On Tollswitch Hill Stories from the Averraine Cycle Read online

  On Tollswitch Hill

  Stories from the Averraine Cycle and more

  By Morgan Smith

  Copyright 2017 Morgan Smith

  Traveling Light Publications

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  On Tollswitch Hill

  By Morgan Smith

  Copyright 2015 Morgan Smith

  Traveling Light Publications

  On Tollswitch Hill

  It began with a pig that escaped.

  She was laughing, but it wasn’t funny, not really, because down in the yard, there was a sack of grain split open and spilling into the dirt, and a bushel’s worth of turnips getting smashed to bits underfoot, and they could ill afford the losses. But the sight of all those men, in their once-bright festival shirts, scrambling in the mud as they vainly leapt onto the squealer and missed?

  Well, what else could you do but laugh?

  It was a mistake, that laughter. The villagers remembered it, in the dark of winter, when the frost-sickness came. They began to whisper among themselves when the spring rains were scant. The whispers turned to mutterings as the days began to shorten again, and when an early frost made the harvest lean and Aideen’s best milker dried up, they weren’t just talking anymore.

  They took her out to the end of the long meadow to do the deed; there was a good oak tree there to hang her from. Two men held her angry husband back and stifled his weeping protests, and then, in the morning, they cut her down, and the bravest among them buried her in the middle of the ruined temple their ancestors had used to go to up on the hill, back when the Mother liked her worship among the stones, instead of in the fields and groves.

  He killed himself, the husband, another hanging. That was unsettling, but then, married to a witch, he would be doing odd things, wouldn’t he? They buried him up there on the hill beside her, and they never spoke of what they’d done, or that place even, forever after, except sometimes in hushed tones and with the warding signs. It hadn’t been a place of theirs to begin with, and now it seemed a little more otherly, a little more fell. They never went there.

  It was a good many years, though, before the real trouble began.

  ***

  Kenzie wasn’t ever what you’d call a happy man.

  His mother had always remarked he was the kind of boy who could see clouds rolling in on the sunniest day, and she wasn’t far wrong.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be happy. It was just that every time he thought about any activity, his mind instantly began to imagine what could go wrong, and all his potential pleasure in life was extinguished.

  So the moment his father began explaining what it was he wanted Kenzie to do, his first instinct was to list in his mind the various discomforts his proposed journey would entail, and what dangers he might face along the way.

  Curiously, what might be happening in a tiny, isolated village, and the possibility that rumours might, in this one instance, prove as true and as calamitous as they hinted at, did not in any way figure into this.

  He assumed only that he would, for the foreseeable future, be consigned to flea-infested beds and indigestible suppers washed down with sour ale, limited to the dullest of companions, possibly for weeks on end, and that there would be no thanks or reward at the close. It did not once cross his mind that the village itself was anything more than an uncomfortable stopping place where he would have to lecture a few yokels on the unwisdom of exaggeration and letting tall tales get out of hand.

  But he was also not the sort of person who shied away from any assigned task, nor was he in the habit of arguing with his father. He gathered up his spare shirts and a couple of books, he packed an extra-thick wool overtunic and his least worn-out hunting boots, he ordered the castle cook to assemble some basic travelling provisions and, together with his servant, Galen, saddled up and left Issing Keep the following morning, on the grounds that the sooner he got on with this, the sooner he could be home again.

  Probably home to convalesce from the ague or the squits he’d undoubtedly catch, but at least he would be home.

  ***

  When you rule over the many, when you’ve become accustomed to a certain power, and when you’ve had a few years to get used to not merely respect but instant obedience, it’s a hard thing to come up against a sudden, immoveable stubbornness.

  She had tried reason. She had tried cajoling and flattery. She had tried guilt and bargaining.

  She was down to threats, because by now she was furious.

  “We’ve given you everything, Roisean. Everything. All the Talent in the world would be useless to you, if we hadn’t taken you in and taught you how to use your gifts. How dare you throw this back in our face! If you do this, I warn you, there will be no turning back. Our doors will be closed to you.”

  Roisean only nodded.

  She’d said very little, this last hour or more. But that little had amounted to “No” and nothing much else, and for the life of her, Dalriega could not remember anyone who had said this to her so unequivocally and so adamantly for so long, in years.

  And then, when she’d waved Roisean away with an imperious gesture of dismissal, she sat, still fuming, because the chit hadn’t even had the decency to slam the door in anger behind her, and she began, in her mind, to enumerate all of the ways in which Roisean had always been the most infuriating student. So sure of herself, even from the start! So quiet and self-contained that even her earliest teachers had been unable to tell if she was listening to them at all.

  But then she reflected on the fact that they could ill afford to lose Roisean. True Dreamers were incredibly rare – there hadn’t been one studying on the Holy Island for three generations, and despite extensive reading of the Chronicles, Dalriega had never found an account of there ever having been one so skilled, let alone as gifted, as Roisean.

  Ah, well, she’d put things right in the morning. After devotions, she’d talk to her, and explain why it was so important for her to stay and serve the Goddess in the way the Blessed Mother of All had obviously intended. She’d think of some compromise for the girl, so that staying would seem the more prudent and desirable choice.

  But in the morning, Roisean was nowhere to be found, and it was another full day before Dalriega, Most Reverend Mother of Braide, discovered that the girl had boarded the last ferry of the evening, back to the mainland, and from there, utterly disappeared.

  ***

  Kenzie hadn’t bargained on a pack of outlaws.

  They came out of the woods and onto the road with a terrifying suddenness, and it had only been their horses’ good sense that saved them. Both had shied and bolted, skittering down the road a good half-mile before he and Galen had been able to rein them back under control.

  By then, the pack-pony was long gone, swallowed up with their attackers into the forest, and leaving the two of them gasping for breath on the longest, loneliest stretch of unused and uninhabited road his father’s lands could boast of.

  It was only to have been expected, in Kenzie’s opinion. His estimation of the perils of this journey had been wildly optimistic, even given his low expectations. The food in some of the taverns had been more than inedible and they had run through all their emergency provisions in a shocking
ly short time. There had been more nights spent benighted between villages, camped out under the unforgiving stars, than he had imagined possible, and Galen’s horse had gotten a stone lodged in one hoof, which had kept them kicking their own heels in a tiny, nameless hamlet for three full days.

  And now this, he thought, savagely hauling on the reins. His clothes, his books, his warmer cloak, all gone, and they still hadn’t arrived at that misbegotten village that had decided to draw attention to itself for no good reason.

  It was then that he saw the woman.

  She was standing in the middle of the road, perhaps thirty yards away, and her head was tilted off to one side, as if she were listening for something more than merely the sounds of the forest. As the two men drew near and Kenzie opened his mouth to call out to her, she held up an authoritative hand, demanding his silence.

  He was so astonished that he obeyed the gesture without thinking, before his consciousness of his station in life reminded him that he was the one to give the orders.

  At least, that is, to unknown women wearing coarse, brown, woollen gowns suited to the lesser classes, standing on roads that belonged to his father.

  Before he could reassert his borrowed authority, she sighed, shook her head and turned to face him.

  “You’re a bit late on the road, aren’t you?” she said.

  She wasn’t beautiful. She wasn’t even pretty, not in the way that the girls his mother kept trying to introduce him to were. And yet…

  There was something about her that held his gaze, and left him still speechless, instead of taking charge of things as he had meant to do. Behind him, he heard Galen, sucking in his breath in a prelude to an angry reprimand, but whatever harsh words he meant to say died on his lips.

  The wind whipped through in a sudden, angry gust that howled mercilessly through the trees, like an incoherent scream of anguish. The leaves and dust swirled up like towering giants, the nearer branches crackled and whined as if they were babies being torn from their parents’ arms, and then everything darkened, before sinking back into utter stillness.

  ***

  They weren’t, as it happened, all that far from their destination. If Kenzie had any questions about why this lone woman had been standing in the middle of a deserted road, they had been driven out of his mind by that strange wind, coupled with his own intensely renewed desire to get to Toll, talk the inhabitants out of their make-believe and to go home again.

  The woman walked beside them as they struggled on, that last mile or so, and although she answered his occasional questions with perfect amiability, he found that he knew very little more about her, in the end, than he would have had he not spoken to her at all.

  Her name was Roisean, she had come from the north, up near Dungarrow, and she was bound, as he was, for Toll. The why of her journey was opaque, largely because Kenzie was reluctant to mention his own mission. The more he thought about what his father had said about the place, the more high-handed and officious, not to mention pointless, his errand sounded, and he was suddenly conscious, too, of wanting for the very first time in his life to be liked, even just for a little while, for himself and not his birthrank.

  Toll did not have an actual inn or guesting place. Like so many of the places he’d arrived at on this venture, the local watering hole was just a ramshackle addition to the ordinary dwelling of the woman who acted as reeve for the area.

  She seemed distinctly unenthusiastic about his arrival, which did not surprise him. She was even less pleased when he commandeered that communal space as his own quarters, and, because Roisean seemed unable or unwilling to make her own arrangements, the loft above the small tithing-barn for her. She had stood all unheeding while he explained to the reeve who he was, and why he was there, more or less, but he wasn’t sure, even now, that Roisean had been listening to that conversation. Her mind seemed to be very much elsewhere.

  He had sent the reeve out to assemble the villagers, after she had grudgingly produced some ale and some dry, coarse bread for them. If he could put the fear of the Lord of Issing into them, so that they at least kept their idiotic superstitions to themselves, he’d be happy enough to call it a job well done.

  His father, however, had been a little more explicit about what he wanted. Lord Raghnall was, by habit and temperament, an uncomplicated and straightforward man who liked getting to the bottom of things. He had told his son to find out what lay at the heart of this sudden emergence of a tale of soul-stealing and child murder. His father had seemed to be of the opinion that some outside force was at work, some person from some other place who must have stirred things up.

  “Country folk,” he’d said. “They’re a gullible lot, but they haven’t enough imagination between them to have dreamed this up on their own. And it’s interfering with trade. Scared half the farmers down Alindor way from bringing their cattle up this year, seeing as how they’d have to herd them through not three miles distant from Toll. Took ‘em out to old Hamish on the coast instead. Can’t have that.”

  Less than a candle-mark later, though, Kenzie began to have serious doubts about his father’s rendering of the problem, and of his own ability to give them a firm lecture that would squash their yobbo pretensions down enough to turn this back into a purely local stupidity.

  To at least seem to be fair, and to get them on his side, he had asked, in a studiously neutral tone, for the headman and a couple of the more prosperous-looking farmers to explain the situation to him. This had proven to be difficult.

  They weren’t at all forthcoming. In fact, they made low-voiced comments that said they did not want to discuss this. That seemed odd. If their purpose was to draw attention to themselves, to aggrandize a hamlet whose only claim to fame was that very occasionally, for a reasonable price, they helped locate stray cattle on their way to the market at Mynedd, one would have expected them to be eager for the chance to widen their scope, so to speak.

  Instead, they muttered that “there weren’t no hope for it” and that “least said, soonest mended”.

  Kenzie pointed out mildly that it would be a lot sooner mended if they told their liege lord’s representative and only son what needed mending. This did not improve things at all, and he began to feel slightly irate.

  He felt a tug at his sleeve.

  “Ask them if they perhaps no longer care for their children,” Roisean said.

  He didn’t need to; they’d all heard her, for all she hadn’t raised her voice much above a whisper. And it worked, after a fashion. One of the women slipped to her knees and began to wail, in a high, keening voice, about poor Caed, and that opened the floodgates.

  They showed him the graves, small things, not more than an arm’s-span long, the pair of them. Between sobs, the mother of Caed told how the boy, an impossibly sweet child without fault or blemish, apparently, had been found, cold and stiff with wide-open eyes, out at the edge of the long meadow one morning.

  “He was witched, your worship. He was witched and no mistake. Didn’t he know better than to go about alone in the dark, now? And what would he have done so for? There weren’t nothing in that meadow for him, poor laddie, on such a cold, moonless night.”

  And then there was the carpenter’s wife.

  The door to the carpenter’s house was low; Kenzie had to duck down to enter, and there she was, huddled by the hearth, filthy and drooling, those vacant eyes staring out at nothing. He felt sick, as much from the smell of her as from the sight, but he managed to keep outwardly calm, much calmer than he felt.

  It was Roisean’s reaction, or her non-reaction, perhaps, that upset him the most. She leaned toward the woman, her face nearly as blank and expressionless as the afflicted one’s, and touched that waxen cheek, all the while whispering something he couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t quite hear.

  And the woman slumped, eyes finally closing, and her head lolling down towards her breast, as if she had fainted.

  What in the nine hells was going on here?

&n
bsp; Kenzie pushed his way out of the cottage and past the villagers, and once more out into the cooler, fresher air, he sucked in a few lungfuls of air, desperately trying to clear his head.

  This was not what he’d bargained for, back in Issing Keep. This was not at all what he had expected to find, and now the loss of his pack pony and more especially, his books, was revealed as a truer disaster than he’d imagined only a couple of hours before.

  He’d chosen them with casual care: one, his copy of “The Histories” had been purely for his own pleasure, but the second one, Theofrancia’s “Arcanium”, had seemed to him the very thing with which to combat idle and ignorant superstition. With judicious quotations and readings, he’d expected to surmount and refute any superstitious or spurious tale these yobboes would have offered as proof of their wild stories.

  It was a book he knew almost by heart. He’d always been fascinated by Theofrancia’s reasoned, temperate discourse, his careful detailing of the true nature of otherworldly and malignant occurrences, and how to contain or defeat them, and he’d assumed that Toll’s bit of make-believe would not have held within them the essential details that would have been present in a true Curse or Haunting. He would have pointed out the lack of evidence, the absence of concrete facts and their corresponding emanations, and shown these uneducated peasants that they could not go around making up stories out of whole cloth and disrupting other people’s livelihoods or peace of mind just to garner a little fame and attention.

  But that poor woman in the hovel behind him had thrown this to the winds. It was, as near as he could tell, a textbook case of diabolical and verifiable evil afoot – and somewhere in the “Arcanium”, he was sure, was the remedy, now lost to him.

  The glosses of the rituals and spells had always been the part of the book he’d paid the least attention to, partly because they were somewhat incomprehensible, but more so because he had thought them useless. Perhaps long ago, the countryside had been mired in little evils, or prone to such things as malevolent spirits, and needing common remedies, but in this day and age? Such things were the stuff of fireside stories for children. Such things were the stuff of the long-dead past.