~ MACEL ~
The scullery was thick with the odour of carbolic soap. The smell had hung there for an hour or more, as Adela Rice scrubbed away at the dinner things. Delie still had half of the forks to wash when Macel left her. The candles were burnt half away, casting a dim glow of flickering yellow around the room. A large metal pot, soaking on the counter, reflected each glint of candlelight right back at Delie.
She’d made a joke earlier, at Lieutenant Bennett’s expense and in Lieutenant Bennett’s hearing. This was her prize: all the dishes in Plateau Watch. Sam had pissed himself laughing when he heard, and Issy Cutler suddenly thought of places she had to be this evening. Macel alone had been sympathetic to her. He’d offered to keep her company for a bit while she worked, perhaps even lend some elbow grease. Not that he had the least intention of staying for the long haul. He was only here to while away the twilight.
Almost every night, he’d gone to the farriers’ cottage beside the stables. Bess would have him talking half the night, and he endured it just so he could hear her voice, and see the way the corner of her lip twitched when she got excited about something. Last night, they’d talked until the light of dawn was peeking over the distant horizon.
Apparently they talked too loud. Liz Hamish had returned from an errand at the stables with a note, written in the neat, looping hand that Bess swore she’d developed just for the fun of it. Speke the stablemaster was suspicious, it seemed—suspicious of the voices that filled the hallways of the farriers’ cottage until the small hours of the morning, and suspicious of the increasing lethargy of her work. He didn’t want her entertaining any visitors in the cottage for the time being. The maid had been charged with watching and letting him know.
So the new plan was to meet in the stables. Speke’s maid was proud of how tidy she kept her uniform, and had to wear gloves just to dust the light fixtures. She would never dare venture anywhere that horses shat. “I don’t dare go there until an hour after sundown,” Bess had written, “so I can be sure Speke’s gone to sleep.”
Sundown was almost an hour ago now.
Macel announced his departure with a mocking comment, and Delie flicked the waterlogged remnants of a piece of creamed potato at him off the fork she was currently scouring.
“Snack for the road?” he asked.
She launched another lump at him.
Outside, Plateau Watch was coated almost entirely by night’s shroud. Atop the perimeter wall, Craig Armitage sat yawning in a pool of light. He nodded at Macel, and stifled another yawn. The only other light Macel could see was a faint glow from the stables.
It had rained on and off throughout the day. Large portions of the courtyard had been turned to sticky mud, and the duckboard bridge had been painted brown by bootmarks. He took his torch from his pocket to shine on the floor here; when it rained heavy, the stream that ran that channel rose, and the mud became a quagmire. Wilding had misstepped the other day, and got his boot stuck fast as reward for his efforts. His foot had come free. By the time he’d pulled the boot out, his sock was sodden and fit for throwing out. They’d all laughed at Wilding over cider in the kindling shed, and nobody had chanced the bog again.
Once over the bridge, Macel felt safe in turning off his torch. At once he stepped in a muddle. On Speke’s stone floor, the water hadn’t soaked into the ground but had settled on the surface. Now it rushed into his shoes, drenched his socks. He swore loudly. Behind him, Craig Armitage was having a merry time laughing at his misfortune. By morning everyone would know.
There were no lights on at all in the farriers’ cottage. It was really the wrong name for it entirely. The building was less a cottage and more a wooden shack with some faint hint of brickwork. And it was home to very few farriers (though in fairness, there was at least one—a stocky bloke with a beard of black silk whose name was something along the lines of ‘Gevvn’). From the cottage door, he could see the stable light very clearly, and he could see Bess illuminated in silhouette as she sat there.
She looked like she’d just finished her day’s work. Her trousers and the brown leather boots she wore to care for the horses were offset with a russet pullover, and she played with the messy ponytail her hair was held in.
“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” he called, as he reached the stables. “You did say an hour after dark.”
Her face was suddenly glowing. “Macel,” she said, beaming. “I hoped you’d got my note. I don’t think much of that woman I gave it to.”
“Liz?”
“Is that her name? She didn’t seem to want to help. Kept on scowling.”
Macel nodded. “Liz isn’t easy to please. You could give her all the gold on Opteris, and she’d still find fault.”
“Still, you’re here.”
“You think I wouldn’t come? There’s no way I’m missing one of our chats. It’s quality conversation.”
They said nothing for a few seconds. Bess shuffled in her perch, a stile separating a darkened corner of the stables. Macel coughed and examined his fingernails. They were rimmed with black dirt from the day’s work.
Bess shifted to the edge of the stile and patted the wood next to her. “Sit down,” she said. As soon as he did so, she gripped his hand and squeezed tightly. He looked at her in surprise. All of a sudden, her face had the aspect of a frit child. “Stay with me,” she said, “All night if you have to. Say you will.”
“Of course I will.” Her eyes were wide, and her grip ever tighter. He wrestled it free and put his arm around her. “You’re upset. What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just stay here, that’s all I need.”
“It’s not nothing. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me and I can fix it.”
“No. You’ll hate me. You’ll leave and I’ll never see you again.”
He frowned. “Why would I do that?”
“Everybody does. They tell me I’m a demon and then they disappear.” Her whole body had stiffened. She turned to him, and he noticed her eyes were damp. “I don’t need you to fix anything. I just need you to be with me. I can’t bear to be alone.”
“I don’t believe in demons,” he said. Bess looked at him with a curious, almost hopeful expression.
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Demons. They aren’t real. Scary stories, folklore, nothing more. Why would I call you a demon? Whatever you might have done in the past, whatever you might do in the future, there’s no denying the fact that you’re real. Every time you breathe I can feel it on my forearm. I could pinch your cheek if I wanted to, and I wouldn’t just end up grasping at air.”
She recoiled. “Don’t do that. Why would you do that?”
“I wouldn’t. But I could, if I needed to prove you were real.”
She reached for him again. Her fingers fumbled against his wrist, then closed around a finger. Her head turned to his, and there her eyes caught the glint of the stable light. He squinted, dazzled by the sudden reflection.
“You do look like a demon, now. The way the light catches.”
“Why do you come every night?” Her question threw him.
“I come for you,” he said. “I want to spend time with you.”
“Yes, but why? You could talk to anybody. What makes you want to talk to me?”
There was a sincerity on her face. He could see the furrowed brow, the head tilted so slightly back, the faint quiver of a painted lip. There was only one golden rule with women, his father had told him—tell them what they want to hear.
He wasn’t really sure what answer she was looking for. Perhaps the truth. Dad had also told him he should always answer truly. “I like you, Bess. You’re a good friend.”
“Just a friend?” She spoke with all the gusto of a deflated balloon, sagging as it breathes its last. Her head fell. “That’s all I’ll ever be, isn’t it? I thought perhaps I could be normal here, be no less a woman than anybody else. You’re the only person who ever seeks my company, Macel. The only person who wants to talk to me. If I’m just a friend to you, I’ll never be more than that for anybody.”
“Bess...”
“No, it’s okay. I understand. I’m naïve, I’m broken, I’m too damn needy. I’m working on it. It’s hard to fix something that’s used to being broken.”
“Who says you’re broken?”
“Everyone.”
“Well,” said Macel, straightening his back. “I’ll have to have words with ‘everyone’. You’re too beautiful to be broken.”
Bess said nothing. She leaned against him, her hair a dark pillow on his shoulder, and hummed an old children’s song. Hers was the smell of roses, intoxicating, and he breathed it in.
“Can we stay like this?” she said suddenly, breaking off her tune in the middle of a verse. “You and me, in this stable, under these stars.”
He laughed. “I can’t stop the stars from changing. I’m not a god.”
“No, you don’t look like a god,” she said, squinting. “A god would have a better jawline.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my jaw. I can chew my food as well as any man.”
For half an hour or so, they talked about nothing in particular. Macel would joke, and with each joke he told, Bess threw her head back laughing. Each time, her eyes lingered a little longer on him before she composed herself and resumed the conversation.
And then they were outside, behind the stables. Here the tight hills pressing to north and south, restricting the fort’s sprawl, had relinquished their hold, breaking away to yield to wider plains. Trees prevailed upon the grounds here in places, and off to the east a narrow river expanded briefly into a pool before contracting again in the wake of an imposing tor. The Easterwood. What had once been a name of convenience had been scratched into the maps, in black ink.
The Easterwood was the boundary of man. Beyond it, past the apex of that clambering hill, it was all virgin land. Untouched, unravished. In every way it was a mystery.
Bess was singing. Her voice was feather-light, cracking in places as she felt for her range. The sound was sweet.
“On frost-kissed glade today I walked,
And there the maid so sweet I saw,
Where running stream so softly talks,
And gently gleams, and laps ashore.”
It was an old song, a tragedy from the time long since when kings ruled. Macel had heard it once or twice before, usually sung in a major key to keep the spirits up. Bess sang it dirge-like. Her voice quavered on the high notes, and faded to a whisper on the low.
“She told me of her troubled life,
And every love that stole her heart,
For never had she been a wife,
And so was glad, and sad in part.
Abandoned by her mother and
Each night to lie— See that?” Bess stopped mid-song, lightly charging Macel’s shoulder with her own. Her arm was outstretched to point at the far Easterwood, at the tall leafy sentinels stood row on row in that darkness.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Only the darkness wasn’t total.
Nobody had been to the Easterwood for a couple of weeks now. Once, there’d been complaints of strange noises, strange lights. Lieutenant Bennett had sent a couple of parties out to investigate. They’d all come back with nothing to report, nothing but a vague feeling of unease. The Easterwood should have been abandoned. Yet there was a light there. The glow was faint and indistinct, but it was unmistakeable, moving through the legion of trees queuing up to take their turn blocking it out. “What do you reckon that is?”
He fumbled for an answer. “It’s a light.”
That earned him a playful punch on the shoulder. “I know it’s a light, numpty. What sort of light?”
“Could be somebody wandering,” he shrugged, though what a place to go wandering, and with the mud so sticky underfoot.
“Could be,” Bess murmured.
“Should we go and have a look?”
His question was answered by the sudden ringing out of an awful wailing noise, a warbling caterwaul, oscillating, cutting down to the marrow of his bones. It sounded animalistic, but he’d never come across an animal that sounded anything like it. The cackling of a thousand laughing lions would have been a fraction of it.
The distant light stopped moving, and around it the trees shuddered. Wind whipped him. Across the way, the selfsame wind was locked in a war against the trees, and the trees were scarcely able to stand their ground. The trunks bowed to the gale, threatened to burst. The woodland creaked in agony, as if the captured souls in the hearts of those trees meant to break free of their earthly prison. Birds took flight. They sang the shrieks of the damned, caught on the wind. And all the while that light continued to shine.
Bess was staring at it, transfixed. The light reflected like a beacon in her eyes. She whispered, a single word: “vatié”. It was one Macel didn’t know.
“Say that again?”
“Vatié. Ghost light.” Bess broke away from the Easterwood, turned to face Macel. “It’s an old word. I... don’t know why I said it. It felt right.”
He looked at the floating light, narrowing his eyes to better see it. “A ghost light indeed,” he said. His nose was assaulted by the wafting of copper, cold and metallic. The light grew hazier, spread wider.
And suddenly it was gone. He didn’t see the moment the light was extinguished, didn’t notice it going out. He did notice the totality of the darkness that came after it. The surging wind grew louder and more ragged... and that too shut out.
He stood in the sudden still, breathless.
Bess whispered again. “Macel! The stars!”
This time he knew what she was talking about. The sky was black, where seconds ago it had been ablaze with stars. Where had they gone?
They stood there for an age, or perhaps just a second—Macel couldn’t say which. He could feel the darkness washing over him deep inside, slick black waves filling every vein. At last, he heard footsteps, and with that sound so the light and colour returned to his world. The stars were back in their places.
“What are you doing up?” He recognised Sam Preston’s voice, and turned to scowl at his friend.
“I was talking,” he said. “You know Bess.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “It’s late.”
Beside Sam, Eric Scobie stood, with a smirk printed on his pink face. “Did you hear that noise?”
“Hard to miss it,” said Macel.
“We’re going to check it out,” said Sam.
“Did Bennett send you?”
“To the Darkness with Bennett,” Scobie scoffed. “What can she do?”
Macel shrugged. “She can have you arrested.”
“Food and board and no need to work? Sounds like a better deal than the one I’ve got, to be honest.”
“No.” Bess spoke from behind Macel, where she’d positioned herself. Her voice was imperious in a way Macel had not heard before. “It’s not worth your time. It’s just an animal.”
The two soldiers looked at her. “Strange bloody animal,” said Sam.
“Strange bloody planet,” said Bess. “It’s only an animal. I promise. There’s really no point in going out of your way.”
Scobie jostled forward. “Hey, what do you know? Why are you making promises?”
“Why should we believe you?” asked Sam.
“Yeah, and even if we do, what if I want to see what sort of animal makes a noise like that?”
“You don’t.” Bess spoke with finality. The stable light on her face revealed something in her eyes. Her face was set with determination, but the eyes bathed in pools of fear. What does she know? Macel was suddenly afraid of her.
Sam and Scobie exchanged glances. “What about you, Macel? What do you think?” Sam looked expectantly at Macel, waiting for support.
As he looked her way, he saw Bess’s lip quiver. “She’s right,” he said. “Just an animal.”
That seemed to satisfy Sam. He shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the bunkhouse, and Scobie followed on behind him. As soon as they were across the duckboard bridge and out of earshot, Macel looked back at Bess. She was out of breath, panting and shuddering. “It wasn’t just an animal, was it?”
“No.”
“What was it?”
“I can’t say.”
“Right.” He looked her up and down. There she was, in the flesh, a mystery girl. He knew barely a thing about her. How many hours had he spent talking to her, keeping her company? And apparently she had a sixth sense she’d kept from him. Had he wasted his time? He needed to be alone for a little while. “I have to go, Bess,” he said, moving towards the planet. “Sam has a point. It’s late.”
He got as far as the stable door before Bess called him back. “Wait, Macel. Look, I need to be honest with you. You’ll hear me out, right?”
When he turned she was watching him, clutching at her ponytail. Her feet shuffled awkwardly on the dirt. “Of course I will.” He went back to her, reached to touch her cheek. A tear had crystallised there. He scraped it aside with his fingertip.
Bess threw herself into his arms and sobbed.
An eternity seemed to pass before she could speak, an eternity of ragged breathing and stifled tears. He stood holding her to his bosom all the while. His hand, resting on her back, was tickled by the tips of her hair with every slight motion of her head. When she was ready, she pulled herself away from him. “I have dreams,” she said. “Real dreams. Things that happen, or will happen—things I can’t know. I used to think it was coincidence. Doctor Ballard told me about it. It’s called Foresleeping. It’s supposed to be rare.”
Macel smiled at her. “I knew there was something special about you.”
“I wish there wasn’t.”
“You say you have dreams. Does that mean you can see the future? Is that it?”
She shook her head. “Not really. Well, sort of. It’s more a feeling—’this is the right thing to do’ or ‘this is bad’. Like I’m being guided by my subconscious. Sometimes there’s a woman in my dreams. Pale, like death. She’s floating in the sky with a candle in her hand. I just want to jump up and blow the candle out, like that’ll make her go away, but part of me is scared to. What if I do that and I don’t wake up again?”
“This woman. Is she—?”
“The Moonlight Woman.” Bess nodded. “She showed me the lake.”
“Did you have a dream about the light on the Easterwood—vatié, was it?”
“Not a proper dream, no. Just the word. And the feeling that it’s something bad. That’s why I wanted to talk to you tonight. Oh, I woke last night and it frightened me something awful, and there was nobody I could talk to about it. I’m too old to have nightmares. When I heard that screaming, it all came rushing back to me. We should stay away from there, Macel.”
He looked over at the blanket of forest. Now, in the silent grip of night, the Easterwood seemed so peaceful. How could there possibly be anything bad over there? Yet he had seen it, whatever it was, and he’d heard it too. And Corporal Bartley went that way, and Cailie and Warner too, and none of them have come back.
“Come on,” he said, wrapping his arm around her. “It’s late. Time to sleep.”
“I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight. Will you stay with me?”
He looked at her. “I don’t think Master Speke would appreciate that.”
“Speke’s not my father,” she said. “And I’m a grown woman. If I want someone to sit at my bedside while I sleep, that’s my choice. Not Speke’s.”
The farriers’ cottage was silent and still as a quiet grave, mourning another dead day. Not a soul stirred. Even Connor Paddock, the farrier with jowls like a bulldog who sat snoring in a soft chair facing the cottage doorway, was not woken.
Bess had the furthest bedroom. It was sparsely furnished. A tiny bed with a shabby blanket rested on a bare wooden floor. Half a dozen books lay on an old shelf stained with varnish in the corner of the room, next to a narrow window with open panes. Macel wandered over to them, and as Bess undressed he flicked through one. The title, in flaking gold leaf, identified it as a copy of the Béasin, with a publication date two hundred years earlier. The pages were yellowed and brittle.
“That’s my favourite,” said Bess. She’d changed into a silk nightdress that hugged her figure snugly.
“It’s an antique,” said Macel. “You could make more than a few bushels from this. Get you enough to buy a shiny new copy, and keep you comfortable for the next decade or so.”
“I couldn’t sell it,” she said, a weak smile. “It was a present from Nana. She left me the whole set, when she died. There was no way I could take them with me when I left home, so I didn’t. But I had to have this one.”
“Why this one?” The Books of Lightness were full of bloodshed and war, the stories that got the heart racing. When it came time to reenact a scene for school festivities, every child wanted something from the Four Fiefs, or the Tolleiac. The Béasin was just talking.
“It sounds silly,” said Bess, “but I connected with it. The poor Mother... It always made me cry. Imagine loving somebody so much that you’d walk a whole world to find them. Elly always had to be tucked in to something from the Tolleiac, and she’d throw a tantrum if she didn’t get her way, so that was all I got to hear. But when Nana was around, she’d wait until Elly had fallen asleep and then she’d come back and read me a passage from this.”
“She sounds like a wonderful woman,” said Macel.
Bess nodded. “She was the best. It’s a shame her daughter turned out so rotten. When Elly disappeared, I started crying myself to sleep. It took me ten years to kick the habit. One day, my mother heard me crying, and she came in to me. You’d think she’d say something kind, try to comfort me even if she couldn’t make things better. Not my mother. She told me it was my fault Elly was gone, and if I didn’t get my act together I’d be out as well. She said she was ashamed to have given birth to me.”
“How old were you?”
“Does that matter?” Tears were snaking down Bess’s cheek now. “She was my mother. All I wanted from her was kindness. There’s no age limit on kindness.”
“I know that,” Macel nodded. “I just wanted some context.”
“I was nine. Nine years old and I found out my mother didn’t love me.” Bess stood beside her bed, letting the tears flow. She made no attempt to wipe them away. “You don’t have to stay, if you don’t want to.”
“It’s okay,” said Macel.
There was a wood-hewn chair by the window, a rickety thing with spindly little legs. Macel pulled it up beside Bess’s bed, where she lay, her eyes closed. He watched her for a while, the book in his lap. When he thought she might be asleep, he picked it up, flicked through the pages until an illustration caught his eye. It showed a woman with emerald eyes just like Bess, looking out over an ocean that spanned the rest of the page. The words were written atop the blue of the water:
“‘Then for four weeks the Maid of Narvīm walked, across a great desert where only ghosts looked at her; her shelter was the bare hollows of the rock, and the water made her sick. Still she walked, until one morning a woman in rags appeared before her. And the woman was thin, and gaunt, and on her hands were a hundred calluses.’”
“A thousand,” Bess murmured, eyes still shut.
Macel peered over the pages of the book. “I beg your pardon?”
“The woman had a thousand calluses. It’s spelled wrong in my copy, that’s how I remember.”
He looked again. Sure enough, Bess was right. ‘And on her hands were a thoosand calluses,’ the text read. “Should I stop reading?”
“No,” said Bess. “Carry on.”
And he did. He read the whole story aloud—the bit where the old woman begged for some food, and the Maid of Narvīm gave away the last of her bread. And then when the old woman revealed herself to be Fréreves, the God-Mother, and showed the Maid of Narvīm how to get out of the desert. The story ended when the Maid came to a town on the coast, begging for any word of her long-lost sister. When she sat beside the sea, Macel shut the book and laid it gently on the table beside Bess’s bed. He blew out her candle, and stayed with her in the darkness—just listening to the rise and fall of her breathing. At some point in the night, he fell asleep.
Morning came too soon. The breakfast things were being cleared away when Macel arrived in the dining room, bleary-eyed and still buttoning up his uniform. Bess waited until she was dressed to wake him up. By then, the farriers’ cottage was alive, and sneaking out unseen by Speke was a considerable task. He’d run to his bunk and thrown on the first uniform he could find—the one he’d worn yesterday, discarded on the floor—in the hopes of making it down in time to get a bite to eat.
Lieutenant Bennett was waiting for him. “Donea,” she said, smirking. “You join us at last. Did you not feel like showing for the roll call this morning?”
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said. “I had a late night.”
“No doubt. You’re free to do as you wish in your downtime, Donea, it makes no odds to me, but take an alarm to your next conquest. You’re not free to come and go as you please.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
“Good. As it happens, I have a job for you. Since you slept through the morning’s exercises, you’ll have more energy to spare than anybody else here.”
He stifled a yawn. Bennett saw it and smirked.
“Captain Clifford has informed me that we’re to have wiring installed in the coming days, so that we can be connected to a more reliable power supply out of the valley. That’s the last impediment to getting Plateau Watch finished. I need you to run to Wallwork the glazier, and ask him to come along and take the measurements he needs.”
“You want me to run an errand?”
Bennett nodded. “I want you to run an errand. But because I’m kind, I’ll let you take a late breakfast first. I’m not going to delay the kitchen staff in their cleaning up, and you aren’t either, but you’re welcome to anything you’re able to grab.”
There wasn’t much left to grab by the time Lieutenant Bennett had left the room. Most of the trays of food had been taken away, and the few that were left were empty aside from the last unappetising remnants. He picked out an assortment of foods, none of which really belonged together. The porridge at the bottom of the bowl was stodgy, and even stirring the vilsa chunks in didn’t do much to mix it all up. The whole thing tasted horrible anyway. What little milk he found at the bottom of a jug was sour.
“Just talking?” Sam appeared just as Macel was tucking into a damp pastry, the last in the tray. “Admit it, Macel, you were shagging the horse-girl silly last night.”
Delie had her arms folded. “That’s not the sort of thing Macel would do. He’s not like you, Sam.”
“I’ve had sex,” said Macel, a little too eagerly. “Not last night, but in the past.”
“So what were you doing all night?” Sam seemed genuinely confused. “How many other ways are there to spend a night in the company of a girl? I mean, there are prettier ones out there, but Bessily isn’t hideous.”
“I’ve not known one prettier,” said Macel. “Present company excluded, Delie.”
Delie grinned.
Sam’s eyes bulged. “Then why weren’t you shagging her? What was so interesting that it kept you from man’s greatest natural urge?”
“I sat with her,” said Macel.
“You sat with her?” Delie spoke as though she’d misheard him. Sam started laughing.
“I sat with her,” Macel nodded. “She didn’t want to be alone, so I sat by her bed until she was asleep.”
“I’m impressed,” said Delie, beaming. “You followed my advice for a change.”
Macel nibbled at a corner of his pastry, which was decidedly dry and flaky. He grimaced and forced it down. “She needed a friend,” he said. “What else could I do?”