Hearts Blood - Juliet Marillier

Inevitably, there came a tap on the door.

“My lord?” Gearróg’s voice. “There’s food and drink here. Orna brought it over. Rioghan said I should wake you; you need something before you march out.”

Anluan sighed. “Thank you, Gearróg,” he called.

“I’m hungry,” I said, realizing it was rather a long time since that uncomfortable meal eaten by the roadside. “I’ll fetch it, shall I?”

“Not like that.” Anluan regarded me from the bed as I wriggled out to stand stark naked in the center of the room.“Put the shirt on, at least. Even so, you’ll shock that devoted guard of yours. He’s done a fine job, Caitrin. Rewarded your trust a hundredfold. I’ve asked him to stay with you when we go down the hill today.”

At the door, I took the tray from Gearróg. There was a smile on his blunt features. Orna had assembled a tasty meal for two, some kind of cold roast meat, slabs of dark bread, eggs cooked with herbs.A little jug held ale. It seemed to me the whole household must be awake, and doubtless the whole household had worked out what Anluan and I were doing alone together in his chamber, but I did not really care. The Tor was full of hope tonight. Hearts were high. I had found the treasure I had believed lost forever, and a little embarrassment was neither here nor there.

I poured two cups of ale, then passed one to Anluan, who was sitting up on the bed with the blanket across his lap. I was cold in the borrowed shirt. I moved to the storage chest, rummaging through the heap of garments for a tunic or cloak. Later I would see if any of the clothing I had left was still in the house.

A sound from behind me, like a faint cough or clearing of the throat; then a thud as something fell to the floor. I turned. Anluan had dropped the cup. He had both hands at his throat and his face was gray.

“What?” I was by his side, my heart pounding. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

He tried to speak, but he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. He gestured frantically, trying to convey some message to me, but I could not understand what he meant. As I reached to support him he fell back onto the bed, his eyes rolling up.

“Gearróg!” I screamed. Oh, God, it was true, it had happened after all. I had asked too much of him, drained his energy . . .There had been something wrong that he hadn’t told me, some illness . . .

Gearróg burst in, uttered an oath, then strode back outside to yell for help. As I fought for calm, laying a hand on Anluan’s chest to feel if his heart was still beating, putting my fingers to his neck in the place where the blood pulsed, the chamber filled up with people: Olcan, Eichri, Orna and Tomas. And just after them, Rioghan, who took one look and said, “Dear God, it’s Irial all over again.”

“What—” I began, outraged that anyone would believe Anluan, beloved Anluan who had held me and lain with me and made magic with me, might want to kill himself. Then I realized what he meant. The cup. The sudden collapse. The blue-gray pallor, the loss of speech, the labored breathing . . .“He’s been poisoned,” I said.“The ale—that was all he took—who prepared this tray?” Do something. Save him, now, now! screamed my inner voice, edging me closer to complete panic.

“Sionnach prepared the food,” Orna said. She kept glancing sideways, as if the close presence of uncanny folk still made her nervous.“Tomas got the ale for us and I brought the tray across to Gearróg. I was halfway back to the house when I heard you scream. It’s the same food and drink all of us had for supper, and nobody else is sick.”

A silence, though everyone was busy, Olcan supporting Anluan, Eichri at the door giving terse instructions to Gearróg, Orna dabbing a damp cloth to the stricken man’s brow. Anluan’s breathing was shallow and uneven. His skin was a corpse’s, all shadows.

“Did anyone else come into the kitchen when Sionnach was preparing the food?”

“Who else would be there in the middle of the night?” Orna frowned. “Oh, that strange creature did come by; the girl in the veil. Slipped in and out in that way she has, gives me the creeps. She was only there for a moment.”

A moment was long enough. Long enough to put a drop of poison in a jug. Long enough to kill a man.“There must be an antidote—we just have to work out what the poison is—who knows about herbs?”

“Only Magnus,” Rioghan said. “And he’s not here. Besides, if it’s the same thing that killed Irial, we never found out what it was. Nobody knew.”

I wanted to scream, to rend my garments and wail like a madwoman. I summoned the same chill purpose that had helped me once before, when I had walked into the house to confront Ita and Cillian. “Someone does know,” I said. “Find Muirne. Bring her here right now. This is her doing.” Aislinn was expert in herb lore. Aislinn knew all about potions. She loved Anluan, but perhaps she hated him too; hated him for loving me, hated him for changing everything on the hill. Maybe she hadn’t cared which of us drank first. “Hurry,” I said, but Rioghan was already gone.

“Caitrin.” Eichri spoke quietly. “If it’s the same thing Irial took, we don’t have very long. An hour, maybe. We can’t wait for Muirne, even if you’re right.” I heard in his voice that he could not believe Muirne would turn on the object of her lifelong devotion. “We must do something now or we’ll lose him while they’re still trying to find her.”

“Irial,” I said, as a new idea came to me. If Muirne was prepared to kill her beloved Anluan out of jealousy, might she not have done the same thing to Irial, to whom it seemed she had been as devoted a companion? “Irial would have known the antidote. He wrote notes on everything he discovered; he’ll have recorded every plant that grew on the Tor, I’m sure of it. It will be in one of those little books. He’ll have written down the symptoms, every detail—we need to find the poison first, and he should have noted the antidote underneath.” An hour. A little less than an hour.And I was the only one in the house who could read, apart from her. If there had been a better scholar among them, perhaps Irial could have been saved.

I took Anluan’s limp hand and brought it to my lips. He seemed already gone, but I had felt the blood still moving in his veins, weakly; I had felt the halting heartbeat. To release his hand and walk away was a little death. “I’m going to the library,” I said over my shoulder. “I need a safe lantern and a man to guard each door. If anyone finds Muirne, I want to see her straightaway. Gearróg, don’t let her anywhere near Anluan.”

I ran across the courtyard in my bare feet, with Gearróg’s cloak slung over the borrowed shirt.The news was spreading fast. By the time I reached Irial’s garden, folk of the host and folk from the settlement were gathering in huddled groups, faces somber. Cathaír came running into Irial’s garden before I entered the house, a lantern in one hand, a long dagger in the other.

“I’ll take this door, my lady. Broc’s on the other, with the dog. Let me open up for you.” He pushed the library door and it swung open; the inner bolt had not been fastened. “Where do you want this light?”

“On the shelf, here in the corner. If Muirne comes into the garden, call me straightaway. She has the answer, I’m certain of it.”

“Muirne?” Cathaír sounded less dubious than Eichri. “She did come in here a lot, while you were gone. Dusted shelves. Moved things about. Looked at the books.”

My heart was as cold as the grave. I swept an armful of Irial’s notebooks from their shelf and set them on a nearby table. Fumbling in my haste, I began to turn pages, not taking time to read anything fully, for there was no time—stay alive, please, please—but scanning them for words that might jump out at me: sudden onset, breathing, speech, gray-blue, poison, antidote . . .

One book, two books, three . . . There were poisons here, but not the one I wanted. There was blue-gray, but that was only the description of a leaf. My hands were sweating with fear; my body was clammy. My heart was knocking about in my breast. My stomach had tied itself in knots. Irial’s spidery writing blurred before my eyes. Five books, seven, nine . . .

“Any good?” Cathaír had stepped inside the door.When I glanced up, pain lanced through my neck. I had barely moved for . . . how long? Too long.

“I can’t find it!” My voice cracked. “I can’t find anything! And it’s not just finding it, it’s making the cure and giving it to him, and I’m running out of time!” I seized another book, started to flick through the pages, knew I was close to losing the ability to understand the words before me.

“My lady,” Cathaír said, his tone diffident, “they’re saying you think Muirne did this. Gave Lord Anluan the poison.”

“That’s what I think, yes.That she can read.That she knows plants and their uses.That she gave it to him, and that she’s hiding so I can’t make her tell me the antidote before he dies.” Herb of grace; comfrey; wormwood. Meadowsweet, mugwort, thyme. This was useless, useless. I should go back and hold him, cradle him. At least I would be there to say goodbye.

“It’s just that . . .” Cathaír hesitated.

“Go on.”

“If it’s her, Muirne, you might want to look in the stillroom—you know, that little place next to the garden wall. That’s where she goes at night. Irial used to do his work in there, his brewing and concoction. Since he died, nobody’s gone in; nobody but her.And she loves those little books, the ones you have there.Those are the ones she looks at when she comes to the library. Holds them against her heart as if they were children.”

I was out in Irial’s garden before he had finished speaking.The door to the low stone outbuilding was bolted, as always.That would be no barrier to Muirne. She could probably walk through walls. “I need you to open this for me,” I said. “Quickly. And I need you to help me search. It’ll be a small book like those others.” Irial’s sad margin notes had been numbered up to five hundred and ninety-four. But he had outlived his wife by two years, and that was more than seven hundred days. Unless he had stopped writing them, unless he had lost the will to write at all, somewhere there was another journal.

Cathaír set his boot to the stillroom door. The timbers parted, the chain fell loose, the bolt came tumbling out of the stone wall. I peered into the dim interior.“Hold up the lantern,” I said, stepping inside.There was a wrong feeling about the place, something I could not quite identify. I had expected old, musty things, tools stored and forgotten or the crumbling remnants of Irial’s long-ago botanical work. But the stillroom was perfectly tidy. A millet broom stood in a corner; a duster hung on a wall. Candles were ranked on a shelf. There was a workbench with crucibles and jars, some holding objects I could not identify.A mortar and pestle stood beside a rack of knives and other implements that gleamed darkly in the lantern light. Bunches of herbs hung from the roof. At one end of the immaculate room was a pallet, and on it lay a small lidded box.

No books in sight. “She must have it here somewhere,” I muttered. “Look everywhere, Cathaír. It’s here, I know it. Here but hidden.” I grabbed the blanket that lay bunched at the end of the pallet, the only untidy note in the whole room. I shook it out; nothing there. I reached down the back of the bed. Nothing at all. I crouched to look underneath, while Cathaír worked his way along the shelves, picking things up and setting them down. A bundle of rags lay on the floor, under the bed; I drew them out. Familiar somehow, but what were they?

“Baby!” The little voice spoke from the doorway, and a moment later the ghost girl was crouched beside me, gathering up the pathetic heap, trying to hold the pieces together, pieces that were white, like Róise’s face, and violet, like the little veil I had made to cover the doll’s ruined hair, and brown, like the skirt that had been shredded and destroyed in the quiet of my bedchamber. Threads of woollen hair; tattered fragments of a smiling mouth embroidered with love.The child stood clutching her violated treasure to her breast. “All right now, baby,” she whispered.

Cathaír squatted down beside the girl, and while his eyes were as wild and shifting as always, there was something gentle in his manner. “Little sister,” he said, “have you come in here before?”

“Mm,” she murmured, but did not look at him. Her head was bent over her ruined baby.

“Is there a book here?” the young warrior asked.“Does the lady in the veil have a special book hidden away?”

A silence.

“Please,” I said, trying to keep my voice as calm and kindly as Cathaír’s, though a scream was welling up in me. “If you know where it is, please show us.”

A little hand rose; a finger pointed to the box on the bed. It was much too small to hold a book, even a tiny one, and my heart sank anew, but I lifted it and unfastened the catch. I opened the lid to see my mother’s embroidered kerchief, folded precisely. Under this was a strange assortment of little items: a strip of bright weaving in shades of violet and purple; a decorative buckle from a lady’s shoe; a striking cloak-fastener of silver and amber. She’s kept a trophy from each of us, I thought. From each of those she hated and thought to kill. From each who took a beloved chieftain from her.

“What’s that at the bottom?” Cathaír asked.

“It’s a key.” A thin thread of hope at last. “What does this open?”

The child shrank into herself, perhaps frightened by my desperation.

“Please,” I said more quietly.“Please help me. Lord Anluan is very sick; we have to save him. Do you know what the key is for?” I lifted the embroidered kerchief and spread it out on the bed. “You can put the baby in this and wrap her up safely.”

The child placed her pile of scraps in the middle of the kerchief and watched while I tied the corners together, two and two, making a neat bundle. “The mirror,” she murmured.

“Mirror?” There was an odd note in Cathaír’s voice, and when I looked up I saw him put a hand to his brow as if in pain. “What mirror?”

Abruptly, the girl began to cry. “My head hurts,” she whispered, picking up the kerchief bundle and holding it against her breast.

Not this; not now, oh please . . . “Hold fast, Cathaír,” I said. “I need you. We must find this book.” From outside, in the garden, came sounds of folk cursing, wailing, shouting.

The young warrior staggered, thrust out a hand, gripped the bench and straightened. He pursed his lips and whistled a few desperate notes: Stand up and fight . . . men of the hill . . .

“That mirror,” sobbed the ghost child, and pointed.

It was old, corroded, revealing nothing at all save the crusted debris of long neglect. It stood against the wall at the back of the workbench, screened by a row of jars. As I moved them aside their contents stirred in an unsettling semblance of life. I lifted the ancient mirror away and there, behind it, was a wooden hatch with a keyhole.