It's a short ride to the cliffs overlooking the river that emptied into the lake. The cliffs were ancient places, something that had been a sort of sacred place to whoever made up the village a thousand years ago. There had been a small shrine built on top of the cliffs, a warped sculture set upon it, looking out onto the lake. It used to represent the river god, or goddess, but no one knew for sure; when the sun shone on it in the afternoon, the strange sculpture cast odd, black shadows below. Someone had knocked the sculpture down hundreds of years ago, and built a small church next to it, of which there are ruins now. The church itself casts an inky reflection of itself all along the edge of the cliff, and in the afternoon, you can hardly see the dark flowers that grow along its side.
At the base of the cliff, just before the main road turned into farmland, there is an inn called the Riverhouse. It is three stories tall, and with the sudden amassing of soldiers travelling along the road, it is packed this evening; the crowds of animals in uniform absorbing the little dusty light the inn provided.
Inside, it is a study in contrasts, an orange glow from the firelight, but otherwise, everything a swollen darkness. In the corner of the inn, Wolf O'Donnel sits at a chair and writes a letter; in a few moments the letter will be carried off to Cornerian City by a well-paid rider, but for the moment he finishes it and sets it aside, thinking about his drink, thinking about the bread and cheese, thinking about the owner, wondering if she is a madam, or if she and her girls happened to be the only honest innkeepers from here to the Thames.
She is a woman named Mrs. Phoenix, although her husband is nowhere to be seen (and, if the other patrons are telling the truth, hasn't been seen in a few years). She pushes through the crowd, moving through various shades of light. This cramped dark does no wonders for anyone's beauty, and Wolf can only sometimes see that the woman's prettiness has not yet faded. She moves close to him, wiping the sweat and grime from her fur, asks him if he's ever going to finish his food, or if she's going to have to toss it to the hogs.
"I'm a slow eater," he says.
The candle next to him extinguishes itself in its own wax and his corner darkens to the point he can barely see his plate.
"Christ in God's holy heaven," Mrs. Phoenix says, snatching up the candle. "This place is falling apart, mo mhuirin. If it weren't for these fools in uniform-- ah, I'll get ye another."
Wolf sits in his pool of darkness and thinks of the monastery on top of the cliff. He'd found it startling when he'd seen it, a symbol of an older, thicker Christianity, that the Cornerians have tried mightly to shake off. Was this not, after all, the time of enlightenment? These soldier boys, these Prostestant soldier boys, spent their days wandering through sunny dogma, the new Cornerian spirituality, a raise of the eyebrows towards religion; God is a Cornerian, by God and by Christ, that sort of thing.
Certainly religion does not hover by their ears all day. Wolf can feel religion in a way he thinks they cannot; he feels it tremble behind him, a great darkness boiling over his shoulders. Sometimes in the night he wakes up and thinks he is in his old cell, in the old shadows, and he cries something out in Latin. Sometimes he hears the clanging bells. He remembers sitting in the pew, praying, hearing the deacon move up and down, up and down.
"Bene orasse est bene studuisse," the old sheepdog would say quietly, moving down the hall of the cathedral. That was always what he was saying; pray well, the capacity to pray well, not just to pray, but to pray well.
And the hallways, the old musty hallways, peeling out away from him, so that the young Wolf would stumble back, claustrophobic, and feel the mutterings of the saints flutter up from the shadows in between the windowframes of light on the floor.
"Caelitus mihi vires." That had been what he had cried out last night. Wolf sinks down in his seat and waits for the rider to come and take his letter.
"Candle there, mo shearc," Fara says, setting one down and using another to light it. The blaze banishs the shadows back into the dark eels that drift along Wolf's face. "Was it a knife, ye don't mind me asking?"
At first he doesn't know what she's talking about; he is sitting in a pew in the cathedral in his black dress, watching all hell boil about the walls, as hellfire comes from the bishop's mouth, landing like dogs of jet around the floor, globbing up at the edges of his eyesight.
"No," he replies. "It wasn't a knife."
"My daughters get strange fancies in their heads," she says, smiling at him. "You should hear the lies they make up about you."
"They might be true."
"Eat your cheese and bread. I don't want to have to throw any food away, d'ye understand me?"
He understands, and as he finishs the meal, the soldiers dissolve into the dark as they make their way to their rooms upstairs, or out into the night to sleep with their carts. They can't stay up; their travels have been long and tiring, and sleep comes too soon with the beer helping it along. When they are gone, and the common room empty, it smells less of sweat and grime than of wood. Wolf can imagine this inn always smelling of wood; some places don't-- the smell of dust and people seeps into the edges, and that becomes them. Here, there is just the scent of the oak.
He goes upstairs quietly to check in on Andrew, recuperating in the room at the end of the hall on the second story. The room is pitch black and he steps in, all vision taken from him. He's never been afraid of darkness; since they put out his eye, he's lived half in darkness, anyways; it is a constant companion. "Andrew," he said quietly. "Comment est ton jambe?"
But Andrew is asleep, and Wolf can hear his soft, low breathing. Walking next to the bed, Wolf looks down at where he supposes Andrew is. Ah, Andrew, he thinks; good Christ, das ist aber schade. "Ah," he whispers, "es macht nichts."
But in the darkness there, he feels stained glass windows harden around him, and suddenly, as if the monastery on the cliffs has infected him with memory, he can sense the cathedral around him. He feels black robes on him, can hear the Latin pounding in his head, chilly heaven above, boiling hell below. Where can he go, with memories like these clutching at his heart--
The mountains?
"The mountains?" Fara asks, as she crosses the empty common room over to his table. "Aye, it's always good for a child to grow up near mountains. We have them too-- ah, where I grew up, I mean."
Her two older daughters are seated at the bar, cleaning dishes. Fara sits at the table, mending her youngest's dress. She is tired, and feels old, and unattractive. She half-wishes Wolf would go to his room, so she can lock up and draw herself a bath.
Wolf laughs and shakes his head. "These mountains--ah, my girl, these mountains you would not want to grow up in. Bramble country. Pine and snow. You'd come out of the cabin and stare down over it all; white and shadows on the white and--"
And ice clinging to your fur, and your father standing over you like a behemoth, swinging an axe into the side of the tree with his one working arm. Couldn't be a doctor any more, because of that arm; he had been replaced by his apprentice, but the man could still fell a tree. Would they go to the city that weekend? There was no reply.
"Entschuldigung," his father said simply, when the tree nearly clipped Wolf on the way down. His father spoke rarely, and when he did, it was either about medicine or the Church.
"Snow in the mountains?" Fara asks, looking at him, picturing it in her head, romanticizing it.
"Snow up top," Wolf says. "Bramble and pine down below. We were not wealthy."
After her daughters have gone to bed, Fara stands in the doorframe of the common room. Wolf sits there, staring at the table, lost in memory.
"Are ye a arms-trader, Mr. Wolf?" she asks.
"Hm? No, Frau Phoenix." He stands up, still feeling the haunt of the Church about him, his blood feeling liturgical, stain glassed windows flickering at the edges of his sight. He walks past her, extinguishing the candles as he went, so that the room became only blackness against the low orange glow of the fireplace. He looks her straight in the eye and says, "I trade arms, but I'm also a Whig magistrate."
Her mouth moves; eyes flickering from his one good eye to his eyepatch. "A Justice of the Peace, eh?" She snorts. "No, ye'er not."
His lips draw back into a grin. "Good night, Frau Phoenix. I shall see you tomorrow."
He ascends the stairs, and vanishes into the dark. In his mind, he is up on the cliff, stepping into the dark ruins of the monastery, picking his own over the bits and pieces of stone. What trinkets of the old faith would he find? Or would they have been lost to the ages and corruption, butchered and sold off in parcels five hundred years before?
His first arrival to England had been on a rare sunny day; the boat struck up against the pier and the light blasted away all the shadow of his past. There is now only himself, and Death, and his billowing intellect. There is profit, and there is travel, and his life can be pieced to both.
The moon is in the sky, and as he looks up at its bright face, he thinks of Fox, and wonders what Fox is doing now, if he knew what Wolf is about to bring upon him. The moon, he decides, is very beautiful. "Pretty," he says, because he likes the word.