The Black Raven

‘They’ve not.’

‘Good.’ Werda rose, gathering her cloak around her. ‘If you do feel the slightest alarm, then come to me straightaway. I care not if it be in the middle of the night, young Niffa. You find yourself a lantern, Lael, and bring your daughter to my house. Do you understand me?’

‘I do,’ Lael said.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Niffa said. ‘Why would they come plaguing me?’

Werda merely looked at her with a twist to her mouth, as if she were wondering how Niffa could be so stupid. Lael sat like stone, but Niffa knew he was watching her. Her mouth went so dry she couldn’t force out one word.

‘Ah well,’ Werda said at last. ‘The time will come when you’ll not be able to deny the truth. When it does, you come to me, and we shall talk.’ She turned to Lael. ‘Master Lael, I wish to paint a warding on the outside of your door. I do trust you’ll not object.’

‘Of course not.’ Lael got up and bowed to her. ‘If there be aught I can do –’

‘Nah, nah, nah. Today we’ll do naught but prepare the door.’ Werda nodded at Athra and the bucket. ‘On the morrow we’ll be back to work the charm, once the whitewash does dry.’

‘Well and good, then. Will you be painting such on the entire town?’

‘We won’t.’ Werda paused for a significant look Niffa’s way. ‘Only on the public places, the council house and suchlike, and then on those few homes that I do deem vulnerable.’

They went out, and Lael closed the door and latched it against the wind while Niffa mended up the fire again. They could hear Werda through the door, instructing Athra, and the soft whisk of the brush. Until the holy woman and her apprentice had finished, no one said a word. At the sound of their leaving, Dera sat up in bed and ran her hands through her hair to push it back from her face.

‘You did well, lass,’ Lael said to Niffa.

Dera nodded her agreement. Niffa managed a brief smile and stood up.

‘I be weary again,’ Niffa said. ‘I’d best go lie down.’

‘Ai, my poor lass!’ Dera said. ‘It does seem that all you do is sleep.’

‘Mayhap. But this news – whose heart wouldn’t it weary?’

In the long weeks since Demet’s death, Niffa had indeed been hiding from her grief in the refuge of her dreams. Since childhood she had spent her nights in many-coloured kingdoms of sleep, had longed for sleep and dreams and treasured those she remembered upon waking. Now, however, the dreams had become more urgent than the doings of the day. While her parents talked in the great room, she crawled into her blankets, across the room from Kiel, who was snoring worse than the wind in the chimney. In their wooden pen the weasels chirped to her, but she lacked the strength to say a word to them.

As soon as she lay down, she felt as if she’d stepped into a boat and glided effortlessly out into a strange lake, huge and rippled with waves. She dreamt, as she often had, of Demet. Tonight she saw him standing on the far shore of the pale turquoise water. Her boat sailed steadily forward, but the shore just as steadily receded. At last she saw him turn and walk away into the white mists, and her dream faded.

In the middle of the night she suddenly woke. Kiel’s bed lay empty. She could guess that the noise he’d made leaving to go on watch had wakened her. She got up, went to the tiny window, and pulled back the thick hide that kept the wind out. By craning her neck she could just see over the rooftops of Citadel, falling away down to the lake. A sliver of moon hung over the town, and she realized that soon the moon would go into its dark time. It had been full when they’d laid Demet’s dead body out in the forest for the wild things. A half turn of the moon gone, she thought, and my grief rules me still.

All at once she heard someone come into the room. She turned, smiling, expecting to see Kiel, returned for some forgotten bit of his gear. No one was there. The cold draught from the window ran down her back and made her gasp, but she held the hide up nonetheless for the little light the moon gave her. In their pens the ferrets suddenly began rustling the straw. She could recognize Ambo’s chuckle of warning; as their hob he would defend his pack. Someone, something stood in the doorway across the room. She was sure of it, could see nothing – but Ambo must have smelled it, whatever it was. He began to hiss in little moist bursts of sound like a sucked-in breath. Her danger-warning grew stronger. His hissing turned into one long threat. She could hear him rushing around the pen and scattering straw as he searched for this unseen intruder.

Suddenly the presence vanished. Ambo stopped hissing. The other ferrets chuckled, then fell silent; she could hear them all moving in the straw again. The icy air from the window was making her shiver so badly that she let the oxhide fall. In the dark she made her way back to bed and lay down, huddling and shivering under the blankets. She knew that she should wake the house and run to Werda, but the cold had got into her bones, or so she felt, and she couldn’t make herself get out of the warm wrap of her bed.

‘The jeopard, it be gone.’ The voice was Werda’s, but Niffa heard it only in her mind. ‘You may sleep, child.’

Niffa sobbed once. Slowly the ferrets quieted. For a long while she lay shivering, sure that she would stay awake the entire night.

But suddenly she woke to morning and the sound of her mother and father talking in the room just beyond her door. She sat up and looked around. The ferrets lay piled on top of each other, asleep in the straw. Had she dreamt their ghostly visitor and Ambo’s hiss?

‘I do dream so many strange things,’ she muttered to herself.

But Werda’s voice, she knew, had been real, no matter how hard she tried to explain it away. She said nothing to her kinsfolk, but all that morning she noticed them watching her as she sat in her corner by the hearth with one or another of the ferrets in her lap.

Werda returned near mid-day, her arms full of bundles wrapped in rough sacking. Athra trailed after, carrying a big covered kettle. The kettle went by the fire to warm, whilst the bundles got set down carefully on the plank table.

‘The warding black, it does contain pitch,’ Werda said, pointing at the kettle. ‘In this cold weather, it does grow too stiff to use after a bit.’ She considered the bundles for a moment, then picked one up and handed it to Niffa. ‘This be for you. Set it at the head of your bed.’

The bundle contained what at first glance seemed to be an ordinary pottery bowl. When Niffa took it, she could see that in truth it was a pair of bowls, the outer stuck to the inner with more pitch. A thin black line of squiggly decoration covered the inner bowl, starting at the middle of the flat bottom, then winding in a tight spiral out to the rim.

‘It does confuse the spirits,’ Werda said. ‘That line of writing be a spell, and their curiosity does drive them into the bowl to read it, and then they slip between the bowls and cannot find their way out again. Once every some days Athra will fetch the trap away and leave another, that we may deal with the spirits in it once and for all.’

‘My thanks,’ Niffa said, stammering a little. ‘I do ken that I need such.’

‘Indeed?’ Werda looked at her with a twist to her mouth. ‘It gladdens my heart that you do.’

* * *

When the sun hung at the peak of the sky, Verrarc went to the stone council house, which stood on the north side of Citadel’s plaza. In front of it rose a line of stone columns, a reminder of the trees that had surrounded the meeting places of the Ancestors, back before any of the Rhiddaer folk lived in cities. With him Verrarc carried a lit candle in a tin lantern, though the day was bright through thin clouds. At the door he paused to examine the wardings painted on its white-washed surface. Against the fresh whitewash the thick black lines of Werda’s pitch and lampblack concoction stood out sharp and shiny. She had painted a design of two spiral mazes, one above the other, both amazingly intricate, to fascinate the spirits and keep them outside.

When Verrarc went inside, he closed the door carefully behind him. The stone room, with its high ceiling and rank of windows covered only by wooden shutters, was as cold as the open plaza. Earlier, Harl had on his orders laid a fire in the hearth and arranged the council’s round table and chairs in front of it. Verrarc knelt down and used his candle to get the tinder started. A few quick breaths and the kindling caught as well, but Verrarc kept his cloak wrapped around him. The fire would do little but take off the chill.

Chief Speaker Admi joined him in but a few moments, still wheezing from his climb up the steep path to the plaza. He waddled across the room and stood in front of the crackling fire.

‘Good morrow,’ Verrarc said.

Admi nodded and fumbled inside his cloak for a rag to mop his face. When Verrarc pulled out a chair, Admi sank into it with a little nod of thanks in his direction. Verrarc took a chair next to his.

‘Ah, there, my breath returns,’ Admi said finally. ‘Which does remind me. How fares your poor woman?’

‘Better, my thanks.’ Verrarc shuddered as the memory rose of Raena’s dead gaze. ‘Gwira did fear that fever would set in, but Raena, she’s been naught but sleepy. This sort of possession, Gwira did tell me, exhausts the poor soul who suffers it.’

‘No doubt.’ Admi’s fingers twitched in the warding sign. ‘It gladdens my heart that she came to no harm.’

‘My thanks. I do appreciate your nicety of feeling.’

‘Welcome, I’m sure.’

‘If only –’ Verrarc hesitated, but Admi’s eyes were all sympathy. ‘If only my cursed father had let me marry Raena, back before her father did betroth her elsewhere, none of this trouble would have fallen upon us.’

Admi nodded, considering.

‘True spoken,’ Admi said at last. ‘He did think her beneath you – ah. Here be Frie.’

The stocky blacksmith opened the door, then stood half in and half out while he looked over the warding.

‘No use in discussing your woman in front of him,’ Admi whispered.

‘I know,’ Verrarc said, and as softly. ‘It be his wife, she did always hate my Raena.’

Admi raised one eyebrow, then forced out a bland smile. Frie had shut the door; he strolled over, wrapped in a thick grey cloak with his ceremonial scarlet draped on top. His thick dark moustache glittered with frozen breath.