palm was a bleached white vertebra bone. It might have been the remains of the old woman's supper, except that it was stained with a wine-red mark, a single letter it looked like, though Elena, unable to read, could not make it out.
Gytha groaned and spat three times on the back of her two fingers. 'Three times — ash, rowan, bone — and each time the same. It is sealed. No power on earth can change it.'
'But what is sealed?' Elena demanded.
'There's a shadow on the heels of the boy.'
'Everyone has a shadow.'
'Not like this. Not a human shadow, the shadow of a fox. It's a portent of deception ... a thing to be feared. The fox is the Devil's sign.'
Elena gave a little wail and crossed herself. 'My baby ... what. . . what's going to happen to him?'
Gytha shook her head. 'The portent may not be about the bairn, but what will follow in his wake. The dream, you say you have it every night, and it's always the same?'
Elena nodded dumbly.
'Then you must finish it — see what happens to the child in your dream, then you'll know.'
Elena rocked back and forth where she sat, her face buried in her hands. 'But I can't finish it; I always wake up as I pick up the child. You can see the future. You have to look in the bowl again, please —'
'Wouldn't do any good, the spirits'll tell me no more. It's your dream, only you can see the way it ends.' Gytha crossed back to the fire, stirring the iron pot so that a rich aroma of woodcock and thyme rose from it in a cloud of steam. 'But I might be able to help you stay longer in the night-hag's world to see what you must see more clearly.'
Again she looked across at her mother as if silently asking her something. The old woman was leaning forward in her bed. She licked her lips like a hungry animal, and there was such an expression of greed on her withered old face that if she'd been younger you might have called it lust.
Gytha crossed to the end of her mother's bed and reached into the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wattle wall. She seemed to be groping for something, and finally pulled out a small wooden box. She opened it and held up a shrivelled black root, roughly formed into the shape of two legs, two arms and a body, with a head made by the withered knot where leaves had once grown.
Yadua. Some call them mandrakes. The male is white, but this is the woman, black and precious as sable. Comes all the way from the hot lands across the sea.'
Gytha was honest about that much at least. It was the genuine article. There are many bilge-spewers and piss-filchers who, through ignorance or greed, will try to pass off bryony root as mandrakes. Any fool holding them in his hands can feel they are as lifeless as drowned kittens and about as much use. But that cunning woman was no fool and she had enough respect for what we could do to give us our proper name, for an immortal deserves a godlike appellation.
Gytha cradled the mandrake in the palm of her hand as if it was a baby. 'You must take a drop of your blood drawn from your tongue and a drop of white milk from a man, smear them on the head of the creature, then hide her beneath the place where you sleep. She'll strengthen your dreams so that you will hear the spirits speaking to you and see the shadows more clearly.'
Elena scrambled up, holding out her hands for the mandrake, but Gytha swept it away from her reach.
'I told you, they grow only in the hot lands. Men risk madness and death to capture them, for they scream as they are dragged from the earth, a sound so dreadful that it shatters a man's reason. Yadua is costly, worth far more than a few dried apricots.'
'But I only want to borrow it for a night, if it shows me what —'
Gytha laughed. 'She can't be lent or borrowed. A fetch will only bring visions to the one who owns it. You must buy her from me and once she is bought, you can only rid yourself of her by selling her in kind, for the same price at which she was bought.'
'I have money. Lady