Duncan must have sensed my thoughts, for his cheeks turned red. “The holy well, then. At Carterhaugh?”
At this, Mairi stirred in her bed, thrashing about wildly, and stared like one crazed. Even Duncan, large as he was, stepped back, afraid.
“I willna go,” Mairi growled. “Not to that place. The guid neighbors live there. They took her, my bonny little Bess.” Tears rolled down her face. “All I tried to do was protect a...” She trailed off, staring blankly into the distance.
Protect who?I pulled the covers around her, cooed softly, and tried to comfort her.
My bonny little Bess.
When she said those words, I needed comforting myself.
In the end, Mairi caught a great fever, and Eamon summoned the priest to pay her a call. This alone pulled me away from Mairi’s bedside, for he would hang a cross about her throat, speak to her many prayers, and generally perform such rituals as would drive a fae like me away. I did stir the pottage on the hearth, and listened while he and Eamon spoke.
“This is only to be expected,” the priest said. “That this dread disease should take her. She attempted to thwart God’s will.”
I had to stop myself from spitting on the floor.
“I pray He will have mercy on her,” Eamon said, not even bothering to stand up for his wife’s honor.
“Aye,” said the priest. “Mayhap she can work her sins off in Purgatory. I fear it will not be long now.”
How did he come here and speak of Mairi thus? Naught of evil was in her, nothing of sin or pride. I had known her to go to a home riddled with scourge, where the doctors and priests feared to venture, with no regard whether the family could even pay. And if, in that scourge-riddled family, three of the seven survived, and Mairi herself came home with only a bit of ague, it was counted as God’s mercy, and none of Mairi’s doing. They took her for granted, they did.
If only I could learn to heal so well.
I glared at the back of the priest’s head, noting the little shadows playing across the walls. Would that the wisps led him astray in the forest, and he never set foot in our cruck house again. May his food have no savor and his nights be lacking in sleep.
I was only half-fae, with no magic of my own; my thoughts affected him not at all.
The priest pulled back the heavy curtain around Mairi’s bed. His pointed nose gave him the look of a raven pecking at a corpse. Then he bowed his head, folded his hands at his breast, and began to pray.
Nausea gripped me; my head clenched, and the skin around me seemed to grow too tight. I pressed my lips together that nothing of blasphemy, no scream of pain, would erupt forth.
Finally, he finished praying, and I thought with relief he would be on his way. Instead, he raised his beak-like nose and stared at me with his beady little eyes. “Bess Grieve,” he said, voice thin, nasal, and disapproving. “I do not recall seeing you at chapel this Sunday.”
Nor ever,I added silently. Yet I could not answer thus or betray my fae nature. I lowered my head and stared modestly at my lap. “I am easily overlooked.” It was no untruth, for I was plumpish and plainish and wont to keep quiet.
“Aye.” The priest stood and walked over to me, his eyes passing across my body and making me itch. “I am surprised to find ye still living here, lass. Are ye not a woman grown?”
I was. Eighteen now, a ripe fruit growing rotten on the vine.
“Bess has been looking after her mother,” Eamon told him, the closest he had ever come to speaking in my defense. “She has been a good helper to her all these days.”
My heart lifted in my breast, though Eamon wished only for the priest to think we were a godly house. Yet I had been Bess for eighteen years, and this need for his approval was hard to break.
The priest sniffed. “Not too good a helper, I should hope. We did tolerate Mairi Grieve for the lives she brought into the world and the baptisms she performed. But her healing was a prideful act that challenged the will of the Lord. I would not have your daughter follow in her footsteps.”
“She will not,” said Eamon, eyes boring into me. “Is that not right, girl?”
Not follow in Mairi’s footsteps? How could I make such a promise, when the only moments of pleasure I had ever known in this life were at my mortal mother’s side? When she took me out to the family garden and taught me the name and use of every plant? When we visited the ill and injured together, and she taught me everything of compassion I ever knew?
She had taught me as an apprentice, but she treated me like her child. How could I put all that aside?
The priest and the man I called father were both watching me. With my head bowed, I quietly said, “I do swear, while I walk this earth, Bess Grieve shall not follow in her mother’s footsteps.”
I could not speak them false, but they did not comprehend the truth of what I said.
The mourners filtered in and out of the house throughout the day and into the evening. Near suppertime, my sister Sorcha took my place at Mairi’s bedside, freeing me up to prepare the evening meal. I served the gathered kinfolk with the gifts of food that had been brought to us all day long, fed myself, and even went up to my bedroom for a bit of rest. As night fell, I came to stay beside Mairi’s body again. The others drank to forget their problems, to remember the deceased, and to celebrate her life, but I sat alone in quiet contemplation. Let them all think it was prayer. I merely waited for the moment they retired.
