The Two Paupers

by C. S. E. Cooney

  She laughed when he glared at her. “Don’t flash your eyes at me, cousin,” she drawled. “You Alderwoods may harness the lightning, but we Mannerings invented rubber boots.”

  “Fallacy,” Gideon retorted. “Rubber boots offer no protection against lightning.”

  Desdemona gasped in mock dismay. “Horned Lords save me! My metaphor has fallen to the foe!”

  He cracked a reluctant half-smile at her, which she knew to be her victory. Then he left her to her breakfast, and went to lick his wounds.

  ***

  Analise plopped cross-legged on the floor before the statue. After a minute, the statue also sank to its haunches, sliding the rest of the way, imitating her position. As its movements grew more fluid with each passing hour, the expression on its face also relaxed, that first fatal pleading and panic becoming something more somber but no less intense. It never stopped watching her, never blinked, or blinked so slowly she could not categorize it as such.

  The consistency of its skin remained cold and white, becoming more like marble than eggshell.

  “I think you’re getting stronger,” Analise told the statue. “Look at you! Less friable already than you were this morning. Lay odds you’ll have skin like lonsdaleite if you’re let to live unmolested by sledgehammers.” She reached out and patted its knee. “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Never did an Alderwood stand a chance against a Field. Gideon may not know it, but my name comes from Field of War, and has nothing to do with my family having been farmers since the Neolithic Revolution.”

  “What,” asked Elliot behind her, “did the Fields call themselves before the domestication of plant life?”

  Analise grinned at him over her shoulder. “Killers! We were hunting griffins while the Alderwoods were still swinging from trees. Didn’t you know?”

  “I suspected. Thank you for clarifying.”

  Elliot watched from the doorway of his studio that doubled as a guestroom (if the guest didn’t mind sharing her pallet with a stack of stretched canvases and a bucket of turpentine). He’d asked no questions the night before when Analise showed up at his door, leading a walking statue by the hand. Merely, he had stepped back to let them in, breathing, “Gideon.”

  “Yes.”

  “So. That’s why he destroys them.”

  Then he had put both of them right to bed, explaining that his wife was out on one of her long walks, and was not expected back till well after breakfast the following day. It was noon now, but Nyx was still not back. This did not seem to faze her husband at all.

  Looking up from her study of the statue, Analise exclaimed, “Say, Elliot! Do you have any storybooks?”

  “Sure thing. What did you have in mind?”

  The gravity well of the statue’s relentless gaze drew her attention forward again. “Children’s books? For small children. Lots of illustrations. Simple words. I want to try something.”

  There was a long silence. When Elliot didn’t answer immediately, Analise glanced at him again and saw that his broad face had turned bright red.

  “What?” she asked, surprised.

  “I...It’s just...For a second there I thought...I thought you’d guessed.”

  “Guessed what?” His face, if anything, went redder. Elliot smiled a bit helplessly and spread his hands, and suddenly she knew. “Oh.” Analise blinked hard, then hopped up from the floor, barely aware of the statue doing the same behind her. She barreled into his arms and hugged him hard.

  “When?” she demanded. “When is Nixie due? When do I get to meet my fairy godchild?”

  Elliot tried to rub the grin off his rosy face, but it would not long stay suppressed. “Early spring. Nyx says Spring Equinox at the twelfth bell of noon, but I reserve judgment. Though I shouldn’t.” He shook his head. “Ana! How you let me go on. Come along to the...the nursery. We happen,” his laughter burbled up again, “to have started a children’s book collection.”

  “Wait!” Analise cried, halting Elliot in his steps. She cast herself back upon his broad chest and hugged him once again.

  “That’s all,” she murmured when his arms closed around her, the heat from his bear-like body seeping into the chill she hadn’t known had gone bone-deep. “I just wanted to do that a little while longer. That’s all.”

  Behind her, another set of arms reached around to close about Elliot and complete a circuit of embrace. Elliot let out his breath slowly, resting his head against Analise’s forehead.

  “It’s learning,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” she said, the cold marble pressing hard against her back.

  After a moment, the marble warmed to her skin temperature. Surrounded in this knot of limbs, she was not certain where she ended and her companions began. No one moved for several minutes, so Analise was able to identify the exact moment the stillness in that sculpted chest behind her picked up a faint pulse.

  It grew steadily stronger, as if taking a cue from her heartbeat.

  ***

  Midnight was the breaking hour. It always had been.

  Gideon stared bleakly at the walls of his bedroom. This was Breaker House’s “Sea Foam Room.” Just at present he could attest that from his vantage point, sitting on the floor with his back to the bed and surrounded by all that pale green and cream, it did feel remarkably like drowning in so much silk jacquard.

  It was twenty-six past eleven. The walls were very still.

  They had been very still since twilight.

  “I’m not fooled,” he told the printed silk wall coverings. “Do you think I’ve never seen a hawk on streetlight, watching the park below? There is a stillness worse than wavering, and you are it.”

  He set his chin on his arms, which barred his knees to his chest. His body had done this automatically without the precise consent of his brain, to make of itself a smaller target. To protect its back and keep its eyes on the door. The problem with Breaker House was, everything became a door at midnight.

  Gideon had been nine when the walls of Breaker House first opened to him, when he learned that his cousin’s palatial summer cottage was not one house but three, all occupying the same space in three different worlds.

  Or, as one of the fickle Gentry tried to explain to him at some point, when he was a little older and ripe for the games and seductions of twiggy-limbed, snake-skinned, goat-horned maidens, “In reality, it’s really only one house after all. If you can call anything real that has to do with this house. Which you can’t,” she laughed, shrugging and rippling and turning silver in that light that came from nowhere Gideon could see. “Because only the Veil is real. But if there were other worlds before and behind the Veil, young mortal, this house would be anchored in all of them. Your Athe, our Valwode, and in Bana the Bone Kingdom as well, where the goblins dwell. And in all the seven hells beneath too. Of course.”

  Gideon himself always imagined (when he let himself imagine anything about the situation, which was not often, as he felt that even to think about the place beyond the walls was as dangerous as standing too close to Analise Field) that Breaker House was a world itself, tucked inside an infinite series of worlds like Damahrashan nesting dolls.

  As a child, he would visit every summer when his mother came to call upon her sister-in-law, Tracy Mannering, née Alderwood. After the first few times Breaker House had swallowed him and spat him out again, Gideon tried refusing to return. But Mother—that was, Mrs. Audrey Beckett-Alderwood—whose eyes were blue ice and whose smile glittered as if painted with powdered glass—merely waited out his storm of tears.

  After nine-year-old Gideon had thrown his fit, declaring he would never, not ever, not if she whipped him, or laid about him with sticks, or beat him with a broom of linden branches, go back to Breaker House, Audrey Alderwood told him, very simply, in a voice as polished and coiffed and manicured as the rest of her, “You have two choices, Gideon. You may come with me to Breaker House. Or you may spend the holiday with your father.”

  To which threat Gideon responde
d by snapping his mouth shut and weeping silently, protesting no further.

  Some things were worse than being eaten alive by Breaker House.

  How many times had he been brought through the walls in his sleep? Or coaxed from his bed by the cajolery of those strange bone bells? Or bribed into that twilight world with treats and sweets, blackmailed, bullied, threatened, promised, hissed at and hounded through those shifting quicksilver walls?

  And always when he came back to Athe, that strange compulsion on him to make statues. To build them up, build them high, to watch them quicken, and quickened, return through the walls to their true world.

  No, Gideon hadn’t always destroyed them. Not at first. Not until the last time he’d gone into Dark Breakers, and saw his statues marching rank on rank. They had a captain by then, a rough-hewn statue, Gideon’s first, who now wore a red cape of office and a ruby broach, and who carried a spear tipped in obsidian. He saw his statues training in the courtyard of Dark Breakers, ripping the heads off prisoners, or snatching their beating hearts from their chests, all while the woman with the linden-branch hands looked on.

  He saw what they were being used for. The work of his hands.

  Once Gideon purchased his sledgehammer and started putting it to use, the walls never opened for him again. But the compulsion to build never left him.

  Until now.

  Until Analise stole his statue. At last the crawling itch in his fingers was quiescent, the fever in his brain calm. At last, stillness.

  Gideon knew this was only a temporary reprieve. The walls continued to watch him, malevolently and not a little gleefully. As if waiting for the statue to march through the mansion’s iron gates, through the Great Hall, up the Grand Staircase, and into the Sea Foam Room where Gideon awaited it.

  It was only a matter of days, perhaps hours, before this happened. Gideon did not think, this time, that when he was taken from Day Breakers into Dark Breakers (he thought of that other house in the Valwode where the Gentry lived, as “Dark Breakers”) he would be let to return.

  “You got lucky,” Gideon told the walls. “I have an interfering neighbor. She’s a farmer. You’d think she’d know about animals needing to be put to the slaughter. But no. She has to have a heart in her not of practical resolve, but of wind and fire. Wind and fire,” he muttered, shivering, as he always did when contemplating Analise Field’s dangerous heart.

  Midnight was the breaking hour. It always had been.

  The walls would melt. Any minute now. At the twelfth chime, the world as he knew it would begin to run like watercolors all around him...

  “Gideon!”

  Gideon flinched as the bedroom door slammed open, the force of it bouncing the delicate crystal knob against the gilded boiserie lining the lower half of the wall. Desdemona stood in the doorway, wearing her bathing costume, hair tucked up under a swimming cap, towel flung over her shoulder, streaming water onto the tapestry-smothered marble of the hall floor.

  “Gideon, great and foolish gods, what are you doing on the floor?” Shrugging off his answer before he even opened his mouth, Desdemona went on, “I had the most marvelous idea for a party! A ball, that is. A masque. Stop brooding all over the Countess’s Lirhuvian carpet and come into the loggia with me. I’ve had desks brought in and plenty of lamps. If we work through the night, we can get the invitations out first thing!”

  Some things, Gideon reflected, rising from the floor, were worse than being eaten alive by Breaker House.

  “Why not?” he sighed.

  ***

  Pale his tunic, pale her gown

  Bone his scepter, ice her crown

  Swan-down cape and snowflake mask

  Who they are though, none shall ask

  Join our revel, gather soon

  To dance under a Gentry Moon

  In Celebration

  Of the Annual Autumn Festival of Gentry Moon,

  Miss Desdemona Kirtida Mannering

  &

  Mister Gideon Azlin Alderwood

  Request the Pleasure of Your Company

  at the

  Gentry Moon Masquerade Ball.

  Breaker House

  Oak-and-Acorn Boulevard

  Seafall, Leressa

  Gentry Moon Eve

  10 PM

  Attire is Moonlight Formal.

  Those not Arrayed Appropriately

  Shall be Refused Admittance at the Gates.

  – D. K. M.

  ***

  When Analise came upon them, Nixie was sitting on the kitchen counter, nestled between a pot of navy beans set to soak and a rack full of drying dishes. Elliot stood before her, hands braced on either side of his wife’s hips as she read to him from a cream-cake rich invitation, embossed in gold and trailing bits of silvery floss. Nixie read it aloud with a half smile, but Analise had the impression of leashed fury. A deep frown line bisected the bridge of Elliot’s nose.

  Nixie shook her head as she read out Desdemona’s initials at the end of the invitation.

  “Does she know what she’s calling down?” Her blue-black braids tumbled over her shoulder and into her lap. Elliot lifted the tail of one and rubbed its roughness between two fingers.

  “Even if she did,” he replied, “do you think she’d hesitate for a heartbeat? This is Desdemona. The only daughter of Candletown Coal Magnate H. H. Mannering. You know what they call her? The Anthracite Princess. Once at Uni, Gideon brought her to a frat house costume party, and she dressed as a dead canary. I still don’t know if it was a joke.”

  Nixie’s half smile turned whole as she gazed upon her husband. “Mortal humor is often obscure to me.”

  “Me too!” Analise said from the door. “Morning, Nixie.”

  Nixie’s smile did not scimitar down to its former expression of fury and contempt, but her blue-black eyes grew somber. A curious sensation splashed through Analise’s ribcage, churning against the walls of her heart. This often happened when Nyx Howell’s attention fell wholly upon her. It was as if when Nixie looked at her, she was remembering back to the day Analise was born, and the day her mother was born, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother. As if she had stood upon the fields farmed by the Fields since the days when they had been forests, and since before that time too, when the forests had been a restless sea.

  Then she blinked, and grinned, and it was only Nixie.

  “Good morning, Ana,” she said amiably. “I am sorry I was not here yesterday to greet you.”

  “Did you have a good walk?”

  “Horned Lords know it was long enough,” Elliot muttered, but laughed as he said it, and kissed his wife on the side of her slender brown neck.

  “It was informative,” Nixie replied. “It is so near Gentry Moon; the veil into the Veil is thin. Speaking of which, Ana, Elliot tells me you stumbled upon a Gentry enchantment astray in Athe. And have decided to teach it the alphabet in our guest room.”

  Analise felt the first bloom of blush in her cheeks. She knew it but preceded a more fervent rush of blood. The foreknowledge never helped, never staved off the indignity of having her own skin betray her.

  “I...I don’t think about it like that, Nixie. It...it needed my help, that’s all. I don’t believe in, in,” she waved her hand, “all those old Seafall superstitions.”

  “The stories of the Valwode are older than Seafall, and far wider spread,” Elliot reminded her.

  “I know, I know.” Analise shrugged. “And I love when your paintings reflect the mythology, Elliot. Seven hells, my writing brims over with Gentry allusions and goblin chicanery. But...This is the Orchid Age. We have automobiles. Trains. Electric light. The diphtheria vaccine. Even if...Even if there used to be such a thing as Gentry magic, and, and traffic once flourished between our worlds, we live now in cities of concrete and steel. Don’t all the old tales say the Gentry can’t bear cold iron? Anyway, the statue...Gideon’s statue...It’s just...I mean...”

  But there was no way to explain the statu
e without magic. Because statues did not walk. Or weep. Or learn. Statues simply stayed put. That was inherent in the etymology.

  Uncomfortable in her fiery skin, Analise shrugged again. “I just didn’t want Gideon to destroy it,” she mumbled. “That’s all I know.”

  “It will not talk,” Nixie said after a long pause. “Not here.” She waved her cream and silver invitation at Analise, introducing the subject change. “Will you be attending this ball, Ana? Shall you wear a mask of pearl, a gown spun of organdy and apricot anemone, and dance with that dour boy who shares a garret with you?”

  Analise took a step back. “Um. No. I—I don’t think I’m invited.”

  Elliot handed her the envelope. “It’s addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Elliot Howell, plus one guest. I think Alderwood knows you’re here.”

  “That’s Miss Mannering’s handwriting,” Analise observed. “She likes fireworks at all her parties—and not just the expensive kind from overseas. She’d love to see Gideon throw me out of Breaker House in front of the polite world.”

  Nixie patted Analise’s cheek. “If that young woman wants fireworks,” she said, “I shall be happy to provide them. But I am going alone. You both will be needed here, to keep the statue from harm. Ana is correct; it must not be destroyed. Not this one. Not while we have it under our influence. Now. All that remains to decide is what to wear. Maestro,” she murmured, stroking back her husband’s hair with her knuckles, “you shall have to paint me again.”

  ***

  “She’s not coming?” Gideon repeated.

  “No. Nor Elliot either. Pity. I like dancing with him. He’s so big and lummoxy and warm. And so polite. I like to make him blush. I like to rub my smell all over him and imagine him dreaming about me at night. I caught him sniffing his coat one time after I hugged him.” Desdemona grinned. “This was before he married Mrs. Howell, of course. I wonder if he’d still blush when I kiss him?”