It was years since that conversation, and Imogen still squirmed in embarrassment. Her mother explaining in her blunt fashion the way a lover should treat his mate was one thing, reading about such very personal experiences something else entirely. She fluttered those pages through her fingers until she reached the section she’d stopped at a day earlier. This entry was different and far more intriguing.
There is a man in my house. Or half a man at least. Poor creature. I stumbled upon him behind the bailey, hidden by the old rowan near the eastern wall. I thought him a half-rotten corpse, dug up from a shallow grave by an opportunistic scavenger. Then it spoke. Sweet gods, I nearly pissed myself.
Imogen worried her lower lip with two fingers, eyes glued to the page.
I almost left him there. My magic is of earth and seasons and growing things. I don’t truck with the black mages of Westerwall, and this deathless horror facing me is surely the creation of one of these mages.
Imogen paused in her reading. The irony of Niamh’s statements struck home. She wondered if the woman had ever reread these passages in her later years and thought to herself how strange it was that Death in another form resided in her house and had been raised at her knee.
She returned to her reading and Niamh’s account of bringing the man into her house and placing him in one the guest rooms where servants dared not visit. Planning and secrets and the need to keep down servant gossip made for good reading and Imogen was absorbed by her mother’s descriptions of her patient.
He rarely speaks. I think the suffering is so great, it’s too much effort to talk. I cannot help but watch as his body is slowly made whole by unseen hands. He must have been burned at some point, for it is ashes, still smelling of the fires, which swirl into the room and cast themselves upon him, becoming healthy flesh.
Imogen’s skin prickled at the imagery her descriptions evoked, and the hairs at her nape stood on end at the next entry.
I found a bone outside his door this morning, scorched black in spots. I don’t know how it got here without being noticed. I didn’t dare touch it, only opened the door and walked away. When I came to check on him in the afternoon, he had regained an arm.”
Another entry referenced the Tineroth pendant.
This magic is old. Old beyond the memory of our books and scribes, even beyond the knowledge of the Primus mages. A key and a map to vanished Tineroth. There is truth in every legend. I didn’t refuse the gift, though I have no desire to wear this strange bauble, nor any reason to seek this mad king’s help. He speaks little even now, but his eyes…I will be glad to see him go back to whatever so desperately calls him.”
Imogen rubbed her arms. She promised Niamh she would read her journal. She’d made no promise to seek out Cededa of Tineroth. Her hands, ungloved now, looked innocent enough, and she held them up, watching as sunbeams streamed between her fingers. Not until Niamh’s death had she ever touched another living person with her bare hands. Her affliction might have been easier to shoulder if it was limited to her hands, but death flowed in her veins. Could this king, immune to the very thing that cursed her, truly help?
The light had grown so weak, Imogen had to squint to see the writing. She closed the book and rose from her place. The flowers resting atop the grave waved their petals at her in the gentle breeze, as if to bid her farewell for the evening. Imogen lifted the book and gazed speculatively at the burial mound. “Who is this woman I’m reading about, Mother? She is a stranger to me.” Only the creak of the fir’s limbs and the growing chorus of frogs peeping answered her. She returned the book to her apron pocket and trudged back to the house.
Her dinner that night might well have been a bowl of mud for all the attention she paid to it. Niamh’s history, in the time before Imogen was born, read like the legends she’d filled her ears with in childhood. Lover of one man, savior to another. What had brought her so low in her later years?
Her gaze drifted to the box that still housed the Tineroth pendant. It rested back on its shelf undisturbed. Imogen had left the pendant alone, still unnerved by its odd abilities to come alive at unexpected moments. Her growing curiosity overrode her wariness, and she retrieved the box. Left unlocked by Niamh’s spell, the lid opened easily, revealing the pendant. A metallic wink greeted Imogen, and she carefully lifted the bauble by its delicate chain and held it aloft.
It swung from her fingers, silver catching the candlelight so that it shimmered. At some point, after Imogen dropped it back in the box, the pendant had again reconfigured itself. The serpentine knotwork was now a lacy filigree that reminded her of crossing paths and roads that led to endless loops.
She eyed it closely. Keys bore many designs, especially magical ones. Set within the hidden spot of a wall or inserted into a decorative urn, any lock might open with the key made to match it. But a map as well? That was more of a puzzle, and Niamh’s journal had yet to reveal that small secret.
The pendant half rotated one way and then the other on its chain as Imogen admired its new shape. Except for the eerie propensity to shift and writhe, the key was a thing of beauty, made to catch the eye of woman or man. Despite her misgivings and coaxed by an urging she couldn’t explain, she slipped the chain over her head.
The silver lay warm against her breastbone, and Imogen wondered anew at the magic that made something so delicate in appearance feel so weighty. Wanting to see how the pendant looked on her, she opened the blanket chest at the foot of Niamh’s bed and pulled out an ornate hand mirror.
Backed in silver decorated with curving designs of scrolls and roses, the mirror had been an endless source of temptation and at least two swats to the backside when Imogen was growing up. Using it to play pretend-I’m-a-queen had consequences.
Niamh, usually generous to a fault in accommodating her only child’s wishes, had been uncharacteristically territorial with the mirror and had punished Imogen for sneaking it out of the blanket chest. She’d never explained her possessiveness, and after a second paddling and early trip to bed without supper for her transgression, Imogen lost any desire to ask why. Now, years later, with Niamh’s journal to enlighten her, she suspected the mirror had been a treasured gift from King Varn.
She lifted the glass and eyed her reflection. Hers was a forgettable face and one only Niamh had seen as it actually was. Strong enchantments fooled everyone else into seeing an old woman who might have been Niamh’s mother instead of her daughter. Imogen looked beyond the pale skin and brown hair to the pendant resting against her collarbones.
A truly lovely piece. She traced the new design with one finger, waiting to see if the pendant would do as it had with Niamh and wrap a silver tendril around her knuckle. It didn’t move but sent small vibrations across the surface of her skin.
Imogen jerked her hand away as silver threads of lace suddenly unraveled and spread across her chest like a contagion of climbing ivy. Imogen’s admiration turned to terror, and she cried out as the metal strands slithered up her neck and over her shoulders beneath her shirt. The mirror fell from her hand, shattering glass across the floor as she clawed at her skin.
The crawling feeling halted just below her jaw, and her flesh stung where her nails had torn at the metal tendrils. “Oh gods,” she breathed. “What is this? What is this?” She ran her hand over what was now a filigreed collar and came away with a bloodied palm.
Heedless of the glass crunching beneath her shoes, she wrenched the door opened and stumbled outside—only to be greeted by a world gone topsy-turvy. What should have been a blanketing darkness that concealed anything beyond the weak corona of light spilling from her open door, was instead a shimmering miasma of illumination, as if thousands of fireflies swarmed the clearing around the cottage and the dark forest beyond.
Imogen gasped and blinked. Surely, she’d been made either blind or mad by the parasite encircling her neck and shoulders. But no amount of blinking diminished the lighted mist, and like the pendant, it began to take a defined shape. Vaporous, it coalesced into rigid lines that widened to create a single brightly lit path leading straight into the heart of the forest.
She backed into the house and slammed the door. The action dulled the brightness from outside but didn’t shut it out. The illuminated path started at the tip of her toes. Imogen took two steps back and the path followed, moving where she did as if tethered to her feet.
Imogen breathed hard, grasping for a measure of calm and some small understanding of what just happened. Oh gods, why did she have to put on that cursed pendant? “Foolish, Imogen,” she snarled. “How could you be so stupid?”
A tingling spread, sliding across her neck and shoulders, and she whimpered. The collar was growing again. She touched a spot below her neck and shuddered. The metal was gone, leaving in its place raised scars that mimicked its design. The tingling remained, not painful but unpleasant in a crawling, prickling way. Imogen bent and retrieved a shard of the mirror.
