The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,77

as a result of her family background, she ended up more able to help other people stay lucky and well, that was a gift she was happy and honoured to share. But if it came to some inbred right to dominate people and the forces of nature, just because you could, that was where Niav, very firmly, drew her line in the sand.

But Estra’s next, worrying, foray into the worlds of imagination concerned the sacred “barra” or wand of power. Obviously every self-respecting wise woman would be expected to have one.

“We have to have barras!” Estra solemnly announced one afternoon as the three girls were busily engaged in collecting the latest harvest of wool that the sheep regularly rid themselves of in the thorny field hedges. “We have a great heritage, you and I, Niav, a mystic bond, I sense it! This river – it’s malevolent. It wants to steal our powers! We have to join forces to face the river out. I know we can do it!”

“I think you have to wait for your barra to find you,” countered Niav nervously, plucking out of the air a vague memory of something Aunt Grizzel had once mentioned. She had the greatest respect for the raging majesty of their river, but she doubted that it would waste its time on the rantings of two little girls.

Where on earth had this latest notion come from? Some puzzled questioning finally made Niav suspect that someone had mentioned to Estra that both her own mother, Seyth, and Niav’s mother, Befind, would have had their barra with them when they died.

Somehow Estra had turned this obvious fact into a cosmic conspiracy, and Niav noted to herself that their mothers’ barras hadn’t proved much good against the power of the river. But still, she began to wonder what had happened to her mother’s barra.

Had it been in their family a long time? Could Lurgan have told Estra as much, and made her feel that it should really have come down to her, his eldest daughter, because Befind had abandoned her birthright and should never have taken it away?

Aunty Grizzel, for once, seemed to think this was perfectly probable “Poor child, nobody likes her. She simply wants to feel special in some way. She will grow out of it, I expect.”

“Did Mother’s barra belong to Granny as well? Would I have had it?”

“I dare say it did – and possibly a whole string of grannies before that. It would have come down to you, in due course; certainly not to Estra, anyway – things like that would go down female relatives, and her mother was a complete stranger. Besides, it sounds as though she had also thrown away whatever birthright it was she claimed to have had – from wherever it was she came! It’s just Estra’s nonsense. Try to distract her on to something else. If either of you two is meant to have a barra, it will emerge when the time is right.”

But it was her mother’s death, not her mother’s mislaid barra, that most concerned Niav. However, month followed month, and year followed year, with Artin showing not the slightest sign of reappearing at the river’s mouth. There could be no chance of Niav (even if she had managed to approach him at all) questioning him successfully about her parents’ tragedy. Artin seemed to be the most elusive of men – if he was just a man.

However, for all the other people who awaited him in the valley, the legend of what Artin was and the things he’d said and done seemed to simplify and became easier to understand – mainly because Uncle Lurgan was so assiduous in keeping his interpretation of Artin’s teachings alive in people’s minds.

“You know,” Aunty Grizzel observed, “there are times when I doubt that Artin would recognize a word of what he is supposed to have said at all.”

As for Artin’s boy, by now everyone loved Fearn for himself as much as for the memory of whose son he was. He was found to be astonishingly creative even by local standards and determined to try his hand at mastering any skill that the people on the western bank would let him learn – besides what Lurgan tried to teach him over on the eastern side.

The bees liked him too and he helped to take over the care of the hives – as might be expected of someone who has been used to the mysteries of smoke and magic –