The Devil’s Diadem by Sara Douglass

‘In the solar, my lord. I am sorry —’ That damned word kept burbling to the surface, and it was the most useless word contained within a priest’s — or any man’s — vocabulary. I thought of muttering something about peace, and God’s will, and thought better of it immediately.

I need not have worried. The earl was already gone, running to the inner gate and the great keep.

He did not come back until that evening.

I saw him enter the chapel, pausing as he stared at the crammed beds, his nostrils twitching at the stink, his face aghast at the moans and wails of the dying.

I hurried over. ‘My lord?’

‘Maeb is somewhere I cannot reach her now,’ he said. He looked me in the eye. ‘Running with the wolves.’

I went cold. I knew what he meant.

‘I have done all I can for her,’ the earl continued. ‘Either she will live or she won’t. Where is Stephen?’

‘Behind the altar, my lord. Do you … do you require my aid?’

Pengraic studied me. His face was weary, so weary, and his skin ashen, as if he suffered himself. ‘Do you have the time?’ he said, indicating the chaos of the chapel.

‘I will always have the time for Lord Stephen,’ I said.

‘Then thank you,’ the earl said. ‘Yes, assist me if you will. And after … cause Stephen’s name and rank to be carved into the central heartstone of the chapel that his soul may rest in the very heart of this sacred place.’

I nodded, and together we moved toward the altar, and poor Stephen’s body.

Part Three

The Countess

Chapter One

I drank the hemlock, and was grateful and at peace. I was certain I would go straight to hell for my sins, but at least I need not suffer needlessly in the doing. I lay back and Evelyn, weeping, sat with me, holding my hand and stroking my forehead.

A time passed, and I felt my limbs grow cold. I tried to move my hands and feet and found I could not.

More time passed, and my vision blurred, the high roof of the solar vanishing into myriad patches of indistinct greys and browns.

I could not see Evelyn at my side, which I much regretted for I would have liked to depart this life with my last sight being of her kind and loved face.

After yet more time as my limbs grew heavy, and so cold I wanted to shiver, but could not, my consciousness dimmed and I knew only blackness.

I died. It was utterly wonderful. I did not need to fight any more. It was peaceful. There was, finally, no pain. I had escaped any hemlock and plague both. No demons from hell came to seize me. I had no guilt any more. My world became one of complete serenity.

There was just … nothing, and I could drift uncaring and at peace.

I dreamed as I faded from life. I dreamed I heard an angry man shouting and Evelyn’s fearful voice replying. I dreamed of being rocked back and forth, and of being shaken about in my cold, hard bed.

Then my dream grew most strange, and I thought to myself that the hemlock was working fully to drive my senses from my body.

I dreamed I walked down a path in a dark, dark forest, peopled with the trees from the walls of the castle chapel. There was no light. Nothing.

In the forest wolves howled and something monstrous grunted and roared.

I grew frightened. I hastened ever faster down the path, knowing that down here, somewhere, lay safety and peace.

Then something huge blocked my path.

I cried out in fear and fell back, but the massive thing pursued me. I felt hot breath wash over me.

Go back, someone said.

A wolf snapped at my heels and I shrieked.

Again something massive pushed at me, and somewhere in the depths of my mind I think I recognised it as the shoulder of a mighty horse.

Someone, the rider on the mighty horse, was using the animal to push me back.

Go back.

I turned, and fled, the wolves and the horse and rider pursuing me.

I dreamed. I dreamed I wandered the mountain tops, carrying a torch. I was looking down into the valley, and there was the table-topped mountain that now held Pengraic Castle, save that in my dream I again saw the circling dancers and the man standing in their centre, with light about his head.

I wanted to get to that flat-topped mountain, to those dancers, to the man crowned with light, but every time I started down the thing came at me again (the horse) and it pushed me back, back, back.

The wolves howled.

I fled along the forest path. Behind me came the thunder of hooves, and the snap and snarl of the wolf pack.

I was terrified, witless with fear, my heart pounding so fast I thought it would burst.

I ran.

Eventually, I collapsed with fear and exhaustion, and the horse and the wolf pack were upon me.

Then, somewhere far distant, I heard the shout of an angry and vengeful man. I trembled within my non-existent state. Was it the Devil, reaching for me?

The man, shouting again, closer now.

Now the voice of a woman. I could sense — hear — her cringing within her reply to the man, hear her fear, and her guilt also.

What was it, this guilt, that it had spread throughout the entire world? I wished them gone, for they had both destroyed the peace of my death. I tried to ignore them, tried to push myself back into the void of death, but the voices were insistent, and they dragged me closer, closer, closer.

Pain shattered my peace. I found myself within a body again and it was wracked with pain. I gasped, spending a fraction of existence wondering that finally my throat had opened enough to admit air, then gasped again, choking, drawing in painful breath after painful breath, feeling my ribs crack with the force of my coughing.

The pain was terrible but, worse, was the realisation that I was still alive and that, somehow, someone had denied me death.

The hemlock had failed me and now I would burn.

I hated whoever it was had denied me death, and I wept, not wanting to open my eyes in case that action finally sealed my re-entry into life.

‘Maeb? Maeb?’

It was Evelyn. ‘Maeb?’

I wept anew, and finally opened my eyes. I had been seen, it was too late. ‘I hurt, Evelyn. I am in agony. Kill me, please, please …’

‘Like you did my son?’

I turned my eyes, and there stood the Earl of Pengraic, and I knew the Devil had come to fetch me.

Chapter Two

It took me years to understand why I did not die, and to understand the significance of the horse and rider and the wolves.

But then, in that year after I woke up from death, I had no idea. I could not understand why I had not died. I knew I was dying from both plague and hemlock, and yet neither killed me. Strange. Moreover, I was certain that I did die, so how was it I found myself alive? Breathing? In agony?

Neither Owain, nor Evelyn, nor even the earl, would speak of it to me. Owain and Evelyn because, I think, they simply did not know how my health was accomplished, and the earl would not speak of it because that was his prerogative (and he probably did not know, either). I had fragmentary dreams of wolves and horses, but I thought them the hallucinations of the hemlock, not of any true vision.

I found myself in the world, and somehow I needed to find the strength to live once more.

I spent many days, probably weeks, in my bed in the solar. Evelyn nursed me constantly, feeding me broths, washing me, turning me from side to side so I did not develop sores on my body, murmuring to me as to a child, perhaps like she had once murmured to her daughter, who she must have been frantic about … But still she nursed me.

Owain visited many times, bringing both company and his skills as a herbalist. I asked him about Stephen and the children, and he said that the earl had commanded that Stephen be buried under the heartstone of the chapel, and the other children in the aisle with their mother.

When he initially told me this I accepted it, thinking that beneath the heartstone was a fitting place for Stephen to lie. But over the next few nights I had unsettling dreams where I saw Stephen’s corpse falling through space until it caught in tangled, mossy tree branches, or being eaten by the wolves I had hallucinated about during my death.