The Winter Triptych

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  For Mike Allen, best of all possible creatures, without whom this story would have died an Untimely Death and I would have no shiny hats to steal.

  The Winter Triptych

  © Nicole Kornher-Stace 2011

  Artwork © Oliver Hunter

  ISBN 978-1-907881-05-3

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without permission from the publisher.

  Papaveria Press

  www.papaveria.com

  “ – and it was singing from no mouth at all,” Tally hisses, and the circle sucks up breath. Cook claps like a trained bear – Tally’s her favorite these days, the latest starved slip at the beggars’ backdoor always is – and four or five take up the applause, unsure, their skulls atwirl with picturing. Not peeking sidewise, past the light, for what might crouch there, waiting, cold as winter’s very heart, all gluttony and stare and clever patience. Not disclosing their skins crawl. Not illustrating weakness.

  They slide shy eyes to Cook, and Tally toes the pot and candle to her right. Taking up the candle in her turn, Liese gazes for a moment in the stills. There she sees a face, trapped beneath a skin of water like some creature fallen down some well, but not drowned – or not yet. It is a face as blank and grey as skipping-stones, with sparks set in it for eyes. A dishwater thrall. When Liese blinks it blinks back.

  She splashes it to shivers. Then she tells.

  “Ghosts in greenwood,” murmurs Liese. “And another on the stair.”

  Liese recalls that stair, the wide-hipped sweeping skirt of it. She’s heard stories how the dead queen’d had it carpeted, hundreds of yards of blood-colored velvet zigzagging up nine flights, until it had rotted away, very post-Altheia, and was lugged out in slapdash hacked-off lengths and burnt. She thinks she might have liked to see it: all that red, cascading.

  “Bah,” Tally brags, mock-bold, while Cook beams down. “Another hant?”

  “Thine was,” says Kat, and pulls a face, and kicks her voice up a full octave when she says: “'Singing from no mouth at all!’ Ooh!” And lets fly with an elbow into Liese’s ribs, for solidarity.

  Liese starts. The memory collapses round her, the flimsy scrim of it goes to debris in her hands. She sets her eyes in Tally’s. Tally flinches. “I’ve seen ‘em,” Liese says.

  “I’m sure,” says Tally. “Moony as thou is. The sight on thee and everything.”

  “Shut that,” Elspet snarls.

  Cook rounds on her. “What’s it, missy?”

  “Cry thee pardon, Cook,” Elspet mumbles at her lap.

  Cook glowers at her. “Maybe.”

  “Candle’s nearly out,” says Nell, and smiles across the ring at Liese. “What saw?”

  Liese looks all round, at Tally most, till Tally, blushing furies, looks away. Then speaks. “A ghost in a blue dress, and a silver circlet on her head. Red mouth and dark hair. And a child in her. She’s round with it. All her stays’d been let. She – walked.”

  “In greenwood?” prompted Nell.

  “Nah,” says Liese. “The stair. And up and down a corridor, with looking-glasses all along the wall. But she cast nothing in the glass. And dragged a sleeve along the banister, but no dust stuck.”

  “Hant,” yawns Tally. “Dull.”

  Tally casts to Cook, who doesn’t beam, not now. Cook’s attention’s fixed on Liese, and when Liese notes and aims her gaze away, Cook buttonholes her with a look. And when Cook talks, her face is ash, her voice is full of snags.

  “Missy,” she rasps, “thou saw it when?”

  Liese does not say: I pick my shackles with a needle every night, to wander while the others sleep. I hide it in my hem. I’ve run with the ghosts who comb the greenwood for their kin, I’ve climbed the Keep near to its topmost, and I know that bitch-ghoul well enough by now; I know her step, her keens, her violence, her dead breath and her awful eyes.

  She does not say: And I am not afraid.

  Instead she says: “In dreams.” And forces half a wisecrack’s grin at Cook, and toes the candle on.

  Once there was, and once there wasn’t, as it goes, a queen as beautiful as she was bitter, and as sorrowing as vengeful, for when her lord took a bellyful of arrows on the highroad in broad daylight, her own belly stood empty – so she’d thought. She did and didn’t, in her wrath, melt herself down and cast herself anew, like any ornament reshaped in time of need to any blade. Her name was, and wasn’t, Altheia.

  She knew the subjects of her murdered lord would love to string her up for scapegoat, rend her piecemeal for their suffering – wide-winged rumors flew the plot was hatched of her black heart, and she’d seen the people turned out in the snow to weep real tears for her lord’s bear-gnawed remainder – but her white Keep was unassailable, and if those rebelling rose and crashed against her walls from time to time, it was with the soft serenity of breakers lapping on the sand, and provided her some small amusement from her balcony, peering down at marching ragtags scurrying, industrious as any ants, as fragile.

  From time to time, she might hear muttering among the guard, soon silenced at the first hint of her slippered footfall, the first glint of query in her eye. It was nothing to her.

  Besides, what fault of hers was the drowned crop, the emptyhanded harvesting, and whatever famine dogged its heels? Her granary was full; her Keep would eat. Her faith was in the locks. What fault of hers was winter, and the rustlings of pestilence that sent the bravest out to set their hounds on rat-nests, sent the children out to stone the ravens from the wall? Her Keep was sound; she did not toss with dreams of wolves. The breakers rose and once more ebbed away.

  What fault of hers, at that, the king was dead? In truth, no blood of his was on her hands. All she had done was after that: to shut the gates, then watch as what must happen did.

  The rebels fired her gardens of white roses once, in one night razed all the mazy field. But the snow began to fall, drifting from the Keep’s crown in a perfect radius, and smothered the fire to plushy clots of ash by dawn.

  As the stars walk, so walks Liese.

  In the kitchens, tomorrow’s stew’s a-simmer on the hearth; the black pots sleep nestled in a corner, where Liese’s day’s last chore had stacked them. The dead queen’s roses, all grown back by now, nod and scrape against the outside wall, against the alms-door that abuts the crumbled garden walk. The first time Liese had heard the noise of that, she’d fancied wraiths leached from the greenwood, some languid bonecracking spectre pirouetting out there in the snow. Nell had kept awake for Liese, to plait her hair and sing her bawdies, and so stray her mind from that iron-cold sorrowing sound, that expanse of cheerless cold without. But that was past, and she’s not told Nell or anyone of her lockpick or her wanderings.

  Tonight, fifteen scullery-girls sleep with one wrist chained up to the kitchen wall. Count them, though, and come up short – and look, and there are footprints in the rushes, and a wedge gone from a moon of cheese, and the door leading back and up into the Keep is unsnicked, is actually ajar.

  Through the corridors Liese wends her way, nibbling, eyeing her shadow traipsing at her heels, until she stops short at the great stair’s foot, squints upward through the gloom, begins to climb.

  She tiptoes up one flight, another, one chapped hand clutching at her cheese, the other hiking up her hems. There comes to her a soft susurrus, a larger sound than rats, and unconsenting of the wind. By now she’s used to the smell of unseen roses, to the whisperings, the rustlings as of skirts upon the stair. The ghosts do see her, she is sure, but she comes as a sister in the night, in the phantasmagoria of the house of the dead queen.

  Several times she senses movement at the corner of an eye, but when she steels herself and whirls to stare it down, it disappears. />
  Black Meg awoke in a clearing in the greenwood, an abrupt space with a partial ring of stones. She shook snow from her cloak and fished in the pack for bread, which she tore into fistfuls and passed round, pitching the largest toward Queenskeep proper with a prayer. The least bit was Meg’s own. She watched the others gulp their crusts, some still pulling their ankles free of dreams, some wide awake and casting wistful glances at the heel-end lying in the snow. Black Meg chastised them with her eyes.

  They, as she, had shed their true names with their other worldly goods, and while some wore their sobriquets like masks, and others wore their own like jewelry, and still others like chains, they all travelled lighter for their other lives’ subtraction. They must travel light, she’d told them, each by each when they had come to her – for they must travel far.

  When they’d all awakened, Black Meg gathered them around her, Non and Jack and Kay and Bren and Ashe and Briony. Crow was seeing to the traps, Saint-Gilles was dawdling in prettiment, and the others were in town.

  Meg led them in reflection. Times were bad, but had been worse, and though strife served to volley more hearts to her cause, she in her innermost was thankful: true, the wasting still rode Queenskeep’s roofs, mitigated only slightly by the gifts filched from the granary, the guardhouses, monastery gardens, Keep’s own kitchens, then slid through doors and windows by enigmatic hands, by night; but at least the pestilence – Meg crossed herself – had died back into memory, like any wound, half-healed. Well could she recall the wolves, arriving with first snow, to quarrel the collectors for the dead; the brigades of volunteers gone out with slings and staves and swords dragged down from dusty mantels; then the wolf-meat simmering in pots, a ladleful to anyone who queued, and seconds to the sickly; and the pelts swinging from gables, slapping at the wind, soon gone to warm the beds of children, who in their fevers twitched and dreamed of dancing wolves, dark on white against the rumored finity of snow.

  The innocent, Meg knew by now, dropped first. She’d fight that none must drop again.

  Yet did the people trust them, for their pains? She heard the stories mostly secondhand, as her people reported back, for though she’d boasted far and wide she’d kill the queen besieging her own city, Queenskeep’s wives used Meg’s own name for frighting wayward children into sweetness, and only from a distance did any dare berate her. Devil’s doxy, and a witch besides. She’s a sixth finger on one hand of her – sure sign. She and hers, why, eat such souls and children as can catch them.

  The greenwood, Meg surmised, would keep them well hid till their work was done, the queen was overthrown, and history would sing their praise. Altheia’s guard never ventured here – overmuch talk of wolves and ghouls for their taste – only the odd poacher, which Black Meg could handle. Those who chanced the greenwood did so for they sought her cause, her fellowship, and they were brought blindfold to her, and she raised them from their muddy knees into the bright flux of her notice.

  As for the rest – fleet moments of vanity aside, she did not much crave the people’s recognition. Let them curse her heart, then ballad her cold corpse. She’d wait.

  Crow rushed out of the trees. He’s late for bread, Meg thought, and emptyhanded from a dozen snares. But she leapt up when she saw his eyes.

  “Riders,” he gasped. “Five. God’s teeth. Queen’s men. Draw,” he screamed, then gasped again: “Ah – no – ”

  Shod hooves on hardpacked frost, and nearing. Meg turned to face the sound, and they were there. Five white chargers, groomed, V’d out like springbound geese; their riders liveried and smug. And in the vanguard’s fist, the standard of the queen.

  At Meg’s back, quiet panic, half-drawn blades. Kay rattled off a prayer; Jack cursed and spat. Little Briony passed out cold. Meg stood her ground. Only Saint-Gilles spoke.

  “Queen’s curs,” he observed. “Well, I spit on her. See.” He dropped to one knee in the slurry and drew Altheia’s caricature by knifepoint in a drift: stabs for eyes, slit mouth, tall peaks of diadem like snaggled teeth. He did this slowly, with a makeshift shiftlessness: he played. Straightening, he spat nearish its eyes. “I piss on the queen,” he added, meditatively. “I shit.”

  The vanguard dismounted and lunged at Saint-Gilles with a fist, but Meg got in the way. He fetched against her, fuming. “A leash for thy whelp, witch,” he hissed.

  “As the whore-queen has for thee,” said Saint-Gilles, and looked up at them coy-eyed from the safety of Meg’s back.

  They did not heed. Meg looked round at each and started: rather, they were counting heads.

  Their deliberate pointing lit on Jack, Briony, Saint-Gilles, herself. And the queen’s men, though provoked, did stand ground, did hold peace. She looked a query at the vanguard, but he only mounted, signaled and the five chargers whirled roundabout and rushed away, upsetting the crows.

  Silence. Then:

  “Why in hell’s name,” said Jack, “did they not draw?”

  “Outnumbered,” said Ashe.

  “They’re horsed, thou fool,” said Crow.

  Saint-Gilles bragged, “We’ve steel enough.”

  “A gambit,” Meg said then, which hushed them. “To fright us into scattering, to warn the rest. To lead them to the others. To Isele.”

  “How could they know of her?” This was Kay.

  “Does it matter?” Crow fired back.

  Little Briony, come round, began to weep.

  “It’s an evil road we walk,” said Meg, and sighed. “We must keep faith in its completion.”

  Liese had returned with the tag-end of the night and swept her prints from the rushes in time to squeeze herself back in among sleeping scullery girls, half-slumped against their wall. They’d wake with cockcrow: more precisely, with Cook looming overhead like Death herself, banging on a pot.

  Liese’s eyelids feel like bricks, and she keeps nodding off over the tureen she’s polishing. Cook’s dragged out the best service, the one with lace-fine filigree, with the sugar bowl that, when Liese claps it to her ear, she can swear she hears the sea. The one that comes out once a year or less. And the kitchen buzzes with the mystery.

  Cook does know its clue, the girls can tell. They’ve learned by now that few tidbits exist which Cook will not disclose. The secrets of the upper floors. The tower’s history. The meals they send to the topmost floor twice daily: the most sumptuous dishes at the kitchen’s command, but cooked down to mush or pulverized with wooden spoons – very unlike the roasts and loaves and poacher’s stews they send to the lower floors’ inhabitants: the hangers-on, by blood or opportunity, of the dead queen.

  They asked: Cook brushed them off: they wrapped the question round with stories of their own. They hadn’t much to go on. Just the fact of its enigma – Cook swore up and down and sideways none lived higher than the fourth floor of the tower’s nine – and the white-clad convoys who venture down to deliver the kitchen’s strange purees to whatever stripe of shutaway keeps the Keep’s derelict crown.

  Now, as then, Cook jiggles her jowls at them. Her lips are pressed into a slash. “I’ve nothing to tell thee. It ain’t thy place to ask, and neither mine.” But she seems preoccupied. “Back to work,” she growls, swiping at the nearest for good measure.

  Liese hunches over her tureen, meeting no-one’s eyes. She’s got her own clue to this mystery. Something she, last night, in seeking phantoms, found instead.

  First there’d been the pregnant lady’s ghost, that banshee in a diadem Liese knew by now to shy from. Once it’d shoved her face-first at a wall, and Liese had had to explain away the black eye and bleeding tooth to Cook, who’d suspected quarrels among her charges.

  In her wanderings, Liese had never gotten past this floor: the phantom barred the way.

  Last night, Liese had skulked behind the banister to watch this ghost walk its circuit. This one’s was to pace the hall, to howl at its reflection, to slap at its own roundness as though it would drive the baby out of it, away. Perhaps, Liese thought, this ghost had
died in childbirth, and knew it. The sometime woman in blue silk peeked into the glass and saw the blood blossom over her finery, dark as any rose.

  Liese had seen all this before. It was this phantom’s dance, so she must dance it. We are all, Liese mused, courted by different dooms. She inched back down the stair.

  Then stopped.

  The front doors, which Liese had never seen so much as budge, were opening. Liese froze. Four men were coming in. Not further ghosts: they stank of sweat and night and horses; one also of blood. Liese peered out through the banister as three muscled the fourth over the threshold – an old man, bound at hand and foot, and dripping from the wrists, but struggling still. Furthermore, he was setting up a terrific noise, quite on a par with the pregnant phantom upstairs.

  Liese’d tagged the three for cutthroats, making use of the Keep’s ruination to practice their foul play. She heard them muttering and tossed guesses at their words. Shut his noise. They’ll hear. Who’ll hear, the ghosts? The dead? It’s going calling he’ll be doing, this one, soon enough. Liese trembled to think what must come, and soon: a wire at the throat or a jab in the ribs, or a sst! and a spilling of veins.

  But when they spoke up, she heard:

  “You’ve your life back,” one said. “Free as birds is what thou is.” He paused, and smirked. “Almost.”

  “It must have been an Amaranth grave, weren’t for us,” added another.

  “As a favor,” said the third, and barked a laugh. “And now, thy turn to do one.”

  From the old man’s face, he knew it already. The terror on it was perhaps not unfounded. “Ellinor,” he whispered, a name Liese did not know.

  “Clever,” crowed his captors. “Clever.”

  The old man squirmed and bled.

  “The Amaranth madhouse then? Is that it? God save me, I’ll have thee on their doorstep quick as thought if – ”

  At this the old man straightened. His face filled up with crazy hope. The light caught in his eyes, showed amber. Odd, thought Liese.