A Bright and Terrible Sword Read online

  Also by Anna Kendall from Indigo:

  Crossing Over

  Dark Mist Rising

  Book Three of the Soulvine Moor Chronicles

  Anna Kendall

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Also by Anna Kendall

  Copyright

  1

  I watched the spider inch across its web towards the tiny mouse.

  Neither should have existed, not this early in the spring, and not inside the cottage. Not even in such a mountain cottage as this one, snugly built but seldom swept and smelly with droppings from the pig that the children brought inside on cold nights. But the cottage, although filthy, was warm. Spiders had hatched, baby mice had been born, and overnight this small life-and-death struggle had begun in the dim chimney-corner where I lay, still weak from my illness, on a pallet of dirty straw.

  I had lain here for over a month, dependent on the good will of the cottagers who took me in. Although perhaps ‘good will’ were not the right words. Without this family of John the Small (he had no other name), I would have died. And with this family—

  ‘One Hand!’ shouted Bets, the oldest girl, hurling herself down the ladder from the loft. They all shouted, all the time. She raced towards me.

  ‘Hush your mouth!’ cried Mrs John, coming from the bedroom, which was the only other room the cottage possessed. ‘You’ll wake him!’

  ‘He’s awake!’ screamed Bets, jumping on top of me. It hurt, even though she weighed so little. Every move of my body still hurt.

  ‘Get off!’ yelled Mrs John, plucking her daughter up by her neck as if Bets were one of her scrawny chickens. ‘Go get the wood!’

  ‘That be Ned’s labour!’ Bets cried, suddenly all wounded injustice. She had not noticed the spider web.

  ‘Do it!’ Mrs John roared. She gave Bets a shove towards the door. To me she said nothing, as always.

  Inches from my face, in the dim corner, the spider had reached its prey. The mouse was less than two inches long, although it had grown old enough to venture from its mother’s nest in the wall and be caught by the sticky strong threads closest to the floor. The spider was huge, half the size of my thumb. As Mrs John lit a rushlight and stuck it into the holder on the wall, the spider’s hairy body glittered a dark red.

  ‘I be hungry!’ yelled Ned, shooting down the ladder. The other three children followed. From the bedroom the baby wailed.

  ‘Then fetch the water for gruel!’ Mrs John bawled, ‘or none of ye eat! John! Get up! Get up now!’

  Robbie loomed over my pallet. ‘Are ye still sick then, One Hand? Are ye dying?’

  ‘Leave the lad be!’ Mrs John shouted. ‘Water! Now!’

  ‘That be Bets’s labour!’

  Mrs John slapped both boys and shoved them to the door, all the while crying towards the bedroom, ‘Get up! Get up, ye lazy no-good!’ The baby screamed. The two smallest children had just made it laboriously down the ladder, although Jemima fell the last three rungs, lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, and screeched.

  The red spider hung with four legs in its web and four on the struggling mouse. Its fangs closed on the mouse’s skin.

  John the Small slouched from the bedroom, scowling at his wife. ‘Will ye not let a man rest, woman?’ he bellowed, reached inside his half-tied trousers, and scratched his privates.

  I had no idea why these people had saved my life. John the Small had found me collapsed in the snow on a track that led down the western mountains towards The Queendom. I had shivered and raved with illness. Unable to lift me – he was barely four feet tall – he had brought his wife and two oldest sons, of nine and ten, and the four of them had dragged me inside, dumped me on the hearthside pallet, and left me there for a month. It was an incomprehensible act of kindness towards a stranger, for although the season was wrong for plague, I might have carried any number of other diseases that could have killed them all. Incomprehensible, too, as since bringing me inside, husband and wife had almost completely ignored me. Neither ever addressed me. The children brought me food when they remembered. John and Mrs John treated me as if I were part of the pallet itself, and of far less interest than the pig. I had not washed in a month. I was not alone in that, and smelled no worse than the others.

  The mouse gave a last desperate struggle to free itself. The spider hung on. The web trembled and its bottom strands tore.

  ‘It be warm out!’ Bets cried, coming back inside with an armload of wood. She dropped it onto the floor, where it clattered and rolled. ‘Spring!’

  ‘And the field not even turned!’ Mrs John yelled, rounding on her husband. ‘Ye’ll never get the planting done in time!’

  ‘Let me be, woman!’

  ‘It be spring!’ Ned bellowed, sloshing inside with the bucket of water. The bucket leaked. A trail of water spread across the floor as Mrs John lugged the bucket to the hearth and dumped the water into the kettle.

  The mouse went still. Its struggles had further torn the web, and now only a single strand connected the spider to the web above. It began spinning more threads to bind the mouse to the web.

  ‘Well, bring the wood to the fire, girl!’ Mrs John yelled at Bets. ‘Be ye a half-wit? Jemima, stop that wailing or I’ll give ye something to wail about!’

  Jemima did not stop wailing. The baby bawled in the bedroom. The pig came in the open door and the three older children raced after it, yelling.

  I sat up. It was the first time in a month, it took me a long time, and it made my head spin. But from this position, I could reach the web. Slowly I put out one finger on my one hand until it touched the centre of the web. The spider silk felt sticky, but strong. My touch did not break it, not even when I pushed on the interwoven strands.

  The family sat or stood – there were not enough chairs – around the wooden table, slurping gruel and screaming at each other. However, my unaccustomed movement attracted attention. Mrs John looked right at me. Never before had she addressed me directly, so it felt almost shocking when she did.

  ‘Ye call out in yer sleep, One Hand.’

  I went still. My old fault, and the cause of so much grief in my life.

  ‘Look – there be a web!’ Robbie shouted.

  Mrs John and I stared at each other.

  ‘It hold a spider!’ Bets screamed.

  ‘Ye always call the same name,’ Mrs John said.

  ‘Get it!’ Ned bawled. The two boys leaped from the table and scrambled over me to the wall.

  ‘Look – it hold a mouse!’

  ‘Kill it!’

  Robbie’s arm sliced through the web. It gave way. Ned, bouncing painfully across my legs, grabbed a stick of wood and smashed it down on spider and mouse alike. I held my breath. The country folk, unlike those of the palace, are close enough to death to believe in the old ways. If in my sleep I had blurted out the words hisaf or Soulvine Moor …

  Mrs John said, ‘W
ho be Katharine?’

  ‘Got it!’ Ned bawled, and the web hung in tatters.

  ‘Katharine’, not ‘Maggie’. I had called not the name that filled my thoughts as I lay on the pallet week after week, but the name I tried nightly to forget. My mother’s name, my sister’s name. The name that used to invade and terrorize my dreams and did so no longer. Just as I no longer crossed over to the Country of the Dead. Whatever was happening there, my part was to stay away. Mother Chilton and her witch apprentice, Alysse, had made that very clear to me. I was to stay out of the war they waged with Soulvine Moor and, instead, go home to Maggie and my unborn child.

  There was nothing I wanted more. Maggie, with her fair curls straggling over her forehead, her tart competence, her love for me that had been undeserved and unrequited for so long. I yearned to go back to Maggie, living in Tanwell with her sister as she awaited the birth of our son.

  And I had lost so much time already! Mountain travel in winter had proved much harder than I had expected, especially with one hand. Time and again I had been forced to hole up at some remote farm or rough inn while snow storms raged outside. I would have died without Mother Chilton’s money to buy such sanctuary. Then, nearly at the base of the jagged western mountains and nearly into spring, what did I do but fall ill and into the wild household of John the Small.

  Maggie must, by now, be but a few months away from her confinement. It had been summer when I lay with her on that fragrant hillside, amid the scents of wildflowers and the heavy drone of bees.

  I did not answer Mrs John about the name ‘Katharine’, and a moment later her attention flew to Ned and Robbie, who were tossing the dead baby mouse back and forth across the table. ‘Get that dung out of here – what ails ye?’ she bawled. ‘Yer daft, the pair of ye! Out! Out!’

  The boys fled, shouting, outside. The morning chaos continued. Through the open door came sunshine and the intoxicating scent of sweet warm air. It was indeed spring. I must recover completely from my illness, must become strong enough for travelling, must return to Maggie. If, after all I had done, she would still have me.

  Bets cried, ‘Look! One Hand is standing up!’

  ‘I—’

  She barrelled across the room, jumped on me, and knocked me back down.

  I persisted. Day after day I forced myself to stand, to walk, to strengthen my withered muscles. When I could, I went into the woods and gathered bird eggs, dug roots, found last autumn’s nuts, brought back firewood – anything to help repay Mrs John’s rough kindness. I had money left, sewn into a secret pocket of my cloak, but I didn’t offer any, sure in the knowledge that this family would simply take it all. Mrs John took my contributions to her household without comment. But the day Robbie tried to knock me over and I swatted him away with my one good hand, remaining on my feet, she smiled.

  And it was so good to be out of that filthy cottage! Birds sang from every branch in the woods. Crocuses and hyacinths bloomed in the sun, lilies of the valley in the shade. One day I bathed in a forest pool, longing for Joan Campford’s strong yellow soap. I washed my clothes as best as I could. With the little shaving knife in my boot I shaved off my tangled beard and cut my hair. Then I lay naked under the strong sun while my clothes dried and, weary from such unaccustomed exertion, fell asleep.

  And dreamed.

  Darkness—

  Cold—

  Dirt choking my mouth—

  Worms in my eyes—

  Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

  I was dreaming about crossing over. But the dream crossing brought me not to the Country of the Dead, which I had promised never to visit again, but rather to John the Small’s disorderly cottage. Mrs John sat at the table, shelling nuts I had brought her, popping nut meat into little Jemima’s mouth. The baby slept in its ramshackle cradle. For once, the cottage was quiet.

  All at once, another presence entered the dream, although not the cottage. A shadowy presence … No, not even that. A grey whisper, somewhere between a scent and a sound … It was vague but unpleasant. Perhaps Mrs Johns felt it, too. For in the dream she stopped shelling nuts, her hand suspended in the air, holding a broken black walnut, and her eyes stared. At me, even though I was not in the cottage.

  A long moment spun itself out.

  Then I woke beside the forest pool and the sun had gone behind a cloud, leaving me shivering and cold.

  I dressed in my still damp clothes. The dream had been so mild compared to those I once dreamed, so why did it leave me uneasy? That unpleasant whisper in my mind … no, not even a whisper, merely a vague stirring of … what? A faint animal scent, a nearly inaudible sound. Trivial things, nothing to make me afraid. Not I, Roger Kilbourne, who had caused a battle to be fought and a savage lord to die and a queen to burn. Who had killed the sister who once haunted his dreams.

  Late afternoon shadows, long and deep, slanted over the cottage when I returned. Robbie, Ned and Bets screamed from atop the roof, where they played some game that threatened to topple them all into broken bones. Matt, too little to climb to the roof, had to remain below and bellowed at this foul injustice.

  Inside was just as noisy. John the Small had not returned from wherever he’d gone, but Jemima cried and pulled at her mother’s skirts and the baby wailed. In the middle of this din, Mrs John was a single point of stillness. Not a muscle of her face or body moved as she faced me across her dirty table. Her grey hair straggled around her face. Fear filmed her eyes.

  ‘Ye maun go now.’

  ‘What?’ I said, inanely.

  ‘Ye maun go.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Ye did not say what ye be. Now you maun go.’

  What ye be. She could have meant anything. A hisaf. A murderer. The former palace fool. Of all the things I could have said, I blurted, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Go now.’ And then, ‘I have me bairns to think of.’

  ‘I’m … I’m no threat to your children, mistress.’

  ‘Go.’

  She was implacable. She handed me a packet: my waterbag, Tom Jenkins’ two knives, what smelled like food wrapped in leaves. And all the while her eyes held mine and I saw in them not only resolution but fear. It was the fear that decided me. These people, however crude and slovenly, had saved my life. I could not bring fear to them, not even when I believed there was nothing to fear. I took the packet and left.

  But at the doorway I turned to try one last time. I must know. I said, ‘Was it … did you … did you happen to fall asleep this afternoon, mistress? To … to dream?’

  ‘Go now.’

  I went. From the roof top Bets, giggling, threw a pebble at me. This struck Robbie and Ned as a great idea and they scrambled to dig more stones from the thatch. There were none so they threw the thatch itself, and it was in a hail of straw that I left the cottage and set my feet upon the track down to the valley below.

  2

  In truth I was not sorry to go. It seemed to me that I was strong enough now for the journey or, if not, would soon become so. I had youth on my side; in another two months I would turn eighteen. And the weather had turned. When I tired, I could build a fire and stop for the night.

  Exhaustion came earlier than I thought, before the thin track from the cottage had even joined a proper road. Sitting before my fire, eating the hard bread and harder roots that Mrs John had sent with me, I thought about her fear. The country people, not sophisticated enough to have abandoned the old ways, often believed in soul arts and hisafs. But that did not mean that they could recognize them. The only ones I knew of who could do that were women with talent in the soul arts themselves. Sometimes they didn’t even know they possessed such untutored talent, like Princess Stephanie. Sometimes they knew they did not but longed for it, like Queen Caroline. Sometimes they made of their talent a weapon to fight the war against Soulvine Moor, like Mother Chilton. The web of these women stretched across The Queendom, the Unclaimed Lands, Soulvine Moor itself. And Mrs John must be one of them, in so
me minor and untaught way. She had recognized me as a hisaf.

  But only after I had dreamed of crossing over. It was through dreams that my sister Katharine, now more than merely dead, had terrorized little Stephanie and me. Through dreams Katharine had even killed Stephanie’s attendants. But my sister was gone. And I would never cross over again.

  I banked my fire and put Mrs John from my mind. For me, the battle against Soulvine Moor was over. I was journeying to Maggie. Again and again I pictured my arrival in Tanwell. I would tell Maggie I loved her, that I had been a fool not to know it sooner. She would cry, perhaps, and I would hold her and kiss her fair curls and lay my hand on the bulge of her belly that was my son. Then, afterwards …

  I fell asleep smiling, happy to breathe in the sweet night air instead of the fetid cottage. I was journeying to Maggie.

  However, the journeying was harder than I expected. I had not yet got back my full strength. The next day I had nothing to eat but some early strawberries. At the first farmhouse I came to, one cleaner and more prosperous than John the Small’s, I was able to buy some food and rest in the barn. So I continued for a few more days, and I felt my body return to itself.

  But then the weather changed. Cold rain woke me before dawn. With sleep no longer possible, I set out walking, grumpy and shivering. The sun had risen unseen behind grey clouds when I came, sodden and weary, to the first town of The Queendom that I had encountered since last autumn. The village lay at the base of a series of steep hills, with a small river on one side. Abruptly the road to the east had broadened from a rutted track to a hard-packed surface. Cottages appeared like those in prosperous market towns, with fenced kitchen gardens and well-tended sheep pens and scrubbed front doors. On the river was a mill. An inn, the Blue Horse, stood on the main road.

  But the road was filled with screaming people.

  I gaped, confused, as a young man rushed from one cottage, an old woman from another. The man dashed through the pelting rain and pounded on the door of another dwelling, but the woman stopped in the middle of the road and just stood there, as if too bewildered to move. I went up to her and touched her shoulder. She screamed and leaped away from me. Two of the other people pouring into the street rushed up and a man seized me.