“There’s the runt,” the Judge mumbles.
I sigh. “We’re alive, we’re safe, and we’re home. What’s your problem with me now?”
“Home we are, but neither safe nor alive.” She snorts, then awkwardly turns to address the Refinery girls. “Are we waiting for something?—Or am I yet re-erected?”
The one called Roxie and the twelve-year-old are here waiting for their assignments from the large-in-charge Marigold. It’s fateful that these three should reunite, the same team that helped me so long ago, the ones to whom I owe credit for, in essence, creating Winter.
“When I’ve my sword-bearing arms again,” the Judge grunts at me. “I will decide with the Mayor’s counsel what to do with you.”
“Have at it.” I exhale, leaning against the door and choosing not to go on talking. Last thing I’d want to do is encourage the stiffly Judge. I stare at the cherry-colored wall, feeling powerless, abandoned, and sad. I really shouldn’t be surprised that John has left. I only wish I had known to say goodbye the last time I saw him.
“It’s time to begin!” Marigold chirps excitedly.
As I wait my turn in the Refinery chair to fix my leg and arm, the twelve-year-old straightens the Judge’s spine with a two-headed hammer thing. Roxie is scrubbing the Judge’s arms down with a sandpaper brush while the expert Marigold manipulates her legs and hips with giant stitches that shimmer … and all my thoughts are John.
“Why did the army of Deathless men kneel to you back at the Grounds?” asks the Judge sitting up, her back being patiently sewn together.
Put on the spot by her out-of-place question, I realize I hadn’t thought on it at all since my time in the cage. Why had that ghoulish army bowed down to me as they did when I so shamelessly faced them in that murky field, sword in hand? I found it strange then, and remembering it, I find it stranger now.
“And why were you chosen to speak to the King?” she goes on, not bothering to mask her tone of voice. “No one speaks to the Deathless King and survives. Not even the Mayor of Trenton has ever seen him.”
I feel the eyes in the room on me, perhaps others as curious about my answer as she is, but I don’t have one.
“I really wish I was never chosen,” I retort, annoyed by her questioning. “What does it matter? We’re out of that vile place, aren’t we?”
“We already had one traitor in our midst,” she says, getting to her point—perhaps her point all along since we found her shattered remains in the woods. “You were closest to him, were you not?”
“What are you implying?” I ask heatedly. “Are you trying to say that I’m a D—Deathless like Grimsky??”
“Are you?”
“NO,” I shout, angry that I’m having to defend my honor, yet again. To my own kind, no less. “I could’ve left you in the woods, in pieces and alone and helpless. Perhaps that would’ve been the better choice, had I known how utterly grateful you’d be otherwise.”
With that, I move—or rather, hop—my way out of the building and into the street, clumsily sitting on the front steps of the building with flames in my eyes.
I’m fuming because I’ve been made a fool of, too. Grimsky, the one everyone in town knew I was coupled with, the one I’d confided in, the one I’d entertained some concept of love with … He is now the traitor. At least once the news spreads, as it seems to do so easily in Trenton, he will be the bad guy … and I, the fool.
After a generous while of waiting, the Judge bursts from the building, not caring to glance in my direction as she marches off, all in one piece, toward her whatever-destination. It doesn’t matter what she says or does; she owes me her life whether admitted or not. But in trusting Grimsky all along, how many lives have I cost?
“Your turn,” the pudgy-nosed Roxie says at the door.
I hesitate, wondering if I should chase after the Judge and talk reason into her, but figure it wouldn’t help. She needs time to cool down. Then she’ll realize I’m not the one she needs to fight. We could help each other, should she finally understand I’m on her side, attitude or not.
“I’m ready,” I announce unnecessarily.
All too soon, I’m back on the working table myself. Death and sword-puncture and almost-shattering later, I sit on this table for the third (or is it fourth?) time and let the women do their work. My leg is easily restructured from within, though I can’t say how because I’m looking the other way. The functioning of my exposed forearm gets fixed, but after having tried six different ways to get the flesh to stick to the bone, the twelve-year-old mutters under her breath, cursing in ways a girl her age ought not to … though her actual age might be questionable.
“Forget it,” I say, lifting myself off the table. “Just leave it as it is.”
“I—I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. And will.” I look down at the visible bones with fondness, exposed like an actor on a stage, proud and true and fearless. I think for some reason on the wound I gave the Deathless King, and how she said she’d wear it proudly. “The look’s … grown on me.”
“You can’t go out in public like that, dear,” Marigold tells me, her voice careful and sweet. “See my beautifully ruined upper arm?—How I rid it of its flesh to bludgeon those fell Dead with my steel-plated humerus? Even I must get this mended, pretty as it is.”
“I want mine left alone,” I insist stubbornly. “It’s like a badge to me, and I’ll wear it with pride. My Raise is the one who gave this to me, after all.”
“It’s law,” Roxie states tiredly. “That’s why we’ve a Refinery at all, to cover up these deathly blemishes.”
“But this is not a blemish,” I retort. “It is bone. My bone. We all have them, and I’m not covering mine up.” I put a little weight on my mended legs, which hold. Turning back to my trio, I say, “Thanks for the feet.”
“Always,” the young girl responds, staring uncertainly at my exposed forearm.
“What was it like?” asks Roxie suddenly.
I tilt my head. “What was what like?”
“The Deathless,” she says. “Being captured by them. Kept in their dungeon … What was it like?”
“Great fun!” Marigold blurts, putting away her tools.
I take a patient breath before addressing Roxie. “I’m sorry. Maybe sometime I can talk to you about it, but for now, it’s a bit fresh on my mind. I hope you understand.”
“I don’t.” She puts down a carving scalpel and lifts her brow. “My business is in restoring the dead. Turning the wretched into the beautiful. I’m fascinated by a society that believes in neither of those things.”
“I would suggest not being so fascinated.”
“You met the Deathless King?” she presses on.
“I’m sorry.” I smile wanly. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“There is no tomorrow,” she says. “Not for our kind.”
“Later today then,” I correct myself, annoyed. “Much, much later. As in, days from now, today.”
Roxie and the twelve-year-old just stand there, one of them staring at my half-repaired arm, the other watching my eyes, her own filled with something I can’t quite distinguish—suspicion, beguilement, it fails me. Marigold starts to whistle to herself, cleaning off a metal-bristled brush in a basin of liquid like it’s just another day.
“Thanks for the leg,” I say again before leaving.
Really, there’s nothing important for me to do at all. The Judge is going straight to the Mayor, no doubt. I have no Grimsky to talk to since he’s, well, elsewhere and elsewise. Helena’s Final Life has been ended, the image of her silent head on the floor of the Black Tower still freshly burned into my retinas, so I haven’t her to consult with.
Add to all that, my Human’s disappeared. John, my secret companion in this town. I hadn’t fully appreciated his importance to me until I ransacked my tiny house in search of him and turned up empty-handed.
On the way home, despondent and dejected as ever, I make a point to pass Hilda’s Sing
ing Seamstress. Hilda is there as expected. She looks overjoyed to see me and waves. I wave back—seeing as I’m in a hurry to get home and cry myself to sleep—and her face collapses. Confused by her reaction, I carry on down the street, rounding a corner. Is she still put off by the hole in her red dress? It wasn’t my fault; it was the Judge’s for stabbing it. By the time I reach the crossroads in front of the pottery shop where the owners are closing up shop, it dawns on me what caused the adverse reaction: the sight of my unsightly arm.
I feel a pinch of hurt. I would rather it have been about the dress.
Hurrying down another street full of trinket vendors who are only open two or so hours at a time (the consequence of being your own boss, I suppose, is eternal laziness) I pass a group of men who recognize me. I wave with my other hand this time, careful not to make the same mistake. They see my other arm anyway and recoil. One man is polite enough to lean in as I pass and point out my “wound” to me—as if it were a silly oversight of mine—to which I reply, it isn’t a wound.
I don’t get what everyone’s fuss is about. It’s just a harmless gash … A harmless bone-exposing gash.
Not caring to pass any others who’d recognize me and then make a point to react nastily, I head straight home without further detour. Getting to the door, I clutch the handle and close my eyes. Fondly, I remember a time when someone awaited me inside.
Hand still resting on the knob, my gaze is pulled to the porch right next to mine, the porch where a certain handsome someone and I shared many glasses of pretend-wine. Someone who is no longer my neighbor. Someone who saved my life in one way only to betray me in another. Someone the whole town will learn to hate, once the gossip spreads as gossip does.
I sigh. Both John and Grimsky … just memories now. I push open the door and shut it behind me. The silence of an empty, lifeless house swallows me, floods my ears with rushing, crushing noiselessness.
“John … You selfish, brutish, Human mooch.”
With a sudden conviction, I turn the house over once more, bedroom to bathroom to kitchen to den. I realize I can’t even find his writings, his notes, his scribbling. He must’ve taken them with him. There’s no note he’s left me, nothing. Not even a goodbye of his own. I was certain he would not have left without notice of some kind, at least. Maybe his hunger had taken the best of him, inspiring him to quest out in search of his own food sources. Maybe he’s gone for good.
I step out of the house, not bothering to lock it. I need to find him, and optimism is pointing me in the direction of … somewhere in Trenton. Somewhere in or around or beyond all of Trenton.
But before my quest for a missing Human has the chance to begin, my neighbor Jasmine from across the courtyard is on her porch, beckoning me over. “Winter! Winter!—Come hither, my long-lost pet!”
“I can’t!” I call out in a half-hush, as if I’ll wake anyone from their sleep. “I’m busy!—I don’t have time!”
“This isn’t a matter of vegetables and tomatoes, my rabbit! This is a matter of your life!”
That gets my attention well enough. Putting a pause to my immediate priority, I briskly cross the courtyard and step onto her porch, following her into the house.
She quickly shuts the door behind us. Wasting no time, she turns to address me with strained eyes. “You know it is against the Law, yes?”
I stare, confused. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know it is punishable by permanent exile, yes?”
“The arm?—Are you talking about the arm?”
“Your arm is the very, very least of our concerns,” she says, her voice trembling. “I’m talking about—”
“My Raise?—or my time as a prisoner? Grim?—Does everyone know already?”
Turning suddenly, she rushes into her bedroom. A moment’s moment later, she returns with a small satchel which she slips over my shoulder. “My pet, you should take this. It will help you.”
“What is this for?” I ask, my hand moving to the buckle to examine its contents.
“Leave it shut. You’ll need it later once all is settled.”
“Once all what is settled?”
And then there is a knock at the door. Jasmine and I turn, either of us more alarmed than the other.
“Expecting visitors?” I whisper doubtfully.
Jasmine hurries to the door. I have a sudden urge to tell her to stop, but she opens it before I can speak and greets pleasantly her guests: The Mayor and two burly men I’ve never met.
“Winter, hello,” the Mayor says, smiling shyly. “We checked first your home, and in finding you not there, have since checked your neighbors for your whereabouts. Linus and Lenora next door say hello and welcome you back from your—ah—vacation. Thought it polite to pass that on. You wouldn’t mind to accompany mine men and I please to mine office? That would be most nice.”
“Sure,” I say, barely audible. Passing Jasmine, she seems to give me a deep and knowing look.
I wish I had an idea what was going on.
“Come this way. Don’t let the men alarm you,” says the Mayor with a cheery snicker as we leave.
My mind wrestles with doubts. Permanent exile, did she say? Trenton Law? For what? Is this the price I pay for having potentially lost the lives of the Judge’s men? The possibly lost allegiance of my new days-old Raise?
I want to ask so many questions, but the trek to the Town Hall turns out to be a silent, wordless one. As though I’d been plucked from class and now am walking in shame to the principal’s office, we pass through streets where, when people see us, they only watch. No one waves any longer. I note the Mayor pays no mind to my exposed arm, nor mentions anything of the reason why he’s summoned me forth. I can already suspect several.
“In here, please,” the Mayor says, ushering me down an alley behind the Town Hall where, at its end, waits a narrow doorway. I enter it and descend endless steps that terminate in a small holding room of sorts with many tall doors and another hallway leading even deeper into the facility. “Second one to the right, please,” he directs me. Wordlessly I enter the second door and, to my near-amusement, find a bare room in the exact likeness of the one the Judge had interrogated me in so long ago, complete with a sad little chair in its center.
“I’d once been speared by steel in a room like this,” I say good-humoredly, but neither the Mayor nor his men laugh. Just as well. I approach the chair and, with a careless wave of my hand, ask, “Is this where I sit?”
“Please,” says the Mayor with a shy little nod. I lower myself into the creaky seat. “Normally,” the Mayor begins after the two men have left, shutting us in this room by ourselves, “the Judge is the one to conduct these such things. But seeing as she is giving her account of the Deathless to the Council, I’m afraid I must do this mine-self.” He lifts a pair of glasses up to the bridge of his nose, then pulls out a folded sheet of paper from his coat. We both know he can see perfectly well without the glasses, but apparently upholding the charade is more important to him than the actual functioning of an eyepiece.
So I play along. “Those lens look quite nice on you.”
“It’s a habit,” he admits with a soft chuckle. “They serve no purpose. Just a habit from mine Old Life, of course. Now, here say,” he states, lifting the paper to read better from it, I assume, “I’ve some unfortunate things with which I must press upon you, sadly. First of course, the issue of your unsuccessful Raising.”
“I’m sorry,” I say in as straight a voice as I can manage, “but I have some information about that, actually. Grimsky, in the Necropolis, he told me he—”
“Oh, we won’t speak of that here, my dear. All in time, the town will accept a truth we draft on the matter. Which brings us to our next point.” I try to mask my look of utter bafflement. “The loss and revival of your misses, Marigold of the Nether and our Judge, Enea of the Ninth. Both are returned of sound mind and fully unblemishéd. Still mislaid and unrevived are the lives of Drecklor, Carnesaid, and you
r Reaper, Helena of the Fourth. All presumed surrendered to the Deathless men, whether in Final Death or otherwise, to be verified or acquitted outright in due time.”
I cast my gaze to the floor. Guilt would flood my eyes at the mention of Helena’s name, were they so capable.
“The soul called Grimsky, I’m afraid, is one whose current condition, I suspect as you may endorse, is a permanent adjournment at the Deathless Capital, having admitted forthright his allegiance to the Deathless and their King’s cause?”
Eyes still averted, I realize he’s expecting a response to that one, so I just nod.
“A pity,” he says, adjusting the paper in his hand. “And now there’s a concern for your—ah—refusal of Upkeep.”
“Oh, this?” I murmur, lifting my little harmless arm.
“Your refusal to accept completion of your Upkeep is, well, a concern of mine. If our Judge were present, she’d perform the necessary tests to—Well, it’s very possible the Deathless might’ve compromised you, needless—”
“Tests? … Like pulling another sword through me?”
The Mayor smiles shortly, then kneels in front of me as though he were addressing a child. “Needless to say, your soul is one we most value. Winter, you cannot take the Deathless so blithely. Your encounter with them, it could compromise our way of life here in Trenton. We are a simple life here. We begrudge nothing of the lives we had, or the lives we led. We judge you not for who you were, but for who you are meant to be.”
“You act as if you knew who I was,” I say, surprised a bit by the bitterness in my own words, then turn my gaze slowly on him. “Even I’m not so lucky to know.”
His face shrinks, lips drawn in as though tasting something sour. He seems to want to say something, but then after a moment, only mutters, “Yet.”
I watch him cross the room, taken by his odd reaction to my remark. When he reaches the door, he turns and says, “If you do not cover your bones—”
“It’s just a stupid forearm,” I bite back, annoyed. “It’s just bone … We all have them. It’s an … an expression.”
“It’s a Deathless ideal. Haven’t you realized what it is, exactly, you are expressing?”
The Beautiful Dead Page 19