The cursed towers 260
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Isabeau's grief and sense of guilt were still raw. She dashed her tears away with the back of one hand
and went on gruffly, "He is your husband and ye say ye love him more than life itself. Well, care for him
then and teach him, as ye should have cared for Iseult and me."
Ishbel's eyes dropped, color sweeping up her throat and over her pale cheeks. "I ken . . . I'm sorry . . ."
she tried to say.
Isabeau said, "Ye ken I shall come back as soon as I can, but Maya and Bronwen need me too."
It was the wrong thing to say. Ishbel's mouth thinned and she said angrily, "To think my own daughter
would shelter and help our greatest enemy, the sorceress who did this to your father and to me! Do ye
no' understand that she and her evil Awl murdered hundreds o' innocent men and women?"
Now it was Isabeau's turn to blush and stammer. She could say nothing to explain her strange sense of
connection and empathy with the Fairge, so she merely turned away, saying tiredly, "I must go, Mam. I
said I would be back as soon as I can."
Maya had been living alone in the tree-house ever since the battle with the Mesmerdean the previous
summer. Isabeau had moved her back to the secret valley only a few days after Feld's death, for neither
Ishbel nor Khan'gharad could bear to have Maya anywhere near them. In their eyes the Fairge was their
implacable enemy, the one who had taken their lives and smashed them into a thousand irreparable
pieces.
Their condemnation hurt Isabeau and she wished she could see some way out of the tangle. She could
not abandon the Fairge, much as she sometimes secretly longed to, for she knew Maya could not survive
in the mountains. Even though Maya was her enemy, she could not help feeling a stir of sympathy for her.
The fact that this empathy was spiced with a fierce jealousy only made it harder. Isabeau may have been
able to condemn Maya to a cruel death to save everyone she loved further hardship and heartbreak. To
do so because she wanted Bronwen all to herself was to truly become a murderess. Although Isabeau
had killed before, she had never done so lightly. It had always been in extreme circumstances, when she
had had to choose to kill or be killed. Abandoning Maya to die from the bitter cold or from the fierce
mountain animals and faeries was to murder deliberately and Isabeau could not take that final,
incontrovertible step.
So she compromised. She left Maya as a prisoner in the hidden valley, opening the secret passage from
the kitchen so the Fairge could get in and out as she pleased. Isabeau moved all of Meghan's books and
potions into one of the higher storeys and warded it off so the Fairge could not learn any more of
Meghan's secrets. Then she divided her time between her parents at the Cursed Towers and Maya in the
hidden valley, taking Bronwen with her wherever she went.
Isabeau foraged for all their food, cooked their meals, taught Bronwen her letters and numbers, and
Khan'gha-rad how to behave like a man. She took Maya and Bronwen through the caves to the
underground loch to swim, spun wool, knitted and wove all their clothes, dug and weeded the vegetable
gardens, milked the goats and tended the beehives. She sometimes felt as if she was a mother hen with
four helpless chicks, rather than a young woman just turning twenty and rather in need of some mothering
herself.
The winter had come and gone, the snow storms making Isabeau's self-imposed task even more difficult.
She had not gone to the Spine of the World as usual, worried about how her charges would manage
without her and not trusting anyone else to look after Bronwen now Feld was gone. Ishbel did not have a
strong enough nature to deal with the situation well. The daughter of a Blessem laird, she had been
brought up with servants to wait on her hand and foot and was not used to having to cook or clean up
