Full Circle (21 page)

“He’s doing whatever can be done.”

“So are we all,” Vi replied.

“Pray it’s enough,” Reed said, and he shivered and looked up to the rafters of the inn, as though he expected to see something
there, a demon, perhaps. He began to eat again, but his face was grave, as though he were preoccupied with more than the food.

No, Leof didn’t think they would try to run. Whatever the Lake had in mind, she was buying time for the people of Baluchston,
and the councillors were the price.

T
HERE’S NO
saying what will happen next. That’s what I learnt, that summer, that winter, watching her change. Losing her. They said
at first that it was madness, wandering wits, but I knew better.

The gods talk to us but we don’t see them. What if we could? What if
she
could, my Eaba? The first time, she looked up from the table where she was stringing beans for dinner, and her face lit up,
as though she had seen a friend come in. I turned from punching a pattern into a belt length, but there was no one there.
I raised my eyebrows at her, but she just smiled.

Well, Eaba and I have managed to share the same workspace for thirty years by keeping our noses out of each other’s business.
So I shrugged, although I puzzled over it later, in bed, her hand resting on my chest as it always did.

Then our children started noticing things. We’ve got eight, some grown and some half-grown and some still running about bare-legged.
Two are married, though not the eldest boy, Wyst, and he was the one to say something.

“What are you looking at, Mam?” he asked one day, when she was smiling into the branches of the plum tree, though the blossom
had long since disappeared and the fruit hadn’t swelled yet.

“Why, that,” Eaba answered, waving her hand to the sky as though it was obvious. But when we looked, we didn’t see anything.

She picked her washing off the rosemary bushes and went inside, and Wyst and I stared at each other, then shrugged. Women!
I think we both thought.

But it niggled at me and that night in bed I asked her, “What did you see in the plum tree, love?”

She laughed at me. “Don’t try that on me, husband,” she said, as though I were trying to trick her. “As if you didn’t see
it!”

“I didn’t see anything except the tree,” I said.

“No?” she replied, unconvinced, and settled down to sleep.

That shook me. What had she seen so clear that neither Wyst nor I could see? I wondered if it might be something to do with
her being a woman, after all.
Could
they see things we couldn’t? Nothing about women would surprise me, not after thirty years with Eaba.

The next time she got that look, she was combing the winter wool from her favourite nanny out in the goat shed, and I asked
her straight out, “What are you looking at? And don’t say ‘that’! I can’t see anything here except the shed and the goats.”

Her face clouded over and she looked worried. She peered up again into the rafters — it was always up she looked, never down,
when she had that expression.

“You don’t see it?” she asked slowly.

I shook my head. Her eyes almost disappeared, she frowned so much. Then she looked up again.

“Why can’t he see you?” she asked, and cocked her head as if listening to an answer. She wasn’t pleased by it, whatever it
was. Her lip stuck out in that stubborn way I knew so well, and she muttered, “That’s no answer!”

She turned to me, still frowning, and asked, “I suppose you couldn’t
hear
that, either?”

“No. I heard nothing.”

She sighed. “It says that you don’t have the right kind of eyes, but what sort of answer is that? It told me last week that
I’ve only just got the right kind myself. Something to do with the veils.”

Ah, I thought. Her eyes
had
been changing lately, growing the milky veils that had blinded her mother and her grandmother before her. She’d been resigned
to it, starting to learn the house by touch as well as sight. Perhaps this — whatever it was — was just a missight, so to
speak, because her eyes weren’t working properly.

But she heard this thing as well.

“What’s
it
?” I asked.

She opened her mouth as though to explain, and then shut it. She peered upwards, then shook her head.

“I don’t know how to describe it,” she said, tapping the wool comb on her knee in frustration. “The words aren’t the right
words…”

“Just give me an idea.”

She paused, searching her mind, but shrugged helplessly.

“Is it alive?” I asked.

“Oh, yes!” she said.

“Is it human?”

“Oh, no!”

“A spirit?”

She shook her head. “Not like the water sprites, or the wind wraiths… I don’t rightly know what it looks like.”

“Well, what colour is it?”

She went very still, as though realising something for the first time.

“I don’t know…” She looked up again, then slumped back on her stool. “Oh. It’s gone. I don’t think it likes being talked
about.”

“But —”

“It
is
beautiful,” she said eagerly. “It’s
very
beautiful. Like… like joy would be if it had a shape.”

“But what shape?” I said, a bit loudly, frustrated myself. She looked hurt.

“I can’t say. Can’t, husband, not won’t. I don’t have the words.”

After that, she didn’t want to talk about it, but whatever the thing was, it came more and more often. The children all noticed,
first, and then the villagers.

The little ones were convinced it was a wish sprite, like the ones in their stories. The older ones were worried, but no child
likes to think their mother is going mad, so they didn’t actually say it aloud.

We prayed, Wyst and I, at the black rock altar, but the gods have never spoken to anyone in our family, and they didn’t now.
When the villagers started muttering about wandering wits, I decided to go find a stonecaster.

Eaba was lighthearted. “It’s like a holiday,” she giggled, as she did when we were courting, and tucked her hand through my
arm and snuggled close, and it was suddenly a good day, even if my worry for her was tugging at my mind.

She didn’t look away from me the whole walk, and it was only then I saw that what I liked least about this
it
was how Eaba’s face lit up when she saw it; the way she used to light up when she looked at me, or our babies. It was a kind
of love she felt, not just delight, and I resented it hot and fierce once I realised it.

The stonecaster was a woman named Sylvie, a woman a few years younger than us, but not so young that I felt she wouldn’t understand.

“You ask,” Eaba said when we got there. “You’re the one as wants to understand.” And that was another annoyance. Eaba never
seemed to care what the villagers were saying. Didn’t even seem to be curious about this
it
— as though the presence of it answered all her questions, even when she couldn’t tell anyone else what it was.

Well, I thought, I’m not going to beat around the bush. I spat in my palm and clasped hands with the stonecaster. “Is it real?”
I asked.

She blinked in surprise and felt in her pouch for the stones. Brought them up, cast them.

They looked just like ordinary stones to me. Four landed face-up, with their marks showing. The other, a dark rock, face-down.

“New beginnings, Joy, Family, Spirit, face-up,” she said, touching them lightly. Then she put her fingertip on the dark stone.
“Chaos,” she said quietly, and seemed to listen. Then she sat back and shook her hand as if her finger had been bitten. “Well,”
she said. “Whatever it is, it’s real enough.” She looked at the stones again, then sighed. “They’re not saying much. There
is some kind of spirit or sprite come to you, but what kind it is I cannot say. It brings joy.”

“Yes!” Eaba said. “Only joy.”

Sylvie looked her straight in her milky eyes. “For you. It brings joy for you. But for others it brings chaos, upheaval. A
change in everything they have known or believed.”

Eaba sat back on her haunches, brow puckered. “But why?” she asked. “What does it matter to them?”

“Because you love it more than you love us!” I burst out. “You’d rather stare up at it than do anything —
anything
— else.”

She blinked and stared at me with more attention than she’d given me for a month. For a moment I could see through the veils
in her eyes to the woman I loved. But her eyes filled with tears, and I lost her.

“I’m going blind, husband,” she said softly. “I have loved you for thirty years, and I will love you until the day I die.
But in all the world, it’s the only thing that is bright to me. Would you take that light away from me?”

What could I say? I loved her. Love her.

I took her home and told the children and the neighbours what the stonecaster had said. I think some of the neighbours didn’t
believe me. I didn’t care. I cared for her and I did her chores when she was too busy staring at the sky to notice what needed
doing. She stared more and more, longer and longer, as though the sight was food and drink to her. I became father and mother,
both, to our children and was relieved when they grew old enough to care for themselves and to help care for her.

I loved her. Love her. But when Vi told me the plan to stymie the warlord, and that like as not he’d take all of us councillors
as hostage if we went to the square and defied him, I went anyway.

I’d like to think she noticed that I was gone.

H
ALFWAY DOWN
the tumbled mountainside, they saw people gathering below, drawn by the thunder of the breaking rocks. Young men, the fastest
runners, arrived first. Then children, then the adult villagers, more stolidly, but betraying in their bodies a mixture of
fascination and fear. Not warlord’s men, thank the gods. But dangerous for all that. There wasn’t a dark head among them.

Acton waved cheerfully to them and Bramble suppressed a smile. Medric was excited and rather proud, Bramble thought, to be
coming out of the mountain with Acton. She hoped he was right not to be afraid.

Ash looked worried, but with a touch of anticipation. “See if he can talk his way out of being a ghost,” he muttered to Bramble.

“You talk for me, Baluch,” Acton said, before they reached the waiting group.

“What do I say?” Baluch asked, a little out of breath. He was having more trouble climbing down than they were, Bramble thought,
and she remembered the young Baluch, climbing a mountainside, springing from boat to shore, running.

“Tell the truth!” Acton said, his face surprised. “Tell them who I am and that I’ve come to defeat the enchanter.”

The villagers were whispering to each other, pointing at Acton. Some carried scythes, sickles or hoes as weapons.

They halted a few feet above the crowd, and Baluch announced, in that clear, singer’s voice: “People of the Domains, Acton
has returned to you to lead you in victory against the enchanter!”

The suspicious faces cleared immediately, and they cheered. It astonished Bramble.

“It’s the legend from the songs,” Ash said. “The last thing he said as he rode away was, ‘I’ll be back before you need me.’
In their hearts, they believed it, so they believe him, now.”

Bramble laughed. “If they only knew!”

Acton sprang down from the rock and the villagers crowded around him. They wanted to touch him, despite the graveyard chill,
and he let them, as if understanding the need to make sure he was real. He smiled, but it wasn’t his mischievous smile, it
was the smile of the commander, trustworthy and responsible and strong. She realised that it wasn’t a false face. He just
shifted as the need arose, because he could be whatever people needed. Maybe that’s what he had always done — served other
people’s needs. The only thing he’d ever wanted, really wanted, for himself was to go to sea, and he’d never had the chance.
That was what Tern, the enchanter of old Turvite, had done to him. She had cursed him: he would never have what he truly wanted.

The crowd grew more excited. “Acton! Acton!” they called.

Bramble was reminded of other scenes, battles, where Acton’s warriors had done the same thing just before they killed. She
hoped it wasn’t a portent for the future. She drew Ash aside. “You gave him the perfect introduction. A mountain bursts apart,
and Acton appears! The stuff of legend.”

Ash scowled. “We’re wasting time.”

Acton put up a hand and the villagers drew back a little. He turned to Baluch and pointed to his own throat.

Baluch nodded. “Acton has returned from the grave for you, and he speaks with the voice of the dead. Be prepared. It is a
harsh voice, but it is the voice of strength from the darkness beyond death.”

The smith took a step forward. The village voice, may be.

Acton nodded gravely to him and said, “Where are your Travellers?”

It was the last thing Bramble had expected. Ash was as surprised as she was.

Baluch translated and the smith, a curly headed blond with hazel eyes, stared at them all, astonished. “Travellers?” he asked,
looking around as if to find some. “Most escaped, my lord.”

“Who from?” Acton said sharply. Again, Baluch translated.

“The warlord’s men came,” the smith replied. “And took a few of them. The others ran.”

“Find them,” Acton commanded. “They are your only defence.”

Baluch translated again, but this time the smith and his people were mutinous. “Travellers? What good are they?” He stared
with narrowed eyes at Bramble and Ash, and she looked impassively back at him. She had no idea what Acton was planning. Medric
moved slightly in front of her.

“The enchanter seeks to kill all of my blood,” Acton declared. “Only Travellers, standing shoulder to shoulder with you, can
defy him.”

“He’s mad,” Ash whispered, and Bramble could see the same thought in the smith’s eyes.

“No,” she said slowly. “He’s right. The enchanter may think he’s doing what Travellers want. If they challenge him —”