Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  “What?” I finally ask him with irritation, my mouth full of berry compote.

  To my surprise he raises his glass to me in a wordless salute and then turns away, but not before his face lights with the most unexpected and magnificent smile.

  Chapter Eight

  My nightmares are long-dead ghosts that are roused anew by my coming here.

  “It isn’t like him,” my sister says, “to keep us waiting.”

  She lets the curtains in the kitchen window fall.

  Ingrid is thirteen, I’m six, and our father is late. He works three-quarters of an hour from here in the Vestergaards’ southern mines, and he’s always home in time to wash for dinner and change out of clothes coated in limestone dust. He whistles while he rinses the grime from his mustache, even when the water is cold enough to have little chunks of ice floating in it.

  I wait, swinging my legs, knotting a dishtowel between my fingers.

  Ingrid ties and reties her handkerchief and scrubs the wood table until her hands turn red and raw. She ruins the rye bread; it sinks into a soggy mess. She keeps looking out the window. Until finally, we hear it. The jingle of bells on his horse. We run to the window, breaths fogging the glass.

  Ingrid makes a choking sound when she sees the black uniform, the golden tassels. The knock on the door sounds like a branch cracking under the weight of snow.

  The man in black holds out an envelope stamped with the Vestergaards’ dark seal. The hammer and pick. Ingrid’s slim fingers tremble so badly she can hardly open it.

  The man waits as she reads the letter. He offers a formal “I’m sorry, ma’am,” and tips his hat toward us. “I’m going to need to ask you a few questions. You and your sister.”

  “Please, not tonight,” Ingrid says, her voice strangled. “You’ll have to do that later.” The door closing behind him is loud, but worse is the sound of the lock when Ingrid clicks it into its place. I know for sure then, as soon as Ingrid dead-bolts that door.

  Because now Far can’t get in from the outside. If he were still coming home.

  I start to wail even before she turns to read the letter out loud to me. Sob and beat my fists against her when she says the words.

  There was an accident at the mines.

  Landslide.

  Buried beneath.

  We sit in the kitchen together long after darkness falls and the fire dies in the hearth. Still, she clutches that letter in her hands and doesn’t let it go.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask, and then, tired from crying, lay my head down on the clean wooden table. My breathing slows. Perhaps she thinks I’ve fallen asleep.

  “An accident,” she says, as if to herself.

  I open my eyes to see her hands folding tighter around the letter, crushing it under her delicate fingers. The ink of the words is smudging into her skin. She blinks, once, twice, her blue eyes clouding.

  Her fists curl like shells at her sides, the magic thrumming through her.

  Someone else’s fingers suddenly tighten around my arm.

  “Marit. Are you okay?”

  When I open my eyes, Liljan is kneeling by my bed, shaking me.

  “You were . . . crying,” she says softly.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I pull the sheets around me like a cocoon, around my hammering heart, and turn away from her. “Sorry,” I say stiffly.

  Now, in the brightness of morning, I can smell the coffee wafting up the staircase from the kitchen as well as something warm and doughy that instantly makes me feel hungry. I pull the sheets tighter around me as the nightmare fades, weary at the idea of fighting Dorit and Brock for some scraps of breakfast. Liljan squints at me for a moment as if to make sure I’m all right, and then she closes our bedroom door with a faint click behind her.

  I rise, wash up, and am changing into my uniform when Liljan reappears in the doorway. She sets something down on my nightstand: a steaming coffee and a napkin that falls open to reveal a single freshly baked blackberry scone.

  “Hair, glass, and sand free,” she announces.

  “Thank you,” I say, and a warmth lit by surprise spreads through my chest.

  “Just don’t let Nina find out,” she says. “If you have to, eat the napkin.”

  I smile at her shyly. When I take my first bite of scone, the blackberries are still warm.

  Downstairs, Nina inspects my starched white pinafore and bonnet before giving me a key to my workroom and instructions on how to find Mrs. Vestergaard in her quarters. My steps echo through the cavernous main house. Rooms seem to spill out endlessly from one another, with corridors leading off in different directions, some blazing with light and others cloaked in darkness. The floors are a lattice of wood, shades of oak panels clicking together like intricate puzzle pieces, and gilded sconces seem to melt into the patterned walls.

  My heart lifts at the thought of seeing Eve.

  Helene Vestergaard is sitting at a dressing table as Liljan pins her hair into a sharp updo. Her bedcovers and curtains are heavy brocades embroidered with silvers and blues. A massive masonry stove is nestled in the far corner, and warmth pours out from behind its gleaming golden doors. The stove’s pattern of white tiles and delicate blue flowers extends all the way up to the ceiling.

  “Marit, are you settled in?”

  I catch my reflection in the mirror. I wear the nightmare like hollows beneath my eyes, the memory of the wax Vestergaard seal on that horrid letter now fresh in my mind.

  “Yes, Mrs. Vestergaard.”

  “Good. I have a job for you that will require quick work. I’ll need several dresses for me and for Eve.” Her earrings dangle in the reflection, hovering like water that dripped from her earlobes and then froze. “Liljan has left my measurements and designs in your workroom.”

  “I’ll begin right away,” I say.

  “Eve’s uncle—my late husband’s brother, Philip—will be joining us for Mortensaften,” Helene says. Liljan sweeps a dark wave of hair up to reveal the nape of Helene’s neck. “I’ll need the first two dresses by then.”

  Mortensaften—the dinner held the night before St. Martin’s Day to celebrate the harvest—is tomorrow. There’s a faint sound in my ears, like glass shattering. What she’s asking for is two dresses’ worth of magic in a single day.

  Helene watches me in the reflection. “Will that be a problem?”

  “Not at all,” I say evenly, and take two silent steps backwards. As soon as the door closes behind me, I lean against the wall. Fear prickles just beneath my breastbone.

  The door across the corridor is cracked just enough for me to glimpse the curve of a small brown foot peeking out from beneath the covers—Eve’s right foot, the one that always ends up outside the blanket. “You sleep like a starfish,” I once grumbled when we were forced to share a bed. She yawned and pulled her arms and legs in to make herself a tiny ball, rolling onto her back, her ballerina feet tucked beneath her. “Now I’m a snail,” she said, giggling, and then made her snore noise, the one that’s loud and obnoxious and sounds exactly nothing like an actual snore. “Honch, honch, honch,” she fake-snored, and it was so terrible that I started laughing and couldn’t stop even when Sare threatened to hit me with the wide end of a broom.

  I pause outside Eve’s door, wanting to stop and climb into bed with her like I used to. But that’s not appropriate now that she’s a Vestergaard and I’m just a servant. Instead, I hurry on to my little workroom, which is tucked into a nook on the third floor of the staff quarters. When I find the corkboard pinned with the dress sketches, I half chuff in disbelief. The embroidery, lacing, buttons, and beadwork—each would take me at least a week without magic, even if I worked all day and all night.

  I unearth a razor-sharp pair of silver shears and run my fingers longingly over the lush silks and thick brocades I find in the closet, wondering again at the staff last night. How the magic practically hummed off them, yet how settled they seemed together. How strange that they all want to stay here.


  I bite down on a pin and consider as I drape the bodice across the dress form. I suppose it’s the same thing as the men working in the mines. No one is forcing them to, just as no one forced me to take this job. But is it right to ask people to work for your benefit if it poses such danger to them? I think, jamming the pins into the soft flesh of the mannequin. Or have I been wrong to begrudge the Vestergaards for all these years?

  Because they were easier to blame than my father for the choices he made?

  I stand in front of the dress I’ve pinned across the form as though I’m confronting an adversary. I grit my teeth, feel the familiar tension mounting in my jaw. If I think too much about using my magic, I’ll talk myself out of it. So I don’t let the fear build any more. I picture walking to the edge of a dock, facing the dark waves below.

  Then I brace myself and just plunge in.

  Immediately, a tingling chill lights through my limbs, and it always shocks me—how good it feels—as if I’m doing exactly what I was made to do. But then fear chokes out any pleasure there is to be found. I wonder if small traces of the Firn have managed to build up within me by now, crystalline patches of frost, even though I’ve been so terribly careful with my magic through the years. Suddenly, all I can see is Ingrid. I remember the way her toes looked, stiff and blue, when the Firn spilled through her body and the cremator came to take her away.

  Think of Ingrid happy, I tell myself. I picture her on the morning of Shrovetide, laughing as she pretended to hit Far with the ceremonial branch we’d made from birch twigs, feathers, and hollow eggshells. Far bellowed when I bounced it on his head to get him out of bed. Afterward he placed the rod in a vase on the kitchen table as if it were a lovely bouquet instead of a mishmash of ugly sticks. Later that evening, I became Queen of the Cats. I bashed a branch into a wooden barrel and sent candy gushing out like rain from a spout. But Ingrid was the one who had primed it for me. She had done the hard work on the turn before, so that all it took was the smallest swing, and I got the reward.

  It suddenly hits me that I’m older now than she was when she died.

  I work through the swell of the day until the sun is setting and beads glitter up the fabric of Eve’s dress like delicate wisps of smoke. I can’t imagine what damage the magic might have done to me on the inside. But when I catch my reflection in the mirror, I actually look flushed. Exhilarated. I feel alive. My skin and nerves practically crackle. Life is a blade that seems to grow dull with too much ease or assurance of what each day will bring. Tonight has none of that; it throbs with reality, and even the air has a slicing edge when I breathe it in.

  I make sure to lock my workroom behind me, not putting it past Brock to sabotage the dresses before I can get them safely to Helene and Eve.

  When I reach my room, there is a letter folded on top of my pillow.

  “That’s from Helene’s daughter. For . . . you?” Liljan says. She looks at me with eyebrows raised, creasing the folds of her uniform before she puts it away. Her unasked questions hang in the air between us.

  “Oh?” I ask, carefully turning my back to her when I unseal the paper. To Liljan’s credit, the note doesn’t appear as though anyone’s tampered with it. I recognize Eve’s familiar, uneven penmanship, the middle tine of all her w’s rising higher than the other two.

  Mare,

  Tried to find you. Where are you? Did you get lost in the corridors? Eaten by a draug? Did you wander off and smell too much wool? (Har, har) Were you taking a nap? (Honch, honch)

  Tried to save you a wienerbrød with that almond filling you like but that woman Nina wouldn’t let me bring it out of the kitchen. So I ate it.

  come visit soon

  love from Eve

  and Wubbins

  I feel a warmth bloom in my chest and then realize Liljan is still looking at me. I think back to Brock’s revealing comments last night—that Aleks Vestergaard might have been murdered, that Eve might even be a pawn of some sort—and wonder how quickly those inside observations would quiet if the other servants knew about my own friendship with Eve. Perhaps it behooves me to keep that hidden—and my ears pricked in the meantime. “Just some requests for the dresses I’m making,” I lie. “Did you know Philip Vestergaard is coming for dinner tomorrow?”

  It’s a blatant attempt to change the subject, but Liljan takes the bait. “Dorit’s Mortensaften goose will melt in your mouth,” she says. “It tastes like butter. Like actually eating magic.”

  I pull out the Hans Christian Andersen book and slip Eve’s letter inside with my father’s. Then I roll up my sleeves to examine my wrists.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. The skin there is blank, with no sign of the Firn.

  But I’m walking a tightrope that will continue to fray, with Helene’s impossible tasks and her house full of servants pouring out magic.

  Sooner or later, Eve’s going to find out that I’ve been lying to her for years. I roll my sleeves back down.

  I can’t risk her learning the truth about me from someone else, I think.

  So tonight, I will tell it to her myself.

  Chapter Nine

  I wait until Liljan’s breath turns even that night and the moonlight slices like a piece of white glass through the window before I sneak out of bed with Eve’s new dress tucked under my arm. I don’t dare light a candle, so I feel my way down the staircase, wincing when I find a creaky board. The corridor to the main house is cold and dark as a grave, and I feel along the wall with one hand and bite on the knuckles of the other out of a silly childhood fear that I’ll run into a wight or draug. Or worse, Brock.

  I listen for a moment when I reach the main house and climb slowly up to the third floor. I half can’t believe myself, taking this risk of getting sacked, and I clutch Eve’s dress tighter to my side when I tiptoe past Helene’s bedroom. I give the five lightest knocks I can manage on Eve’s door, in the telltale rhythm we’d use on the floor of the Mill when we wanted to talk, so she’ll know it’s me. When she cracks open the door, she’s dressed in a nightgown, her hair oiled and tucked into a night scarf, and her face breaks into a dazzling grin. “What are you doing here?” she whispers, and ushers me inside.

  My stomach turns a little.

  “I brought your dress,” I say. She brings it over to the window and lets it catch the moonlight. The beads are like liquid silver. She tilts the dress back and forth, admiring the clasps of the corset, the scalloped neck. “You did this all in one day?” she asks, and I hear the first note of suspicion in her voice. “Marit, how?”

  Here is my chance. I wasn’t expecting it so soon. I hesitate, looking at her deep brown eyes. How do you tell someone you love that you’ve been hiding something from her for her entire life? I flip the dress over to reveal the hem of the petticoat. At the Mill I used to sew secret pockets into our clothes so we could hide our little drawings and hard candies, feathers and pebbles, from Ness and the older girls. “H-here, Eve, listen,” I stutter, trying to buy myself time. “If you ever need me—just claim one of your dresses needs mending and tuck me a note in this pocket.” I slip my finger into it to show her. “Look, just like old times. Do you remember the Morse I taught you?”

  My father was the one who taught me Morse. I peeked over his shoulder one day and asked him about the dots and dashes he was looking at, and he showed me patiently how to write my name. It became a game—we left little messages for each other in the dust that gathered on the windowsill, in the frost of the window. It was our way to communicate. And then, after he died, I passed what he’d taught me on to Eve.

  “Why would I need to send you a secret note?” she teases. She tucks her fingers into the slip pocket. “I’ll hide a bite of Dorit’s cake in here to make sure you get some.”

  “Well,” I say delicately, “things here are different now, Eve.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, laying the dress out on her trunk.

  “Our stations have changed. It probably isn’t such a good idea for you to . . . frat
ernize so openly with the staff.” I pause. “With me.”

  The light of realization dawns in her eyes. “I’m not ashamed of you, Marit.”

  “Oh, I know that.” I take her hand. “But it’s better this way. It can be our little game,” I say lightly. I smile at her. “Send me a note, and I’ll send one back.”

  I let go of her hand and examine the details of her room, with its walls somehow already patterned in pink roses and sketches of ballerinas. Incredibly, some of them even look just like Eve. I trace the images in the moonlight, and my stomach clenches.

  To tell the truth now means admitting two critical things: first, that I’ve lied to her, and second, that I’m risking the Firn with each day I remain at the Vestergaards’. Both will infuriate and hurt her.

  Knowing Eve, and how wily and clever she is, she’d probably accuse me of stealing something and get me kicked out—just to save my life.

  I turn away from her. No, I decide, my nerve faltering. I won’t tell her about the magic. Not yet.

  “Do you have to go, Marit?” Eve asks.

  “I should,” I say. But instead I climb into bed with her, nestling under the warm eiderdown quilt, breathing in her smell of palm oil and toothpaste powder. “How is it?” I whisper, snuggling closer to her. “Being here?”

  She exhales a long breath and tucks into herself like a shell. “It’s like being hungry and then eating so much rich food you think you’ll make yourself sick. Look at all these beautiful things.” She runs her hands over her satin coverlet. Her voice is almost a whisper. “Sometimes I wonder why she picked me, Marit. What if it turns out I’m not what she wanted?” She rolls over, so that her back is to me and she is whispering to the wall. “Maybe she’ll change her mind and send me back to the Mill. I’m almost afraid to let myself enjoy it. As if I’ll wake up and it’s all going to go away.”

  “That’s not how it works, dear one,” I promise her. “No returns allowed.” I kiss the cloth covering her hair and feel a stab of guilt for the secrets I’m still hiding from her.