It was hard going for them both. They had to backtrack as they climbed, rushing closer and closer to the gurgle of a fast-moving stream. At least that’s where she thought they were going. It was hard to tell until her mother abruptly pulled up.
Iseabail dismounted, taking the time to walk her horse to the stream to drink, but her mother shook her head.
“Forget them.”
Forget the horses? Had she gone mad? But her mother kept issuing orders.
“Out of your dress. Say in the shift. Where are you paints?”
“What—”
“Do as I say! Our lives depend upon it.”
That would have been a startling statement if it had been shouted. Instead, it was spoken with a dark kind of finality. It was the same voice she used at a sickbed when hard truths had to be faced. So Iseabail pulled out her kit, then stripped quickly while her mother began mixing the paints and wetting the brushes.
They could both hear the horses coming closer. The men were even less quiet, shouting back and forth to one another. Iseabail knew the words and the men. Her uncle was here, and he’d brought half the clan out after dark to find them.
Ahuntingparty.
“He’ll kill us for the insult,” Iseabail said, her shivers making her words stutter.
“Aye,” her mother agreed, her voice grim. Then she shoved a brush into her daughter’s hand. “Paint on your body. Cover it.”
“Paint what?” she asked as she hastily shoved the brush into the dark ochre.
“Symbols. Dots. Anything.”
“But it won’t mean anything,” she protested even as she began stroking orange onto her calves.
“They won’t know that,” her mother said as she dipped her fingers into the blue paint. It was bright and pretty, Iseabail’s favorite color, and her mother was using it all up and down her arms, around the dark smudges of the crushed herbs from before.
Next came the white, as thick and ghostly as possible, thumbed into her cheeks and around her eyes. Hard presses, quick dots, bursts of zigzagged lines that made no sense.
“Mother,” she whispered. “What is this for?”
Her mother looked at her, shaking her head. “It won’t be enough,” she said, the words half-gasped. “I’m sorry. So sorry.” Then she gripped her daughter’s shift and pulled it straight off. Iseabail’s body was naked in the moonlight, except for the paint. “They must see something awful so they remember it.”
Something awful? Her naked body?
Her mother meant the paint which she spread everywhere. It covered her nipples and dripped into her mons. Her mother used all the paint. The white went everywhere, but she didn’t spare the other colors. Then, when they could both hear the creak of the saddles of the men coming closer, she threw the paints aside and dragged Iseabail into the freezing water.
Iseabail gasped, the cold a shock to her system. She started shivering immediately, but that was nothing compared to what her mother did. The woman joined her in the water, her skirt pulling in the frigid water. She must have been freezing, but that didn’t stop her from using her paint covered hands to smear the junk all over her face and neck. And then she began chanting. Nonsense words filled with reverence and power.
It might have been a prayer to the moon. It could have been a child’s first babble. Or it was the darkest witchcraft dredged up from the bones of the earth. Such was the power of her mother’s voice that Iseabail couldn’t tell what was true and what was not. She began swaying with the force of her mother’s magic, her body thrumming despite the cold.
One by one, her uncle’s men appeared around them. Front and back, all eyes upon her and her mother. What Iseabail couldn’t see, she could hear, and it was the muttered curses of superstitious men.
Her knees were weakening, her head fuzzy. She could no longer feel her feet from the cold. The only real thing in her mind was the sound of her mother’s voice and the heat from her two hands where they held her shoulders. Then her mother lifted both hands and she heard the men gasp in surprise.
A moment later blood dripped into her hair, across her face, and down her front. She knew it by the smell, not the sight. And by the way her mother used the bloody knife to score a sharp cut down her sternum. It was a shallow cut, but it bled dark enough against the white paint. And then her mother stopped.
“It is done,” she said.
Her uncle ambled closer until he stood directly before them. Iseabail finally felt her nakedness as her wits sharpened from the burn of her cut. But she said nothing. She was too busy trying to control the way her teeth chattered.
“What’s done?” he asked, menace in his tone.
“My power, my gifts, and my magic. It’s all gone into her.”
