Hunted by the Church in the heart of a briar hedge, we had no torches nor lanterns to hold back the night. The falling snow grew thinner with the departure of day, and in the wake of the storm came bitter cold, so cold that trees creaked and groaned in the forest and each breath sparkled on the breeze.
The only light in our central tent was the dim illumination of a shrouded firepit, a ruddy glow that existed in compliment to the dark rather than opposition. The only sound was the occasional cough, an exhalation, a crack of shifting embers.
And Eris.
She had a lovely voice, deep and strong, warm like velvet. In speech she seemed ill-used to it, soft-spoken and gentle in a way I found endearing. Yet when time came to recount a tale or to sing a song, she forgot herself, or gave herself over to the act, and it was…it was Holy. It took the breath from my lungs. To hear her felt like…
Like hearing the piping of foraging birds in the darkest midwinter, in the freshness of a red dawn, in the holiest hour. She told us a story, and she enfolded us in the words so gently, that there was no time to realize it, nor to protest, nor to wonder.
She sat on a half-broken crate over the firepit with red light haunting her face, and she spoke another world into being. Even Grannine was ensorcelled, present as a slash of white fabric on the edge of my vision, silent in Her fascination. We sat together with Dermot at the edge of the tent, watching Eris from afar as she wove her spell.
“There was a time very different from this one,” Eris said. “When there was no Veil, and there was no Church, and a woman…or a man, I suppose–”
Some of the women laughed. I heard Astrid’s dry laugh among them. “…A woman could walk from one shore to the other along the Highroad, that stone commonway that stretched more miles than any living man had now travelled.”
“Or woman,” she added, again, and this time we knew it was coming by the way she paused, and the way her eyes caught the fire. But we still laughed, for she looked so pleased with herself to have made the joke.
“In this time before the Church, far from Frydain, there was a city, among green forests and high plains. A beautiful city of silver and stone, a city of tall and virtuous folk. Their skin was dark, their eyes were sharp, and they had no fear of Death.”
“In a blue and yellow house on the steppes outside this silver city there lived a mother named Esper, a woman expecting her first child. Her man had gone, and the coming baby was the only memory he’d left her.”
The moment she spoke the words, Eris looked stricken. She looked straight through the crowd, and I followed her eyes.
There was a woman in the crowd with black hair and a swelling belly, who had covered her mouth with her hand, and for a moment I thought Eris might break the spell to apologize, or to utter some explanation. What better cause to falter in the midst of a tale than to recognize the depth of another tragedy? But she did not.
“She loved the child before it was even born,” Eris said. She swallowed, carried on with more strength. “One night Esper had dreams. Dreams of music. She dreamt the stars came down from the sky while she lay dreaming. They spoke to her. ‘Your child can be blessed,’ they said. ‘Your child will make such music with us. Your child, your child will be golden. Your child will be ours, ours to take, ours to keep safe forever. Do you accept?’”
Eris paused. She looked about the ring of children huddled close to her, their faces upturned. She lifted her gaze, swept the circle. No one answered. “Well. Would you? Esper thought she was dreaming. Who wouldn’t do anything in a dream? Who wouldn’t want their child to be blessed, to be safe forever, to be golden?”
No one answered. I saw Mercy Harper actually avert her eyes, as though Eris might read the answer on her face.
Who would turn away power offered? I thought. I kept myself from looking to my right, where Grannine hovered in the snow. I would say yes.
“She said yes,” Eris said. “And she thought no more of it…until the baby came.”
At that precise moment, a knot popped in the fire, as though to punctuate her story. Eris did not so much as blink at the interruption. “Esper’s child was born at midnight on a stormy summer eve. She was born laughing, and she was born gold. Gold like an Imperial Fryd.”
Eris flicked her wrist, and a single large, golden coin materialized in her fingertips, held between middle and index finger. I could hardly see at this distance, and it might well have been yellow paint or even tin in the fire, but in her hands, in the midst of the story, it seemed of the purest gold.
“Gold like straw in the sun. She wasn’t metal—the child was alive enough to laugh—but she was gold through and through, with brown eyes and a fine head of dark hair, and her wee laugh was like the sound of harpstrings.”
She struck a match.
The spurt and fizzle of sulphur flared around her fingertips, and the light of the match flashed up the length of her upraised arm, turning her skin from shadows to brilliant gold. She flexed her fingers in the unsteady light, and for an instant we were witnesses to a miracle, to something more than the work of nature, to a hand of living gold.
“Esper was afraid,” Eris said. Her voice softened, clung to us in fading smoke. “She realized she’d made a bargain without ever knowing it. She’d made a bargain to accept the stars’ blessing, and to let them have sway over her child. To take her child! This, the last thing left of her man, this new joy of her life. She wouldn’t have it.”
“That’s right,” a woman murmured, among the crowd. A gleam of satisfaction shone out in Eris’ eyes.
“But this wasn’t some hapless noblewoman—begging your pardon, love,” she said, and she looked right to me, struck me speechless with the word.
Eris-
But the others laughed. The moment passed without a sign that the others had so much as noticed my flash of apprehension. Her smile widened, and she was flying now, from one word to the next. “Esper was a shepherdess. She’d kept her flock safe on her own with crook and hound after her man had gone, bearing his child. She’d earned clips and silver by the labor of her hands. She was a woman of this proud and ancient city, a child of Sedek, and she wasn’t about to lie down and give up her baby to a bunch of singing lights.”
Saric whispered something under her breath. Delight was never far from her features, but now it was spreading fast with some realization. She leaned over to say something to Rina, who nodded and answered in an undertone.
“She sent the doula home, and though it was late, she rose from her bed. The clouds were thick over her blue and yellow house, and she knew she hadn’t long before they cleared. She went to her spinning-wheel, to her basket of goods, and she fetched a wee bottle of brown dye, traded at a great price all the way from the eastern shore.” Eris paused, and again there was a glint in her eye, a clever look. She dared us to anticipate, to follow her and foresee the thought, and to pursue her through the story made for a delightful shock as we caught her. “She took the dye, and she took her lovely young babe, and she rubbed the child down from head to toe, until her skin was just as fine and dark a brown as that of her mother.”
More than a few of the children giggled at this. One of them held up a small, round hand to look at it, pale skin standing out in the dark.
I wondered at her choice of tale. The folk of Frydain were fairer, as a rule, and that was only one of the ways in which the druids were different—some of them were darker, with deeper browns or golds underlying the colors of their skin. For some of the folk of Caer Lunan—and surely for some of the children—Dermot and his kind might have been the first time they saw any living man of that color. And here now was Eris to tell a tale of a city, long ago, far away, where every man and woman was tall and dark in countenance. Was it only chance that this tale had occurred to her? Or was there some subtler purpose she was working toward? I longed to ask her. I would never have stopped her, not before her tale was told.
“She covered the baby head to toe. And then she took her baby and fed her, and fell asleep with the girl there, quiet at last.”
Eris struck another match. This time not below her hand, but close to her face, so close that the curling smoke framed her features, the light flashed a skeletal silhouette up across the hollows of her eyes, rendered her grin a stark and spectral leer. Some of the children started at the flash and flare. “So Esper dreamed. And in her dreams, the sky opened. The walls of her blue and gold house peeled away, and the stars came down. They were terrible to see, so beautiful it made her heart ache, and so far from anything human.”
She leaned forward, spreading her hands. In the undertones of her voice, in the breath and the rumble of her words, she brought forth an ominous tone. Not a growl, not a hiss—but a high, clear voice, cold and lifeless as a winter sky. “‘We have come to keep our bargain,’ they said. ‘The child is here as we have promised.’”
In a flash, she dropped the affect, speaking quickly to the crowd in a hunted tone. “Esper was there holding her new child to her breast, with not a single thing to serve for a weapon. But she sat up in the bed and faced them down, beautiful and terrible though they were, and she said…”
Eris paused. In the moment between one storyteller’s mask and the next, as her face changed from cool, emotionless, expressionless, I caught a pure and unvarnished smile, simply joy in the telling, and I found myself smiling in turn as Eris put on an accent that dripped with the sound of Caer Lunan, a low Queenshire voice with a hint of an edge.
“‘What sort of bargain do you call this, then? You told me the child would make music, and that she’d be gold. This child’s surely not making music, and she’s not gold at all!’”
Eris snatched up one of the smallest children, Sara Bauldry, a girl who had her mother’s hair and her father’s face, and she waved her gently in the air in front of the crowd, much to Sara’s delight, and the entertainment of the watchers. She shifted the child to the crook of her arm, the better to wag her finger. ‘See?’ she said to them. ‘She’s just the same color as I am!’”
The rise and fall of her momentum set a frame to the performance. Eris spoke for precisely as long as she wished, and when she stopped, she moved less, blinked less, sat coolly. She stopped now, and slowly let Sara Bauldry back down until her feet touched the dirt floor.
“The stars came close,” she said. She bent in close to look at Sara, and she wiggled her eyebrows, walking her fingers across the girl’s head. “They looked at the baby without eyes, and without any words, looked at her as she lay there safe and sleeping in her mother’s arms.”
“The stars, you see, spend all their time up there.” Eris swiveled, pointed up into the sky, and more than one head followed her pointing hand, even though the night was overcast, even though we sat beneath the canopy of a tent. I half-expected to see Corail sail from behind a cloud at the moment of her evocation. “How’d they be knowing what a baby’s supposed to look like? So they looked, and looked, until the poor tired mother thought surely the sun ought to have come up by now, and at last they said to her, they said–‘Woman. We know not what has gone wrong with our bargain. Perhaps the child will change her colors with a little time. You may keep her for ten years, and on that day, we will return.’”
Eris shrugged. “Well. She was a shepherdess. She haggled for her food, for her wool, for anything and everything. So she shot right back at them to say, ‘Ten years! You don’t know anything of children. That’s no time at all. Might as well say twenty!’”
“The stars answered. They said, ‘Twenty years, then. In twenty years, we will return for the child we promised.’”
“‘And much luck to you!’ Esper said, with a huff. ‘Get out then, and leave me with this girl until she’s ripe.’”
“And just like that, she blinked her eyes,” Eris brought her hands up to her face, rubbed her eyes dramatically, looking out over the children. “And there was the dawn, coming up red over her city. The stars had gone, and with them the night, and they’d left her own perfect baby in her arms. And young Esper looked at her girl in the first light of the day and only then did she realize, she’d not quite covered her all the way up.” Eris held up her hands in a shrug. “She’d done a fine job of it with the dye, to be sure. But she was tired, as any new mother would be, and the dye ran out just before she was done filling in all the spots. So her baby girl had freckles of gold…” she touched a finger to her face, tapping along the cheekbone. “That marked her, ever after, as a child of the stars. As someone who was ever-so-loved by the woman who bore her. Because after all, a mother will do anything to keep her little one close.”
I saw Lyn Dorsey pull her boy close, as Eris looked up at the sky with a grin.
“She’ll even cheat the stars.”
A whisper, perhaps. A murmur of sound. There might have been a sigh as Eris closed her tale. One of our youngest broke the silence, one of the children orphaned in the revolt, heedless in her curiosity.
“But what happened to the baby?” she asked, her little voice breaking the silence, and the spell.
Laughter. Sighs of relief. Sore backs and legs shifted, weight was redistributed, cloaks and blankets drawn close as we came back to ourselves, realized where we sat, where we lay. As the bitter reality of our circumstances began to return, Eris smiled. She tousled the girl’s hair.
“Many things, Finnula. Many, many things. But I think those are stories for another night.”
*
BLANK SLATE 
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