XXVII. Mary of Clipstone
The piebald horse wasn’t in the paddock. They found it in the stable, securely put away in a stall where it might go unnoticed for a day—long enough for what Kunastur wanted. He might have been here since the day before, giving him plenty of time to select the most useful member of the household to impersonate.
It was no longer speculation. The Yvag walked among them.
Neither the Waits nor Thomas nor John knew the retinue of the King’s Houses. That left it up to the four Keepers of Sherwood to identify the glamoured pretender.
They left torches in the outside brackets on the walls of the palace and Great Hall, lighting their way to the kitchens. Fog swirled around them.
Thomas nocked his bow and belted his quiver; Little John grabbed his quarterstaff. They and the two Waits followed Isabella and her group at a distance, lagging behind to watch for anyone who might try to flee.
Isabella had barely mentioned that there might be someone in disguise among them, when the head cook gestured for the Keepers to follow her outside.
“This is Sehild,” Isabella said, introducing the auburn-haired woman.
Sehild said, “Don’ know about disguise exactly, but I’ve one that’s afflicted now two day on.”
She directed them through the pantry and finally into the pitch-black buttery, where casks of ale and bottles of wine were stored. Sehild brought in a candle from the pantry.
In one corner, behind three kegs, a girl in a coarse woolen overdress crouched tightly as if she might squeeze through the joints of the wall. Before they even moved the top keg out of the way to see her better, she started to wail. She kicked at the floor with her wooden-soled shoes, which slipped and scraped, and slapped the wall as if it might open and let her pass through.
Will and Adam took her by the arms and lifted her onto one of the kegs. She squealed fiercely. Only when they backed away did she calm down. Her eyes flicked about as if she was seeing things in the air around her, and she tried to climb back behind the kegs. Adam and Maurin stopped her, though neither of them seemed to want to touch her for fear that whatever this was might be contagious, but she wriggled and tried desperately to tear free of their grasp. This time they held onto her.
The girl had a prominent overbite and receding chin. Thomas asked Sehild who she was.
“Mary, of Clipstone,” came the answer. Of course everyone in the kitchen was “of Clipstone.”
Adam told the youngest and least threatening, Calum, to hold onto her. Then he knelt in front of her and gently caught her eye. Softly, he asked, “Mary, why are you in the buttery?” He stroked her hands, which seemed to calm her—at least, she stared with fascination at his hands upon hers. Thomas watched Isabella watching her son, as if she’d never seen this side of him before.
Mary of Clipstone replied almost in a child’s lilt that another voice had compelled her to hide here.
Someone among the kitchen staff? She couldn’t say but didn’t think so. She thought it was a presence that had entered the kitchen. “I thought maybe a bodach but no little man did I see about me.”
The cook crossed herself. “It’s the devil, isn’t it, girl?” she said, her tone sharp and accusatory, all but blaming Mary for letting it in.
Scathelock told her to hush up. Adam asked Mary if she had been speaking to someone in the moments before the Keepers found her. She didn’t know. Her memory of the time before they found her was confused. “It’s all smeary, the time. What day is it now?” Then, weeping, she added, “How I walked from home this morning, I can’t even say that it was today.”
Thomas whispered to Adam, “Keep talking to her.”
While he engaged her, Thomas directed Calum to slide in beside her and pull aside the collar of her mantle. He did so, carefully. She flinched at his touch, and stared over at him as if fearful of finding the devil next to her, but she didn’t scream. He folded back the material. The bite mark was raw where Kunastur’s needlelike teeth had sunk into her throat.
Thomas said, “She would have been out of her mind perhaps for hours from one bite.”
“How do you know?” asked Scathelock.
He tugged at his own cotehardie, revealing the bruised bite he’d received from Zhanedd. “The Pilgrim,” he said.
While they stared at him, Sehild added, “Mary does nae work in the kitchen, but in your lordships’ chambers and the hall, collects the bedding, passes the warming pan on chill nights like this.”
Isabella said, “She’s one of our chambermaids. I saw her just this afternoon.”
“I think not,” said Thomas. “Though I expect her double has gone through most of our chambers and belongings by now.” Then to John, “Quick, come with me.”
Beyond the buttery lay a serving passage leading into the Great Hall. The two men slipped into the empty ground-floor chamber. Will Scathelock followed. He’d also grabbed his bow. Thomas gestured for him to stay by the main door. Thomas and Little John quietly ascended the two staircases to the second floor, John emerging on the left and Thomas on the right. He’d anticipated that the Yvag would be in his chamber. They all seemed to know he had possession of the dights, maybe of ördstones, too.
Once Kunastur had those dights, he could open a portal right there in the chamber. Return to Ailfion in triumph and leave behind a gate right into Thomas’s room.
The only drawback to this plan was that the dights were no longer to be found in the patched and empty mason’s bag. It still hung on a peg in the room, an inviting target. Or at least it had at the point of the afternoon meal.
As he crept toward his own room, he heard a soft rustling, but it didn’t come from his chamber. It came from Will Scathelock’s. The “maid,” no doubt having exhausted the possible hiding places in Thomas’s room—there were few indeed unless one started prying the panels off the walls—had concluded reasonably that he’d given the dights to someone else. He glanced over and saw that John had heard the same sound. John would reach the door first, so Thomas took up a position behind him and out of the way of the door. He nodded.
John flung open the door and stepped in.
“Oh!” cried the chambermaid in a voice sounding just like Mary’s. “Beg pardon, sir, I was just passing the warming pan down Master Scathelock’s bed.”
Indeed nothing in the room appeared to be out of place. A jug stood on the small corner table. Beside the bed was a wood-and-leather chair with Scathelock’s bag upon it, seemingly untouched. The girl’s voice was, well, the girl’s voice. Not glamouring, then. The Yvag had reshaped itself, becoming her twin right down to the marrow. No wonder it had bitten her, sharing her memories, collecting some of her . . . self. No wonder her recent memories were now vague. More intense and exhausting for the Yvag, but who knew when or if it had shifted away and back again. Without her voice it certainly didn’t dare wander through the various buildings here, where too many knew Mary of Clipstone. She’d probably spoken to some of them earlier when no one was paying any mind, to Isabella for one.
Then again, that was its undoing here. Adam and Calum were even now with the real Mary of Clipstone, identical to this one, right down to the wooden soles on her shoes. The only remaining question, then—he heard the barest chirr—“Mary” was communicating with . . .
“John, get out of the doorway!”
Kunastur’s hob swooped down upon Little John, screeching, “Yaaaaa!” John swung at it, missed. It dove into his hair, bit his ear, then reached around and tried to gouge his eyes. It sliced into one eyebrow and blood flowed down his face. He spun around, swinging his staff, striking himself in the head in an attempt to smash the creature.
Chambermaid Mary turned and sprang for the window. Thomas didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting the whirling John.
The window frame cracked. The many rectangular panels shattered.
“Will!” Thomas yelled. “Outside!”
He charged at Little John, took the arrow he’d drawn and skewered straight through the hob, nailing it to the doorframe. John continued slapping, spinning, even after it was off him. Blood from his ear and the gashes above his eye covered half his face. He howled with rage.
Thomas dodged him and ran to the window. In the light from the various torches, the chambermaid was visible, running hell-bent through the mist for the paddock, transforming even as “she” fled. A difficult shot, but he nocked, drew, and fired anyway.
In the same moment something flashed from below him on the right—a crossbow bolt. Both arrow and bolt struck Kunastur at almost the same time, throwing the Yvag off its feet even as it reached the rear of the palace. It ran up against one of the stone buttresses and folded over it, twitching for a moment. Finally it lay still. Thomas’s arrow had caught it in the side. The bolt had finished it, impaling it at the base of its neck.
In the yard below, Will Scathelock and Isabella Birkin appeared. She emerged from the right, holding a crossbow. Will hadn’t fired his arrow at all. He called out, “The door—I never had a shot!”
They all nodded to each other.
The others emerged from the Great Hall now and with torches strode warily, weapons drawn, to the other, smaller palace. This Yvag would not be resurrecting. Thomas went to assist Little John. He could do nothing to bring back Ernald or Osbert, but at least their killer would walk no more.
“Will,” he said, “is going to need a different room.”
Those who’d been on hand at Sheriff Orrels’s office watched Kunastur long enough to satisfy themselves that it would not resurrect and come at them again. Then they buried the corpse in the paddock’s midden heap. Thomas nabbed its ördstone, which flickered and skritched ineffectively at his thoughts. He was beginning to feel like the keeper of ördstones.
Knowing that the Yvag’s body still lay out there seemed to worm its way into everyone’s thoughts and attention. Calum, who hadn’t beheld the demise of any other Yvags, seemed particularly ill at ease.
In the Great Hall where they all sat together, one or the other nervously cast owlish glances over their shoulders, at shadows, at the fire. It was as if, having seen one Yvag knight resurrect, they could not help but assume all others would do the same. Thomas could almost hear them imagining the black alien blood slowly flowing across the yard and back into its body.
Finally, he excused himself, went outside and, using the magical Yvag sword, decapitated the corpse. He carried the head to the far side of the King’s Houses and threw it into the fortification ditch. Then he walked over to the long pond and tossed the creature’s ördstone in it. The blue gems flickered as they faded, sinking. He was tired of collecting the things, and still did not know with absolute certainty that creatures on the other side of Ailfion couldn’t identify its location and come through in that exact spot. Just because he hadn’t witnessed or tried such a thing didn’t mean they couldn’t do it. Let them cut a doorway in the pond.
The surface stilled. He turned back to the hall.
He’d killed enough of the Yvags in his time, more than he’d ever wanted to encounter in the first place. Most of them had been sicced on him by the Queen or her consort, the one called Ađalbrandr. He’d never had to rationalize his deeds; he was running for his life. If anything, the killing took place in a white-hot blur of rage—or at least so it seemed from this distance. Ađalbrandr he could have killed and resurrected a half dozen times just to kill him again, though at this remove even that passion felt like a tiny echo of the seething fury he’d felt so long ago. This all needed to end but it would not end. His intrusion the first time had been mischance, the first time anyone had actively opposed the Yvags, disrupting their routine of snatching a teind whenever they were so inclined, a human they could glamour and sacrifice in place of one of their own. From the Yvag perspective it was a small blot, hardly worth troubling over. There was an endless supply of humans . . . until he’d cost them a dozen of their kind. He understood how they reacted to that—like the one in Orrels’s gaol, they were immortals whereas his kind lived forty, perhaps sixty years if lucky. Using humans, tossing them in that well like tossing logs on a fire, they saw as an act of no significance. Humans were disposable. What he did in opposing them was monstrous to them. He could appreciate their perspective: He was the villain in their tale. Immortal beings had died by his hand. They would have had to be foolish indeed to think he would ever capitulate. But they thought him long dead.
The first time was the aberration, the oddity. Nicnevin had brought it upon herself.
What was this time, then? Another odd mischance, performed by an outlaw this time, one who just wanted the sparkling jewels that bedecked an errant bishop? And his longstanding friendship with that outlaw and his mates had brought the fight to his door once again. Happenstance? Perhaps.
But it was beginning to feel like destiny.