After a long silence the guest murmured, “Mistress, your telling is better than any Lay.”
The innkeeper was impassive, though evidently not displeased. It was a while before she took up the story. She shelled a few beans without looking at them, or at anything. “My sister’s daughter Fern worked in the great house at Odren in those years,” she said, and paused again. Her hands rested in her lap. “She was the youngest of the lady’s women, and something of a pet to her. I myself went up often to carry fresh butter, for we weren’t keeping the inn then but dairying. I could talk with Fern. So this is no hearsay or gossip I tell you, but the truth as you won’t hear it from any other mouth. But the cause of the trouble, anyone can tell you that. My lord sails away and leaves his lady, and with her he leaves a handsome young man, a sorcerer who has no more work to do, since the ship is built and gone. Yet there he stays. The lady puts out word that the great house is in need of rebuilding, and the sorcerer’s staying on to see to that work. And indeed some scaffolds were set up and some roofing seen to. But what need for sorcery, with slate right to hand at Velery, and workmen willing and able? And then the lady says that the sorcerer, wizard she calls him, is staying on at Odren to work spells of safety on the house and its children, and such stuff.
“Nobody spoke well about it, but few spoke much ill about it either. The lady was the mistress and Ash was a sorcerer. You never know what such a man may hear or do. But my niece Fern and other women in the house told me it was a wicked thing how the boy and girl were treated now. And I myself saw the girl dressed poorly, always out in the gardens and fields with her little brother.
“Then the people at the great house heard that the sorcerer had seen our ship and all its people lost. He saw the battle in his water-mirror. That’s a bowl with spelled water in it. He looked and saw the pirates boarding, and the fighting and fire, saw the ship sink. He rushed through the house, crying out, ‘They are gone, gone down, they are gone!’ And my niece said when she heard his cry it was as if she saw the ships before her own eyes in a great whirl of fire and seawater red as blood. The people of the household wept and screamed, and the lady sank down as if struck by a stone.
“But after she rose up, she gathered all the people of the house together and told them that they mustn’t speak of what the sorcerer had seen in his bowl. For though her heart told her it was true, yet better not to grieve so many people before the word came from the east, and maybe there was hope for other ships of the fleet, if not for the Lady of Odren.
“She said that name as steady as any other name, my niece told me.
“The daughter of Odren was a girl of sixteen then. When she heard what her mother said she cried out that it was a lie and her father was not dead. The lady tried to calm her, but the girl raged and stormed and ran away from her and from the sorcerer, shouting that she would not have them touch her.
“After that she kept as far from her mother as she could. She was called Lily, as her mother was, but she changed her use-name and told the people they must call her Weed, and her brother, Little Garnet, she called Clay. He was about ten then. The mother let them do as they pleased, even to changing their names. Truth was, she paid them no heed at all, Fern told me. She was always with the sorcerer, combing his long tar-black hair and caressing his cheeks and unlacing his sandals and stroking his feet, Fern said, and his hands were always on her, pressing and caressing. None of the people of the house dared show much kindness to the children, for fear of the sorcerer’s ill will. For he was truly a man of power. My niece had seen what he could do. She never would tell me what it was, but she’d learned to fear him.
“There was a gardener’s man, though, who was kind to the little boy, a west country man. The great folk in the house took no notice of him, so I suppose he didn’t fear the sorcerer.”
She stopped. The listener asked no question, though the pause went on a long time.
“Then came news that the pirates were defeated. One ship alone came back to port, down at Barreny. Her crew told of the long pursuit, and a hundred sea-battles when the pirates turned their fleet upon us or lured aside and destroyed one ship or another of ours in their wicked cruelty. But at last we’d scattered them and defeated them, sunk their ships, cleaned them out of the Closed Sea, and our ships would be coming home—those still above the water.
“Then one ship and another began to come in to port all up and down the coast. They’d all been scattered by the spring gales as they tried to sail west. But no sign or word of our ship. Summer went on, autumn came again. And word of what the sorcerer had seen had got about, so people all said he’d seen truly, and the Lady of Odren was lost.
“And then one bright morning the daughter of Odren comes crying from the sea-cliffs over the cove, ‘The ship! The ship! My father’s ship!’
“And it was her, the Lady of Odren, her sails all stained and worn, sailing in on the wind from the east.
“My niece was there in the house, and what I tell you now, she saw and told me.
“When the Lady Lily looked from the window and saw the ship entering the cove, she stood like stone. She spoke to the sorcerer in her room for a moment. Then she went out and down the long stairways to the beach along with many others, and was first on the pier to greet her husband as he came off the ship. His hair had grizzled, but my niece said he looked a warrior, a big powerful man, laughing aloud, and he picked his lady up and swung her about in the joy of seeing her again. And she held to him and stroked his face and said, ‘Come home, come up to the house, dear lord!’
“She had the cooks make a feast, and that evening the candles were all lighted, and the lord told his tales of sea-battles and showed his scars and squeezed his wife and petted his son and daughter. And Ash, he smiled and kept aside like a humble sorcerer.
“The lady stayed with her husband, clinging to him every moment till they went to their bedroom. So it was her daughter couldn’t speak to him alone, nor anyone else.
“Now, in the morning at first light the lady came from her room asking the women had they seen her lord. She had waked and he was gone from her bed. No one had seen him. She made light of it, saying he must have gone out to walk his domain as he often used to do, alone and early. And she told them to make breakfast ready for his return. But then as the day came, someone looked from the window and said, ‘The ship is gone.’ And so it was. The harbor was empty.
“And from that morning on there has been no sight or sound or word of the Lord of Odren, or his ship the Lady of Odren.”
“Strange, strange!” said the listener, in a subdued tone. “What can have become of them? Was it . . .”
She didn’t finish her question, and the innkeeper didn’t answer it. She said, “Well, then they found that Odren’s children were gone too. The people told the lady that. She’d been wailing and weeping for her husband, but she went silent then as if she’d been struck. All she could say was ‘The children? My children?’ And she didn’t weep, but began going about the house and the grounds seeking them, silent, like a mother cat whose kittens have been taken to drown, Fern said. And that went on for hours, until the sorcerer gave her a potion to quiet her.”