Runemarks (4 page)

3

They met in the summer of Maddy’s seventh year. It was Midsummer’s Fair Day, with games and dancing on the green. There were stalls selling ribbons and fruit and cakes, there were ices for the children, Mae had been crowned Strawberry Queen for the third year running, and Maddy was watching it all from her place at the edge of Little Bear Wood, feeling jealous, feeling angry, but nevertheless determined not to join in.

Her place was a giant copper beech, with a thick, smooth bole and plenty of branches. Thirty feet up, there was a fork into which Maddy liked to sprawl, skirts hiked up, legs on either side of the trunk, watching the village through the circle of her left thumb and forefinger.

Some years before, Maddy had discovered that when she made this fingering and concentrated very hard, she could see things that could not normally be seen. A bird’s nest in the turf, blackberries in the bramble hedge, Adam Scattergood and his cronies hiding behind a garden wall with stones in their pockets and mischief on their minds.

And it sometimes showed her different things—lights and colors that shone around people and showed their moods—and often these colors left a trail, like a signature for any to read who could.

Her trick was called
sjón-henni,
or
truesight,
and it was one of the fingerings of the rune
Bjarkán
—though Maddy, who had never learned her letters, had never heard of
Bjarkán,
nor had it ever occurred to her that her trick was magic.

All her life it had been impressed upon her that magic—be it a glamour, a fingering, or even a cantrip—was not only unnatural but
wrong.
It was the legacy of the Faërie, the source of Maddy’s bad blood, the ruin of everything good and lawful.

It was the reason she was here in the first place, when she could have been playing with the other children or eating pies on the Fair Day green. It was the reason her father avoided her gaze, as if every glance reminded him of the wife he had lost. It was also the reason that Maddy alone of all the villagers noticed the strange man in the wide-brimmed hat walking along the Malbry road—walking not toward the village, as you might have supposed, but in the direction of Red Horse Hill.

Strangers were not often seen in Malbry, even at a Midsummer’s Fair. Most traders were regulars from one place or another—bringing with them glass and metalware from the Ridings, persimmons from the Southlands, fish from the Islands, spices from the Outlands, skins and furs from the frozen North.

But if he was a trader, Maddy thought, then this man was traveling light. He had no horse, no mule, no wagon. And he was going the wrong way. He could be an Outlander, she thought, with his matted hair and ragged clothes. She had heard they sometimes traveled the Roads, where all kinds of people met and traded, but she had never actually seen one; those savages from the dead lands beyond World’s End, so ignorant that they couldn’t even speak a civilized language. Or he might be a Wilderlander, all painted in blue woad, a madman, a leper, or even a bandit.

She slipped out of her tree as the stranger passed and began to follow him at a safe distance, keeping to the bushes by the side of the road and watching him through the rune
Bjarkán.

Perhaps he was a soldier, a veteran of some Outland war; he had pulled his hat down over his forehead, but even so, Maddy could see that he wore an eye patch, which hid the left side of his face. Like an Outlander, he was tall and dark, and Maddy saw with interest that although his long hair was going gray, he did not move like an old man.

Nor were his colors that of an old man. Maddy had found that old folk left a weak trail, and idiots left hardly any trail at all. But this man had a stronger signature than any she had ever seen. It was a rich and vibrant kingfisher blue, and Maddy found it hard to reconcile this inner brilliance with the drab, road-weary individual before her on the way to the Hill.

She continued to follow him, silently and keeping well hidden, and when she reached the brow of the Hill, she hid behind a hummock of grass and watched him as he lay in the shadow of a fallen stone, his one eye fixed on the Red Horse and a small, leather-bound notebook in his hand.

Minutes passed. He looked half asleep, his face concealed by the brim of his hat. But Maddy knew he was awake, and from time to time he wrote something in his notebook, or turned the page, and then went back to watching the Horse.

After a while the Outlander spoke. Not loudly, but so that Maddy could hear, and his voice was low and pleasant, not really what she’d expected of an Outlander at all.

“Well?” he said. “Have you seen enough?”

Maddy was startled. She had made no sound, and as far as she could tell, he had not once looked in her direction. She stood up, feeling rather foolish, and stared at him defiantly. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

“No?” said the Outlander. “Perhaps you should be.”

Maddy decided she could outrun him if need be. She sat down again, just out of reach on the springy grass.

His book, she now saw, was a collection of scraps, bound together with strips of leather, the pages hedged with thorny script. Maddy, of course, could not read—few villagers could, except for the parson and his prentices, who read the Good Book and nothing else.

“Are you a priest?” she said at last.

The stranger laughed, not pleasantly.

“A soldier, then?”

The man said nothing.

“A pirate? A mercenary?”

Again, nothing. The Outlander continued to make marks in his little book, pausing occasionally to study the Horse.

But Maddy’s curiosity had been fired. “What happened to your face?” she said. “How were you wounded? Was it a war?”

Now the stranger looked at her with a trace of impatience. “
This
happened,” he said, and took off his patch.

For a moment Maddy stared at him. But it was not the scarred ruin of his eye that held her thus. It was the bluish mark that began just above his brow and extended right down onto his left cheekbone.

It was not the same shape as her own ruinmark, but it was recognizably of the same
substance,
and it was certainly the first time that Maddy had ever seen such a thing on someone other than herself.

“Satisfied?” said the Outlander.

But a great excitement had seized hold of Maddy. “What’s that?” she said. “How did you get it? Is it woad? Is it a tattoo? Were you born with it? Do all Outlanders have them?”

He gave her a small and chilly smile. “Didn’t your mamma ever tell you that curiosity killed the kitty cat?”

“My mamma died when I was born.”

“I see. What’s your name?”

“Maddy. What’s yours?”

“You can call me One-Eye,” he said.

And then Maddy uncurled her fist, still grubby from her climb up the big beech tree, and showed him the ruinmark on her hand.

For a moment the Outlander’s good eye widened beneath the brim of his hat. On Maddy’s palm, the ruinmark stood out sharper than usual, still rust-colored but now flaring bright orange at the edges, and Maddy could feel the burn of it—a tingling sensation, not unpleasant, but definitely there, as if she had grasped something hot a few minutes before.

He looked at it for a long time. “D’you know what you’ve got there, girl?”

“Witch’s Ruin,” said Maddy promptly. “My sister thinks I should wear mittens.”

One-Eye spat. “
Witch
rhymes with
bitch.
A dirty word, for dirty-minded folk. Besides, it was never a Witch’s
Ruin,
” he said, “but a Witch’s
Rune:
the runemark of the Fiery.”

“Don’t you mean the Faërie?” said Maddy, intrigued.

“Faërie, Fiery, it’s all the same. This rune”—he looked at it closely—“this mark of yours. Do you know what it is?”

“Nat Parson says it’s the devil’s mark.”

“Nat Parson’s a gobshite,” One-Eye said.

Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson
gobshite.

“Listen to me, girlie,” he said. “Your man Nat Parson with his foolish Good Book has every reason to fear that mark. Aye, and envy it too.”

Once more he studied the design on Maddy’s palm, with interest and—Maddy thought—some wistfulness. “A curious thing,” he said at last. “I never thought to see it here.”

“But what is it?” said Maddy. “If the Book isn’t true—”

“Oh, there’s truth in the Book,” said One-Eye, and shrugged. “But it’s buried deep under legends and lies. That war, for instance…”

“Tribulation,” said Maddy helpfully.

“Aye, if you like, or Ragnarók. Remember, it’s the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings. If the Æsir had won—”

“The Æsir?”

“Seer-folk, I daresay you’d call ’em here. Well, if they’d won that war—and it was
close,
mind you—then the Elder Age would not have ended, and your Good Book would have turned out very different, or maybe never been written at all.”

Maddy’s ears pricked up at once. “The Elder Age? You mean
before
Tribulation?”

One-Eye laughed. “Aye. If you like. Before that, Order reigned. The Æsir kept it, believe it or not, though there were no Seers among them in those days, and it was the Vanir, from the borders of Chaos—the Faërie, your folk’d call ’em—that were the keepers of the Fire.”

“The Fire?” said Maddy, thinking of her father’s smithy.

“Glam.
Glám-s
ý
ni,
they called it. Rune-caster’s glam. Shape-changer’s magic. The Vanir had it, and the children of Chaos. The Æsir only got it later.”

“How?” said Maddy.

“Trickery—and theft, of course. They stole it and remade the Worlds. And such was the power of the runes that even after the Winter War, the fire lay sleeping underground, as fire may sleep for weeks, months—years. And sometimes even now it rekindles itself—in a living creature, even a child—”

“Me?” said Maddy.

“Much joy may it bring you.” He turned away and, frowning, seemed once more absorbed in his book.

But Maddy had been listening with too much interest to allow One-Eye to stop now. Until then she had heard only fragments of tales—and the scrambled versions from the Book of Tribulation, in which the Seer-folk were mentioned only in warnings against their demonic powers or in an attempt to ridicule those long-dead impostors who called themselves gods.

“So—how do you know these stories?” she said.

The Outlander smiled. “You might say I’m a collector.”

Maddy’s heart beat faster at the thought of a man who might
collect
tales in the way another might collect penknives, or butterflies, or stones. “Tell me more,” she said eagerly. “Tell me about the Æsir.”

“I said a
collector,
not a storyteller.”

But Maddy was not to be put off. “What happened to them?” she said. “Did they all die? Did the Nameless hurl them into the Black Fortress, with the snakes and demons?”

“Is
that
what they say?”

“Nat Parson does.”

He made a sharp sound of contempt. “Some died, some vanished, some fell, some were lost. New gods emerged to suit a new age, and the old ones were forgotten. Maybe that proves they weren’t gods at all.”

“Then what were they?”

“They were the Æsir. What else do you need?”

Once again he turned away, but this time Maddy caught at him. “Tell me
more.
”

“There is no more,” One-Eye said. “There’s me. There’s you. And there’s our cousins under the Hill. The dregs, girlie, that’s what we are. The wine’s long gone.”

“Cousins,” said Maddy wistfully. “Then you and I must be cousins too.” It was a strangely attractive thought. That Maddy and One-Eye might both belong to the same secret tribe of traveling folk, both of them marked with Faërie fire…

“Oh, teach me how to use it,” she begged, holding out her palm. “I know I can do it. I want to learn—”

But One-Eye had lost patience at last. He snapped his book shut and stood up, shaking the grass stems from his cloak. “I’m no teacher, little girl. Go play with your friends and leave me alone.”