Burn it all to ash.
THIRTY
Alys had been in the Lakes exactly five days the first time she woke up in a tree.
Her eyes opened to the night. Air moved on her skin. She felt bark under her toes and through the linen of her nightshift. She was sitting. Perched. Like a bird.
There wasn’t a moment between sleep and waking that she thought she might be dreaming. Nor was there a moment she thought she might fall. She sensed the ground was far below her, but her feet were sure under her, her crouch steady. She thought if she just opened her arms and tilted forward she might float gently downward.
She didn’t though. She clung to the branch. With each passing second she felt more herself, more aware that this was terribly wrong. Girls didn’t wake up in trees. Creatures did.
She feared that’s what she was becoming—a creature.
It was then that Alys split in two. There was an outside part of her that went on, spoke to people. Ate food—or tried to—and went to sleep under covers, inside a tent. But the inside part of her—the part that was truly her—wasn’t present among these people. The inside part of her was in the trees, in the fforest, sniffing the air.
Alys had been hopeful when she first arrived in the Lakes. Despite everything terrible that had happened, she thought her life might be taking a turn. She’d lost Mother and Father, and she ached for them. But Defaid hadn’t been her home. She’d never belonged there, had never wanted to belong. From the moment she’d decided to go to the Lakes with Pawl and Beti and Cian, she’d felt such a strong desire to be at rest there. To join them and feel joined to them. That desire was more powerful than any she’d allowed herself to feel before. As a child of Gwenith, a watcher, she’d learned not to look forward. There was no future for her in Defaid—at least not one any better than the present. Those days were behind her now, but from the moment she first awakened in a tree, Alys couldn’t deny the sick certainty in her heart that there was no peace for her here, either. She carried darkness within her. She could never get away from it, because she could never get away from herself.
The Lakers had been welcoming at first, and Alys enjoyed how free in their ways they were. Alys expected they’d be different from the villagers, but she couldn’t have imagined how different they were—even from each other. Folks from the villages all looked the same. They had the same starched collars, same starched skin, same starched faces. The Lakers were alike only in that they were all a muddle. They dressed in a muddle of shapes and colors, they lived in a muddle of tents and lean-tos, they worked a muddle of occupations that might change from day to day, and at a muddle of hours that might shift on a whim. If they didn’t feel like fishing, then they didn’t. And they might be up with the sun to weave, or salt, or sew, but if they weren’t in the mood to do those things, then they didn’t. There was no starch in the Lakes. No collars. There were women with short hair, and men with hair down to their waists. Women and men with beads hanging from their ears, and signs, words, and pictures inked into their skin. There were people who weren’t man or woman. They were both, either, neither. Alys was more curious than alarmed by all the variety. She’d even grown accustomed to letting her own hair hang loose, and to dressing as she wished instead of as she ought.
Before, she would have felt uncomfortably exposed without her dress fastened tight up to her throat. But the fresh warmth of spring’s arrival, the damp of the Lakes, the hard work of netting fish and cooking over open fires, made her dress hang heavy and confining on her limbs. Alys found herself looking with envy at the Laker women who wore loose shirts like men did, even trousers. On her third day in the Lakes, Beti handed Alys a folded stack of clothing and said, “Here, child, I’m hot just looking at you.” Alys flushed crimson and thanked her, and waited until she was alone to examine everything. There were two linen shirts, one a washed indigo blue and one white, also two pairs of thick linen trousers, loose around the thighs and more fitted at the calves. Coiled in the middle of the stack was a brown leather belt for holding up the trousers. That evening while the sky was still light, Alys stole away to her sleeping tent and tried everything on. The shirt was open at her neck, and the evening air kissed her collarbones. The trousers were magical. She bent, she sat, she stood, she stretched. Nothing pulled or draped over her. Nothing stopped her from taking long strides. She felt unencumbered. Nothing but her own muscle and bone limited her movements. The next morning she walked out of her tent dressed like a Laker. Hair loose down her back, throat bare to the sun and breeze, legs moving freely. Cian smiled at her and looped a finger through her belt. “What’s this now?” he said. Pawl nearly spit his tea when he saw her. “Our Gwenith lass is a Laker!” he cried out. Beti laughed. Beti always laughed.
Alys had felt happy for a precious, short while—and as free as her legs felt in trousers. She fell into the rhythm of the Lakes so easily it shocked her, like finally resting her head on a pillow after having slept too long on a hard floor. The rightness and softness of the Lakes and the Lakers enveloped her. She admired their easy ways, even if she doubted she could ever feel so loose and open herself. She found herself imagining what a future here might look like. A future with Cian. She thought of sharing all this happiness with Enid and Madog once they arrived. She’d teach Ren to canoe, the way Cian had taught her.
When she woke up in a tree the first time, that all changed. Like wheels in ruts, she sank into old, familiar feelings. Fear. Doubt. Doom. And just as she always had in Defaid, she kept her thoughts to herself.
Then the whispering started.
The Lakers might have dressed differently from the villagers, but they weren’t so fearless as they appeared. It had come as a shock to them when Pawl and Beti announced what had happened to Defaid, and that Pysgod had shut its Gates to travelers—with Tarren no doubt soon to follow. The spring thaw meant no one in the Lakes would starve for lack of trading. There was plenty of fish and game, and there would soon be berries, mushrooms, and greens. But the things that Lakers looked to the villagers for—grains and saddles and smoked meats, lard, butter, potatoes and apples—would dwindle. Alys’s sharp ears picked up the hushed voices around evening fires. More than once she’d heard her name spoken just a bit too loudly, before the person talking realized that Alys was within earshot. More than once she’d heard it remarked that all their troubles had coincided with the village girl’s arrival.
Alys pretended not to hear them, and Pawl, Beti, and Cian pretended the same way. Pawl told stories, Beti guffawed. Sometimes Pawl and Beti drank too much, sometimes they didn’t. Cian kept smiling. None of them acknowledged the whispering. Instead they tried to distract themselves as well as her. When silence fell around their campfire, Beti would pipe up with plans for the Gwenith children’s arrival. Occasionally this cheered Alys, but just as often it caused her to worry more about what might have befallen them on the way. When Alys counted aloud the days that had passed since the fire, Pawl assured her the children’s slowness was as it should be. “They’ll be following the river to find their way here. It’s awful bendy. And they’ve got the babies in tow. Any day now, they’ll turn up. Patience, lass.” She wanted to believe him.
The first time she woke up in a tree, she’d hoped it wouldn’t happen again. Maybe a dream had led her up there, she thought. But she didn’t believe it. And the very next night—and every night after that—she woke up the same way. She went to sleep each night afraid of what was surely to come. She piled clothes, pots, sacks of potatoes, and blankets in front of her tent flap, thinking the obstacles might slow her down, cause her to wake up and stop herself. She lay in bed, calming herself, touching the bit of linen embroidered with the names of the children of Gwenith—as if they might keep her settled, keep her down. But each night it was the same. She awakened perched on a branch, legs crouched bird-like underneath her, as balanced and aware of the space around her as if she were an owl.
This made her think of the soul eaters, of course. Those sisters, with th
eir owl eyes, their love of the dark. Their comfort in it. She wondered if this was how soul eaters slept—perched high off the ground, watchful even while resting. Alys had thought her days of night watching were over. Alys had been a fool.
The evening of her tenth day in the Lakes, Alys felt that she would surely crawl out of her skin if she didn’t get away from all these people. She remembered what Cian had said about the Lakes—so many people and their smells. Her nose was constantly full of their scents, her ears full of their voices. Cian knew how to be quiet, and fishing with him or helping him mend his nets were the few moments of calm she had. But the foulness within her was such a terrible secret that she felt as if she were just acting like a girl. It was a constant effort to appear right.
So instead of trying to appear so, she left camp and walked into the fforest, allowing herself simply to be what she was. The fforest here was even thicker than what grew up between Gwenith and Defaid. Thicker and wetter. The trees themselves seemed more alive, as if they might move around on their roots when no one was looking. Tangles of vines and moss grew from them like hair.
When she had gone so deep into the fforest that she wasn’t at all sure she could find her way out again, Alys found a wide tree and she began to climb it. There was nothing about climbing that caused her to feel unsure of herself. No moment when she felt she might put a foot or a hand wrong. She climbed and she climbed, past the first set of outstretched branches, and then past the next and the next. Once she was high above the ground, enveloped by leaves and bark, she perched. She closed her eyes. She listened. She breathed in.
At first she was most aware of sound—of water dripping from one leaf and patting onto another. Of the tick of beetles and the slithering of centipedes and lizards.
Then it was only scent. Everything else withdrew from her. She smelled the water where it sank into wood, the black-shelled insects, the smooth-skinned lizards. The hot breath of weasels and bats. Of wolves.
She thought of the wolf. The one she’d killed. It wasn’t the revulsion and horror of killing the poor creature that came back to her now. It was her enjoyment of it, how wonderful it had made her feel. She felt again the intense pleasure of eating the wolf’s soul, the shedding of all worry and want. The absence of all fear and weariness. Hunger cramped her belly but made her sick at the thought of real food. This was not food hunger, Alys knew. This was something else. This was soul hunger.
Then she felt she was falling—but she wasn’t falling. Gone was sound and scent. Gone was the fforest. She felt rather than saw that she was with The Beast. The Beast was high up on the mountain, and she was there, too, in her mind if not her body. The air was thin and cold. The Beast was talking to her, inside her head, inside her chest, telling her something, asking her something. Asking her for something. The Beast was leading her, and she was following. The Beast was just ahead, just ahead. And then Alys opened her eyes and looked down, and there was no fforest there anymore. There was nothing but the deepest, darkest, most enveloping hole beneath her feet. She looked up for The Beast, but there was no more Beast. There was no more anything. Only black nothing above, and around, and below.
Alys gasped aloud and the world came back to her—and she came back to herself. She was a girl made of skin and bone and hair, perched in a tree. And there was a woman who seemed made more of leaf and mud than skin crawling toward her, along the branch.
Angelica.
Alys knew her by name, but more than that she knew her by sense. Alys’s skin was on fire.
No, her skin was freezing.
No, it was on fire.
Unlike her vision of The Beast just now, Angelica’s appearance before Alys was no vision. It was terribly real.
Angelica crawled like a wildcat, low to the branch, her large, gray owl eyes open and curious. Her hair hung down around her face, and even through the snarl of dirt and bark that seemed as much a part of her as her teeth or fingernails, Alys could see how beautiful she was. More beautiful than any woman—any person—she’d ever seen before. More beautiful than any memory of her mam’s face.
“Angelica,” Alys said.
“You know me,” Angelica said. Her voice was soft and cool like rain. “And I know you.”
Every question Alys might have had for Angelica—every accusation—departed her in this moment. Alys only wished to reach out a hand and touch Angelica’s face, to step inside of Angelica. To feel what it would be like to be Angelica. And then Angelica was touching Alys’s face with her dry mud hands and it felt as if she were reaching inside of Alys, touching her tender parts. Examining them with careful hands.
“You’re like me now,” Angelica said. “You should come with me. It’s time.”
Alys caught a scent of something then. An emptiness in Angelica. A vacancy as deep and frightening as the vast hole in her vision. “Your sister,” Alys said to Angelica. “Where is she?”
The emptiness in Angelica opened. It screamed, but there was no sound. Angelica retracted her hand as if Alys had wounded her. “Benedicta has left me.”
Alys remembered the thread that traveled from one sister’s hand to the other, through Alys, and couldn’t imagine how such a thing could be broken. “Why?” Alys said.
For just a moment Angelica’s round eyes narrowed and Alys smelled something sharp and bitter in her nose. Then Angelica’s gray eyes opened wide and bright again. “The boy. My sister was jealous of him. He followed us. Wanted to join us, be like us. I pitied him. But my sister’s heart was hard. She wanted me to leave him, but I wouldn’t.”
Delwyn. Alys remembered him calling to her, wanting her to come to him. She’d felt his longing inside of her. Crawling.
Angelica’s voice sang to her, it caressed her. “Come with me, Alys. You don’t belong with them. You have the hunger, too. Come rest with me and never again be hungry or tired or alone.”
Night was falling and Angelica’s voice was lulling, and it would be so easy for Alys to let herself go, to sink into Angelica’s leafy embrace and become whatever she was meant to become. Alys closed her eyes and tried to imagine being like one of these trees, with vines and moss for hair and clothing.
But then the hole. The hole. The horrible hole. It grew larger and more terrible than ever when Alys’s eyes were shut, and although it vanished again when Alys opened her eyes, still she felt it. The hole was real, and it was here, and Angelica was a part of it, and she wanted Alys to become a part of it, too. Alys felt that in her gut, which had turned sour and rose to her mouth. “No,” she said to Angelica. “No.”
Alys scrambled backward and slid and fell and clawed her way down the tree. Angelica’s laughter flew at her and cut like shards of glass. “You’ll come to me, Alys. We’re the same, you and I. The same.”
THIRTY-ONE
Alys lost all hope after that day. She wanted to believe that Angelica was lying. She could smell her deceit, little puffs of stink that rose off her. But Alys felt certain that just as with Cerys, the one thing Angelica hadn’t lied about was the worst truth of all: Alys was becoming like Angelica.
When Alys returned to camp from the fforest that evening, all of her senses were alive, and in a way that terrified her. Mother had told her to closely guard her ability to sense illness, because that alone would be cause for suspicion of witchery among the ignorant villagers. Even Mother, as sharp as she was, couldn’t have comprehended what Alys was feeling now. The Lakes had been a noisy place to Alys before her encounter with Angelica, but now every moment was cacophony. Too much sensation, too much awareness. She sniffed the air more from instinct than desire, and what she smelled wasn’t the scent of food or people—meat, sweat, hair. What she smelled was fear, anger, loneliness. It wasn’t just her nose that was alive to it. It was her skin. The hair on her arms rose up when the whispers around campfires turned to dreadful things that lurked and crawled in the dark. At those times the gnawing in her stomach was half hunger, half excitement. She recoiled from herself.
Fo
od lost its flavor again. At breakfast the day after her encounter with Angelica, the fish cakes and bread that Beti handed her tasted like ash in her mouth. Dreading that Beti, Pawl, and Cian might notice and ask her what was wrong, Alys forced herself to take bites of food, while coming up with excuses to rise and fetch water or bread or another portion for one of them. She took her plate with her and slipped her own portion back into the pot. After two days of this, she had to tighten the belt around her waist to keep her trousers from falling down.
Worse even than this was how visions of the hole dominated her waking hours. She grew afraid to blink. When she closed her eyes, the nothingess of the hole possessed her. Everything else faded away until the painful thumping of her heart brought her back and she was able to see the Lakes taking shape around her again. She was there, skin and bone, touching and feeling, but she wasn’t there. Nothing was real to her anymore. The Lakers, the Lakes themselves, Pawl and Beti and Cian—it all felt like a fantasy that the lightest touch would shatter into pieces.
Everything Alys looked at, or touched, or ate, or heard—it was all dimming. She felt as if a light had gone out inside of her—a light she hadn’t even known was there until it sputtered and turned to smoke.
Since she’d tried to take Cerys’s soul, Alys told herself that if she ever felt she was a threat to anyone she loved, she would strike out on her own. Now she had to face what she had tried to ignore for too long. She couldn’t get away from the monster. She was the monster. She must leave before she did real harm, and she must do it soon. Certainly before Enid and Madog and the other children arrived.
As it was, her departure would be devastating enough. She clung like a child to the bit of comfort Pawl and Beti offered her, and the warmth she felt whenever Cian was near. The thought of losing them was so painful to her that she had to will tears not to form. So instead of leaving immediately as she should have, each night she awoke in the trees. She climbed down from her perch and returned to her tent. She crawled under covers, heartsick and trembling, until sleep overtook her again. Then each morning she woke up and she stayed one more day. At breakfast she looked at Cian and she thought, Tomorrow I can leave him. But then she didn’t. Nor did she tell him what was happening to her. She imagined his face if she were to tell him about waking up in the trees, about her vision of the hole, of how she’d been drawn to Angelica, and of the undeniable satisfaction of taking a soul. She imagined every good thing Cian felt for and about her turning to horror.
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