Worlds Unseen by Rachel Starr Thomson (best classic novels TXT) 📕
"Maggie Sheffield?" It was a trembling voice, old, and strangely familiar. It was deep with illness.
Maggie turned slowly to see a small, hunched old man step out from the shadows. He stood silhouetted against the fence, and Maggie could not see his face or his features. He stretched out a hand toward her. It was shaking.
"Maggie?" he asked again. He took a step forward and Maggie realized that he was about to fall. She dropped the leafy twigs in her hand and rushed forward, grabbing the old man's arm to steady him. He looked up at her with weary, gray eyes.
"Thank ye, Maggie," he said.
She knew who he was. The relief of recognition flooded her. Those gray eyes had regarded her kindly when she was a child in the Orphan House, and once they had watch
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“I read a poem today,” Lord Robert said. “I wondered if you might like to hear it.”
The prickling, tingling sensation had grown so strong that she could not quite understand what he had said. Her voice, answering him quickly, was urgent.
“You have something with you?”
There was a pause, as Lord Robert was taken aback by Virginia’s intensity.
“Yes,” he answered.
She took her hand from the plaid wrapped around her and stretched it out toward him. “May I have it?” she asked.
He made no audible reply, but in a moment she felt the rough, cool leather of an old book in her hand. She took it gently, drawing it close to her and letting it fall open. She ran her fingers over the open page, trying to feel the paths of ink on the rough old paper. Warmth emanated from the handwriting and then began to flow from the page into her hand, traveling up her arms like a shock. She gasped deeply as colours began to flash before her eyes, patterns and pictures whirling before her. The sounds and smells of the Highland hills sank into oblivion before the dizzying force of the vision. In a moment the colours had settled themselves into forms, and scenes began to move through her mind.
She saw a warrior of ancient days, his hair the colour of flax. He rode a spotted horse that moved with the slow, painful steps of exhaustion. Its coat and hooves were flecked with blood. Around and above him was the deep green of a forest; below him, roots tangled in black earth. Others rode all around him, similarly weary, and dressed in the blood-spattered, dirt-ravaged clothing of desperate men. On a white horse at the head of the party rode one whose features Virginia could not describe. Every time she thought she could, his face seemed to change. The only constants were the sense of power that rested on him and an accompanying sense of grief.
The scene dissolved in light. The light formed itself into a pulsing circle. The leader of the men stood before it. Virginia watched as he stepped back, into the circle, and the light enveloped him completely. She watched as the warriors followed him beyond the forest, through the circle. The scene shifted, and she saw the flaxen-haired man sitting alone beside the dying embers of a campfire, holding a red book in his hands. He was writing words that burned their way into the pages.
Suddenly everything changed. She no longer saw the forests. Instead, she saw three black-cloaked figures with eyes like deep pits. The foremost of them held a scroll, newly signed and rolled. One opened his mouth to speak, and from his mouth flowed pestilence.
The scene changed once more, now flashing images at her in rapid succession. She saw faces, and she felt that she was no longer seeing the ancient past, but the present. Through her mind’s eye she saw a woman sitting at a harp in a small cottage, singing a beautiful song that wove its way through the visions of others. She saw a boyish face with a thick head of curly black hair, his mouth laughing with delight. She saw a beautiful young woman with long, white-gold hair, tending roses and vines in a quiet garden. She saw two tall figures in black cloaks, stretching out their hands toward a circle of fire. She saw a girl on a mountainside, wrapped in red plaid, and with a shock she realized she had just seen herself.
Once more all the scenes and colours blurred together and then spun out to make a new scene. This time she saw the flaming walls of a city. She saw a tall, hooded man on a horse, lifting up a sword with a mighty shout. Around him the very sky throbbed with golden light: underlying power, passion, mystery. She saw a very old man, with a long beard that reached nearly to his waist, lift his hands up toward heaven while swords clashed all around him. She saw an auburn-haired girl on a castle wall in the city, running along the stones, seemingly oblivious to the danger beneath her.
One last time everything changed, and she saw the raging waves of the sea. Standing in turbulent stillness over the waves was an army, its golden radiance casting a glow on the clouds and black water all around. The sea wind tore through the hair of horses and warriors, armour and steel clashed as thunder and lightning split the sky. Just before blackness overtook the vision, Virginia thought she saw the shape of a man stepping back through a circle of light, speaking words that were just beyond her hearing…
And then she took a deep breath of the heathery mountain air, and she felt Lord Robert’s hands gripping her shoulders, and heard the whine of the deerhound.
The laird’s voice came through the fading shock. “Are you all right?”
She managed a nod, and his voice dropped to a hesitant whisper. “What happened?”
She moved against his grasp, and he released her. She brought her hands up and covered her face. The deerhound’s lean body rubbed against her.
“I have seen,” she said, and found that she could not go on.
*
The men were rough and rude, and Roland MacTavish didn’t like them at all. They demanded the best rooms and the finest food in the inn. The MacTavish, Roland’s father and the owner of the inn, did all but lick the ground where they walked. Roland took their horses for them and said nothing when they cursed at him and told him to be careful with the animals, and called him “Boy” and threw him a shilling for his trouble.
He knew who they were; everyone did. They were Imperial High Police, imposing figures dressed in black and green. But that did not give them the right to treat the villagers like inferiors, Roland thought, here in this land where his family had lived for hundreds of years, maybe even before there was any such thing as High Police-even before there was an Empire. Other boys in the village talked with bright eyes and high expectations of the day when they might be recruited by the High Police. They spoke of going to Athrom, the Great City of the Emperor, to train, and of becoming great warriors. Roland, the only son of his father, knew that he might one day be taken into the ranks of Black-and-Greens, but for him there was no joy in the knowing.
When the men went to bed drunk that night, Roland kept the village children entertained with imitations of their peacock’s strut and harsh accents.
He did not learn to be afraid of them until the next day, when they began asking after Virginia Ramsey.
They went to Wee Cameron first, the five-foot-two blacksmith with arms like iron pillars. Roland was in Wee Cam’s shop, helping shoe a horse, when the soldiers came in, asking where to find a blind girl who was rumoured to have strange gifts.
Wee Cam chewed on a bit of straw and looked at them with squinty eyes out of a sooty face. “What would you be wanting her for?” he asked.
One soldier answered. “She’s wanted in Londren.” He grinned.
Wee Cam spit and folded his enormous arms over his chest. “Sorry, but I canna help you.”
The soldier stepped forward menacingly. “I’m asking as an officer of the Empire,” he said.
Wee Cam drew himself up to his full height and glowered at the soldier from a face that was nearly as ruddy as his hair. His eyes sparkled with heat borrowed from the forge.
“And I’m tellin’ you, as a citizen of this village, that I canna help you.”
The soldiers backed out of the shop and went in search of more amicable help. A look passed between Roland and Wee Cam, and without a word Roland left the horse to Cam’s able care. The men were on their way back to the inn, and Roland followed them with a mounting sense of dread.
He listened as his father told the men how to reach the side of the mountain. Roland wondered if the men would toss his father a coin for his troubles. No doubt the MacTavish would be properly grateful for it.
Before the MacTavish had finished detailing the way to Virginia’s outcrop, Roland was running for Angslie as fast as his feet could fly. He ran first for the little stone house where Grandfather Ramsey would even now be working the land, but he changed direction midway and ran for the great house of Robert Sinclair, Lord of Angslie, instead. This was the laird’s land. There had to be something he could do.
*
Lord Robert had not been gone half an hour when light began to probe once more at the corners of Virginia’s darkness. But there was no shock this time; no swirling, reeling bewilderment of colour and scene. Instead, gentle rays of light found their way through to her eyes. They illuminated no strange scene, but her own hillside. She saw the rock and earth beneath her and the blue sky overhead, speckled with clouds. She saw the colours of her own skirt and the plaid wrapped around her shoulders. She saw the deerhound sleeping by her side, its rib cage rising and falling under a cover of wiry fur.
She turned her head to look at the worn path that stretched away from the outcrop and down the mountainside. Someone was coming up the path toward her.
As he came closer, a breeze rustled through the grass ahead of him. It carried the scent of spring flowers and running water. Virginia felt something stir inside her. His shadow fell over her, but it was not a like a shadow-it was like light coming through raindrops. She looked to his face and found that she could not describe him. He seemed young, but then he seemed old; his skin was neither dark nor white. He wore a homespun robe and his feet were bare.
He came very close, and Virginia stood to meet him. He held out his hand to her and she took it, without hesitation or fear. His touch was strong and warm.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked in a voice as indescribable as his face.
She nodded, slowly. “You are the King.”
“Do I look like a king?” he asked, glancing down at his homespun robe and bare, calloused feet.
“Yes,” she answered.
He smiled. “You see very clearly, little one. What do you know of me?”
“Only that I will follow you wherever you go, if you will let me come,” Virginia said. His presence filled her with a sweetness and peace that she had never known. All that was in her reached out to him. The only fear in this moment was that he might leave, as all visions left.
“You name me king,” he said. “Of what kingdom? Can you tell me that?”
“I do not know.” Virginia faltered. “But, if my heart can be called a kingdom, then you have a throne in it. Somehow, I think you always have-though I have never seen you before today.”
A distant light appeared in his eyes. “Be it known, then,” he said, “that I am the king of all the world and all the sky and all the stars, and of all the vast worlds beyond them. There was a time I walked this
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