The Bone Palace - Amanda Downum [76]
They stopped at a small house on the outskirts of town, where buildings gave way to fields. Smoke trickled from the chimney and the shutters were open to the breeze. The woman stopped in front of the open door, waving them in and saying something to Iancu that sounded like a warning. Her voice rasped, as with long disuse.
“Her grandmother may help us,” Iancu said. “We are bid be solicitous of her poor health.”
The house was a single open room, the curtained bed the only privacy it offered. A spinning wheel stood beneath one window, surrounded by brushes and baskets of uncarded wool and a fat butter-colored cat who eyed a coil of yarn. Charms hung from the rafters, strings of leaves and beads and coins that rustled and chimed in the breeze. The room smelled of herbs and wool and camphor. In a much-mended rocking chair beside the hearth sat an old woman.
She was frail and stooped, skin creased and thin over once-strong bones and cheeks sunken with missing teeth. One side of her face drooped like hot wax, and her left arm folded unmoving in her lap. A cane leaned against the wall within reach of her chair.
She studied them with one canny dark eye—the other veiled by its creased-paper lid—while Iancu asked his questions. Savedra knew enough Sarken for courtesies and bad directions, but not enough to follow his low urgent tone. When the woman replied her voice was slurred and slow and even less comprehensible. She dabbed her mouth constantly with a handkerchief to keep from drooling. They spoke for several moments, not quite an argument. The woman tried to shake her head, but it was more a feeble twitch.
“Vau roc,” Iancu said, several times. Please.
Finally the woman made an angry slashing gesture with her right hand. At first Savedra feared she was throwing them out, but then she began to speak.
“I remember,” Iancu translated softly, keeping pace with her muttered Sarken. “I remember Phaedra Darvulia, and sometimes I think remembering is what broke my body and my magic. I would trade these memories for my health, but not even gods make such bargains.”
Ashlin sank to her knees and Savedra followed, sitting cross-legged on the creaking floorboards like children.
“It was like a minstrel’s story,” Iancu continued. “A beautiful girl went riding in the woods and became lost. A handsome hunter rescued her and took her home, and they fell in love. Bells rang in the castle and the village on their wedding day, and bright ribbons flew from the battlements of Carnavas. The women wore flowers in their hair as the bride and groom rode by.
“The girl was a witch, and perhaps a little mad—prone to black moods and wild frenzies—but she and her march-lord husband loved each other, and the village loved her in turn. She often spent the winters in the south with her own people, and the mountains were all the colder without her.
“What happened next no one can say for certain. Raiders came. Some say from the north, some from the east; some say they were demons of the frozen wind. I say they came from the south, but I’m the only one who remembers it so. Wherever they came from, whatever they were, their weapons were sharp enough. When villagers came to the castle days later they found only frozen corpses. The lord lay dead in his hall, stabbed through the heart and his sword in his hand. The servants had been rounded up and slaughtered like sheep. Of the lady there was no sign, but her library and workrooms were destroyed. The villagers searched the woods and riverbanks for her but found no trace, though some claimed to have seen blood on the rocks below the castle ramparts.
“We buried the lord and his people, but the castle became home to ghosts and hungry spirits, more than the village witchwives could dispel. Demon birds circled the towers, and many thought them the lady’s pets driven mad by her death. The Sarken king sent no new lord to hold it, and the Selafaïns staked no claim, so villagers circled