by Rita Woods
The old woman had wanted her to wait for Winter. To wait for the healer, but all Margot wanted to do was sleep. To dream of her grandmother, her sister. Of a place that made sense. She turned in a slow circle. All of the little trails looked the same.
She had just decided on one, hoping it would lead her back to the little shelter or perhaps to the healer she was to meet; just taken a few steps into the shadows, when a woman came bursting through the brush. She saw Margot standing in the middle of the trail and skittered to a stop, clutching a reed basket tightly to her chest.
The woman was frail looking, young, perhaps mid-twenties. But it was her face that seized Margot’s attention. The right side was smooth, the color of milk chocolate, her eyes almond shaped. But the left side … the left side was a ruined horror, collapsed, the deep purple-hued scars running like melted wax from her hairline to the corner of her lips, twisting her features, distorting her mouth.
Mon Dieu!
Her own face burned in sympathy.
“Well?” snapped the girl.
Margot blinked and looked away in embarrassment, then, glancing at the basket of herbs, forced herself to meet the girl’s eyes. “I was looking for the healer. Louisa?”
“What for?”
Margot flinched at the woman’s sharp tone. “Mother … Abigail said she would have something…” She stopped. The girl was glaring at her, openly hostile.
Margot was both startled and amused by the girl’s aggressive unfriendliness. She was like a badger that she and Veronique had once cornered near the Kentucky woman’s henhouse. Biting her lip to hold back a smile, she asked, “You are she? You are Louisa?”
“Yes,” said the girl after a long, narrow-eyed pause. “I’m Louisa.”
“Mother Abigail sent me to you,” Margot began again. “She said you would give me something for … strength.”
Louisa sucked her teeth. “Course she did. Special requests. Something for strength,” she grumbled. “Think I was back on the plantation, folks makin’ demands. Well, come on then. Can’t make it standin’ here, can I?”
Margot stepped aside to allow the herbalist to pass. “My name is Margot,” she said to Louisa’s back. The other girl did not respond. This healer was a curiosity to her but she held her tongue. She doubted that the cantankerous girl would answer any questions anyway. As they stepped back into the clearing, Louisa flicked a hand toward the Central Fire.
“Go. Wait over there. It’ll take a bit to mix up something. Not like I got nothin’ else to do. Might as well be warm while you wait.”
There was a sudden commotion behind them. Margot turned in time to see Winter careening from the trees, her face wild, her headdress undone. They locked eyes and then she was on her, pulling at her, her eyes crazed.
“Mother Abigail? Where is she?”
“I don’t…” Margot shook her off. “What is it?”
She took a deep breath, but it was too late. Winter’s fear had already begun to infect her. From the corner of her eye she saw the other settlers edging closer.
“What is it?” she asked again.
Winter shook her head, as if whatever it was was too terrible to put into words. She spun away and dashed toward the cottages. Margot looked uneasily toward the woods that she’d just exited but saw nothing.
She found herself following Winter as the girl wove frantically among the cottages searching for Mother Abigail.
The old priestess was coming down the slope from the highlands, laughing softly at something Josiah was saying into her ear. Her face froze as her frenzied charge skidded to a stop in front of her. A young couple walking nearby turned to stare.
“Child, what…?” Mother Abigail began.
For a moment, Winter said nothing. She stood gulping mouthfuls of air, one hand clutching the priestess’s cloak, the other pulling nervously at her hair. Finally, turning her back against the staring couple, she spoke.
“Pattyrollers!” she gasped, her voice strangled. “In Louisa’s garden.”
Pattyrollers?
Margot frowned. For a moment, she couldn’t place the word, and then she remembered. It was what some of the slaves called the slave hunters. Her blood turned to ice. The shocked expression of the others around them told her that they’d heard it too.
Around her, the world had gone silent. Time slowed, oozing around her like cooling molasses, images coming to her in fragments: Louisa’s basket falling to the ground, Mother Abigail’s frowning confusion. And the old man, Josiah, his face as bland as milk, smiling gently, as if he hadn’t understood the words Winter said. That night at the mulberry, the sickly farrier had said she would be safe here in this place. Winter had said it as well, and the old woman. They all said it.
A lie! It was all a lie! Nowhere was safe! All this, everything has been for nothing!
Sound slowly seeped back into Remembrance as time caught up with itself.
“What you sayin’, girl?” hissed Mother Abigail, grabbing one of Winter’s flailing hands. “No white mens in Remembrance! Silans kounye a! Hush now! That is impossible!”
The priestess’s touch seemed to gather the girl. “I heard them,” she cried. “White voices. Up in the gardens. Just now.” Her voice shook.
“Liar!” snarled Louisa. “Ain’t nobody up there. I just came from up that way. How any white men gon’ get in Remembrance in the first place? And if they did, how they gon’ get way up there without makin’ a big ol’ ruckus. Don’t nobody come in my gardens.”
The priestess sliced an impatient hand through the air, silencing her, then pulled Winter into a space between the cottages, out of earshot, Josiah close behind. This time, Margot did not follow.
“Lies,” Louisa said aloud. “All of it.”
She shot Winter a withering look, then bent to pick up her fallen herbs. Margot smelled the terror lurking just beneath the girl’s anger. She stood there, uncertain of what to do. Go back to her shelter? Wait by the Central Fire? She wanted to run: as far and as fast as she could. It didn’t matter where. All this, and Veronique had died for nothing. She rubbed a thumb over the bridge of her nose.
Margot looked around. A young couple stood with their heads together, vigorously whispering. The man’s hands waved about in agitation. People were milling about the fire, looking up to where Mother Abigail had disappeared among the cabins. A restless murmur filled the area.
Louisa had disappeared and there was no sign of Winter, Mother Abigail, or Josiah. She ground her teeth. There was a phrase her grandmother had said many times when things sometimes seemed to go from bad to worse. Margot whispered it now under her breath.
“De la pot dans le feu. From the pan into the fire.”
26
Mother Abigail
She’d sent them all away so she could think—except that she’d been standing in the exact same spot at the trailhead for an eternity without a single useful thought. Winter’s words had struck her in the face like the flat side of an ax. The girl had said the same words over and over, though the priestess had needed only to hear them the once: white men in Remembrance. The only reason Mother Abigail remained silent was because so many conflicting emotions—rage, fear, disbelief—had seized up her tongue.
She’d sent them away, Winter and Josiah, everyone. She needed to be alone. It felt as if those terrible words had rubbed the very skin off her body, exposing the nerves underneath.
The girl had wanted to charge back up the hill to the gardens, to confront the white demons that dared invade Remembrance. And do what? the priestess wondered. Demand that they leave? Snatch them down from their horses and hold them hostage?
It is what they would have done if they’d found the slavers, but she’d sent two men back up to Louisa’s gardens and they’d found … nothing. But the priestess had no doubts about what Winter had heard. It was slipping away from her; each day it grew harder and harder for her to find the seams running through space. Even that moment with Margot in the dooryard, something that s
hould have required no more effort, no more thought than flicking a mosquito, had left her feeling drained.
She closed her eyes. The barrier between them and Outside was still there, but it was weakening, she was weakening. She felt it like an ache in her gut.
The Edge.
Her creation.
Those years of studying the Art had opened a place in her brain where her boundless rage, her hate, could be turned into the power to manipulate space. She had made this place. A sanctuary. This one thing they could never take from her. But now …
The slavers were not in Remembrance. Not now. Not yet. But they were coming. She could feel it, and even so, she could not rouse herself to action. She stood shivering at the head of the trail leading up into the gardens and moaned. Time was a slim thread running before her, and it was running out.
She needed to …
She shook her head, trying to clear it. She didn’t know what she needed to do.
A branch snapped in the shadows.
“Who’s there?” she cried, wincing at how old, how frightened she sounded.
“Who’s there?” she called again, forcing the quiver from her voice.
“Just me, Mother Abigail.”
A young man stepped from the cover of the trees and she relaxed.
“What you be doin’ out here, David Henry?” she asked.
“Josiah asked me to bring you something to eat.” He held a cloth-covered bowl out to her and looked up at the gray sky. “Look like snow comin’.”
The priestess glanced up without comment. Her hands shook as she took the bowl and lifted the cloth. The sweet smell of corn chowder wafted up, and her stomach growled in appreciation. She thanked him and eased herself to the cold ground to eat. When he didn’t turn to leave, she rested the bowl in her lap and examined him.
David Henry was what Josiah called “an invisible Negro”: average height, average weight, skin just a nondescript average brown. He was one of the few who’d chosen not to share his before story, though the thick scars crisscrossing his back told them most of what they needed to know.
Remembrance had come to depend on his quiet, cheerful strength. She had come to depend on it. And when he had his “spells,” disappearing into the woods for days, only to return near mute and wild-eyed, Remembrance gathered around him, holding him, until his demons went back to sleep.
He stood now, watching her quietly, his skin glowing reddish in the late-afternoon light. He was holding a rifle. He had been one of the two men that had gone in search of the slavers near the hives.
“What you got, David Henry?”
He smiled but said nothing, his eyes never leaving hers.
“So you think Remembrance be needin’ protection with a gun now?” she asked.
He ran a hand lightly along the gun’s barrel. “There’s protection and then there’s caution.” He smiled and cocked his head. “And a man can’t never have too much a’ either.”
She nodded and studied him a moment. “What you hear, David Henry?”
He shrugged and stared up the darkening path toward the gardens. “Just things on the wind.”
Still watching him, she slurped her chowder, savoring the crisp cracklin’ between her teeth.
The young man turned and gazed off into the distance, his back straight. “Mother Abigail, Remembrance be my home. It be the place I born as a true man.”
He stopped and took a deep breath. She nodded again and waited for him to go on.
“If I gon’ have to die,” he said, “then it’s gon’ be here in Remembrance. For Remembrance … dyin’ as a man should die, protectin’ his own.”
“So that what you be hearin’ then? Dyin’ talk, David Henry?”
He looked at her and she saw a dangerous, simmering anger behind his smile. “Whenever you got white mens lurkin’ in the shadows hopin’ to catch nigras, ’specially nigras with no intention of cooperatin’,” he said, “somebody’s bound to die.”
Mother Abigail felt a chill. Were the loa speaking a warning through this man? For just a moment, the world tilted on itself, blurring her vision.
“Don’t understand much a this mumble jumble about Remembrance, how it come to be and such. How it works,” he went on. “Don’t much matter, anyhow. Remembrance’s real. That’s all I got to know. It’s real and it’s mine. And if the white folks ain’t here now, it just be a matter a’ time. Always is.”
His brown hand caressed the gun.
“It ain’t like I don’t believe in you, Mother Abigail. Nothin’ like that.” He chuckled, a pleasant, rumbling sound. “It’s just like I say. There’s protection and then there’s caution.”
“Well…,” she said. The world righted itself again. “That … sounds most sensible, David Henry.”
He peered at her intently, his face deadly serious again. “What you gonna do, Mother Abigail?”
The old woman grinned at him. The shaking in her hands had slowed a bit. “Well, jenn gason, right now, I’m fixin’ to eat me the rest of this fine chowder.”
* * *
The sun was barely peeking over the trees when she arrived at the clearing the next morning. Josiah was already there, slumped against the hollow tree, smoking his pipe. Winter squatted several yards away, her face closed. The priestess frowned, looking from one to the other, sensing the hum of anger in the air. Josiah blew fragrant smoke into the morning air. He nodded as she stepped clear of the trees. “Abigail,” he said mildly. Winter just stared.
She stopped a few feet from them and gazed across the yellowed grass. The air sparkled in the predawn crystalline fog, turning ordinary trees and shrubs into magical creatures. David Henry was right. An early snow was on the wind.
The priestess peered at Winter. “Most days have to near ’bout set you afire to get you out of bed. But today you be out in the freezin’ cold and the day barely broken,” she said dryly.
Winter shot a look at Josiah. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Mmmm,” replied Mother Abigail, one eyebrow raised.
She cut her eyes at Josiah. “And you couldn’t sleep either, old man?”
He chuckled and blew another plume of smoke into the frigid air. “Abigail, you know I ain’t slept in nigh on sixty years. Too much happenin’ in the world.”
“Wi, always.”
“Mother Abigail? What about the slavers, the pattyrollers I heard?”
The priestess turned to Winter. Absently licking her thumb, she smoothed a stray lock of Winter’s hair. The girl half-heartedly batted her hand away.
“Mother Abigail?”
The old priestess sighed and pulled her hands inside her cloak to hide them. The shakes had come back. And the pains in her head. Thoughts came to her like fireflies, flickering for a moment, then disappearing. She heard the sound of carriage wheels on the cobblestone street and dug her nails into her palms.
She tried to smile, to reassure the girl. “They not here, petite.”
“I wasn’t lying. I heard them!”
The priestess held up a hand. “I know child. You heard them. But they not here.”
Winter frowned. “I don’t…”
Mother Abigail felt Josiah watching her. Her head swam and she ground her teeth. Winter sat uncommonly still, waiting.
“The Edge,” she pressed on. “It … weak. That why you heard them. But they still Outside.”
“What?” Winter leaped to her feet. “What do you mean ‘weak’? What does that mean?”
Mother Abigail closed her eyes, opened them again. “Things change always, child,” she said, forcing her voice to stay calm. “The Edge … been around a long time. It just wearin’ down a bit. Like me.”
Winter stared at her, eyes wide in shock. “Can they…?” She took a deep breath. “Can they get in here?”
Josiah, still slumped at the base of the hollow tree, puffed quietly on his pipe. Though he said nothing, she sensed something in him, a heightened vigilance … and something darker.
“No!” Mot
her Abigail swallowed, the word sticking in her throat.
“You can fix it?”
The priestess looked away, fighting that peculiar sense of falling, of drifting off the world’s edge.
An image of David Henry with his gun popped into her head and she pushed it away. Of course she would fix it. She had made it, hadn’t she?
“Wi, petite. I can fix it.”
“Abigail.” Josiah got to his feet with an ease that defied his years.
She waited.
“Let’s walk, old woman,” he said. “You wait here, girl.”
He hooked an arm through Mother Abigail’s, and she let him lead her into the clearing.
“Makin’ promises you not sure you can keep, Abigail?” he said when they were out of earshot of Winter. “Lyin’ to the girl.”
She whirled on him. “That the second time you call me a liar, Josiah!”
She turned her back to him. There was a fluttering in her gut, faint but there, an echo of the day Zeus had appeared in Remembrance with his slaver.
“Abigail!”
She started and realized that Josiah had been talking to her the whole time. She frowned. “What?” she asked irritably. “What you tryin’ to say to me?”
He was standing in front of her. Those strange, dull eyes that should not have been able to see and yet missed nothing locked onto hers, and she felt the familiar rumble in her soul as she sensed the quiet force within him. She knew their relationship confused the others. He was not just her friend. It was more complicated than that. They fed off each other, back and forth, trading strength and knowledge. By now, after all these years, in some way they were nearly one creature. She was weakening and he knew it. Her weakness weakened him.
“What?” she asked again, impatient.
He hesitated. He was afraid, too. She saw that now and dread washed over her.