Lady Macbeth's Daughter Read Free Page A

she was born.
    The chants filling my ears. I feel the sound deep in my bones. The spirits whirling on the winds, pushing through the earth, surrounding me.
    “Look at her eyes darting dart back and forth,” Helwain saying to her sisters. “She sees them.”

    I think that Mother and her sisters and I are the only people in the world until the day I meet Murdo and Colum, who live in a cottage on the edge of the Wychelm Wood. Murdo grows barley and oats and has more sheep than I can count with my fingers and toes. He frightens me at first. His voice rumbles like rocks falling down a hill and his head is as hairless as an egg. He carves two pieces of wood and fixes them to my leg with strips of hide. Mother explains that he is helping my leg grow straight and strong. Like a tree.
    Colum is a child like me. He has curly hair and makes me laugh with his silly faces. He can run and jump like the squirrels. I want to do the same, and one day I grasp Colum’s arms and pull myself to my feet. I take my first steps. My mother weeps, but somehow I know she is happy.
    Walking is so much better than crawling on hands and knees. I walk to the village with Mother to trade wool and baskets for cloth and food. People give me pitying looks, but I am too pleased with myself to care. When I come home my leg aches and Helwain wraps it in hot, smelly cloths. She mutters and complains, yet I know that she, too, is pleased.
    I have been to the village often enough to know that my mother and Helwain are not like the folk who live there. Helwain seldom leaves the roundhouse. She sits by the hearth, turning the stone quern, grinding flour. Or she spins, holding the wool under one arm and twisting the strands with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. The spindle drops to the floor, whirling. It makes me dizzy to watch.
    Only at night does Helwain go out, and in the morning she returns with a basket full of leaves and roots. She hangs them from the beams to dry, where they rustle and put out strange smells. Sometimes she brings back the skull of a small animal, a snakeskin, or a lizard from beneath a mossy stone. These are my playthings—until she grinds them into powders and puts them into small pots and forbids me to touch them.
    Rhuven, the sister of my mother and Helwain, always brings me a toy when she visits and sometimes a new dress. Her own clothes are made of soft cloth the color of the summer sky or ripe berries. She peers at me with tears in her eyes and says, “How big you are getting!”
    Even my leg is growing. I can climb to the top of the Skelpie Stone on the path to the peat bog. It has rings and zigzags where the faeries have worn down the stone with their dancing. The faeries are small enough to fit in my hand. Their skin is the color of buttercups, their speech like the splashing of water or the rattle of tiny stones. At night they sometimes pinch and bite me, and when I wake up I have red marks along my arm. I even play with them in the daytime. We float a cockle shell in a bucket of water, placing tiny pebbles in the shell until it is almost underwater.
    Now sink little boat; no more shall you float ,” I sing. “Here comes the storm!” And the faeries and I rock the bucket.
    “Stop, Albia, you naughty girl!” says Mother, who is watching me play. But the cockle shell and all the little stones have already sunk to the bottom of the bucket.
    “I did it, just like I have seen Helwain,” I announce.
    “You shouldn’t listen to Helwain’s nonsense.”
    But I do, even though her stories sometimes frighten me. Helwain says that the moor is haunted by a bogle that leads people to their death. But she claims to have tamed the spirit so that it guides her around the sucking bog and keeps the wolves away.
    “What does the bogle look like?” I ask her.
    “Sometimes it takes the shape of a doe and sometimes a dog. The doe is the ghost of a lady who disappeared on the moor and the dog is her husband. He went to look for