Grim

by Anna Waggener

  Shawn gave up. He found a fallen tree and sat down. He gave Megan and Rebecca some of the bread, but took none for himself. He was desperate to remember which direction they’d come from. His headache grew.

  When a bird twittered nearby, Shawn froze. As the first sound since the lake and Baba Laza’s cottage, it split the air like gunfire.

  “Shawn?”

  He glanced at Megan, who was staring into the woods.

  “What, Meg?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who?” He followed her eyes.

  A man stood a dozen yards off, dressed in a dark brown trench coat. A light shadow of stubble dusted his jaw and his hair settled, curly and dark against his temples. He had an arm propped up against one of the low limbs of a poplar tree, and a white bird bobbed its way along the length of the branch, from the slim trunk to his waiting fingers and back again.

  Shawn staggered to his feet.

  “What is it, Shawn?” Rebecca, who looked ready to bolt, held on to Megan with one hand.

  “I’m not sure.”

  The man raised his arm in greeting.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  Shawn tried to place the voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “Jeremiah,” the man said. “Would you mind if I came closer?” When he moved, the bird he carried bobbed its neck to match his footsteps.

  Megan finally recognized him and gave a muffled cry.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, darling,” Jeremiah said. “You’re thinking about that dream, aren’t you? Your mother’s fine. She isn’t even angry with me.” He held the bird at arm’s length. “Would you like to hold Kala for a little while? She’s a very good pet.” He offered his hand and waited as the Caladrius minced her way onto Megan’s fingers. Kala looked at him with her shining black eyes before burying her face deep beneath her wing. He folded his arms and measured up Erika’s youngest child. “No,” he said, puzzled.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Jeremiah glanced back at Shawn. “Pardon?”

  “Are you going to help us?”

  He opened his mouth, and then shut it again. “Hardly,” he said at last. “Not that I haven’t been trying. I just needed to know … but I was wrong. So.” He pressed his lips together and then started pacing. “I won’t be able to come back again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because someone is trying to kill me.”

  Shawn looked at Megan but didn’t say anything. She was too busy trying to coax away Kala’s fear. She kissed the bird’s small white head and stroked the long feathers of her back and tail. Kala cooed and shivered into her own little breast.

  Jeremiah reached up to massage his neck and felt a two-day growth of beard. He stopped pacing, hand poised just an inch away from his face, and glanced back at Shawn, and then Rebecca.

  “Someone has a strong personality,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” said Rebecca, offended.

  “And knows it,” said Jeremiah under his breath. He dropped his hand and gestured at the elder Striplings. “Can I talk to you two for a minute?”

  Shawn took Rebecca by the hand and led her away. Jeremiah smiled at Megan before following them.

  When they were far enough away for a private conversation, Jeremiah stopped walking. “You’re here because of your mother,” he said flatly. “She wants you to be with her. Personally, I think that it’s a terrible idea, but it doesn’t seem to matter. And after what I’ve done, how can I refuse her?”

  “What exactly have you done?”

  “To the point, Rebecca,” he replied. “Unfortunately, I haven’t finished doing it, so it would be preemptive for me to say. But it started with a mishap.” His voice dropped. “Actually, it started with coffee.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Listen. I have a brother who might be able to help.”

  “I need my eyes,” said Rebecca.

  “Your … Oh.” Jeremiah touched the side of his head. “I’ll try,” he said. “I will try. But I’m afraid that some things are more pressing. I need my head, for example, and I’m very close to losing it right now.”

  “You said that someone wanted you dead?”

  “Not just dead.” Jeremiah wet his lips. “I don’t think you’d understand.”

  “They’re after us too,” Shawn said.

  Jeremiah sighed. “That’s not possible.”

  “They wear black,” Shawn said.

  “Around here, a lot of people do.”

  “They’re made of smoke.”

  Jeremiah raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “They have dogs.”

  “The hounds? I can’t believe …” He shook his head. “They went for fireworks, did they? Well, then yes, you’re right.” Again, Jeremiah sighed. “Don’t talk to them. Can you do that for me?”

  Shawn let a disgusted grunt escape his throat.

  “It’s the best I can do,” Jeremiah said. “They shouldn’t be here. I could have them charged for being here.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. But look, I’m trying. I haven’t slept for trying. I haven’t eaten. It’s complicated. I can’t exactly waltz you through the gates.”

  “Then what can you do?”

  “Give you a little hope,” Jeremiah said. “You’re human, so that should mean something to you. I won’t give up and you shouldn’t, either.”

  “But what are we doing?” Shawn asked.

  “Keeping on the move,” said Jeremiah. “You have to, since they’re following. I’ll send in the cavalry as soon as I figure out how, but now I have to go. I’m putting you at risk by standing here.”

  Rebecca looked annoyed. “Then why don’t you just leave?”

  “I will,” Jeremiah said, “before you make me say something stupid.” He pricked a finger with the tip of his pocketknife and then whistled at Kala, who fluttered out of Megan’s hands and latched on to his wrist. She opened her beak to the rising mist and, with a dry hiss of shifting leaves, they both vanished.

  It was late summer and the gardens were golden with afternoon sun.

  There were five boys sitting on the west patio, books open in their laps. Behind them went the tap-tap-tap of their tutor’s cane. The youngest of the boys, a slim child with a nest of curling brown hair, picked a pebble loose from the patio stones and flicked it at one of his brothers. The second prince, and the eldest there among them, smirked and scratched another line onto the count. Jegud picked up the stone and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes on their tutor, before he tossed it back at his little brother. Another smirk. Another tally mark.

  Across the lawn, in a wooden gazebo, the queen sat sipping weak tea with her sister, the Lady Sara. They were watching the children because conversation had failed them, as conversation often did.

  “He’s grown,” Sara said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Jeremiah. He’s grown.”

  “He has, hasn’t he?”

  Sara set down her teacup. “Dramatically,” she said. “Is that rogue of yours his nursemaid now? I haven’t seen her in so long.”

  “She was dismissed,” the queen said, her voice stretched thin.

  “I’ve never heard of a rogue failing their job.”

  “She didn’t fail,” the queen told her sister. “She worked too well. It distressed the other help.”

  Sara nodded slowly before risking her next move. “Tell me the truth, Sister,” she said. “I’ve heard such —”

  “I would expect you to ignore the gossip, Sara,” the queen cut in. “We both know how badly hearsay damaged you in the past.”

  Sara closed her mouth and tilted her head away, as if she hadn’t heard.

  The queen, of course, had also caught the rumors as they flew past her windows:

  The sixth prince had aged so quickly.

  The sixth prince looked nothing like his mother.

&nb
sp; The sixth prince made his father so sad. So distant.

  And, most curious of all, part of the royal crypt had been closed to the public. The queens’ tombs only. It was as if the palace mourned.

  Holding back her temper, the queen calmly poured out another cup of tea.

  The sun set long before Jeremiah finally made it back to Limbo, so when he saw lights glimmering over the city wall, they surprised him. He slipped through the gate and peered down the main street into the square.

  A figure in white stood on a makeshift stage. He gripped a spitting torch in one hand, his other fist raised above his head. Jeremiah recognized him as a councilman and a friend to his brother Michael.

  A crowd, made up of the city’s charges, pressed close. At first glance, Jeremiah thought that it may have been a few dozen people, but then he saw a glitter in the dark, and realized that it was the flame of the man’s torch reflecting in the eyes of a hundred hungry souls. Of a thousand. They faded into the blackness of the night, snaking into the alleys between buildings, perched like gargoyles on the eaves of tenements, hanging out of windows to catch the angry words that this courtier shouted.

  “But he does not only claim rights to the throne! No! He takes in a human soul! Never has this been done in all the millennia of the three Kingdoms! Why that one over you, I ask? Why that one over any of you here?” The councilman’s voice dropped, and the crowd huddled forward with anticipation. “The balance, then, is broken forever by these rash actions,” the man said. “By his stupid self-importance!” The mob leaned back out and hummed to itself, thinking. Believing.

  Jeremiah shivered.

  Then he saw the horses.

  Michael’s train appeared at the top of the northern hill and started down, his black carriage surrounded by low-cut chariots of gold. A flag, emblazoned with the original five-part crest, flew at the back of each. As the procession neared the stage, a hand darted out from the prince’s coach, and the speaker caught the cloth thrown at him.

  “Look now!” he cried. “The second prince offers a gift to you!” He unfurled the cloth and held it up at arm’s length; the six-part crest hung limply from his fingers. “What shall we do to the sign of the traitor?”

  The crowd hesitated as it turned over his question. Since entering the Kingdom, it had never been asked to form an opinion. Then one man leaned out of an upper-story window and called out the answer: “Burn it!”

  The councilman pointed at the window and held the flag higher. “What shall we do?”

  The crowd answered, eager: “Burn it!”

  “For Jeremiah!” he screamed. “The boy who wants to steal the crown!” He brought the torch to the heart of the flag and held it there until the center had burned away and the flames were beginning to lick his fingers. “Will he ever steal it?” he yelled, throwing down the last scraps.

  “No!”

  “Will you ever call him king?”

  “No!”

  Jeremiah turned and fled, clutching Kala safely against his chest.

  When her master came in, Martha continued to refill the water dish in Kala’s cage. Her eyes flicked up to him, but she didn’t smile.

  “Erika is in the study,” she said.

  “Why did you let her in there?”

  “Because you did. You said that she had range of the house. I knew that it was a bad idea.”

  “No, I did.”

  Martha’s eyebrows drew up to the lace of her cap. “Sir?” she asked.

  “That was rude.”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “I know it was.”

  “Apparently.”

  Jeremiah held Kala out to Martha.

  “Put her away, please,” he said.

  “Of course.” Martha took the bird in her wrinkled hands and gently smoothed the white feathers.

  “Did Jegud come by?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did Uri?”

  “Only if Erika let him in.”

  Jeremiah hissed and clamped a hand over his own mouth.

  “You’re having a bad day, sir,” Martha said quietly.

  “I know.”

  “Apparently.”

  He groaned and left the room, tearing off his scarf as he went. Martha returned to her work without a word, her transition as tactful as a housemaid and as blind as a rogue.

  When Erika ran her forefinger over the mantelpiece, she came away with a thick pillow of dust. The hearth looked too clean for anything to ever have been burned on its polished black stones, but a pretty rack of cast-iron shovels and pokers stood ready, just in case. Erika wiped the dust from her hands and stepped back for another look at the portrait that hung over the mantel.

  The woman, dressed in dark blue, her hair twisted up and held with gold-and-amber netting, sat perched on a patio wall that overlooked an expanse of gardens. She held her right hand posed in midair, but the trinket she dangled had been painted over since the original commission. Her thin white fingers were smudged from the poor touch-up job and detracted from the beauty of the painting as a whole. A lovely piece, but not a happy one. The gentle smile on the woman’s lips never reached her eyes. Erika thought that the painter must have been very brave to have captured the emptiness there.

  Behind her, the study door clattered open.

  “Leave, Erika,” Jeremiah said, tramping in. He had a black scarf balled up in one fist and tossed it to the side as he struggled to pull off his jacket.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Leave,” he repeated. “Go to your room. I’ve had a bad day.”

  “You sound like my husband.”

  “Your ex-husband. You shouldn’t have divorced him if you didn’t want him to leave.”

  Erika’s mouth flew open.

  “I’m not my mother’s son today, and you’ve had enough of my brothers to know that the alternative isn’t lovely.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That you, as I have now mentioned twice, need to leave.”

  “This morning —”

  “We cannot talk about this morning, Erika. Not now. I should never have let that happen, and it will not happen again.”

  She squared her jaw, stood up straighter. “I stayed up to talk to you. You don’t understand —”

  “No, Erika, I understand perfectly,” Jeremiah said. “I wished before that my mother had been like you, but I take it back. It isn’t love that’s driving you, it’s selfishness, and your selfishness is oppressive. Overwhelming. You’re in a house full of slaves who would read your mind and do whatever you asked before thinking twice, and you still aren’t satisfied. I’ve pampered you like a queen and you haven’t even married my father yet. I’ve given you everything and you’ve never thanked me.” He threw his coat down on the back of the sofa. “All you can think about is your children, and all they want is to move on. God, the Striplings are a stubborn family. I don’t know who’s worse, but it must be you because at least they listened when I said no. You certainly haven’t shown the courage to do that. I’d even say that —”

  “Yet?”

  Jeremiah planted his palms on the couch back and let his shoulders slump.

  “I haven’t married your father yet?” Erika clenched her jaw. “You make it sound like I’m going to, Jeremiah.”

  He glanced from Erika to the portrait on the wall. After a silence, he risked the question.

  “And?”

  Erika paled. “What have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything, Erika,” he said. “I haven’t done anything at all, except what you asked. You wanted your children, so I nearly killed them.”

  “What?”

  “Nearly,” Jeremiah barked. “I said ‘nearly.’ If you’re going to pick words to overanalyze, you might as well choose important ones. You wanted me to make sure they were all right, so I risked my head and theirs to see them. I’ve spent half of my day wandering to cover my trail, and then I come back to the city and you know what I see? I see my big brother in full r
egalia on the streets, trying to rally the entire Kingdom against me. I’m a traitor now, or didn’t you realize? And I’m housing you, which makes things unfair and unholy and unprecedented and every other damning ‘un’ that the court can think of.” He waved a finger at her. “And then I come home, and I find you, here, in my study, touching my things, and wondering where your children are. Well, I don’t know, Erika, and I’m sorry. Sorry because I know that that’s going to piss you off, and sorry because it makes my own job a damn sight harder. So please, in honor of everything good left, just go to your room and leave me be.”

  “I need to know what you mean about your father.”

  “No,” Jeremiah answered, “you don’t. If you needed to know, then I would know, but I don’t. You can’t see, can you? I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have half the answers. Maybe you shouldn’t ask for things if you won’t accept the consequences. There are things that I’d like to have happen too, you know. I’d like to have a biologically stable mother, for one. I’d like to have a dad who actually acknowledges me, for another, and I’d maybe even like to have a family that doesn’t want me spitted and charred. But I don’t ask for any of that, because I know that everything has consequences. It’s cause and effect and it always has been, even on Earth. I know that you died young, but for God’s sake, you’d think you would’ve learned a few things. Like how having sex gets you pregnant and running off with an alcoholic gets you disowned.”

  Erika had gone red faced, half shocked and half enraged. She spun out of the room and into the hall, slamming the door behind her so that the bookcases rattled. She wasn’t there, then, to see Jeremiah collapse onto the sofa with his hands over his face. He felt sucked dry.

  Shawn spread out the blanket that Baba Laza had given them and lay down beside Megan. It felt awkward, sleeping so exposed in the woods during midday, but he was too exhausted to care. They’d taken Jeremiah’s advice and walked as long as their legs let them. It was rough going, since they were barefoot.