowing.

Gone.

And more than gone. Pulled stone from stone, and torched and trampled in a great wide circle, salt with snow. Cold out. All her toys.

"Go," she'd said. And so he'd gone.

He would have died for her.

He fell to his knees where their hearth had been, the ashes at the heart of ashes. Nothing left: all taken, lost, betrayed. But there, a something like a wren's dulled eye, its dead claw, in the snow. A ring. Not hoarded, so not lost. He scratched for it, and found the other; turned them in his fingers. Blood and tears.

*

Margaret knelt amid cold ashes, drawing mazes on the hearth. They'd left no book to her, no ink, no candle: whips of juniper to gaze on, and the drowsy wine. My lady's glass, which was black adamant: she could not break.

And so she did what she had left to her: undid. Ate nothing they had given her, but dwindled out an orange she had kept, a heel of bread; drank snow from her window sill. She worked by scant starlight at the puzzle of her cage. Scrawled figures with a stick of charcoal; rubbed them out, redrew them, all in black upon the hearthstone, what was white with snow without: the labyrinth of yew and stone. If she did journey, she could not rub out.

So then: for her door, she had the jackdaw's key; then came the maze she would unriddle and the hedge of thorn, the wintry sea. The world. Beyond that, she could see no way. A ship? But only to have touched the sea, washed Morag from her skin; to glimpse a world unbounded by my lady's walls. She set herself to reach the sea. The garden was configured as the starry sky; that much she knew, had read her book beside the white girl crowned with leaves, with leaves and flowers in her stony lap. And water running down and down her face: it wept for her, who could not weep. Bound Ashes, in a box of yew.

She knew now what she was; what she was for. A hole to fill, said Morag truffling. Naught else. Yet had my lady smiled and pinched. A limbeck. See, how sweetly she distills. Had kissed: how scornfully, and yet had lingered. It was almost a caress. The bracelet burned against her skin. I have sent to fetch thee a rare dowry. Dishes for thy maiden banket; jewels for thy chain. Thy first shall be thy father's soul.

For a long time afterward, Margaret had sat, and turned and turned the hidden cards.

O the Nine, ah yes, the Nine would come and carry her away. She heard the clatter of their wings; she saw them, children of the rising light, like swans. Her heart rose up. Being mute, she could not cry to them; they lighted, children as they touched the earth, but a glory of their wings about them, like a snow. Sister, come with us, they said. I will, said Margaret's heart, but have no wings. No ship. And turned it up: that Ship whose mast is green and rooted, flowering as stars. And then bright Journeyman, the thief.

A rattle in the keyhole. A black stick on the floor. She'd risen to it, curtsied, with the cards behind her: all in haste. But three had fallen from her lap like leaves; their tales had withered at my lady's glance. See, thou hast overlooked the Tower. That takes all. The witch had stooped for it, mock-courteous, and held it to her branching candle; dropped it burning to the floor. And which next shall I take? Thy cockboat? Or thy nest of geese? Her gaze schooled Margaret's; they would bind her if she flinched. Thy choosing, Madam. It will make a game.

The Hare. My lady's wrist was bare, no braid.

Aha, the Master Lightcock. Thou'rt seed of his, didst know? Shall watch him burn. And my sweet crow shall have his stones, to bait her dogs withal. Then she had signed to Morag with the box. Undo.

And after they had gone.

It seemed that someone else took over, swift and secret, while the old lost Margaret sat, dreaming in a drift of cards. Thou timorous, thou creeping hodmandod, she thought: thou snail that tangles in her trail of dreams. Draw in thy tender horns? Thou liest between the thrush and stone. That other self, herself, had thought of riding, light a horseman as the moon; her mantle of the flying silver, fleeting on the wind. But now her new shrewd voice said, Shoes and stockings, stout ones. In that room with the sea-chests. Thou needs must walk. Will need the way.

And so she sat, and drew what she remembered of the labyrinth, the doors.

*

"No ship," said Kit. "When thou didst come on me, and take me up from drowning, there had been no ship. No storm. I'd gone in after her."

"I know," said Whin. "But thou was not to follow her. Thy lass did spell for thee."

"Not drown," said Kit. "I know. I am for hanging in yon braid. That I did twist myself."

"What for?" said Whin. "Thou's never telled."

"To hold fast." Kit clasped his hands, unclasped. "Ah, not to Thea -- what I loved in her I held like moonlight in a sieve, I riddled rainbow. 'Twas a falling star, that nowhere is and yet is light. No, what I braided was a face she turned to me, a mask: that lady who did run away with me, did overturn her fortune for my sake. Mine own. The moon that turned and turned from me, yet bent within mine orb. Thought I. So kept that vanity, that she did shear. At first." A silence. "And after, I would keep myself, as I had thought I was. Would be. That Kit who called down witches with his airs. Not Thea's bow-stick, but a one who played." He bit his lip; looked up. "And she owed me a fiddle, I did tell myself. No matter; yet it rubbed. And at the last -- moon blind me -- I could not endure to tell her of my folly."

Whin passed the cup. "What now?"

"If not for Thea's sake, yet I will die, as all must die. And I would live ere then." A something lightened in his face. "And see our lass."

*

Asleep. Thy cards lie scattered on the floor, in knots and wheels, and painted gatherings. I cannot turn them. There, the Ship and the Rattlebag, the Hanged Lad and the Nine. Burnt Eldins. Ashes. And the Crowd of Bone: that fiddle that the old year plays of Ashes, of her bones. They strung it with her long bright hair. Itself and all alone, it sings, its one plaint always: of her death. Sings truth in riddles.

In a tale, thou Margaret wouldst brave my lady, even in her glass. Wouldst find my nine bones that were left; unbraid my hair and string the fiddle for thy father's hand to play. And thou wouldst dance to it, his daughter and my death. And down the witch would tumble, burning, in her iron shoes.

But I have sung my tale. Unstrung myself. Have told out all my thread but this, the endknot: they were always one, the braid that bound us and the strings that spoke.

Thou canst not hear the ghost now, Margaret: thou art child no more.

But thou art Margaret, thyself: no witch's blade can rive that knot intrinsicate we knit for thee, of love and pain. Thou art the daughter of my heart's blood and my soul. Bone of my bone, and heartstrings of my heart. To Kit I would restore thee: not his fiddle but my heart, translated. Not for him to play, but thou to dance for him, to sing thine own tale always, light and dark.

*

 

"So," said Whin. "Yer off."

They stood by her coble, sunk in snow to the black rim, as a mussel shell in sand. A white morning, toward Kindle Wake.

"I'll set thee on," said Kit.

Together, they dug out her boat and laded it; they pushed it down the blackweed shingle, salt and frost, to the water's edge. A wave crisped his boot. But only one. The tide was turning outward.

They clipped hard, clapped back and shoulder.

Kit said, "Thou ask at my daughter."

"And thou at my son," said Whin.

"I will that. Farewell."

Then they pushed her black coble into the sea. As it slipped, Whin leapt the gunwales; locked oars. It rode the swell, it hove. The next wave took her out. Kit watched from the shore. Whin rowed easily, strongly, turning only just to check her heading. Luneward. And to Law.

So they parted.

Kit took up his scant gear, new and raw. A knife, a cloak, a cookpot, and a flint and steel. Grey worsted stockings and a harden shirt. A stone in his pocket, with a leaf on it. He set out on his journeying; turned inland, in the snow.

*

I am walking, to the knees in earth: long-toed, reaching, rough of knees; gnarled wrists knotted, flowering at fingers' ends. They see, though I am blind. White, wet, my petals fall and fleck -- like moons, like childing moons -- my cold black bark. My lap is full of snow. In winter do I bear the misselbough, the Nine, entangled in my crown.

I was Ashes.

I am rising from the dark, and rooted; I am walking from my mother's dark.

My green leaves speak in season, in their turn, unfolding word by word till all is green and silent, lost in green, unselved. The green is wordless, though it spells the earth, it sings the wind. Rooted, I dance, unbraided to the wind. And then by leaf and leaf, I turn, take fire and prophesy. They spill, a tale of leaves, of endless leaves. My green is no one, everywhere, as wood as love; my age is selving. In my nakedness, I crouch and listen.

See, where I am split, my belly seamed. A curved blade caught me; I was reft. Yet I do bear, I ripen, plum and stone. They hang, my sloes, world-dark as winter nights, abloom with souls. They fall and sunder, worm and root.

I stand among a grove of girls. A garland, woven all of Ashes.

Touch my bark and I am elsewhere, though my lyke is earthfast, here and now. Break wood and I will burn. Do you see me? Now and nowhere, turning nowhere, telling light. But I am not my tongues. I rise with my sisters, woven in our dancing, scarved in light. We are pleached in an endless knot, an alley, in a cloud of stars: a hey as white as hag.

*

All ways led upward: not a door would let her to the wicket gate, the garden, to the maze that she would solve. She'd brought the clew to measure it; had sopped her manchet in the drowsy wine to brave the dogs withal. A hard frost glittering on snow: she'd hoped to leave small trace. Thin shoes, no mantle. She had only what was hidden left to take: the key, the clew, the ring. Her ravaged cards. Nine burnt.

No door. And higher still. A window? Could she get a wren's-eye view of it? Could draw it then. Thou mole, she thought. 'Tis black of night. Moondark, so my lady and her raven hunted souls, and thought she slept. How long until they came to wake her? Found her gone? Dread struck her like an ice-axe to the shattered heart. Go on, she said, in darkness. All among her shards. Old mole. 'Tis nowhere here. Get on. Lightless, breathless with enormity, Margaret wound the stair.

She pushed through a last door, out onto the leads in snow. O heavens. Round she wheeled, within the greater wheel of stars.

The wood above.

That she had forfeited. Pasteboard and precious tawdry, turned celestial. All burning, unconsumed.

She'd never seen the stars at once; had learned them from her slit of window, from my lady's iron hoops, her brazen spheres. Her stones that hopped from perch to wire, dish to wire, like a cage of singing birds. But these were glorious: they flamed amazement in her eyes.

Giddy with the sky, she turned, until her breath had blinded her. Then she wiped her glazy spectacles, and stood and stargazed.

Knot by shining knot, she made them out -- the Nine, the Hallows Tree, the Ship -- yet wondered even in her wonderment. But why a Ship? Why not a ladle or a swan? Why not bare stars, themselves? And why Nine Weaving? There are stars in clouds of stars, as if I breathed on frost. And which is the lost star of the Nine, amid so many? She looked for the sisters, jumping edgewise in her slanted sight. Ah, she wished for those spectacles she'd found and left, that made the candle huge. They tangled in and out of focus, in a country dance, a hey. Five, a cloud of silver, three, four. Gone again.

And one bright planet threading through the maze. Like a knife round an apple, all askance. Or like a lantern through a labyrinth. O yes. Clasped hands flying to her lips: she bit them, so as not to cry out loud for joy. And ever after, when the Nine were named, she tasted rime on rough wool, and the oil of orange in her nails. Yes. The garden was the quickset stars. The key was errant: Perseis, and in her night house, at the wake of Souls. The Crowd of Bone. Those stars ascendant at her mother's birth.

She saw the way.

Down and round she ran, still downward with the falling spindle of the stairs, that twirled the heavens to a clew of light. That other chain, the necklace that she wore, broke loose in running, whirled and scattered on the steps. She left it as it fell. As later, in the time to come, she would outrun the world of her begetting, scatter it behind like leaves: her glass would crack my lady's heavens, would unstring the stars.

Margaret ran on.

O

< Page 1 > | < Page 2 >

Trampoline
Greer Gilman interview