Page 97 of The Queen’s Witch

“My name is not Sarah. It is Alysoun Rowe, daughter of Joan, daughter of Frances.”

He did not turn, did not acknowledge that I had spoken, but I knew he heard me. It would have to be enough.

True names hold power.

34

Salle

During my walk back through the Fens toward Salle, I dreamed every night. Making my way among the shifting wispy lights and ancient sacred stones of that magick place, I dreamed of Anne on the scaffold, of Roger in my arms, of Grandmother and Joan. Not of the Dark One; my dreams of both the living and dead were dark enough. The living died horrifyingly, the dead came horrifyingly to life. I was glad to leave behind the salt marshes and meres.

At Bishop’s Lynn, I learned that Cobbler Melton’s rebellion had failed. Leaders were arrested and taken in chains to London. But now, as Roger had foretold, rebellion had reignited in York, where Robert Aske led tens of thousands.

Was Roger among them? Where were Cecily and baby James? Were they safe?

I had no answers, only fears and longings and nightmares. And so, on Samhain I came to Salle and the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and my final battle.

As always, I could see the spire for miles. I hid in the trees and watched the church. No one entered or left for hours. The building stood, lonely and isolated, and at sunset I spelled open the heavy wooden door and barred it behind me. The last light of day spilled through the colored glass of the windows. I moved past the brass of Geoffrey Boleyn, great-grandfather to Anne, perhaps father or grandfather to Mother Redcap. Pipkin followed me. I walked under the carved angels and Green Man in the roof of the nave and into the chapel in the north transept, where in the last four months, Anne’s plain black slab had settled.

Only the dead can haunt the dead. Mother Redcap had told me, so long ago, about Grandmother and Joan. Mother Redcap had also said, A mortal must never try to wake the dead, if that is even possible. I do not know. And it is not needed.

But there was need. I had learned from my failed attempt at Bredham Abbey that Anne’s consent was necessary for me to summon her. But how could she consent before being summoned? She could not, in this realm.

I would have to go to her.

Then if I could not rouse Grandmother and Joan, I would have to compel Anne, no longer mortal, to rouse them.

Midnight, and a single candle taken from the altar burned on the stone floor, as I began the summoning, just as Mother Redcap had in Tydd Saint Stephen. As Agnes Snayth had in the forest at Bredham and again in her cottage during my thrice-braided ceremony. As I myself had in the deserted and ransacked Bredham Abbey.

I stood, Pipkin trembling but obedient at my feet, and began chanting in the old language dredged from memory deeper than my own.

The air vibrated as the boundary between worlds thinned even further than was usual on Samhain. Then red glow, deep as flame. The stone floor of the chapel smoked.

The Dark One appeared, glimpsed in wavering snatches, in all His unearthly, naked male beauty.

“I, Alysoun, daughter of Joan, the daughter of Frances, daughter of Camma, descendant in blood of Ælfwynn of olde, seek to enter the realm of the dead.”

The Dark One laughed, that laugh that promised pain, torment, despair, and His joy in all of them. His laugh echoed throughout the chapel and even in the nave beyond. He spoke then, words in the old language, and yet I understood. “You wish to enter the Otherworld.”

“Yes.”

Twice more His words came to me, and twice more I answered yes.

The Dark One disappeared.

For a long, blinded moment I thought I had failed again. Then the entire chapel filled first with a red haze. In the center formed a dense, dark mist, colder than the North Sea. A great wind blew, extinguishing my candle. Only the red haze illuminated the stone walls, the polished brasses, the black slab at my feet. The wind did not disturb the red haze nor the terrible black mist at its heart, and I knew the truth: This, not the form I had seen before, was the Dark One. That other, seductive, impossibly beautiful demon had been but His servant. His actual form I could never see. Mortals who looked directly at Him would die.

I fell on my knees but resisted, with the entire warp and weft of my being, the desire to cover my eyes. Cold filled the chapel, the cold of a million tiny blades, and I shivered uncontrollably.

The Dark One did nothing, waiting.

In the presence of that cold, monstrous, unholy power, my voice came trembling and weak. “I, Alysoun, daughter of Joan, the daughter of Frances, daughter of Camma, descendant in blood of Ælfwynn of olde, seek to enter the Otherworld.”

What had I expected? That the Otherworld would be vague, misty as the drifting lights in the Fens, indistinct as the wavery forms of the dead that I had glimpsed twice before: Grandmother in the flickering light from Agnes’s hearth, Joan in a deserted chamber at Bredham Abbey. But this was entirely different. The red haze cleared, although the black mist at its heart remained, and I stood as before in the chapel, but now a chapel transformed. Everything in the chamber—brasses, altar, candelabra, carvings—took on a clarity so brilliant it nearly blinded me with color and glow, all edges sharp as swords. It was like waking from a fitful sleep to a reality so acute that it hurt. It was the mortal world that had become the dream.

I rose from my knees, and the ground beneath my feet trembled.

I blinked, and the weight of my lashes shifted the world.