A whispering rose along the hallway. Milla could tell by the way he faltered for just a moment that Niklas had heard it, too. It sounded like wind through leafy branches, only sharper, crisper. Then she thought, No, that’s not what it sounds like at all. It sounds like hissing.
Then the hissing became words.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
Niklas held one hand behind him, quickly squeezing one of hers. “Remember what I said. Don’t look. And . . . don’t listen, either. They’ll say things to you. It’s the demon talking. Remember that.”
Milla noticed he hadn’t prayed the way they’d been taught to do whenever anyone mentioned the demon. Nor was there salt around doors and windows. Come to think of it, there was none in Ragna’s cottage, either. She wondered if everyone who spent any time here realized it was pointless. The demon was already here, and would do as she wished.
Milla could see the iron bars of cells, one after the other, curving along the outer wall of the corridor, and as they passed the first, hands shot out at her through the bars, fingertips grazing her arm and nearly catching hold of her sleeve. Niklas threw an arm around Milla and jerked her backward until they both leaned against the corridor’s inner wall, beyond the reach of the girl.
Though she was not a girl at all. She had a woman’s shape beneath the rough burlap she wore—more sack than dress. There were lines cobwebbing the corners of her eyes, and her cheeks were hollow, her lips thin. She stood pressed up against the bars, a smile across her face from ear to ear exposing her teeth, yellow with age. She laughed and hissed—laughing on the intake of breath, hissing on the exhale—and gripped and shook the iron bars. “She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!”
More hands and arms emerged from the iron bars along the corridor and the whisper-hissing grew louder and constant.
“I’m taking you out of here,” Niklas said. “It’s not safe.”
She turned to him, calmed her face and willed herself to be convincing. “I’m fine, Niklas. They’re all locked up. They can’t get out. And I’ve come this far to see Iris. Please don’t make me leave until I do.”
Niklas took her hand, less with affection and more, she felt, out of a desire to keep her close. Then he turned and led her on. Milla made no pretense of not looking at each woman and girl that they passed, their faces lit up by the oil lamps. She saw that there seemed to be two kinds of prisoners here. Those who smiled and whispered and held the bars as if waiting for something to be brought to them. Their faces were bright with expectation, from the oldest to the youngest. One of these women, old enough to be her mother, had hair and eyebrows that looked as if they might once have been the same rust-red as Iris’s. She wondered if it was Leah, Iris’s aunt. These women frightened Milla—their smiles were so wide as to be grimaces. They seemed to have teeth too numerous, too large. They were frenzied.
But there was another kind of prisoner here, too—girls who didn’t whisper or grip the bars. In their faces Milla saw what Asta would become, whenever Ragna was finished with her. These girls huddled in the dim of their cells, only staring, the fight gone out of them.
Niklas stopped in front of one of these cells. Inside, on a low cot covered with dirty hay, sat a girl, her knees pulled up to her forehead, her arms wrapped around them.
It was Iris.
Niklas stepped up to the bars. “Iris. It’s me. Niklas.”
Iris lifted her head from her arms, and Milla was overcome with relief and anguish—both. Relief because here was Iris. Anguish because here was Iris. Here. And in this way. She wore the same rough, dirty burlap sack that all the other girls and women wore. Milla rushed to the door of the cell and thrust her arms through the bars. Iris leapt up and reached for Milla before Niklas could pull Milla away.
“Oh my dear. My dearest. I’m so sorry they’ve done this to you.” Milla held Iris through the bars, felt the bones and muscles under the skin of Iris’s back. Iris seemed at once thinner and stronger than she’d been just a few days before. Milla wanted to push her face through the bars and press her cheek, wet with tears, to Iris’s. But the bars were too close together. She looked at Niklas. “Let me inside. Let me sit with her.”
“Oh, Milla,” he said. “Don’t you know how I’d love to let you? But it’s not safe.”
“Niklas, please,” Iris said, in a voice that was all her own. “I’m me. You know me. I would never hurt Milla. She’s like my own sister.”
“Iris,” he said. “You know that won’t keep her safe from the demon.”
What he meant, Milla knew, was that Iris’s love for Milla wouldn’t keep Milla safe from Iris. “Niklas, what is the worst that could happen if you let me inside? What is the worst these girls ever do? Say bad things? Look at her, Niklas. She’s just as she ever was.” What Milla thought, but didn’t say, was that Milla herself bore far more proof of possession than any of these girls. If Ragna knew there were snakes growing from her head, they’d build a new prison, just for her.
Niklas raised an eyebrow at her. “Milla.”
“I know Iris. All you have to do is let me in and lock the door behind me. And if anything happens I’ll call to you. Anyway, I’m hardly going to sleep in a room with all those boys looking for their proof that I’m demon-possessed. I’m safer here than there. Then you can come get me in the morning and let me out before Ragna arrives.”
“Petter’s on guard duty tonight,” Niklas said, “so he’d be the first to hear you if you called. Not that I imagine I’ll be able to sleep a wink knowing you’re in here.”
“You could stay with us, Niklas.” Iris smiled at him, and something in the brightness of her smile gave Milla pause, but then she told herself that she was being silly. It was just Iris’s usual smile. Wasn’t it?
“Yes, Niklas,” Milla said. “Do that.” She looked to Niklas hopefully, realizing with shame that she’d welcome his company. As the damp chill of the stone walls settled into her and the whispering circled and circled the corridor like a creature prowling, Milla felt suddenly afraid to be here alone.
Niklas thought for a moment. “No. It will make the other boys suspicious, and that will be no good for you. Besides, I can only lock the door from the outside. And . . .” He looked at Iris. “Leaving it unlocked wouldn’t be a good idea.” He pulled Milla away from the iron bars. “Milla,” he said quietly. “You must listen to me now. And believe me. Trust that I love Iris, too, and I wouldn’t lie to you. Do you trust me?”
Milla nodded. She did. Didn’t she?
“Then trust me when I say that Iris isn’t always like this. I know she seems like herself now. But I’ve seen her act just like the others. She hisses and laughs and throws her milk back at me like she doesn’t even know me. She says terrible things. Things Iris would never have said to me before.”
Milla wanted to protest, to say it was no wonder—after all, look what they’d done to Iris. Shouldn’t she be angry? But something in Niklas’s face told her that he’d seen things she hadn’t. That arguing with him now would be unkind. That he was frightened for her, and trying his hardest to do right by her.
“Promise me that you’ll scream your loudest if you need me,” he said. “I don’t trust some of those other boys. I see how they act with the girls. So far I’ve kept them away from Iris. And I’ll keep them away from you. I’ll stay awake in there with them, and I’ll keep an ear out for Petter, too. You call me if you need me, do you hear?”
Again, Milla nodded, then put her arms around him and squeezed tight.
“All right then,” Niklas said. He walked toward the door to Iris’s cell and unclamped the wooden bar that held the iron-barred door closed. “Iris, you’ll take care of Milla tonight, will you? Don’t let anything happen to her?” He lifted off the bar and pulled the door open.
Milla squeezed Niklas’s hand one last time and then she walked inside Iris’s cell.
“Milla is my friend,” Iris said. She put a gentle arm around Milla’s
shoulder and smiled at Niklas, so brightly.
16
ONCE NIKLAS HAD LEFT THEM, Milla felt shy and uncertain. She pulled away from Iris and circled the cell, touching the cold, rough stone of the walls, looking up toward the small window—more an opening than a window, too high and tiny to offer much light during the day, but big enough to let in the night chill. The moon shone weakly through it now. The only other light came from the oil lamp that hung from the wall outside. Milla looked around the floor, at the bucket in the corner where she supposed Iris must relieve herself—the stench rising from it revealed as much—and then, finally, at the cot with its layer of old straw. Clearly Iris wasn’t the first girl who had lain upon it. And if she wasn’t the first, then what had happened to the others?
“The girl who was here before me died,” Iris said.
“How did you know I was wondering that?”
Iris shrugged. “I know you, Milla. I read the question in your eyes. It’s natural enough to wonder. I did, too. It’s the first thing I thought when they put me in here. I could smell her in the straw. I could smell her in the bucket.”
“How did she die?”
“Fever.”
Milla imagined a girl curled up on that straw, sweating and shaking, all alone. Ragna did that—she was responsible for that poor girl’s death.
“I found out this morning what the girl’s name was. Her name was Beata. My dearest Beata. She glowed, Milla. Like a flame. And they put her out.”
Milla heard a whisper. Iris went to the door of the cell and crouched down, pressing her face to the bars. “It’s Milla,” she whispered back. “Niklas’s sister. She’s come to save us. I told you she would.”
Whispers hissed up and down the corridor then.
shesheresheshereshesheresheshereshesheresheshereshesheresheshere
Iris stood and turned toward Milla. Milla groaned and put her hands to her face. How would she save them all? The most she could hope to do would be to convince Niklas to let Iris out. But even that seemed remote. She saw the fear in his eyes when he looked at Iris. He didn’t trust her.
Iris stood there, thin and dirty, barely dressed, and still she looked so strong, so alive with certainty. Iris walked toward Milla and put her arms around her. “Milla, dearest. I knew you’d come. I knew you’d hear me. And you did.”
Milla had never felt so uncomfortable to be embraced by Iris. She pulled away. “How can I possibly save all of them? I’m not even sure I can save us.”
Iris looked at her oddly, as if she weren’t listening to Milla’s words at all. “Why do you hide them from me?”
“Hide what?” But Milla knew what Iris meant. What chilled her gut now was not that Iris knew. It was how Iris knew.
“Your snakes.” Iris reached out both of her hands as if to cradle Milla’s head, and then turned them palms up, the way you would to reassure a dog. Milla felt her snakes emerge from their hair nest and watched as they rested their heads on Iris’s hands and tasted the salt of her skin with their tongues. Milla’s crimson snake was now as fully grown as her green, both of them as slender as her little finger, elegant and beautiful, and long enough to rest their heads on her shoulders. “You’re so lucky,” Iris said.
“Lucky,” Milla said. “How can this be lucky?”
“The demon gave you snakes but left you this.” She tapped Milla’s forehead with a finger. “You’re still you. You’re not taken.”
“You’re not taken, either,” Milla said.
“No? Then why do I hear her voice in my head?” Iris gripped her skull in her hands, squeezing as if she would crush it if she could. Her face crumpled like a dry leaf. “She’s always in here. I want her out, but she won’t leave.”
And there she was. There was Iris, Milla thought. Her Iris. This time, Milla was the one to embrace Iris, and neither of them pulled away.
They sat on the old straw of the cot while Iris ate the bread from Niklas and told Milla about The Place. And about how Stig and Jakob had left her with the midwife. By then, Iris said, she’d so exhausted herself with crying and begging and terror of what was to come that she no longer tried to escape. When she was led to her cell she walked meekly by the other girls and women, who stared at her, blinking. Once. Twice. She sat on the dirty cot and obediently changed out of her nightdress and into the burlap she now wore.
“You say the girls blinked at you,” Milla said, thinking of Asta.
“When we’re not alone but can see each other, that’s our way of talking.”
“What does the blinking mean?”
“Anything. Everything. I see you. See me. There’s a lot you can say with your eyes when you can’t use your mouth. And there isn’t time for anything more than that, because the only time we’re out of our cells is when one of us is taken out for punishment or on visiting days. And most girls never get visitors. At night, when Ragna’s gone and there’s only a boy on guard, we talk to each other in whispers, from cell to cell to cell. The woman next to me is Agnetha, and she’s the youngest of four sisters, all taken. Agnetha will give me a message for her sisters and then I pass the message to Rebekka in the next cell. And then she passes it on. It’s how we spend our days, whispering to each other. They like my stories. Sometimes we get loud. We howl.” Iris wrapped her arms around herself and looked around at the grimness of her cell as if seeing it again for the first time. “It’s so cold here, Milla. And lonely. So lonely. It’s only been three days and already I feel that I can’t survive another. The last woman to be doused was my mother’s sister, Leah. I heard her screaming, then crying. It hasn’t happened to me yet, but it will. Agnetha says there’s no rhyme or reason to when they come for you. You could be sleeping in your cell and next you know they’re dragging you away.”
“Oh, Iris,” Milla said. “I can’t bear to think of them doing that to you. I won’t let them.” Then Milla remembered the blinking. “I was in Ragna’s cottage and saw a girl there, named Asta.”
Iris nodded. “I heard about her. From the whispers. She made Ragna angry.”
“How?”
“Her mother and father came to see her on visiting day. It’s only the newer girls who get visitors. Their families still miss them. The older ones, their families have given up. Can’t bear to see them here, I suppose.” Iris’s face changed, became all planes and edges, and she seemed to go somewhere else in her head. “Or maybe those mothers and fathers didn’t love their daughters much in the first place.”
“Asta,” Milla said, wanting to bring Iris back to her, frightened of the sudden distance she felt between them. “What did she do that angered Ragna?”
Iris spoke urgently, as if she thought she’d be stopped even though she and Milla were alone and there was no one to interrupt them. “The thing you need to understand, Milla, is that not all the girls here are the same. Some of the girls aren’t taken by the demon at all. They swear they can’t hear her voice in their heads.”
“Then why are they here?”
“They just misbehaved. Some only once, some more than once. But they say it wasn’t because the demon was making them do it. They just got . . . angry.”
“That’s all?”
“The villagers are so frightened their daughters will turn on them that some of them, if their daughters make the tiniest misstep, they’ll send for Ragna. And the thing is, Ragna never examines a girl and says she’s not possessed. Once Ragna is sent for, the girl is doomed. That’s what happened to Asta. She slapped another girl and that girl told her mother and father, and they insisted on sending for Ragna.”
“Asta’s mother and father should have taken her away before Ragna could get her. She doesn’t belong here.”
Iris cocked her head at Milla. “And I do? And these other girls who hear the demon’s voice in their heads? Do they deserve to be here?”
Milla felt hot with shame. “No! No, that’s not what I meant.”
Iris smiled at her. “It’s not? Then what did you mean?”
&nb
sp; “I meant . . . I meant . . .” But what had Milla meant, really? She’d meant what she said. She could make an exception in her head for Iris. She knew Iris and loved her and didn’t want her to be here. But those other girls, the ones who smiled too wide and hissed . . . she could understand why their mothers and fathers were frightened of them. She was frightened of them, too. She knew she was wrong to make such a distinction. To make allowances for the known while shutting herself off to the unknown. Did Milla think she herself deserved to be here? What made her better or different? She had snakes growing from her head, and hadn’t she heard Iris’s voice in her head? Why did anyone deserve this? There was no good reason. No one did. “I’m sorry.”
Iris patted her hand, but looked away.
“Please finish telling me. Why is Ragna keeping Asta at her cottage?”
Iris turned back to her. “It’s only the girls who insist they’re not possessed who are taken there. And when they come back they don’t insist anymore. They give up. When Asta’s mother and father visited her, she told them that she didn’t belong here, that she’d just been angry with that girl she slapped. And I suppose she must have seemed quite herself to them, and maybe that got them to thinking. They must have gone to Ragna.”
“And then Ragna took Asta,” Milla said.
Iris nodded.
“What’s she doing to her?”
“Ragna has a way of getting in your head. Of making you give up. It’s like she’s a demon herself. Kari, one of the girls who came back from Ragna’s, said that after being forced to listen to Ragna for days on end, she wished she were demon-possessed. She said she would prefer it to having Ragna’s voice in her head, telling her things about herself that weren’t true. She said Ragna talks and talks until you start to wonder if you really aren’t who you think you are—if you know yourself at all. She said Ragna’s voice was worse than any demon.”
“Ragna. Hulda,” Milla said. “They’re the same, aren’t they? Putting their voices where our own should be.”
The Cold Is in Her Bones Page 12