Secrets of Carrick: Ghostheart Read online

  In Carrick things are changing and Mally needs to change too.

  Her brothers and sisters are fearless, light as scuds, quick as hoppers. Not Mally. She knows too many secrets. Mally is frightened – frozen at the edge of the shore.

  Out of nowhere comes Dolyn Craig – a sneak and a bully. But that’s not the worst of it. He wants something from Mally. But what?

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Logo

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter Epilogue

  Glossary

  Weaving Terms

  A Note on Women at Work in the Middle Ages

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Other Books by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Prologue

  Waterline

  IT WAS LIKE THIS.

  I saw it break cover from Spindlestone Stack and stop in the milky sea, washed in light, like one of the chapel wall saints, with its silverthread hair flying in glories. Then it waded ashore.

  Watchful.

  And just for a moment I thought it was her – Dodi Caillet – come back. That she’d found her way home. I thought it was all the years of my missing her that was making her shine like that. All the years of my wanting her, lighting up the morning. And I took a step toward her. I thought it would be me and Dodi, together again.

  Like nothing ever happened.

  But it wasn’t.

  It was some strange female and plainly so longdead it didn’t even have to cover itself any more. It walked about like decency was nothing to it, mottling in its own skin and its hair hanging. Where it waded the sea, the waters went in blazey wakes and where it walked the shore, damp sand fell in over footsteps of light. It went low. Crabwise.

  Sneaky.

  I saw it go up onto the breakbone rocks. The light streamed from its heels as it walked. First in gleamy ribbons, then to dwindling strings then to specks fading on the dry stone. I heard its wet hair snap in the breezes, and I felt the spindrift flay my legs. I wanted to run.

  But I was stuckfast.

  Under the cliff it shook itself and slid into the shade of the rock wall. It could have been just a shadow in the stone’s folds. But it wasn’t. The fog opened; it turned with one hand flat to the rock – and then it saw me.

  And it was bold all right.

  It saw me and it looked a long moment. And the face on it was various. Shy and wild, sharp and tender, cruel, sad, lost and prideful: all these things at once.

  And I was right out in the middle of the Sands, tall and plain as a post. Its eyes went into me like tunnels. It took a small step away from the rock. A step toward me.

  I told it No.

  No No No.

  I hid my face in my hands. I dropped onto my knees. I prayed wild and anyhow to anything that was listening.

  And nothing happened.

  The foamwash hissed and the sibs called out and the Mordecai bell rang out over the town.

  I looked through my fingers.

  I saw its hair silver in the shadows in the rock. The sheeny little flies that swarm there covered it thick as a curtain. And then it was gone, like some rock spider, away into the cliff.

  I knew what it was: a scaan.

  Some Dead-one, walking.

  I stood in heart-storms, holding my breath so it wouldn’t hear and come back. Then the storms broke and I was running.

  Running across the stoneway. Kicking at the crabs. Slicing my feet.

  Running, fear-split. I saw my face in the rockpools as I ran. Wide white eyes. Red mouth wide. A white face stretched tight over sharp bones.

  Running. Across the threshold pools. With the wind at my back. Running. Right into the sea-cave.

  Right into Breesh Dunnal.

  And I felt better straightways. I grabbed hold of her big hands and held them tight. She pulled me close and she was warm and smelled of salt and herself. Everything would be all right now. Everything was always all right with Breesh Dunnal. She was my best friend. My only friend. The only one who knew me. The only one I could stand to be with. My secret sister.

  My heart.

  “Did you see?” I asked her.

  Breesh Dunnal stooped to look into my face and I saw myself reflected there. One of me deep in each of her quicksilver eyes. Small. Trembling. Fright-cracked. As always.

  “See what?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But it wasn’t nothing.

  I’d seen the scaan and I could not unsee it.

  Chapter One

  Holdfast

  MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS are fearless, light as scuds, quick as hoppers all over Shipton Sands. They’re straight down the shore, moving seaward in a mob. They go hand-in-hand or one-by-one, tumbling in low talk and high laughter. They’re gathering at the foggy waterline. They’re trooping into the water. They’re just shapes in the shallows, holding their shifts out, wading into the soft early sea-foam. The dawn is coming slow and their pale faces are rocking like lamps over the dark water. Tosha and Ally. Coonie and Hugo. Treen and Neven and Sula and Flaxney. And Nessa. My sibs.

  I hate them.

  I stand at the mid-waterline, lonely as a cornstalk in a saltmarsh. Even Lovelypig is going down to the water. Jumping to keep herself above the sand, sinking to her belly every time. She keeps stopping to look back at me, hopeful-like – but it’s impossible.

  I can’t go down to the sea.

  I can’t cross the mid-waterline. I just can’t. I am a holdfast.

  These are my siege-walls: the mid-waterline, the town palings, Midwood and all the paths that mark out the edges of Shipton. I am clinging to the world held between them. They are my fright-lines. I’m always dancing on the edge of taking the step that would fetch me outside the walls, over the lines, and mean I was like the sibs. Like Mam and Da. Like everybody else. Every morning I am trembling here, willing that one step.

  I never take it.

  For as long as I remember just looking on the mid-water’s dark line of weed and shellgrit had made me breathless. Just seeing it in my mind-eye made my head swim. Just thinking on it brought on a middling fit of the Frights. Even knowing it was there opened icy caverns deep inside me. My inside-parts washed always in trouble and sorrow and terror.

  And the sibs knew it.

  They used to try to help. But no matter if Coonie heartened me with her lowest, kindest tones or if Hugo preached his sharpest, clearest reasons, I couldn’t do it. Even when tiny Sula gave me her look that said plain as words that she was shamed by me. Or if Neven treated me like he was the one who was fourteen and I was four. I could never go where they went. I just couldn’t step over the fright-lines.

  Those lines ran right round town. I couldn’t go outside of Market-Shipton. I couldn’t walk outside the safe paths at all. Every time they went out the sibs would be straight off those paths. Straight into the woods they’d be. Or talking with outsiders over the palings that mark out the fields and holdings. Talking and laughing even with muddy uplanders, even eating their food.

  “If
you eat their food, my lovelies, you’re Theirs,” Mam had told us all when we were small ones. “And not just for a bit. Eternally.”

  “Time without end, that means,” said Da, nodding.

  Even Sula, who was frowning at folk from birth, loved those palings for the strangers who passed through them. But I couldn’t even stand to look on them; those who lived outside our town brought on the worst sort of Frights. They weren’t like us, with their slow eyes like beasts watching and their bodies hung all over with devilish charms. Bog-girls from up the moaney, in their men’s clothes and looking you straight in the eye. Cronk-folk with their low, quiet talk like they were always hiding something and their knees flexing like they were always walking steep hills no matter where they went. All-sorts trooped down those Upward paths to trade and you could tell by looking that none of them were what you’d call regular Christians.

  I said so to Mam once and she said right sharp, Well, look about you, Mally. Who Is?

  It didn’t make me feel any safer.

  Sula particularly loved that Scully, the one with the bodgy fiddle and the crooked old woman who followed him about. She hung on his tunes like they were prayers. I always turned away from him though, for what might fly out of his eyes. Mam said he was blind but when he looked my way, I thought he could see just fine.

  Sula never looked for me any more, to see if I was coming down to the breakwater with them. She used to. But now she was six and old enough to know I never would. Only Neven still looked for me. That day, just before the scaan came, he’d been standing with crossed arms, gold-skinned in the silver sea with his bleachy hair stuck halfway down his back, shouting to me to Come On.

  “I brave you, Mally,” he’d called up the sands, “I brave you!”

  Braving folk to do things is Neven’s favourite thing to do. He would never refuse a brave himself. He didn’t understand yet that some things just couldn’t be done. Not by wishing or praying, not by forcing, shaming or pretending.

  Not even by braving.

  All the paths and ways were closed to me. Other folk could run and stroll and skip up-and-down them like it was nothing, down to the sea or up into the uplands. I would swoon as soon as my foot touched a fright-line and fall, gripping the ground. At first kind folk fetched me back inside with soft words. Now they just let me crawl back by myself. I had to go on my belly, close to the earth, until I was safe again. Like some low and creeping thing.

  Like some worm.

  I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to be let be.

  So after Neven’d braved me, I stared at the sand like it was all new country and I was too taken with it to hear him calling. The seastars twinkled at my feet and faded into the sand. I poked at a clod with my toe and a moonsnail fell out. The morning fogs were clearing. They were opening and giving us the gift of the day. I breathed it deep into me.

  It smelled like home.

  Settled in my skin, in my hair and deep inside me was the smell of low-water. It was our smell. The Crowal smell. It was the smell of shells, of lugworms and sea-snails. The smell of whelk and limpet. In our sleep we breathed out the brimstone of sponges. Our words came on the reek of rockweed, like metal in our mouths, and underneath it all, always, there was the salt.

  “Mally!” Neven called out from the waterline.

  I looked closely at the sand, like it was the most interesting thing on the shore and I couldn’t tear my eyes from it.

  “Mally!”

  I shaded my eyes and looked faraway at where the tall cliff went straight down into the water. The great rock out there tilted into the sea like it’d been pushed under water by some giant hand.

  “Mall-eeee,” bawled Neven.

  If that cliff tilted just a bit more, the sea would come in right over the land. In my mind-eye I saw it making islands of the Cronks and pouring into the lowlands like the worst spring tide in all the histories. Everybody living on the edge would be carried off.

  I sneaked a look down the beach.

  Neven had stopped calling. Now he lay in the quicksilver shallows, chucking pebbles, talking to himself, singing his songs. The drags had carved out a new streaming bed in the sea and Neven was floating in it, stopping himself flowing away by digging his toes and fingers into the melting sand.

  He had given me up entirely.

  But Lovelypig was back. I sat down and laid my head on hers. That pig was a great comfort to me.

  She upturned her face, smelling me for Frights. Her nose is a marvel when it’s on a smell-trail. It twitches and trembles, it can bend round corners. It catches all the smells on the shore, and I can tell that she catches smells I will never know. Not just shells but shellgrit. Not just urchins but every single urchin. She smiled up at me like, Well, here we go Again. But then she sighed; the sigh rushing out of her like the spouting of a small whale. She looking fretful at what she smelled coming off me. Even she was sick of it.

  So we sat together and watched the sibs as we always did. Her tail stuck straight-out behind, where her mam lay on top of her after she was just born – and her mam was a sizeable sow all right. Her tail was never the same. It took the screw right out of it.

  Lovelypig leaned against me and pushed her face into the fog like she was foraging. She can taste the wind. She can taste everything, even feelings. The whole world is food to Lovelypig.

  The tide was turning and the sun full-rising. Its rays reached over the sea and touched us on the shore. I felt the heat in its beams and it wasn’t even proper morning yet. It was going to be hot again, with the sort of heat that broiled you into one small wet point. The sibs were coming back. I counted them.

  One was missing.

  Neven. I ran down to the mid-water line. He was rolling like a seal out in the waters, out in the wrack, out in the boomers. Far out. A flight of gulls scattering and calling around him. And the Frights came on. They were low at first. Just an unsettling in my heart, and a weakness in my legs.

  I tried to breathe deep and easy, like Mam said I should. I told myself not to be so gormless, like Flaxney told me. I asked Mary-mother-of-the-god for help, like the old women advised. I told myself I was being soft. I told myself to be sensible. To be grown-up. Or at least be as brave as my pig.

  I told myself to get some gorm.

  But I was panting; I was clammy. I felt my skin prickling. Soon I would be just a set of shivering bones. In the quiet between gusts I thought I heard Neven’s body rolling drowned and gritty in the sand. And the Frights came on stronger.

  Low-to-middling now.

  Low-to-middling Frights wasn’t so bad. It could be worse. My heart was beating too fast, too light; I laid my hand flat on my chest. It was like trying to hold some sprat in a mug. But at least my heart was still beating, not lolloping or flopping or stopping altogether. I patted myself and thought Ssssh, but it didn’t take. Neven was staggering about in the spray and falling back on his arse in the foam. I thought I heard him scream. And my throat slammed shut on the breath. The Frights were full on me. There was no stopping them now.

  Middling-to-high.

  Middling-to-high was trouble. My ears were ringing: I was deafened by it. I was twisting my fingers until they hurt. My flesh was jumping like fleas. There was a stone in my belly that wasn’t hunger. I made fists. I got to my knees ready to run.

  I couldn’t help it.

  Neven was getting up and then falling back, over-and-over into the waves. But he was laughing, not screaming. Like it was fun. In my mind-eye I saw him go under one of the boomers. In spite of seeing that he was just playing, I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself.

  It was impossible.

  “Look oouut!” I wailed my warning in plover-tones, which carried down the Sands, right to where the sibs were gathered at the weedlines.

  They turned on the sound and saw me, and they turned away. I was fretting the mid-water now, dancing in terror up-and-down it. Even if Neven was only playing, the sea could still take hi
m just like that. But I could not cross that Fright-line and go down to the sea. Not for food, not for coin. Not even for my brother’s life. Lovelypig jumped the line for me and went down to see.

  It was shameful.

  Every inside-part was harrowing, threshing, churning. I shouted at Neven. Look out, look out, Look out. Like some chant was on me. Some fear-spell.

  It went on and on.

  The others were gathering sweetweed along the breakwater. I didn’t see Hugo and Flaxney roll their eyes but I felt it. Neven was lying still in the longshore drag now and letting it take him as it would. The drag rolled him sidewise towards the harbour. He stayed a long time floating out in the wash, wrinkling his skin and spitting saltwater. I saw the spit make small bright curves in the air before it turned to spray and flew away.

  He just does it to spite Me, I thought. The little Turd.

  I sat in the cool sand and tried not to hate Neven but I failed. Deep in my holdfast bones I envied him. I envied him the waves. I envied him the waterline. I envied him the whole sea.

  I was eaten by the envy sin. I envied everybody. I envied the gulls their wings. I even envied the disgustful sea-hares; they were ugly but at least they were free. And then there were the sibs. Walking about by the waters. Like it was nothing.

  Full of themselves.

  They weren’t bothered by boomers or deepwaters or whalefish. Or by brouty bullying sea-Trows. Even furious merrows left the sibs cold. They weren’t bothered by Cross-bones rising from the sea-floor, gathering their own bones in a basket and then forming back into skeletons right in front of them. Or by Blue-men with their sea-floor cages, waiting for a person to lose their footing and slip off the sand-shelf into their man-nets. They just weren’t bothered.

  It was only me.

  Even those wiggynagh Northmen with their yellow hair and red eyes, their slick boats that come so quiet and their terrible blades that they name like people, didn’t bother them. They sat quiet as me while Da told about the wiggynagh and the old slave-raids. How the snakeboats with their prows like serpents would come in the last hours of the night, when even the most watchful folk had fallen asleep. How in the morning there’d be weeping. How folk were stolen in the dark from their own beds, and nobody ever saw them taken. You can’t stay awake forever, he said. Even with such a fear on you. The sibs listened as hard as me to those stories he told. But afterwards they’d run down to the sea like they’d heard nothing to be bothered about.