Then the child’s wits shall be restored.’
Jónas shudders. ‘The wretch deserves to lose his mares and more besides after what he’s done to my beautiful daughter, but I would sooner kill his horses with my own hand than rob the dead.’
‘Dark magic harmed your child, only vengeance from the spirit world can undo the curse. It must be done as I have told you,’ Valdis tells him.
I am so horrified at hearing the voice come from my dead sister’s lips that I have barely taken in what is being said, but the words finally penetrate through the veil of fear and revulsion in my head. I know what she is telling him to do is wrong, terribly wrong.
‘No! No, that is not what ails the child.’
Jónas turns to me, puzzled, as well he might be, for my sister and I have always before uttered the same thought.
‘The cloud was not a Sending. There was no malice in it, no life in it, no spirit.’
‘Just look at the child,’ Valdis jeers. ‘How can you say there is no malice in this?’
‘The child is sick, but I sense that no human hand lies behind this. The cloud came from the mountain, not from your neighbour Pétur. Frída will –’
But Jónas interrupts me. ‘Your sister Valdis is right, whoever heard of a cloud moving so fast and why did it make straight for my daughter? Her friend said it was as if an arrow had been fired at her.’
He scoops the child up and slings her again over his shoulder, his face grim with resolve.
‘What Valdis says about the Sending is the only explanation that makes sense. I’ll do as she says. I’ll take a dead man’s coin to Pétur’s farm. Even if I have to dig up a hundred corpses before I find such a coin, I will do it to cure my child. What father wouldn’t be prepared to risk the wrath of a thousand ghosts if it was the only way to save his daughter?’
‘No, please listen, Jónas,’ I beg, but he strides away, determined not to hear me.
As soon as I hear him scrambling out of the crack in the rock above, I steel myself, then slowly pull the veil from my sister’s face. Beneath the cloth, her skin is yellowed like old parchment, the features wizened and sunken as if every drop of moisture has been sucked from her body by the heat of the cave. Her lips have shrunk back from her teeth. Her arms swing limp, the fingernails blackened, the skin cold as the grave.
But though I closed her eyes tenderly when she died, now suddenly they are wide open and looking straight at me. But it is not my sister’s soft blue eyes that stare up at me. I have known and loved her eyes all my life. I could not mistake them now. The blue is gone, the whites of the eyes have vanished, only two huge black pupils remain like great gaping holes. I am staring into twin open graves. I gasp in horror and the eyelids slowly blink.
Chapter Seven
A French nobleman was suspicious that his wife had a lover. So he locked her up in a high tower, with only a narrow window at the top and walls no man could scale. Then he set his sister to keep watch on the tower whenever he was absent from it. But when the nobleman left the tower each day to go hunting, the woman’s lover transformed himself into a goshawk and flew in through the narrow window. There he turned into a man again and made love to the woman, before flying away. And so they continued for many months, blissfully happy in each other’s arms.
But the woman’s sister-in-law noticed the goshawk flying in and out of the tower. One day she followed the bird, and when he alighted on the ground, she watched him resume his human form. She told her brother, who fitted sharp spikes to the window, then pretended to go hunting. The lover, believing it was safe to visit the woman, transformed himself into the hawk and flew in through the window, and impaled himself on the spikes. The wounds were fatal and he died in his lover’s arms. But his beloved was already pregnant with his son and that infant grew up to become a great hero of France.
Coast of France Ricardo
Ruff – when the falcon strikes its prey without seizing it.
‘The men will row you ashore now,’