Dream Magic Page 9

  He’d gone with Brand on one fateful morn to the land of the Fae. Like his cousin Bret Silure, he’d wanted to find a wife. Unlike his cousin, he’d come back alive and with the woman of his dreams. In the Twilight Lands, he’d met his lovely bride and bedded her that very night. Never had any experience of his brutal life prepared him for the bliss he felt when he was with her.

  Slet had returned from the land of elves a changed man. He brought his new bride with him and showed her to all his relatives. They were stunned, envious and even spiteful—but a few were happy for him. They encouraged him to clean up his life and rejoin the clan as a functioning member.

  Soon after, he landed a job as a dockhand with steady pay. He broke his pipe and discarded it. He ignored the lowlifes he’d spent time with in the past, swearing to his new wife Annelida that he’d never take up with them again—a pledge he’d never broken, from that day to this.

  Sadly, things did not go perfectly for Slet. His wife turned up pregnant and quickened with unnatural speed. Alarmed, he did his best to make her comfortable and to provide for her.

  But at last, when the night of the birth came, a gale blew hard outside and dark clouds threatened with rumbling thunder. Slet had worked late, and when he returned his family stared at him with sad, tear-filled eyes. They had to tell him his fair wife had died in childbirth, having not been able to get the child free of her womb. He asked to see the child, but the midwives had told him firmly it was best he didn’t. He finally agreed and left.

  Grief-stricken, he’d wandered the streets in a daze. It wasn’t until weeks later when the Storm of the Dead lashed the Riverton streets that he’d been able to do anything useful.

  When the Dead came, he changed. In those grim hours of desperation, he took up a sword and chopped the bodies of every mad-thing that assailed the houses of the River Folk. He did this with a blood-lusting fury and snarling teeth. Those who saw him attested to his courage, but they also quietly suggested Slet was a man unfit for permanent duty alongside the blue cloaks of the Constabulary. It was felt he was a madman in battle and might cut down his comrades with the same zeal he turned toward his foes.

  And so, when the militia forces disbanded, it was only natural for someone who’d served as a soldier at the cemetery change his sword for a shovel and sword. Slet was given the post, and he had accepted it, not knowing what else to do with his broken life.

  Each night that passed he remembered his beloved Annelida. He wondered what his child had looked like, and he contemplated suicide with regularity. Years rolled by, and old wounds slowly healed. Still, he never drank, took a new wife, nor smiled when called to. Having turned sour in middle age, he had grown into the role of a reclusive hermit. School children frightened one another by invoking his name, and when they came up to Cemetery Hill on a dare, he obliged them by chasing them out with curses and vile threats.

  One night while he secured his shop and headed for bed, he thought to see a figure walking among the gravestones. It was long after dark, and visitors here were far and few between even on sunny days. Growing instantly annoyed by the intrusion, Slet furrowed his brow and stormed out to meet the stranger.

  He’d intended to order whoever it was back down the hill to their home—but halted, entranced.

  The figure he met among the dark, carven headstones was not a drunken fool, a giggling teen, nor even a sadden mourner. It was a woman, clad all in white.

  She was not lovely to look upon, nor was she homely. She was plain of face, but had a regal quality to the way she carried herself. Slet shook his head like a hound and started forward again, lifting a hooded lantern and directing its beam toward the woman. Like a watchdog that has taken stock of a seemingly harmless intruder, he’d decided that barking was the best policy, if only to maintain an old habit.

  “See here, madam, the cemetery is closed. You’ll have to…” he began, but trailed off.

  “Yes?” she asked, coming closer.

  As she walked toward him, he vaguely noticed there was no sound to her footsteps. He glanced down to see her feet were bare. Then he noticed the jewel clasping her white gown. It reflected the light of his lantern with unusual vigor. A thousand scintillating beams shot back in his direction as if he gazed into a stream reflecting sunlight.

  “Who are you, anyway?” he demanded.

  “I’m someone who’s come for help,” she said. “I’m looking for something, and I need your aid to acquire it.”

  Slet halted and raised the lantern a little higher. He didn’t want to get any closer to this strange woman.

  “I’m not paid to help people in the middle of the night.”

  “I can see you’re a difficult man to reach,” she said. “You have a heart like a lump of coal. But I can pay in ways others cannot.”

  Slet laughed in an unseemly fashion. “Be that as it may, I must ask you to leave.”

  She didn’t leave. Instead, she walked among the graves, running her fingers over the cool granite face of each. She read the names aloud as she walked. Slet tracked her progress with his lantern, growing more concerned as she took each step.

  “Betty Fob, Granther James, Gram Rabing…” she said.

  “See here, miss—”

  The woman suddenly halted over an open patch of land. There was nothing there but green grass and dandelions.

  “This is the spot,” she said. “There’s something missing here. A grave gone unmarked.”

  Slet shifted uneasily. It was indeed possible she was correct. During the Storm of the Dead, the corpses had fled from here in droves. Most of the graves were empty now. The corpses—hacked, hewn and burned to stop them from moving—had been reburied in a gated area for safety. Over the years, the people had gone back to their old habits, however, and now put their dead to rest on this hill again.

  “Most of them are missing,” he said. “Don’t you know about the Storm of the Dead?”

  “Oh yes,” said the woman, “but I’m talking about two creatures that were not part of that storm. They were unsuitable for Arawn’s army.”

  Slet licked his lips. He didn’t like the nature of this conversation at all. He turned his head this way and that, staring into the darkness. Was there a pack of ruffians moving in? He didn’t have much, but possibly rumors had grown about his hermitage. He might be wrongly called a rich hermit who robbed the dead. Perfect for bandits to prey upon.

  It was the strange woman’s turn to laugh. “Your mind reels with absurd fantasies. I’m not here to rob you, bitter grave-tender.”

  “Then what, pray tell, brings you to haunt me tonight?”

  “You have an inkling of what you face. Still brave, even in the face of real power. I’m impressed.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose and, therefore, nothing to be frightened of.”

  “Wrong, and wrong again. But let us turn back to the lack I mentioned before. Aren’t you curious as to who lies below this spot? What corpses might here be buried without marker?”

  “No, not really,” Slet lied. “But I suppose you’ll tell me anyway.”

  “They are none other than your wife Annelida and your unnamed son.”

  Slet stared at her in shock. After the initial stunned moment passed, however, he was goaded into action. He stepped up to her, snarling.

  “I’ll not be mocked! No matter who you are!”

  He shook a fist at her, but she seemed unafraid—almost amused. She lifted up a single outstretched finger and touched his knuckles with it.

  Slet felt strange at her touch. He felt…weakened. As if his mind had been numbed. He hadn’t had a drink in over ten long years, but now it was as if he was comfortably drunk again, all at once. He staggered away from the woman, dazed.

  “Dig,” she said to him. “Right here. There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Dig?” he asked in a foggy voice. “Why would I dig?”

  “Because you must,” she said gently.

  “Yes. That’s right, I must.”
/>
  He turned around and went to his shack. He returned with a long-handled spade. It was specially built to reach down, down into the dark earth. Graves were dug deeply in the Haven, as people liked to hope the Dead would rest peacefully if they were farther down.

  And so he dug. It took an hour, perhaps more. Slet never spoke further, nor did he stop digging until the casket was revealed.

  At the bottom he found a cracked-open lid. He frowned, shining his lantern down into it. Something trailed out from the cracked lid. A wisp of gold. What was it?

  Slet realized it was hair. The dead hair of the person in the casket. That color…he knew it well. It shone like spun gold. It was his dead wife’s hair.

  Slet roared in a sudden fury. He stood woodenly and lifted his shovel. He turned to snarl at the woman in white.

  She was there, but she did not flee from him. Instead, she caressed his cheek. It was such a sudden, purposeful motion. She’d clearly been ready to perform it.

  Slet stood transfixed. He could not move. He could barely breathe.

  “You will listen, and you will speak only when I tell you to,” the woman said very softly.

  “Who are you, witch?” he whispered back.

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “A strong mind you have. But not strong enough. Still, I will answer your question since it was so bravely posed. I am Morgana, your mistress. And now I will ask you something. Do you know who lies in this grave?”

  “My wife, Annelida.”

  “Just so. And can you guess who lies in the unmarked spot beside her?”

  Slet’s eyes shifted to the spot indicated. His heart pounded in his chest and he yearned to be free, but she held him. Only his lips and eyes could move.

  “Please, mistress,” he said. “Don’t make me dig up my child.”

  “But don’t you want to know the truth of the matter?”

  “I don’t want to know anything you have to show me.”

  Morgana nodded, as if in sudden understanding. “That is the problem. I have it now, thank you.”

  “Please, don’t make me…”

  “Put your mind at rest. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. The trick is, of course, that you do want to dig up your child and see it with your own eyes. You want to see how it died, and why.”

  Morgana touched him again, very lightly, but her touch burned him. After her fingers left his cheek, the spot was on fire. Strangely, he found he now did want to see what was down there in that casket. He wanted to know what it was he’d sired so long ago. They’d told him it was a tragedy, and they’d looked remorseful and wept with him all night long, the midwives and his aunts…

  But what else had he seen in their eyes that night? Guilt? Possibly even a glimmer of fear? What had they hidden from him? He had to find out.

  Slet turned and began to dig. The woman in white stood behind him, all but forgotten. He dug until his calloused hands bled, and he kept digging.

  When at last he found the bottom of the second cold grave, a soft rain had begun. The water fell over his back and soaked his unkempt hair. With bleeding, grimy fingers, he pried away the tiny door of the tiny casket and saw what laid there inside.

  They’d killed it.

  A troll lay in the tiny box. It could not be anything else. A furry monster with mad, staring eyes and a mouthful of sharp teeth. The strangling cord was still wrapped around its neck, as tightly wound today as it had been the day his child had met death.

  “And now you know,” said a soft voice behind him.

  Slet wept openly. His tears mixed with rain and dirt and formed a slurry of mud all around him. He’d not wept since Annelida died. From that day to this, he’d been stern and snarling—but this was too much.

  “Who did this to my son?” Slet wailed.

  “Your Aunt Mattie, that’s who. Look into your heart. You know I speak the plain truth.”

  He shook his head. Matilda had always been kind to him. Perhaps, he thought, she’d done this horrid deed to save him from the pain he felt right now. He hadn’t thought he could grieve any more for his lost family—but he’d been wrong. The pain was fresh again.

  “Witch,” he said. “You’ve done your worst. You’ve had your fun. Now, leave me in peace to bury my family again.”

  “Not quite yet,” she said. “I have another task for you.”

  He turned to look back at her. The Jewel at her neck shone like the sun, despite the black rain around them.

  “What else would you have of me?”

  Morgana pointed down into the dark grave.

  He followed her gesture, and his jaw sagged, and he slowly shook his head.

  “No,” he whispered.

  Suddenly, she stood close to him, but he could not turn to look at her. He could not do anything but stare at his son lying in his grave.

  “The cord,” she said, her hot breath puffing into his ear, “you must remove it.”

  Slet felt her hands on his arms, fingers curling around his biceps. Her nails sank into his flesh, but he didn’t feel the pain. He didn’t feel much of anything. He stared at the strangling cord. It was leather, and thick. Three thongs braided together formed the cord, which had been twisted tight with a stick. The stick had wound up close to the troll’s small head, making the neck loll to one side as if broken.

  “No,” Slet whispered again.

  “Do you believe your Aunt did the right thing? Do you approve of this murder? Would you have done the same?”

  “Not that,” he admitted with a whisper. “I could not have done it.”

  “Good…now, remove this desecration from your child. Unwind the cord.”

  Face trembling with horror and sorrow, rain and tears dribbling from his nose together, he climbed down into the grave. When he crouched upon the crumbling casket, he reached down into the grave and lifted his dead infant from its resting place.

  * * *

  Trolls are creatures apart from all the rest. They have habits and natures both strange and foul. The being that Slet took into his arms was furred and stiff. It did not feel alive or as if it had ever been alive. It felt like a stone wrapped in a thick wooly coat of black hair.

  As he unwound the cord from its neck, he stopped weeping. He felt numb. It was as if he had no direct contact with the world around him—as if he moved in a nightmare from which there was no awakening.

  The cord was stiff with age. The braided leather thongs had changed after being in the cold ground for years, becoming brittle and flaking as he forced them to move. Strangely, the creature the cord had strangled so long ago had not likewise rotted. Slet’s fascination with what he was doing was so great that he didn’t ponder the implications of this.

  “That’s good,” said the witch, crouching near him. “Now, lay the child down on the earth—gently! Let those raindrops fall upon its brow. They will do it no harm, and may do it some good.”

  At this, Slet managed to look at her with a frown. How could rain do his child any good? The tiny creature was as dead as a cat in a drowning bag.

  He almost managed to open his mouth and speak these words when he heard something, and his eyes were dragged back to his son’s bestial face.

  What he saw then shocked him as greatly as the moment he first had laid eyes upon the wave of dead-things shambling toward him up the High Street a decade earlier.

  The eyes were open. They were yellow, and each had a large black vertical slit for a pupil—like a cat’s eyes. There was no life in these eyes, no breath in the lungs—but they were open, and they looked glassy, as if life had only just left the body of this tiny, pitiful thing.

  “My son is a dead-thing?” he asked in horror.

  “No, fool,” Morgana said. “You didn’t get far in school, did you boy? The child is a troll. Trolls can’t be killed forever by cords. It takes fire or acid to destroy their bodies permanently.”

  Slet stared at her, then turned back to the body lying in the mud before him. “He’s alive?”


  “Not yet, but soon.”

  “Has he been in pain all this time?”

  She laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, almost a cackle. “How should I know? Ask it if you dare when it draws breath again.”

  Slet stared at the witch. “Why are you doing this?”

  “All will be clear soon. Here now, we haven’t much time. I’ve got the cage ready. Put it inside now.”

  “A cage?”

  “Do you want a feral troll, fresh-murdered, in your arms as it awakens? He won’t understand you are his papa. He’ll tear your throat out.”

  Reluctantly, Slet did as she bade. He put his small furry child into a cage of hardwood with silver bars and she shut the door, yanking her fingers back.

  It was just in time. The creature inside, who’d been motionless a moment before, launched itself after her hands. Morgana pulled them away, but not quickly enough. A curving, hook-like claw caught the back of her hand and laid it open. She hissed with displeasure.

  The troll was up on its haunches, glaring at them through the bright metal bars of its tiny prison.

  “Damnable thing!” she cried. “I’d burn you right now if I didn’t need you so!”

  Somehow, these words goaded Slet to action as nothing else had. He stood suddenly and grabbed the woman by the wrists. She stared at him in surprise and rage.

  “Let go of me!” she hissed.

  Slet almost did as she ordered. He wanted to—he had to. But managed to hold onto his own mind for a few seconds longer before he released her.

  “If you harm my son, I’ll kill you,” he said matter-of-factly.

  He found he wanted to slay this woman more than he’d ever wanted to kill anyone in his life. Although he wanted to clutch her throat and strangle her, to make her suffer every moment of pain his child had once endured, he could not do it.

  Instead, he released her. Both of them stepped apart, breathing hard and glaring. The Jewel at Morgana’s neck glimmered, and Slet staggered back another step, almost stumbling. There was a contest of wills, but it was uneven. Slet’s eyes dropped to the ground and became as glassy as the tiny puddles of rain that had formed everywhere on the ground.