The Crimson Skew

by S. E. Grove

  As she walked on toward it, Sophia squinted. What was it? A house? A wagon? She moved closer.

  “Sophia! Stop,” Casanova shouted as he caught up to her, seizing her arm.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking at the strange box.

  “I am not sure.” He frowned. “Let me go first.”

  Theo joined them. “I know what it is,” he said, with faint surprise. “It’s harmless.”

  After a moment, Casanova continued onward, with Theo and Sophia close on his heels. Only when she had nearly reached the motionless object did Sophia realize what it was: an iron cage with long carrying poles, like a palanquin, rested on the ground by the banks of the river.

  There was someone inside. As they drew closer, Sophia realized that it was a girl. She could not have been more than ten or eleven. Her long, black hair hung loose and wild, and she was weeping. The sobs were inaudible in the thunderstorm, but they were visible in how they wracked her body. The girl clenched the iron bars and leaned slowly forward against them, as if exhausted, sinking into a pile of her own skirts.

  Their hems were charred.

  In a moment, Casanova was at the cage, working upon the lock. Theo watched his futile efforts. “It’s the Weatherer,” he said in Sophia’s ear. “The one I saw in the memory map.”

  And then, in a rush, she understood. It was Datura—the sister Bittersweet had sought so desperately for so long. She is just a child, Sophia thought, shocked. She found it hard to believe that the small, wretched creature before her was the cause of so much catastrophe. “Datura,” she called out over the rainstorm, reaching to touch the small fingers that gripped the iron bars.

  The girl’s sobs stopped abruptly, and she looked up. Her face, green at the edges where it met her dark hair, was white and strained. She looked half-starved, her cheeks gaunt and her green fingers bony. Her lips were scabbed from old cracks and red from new ones. With eyes wild and despairing, she looked from Sophia, to Theo, to Casanova, and back again.

  Sophia leaned in close to make herself heard without shouting. She covered the girl’s fingers with her own. “Datura,” she said gently. “I’m a friend of your brother’s. Bittersweet is looking for you, searching everywhere. He will be so glad to know we’ve found you.”

  Tears filled Datura’s eyes once more, and she pulled her fingers away. “He will not be glad. I have done terrible things.” Her trembling voice was not the voice of a child; she sounded to Sophia like a woman who had lived long enough to regret decades of her life—a woman who had lived enough to grow bitter and weary. She dropped her head again, covering her face and renewing her sobs. “Terrible things,” she cried.

  Sophia reached through the bars and took Datura’s bright green hands in her own, drawing them away from her face. They were small and terribly cold. “You had no choice.”

  “I did have a choice,” the girl said, looking up, her expression agonized. “I do. And every time, I choose my gift. Every time, I choose Mother and Grandfather over everyone else. It is unforgivable,” she whispered. “But I love them too much.” Her words were almost inaudible.

  Sophia felt tears in her eyes as she pressed the girl’s hands. Suddenly, a muffled bugle call sounded from the direction of the New Occident troops. Datura started. She scrambled to her feet and stood in the center of the cage, her arms rigid. “That means I have to begin,” she said, her voice trembling. “You must run as far as you can. The vapors will spread in seconds.”

  Sophia glanced at Theo, who looked tired and wet, and Casanova, who looked stricken and uncertain. He had given up on the lock. Sophia could see him calculating the weight of the palanquin, wondering if he could lift the front while Theo and Sophia raised the poles at the rear. She had briefly considered the same thing, but with Theo’s injury it was out of the question. Looking meaningly at Casanova, she shook her head. “Go,” she said. “I will stay with Datura.”

  “All of you must go,” Datura insisted. The bugle sounded again, and she jumped. “Please, please, I beg you!”

  Theo and Casanova had not moved, but Sophia could see, taking in every sight and sound around them, how the circumstances of the present would unfold. The roaring of the storm seemed to recede, and she felt time slow around her. The New Occident troops in the distance were a blur of red and white. Behind them, the weirwind waited, enraged and hungry. Casanova was shielding his eyes from the rain, and the water ran down over the bandages of Sage’s poultice. Both his arms were trembling. Sophia realized that he had overexerted himself yet again—had he tried to lift the palanquin alone? No—it must have been earlier, while steering the canoe. She noticed that Theo’s boots had sunk into the mud, and he was frowning fiercely, squinting at Sophia with a look that was one part exasperation and two parts agony. He would not leave her with Datura. He would not leave her here, the way he had in the driving rain outside of Nochtland the year before, because if he could help it, he would never leave her again.

  That was when she knew: Theo had changed. He was no longer happy to save only his own skin; he no longer counted himself lucky when he slipped away unnoticed. He was tied to people and places now, and he wanted to be. He was tied to her—to Sophia. It was in every line of his furious, loving scowl. Sophia wondered how she could have missed it. I’m weathering, she realized. I’m making space so that I can see everything. This is what Bittersweet described to me, what seemed so hard to imagine when he did.

  And a chain of events unreeled before her. The terrified child in the cage would open her hands, and red flowers would bloom from her palms—Datura’s gift would blossom once more. The scent of the flowers would drift, carried by the powerful winds, and the tension of the waiting armies would collapse in the chaos, confusion, and carnage of the crimson fog. The weirwind would descend the slope, and the troops from both sides would be battered into death. When the storm passed, there would be little more than the wreckage of an iron cage.

  Sophia could see no way to prevent these things from happening that did not begin and end with persuasion. She had to persuade Datura to wait. She had to persuade the commanders to wait. She had to convince the armies to wait.

  But though it was Sophia’s gift to have all the time in the world, she had run out of time.

  • • •

  THERE WAS A crashing sound, and Sophia felt the ground shaking under her feet, as if from the impact of a horse’s hooves. The space she had created around herself collapsed; time ran on as usual. She looked desperately to either side of the valley. Had the weirwind descended? Had the troops begun their charge?

  “Da-tu-ra!” came a distant shout. Sophia turned. She could see only a dark blur, racing toward them along the riverbank, but she knew that voice. Even though she had never heard it shout, she recognized it. The dark blur became a moose, charging toward them with its antlers lowered, moving at an incredible speed. “Datura!” came the cry once more.

  “It is Bittersweet!” Sophia exclaimed, reaching through the bars once more to take Datura’s hands. “You see, he has come to find you.”

  Datura stood staring, wide-eyed and wondering, as Nosh bulleted toward them. The bugle sounded again, but she ignored it.

  Sophia saw, out of the corner of her eye, an uneasy stirring at the front line of the New Occident troops. She imagined how this would appear to General Griggs, who had now ordered Datura three times to release a fog that did not come: first, three figures in a canoe had appeared, and now another who knew the girl by name. Clearly, he was only waiting because he expected the fog to begin at any moment. How long would he wait? She willed Nosh to run faster.

  He closed the distance, now fifty feet away, now twenty, and finally Bittersweet slid from Nosh’s back and ran to them, soaked to the skin, his face bright with exertion. He threw himself against the bars and pulled Datura toward him. They held each other close. “Little sister,” Bittersweet murmured, his hand on her head.
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  With effort, she pulled back, and her face was strained with grief. “You must go,” she said, trying to push him away.

  Bittersweet was unmoved. “I am not going anywhere.”

  “But Mother and Grandfather,” Datura said, dissolving into tears. “If I don’t—”

  “They will understand,” Bittersweet reassured her.

  “They will be dead! They are in winter sleep and will never wake unless I do everything the men ask!”

  As Bittersweet and Datura spoke, Sophia felt a tremor of warning course through her. Perhaps, in the past, she would have pushed it aside as her own baseless anxiety. Or, if by chance she listened to it, she would have ascribed it to some mysterious better instinct. Now she knew that it was neither baseless anxiety nor sound instinct; the warning came from the old one, and she raised her head abruptly.

  It was not the New Occident troops advancing toward them, as she had feared. It was the muddy river water, rising and falling in mutinous currents. A section of grassy earth disappeared beneath a swell of water; the riverbank was being eaten before their eyes. Sophia looked down, aghast, at the widening fissures in the soft ground underfoot.

  “We must move!” she shouted, seizing one of the poles of the palanquin. The others looked at her, startled. “The riverbank!”

  Bittersweet was the first to understand. He took up the pole beside Sophia and began straining to lift it.

  Casanova followed suit, pushing Theo aside and attempting to lift both poles at the rear of the palanquin. Sophia could feel his exertion through the wood in her hands, but the iron cage did not move.

  “It is too heavy,” Datura cried. “They use eight men—you will not be able to lift it!”

  Sophia looked at Bittersweet in anguish. She could see in his face the same desperate, fruitless unreeling of what lay before them: the rush of the river, the muddy soil, the crumbling ground, and the heavy iron cage. Before long, the ground underfoot would give way, and Datura’s prison would fall into the water. Datura, trapped inside, would drown.

  Sophia’s mind worked rapidly through one possibility, and then another, and another; she could see only one way forward, and it was precarious.

  “Go!” she shouted to Casanova, pushing him away from Datura’s cage. “Get Fen Carver! Tell him Griggs has agreed to negotiate a truce!”

  Casanova did not protest that this was a lie. He did not ask how the lie would be made true. Without a word, he ran toward the boulders that served as a bridge to the western riverbank.

  Sophia turned to Bittersweet and Theo. “Keep her alive,” she said. Then she ran uphill, toward the soldiers who stood, unmoving, like rows upon rows of black teeth, preparing to devour the valley whole.

  38

  One Terrier

  —1892, August 17: 10-Hour 56—

  In addition to the above measures prohibiting the sale and traffic of human beings, New Occident hereby agrees that any person in this Age known to engage in such sale and traffic after the passage of this treaty, even if such sale or traffic occur beyond the boundaries of the nation, shall be tried for his or her crimes. The penalties in this case will be identical to those described above for the sale or traffic within the boundaries of New Occident.

  —1810 Treaty of New Orleans

  SORENSEN AND THE Elodeans had given their testimony, and Mr. Fenton had summarized the narratives offered by the seven witnesses, explaining to the judges what evidence was laid before them.

  Gordon Broadgirdle, he asserted, was Wilkie Graves, a known and notorious slaver. Graves had made his way into New Occident and pursued a political career, shedding his old identity and taking on a gang of armed men to dissuade the intervention of any who might get in his way. Though there was not yet evidence to prove it, Broadgirdle had likely begun his plot to kill Prime Minister Bligh months in advance—all with the intention of starting the war he had effectively begun in the summer of 1892. What had been proven beyond doubt, Fenton argued, was his treatment of Gerard Sorensen and the Eerie, who had been most cruelly used in pursuit of his agenda.

  The judges heard this summary solemnly. “You may be seated, Mr. Fenton,” the chief judge with the impassive face instructed. All of Mr. Fenton’s witnesses shifted slightly, their attention turning to the defense.

  “Mr. Appleby?” said the judge. “Please present your evidence.”

  “I certainly will, Your Honor,” Mr. Appleby said, rising. “I have counseled the prime minister to tell you the truth, and I hope you will take this into consideration as you determine the next steps. Prime Minister,” he said, nodding to Broadgirdle.

  Broadgirdle rose, and with the confident air that always hung about his person like an ornate cloak, he strode to the dais instead of remaining by the table. Shadrack considered him with reluctant admiration. There was nothing in the man’s expression to suggest that he was the target of multiple devastating accusations—that he was on the very verge of losing not only his high position, but his freedom. He seemed, rather, the same self-assured politician he always was, primed to deliver a momentous speech that he knew already his audience would applaud.

  “Your Honor and members of parliament,” he began, looking at them all with a slight smile. “I will heed Mr. Appleby’s wise counsel, and tell you the truth about my past, thereby filling in the considerable holes left by the testimony of these . . . ahem, unusual witnesses.” He cast his eye over them wryly. “What these seven don’t know would fill a chamber much greater than this one, Your Honor. In fact”—he shook his head with a low chuckle—“what they don’t know might fill an entire Age. For you see, honorable judges, members of parliament, you are right—I am not a native of New Occident. Nor am I from the Baldlands. In fact, I am not of this Age at all.” There were murmurs of considerable surprise.

  Shadrack frowned. He had expected a well-crafted response from Broadgirdle, but he had not expected this. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Cassandra was looking sharply at Broadgirdle with something like concern. “I,” Broadgirdle said, waiting for the suspense to climax, “am from the Age of Verity.”

  The murmurs from parliament shifted to become something more disbelieving—more ridiculing. “My father was a criminal,” Broadgirdle said, cutting into the murmurs. There was instant silence. “He came from another part of this Age of Delusion—Australia. As the testimony from Pip Entwhistle has intimated, he was a desperate man prone to dramatic and excessive measures. One of those excessive measures was to flee his native Australia when threatened with life in prison for a crime he had committed. He escaped to this hemisphere, where he landed on the western coast of the Baldlands and met my mother. My mother died at my birth.” He covered his eyes briefly with his hand, and Shadrack recognized the falsity in the gesture—but he doubted any of the judges would. “With a motherless infant and a criminal past, he made his way east, toward the middle Baldlands.

  “You can imagine the kind of life I led,” Broadgirdle continued, his voice low and strained, “with such a man as a father. It was a difficult life. And it was made more difficult by a discovery I made when I was fifteen. Due to the circumstances, of course, my father had brought very little with him from Australia. He had a small wallet with him, however, that contained all of his identification papers, and I had occasion to examine the contents when my father was taken ill. I found in the wallet a surprising piece of dreck—dreck that described me by name. I lived in Australia, a grown man—an important man. A man of influence and power. The fact that my father had kept this piece of dreck spoke to me clearly: coming to the Baldlands had not only been an act of desperation, it had been an act of selfishness. He had stolen from me the future I ought to have had.

  “I left my father on that very day, and I have not heard of him since. I will leave aside the intervening years, as I tried—without success—to recover the fate my father had stolen from me. And then the course of m
y life was changed again—by Pip Entwhistle.” He looked at Pip with what seemed a smile of genuine warmth. “Yes, indeed. You did not know it, but the piece of dreck you sold me set me on a new course. For it mentioned me by name as a great political leader in a great war, uniting the western continent.”

  “But . . .” Pip protested, entirely out of turn. “But that newspaper made no mention of a Wilkie Graves.”

  “Wilkie Graves is not my true name,” Broadgirdle said with a gleaming, assured smile. “I recognized at once the meaning of the paper in my hands. Now there were two pieces of dreck, both of which described my illustrious future. It was clear that I was destined for such a path regardless of which Age I inhabited. Within the year, I had joined the Nihilismian sect. Of all the misguided people in our world, I understood that they, and they alone, were attempting to restore the Age of Verity that we had all lost. With their guidance, I began to see more and more the true nature of the world around me. I realized that there are certain people, certain paths, that will transcend even disruptions of the kind that occurred ninety-three years ago. And I was one such person.

  “I have tried,” he said, leaving his explanation and past behind, his voice rising to a crescendo, “to bring this misguided Age of Delusion closer to its true path—closer to the Age of Verity that is irrevocably lost to us. We must,” he said, pounding his fist on the podium, “correct the mistakes of this deluded Age. We must do everything we can to align ourselves with the events that transpired in the Age of Verity. That Age is beyond saving, I know.” He looked at the parliament judges with reproach. “But to sit here idle while Verity runs away from us—it is inexcusable. Every one of my actions,” he said, with an air of great self-righteousness, “has been an effort to keep us on track. An effort to recover the world we have lost. An effort to save what little can still be saved.”