The Crimson Skew

by S. E. Grove

  Sophia looked up at the crest of the hill. The weirwind had gone—retreated or disintegrated. There was nothing left now but a scorched line where the contained lightning had held itself in check. The New Occident troops were already withdrawing, marching steadily toward the path leading out of the valley. Theo and Casanova watched them depart, and Theo leaned heavily on his friend’s arm, suddenly overcome.

  As the air warmed, a gray mist began to form. It blanketed the valley, enveloping Datura’s cage and hiding the muddy ground from view.

  Sophia could sense the change all around her—a deep breath exhaled, a tension unwound. The old one knew that the danger had passed. Turtleback Valley was calm and still.

  Casanova, Sophia, and Theo stood at a slight distance, witnesses to Bittersweet and Datura’s reunion. Datura leaned against her brother’s shoulder, and, his arm around her, Bittersweet spoke steadily, telling her how they would leave the valley and go spend some time with Smokey, and how they would write to Boston for news of Mother and Grandfather.

  Sophia watched them with a mixture of gladness and reluctance. On the one hand, she could almost feel the relief that was evident in each of their faces. On the other hand, their reunion reminded her painfully of the unavoidable possibilities that had finally arrived. When it ended, she would have to venture into the grove, where Minna and Bronson either would be or would not be. All the signs had led there; there was no place else to go. If I don’t find them there, she thought, I won’t find them at all.

  Sophia looked away from Bittersweet and Datura and considered the mirrorscope in her hand. She packed it carefully in her satchel. “The scope gave him pause,” she said to Theo and Casanova, “but without the messages from Boston, it would not have been enough.”

  “Yes,” Casanova said, “but if Griggs is anything like me, those glimpses of what war can do will linger for much longer—they may never go away—and change how he thinks and acts in the future.” He gestured uphill, where the New Occident troops had begun to withdraw. “What you see now is only the first step. But those images are lasting ones, and they will have a lasting effect.”

  Theo took Sophia’s hand and pressed it. He gave her a crooked smile. “Borage will be very impressed. Shadrack, too, when we tell him.”

  Sophia smiled back. “Perhaps. It is really Shadrack who stopped this war.” She took one of the slips of crumpled paper from her pocket and showed them the blue stamp—the official seal of the Ministry of Relations with Foreign Ages. “He sent a dozen pigeons. To be sure the news arrived.”

  “Let us go,” Bittersweet announced, walking over, his arm still around his sister’s shoulders. Nosh plodded after them, the pigeons still perched on his antlers. “We are ready to venture into the grove. And you should go first, Sophia.”

  Without realizing it, she had turned her back on the grove of Red Woods. With a deep breath, she faced it. “Very well,” she said, her voice determined. “If you are ready, I am ready.”

  They headed toward it, quiet descending upon them. As they approached, Sophia deliberately chose to observe what was around them, rather than anticipate what was to come.

  The trees were unlike any she had ever seen. They reminded her of the red trees described by Goldenrod in her story. Their bark was the color of old bricks, and they seemed as tall as the surrounding hills. Standing at the very entrance of the grove, Sophia peered up and found that the treetops were lost from view, blurring as they reached for the sun. A narrow dirt path cut between rolling mounds of clover, and the base of each tree was almost hidden by ferns. The bright green of the clover, the dark red of the tree trunks, the vivid blue of the morning sky: the grove seemed entirely composed of shining parts, making a brilliant whole.

  Theo gave her a slight nudge, and Sophia stepped onto the path. She walked along it slowly, entranced by the stillness of the grove. The silence seemed intentional and aware, as if the grove itself were watching them with bated breath. Following the winding path, she skirted a mighty tree with a trunk so wide, ten pairs of arms would not have encircled it. “Have you ever seen trees so large?” she whispered over her shoulder.

  Theo shook his head.

  “Never,” Bittersweet replied.

  Casanova and Datura were lost in wonder, gazing up at the massive trunks. Nosh ambled happily in their wake, bending his head to nuzzle the ferns.

  The path turned, opening onto a clearing. The fallen needles of the Red Woods made a carpet in the center, and at the far side of the clearing were two great trees that had grown toward each other, meeting several feet in the air, their trunks becoming one that stretched upward toward the sky. The space between them was a natural shelter, cool and shady—almost like a room made by the trees themselves. Sophia walked toward it with delight, stepped into the dark chamber and smiled; something here struck her as safe and welcoming. She felt at home.

  And then she froze. Inside the shelter, between the two trees, hung a watch on a chain. The trunks had grown through and around it, swallowing parts of the chain whole, and yet Sophia could see the watch face well enough to recognize it immediately. She had seen it before, in a memory map made of beads. She had seen, through the eyes of a faithless sheriff, two condemned prisoners wrap it around their wrists to join hands. It was the watch Richard Wren had given to Minna and Bronson Tims.

  A sob caught in her throat. She reached up to take the watch with both hands, but it was too high up, and her palms fell against the brick-red trunks on either side of her.

  The grove fell away, and memories flooded her mind. She had never before seen memories so vivid, and even as she felt bewildered at their clarity, some part of her paused and understood what had been working below the surface of her mind for some time. The disc of wood, the antler, the birch bark scroll, and the garnets: they had suggested to her the possibility that all such remnants had the potential to be memory maps. And now she was proven right.

  She saw the memories in disordered flashes—meaningless bursts of light, faces, darkness, groans, crashes, piercing silence—before she realized that her own frantic touch was creating the turmoil. She was skipping feverishly through the memories, glancing at them too quickly, searching for something without knowing what it was she sought. She took a deep breath and stilled her hands. The memories slowed. She could see them now with greater clarity: the long years spent as Lachrima and the preceding ones spent as living, thinking, loving people. There was not yet a sense of order, of linear time, but Sophia dwelt in the memories with intention now, with enough restraint to see coherent moments.

  A young Minna remembered making a castle out of sticks as a child, patiently breaking and building over and over until she was rewarded with a fantastic porcupine of an edifice. An older Bronson remembered meeting Shadrack, a young man with untidy hair and ink all over his hands. Minna, now grown, made a pie in midsummer out of stone fruit, and she sat on the porch with her feet on the railing, letting the smell of the baking waft out through the open door. Bronson sat as a child in school, staring out the window, daydreaming about exploration. Minna remembered squeezing Shadrack’s hand tight as a doctor stitched the aching gash on her knee. Bronson remembered seeing Minna throwing snowballs in the Public Garden; she laughed, her hair disordered and her cheeks pink from the cold, and he felt a stab of something both terrifying and comforting—he had loved her at once. Minna remembered falling asleep on Bronson’s shoulder; they had meant to stay awake to watch the sunrise, but she felt such exhaustion and relief that she could not keep her eyes open. Bronson remembered holding a smiling Sophia, who had new-grown front teeth, and as he leaned forward to bump noses with her he felt an overwhelming joy that left him breathless. Minna remembered cradling Sophia as she fell asleep in her arms.

  Standing between the red trees with her hands upon their trunks, Sophia felt overpowered, not at the sight of her own face, but at the resounding happiness that filled Minna and Bronson w
hen they saw it. It slowed her progress, and suddenly the memories flashed forward and took on a clear order.

  She recalled with abrupt and shocking vividness the events Minna had described in her diary: conversations with Captain Gibbons, long evenings spent on the deck, the gentle rocking of the ship, the explosive storm that passed so quickly it seemed to swell and burst like a bubble. She saw Wren’s familiar face, and she felt her heart pounding with relief as she clutched Bronson aboard the Roost. Wren moved through the memories like a bright and sturdy cable, anchoring them in the possibility of safety. He vanished as Seville appeared, wrecked and desolate, still plague-ridden. The kindness of the innkeeper, the terror of discovering the plague in Murtea, the slow and building desperation of imprisonment, all finally led to the moment before the bridge. She saw the moment now not from the vantage point of Murtea’s sheriff, who had looked on with such reluctance, but from the eyes of both Minna and Bronson. Both appeared calm to the other, and both burned with terror. It was as palpable as the watch chain that linked their wrists together. It astonished her to feel the texture of this terror, for it was not about what they would find when they crossed the bridge; it was fixed on a distant point on the other side of the ocean—a smiling face that could not be lost, that must be remembered at all costs.

  Her own—Sophia’s—face.

  Minna and Bronson crossed the bridge, and the piercing light of the shifting Age moved through them. The world became blurred—not blurred by sight, but blurred by grief. What would have appeared to an untouched mind like hills and paths around them seemed, rather, like a flat canvas. It was visible, but it meant nothing. Even when it changed, giving way to towns and then cities as they fled across the Ages, it seemed to have no meaning. The only intelligible thing was the despair, which filled every corner of their minds with its terrible, inescapable language. The words spoken by people near them, the expressions of horror, the landscapes of ice or hills or desert were all there, but it was impossible to understand them, for grief weighed down upon Bronson and Minna’s minds like a visor. Even the rising and setting of the sun seemed incomprehensible, a predictable cycle that remained senseless in its repetition. Through this, they moved with heavy hearts toward a single point of clarity: a place. The place had meaning—as yet unknown meaning, but a meaning nonetheless; the unseen place promised them an end to the grief; it shone on the horizon like a dawning star. And so they followed it.

  The desert pathways grew hot and cool with the passing days. Rain fell in sudden bursts, and then cleared. Bands of traders rode past, galloping away from them with shouts as if fleeing a plague. The deserts gave way to mountains, and strange animals became their companions. Silent and tall, covered with gray-white fur, they radiated a gentle and stubborn intention that made its way past the grief. At first the creatures walked beside them. Then they carried Minna and Bronson in their arms. The two were passed from one pack of creatures to another, and the creatures spoke to one another in silence, tapping their feet against the earth. Their kindness slowly made itself evident, even to Minna’s and Bronson’s dulled minds: warmth and shelter, wrappings of fur for clothing and shoes, a low and penetrating hum at night that lulled them into uneasy sleep.

  Years passed in this way, with the mountains flattening into hilly plains, and the plains giving way to long expanses of ice. The creatures left them, reluctantly, when the ice ended.

  For a time yet, Minna and Bronson sensed the heavy trembling in the ground that came from the creatures’ footsteps, and though the meaning of those messages was obscured, the reassurance of their continued presence in the distance carried the weary wanderers a way farther. Then the footsteps faded, and the world was a green tunnel. The place they had sought was close. It had a sound. That sound was a voice—a constant, quiet call that spoke their names.

  “Sophia,” someone said.

  She resisted. She did not want to be drawn away from these memories. She wanted to see them all—every one of them—and then she wanted to see them again.

  “You will see them all,” someone else said. “There will be time.”

  Sophia felt a moment’s confusion. She had not spoken. Had she? She realized that her eyes were squeezed shut. After a slight hesitation, she opened them. She had fallen back against the wall of the shelter; her hands rested on the gnarled trunks of the trees.

  Standing before her were Minna and Bronson Tims.

  Sophia could not find her voice. “Is it really you?” she finally whispered.

  Minna smiled, her eyes shining as she gazed at Sophia’s face. She reached out impulsively and then checked herself. Slowly, she drew back her arm. As she did, Sophia realized that the brick-red trunks behind her were still visible. Minna and Bronson were fading.

  “It is really us,” Minna said quietly.

  “We have waited as long as we could,” Bronson said. His voice caught. “And it was enough.”

  Sophia could not stop looking at them. This was no feat of the imagination, for she could not have imagined the way their faces were lined with age and long exhaustion. Minna’s hair was streaked with gray. Bronson’s beard was gray around his mouth, and a long scar ran along his neck. They wore strange clothing—soft leather molded and tucked around their bodies. It seemed alien: a fragment of another world. She felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of betrayal. They changed, Sophia thought. They changed without me.

  “How?” she asked out loud. “How are you here?”

  “We traveled here,” Bronson replied. “All the way from the Papal States. Through the Middle Roads, into the Russias, across the land bridge into the Prehistoric Snows. And finally into New Occident. To here.”

  “You saw some of it,” Minna added. “It was a dark time, and our memories are no clearer than what you yourself saw.”

  “But why here?” Sophia pressed, unable to fully voice her true question.

  “We were called here,” said Bronson.

  “Our hearts did call us to Boston,” Minna acknowledged. “I believe every movement for years carried us in that direction. Toward Boston—toward you. But then the call began.”

  “It promised us wholeness. An end to the life, if you can call it that, we were attempting to survive.”

  “But who called you?” Sophia asked. And then she realized: “The old one.”

  “Yes,” Minna said. “We came here, to this grove, because we were called.” She gestured at the two trees above and around them. “This grove, this place you stand in, is the start of a new world.” She smiled gently. “We are making it. Not just us—all of us who were effaced.”

  Effaced. “The old one is healing the Lachrima?” Sophia breathed.

  “It is more than that,” her mother told her. “Yes, it is healing the Lachrima, but in so doing, it is creating an answer to the kind of grief that burdens the Lachrima. An answer to the war that almost destroyed this valley.”

  “This grove,” Bronson said, his eyes shining, “is even an answer to the Disruption.”

  “The Disruption?” Sophia did not understand.

  “The great conflict that erupted as the Climes faced their own extinction. An extinction they might understand, but we as yet do not. The cause is obscured. The ‘old ones,’ as you call them, could not agree on how to prevent their own annihilation. The Disruption was the result of their disagreement—instead of one solution, many solutions. From the Disruption emerged a world with old ones in different times, different Ages. But we hope that this disagreement has ended. We hope that this place will prevent such a thing from ever happening again.”

  “How?” Sophia wondered.

  “By bringing to the surface what is hidden. By making the past always visible in the present. With the surfeit of memories we—the effaced—carry, a place made of memories can come into being. For now it is just this grove, but the Ages will slowly be remade so that they are entirely made of memories.” />
  “What do you mean, ‘made of memories’?”

  “Just that,” Bronson said. “Every blade of grass, every stone, every drop of water—they will contain the memories of what they have been part of.”

  It was as Sophia had imagined, considering the wheel of wood, the antler, and the birch bark. Here, in the grove, the old one had rendered memory in a way that everyone and anyone could see. It required no expert knowledge, no skill of discernment, no elaborate device. The old one wished these memories to be attainable at a single, thoughtless, touch. “Everyone will know what the past is made of,” she murmured, comprehending at last.

  Her mother nodded. “And though there are many who are misguided in this world, we believe, as does the old one, that knowing the past so entirely will offer guidance.”

  “But to make such a place,” Bronson continued, “to begin, the grove had to emerge from memory itself. And that is what Lachrima are. What we are.”

  “Then these two trees . . .” Sophia began.

  “The two of us are everywhere in the grove, but mostly we are here. When we came to the valley, we wished to make a space that you would find one day, and this is it.”

  “We knew you would come,” Minna whispered.

  “But I can see you—your faces. Can you not leave now, as you are?” Sophia heard the desperation in her own voice.

  For the first time, Minna and Bronson took their eyes from Sophia’s face and glanced at one another. “No, we cannot. We are hardly here at all,” her father said, with a sad smile. “Everything that we are has gone into the making of this place. But it is right,” he added gently. “This is how it should be.”

  Sophia’s vision blurred, and she felt the tears begin. “But I just found you,” she whispered.

  “It is more than we ever hoped,” her mother said, her face softening. “And it is better to see one another briefly than not at all. Isn’t it?”