Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32

by Kelly Link

  Toto was gasping. There was a rope around his neck, and he had pulled and pulled against it. He tried to bark and could only cough. Dorothy tried to untie the rope. It hurt her hands. She saw Uncle Henry on the doorstep. She screamed as if she had seen a monster. He came down the steps toward her.

  Dorothy turned and ran. She knew she had lost. Her clothes would be burned—except for the white dress that had been worn only once by a fairy in a play.

  It was night now, black. Dorothy ran clothed in darkness, as the rain came, hard. “Dorothy!” called Uncle Henry. “Dorothy!” called Aunty Em.

  Down in the fields, there was death. Dorothy ran uphill, feet pattering in mud. She slipped and the mud peeled away in a damp layer, like flour. She stood, coated in mud, still clutching the fairy dress, now besmirched.

  Sssssh, said the rain, as if comforting her.

  Suddenly branches clawed at her face, catching her half-chopped hair. She plunged through a thicket, her face scratched, and her hands were suddenly scrambling at the rough bark of a tree trunk. She went deeper into the woods. She would stay in the woods; she would live there like an Indian; she would never go back.

  “Do-ro-thee!” called a voice down the valley.

  “Holy Jesus,” said a voice closer at hand.

  Dorothy stopped running and looked around her. Rain ran over her face. She imagined wolves or giants.

  “Is that Dorothy?” It was Wilbur’s voice. “Is that you crying?”

  “She’s burning my clothes,” said Dorothy.

  Rain like tiny people running on the leaves.

  “It’s raining. You better go back.”

  “I don’t want her to burn my clothes.”

  “I guess it’s because your papa and mama died.”

  “My papa didn’t die. He left.”

  Wilbur said nothing for a moment, in the dark.

  “Oh. I thought that’s what your aunty said.”

  “I’ve got my fairy dress. I want to hide it.”

  “I know a place,” whispered Wilbur. “There’s a hollow tree just around here. Hold on to my hand.” Dorothy reached out and their hands met. He seemed to be carrying a big stick. She could hear something thrashing the leaves.

  “Ow!” cried Dorothy as she skidded barefoot over a gnarled branch. There was a hollow thump as Wilbur’s stick hit something.

  “Give me the dress,” said Wilbur. He took it from her. Dorothy had an impression that it was lifted over her head.

  “You can come back and get it later,” he said.

  “She’ll never find it, ever,” said Dorothy. She squished mud between her toes. Wilbur’s hand reached back for her.

  “What have you got on?” Wilbur asked, feeling her shoulders. He gave her his shirt. It was huge and wet, clammy and musty at once, but at least it covered her. They walked blindly, feeling their way down the hill.

  They came to the lane and saw a lamp.

  “We’re over here, Mr. Gulch,” called Wilbur.

  Uncle Henry had a coat draped over his face, over the lamp, Dorothy saw his face solemn in its red light.

  “Thankee, Wilbur,” said Uncle Henry. He took Dorothy’s hand.

  “You be all right, Dorothy,” said Wilbur. He and Dorothy had a secret.

  Aunty Em was sitting at the table, reading by candlelight. She wore steel spectacles.

  “Time for bed, Dorothy,” she said.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Aunty Em stood up, pulling back her chair. She pulled back the old blanket that hung across the room. She pointed to the straw.

  “This is where you sleep. We will be getting you a bed as soon as we can afford it, but for now you’ll have to sleep on straw. Not what you’re used to, but it is good clean Kansas straw.” She took a rag, soaked it in the bathwater, and used it to wipe the mud from Dorothy’s feet. “At least the rain got you clean,” she said. She gave Dorothy one of her own old, darned nightdresses. “This has already been cut down for you.”

  Aunty Em unfolded blankets over the straw. She stood up, wincing, hands pressed against the small of her back. “Good night, Dorothy,” she said.

  “Good night, Ma’am.”

  “That was quite an introduction we had.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Dorothy crawled onto the blanket, and felt the straw underneath it. She pretended to go to sleep. She listened. She wanted to hear what Aunty Em said. She heard pots banging on the stove. She smelled food burning. She heard the rain on the roof.

  “I’d say that was as thorough a job as she could manage of showing me up, with the Jewells,” Aunty Em said, a long time later.

  Uncle Henry sighed. “I don’t reckon Wilbur will say anything about it.”

  “She had a scarlet dress. Scarlet. For a child. God knows what sort of life she had in St. Louis with that man.”

  Dorothy heard creaking. Uncle Henry was crawling onto the bed.

  “Work,” he mumbled.

  And Dorothy heard Aunty Em pace. She heard boots clunking back and forth, back and forth on the hollow floor. She heard Aunty Em weep, brief, breathless sobs. She heard the garments slip off. She heard the lamp being blown out. Everything went dark. She waited until she heard Aunty Em snore. Aunty Em’s snores were loud, enraged. Then Dorothy took off the sour old nightdress and she padded on light child’s feet across the floor, and she stepped out into the rain again, and she slipped under the house. It was fairly dry under the house, except for where the water trickled in little streams like blood.

  “Toto,” she whispered. “Toto.”

  He crawled toward her whimpering. She hugged him and he licked her face. He shivered. They both shivered. Dorothy had to be loyal.

  I will wait, Dorothy promised Aunty Em. I will wait until you are sick and old, and I’ll put lye soap in your eyes, and I’ll take some shears, and I’ll cut all your hair off, and you won’t be able to do a thing, and I’ll say, It’s for your own good, Aunty Em, because you’re dirty. And I’ll just let you cry.

  Dorothy had learned how to hate.

  An excerpt from Archivist Wasp

  Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Prologue

  The knife. She’d lost the knife. Now she was as good as dead.

  Frantically she scanned the sand around her. No knife. How far off could it have landed? She squinted to see farther out, but the crowd’s torches were too far back for the blade to catch their light. She swore under her breath. Fractions of a second passed while she, Wasp, three years Archivist and terror of the upstarts, actually froze. They were probably the last fractions of a second she had left.

  There was a pause as the other girl, this year’s third and final upstart, realized what had happened. As the crowd began to shout. An Archivist disarmed! The Catchkeep-priest in his high chair raked his gaze across them and their shouts hushed to murmuring, showing the Archivist-choosing day its due respect.

  Still, out of the corner of her eye Wasp could see spectators jostling to the front of the ring, parents lifting children on their shoulders for a better view. She knew there’d be a few in the crowd secretly betting now: would she try to fight unarmed? Would she run? Would she stand unmoving in her pride and let the upstart cut her throat?

  The upstart staggered to her feet, bleeding freely from half a dozen wounds, and bobbed behind her own knife, watching Wasp cagily.

  Still Wasp stood there, her pulse banging at her wounds, sweat cooling on her skin. Somehow, it was almost a relief. It wasn’t like she’d ever thought she’d die easy. That was a luxury Archivists weren’t really allowed. Getting it out of the way now might not be so bad. She thought on what she’d miss in those last moments, bleeding out into the sand. It wasn’t a long list.

  Not a split second too soon, reflex grabbed her, dragged her back. The upstart’s blade slashed the air a thumb’s width from her jaw. The slick hiss of its passage sounded daunted. It’d meant to empty out her throat.

  Dumb luck. It couldn’t last. The upstart was getting cocky
now, slashing wide and wild, riding high on the vision of Wasp’s death and her own ascension to Archivist in Wasp’s place—and Wasp had to fling herself back hard from the next swing.

  Not hard enough. The knifepoint caught her lip. She tasted blood. Momentum and lightheadedness caught her feet in the sand and she faltered a few steps and went down.

  The crowd’s sudden silence beat at her like wings. Respect for the goddess Catchkeep whose ritual this was, but respect too for Catchkeep’s Archivist, soon to die. Soon enough they’d be dragging her from the sand, reading the holy words over her as her corpse was sectioned out like an orange. Meat for Catchkeep’s shrine-dogs, powdered bones for the planted fields, a skull on the shrine-wall with a green stone in its mouth. The bloodied sand of her drag-trail scraped up and kept, for luck.

  And Wasp would dwindle in their sight until she was no monster any longer, not marked from birth as Catchkeep’s own and holy. Just a girl with a knife, infinitely breakable, and for days they’d amuse each other with the story of that breaking.

  But she knew all this already. It was a decision she’d been making over and over for three years now, and she always reached the same conclusion. She hated being Archivist. Hated being forced to choose between killing upstarts to keep the sacred role she’d grown so tired of and letting herself be killed so that the upstart who killed her could take up that role when she was dead.

  But if there was one thing she was terrible at doing, it was giving up.

  Use your head, you carrion, she commanded herself. You relic. Think.

  She’d lashed out. Her blade had bitten deep, then skittered against ribs, caught and twisted. Flung. She had not heard it land. If she went looking for it now she’d just get tripped and gutted like a deer. She’d have to improvise.

  The upstart hung back, unsure. It wasn’t for nothing that Wasp had been Archivist for so long. Even with Wasp disarmed, blood-drenched, and downed, the upstart was still one wrong move from having the hair cut off her corpse’s head and interwoven into Wasp’s many-colored braids, a trophy among trophies.

  Far above, the sixteen stars of Catchkeep’s constellation twinkled down on Wasp, all innocence. She ignored them. So Catchkeep’s ritual trapped her here, staring down her death as sure as if she had her eye pressed to the barrel of a gun. She didn’t have to like it.

  Meantime, the upstart seemed to have reached her decision. She began half-stumbling half-charging at Wasp, moving like she had shackles on her ankles and a mad dog at her heels. She had the knife gripped out at arm’s-length, elbows locked. No art in it. No grace.

  She needed none. She only had to fall.

  Like a ghost to a saltlick, Wasp thought. Stupid as snot.

  Wasp waited for her moment, then kicked out hard, heard something in the upstart’s leg give way. The upstart cried out and plunged down, knife first, her aim knocked perilously out of true.

  Wasp caught her mid-fall, one knee in her ribs, one fist in her hair, and eased the upstart down to kneeling. One leg splayed out at an ugly angle, but the upstart made no sound. The upstart’s knife-hand snapped up, too quick to draw a gasp from the crowd, and Wasp snatched her wrist and broke it. She caught the knife as it fell free.

  She seized a handful of the upstart’s hair and the upstart flinched away, expecting her own knife in the throat—but Wasp only wiped the blade clean on the upstart’s ponytail, then palmed the hilt, still slick with fear-sweat, and watched the girl thoughtfully.

  What she was supposed to do at this point was cut the upstart down, preserving her role as Archivist unchallenged for another year. For three years she had done precisely that. She could still see the face of every upstart she’d killed. Still woke from dreams in which they died all over again, woke nauseous and sweaty and scrubbing invisible blood from her hands.

  She was sick of it. She was beyond sick of it. There had to be another way.

  So many eyes on her. The crowd’s. The Catchkeep-priest’s. The upstart’s. Catchkeep’s Herself. Wasp kept hers straight ahead. She turned and walked to the edge of the sand and threw the upstart’s knife as far as she could into the lake. It flew out into the dark and splashed.

  Voices behind her, outraged now. Calling for a bloodletting, as was Catchkeep’s necessity and the people’s right. If the ritual had ever ended before with two girls alive, Wasp didn’t know when, and it seemed the crowd didn’t either. Well, let them squawk. She was done listening.

  The upstart had stayed where she had fallen, hugging her wrist and screaming through her teeth. She gathered like a cornered hare as Wasp approached, but did not try to run. Some pride in that, thought Wasp, used to chasing upstarts across the sand as they fled her knife.

  Wasp stood looking down at the upstart. She wondered if the upstart had gone into this fight gladly, her eye on becoming Archivist, or whether she, like Wasp, was only fighting to survive, because the least of evils couldn’t possibly be death. She wondered what the upstart thought she’d miss when she was killed. Whether her list was longer than Wasp’s. Wasp wasn’t sure whether or not she hoped it was.

  The upstart’s wounds weren’t immediately life-threatening. If she got to the midwife’s for stitching, fast, and had the leg and wrist set, and nothing became too badly infected, she’d get out of this alive. Certainly Wasp would be punished for her disobedience, but she was long since used to that.

  She collared the upstart and hauled her to her feet.

  “Come after me,” she whispered, “and I will see to your ghost personally.”

  She let go, and the upstart dropped deadweight to the sand. Stay down, Wasp thought at her. Please stay down.

  The upstart stayed down.

  When the crowd tried to block Wasp’s path, she shouldered through. One of the gamblers grabbed her arm but let go fast when he saw her eyes.

  “Kill her yourself, then,” she spat at them, knowing as well as they did that interference in the fights was forbidden, even by the Catchkeep-priest himself, and they wouldn’t harm an upstart any sooner than they’d heap filth on Catchkeep’s shrine.

  Then she walked away across the lakeshore, not looking back along the beach toward where her people watched her, not looking up into the stars toward where Catchkeep did, and kept on walking, leaving a red trail, until the world around her darkened and she went down face-first in the sand.

  Chapter One

  As it did every year in the days that followed the Archivist-choosing day, Wasp’s recovery routine kicked in each morning even before she’d come completely awake. It was her third year as Archivist, after all, the third year she’d stayed at least a week in bed so the wounds could knit themselves to scabs, then scars. By now, the steps came to her easy as breathing.

  One. Check the bandages.

  The smallish ones on her neck, legs, and shoulders, then the wide one at her side where the third upstart’s second knife had gone in and stayed—until Wasp had pulled it out and flung it at her head, ruining an ear. Also the set of neat stitches tracking down her lower lip to her chin, and the other one cutting across the old scars on her cheekbone and up into her temple.

  For the first few days, this was as far as she had gotten before pain and exhaustion had overcome her, and she’d spent those days drifting in and out of healing sleep, in and out of less productive nightmares.

  Today, all seemed sound.

  Two. Sit up.

  This took longer than she would like, and she expected any moment to feel the pull and gush down her hip where the deep wound had reopened. She dreaded this, of course, but more than that she dreaded another round of festering and a fever high enough she could practically boil water on her forehead when she tried to treat the newly opened wound herself. Exactly a year ago she’d nearly killed herself doing exactly that, but she was fairly sure she’d do it again. A choice between a moment with a heated knife and a bottle of spirits and a rag to scream into, or letting the midwife back at her, didn’t seem to her like much of a choice at all.

&
nbsp; There was a pull, but no gush came.

  Three. Stand.

  The fracture in her ankle screamed but held, and a glance at her bandaged side in the light discovered no bloodstains, no greenish watermarks of pus. She took a deep breath, gritted her teeth against what was coming, and bounced a little on her toes to see if they’d take her weight.

  If she ground down hard on whatever desperate messages her ankle was firing at her brain, she could push through or outstubborn the rest.

  “Finally,” she whispered.

  Four. Get back to work.

  Her injuries were different (and, alarmingly, more plentiful) than last year’s, so, as she did every year, Wasp improvised, inching her way back out into the world.

  Two weeks in bed had taken their toll. Her arms felt weaker, somehow stiff and rubbery at once, as did her legs. When she bent down to touch her toes, the muscles in the backs of her thighs began complaining even before the wound at her side got its say. Squatting over her pissing-pot was agony. So she tried to stretch her back and instantly her side felt like someone had stuck a pick in it and twisted.

  She paced a bit, feeling like a caged cat, trying to outwalk the pain. She wished she could limp back into bed. Sleep, dream, let the Catchkeep-priest set the upstarts at each others’ throats until whoever was left standing became Archivist in her place. There would be another soon enough at this rate anyway.

  But there was the backpack in a corner, and there were the jars and knife and saltlick, and she never would have gotten away with it. Wasp knew quite well that two weeks abed was already enough of a display of weakness, without adding any more wasted days on top of it. She knew what the dozen surviving upstarts must be saying about how long it’d taken her to beat the three who’d drawn this year’s short straws, and how many wounds they’d given her. How Wasp just wasn’t what she used to be. How next year it’d be her on the wrong end of the knife. It had to be eventually. It always was.