II. Fontevraud, 1185
Janet was dying. The tall and imposing Abbess Gilles told Thomas herself, but he knew already, just as he knew there was nothing he could do this time to cure her. Something had been in her lungs for months, and it was getting worse.
She was seventy-three now, a remarkable age. He could still see in her thinner face the woman he remembered. Janet’s skin was like moist parchment pulled over her bones, her lips prone to cracks, and her hair gone completely white. Her skinny wrists and arms made him think of birds. But Janet’s reaching the end of her life was natural. What was unnatural was his own failure to do the same.
Even Morven, their daughter, was older in appearance now than he. Morven resembled Janet as she appeared after his return from Ailfion: the same slope to her nose, the same wide jaw. He’d taken care not to unglamour in her presence. He’d been careful with that right from the first.
Two decades earlier when he’d brought his sister, Innes, back to Ercildoun from Cluny, he had looked the part of her younger brother naturally. However, because he was going to have to masquerade as their nonexistent relative, Ainsley Rimor of Alwich, for a short time, he’d had to reveal to her how because of the elves he could change his appearance. Poor Innes had already long been the victim of elven magic, labeled a madwoman and shut away with the truly mad, initially by the Yvag that had inhabited their father. Damaged by their cruelty she might be, but mad she was not, despite that they’d stolen her baby and told her it was dead. How she withstood that loss, he did not know, but she accepted Thomas’s power to transform as if it were the most normal thing in the world. She grasped immediately how he must pretend to have aged in order to match his Janet. He had believed the discrepancy was due to the way time ran here versus in Ailfion: Janet had waited twenty years for his return while for him their separation had lasted a handful of months. So he aged himself to match his beloved, to let her forget.
Innes took charge of the family estates. He remained nearby at Cardden’s keep with Janet only long enough to determine that the Yvag had gotten his message never to return to Old Melrose: For months none came through the invisible gate there. No fiery green ring appeared near the ruins, and no grotesque gray sleepers lay among the tombs of St. Mary’s Abbey. No doubt Yvags were emerging through a gate somewhere to collect their teinds, but they weren’t invading his territory or harming those who mattered to him any longer. His private war with Nicnevin was done.
Innes continued to oversee the Rimor and MacGillean lands while Janet and he divided Cardden’s holdings including the keep between the two Lusk brothers in return for a promise of semiannual proceeds from the profits. Finally, he bid Innes farewell; they gathered up their belongings, including Janet’s loom, his bows and stonecutter’s tools, and headed off for the Abbey of Our Lady of Fontevraud where their daughter lived.
Morven had long since accepted that no one was coming for her, and had taken her vows. She was married to the Lord, devoted to the abbey, and in particular to the current abbess, Audeburge de Hautes-Bruyères, who’d been in charge now for fifteen years, more than half of Morven’s life. For the abbess, and for Sister Marguerite—which was what Morven answered to now—Thomas’s elves were plainly demons, and he and Janet had been right to rescue their daughter from such influences. Witchcraft and malevolent spirits were everywhere these days. And hadn’t God’s knights fought two crusades to conquer such dark forces?
Knowing next to nothing of any crusades, Thomas could only acquiesce in the abbess’s opinion. Morven had never seen an Yvag. Her only memory of a near encounter was of a voice outside their door the night that Janet had whisked her from their home. While she wanted to believe her parents, her reliance now fell upon the Order of Fontevraud. These strangers might be her parents, but what did that word even mean? The busy abbess assigned Sister Marguerite to take Janet and Thomas on a tour of the abbey.
Fontevraud was a double monastery, Sister Marguerite explained to them, with monks living on the grounds in the Priory of St. Jean de l’Habit and working in support of the nuns, as unusual as that sounded. They all labored side by side while living separately. Altogether, the community numbered close to three thousand, with far more nuns than monks. She showed them the gardens of healing herbs, of vegetables and fruit trees, the smokehouse, the leper house of St. Lazar, and the abbey itself with its bone-white sculpted capitals. “Near one hundred of them,” said Morven. Thomas replied reflexively, “One hundred two,” then apologized for a facility he couldn’t control.
They wandered the grounds, past a well, and a sepulchral chapel being erected, where nuns were to be interred. He couldn’t help being suspicious at the sound of that, wary of anyplace where it seemed the dead lay sleeping. Crypts could never be trusted.
The abbey was built on a slope, and part of the lower wall surrounding it had collapsed after the spring rains. Thomas noted that as they strolled past.
When Morven returned them to Abbess Audeburge, he offered to rebuild the wall where it had fallen in. He and Janet, he explained, had moved into a small house in Chinon nearby, so that they could be close to their daughter. He would apply to join whoever was constructing the chapel building as well. The abbess asked if he wasn’t past his prime with regards to working in stone. He looked, after all, like an old man of fifty years or more, matching Janet’s appearance. It was Janet who spoke up then, to say that her husband knew more about the working of stone than anyone she had ever met and that the abbess would not regret taking him on. “You’ll be working with monks,” the abbess said. He replied that he had worked with them before, at the abbazia di Santa Maria di Lucedio in Italia. The abbess knew of that Cistercian abbey. If anything its mention suggested he was even older than she’d thought. Nevertheless, she agreed to take him on.
* * *
By the time Innes died, Abbess Audeburge had also passed on and been replaced by the Abbess Gilles. Because of his masonry skills, Abbess Audeburge had referred Thomas to the seneschal of the Château of Chinon, and he had gone to work there for King Henry. Portions of the château remained unfinished, and it was often unoccupied in that time, but the work was suspended on numerous occasions while Henry battled his own sons and his queen.
Thomas watched the staff and advisors for any hint of Yvag habitation, but circumspectly, so as not to reveal his own identity. To the household of King Henry he was simply Tàm the Old Mason, whose wife wove lovely shawls and small tapestries, and who had a daughter in the abbey nearby.
That he could do the work of a much younger man was remarked upon, however, and so he started to do less. Routinely, he feigned exhaustion, a perfect excuse to spend even more time in the company of his wife. She had grown more frail.
Janet’s hair by now was all white. At her loom, she did not pass the shuttle with anything like the agility of old. Her fingers were long, thin, and knobby, and often seemed to pain her. She and he lived well enough, with money coming from Filib Lusk twice a year to bolster what Thomas earned with his mallets, chisels, and trowels, and she with her loom.
Kester Lusk had died and his son had taken over his role as a tenant-in-chief, but Thomas didn’t learn his name until word of Innes’s death reached him, and he felt he must go home and settle things. He knew Janet would not come with him. Before he’d even asked, she told him, “These old knees of mine will never make the journey. You needs must go on your own, Tàm.”
He didn’t like being away from her. Too much of his life had been spent away already. But Innes was gone and the estate must be settled. In her last letter to him, she had stated that she’d put it about that a cousin of hers was expected, one Thomas Learmonth, thus covering his identity locally. Through her the unseen Learmonth had already purchased a small cottage in Ercildoun, so no one would be surprised by his arrival. Briefly, he considered cutting open a portal, using the ördstone of Alpin Waldroup he’d found long ago on the path through Þagalwood, and simply stepping from Chinon to Ercildoun, but worried that such an act would send ripples, alerting the Yvags to his whereabouts. They might follow him back home or, worse, arrive here while he was gone. He made sure that Janet was looked after in his absence. Abbess Gilles and Morven would ensure that.
So by horseback and by ship he returned to Ercildoun, which he’d never intended to see again.
There, for the first time in years, he went about without any glamour. After all, he was neither Thomas Rimor nor Tàmhas Lynn anymore. Now he was this new Thomas of his sister’s creation. Stopping to give his horse a drink, he studied himself where the water was still: a young man with a short beard and thick dark hair, muscular and handsome. He disbelieved his own eyes. Surely this was more a memory of who he’d once been than a reflection of who he was. This was the Tàm of Janet’s dreams. And anyway, it was impossible, wasn’t it? At twenty years Janet’s junior now, he was nearly fifty. Perhaps so long under glamour had a lingering effect, or maybe he hadn’t fully thrown it off yet. Perhaps over the next few days he would advance to his proper age.
The town of Ercildoun had doubled in size, in part due to land Innes had gifted it. Their castle had become a manor, surrounded by nineteen workers’ houses, a small church, fields of barley and oats, and even a small mill of their own operating on the Leader River. Innes had already been buried. She had left him instructions for the parceling and distribution of the land, lots large and small, naming to whom each should be distributed, and who would handle all of this for her. She had used her influence in order to have the property deemed adjudged a fee simple absolute. As such, it was hers to do with, and now his.
But Janet was ill, and so he remained only long enough to see a stone erected at Innes’s grave and to visit Filib Lusk, now residing in Cardden’s keep, to make one more request of him, that he follow up on Innes’s instructions. Filib, near an ancient sixty, looked worn down, his hair thin, his teeth nearly gone. There had been no further business with the elves. So far as he could say, they’d stayed away. But, oh, how effectively Thomas was glamouring himself to appear young in his role of Learmonth. Thomas said nothing, but upon his return trip to Ercildoun, he paused at the pool on the Teviot where he’d once watched Janet swim, to look again at his impossible reflection. Who was this staring up at him? Not someone who had known more years of life than old Filib—Filib, whom he should have resembled by now.
He all but fled the pool.
In the morning, he would depart for Tynemouth but thought to pay a final visit to The Gorse and Hare, which was still a going concern in the same location where he and Alpin Waldroup had once spent the night. He hadn’t heard the voice of that ghost in so long that he could no longer remember it accurately. When he’d sailed across the Channel with Janet, the spirit of Waldroup had remained behind.
In the tavern he confessed to being Innes’s cousin, and was asked in turn if he intended to stay on at the manor. He started to explain that, no, he was entrusting a local party to execute her will, when his eyelids fluttered and the world seemed to tilt on its side. His head turned ice cold and lightning flashed through it, rattling his skull. The fit was so unexpected he couldn’t fight it.
As if down a deep well, his own voice echoed to him.
“The eldritch gone for now return one day for all.
When the Thorn Tree of Ercildoun on the Common here doth fall.”
He came to himself on the floor. A crowd of people encircled him and more were arriving. In the few minutes he’d lain unconscious, word had gone out that Thomas the Rhymer himself was back among them, here in the tavern.
He sat up and they pressed back, as if fearful he might use some mystical force against them, or cast a spell, or otherwise curse them for sussing his identity. He pulled himself up against the nearest table, then gripped onto it to stabilize himself while the world tossed off tiny sparks and tilted itself upright again.
Then the taverner stepped forward, put one hand upon his shoulder, and said, “Oh, sir, give us another—tell us our fortunes. When will that tree fall? Who are the eldritch?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, confused already as to what it was he’d said. “I don’t know any of it.”
He backed away. The crowd parted for him, and he turned and fled out the door, ran down the High Street to where his small cottage stood. They called to him all the while to come back and tell them more.
He knew what would happen next. Without him there, conflicting recitations would fill The Gorse and Hare—not just of this riddle but of many others, most of them things he’d never said. The two simple lines he’d spoken would mutate, until people were fighting over what they’d heard. The Thorn Tree was known to them all, but even he didn’t know what the eldritch were.
What had he, Thomas Learmonth, meant? What was the secret of his riddle?
He had only minutes before the arguing factions banded together and marched off down the High Street in pursuit of their new True Thomas. He needed to be gone. His satchel was packed, his horse ready.
Now he heard the crowd approaching down the lane; as he’d imagined, they were arguing over what the eldritch could be: “Witches!” “Queer forces!” “No, creatures never made by God!” And someone drunkenly rejoined, “How can there be creatures never made by God?”
Quickly, Thomas cut a portal straight from Ercildoun back to Fontevraud. In his terror he had no trouble concentrating on his destination, turning, and sealing it up again. And if by some chance it alerted the elven now, so what?
Janet was dying. . . .