Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “No, wait a minute,” I said to Maeve. “The Watchmaker’s just a character you made up. He can’t take anything away from you—he comes from you. You can get Willa back any time you want.”

  Ms. Burden closed her hand around the apple, her knuckles whitening.

  “It isn’t that easy,” Maeve said. “I don’t know if even you can understand, Ivy. She was very powerful, Willa. More than Piper, I think, much more. I think Piper’s very young, compared to her. And it was terrifying having her, terrifying and astonishing all at the same time. It was like living with a god, like a thunderstorm in your head forever. No one can stand that for very long. And when I saw that the Watchmaker wanted to take her, well, I let him.”

  “Why didn’t you just go back to the grove, and tell Willa she was free?”

  “I don’t know, child. I was young, and I enjoyed her company sometimes—most of the time—and we were writing this wonderful book . . . I guess it was just easier to let someone else make the decision. Or to pretend that someone else made the decision, since, as you say, the Watchmaker was a part of me. I know what my sin is.

  “That’s why it’s been so hard for me to live in this world,” she went on. “Why I get so confused so much of the time. I never really got used to being without her, not even after fifty years. I know you thought that having a muse was the reason I could barely function sometimes, and I’m sorry I deceived you. But it was very hard to talk about her. About everything, really.”

  I had thought that. I’d thought that I would go the same way, that because I had Piper I’d end up a bewildered old woman, barely able to feed myself or leave the house. I felt a sudden bitterness that she’d lied to me, that she’d given me yet another thing to worry about.

  I couldn’t stay mad at her for long, though. It had been so much worse for her.

  Ms. Burden was still looking at the apple, her mind continuing along its single track. “Willa, come to me,” she said. “Be my muse.”

  We waited, not breathing, but nothing happened. “All right then,” she said. She looked directly at Maeve. “Tell her to come to me.”

  Maeve’s mouth worked as she tried to hold back the words. “Willa, go to this woman. Mrs. Berman, is that your name?”

  “Burden. Kate Burden. Say it.”

  “Go to Kate Burden, Willa.”

  Ms. Burden sat back. Once again nothing changed; she remained the same as she had always been. She scowled. “Why didn’t it work?”

  Maeve shook her head.

  “You can’t disobey me,” Ms. Burden said slowly. “So I know you’d give her to me if you could. Something deep inside you doesn’t want to, the same way you wanted to give her to the Watchmaker. Or maybe you lost control over her when you gave her away.” She thought for a while. “Tell me what you cut from the manuscript.”

  “I didn’t cut it,” Maeve said. She was looking at me instead of Ms. Burden, one writer talking to another. “It was the editor’s idea. I’d written about myself, you see, and how I’d lost Willa, and what happened to me after I got home. My editor said that I’d destroyed the mood, that when I returned to reality like that it drove people out of the fantasy world. And that this ending was too sad, after most of the book ended happily, that the sudden change clashed with the rest of it. He was right, of course—I see that now.”

  “I thought, when the lights flickered on and off—it almost looked like pages flipping past,” I said. “Like we were inside the book itself.”

  “Maybe you were.”

  “And we heard a song . . .”

  Maeve laughed. “Oh, that song! It was all over, that year. ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ I think it was called. I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

  I heard footsteps and conversation from the hallway, Beatriz and Semiramis. I opened my mouth to tell them to stay away, but they’d already come into the dining room.

  “Careful,” I said. “She can do things now—”

  “I told Ramis,” Beatriz said. They sat down next to me, as if to show me their support. Semiramis was wearing a necklace I had given her, with a small apple painted to look like ivory. She’d put it on as a sort of talisman, I guessed.

  “Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere,” Ms. Burden said impatiently. “I have an idea. What if I took away something of yours, something important? You’d overcome your scruples then, I bet. If I burned your house down, for example?”

  “What!” I said. Maeve groaned and hid her face in her hands. “You can’t do that,” I went on. “Look at everything in this house—the books, and the artwork—there might even be some notes about how she wrote Ivory Apples. We’ll—we’ll give it to you, all of it. A first edition if you want it. Maeve will even sign it for you.”

  “She’d sign it for me no matter what,” Ms. Burden said dispassionately. Then she seemed to realize who was sitting across from her, and an unfamiliar expression passed across her face, moving as slowly as a shy speaker standing up to deliver a dinner speech. She looked contrite, almost apologetic. “I’m sorry I have to do it this way. I don’t have any choice, though. If you hadn’t been so selfish, if you’d just shared what you found with other people, all of this could have been avoided.”

  She stood and went to the kitchen. From where I sat I could see her rummaging through the drawers and slamming them closed. She made a sound of triumph and came back, holding a box of matches.

  I lunged toward her. “Stop,” she said.

  I froze, halfway out of my chair. “None of you leave this table,” she said. “Oh, sit down, Ivy. You look ridiculous like that.”

  I sat. She lit a match and laid it against the wall. Nothing happened at first, but the house was made out of old wood and a flame got a toehold.

  She left the kitchen. I couldn’t see where she went, could only imagine the damage she was doing to the rest of the house. The fire began to crawl upward, so slowly that I could have put it out, if she had let me move.

  “Is she going to leave us here?” Semiramis said.

  “No, of course not,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure of that. “She needs Maeve for what she wants. She’ll come back and get us.”

  We watched the fire spread along the wall, and make a start on the floor. Amaranth was still in the living room, I realized. Would Ms. Burden allow her to join us, or would she let her die?

  Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, Ms. Burden came back. “All right,” she said. “I can stop the fire if I want to. So. Are you ready to give me that muse?”

  Maeve said nothing. I thought she was trying to do what Ms. Burden asked, to give Willa to her. Ms. Burden looked eager, but once again nothing about her seemed changed.

  What if I could do it? A muse had found me congenial once; maybe this one would as well. I reached out to Willa with my mind.

  A bomb went off inside my head. Fire and gales of wind hurtled toward me, threatening to annihilate me. Loud noises flew past, screams and explosions. I pulled away, terrified.

  The flames were gaining strength now, gnawing hungrily on the wood. Through the doorway I saw Ms. Burden set fire to a bookshelf. Which ruin would be worse, hers or Willa’s?

  I pushed out toward Willa again. This time I could feel her in the whirlwind, a sense of something strong and very old. Just a touch from her could make me lose myself, make it as though I had never been.

  I backed away again. Maeve was right: Willa could not be contained by anything human.

  “I was sure that would work,” Ms. Burden said. “All right, I suppose I’ll have to try the grove now.”

  “What about Rantha?” I asked.

  “What about her?”

  “What about her? She’ll die if we leave her here!”

  “Very well, go get her,” Ms. Burden said. “Just don’t leave the house.”

  I ran into the living room. Smoke and heat came from everywhere, like dragons breathing all around me, and I could barely see. I opened my mouth to call Amaranth a
nd started coughing instead. I tried again. “Rantha! Where are you?”

  “Look, we have guests,” she said from somewhere. “Very pretty they are, too, dressed all in bright red and yellow. They’re too hot, though. Here, why don’t you take off your coats?”

  She kept talking. I made my way toward her voice. I coughed again, then doubled over in a coughing fit that seemed to go on forever. Finally my fingers brushed against the edge of the couch.

  I fumbled onward until I reached Amaranth. “Come on, we have to go!” I said, grabbing her hand.

  “But that’s rude, isn’t it?” she said. “To leave our guests alone like that? Shouldn’t I offer them something, cold water maybe, or some ice cream . . .”

  I tried to drag her toward it but she wouldn’t move. I pulled on her arm, hard, and we stumbled into the dining room. We stood there a while, trying to catch our breath but only able to cough. A small flame was darting up the back of her shirt, and I grabbed the tablecloth from the dining table, spilling plates and silverware to the floor, and snuffed it out.

  At first I didn’t see the others; then Ms. Burden called to us from the kitchen door. “Come outside, Ivy. You too, Amaranth. And Maeve, take me to the grove.”

  I glanced back at the house as we walked away. I could see flames through the windows, dancing gleefully, like children capering after their parents had gone. All of it would burn, everything we own . . . the different versions of Ivory Apples: the first edition, the translations and illustrations, the unauthorized printing. The artwork people had sent Maeve, the papers and correspondence. Hat racks and mirrors, umbrellas and Post-it notes, pots and pans and photographs.

  “Maybe it isn’t really on fire,” Beatriz said, coming up to me and speaking softly. “Maybe it’s one of her illusions.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t think Beatriz was right, though. It seemed to me Ms. Burden had had years of brooding, of growing anger that someone had something she wanted. She had reached the end, she had finally found the grove, and she was determined to make it count.

  “Maybe,” I said to Beatriz, not wanting her to lose her optimism.

  We headed into the woods. We tried to talk, but all our conversations trailed off into silence. I heard leaves rustling on the trees as we passed, and branches breaking underfoot, and birds calling from a long way away. I was thinking hard, worrying about my sisters, and the grove, and what Ms. Burden might do next.

  I looked back at Semiramis, remembering how frightened she’d been in the warehouse. But she was staring straight ahead, an unreadable expression on her face. Had she gone beyond fear, was she so terrified that she’d just given up?

  And Amaranth had been quiet for a long time, so long that it seemed unnatural. What was happening to her, and to Piper?

  And I was even more worried about Maeve. The path was treacherous for someone so fragile, steep in places and bumpy with old roots and rocks and branches. She had started out in front, guiding Ms. Burden, but she soon dropped back, and I moved close and held her arm to steady her. Finally she sank onto a rock near the path.

  “Hold on,” Ms. Burden said. “Everybody stop.” She went back to Maeve and asked, “Are you all right?”

  It was strange to see her waver between showing Maeve respect and treating her like an object, a means to an end. Maeve took several deep breaths. “I’m not used to—to this,” she said.

  “All right, then. All of you—we’re going to rest here for a while, and when we start up again I want you to go slower. Oh, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there like statues. You can move around if you want.” She turned back to Maeve. “How far is it to the grove?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Maeve said. “Sometimes it seems closer, sometimes farther away.”

  “You mean—it moves?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s about another mile, I think.”

  “And what happens then? Is it like Mount Helicon, where you wait to see if you’re accepted?”

  I’d already figured out that I couldn’t lie to her while she had the apple. Now I wondered if I could keep to the truth but not give her anything useful. “I don’t know—I’ve never been to Mount Helicon.”

  Her eyes narrowed “You know what I mean. Tell me—”

  “They might not give you a muse, you know,” Maeve said, interrupting.

  Ms. Burden looked at her, startled. “Don’t be ridiculous—I have Willa. Come on, let’s get moving.”

  I gave Maeve my hand, and she pushed herself up from the rock.

  We fell in behind Maeve. She went slower than before, slower than she needed to, I think. Several times Ms. Burden hurried ahead and then had to wait for her, looking impatient.

  Finally I heard the familiar sounds of rushing water, of music and laughter. The woods opened out, and we came into the grove.

  Ms. Burden stopped and gasped in astonishment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, after all this time.”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE SPRITES STOPPED what they were doing and came toward us, moving cautiously. One of them held blue and yellow flowers shaped like bells, and she dropped them along the path as she went. I stopped breathing, waiting to see what they would do, if they would choose Ms. Burden after all.

  They ranged before her, standing on the shore, sitting cross-legged on rocks, balancing on a tree branch. They studied her, their eyes impassive. I began to breathe again.

  She hadn’t been chasing the muses for so many years to stop now, though. “Hello,” she said, putting on her pleasant voice, the one she’d used when she first met us. “I’m asking you, petitioning you, to help me. To become my muse. I brought you an offering, to move you to think more kindly toward me.”

  It sounded rehearsed. Well, she’d had long enough to think of it. She took the apple out of her pocket and held it out to them.

  One of them came over to look at it. He wore a conical cap stuck with a bright red feather. Thick black hair flowed from down his back, tangled like sheep’s wool. “Ahhh,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  More sprites came toward it, laughing and talking. “As beautiful as a bird, lifting from a tree,” one of them said.

  “As a sunset, when it changes from rose to red.”

  “As a snail, crawling over the grass.”

  “There’s a muse there, Willa,” Ms. Burden said. “I’ll give her to you if you grant my petition.”

  “Willa?” the one with the red feather said. “We don’t know any Willa.”

  Ms. Burden turned to Maeve, furious. “You told me that was her name.”

  “That was what I called her, yes,” Maeve said. “I don’t know her real name.”

  “Oh, what does it matter? Here, I have a muse, one who’s been trapped inside this apple for fifty years. Don’t you want her back?”

  “Of course we do,” one of them said.

  “All right then.”

  “But we can’t help you.”

  “Then she’ll stay here, for another fifty years or longer. And it’ll all be your fault.”

  One of them laughed. “Our fault? How can that be? It’s your apple.”

  “By the tree—it’s Talia!” someone called out. “She’s in the apple!”

  “Talia?” I said. The sprites echoed me, murmuring, the name passing among them.

  “Who’s Talia?” Maeve asked.

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked. “Craig told me about her. She lived on Mount Helicon, someone very old and powerful, and then she left Greece and came here. Craig thinks she might be the Greek muse Thalia.”

  “And this Talia—she was my muse? She was Willa?” Maeve asked. I nodded. “No wonder it was so hard to abide her. One of the Nine, the first muses.”

  “And she was in love with Claudio,” I said. “He wanted to follow her here, but Ms. Burden captured him when she went to Mount Helicon.”

  “Claudio?” Ms. Burden said.

  “Don’t you even know their names? Well, that’s typical, I guess. He’s in that—tha
t cloud you have, the ones you enslaved.”

  “So I have them both, Claudio and Talia,” Ms. Burden said. “I have a great many of them, in fact—I should be able to do something with that. Talia, if you want to see Claudio again, come to me.”

  The apple glowed softly in Ms. Burden’s hand. That was the only change, though; Ms. Burden still seemed her old impatient self.

  “Try again,” she said to Maeve. “Use her real name this time. Call Talia to me.”

  “Talia, go to Ms. Burden,” Maeve said, her voice dull.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Why don’t you want to free her? She’s been trapped in this apple for fifty years—what do you think that’s done to her?”

  Maeve said nothing.

  “Tell me,” Ms. Burden said.

  “Maybe because—” I could see that Maeve was trying to resist, but once again she was forced to answer. “Because, well, I sometimes wonder if she was the reason the book was so popular. The reason it stayed with people. She was there in Pommerie Town, at the heart of it. She lent it her power, her glamour. And if she ever left, the town would fade away, become dull, ordinary.”

  “Nonsense. It’s a brilliant book—that’s why it sold so well. And, well, she’s already left Pommerie Town, she’s with me. There’s nothing you can do about that. Try calling her again.”

  “I am trying!” Maeve said.

  “Are you? I wonder how quickly this grove would burn down.”

  We all cried out together, me and Maeve and Beatriz and Semiramis. “No, stop! Don’t do it! They won’t let you!”

  “Well, let’s see if they will or not.”

  She went to the closest tree. Then, moving with the dignity of a priestess lighting a sacred fire, she lit a match and held it to the outer twigs. The fire began to eat through a branch, moving slowly. Most of the spriest watched in fascinating, but a few scooped up water from the lake with baskets and ran to the tree. Water escaped through the weave of the baskets, leaving a trail behind them.

  I reached out to Talia again. The blasting wind pitched me under and spun me around, the wild noises went on and on. I wanted to turn and run, but I forced myself to call out to her instead. “Talia! Talia, we need your help.”