Oddity

by Eli Brown

  Clover recoiled and stumbled down the stairs. Panic shook the tavern as the jar shattered on the floorboards. The Sweetwater rattlesnake writhed like boiling porridge near the bottom stair. Clover was knocked down by the flood of patrons rushing for the door. She lifted her head to see the viper tightened into a coil just a few feet away, its arrowhead face pointed right at her.

  Screams filled the hall, but the only sound Clover heard was that furious rattle, blurring in the air. With her eyes locked on the snake, Clover slowly lifted herself to her feet. She took a cautious step backward, but her foot rolled off a beer mug, and she fell hard on her back. To her horror, the snake came right for her, its rattle rising in pitch like the sound of fear itself.

  The viper struck.

  It happened so quickly that Clover hardly felt it. She turned her head to watch the snake disappear into a dark corner of the suddenly empty tavern.

  Then Nessa came rushing toward her, her skirt still dripping with horse water. She must have been watching with the rest of them. Clover was so glad to see Nessa’s round face that she almost kissed her. Instead she struggled to pull her own pant leg over her boot.

  “Am I bit? Nessa, I think I’m bit.”

  Exposing her calf, Clover saw the twin fang marks on her shin. They looked too small to matter, but the skin around them was already turning a sooty green.

  Nessa gasped. “No . . . oh no, Clover!”

  “Quickly! My father’s bag!” But Clover was already too dizzy to operate on herself. “Go for a doctor, Nessa. I need a doctor to draw the poison!”

  Nessa ran out the door, screaming, “Doctor!”

  “Hurry . . .” Clover whispered, finding her head on the floor again.

  High above her, Clover saw Smalt’s face peering down with a gargoyle grin. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  Clover remembered the tourniquet inside the medical bag, a spark of hope. She got to her knees and shuffled toward the stairs, but it felt like the sky itself had clubbed her on the head, and she dropped. A taste like maple syrup filled her mouth.

  Clover remembered Susanna. She fumbled with the leather strap, but her fingers were too numb to open her bag.

  Her legs felt wooden except for the place where the snake had bitten her. There, she felt every hair follicle, every pore. She even felt the burning wad of venom the viper had left under her skin. It seemed to be unwinding and making its way deeper into her leg. As her limbs stiffened, she felt the poison’s milky tendrils reaching out, threading up into her veins.

  “Hurry . . .” she tried to say, but her tongue was as useless as a cotton rag, and her ears were ringing as if the rattle were now inside her. It might be minutes before Nessa brought a doctor. Clover didn’t have minutes. She had seconds.

  Her clothes were soaked with sweat, but she couldn’t feel them. All sensations had faded except for the venom creeping deeper. It seemed to be growing as it found the larger veins. When it had writhed its way to the small of her back, Clover felt that the venom had become a viper itself. She felt it bite one of her kidneys.

  Smalt whistled down at her from his perch high above. “Be a good sport and tell Smalt how it feels.”

  It was too late.

  Clover closed her eyes, not wanting Smalt’s face to be her last sight. She tried to think of good things, of her father, of the sound of oars on the lake. But the venom was still moving, forking its tongue at her liver and crowding her lungs. Now the viper was coiling around her heart. Her heartbeat accelerated, thrumming like a rabbit caught in its burrow, before slowing.

  It beat feebly twice more.

  Father, forgive me.

  Once more.

  Mother . . .

  Clover’s heart stopped.

  When the snake moved up the wide arteries of her neck and coiled into the warm cave of her skull, Clover’s eyes popped open, but she saw nothing. Clover Elkin was dead.

  There were pinpricks of color in the darkness. Clover’s mind was going cold. As she sank into the shadow of oblivion, she saw flickers of long-buried memories. A dead rabbit. The smell of sulfur. The sounds of breaking glass and Willit’s voice. These were her earliest sensations, coming to her in a dream as she perished. They were clues to the mystery of her past, too faint and too late.

  Clover woke on a horsehair mattress in a humid canvas tent. A stack of books sat atop a bundle of clothes nearby. The tent was smaller than she’d expected heaven to be, but it smelled pleasantly of lavender and duck soup.

  Clover made out the blurry outline of an old woman knitting at the foot of the bed. Her neck was wrapped thickly in the same green scarf that her woody hands were knitting, one slow stitch at a time.

  “Am I dead?” Clover asked, rubbing her eyes.

  “You were,” the crone said, her voice like the crackle of autumn-blown leaves. “Now, take a sip of this broth.”

  Clover rolled onto her back with a moan and leaned against the folded quilt at the head of the bed, feeling woozy. Near her head was a bowl of hot soup, an aroma so familiar it was its own memory. There was a salted duck foot floating among dark strips of collards. Her mouth watered, but she was too shaky to eat.

  “Do I know you?” Clover asked.

  “You had better!”

  “Widow Henshaw?” Clover cried, her vision clearing enough to recognize her neighbor from Salamander Lake. “You’re here? How did you save me?”

  The widow pulled her pewter locket from the tangled scarf around her neck and opened it. The interior was dusted with a sky-blue Powder.

  “I gave you the last of the Powder. I’d been saving it for an emergency. I guess you’re that emergency.

  “A lifetime ago, the Society entrusted me with item Forty-one, the Pestle,” the widow said. “If you grind teeth in the Pestle — and it is not easy to grind teeth — it produces a blue Powder that can cure almost any ailment.”

  “The Society? That’s why you had those journals. You left them for me to find, didn’t you?”

  “I promised your father I wouldn’t tell you about oddities. But what you read yourself . . .” She shrugged mischievously. “You’d learn the truth eventually.”

  “Father . . .”

  “The Powder wouldn’t have worked on him. He was too far gone. There are some injuries that even the Powder can’t . . .” The widow paused, seeing Clover’s agony. “We took care of everything, lamb. He’s resting now.”

  “What are you doing here in Brackenweed?”

  “I came here after the ice,” the widow said. “I can’t afford to rent a room, but this tent is home enough for now.”

  “What ice?”

  The widow fished a large wooden spoon out of her apron and cupped it behind her ear. It was something Clover had seen hundreds of times, and it still made her smile. The widow was nearly deaf, so Clover leaned close and spoke loudly into the spoon. “I said, ‘What ice?’”

  “After your father was murdered,” the widow whispered, “and you disappeared, a frost bloomed across the water, like the lake itself was mourning. Froze solid as glass in a single night. A wrenching and popping like you never heard! Great slabs and splinters pushed up like knives, and that ice is still creeping right up the river.”

  “Oh no . . .” Clover whispered. She couldn’t bring herself to say aloud what she knew about the ice, but she felt that the old widow knew more than she was saying.

  “We were half-frozen ourselves,” the widow continued. “Some went to relatives or to the Sawtooth to wait it out. I went to New Manchester to find Agate. But I gather he left the city in some commotion. No one can find the man. They say poachers rousted him. So I came here to find help.”

  “From Auburn?”

  “Heavens, no. My boys fought for Auburn during the Louisiana War, and they died for nothing, because all the promise of freedom and equality disappeared as soon as the smoke cleared. No, I’ve come to find some old friends. Ruth Yamada. Ephram Carter. They’ve gone underground like the rest, but I’m going to sn
iff them out.”

  Clover recognized the names from the journal. “You’re joining the Society again.”

  “It’s going to take something powerful to stop that ice. Don’t you fret, lamb; we’ll see things sorted out.”

  “But is it safe for you here, in a big city, I mean?”

  “No one promised us ‘safe.’” Widow Henshaw blew her nose into a kerchief and resumed her knitting. “My freedom papers were lost in a flood before you were born. But I’m too old for slavers to come snatching me up.”

  Clover closed her eyes as the tent spun around her. Widow Henshaw was putting a brave face on a desperate situation. What could possibly pull the Ice Hook from the bottom of a frozen lake? It was as hopeless as trying to find the Wineglass under the Wine Marsh. And now the kindest woman Clover had ever known had left her home because of Clover’s recklessness, her stupidity, her heedless —

  Seeing Clover’s tears, the widow poked her with the spoon. “No need for all that. At least you’re alive! Drink up, lamb.”

  The woman jutted her chin at the bowl, and Clover took a sip. A sheen of oil shimmered on the surface of the broth. Clover found herself slurping up mouthful after mouthful. She chewed some of the greens and wiped her chin with her sleeve.

  The widow gave her a toothless grin. “When you can’t chew, you get good at making soup.”

  It soaked into Clover’s bones, giving her strength. “Do you still have the Pestle?”

  “Haven’t seen it for years. When I was a midwife, the Pestle saved many lives before I loaned it to Miniver for her experiments.”

  “You knew her?”

  “I knew her work. The Pestle was a miracle, but it was infernal to use. It took thirty human teeth to make the smallest pinch of Powder. But when Miniver saw one person cured, she wanted to cure ten, a hundred. She wanted to . . . expand its power, combine it with other oddities to cure more than the one body’s affliction.”

  “More than one body?”

  “I mean the afflictions of poverty, slavery, war.” The widow shook her head sadly. “It sounds outrageous now, but your mother had a way of making wonderful things seem possible.”

  “Did Willit Rummage kill her?”

  For a moment, Widow Henshaw seemed not to have heard the question. Her gums worked idly, her lips bunching and stretching. Just as Clover was about to ask again, the old woman set her knitting down.

  “Your father wanted to tell you when you were ready, but he can’t now, can he? You’re not a child anymore. You’ve just died and come back, which is more than I’ve done. So I’ll give you the hard truth. Your mother isn’t dead.”

  Clover opened her mouth but couldn’t speak; a hundred questions seized in her throat.

  The widow whispered, “She’s a witch.”

  “How can . . . What are you —?”

  “I won’t tell you a thing if you keep squirming like that,” Widow Henshaw said, taking Clover’s bowl away before it spilled. “She wasn’t just a collector, your mother. She was always tinkering. What would happen if you poured an ocean of tea over the Ember? She produced a lot of steam, that’s a fact. What would happen if you ground emeralds in the Pestle instead of teeth? Well, she ruined some perfectly good emeralds. Maybe with more time, Miniver could have changed the world, saved us from ourselves, but something went wrong, and there was a terrible accident.”

  “The fire . . .”

  “It was quick and mean. Half the city came to help, but there wasn’t much could be done. The Heron . . .”

  Clover flinched.

  “So you know about the Heron? Don’t worry — there was a thunderstorm that night, and the Heron was doused by simple rain. Without that bit of luck, the whole city would have burned. But that wasn’t the only thing lurking in the fire that ate up your house. Everyone had a different story to tell about what they witnessed in those flames: bursts of music, a sour green smoke — but most everyone saw a smoldering figure hunting through the inferno, burning alive, eyes glinting like lightning. Some said it was a demon Miniver had summoned. Some said it was a jealous witch come to destroy your mother before she became too powerful. Later, after the vermin, they named this witch the Seamstress. Most think she killed your mother. Hush now and listen.

  “Your father was on his way to a country call, halfway out of the city when he saw the sky lit up and came back in a hurry. Folks tried to hold him, but he ran into that furnace three times, trying to find you. His head was wrapped with a wool blanket, and still the beard burned right off his face. And finally, when the roof came down, Constantine collapsed in the gutter, half-dead himself, and that’s when you came crawling through the cinders like a lizard from the kindling. He said you were sooty and hot as a kettle, but you were whole.

  “And as he was wrapping you up, and using his tears to clean your face because he could hardly believe it was really you, he looked and he saw that witch up close. She was roasting alive, her hair like a torch, as she dug through the timbers, looking for you. No one got as close as your father — no one saw her as clear as he did. And what he saw scared him so bad that he left the city right then and never returned. Left his practice, his friends, everything, to hide you in a tiny village in a distant valley. Far from trouble.”

  Clover’s mouth was parched, her heart struggling under a smoking ruin. “Was it really —?”

  “He never said. Not exactly. You know how hard it was to get Constantine to tell something he didn’t want to. But I can guess, and maybe you can too.”

  “Mother? She’s the Seamstress?” It was a truth that fit into the deepest holes in Clover’s heart. “But why did he leave her? Why didn’t he —”

  “She’d become something terrible. They say the Seamstress screams with two voices, that she’s pieced together like a broken plate. A wraith. A haunt. And I think . . . Well, I am only guessing —”

  “Please.”

  “I think Constantine was angry. To see what Miniver had done. To see the risks she took with you.”

  Clover gripped the widow’s arm tightly. “But how did I survive? Why am I odd?”

  The widow eased Clover back down, saying, “Whatever happened that night, it changed you, and it changed your mother so much that Constantine never looked back. And here is what I want you to hear: it’s better to say Miniver died. Can you see that? What came out of that fire after you, maybe it had once been your mother, but it isn’t now. You both walked away from those flames — but you’re the only one who really survived.”

  “What changed us?”

  “No one knows.”

  “She knows!”

  The widow tsked. “Go and ask her, then. Even if you knew where to find her. Even if you could make your way through the wilderness, past the vermin, to her secret den in the mountains, do you think she’ll sit for tea and cookies? The witch who steals teeth from children is not Miniver Elkin. Not anymore.”

  Clover wanted to scream. She was closer than ever to understanding what had happened to her family, the spark of trouble that had set her whole world alight. And it was still unreachable. She felt dizzy.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I promised your father. He wanted to give you a quiet life. A safe life.”

  Clover shook her head. “Safe . . .”

  The widow shrugged. “We tried.” The old woman wrapped her arms around Clover and held her for a long time. Clover wanted to stay there forever, soup warming her, protected in the widow’s embrace. She recalled the last person who’d tried to hug her.

  “Where is Nessa?”

  “Who?”

  “Wasn’t it Nessa who . . . How did I get here?” Clover asked.

  The widow pointed a crooked finger at Clover’s bag. “Your friend pulled you.”

  Susanna peered over the edge of the doctor’s bag, smiling to see Clover alive.

  “When I heard people saying that a mountain girl had insulted Smalt, well, I had to see for myself. You were pale as milk in the moonlight by
the time I got there, with Susanna dragging you out the door.”

  “You know Susanna?”

  “Agate introduced us, long ago. She threw a chair at me then. But she remembers a friend, don’t you, Doll?”

  Clover tried to eat another bite of soup, but she choked and started crying again. “Father should have told me. These secrets feel like a web,” Clover cried. “I’m caught, and every strand I cut gets me more tangled!”

  “Your father wanted an orderly world, predictable and safe. And I want a cow that spits nickels.” The widow chuckled.

  “But I have to know what happened. How else can I set things right, mend this mess I’ve made?” Clover started to sit up, but the gentle weight of the widow’s hand on her chest was all it took to keep her pinned to the mattress.

  Mrs. Henshaw clucked. “This mess is older than you.”

  “Those bandits came to Salamander Lake because of me,” Clover said, the words like bile on her tongue. “I know it. You know it too.”

  “Oh, child.” Mrs. Henshaw’s words finally failed her, so she just patted Clover’s head. Clover let herself crumple into the widow’s arms.

  “You have a healer’s heart,” Mrs. Henshaw whispered. “You want to fix things. You’re an Elkin.”

  It felt good to let the tears roll down her cheeks, each sob making Clover a little lighter until she felt something like clarity. “I will find her.”

  “People have looked. Those who hunt for the witch don’t return. No one knows where she is.”

  “Smalt knows.” Clover shuddered, remembering his crackling face, the glass jar tumbling through the air. “He said it himself: ‘where the vermin are wrought.’”

  “But you tried that.”

  “I’ll try again.” Clover pushed herself up, determined, and scanned the room for her boots. She saw a wool blanket atop a pile of straw and worried for the old woman, trying to stay warm far from home.

  “It isn’t going to be as easy as that,” the widow said.

  “What do you mean? Aren’t I cured?” Clover pulled the blanket away and saw the wound on her leg. The skin around the snakebite had swollen purple, like a mouth of a boxer who’s lost a fight. It was tender to the touch, but Clover could see that it was not infected. Still, the sight of it made her wish her father were alive to treat it.