A Magic of Nightfall

The White Stone

They came to her at night, those who the White Stone had killed. In the night, they stirred and woke. They gathered around her in her dreams and they talked to her. Often, the loudest of them was Old Pieter, the first person she’d killed.

She’d been twelve.

“ Remember me… ” he whispered to her in her sleep. “ Remember me… ”

Old Pieter was their neighbor in the sleepy village back on the Isle of Paeti, and she’d known him since birth, especially after her vatarh died when she was six. He was always friendly with her, joking and gifting her with animals he’d carved from oak branches, whittling them with the short knife he always carried on his belt. She painted the animals he gave her, placing them on a window shelf in her little bedroom where she could see them every morning.

Old Pieter kept goats, and when her matarh would let her, she sometimes helped him tend the small herd. The day her life changed, the day she started on the path that had led her here, she’d been out with Pieter and his goats near the Loudwater, the creek falling fast and noisy from the slopes of Sheep Fell, one of the tall hills to the south of the village. The goats were grazing placidly near the creek, and she was walking near them when she saw a body in the grass: a doe freshly killed, its body torn by scavengers and flies beginning to buzz excitedly around the carcass. The doe’s head, on the long tawny neck, gazed forlornly at her with large, beautiful eyes.

“If ye look into that right eye, ye’ll see what killed her.”

A hand stroked her shoulder and continued down her back before leaving. She started, not realizing that Old Pieter had come up behind her. “The right eye, it connects to a person’s or an animal’s soul,” he continued. “When a living thing dies, well, the right eye remembers the last thing they saw-the last face, or the thing that killed it. Look close into that doe’s eye, and ye’ll see it in there, too: a wolf, p’raps. It happens to people, too. Murderers, they been caught that way-by someone looking into the dead right eye of the one they killed and seeing the killer’s face there.”

She shuddered at that and turned away, and Old Pieter laughed. His hand brushed wisps of hair that had escaped her braids back from her face, and he smiled fondly at her. “Now don’t be upset, girl,” he said. “G’wan and see to the goats, and I’ll carve ye something new.. ..”

It was later in the afternoon when he came to her again, as she sat on the banks of the Loudwater watching the stream tumble through its rocky bed. “Here,” he said. “Do ye like it?”

The carving was a human figure, small enough to hide easily in her hand: nude, and undeniably female, with small breasts like her own budding from the chest. It was the hair that distressed her the most: a moon ago, a ca’ woman from Nessantico had passed through their town, staying at the inn one night on the road to An Uaimth. The woman’s hair had been braided in an intricate knot at the back of the head; entranced by this glimpse of foreign fashion, she had worked for days to imitate those braids-since then, she had braided her hair every day the same way. It was braided now, just as the nude figure’s was, and her hand involuntarily went to her knot of hair on the back of her head. She wanted, suddenly, to tear it out.

She stared at the carving, not knowing what to say, and she felt Old Pieter’s hand on her cheek. “It’s you,” he told her. “You’re becoming a woman now.”

His hand had cupped her head, and he brought her to him, pressing her tight against him. She could feel his excitement, hard on her thigh. She dropped the doll.

What happened then she would never forget: the pain, and the humiliation of it. The shame. And after it was over, after his weight left her, she saw his belt lying on the grass next to her, and there in its sheath was his knife, and she took it. She took the hilt in hands that trembled and shook, she took it sobbing, she took it with her tashta ripped and half torn from her, she took it with her blood and his seed spattering her thighs, and she took it with all the anger and rage and fear inside her and she stabbed him. She plunged the blade low in his belly, and when he groaned and shouted in alarm, she yanked out the blade and plunged it into him again, and again, and again until he was no longer screaming and no longer beating at her with his fists and no longer moving at all.

Covered in her own blood and his, she let the knife drop, kneeling alongside him. His dead eyes stared at her.

“When a thing dies, the right eye remembers the last thing they see-the last face they saw…”

She half-crawled to the bank of the Loudwater. She found a stone there, a white and water-polished pebble the size of a large coin. She brought the stone back and pressed it down over his right eye. Then she huddled there, a few steps away from him, until the sun was nearly down and the goats came around her bleating and wanting to go home to their stables. She woke as if from a sleep, seeing the body there, and she found that curiosity drove her forward toward it. Her hand trembled as she reached down to his face, to the pebble-covered right eye. She took the stone from that eye, and it felt strangely warm. The eye underneath it was gray and clouded, and though she looked carefully into it, she saw nothing there: no image of herself. Nothing at all. She clutched the pebble in her hand: so warm, almost throbbing with life. Her breath shuddered as she clutched it to her breast.

She left then, leaving his body there. She walked south, not north, and she took the pebble with her.

She would never return to the village of her birth. She would never see her matarh again.

The White Stone turned in her sleep. “ I didn’t mean to hurt you, girl, ” Old Pieter whispered in her dreams. “ Didn’t mean to change you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”