Read Lady Macbeth's Daughter for Free Online

my head hurts,” complains Helwain.
    “You hush, Helwain. She has cut herself, my poor child.” Mother pulls out the thorn and dabs at the blood welling from my palm.
    But it is not the pain or the blood that made me cry out. It was the brief sight of three bodies and a man holding a dagger with blood on its blade. I shake my head to dispel the scene, but when I close my eyes it is still there. I rub my hands together, but it only spreads the blood.
    “What are you doing, Albia?” asks Mother.
    “She has a strange look,” says Helwain excitedly. “What do you see? Tell me.” Her face is so close to mine that her features blur, except for the gleam in her eyes that frightens me. “Speak up, girl!”
    But I press my lips tightly together and close my eyes. I will not let Helwain see inside me.

Chapter 5
    Wychelm Woods
    Albia
    After that night on Wanluck Mhor, I stay away from Helwain. Mother puts a salve on my cut until it heals, leaving only a tiny scar on my palm. She keeps me close to her. I know she regrets allowing me to go to the moor. I don’t think she even suspects that I saw the painted warrior and heard every word that was spoken. But I often catch her gazing at me with a sad and worried expression.
    “Why do you look at me that way?” I ask her. We are sitting in a small coracle, fishing in the loch with nets on long poles. A sleek, glittering fish noses my net, then darts away.
    “There is so much you don’t know,” she muses, shaking her head slowly.
    “Then tell me!” I tease, wanting to see her usual smile.
    “Do you know that your eyes are blue, and yet gray, as when a cloud is reflected in the loch on a sunny day?”
    I peer into the water where my reflection is broken up by ripples. It scares me to look where the water is so deep it is black. I sense something lurking there, something as unknowable as the time before I could speak. Mother is right. I know almost nothing. But it is not the color of my eyes I wonder about.
    “Tell me where this water comes from, and the creatures who live under it.” It is the only question I can put into words just now.
    “I will,” she agrees. “You are old enough to learn the ancient wisdom.”
    Mother tells me how, ages and ages ago, the god Guidlicht lay with his wife Neoni, and from her womb the earth and skies rumbled into being, the mountains and valleys, fire and winds and water, and everything that lives, from the humblest creeping bug to the great leviathan of the sea.
    “All these creatures, because they sprang from the same source, Neoni, partake of each other. So each person’s nature mingles the traits of different plants, animals, and elements.”
    I feel my mind expand with amazement and wonder. “What makes up my nature?” I ask.
    “Alas, Albia, I cannot see it. You must be the one to find it out. All I can advise you is that it is mixed of good and ill, and that you must feed your better traits that they may grow stronger than your worse ones.”
    I do not understand this, nor do I know how to discover my own nature. Instead I study the nature of others. The eagle that can seize a single mouse from the moor shows keen-sightedness, but in flying so high, it also shows ambition. It is the nature of the spiky hawthorn to protect the birds that nest there and to stab any other creature that strays too near.
    What is Helwain’s nature? She is like the black, harsh-voiced crow and the bent moor-pine with its rough bark. She is like the elder tree from which her staff is made, for she used its magic to cure my lameness. Once she was generous of heart, like the skies that shed rain, but now she is the dry stalk in the drought, withered by her own unkindness.
    My mother, on the contrary, is all good-natured. Being light and strong as the reed, she tolerates hardship. Cheerful as the golden broom-flower, she can love even the ill-natured Helwain. Nurturing as the mother bird who feeds her chicks, she is easy for me to love.
    But something