Grim

by Anna Waggener

  Whereas the law of this Council does necessitate, the renouncement of said title shall establish the progeny at five, and must therefore account for the Sixth Residence of His Magnificence the Throne, which shall be reclaimed by the Crown and the Council so standing.

  Whereas the law of this Council does necessitate, the renouncement of said title shall strike the standing Sixth Prince from the record of the Council, establishing him as neither blood nor charge and so revoking his right to reside within the boundaries of the protectorate of His Magnificence the Throne.

  Let it therefore be announced, as witnessed by the undersigned, that His Magnificence the Throne, and his Court, has so extended a proper and authorized request unto the Sixth Prince that shall be answered within a period of no more than fifteen days or that shall, by default, be considered a renouncement in the eyes of the Court and the Crown and the Council.

  Beneath were the smooth, clear signatures that accompanied royal politics. Jeremiah recognized all the names of the men who had tutored him in his childhood, and who had brought him prizes of sweets when he studied well, and who had called him Prince. And at the very bottom, signed with an ink so fine it still looked moist, waited his father’s rolling scrawl. A death sentence wrapped up in a gold-leaf box.

  “So you’ve seen it.”

  Jeremiah glanced up.

  “Jegud.”

  “I came as soon as I heard that Uriel was giving it to you.”

  “You knew?”

  Jegud nodded. “And I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

  Jeremiah waved away the apology. “Not your fault. You’re in enough trouble already. Have you agreed to this?”

  “I had to, Jeremiah, or I would be …”

  “In my position? I understand.” He paused and looked again at the letter. “They want my name, Jegud.”

  “I know.”

  “And my mother’s.”

  “I know.”

  “And my house.”

  “And they’ll have it,” Jegud told him. “One way or another, they’ll have it.”

  Jeremiah rubbed his bottom lip with the back of his thumbnail. “Will they?”

  “What are you planning?”

  “Nothing. Not yet. Only …”

  “What?”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “I think I have a consort in procession.”

  “No, Jeremiah.” Jegud took a step back, as if to distance himself from both the idea and his brother. “Making her a bride to an old man, just so you can get out of your own mess? You can’t do that to Erika.”

  “It’s no worse than anything else I could do. She wants her children, and I can’t give them to her. But our father can.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He has always outdone himself for love. Why else would I be here?”

  Jegud turned away and paced the floor. Then he paused behind the couch, resting his fingertips on the polished wood of the mantel. He looked at the portrait of Jeremiah’s mother, and at the dome of glass that sat in front of it, protecting a silver pendant, gone copper colored with age. From a length of sheer black ribbon dangled a perfect little ring, no larger than a watch face, crossed through the middle by a pair of sickles. So much trouble, Jegud thought, over something so small. He could feel his brother’s eyes on him.

  “She has the same hair,” Jegud conceded.

  Jeremiah smiled. “So I’ve heard. It might work.”

  “It won’t.”

  “It might. And if I can make her queen, Erika can have anything she wants. She can have her children, or she can send them home. She can save them, Jegud. She won’t say no to that. And I can keep my head and my house, and maybe even my name.” He paused while Jegud watched him, fascinated and a little appalled. Jeremiah pretended not to notice. “Have you seen Uri’s pick?” he asked. “Or Gabriel’s?”

  “Gabriel is refraining,” said Jegud. “He finds it improper.”

  “Good of him. That leaves me to fight off four.”

  “Three.”

  “Michael isn’t offering, either?”

  “Of course he is,” Jegud said. “But I’m not. I won’t play politics with them, Jeremy. That’s your job.”

  Jeremiah ran his fingers along the creases of the proclamation and reread all the names that were daggers in his back. “Then thank His Magnificence the Throne,” he said, “that I’m still good at it.”

  It was a pretty little cabin, but in greater disrepair than West’s had been. A sheaf of honeysuckle and ivy crept up the side and over the roof, and a line of bird nests clogged the gutter. Moss, like a second glue, had worked itself into the sandy mortar. A pile of firewood waited by the stoop and, on top of it, a wicker basket brimming with mulberries. Shawn looked at them with hungry eyes and realized that it had been days since they’d last eaten.

  “If thinking were acting, then you would be a thief.”

  Shawn jerked up to see a man peering through a gap in the shuttered window near the door.

  “Luckily, this is not the case. Can I help you?” The old man’s eyes fell to Megan, who had turned in the direction of his voice. “A bit young, aren’t you? And … not a man.”

  “Excuse me?” Rebecca’s head bobbed out from around Shawn’s shoulder.

  “Oh, bless,” the man said. “What happened to your guide?”

  “We never had one,” Shawn told him.

  “How did you get across?”

  “West brought us.”

  “West?” The man pushed the shutter out a little farther. “Has he gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, what are you doing?”

  “Are you Laza? He said that you would help us.”

  “Oh, he said so, did he?” Laza asked. “Well, fine then, but leave the berries be. The door’s open.”

  Jeremiah made the long, slow climb up the stairway and walked down the hall with the light of the open window. The air still smelled like morning, but the sky had taken on the clear white of cloudy afternoons.

  He knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” Erika called.

  “May I apologize?”

  The lock clicked open and Erika’s face appeared in the door. “If I deserve it.”

  “Erika,” Jeremiah said, “I’m the only one here with cause to ask for second chances. You deserve so much more than my secrecy, but I stand here after having told you nothing. I haven’t even told you things that you should know. That you need to know.” He looked over her shoulder into the open room. “May I come in?”

  She stepped out of the way and offered the threshold. “Please.”

  “Would you mind if I asked you to sit? It’s a long story.”

  Erika sank into the wing chair and watched him. Her eyes were curious and expectant as she waited for her story. The letter in Jeremiah’s breast pocket was heavy, and each careless, scribbled signature darted through his thoughts. Jeremiah shook his head to clear it and closed the door with the back of his heel. He moved to the bedroom window.

  Beggars crowded the streets now, all returned from morning services. They stretched their hands out to the riders who traveled from one side of the district to the other. Jeremiah wondered how many of those dead he had brought here himself, giving them promises of peace because it was what they wanted to hear. He felt a rush of self-disgust creep up his throat.

  “My mother wasn’t a whore,” he said.

  Erika held the silence for a few seconds. “Okay,” she said at last, when it became clear that he didn’t want to continue.

  “She wasn’t.” Jeremiah looked at her.

  “I believe you.”

  “She was only unlucky.” He wet his lips. “And my brother Uriel is a liar, since you’re thinking about this afternoon.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re a liar too.” He picked up the edge of the silk curtains and rolled the hem between his thumb and forefinger. “I never knew her because I lost her in birth. It was out of wedlock. My father’s fault
.” He shook his head. “And not what you think, either. It was his fault completely. He wanted another boy. He had five, but he thought that he needed one more. There’s a lot of familial killings in the Middle Kingdom, ironically enough. Father didn’t realize that she knew, which was stupid of him. And even so, he didn’t realize that it would matter. I don’t think that she did, either. She was never made to reproduce. But then, she was never made for anything. She was an accident too.” He dropped the curtain and glanced over at Erika. “You don’t understand a word of this, do you?”

  “I’m trying.”

  Jeremiah left the window and settled at the foot of the four-poster.

  “My father,” he said, “is a seraph.”

  “An angel?”

  “Sort of. Purebred. And yes, they breed. He is, and was, the ruler of souls. Of the Middle Kingdom.”

  Erika nibbled her lip. “And your mother?”

  “My mother … was different. There are three groups here. There are the seraphs, who live like royalty; the souls of men, who live like dogs; and the rogues, who are halfway between. Rogues guide the dead along the road and try to help them transition.

  “Souls are sad creatures, Erika — the only parts of humans that matter but the only parts that they don’t understand. Human feelings and memories and selves are all wrapped up in their souls, but they’re so afraid of letting go of their bodies. They stay here, in Limbo, eating because they think they must eat, bleeding because they think they must bleed, feeling because they think they must feel, when their skins aren’t even real anymore. Not here. And when they can finally face that, they can set themselves free.”

  “Free into what?”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” said Jeremiah. “To die in one of the Kingdoms is, as far as we know, to die forever. It’s a thought that even frightens seraphs, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t terrify humans, who come here and believe that they’ve found immortality.” He stared at the window, out of the city so filled up with souls that he had ferried in. “That’s why rogues exist. To be soulless, since the rest can’t be.” He smirked, and then grew serious again. “They … We are not supposed to feel. At least not for ourselves. We identify with those who can feel. We appear as they wish us to appear, speak as they wish us to speak. We cannot lie, but we do what we can to make our charges comfortable because that, above all, is what everyone wants, whether they are seraphs or souls.”

  “You are what you’re made out to be,” Erika said, her eyes darting to the pocket where he kept his pocketknife. She was thinking of the first time he’d showed it to her.

  “Exactly,” Jeremiah said. “And because we cannot feel, we cannot love.” He glanced sideways at Erika, but she didn’t seem to notice. She stared at her hands now, her bottom lip between her teeth as she concentrated on a thought that Jeremiah couldn’t read. “We’re made by the seraphs,” he went on, “from the earth of the road and the shells left by souls who’ve moved on. There are only ever supposed to be male rogues,” he said, “but sometimes … sometimes there are mistakes. Martha was a mistake. My mother was one too.”

  Erika pulled her feet from the floor and tucked them under her legs. Jeremiah handed her the quilt that lay folded at the foot of the bed and went on.

  “They put my mother into service at the palace,” he said. “As a handmaid to the queen. They shouldn’t have. My father became enchanted with her. He wanted her. And what was she to do? It wasn’t her choice. It wasn’t even her choice to make.

  “He fell in love, and because he wanted love, she gave it to him. And because he wanted a child, she gave it to him. Before that, no one knew that it was even possible. Rogues are supposed to be sterile.” He clasped his hands together as he said that, and looked up and out through the bedroom window, as if he were speaking to thin air and the shattered city beyond.

  “The queen wanted her gone, but the king refused. It tore my mother apart, those conflicting desires. She lost herself in childbirth. He had her entombed in the royal crypt, thinking nothing of it, and hoped that he could bring me up as his own, as a last promise to her.

  “The funny thing, I guess, is that he put that promise on her lips. Because he wanted her to be able to love, even to love an unborn child. He needed to know that she could do that, and so she said that she could.” Jeremiah paused, and Erika waited for him to push through that private pain.

  “I lived like that,” he went on, “without knowing, for a long time. Rogues don’t live for long, but seraphs hardly age at all. My father wanted me to be like my brothers, so I compensated, never realizing what was happening to me. Once I looked about their age, I slowed down. Everyone noticed, but they were afraid to mention it aloud. They said that I was an early bloomer.” He shook his head.

  “In the end, my father was wrong about a lot of things. The queen could never love me, for one, and, for another, I didn’t take it very well when they finally sent me away. How was I to take it? I still don’t know what he expected.

  “He gave me my mother’s home, his sixth house. It was the one that he’d built for her to live in while she came to term. He gave me Martha, my mother’s old maid, and Simon, the gardener. It was more than was his duty, I know, and it made the queen sick, but that was nothing, compared to her children. Boys will be boys, they say, but human children don’t have the power behind the king of the dead. He had to call for legislation to protect me. I can’t be killed as long as I’m in Limbo. The problem is that I’m still a rogue. I’m still a guide. I’m expected to work, and so I have to. Whenever I go back to Earth, my brothers follow me. I’ve been endangering more souls than I’ve helped. And now,” Jeremiah said, taking the letter from his pocket, “they want me exiled. My father is passing his crown to my eldest brother, and it would seem that I’m a complication. They had my mother taken from the crypt, but I’ve always been an official heir. And, as they say,” — he folded over the letter and read from the last clause — “‘the renouncement of said title shall strike the standing Sixth Prince from the record of the Council, establishing him as neither blood nor charge and so revoking his right to reside within the boundaries of the protectorate.’ Rogues don’t live in the Kingdom if they don’t serve the throne. I’ll be sent to the Colonies. And then my brothers will break me.” He tried to force a smile.

  “But why?” Erika asked. “Why go that far? If you give up your birthright, then you give up your claim to the throne.”

  “If it were only Uri, it would be that easy. But to Michael, the second prince, I will always be a threat to his claim to the throne and to his family’s purity. I’m still half seraph, and he’s terrified that I’ll have children of my own. And then what? The War of the Roses, but without British etiquette. If I were like my mother, then I suppose it wouldn’t matter, but I’m not. I follow her in a lot of ways, but not in this. I’m so afraid to lose, Erika,” Jeremiah said, “because I don’t know what’s waiting there. At least I’ve seen what death means.”

  Erika clambered out of her chair and sat down beside Jeremiah on the bed, putting a wing of blanket around his shoulders and tucking her head beneath his chin. Jeremiah wanted to resist her, but he felt too fragile and her presence was too powerful. He didn’t know whether he was drawn to her because of her own wishes calling out to him, or whether there was some of his father in him, capable of loving all on its own. When he rested his cheek against Erika’s hair and held her, his own body shifting with her steady breathing, he wondered whether it mattered. Humans and seraphs couldn’t explain why romantic love happened the way it did, and could hardly describe what it felt like, so who was he to judge? Maybe this, whatever it was, was enough. It was probably as close as he would ever get.

  “This will work out for you,” Erika whispered. “I promise.”

  Jeremiah knew that she was only hoping, but he didn’t argue. He only wished that she were right.

  The young man opened the cottage door and looked at his visitor. A grin spread across his fa
ce. “Highness?” he said. “Welcome. How long has it been since you last ventured the Woods? I thought that you had given us up.”

  The king pulled back the hood of his cloak. “Don’t chide the Sickle,” he said. “They call you West?”

  “They do,” the young man said, amused. “West of the Woods.”

  “I need to speak with your sister.”

  West’s smile faded. “Of course, Highness,” he said eventually, taking a lantern from the wall. At his touch, a flame blossomed inside the glass flute.

  The pair followed the stone path past a line of statues, to the black edge of the lake.

  “Your knife?” West asked.

  The king took a pearl-handled pocketknife from the depths of his robes. He handed it to West.

  The man turned it over in his hands.

  “Your crest will have to be remade.”

  “That is why I come.”

  “Then I hope you brought more than your name, Highness,” West said. “It barters less credit than before.”

  The king turned to the lake without answering.

  West held his work-worn palm over the water and flicked the knife blade across it. “Blood calls blood,” he said, kneeling. He slipped his hand into the water.

  They waited.

  A thin line of air crept down the surface of the lake. As it funneled in, deeper and wider, water rushed to fill it.

  West pulled his hand from the whirlpool and a woman came with him, hair clinging like seaweed down her shining back. Her dress, tied around her neck and waist, was a worn and filthy gray, frayed and speckled with sticks and river beetles. Over her shoulder, the lake continued to shudder until a stairway appeared, cut in stone and painted with dark algae. She smiled, revealing rows of thin fish teeth. Air whispered through the spaces as she spoke, and to make her words clear, she said them slowly, as if puzzling out each one.

  “Brother,” she murmured. “Too long away.” She dropped his hand, leaving a film of slime on his skin. “You never did much love the cold and hungry South. Or are you still afraid of me?”