The witch fiddler, p.1
The Witch-Fiddler, page 1
The
Witch-Fiddler
Deborah Bradford
Copyright © 2015 Deborah Bradford
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1511891785
ISBN-13: 9781511891783
To my mother, Yvonne Palmer, lesh graih.
Author’s Note
THIS IS A work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to real events is purely coincidental. While my writing is informed by my love of all things Celtic, the regions in this book (the Lowland and the North Country) are my own inventions and are not meant to correspond to any real places or cultural entities.
The language that my Northern characters speak is Manx, with a little bit of Irish. I have not studied these languages in any depth. I couldn’t say, for instance, whether words like caillagh and ashlins, in regular usage, really do carry all the meanings I’ve ascribed to them here. Additionally, the name Gwehara, which sort of resembles the Irish word for “wind,” is a word I made up.
Fans of Celtic lore will recognize where I took other liberties, including with the concepts of geasa and immrama. The definitions I’ve given them are specific to the story and do not fully reflect the various ways they function in Celtic mythology.
That being said, it’s always been my goal to write a story that can be enjoyed on more than one level. Whatever you get out of it, I hope you enjoy it a fraction as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
Deborah Bradford
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
HOW NEMAIN HAD come to Briarvale Castle was well known. Her mother was an Outlander, a vagrant who had died giving birth at the castle gatehouse. But why Nemain was allowed to stay at Briarvale—and, for that matter, how she had come by the name Nemain—was a mystery to most people, including herself.
From early childhood she was large-boned and awkward, and she grew so rapidly that her clothes hardly ever fit. She had a round face, a long rope of dark hair, and no beauty except for her smile and her eyes. But her smile was a rare, fleeting thing; and her eyes, large and golden-brown under black brows, were usually downcast.
She also had a strange and terrible deformity: her hands. They were like a corpse’s, withered and misshapen, the veins and sinews showing through the brittle skin. For this reason she was made to wear gloves all the time, and if she got caught without them she was punished with a birch switch.
Not surprisingly, young Nemain was rather shy. She knew that most people at Briarvale—the servants in particular—viewed her as an interloper, an unlucky thing, and she kept out of their way as much as possible. She haunted the castle like a shadow, barely visible from the corner of your eye, disappearing when you looked at her directly.
But if you gave her a fiddle and asked her to play … ah, there was magic for you! Of course she must take off her gloves, the better to feel it; but once she began, you would forget about her hands and everything else. From this untrained child—from her first clumsy scrapings of the bow, at age five, on a fiddle she could barely heft—flowed music of astonishing vigor and beauty, music that could draw the heart and soul right out of you. Some who heard it were moved to weep; others, to dance. A few (the most superstitious) held it in dread, believing that her uncanny gift, like the unnatural appearance of her hands, was the result of some faery mischief or evil enchantment.
So Nemain, even as a child, was surrounded by a sense of fear and ill omen, of things that were never spoken of and things that must not be seen. But in spite of this, she was content with her lot. Hers was a better existence than an unwanted orphan could hope for, and she took for granted, along with everyone else, that an unwanted orphan was all she would ever be.
Chapter 1
BRIARVALE WAS SITUATED on a hill overlooking a little valley of thistles and wild roses, from which it derived its name. With its neighboring village of snug timber-framed houses, it made a pretty picture against the rolling hills of the Lowland.
It was good land, the best in the region, where the winters were mild and the summer rains fell gently. And Lord Winworth was a good landlord, albeit a somewhat reclusive one since his wife had died. The days of merriment at Briarvale, the balls and feasts and tournaments, were long over; Lord Winworth no longer cared for such things. Nor, oddly, did he seem anxious to remarry and get himself an heir. He managed his estate dutifully enough, but the only thing in life that seemed to give him any joy was his young daughter.
Little Monessa Winworth was a miniature of her mother, a sweet, laughing, elfin thing with ash-gold hair and the promise of beauty in her face. Her eyes were wide and arrestingly blue—the eyes her mother had been famous for—and her skin was as delicately fair as a white rose petal. No one who met her could help loving her, and fortunately, she had one of those rare dispositions that all the love and indulgence in the world couldn’t spoil.
She was a year older than Nemain, and the two were best friends. They made an odd pair—the exquisite little lady and the ungainly Outlander—but were perfectly happy in each other’s company. Nemain thought Monessa the kindest, sweetest, fairest being in the world. She brushed her hair for her, made up little songs for her, followed at her heels like an adoring puppy. As different as they were, their natures dovetailed: Monessa was naturally affectionate, Nemain starved for affection; and Nemain was quick-witted while Monessa was quick to laughter. So there was plenty of laughter between them, and whenever it rang through the corridors, Lord Winworth would pause whatever he was doing and listen, and sometimes almost smile.
But if Lord Winworth approved of the girls’ friendship, his sister, Lady Bronwyn, did not. “Remember your station!” was her motto and her constant admonition to her niece. She despised Outlanders in general and Nemain in particular; but since her brother insisted, for whatever reason, on keeping the brat, she relieved her outraged sense of propriety by bringing up Nemain with a strict hand.
As much as Nemain loved Monessa, she feared Lady Bronwyn, the wielder of the birch switch. Lady Bronwyn was a tower of menacing disapproval, a harsh voice raised in castigation, a pair of narrow gray eyes that missed nothing. Her presence in the room was enough to make Nemain tremble, and the threat from a servant, “Lady Bronwyn shall hear of this!” filled her with a dread that was worse than the whipping itself.
But not all of the adults at Briarvale disliked Nemain or treated her harshly. There was Master Ives, for instance, the resident tutor Lord Winworth had engaged for Monessa. He gave Nemain lessons as well—a full-time job in itself, for she was a quick and voracious learner. In the schoolroom, as in Monessa’s company, her habitual shyness fell away from her. She monopolized Master Ives’s attention, prattling and questioning ceaselessly, delving into his books to see for herself what they contained.
Such a child would have tried any man’s patience, but Master Ives never seemed to mind. He lent her his books freely, though many of them were old and valuable. He heard her out and explained things to her with good humor, smiling when she was clever, laughing outright when she was impudent (as she all too often was).
“In this passage there are seven errors,” he’d say, copying some text onto a tablet. “Point them out.”
Nemain counted. “There are nine.”
“Now miss, I counted them myself. There are most certainly seven.”
“Well, you counted wrong.”
And she would proceed to mark them. Somehow, she was always right. “There! You see, I’m better at this than you are.”
The only subject Master Ives did not instruct her in was music. He taught Monessa to sing and play the lute, and Nemain would have liked to be included in those lessons as well. But having once heard her play the fiddle, Master Ives flatly refused. “As well teach a fish to swim,” was how he put it.
In fact, only one person had ever given Nemain a music lesson: Tynan, the man who looked after Lord Winworth’s horses. He had a battered old fiddle that he had brought with him from the North Country, and he had taught her how to hold it and tune it—not much more than that. But she had picked up a great deal just from watching and listening to him play. And though he had little to say to her or anyone else, he never seemed to mind her watching or listening.
Tynan was a broad-shouldered, taciturn giant of a man, somewhat harsh and grim in appearance, but capable of great tenderness when caring for an ailing horse or handling a skittish one. He spoke, when he spoke at all, with a North Country burr, and his words and manners suggested he had been well educated. His presence at Briarvale, like Nemain’s, was something of a mystery.
; Nemain liked him, and not just because he let her play his fiddle and even gave her a canter on Lord Winworth’s prize jennet now and then. She liked him for himself, for what little she knew of him. His accent, his love of music and horses, his solitary nature … all these things she found very agreeable for some reason. She felt somehow that she could learn as much from Tynan’s silences as from Master Ives’s lectures.
When she was about nine years old, an incident occurred that taught her a great deal more about Tynan—and, eventually, about herself as well. It was only in later years that its full significance became clear to her, with implications for her future as well as her past.
Chapter 2
ONE SULTRY SUMMER afternoon, she was sent out to the village on an errand. The air was heavy with a gathering storm, but the sun was still high and hot when she set out.
If she had hurried back, as she had been told to, probably nothing would have happened. But she was spinning out a melody in her head, and she dawdled along until thunder began to murmur in the distance.
She quickened her pace, but soon became aware that she was being followed. Turning, she saw a group of boys about her age or a little older, watching her with curious, unfriendly eyes.
“That’s her,” one of them said. “The Outland freak. She’s wearing gloves.”
Nemain immediately turned her back on them and continued walking. They followed, not troubling now to move stealthily or to lower their voices.
“My mam says she’s Lord Winworth’s bastard, and that’s why he keeps her at the castle.”
“My mam says her hands are all rotten like a dead person’s, and that’s why she wears gloves.”
“Ugh! Is that true? Hey, you, girl! Show us your hands!”
She ignored them.
“Are you deaf? Can’t you talk?”
“Come on, let’s have a look at ’em!”
She began to run, but they quickly surrounded her and pinned her to the ground. Frantic, she clenched her fists tight and tried to twist out of the boys’ grip, but they eventually pried her fingers open and her gloves off.
A sudden silence fell. They backed away a step or two, and one of them uttered a low curse. Nemain scrambled to her feet, trembling with shame and rage. Never in her life had she been spoken to or handled in that way—as if she were less than human! Even Lady Bronwyn had never treated her like that.
She tried to cry out, “Give them back!” but her voice was only a hoarse rasp, and none of the boys moved. Something in their faces—some of them leering with horrified delight, others simply aghast—hurt her deeply, struck at her inmost being. Before she knew what she was doing, she sprang upon the nearest boy and knocked him to the ground.
What happened next, she never fully remembered. There was a mêlée of fists and claws and feet, a painful blow to her stomach and another to her jaw. At some point she lost consciousness, and when she came to, the boys were gone and her gloves were nowhere to be seen.
She struggled to get up. It was raining, and the drops were cold and stinging on her skin. Her head and stomach ached horribly. She felt an odd graininess in her mouth and spat out a few tiny pieces of tooth.
Where could she go? She could not return to the castle without her gloves—she quailed to think of how Lady Bronwyn would react—and she dared not seek shelter at any of the houses in the village. Then she thought of Tynan. His living quarters were behind the stables, and he wouldn’t mind if she waited out the storm there. What she would do after that, she did not consider.
Fortunately Tynan was at home, and responded promptly to her desperate beating on the door. He took one look at the shivering, white-faced apparition on his threshold and drew her inside.
“What are you doing out, inneen?” That was what he always called her, the Northern word for “little girl.”
“I’m sorry to bother you”—even distraught and weeping from pain, she did not forget her manners—“but I’ve lost my gloves. Can I stay here for a bit?”
“What happened?”
Nemain sobbed out the story through chattering teeth. She was embarrassed at her own lack of composure—she was not that hurt, surely—and didn’t know why her feelings were still so harrowed up. But evidently it was no small matter to Tynan. His face darkened with fury, and he swore in two languages while he prepared a poultice for her.
“Mollaght mynney! Plague take them all,” he muttered. “Lie down, inneen, and put this against your head. Do you know who any of those boys were?”
“No.”
“When I find out, I’ll kill them.”
She managed a faint smile. “Thanks.”
“Feel sick?”
“No, just sore.”
“Good. Rest now—there’s a basin over there if you need it. I’ll be right back.”
He went out into the storm, and after a while Nemain sat up and gazed curiously at her surroundings. She had known that Tynan was poor, but she had had little idea of what that meant. Now, inside his quarters for the first time, she realized that this room was all there was. He had a wash basin, a table, a chair, shelves filled with medicinal herbs and cracked dishes, and the pallet on which she lay. His fiddle was in its leather bag in a corner. On the table, next to the lamp, was a stack of books. Nemain could never leave books alone, and she examined these with interest. The covers were of tooled leather, the pages illuminated with Northern designs. The artwork was unintelligible—to her eyes, Northern art was just a lot of whorls and squiggles—but strangely appealing; and so was the text, which was in a script she could not read.
She was still looking at the books when Tynan returned, carrying a cloth-wrapped parcel. “I’ve told Winworth what happened,” he said. “You’re to stay here tonight so I can keep an eye on you.”
“Was he very angry?” Nemain had a dread of Lord Winworth, whom she rarely saw, that rivaled her dread of Lady Bronwyn. Not that he had ever been unkind to her, or even taken any notice of her; he was just the distant, stern figure on whose charity her life depended. It was funny to hear Tynan refer to him simply as “Winworth,” like an equal.
“With you? No. Sensible man, Winworth. He’s sent you some supper, if you feel up to eating.”
Tynan unwrapped the food—some bread, cheese, and cold meat—and while she ate, he busied himself mending a shirt by the lamplight. He didn’t seem disposed to talk any more, but that didn’t stop her.
“What’s in those books?”
“The top one is poetry.” He snipped a length of thread with his teeth. “The others are history.”
“Are they in the Northern tongue?”
“Aye.”
“What does it sound like?”
He turned to the book of poetry and read a few lines aloud. The soft, lilting sounds brought a warmth to his voice Nemain had never heard before, and it affected her like music. She felt sorry when he abruptly stopped and went back to his mending.
It seemed strange that anyone who lived like this would have such beautiful, obviously valuable books on hand. They must be precious to him indeed—worth more than all the food and furnishings he could have gotten for their price.
“Where did you get these?”
“From my home.”
“Along with your fiddle?”
“Aye.”
With a tentative fingertip, she traced the stippled design on the cover of the poetry book. He must have come from a wealthy home in the North Country. She tried to picture Tynan as a wealthy man—a nobleman perhaps, like Lord Winworth—and couldn’t do it.
“Why did you leave home?”
“It was not by choice.”
“Oh.”
Silence. Nemain wished she had not asked. Tynan set down a few more stitches before he spoke again, and his voice was calm though bitter.
“I made a mistake when I was young,” he said, “and my family cast me off.”
“What was your mistake?”
“Never you mind.”
Nemain bit her lip and looked again at the wretched surroundings. He didn’t seem to want pity, but she felt she had to say something. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Tynan folded the shirt and laid it aside. “Most of the time.”
“Not all the time?”
