Page 31 of The Changeling

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said helplessly. ‘What can I do to help?’

‘Not safe. No-one must know.’ Suddenly he stood up, knocking over his stool. ‘Must go.’

‘Wait. Please. Father, I must ask you … I need to ken …’

‘How can I help, my child?’

His gentleness unlocked something in me. I grasped one of his thin hands. ‘Father, tell me … what … what manner of creature are the faeries? The hidden people of the hollow hills?’

‘Fiends from hell. Fallen angels who defied the one true God. They have no souls and so deserve no mercy.’

I recoiled.

He mumbled something in Latin, making the sign of the cross again and again over my head. ‘Exorcizo te, creatura salis, per Deum …’

I turned and ran back inside the safety of the high walls.

Part III

White hawthorn, wild faery tree makes a lover’s mayday crown sharp barb pins a lover’s shroud black hagthorn turns the dread key

I

The Poet

Do no harm, my great-aunt had always told me.

I had done great harm. The snowstorm I summoned lasted for weeks. Trees were felled, roofs blown away, people died. The harvest failed and many went hungry. Pastor Knox said it was the queen’s refusal to convert to the new faith that had provoked God to curse the fruits of the land.

‘Does everything have to be my fault?’ Mary raged. ‘I should banish him! Execute him!’

‘I wouldna advise that, madam,’ Mistress Gowland said. ‘You dinna want to make a martyr of the man.’

‘I do not understand,’ Mary said. ‘Why does he hate me so much? Is it because I am a woman? I am my father’s only legitimate child and his heir, appointed and anointed by God!’

Mary was a queen alone in a world in which men could not endure a woman they could not control. In the year since her return, there had been plot after plot to seize her and compel her into marriage, or to force her to give up her faith and worship as the Kirk decreed, a religion in which the face of the blessed Mother Mary was hacked away. All the while, Pastor Knox preached against her, saying it was an insult to God for a woman to rule over men.

The consequences of my spell weighed on me. I had wanted snow and conjured a blizzard. People had suffered, and the queen, whom I had sworn to serve, was blamed for my action. It terrified me, this strange uncontrollable magic. I did not know how to bind it.

One day, a year after I conjured the snowstorm, I knelt before the queen’s blue-tiled fireplace and stirred cream into soup thickened with almonds. Mary stood by the window, well wrapped in furs, gazing out at the mist drifting past the mullioned glass.

‘How I miss the sun,’ she said.

I bent my head, weighed down with guilt and regret. I’d meant no harm; I’d sought only to keep myself safe. But my blizzard had wreaked such havoc. I could never be so heedless again.

‘Do you know what my father said just before he died?’ Mary said, coming to sit in her cushioned chair by the fire. ‘He said, “It came with a lass, it will go with a lass.” Meaning the kingdom. The Stewarts inherited the throne through Robert the Bruce’s daughter, and so it came with a lass. And he thought I would be the one to lose it.’ She took a deep shaky breath. ‘I swore I’d prove him wrong, that I’d hold Scotland safe.’

I had not heard this story before. What must it have been like to grow up as queen, knowing your father expected you to fail? For the first time I saw the burden of her crown weighed heavily upon Mary. No-one thought a young woman capable of ruling. They thought her feeble simply because she was female. She was doing her best to show that she could be as strong and resolute as any man, but it was costing her.

I set the tureen of soup on the table. ‘I’m sorry, madam. That must be hard.’

She seemed grateful for my understanding. ‘Aye. It is.’

I laid her napkin on her lap and poured her wine, and prepared to withdraw. But she reached out and stilled me. ‘What do you see in my future, Caitlín? Tell me, what lies ahead for me! Was my father right, will I be the lass that loses it all?’

She had asked me such questions many times before, but I had never seen anything as a consequence. Perhaps it was because it was once again Yule, a time when the veils between the worlds parted, or perhaps it was because she had touched me. Whatever the reason, the Sight crashed down on me like a dark drowning wave. I spoke, not knowing what I would say until the words could not be undone. ‘One day you will have a son, and he will rule the whole of the isle from the far cold north to the southern-most point.’

The queen drew a shuddering breath. ‘A son who will rule all …’