Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32

by Kelly Link

  She couldn’t keep that day from coming. But she could push it out of reach a little longer.

  So she limped her way over to the far wall, where the painting was.

  The bones of the painting were nails, hammered straight into the wall to pick out the stars of Catchkeep’s constellation. And around them She had been outlined in thick black paint, all teeth and legs, Her back curved like a rainbow, caught in mid-leap over a shadowy abyss. On one rocky shore of it a woman stood, tiny in comparison with Catchkeep, Who spanned the wall. She held an open jar out in front of her with both hands. Gray fog drifted from the jar, up toward Catchkeep, forming into figures that clung to Her back as She carried them to the far shore. That shore itself was misty, hard to make out—but green, greener than anything Wasp knew. She wasn’t even sure what had been used to paint it.

  In little drips of color that same green was radiating off of the gray figures, drifting back toward the woman. There was a book by her feet, and the greenness went there and infused it with a glow. From there it floated off behind her in threads to tint the shadows at her back. On her side of the abyss, it was the only color whatsoever.

  Catchkeep Herself was black and red. Stepping close to Her you could make out the outlines of handprints, darker where they overlapped. Wasp’s first day as Archivist, they’d rushed her here before the blood of the fallen Archivist could dry on her palms, and to the painting she had added the shape of her hand, which was the shape of her predecessor’s death. Sometimes she wondered where that Archivist’s handprint was in the painting, whose blood had made that mark. Sometimes she wondered which part of Catchkeep her own blood would redden, whose hand it would be in the shape of.

  Wasp didn’t need to come close enough to read the words painted in above Catchkeep’s beartrap of a head. She’d known them by heart for years. Every day she went out to do the work, she stopped here and said the words first, like every Archivist before her. Now more than ever, she needed them to keep her safe.

  She bowed her head before all that long-dried blood.

  “I am the Archivist. Catchkeep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones Her stars. Mine is the mouth through which the dead world speaks. Mine are the hands that record what the dead world left behind. Mine are the eyes that hold vigil, so that the old world’s death does not return to kill the world anew. Protect me, Catchkeep, until another stands before You here, as I stand where another stood. Protect me so that I can do Your work, until my flesh fails, until my bones fail, leaving only Your stars, which light the earth forever.”

  She felt like a fraud even saying the words. In freeing the last upstart she was supposed to kill, she had spit on the very rituals she was calling upon now to keep her alive.

  But she could still do the work, and she’d keep on doing it until she found a way to break free. It seemed to be enough for Catchkeep. After all, Wasp had lost count of her attempts to rebel against the Catchkeep-priest and escape, and Catchkeep hadn’t yet come down out of the sky to murder her.

  Besides, it wasn’t the work she minded. It was everything else. Next to that, the work was downright soothing. What could the dead do to her that the living did not do already?

  She shouldered the backpack and stuck the harvesting-knife in her belt. Pulled on her shoes. Gulped down half the stale contents of her water-jug and poured a cupped handful to splash her face. Eased off the bandages, all but the big one at her side, which her shirt would cover. Stuffed some flatbread and raisins in a pocket to eat while she walked. Stopped, one hand on the door, to glare over her shoulder at the room: cot, shelves, braided rag-rug, not much else. A few hanging strings of wild garlic, peppers, apples, drying or dried. A few changes of homespun clothing. The box that held her field notes. Everything but the food had been handed down from dead Archivists, inherited with the little house itself. No knowing how many Archivists had patched and mended those clothes before her. From the look of them, plenty. But Archivists had been adding field notes to that box for four centuries. In them was all the knowledge they had ever gained from their studies, going back and back to when the first Archivist was given the harvesting-knife and learned what it was for.

  The upstarts never touched the field notes. Nor did the Catchkeep-priest. They were the only line of communication between that long line of Archivists, and the only way each one learned how to do Catchkeep’s work was by reading them. It wasn’t like any old Archivists were left alive to teach the new ones.

  And then there were the jars. There had to be at least a hundred, crammed on the shelves that lined three walls of four. Clay pots and wooden boxes, made by town crafters or traded for, made up the majority. Much rarer were the glass jars, found out in the Waste. Some with only hairline cracks or chipped rims, some still with the matching screw-top lids that were so precious that scavenger kids would fight over who brought them to the Catchkeep-priest, for they were usually worth a decent meal in trade. Never mind that the Catchkeep-priest only ever took that meal out of the upstarts’ share, never skimming from his own.

  As though aware of her eyes on it, from somewhere among the jars there came a rattling. As she watched, a row of empty glass ones began to clink against each other, pushed gently, rhythmically, by something from behind. Well, if they fell and shattered, the Catchkeep-priest would have her hide for a coat, bones for buttons, and she knew it. Quickly she scooped those off the shelf, then located the rattling jar behind them and stretched, hissing through her teeth as she went up on tiptoe to bring it down. It was a reddish clay one, the size of her two fists pressed together, with a tooth-shaped chip near the base. With a sinking feeling, she remembered it. The patience of the thing inside it astounded her.

  “Morning, troublemaker,” she told it, and set out, cradling that jar as carefully as she would old ordnance or a pail of rain, for Execution Hill.

  She threw open the door on the autumn and the woodsmoke from the warn-fires and the half-frozen mud and the rotten-sweet windfall smell from the valley—and the first thing she saw was not the warn-fires or the orchard or the valley for that matter, or even the mud, but the Catchkeep-priest, rummaging among the cairns of offerings the people had left by her door as she’d slept.

  Apart from what she managed to forage herself, those offerings were all that would see her through the winter, for there was not a shopkeeper who would trade with an Archivist, not a townsperson’s roof under which an Archivist was welcome. That was her bunch of wild onions. Her horseleather gloves. Her nettle-yarn scarf. Her sharpening-stone. And there he was, picking through her things with those soft long daintyfingered hands that had never seen a callus or probably so much as a blister in all their days on earth.

  He had two shrine-dogs with him, hulking and silent. For once, they did not snarl at her. They were much too occupied with eating a loaf of bread the Catchkeep-priest had picked out of her things for them. One, finished, raised its head, and the Catchkeep-priest cooed at it and flung some eggs and jerky he’d unearthed. The shrine-dog set to, slobbering, and the Catchkeep-priest turned to regard Wasp, who forced her face to show only apathy.

  He was nibbling at something else he’d found. A pear, and a ripe one, from the smell of the juice Wasp could see running down his wrist. Her mouth watered. She spat.

  She would not let him rile her. It was only food. She could find more somewhere, if she looked hard enough. Another cart of offerings would come eventually. She would not show weakness. She would walk on by.

  She’d never gotten what was coming to her for disobeying him, disobeying Catchkeep Herself, letting that last upstart live. He was forbidden to kill her himself, but Wasp was sure he’d thought of some way to try to stomp her back down into her place. He always did. She could think of no other reason why he should be here.

  Even nearing him, her palms went clammy and she had a sensation like someone had dumped a bucketful of worms down the back of her shirt. He smiled and the sensation intensified.<
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  “A fine morning to you, lazybones,” he said, bending to her height. “To think I was beginning to forget that pretty face.”

  He’d found a kind of necklace in the heap: bits of old glass, remnants of shotgun shells, tarnished rings and yellowed fingerbones, all strung on somebody’s lost cat’s sun-dried sinews. It looked like the contents of any out-turned pocket of any scavenger kid in the Waste. There was a tiny locket on it with a blue-and-white enamel windmill on the front. He popped it open with a sticky thumbnail to hold it glinting before her.

  A shard of mirror trapped a fraction of her face and proffered it. Part of a dark eye. Part of a dark eyebrow. Part of a snarl of five-colored hair, not hers, darkened with two weeks of grease, falling not quite over the eye, not quite over the four long scars, paler and pinker than her skin, that ran the full length of the right cheek, temple to jaw, with which Catchkeep marked each upstart in the womb to do Her holy work—

  She grimaced at her grimace. “Pretty face yourself,” she mumbled, and began to walk past him. He set a hand to her arm and despite herself she stopped. It was a gentling hand, such as she’d seen him use on the shrine-dogs when they’d gone wrong with too much Waste or too much holiness, a gentling hand to the top of the head while the hidden knife slid in under the jaw and—

  “That’s better. Now let me look at you. Catchkeep’s champion. Wrecker of upstarts. Glorious horror.” His tone changed, honey to oil. “Long fight this year. Long heal. What must they be saying.”

  “Nothing I can’t answer,” said Wasp, staring straight ahead as the dogs began to growl. They didn’t seem to like her tone.

  “Today, maybe. Today you have a fresh fierce face to show them. No blood. No bandages. No footholds by which to climb you. No handholds by which to tear you down. But in a year?”

  His inspection of her paused. His hand was very near the deep wound in her side. Did he remember it? Her pulse ticked in her neck. Of course he did.

  “But in a week, when this has festered and you are babbling on the midwife’s cot?”

  His fingers dug in, very slightly, and the air went out of her. She could have sworn the dogs were grinning.

  “Or in a day, when this ankle, which you are too proud to have set, finally gives out on you, and the whole market watches you hobble up your hill like somebody’s toothless granny?”

  He drew his foot back, gave that ankle the tenderest of kicks, and Wasp saw stars. She bit down on the cry.

  He laughed. Gave her head a little pat, like hunters pat a bear-torn dog’s that did its best. Began to walk away. “Won’t that be a pity.”

  “Too bad you’re not allowed to fight me yourself then,” Wasp snapped, and when he stopped walking she instantly regretted it. She’d let him rile her. She really was losing her edge.

  “No point in dirtying my hands on you,” he said. “All I have to do is wait. And I am very good at waiting.” Half display of wastefulness, half contempt, he turned and lobbed the pear-core at her.

  She was meant to stand and let it strike her. She swatted it from the air.

  The Catchkeep-priest watched her for a moment, smiling like a shark, licking juice from his fingers thoughtfully as he took those few slow steps back to face her. She expected him any moment to kick her ankle for real, breaking it along the fracture, or tear that ominous wound at her side back open. Or black her eye for her, or split her lip along its stitching. Give the upstarts some fresh blood to mutter over.

  Could she take him in a fair fight? She wasn’t sure. He wouldn’t fight fair, though. Then again, neither would she. She tensed, gauging. If she was fast, she could maybe blind him. Not outrun him, not like this. Not that she would run. She’d never taken a wound to the back in her life and she wasn’t starting now.

  The window was a few seconds wide at most, and narrowing, before he got the upper hand.

  She touched the harvesting-knife at her belt and, just like that, the point of his blade was at her throat. He peered down his nose at her with scholarly interest.

  “Well, look at you, with your fire up. Such terrifying confidence for someone who couldn’t even finish her last fight.”

  That last upstart, the third this year. Who Wasp had disarmed. Whose knife Wasp had thrown in the lake. Who Wasp had let live.

  For an upstart, or an Archivist, to be killed was to be erased. Swallowed into history. Turned ghost. Already the other upstarts would be forgetting the ones who had died. Their names would be the first thing to rot from their bones.

  Aneko, Wasp thought. Her name is Aneko.

  “That fight was finished,” Wasp said, her voice thickening so that she had to wring it out of her throat. “You want them cut up like chickens, take them to the butcher.”

  Heal clean, Wasp wished at her, wherever she was convalescing. Then run. Let the Catchkeep-priest say what he would to her. This time, she had won.

  “Well, that’s the thing of it, Wasp. You see, I took them to the butcher. And the butcher lost her nerve.” He shook his head sadly. “Do you know it took that poor girl four days to die of her wounds, raving of fever and thirst in the street?”

  It struck her like a punch to the stomach. She hadn’t known. She hadn’t known at all.

  “How is that charitable?” the Catchkeep-priest continued, but Wasp could barely hear him over the rush of blood in her ears. It was all she could do not to leap at him with the harvesting-knife. “What are you proving? She’s still dead, and people are saying her ghost will walk for all time because it’s caught in-between and Catchkeep can’t take it across. Nobody’s happy about this, Wasp.” He chuckled. “Well. Nobody but the upstarts. Next year they’ll be fighting over those short straws. What a gift you’re giving them. Making things so easy.”

  His knifepoint went in, just enough to draw blood, and he gave it a delicate quarter-turn, bringing Wasp up slightly on her toes. He smiled.

  “Hate them, if it helps. Hate me. Hate every person in this town and every ghost outside of it. But you were entrusted with the tools to do the work, and you will do the work. It’s not like much is asked of you. Catch ghosts. Take notes on them. Send them on to Catchkeep. In exchange, your roof is sound. You don’t break your back taking rotations boiling water or working the gardens. You’re untouchable to every person in this town who’d rather just stick a knife in you and leave you for the bears. Is it really so terrible?”

  They only want to do that because they’re scared of what I am, Wasp thought. Because of what you’ve made me. Because they can’t deal with the ghosts themselves. Because they have to give me offerings, when they have nothing to spare. They hate themselves for needing me.

  But she’d said all this before. It had made no difference then, would make no difference now. Same for everything else she wanted to tell him. I never asked for this. I never wanted this. Well, maybe I did once, but that was a long time ago. All I remember wanting is out.

  The Catchkeep-priest saw in her face all the things she was not saying. “If you don’t like it,” he said, “then next year’s fight, don’t fight back. Until then, you belong to Catchkeep, which means you belong to me, and you will jump when I say.”

  The jar in her hand started shifting in her grasp. His gaze went from her face to it and back. She almost managed not to flinch. “The fact that you have not yet sent that one on to Her is an embarrassment to Her and to us all,” he said. “Ghosts don’t like to be kept waiting, my girl, and neither does She.” His smile was kindly, forgiving. She didn’t trust it for a second. “When you are finished, do us the kindness of coming down from your hill to break bread with us. Your sisters are all so anxious to see the results of your convalescence.”

  Slowly, deliberately, he lowered the knife into Wasp’s field of vision. It was not his knife.

  There was blood dried onto it. Sand dried onto that.

  Somebody’d found it after all.

  “Take it,” he said, holding the knife out toward her.

  She swallowed hard. �
�I don’t want it.”

  In answer, he set the flat of the blade to her cheek, drawing it softly down along the scar to where it ended at her throat. Flaking dried blood against her skin. “I didn’t ask.”

  Wasp grabbed at it, too fast. Anything to get it off her face. Sliced a finger. Didn’t care.

  “Really you should have just cut her throat,” the Catchkeep-priest mused. “This much blood, you’d think it would have been quicker. Half a week you left her wandering, yowling like a cat in heat. Children following her with pockets full of stones I could not let them throw. However long their mothers begged.” He shook his head at her, all sorrow. “All you had to do was walk up to her and finish what you started. But no. I hope your little nap was restful, Wasp. I do. I hope your dreams were sweet.”

  He patted her cheek and walked away, dogs at his heels. As soon as he was out of sight around the rocks, Wasp dropped the knife, then stuck two fingers down her throat and retched. Nothing but bile to bring up. She brought it up all the same and spat on the tamped dirt path where he had stood. No use. Everything still smelled like that pear.

  Wasp’s tiny house sat on a high hill, perched on a heap of boulders like a nesting hen. From there, the path switchbacked down and down, bottoming out in the valley where an ancient orchard had long since gone to seed and metastasized into a stunted woodland, its maggoty apples a lifeline some years, a staple every year, to the pieced-together little salvage-town of Sweetwater that clung to its westerly edge. All the trees leaned hard one way, toward a lightning-blasted spit of rock. It was jagged and black and its peak was twice as high as Wasp’s house on the other side.

  It was the one ridge in the whole valley where the people raised no warn-fires. The one whose rock was never used for building, though it was dense and tended to break in clean lines and chunks of it littered the Hill’s foot where they had tumbled or been blasted out for that purpose by those long vanished. Now nobody dared touch it, for it was sacred to Catchkeep, so it was the Archivist’s property.