Mist Over the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

lived here all your life, and I would wager a silver penny that you could skip over the tussocks all around Aelf Fen without even getting your toes wet.’
    ‘I’m sure I couldn’t!’ I protested. ‘I—’
    Edild held up her hand. ‘Enough,’ she said, but she was still smiling. ‘Do not take unnecessary risks, Lassair, but keep your eyes wide open for the chance that will present itself. You will not fail.’
    It sounded horribly like a prediction. ‘But—’
    I was talking to empty air. My aunt had spun gracefully around and was gliding back inside her little house.
    I stood out there in the sunshine for a few moments, waiting until I felt calm enough to face Alvela. Edild has always pressed on me the importance of a serene demeanour when dealing with the sick and the disturbed; even in the face of the highest fever and the deepest wound, she says, the healer must give the impression that this is all in a day’s work. People can be killed by shock, she tells me, and someone already gravely ill could suffer a seizure if the person who has come to heal them were to throw up her hands in horror and go aaaagh, I can’t deal with that!
    I breathed in deeply and slowly let the air out, repeating the process several times. I was admittedly quite thrilled at what Edild had just said, and part of me was just longing to test myself to see if I could do it. The more sensible part, however, was moaning that too much was being asked of me. As if it were not enough to be sent alone to deal with a gravely ill man suffering from a high fever and a deep wound in his foot, now somehow I must also find the time to slip away and try out my skill at marsh-hopping. I felt my stiff shoulders relax. If the opportunity arose – and it was only if , I reminded myself, even Edild had said if – then I would cope with it. For now, there were other things to perplex and worry me.
    Primarily this: Morcar had suffered his accident on the Isle of Ely, where the Normans were building a huge and showy new cathedral. That cathedral was a part of a Benedictine abbey, no doubt full of learned monks who read the ancient tracts and studied the knowledge that had been handed down to them out of the past. Quite a lot of that knowledge would be concerned with the healing arts, and not a few of the monks would undoubtedly be skilled and renowned healers.
    So why on earth had whoever was caring for Morcar sent the message to his mother to bring help for her son? Why had they not taken him straight to the abbey’s infirmary, where he could be tucked up beneath clean, linen sheets with bland-faced, psalm-chanting monks gliding around him and swiftly and efficiently answering his every need?
    Why, in the dear Lord’s name, was I going to Ely?
    For the first time, I felt a deep shiver of unease.

FOUR
    S
ibert and I set out in the early afternoon. As the crow flew it was probably only eight miles or so from Aelf Fen to Ely, but Sibert and I were not blessed with wings and would have to trudge along many extra loops and detours as the track edged it way round numerous watery obstacles. In addition, although it was fine today it had been raining hard for the past few days, and the water level everywhere had risen quite dramatically.
    It really was no time for a would-be marsh walker to test her probably non-existent skills.
    We were basically good friends, Sibert and I, but it was some months since we had done more than nod a greeting to each other as we passed in our daily round in the village. Consequently, it took a mile or two before we even began to be easy together. Sibert asked a few polite but stiff questions: are you well? Are you enjoying working with your aunt? How’s your sister, Goda? Still as awful as ever? To the last I was able to answer honestly that, yes, Goda was pretty much her usual self. She bore her first child – my beautiful little niece, Gelges – two summers ago, and the baby’s safe arrival did, for a precious few months,