tmp_48d41530aaad86c106555e2e52630fd9_VLf2O0.fixed.tidied

by Scott Andrews

  “It’s too late,” another woman said. “We’ve begun.”

  Zel whimpered against the palm. The shock of steel had broken her out of her calm, and now that calm seemed impossible, insane. She remembered she hated brandy. She remembered she did not want to die. The hand tightened at the sound of her voice, but the blade still did not break her skin.

  “Hush.” Her captor’s whisper stirred the fine hair above her ear.

  Surprise had made her blind; now she began to see what was in front of her. The cellar, its vaulted ceiling deep in shadow, was older than the house above. In this first room, small hollows had been chiseled in the stone of the floor and filled with oil that burned with red and fragrant flames. The women that moved within the ring of flames wore nothing but their shifts, silk and lace that freed long white limbs Zel could not help but admire. Three women among the flames, a fourth who held the knife: the old man’s ice maiden daughters.

  Northerners only hanged thieves. They saved far worse for witches. Zel could not understand why she wasn’t already dead.

  One of the sisters sang, the other two danced, blonde hair loose on their shoulders and tinted red by the flames. They danced for so long that the sister with the knife looped her arms around Zel’s shoulders to ease the strain on her muscles. She was taller than Zel, they all were. The family resemblance was strong.

  One of the dancers said, strain in her voice, “Audey, we need you now.”

  “Yes,” Zel’s captor said, “but what do I do with this one?”

  “Kill her,” the other dancer said.

  The singer, still singing, shook her head, and Audey, the woman with the knife, said, “Her blood will taint the work. We will have to deal with her after. But she will wait until then. Won’t you?” A warm murmur in Zel’s ear. “You can wait for me a little while, and then you can rest. Won’t that be nice? A soft white bed for a tired thief, and a pretty necklace for your reward.”

  The image in Zel’s mind was of the girl in the snow, the red jewel now a chain of rubies across her throat. Beautiful. Magical. She sighed against Audey’s hand.

  “Good.” Audey withdrew the knife. Zel swayed, but did not otherwise move as the witch joined her sisters.

  The song became a chant, slow and rhythmic as a sleeping heart. The dance wove together three women, then four, then one alone with steel in her hand. Zel dreamed on her feet, free of pain, comfortable with the prospect of death. The white bed, the rubied throat. Two of the sisters went away into the darkness beyond the ring of fire. When they returned, they bore a white ghost between them. A white-feathered ghost with yellow eyes that burned brighter than the flames.

  ~ ~ ~

  The owl’s perch was set so the bird faced the singer, but the great white head swiveled on its shoulders to keep Zel in the beam of those blazing eyes. She could not look away. In her befuddled mind, feathers replaced snow, amber took the rubies’ place, and then even that vision was burned away by the owl’s glare. Her sluggish heart picked up pace, outraced the numbing chant. She gulped the air, felt the pain in her hands. Audey with the knife danced up to the perch, and stopped. The chant stopped. The world stopped. Only the owl carried on through time, leaving them behind.

  All of them but Zel. That yellow stare blinded her like the desert sun, left her with nothing but the snow-owl’s sight. Audey raised her empty hand—and Zel could see the fine bones in the wrist, a tear in one nail, a smear of blood from Zel’s chapped lips on the palm. Audey raised the knife—and Zel saw the room reflected in the polished steel, blonde witches, white owl, dark Zel frozen by the stairs.

  Audey clasped the owl’s snowy breast, plunged the dagger into the owl’s throat, put out the owl’s eyes—and Zel was blind. Blind. The bright flames shrank to ghostly pearls, the witches faded into shadows, the magic drowned in the dark.

  Terror overcame even the blindness, and Zel ran. Up the stairs, through the kitchen, down the corridor, across the hall. Still blind, how did she manage the bolts of the door? A question she would ask when she had a mind again. Now there was only the night, the snow, the cold.

  The bird’s heart stolen from the storm.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gannet’s guests were still there, and Zel did not dare be caught, half-blind and shuddering with terror and cold, so she crawled in silence up the stairs. The lamp was lit in the bedroom, a dim star in her darkness, but the fire had gone out. She needed the fire, the shaking of her body tore muscles and rattled bones. She stumbled over a footstool, tangled her feet in one of Gannet’s gowns. (Gannet in her shift: This one, or this? They’re such a stuffy lot, and would Zel ever see her face again?) Tears scalded her face. She groped after the box of matches and knocked it to the floor. Matches pattered across the hearth. She lowered herself to her knees, and then just crouched there, shivering and blind.

  Voices sounded from the foyer, cheerful with the liquor Gannet and Zel could not afford. The door closed. Zel heard Gannet moving about, extinguishing candles and banking the fire, the servant’s tasks Zel usually performed. A role, a game, just as Gannet-the-lady-of-leisure was a role, a game. Gannet the huntress, Zel the thief. But what now, when they had nothing but debts, and Zel. . . . She shut her eyes, praying that when she opened them she would see again.

  Gannet came in on a waft of tobacco smoke and perfume, shut the door, humming, then squeaked with surprise. “What on earth? You scared me, lurking there. I hope it was worth it, wherever you went. You didn’t try the Bodils’, did you? The rumors I’ve heard about that family! And oh! I wish you could have heard the story Willam Torrend told tonight, I hardly knew whether to laugh or scream. These northerners, some of them are so. . . . Brr. Aren’t you cold?” A change of tone: “But what’s happened? Zel? Are you hurt?”

  And finally, finally, her warm arms were around Zel, her warm hands stroking Zel’s skin.

  ~ ~ ~

  They curled together in the bed, Gannet flinching from Zel’s chill flesh while Zel tried to tell her what had happened. Words, never easy for Zel, slipped away into the dark of the owl’s blinding.

  “I wasn’t afraid. Cold, but not afraid until. . . .” Until the rope circled the rainspout, a noose around the owl that hunched over the four-story fall. “But then I wasn’t, again, inside. The cold, the warmth hurt so much, I forgot to be afraid. But it wasn’t me. They did something. I saw. . .” . . . a dark girl sleeping in snow with a jewel in her frozen hand, a red flame that burned even now.

  “Ssh,” Gannet said, but her breath was like Audey’s in Zel’s hair. “What did you see? Was it really so terrible?” A note of excitement: “Did they kill someone?”

  “An owl. They killed the owl.” Zel wept suddenly, racked by sobs that hurt in every aching joint.

  “Oh, my dear.” Gannet kissed her bare shoulder, her burning ear. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset. Is it that they saw you? Zel?”

  Zel shook her head. She didn’t know how clearly Bodil’s daughters had seen her face, but doubted it mattered. If they wanted to find her, they would.

  “What, then? This owl. . . .” Gannet drew in a soft breath. “They killed the owl. Do you mean as a sacrifice?”

  Zel nodded against her shoulder.

  “Zel,” and now Gannet’s voice trembled on the verge of laughter, “Zel, are you telling me the Bodil daughters are witches?”

  Another nod.

  Gannet laughed. “Witches! I knew it! Yes, I should have known, they’re so arrogant and cold.” She broke off when Zel thrust herself from her side.

  “Don’t laugh. You don’t know. You don’t know. I saw their power, I felt it, I—” But she was staring at Gannet’s face and seeing nothing but a shadowed blur, and the words escaped her.

  “No,” Gannet said, “I won’t laugh. You’re right. I’m sorry. Come here, come, I won’t laugh, you’re letting in the cold.”

  Zel allowed herself to be pulled down into the warmth, and held her secret, the secret of the owl’s eyes, close as a bitter gem. It
hardly mattered. Next morning when she woke, she found that she could see.

  ~ ~ ~

  The house they had rented for the season was not even a proper house, just a few rooms scattered through the sprawl of an Old City warren. In this place where half the year was spent hiding from the cold, whole neighborhoods roofed their streets and joined their houses together. Only the wealthy could heat an entire house. Everyone else rented only as many rooms as they could afford to keep warm.

  Cold as a rich man’s bedroom, they said here. Warm as a poor woman’s heart.

  Zel didn’t like their rooms. Buried as they were in the Old City warren, half of them were caves with no windows, and the ones that did have windows looked out on nothing but more walls. But the main room, the room where Gannet did her entertaining, was gracious, a fashionable drawing room wedged improbably into the rat’s maze. They had counted themselves fortunate that such rooms were popular amongst the novelty-seeking rich this season—less fortunate as it became clear that these hard-headed trader’s sons had some instinct that kept them just out of range of the huntress’ claws.

  Except one, Gannet said. Perhaps.

  “And he’s coming for coffee this morning, so darling, please, I know you’re still tired, but it looked so odd last night having no servant, I had to hint at mysterious errands, but that won’t do for this morning, he’d start to wonder what errands I have that would keep you running about in the snow night and day, so would you please, darling? Wear that stiff coat of yours and play the maid?”

  Zel didn’t mind the coat. Charcoal-gray wool that buttoned throat to knee, it was the warmest garment she owned. She wanted nothing but to be warm again. But that was a lie, of course. She wanted to forget the embrace of witches. She wanted to forget yellow eyes watching death’s approach. She wanted Gannet to see the shadow last night had left on her soul.

  “You are tired, aren’t you? Poor love, and with nothing to show for it but a scare. But don’t worry! Our virtuous Captain Torrend will provide, I feel sure of it, if only I can get him to bend his backbone just once.” Gannet laughed, a plump, pretty blonde with velvet skin and pansy-brown eyes. “He’d make a better husband than old Bodil. I wonder what the poor man did to deserve those daughters of his? He must have been cuckolded by an ice-gnome. Oh, I know!” She clapped her hands. “I know just what to do. I’ll tell Willam about the Bodil girls’ owl murder, his uncle is the King’s Inquisitor, well really his whole family almost are the King’s Guard, he’ll be a commander before he’s thirty, and he’ll be so surprised and grateful—”

  “Don’t.”

  Gannet blinked. “What, darling? Don’t what?”

  “Don’t say that.” Zel was shaking.

  “About Captain Torrend?” Gannet studied Zel from beneath her lashes. Her cheeks were appealingly flushed. “Darling, when I said he’d make a better husband, I only meant I’d let him live a week or two before I poisoned his wine.”

  “The owl. You can’t tell him about the owl.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Because.” For a moment the witch’s hand was across Zel’s mouth again, long nails caressing her cheek. She shook it off. “Because if you told him, you’d have to tell him how you know.”

  “Well of course I. . . . My dear, those awful girls really did give you a scare, didn’t they? But of course I won’t tell.” She gave an odd, meaningless laugh. “Come help me decide what to wear.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Zel the servant sat in the entrance hall and listened. She couldn’t hear what they said, only the fluid murmur of Gannet’s voice interrupted now and then by a male chuckle, a rumble like stones in the bed of a stream. Her hands hurt in the chill of the hall. She closed them into fists, felt her heart beat hot as the pulse of coals. They had been red when she had served the coffee, clumsy with the cups. Before, Torrend had been just another quarry to her, someone to be flirted with, bamboozled, left with pockets lighter than they’d been. Now—ice-eyed captain of the Guard and nephew to witch-hunters—he terrified her. She worked her thief’s hands and listened while Gannet teased him into bending his ram-rod spine.

  ~ ~ ~

  The next morning there were bills, the sort of bills that threatened legal action if the account was not paid in full. Legal action, debtors prison, a lifetime in jail. Zel couldn’t read the northern script, but she knew from experience what they were by the way Gannet fiddled with the paper, furling and unfurling the corners while she stared into the fire.

  “I’ll go out again,” Zel said, feeling the prison walls already growing up around them.

  Gannet turned on her with a blank look, a stranger’s look, and then softened. “No, darling.” She softened further. “No, darling, not this time. For once, I am going to be the one to pull us out of trouble by the scruff of our necks. It’s too cold, and these people are too dangerous. Goodness knows what you’ll find in the next house you break into, there is probably a lot worse happening in this city than a dead bird or two. No, this time it’s for me to do.” She slid the bills aside and reached for a fresh sheet of paper and a pen.

  “Do what?” Zel tried to keep the desperation out of her voice. What could Gannet do? What had she ever done? But this time Zel was too far out of her native element, here in this cold land of bloody-handed witches, and she did not know herself what could be done. So if she asked in desperation, it was a desperation tinged with hope. “What can you do?”

  “My dear, I am writing Willam a love letter.”

  Zel said nothing. Feeling again the witch’s knife at her throat, the witch’s hand over her mouth, she could summon no voice for a reply. They were doomed.

  Gannet, bent at her writing desk, smiled over her pen.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gannet wrote it, but of course it was Zel who delivered it, not knowing what it said.

  The Torrend butler took the letter but would not let her leave. He left her under the eyes of a footman and carried the letter off into the depths of the house. The footman, broad enough to be one of the captain’s soldiers, eyed her but said nothing. There was a fire crackling under a plain granite mantelpiece. On the mantel, two lamps. Above them, an enormous fan of polished swords.

  The Bodils had an owl over their fireplace. Zel, standing in the Inquisitor’s hall, felt that she had trapped herself—no, that Gannet had trapped her—between the witches and their enemies, like a mouse caught between the owl and the fox. Feeling the footman’s stare, she reminded herself that she was a servant, only a servant, of interest to no one. It didn’t help. Freedom and safety were calling her from the cold on the other side of the door.

  “I don’t think,” she said to the footman, “that my mistress was expecting an answer.”

  The footman made a scornful sound. “It’s not what your mistress expects, it’s what the captain wants.”

  “You don’t know he—”

  “You don’t know he doesn’t.” The scorn was now tinged with curiosity. “Don’t they train servants where you’re from?”

  Where Zel was from, servants were slaves, born, not trained. She said nothing, though her heart was beating in her throat. The butler returned with a magisterial tread.

  Captain Torrend was a tall man, as most of these northerners were. He had closely trimmed brown hair, a mustache, gray ice-chip eyes. Gannet called him handsome, but in Zel’s eyes he was too big, too raw, too cold. He stood by a window with Gannet’s letter in his hand, the white light harsh on the planes of his face. He didn’t seem to notice them enter the room.

  “The girl, sir,” the butler said.

  “All right, Gherd.”

  The butler bowed and faded away. Torrend’s pale gaze found her face.

  “What is your name?”

  “Zel, sir.”

  “That’s not a Pelwarsh name, is it?”

  Pelwar was where Gannet was claiming to be from. “No, sir.”

  “Southern, I suppose. I think I remember your mistress saying something to that effect.”
He studied her, the letter restless in his hand. “Have you been with her long?”

  “For some time, sir.”

  “Did she find you in the south?”

  “No, sir.” The truth felt strange in her mouth. In this context it sounded like lies.

  “But you’ve traveled quite a distance with her. She said she is fond of travel. That must make a lot of work for you.”

  Zel didn’t answer the implied question. She didn’t want to answer any questions. When did the son of such a house ever take an interest in a maid’s work? Her heartbeat even faster. What did he really want to know? What had Gannet told him?

  He persisted. “Has she never had any other servants?”

  “Not since I’ve been with her, sir.”

  “Yet she strikes me as a woman who is accustomed to a larger establishment. A woman with a gracious past.” His eyes drifted to the letter in his hand, and she realized their color had deceived her: not cold, only pale. Caught in a slant of snow-light, they became transparent, undefended. The letter was, as Gannet had said, a love letter, and he was in love.