“You can stop staring now,” he said.
“You were supposed to be old,” I said. It sounded more critical than I had intended, as though he had failed a personal test.
“I am,” he said, without inflection, and left the room without waiting to see if I was behind. His wings trailed their feathered tips in the dust, but his bare feet left no prints. I gathered Torren more securely against my chest and followed.
I had spent two and a half seasons in this place, searching its many rooms and passages, but I had never before seen the door Forsythian opened. Had the stacks of books concealed it all this time, or had it simply not been there until the sorcerer wanted it to be? Inside was a short flight of steps into a large tower room, which overlooked the apple tree courtyard from an unlatched window on one side and the forest road on which I had arrived from the other. The arrangement should not have been architecturally possible and bothered me more than it should.
There was a fireplace here, left unlit. It seemed Forsythian did not feel the cold. A long, scarred artisan’s workbench was positioned underneath the courtyard window, scattered with open books and unrolled maps, brightly coloured bottles and squat beeswax candles in small glass bowls. In the midst of it all was a large clay dish of ink.
“I will need blood,” Forsythian said.
I nodded, laying Torren down on a nearby chair and crossed the feather-scattered floor to the bench. There was an ivory handled lady’s hunting knife laid out beside the bowl of ink. “Where do I cut?” I asked practically.
Forsythian’s eyebrows might have risen then, although it was difficult to tell beneath his crows-nest of hair. “I’ll do it,” he said, and raised a wing. Fingers emerged from the feathers like a hand pushed from a sleeve, but the grimace of pain on the sorcerer’s face told me it was nowhere near as easy. He snatched the knife from my hand and slit a line at the base of my earlobe. His thin cold fingers thrust my head downward so that the welling blood dripped into the ink, and then it wasn’t fingers holding me there, but the awkward pressure of a wing.
“Remember your heart,” he whispered in my bleeding ear. “What did you love? What hurt so badly you couldn’t bear its weight any longer?”
Logically enough, I started with small things. The tart sweetness of the first apples of the year. Blankets warmed by the fire in my childhood bedroom, scented with sprigs of dried lavender to help me sleep. But small pleasures, I knew instinctively, would not be enough. I remembered my mother’s face as she was lain out for her funeral, waxen pale and unapproachably beautiful, as though she had already metamorphosised into her own stone memorial. My first love, clear blue eyes and a teasing smile that would turn as quickly to a scowl or a kiss. It had been I who left him and he’d tried so hard to hide his tears. I remembered the face I had chosen instead, lit gold with lantern light in an autumn night. Seeing it wax pale the day my betrothal to the king was announced and we had looked at one another, desperate to forget, knowing I never would.
My reflection melted in the still ink, ripples of light drifting into a new shape. There was a lake, an island, a stone chest shrouded by five years of encroaching thorns.
The weight on my neck was withdrawn and I staggered stiffly backward.
“Is that where it is?” I asked. Torren was crying behind me. The sound was distracting. I put my thumb in his mouth to quiet him and he sucked the salt from my skin, small teeth biting fretfully. If the sound of his distress had not interfered with my thoughts, I wondered if I would have gone to him at all. It was hard to manage a conscience with only the phantom of remembered emotions to guide me.
Forsythian had his back to me, bending his head so low over the dish that when he looked up his hair dripped black as though his own colours were leaching away. There was ink on his lips and his eyes were half-closed, unfocused. I said his name and he looked at me as if he could not imagine who I was, or why I was there. It was as though he had gone somewhere else, become someone else. I knew I should be afraid then. I backed towards the door and was almost there when I remembered Torren, still swaddled on the chair only a few feet from the empty-eyed wizard, and I knew I should go back. I stopped where I stood in a moment’s indecision.
And Forsythian blinked. He recognised me. The moment of danger passed.
“Come on, then,” he said, flinging open the window.
I stared. “What do you mean?”
“The lake,” he said. “Do you want to find the lake or not?”
“What has that to do with the window?”
In response, he spread his wings. His thin nose narrowed further, hooked, darkened to a wickedly sharp beak. The whites of his tawny eyes were swallowed by predatory yellow. Feathers sprouted from the bare skin of his chest, until I was not looking at a man any more, but a bird — a bird large enough to carry me on its back.
“My son,” I began.
The bird tossed its head impatiently. A feather flew into the air and trailed downwards onto Torren’s face, into his open mouth. He went instantly limp in my arms, the warm weight of deep sleep. The feather had disintegrated on his tongue like ash. It did not seem hygienic or responsible, and the duty I had built to replace my conscience warned me of the wrongness of what I was about to do. Babies should not be left untended. I should go to Alabast or Cianda, but there was no time.
I laid the sleeping baby between the broad arms of the chair and climbed onto the sorcerer’s back.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
I thought I would die on that flight. Somehow, I survived it.
It was still dark when we reached the lake, the grey-edged dark of the hours before dawn. Forsythian alighted on the stone arch of a ruined pavilion, which trembled beneath his weight, and allowed me to climb down before transforming back into a man. For a moment I thought he would stumble off the arch and I spread my arms to catch him. It was not fear for him that motivated me, but the knowledge he was the only way I would ever leave this island. But he did not fall. Regaining his balance, he swung himself down into a crouch on the overgrown ground beneath, and gestured silently.
The stone chest was at the centre of the pavilion. It looked to me like the coffin of a person so unloved their grave had been entirely forgotten, left to the briars and snow.
I looked to Forsythian for instruction. He simply nodded again towards the chest, his assistance apparently at an end. The cold still air sank quickly through my layers of wool and linen, snow and mud darkening the hem of my skirt as I crossed the pavilion. Having left my gloves behind in the hurry to depart, I wrapped my hand in the already soiled cloth to sweep the lid of the chest clear. Thorns bit through the pitiful protection, dripping blood a stark red against grey stone and white snow. I braced my hands against the icy lid and pushed with all my strength.
It slid backward, unresisting, and fell to the ground with an echoing crack of splitting stone. Inside the opened tomb was a box. I remembered very little of my visit to the necromancer, but the box I knew. Small and silver, encrusted with diamonds. It had been a wedding present, of all ironies, given what I had asked him to put inside. I had worn the key to its ornate lock on a ribbon around my neck for more than half a year, in hope. My fingers shook as they lifted it from beneath my bodice, letting the tiny silver key fall into my palm.
I knelt on the frozen ground, barely noticing the cold, and placed the box before me. After all that I had done to be here, I felt now like a puppet, going through the predestined motions of another’s decision. The key turned in the lock. Bloodless fingers opened the box and reached inside.
I felt something as light and fragile as a captive bird between my hands. In the dim grey gloom of impending sunrise, it looked like a vast ruby and was almost as cold. I knew then something was wrong, terribly wrong. My hands tightened their hold instinctively. And the heart I held, poor broken thing, crumbled away to dust.
It was as if the puppet’s strings had been cut. I fell. Crumpled sideways in the snow, I felt my blood turn stagnant, freezing in
my veins. Something dark crossed my vision and I was lifted on soft black wings, my head lolling backwards to stare blankly into the burning sunrise, my mouth open, shaping words I couldn’t say. The hollow in my heartless chest widened into a cavern and engulfed me completely.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Hearts are heavy. They ache and fracture. They fail.
They forget.
Meriel opened her eyes on a moth-eaten settee that was both familiar and unfamiliar, something she had seen in a dream. She wore a white linen chemise that was stained with dry mud; a green woollen dress lay draped over the blankets at her feet and it too was stained with mud, and blood. Her hands lay atop the covers on either side of her body, scratched and sore, but intact.
She watched the winter sunlight pattern the walls as though it might write out what it was she couldn’t remember. Her chest ached, a slow throb like a bruise. Then she heard the crying and sat up quickly. In a nest of blankets in the chair beside her was a baby — her baby. Without thinking she threw back the covers and stepped out of bed to take Torren into her arms. He grabbed at her loose hair with tiny flailing fingers and Meriel laughed, dropping a kiss onto his downy dark head.
“You’re going to drive me mad,” she predicted.
Later she put on the green dress and gathered up the few things left scattered about the room that she recognised as her own. Wrapping Torren securely in a shawl, she left the strange, cluttered room in which she’d woken and went through the quiet corridors of the even stranger house. She could not quite remember how she had come to be here and it seemed the best thing she could do was leave. She thought once, as she passed through a canyon of unshelved books, that she saw a hem of black robe disappearing between the stacks, but when she reached the same point she could see no one there and no door through which they might have disappeared.
“Come on, Torren,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Only she took a wrong turning. The wrong set of steps, a mistake anyone could make. Instead of reaching the road outside, she found herself in a courtyard, where a bare-branched apple tree stretched bony fingers towards the pale winter sky and impossible red apples lay on the paving stones around its roots.
Meriel’s heart leapt. She caught her breath and dropped to her knees, clutching Torren against her chest, reaching out to take an apple into her gloved hand.
“It was the best I could do.”
She twisted around at the voice, familiar and not familiar, but knew even as she did that she wouldn’t see him. “Forsythian,” she whispered, remembering.
“Apples and blood,” he said. “I’ve never made a heart so quickly before. I refuse to be held responsible if you find it loving all the wrong things.” He paused for a long moment. “Though it seems someone has already found their place in it.”
Meriel looked at Torren, small and red-faced and hers. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Thank you, Forsythian.”
“If you want to leave,” he said, “it’s the other stair you want.”
He didn’t say goodbye. Meriel stayed in the courtyard for a few minutes, waiting, then eventually went back inside and found her way to the right passage, where golden-spined suits of armour stared open-mouthed. She let herself out and stood on the top steps, looking at the road. It led away through the forest to towns and castles and people she had once used to love.
She lifted her foot to step down. Her chest contracted painfully.
She looked up and saw black trailing from a window. It might have been a sleeve, or a wing. It didn’t matter. Cradling her sleeping son in her arms, Meriel turned around and stepped back through the open doors into the house, her home, where her heart was.
And when the soldiers later came in search of the queen and her son, all they could see where the sorcerer’s fortress should have been was an apple tree and a laughing crow.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Ella and the Flame by Kathleen Jennings
The people went out of town on foot, horseback and cart, to where the trees grew scraggy on the dusty hills. The house they sought should have been difficult to find. It lay beyond the hard ground of the rutted road, hidden by grey screens of trees, in as unfriendly a valley as any in that hungry country. No clearer path led to it than the faint tangled traces made by cattle or goats or the feet of a solitary child going to school. But many of the townspeople had been there before, on private errands, and the small crowd found its way unerringly.
At the rear of the procession rode the Governor himself. He had known the town when he was a young man gaining experience of the world, but now he returned in all his dignity. He had heard the grumblings and complaints of the dry-spirited people. It had been a long time since rain had fallen. They struggled to live on soil grown thin and shallow creeks run low and rank, while cattle and children sickened and starved. The inhabitants of the house that lay beyond the town had once promised health and cures, but their abilities had been stretched. The merciless drought seemed a punishment for relying on such frail assistance. Each disease, each misfortune, assumed an air of malevolence. The Governor had assured the people that he would see justice done, and his presence lent an undeniable distinction to the proceedings.
The Governor was not surprised when the scrubby wilderness split to reveal the small house neat and grey in its unnaturally green garden. It had been a familiar destination in that youth he had put severely behind him. He was glad to set both memories and rumours to rest at last, like old letters cast into a fire.
Those who had gone ahead had already surrounded the cottage. The doors and shutters were closed.
“They are all inside, sir,” said the Mayor to the Governor. “They will not come out and beg. They will not admit their wickedness.”
The Governor nodded and then a slight frown troubled his serene brow. “There is a child?” he asked, and the faint hesitation in that hitherto resolute voice troubled the Mayor, for promises of governments had proved hollow before now. The fatherless child was grown undeniably like the women who lived in the cottage, and the Mayor did not think it necessary to trouble needlessly the conscience of one who would not have to live with the consequences of this day’s activities.
“It goes to the school,” he answered. “Your Honour may recall the teacher said that she would keep the children in. Though,” he added, regretful, “some poison can only be burned out.”
The Governor nodded. Unpleasant thoughts occurred to him of a girl he had known too well and castles he built in the air when he was young and foolish, but he put those images out of his mind and looked sternly at the cottage and the crowd ready and eager to perpetrate justice.
“You heard the evidence,” said the Mayor.
The Governor inclined his head regally, and replied, “Let justice be done.”
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Planks and timbers fell against the door like the beating of a deep drum. The sisters held each others’ hands and sat on the floor, heads touching. The beams fell like doom against the shutters, and the women closed their eyes.
“We will die,” said Anne, the eldest, simply. When she said “we”, it sounded so small. Just the four of them: three siblings and the child, so slight and brittle a number.
“We have died before,” said the youngest sister, Sable. When she spoke, she meant all who had ever lived and died like them: sisters and aunts and brothers and uncles and parents.
“We are the only ones left to die,” said the middle one, Mary, holding the child on her lap, although Ella had long grown too tall for such a seat. “We are the last of all.”
“People have hated us too fiercely,” said Anne. “Even those we once thought loved us.”
“That man has hated us too fiercely,” said Sable. “And I cannot believe I ever thought…” She fell silent and frowned at Ella, for neither Sable’s pride nor her idea of family had ever let it seem necessary to her to tell Ella of the past. “Will you forgive me that folly?”
Anne smiled and shook h
er head “What is there to forgive, Sable? Youth is always foolish—” here she touched Ella’s hand, “—and yours gave us perhaps more joy than we had a right to. But death has always loved our family too well.”
“What is it like, death?” asked Ella, still enough of a child to be sure the others knew the answer. Anne and Mary and Sable were silent, and the sounds outside were like the knocking of bones and the scattering of stones on a grave. To them, death had taken on the features of a face once welcome, before it had grown great and regretted them. None of them wished to say that to the child.
“Dying is like going to sleep after a long day,” said Anne gently, “when you cannot keep your eyes open however much you want to. You can struggle or go quietly, but darkness falls and all your limbs go loose and easy.”
“Dying is like waking to a bright morning,” said Sable, “when everything is so fresh and new, you are sure no-one has ever seen it before.”
“Dying is like fire,” said Mary dully. “All flash and flame and at the end there is nothing but ashes and cinders.”
Ella frowned over this, for they had raised her to look for truth in stories. With no more questions to answer or tales to tell, they all fell silent again. It was quieter outside. They heard voices of friends and neighbours, harsh laughter of customers and schoolmates, the distant clatter of bundles of sticks and sheaves of dry grass.
“I do not wish to die cowering,” said Anne at last.
“What does it matter?” said Mary. “No-one will know.”
“We will,” said Sable. “Here and now and for a moment, we will know.”
“No-one will tell stories of it,” said Mary.
One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Page 26