Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales by Greer Gilman

Author:Greer Gilman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: fantasy, novel
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2010-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

* * * *

Will hang, said a still voice to Margaret.

She was on a skyless hill, bent onward, neither west nor east, but wading to the knee in shadow. There was something that she'd lost: a knife among the weeds, a stone from off her ring. Her name. No stubble here, nor grass, but swiddened moorland, and the sift of ash long cold. It fell like shadow into shadow, sparse. Around her lay a sprawl of stones, half fallen in a maze of thresholds, perilous to cross. Whatever way she turned was inward.

She had never gone so far.

Beyond her fled a white hare like a furl of fire leaping from a brand, but paler than the waning moon. Like fire it flared and wavered; and went out.

That card was burnt, she thought.

Then she came to the Gallows Tree and saw the crow lad hanged.

He dangled, naked and atwist, agape. She saw his bound hands, writhen struggling against the knotted hemp; she saw his stonebruised feet, now restless, dance on air. She saw his pricket like an angry thorn. His silver hair flared out about the bloodblue face, as if his death eclipsed him. There was something in his tongueless mouth. A stone? And then he twisted and it fell. An egg. S'll harry thee a howlet's nest, he'd told her once. I knaws ae tree. Stooping she picked it up: unbroken, strangely heavy in her hand. It was cloudblack and scrawled with white, with crossings intercrossing. Runes of stars. What tree? For as she gazed, she saw it fathomless, awhirl with light; she saw unfolding galaxies, feathering like frost. She saw the leaves unscattered of the book of heaven.

They were burnt.

To Ashes.

* * * *

Barbed and hooded, masked as for a play, my lady's women brought Margaret down the winding stair. The dream still tranced her, sliding in her blood like sublimate: a bright envenomed clarity, a swaling heaviness. It was the eve of Hallows Eve. So dark a morning still, at noontide, that they bore a branch of candles. Beeswax, as befitted Madam Covener.

"Rare play we had of it,” said Grieve to Rue. To Margaret, “The hunt was up, thy lord and all his pack."

"Afoot and riding."

"Earth and air."

"When thou'rt his lady, thou shalt ride with him."

The girl spoke not, but Grieve answered. “Aye, we took."

"A white hare, and alive."

They crossed the empty parlour, shadows and the ghost of flowers, to the high dim crowded hall. It smelled of winter, with a tang that caught her throat, of smoke and damp and mortal dread. Like Morag's kitchen, with its larder of souls. They had dressed her bravely, as befitted Corbet's property; she felt the silver mantle as a tarnish, like a shadow that would slide and leave her naked as the moon. Hard faces turned and stared and mocked.

She knew them; they had leapt the scythe.

Then she crossed a cold threshold, and she knew the place. They stood in Law. About them, silent, there were grey-cloaked women, in the places of the stones, the stars.

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