The Winter Triptych

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Yes,” the old man cried, and nearly dropped to grovel. “Beg thee. Gladly would I go.”

  They exchanged looks over his head.

  Demons in Queenskeep, or so the whispers flew, leaked down from the guardhouse, trickling to the streets. The urchins took it up, and round it went. Demons, tittered the complacent, those who still had wood to burn and bread to eat. This is a new one. They collected stories and exchanged them, for the novelty.

  This may or not be how it all began.

  Not long after the roses burned, there came a knock at the Keep door. The knocker paused, knocked, then drew back at the sound of footsteps from within. When the maid opened the door to him, she was white-skirted like the tower, and a cold air issued out from past her, and the mausoleum stink of countless roses.

  She eyed him, for she kept the door, and must take in all callers at a glance: outlandish, tatter-clad, unarmed, and hefting a clay jar. When he spoke, the accent of his voice was strange to her, and his glassy eyes – no trick – were yellow, like the eyes of creatures seen by night. Nor was there sign of a horse, though no footsteps trailed him in the snow. He may as well have dropped down from the sky.

  He eyed her, for she recalled him to the witch who’d laid his fate on him: she’d too been dressed in white, though hers had been the white of skins, some with legs still attached, with tails and heads. For all his studying, he’d not quite determined the origins of some, and dared not ask. It had been the witch he’d gone to, in his fear, and she had laughed full in his face, a belly laugh that danced the flopping legs and queased his gut – but he’d stood ground, and eyed her level, till she’d stopped.

  A honey thief, she’d named him.

  He’d furrowed his proud brow at her and said, A scholar.

  Same.

  Is it so?

  Ignoring him: And overmuch enamoured of oblivion.

  If that’s to mean I fear thee, I do not.

  Ah, she’d said, and her shawls’ eyes glinted sharp sparks in the murk. Thou ought.

  The girl pushed wide the door enough to drop a curtsy now, though in her mouth and eyes was still suspicion. “She awaits thee?”

  “She will. I am expected.”

  The girl nodded at his boots. “Come then.”

  He did, and she shut the white door behind.

  A few nights pass, then Liese dreams something odd. She is trespassing Keep halls, hunting phantoms, maybe, when she comes upon a girl in a scullery-maid’s aproned shift, besmirched with grease and grime. The girl’s hair is a nest, her hands chapped raw, her feet sooty and bare.

  Liese the kettle-scryer recognizes herself.

  Then, looking down at her dream-self, she sees she walks in white felt slippers; her shift is white, true white, and clean, and smells to her of roses. Setting a hand to her hair, she finds it plaited into whirligigs and pinned fast to her head. The smell of roses becomes overpowering.

  A tale, the girl in aprons says, and her voice is Liese’s own. When the king wasn’t yet cold, Altheia changed the city’s name to the honor of her person and her rule. She announced it from her balcony, then sent the guard around to knock on all the doors, questioning the people. Those who answered Queenskeep were not ducked, not burnt, not pilloried, not hanged. Their teeth were not broken; their tongues were not slashed. Their houses not put to the torch. But the pestilence and hunger still felled them in scores, and even the rope’s a swifter, cleaner executioner.

  Liese says, What? When?

  Then she awakes.

  The first thing she sees are eyes that stare straight into hers, from not a handspan off.

  She gasps. Her heart bounds on hare’s legs to her throat, and she backs and backs until she’s scooted, crabwise, up against the great stair’s banister.

  The stair? How had she gotten here? She gulps in ink-dark, ink-thick air. The eyes hover in it, bob in it, like the pickled kittens Nell had seen, once, in jars on a mountebank’s cart. She can hear breathing, not her own.

  But she hunts ghosts, does Liese, is used to willing herself into bravery, into its imitation.

  “Who – ” she ventures.

  Hands reach and grab her, haul her to the sudden light. A lamp. It had not been there, she thinks, before. It dazzles her, but she endures. She’d stare down any sun.

  In a moment he comes clear: the old man she had seen lugged into the Keep, sobbing, bound, gagged, bleeding, nights before. By the time this clicks together in her brain, he has a hand over her mouth.

  A panic rises in her, but harm does not seem his intention. Rather he cups her face and turns it side to side in the dim. His eyes, she notes, are yellow in the half-light. His grip is better than she would’ve guessed.

  After a moment he lets out a slow hiss, like steam escaping a kettle. He slumps a little, Liese’s chin still caught up in his hand. “Ah blithering Christ,” he says, tilting her jaw hard enough to bruise. His eyes burn clean through her. “It is thee. Isn’t it.”

  Then the light’s gone: he has snuffed it. The world goes head over heels. Liese comes to in the gluey near-dawn, crumpled at the stair’s foot where she’s landed, and limps back to her chain.

  Meg had cried them all to scatter, so they had, but had not, as Altheia’s men had hoped, contacted the rest. Keep thee isolate, Meg’d said. Keep furtive and keep hid.

  And quashing all her better judgement, Black Meg clothed her pride in rags and tatters, and went to see Isele.

  Meg found her where she always could: in the garret where Isele was hid, barely seven paces square, where the ceiling peaked just above Isele’s head, so that Meg was made to duck. A sympathetic cousin let the room, and Meg trusted in the story he’d concocted: should Altheia’s men ever come calling for the girl who hears voices, none, of course, had heard of her. Isele, why, was the maid. Her name? Lill.

  Isele’s linens were washed for her, her plates set by the door. She had never met with the others in the wood. Some few of Meg’s gang had never even seen her. To half their number her existence bordered hard on legend; to mostly half she was a farce. Hears voices, indeed. It seemed to some good reason for an exorcism; to others, good reason for a drubbing-down for charlatan.

  Either way, between the threat of truth in her ability and the threat of queen’s guard hunting them in her pursuit, they had all, at one time or another, feared Isele. But one.

  Saint-Gilles had sworn his life to her. Our greatest weapon and our only, he would say. Meantime, neither Crow nor Bren nor Jack nor several others ever trusted in Isele. Not as far, they said, as I could throw her.

  Still, most admitted it, sometimes: Isele of fifteen winters was the least expendable of all.

  Black Meg pushed open the garret door to find Isele at her window, one hand flush against the glass. Again Meg had the image of a songbird in a squalid cage, poked at with sticks to sing. She sighed.

  Today, though, Isele needed no prompting.

  “Meg!” Isele cried. She flung herself from the window. Gasped and reeled. “Meg – oh – thank God – ”

  Meg grabbed her, hauled her up. The girl’s pulse hammered in her throat like the running of unnumbered feet. Meg crooned. “Softly, child. What’s frighted thee?”

  By now Meg was unsurprised. Like any gift, she knew, Isele’s did have its risks.

  “Nothing,” Isele breathed.

  Meg guided her back toward the window. Isele protested, flurried, fought, then acquiesced. And in the light –

  – Isele was all over bruises, like windfallen fruit. Over one cheekbone the skin had split and oozed, and a lump stood on that temple, the color of a plum. Breathing she flinched. She staggered from the light, as if ashamed.

  “Isele!”

  “No – Meg, please no – ”

  “It’s though someone kicked thee down a stair.”

  Someone did, Isele burned to say, the words branching fire on her tongue. A living man in a dead house. I fell backwards through the smell of roses.

  Her silence brought
Black Meg up short. Could the fear have driven Crow or any of them to this thing? Dared they defy her fastest law, lay hands upon Isele?

  Meg watched her wide-eyed, then took Isele by both shoulders and shook. “Who’s done this, girl? Was Jack? Was Crow? I’ll flay the both. They’ll lay no hand to thee again.”

  “Meg – it hurts.”

  Meg started. She snatched her hands away. She hung her head. “Isele – ”

  “We are in danger, Meg.”

  “The bitch-queen’s guard. I know. They came to us in the wood. Sought thee. But we ran them off,” Meg lied.

  “No, Meg.” Isele’s eyes blurred to some great distance through the wall. Her voice went singsongish. “His pride dreaded the slow decline, his vanity the withering – ”

  “Gently,” whispered Meg. As though the child were a skittish horse, she thought, and hated her own helplessness. She patted Isele’s hand. Her own hand, she thought, looked cloddish in comparison.

  Isele’s eyes refocused. “What?”

  “What back at thee, girl. Were singing.”

  She laughed. “Was not.”

  “Think, child. What saw?”

  Isele stared at the wall. Meg sat. She’d wait her out. She must. Think of the others, run down in the streets, skewered mid-dream in their cozy beds, strung up for the spectacle of laughing eyes. These, Meg knew, would be the lucky. She did not want to think about the rest.

  Suddenly, Isele cried out. Meg glanced, and she was trembling. Reached, but she pulled away.

  “The queen’s huntsman,” Isele barely said.

  “What’s this?”

  Isele gave a mad little laugh. “Something,” she said, “new.”

  “A danger?”

  “A nightmare. Kills for the queen.”

  Meg hesitated. “Were it the – the voices told it thee?”

  Isele nodded, phantoms shining in her.

  “Kay says they’re angels,” Meg offered.

  “Kay,” said Isele, “is a fool. He mocks at me. He takes me for mad.”

  To soothe her, Meg said: “Maybe angels is what they are.”

  “No,” said Isele, with a small sad smile. “Only a girl. A girl lost in a house of ghosts.”

  Cook takes one look at Liese and screams fit to raise the dead – though, now, even here, the dead stay put. The girls, sleeping sprawled against the wall that’s both their bed and bedroom, jerk awake. Some heads bang on the shackles. Cursing’s heard.

  Only Liese among them does not stir: does not because she can’t.

  “I want to know,” Cook bellows, “who did this.”

  Curiosity bests Liese. She lifts her head. She looks upon herself. She pokes at the pain in her arm, her shoulder, neck. She investigates her ribs and is floored by a dazzlement of sparks. Where her face is not bruised green it greys. She hitches breath and melts back to the stone.

  Meantime, Cook waxes decisive. She kneels and fiddles at the lock. When she straightens, Liese slung in her arms like a new bride, her knees crack. The girls snigger in their sleeves. “Stay put,” Cook roars. The girls exchange glances. None dare ask Cook to take the key to their cuffs too. Those who must piss will hold it. Those who are uncomfortable hold peace. Cook adjusts Liese almost gently in her brawny arms and walks with her to the door.

  As one, and all despite themselves, the girls let out a gasp. “You’re taking her up?” the boldest yelp. “You’re taking her in?”

  They squeak as Cook kicks shut the door behind.

  The days drifted by like skirled leaves on a pond: each like to the last, each full of rot and moldering, in turn. Meg watched them with a heavy heart. Like a hare, she had been run to earth, could do nothing but hide and seethe. In her girlhood she’d heard stories of great leaders of men, each an icon to a cause, each cause calling armies to lay lives on lines, drop smiling in someone’s idea’s name. And she?

  Snow fell and banked and peaked and whorled; in time, began to thaw. There was abruptly mud. Sharp vivid shoots. Ditches full of runoff cold as stars.

  “Charisma,” she informed the walls, “allows thee ask of thine own people anything, and have it, and know that, and, knowing it, not ask.”

  She took off her boot to have something to hurl at her shadow.

  “They were not ready,” she snarled. And then, laid bare in honesty, her head between her hands: “Thou fool. They are no longer thine.”

  Meantime, Meg’s people sank hesitant roots into the floors and streets of Queenskeep. They remembered pallets, pillows, dry feet, bread. They remembered sleeping under ceilings. They forgot gnawing ill-cooked scrawny foxes, drawing straws to stand guard under drooling sleet, turning ankles on sharp stones concealed in snow.

  They forgot sending messages in code to those they missed: some urchin tapping with tossed pebbles at a window, and within, a mother racked with gallows-dreams, or a pale wife running slow hands over her own breasts and thighs, attempting to recall another’s touch. They forgot brambles and frostbite and fear.

  In her garret, Isele sighed and her breath misted on the window, then froze in fingers. She wrote her name in the ice.

  Almost fear.

  Turning, the year’s wheel disclosed Altheia’s secret to all eyes, and there were those who whispered darkly of the mad queen’s future heir, and others who already plotted its destruction, and a very few who took up ribald songs impromptu, on the last act of the king.

  A saying came current, that those with quick tongues must needs have quick feet.

  “It was Isele they feared,” Meg could be witnessed mumbling into mugs of ale. “How not? They’d only yarns of voices – ghosts – they never did set eyes to her and see her true. And they must die so she might live. Fool thou is,” she told herself. “Idiot fool.” She drained each mug and each time stormed away.

  And on the Keep grounds, where the white roses had grown, a scaffold took slow shape against the sky.

  News filtered to Meg piecemeal. Her band, disbanded, posed no threat, raised no steel of consequence against the queen. Each by each, Altheia’s guard could sniff them out and run them down, easy as any game.

  She heard:

  Jack’s house burnt down around his ears, himself subtracted from the ruin, oozing with black burns, marched Keepward;

  Bren’s infant son yanked from his suckling and cast aside, and Bren bundled in a sack and dragged behind a horse through Queenskeep’s streets;

  Non and Ashe beaten senseless and trundled off, not before they cut up Non and raped her, six on one.

  What guards had been sent to the woods that day had wished to attend to Saint-Gilles personally. He’d slipped them, knifed two, then fled the third: a man wearing a feather cloak and what Saint-Gilles swore was the head of some vast bird.

  He’d gone begging answers of Isele. The demon? True, the stories circled freely now, not landing, touching only upon points. A soul-sale. A man terrorized of death-as-relinquishment, the transience of clay. So a devil’s bargain, and a ragbag demon pieced and sealed, laid roundabout with whispered names: the seeker, the prince of crows, the huntsman of the queen. A two-edged immortality, hoarded like a purse of gold. With teeth. Tag-end snippets of a makeshift song: his pride dreaded the slow decline, his vanity the –

  Isele set her palm to Saint-Gilles’ brow. He shushed.

  In silence now she gaped on him and marvelled. From all her spying from the window as the city moved below, Saint-Gilles was the only man she knew, and that but scarcely. In recent years she’d felt vague stirrings toward him, but either ignored them or quenched them herself. Or tried. She was timid and she despaired of his notice. Now he sought her, dropped down to his knees before her, clutched at her like he drowned – and all Isele could think was that he looked a child routed from a nightmare. He sweated and his eyes were wild. To her surprise she found she only wished to reach and tousle his pale hair, smile, lullaby him off into some kinder dream.

  But she could not.

  The last time Meg came calling on Is
ele, she stayed and spoke with her till dawn. She blessed the empath, and Saint-Gilles, who stood against the window, unbelonging, jumpy, chased. Meg gazed on both with what appeared an odd serenity – full four-fifths of her people courted the queen’s huntsman now – and then was gone, pulling the door to with her sixth finger.

  Morning found her, all got up in pilfered silks and rage, hammering at the white doors of the Keep. After some while a man with yellow eyes opened to her, watching her with some surprise. He took one look at her and knew her for a greenwood witch, saw the awful weight of comprehension in her gaze. It was some effort for him, dredging scorn, when he sooner would have hid his face – he felt she saw into his innermost, picked all his secrets clean. And he knew that they were like, himself and she: devolved into stories told to scare.

  He’d a clay jar crooked in one arm, cradled like a bag of vipers, and shifted it to grip her by one wrist, which she allowed.

  “Does know me?” Meg inquired.

  He forced a laugh to mock her. “Does know me?”

  Meg set her jaw. “Don’t care.”

  He dropped a rascal’s bow before her finery, her sparking eyes, her trembling hands.

  “Ah,” he said. “Thou will.”

  He turned her over to a pair of guard, who led her to a cell and shoved her in. They all were there, were Crow and Kay and Jack and all the rest. Bren wept and wasted; Jack they’d bandaged head to foot. His eyes peered, glassy with the pain. He seeped.

  Crow set eyes on Meg and cursed. “Got thee as well, Meg. This must be the end.”

  “No,” said Meg, blazing like any detonated star. “It’s only now beginning.”

  “Hey,” the guard called from the door. “Witch.”

  Meg turned.

  “Thou. Witch.”

  “As thou sees.”

  The guard spat. “Tell them, now, what thou told us.”

  She froze.

  “Tell what, Meg?” they inquired.

  Meg felt a hand knot in her hair. Her head wrenched back. She saw dull eyes, wrecked teeth. Foul breath wheezed in her face. “Now then,” said the guard. “Thou tell.”