Runemarks Read online

  Now, Maddy had never liked Nat Parson. She watched him in silence as he spoke, occasionally lifting her left hand and peering at him insolently through the circle of her thumb and forefinger. Nat itched to slap her, but Laws knew what powers her demon blood had given her, and he wanted as little to do with the girl as possible. The Order would have known what to do with the child. But this was Malbry, not World’s End, and even such a stickler as Nat knew better than to try to enforce World’s End Law so far from the Universal City.

  “Do—you—understand?” He spoke loudly and slowly. Perhaps she was simple, like Crazy Nan Fey. In any case, she did not reply, but watched him again through her crooked fingers until at last he sighed and went away.

  After that, or so it seemed, Jed Smith’s youngest daughter had grown wilder than ever. She stopped going to church, lived out in Little Bear Wood for days on end, and spent hours at a time talking to herself (or, more likely, to the goblins). And when the other children played jump stone around the pond or went to Nat Parson’s Sunday school, Maddy ran off to Red Horse Hill, or pestered Crazy Nan for tales, or, worse still, made up tales about terrible, impossible things, which she told the younger ones to give them nightmares.

  She was an embarrassment to Mae, who was merry as a blue jay (and as brainless) and who would have made a brilliant marriage but for her unruly sister. As compensation, Mae was spoiled and indulged far more than was good for her, while Maddy grew up sullen, unregarded, and angry.

  And sullen and angry she might have remained but for what happened on Red Horse Hill in the summer of her seventh year.

  No one knew much about Red Horse Hill. Some said it had been shaped during the Elder Age, when the heathens still made sacrifices to the old gods. Others said it was the burial mound of some great chieftain, seeded throughout with deadly traps, though Maddy favored the theory that the place was a giant treasure mound, piled to the eaves with goblin gold.

  Whatever it was, the Horse was ancient—everyone agreed on that—and although there was no doubt that men had carved it into the flank of the Hill, there was something uncanny about the figure. For a start, the Red Horse never grassed over in spring, nor did the winter snow ever hide its shape. As a result, the Hill was riddled with whispers and tales—tales of the Faërie and of the old gods—and so most people wisely left it alone.

  Maddy liked the Hill, of course. But then, Maddy knew it better than most. All her life she had stayed alert to rumors culled from travelers, to pieces of lore, to sayings, kennings, stories, tales. From these tales she had formed a picture—still maddeningly unclear—of a time before the End of the World, when Red Horse Hill was an enchanted place and when the old gods—the Seer-folk—walked the land in human guise, sowing stories wherever they went.

  No one in Malbry spoke of them. Even Crazy Nan would not have dared; the Good Book forbade all tales of the Seer-folk not written in the Book of Tribulation. And the people of Malbry prided themselves on their devotion to the Good Book. They no longer decked wells in the name of Mother Frigg, or danced on the May, or left crumbs by their doorsteps for Jack-in-the-Green. The shrines and temples of the Seer-folk had all been torn down years ago. Even their names had been largely forgotten, and no one mentioned them anymore.

  Almost no one, anyway. The exception was Maddy’s closest friend—known to Mrs. Scattergood as that one-eyed scally good-for-nowt and to others as the Outlander, or just plain One-Eye.

  3

  They met in the summer of Maddy’s seventh year. It was Midsummer’s Fair Day, with games and dancing on the green. There were stalls selling ribbons and fruit and cakes, there were ices for the children, Mae had been crowned Strawberry Queen for the third year running, and Maddy was watching it all from her place at the edge of Little Bear Wood, feeling jealous, feeling angry, but nevertheless determined not to join in.

  Her place was a giant copper beech, with a thick, smooth bole and plenty of branches. Thirty feet up, there was a fork into which Maddy liked to sprawl, skirts hiked up, legs on either side of the trunk, watching the village through the circle of her left thumb and forefinger.

  Some years before, Maddy had discovered that when she made this fingering and concentrated very hard, she could see things that could not normally be seen. A bird’s nest in the turf, blackberries in the bramble hedge, Adam Scattergood and his cronies hiding behind a garden wall with stones in their pockets and mischief on their minds.

  And it sometimes showed her different things—lights and colors that shone around people and showed their moods—and often these colors left a trail, like a signature for any to read who could.

  Her trick was called sjón-henni, or truesight, and it was one of the fingerings of the rune Bjarkán—though Maddy, who had never learned her letters, had never heard of Bjarkán, nor had it ever occurred to her that her trick was magic.

  All her life it had been impressed upon her that magic—be it a glamour, a fingering, or even a cantrip—was not only unnatural but wrong. It was the legacy of the Faërie, the source of Maddy’s bad blood, the ruin of everything good and lawful.

  It was the reason she was here in the first place, when she could have been playing with the other children or eating pies on the Fair Day green. It was the reason her father avoided her gaze, as if every glance reminded him of the wife he had lost. It was also the reason that Maddy alone of all the villagers noticed the strange man in the wide-brimmed hat walking along the Malbry road—walking not toward the village, as you might have supposed, but in the direction of Red Horse Hill.

  Strangers were not often seen in Malbry, even at a Midsummer’s Fair. Most traders were regulars from one place or another—bringing with them glass and metalware from the Ridings, persimmons from the Southlands, fish from the Islands, spices from the Outlands, skins and furs from the frozen North.

  But if he was a trader, Maddy thought, then this man was traveling light. He had no horse, no mule, no wagon. And he was going the wrong way. He could be an Outlander, she thought, with his matted hair and ragged clothes. She had heard they sometimes traveled the Roads, where all kinds of people met and traded, but she had never actually seen one; those savages from the dead lands beyond World’s End, so ignorant that they couldn’t even speak a civilized language. Or he might be a Wilderlander, all painted in blue woad, a madman, a leper, or even a bandit.

  She slipped out of her tree as the stranger passed and began to follow him at a safe distance, keeping to the bushes by the side of the road and watching him through the rune Bjarkán.

  Perhaps he was a soldier, a veteran of some Outland war; he had pulled his hat down over his forehead, but even so, Maddy could see that he wore an eye patch, which hid the left side of his face. Like an Outlander, he was tall and dark, and Maddy saw with interest that although his long hair was going gray, he did not move like an old man.

  Nor were his colors that of an old man. Maddy had found that old folk left a weak trail, and idiots left hardly any trail at all. But this man had a stronger signature than any she had ever seen. It was a rich and vibrant kingfisher blue, and Maddy found it hard to reconcile this inner brilliance with the drab, road-weary individual before her on the way to the Hill.

  She continued to follow him, silently and keeping well hidden, and when she reached the brow of the Hill, she hid behind a hummock of grass and watched him as he lay in the shadow of a fallen stone, his one eye fixed on the Red Horse and a small, leather-bound notebook in his hand.

  Minutes passed. He looked half asleep, his face concealed by the brim of his hat. But Maddy knew he was awake, and from time to time he wrote something in his notebook, or turned the page, and then went back to watching the Horse.

  After a while the Outlander spoke. Not loudly, but so that Maddy could hear, and his voice was low and pleasant, not really what she’d expected of an Outlander at all.

  “Well?” he said. “Have you seen enough?”

  Maddy was startled. She had made no sound, and as far as she could tell
, he had not once looked in her direction. She stood up, feeling rather foolish, and stared at him defiantly. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

  “No?” said the Outlander. “Perhaps you should be.”

  Maddy decided she could outrun him if need be. She sat down again, just out of reach on the springy grass.

  His book, she now saw, was a collection of scraps, bound together with strips of leather, the pages hedged with thorny script. Maddy, of course, could not read—few villagers could, except for the parson and his prentices, who read the Good Book and nothing else.

  “Are you a priest?” she said at last.

  The stranger laughed, not pleasantly.

  “A soldier, then?”

  The man said nothing.

  “A pirate? A mercenary?”

  Again, nothing. The Outlander continued to make marks in his little book, pausing occasionally to study the Horse.

  But Maddy’s curiosity had been fired. “What happened to your face?” she said. “How were you wounded? Was it a war?”

  Now the stranger looked at her with a trace of impatience. “This happened,” he said, and took off his patch.

  For a moment Maddy stared at him. But it was not the scarred ruin of his eye that held her thus. It was the bluish mark that began just above his brow and extended right down onto his left cheekbone.

  It was not the same shape as her own ruinmark, but it was recognizably of the same substance, and it was certainly the first time that Maddy had ever seen such a thing on someone other than herself.

  “Satisfied?” said the Outlander.

  But a great excitement had seized hold of Maddy. “What’s that?” she said. “How did you get it? Is it woad? Is it a tattoo? Were you born with it? Do all Outlanders have them?”

  He gave her a small and chilly smile. “Didn’t your mamma ever tell you that curiosity killed the kitty cat?”

  “My mamma died when I was born.”

  “I see. What’s your name?”

  “Maddy. What’s yours?”

  “You can call me One-Eye,” he said.

  And then Maddy uncurled her fist, still grubby from her climb up the big beech tree, and showed him the ruinmark on her hand.

  For a moment the Outlander’s good eye widened beneath the brim of his hat. On Maddy’s palm, the ruinmark stood out sharper than usual, still rust-colored but now flaring bright orange at the edges, and Maddy could feel the burn of it—a tingling sensation, not unpleasant, but definitely there, as if she had grasped something hot a few minutes before.

  He looked at it for a long time. “D’you know what you’ve got there, girl?”

  “Witch’s Ruin,” said Maddy promptly. “My sister thinks I should wear mittens.”

  One-Eye spat. “Witch rhymes with bitch. A dirty word, for dirty-minded folk. Besides, it was never a Witch’s Ruin,” he said, “but a Witch’s Rune: the runemark of the Fiery.”

  “Don’t you mean the Faërie?” said Maddy, intrigued.

  “Faërie, Fiery, it’s all the same. This rune”—he looked at it closely—“this mark of yours. Do you know what it is?”

  “Nat Parson says it’s the devil’s mark.”

  “Nat Parson’s a gobshite,” One-Eye said.

  Maddy was torn between a natural feeling of sacrilege and a deep admiration of anyone who dared call a parson gobshite.

  “Listen to me, girlie,” he said. “Your man Nat Parson with his foolish Good Book has every reason to fear that mark. Aye, and envy it too.”

  Once more he studied the design on Maddy’s palm, with interest and—Maddy thought—some wistfulness. “A curious thing,” he said at last. “I never thought to see it here.”

  “But what is it?” said Maddy. “If the Book isn’t true—”

  “Oh, there’s truth in the Book,” said One-Eye, and shrugged. “But it’s buried deep under legends and lies. That war, for instance…”

  “Tribulation,” said Maddy helpfully.

  “Aye, if you like, or Ragnarók. Remember, it’s the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings. If the Æsir had won—”

  “The Æsir?”

  “Seer-folk, I daresay you’d call ’em here. Well, if they’d won that war—and it was close, mind you—then the Elder Age would not have ended, and your Good Book would have turned out very different, or maybe never been written at all.”

  Maddy’s ears pricked up at once. “The Elder Age? You mean before Tribulation?”

  One-Eye laughed. “Aye. If you like. Before that, Order reigned. The Æsir kept it, believe it or not, though there were no Seers among them in those days, and it was the Vanir, from the borders of Chaos—the Faërie, your folk’d call ’em—that were the keepers of the Fire.”

  “The Fire?” said Maddy, thinking of her father’s smithy.

  “Glam. Glám-sýni, they called it. Rune-caster’s glam. Shape-changer’s magic. The Vanir had it, and the children of Chaos. The Æsir only got it later.”

  “How?” said Maddy.

  “Trickery—and theft, of course. They stole it and remade the Worlds. And such was the power of the runes that even after the Winter War, the fire lay sleeping underground, as fire may sleep for weeks, months—years. And sometimes even now it rekindles itself—in a living creature, even a child—”

  “Me?” said Maddy.

  “Much joy may it bring you.” He turned away and, frowning, seemed once more absorbed in his book.

  But Maddy had been listening with too much interest to allow One-Eye to stop now. Until then she had heard only fragments of tales—and the scrambled versions from the Book of Tribulation, in which the Seer-folk were mentioned only in warnings against their demonic powers or in an attempt to ridicule those long-dead impostors who called themselves gods.

  “So—how do you know these stories?” she said.

  The Outlander smiled. “You might say I’m a collector.”

  Maddy’s heart beat faster at the thought of a man who might collect tales in the way another might collect penknives, or butterflies, or stones. “Tell me more,” she said eagerly. “Tell me about the Æsir.”

  “I said a collector, not a storyteller.”

  But Maddy was not to be put off. “What happened to them?” she said. “Did they all die? Did the Nameless hurl them into the Black Fortress, with the snakes and demons?”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “Nat Parson does.”

  He made a sharp sound of contempt. “Some died, some vanished, some fell, some were lost. New gods emerged to suit a new age, and the old ones were forgotten. Maybe that proves they weren’t gods at all.”

  “Then what were they?”

  “They were the Æsir. What else do you need?”

  Once again he turned away, but this time Maddy caught at him. “Tell me more.”

  “There is no more,” One-Eye said. “There’s me. There’s you. And there’s our cousins under the Hill. The dregs, girlie, that’s what we are. The wine’s long gone.”

  “Cousins,” said Maddy wistfully. “Then you and I must be cousins too.” It was a strangely attractive thought. That Maddy and One-Eye might both belong to the same secret tribe of traveling folk, both of them marked with Faërie fire…

  “Oh, teach me how to use it,” she begged, holding out her palm. “I know I can do it. I want to learn—”

  But One-Eye had lost patience at last. He snapped his book shut and stood up, shaking the grass stems from his cloak. “I’m no teacher, little girl. Go play with your friends and leave me alone.”

  “I have no friends, Outlander,” she said. “Teach me.”

  Now, One-Eye had no love for children. He looked down with no affection at all at the grubby little girl with the runemark on her hand and wondered how he could have let her draw him in. He was getting old—wasn’t that the truth?—old and sentimental, and it was likely to be the death of him—aye, as if the runes hadn’t already told him as much. His most recent casting of the runeston
es had given him Madr, the Folk, crossed with Thuris, the Thorny One, and finally Hagall, the Destroyer—

  —and if that wasn’t a warning to keep moving on—

  “Teach me,” said the little girl.

  “Leave me alone.” He began to walk, long-legged, down the side of the Hill, with Maddy running after him.

  “Teach me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Teach me.”

  “Get lost!”

  “Teach me.”

  “Ye gods!”

  One-Eye made an exasperated sound and forked a runesign with his left hand. Maddy thought she saw something between his fingers—a fleck of blue fire, no more than a spark, as if a ring or gemstone he was wearing had caught the light. But One-Eye wore no rings or gems…

  Without thinking, she raised her hand against the spark and pushed it back toward the Outlander with a sound like a firecracker going off.

  One-Eye flinched. “Who taught you that?”

  “No one did,” said Maddy in surprise. Her runemark felt unusually warm, once more changing color from rusty brown to tiger’s-eye gold.

  For a minute or two One-Eye said nothing. He looked at his hand and flexed the fingers, now throbbing as if they had been burned. Then he looked at Maddy with renewed curiosity.

  “Teach me,” she said.

  There was a long pause. Then he said, “You’d better be good. I haven’t taken a pupil—let alone a girl—in more years than I care to remember.”

  Maddy hid her grin beneath her tangled hair.

  For the first time in her life, she had a teacher.

  4

  Over the next fortnight, Maddy listened to One-Eye’s teachings with a single-mindedness she had never shown before. Nat Parson had always made it clear that to be a bad-blood was a shameful thing, like being a cripple or a bastard. But here was this man telling her the exact opposite. She had skills, the Outlander told her, skills that were unique and valuable. She was an apt pupil, and One-Eye, who had come to the valley as a trader of medicines and salves and who rarely stayed anywhere for longer than a few days, this time extended his visit to almost a month as Maddy absorbed tales, maps, letters, cantrips, runes—every scrap of information her new friend gave her. It was the beginning of a long apprenticeship, and one that would change her world picture forever.