The Amber Legacy Read online

  ‘Dad went,’ said Daryn.

  ‘Your father’s a man. He makes his own decisions.’

  ‘I’m thirteen. Two more years and I’ll be a man,’ said Daryn adamantly.

  ‘Let’s hope you’re a smarter man than your father,’ Dawn murmured.

  ‘So, no news from Dad?’ Meg asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  As the boys stood to leave the table, Meg said, ‘You can wash up tonight. Mum’s not doing it.’

  The howls of protest from Daryn and Mykel were squashed by Dawn. ‘Go to bed. Meg and I will clean up. But you boys can organise Peter before you all climb into bed.’

  ‘When can I have my own room like Megen?’ Daryn asked.

  ‘When you’re a man in your own house,’ Dawn replied.

  ‘But how come she gets her own bed?’

  ‘I’m oldest,’ said Meg.

  ‘It’s because you’re a girl,’ said Mykel.

  ‘Go to bed now, or you’ll be doing the dishes,’ Dawn warned.

  After the chaos of three boys left the room, Meg put a small pot of water on the fireplace to boil. ‘Why do you let them get away with so much?’ she asked, as she tied back her mane of red hair.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Dawn said, the question ignored.

  ‘What about?’

  Dawn put down a grey plate from which she was cleaning scraps, and wiped her hands. ‘I want you to come with me to Samuel for a foretelling.’

  ‘Mum!’ Meg protested. ‘Not this stuff again.’

  Dawn put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, looking up at her and noting how tall and strong she was getting. ‘You’ve grown again.’

  ‘I need new trousers and a new pair of boots.’

  ‘You should start wearing dresses like a woman.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mum. How could I do the work in a dress?’

  Dawn poured a bucket of cold water into the wooden washing tub, saying, ‘It’s time Daryn took more responsibility. He is almost a man.’

  Meg snorted contemptuously. ‘Nothing would get done if it was left to him. He’s a lazy little slime. All he does is fish and hunt. He still doesn’t know how to harness the bullock to the plough.’

  ‘Then show him. He can do it this year.’

  ‘I’m not wearing dresses to be a pretty girl, Mum. I want some new trousers.’

  ‘Will you come with me to Samuel?’

  Meg threw up her arms in frustration. ‘Mum, I don’t have a Blessing. You know that. We’ve been to Samuel before.’

  ‘Three years ago. You were a child. Emma says that the Blessing sometimes doesn’t mature in some the way it does in others.’

  Meg lifted the boiling water from the fire and carefully poured it into the large wooden washing tub, and began humming a ballad. As she put down the pot, she saw her mother’s plaintive expression, and sighed. ‘All right. I’ll come. But I don’t believe in all this magic and foretelling. It’s not real.’

  ‘It is real,’ Dawn replied.

  ‘Have you ever seen any real magic, Mum?’ Meg challenged.

  Dawn hesitated, her silence an answer, but she quickly added, ‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I’ve heard a lot of stories about it happening. The Queen’s Seers can use magic.’

  ‘Mum, you believe fantasy stories. People make them up.’

  Dawn shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I still want you to see Samuel.’

  The worst part of sleeping was also the most fascinating. She had dreams, strange dreams, dreams that made no sense because she found herself in places she’d never been with people she’d never met. Every night, as she settled into her pillow, she wondered what dream would visit her. Some nights she had no dreams at all—at least nothing she could remember in the morning. Other nights the dreams were so clear that she woke wondering whether or not what she thought she had dreamed had really happened.

  Knowing that her mother was insisting on her seeing the crazy old man made sleeping difficult that night, and she felt as if she would never fall asleep. When she did, she slipped into a dream that seemed new and yet familiar.

  The place was cold and dark, so dark. Yet somehow, in the absence of light, she could see clearly and that only made this dream more eerie than the others. She was in a dark place and yet she could see. And she could hear his voice. He was always whispering something, but the words were never clear in the dream, just a tone that compelled her to search for him. Even in the dream, she knew she’d dreamed what was happening before. There was a dark corner ahead and she knew he was somewhere in the darkness just beyond it, waiting for her, calling to her. Yet she never turned the corner.

  A shiver raced along her spine the moment she entered the cave. Smoke drifted in the flickering torchlight, irritating her nose and eyes, from a half-consumed cigarette teetering on the edge of the stone table. Samuel was the only person in the village who smoked. Others had experimented with the strange foreign habit, and rejected it. ‘What’s the sense in sucking smoke into your lungs?’ Dawn asked. ‘You might just as well stand over the fireplace and breathe it all in.’ Meg saw no sense in the habit either. Also on the table, a shiny black bush rat was engrossed in cleaning its whiskers, as if it considered the humans irrelevant. Bush rats are brown, Meg noted. Why is this one black?

  ‘Five people,’ the old man announced, as he stared into a sliver of amber crystal resting on the grey stone. ‘There will come five people. Their lives will be inextricably linked with your own. One will be a thief. One a killer of men. One a young woman of beauty and low virtue. One will be in business. And one will be a king-in-waiting. You must beware the king-in-waiting. He will be your nemesis.’ Samuel raised his brown eyes, and when he licked his cracked lips a gob of spittle lodged in a hairy wrinkle by his mouth.

  Don’t ever let me get old and disgusting, Meg thought, fighting the gorge welling in her throat.

  The old man grinned, revealing his rotting yellow teeth and sunken gums where other teeth had once been. ‘You will grow very old,’ he told her, ‘and with it you will gain great wisdom.’ Ignoring her gasp of surprise, he returned his attention to the amber crystal. ‘Before all of these there will come others,’ he continued. ‘One will be a soldier and he will bring you great happiness and greater sorrow. One will test you. One will take you to a great city in a foreign land. One will tempt you with impossible promises. Two will be your loves. One will be your greatest threat and your greatest hope.’

  ‘Are these the same people?’ Meg interrupted.

  The soothsayer looked up and shook his head. ‘Much is hidden,’ he said in his croaky voice, ‘but be patient, girl. There is something else here, something powerful.’ He looked down again.

  Meg waited for more predictions, but the old man was silent. Irritated by his silence, her attention drifted from the grey stone tabletop to the cave’s dark and cluttered walls. Weird things hung from myriad hooks and wires—dried animal and bird carcasses, rusted weapons and farming implements, assorted string, cloth and hessian bags, all bulging with odd contents; sticks, clothes, dried plants. The cave stank of a putrid mixture of offal, rotting vegetable matter and sweat. Towering in the shadows near the entrance was a stuffed fully grown grey kangaroo. Why would anyone want to keep dead, stuffed animals? she wondered. Bored, she refocussed on Samuel, and was astonished to find him still staring at the crystal. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey. Old man.’ He did not respond. Sweat beaded on his furrowed brow. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. The rat sat up and stared inquisitively.

  Samuel’s body jerked, as if he’d pulled away from an invisible hold, and he nearly fell off his low wooden stool. He gulped in deep, desperate breaths like someone resurfacing from being underwater for almost too long, but his wild gaze did not diminish. To Meg, he half-whispered, ‘You are pursued by the shadows of death, girl. The weight you will carry is more than any mortal should bear. But bear it you must.’

  His cold gaze made her extremely uncomfortable. ‘Well?’ she blurted.

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nbsp; ‘The crystal knows you,’ he told her. ‘It sings to you.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Ask old Emma for more,’ he replied. ‘I’ve told all I dare. I didn’t expect you to come here.’ His bony hand closed over the amber and its thin gold chain, and he thrust it into the threadbare folds of his ragged green robe. Fixing her with a fierce expression, he said, ‘Go!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Go!’ he screamed, thrusting his arms wildly forward. ‘Go!’ The cigarette and rat cartwheeled to the floor, the rat scurrying for cover.

  Meg was glad to escape the dank, stinking cave. Samuel was a lunatic. She emerged in a dappled glade, breathing the fresh midmorning air, and peered into the brook by the old man’s cave. It was an enigma. It always had water, even in the harshest days of Fuar. If magic was real, it could explain the brook’s persistence, but she also knew how underground springs worked and this had to come from one.

  Her mother was waiting where the water trickled over smooth brown rocks, catching flashes of the morning sunlight. In her yellow smock and dark green apron, her dark blonde hair loose about her shoulders, Meg decided that her mother was still beautiful, despite the ravages of working hard on a farm and the struggle of giving birth to four children. Little blond-haired Peter squatted on the ground, fascinated by a hopping insect-chasing blue bird. Sunfire watched her expectantly. White butterflies danced erratically above a patch of emerald moss. ‘Well?’ Dawn asked.

  ‘I can’t believe you made me walk all the way out here just to listen to this crazy old man,’ she complained. ‘Do you seriously believe in all this stuff?’ She beckoned to Sunfire whose jaw dropped open to unfurl a pink tongue as he trotted to her side.

  ‘But what did he tell you?’ Dawn asked. ‘Was it exciting? Will you travel? Will you find true love?’

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ Meg gasped in exasperation. She slumped to sit on the soft grass on the bank of the brook and Sunfire dropped beside her. ‘He didn’t say anything about who I’m going to marry.’

  Dawn sat and took Meg’s hand. ‘So what did he say? Tell me.’

  Meg paused, partly to catch her breath, partly to tease her mother, before she said, ‘He didn’t say anything I wouldn’t expect to hear. He said I’m going to meet people. Some people are going to be nice to me, some aren’t.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘I’m supposed to see old Emma. He said something really weird about the crystal singing for me, but he wouldn’t explain. Only that I had to see old Emma if I wanted to know more. It didn’t make any sense. He tried to impress me by scaring me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Can we go?’

  ‘Are you telling me everything he said?’

  Meg glared at her mother. ‘If there was something really good, I’d tell you,’ she replied, annoyance bristling.

  Dawn sighed and stroked her daughter’s long red tresses. ‘I was hoping…’ she began and trailed off.

  ‘You were hoping he’d say I had the Blessing, weren’t you? Or that I was going to marry a famous or rich man and have lots of wonderful babies? But I don’t have the Blessing, and I’m not marrying anyone famous or rich. That’s what all those stupid ballads and stories say. You know the ones I mean. Poor little pigherd boy becomes great sword-wielding hero and the new king. Village girl is swept away by lovestruck prince. Well, that doesn’t really happen, and it’s definitely not me. I’m sorry I disappoint you, all right? But this is who I am.’

  Dawn looked crestfallen. ‘Do you really think I’m so desperate to have a daughter who is going to be whatever you said then?’

  ‘You keep taking me to the soothsayer.’

  ‘I just want my daughter to be happy. Is that too much for a mother to ask?’ She took Meg’s arm and pulled her close.

  Meg acquiesced and accepted the affection, but when she’d had enough she pulled away, and said, ‘Can we go now?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  He was buckling on his sword. She stood in the shed doorway. ‘You’ll have to take care of your mother while I’m away,’ he said, tightening his belt. ‘You’re thirteen. You can work in the fields and drive the bullocks. Your little brothers can help.’

  ‘Why are you going?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t there enough soldiers already?’

  Her father put his hands on her shoulders. His shock of red hair framing his bearded face, his dark green eyes serious and sad, he told her, ‘The Queen has called for volunteers, Meg. The war isn’t going our way yet. The Rebels have been reinforced by some of the barbarian chieftains. That’s why I’m going. So are other men from our village. I have to go. We can’t let the war come to our homes.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  He chuckled. ‘With all of us going, we’ll whip the Rebels and be back for harvest.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘I won’t be away long, you’ll see.’

  She watched him walk towards the village, Daryn and Mykel trotting eagerly in his wake, the boys wondering what great adventure their father was undertaking while they tried to touch his sword.

  Meg stopped chopping the carrot and stared out the open window at the fallow field. That was how she last remembered her father. She recalled his parting words with fondness and bitterness, because he’d marched away two years ago, and hadn’t returned. Like her mother, she waited for word from him, but it never came. The war ebbed and flowed somewhere in the kingdom, in places foreign to the people of Summerbrook. News of battles won and lost crept into common discussion whenever carters and travellers and minstrels passed through, but the war was always somewhere else. Samuel constantly warned that the war would descend upon them all, but the old man was wrong. The war was a long way away. A voice interrupted her daydreaming. Dawn stood with a broom, her left eyebrow raised in question. ‘Sorry, Mum, I didn’t hear you,’ Meg apologised.

  ‘I asked when you were going to see old Emma.’

  Meg quickly finished chopping and dropped the carrot with a splash into the blackened cooking pot. ‘I thought you said you were going to let it go.’

  ‘It’s not going to hurt to find out what she’s meant to tell you,’ Dawn argued.

  ‘It costs a silver shilling to see her.’

  ‘I can give you one.’

  ‘And what are we going to use to pay Pan Baker for the flour? We need every penny we have.’

  ‘I can get money from selling vegetables at the market tomorrow,’ Dawn replied. ‘I’ll get you a shilling. Go this afternoon.’

  ‘Mum!’ Meg growled, infuriated, but her mother was already retreating to her bedroom to fetch the money.

  When Dawn returned, she pressed the silver coin into her daughter’s hand. ‘I promise I won’t ask again, if you go this one last time.’ Her appealing expression was so ludicrous that it broke Meg’s determination, and she burst into laughter. Dawn laughed with her, and as she caught her breath she asked, ‘So, you’ll go?’

  ‘Yes, mother, I’ll go,’ Meg confirmed, untying her apron. ‘But tomorrow morning, all right? I’ll do the chores first. Can you make sure Daryn and Mykel clean up the vegetable patch? And where’s Peter?’

  ‘Your brothers are fishing. They took Peter with them.’

  Meg flung down her apron. ‘They don’t do anything anymore!’ she said angrily. ‘Where are they exactly? Are they watching Peter?’

  ‘I’ll go get them,’ Dawn said, determined to appease her daughter. ‘You go to Emma’s tomorrow.’

  Meg glared fiercely at her. ‘This is the last time. Promise?’

  ‘The last time.’

  ‘Promise?’

  Dawn hesitated, sighed, and said, ‘I promise.’

  Bright blue. The mounted warrior’s armour shone with a strange light as he rode through the ranks of fighting soldiers, passing through the thick knots of writhing bodies as easily as a boat gliding through still water. He twirled a heavy battleaxe in his left hand as if it were a dagger. She was there, but she was not in the battle,
just watching as if it was a play. The warrior in shining blue armour bore down on a lanky, weak-looking soldier, the axe whirling menacingly. And then she was looking into the face of a dead person, the face of a handsome young man with light blond hair, and the vision filled her with immeasurable sorrow.

  Some dreams were bizarre. The vision of the blue-armoured warrior had no correlation with anything that she knew. When she woke, the sky was a soft grey, waiting for the sun to rise and splash its warmth and colour across the landscape. She struggled out of bed, dressed, and left the house. Her mother and brothers were still asleep as she began the morning chores of milking and feeding the cow, and releasing the chickens from their coop.

  Old Emma had lived at the edge of Summerbrook in a two-roomed cottage for as long as Meg could remember. In fact, Dawn said that Emma was an old woman even when Dawn was Meg’s age. There were stories that she had come to Summerbrook as a solitary young woman, and she had never married or shared a relationship. She had no children. Everyone felt sorry for her because she was alone, but everyone also knew that she had deliberately chosen a lonely life. The villagers agreed that she had the ability to cast true magic because she had Jarudha’s Blessing, and that what Emma revealed to people was simple and true. And she was entrusted to identify the Blessing if it appeared in anyone in the village.

  Meg passed through the village centre with Sunfire at her side, acknowledging people. Summerbrook was small. Everyone knew everyone. No one had secrets, and those who tried to keep them were quickly embarrassed by village gossip. A young man, labouring at repairing shingles on the stables beside Archer’s Inn, called out, ‘Good morning, Meg,’ as she passed.

  She waved, replying ‘Good morning, Button,’ and hurried on. Button Tailor was a year older than Meg. He was handsome, she admitted privately, and she liked how he wore his long dark hair tied back when he was working. He was apprenticed to Beam Carpenter because he was the second son of Needle Tailor, and Needle’s firstborn, Cloth, was learning his father’s trade, leaving no place for Button. Beam Carpenter didn’t have a son to pass on his trade to, so he was happy to take on Button as his apprentice. Dawn had pointed Button out to Meg as a young man who would make a good husband—a recommendation that kept her from being overly interested in his overtures. Marrying and having children wasn’t her priority, especially while her father was away. She had a farm to manage.