The Plague Diaries

by Ronlyn Domingue

  “I don’t need to know, Miss. This dance I’ve watched before, even when I didn’t see his partner. You would do well to take your leave and never return.” His brown eyes carried a look of warning.

  “I will not. Cannot.”

  “You need make no decision at the moment, but do take some time to think. Good day,” he said, bowing slightly.

  I shut the door, laid the package on the table, and stared at my desk. I remembered the dream I’d had the night before—but no, it had not been. Mrs. Woodman baked on her off day. After the terrible dream, I’d slept through an entire day and the next night.

  An anxious thrum rose in my blood. I read the note folded under the package’s ribbon.

  Worth the wait, my keeper of tales.

  fm

  Wrapped in the paper was a book. The first and last pages didn’t bear his mark. It seemed immaculate, a quarto still uncut, thin paper protecting the brilliantly colored illustrations—a frog wearing a crown, a girl with impossibly long hair, a fox chasing a hen . . .

  I’d seen the book before.

  Not in the library, but in my father’s house. It was the same book Fewmany brought the night he questioned me about the symbol, the pages laid open on the table near the bowl and scissors. At first, I laughed as if this were an old joke between us—oh, he kept that old thing all these years, what a misunderstanding that was—but there was a hitch. The laugh verged on a cry.

  Even at the age of eleven, I knew the book had been meant as a bribe, withheld because I did not, and could not, tell him what he wanted to hear. Now it was a reward. Then, if I had told him the location of a symbol, my guidance would have been a simple answer to a simple question. Now I wasn’t unwitting. I knew what he wanted and why, and he believed I could do what he couldn’t, as a girl wandering the woods, at the mercy of crones, alone and motherless.

  My eyes shut.

  Mother.

  What had she known as she stood silent the night they questioned me? What did she know as she created the cipher, before she died?

  When I looked down, two wispy antennae emerged from the top of the book’s spine. The silverfish crept across the table. As it crawled over the edge, I watched dozens of them stream from my wardrobe to the floor. They skittered as I approached, disappearing into cracks along the walls.

  There was no escape for me.

  A yielding calm quieted my pulse as I opened the wardrobe to get the cipher and arcane manuscript. Logic wouldn’t bridge what had just occurred any more than it would explain what was to come in the hours, weeks, and months ahead.

  I pushed everything away on my desk and stared at the cipher. On a sheet of paper, in three columns, I named each drawing—flower, boat, etc. Then I listed the letters from the large circle and copied the strange alphabet revealed behind the small one. I realized each drawing was meant to correspond to a letter in my language.

  What was the connection?

  I remembered the one-sentence clue my mother left behind: “A map is to space as an alphabet is to sound.” I recited this again and again, attentive not to the meanings of the words but the sounds of them. I held the image of a map in my mind—and what came forth was the word, the sound of it—in the ancient language I spoke when I roused from the fever.

  There was something familiar to this connection between image and word. I pondered how I communicated with creatures and plants. What came first was an image, connected to thoughts and feelings, and then a translation into language.

  I studied the drawings and named the wholes and parts aloud in the ancient language. Flower. Petal. Stem. Leaf. Pistil. Stamen. I tested combinations of letters and sounds with the first sentence of the manuscript. I aligned a letter in my native alphabet to a drawing. A sound within the foreign word matched the letter. BOAT matched with B, LEAF with E, JUG with G. The window in the smaller circle revealed symbols in the ancient language.

  I understood how the cipher worked. The sound of a letter in my alphabet mirrored the sound from the other.

  Suddenly, the manuscript’s first line came clear: THIS WILL BE THE MAP OF YOUR HEART, OLD WOMAN.

  I skimmed the first page, the mention of learning shapes—circle, triangle, square—a question posed, AOIFE, WHO TAUGHT YOU TO DRAW A MAP? That name—Ee-fah—pealed through my veins. Further, I read . . . Aoife hid and played in the woods. She had no interest in what entertained most girls. She drew the hidden realms of bees and ants.

  SEE, YOU BECAME A MAPMAKER.

  She was an apprentice. Her elderly adept, Heydar, gave her a waywiser. Prince Wyl built a tower to ease her work. She traveled through the kingdom, charting. At the bank of a river, men emerged from the forest.

  YOU STUDIED THE FIVE MEN IN YOUR DESCENT. BLUE COATS, WHITE BELTS, FLAXEN LEGGINGS, TANNED SHOES.

  My body shook with the force of a seizure. A noise made me look up. There on my windowsill sat a crow with a narrow bald stripe across his chest. I’d seen the scarred bird before, years ago, as I spoke to that strange little peeping child, Harmyn . . .18

  A crack split me from groin to crown. All the ruptures and dreams I wanted to forget streamed into the gap.

  I remember stumbling down the stairs, then falling on the building’s doorstep. Passersby stared. “Soused—this time of day!” someone said.

  Above, hawks and crows circled; between, pigeons and doves cooed; and below, a mouse and a cat scampered at my feet. A dog put his head in my lap.

  Follow me, he said without saying.

  My right foot dragged behind my left. People glanced as if I were afflicted and gave me space to clear them. I recognized a shop here and there, then could make no sense of the sights. I was lost.

  The dog led me through wards. Buildings in disrepair, drains spilling into the streets, alleys full of refuse. A newsbox report—mining village in Seronia—dragon menace—laid waste—charred bodies. Tell-a-Bells chimed and the people’s tolls rang out in response. I tripped on a buckled sidewalk and saw a figure crouched in a doorway dressed in worn clothes. The child looked up, with a cracked yellow spectacle lens. Suddenly, I called out a name, a question, a memory.

  “Harmyn?”

  A cluster of garrulous women walked by, and after their languid passing, the area was vacant. I looked left and right but saw only people and horses.

  More voices, then, some clear, some not. “You lost, girl?” “She looks good enough to eat, and I’m hungry.” Animals around me, my guards, my guides.

  At the town’s edge, the dog prodded me forward. In the distance, ahead of the trees, was the stone wall, nowhere near complete.

  At the woods’ margin, through the young leaves, a stag emerged, the scars on his shoulder raised. The dog nuzzled me, then ran. The stag led me through the trees to a huge rounded rock, a marker for this particular place and a guide that pointed to another, which I sensed I’d seen before.

  Feel for the groove. Trace its line off the rock, past the trees, and into the glade, the stag said.

  I approached a cottage with blue shutters. I called out but there was no answer. Inside, the hearth had warm ash, but no fire, no embers. I sat in the shadows next to a cauldron, the impression of the symbol under my fingers.

  I felt abandoned, then furious.

  I ran. The woods tore at me as I plunged deeper than I’d ever been. I ran from what stalked, then chased me, even as I slept, ever since I was a child.

  Exhausted, I sat on a dead log. I stared at my hands, which felt gloved by another skin.

  “So, you’ve returned,” he said.

  I looked toward the voice and saw a solid shadow. Part of me filled with the instinct to flee, the other with the peace of surrender.

  “You cannot be alone now. Whom do you wish to help you?” he asked.

  I searched myself for a name. So many names, near and far, past and present. Faces shifted like mist in my mind’s eye.

  “Nikolas,” I said.

  The owl above my head screeched. Old Man carried me to a giant hol
lowing tree. He nested me within, the space softened with his large cloak. The warm wild smell was a comfort, as well as the familiar touch of whiskers and small paws. Cyril’s.

  I stirred at the sound of hoofbeats and footsteps. I heard the voices of two men, which first panicked, then soothed me. One gave instructions to the other one.

  When my body was moved, I was too weak to fight or assist. “Secret,” a man said. “I’m here.” Then consciousness spiraled away.

  I AWOKE THRASHING IN A strange bed.

  Hands pressed into my arm. “Do you understand me?” Elinor asked, her eyes heavy with concern.

  “Of course I understand you.” I glanced around. “This is the spare room. Why am I here?”

  “You’ve been ill, talking nonsense, breaking into rigors every few hours.”

  Oh no, I thought as fragments came back to me. She put a cup of water in my hands and went out to find my father.

  He had the same worried look on his face as he did when I awoke from the fever almost five years before. I had no doubt there was a link between the two.

  “That was the worst case of acute dyspepsia I’ve ever seen,” Father said lightly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Prince Nikolas brought you here after your dinner. You were quite sick, but it was later evident the vomiting and sweating weren’t because of a bad meal.”

  “What’s the date?”

  “The third.”

  I sighed. I’d lost several days and missed the ball.

  “I took the liberty to inform Fewmany. He said you are on holiday through next week but not to rush your recovery.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He mentioned your understanding.” Father smiled, but it was restrained. “We’ll talk of it later. For now, I expect you to stay here until you’re well. Elinor and I have worked out an arrangement. Oh, and the prince should be here to see about you this evening, as he has these nights past.” He seemed to resist the temptation to say more.

  I nodded. I was exhausted, in no position to argue, although I wanted to be in my own home alone to make sense of things. After a bath, I lay in bed thinking, as Elinor checked on me throughout the day. She served Father and me dinner in the room. Soon after we’d eaten, Nikolas arrived.

  As he walked up the stairs, I heard him refuse Elinor’s offer of tea. He knocked on the half-open door before he entered, then sat in the chair nearby without a word. The look in his eyes was wounded and worried.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “For what?” he asked in a clipped tone.

  “For being so cold since your return and forgetting I have no truer friend than you.”

  “That sounded sincere.”

  “It was.”

  He sighed.

  “I remember nothing after I was inside the tree. How did you find me? What happened?” I asked.

  “An owl came into my room and dropped strands of silver-tipped black hair on my bed. It flew at my door, and there was no question you were in trouble. I had my horse saddled and left without a guard—you know what a breach that is—and the owl led me to the woods. Old Man said you called for me. There you were in that tree, with Cyril, barely conscious. Old Man told me nothing and left me alone as you became sicker. I didn’t know what else to do but take you home to your father. I managed to get you on the horse even though you fought me as if you feared for your life and I couldn’t understand a word you said.

  “So, I told your father we met for a late dinner which hadn’t agreed with you. I think he thought you were drunk, because he brought in a bucket and a glass of willow powder. He tried to look stern, but I believe I saw him hide a grin,” Nikolas said.

  “At last his good girl had a lapse,” I said, thinking Father might not be so amused if he knew what limits of propriety I’d violated since I left his house.

  “After you finally fell asleep, I returned home. I stayed awake through the night wondering what happened but certain you hadn’t gone mad. The owl, Old Man. No, something uncanny was afoot.”

  The time is coming to bring the pieces together, I remembered from the dream months before.

  “Just now, when my carriage stopped at your door, a fox bolted into the alley. A murder of crows sits on your rooftop, and beetles are crawling over the front steps. They’re here for you, aren’t they? Do you know why?”

  I looked into his eyes. I stifled a cry of recognition. He was still the blond boy with the gold cup I met long ago, the same boy I led into the woods who believed me when I said I could speak to creatures and plants, whom I trusted and adored above all others.

  “I don’t know why. Not yet. I don’t want to speak too loudly. Come closer,” I said. He pulled the chair next to the bed. “What I’m going to tell you is what I know now, which is a part of a much greater story.”

  “Very well, then,” he said.

  I tried my best to think clearly, to connect one thing to the next.

  “Do you remember when I told you about the cipher my mother made and the arcane manuscript she didn’t translate, the one that went missing?”

  He nodded.

  “I found the manuscript at last”—I didn’t tell him the details then; this was complicated enough—“and several days ago, I broke the cipher and read the first pages.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And do you remember when I was horribly sick with that fever and my hair began to turn silver? I’d just turned fourteen.”

  He rubbed the scar on his right hand, as he had that day he came to see I wasn’t dead, that same wound healing, scabbed. “I do.”

  “I told you then I had strange dreams, but I didn’t describe them. There were three I still remember clearly. One was of a ritual dance at a fire, with a child dressed in white and someone dressed as a red dragon. In another, I was shackled and a man tried to rape me and somehow I escaped. And the last—I dreamed of a spiral stair and a cave filled with treasure.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “What I didn’t tell you was I awakened able to speak a language I didn’t know. For days, I could think, but not speak, in our native one. Of course my mother knew the strange tongue, but she didn’t explain why I suddenly spoke it,” I said.

  “When I couldn’t understand what you were saying when I found you—”

  “Almost certainly I was speaking it.” I took a deep breath. “But before all that—before I found the cipher or had the fever—when we were eleven, I drew a symbol for you I’d seen in a dream. You didn’t recognize it, but something rippled between us, some perception for which we had no words,” I said.

  “It was made of shapes—a triangle, square, and circle, with an opening in the middle,” he said.

  I nodded. “I’ve had other dreams before that and since, all vivid and potent. And I’ve had what I call ruptures, which happen when I’m awake. The ruptures are physically painful, aching and tearing through my body, and images always come with them. Those and the dreams—there’s no other way to describe them other than . . . memories that aren’t mine.”

  There, I said it. I named what I couldn’t before.

  Nikolas remained quiet.

  “I don’t know what the manuscript is yet—a history or a biography—and it’s written in the language from the fever. Strangely, the person who wrote it used the pronoun ‘you’ throughout, not ‘I’ or ‘she,’ as if she were addressing herself. The subject appears to be a woman named Aoife, who was a mapmaker, and a friend of Wyl.”

  He nudged back in his chair. “Wyl?”

  “One of Ailliath’s early kings. There’s mention in those first pages of a prince named Raef,” I said.

  “Ancient history, then. Raef was Wyl’s younger brother.19 Who is this Aoife?”

  “I don’t know other than what I’ve read thus far. She was from a noble family. Her father and Wyl helped her to become a mapmaker’s apprentice.”

  “I’ve never heard or read her name. She would have been alive around the time of
the war,” Nikolas said.

  “The Mapmaker’s War,” I said.

  We both shivered and rubbed our arms.

  “What I said about the memories that aren’t mine . . .” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “When I’ve had those moments, it’s as if my very being is filled with thoughts and feelings and sights and sounds I can’t attribute to my own experiences or imagination. The moments are—visceral—as if something has been unleashed from deep within.

  “I’m not insane, and I’m not lying, Nikolas. I’ve remembered three moments that appear in the manuscript. A few months ago, I had a rupture when I handled a waywiser—that’s a mapmaking instrument—remembering an old man’s hand. The day of Charming’s wedding, when we went to the tower, I had a rupture then, too, there was a man with green eyes—the manuscript describes Wyl as having green eyes. And then after the summer grand ball many years ago, I had a dream of men in blue coats, and Aoife describes them on the last page I read.”

  “Those were your first words to me. ‘I dream of blue men,’ ” Nikolas said.

  I shut my eyes to sudden tears. Yes. He remembered. The bed shifted. When I looked up, he was leaning against the mattress.

  “What about the symbol?” he asked.

  “It’s real. There’s one in Old Woman’s cottage at the hearth. I expect to read of it in the manuscript. At this point, I don’t think the mention of Aoife learning shapes—circle, triangle, square—is mere coincidence.”

  “So, the confusion when I found you?”

  “Too much converged at once. I was lost in whatever returned,” I said. “It’s more complicated, still.”

  “Well?”

  At that moment, I decided not to mention what Fewmany had asked of me. There was too much to explain, too much I hadn’t sorted out for myself.

  However, Nikolas needed to know what Old Woman told me the last time I saw her.

  “Not long after you left for the goodwill visits, I saw Old Woman. She revealed things to me I didn’t want to know. She said she’s from a people called the Guardians and that she’s an elder who volunteered to live alone in the woods. These elders are supposed to help those who need safety,” I paused, thinking of Fewmany and the woman who’d given him refuge, “but they’re also meant to watch for children who were foretold in their legends. She said we—you and I—are among them. We’re here to ‘shift a balance,’ but she didn’t say how or for what reason. She even mentioned the arcane manuscript. She knew it was important and that my mother was meant to translate it.”