‘We cannot know for sure,’ she said. ‘We can only guess. Those people lived so long ago, and all we can know of them comes to us through our ancient legends and our own blood.’
‘Were they our ancestors?’ I wondered how we could possibly tell.
Edild smiled, a small, private smile. ‘We don’t know that, either,’ she said. ‘They lived in the land where our ancestors lived, and our own stories go back a very long way. It’s possible.’
A thought was slowly taking shape in my head, and I tried to put it into words. ‘I really felt as if I were that person in the procession,’ I said slowly. ‘She could do what I could — find the hidden path, I mean — and I had the strong sense that she was me in an earlier time, that I was seeing through the eyes of one of my own forbears.’
Edild nodded. ‘I have heard Hrype say much the same thing,’ she said. ‘He, too, believes that we share our skills with our ancestors; that such things come down through the generations in the same way that the colour of our hair does.’
I nodded, letting her words sink in. Then I murmured, ‘You said we can only guess what they were doing. Will you tell me?’
‘I will.’ She composed herself, then said, ‘The ancient people made a place of power, out there on the foreshore. It was a magical place, where the element of water meets the element of land and neither one nor the other truly prevails. One of our most obscure and incomprehensible legends tells of the upturned oak stump that you saw in your dream, its roots raised to the sky and its massive trunk thrust down through the crust of this world into the underworld.’
‘Which mirrors this one,’ I added. ‘Granny Cordeilla told me.’
‘Yes,’ Edild murmured. ‘Yes, she believed that to be true.’
‘Do you?’
She shrugged. ‘I do not know.’
‘What did they use the oak stump for?’ I had a feeling I already knew.
She sighed. ‘The myth says it was where a very important member of the tribe was put after death. The body was borne in state across the sands, taken into the wood circle and laid out on the upturned oak stump’s roots. It was — it is — a crossing place.’
‘Where land meets sea,’ I supplied. ‘Yes.’
She gave me a strange look. ‘Also,’ she whispered, ‘where souls cross over.’
I felt a shudder run down my back. Where souls cross over. .
‘The ceremonies went on for days,’ Edild was saying dreamily. ‘The people all wished to honour their dead leader, and they knew they would be bereft. The dead one had been a mighty sorcerer — perhaps the greatest that ever lived — and the people had no idea how they would survive without the protective magic they had taken for granted through all the long years.’
‘Did they survive?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ Edild answered, ‘if the tales are to be believed.’ She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised as if she were faintly mocking herself. ‘For here we are.’
We sat in silence for what felt like a long time. Edild was watching Elfritha, and I was watching my aunt. I was trying to work out how to ask her the question that was all but bursting out of me in such a way that she would answer it in the way I wanted.
In the end, there was no need. She had just finished bathing Elfritha’s face, chest and arms, and she put her washcloth down with a sigh, turning to me.
‘It is inadvisable to ignore the summons of a power dream,’ she said gravely.
My heart leapt. Did she mean what I thought she did? ‘Er — it really takes two of us, to look after Elfritha,’ I hedged.
Edild rinsed out the cloth. ‘Elfritha does not need much nursing. I can manage alone.’
‘Will Hrype be back soon?’ I didn’t like the thought of leaving her on her own.
She shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
I knew better than to ask where he’d gone. Knowing him and his secret ways, it was quite possible he hadn’t told her, and I didn’t want to put her in the awkward position of having to confess her ignorance to me.
She turned to look at me, her face intent. ‘Do you know where to go?’
I shook my head, hardly daring to breathe.
‘In that case,’ she said — and I could hear her reluctance in her grave tone — ‘I’d better tell you.’
THIRTEEN
Hrype was sitting under a low hazel hedge that meandered from the rear wall of the abbey down to where the water lapped against the shore of the little island. He had been there for a long time, so deep in thought that he had not noticed the chill night air. His mind was far away; he had been walking with the spirits.
He had been unable to remain in the little room where Edild and Lassair were fighting to save Elfritha’s life. Neither of the two healers seemed very interested in discussing, or even thinking about, who had poisoned the young nun, and the question that so fascinated Hrype — was the same person responsible for the deaths of the man in the fen and Elfritha’s friend? — did not appear to engage them in the least.
It did; of course it did, and he knew it. Had he been a healer, he was sure that he, too, would have been so preoccupied with caring for his patient that there would have been little room in his mind for anything else. But he was no healer.
He had forced himself to remain in the room at the end of the infirmary, his presence doing no good to anyone, for as long as he could stand it. He had even returned after the priest had made his brief visit. Hrype had sent a silent, fervent prayer of thanks to whichever of his guardian spirits had warned him that Father Clement was on his way. He was deeply thankful that the priest had not set eyes on him, for the business at Crowland had been far more serious than Hrype had revealed, and there was little doubt that, had Father Clement seen him, he would have recognized him. Hrype did not even want to think about what would probably have happened next. .
He had sat in his corner of the room for some time, watching as Edild tended her patient and Lassair slept. He had sent out feelers to each woman and had understood that while the woman he carried always in his heart was simply exhausted, Lassair was deeply distressed, almost to the point of despair. He wondered why. Her sister, of course, lay before her, very sick, but Hrype knew by then that Elfritha was not going to die. If that were Lassair’s sole concern, soon it would not distress her so deeply. There was, he felt, something more.
His thoughts had returned, over and over again, to the question of who had tried to kill Elfritha. From what Lassair had told him, it did indeed appear that the poison had been administered by the same hand that was responsible for the two deaths. But who was he, and why had these three people been his victims?
Restless, frustrated, impatient with himself and everyone else, eventually Hrype had got up, moved lightly across the little room and out through the open door. He had used the outer door that led to the cloister several times by now, and he knew it opened without a sound. Soon he had been out in the dark night, loping across the cloister, down the maze of passages that twined through the abbey and over the patch of rough ground inside the rear wall. He had climbed this effortlessly, then hurried over the damp grass to the hazel hedge, stopping at a point where a small stream flowed close by.
Now, deep in the shelter of the hazel bushes, he was lighting a fire. He controlled the leaping flames, keeping the fire small. It was not for heat that he had lit it; merely to give a little light and, crucially, to provide one of the four elements. Water was provided by the stream running beside the hedge; earth was beneath him, and air above.
When the fire was burning to his satisfaction, he sat down again, crossed his long legs and untied the thongs of a soft leather bag that hung from his belt. Opening it, he spread out a square of linen on the ground in front of him and then closed the bag, holding it in both hands.
For a long time, he sat motionless. His eyes were closed, and he was murmuring a long, involved incantation. He needed the help of his guardian spirits, and it took a huge effort to summon them. Some were his ancestors, fierce men and women whose roots were in the cold north lands and in whom had run a rich seam of magic and sorcery. Some of the guardians were animals; his own spirit animal was a great brown bear, whose protection and help were invaluable when he chose to bestow them.