Witchlight Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  1 - A Winter’s Tale

  2 - A Rose in Winter

  3 - A Hazy Shade of Winter

  4 - All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  5 - The Royal Hunt of the Sun

  6 - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

  7 - The Winter Carnival

  8 - Winter and Rough Weather

  9 - Every Mile is Two in Winter

  10 - The Hunting of the Wren

  11 - Lord of the Wild Hunt

  12 - Past Reason Hunted

  13 - Winter Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots

  14 - All the World is Winter.

  15 - The Winter Heart

  EPILOGUE - Home is the Hunter

  Tor Books by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Copyright Page

  1

  A Winter’s Tale

  A sad tale’s best for winter.

  I have one of sprites and goblins.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  THE HOUSE was called Greyangels. It had been built in the last years of the old colony and added to in the first years of the new nation. Old orchards from its days as a farm still surrounded the house; their hundred-year-old trees long past fruiting but still able to bring forth a glory of apple blossoms each spring. But the house’s days of ruling over acres of corn and squash and rows of neatly barbered apple trees were long past. Now, only the house remained. Its pegged, wide-planked floors, its lath-and-horsehair plastered walls, its low ceilings with their smoke-blackened beams, its tiny windows with their wavery, hand-rolled glass, had dwindled from luxurious to old-fangled to quaint to dowdy, before being forgotten entirely and abandoned to the mercy of time and the seasons.

  Years passed. The house was nearly dead when it came to the attention of the living once more, to be gently renovated to suit the tastes of a generation raised with indoor plumbing and furnace heat, a generation which summered outside the city. But tastes and fashions continued to change, and soon New Yorkers had less desire for an old summer house on the banks of the Hudson River.

  The house passed from hand to hand to hand, drifting farther even from the memory of its initial purpose, as cars got faster and roads improved and the suburbs moved north and north again, until Dutchess County was filled with New York commuters racing for their daily trains and it seemed that Amsterdam County, too, would soon fall to tract housing and the desire of the city’s residents to reside in the peace of what once had been country.

  But for now the house was spared, sitting on its dozen acres between the railroad and the Hudson, its nearest neighbor a private college with a lurid reputation and an artists’ colony that sought anonymity above all things. For a while longer the old farmhouse still sat quietly in the quiet countryside, and nothing disturbed its peace.

  THAT MUST BE why I came here, Winter Musgrave told herself, although to be brutally accurate, she could not remember the precise details of her flight here, and prudence—or fear—kept her from reaching too forcefully into the ugly confusion where the memory might lie. There were things it was better not to be sure of—including the frightening knowledge that her memory had—sometime in the unrecorded past—ceased to be her willing servant and had become instead a sadistic jailer waiting to spring new and more horrible surprises on her. A day that did not bring some jarring revelation, however small, was a day Winter had learned to treasure.

  The quiet helped, and the slow pace of the countryside as it ripened into spring. She had a vague understanding that she had not been here long; old snow had still lingered in shadows and hollows when she had driven her white BMW up the curving graveled driveway, and now only the palest green of half-started leaves softened the outline of the surrounding trees: birch, maple, dogwood—and the apple trees in gnarled files marching down to the river.

  Winter did not like the apple trees. They worried her and made her feel vaguely ashamed, as if something had been done among the apple trees that must never be remembered, never spoken of. The orchard formed an effective barrier between Winter and the river that could be glimpsed only from the second-floor bedroom.

  But she could see the apple trees from there, too, and so Winter had made her bedroom downstairs, in the tiny parlor-turned-spare-bedroom off the kitchen, which was both warmer and hidden from the sight of the flowering orchard.

  So long as no one knew where she was, she was safe.

  The notion was a familiar one by now; familiar enough that it might even be safe to think about.

  Why should no one know where I am?

  Winter picked up a heavy carnival-glass paperweight from the Shaker table and stared down at its oil-slick surface as if it were a witch’s crystal and she could find answers there. Wordless reluctance and fear surged over her, making her hastily return the paperweight to the table and nervously pace the room.

  The front parlor of the farmhouse was sparsely furnished; there was the Shaker table with a lamp on it, a Windsor rocker made of steam-bent ash, and a long settle angled before the fieldstone hearth. A hand-braided rag rug softened the time-worn oak-planked floor, and on one whitewashed wall hung a mirror, its thick glass green with age, set in a curving cherry frame.

  Winter stopped automatically in front of the mirror and forced herself to look. It could not hurt more than coming upon her reflection by surprise, when the clash between what she saw and what she remembered fashioned another of the small humiliations and terrors by which she marked out her days.

  Hair: not wavy and chestnut any longer, but flat and lank and dark. The skin too pale, its texture somehow fragile, flesh drawn tight over prominent bones that said the border between slender and gaunt had been crossed long ago. Hazel eyes, sunken and shadowed and dull; a contrast to the days when more than one admirer had sworn he could see flecks of baltic amber in their sherry-colored depths. Her mouth, pinched and pale and old. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn lipstick, or what color it had been. Did she even have a lipstick here? She couldn’t remember—did it matter?

  Of course it does—Jack always said I should wear as much warpaint as I wanted; it made them nervous … .

  The scrap of the past flashed to the surface like a bright fish and was gone; pushed away; sacrificed to the need to hide.

  From what? Frustration almost made Winter willing to risk the pain of trying to remember. Restlessly, she made the circuit of her world again: the front parlor, with its welcoming hearth; the kitchen, looking out on the remains of someone’s garden and a windbreak of tall pines; the downstairs bedroom, bright and homelike with patchwork quilts on the white iron bed and a bright copper kettle atop the pot-bellied woodstove; the entryway with its door to the outside world and the staircase leading to the second floor—the place that held so many frightening possibilities. From the front hall she could see the woodshed that held half a rick of oak and pine split for burning, and that held her car as well. She’d need to bring in more wood soon, for the electric heat that provided the farmhouse’s heat was feeble and unreliable, and she’d learned to keep fires burning both in the bedroom stove and the fireplace in the parlor to fend off the chill of ea
rly spring.

  But that would mean she’d have to leave the house; to walk outside in the open air.

  How long has it been since I’ve gone outside? Sheer stubbornness made her demand an answer of her memory, and at last the image surfaced: Winter, carrying suitcases—suitcases?

  —slipping on patches of rotting ice in her haste to get into the house, running away from …

  The knowledge was so close she could nearly grasp it; she shied away, knowing that the balance between fear of knowing and fear of ignorance would soon shift, and she would reclaim at least that fragment of her past. Even though it must be something terrible, to drive her to hide here, crouching behind closed shutters and drawn curtains like a wounded animal in its burrow.

  I haven’t been out of this house in … weeks, her thought finished lamely. It was no good knowing that this was April—surely it was April; the new leaves and the masses of daffodils she could see from the window told her it must be April at least—if she did not know when she’d gotten here. March? Was there still snow on the ground in March? Maybe it had been February …

  But whenever it had been, she had spent enough time since then indoors. More than enough. Spring was the season of rebirth; it was time for her to be born.

  There was a sudden copper taste in her mouth, but this time the fear seemed to spur her determination rather than hinder it. Before she could think what she was doing, Winter strode into the hall and flung open the door to the outside.

  The living air of the countryside spilled in, and the sunlight and the breeze on her skin were like messengers from another world. The spaded earth alongside the flagstone path was dark and fragrant with recent rain, and tiny sharp grass blades lanced up through the soil beside the darker, more established green of daffodil and iris, tulip and lily of the valley. The flagstones curved down and to the left, to meet the graveled drive that led from the garage to the outside world.

  There was no one anywhere in sight. Not even the road was visible, and no traffic noise disturbed the illusion that time had not gone forward since the farmhouse had first been built.

  It’s okay. It really is. There’s nothing out here that can hurt me, Winter told herself bracingly. With as much determination as courage, she stepped from the house to the flagstoned path.

  One step, two … As she left the shadow of the house a wave of giddy disorientation broke over her; she felt the same faint lightheadedness that she imagined one would feel opening a tiger’s cage. The rolling pastoral landscape around her seemed to rear up like an angry bear, threatening to crash down upon her and rend her to bits.

  It’s just your imagination! That’s what they always said … . A sudden flash of memory swirled out of the vortex of sensation, striking sharklike without warning.

  Another vista of green, but this time tamed and tended. Bright autumn sunlight warming the terrace, where patients in discordantly cheery bathrobes stared mutinously out at the sanatorium’s landscaped grounds.

  The sanatorium—yes! I remember Fall River. Did I escape from …

  But no. The memory was clear of the weeks of desperate courage: first to refuse her medication, then, to leave. She was an adult, she had checked in of her own free will; they really had no reason to hold her.

  And at thirty-six one ought to know one’s own mind! Winter thought with a flash of gallows humor. So she had left—why had she left?—had they said she was cured?—surely she ought to feel better than this if she had been pronounced sane and well?

  They were talking about me … . Another hard-won memory, and now her tottering steps brought her to the shelter of an ancient oak, and the refuge of the bench that some former tenant had built to encircle its trunk. Winter sank down on the moss-green wood and looked back toward the house.

  Talking about her at the sanatorium. Saying it was just her imagination, when she knew it was not, that the tales they ascribed to the inventive fancies of a disturbed and unbalanced mind were real.

  I did not make it up.

  Grimly she clung to that truth, but the act took all Winter’s strength, and she had none to spare for the effort of remaining outside her refuge. She forced herself to walk slowly, not to surrender to blind panic, but her mouth was dry and her chest was crushed by iron bands by the time she could shut the front door of the farmhouse behind her once again.

  The staircase beckoned; the elusive second floor of the house. That, and the memory of the suitcases, and the need to draw some triumph from the jaws of this latest defeat made Winter put her hand on the newel post and her foot on the first of the risers.

  This isn’t so hard! she told herself rallyingly a few moments later, even risking a quick peek out the window on the landing. She could see the roof of the woodshed from here, its slates knapped and mellowed with age.

  Only three more steps.

  The second floor was smaller than the first. It held two bedrooms and a modernized bath, its pink and white fifties curves Rubenesquely out of tune with the house’s Shaker simplicity. The largest bedroom was the back one, and Winter, peering through the door, saw two Vuitton suitcases and a Coach Lexington brief in British Tan flung haphazardly onto the bed.

  She could go downstairs now. She could leave that reclamation of her identity for another day, along with that sense that to reclaim herself meant also to take up some awful burden.

  But if I don’t, there’s no one else to do it.

  She could not say where that certainty outside of time had come from—it would be so easy to dismiss this sense of special purpose as just one more of the daydreams of the delusional. When she had tried to talk about it at Fall River she’d been hushed and dismissed, until she’d prayed for the nagging sense of mission to go away, to leave her normal; to make her seem to respond to their treatment and their drugs just like all the others who came to …

  To that privileged retreat for failed overachievers, Winter finished with a flash of mockery. But the words weren’t hers. Whose?

  Never mind that now. Her mind was trying to distract her with inessentials to keep her from acting, but she knew that trick by now. Squaring her shoulders, Winter stepped over the threshold into the bedroom.

  THESE WERE the bags she—or someone—had packed when she went to Fall River. She emptied the contents of both Vuitton cases onto the sere candlewick bedspread; all casual clothes, resort clothes; but somehow, by accident, her pit pass from Arkham Miskatonic King was there. She stared at the photo.

  I look like I’ve been caught in the headlights of an oncoming train … . Despite which, it had been her proudest possession since the day she’d qualified for the Pit. As a commodities broker. On Wall Street.

  As smoothly as that, the missing past rushed in. She was Winter Musgrave, a trader at Arkham Miskatonic King on Wall Street. She’d been there for ten years, since they’d romanced her away from Bear Stearns …

  She remembered getting up early in the morning to walk to work when the subway was on strike; remembered her apartment. If she opened the briefbag lying on the bed now she could say just what it would contain: the Wall Street Journal and a bag full of throat lozenges; a pink stuffed elephant—a good-luck charm—and a spare T-shirt to change into; extra pens …

  My life, in short.

  She’d had no life, outside of the Street. And she hadn’t wanted one, either. She’d ignored all well-meaning advice to ease up, slow down, find a hobby, get a life.

  I had a life.

  Until that break between past and present; the event that she could not yet remember. That she now knew would come in time, and explain, perhaps, this purposeless sense of purpose.

  Shaking her head, Winter gathered up an armful of clothes. If she was going to stay downstairs, she might as well have her clothes with her. At least she could pretend she was normal.

  But don’t crazy people always think they’re normal? Isn’t that how it starts?

  No. It had started with the breakdown that had brought her to Fall River—and now she was out
of Fall River, but not because she was better … .

  Face it—FACE IT!

  Winter ran down the stairs; not running away, but running to the only thing left to frighten her; the thing that had driven her into this long fugue state.

  The clothes she had gathered scattered behind her like autumn leaves. She flung herself across the serene parlor and into the cheerful kitchen. Here were the dutch doors leading out into the garden; to the orchard; to the river. She threw open the door and recoiled with a cry, even though she had seen what was there before; had seen it this morning, in fact … .

  The creature was difficult to identify, although from the size, it had probably once been a squirrel. Only a few wisps of gray fur clung now to the ruined blob of shredded meat flecked with white spurs of shattered bone.

  Like all the others. Just like all the others.

  It began with pigeons. Pigeons and squirrels and mice; she’d found the tiny bloodless corpses everywhere she went until each new discovery had been almost beyond bearing. When she’d gone to Fall River there had been no more for a while, but then the bodies had begun appearing again, and when she’d sworn she had nothing to do with the deaths, Dr. Atheling said he believed her but none of the others did. They said she was doing it herself—that she was the one responsible: catching and hurting and killing … .

  And so she had run away, praying that if she ran far enough, hard enough, she could outrun that vengeful shadow. And for a while she’d thought she’d succeeded.

  Until today.

  WINTER WAS RESTLESS all the rest of the day, as if the appearance of the tiny shattered body had brought with it a summons that could no longer be denied. Winter spent that night sleepless before the old fieldstone fireplace, feeding the last of the woodpile to the greedy flames.

  With the morning light came the certainty that she could hide here no longer. If she was sane, she could test that sanity in the outside world. If it failed, she’d …