Meri (30 page)

She wished Osraed Bevol was here now so she could ask him, “Did
I try your patience, Master?”

Nonsense. She knew the answer to that. Of course she did,
and often. The way she would always ask the same question five times in
different ways as if she expected a different answer each time, the way she
insisted on reading every word of every reference book herself—as if she didn’t
trust the accounts of her Master or teachers. Her stubbornness, her lack of
unquestioning obedience—that would have tried anyone’s patience.

Well, she had tried to remedy that. Tried so very hard,
because it was disobedience, after all, that had put her in Bevol’s care.

“Go straight home, Meredydd.” She heard the words as clearly
as if her mother stood before her and spoke them. Dear God, she wished her
mother
could
stand before her—could say
anything
to her.

She shivered and glanced about. She could see no more than
four or five feet in any direction. The ocean fog was in, lying woolen upon the
shivering sand. She could almost make her mother appear, an angel in pale blue
amid the silver-grey of the mist. She was beautiful in pale blue. It was her
favorite color. It favored her eyes. Meredydd’s eyes were dark like her father’s—nearly
the burgundy of wine. She was always torn between pride at that and longing
that they be like her mother’s—pale and clear and sweet.

“Go straight home, Meredydd.” The blue-dress angel was firm,
but smiling. She stood in the bright sun of the Cirke-yard, a light shawl about
her shoulders, her hair ruddy-gold. “There’ll be dumplings for dinner.”

“Yes, marmie,” Meredydd said, but she would disobey. She
knew she would disobey even as she lifted her face for her mother’s kiss and
skipped away into the mellow summer afternoon.

In what had she failed?

She had failed to obey. She had failed to be there when the
killers came. Her very existence spoke more eloquently of failure than any
words she could say.

“Yes, marmie.”

Chilled to the marrow, small and shrinking, Meredydd hugged
herself for warmth.
And then
, she thought.
And then I disobeyed Osraed Bevol
.

How often had she gone there—to Lagan—when she knew he didn’t
wish her to? How long had she spent there raking through ashes, burrowing under
rubble, looking for a clue? How long had she spent in Nairne, at Cirke,
everywhere she went, ears pricked like a hearth cat’s for a breath of the
murderers’ names?

And she had failed to discover
that until—

Why did you not tell me before
?
she asked, and all the reasons spoke sharply, clearly. She could even
understand them.

Wyth Arundel had planted the suspicion in her mind, Osraed
Bevol had only confirmed it—or nearly so. That he had confirmed it now—was that
merely a coincidence, or was it one more test of her worthiness, one more test
she was failing? She could not be the forgiving, long-suffering saint she
wanted to be—not with this horrible, dark anger dwelling inside her. It cast
its long shadow over the silver-bright mist, turning it to dark gloom.

She conjured a child’s memory of Rowan Arundel, towering
(all men are giants to a little girl), big-boned and broad. Wyth took more
after his mother. He’d visited the forge, of course; everyone about Nairne
visited her father’s forge. It was a fine, grand forge and Meredydd wished she’d
been a boy so she might be expected to grow up and work it at her father’s
side.

But she was a girl. Had her father ever regretted that? If
he had, he never let it show. He let her watch him as he hammered and shaped
the fire-bright iron into horse shoes or wheel rims or ornate, decorative
shapes. He would even give her little tasks to do for him—ferrying bits of
iron, holding his files when he did a shoeing. He’d done some andirons and a
fender for Arundel, she recalled.

She’d had occasion to be in the forge when Rowan Arundel
came there. Hadn’t there been a time when she might have divined the shape
events would take? Hadn’t there been a certain burden between the
Smythe-a-Lagan and the Eiric of Arundel—something of more import than an
argument over the price of andirons?

o0o

“Are you certain,” asked Arundel, “that’s your final word?

It could be worth a fair piece to you.”

His back was to the door of the forge; he did not see her
there with her little bucket of apple peelings (a favor for her father’s
four-legged clients).

“I know what it’s worth,” said Father. “Tha’s naught to me.
But you may have th’easement.”

Arundel’s neck grew bright red and Meredydd wondered what “easement”
was that it made him so fired.

“That’s charity,” he said.

“’Tis a virtue worth cultivating,” Father returned and smote
the iron bar he worked a stiff blow. Sparks leapt.

Meredydd loved the sound of that—metal on metal. It was
music to her. But not so, apparently to Eiric Rowan Arundel, who made a
forceful, futile gesture with one great arm and said, “Is that your last word,
smythe?”

Her father looked up then, and blinked at his visitor
through the sweat that covered his face in a glistening mask. His cheeks were
ruddy, glowing, near bright as his forge. “Aye. And take it as tha’ this time,
Arundel. Ye’ve heard it often enough.” He looked back to his work.

“You’re not a local, or—”

Her father’s face came back up again, glowing brighter, eyes
glittering. “Or what, sir? Or I’d know the place of a smythe before a
well-landed Eiric? Well, forgive me, sir. Pardon me, sir. But I couldn’a love
this place more if I’d been birthed here. You’ve my last word, sir, but if ye’re
not a-feared of a little neighborly charity, th’easement’s yours.”

“I’m not
a-feared
of
anything,” said Arundel, “or anyone.”

He nearly tripped over Meredydd in his haste to leave.

She hopped aside and held up her bucket of peelings for her
father’s inspection. “Will there be horses today, tada?”

He never answered her. He turned to look at her, his
handsome, beloved, sweat-polished face set in a smile, and faded to grey.

“Tada, no!”

o0o

Meredydd found her arms held open to billowing mists. She
wailed aloud, anguished at the suddenness of loss, feeling as if a great hole
had been carved in her breast, in her life. How many times must she lose them?
How many nights must be spent reliving it, one way or another? How long must
her heart sift through the ashes of dead Lagan and come up with nothing but
pain?

Her sorrow shifted violently toward rage. How dare Rowan
Arundel balk at charity, yet countenance murder? How dare he then die before
she could have her revenge on him?

Tears flowing furiously, she shifted her position in the
sand, pulling her cloak more closely about her shivering body.

She had passed by Wyth Arundel every day, rubbed shoulders
with him at Cirke, said a polite daeges-eage to his mother at market; she had
studied
under him, endured his coldness and
finally his cruelty, never even suspecting that he was the son of her family’s
murderer. Ah, but if she had known—

What? What would you have done,
Meredydd the Avenger—pulled out a dagger and slit his throat? Found a Dark
Sister and borrowed a curse to smite him with? What could you have done,
faint-heart
?

“I could have told him.”

She sat very still, inside and out, pondering that—tears
stoppered. Yes, that would have been revenge enough. The boy was already
burdened by his father’s suicide, by a weakness he feared he might have
inherited. Rumor was, he’d taken up the quest for Osraed-hood because of his
father’s sin. It was his atonement.

He’d all but groveled at her feet that day at Lagan. Ah, and
what more perfect place! If she had only known then what she knew now, what a
different scene that would have been.

o0o

“Your father killed my parents. Killed them to get their
land for his stupid, hungry sheep. Killed them so he could get more animals to
market at Creiddylad—so he wouldn’t have to take them along the highroad south.”
Her voice was hoarse, raspy—the voice of a harpy, the voice of vengeance.

Wyth cowered from it. “No! It’s
not true! My father—”

“Your father hanged himself for guilt, Wyth Arundel. He saw
his own, black soul staring him in the face and took his life to be spared
seeing it. Ask your mother, if you doubt me. She knows. That’s why she tried to
have me dismissed from Halig-liath. She didn’t want you to get too close to me,
to find out that your father was a murderer and a thief.”

Ah, his face! The horror, the shock, the sick comprehension,
the despair of knowing that she—the survivor of Lagan—was right. And worst of
all, that he loved her.

“Oh, dear God, Meredydd!” He fell heavily to his knees, his
groan of anguish reverberating through the misty yard, bouncing back at them
from the billows of fog. “Meredydd, I didn’t know! You must believe that.”

“I believe it,” she said and could not quite make out the
outline of the well behind him where they lay—her mother and father. “But you
are his son.”

“Yes! Yes! And my father’s stain is on me—in me. I know
that. I
know
that! God forgive me!” he
sobbed, and lay down at her feet.

Meredydd looked down at him lying there, groveling before
her. She was supposed to laugh now, to savor her revenge like a forbidden
sweet. But she was not savoring it, and she did not want to laugh. She wanted
to pull Wyth Arundel into her arms and weep for him, weep with him, console
him. She wanted to sing him a duan that would heal his wounds and lay the guilt
he felt to rest. She wanted to scrub herself inside and out—expunging her own
stain. Tears were hot on her cheeks.

“No, Wyth. No. This is wrong. Your father’s sins stained
only his own hands. Yours are spotless. God need not forgive a sin you didn’t
commit.”

He raised his head then, to look at her, and she reached out
to him, straining forward against some invisible barrier. He faded away from
her fingertips into the fog, his eyes craving her forgiveness.

o0o

Meredydd blinked and wiped tears from her face. She
glanced up toward where she knew Skeet waited, but the mist was like sheep’s
wool pressing her eyes; she could see nothing. Had he heard her, she wondered,
snarling condemnation at the creature of her own aislinn? Or did the magic of
this place prevent that, weaving silence around the Pilgrim’s Post? She hoped
it did. She wanted no one to hear her sound so hateful.

It seemed darker to her now and she wondered how long she
had been locked in the aislinn world, if world it was. Her stomach grumbled and
she pressed her crossed arms over it. The Corah said there were other
worlds—aislinn worlds, Eibhilin worlds. Worlds as real and distinct as the one
men called Real, but they could be seen only in glimmers and glimpses, “as a
memory of dreams,” the Corah said, and as “reflections on trembling waters.”

“Is not the creation of God infinite?” asked that Holy Book.
“There are more worlds than this one. Meditate on this that you might discover
the aim of God, the Spirit of this infinite Universe.”

The aim of God. And what was the aim of God where
Meredydd-a-Lagan was concerned? What goal did That have in her life? What aim
was she to have? She had thought arriving here was the aim once, and had
concentrated on it single-mindedly, making herself miserable. But it was not
the arrival on the Meri’s shore that was significant, it was the condition of
the Pilgrim’s soul when she arrived upon the shore.

Meredydd sat up a little taller and concentrated her entire
attention on the matter of aim. She had thought Pilgrimage a matter of putting
one foot in front of the other and keeping her eyes open for tests. That had
been wrong. This was a spiritual path, no matter how practical the feet that
trod it. The goal was a spiritual one as well, and it was not merely the Meri’s
acceptance.

To be like Master Bevol. Those were the right words, but did
she really understand what they meant?

No, she thought now, riding a growing wave of realization,
it was not the Meri’s acceptance that was the aim, but
becoming
something the Meri could accept! It was
not
seeing
the Meri that was the goal, but
becoming
someone who
could
see Her. A Jewel of great virtue—of great
value.

A shout of pure joy bubbled up from her throat and rolled
like a bright golden ball across the nearly invisible water. She was ready and
willing to follow it, but her body constrained her merely to jump to her feet
and dance, like a madwoman, over the sand. She was stiff, but ignored the
complaints of her joints.

She laughed and sang and whirled until she was gasping and
giddy. Even then, she did not stop, but stumbled about until her addled feet
met the waves. Surprised, shocked by the sudden intense cold, she pitched to
her hands and knees, sobered forcefully by a splash of frigid water in her
face.

“Meredydd! Meredydd! Mistress!” Skeet’s cries provided yet
another dash of reason and she clambered shakily to her feet.

“Here, Skeet! Here!” She backed out of the water, her tunic
and cloak clinging wetly to her body. The euphoria was passing and her
returning senses told her she was soaked through and cold and hungry and
thirsty. She heard the scrunch of feet in sand and moved toward the sound.
Skeet appeared out of the

fog.

“Meredydd! I heard you cry out. Are you hurt?”

“No, no. I’m fine. I just—” She found herself unable to
explain what had prompted her to behave so daftly and fell silent.

“Ah, but you’re not fine. Not at all. You’re all wet and
your teeth are clackiting. Come to the fire—you can have some tea. I’ve made
sassafras.”

“No, Skeet. I have to go back to my post.” She tried to pull
away, but her held her in a surprisingly strong grip.