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Stories / Stories / 
Cindy Rosenthal / Text 7 of 14 / The Ghosts of Ravensgard - Briar´s Story
"The Ghosts of Ravensgard - Briar´s Story" by Cindy Rosenthal
SciFi/Fantasy text 7 out of 14 by Cindy Rosenthal
| Somewhere in the junk drawer that is my brain, there are volumes of Ravensgard Chronicles - this is the second chapter. |
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To understand this story you need to know the story of the last lord of Ravensgard and the village that bears his name. Rhys, the Black Duke, married a woman from across the sea named Siobhan Ravenhair; they were very happy until she had a child who died within a week, and then she walked into the sea and drowned. The Black Duke went mad and when he died, many years after his wife, he was put in the same tomb as she, and now people say the keep is haunted. They say that sometimes a man in black armor walks the cliffs and ruins of Ravensgard Keep, a black-haired woman in green at his side. I've also walked the ruins--the old keep itself still stands, but the roof of the great hall has disintegrated and some of the walls lean and the window glass is long gone, and sometimes villagers pasture their sheep among the foundations of the outbuildings. I've never seen the ghosts of Ravensgard, but I believe they exist.
When the Black Duke died without an heir his estates fell to whoever could hold them, but because it was so close to his supposedly haunted keep, the village of Ravensgard, my village, was mostly left alone. The people built a wall and formed a local militia for protection against bandits and warbands and merchant trains, to do what a lord would do if there was one. Most of the wall eventually came down, and now all that's left is some of the north side. Ravensgard sits in a good location on a main road, but it isn't rich. People were so afraid of the Black Duke, and because they think he haunts the keep, all kinds of stories have sprung up that have his ghost defending the village the way he never did when he was alive. It doesn't help that on a clear day you can see the keep from the road outside town.
Maybe once a year one of the King's judges comes through to try cases that would be beyond the local lord, if we had one, and otherwise we have a council and a mayor to make decisions and keep the law. We're two miles or so inland from the keep, which sits on a cliff overlooking the sea, and we're as normal a village as exists. We farm and herd cows and sheep and pigs, and we have merchants and craftsmen and two competing smiths who hate each other, and a temple with two priests to keep our faith, and there are taverns and an inn, and every so often people traveling the road stop here. One of the King's tax collectors always comes with the judge, and we assume that gives us the right to call on the King if we ever need him.
The King's Road runs past the village, heading north to the King's city; south of Ravensgard it becomes the Tkaya Road, because that's where it goes. No one I know has ever been to the King's city, although some have seen Tkaya, which they say is bigger than Ravensgard, but you would expect any city with a road named after it to be bigger than Ravensgard. It was up this road, coming from Tkaya, that a woman rode one day, trailing a small retinue and a few wagons and horses and livestock. She stopped long enough to ask someone if this was the village of Ravensgard, and when he said yes, she turned west towards the sea. And because the person she asked was my brother, and because she caught his fancy, he followed her and later reported that she had moved into the Black Duke's keep.
Maybe I should say something about my brother. His name is Grey and he's younger than I am by ten minutes; we look alike except that his eyes are the color of his name and sometimes he has the sight. He'll look at a mare and know she'll foal before the year is out, and he knew when the mill caught fire before anyone saw the smoke. The priests think this is a gift from the gods, although they called it a curse when he accurately predicted the death of the mayor's sister. Grey's seen the ghost of the Black Duke and his lady; he says he even talked to them, but I don't believe that.
I always wondered what his sight told him about the woman who moved into the keep, but he never really told me. Possibly it didn't tell him anything--it's more of an intuition than a sight, and intuition isn't very specific and isn't always awake.
In any case, the next day the entire village knew the woman had moved into the keep because it was easy to fix up and that she had a small household--a lady's maid, a cook, a chamberlain, a page, a captain, and six guards. The cook and the chamberlain were married and the page was their son, and the day after they came, the captain and a guard came to town to recruit some men to help rebuild the keep. My brother, predictably enough, was one of them.
"Why did she move into the keep?" I asked him. "Does she know about the Black Duke's ghost?"
"She says she's his heir," he said.
"The ghost's heir?" my father repeated. "Since when can ghosts make heirs?" He thought he was being funny. "Oh, don't make faces at me, Briar, I'm just having a joke at your brother's expense."
"But the Black Duke's daughter died," I told Grey, ignoring my father. "And his wife was an only child, and she came from across the sea to boot."
"She looks like him," he said. He took out three plates and just stood there holding them. "Her skin is like porcelain and her hair is black as night, and her eyes are the color of the sky before a hurricane."
"You couldn't have gotten much work done on the keep if you were staring at her eyes all day," my father commented.
"And you don't really know what the Black Duke looked like anyway," I said. "Are you going to help me or are you just going to stand there with the plates?"
"Oh, sorry." He handed them to me and sat down. "I've heard the Duke had a brother; I guess that's how she can claim his estate. Her men call her 'Lady.'"
"I didn't doubt that part, I just doubt that she's his heir. If he had any, they would've come out when he died."
"There wasn't anything for them to come out for," my father said. He considered himself an authority on local legend and thought he knew everything there was to know about the Dukes of Ravensgard, especially the last one. "The hall was wrecked, the household gone, the village armed, the grounds haunted."
"You tell me, Dad," Grey said, "did the Black Duke have a brother?"
"If someone really wanted Ravensgard they could've easily overpowered the village," I insisted. "Ghost or not."
"Some sources say he had two brothers and a sister," my father went on, "and that the oldest brother died under mysterious circumstances for Rhys to take the title and estates. He was an opportunist even as a boy."
"See?" Grey said to me. I rolled my eyes. Every few years our father had another story about the Black Duke. "I'm going back tomorrow; she wants to restore the hall. We tried to tell her it would take more work than we can give, but she ignored us."
"Sounds like nobility to me." My father nodded, satisfied.
The next day Grey had a more interesting piece of news--the lady, he told us, was named Ryanne. A shiver ran up my spine; when the stories about the Black Duke gave his daughter a name, she was usually called Ryanne.
"If her captain is named Rhys," I said, "I'm going to walk out that door away from this place and just keep going until my shoes fall off."
"I wouldn't worry," my brother told me, "I heard one of his men call him Laine."
That wasn't much better--"Laine" appeared in some of the stories as one of the Duke's men, sometimes his captain, sometimes one of the men who tried to run his estates after he went mad, sometimes as a neighboring lord who fell in love with Siobhan, for which the Black Duke cut out his eyes. It seemed to agree with my brother that the Lady Ryanne really was Ravensgard's heir.
I had a friend named Laina, whose brother Merril used to pull my hair when we were little. Their father was a tanner and their mother the daughter of a dyer, and their clothes were well-made but usually dyed wildly clashing colors. They were a red-haired family, and on a sunny day you could see them coming a mile off. Laina had been named for the man who fell in love with Siobhan Ravenhair and had lost his eyes for it. Her mother thought it was romantic; her father thought it was perverse. I thought it was too much of a coincidence, especially since the Lady Ryanne's captain also had red hair.
Merril and my brother and a boy named Goose (so called because he was the youngest of eight children, and when he was a baby he would honk like a goose to get people's attention) worked on the keep for a week without major incident, although each day brought more proof of the lady's relationship to the Black Duke (from Grey) and more speculation about her relationship to her captain (from Goose) and more complaints about the work she wanted done (from Merril). She got almost all the able-bodied men in town to prop up the walls and work on a roof for the great hall, no mean feat since everyone also had a craft to practice or a business to run or a herd to watch or crops to tend, or some combination of all four. At night most of the workers came home, much to the relief of their families, and the ones who stayed did so because the Lady Ryanne asked them to tell her and her household about the village and how it had fared since the death of the Black Duke, and what she should know if she was to take stewardship of it.
My brother dragged my father out there once, leaving me to watch the sheep and no one to watch the house, and my father stayed all day and all night displaying his great historical knowledge to the lady. I have no doubt he told her all his best stories, even the ones he knew were hearsay and gossip and outright myth, and I also have no doubt she believed every word.
"Your brother was right," he told me the next day. "The Lady Ryanne is unquestionably the Black Duke's heir. She not only looks like him, but she knows more about him and his life and his line than anyone I ever met." Which probably meant she'd already heard all of my father's best stories and most of his second-best ones.
"Does she believe the keep's haunted?" I asked, wondering if she'd known all along. The men who stayed late to educate the lady on Ravensgard came home with stories about how she stood guard over the keep with an ancient two-handed sword, and how they heard someone walking through the ruins and along the cliffs although everyone in the household was accounted for and it was never someone from the village. The ghost walks, my brother told me, and I couldn't even tease him about it.
"She said, when I asked her, that Ravensgard is hers and if the Duke has a problem with that he can come to her."
"So she not only thinks the keep's haunted, but she also thinks the Black Duke will complain to her face if he doesn't like her being there. What's he going to say when she raises the great hall and installs herself as Duchess?" Like everyone else I believed the keep was haunted by the Black Duke's ghost, but if he really wanted her out, she'd be days gone by now.
Grey confirmed the story about the sword; it was an antique, he said, and she'd brought it with her, and he would bet his future that it once belonged to the Black Duke.
"Your future's not worth much now that you spend all your time on her hall," I said, grinning and tugging on his hair. "You need a haircut. Has anyone ever seen the ghost during the day?"
"Sometimes, when the fog rolls in. One of the guards told Goose he saw a man in armor walking around where they say Siobhan's Tower was, but when he called to him, the man just disappeared into the fog. "
"What did Goose say?"
"He believed it. The ruins give him the creeps; they always have."
So the Lady Ryanne was heir to Ravensgard and the Black Duke's ghost walked the ruins of the keep his descendant was trying to make habitable for herself. I decided two things could happen--either the Black Duke would scare her off like he scared off anyone else who tried to hold his keep and his village, or she would defy him and stay there. In either case, we would have something to tell our grandchildren, if we lived long enough to have them. And I only phrase it that way because two weeks after she arrived, the Lady Ryanne's plans and presence caused a mighty storm that almost flattened the village of Ravensgard and everyone in it.
I was in town with Laina when it hit. We went to the Shepherd's Rest because it was close and we liked to tease the innkeeper's son, who was cute and easily embarrassed by girls. But the rain came harder and harder, the innkeeper closed the wooden shutters and pulled the damper down in the fireplace to keep the wind from blowing the logs out into the room, and we figured we might be there longer than we'd expected. The inn was solidly built and had been surviving hurricanes since before my parents were born, as had the Gilded Rose tavern and the mayor's house and the older smithy. In times of wild weather, people tended to cluster in the safest buildings until the wind died down. We'd all heard about people who blew off the cliffs and into the sea, and about travelers who'd gotten caught out in a storm and had been saved by the ghost of the Black Duke.
Laina and I were soon joined by Goose's youngest older sister Katrin, who said she'd put her sheep in the inn's stable and hoped her brother had sense to come in out of the rain. We didn't think so, and when Merril banged in, bright clothes askew and his red hair flattened on his head, we asked him if he'd seen Goose.
"Not since this morning," he said. "He was going into the forest to cut more trees for the damned roof." The great hall was the bane of his existence; it required hard and heavy work, and he hated anything more strenuous than sitting on his butt watching dye set.
We listened to the building creak and prayed it wouldn't fall on our heads. I wondered where my father was.
"This is nothing," Merril was saying, answering some fear of Katrin's that I hadn't heard. "Four years ago--remember?--there was that hurricane."
"That wasn't a hurricane," Laina said. "That was just a lot of rain."
"Our rabbit hutch blew away," Katrin said, "and one of the sheep." A wolf or a dog had probably gotten the sheep, but Katrin always blamed terrible things on either the gods or the weather, or both.
"I remember that," I said. "Our roof leaked for a month. But it wasn't a hurricane, Laina's right. My father says we haven't had a real hurricane since before he married my mother. And anyway," I said to Katrin, "your hutches fall over if you look at them sideways."
"That's what Goose says," Merril added. "Hey," he said to me, "where's Grey? I know he came back to town with the rest of us who aren't killing ourselves on the great hall, but I haven't seen him."
Sometimes, I can find my brother. If he's lost or you just don't know where to look, I might be able to tell you where he is. He says it's like his sight but I think it's just a result of being twins and having known him all his life, although strange things do happen. When we were nine he fell out of a tree, and I tripped on a flat floor in Laina's father's tannery and broke my wrist. And when we were eleven and I went in the sea and almost drowned, Grey was helping Goose watch his father's sheep, and he choked on nothing until they'd pumped the water out of my lungs. The same way the priests call Grey's sight a blessing from the gods, they say I can generally find him because the gods think someone should always be looking after him, and who better than his sister?
The priests are good, faithful men, but no one can know all the gods think and do and say. But sometimes things happen and I know why they became priests. I sat in the Shepherd's Rest with Laina and Merril and Katrin, and we listened to the storm and hoped our houses and crops and shops and herds were ok, and I wondered where Grey was, and suddenly I knew, with the unexplainable certainty of his sight, that the reason for this terrible, destructive weather lived in Ravensgard Keep, and my brother had gone to save her from herself.
"He's at the keep," I told Merril.
"It has a roof," he said. "He'll be dry. And the Lady Ryanne's there. " He made a knowing face.
"That's why he is, just not for the reason you think. I have to go get him."
"You should let him stay there. It's strong, I worked on it. Grey's safer there than he'd be almost anywhere."
"Are you mad?" Laina said at the same time. "You can't go out in that rain, you won't be able to see."
"And you'll blow away," Katrin added.
"I'll be fine," I insisted. "I'll go home first to make sure my father's ok. He's probably sitting under the table because he says it's the safest place in the house."
"How will you get there?" Laina demanded as I stood up. "You can't walk through that storm."
"Take Gelly," Merril offered, after a second's hesitation. "But you might have to force him out of the stable, he hates the rain."
"Then how did you get here?" Katrin asked him. He shrugged.
"Thank you," I said. "I could almost kiss you." He was still grinning at his sister as I elbowed my way out of the common room and around to the stable. Merril's horse dug in his heels when he realized I was going to take him back outside, but I'd always been good with animals, especially horses, and one intractable bay was no match for me when I was desperate.
The rain was sheeting down so solidly it was like trying to ride along the bottom of the sea. As we headed home lightning crashed around us, spurring Gelly faster than I ever could. I tied him to the post in front, miraculously still stuck in the ground, and the wind pushed me inside. My father was indeed sitting under the table with a hurricane lamp and some candles and his books and a blanket. The house shook but at least it wasn't leaking, and the fire was out.
"Dad!" I yelled over the storm. "Are you ok?" I ran into the back room, where I stopped just long enough to strip off my now-dripping shirt and pull on a slightly more waterproof sweater.
"Briar? What are you doing?" he demanded. "This is the worst storm since I was a boy. Where have you been? Why aren't you still there?"
"Laina and I went into the Shepherd's Rest when it started to rain. I have to find Grey, don't go anywhere."
He called my name again, but I was out the door and on Gelly's back. I turned the horse's head towards the keep and slapped him to get him started. He wouldn't move. What with all the wind and rain, it was a wonder he was even still standing.
"Come on!" I yelled in his ear. "My stupid brother's in more danger than your horse's brain can possibly guess, and if we don't find him I'll cut you up for shoe leather!" That got him moving, or maybe it was the lightning again.
We galloped towards Ravensgard Keep through the rain; I prayed that it was still standing, that Grey hadn't blown out to sea, that he hadn't been struck by lightning, that I would live to see him again. I had never been so glad to almost fall over a stone foundation. I pounded on the door of the keep until it opened; I pulled Gelly inside and found the Lady Ryanne's household clustered with a loud herd of geese and some sheep, which clumped against the wall with their heads down. They all seemed pretty frightened, more so because I blew in looking like something out of nightmare.
"What are you doing out?" the captain of the guard demanded at the same time I asked if anyone had seen my brother.
"Where's my brother?" I repeated. "Grey Kitts, he's working on your hall, he never came back to the village, I know he's here."
"He went up to comfort my lady," the captain said, sounding a little annoyed. Clearly he thought he should be upstairs comforting his lady, and not down here trying to calm the geese and the rest of the household. In his annoyance and disheveled red hair he looked uncannily like Merril, reminding me that he and Merril's sister had both been named for a man who lost his eyes to the Black Duke's jealousy.
"Watch my horse," I said, heading for the stairs.
"Wait--you can't--" Maybe he said more, I wasn't listening. And anyway, what were Grey and the Lady Ryanne going to be doing that I shouldn't interrupt?
They weren't on the second floor. I kept climbing; the steps got wetter and wetter. With every thunderclap the keep shook, dislodging bits of stone and mortar, and I hoped it was as strong as Merril said it was. I knew I was nearing the top when I felt rain on my face, and as I rounded a curve I saw my brother's legs poking through the open trap door, his feet in a puddle. I climbed faster, as carefully as I could.
"Grey!" I yelled, grabbing at his shirt. He didn't hear me, and if he did he ignored me. I pushed my way up the last few steps, slipping on the rain-slick stone, pulling on him to keep from falling. I poked my head through the trap door to get his attention and see what he'd come out here for. The Lady Ryanne stood on the roof, gesturing at the sky, the antique sword people talked about dragging behind her.
"You cannot keep this place!" she screamed. "Ravensgard is mine and you will not have it!" The wind howled at her, whipped her hair around her face. "I won't leave, do you hear me? You're dead, and you will not chase me away from what should be mine!"
"Grey!" I yelled again, my face in his. At least, I tried to yell, but thunder boomed, lightning broke out of the clouds, and a piece of wall exploded in a flash of light and a wet haze of stone dust. Grey flinched and I ducked and grabbed his arm. My sweater was already soaked through and I couldn't see for the rain in my eyes.
"Gods above, Grey," I tried again, "we're going to drown!" He wasn't even looking at me. I turned to see what he saw, and nearly fell over.
The Lady Ryanne had stopped shaking her fist at the clouds and now held her sword with both hands. I could only see the side of her face, but she looked a little less furious and a little more reasonable. She looked like she was listening to someone. But that wasn't what stunned me; it was who she was listening to, and that they hadn't been there before.
Standing there, his face like stone, was a man in black armor, his black hair still and dry around his head as if the storm didn't touch him. He was staring at the Lady Ryanne but listening to the woman who stood next to him, one hand on his plated shoulder. She also had black hair, and although the gloom made everything dark, I thought her dress was green. Their clothes were old beyond antique, and the woman's skirts hardly moved at all.
"Rhys, the Black Duke," Grey said in my ear, "last lord of Ravensgard, and his lady and wife, Siobhan Ravenhair."
"You were right," was all I could think of to say. "She looks just like him." I'd heard stories of the Black Duke all my life; I believed in his ghost the same way I believed in the gods--blindly, unquestioning, and without having to see them. I sometimes doubted that he walked the keep, but I never thought I'd get to see him for proof. Grey had a hold of my arm now, and if he hadn't I would have slid bonelessly all the way to the bottom of the keep steps. "What's she saying?"
"I don't know. I think she's trying to talk the Black Duke out of destroying the keep, the village, and the Lady Ryanne. He's very protective."
"He's very dead. What kind of claim can he make on the place?" As if he knew we were talking about him, the Black Duke turned his head and stared at us. My mouth snapped shut. His face terrified me, and not just because it belonged to a dead man. I realized why his name alone was said to have made grown men tremble in fear.
The Lady Ryanne said something and it looked like the Black Duke shouted at her, and Grey said "I wish we could hear him" in my ear. I could hardly see for the rain. It looked like they were all shouting at each other, two dead people and one living one, and Grey and I could only watch.
And then the Lady Ryanne picked up her old, heavy sword and swung it at the Black Duke, and since he was a ghost, the blade passed right through him, and this time I heard what he said.
"No one raises a sword to me in my own home!" he thundered over the storm. Grey's fingers dug into my arm through the sweater. The Lady Ryanne, to her great credit, stood her ground where I would have fainted in fear.
"This is no longer your home!" she yelled back. "You have been dead hundreds of years; you have no claim to Ravensgard except in the chronicles!"
"What can he do to her?" I yelled in Grey's ear.
"Besides wash her over the side of the keep and into the sea?" he said. "He could--"
"You!" the Black Duke demanded, interrupting Grey to point at us. "Who are you to stand in judgement on me?"
"We do not judge you, my lord," Grey said, as loud as he could while still being deferential. "We come from the village of Ravensgard; we only wish to know the fate of our families and friends."
I pushed my hair out of my face and added, "My lord, we have always respected the remains of the keep." Either that was a good enough explanation or we were too inconsequential to bother with, because the Black Duke turned away from us and went back to his debate with the Lady Ryanne and his wife.
I don't know how long they argued or what else they said; I only know I felt as if I was about to drown on dry land and I was cold to the bone and desperately wanted to go home, but I could not move. Grey and I backed down a few steps, held hands and watched the woman who claimed Ravensgard as her legacy try and prove herself to its last owner.
And in the end she won. She heaved the sword over the side of the keep and into the sea, and the Black Duke and Siobhan Ravenhair followed it. The Lady Ryanne watched them with her back to us, and although neither the rain nor the wind let up, she seemed less blown about and more peaceful. Grey climbed the rest of the stairs and was about to go to her when someone else materialized and stopped him. It was our mother.
She died when we were barely a year old, and we'd never seen a portrait of her, but I could have been a half-blind horse on a moonless night and I still would have known her. She looked like a female Grey and an older me, and we very clearly heard her thank the Lady Ryanne for saving her children and her village. And then she crossed the roof to where we stood, Grey with one foot on the wood planks, me with both hands clutching his sleeve, and she smiled at us and kissed us each on the forehead. And then she walked around us and before we could turn she was gone.
"Grey," I said, hoping he could hear me over the storm, "let's go." He looked down and I knew the water streaking his face was not all rain. I'd never seen my brother cry.
The gods have given you this gift of location so you can watch over your brother, the priests had told me. He's a reckless boy, and someone must be able to keep him out of trouble.
That may be true, I thought now, but it was never the gods who told me where he was. It was a little voice in my head that belonged to the ghost of my mother.
"I swear on the names of all the gods, Grey Kitts," I said, "I will never again doubt your word on ghosts." I knew the Black Duke was gone from the ruins of Ravensgard Keep and our mother with him, and I also knew the story of his haunting would pass from fact into myth for our children and children's children and down through the generations, a story to be told even when there was no one left who remembered the Black Duke or the Lady Ryanne or Briar and Grey Kitts or the storm that nearly washed Ravensgard into the sea and out of memory.
Ravensgard Keep was the site of the Black Duke's greatest happiness and greatest sorrow, and in his arrogance he believed that entitled him to hold it for all eternity. But he never reckoned on someone who claimed his ward as her inheritance, who believed she was due his keep and his title simply because she was alive and he wasn't, who was ready to face him down to win them. Rhys, the Black Duke of Ravensgard, whose name even now is used to threaten unruly children--he never imagined that he'd be challenged by someone who was not afraid of him.
She argued with him for what she felt was rightfully hers, and maybe because it was, he left her to it.
When the Black Duke died without an heir his estates fell to whoever could hold them, but because it was so close to his supposedly haunted keep, the village of Ravensgard, my village, was mostly left alone. The people built a wall and formed a local militia for protection against bandits and warbands and merchant trains, to do what a lord would do if there was one. Most of the wall eventually came down, and now all that's left is some of the north side. Ravensgard sits in a good location on a main road, but it isn't rich. People were so afraid of the Black Duke, and because they think he haunts the keep, all kinds of stories have sprung up that have his ghost defending the village the way he never did when he was alive. It doesn't help that on a clear day you can see the keep from the road outside town.
Maybe once a year one of the King's judges comes through to try cases that would be beyond the local lord, if we had one, and otherwise we have a council and a mayor to make decisions and keep the law. We're two miles or so inland from the keep, which sits on a cliff overlooking the sea, and we're as normal a village as exists. We farm and herd cows and sheep and pigs, and we have merchants and craftsmen and two competing smiths who hate each other, and a temple with two priests to keep our faith, and there are taverns and an inn, and every so often people traveling the road stop here. One of the King's tax collectors always comes with the judge, and we assume that gives us the right to call on the King if we ever need him.
The King's Road runs past the village, heading north to the King's city; south of Ravensgard it becomes the Tkaya Road, because that's where it goes. No one I know has ever been to the King's city, although some have seen Tkaya, which they say is bigger than Ravensgard, but you would expect any city with a road named after it to be bigger than Ravensgard. It was up this road, coming from Tkaya, that a woman rode one day, trailing a small retinue and a few wagons and horses and livestock. She stopped long enough to ask someone if this was the village of Ravensgard, and when he said yes, she turned west towards the sea. And because the person she asked was my brother, and because she caught his fancy, he followed her and later reported that she had moved into the Black Duke's keep.
Maybe I should say something about my brother. His name is Grey and he's younger than I am by ten minutes; we look alike except that his eyes are the color of his name and sometimes he has the sight. He'll look at a mare and know she'll foal before the year is out, and he knew when the mill caught fire before anyone saw the smoke. The priests think this is a gift from the gods, although they called it a curse when he accurately predicted the death of the mayor's sister. Grey's seen the ghost of the Black Duke and his lady; he says he even talked to them, but I don't believe that.
I always wondered what his sight told him about the woman who moved into the keep, but he never really told me. Possibly it didn't tell him anything--it's more of an intuition than a sight, and intuition isn't very specific and isn't always awake.
In any case, the next day the entire village knew the woman had moved into the keep because it was easy to fix up and that she had a small household--a lady's maid, a cook, a chamberlain, a page, a captain, and six guards. The cook and the chamberlain were married and the page was their son, and the day after they came, the captain and a guard came to town to recruit some men to help rebuild the keep. My brother, predictably enough, was one of them.
"Why did she move into the keep?" I asked him. "Does she know about the Black Duke's ghost?"
"She says she's his heir," he said.
"The ghost's heir?" my father repeated. "Since when can ghosts make heirs?" He thought he was being funny. "Oh, don't make faces at me, Briar, I'm just having a joke at your brother's expense."
"But the Black Duke's daughter died," I told Grey, ignoring my father. "And his wife was an only child, and she came from across the sea to boot."
"She looks like him," he said. He took out three plates and just stood there holding them. "Her skin is like porcelain and her hair is black as night, and her eyes are the color of the sky before a hurricane."
"You couldn't have gotten much work done on the keep if you were staring at her eyes all day," my father commented.
"And you don't really know what the Black Duke looked like anyway," I said. "Are you going to help me or are you just going to stand there with the plates?"
"Oh, sorry." He handed them to me and sat down. "I've heard the Duke had a brother; I guess that's how she can claim his estate. Her men call her 'Lady.'"
"I didn't doubt that part, I just doubt that she's his heir. If he had any, they would've come out when he died."
"There wasn't anything for them to come out for," my father said. He considered himself an authority on local legend and thought he knew everything there was to know about the Dukes of Ravensgard, especially the last one. "The hall was wrecked, the household gone, the village armed, the grounds haunted."
"You tell me, Dad," Grey said, "did the Black Duke have a brother?"
"If someone really wanted Ravensgard they could've easily overpowered the village," I insisted. "Ghost or not."
"Some sources say he had two brothers and a sister," my father went on, "and that the oldest brother died under mysterious circumstances for Rhys to take the title and estates. He was an opportunist even as a boy."
"See?" Grey said to me. I rolled my eyes. Every few years our father had another story about the Black Duke. "I'm going back tomorrow; she wants to restore the hall. We tried to tell her it would take more work than we can give, but she ignored us."
"Sounds like nobility to me." My father nodded, satisfied.
The next day Grey had a more interesting piece of news--the lady, he told us, was named Ryanne. A shiver ran up my spine; when the stories about the Black Duke gave his daughter a name, she was usually called Ryanne.
"If her captain is named Rhys," I said, "I'm going to walk out that door away from this place and just keep going until my shoes fall off."
"I wouldn't worry," my brother told me, "I heard one of his men call him Laine."
That wasn't much better--"Laine" appeared in some of the stories as one of the Duke's men, sometimes his captain, sometimes one of the men who tried to run his estates after he went mad, sometimes as a neighboring lord who fell in love with Siobhan, for which the Black Duke cut out his eyes. It seemed to agree with my brother that the Lady Ryanne really was Ravensgard's heir.
I had a friend named Laina, whose brother Merril used to pull my hair when we were little. Their father was a tanner and their mother the daughter of a dyer, and their clothes were well-made but usually dyed wildly clashing colors. They were a red-haired family, and on a sunny day you could see them coming a mile off. Laina had been named for the man who fell in love with Siobhan Ravenhair and had lost his eyes for it. Her mother thought it was romantic; her father thought it was perverse. I thought it was too much of a coincidence, especially since the Lady Ryanne's captain also had red hair.
Merril and my brother and a boy named Goose (so called because he was the youngest of eight children, and when he was a baby he would honk like a goose to get people's attention) worked on the keep for a week without major incident, although each day brought more proof of the lady's relationship to the Black Duke (from Grey) and more speculation about her relationship to her captain (from Goose) and more complaints about the work she wanted done (from Merril). She got almost all the able-bodied men in town to prop up the walls and work on a roof for the great hall, no mean feat since everyone also had a craft to practice or a business to run or a herd to watch or crops to tend, or some combination of all four. At night most of the workers came home, much to the relief of their families, and the ones who stayed did so because the Lady Ryanne asked them to tell her and her household about the village and how it had fared since the death of the Black Duke, and what she should know if she was to take stewardship of it.
My brother dragged my father out there once, leaving me to watch the sheep and no one to watch the house, and my father stayed all day and all night displaying his great historical knowledge to the lady. I have no doubt he told her all his best stories, even the ones he knew were hearsay and gossip and outright myth, and I also have no doubt she believed every word.
"Your brother was right," he told me the next day. "The Lady Ryanne is unquestionably the Black Duke's heir. She not only looks like him, but she knows more about him and his life and his line than anyone I ever met." Which probably meant she'd already heard all of my father's best stories and most of his second-best ones.
"Does she believe the keep's haunted?" I asked, wondering if she'd known all along. The men who stayed late to educate the lady on Ravensgard came home with stories about how she stood guard over the keep with an ancient two-handed sword, and how they heard someone walking through the ruins and along the cliffs although everyone in the household was accounted for and it was never someone from the village. The ghost walks, my brother told me, and I couldn't even tease him about it.
"She said, when I asked her, that Ravensgard is hers and if the Duke has a problem with that he can come to her."
"So she not only thinks the keep's haunted, but she also thinks the Black Duke will complain to her face if he doesn't like her being there. What's he going to say when she raises the great hall and installs herself as Duchess?" Like everyone else I believed the keep was haunted by the Black Duke's ghost, but if he really wanted her out, she'd be days gone by now.
Grey confirmed the story about the sword; it was an antique, he said, and she'd brought it with her, and he would bet his future that it once belonged to the Black Duke.
"Your future's not worth much now that you spend all your time on her hall," I said, grinning and tugging on his hair. "You need a haircut. Has anyone ever seen the ghost during the day?"
"Sometimes, when the fog rolls in. One of the guards told Goose he saw a man in armor walking around where they say Siobhan's Tower was, but when he called to him, the man just disappeared into the fog. "
"What did Goose say?"
"He believed it. The ruins give him the creeps; they always have."
So the Lady Ryanne was heir to Ravensgard and the Black Duke's ghost walked the ruins of the keep his descendant was trying to make habitable for herself. I decided two things could happen--either the Black Duke would scare her off like he scared off anyone else who tried to hold his keep and his village, or she would defy him and stay there. In either case, we would have something to tell our grandchildren, if we lived long enough to have them. And I only phrase it that way because two weeks after she arrived, the Lady Ryanne's plans and presence caused a mighty storm that almost flattened the village of Ravensgard and everyone in it.
I was in town with Laina when it hit. We went to the Shepherd's Rest because it was close and we liked to tease the innkeeper's son, who was cute and easily embarrassed by girls. But the rain came harder and harder, the innkeeper closed the wooden shutters and pulled the damper down in the fireplace to keep the wind from blowing the logs out into the room, and we figured we might be there longer than we'd expected. The inn was solidly built and had been surviving hurricanes since before my parents were born, as had the Gilded Rose tavern and the mayor's house and the older smithy. In times of wild weather, people tended to cluster in the safest buildings until the wind died down. We'd all heard about people who blew off the cliffs and into the sea, and about travelers who'd gotten caught out in a storm and had been saved by the ghost of the Black Duke.
Laina and I were soon joined by Goose's youngest older sister Katrin, who said she'd put her sheep in the inn's stable and hoped her brother had sense to come in out of the rain. We didn't think so, and when Merril banged in, bright clothes askew and his red hair flattened on his head, we asked him if he'd seen Goose.
"Not since this morning," he said. "He was going into the forest to cut more trees for the damned roof." The great hall was the bane of his existence; it required hard and heavy work, and he hated anything more strenuous than sitting on his butt watching dye set.
We listened to the building creak and prayed it wouldn't fall on our heads. I wondered where my father was.
"This is nothing," Merril was saying, answering some fear of Katrin's that I hadn't heard. "Four years ago--remember?--there was that hurricane."
"That wasn't a hurricane," Laina said. "That was just a lot of rain."
"Our rabbit hutch blew away," Katrin said, "and one of the sheep." A wolf or a dog had probably gotten the sheep, but Katrin always blamed terrible things on either the gods or the weather, or both.
"I remember that," I said. "Our roof leaked for a month. But it wasn't a hurricane, Laina's right. My father says we haven't had a real hurricane since before he married my mother. And anyway," I said to Katrin, "your hutches fall over if you look at them sideways."
"That's what Goose says," Merril added. "Hey," he said to me, "where's Grey? I know he came back to town with the rest of us who aren't killing ourselves on the great hall, but I haven't seen him."
Sometimes, I can find my brother. If he's lost or you just don't know where to look, I might be able to tell you where he is. He says it's like his sight but I think it's just a result of being twins and having known him all his life, although strange things do happen. When we were nine he fell out of a tree, and I tripped on a flat floor in Laina's father's tannery and broke my wrist. And when we were eleven and I went in the sea and almost drowned, Grey was helping Goose watch his father's sheep, and he choked on nothing until they'd pumped the water out of my lungs. The same way the priests call Grey's sight a blessing from the gods, they say I can generally find him because the gods think someone should always be looking after him, and who better than his sister?
The priests are good, faithful men, but no one can know all the gods think and do and say. But sometimes things happen and I know why they became priests. I sat in the Shepherd's Rest with Laina and Merril and Katrin, and we listened to the storm and hoped our houses and crops and shops and herds were ok, and I wondered where Grey was, and suddenly I knew, with the unexplainable certainty of his sight, that the reason for this terrible, destructive weather lived in Ravensgard Keep, and my brother had gone to save her from herself.
"He's at the keep," I told Merril.
"It has a roof," he said. "He'll be dry. And the Lady Ryanne's there. " He made a knowing face.
"That's why he is, just not for the reason you think. I have to go get him."
"You should let him stay there. It's strong, I worked on it. Grey's safer there than he'd be almost anywhere."
"Are you mad?" Laina said at the same time. "You can't go out in that rain, you won't be able to see."
"And you'll blow away," Katrin added.
"I'll be fine," I insisted. "I'll go home first to make sure my father's ok. He's probably sitting under the table because he says it's the safest place in the house."
"How will you get there?" Laina demanded as I stood up. "You can't walk through that storm."
"Take Gelly," Merril offered, after a second's hesitation. "But you might have to force him out of the stable, he hates the rain."
"Then how did you get here?" Katrin asked him. He shrugged.
"Thank you," I said. "I could almost kiss you." He was still grinning at his sister as I elbowed my way out of the common room and around to the stable. Merril's horse dug in his heels when he realized I was going to take him back outside, but I'd always been good with animals, especially horses, and one intractable bay was no match for me when I was desperate.
The rain was sheeting down so solidly it was like trying to ride along the bottom of the sea. As we headed home lightning crashed around us, spurring Gelly faster than I ever could. I tied him to the post in front, miraculously still stuck in the ground, and the wind pushed me inside. My father was indeed sitting under the table with a hurricane lamp and some candles and his books and a blanket. The house shook but at least it wasn't leaking, and the fire was out.
"Dad!" I yelled over the storm. "Are you ok?" I ran into the back room, where I stopped just long enough to strip off my now-dripping shirt and pull on a slightly more waterproof sweater.
"Briar? What are you doing?" he demanded. "This is the worst storm since I was a boy. Where have you been? Why aren't you still there?"
"Laina and I went into the Shepherd's Rest when it started to rain. I have to find Grey, don't go anywhere."
He called my name again, but I was out the door and on Gelly's back. I turned the horse's head towards the keep and slapped him to get him started. He wouldn't move. What with all the wind and rain, it was a wonder he was even still standing.
"Come on!" I yelled in his ear. "My stupid brother's in more danger than your horse's brain can possibly guess, and if we don't find him I'll cut you up for shoe leather!" That got him moving, or maybe it was the lightning again.
We galloped towards Ravensgard Keep through the rain; I prayed that it was still standing, that Grey hadn't blown out to sea, that he hadn't been struck by lightning, that I would live to see him again. I had never been so glad to almost fall over a stone foundation. I pounded on the door of the keep until it opened; I pulled Gelly inside and found the Lady Ryanne's household clustered with a loud herd of geese and some sheep, which clumped against the wall with their heads down. They all seemed pretty frightened, more so because I blew in looking like something out of nightmare.
"What are you doing out?" the captain of the guard demanded at the same time I asked if anyone had seen my brother.
"Where's my brother?" I repeated. "Grey Kitts, he's working on your hall, he never came back to the village, I know he's here."
"He went up to comfort my lady," the captain said, sounding a little annoyed. Clearly he thought he should be upstairs comforting his lady, and not down here trying to calm the geese and the rest of the household. In his annoyance and disheveled red hair he looked uncannily like Merril, reminding me that he and Merril's sister had both been named for a man who lost his eyes to the Black Duke's jealousy.
"Watch my horse," I said, heading for the stairs.
"Wait--you can't--" Maybe he said more, I wasn't listening. And anyway, what were Grey and the Lady Ryanne going to be doing that I shouldn't interrupt?
They weren't on the second floor. I kept climbing; the steps got wetter and wetter. With every thunderclap the keep shook, dislodging bits of stone and mortar, and I hoped it was as strong as Merril said it was. I knew I was nearing the top when I felt rain on my face, and as I rounded a curve I saw my brother's legs poking through the open trap door, his feet in a puddle. I climbed faster, as carefully as I could.
"Grey!" I yelled, grabbing at his shirt. He didn't hear me, and if he did he ignored me. I pushed my way up the last few steps, slipping on the rain-slick stone, pulling on him to keep from falling. I poked my head through the trap door to get his attention and see what he'd come out here for. The Lady Ryanne stood on the roof, gesturing at the sky, the antique sword people talked about dragging behind her.
"You cannot keep this place!" she screamed. "Ravensgard is mine and you will not have it!" The wind howled at her, whipped her hair around her face. "I won't leave, do you hear me? You're dead, and you will not chase me away from what should be mine!"
"Grey!" I yelled again, my face in his. At least, I tried to yell, but thunder boomed, lightning broke out of the clouds, and a piece of wall exploded in a flash of light and a wet haze of stone dust. Grey flinched and I ducked and grabbed his arm. My sweater was already soaked through and I couldn't see for the rain in my eyes.
"Gods above, Grey," I tried again, "we're going to drown!" He wasn't even looking at me. I turned to see what he saw, and nearly fell over.
The Lady Ryanne had stopped shaking her fist at the clouds and now held her sword with both hands. I could only see the side of her face, but she looked a little less furious and a little more reasonable. She looked like she was listening to someone. But that wasn't what stunned me; it was who she was listening to, and that they hadn't been there before.
Standing there, his face like stone, was a man in black armor, his black hair still and dry around his head as if the storm didn't touch him. He was staring at the Lady Ryanne but listening to the woman who stood next to him, one hand on his plated shoulder. She also had black hair, and although the gloom made everything dark, I thought her dress was green. Their clothes were old beyond antique, and the woman's skirts hardly moved at all.
"Rhys, the Black Duke," Grey said in my ear, "last lord of Ravensgard, and his lady and wife, Siobhan Ravenhair."
"You were right," was all I could think of to say. "She looks just like him." I'd heard stories of the Black Duke all my life; I believed in his ghost the same way I believed in the gods--blindly, unquestioning, and without having to see them. I sometimes doubted that he walked the keep, but I never thought I'd get to see him for proof. Grey had a hold of my arm now, and if he hadn't I would have slid bonelessly all the way to the bottom of the keep steps. "What's she saying?"
"I don't know. I think she's trying to talk the Black Duke out of destroying the keep, the village, and the Lady Ryanne. He's very protective."
"He's very dead. What kind of claim can he make on the place?" As if he knew we were talking about him, the Black Duke turned his head and stared at us. My mouth snapped shut. His face terrified me, and not just because it belonged to a dead man. I realized why his name alone was said to have made grown men tremble in fear.
The Lady Ryanne said something and it looked like the Black Duke shouted at her, and Grey said "I wish we could hear him" in my ear. I could hardly see for the rain. It looked like they were all shouting at each other, two dead people and one living one, and Grey and I could only watch.
And then the Lady Ryanne picked up her old, heavy sword and swung it at the Black Duke, and since he was a ghost, the blade passed right through him, and this time I heard what he said.
"No one raises a sword to me in my own home!" he thundered over the storm. Grey's fingers dug into my arm through the sweater. The Lady Ryanne, to her great credit, stood her ground where I would have fainted in fear.
"This is no longer your home!" she yelled back. "You have been dead hundreds of years; you have no claim to Ravensgard except in the chronicles!"
"What can he do to her?" I yelled in Grey's ear.
"Besides wash her over the side of the keep and into the sea?" he said. "He could--"
"You!" the Black Duke demanded, interrupting Grey to point at us. "Who are you to stand in judgement on me?"
"We do not judge you, my lord," Grey said, as loud as he could while still being deferential. "We come from the village of Ravensgard; we only wish to know the fate of our families and friends."
I pushed my hair out of my face and added, "My lord, we have always respected the remains of the keep." Either that was a good enough explanation or we were too inconsequential to bother with, because the Black Duke turned away from us and went back to his debate with the Lady Ryanne and his wife.
I don't know how long they argued or what else they said; I only know I felt as if I was about to drown on dry land and I was cold to the bone and desperately wanted to go home, but I could not move. Grey and I backed down a few steps, held hands and watched the woman who claimed Ravensgard as her legacy try and prove herself to its last owner.
And in the end she won. She heaved the sword over the side of the keep and into the sea, and the Black Duke and Siobhan Ravenhair followed it. The Lady Ryanne watched them with her back to us, and although neither the rain nor the wind let up, she seemed less blown about and more peaceful. Grey climbed the rest of the stairs and was about to go to her when someone else materialized and stopped him. It was our mother.
She died when we were barely a year old, and we'd never seen a portrait of her, but I could have been a half-blind horse on a moonless night and I still would have known her. She looked like a female Grey and an older me, and we very clearly heard her thank the Lady Ryanne for saving her children and her village. And then she crossed the roof to where we stood, Grey with one foot on the wood planks, me with both hands clutching his sleeve, and she smiled at us and kissed us each on the forehead. And then she walked around us and before we could turn she was gone.
"Grey," I said, hoping he could hear me over the storm, "let's go." He looked down and I knew the water streaking his face was not all rain. I'd never seen my brother cry.
The gods have given you this gift of location so you can watch over your brother, the priests had told me. He's a reckless boy, and someone must be able to keep him out of trouble.
That may be true, I thought now, but it was never the gods who told me where he was. It was a little voice in my head that belonged to the ghost of my mother.
"I swear on the names of all the gods, Grey Kitts," I said, "I will never again doubt your word on ghosts." I knew the Black Duke was gone from the ruins of Ravensgard Keep and our mother with him, and I also knew the story of his haunting would pass from fact into myth for our children and children's children and down through the generations, a story to be told even when there was no one left who remembered the Black Duke or the Lady Ryanne or Briar and Grey Kitts or the storm that nearly washed Ravensgard into the sea and out of memory.
Ravensgard Keep was the site of the Black Duke's greatest happiness and greatest sorrow, and in his arrogance he believed that entitled him to hold it for all eternity. But he never reckoned on someone who claimed his ward as her inheritance, who believed she was due his keep and his title simply because she was alive and he wasn't, who was ready to face him down to win them. Rhys, the Black Duke of Ravensgard, whose name even now is used to threaten unruly children--he never imagined that he'd be challenged by someone who was not afraid of him.
She argued with him for what she felt was rightfully hers, and maybe because it was, he left her to it.
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John Teall
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About 'The Ghosts of Ravensgard - Briar's Story':
• Created by:
Cindy Rosenthal• Copyright: ©Cindy Rosenthal. All rights reserved!
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More by 'Cindy Rosenthal':
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| The Swan Prince (part 1) | Children of the Rain |
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