her grey veil, the old woman laughed. ‘True as the line of your birthright,’ she mused. ‘Never let go! Not until you reclaim the blood-born right to your whole being.’
She extended her hand and dangled before him a shining white crystal, strung on a silver chain. ‘This quartz holds the spell that imprisons your spirit. Sing for your liberty with passionate grace, and the matrix that binds you must shatter.’
Urgency thrummed the strings under his hands. His rushed pulse chased the reach of his terror. Yet no hesitation remarked the shift as he changed the intent that founded his next measures. Where, before, his shaped art aligned outward to seek the Name of another, now, he pitched his quest inward to ignite the lamp at the source of himself.
The first clear notes he struck from the heart collapsed the sensory web of his perception. Falling, he tumbled. His aware grasp on the lyranthe dissolved as his balance upended.
Then a snap! ripped through his tumbling frame. The old woman vanished, along with the featureless, dreary envelope that sealed his long-term confinement.
In place of the null grip of emptiness, he stood, ankle deep in muddy loam. Disoriented, utterly, by the nip of brisk wind, he smelled damp leaves, and the tang of hoar-frost on thickets and grasses. The sudden shock of concrete awareness smashed over his uprooted perception and shattered his equilibrium. Dizzied by the abrupt transition, he crashed to his knees. The jar of firm ground jolted his bones and snapped his teeth shut, while panic spurred his raced pulse and tensioned his breathing.
Who was he? Where was he? No memory of the bodily self he inhabited explained how he came – from where – to awake as though dropped from the void into this sere autumn garden. He stared, benighted, and left at a loss.
Grey mist dripped off a tangle of grape-vines, laddered up a weathered trellis that leaned on a ruined stone wall. The chill in the air suggested daybreak, thickened by the mouldering fust of turned leaves. Whiskered ice silvered the vegetable plot where he shivered, distressed and disoriented. The last hardy stems and a few runners of gourd still hoarded the green bestowed by the last kiss of summer. A wooden rake lay fallen nearby. Sweat laced his wrists, and mud stained the patched cuffs of his shirt and breeches. As if all along, he had laboured to mulch the tough stubble left after a late-season harvest. He had worked the earth here – who knew for how long – to tidy the rows of a field bedded to lie fallow for winter.
Which situation made no living sense, disconnected from all that he knew of existence.
He traced the coarse, callused skin of his palms with a shudder of stark disbelief. These cracked nails and chapped knuckles had not, in this place, ever wrought superlative music on the fret and string of any earthly instrument. Every artful line of his own refined melody deserted his cognizance, lost to him as though hurled to oblivion.
Nameless, rudderless, homeless, he wept shining tears for he knew not what – perhaps he ached for gratitude, perhaps for grief, perhaps for a talent he may never have owned, except in the fled echo of dreams.
Or maybe he cried for the merciless hurt inflicted by bewildered confusion.
The only congruity left was the scars, graven into the chapped grain of his skin. They alone marked the frightful proof of a history that some event, or someone had snatched away, then left him bereft. Beneath a brightening sky, buffeted by a southerly wind that forepromised the misery of cold rain by evening, he shook off his distress and reclaimed his feet. A resiliency he had forgotten he possessed raised his courage to survey the landscape. Ahead, a wrought-iron gateway led through the crumbled wall. The barred portal hung open. Chafed mad by confinement, he kicked clear of the furrow that mired his toes. Whether the way out was a baited trap, he welcomed the reckless risk. Though the impulsive presumption should kill him, he assayed the first bold step towards the overgrown lane, that led towards the unkempt fringe of autumn woodland beyond the gap.
No one’s hand stopped him. When no outcry arose in alarm, he tried another stride, then another. Then he stumbled headlong into a run, upon legs that felt clumsy and strange, bearing his ungainly weight.
He never sighted the lady in grey though she observed his terrified departure. Concealed in one of the tangled thickets that bounded the deserted garden, she took extreme care not to draw his attention. Motionless, she watched his panicked spurt down the carriage-way, once in antiquity paved with white gravel to welcome refined guests to an earl’s summer palace. The ancient woman relaxed her clasped hands and sighed in grateful relief.
Blessed she was, to assist the release of a spirit intact and unbroken.
For the prisoner just restored to liberty had endured an incarceration far longer than any mortal being should ever be made to withstand.
Once his flight reached the tree-line, barely moments after his lonely form vanished from sight, the crone knelt amid the browned stems of wild thorn. She opened her clenched and bloodied palms and buried the smeared fragments of shattered crystal and broken links that remained of the sigil-forged chain that had bound him. Tears of bitter anger striped her withered cheeks as she rammed cold earth overtop the unpleasant remnants. For his life’s sake, no more could be done to assist his escape without danger.
Her fugitive must be left alone on the run. To survive the long reach of his enemies, he would take the harsh road to rediscover himself. If he had been granted the most slender chance to foil the deadly pursuit of the captors who soon would be hunting him, she could not spare him from the brutal whip-lash of consequence: the obliteration of his identity provided his only protection. No friendly hand could shield him from the blow, when in due time he encountered how sorrowfully he had been sold out and betrayed.
The crone’s prayer was not empty as she turned her back on the man whose charge had encompassed her life’s work. ‘May Mother Dark’s powers lend you the strength to stand your firm course through the maelstrom.’
On the very same crisp autumn morning, already saddled with troubles that threatened a crofter’s mean livelihood, two brothers worked side by side, set at odds, as they hitched the yoked ox to the wagon shafts. Neither guessed, at the time, what that fateful market-day trip into Kelsing would bring. Except for the unusual, fierce pitch of their argument, nothing about their hard-nosed, haunted quiet seemed out of the ordinary. The bushels of apples and crates of runt poultry bound for sale had already been loaded. Square jaws clenched, their seething rage crammed into hurtful silence, Efflin and Tarens both struggled, and failed, to bury the axe resharpened by their wounded grief.
The toll taken by last summer’s outbreak of fever had been too swift, and their losses, too tragically recent. No more would their badgering nephews pull pranks. No filched lengths of garden twine, strung underfoot, tripped up the feet of the unwary. No rash little hands misdirected the buckles and entangled the harness, or exasperated them with the endearing hindrance, as hysterical poultry flapped free of mischievously unlatched crates. Never again would their chatterbox aunt pounce into the fracas, or tuck in loose shirttails with floury hands. Adult males and wild offspring alike would not wince as she scolded over their foolish laughter and larking idiocy.
Which hurt that much worse, when the shouting match over the surly bull’s fate devolved from scorched language to fisticuffs. Big men, as honest with fights as they were with the stewardship of family assets, both brothers now puffed, grazed scarlet as schoolboys, stiffly nursing the sting of scuffed knuckles.
‘Could be we’ll regret not keeping yon beef on the hoof to ease the pinch at midwinter,’ said Tarens. Tenderly, he fingered the bruise that swelled into a noxious, black eye. Not the price of his brother’s mulish punch, but from a headlong bash into a fence-post, caused by the cantankerous, four-legged creature his argument still defended.
‘Be
