One Year Ago
She brought no peace to the circle of graves.
At the foot of the oak, she paced ceaselessly beneath the creaking branches, waking the dead. Grey stones huddled round the trunk to match the cairns, to honour a body which was never found.
Weeks before now there had been snow in the air. Weeks from now there would be white blossoms. Today there was nothing save this lost brown leaf, sweeping over the roots and back again, heavy with thought. Her fingers were locked in a strange contortion; she had begun to wring her hands and then forgotten. She glanced at the eulogy on the oak like a beacon of light, and did not look at the graves. She recited the words in her mind like a ward, so she would not hear the voices.
And neither did she hear footsteps save her own. But her mind's chanting soon summoned a voice — the voice of the man who had carved the words — as though the tree had learned to speak for him.
"Good lady," the voice called gently. "It has been too long."
Appearing beyond the oak, Eawulf approached from the east path, stepped into the circle, and waited before her. He pulled back a hooded cloak that had once been green, and his straw hair began sliding over itself in the breeze. Syaven gave him no answer. He might have been a spirit.
He raised his chin to scratch at his throat and squint at her. "Where is your horse?"
Her horse grazed down the path, not ten paces from his own. But few are the decent ways to ask indecent questions.
"Dead perhaps." She wrought her voice to sound forlorn, beyond what she felt. The chill of it lured him closer, until his presence gave some shelter from the breeze. More than a ghost could give.
With a measure of silence in place of an apology, he squinted over the cairns instead. "It grows late. Let me lead you to Eaworth ere night falls."
Syaven looked at him, and weighed his words. He might offer more. She might be glad of it. Eawulf's fondness for song and laughter matched her own, and he was clever — enchanted by many things, but with passion for none. He had spent nearly as long as she in the company of the ranger, and they alone called him by his right name. They alone had taken his instruction beyond the weather-beaten runes of their folk, to know the flowing scripts of the south. Of all who remained, he bore her no spite. Of all who remained, he might confess.
"Why," she began as one speaking to herself, but found the question painful and turned the blade on him. "I am blamed for Halamir; I know this. But the others..." she finished the thought with a sweep of her gaze across the graves that stared back and listened. "Eawulf. Tell me how it came to this. Speak no gentle lies."
Eawulf liked the query even less. "Say not you heed their scorn," he croaked and muttered. "Grief can make fools of s—"
"Speak," she repeated, enough gust in that soft breeze to push him. His reluctance was noble. His duty was not to wound her. Yet after all duty had cost her, she would not abide it. "Find your voice," she went on, tossing it to him with a brush of her hand. "The voice of a man who has recounted the doom of Ulvar's Steading a dozen times at the tavern. Speak not to me; speak to the faces at the table, leaning upon your words." She waited to trap his gaze the moment he raised it. "Spare me no pain."
"Very well," came the answer. And he did not.
❖
Little time had passed, little light was lost, but her heart had crossed mountains. Near to the end Eawulf abandoned his nerve. "With her boots... In the wood..." He faltered now like a lost child. "They found another thing. A thing of yours."
Syaven's hand flew up to her neck, digging her nails into the dip of her collarbone. "Yes," he affirmed with a glare, disturbed by her knowing. "Few could guess how it came to be there, and of the answers none favoured you. Your sister to begin it; your stone to end it. You see now why their wrath wears your name." He released a breath and lifted his head, free to escape the story at last. "None fell after young Celawyn, ere the steading was broken."
"Celawyn," she echoed. Her gaze skipped frantically across the ground, flipping back the pages of her memory in haste. A flash. A face. A touch. "Say their names once more."
"Torvi, Celawyn, Fre—"
"No," she snapped. "In order."
"Halamir," he began, and the wind swelled to attack his voice. "Torvi. Alric..." As he named each grave that circled the tree in the order they were lain, she drifted closer to the one that held the ranger, and her sister's beside it. Suspicion crept into Eawulf's tone, as though he feared becoming accomplice to some dark spell. Yet the moment he finished, he saw her struck with some horrifying revelation and shudder, and pity swept him forward to steady her. One large glove gripped her arm. She hardly noticed.
"This was my doing," she breathed, staring through the void beneath the earth. The grasp on her arm turned fierce.
"Hear me," demanded Eawulf. He grew impatient, and rough as bark. "Daughter of Torven. You are no witch. You lived as a child with me, under this sky." His grip jolted her arm. Shaking the spirits away. Forcing her to listen. "A name may be raked through each mire in the Mark, but the view from the heavens is clear. Our forefathers smile on you still."
"What became of the stone?" she asked, all his arrows missing her. She seemed irritated.
"They cast it to the Entwash," he replied bitterly. "And prayed you would find no peace."
The woman shivered, and Eawulf held her arm firm. She had not wept, and he feared a flood would burst and sweep her away. Finally, gently, he implored her. "You lost a man. You lost a sister. Grieve them, that they may rest."
At last he felt her grow calm. The leaf no longer quivered in the wind. The touch of death no longer chilled her. Yet when her blue stare rose to meet his own, he found she had not fled a storm. She had swallowed it, and kept its threat caged in her eyes. With a slow, sickening, unnatural motion — as lightning that only dripped from a cloud — she straightened her spine, slipped from his grasp, tipped her head, and spat on the grave of her sister.
The silence between them spread long fingers into the air until even the breeze was suffocated, and nothing moved. He stared at her. But the woman soon left his side, and released something from hands he had sworn were empty. A wilted violet. The scrawny weed kissed Halamir's cairn and tumbled away, summoning the wind to awaken.
"Hear me, son of Ealdred," she said with a bite of mirth. "You speak well. No curse am I." The oak's branches once more began to sway that heavy dance, and Syaven let her glances linger, bidding farewell to the circle she would never enter again. "Had this been a reckoning for all that is lost to me, more graves would be sleeping here."
The road to town was quiet. They heard no wolves. Eawulf had not been as shocked as some by her behaviour. 'Do what you will,' he had answered, with a chill that impressed her, and knelt to replace a stone that had strayed from the ranger's pile. 'This place is dark. Only darkness watches you now, and it is none to judge.'
Even their horses were uncommonly hushed as they crested the last hill. Far beyond Eaworth, the south road could be seen — a thin line of chalk under the moonlight, scrawled across the valley. Syaven clung to that line, as she had for many days of late. Watching for a traveller. Asking the road to tell her. What colour his horse. What colour his eyes.
Day and night she waited, burning and dreading to know who would find her first. That fading promise, to deliver a threat. Or that fading threat, to deliver his promise.
