This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…
Liz was certain she not the oldest thing to come out of Wales, there were plenty of others to pick from.
But there were days were she felt older than the mountains… a deep fatigue that spoke to the history of her life written deep in her bones, as an ossuary church declaratively demonstrates the vast depth of human history so exactly because of what it is constructed from. Simply said, she knew in her bones she was old. But there were things older still. That was rationalization enough to avoid the label altogether.
If one were to ask Ysabella “Elizabeth” de Montfort how old she was, one would receive two things in rapid succession. The first would be the answer of the age Liz chose to be, followed by an increasingly crude tirade of colorful insults coupled with a middle finger (or two) defiantly raised in one’s direction. Both would be provided at the maximum volume, either vocally or physically, with little regard to whom would be offended in the nearby vicinity.
Liz would never, ever, consider herself old. Old was a pejorative term. Nearly as bad as Fenian. Or worse yet, English. Liz had made the choice in the Year of Our Lord 1282 to never ever encounter a world where she was going to be called old.
She was a Witch. Witches tended to prefer youth. Immeasurable, unassailable, and perpetual youth. For Liz, her outward appearance of youth was roughly situated in her late 20’s. When she had been a child in the Welsh countryside in the mid-13th century, well after the fall of Normandy, and before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last true free Leader of Wales… being in your late 20’s or early 30’s had been considered middle-aged.
In those days, Death came early. Death came often. For women it was always present. One out of every eight women died in childbirth, or due to complications shortly afterward, and out of every five children, one died as an infant and another would die before reaching adulthood. The lesson learned by every human in those days was that mortality was always near. One bad growing season… one bad war campaign… one unfortunate series of escalating events of situations outside a village’s control, and mortality was not just close, it would hang behind every person like a black shroud they carried until pestilence, exposure, starvation, or a sharp edge of another man’s weapon sent them onward to heaven or hell. Youth was fleeting, if not absent for most. Most girls were married young, and having their first child in their mid-to-late teens. Most people had very little choice in their life or how they would live their life, and for women that fact was doubled over because the Reaper did not spare the birthing chamber. And every birth was a gamble in both their own life and that of their child.
Watching her cousin Eleanor de Montfort, Princess of Wales and Lady of Snowdon, die in childbirth was the first call that things needed to be different for herself. Watching her entire family’s legacy be burned, buried, and melted down by the English was another. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been a strong man with a strong hand, but the sword he held was small, and he was foolhardy. The Welsh communities spent just as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the English, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s final year was nothing but the culmination of idiocy from the entire region that would lament their loss of culture and identity for centuries to come. His death, itself a comical tragedy of errors, was the final cut that rendered her heart free from the constraint of family, hearth, and home.
Since she had been a small child, she knew of the Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. It was said that the monster was a cursed woman, one that would steal children, hollow them out as a spider consumes its prey, stuff them with evil, and return the children to their families as crude mimics of their former selves. The Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the reason crops failed, or livestock died unexpectedly, or why milk went sour. She was a phantom used to scare children, mock peers, and scapegoat like one naturally blames the wind or the rain. It so happened that Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the namesake of her cousin, although in that shitty, terrible, ffycin English, Yr Wyddfa is Snowdon. Perhaps nobility thought by creating a title named after Snowdon, they would steal the power of the name Yr Wyddfa.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was strong. Powerful. Liz had no idea what she was looking for when she went hunting for the real Lady of Snowdon, but she knew deep in her core that her life, as it had been, was as dead as her beloved cousin. She fled from her home to the south and the east, she eschewed the villages and roads along the way, preferring the rough lands and damp skies of the open wilds. She trembled in the early morning fogs that crept from the mountains to lay cold over the lands below. She kept her fires as meager things, for who ever knew who was watching, and she did her best to hide from the eyes of others she spied from afar. The rain was constant, and it made the trek all the more miserable.
… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.
The peak still hung in the distance, and her food had run out three days before. She was nearly mad with desire to find the Lady of Snowdon, Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. She chanted the name over and over as she walked, saying the name like an invocation, calling on a power she did not understand. In that madness, camped for the evening, lamenting her lack of food and capabilities to hunt, instead morosely munching on Fat Hens, a weed to most, but food for the desperate, she mumbled the name again and again, feeling her head, her heart, and her feet, all heavy from the same toil.
… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.
Like her hunger, which had lead to munch on a weed, her drive to find they Lady was desperate. She had hit that point weeks ago. She had hit that point before she had left the confines of her village. Where Liz was now was far beyond desperation. She held her hands over her small fire, looking over her pathetic camp, and prayed that no man would stumble across her in the night. Her eyes were so heavy, but sleep itself was dangerous.
… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.
Liz blinked heavily, her fire, the trees, the soft light of bouncing off her surroundings. Her wandering eyes fell on her torn, mangled, shredded dress. She found herself idly wondering where each tear had been incurred. Had that one been a rock? A tree branch? A bush? Had an angel grabbed at her to keep her safe? A demon had pulled her towards her doom? Which tears mattered? Which ones were inconsequential? Which would pick sides and gather their fellow tears and rend her dress further? Would she end up wandering the hills under the shadow of the peak, forever lamenting the rebellion of her own clothing?
She giggled. Madness was not far for her. Neither was death.
But Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was nearer. Her voice was like hard struck iron, deep and resonant, tolling for a soul that would never hear it. “Your fire is low, kitten. It will not last through your slumber.”
Liz’s head whipped upwards to find a women sitting at the fire across from her. She sat cross-legged upon a soft bed of heather and lichen. She was dressed plainly enough, but her clothes were strange, and the more Liz tried to focus on them, they shifted and turned like viewing a starry night through a layer of thin, high clouds. The witch’s face was unlined, but ancient, like stone had come alive and in doing so, rejected the age thrust upon it. In that magnificent face, Liz witnessed both wisdom and power. Two things that she had never seen contained within the same person before.
“I must keep it low, my Lady. I am fearful for those that may see it,” Liz replied, her desire to sleep had fled like a panicked animal.
“And if I am one of those that you fear?”
“Then I suppose it is a good time for God to take me.”
The woman appraised her for a moment and then laughed. Her laugh was deep and throaty, as if rocks had learned what laughter was just to entertain themselves. “Well I suppose that He won’t, for I am here, and I want to know why a lady such as yourself is calling for me?”
“You are the Lady of the Mountain? I found you?”
“You found nothing, little kitten. I found you. Do you fear having nothing?” The Lady leaned back, to grab some more wood for the fire. She tossed a handful of small branches into the glowing coals.
“I have nothing, my Lady. I am a daughter of no one, sister to no one, and mourned by no one. I have lost everything that I have ever loved. So I have nothing, and I am nothing.”
“Oh a kitten of self pity, all the worse! So why does one miserable, soaking wet thing such as yourself wander the wilds avoiding all trouble but nevertheless calling for it all along the way?”
“I was not calling for trouble.”
The Lady squinted her eyes. “Oh you were. I watched you stumbling along for days, muttering my name, slapping at the midges, crying, and just winging on and on… although I think you did not realize you were. You are in a terrible state, my child.”
“I came all this way to find you, my Lady. Why did you wait until now?”
“I wanted to make sure you meant it, kitten,” the Lady said.
“I mean it.”
“You may regret meaning it.”
“I won’t.”
“We shall see, won’t we?” The Lady smirked. “Well come along, little kitten. Time to start regretting your choices.”