Darkwitch Rising by Sara Douglass

“Will you love her whatever she might be, Eaving?”

“Of course I shall love her!”

“The dead don’t always return as you think they might,” said Long Tom.

“She is my daughter!”

Long Tom sighed. “Very well. I can take you into the stone hall to your daughter.”

He looked at Marguerite and Kate. “Sisters, would you watch?”

They nodded, each reaching out to touch Eaving as if in reassurance, then Long Tom took Eaving’s hand, squeezed it, and said, “Walk down The Naked.”

The girl and the imps were rounding a corner, walking from one maze of laneways across a narrow street into yet another maze, when the girl lifted her head.

“My mother!” she said, her voice hard. “She comes for a visit.”

The imps started, and looked anxious.

“Do as I lead,” the girl said to the imps, then her face assumed a look of complete innocence, and she grabbed an imp’s hand in each of hers, and tugged them towards a nearby open doorway.

I did as Long Tom said. I walked down The Naked and soon meadow grass and flowers turned to marble underfoot, and the vast space of the land was replaced with the smaller, if still vast in its own right, space of the stone hall.

As I drew near to the central portion of the hall beneath the great golden dome, I saw two figures sitting cross-legged before each other in the heart of the patterned floor.

One was a stumpy, knobbled, blackened creature. My imp. I shivered, for this creature marred the beauty of the stone hall.

The imp sat as if deep in thought, his chin cradled in his hand, his brow furrowed, looking at the hands of…

My daughter.

I shivered again, but this time with happiness. There she sat, her hands spread apart before her, red wool twisted between them—and it was at the pattern this wool made that the imp stared.

The wool was nothing…but, oh, my daughter! She was so beautiful, a true amalgamation of Brutus and myself. Black curly hair tumbling down her back, ivory skin, my dark blue eyes, a touch of her father’s carriage, and his pride.

I slowed my steps, trying to calm my eagerness lest I scare her. As I approached she raised her face, turning it towards me. “Mama!” she cried, and, allowing the red wool to fall from her fingers, leapt to her feet and ran to me.

Ah! At first she felt wonderful in my arms. Warm, alive, complete. Love overwhelmed me.

She wriggled a little, and I let her go and dropped to my knees before her, so that she should not have to crane her sweet face to look at me.

“What game is that you play, sweeting?” I asked, for want of anything better to say.

“Cat’s cradle,” said my daughter. “Don’t you know it?”

Of course I did, for Lady Anne’s daughters had often played at it. But I had a feeling that the game Lady Anne’s daughters played and what my daughter played were very, very different.

Suddenly the feeling of warmth and love that had enveloped me when I first held my daughter abandoned me, and I felt hollow, and a little confused.

“Aye, I know it,” I said to my daughter, trying to smile at her. “Are you teaching it to your friend?”

“Friend”. I had no idea what to call that dark hatefulness which now stood a pace or two away, peering intently at us. Friend was a somewhat uncomfortable compromise.

She turned a little and looked also at the imp. “Not truly,” she said. “I challenge him to best it.”

“And can he?”

She looked back to me, and grinned, and my heart thudded in that expression, for it was Brutus’ mischievous smile, that which he used when he felt most sure of himself.

“Not yet,” my daughter said.

“I came because I have missed you so much,” I said, wanting to turn the conversation from the imp.

“I will be born this time,” she said. “Don’t you believe it?”

I stroked her cheek, and felt hurt when she moved away her face. “Yes, I believe it. I just want you to be safe.”

“It is far more important that you be safe.”

I felt more uncomfortable than ever. This was no child speaking at all.

“Be careful of the imp,” I said, wanting only to mother her.

“The imp does not bother me,” she said, rejecting not only the imp, but the mothering as well. Again I found myself fighting away that strange, uncomfortable feeling.

Almost as if she knew how I felt, my daughter leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “Are you walking the land tonight?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then know that the other imp lies quiescent tonight.”

There was a movement behind the imp, my imp, and, yes, there stood another one, his expression dark and cross, and I knew that my daughter had been playing cat’s cradle with both.

Again I shivered. What dark sorcery was going on within my womb that my daughter could summon that other imp hence?

“Genvissa-reborn—Jane Orr—lies alone,” said my daughter, “with no one to love her. Go to her, mama, for you shall both need to be friends if you are to learn the arts of Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

My smile felt frozen. Dear gods, what did she not know? Tentatively, I touched her cheek again, then gathered her into my arms and hugged her tightly. “Be safe!” I whispered even as she wriggled in my embrace, and then both she and the stone hall and its impish inhabitants faded.

“You saw,” Eaving said as she stood once again atop the hill.

“Yes,” said Long Tom.

“We all did,” said Marguerite.

“She is very knowing,” said Eaving.

“She is your daughter,” said Long Tom, “and as such you should love her, no matter.”

Eaving shot him a sharp glance. “I wanted…” she said, then turned her head aside, as if she could not bear to continue.

“What is this cat’s cradle?” said Marguerite to Long Tom, a little too brightly.

“A version of the Troy Game,” said Long Tom. “She creates the winding path of the labyrinth between her fingers in red wool, and then challenges the imps to find their way from the heart of the labyrinth to its exit. They can’t, for they are evil incarnate, and the Game’s very purpose is to trap all evil within its heart.”

“But what is my daughter doing engaged in this trickery?” said Eaving. “She should be just a child, a baby, innocent of all that has gone before.”

“Eaving, do you not recall what I said to you earlier?” said Long Tom. “You should love her no matter what, even if she is not quite what you expected.”

To that Eaving made no reply.

Eventually Marguerite spoke. “Will you go to this Jane?” she said. “To Genvissa-reborn?”

In the stone hall the girl stood, staring at the space where her mother had vanished. The two imps stood at her shoulders, also staring.

“I wouldn’t trust that one, if I were you,” said one imp.

“I have no intention of trusting her,” said the girl, “for she carries not only the seeds of my victory, but those of my destruction as well. She shall have to be carefully managed.”

She sighed, and, after a moment, the two imps followed suit and sighed as one, their black, bony shoulders heaving exaggeratedly.

Idol Lane, London, and Woburn Village, Bedfordshire

Jane had taken to sleeping on a pallet close to the hearth in the kitchen. Weyland had made no objection. No doubt he found that amusing—look to what the great MagaLlan and Mistress of the Labyrinth had been reduced!—but Jane actually quite enjoyed it, as much as she could enjoy anything in this life. The kitchen was the warm heart of the household, and Jane found comfort there alone in the deep of the night that she found nowhere else.

Tonight was much as countless preceding nights had been. The two girls, Elizabeth and Frances, had finished their day’s duties close to midnight, and had gone home to the tavern’s cellar rooms, shoulders hunched against the memories of the day. An hour after they’d departed, Weyland had gone upstairs to his den for the night and Jane was left in peace to go to her own bed.

But she hadn’t slept.

Instead her thoughts had been given over to the Feast of Ingathering, and the memories that invoked. Here, in this life, she was trapped within a city, but even so the feel and smell, and even the sights of the land, were never far away. The celebration of the harvest had always been a huge festival during the age of Llangarlia, and one in which the MagaLlan, as the living representative of the mother goddess, Mag, had always played a large part. Harvest time was Mag’s triumph: fertility come to fruit, life for the coming year.