Daughters Of The Storm (4 page)

The stirring of the sight? For Ash, it had never
stirred.
It had sprung up like an ocean squall on her fifteenth birthday. And every year it intensified.

‘I couldn't sleep,' Ash said, rubbing her eyes as evidence.

Myrren looked at her closely. ‘A poor night's sleep is a troubled woman's burden. Something on your mind?'

‘No.' She kept her face studiously blank. ‘Alice was snoring.'

Myrren's mouth twitched into a smile. She placed a knotted hand on Ash's shoulder. ‘I'm going to see a woman in town. She has a fever and is managing on her own with a small child. I promised I'd call at first light. Do you want to come with me?'

Ash nodded and rose. Most of her studies now were given over to working in the community, mostly in the town of Thriddastowe but often enough in the countryside. She preferred the town. She preferred to be around people and movement, and her dearest hope was that — at the end of her studies — she could return home to Blicstowe and be near family and friends. Her post was yet to be decided, though. A wise and fearsome counsel of crookbacked men and women would make that judgement on her final day as a scholar, based on her history here.

She and Myrren each took a cloak from by the door, the grey-green cloak that signalled their profession, and headed out into the drizzly morning.

Somewhere behind the clouds the sun was rising, and blue burned through on the western arch of the sky. The study hall and its buildings lay on the outer edge of the town. They picked their way through muddy paths past the butcher and the cobbler, the alehouse and the smith. The town smelled of damp, of sea-salt, of coal smoke and fermenting flowers. Layers of smells; sweet, muddled evidence of people and their lives.

Myrren led her to the front door of a little boarding house with cracked wooden boards that were chinked with moss. She let herself in and Ash stood for a moment behind her, eyes adjusting to the dark. Myrren closed the door quietly, but a bleary-eyed woman with her hair tied tightly in a scarf bustled out.

‘Can you be no quieter?' the woman said.

‘I thought I was being quiet,' Myrren answered, drawing herself up very erect. ‘I'm here to look in on Ingrid and the little one.'

The woman indicated the corridor. ‘You know where she is. She coughed all night. I barely slept a wink.'

Myrren thanked her and moved down the corridor. Ash smiled at the woman, but received no smile in return. She and Myrren entered a miserable room with a draughty shutter, a choking fire and threadbare rugs. In a bed on the floor lay a young woman wracked with coughing, and a little boy about three years old. Ash couldn't help but compare the child to her niece, Rowan, who was plump-armed and tall, with shining dark eyes and rosy cheeks. This little boy was pale and small, a bird fallen too soon from the nest.

While Myrren knelt to tend to Ingrid, Ash stood back to watch. The itching started low in her stomach. She never knew why this ability was called the sight, for she always experienced it viscerally, not visually. It shuddered through her body, knowledge seeping into her mind like seawater seeps into a sinking boat: always faster than one fears. Myrren's words became muffled behind a sussuration of whispering voices, none of them clear enough to hear properly. But in an instant Ash knew with absolute clarity the sick woman's Becoming — she would die by the end of the week. Worse, the child would catch her sickness if he stayed with her until nightfall this day. Then he would die, too.

As quick as the feeling came, it withdrew. The real world was clear and present again, but her body ached from calves to neck, as though she had held herself tense for hours. Myrren was giving Ingrid one of her remedies — Myrren was the acknowledged expert in herbal medicine — and reassuring her she would be up and about in a day.

‘Do you not think,' Ash blurted, ‘that the child should go somewhere else while his mother recuperates?'

Ingrid looked at her with anxious eyes.

Myrren frowned, her face still in profile to Ash, not meeting her gaze. ‘There's no need, Ash.'

‘But the illness —'

‘No need, Ash,' Myrren said forcefully, but quietly. She smiled at Ingrid and then the child. ‘You two are better off together.'

‘I don't want my boy to get sick,' Ingrid said. ‘I can send for my sister. We've not spoken for many months but she would come if it was urgent.' Her words were punctuated by wheezes.

Myrren turned to glare at Ash. Ash forced a cheerful smile, even though her blood was thundering in her heart. ‘If Myrren says all will be well, then all will be well,' she said tightly.

As they returned to the study hall, Myrren admonished her in a soft voice: mothers and children belong together, the woman would recover quicker with her child to remind her of her responsibilities, and a separation at this stage would make her miserable and prolong the sickness. Ash heard, but didn't listen. She had long since realised no elderly counsellor — especially Myrren — would tolerate hearing about her premonitions. At best they would dismiss her; at worst their jealousies and fear would see her packed off to some dungheap remote community to learn humility. Ash went to her bower, waited ten minutes, then returned directly to Ingrid's house.

This time, the child was playing on the floor among the mouldy rushes, pretending to make soup in a cracked pot.

Ingrid blinked at Ash from the bed, fear making her pupils shrink. ‘You came back.' Her skin was white and clammy.

Ash sat on the edge of the wooden bedframe and put a hand on the woman's shoulder. Her heart sped. ‘You are sicker than Myrren thinks.'

‘I know,' the woman said. ‘I can feel it. A darkness ... here.' She pressed her hands into the triangle between her lower ribs,
causing a long coughing fit. Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I'm going to die, aren't I? I could see you standing there and you knew.'

Ash turned her gaze to the little boy. He hummed a tune to himself.

Ingrid caught the direction of her gaze and began to sob.

‘Is there somebody who can come for him?' Ash said.

‘How am I to let him go?'

‘By telling yourself that, in him, you live still. And in his children, and in their children.' Ash measured her tone calmly even though her own heart was clenching. ‘We all die, Ingrid. We are here but a brief bright moment then thrust out again into the darkness. To leave our trace in the light is the best thing we can do.' Just as she had been told to say. The sentiment that was supposed to bring so much comfort, but which Ash found no comfort in herself. Perhaps when she was older she would feel it, really feel it, but now, she was as terrified to die as a cow in a slaughter pen.

Ingrid nodded, catching her breath. ‘My sister Gyrda lives outside town, behind the mill. Could you send for her?'

‘I'll go to her myself.' Ash rose. ‘You must never tell anyone I came to you. And nor must she.'

Ingrid shook her head. Her body trembled and hunched, struggling with terror and sorrow. ‘Can I cuddle my boy until she comes?'

‘Of course. Of course.'

She hesitated, then said, ‘When will I die?'

Ash looked at her.
The day after tomorrow, as the sun disappears behind the town.
But she said, ‘I don't know.'

The little boy had scrambled onto the bed and Ingrid reached for him with shuddering arms. ‘A lifetime of kisses,' she said to him, her voice breaking.

Ash couldn't watch. She turned away and headed outside.

That evening she took comfort in the company of her friends, although she couldn't confess to any of them what she had done. Alice and Pansy, with whom she had started her studies four years ago, drank with her in the dining hall and cheered her with stories and comical impressions of their teachers. She flirted subtly with Conrad, one of the first-years. He was sweet on her, she knew, though she still wasn't sure she returned the feeling. The clatter and clamour of movement and voices both revived and soothed her, driving away her sadness, her fear of the dream, her growing apprehension that something dark crept behind her. Something uncontrollably expanding in every moment; a sentient, elastic thing not to be contained between her two small hands.

Rainy dawn broke two more times with Ash happily dreamless. On the third day, she woke early to silence: no rain. She plaited her hair and pulled on her cloak to walk down to the cliff's edge and see the sun rise.

The sky was pale and high, the morning cold, but not cruelly so. On the horizon, blue-grey clouds gathered, veiling the sun as it rose from behind the ocean. Ash followed the pebbled path up to the cliffs, then walked a little further north where she knew of an outcrop of flat granite, perfect for sitting and watching the dawn.

The rush and draw of the sea always made her feel settled. As a child, she had spent a month recuperating from illness at a family friend's house on the southern coast of Ælmesse. Every day she had spent hours sitting on the grass near the cliff's edge, watching the sea move, until it grew so cold she was called inside urgently. She had no doubt the sea's rhythm healed her. Thyrsland was a large island, separated by icy straits from a sprawling continent where traders and second sons hunted their fortunes. It was a
foolish person who did not come to love and respect the sea. The wind picked up, the gulls screeched overhead. Ash closed her eyes and breathed the raw scent of the morning.

Light broke over the clouds, and pressed gold on her eyelids. She opened her eyes to see the first orange-gold bow of the sun. A sharp shred of the dream flashed into her mind: a cliff, an orange light, fire and claws. She shook herself, put her hands on the rock to feel the earth and keep herself on it.

‘Hello there!' A distant voice, calling.

Ash turned. Conrad was trudging up the path towards her, his hands in the pockets of his brown tunic, his shoulders hunched against the cold morning air. She was glad to see him, to have ordinary things to fill her mind. Her panicked heart slowed and she rose and came down the path to greet him.

‘Good morning,' she said with a smile.

He nodded once, but didn't smile in return, making her cautious. The wind tangled in his soft, brown curls. ‘I've been looking for you,' he said.

‘A fine clear morning.' She gestured to the rising sun. ‘I couldn't stay in bed and let it go unwitnessed.'

He glanced over his shoulder towards the study hall, as though he feared they were being watched.

‘What is it?' she said.

He smiled weakly. ‘I overhead Myrren talking to some of the elder seers this morning when I was lighting the fires. About you.'

A coil of guilt in her stomach. ‘I see.'

He wouldn't meet her gaze, squinted his dark eyes against the sun. ‘They say a woman in town died yesterday afternoon. Her little boy was nowhere to be found. They eventually located him at his aunt's house. The aunt said you had arranged for him to be there, that you had seen his mother's death, and his, too, if he wasn't moved.'

Ash swallowed hard. ‘Yes.' Why had Ingrid's sister gone back on her promise not to speak of it? She had probably crumbled the moment Myrren set her grey gaze on her. Old age was to be feared, and Ash was too young to frighten anyone into silence. ‘Did they sound angry?'

He hesitated. Then said, ‘I couldn't read their voices. Angry, perhaps. Myrren certainly was. But the seers sounded ... puzzled.' He shrugged. ‘Worried.'

‘For me, or for themselves?'

‘Impossible to tell.'

Ash chewed her lip, glancing away to the sea.

‘Ash,' he said slowly, ‘I've been taught one can't be a seer until ... well, you're only a year older than me. You saw her Becoming?'

She considered him in the golden light. The desire in his eyes was gone, squeezed out by fear. ‘Thank you for the warning,' she said.

He waited a moment, to see if she would say anything else.

‘I need to think,' she said kindly. ‘I'll see you back at the study hall.'