26. UP THE BEECH TREE

When they got home, Minerva was sent straight up to bed. But in the shadows of the gallery, she paused, transfixed by sharply whispered words: "Jupiter, we must talk about this--now!" The rumbled reply: "Can't it wait?" was followed by a tremulous, "No, it can't." She tiptoed back down the Great Hall stairs as soon as she heard them enter her mother's room and listened frozen at the door that was just barely ajar.

"There's something I must know."

"What is it, my dear?" There were sounds of restless pacing.

"It seems very strange that I was the only suspect in my father's death. Yet I was never prosecuted." A drawer opened and closed.

"It's as your mother said, Iffie. There was no motive...and also, the Prior Incantato was inconclusive." Water splashed into a pan.

"But they didn't look for any other suspects, did they?"

"I don't know that they did."

"You know they did not. Because they were sure that I did it."

"Iffie!" The word rang out sharply. Then her father went on in a gentler tone. "It's true they had no other leads..."

But her mother was implacable. "They knew, Jupiter. It had to be me."

"Darling--"

"It's all right, really. But what I need to know is: why did they not lock me away somewhere secure, like Saint Mungo's lest I should do this thing again...to someone else?"

Her father cleared his throat, but said nothing.

"Did you promise them something, Jupiter? Did you tell them you'd keep an eye on me?"

"I did...tell them...I would..."

"...be my gaoler."

"That is such a harsh word, Iffie...but, yes...it was that or...the mental ward." The last phrase was spoken so low, Minerva barely made it out. "But I couldn't let them take you away, Iffie--from me and our baby."

"It's all right, darling. I'm glad of it. And you see, I can handle the truth." There was a long pause. Minerva imagined--wished--her mother in her father's arms, spent and at peace.

Her father's voice came again, a hoarse murmur: "But now you are back...cured...and I am--we are--so relieved."

"I am glad of your faith in me, Jupiter. But do not be so quick to proclaim me healed and whole. It is true I am seeing more clearly than I have in a long time. But there is always that dread..."

"That you will relapse."

"It has happened before."

"Hush, my dearie. Let me tell you why I think it will not happen again." There were rustling sounds, as if her mother was being tucked into her feather bed like a little child. Her father's voice was gentle. "Those other times I sensed a continued restlessness in you, in your mind, and I knew that the peaceful interlude could not last. But since you came back from Kirk's I've thought--no--I've known--that you will beat this thing. And I don't think it's only Healer Kirk who is responsible for this change."

"No?"

"No. It's your daughter. The way you look at her. And more important, the way she looks at you. Your love for her will sustain you. And she--stubborn, stalwart lass that she is--won't let you fail."

"That's a bracing thought. I do love her so."

"And me, your guard and gaoler? Am I forgiven?"

"Of course. And you know you have my most heartfelt love as well." There was more rustling of the bed-clothes. "Do you think, my dear gaoler, that you could allow me one concession on this evening of such great confessions?"

"Anything, my dearest prisoner, barring another trip to Greenland."

"Could I have my window opened, just a bit? It's so stuffy in here at night."

Minerva sighed in relief at her mother's easy reply. All was well now.

As she tumbled into bed, she reflected on her father's words. ...stubborn, stalwart lass... She had the potential to protect her mother, now that she was a real witch. She would dedicate herself to learning as much as she could about her power, and make herself really useful to her family.

~*~

She was having a happy dream of her mother and father, dressed in Healers' robes. They were dancing the Fling together and laughing, on the frozen waste of a glacier with the Aurora Borealis flashing overhead. But out of the distance, a heavy figure shuffled towards them, its grayish fur glinting wetly in the light. Its lumbering gait made cracks in the ice, from which dark, slushy water oozed. The cracks widened,lengthened, reached towards her parents' feet like long black talons...

Minerva awoke, stifling a cry, and pulled her fleecy blanket closer about her. She breathed deeply the freshness of the cold night air, dispelling stale fears the dream had dredged up. She found another thought to occupy her, her grandmother's puzzling remark about that French painting, but shortly the fragment slipped unresisting into the 'nonsensical things old people say' part of her brain, as her eyes swept the room. Something was wrong.

The risen moon made of the window casement a sharp shadow across the floor. It was open much wider than she had set it, as if it had been disturbed by a breeze. She went to the window and looked out. The air was still. There was only the light of the full moon, still and strong on her face. Here one fork of the beech tree trunk almost touched the casement on its upward ramble to the southwest tower, skirting the walls of her bedroom and of her mother's below. Here and there it poked out a branch as if to steady itself against the strong stones.

She remembered how Ma had taught her to climb this tree. Its wide sloping limbs were her favorite refuge in childhood, the crotch of the forked trunk easy for even a wee lass to clamber into. Up it rose, from just outside the little enclosed garden, past Ma's window and hers, on up to within sight of the small balcony outside Da's library.

She thought for a second that it might have been Gig who threw a stone at the window to wake her, having one of her tantalizing late-night brainstorms that she just had to share with her friend. But it would have to be something really urgent to bring her across dark, frozen fields in search of an empathetic ear. She peered down the leafless branches, following the trunk to its origin in the courtyard. There was no sign of her impulsive friend.

She pondered the tree's limbs, smooth and bare. The word beech, she remembered from one of Da's rambling lectures on the origins of Brittonic witchcraft, was from the tongue of the Sassenachs, meaning 'book' because the ancient druidic culture used thin squares of its pliant bark to make their grimoires. In fact, he had, pressed in his library, a single fragment of such a page with the Connghaill gryphon and spiky runes indicating the beginnings of an ancient charm. "Blest be..." it started, or so Da said.

Now, though she ran her eyes along the comforting smoothness of her favorite tree, the oppression of the day came back upon her, hard, like a rot-weakened branch weighing heavily upon a roof. There would be no blessedness in this house until her mother was long rid of her affliction, which, for all her father's hopefulness, might yet overtake her the way shadows of the end of day gradually covered the fields.

Minerva caught herself. Where did this disturbing image come from? She had been so sure that all would now be well, listening there outside her mother's door. But this same feeling of nameless dread had come upon her by another door, her Grandmother's, when on leaving, thinking about all she'd heard, she'd tripped over a rock. She remembered she had touched it briefly, tried to nudge it back into place. Smooth and soft, yet turgid it was, as if it had absorbed a great deal of moisture in its years half buried in the earth. It had resisted her toe heavily, and she had been swept along by her father toward the waiting sledge. Was her mother's spirit like that rock? Too steeped in a past soggy with failure to be realigned with reality?

Now some aspect of the tree disturbed her. What was it? The trunk was smooth--too smooth. It had from time immemorial shot out small branchlets all along its surface, sucker shoots, always trying, like piglets at a sow's teats, for a place in the tree's complex vascular nourishment. But they had often been struck off by small scrambling feet and reaching fingers. But she hadn't climbed the tree of late, or if she had, had been careful not to injure those shoots out of a maturing reverence for all things living, as taught by Mami Leek. But there, at the base, near her mother's window, where two of the sucker-shoots had grown, was just a pulped remnant of their existence. And just outside her own window, a twig struggling to survive had been likewise flattened. There was a darkish stain on its stump, like frozen sap--or fresh blood. She looked up. Someone or something had climbed the tree, and recently, on the way to the balcony. Her eyes swung back to ground level. Her mother's window stood wide open.

Without thinking further or reaching for a wrap, she swung herself out into the cold, still air. She was hot inside with curiosity and preternaturally alert with the sting of fear. She followed the sinuous, shallow slope of the trunk, squeezing it with her feet, her knees splayed out like a Clabbert's. With the help of friendly branches, she pulled herself up to the balcony outside her father's den. It was empty. But she heard a sound she remembered from that balcony when her mother had last been home. It was human and wordless, like a sob, only now flung out from somewhere along the balustrade of the battlement another storey above her. And inside herself she knew again the penetrating dread that she'd felt tonight when she stumbled to her knees in the dirt outside her grandmother's house.

The sob lengthened, formed into words: "...patricide...aye...it was that...a crime...unforgiveable..." A voice, weak and babbling, yet its dark, accusing words overwhelmed Minerva's heart, and she fought off the misery they engendered.

"...the visit...should never gone there...wounds reopened...the suffering...oh, mother...can you forgive..."

Minerva looked up at the wide balustrade above her head and saw a figure, clinging to it at its far side.

"...the horror...I cannot..."

The moonglow caught a curve of the sweet, familiar face--her mother's face--staring sightless at the sky. And there was something else: behind her, a shiny oval, like a reflection of the moon's light off the tower. Her mouth moved again. "My daughter...I see her...eager to claim her magical birthright...she needs my strength...and I...have nothing give...

Her mother stood frozen in the breezeless cold, yet the light-shape bobbed and twisted, moving in a rhythm oddly synchronous with the words she spoke. Minerva inched closer, studying the anomaly.

"...and Jupiter...my love...I see you flagging...under the burden of a mate...who has lost her warmth...her luster..."

Peering through the balusters, Minerva realized the oval shape was no reflection, but the face of a creature barely tall enough to see over the banister, its bulbous head, white in the moonlight, bobbling about on a straw-thin neck.

And again came that merciless self-degradation from her mother's lips: "...I see it now...how he takes glass after glass of brose at dinner... more than ever was his wont...eying his wife...once an asset...a comfort...now limping...beaten..."

Minerva edged upward, a new caution suffusing her frame, and observed the intruder through the balusters, its thin limbs clothed in a ragged robe, arms hugging an emaciated torso shivering against the chill. Yet despite its discomfort, the face grinned and nodded at the wretched woman before it. When she spoke, its eyes grew larger, and it licked its lips as if feeding off her torment.

"...he knows, though he will not say it, that my affliction is incurable...I see him hang his head as he tries to hide his disappointment...his disgust..."

Yes, the thoughts behind the terrible words belonged to this creature, and they were communicated directly to her mother's brain. Its very appearance bespoke meanness and despair. Her mother cringed under its soft suasion.

"...best to end it now, and quickly...to rid them of the pain of watching mother...wife... lover...slide slowly down the trough of madness..."

There was a bench built into the balusters, and her mother stepped up onto it, flinging her arms abruptly out, to steady herself, or reaching to embrace the stars. Minerva did not know the purpose of that gesture, but with a jolt of fear, she realized she had to do something before Ma put a foot one step up onto the broad railing.

"...it will hurt them for a time...but the sooner done...the sooner they will have a new start...Donnie...Gerry will comfort them...Oh, my darlings! Forgive me!"

Minerva could not cry out, though she ached to do so. The top of the Keep seemed suddenly to recede, as if her own psyche was repelled by so much pain. The gap between tree and battlement now seemed well-nigh unbridgeable, but her muscles tensed to a hardness she did not know she could muster. Her nails dug into the bark of the tree. Without conscious thought, she sprang in two bounds onto the balustrade and raced across it, throwing herself between her mother and certain death. Her mother gave a little startled cry and fell backwards off the stone bench, and into the shadows. Minerva heard a noise of bone on stone and a sigh, as of release.

Her momentum took her past the end of the balustrade to the west parapet wall and she rebounded off it, landing crouched, near her mother's inert form. She sniffed at, nuzzled Ma's face. A cry escaped her lips, unlike any she ever could remember making, the cry of a bairn hungry for its mother's touch--or of a bitch defending her pups. She concentrated a withering gaze on the thin, white creature--the hunter become hunted--which stared at her, horrified. It turned and leaped onto the stone bench, instinctively making for the other fork of the beech tree and freedom. She closed the gap unthinking and swiftly, like a gryphon in full fury of flight. She leaped and caught it in mid-stride. Her teeth--yes, teeth--caught it at its scrawny neck. She could taste the bitterness of grime and the salt of old sweat in its skin. Her fingers dug into its shoulders and she felt in its rigidifying form the same panic the Erkling had evinced when it overbalanced at the edge of the Hole in the cave. And she would not save it from death, for she hated it so much. She could not save it or herself, for her momentum carried her with it over the stone banister and on past the saving branches of the beech tree.

At first their fall seemed endless. She clung involuntarily to the creature. She had snagged its robe somehow, so that they were tethered together, swinging about in a weird parody of the the lazy spiraling orbit of her collision with Dugald in front of the goal net last summer. But she had no time to reflect on this. The ground approached all too quickly.

She landed on the flagged stones of the courtyard, on a fortuitous upswing of their ellipse, the creature beneath her. She felt a shock of pain rocket up through her limbs, and, barely, the spatter of something on her face as they made contact with the ground. She had somehow managed to land upright, on hands and feet, but immediately collapsed into her shattered limbs, as a fog of agony suffused her brain. As her senses melted into the red haze she had one last thought: all the doors would be locked at this time of night, while Ma lay cold and still at the top of the Keep.

~*~

Minerva woke to sounds of bustling activity. It was morning, cold yet, and bright, and she caught the heavy scent of lanolin, felt the heaviness of a fleece pressing her body into the down of the mattress. It was reassuring, this pressure, holding her in place after recurring dreams of falling, turning uncontrollably end over end in an unrelenting dark. But the pressure also made her hurt. Her hands stung, her feet burned. Her arms and legs ached, but at the same time all her limbs felt curiously detached from the rest of her. The door opened as she was trying to wiggle herself into a sitting position, using back and buttocks alone.

"Dearie, ye shouldna..." Goodie Gudgeon hurriedly placed a tray clinking with bottles on a low table by the fireplace.

Minerva had managed to sit upright, but she couldn't steady herself with her useless arms. Not only did they hurt, they felt like rubber. She swayed to the side, and Goodie caught her. She propped her into place with pillows on either side.

"Ye've had Ike Harry's ain fall, lass. Broke ilka finger, thumb, even yer pinkies, an all yer taes. We gied ye somethin fer the pang, but ye haena been properly mendit yit. Dinna move atall. I'll see gif Healer Doohan's done wi yer Ma."

A woman came in and examined her. She had iron-gray hair gathered in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She peered at Minerva over crescent-shaped spectacles, and gently felt her whole body, starting with her abdomen and spiraling outward to all her joints and appendages, including her head.

"Seems this child had an encounter of the flying kind last night," said Brianag Doohan. Minerva focused and remembered: she was a family friend who lived in town. She specialized in Veterinary Healing. "Besides the digits, distal radial fractures to both arms and fractures in the right talus. Clearly she jumped from a great height and landed on hands and feet--or more likely, on fingers and toes. Curious, that. But the wonder is there were no dislocations to the larger joints. What's your tale, child?"

By this time, Jupiter McGonagall had joined them in the bedroom, and Minerva had to ask, "How's Ma?"

He was looking anxiously at her, as if torn between worry over her condition and how to tell her what had happened to her mother, but his glance turned sharp at her question.

"Minerva, what do you know about all this?"

She told him what she remembered, and her injuries were sufficient testimony to the truth of the fantastic story for him to breath a sigh and sit heavily on the bed next to her.

"Poor, brave lassie." He patted her wrist. She bit her lip to hide a wince of pain. "That explains a lot. Your Ma's still out."

"Don't worry," said the Healer at Minerva's look of alarm. "It's a Peaceful Sleep Charm, a precaution only."

"Aye," said Goodie Gudgeon. "Whan yer Ma waukit, there wis sic horror on her face, an laughin an blirtin allthegither, Healer Doohan thought it for the best. She'll sleep till the morn's nicht."

Something had just dawned on her father. "She--your mother--climbed that bloody beech tree!! There's no other way she could have got up there. I lock her door every night, but I never thought...the window...the tree...I'll have the damned thing chopped into firewood tomorrow."

"Da, no!" Minerva looked at her father's sagging face. She wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, but her rubber-arms would not obey. "We love that tree, Da. And it wasn't the tree's fault. It was that--that thing that made her do it. It hounded her so. The way it looked at her...What was it anyway?"

"Och, we'll know in a bit. I've sent for auld Filch. He knows his creatures. Canny as the Thane himself in that respect. But," he paused in wonderment at a sudden thought. "You saved your mother's life, bairnie-girl. You saved her..." His shoulders started to quiver, and he clasped her to him in a bear-like embrace. She cried openly, as much to cover her physical discomfort as to release a night's--nay, a lifetime's--worth of tension. For she was sure that the beastie, whatever its origin, was the source of all her mother's troubles. That face, leering hungrily, told her all.

Inachus Filch came in due time. He consulted briefly with Healer Doohan and the Master over a milk-ewe who was off her feed, then together they bent over the carcass which still lay in the courtyard, covered with a cloth. Minerva sat in a chair by the casement window, having downed a glass of Skelegrow, which she was assured would heal up all her broken bones within hours. She strained to see and hear what was going on, oblivious to her own discomfort. The foreman and the Healer poked the creature about for a bit. Brianag Doohan lifted the remains of the oversized head and turned it this way and that. Da, she could see, was barely concealing his rage. It was plain he wanted to tear to bits this thing that had tormented his wife for so many years. For it had been equally obvious to him, as Minerva described its behavior, that it was this pitiful yet dreadful being who had somehow insinuated itself into Ma's mind, gradually eating away at her sanity, making her suffer.

Filch called up to the window. "Miss, did you see any other animals about the parapet?"

She called back. "No, why?"

"There's fresh puncture marks on its neck and scratches on its arms, from something smallish--a badger or maybe a pine marten."

Minerva shivered. Perhaps the thing that had chased her back in the summer was still around. Yetis, being from the mountains of Tibet, would like high places. But it would have been too big to make those marks.