by IGMS
The bird she had heard before spoke again, as though the presence of the ghost had silenced it, and she tilted her head, listening. She knew that spell - it took the souls of those who had passed and bound them to a magician's service. That must be why the peddler had taken the objects he had, searching for loose ghosts that he might snare.
It was a clever strategy. She frowned. Would it be possible for him to summon Jemmy's soul? But no, all of her efforts in that area had failed. He had sunk beneath the waves, where her magic was ineffectual at best, and was lost entirely. She presumed he was in Heaven, but the thought pained her enough that she habitually avoided it.
When morning first began to filter through the trees, she rose, burped a last fragrant burp, and set on her way to Serenata.
Half a mile on, she ran into a merry little wagon, painted bright blue and white, with golden pennons dangling from its roof, and bells set on the two ponies' harness, so that she heard it coming long before she saw it top a hill and roll down the slope towards her.
The driver hailed her, from the seat where he sat with two fellows. They were young and cheerful men, clean-shaven as though just come to port.
She looked hard at the first one. "I know you!" she said. "You were on Jemmy's ship."
He'd come to her door, along with the Captain and First Mate, to tell her of her loss. Even now, she saw sadness in his face as he returned her look.
"No, isn't that a strange thing!" he said. "But a night ago, I was thinking I saw someone enough like him to be his brother, and now here you are, bringing him to mind again."
"His brother? But he had no close relatives," Hattie said.
The man shrugged. "A trick of the light, miss."
She asked what had set them to traveling and learned that they were newly-landed sailors, who had chosen to leave the sea and use the funds from their last voyage to collaborate on the wagon and its accompanying enterprise: to travel from town to town providing instructive but entertaining lectures on the art of knot-making.
"Let us show you!" said the driver, and they all hopped out of the wagon. They took an enormous rope from where it was slung around the wagon back; they set about demonstrating their act, one hopping in and out of enormous loops as another constructed an illustrative knot and the third solemnly discoursed on the finer points of his companion's actions.
It was, she thought, commentary on the nature of things, how everyone was all tied together in one way or another. Tug on one person's heartstring and it leads to someone else who loves or hates them. Discovering this web was part of life. And part of magic, the strings that lay underneath the universe, patterns more complex than anyone could conceive.
One performer caught another in a knot and tried to apologize and untangle him, managing to ensnare the third in the process. His expression was so droll and his language so lively that Hattie laughed until her face hurt and she was forced to sit down on the grassy bank to catch her breath. Concluding, they arranged themselves in a row before her and made a synchronized bow.
She applauded and congratulated them. She made to take out her purse and compensate them for the performance, but they insisted that it had only been a rehearsal, as well as their first performance before someone other than their fellow sailors. One pressed a knot on her, made of silk cord, as a pretty souvenir. Taking it, she waved them out of sight as they went jingling on their way.
The encounter had cheered her up, and the fairness of the day expanded her mood even further. She walked along and toyed with the knot in her hands, figuring out how a spell might interlace the same way, a twist here, a twist there. It would serve to bind winds, and she amused herself catching breezes and tying them into the knot.
She put it away in her pocket when she topped the hill to Serenata. The port stretched out in front of her, two big merchant ships and a host of smaller vessels in its harbor. Smoke rose from dwellings, and she could hear the distant clamor and clatter. As she approached, she saw more and more people, but most of them said no more than "Good day."
An old man was the exception. He tottered up and said, "Beg pardon, miss, will you help an old fellow to the apothecary?'
He seemed in earnest, and was clean and well kempt. She observed that he was indeed tottery on his feet, and so she took his arm and walked him to his destination. He chattered to her as they walked along, and taught her an old sea-charm she'd never heard before, one that might coax a mermaid into giving up her comb.
"If you ever spot one, mind you!" he said. "They are few and far between these days. Their waters have been spoiled by whalers and pleasure cruisers, even the ones along the coast."
Hattie thought of cook back home and sighed. Mermaids always sounded so pleasant in legends, full of singing and combing their hair, but in reality their teeth were pointed and their breath stank of fish. Still, she committed the charm to memory, accepted the old man's thanks, and went about her morning.
She spent it combing the docks, trying to find news of the peddler. She encountered salesman selling snake oil, magnetic bracelets, and poultices of bran and narwhale horn; seers and fortune-tellers; sailors looking for drink or women or worse; a man selling a fighting dog; children ready to run errands or steal a purse with equal alacrity; explorers, sail makers, and parties carrying thick tubs of tar; a penny pamphlet preacher; washwomen and prostitutes; women going to market with their maids behind them, and maids going to market with no one but their shadow behind them.
But no rags and bones peddler. Not a sign of him.
In a junk shop, though, she spotted a familiar pair of fire irons. Upon investigation, she found almost all of the traded items, apparently discarded now that they had been stripped of their ghosts.
But the picture frame was not among them. No matter how she coaxed, the shop owner could not remember such a thing being among them, much less the description of the man who had sold them to him. She took comfort in the fact that he didn't remember the frame. But why had the peddler held onto that alone? Her mind boiled, trying to put together puzzle pieces.
At noon, she paused and bought food in the open market: a roasted sausage in a roll, lemonade, and spiced nuts. She found a seat on a bench near the town square and, after dusting it off with a handkerchief, for the splotches on it were somewhat suspect, she settled down to watch the boats as they played on the water, and the arching, swaying loops of the gulls, and the sailors from a multitude of ports going about their business.
She was lulled by the warm sun and the hubbub around her. A half dream, mockingbirds and knots and mermaid charms, usurped her thoughts.
A shadow fell across her and she opened her eyes.
A man stood before her. In appearance he was unremarkable, so much so that she could sense magic about that very presence.
He meant her no good, she could tell that in an instant. She sprang to her feet and he fell back a step.
"I hear ye been askin' after me," he said.
She looked harder. This was the peddler?
"I want my picture back," she said without preamble.
He squinted at her. Magic rippled around him.
"What for?" he scoffed. "A trophy of the man you destroyed?"
Tears sprang to her eyes. "You have no right to say such a thing!"
He did not reply, but cast a spell.
He assailed her with ghosts, and she drew a pair of silver shears from her satchel and cut the cords that tied them to him. They went crying away into a great spirit wind that blew her clothes about even though the air in the market was still.
He tried to quench the wind, and she untied her knot, loosing the breezes she had captured. They pummeled him and blew him about, but he maintained his feet.
He was stronger than she was. She could feel it pressing in the air around her. But they wavered back and forth, trading ectoplasmic blows, until she shuddered and went to her knees, head falling forward. Her cap slipped aside and her scalp was bared, the black tattoos crawling like wormwords over
her skin.
She expected him to strike then, to destroy her as he desired, but he was still.
She raised her head with an effort. He was staring at her.
"What markings are those?" he said roughly. His voice was thick, choked with emotion.
"The stars on the day my true love died," she said. "I had them graven there, for I will live under their shadow all my days."
"You lie! You sent your lover to sea with a spell laid in his sea chest, condemning him to wander."
"I did no such thing," she said. "Someone has told you lies." She closed her eyes, weary to the bone. "Go ahead and finish me. At least I will be reunited with him."
But he did nothing but reach forward to touch her shoulder, and when she looked, Jemmy stood there. The ring on his finger was twin to her own.
He helped her up but when he released her, she stepped back, feeling the awkward past between them.
"There was a spell in my chest," he said. "When I was swept overboard, it dragged me down, hung like chains about my feet. I was rescued by a mermaid."
"I did not lay that spell," she said with conviction.
"Until it is broken, I will always be forced to wander. I thought if I killed you, it would disappear. How could I think anyone but you had put it there, when you packed the trunk with your own hands?"
She had. With new clothes she had sewn him, and necessities for his trip, and a dried spray of heliotrope to remind him of her and the night they had spent talking in the garden.
Who in the household would have been able to put a spell in the trunk while her back was turned?
"Madeleine," she said.
"Your sister has no magic."
"I think she does."
He eyed her. This was not her Jemmy, but some stranger, transformed from her lover by suspicion and doubt. It broke her heart.
"How can I prove it?" she pleaded with him. "Why else would I keep the picture of you in such a treasured place?"
He looked at her with sad and confused eyes. "I don't have the picture - I never did."
And so they went to confront Madeleine.
They took a coach back to Vailport, but when they disembarked at the house, there was no one there except the cook, who showed no surprise whatsoever at Jemmy's reappearance, but rather eyed the pair as sourly as ever.
"Miss Madeleine took the boys out for a picnic," she said. She snorted derisively.
It was not a typical gesture on Madeleine's part. Hattie felt a flare of worry for the twins. If Madeleine was, as Hattie suspected, enmeshed in dark magics, she would be losing her connection to humanity, and with it all bonds of love and duty. Nothing would prevent her using the twins in a spell.
The family's favorite picnic ground lay on the outskirts of town, a creek-edged glade full of willows. Jemmy and Hattie saw signs of Madeleine and the twins' passage: crumpled flowers, a discarded sandwich wrapper, and a cairn of pebbles.
Did Madeleine know she was in pursuit, Hattie wondered. And what did her sister intend?
When they reached the glade, they saw the twins playing beside the creek, catching minnows in the shallows. Madeleine sat on the bank on a quilt she had spread out. Hattie noticed with annoyance that it was one of her best, the one that usually sat atop her own bed, a pattern she'd invented herself called Starling's Wing.
Like the cook, Madeleine showed no surprise.
"How did it come to this, Madeleine?" Hattie said sorrowfully.
Madeleine threw her head back in the air, letting her golden locks flow like water, and laughed. "Silly Hattie," she said. "You showed me the way."
"How?"
"Reverand Hosiah preached on the perils of sorcery," Madeleine said. "And I came home that day, thinking that I would never do such a thing, only to find you'd stolen something out from under my nose."
"Be honest, Madeleine," Jemmy said. "I was never anything to you but a foil to use to set other men to jealousy and fighting."
"You were mine," she said. "And if I couldn't have you, no one would. Hattie never guessed I set the anchor for the spell on the picture she so treasured. And lacking that, you will never break the curse."
Hattie thought that perhaps that was the same way Jemmy had intended to break it, back when he'd thought she'd done it, but she put aside the thought. Following it would only lead her down the same path her sister had taken.
"What do you intend with Lute and Cloudy?" she said.
"They've troubled me once too often," Madeleine said. "They put a snake in my bed last night, and that was the final straw. They'll make lovely little suckling pigs, don't you think?"
She reached out as though to make a gesture, but Hattie fingered the almost unraveled knot in her pocket. The quilt billowed up around Madeleine, enwrapping her until she looked like a mummy.
It was over quicker than Hattie had expected, but it drained her to the bones. She drew a deep breath, glanced at Jemmy. Now it was over, now she had him, and life would be different.
But the twins stood in front of her. A tiny smile, so small it could have fit on a tin soldier, hovered at the corner of Lucius' mouth. It was not the smile of someone who had just been rescued from the fate of being turned into a suckling pig.
"You." Hattie asked the twins. "You put Madeleine up to this, didn't you? Why? How?"
Claudius shrugged. "It was easy. Simpleminded Madeline, so full of herself. There's no one so easy to manipulate as someone in love with herself."
"But why?" Hattie demanded. She was physically drained, but that didn't prevent a sense of righteous rage from growing inside her.
"We were just tired of being treated like children," Lucius said. He studied her, still smiling.
"I'm not stupid," Hattie said, as furious with their incessant smiling as their abominable actions. "Don't waste my time with trite answers. I asked a serious question and I deserve a serious answer. I've never been anything but good to you. Why would you do this to me? To the man I loved?"
Lucius and Claudius looked at each other, seeming to communicate without speaking a word.
"Now that your magic is drained," Lucius finally said, "it will be easy to dispose of you. So why not? Why not tell you? You're not the best sorcerer in the family, even if you might wield the most power. When you don't have much power, though, you learn to use it in subtle ways. Small spells that lasted a long, long time, a push here, a nudge there, a touch of wanderlust, a breath of wind. And then when Madeleine cursed your Jemmy to wander, we used that. A curse anchored to our own home proved especially potent. Then you went and got those astrological tattoos all over your head, which only focused the magic on our house even more. Too perfect.
"So now, dear cousin, I'm afraid it's time for you to assume your rightful place. A suckling pig is an excellent suggestion, by the way, since it will keep the tattoos right on your ugly head, right where they will continue to do us the most good."
Hattie felt the twins' magic washing over her, carrying her to another shape, like a wave overcoming a weakened swimmer, carrying her away. Pulling her down.
Jemmy's fingers slipped into hers. "Draw upon my strength," he said.
She hesitated. "But you don't know what that will do . . ."
"Yes, I do know," he said. "Did you think I'd been fooled into thinking myself alive, despite Madeleine's magic?"
Lucius and Cladius both stared, focusing. On another day, she might have been able to resist them without help.
She almost didn't want to. It had been too hard to lose Jemmy once; losing him again would be too much.
Claudius grinned in triumph. Lucius just leered. Both of them standing there with their stupid, evil smiles.
Hattie had no choice. She took Jemmy's fingers between hers . . .
And she unknotted him. Unmade him. Unwove him, turning him into threads of magic as thin and bright as wire. And then she took up that weave and wrapped it around the twins, a net as fine as a knife blade, so sharp that lines of blood stood out on their skin.
His shape wavered beside her as she plucked away the last of the twins' magic, as she bundled them and Madeleine up into the cart like helpless statues.
It was painful seeing Jemmy as nothing more than a shadow. She knew it was even more painful for him to exist that way. All she had to do was unwrap that last knot, the knot that held all that he was still, the knot of the spell that had called him out of the ocean to torment her.
At least this time she would be able to say a proper farewell.
Lifting a hand toward his glimmering, shimmering form, she mouthed the word, Goodbye. She couldn't bring herself to say it aloud, but it was enough. Jemmy lifted a hand to meet hers. Then he melted away.
In the kitchen Hattie confronted the cook.
"You know where it is, don't you?" she said.
The cook showed far more teeth than any human could. "Mine," she said.
But Hattie was already whistling the charm the old man had taught her. Reluctantly, the cook went to her barrel and removed the picture, shaking brine off the surface.
Hattie took it with gentle hands, picking away the spell embroidered around it, like a needle teasing out the last scraps of stitches, plucking away tufts of thread.
Jemmy was gone.
"I cannot thank you enough," she said, despite the tears thickening her voice.
The cook's face twisted with hope and anticipation. Hattie said it again. "Thank you."
They would have to find a new cook, certainly, with the mermaid gone. But Hattie already had a few ideas in mind, and in the meantime she could make the soup herself.