Ash Rising

by Katya Lebeque

  She took her crossbow and she walked. She walked out from the dirt yard behind the kitchen entrance and out into the featureless scrub ground beyond that was once the garden and further into the hunting grounds beyond them. Everywhere she went, the ghosts of what once had been sprung up around her – here, the topiaries and in the distance, the ‘story oak’ she used to climb. She saw where stone benches had sat behind lush hedge walls, small mirror pools reflecting the commissioned statues of family ancestors looking disapprovingly down at the green.

  Ash thought as she walked of cooking the way it had been before and how she had wanted to be a baker, in her own stall, when she grew up. She had moved downstairs into the kitchen and taken up a disgraced apprenticeship under Old Merta, it had all seemed wildly exotic. Ash had found the grooming of ladyship all very airy-fairy, long term and yet surprisingly tense and stifling. One had the impression that with one bad stitch, one wrong note, one false step, everything would be ruined and no one would want you. In contrast, making a pie was an immediate, satisfyingly tangible thing. There was a certain recipe for everything, which did not take years and things were bound to look a certain way afterward. It was simple and that was nice.

  Ash shook her head, almost stumbling mid-stride. Now that the stopper had been pulled from the past by all this talk of her mother and balls, it seemed she could not put it back again. How was Ash supposed to protect anyone like this? A pigeon carrior swooped overhead and Ash crouched, almost resignedly, but the bird flew straight past her. It added yet another surreal element to her day and with a sudden chill, Ash realised that in the past few days, the past had become more dangerous than the present.

  She was almost upon the story oak now. With its now-bare branches open wide to the skies, Ash could easily see the form crouched up near the top, on the crude wooden platform they had once made as children.

  “Derrick?”

  “Morning,” he said, without looking at her.

  It was as good a thing to do as any. She took her spare leather strips from out her smock and tied her crossbow to her back. Then, she began climbing.

  “Do you ever wonder where the carriors nest?” Derrick asked by way of greeting when she’d got to the platform herself.

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, I do. I was worried they’d try our old lookout here, so I came here to guard it a few times. Now, I come here because it’s peaceful.”

  Ash supposed it was, in a stark kind of way. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d come here. They were scarcely three metres off the ground, yet up here the world looked different, slightly more manageable, cross-hatched over with the black of the bare branches. It was not the cosy green hiding place that they had shared as children, that fluttered with the slightest breeze. Now there was no breeze, no green and all the current evils were spread bare on the landscape below them. But, in a blackly humorous sort of way, the term ‘lookout’ had certainly come true.

  “I come up here to remember,” Derrick said in his shirt, his chin resting on his collarbone, away from her. “I was just remembering the time we’d played pirates and you insisted on being the pirate captain for once and I had to be the princess. You almost fell off your rope, but when you landed you put your arm around my waist and kissed me on the cheek. I was so angry. It was my job to kiss you on the cheek and I’d never dared to do it and now it was done.”

  Ash nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at her. She was in her own memory, one she’d never shared with Derrick. She had stomped into the solar at six years old and informed her father that she was going to marry Derrick and they would live in the treehouse with their fifty children. He had roared with laughter and pulled her close. “A servant’s life will never be enough for you, little one, nor a groom like Derrick either. You will want more.”

  And yet a servant’s life had been exactly what Ash had chosen.

  Hadn’t she?

  “I had wanted to ask you if you were going to the palace tonight again, but I’m so tired now. Tired of all of it. I should be getting back, Ash.” She turned to him. Derrick’s nails were bitten down to the quick. In all the excitement of the past few days, she hadn’t noticed. She had wondered when he’d started doing that – Derrick, who was the first to think of making weapons, who had made her this crossbow, then taught her how to do it in case he should die. Derrick, who had made her daisy chains at six years old and pulled the wings off butterflies with the same fingers.

  “When did you come up here?”

  “I came up after we made it back last night. I must not have realised how tired I was - woke up thirty minutes ago.”

  “Derrick! You could have been killed!”

  He shrugged. “There are worse things,” he answered without looking at her.

  The past, its ghost, had come up the tree with her. Ash could not look at Derrick as the crossbow maker, the carrior killer, without seeing the little boy he had once been. And with that, his yellow-haired best friend, Ashling. It was not an easy thing to see and to look out for carriors at the same time.

  “Derrick, we need you here. What would become of Rhodopalais and all of us if you were to be killed by carrior in this old tree last night? Come now. We need you.”

  But Derrick only shook his head angrily like a well-trained horse. “And we need you too. So, if you go off to the palace then, tonight and get killed? What then?”

  Ash just stared at him, which seemed to fan the fire. “And if you leave and marry this prince then?” He was speaking too loudly, a carrior might come, but he didn’t seem to care. “What then Ash? Then, even more so. Who will help Old Merta? Who will see to the Madame, or Vanita, or Tansy or…” but he refused to finish, though there was no one else to name. Just him.

  Up here, amidst the bare wood looking down on the hard ground, at last Ash could say the truth. “I don’t know what is going to happen. And I don’t know what I feel.”

  “So, will you go that ball tonight again, then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence. Derrick looked at her for the first time. “I will take you, if you go. I won’t leave you alone.” She put her arm around his waist, the same way she had once when they were children. “I promise,” she whispered. “Only one of us is allowed to die and I promise I won’t die.”

  “If you die, I will take care of Vanita and Stepmother and all the house, if you’re gone.” I will take care of it all as if I were you if you’re gone,” he whispered back.

  A lump rose in Ash’s throat, but he had stood up and was no longer looking at her. “Let’s go home, Ashling.”

  The two friends walked side by side across the dusty brown ground with its cracked remains of dried-up fountains, which had in years past been many things – pirate seas, enchanted forests, running race competitions grounds – but had never quite been this.

  At last they came to the curlicued shape of Ash’s hazelnut tree, which heralded the servant’s entrance not far behind it. “I never understood how you could pray to some god in a time like this,” Derrick commented as they passed the tree.

  “I never understood how you couldn’t,” Ash responded lightly. “How does one get out of bed with nothing to believe in.”

  “I believe in survival.” He sounded so much like her a few days ago. But Derrick wasn’t finished. “I also believe in you. I do, Ash.”

  He was looking straight at her, his eyes blazing even next to the sun overhead. Ash cleared her throat, trying not to get snagged by those lovely eyes. “You know Derrick, I think I’ll stay here awhile and pray after all. I have my crossbow, I should be fine.”

  It clearly hadn’t been the answer he was expecting, but Derrick nodded graciously enough, turning and walking towards the kitchens on his own. Sighing, Ash sank onto her knees next to her tree. What was wrong with this day?

  It was not yet the time Ash usually came to pray, but now that she was at the tree, she found her heart automatically calming itself and preparing for reflection. The elab
orate, twisting arms of the tree and its stumpy gnarled trunk were the same as always, at least and she closed her eyes for just a moment.

  It had been so hard to pray. With the giddy magic of ball and old dresses transforming into new ones, it seemed frustratingly invisible to simply sit and look within. It had been so long since she had felt that she had truly had revelation from this daily prayer and this twisted, writhing tree and it was almost out of rote that she asked her question now:

  “Should I go to the ball? What is the right thing to do?”

  But a dry wind only blew up from the empty grounds that had once been Rhodopalais and the dry hazelnut tree looked down in silence. Nothing.

  Ash was standing to go, hoisting her crossbow onto her back, when a tell-tale screech filled the air. Carrior. Ash crouched behind the unconvincing shelter of her tree and readied her crossbow, but when the carrior came into view, she nearly stood in wonder.

  A miracle of iridescent feathers - of teals and violets and midnight blues most of all, the colour of Ash’s dress – suddenly flew across the sky. Starling, Ash’s analytical mind said, but the rest of her was awed into silence. The giant bird was a jewel, if a deadly one, winging its way from roughly the direction of the story oak, towards the house.

  As it came closer, Ash saw that it had something in its talons. The shape and size of the carriors cargo was unmistakably a human body and Ash relaxed slightly, knowing that the bird wouldn’t aim for her as a kill with one already in hand. As the starling carrior winged closer, the length of the dark flop of hair in between its talons told her that it was a woman that this bird had just killed.

  It swooped, near enough the hazelnut tree to buffet Ash with the gust of its wings beating and Ash flinched lower to the ground, in spite of herself. If she had looked down, had not been used to watching carriors for her life’s safety, she might not have seen it. But she did. The starling carrior flexed its talons, dropping the body it had been carrying onto the dry earth.

  Ash had never seen a carrior do that before and as it circled around she startled, sending a warning arrow at it that made the bird squawk indignantly. Some of its miracle-dark feathers fell out as it startled at the arrow flying past its head, but it did not dive at her. Instead it only flew off, leaving Ash gaping after it. After some minutes, Ash returned her eyes back to the ground in front of her and the lady’s corpse lying there.

  She had been sallow once, olive-skinned and the golden dress must have suited her well. Now, the paleness of death had taken that away. Ash had seen more corpses since the Expansion Project than she cared to remember and this one must have been recently caught and killed, to still be an unstiffened corpse not yet blue and black. What had this woman been doing in a ballgown during midday? Preparing for tonight’s ball perhaps, but it was still hours too early. More peculiarly still, her dress was unruined and her body unmangled – she looked almost peaceful, with eyes closed, as though taking a nap on the hard Rhodopalais ground. As Ash came closer, she could see a deep talon puncture – just one – in the side of the lady’s neck. A quick death at least and one that had not got any blood on her pretty dress.

  Ash’s eyes roved further down the body and her practical mind took over. It was a lovely dress, with wistful layers of fluffy tulle in dull gold colours and shimmering silvery glints of lace dotted across its embroidered waist, its full underskirt and hem, the clouds of tulle beginning in corn-coloured gold and the bodice and fading to a fluffy white at the dress’s hem. By the time Ash’s eyes had travelled to the bottom of its skirt, she was decided. This woman deserved a decent burial and there was enough iron around to make her a decent-sized hole with a few hours’ work. But the dress she would not waste in the ground. This lady was dead. And Ash, Ash had been surviving but had learned in the last twenty-four hours that she actually wanted to live.

  Derrick, Old Merta and Tansy all looked up wide-eyed when Ash came inside for evening meal, dirtied with soil from head to toe and holding a pristine white and gold dancing dress that seemed to have come from her prayer tree.

  If she registered their surprise, she didn’t show it. “Tansy, I’m going to need help with Vanita’s dress.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Stranger in a Dress

  “There.”

  With some of the starling feathers sewn on, Ash’s blue dress looked completely new on Vanita. Each large, iridescent feather greedily swallowed the fading daylight and glimmered seductively from shin height all the way down to the floor. It looked fierce, almost tribal, in a way that fit beautifully with the refined elegance of the dress’s shimmer. Vanita looked star-like in it and the midnight blue cloth making her pale face a moon and her hair the sun. She modestly lowered her eyes when Old Merta exclaimed on her beauty and it struck Ash suddenly that her sister was growing up. She wasn’t sure why, but in all the chaos of the Expansion Project and its aftermath, she had expected such everyday normalities such as age to pause. Oh well.

  “You look amazing, Vanita. Better than I ever did in that dress, I’m sure and more of a lady. I will just get into my dress and we can be off.” But as Ash turned to retrieve her dress from the pantry, Stepmother stopped her, an authoritative hand lightly on her arm.

  “You will be a lady tonight, Ash, no matter what your choices for the everyday. And a lady is in wont of preparations, some ceremony for the flutter of getting dressed for an occasion like a ball…” She sighed, looking down, suddenly old. “Your mother should be here for this but, well, needs must.”

  Several minutes later, Ash was upstairs in her stepmother’s own bathing room.

  Tansy was lower than Ash in rank and tended to chamber pots and bathing buckets, one for the bathing chamber Ash and Vanita had shared as children and one for the lord and lady of the house, stepmother’s own bathing room for all these years. As such, Ash had not been in this bathing room ever before. It deepened the patina of strangeness on her day. The cloth curtains were tattered and ghostly, but the wooden floors were clean enough. When Ash moved to pick up the buckets and take them down for water to put on the fire, she saw that all the buckets were full of unused water. When was the last time her stepmother had bathed?

  “A woman at her first ball is a mystery reveal,” Stepmother said, chasing away sad thoughts. “She is an important part of the nobility, but one that has not been seen before by that nobility. And so, with her family name and her irreplaceable role that she brings to that family and her class, seeing her at last as a debutante at ball is the joy of a puzzle piece revealed, an important part of the whole.” Stepmother carried on talking as she lifted the dark blonde tangles of Ash’s hair and ran her own brush through them, as Ash warmed the water on the fire and watched the flames.

  “I remember the first time I saw you. A little slip of a thing, caked in mud, eyes blazing! You were just a child… Then, when you were thirteen, a blink away from your first ball, you quit this house for the kitchens.”

  “You had called me into the solar a week after my father’s death and informed me that I would have no dowry, Stepmother.”

  “You don’t have to call me that ridiculous title. I never told you to, anyway. Just you being contrary. And yes, there was no money after your lord father’s passing for dowries for both you and Vanita. But my point is this: years later, I do finally get to see you at ball.”

  Ash looked up and found herself facing a cracked mirror above the fireplace. She barely recognised the long neck and the face that looked younger, somehow. Stepmother had discreetly taken some of the dress’s lace without her looking and used it to fasten Ash’s hair high onto her head – as high as Vanita’s had been the night before. It was uplifting and unsettling all at once.

  After pouring the buckets of water in, Ash lowered herself into the tub with a sigh, the bath linens hot against her skin. When last had she had a bath? Stepmother waited until she felt weightless in cloudy warm water, then asked two simple questions before leaving the room.

  “Ash, do you dis
like the prince’s company and find him unappealing?”

  “No.”

  “Then, would it be such a bad thing to marry him?”

  “You don’t understand. The weight of it… Good grief, the irony! I renounced a title less than a tenth of the size I would get should I marry the prince. To refuse to become a lady and then instead become a princess, maybe even a queen consort… I would be the first to laugh, I hope. No, no - it would be ‘out of the pan and into the fire’, as Old Merta would say.

  “Indeed, it would… And do you remember what I said to you before you agreed to go on the first night of the ball?”

  “That there were other Vanita’s out there and who was going to help them?”

  “Just so. There may be comfort in a small cooking pan, but there is power in fire. Think on that, Ash.”

  Twenty minutes later, her words were still burning in Ash’s brain, as she got into the dress alone. It was uncannily close to the colour of her hair, a dusky wheat-ripened yellow that fell in tulle clouds to the floor, with lace roses embroidered throughout, the colour of silver. Taking cue from her stepmother, she had torn an unnoticeable strip from its hem and used it to tie a tulle ribbon around her neck. In the cracked mirror, she looked a faerie-like, golden dream of a girl.

  Who was this stranger in a dress?

  As she stepped out of the room and into her stepmother’s bedchamber, Stepmother was already there, with her worn old boots for her to put on as she had the night before. But things had changed since the night before. The night before, she had not known the prince, or what was waiting for her. “May I wear the Glass shoes now, please?” she asked in a small voice.

  Some minutes later, a more unsteady Ash emerged, colt-like on long legs, to get into the pumpkin-coach again. As Derrick handed her up into the carriage, her foot slipped on the stair and he had to catch her, his arms feeling sure and strong beneath the thin fabric of her dress. “It has been a long time since I last wore such shoes,” she said to no one in particular, feeling the heat of blush spread across her cheeks and neck. But no one said anything on the matter and Stepmother merely stepped up to the coach and wished her and Vanita “to have fun and be charming to the prince” through the window. As the coach pulled off in its eerie, horseless way, Ash watched the shrinking figure of her stepmother and realised that that was the first time since the Project that she had seen her outside the house.