Lady of Weeds Read online

  Lady of Weeds

  The Lady Series: Book Two

  W.R. Gingell

  Copyright © 2019 by W.R. Gingell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover by Seedlings Design Studio

  For everyone who ever thought they lived in the dark because it wasn’t permissible to be loved, but discovered it was actually because it felt safer not to try again.

  * * *

  Go slowly, but let the sunshine in.

  Contents

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  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

  Bonus Chapter: SPINDLE, Two Monarchies Sequence, Book One

  Also by W.R. Gingell

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  Chapter One

  When Carys went to clear the seaweed from the rock pools that morning, there was a boy floating in one of the more dangerous pools. Face-up, and nudged by the swirling salt water into one of the sharper rocks toward the edge of the water, he floated, caught by the yoke of his shirt or perhaps his shoulder. Carys gave him a brief look, but if he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon: there was a wound on his head that had ceased to bleed long ago, and was now pale and pink against his skin.

  She left him there while she cleaned out the other pools, with the wistful thought that perhaps the sea would have taken him back by the time she returned. It was important to clear the seaweed from the shore and tidal pools every morning: if Carys was late by even a few minutes, the selkies would make mischief with the salt-soaked weeds, and the whole day’s fishing would be ruined for the village. More than that, if the selkies were feeling particularly mischievous, there would be deaths.

  So Carys cleared them all, grimly working from one to the next, trekking back and forth from pool to the dividing line of sand and rock where she laid the seaweed on the sand to keep it out of reach of the selkies. It usually took several hours to collect all that she must collect, and simply taking it from the water was not enough. This stretch of coastline was particularly foamy and rough, churning up unusual amounts of seaweed, and keeping the weeds out of reach of the selkies was just as important as gathering it from the rocks to begin with.

  It was easy to ignore the boy as she worked, because he was in one of the funnel-shaped pools, and difficult to see unless she was looking down into it. The only signs of his presence were the gulls wheeling overhead, sharp-eyed and eager to eat anything that stayed still long enough to sweep from the beach.

  The boy was still there when she came back from clearing the other pools after making her way thoroughly along the rocky water-line. Carys sighed and fished him out with her seaweed hook, too wary to wade out into this particular pool to fetch him. It was bottomless, swirling and seething no matter whether the tide was in or out, sucking anything unwary enough to fall in deep underwater into the caves below the rocky beach. Carys, who knew better than to trust the treacherously slippery rocks, crouched low and long, ready to drop everything if her feet betrayed her, and hooked her seaweed staff beneath one of his arms to loosen him from the rocks. The surging foam tried to swallow the boy whole when she leveraged him away from the rocks, but Carys was too practised with her hook to lose him to such a trick as that. She crooked it around his neck and drew him in rapidly, her bare toes white where they gripped the black rock. He was very heavy for a boy who didn’t seem to be quite full grown, and it was only when Carys had him around the chest to drag him onto the safety of the rocks that she discovered why. Not only was most of the boy’s slender length solid muscle, but there was something hard and heavy belted around his waist beneath his shirt. No weakling herself, Carys dragged him up off the rocky shore and into the sand before she let go of him again. She would have left him there, but when she began to stand something cold and weak wrapped around her wrist.

  Carys hunched back down on her heels in surprise, her wrist caught by slender fingers, and the boy’s eyes opened to the barest slits.

  He whispered: “Please help, Lady.”

  She might still have left him there if his chin hadn’t crinkled with a repressed sob. But it did, and Carys’ lips pulled sideways in a grimace. She picked him up again, taking his weight across her back and shoulders, and carefully put him into her handcart. Then she left the seaweed where it was, and went home early for the first time in ten years, pulling her laden cart behind her. Her cottage was nearby, a plain, white-washed thing with a white-speckled roof of slate that was almost always covered with gulls. It wasn’t a particularly inviting cottage: the doorstep was bare and flat, not dipped from wear by the continual tread of visitors, and on those days that Carys didn’t cook, there was no fire in the hearth of the single room that it boasted. Carys was used to the dark and the cold, just as she was used to the loneliness. She’d become so used to them, in fact, that now she merely thought of them as everyday life, and no longer thought of them by their names.

  Today, however, after she put the boy down on the floor, she went back out to her small firewood stack that was piled under an outcropping of the slate roof, and brought in some wood to lay a fire. When there was a spark of warmth and light in the hearth, she stripped the boy of all his clothes and swaddled him in her soft summer quilt, then tucked her thicker winter quilt around him as well. She looked at the heavy, wet belt she had removed along with his clothes for some time before she hung it over the back of one of her chairs to dry with the rest of the boy’s clothes. That done, she stoked up the fire and left him to live or die, while she fetched the seaweed in. He was warm and dry, and only time would tell whether or not he had been too cold for too long, or if he had lost too much blood.

  It was noon when Carys checked on the boy again. By then, the day’s crop of seaweed was safely stored in damp piles beside the cottage, ready to be stuffed into sacks and taken to market to sell for fertiliser, and it was convenient enough to duck into the cottage for the moment it took to see if the boy was still alive.

  He was, though the wound on his forehead had begun to bleed again in a sluggish sort of a way. Carys clicked her tongue in disapproval, then washed it out with the last remaining bottle of clear liquor she owned, and sewed it up. She did the same by another cut on his shoulder, and by the time she snipped off her thread, his skin was no longer waxy or cold to the touch, and the faintest tint of red had come back to the very centre of his lips.

  “You’ll live,” Carys said, and went back to her seaweed.

  * * *

  The boy didn’t wake again until later that night, when Carys was preparing dinner. She had expected it, and her old stew pot was already hanging over the fireplace with the first proper hot meal she had cooked in months beginning to simmer away inside it. She was chopping a carrot when she heard the first signs of life from him: a faint rustling of the quilt and an unintelligible murmur.

  Carys left her chopping and leaned over him to put her hand against the side of his face. It was warm now—too warm. She clicked her tongue disapprovingly once again, and put the other hand to his forehead.

  His eyelids f
luttered open as she pulled her hand away, and Carys saw the cloudy brown eyes focus momentarily. He said, “You’re that angel from before,” and lost consciousness again.

  Carys gave a surprised hiss of laughter and looked down at the face that was just beginning to tint with colour again. Dark hair softly stubbled his cheeks and chin, which meant he was slightly older than she’d judged him to be: perhaps twenty or so. Even open, his eyes had been narrow and tilted; closed, they were mere slits. Eppan? But his hair was gold, more Scandian than Eppan. Carys looked a little closer and saw the dark roots to his hair. She gave a small sniff. Affectation.

  From his face, her eyes turned almost unaware to the belt that was still drying before the fire. She was curious, but a life spent in trying not to let her curiosity run any faster than her feet could, had also kept her wary. There was no good reason for a child of this age to be washing up on the beach with a wound on his head and a heavy belt hidden beneath his clothes. Carys knew the shipping routes along this stretch of coast; she knew them as well as she knew the peculiarities of the tide and the tricks of the selkies. More than that, if there had been something like a shipwreck, other debris would have been thrown up on the rocky coastline. No, this young boy had been either deliberately or accidentally left to the mercies of the sea in another fashion, and anything that was in his belt was something that likely shouldn’t be meddled with.

  Despite that, Carys gazed at it for a long time, and when she rose again at last, it wasn’t to resume chopping vegetables. She crossed to the fireplace instead, lifting the belt carefully from the back of the chair and folding it just as carefully until it was a bulky bundle of leather belt and thong. She flicked another glance at the unconscious boy over her shoulder, then swiftly removed three of the bricks by the fireplace and stuffed the folded belt into the dusty hole that the removal made. She put the bricks back just as swiftly and then scooped a few handfuls of dusty wood debris from the hearth and sprinkled it over the area. She preferred not to know what was in the belt, but if someone came for the boy and her house was searched for whatever the belt contained, Carys also preferred it not to be so obviously in sight.

  The stew was comfortably cooked and back to simmering when the boy began to stir again. Carys glanced over at him briefly but finished setting the table with its usual two places before she filled a third bowl and went back to the bed. By then the boy had begun to struggle to free his arms from the quilts, but when she approached, he froze.

  “Clothes are gone,” he croaked.

  “Yes,” said Carys. She set the bowl down on the table beside the bed and proffered a half-full cup of water that the boy let her dribble into his mouth at first suspiciously and then eagerly, gulping air and water both in his hurry.

  Carys said: “Slowly. You’ll be sick,” and took the cup away.

  The boy, who had leaned forward to follow it, said, “Sorry, Lady. I’ll slow down. Please.”

  Carys brought the cup back to his lips, and he was as good as his word, slowly sipping the water until it was gone, his eyes warily on her in case she took it away again. When that was gone, she fed him the stew in the same way. She’d been careful when she dipped the bowl, letting everything but the barley slip back out until the bowl was all broth and barley instead of dotted with meat and vegetables. It wouldn’t be quite as good for him, but Carys was inclined to think that he wasn’t capable of proper chewing and swallowing just yet, and when he choked on a few of the barley pearls she was sure of it. She took that away too, and this time he didn’t just follow the bowl as it was pulled away; both hands broke free of the quilt to cling to the hand that held it.

  Carys turned her cold, blue eyes on him and saw him swallow. The two hands that had seized hers loosened and dropped, but it wasn’t until he sat back again and said meekly: “Sorry, Lady,” that she put the bowl back to his lips again. He sipped cautiously, his eyes on her rather than on his meal, and Carys was glad when the bowl was empty. She wasn’t used to people looking at her any longer; she’d been too long alone and too little in the village.

  He was still looking at her when she went back to the table and filled one of the other bowls, and he was still watching when she ate her own stew. Carys ignored him, and eventually, he fell asleep. That was a positive sign, she thought, when she went to feel his forehead again. If he’d had a fever, it had been a mild one; he was still too hot, but his cheeks were nothing more than a little flushed.

  She gave him more water to drink when he next woke, then left the cup beside the bed and put another few pieces of wood on the fire. The cottage only had one bed, and although it was just big enough for two Carys preferred to sleep by the fire for tonight. She settled herself on the old rug with her back to the fire, and went to sleep with the sound of the boy’s slow movements lingering on the warm air.

  Carys woke as the dawn began to glow pink at the shutters. She always woke with or before the dawn, the rocky seashore and its crop of perilous seaweed the first thought in her mind. She brushed the ash from the folds of her skirt and from the shins of her trews that showed below that, and for a moment she froze, because the bed was piled high with quilts and the shape of a person, and that person was tossing and turning.

  She broke herself out of the trance as quickly as it had fallen, a short laugh bitter on her lips, and stoked up the fire. If she was careful about how she laid the wood, the cottage would stay warm while she was gone. It would take more wood than she usually used in a week these days, which meant she would have to make a firewood trek before the end of the week, but at least the boy wouldn’t get cold again.

  She left the cottage while the boy was still tossing and turning, her seaweed staff familiar in her hand and its hook catching the pink glow that was beginning to bulge above the horizon. She followed the coastline more carefully than ever this morning, and even dipped her hook into the more dangerous pools that swelled from the underwater caves beneath, searching for any kind of wreckage that she might have missed yesterday. There was nothing, and eventually she left her search to be sure she got the seaweed in before the selkies came out to play.

  She finished comfortably in time: as she bundled the last of the straggling weeds into one bundle, Carys saw the first silver gleam of water against slick brown selkie hide as they leapt from the waves to the rocks, changing as they came. Her work done and her village safe for the day, Carys sat down and watched them as they played. If it weren’t for the fact that they looked out on the world through feral, alien eyes, it would be easy to confuse them with a group of naked youths, dancing on the black rocks and threading seashells through each others’ hair. Ooohing and aaahing at the green, pulpy seaweed that ebbed and flowed beneath the surface of the water but not daring to touch it, those alien eyes shining. They would have happily seized on any strands that had floated free of their rocky moorings and clung to the rock, but they didn’t dare to reach out to the ones that were still healthily attached. That had confused Carys at first, until she realised that the selkies in their human form couldn’t swim. Once, on a dark day, she’d thought about going down there and drowning each and every one of them while they were in their human forms, but she hadn’t been able to do it. It was just as well: months later came the first stirrings of a village butchered in the night. The village had seen one too many deaths at the hands of the deadly, playful selkies, and that morning only half the fishermen had gone out. The other half had stayed behind until the morning was light and bright and playful on the shore, and when the selkies came up to play, they slaughtered the whole group before they could make it back to the safety of the water. The village and its returned fishermen laughed and danced all that day, and when the night came softly creeping across the gently moving sea, the selkies came softly creeping, too. They had no weapons and gave no warning. Neither did they show any mercy or remorse: when the village was visited by a roving market, the gypsies found cottages inhabited only by strips of flesh and bone that had been torn by nails and teeth, eye s
ockets empty and gaping, tongues torn out of mouths.

  Carys, thinking back on it, shivered to know how close she had come, ten years ago, to bringing about the death of the village she had been protecting for the last ten years before that. She had been nine when she first began collecting seaweed from the rocks along the shore, an orphaned child that no one cared for and no one wanted, and the living had been good, if perilous. She’d thought herself lucky to have it, and she’d learned to take care of herself both at home and on the seashore. And except for that one day ten years ago, she’d never had reason to regret that she’d taken the living. Even that day—that had been her own fault, and she knew better now. It wasn’t the fault of the sea, or even exactly the fault of the selkies; it had been her own stupidity. The selkies might have been the perpetrators of the actual act, but Carys herself had been the one who brought it about.

  She watched the selkies a little longer, eyes distant and hard, then abruptly rose and gathered together the bundles of seaweed onto her cart to take back to the cottage. It was a wet morning, salt spray mixing with the fine mist of rain that swept in from the sea, and when Carys was finally able to enter the cottage again, she could feel the warmth of the fire before she quite opened the door. She opened the door abruptly, as she always did, and the first thing she saw was the boy, frozen as if he were up to no good. He’d managed to dress himself in his small-clothes and breeches again, but either his shirt had been too difficult, or he’d found himself too cold, because he still had the summer quilt wrapped around him like a cloak, clutched to his chin. It trailed against the floor where it did a good job of sweeping up the few whispers of dust that had managed to creep in since Carys swept yesterday afternoon. She swept every second day despite the small amount of actual living that she did in the room; Carys liked things to be neat and tidy.