I almost gagged on the trace of my dead mother’s perfume. “What is that doing here?” I asked.
The woman turned. In one hand, she held a bottle. “Remarkable. Did the scent wake you, Miss Riven?”
“Yes, it did,” I said.
“Secret,” Father said.
“I’ll leave you to talk while you can,” the woman said as she placed the lamp on the table near our heads. The door clicked open, then shut.
Father had a full gray beard, neatly clipped, and a tasseled cap. A handkerchief draped from his neck. When he rolled to his side, the perfume drifted toward me again.
“I was in a good dream,” I said.
“So was I, until it twisted, and I came out desperate to be reminded she had lived,” Father said.
“The caregivers indulge such things? How did she ever find that scent?” I asked.
“I brought it with me, among my things,” he said. “How strange this is, this sleep. Even now, I almost wonder if our conversation is a dream, as so many seem quite real.”
I put my hand over my nose and mouth as a memory of my mother surfaced—a new string of jewels at her neck, the violet gown with the jet buttons, how beautiful in that moment she was.38
“This is real, Father,” I said.
“Then we’ll talk now. I wake more than the rest of you. Harmyn often sits with me. She’s losing that childlike softness to her face. Have you noticed? Her jaw in particular—”
“Yes, I have. Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked.
He pushed the handkerchief into his nightshirt. “She reads your translation of Aoife’s manuscript to me. Last we stopped, Wei saw how her father received his grisly wound, and a Voice came to train her. Sisay, the ancient Voice, who gave a prophecy.”
“Of the children to come, and a great hush,” I said.
“Yes. There is something I want to tell you and something I want to know.”
“What is that?” I asked, dread thick in my veins.
“I’ve told you your mother had a sort of foresight,” Father said. “Sometimes, what she dreamed came to pass, small things, the look of a room or a street corner before we would see it, or a bit of news. And sometimes, the dreams were significant. She foresaw my mother’s death though we lived in two different places, and my title—Geo-Archeo Historian—before Fewmany ever offered a position to me. She had recurring ones, too, and one in particular was so outlandish, it had to be her imagination.”
I held my palm against my face to block the wafting perfume. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Before you were born, each time she was with child, she had a certain dream. In this dream, she was pregnant and she couldn’t hear a single sound, as if the land and every living thing had become mute. She saw the vision of a hand, three times, the same hand, as it poured a liquid from a vial. She watched it spill and she knew the poison—she called it a poison—had caused the silence. She believed the child she carried would commit this deed and destroy the world as it was known.”
Hidden, my mouth gaped open.
“I gave this little thought, of course,” Father said. “Most dreams are nothing but a performance of the mind. When you were born, and the three birds came, I knew you were a special child. A good, gentle girl. I told your mother, our babe received a visit of welcome. All is well. She never spoke of the dream again, and it was all forgotten, until.”
He leaned at the bed’s edge. “There are things you’ve told me since you returned from your journey. Things which made me pause, contemplate, question. How could it be, though? The very idea. Yet we sickened, didn’t we, left mute, deaf, motionless.”
Father reached his hand from under his quilts, holding out for me. Someone in another bed stirred. “I cannot help but think of her dream and wonder if she had, in fact, foreseen but was mistaken about what she saw.”
“GrandBren,” Harmyn said, climbing on his bed.
“You’ve refused to tell me, Harmyn, and I must know,” Father said.
“Please. No. Not yet,” she said, shaking him.
“What have you done, Secret? Tell me, at last,” Father asked.
“I poured three vials. I released the plague.”
I watched the light bleed from his face as my mother’s voice ruptured through my memory. “This spill is but an accident, yes, little scourge.” I had tipped over a cup of water. “Mind what is spilled, girl, and watch it doesn’t spread.” Then, it was a cellar of salt, and Mother’s fault, as if she’d done so on purpose. “You will be the ruin of me, won’t you, girl? You will not make a mess here.” In a perfume shop, the bottle fell but didn’t break, and nothing I could do could set things right.
from darkness I exhume into dimness
a crow calls glass cracks
a soft weight crushes my fevered face
flutter scuffle howl screech hum
my clawing nails strike skin, hair, feathers
my nose and left cheek throb
against the smothering force I rise
a crow with a bloody chest dives toward a black head
the feral stink of animals and fear burns in each breath
she swings the pillow screams with pain
she runs from the beasts at her back
flesh lungs throat aflame I fall
into darkness
into unknowing
Mother meant to kill me
OUTSIDE OF FORM, OUTSIDE OF time, I thinned to ether. Feeling and thought faded the farther I drifted into a spiraling vortex, alone, alone.
Until I wasn’t.
“Secret, can you hear me?”
I thickened, unable to flow forward.
“Secret, there are things the shadows hid from you. Things I hope you’re willing to see,” Harmyn said.
The vortex twisted in the distance as another force pulled me into a dense black tangle of memory. A strand broke free. A reflection in a shop window, Mother and me, her little shadow and dark mirror at once. I heard myself say, “She saw herself in me, and this she couldn’t bear.”
“Do you believe that’s why she tried to kill you?”
“Not for hatred alone. She wanted to stop me. She believed her dream about a child spilling poison, but what future did she see? Was it a way it could have been, the world destroyed, or was it what has happened now and she didn’t understand the vision?” I asked.
“What if it was both, or either, and still something else?” Harmyn asked.
Behind and between shadows, I slipped, among the instances she shunned our strangeness, struggled to mask how horribly she suffered. Within her many lies was a desperate, twisted truth. “She meant to protect me, didn’t she? To spare me of my fate,” I said, “as she wanted to be spared of hers.”
The darkness faded to a gray haze.
“If not for the animals who came to help that day, I would have died,” I said.
“If not for your strength. They came to your aid. You rose with the force of will,” Harmyn said.
“Why didn’t she try again? Why leave the cipher and manuscript if she believed I would bring ruin?”
“Think. What was different after the fever broke?”
“My hair turned silver. I could speak the Guardians’ language. The fever changed me, and she knew it.”
“How was she different?” Harmyn asked.
From a distance, shimmering through, an ethereal voice broke the silence, singing in tones. “She had never sung before, but she did then, alone, at night, so beautiful, so pure. As if something lost had been returned to her. Then as suddenly as she started, she stopped. That is when she made the cipher. That is when she abandoned her role in what was to come, leaving it to me. And then she was gone. And then she left me. And then my mother was dead.”
With a jolt, I found myself once again flesh, bone, and blood, on my knees in a forest near a tiny sapling. One pale leaf unfurled. At the surprise, I held a gasped breath. I didn’t want the terror of the release, but my body violated my
will. I inhaled until my ribs strained and screamed through the hole in my chest.
Rage, bile black, bloodthick, flooded into the gap.
Harmyn touched my shoulder. I crawled away, spewing howls.
“This happened after I drank the vial,” Harmyn said. “I wanted to die, too. Scream, Secret. Rage for what you lost and you want back.”
As I shrieked, the pressure in my skull threatened to burst every vessel, the promise of a lasting final peace.
The web of my right thumb began to tingle. A streak of light flashed from the aperture in my hand. All at once, I was three, seven, fourteen again. I reached up to hold my mother’s bee-stung face. I took her hand after she spoke of her lost brother, and mine. I stood in awe as I heard her sing for the first time, wishing I could touch the sound.
As the moments held in a constellation of time, I felt what I couldn’t name before. I had felt compassion for her, and deeper still, at the core, love unconditional.
More fragments joined the shifting pattern. I glanced up at my mother as she played a memory game with me, handed me a tattered book, watched me tend flowers in the courtyard, laughed as I jauntily flipped a hood over my head. So fleeting, what I felt from her, a curious affection, as if . . . as if the whole of her didn’t despise me.
The love I wanted to give, she could not receive. If she had ever wanted to return it, she could not. Her damage was too deep, her scars too thick, to ever love me. She was too broken to make that choice.
Bright dots appeared across my body, expanding until they overlapped, glowing brighter at the points of connection. Within me, memories ruptured in new dimension. I was not only myself but many, filled with pieces of other lives, those people my blood had been, those my essence once were. I slipped past shadows, beyond limits, beyond judgment, to realize nothing was as simple as it might appear or I wished it to be.
As the openings sealed shut, I looked around at the forest where all was living and all was dying. Beautiful and poisonous, a pale yellow mushroom cracked through the dark soil. With a pinch, I plucked it, watched it turn to gold, and ate it. Light streamed from my fingers and toes as I became again the little girl with black hair, tawny skin, and eyes the colors of night and day; part of the wildness, beauty, and wonder; the duality and paradox; nothing other than myself as Nature meant me to be. A child among the Mystery and too young to find the word to describe what I felt in my own stillness.
Whole.
Harmyn wiped the joyful tears from my cheeks. “This is what the pestilence has hidden in everyone, from themselves and each other. When the plague ends, everyone will struggle to remember how to see this, but no one will forget what was revealed. I told you, Secret, we are all born made of gold.”
20 MARCH /39
ON THE MORNING OF THE first day of spring, I heard the coo and chirp of a pigeon, a dove, and a sparrow. The three birds stood on a windowsill, their chests broad and wings tucked back as if standing in ceremony.
I moved to sit up. Most of the beds were occupied. Harmyn wasn’t in hers, and Father was asleep in his. Quietly I called to him. He yawned, blinked, and smiled when he looked at me.
I walked to the window. The sleeves and hem of my gown were too short.
We’ve come with a message, the pigeon said.
The plants are sick in the nearest towns north, the dove said.
Our kind will report how far it’s spread when it’s known, the sparrow said.
I thanked them and stroked their heads. The caregivers and plague survivors watched them fly in a circle, widdershins.
Moments later, the castle filled with chimes and laughter. Two girls burst into our room with a box of little bells, giving one to each person.
“Everyone up! Harmyn is going to sing in an hour!” one said.
At the open door, Nikolas dodged aside as the girls rushed out. He met my eyes, hurried into the room, and swaddled me in his arms. I held him so tight, he strained to breathe. “My Secret,” he whispered. “My love,” I said. When Father approached, Nikolas reached out one hand to shake his but didn’t release me.
“I have an address to make. You’ll join me, won’t you?” Nikolas said.
“Once we’re properly attired,” Father said, pulling at his nightshirt’s cuff. He pointed to my cheek. “The bruise is gone.”
I touched my face. The full knowledge of what had caused it surfaced under my skin.
“Nikolas, I’ve had a visit from messengers. The plague has spread to the plants north of Rothwyke. I’ll tell you as soon as I know the extent,” I said.
He pressed his chin against my temple. “Right now, we can celebrate. We must.”
Within the half hour, Father and I walked to the castle’s outer wall and climbed up to stand with Harmyn. As she approached us with her arms out, I detected a weary look in her eyes. She hugged Father briefly, then clung to me.
“Why did you come and search for me?” I whispered.
“You stopped dreaming through the shadows. The worst wound took you, and you got so lost. I was almost too late,” she said.
I patted her shoulders, noticing they were broader and she was taller. When I looked up beyond the castle’s wall, my hands froze. Fewmany Incorporated was gone. A stretch of blue sky filled where it once stood.
Harmyn slipped aside. “In February, the ground tremored and groaned. You roused from the sleep and warned us of what was coming. It collapsed two weeks later.”
“No one was hurt,” Father said, “but the surrounding five blocks, the building, and everything inside—furniture, documents—gone. A crater swallowed it all, and the hole filled with water. You’d be amazed at the archeological treasures which were forced up.”
I shut my eyes when I realized the land itself had taken its claim from the town’s shadow of The Mapmaker’s War. “Now what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It seems not much is as it was before the plague,” Father said, drawing Harmyn close to his side.
A moment later, Nikolas, along with several advisers and town officials, stepped up. Harmyn greeted them, then walked to the wall’s edge ringing her bell. When the chime faded, she sang a song of mourning for those who had not survived, one of gratitude for those who had given their care, and one of joy for us all.
When she finished and the crowd quieted their cheers, Nikolas took a sheet of paper from his pocket and gave a concise address.
“Many of you are filled with happiness today, as well as grief, with hope and fear. We wish the uncertain times ahead were not so, but we will persevere. In this, I have full faith because of what I witnessed these long months. I am immensely proud of each one of you. Each one who braved this plague, who gave aid to the sick and companionship to the rest, who kept our children safe and warm, in body and spirit. To those who served as our guardians, thank you. To Lord Sullyard, my advisers, Mayor Pearson, interim mayor Mr. Moore, and those who served Rothwyke and Ailliath, thank you. Last but not least, please join me to thank Harmyn, who in our silence was our Voice and whose gift of song soothed and guided us to this day.”
As applause and bells rang out, Harmyn looked out at the crowd. Nikolas reached into a pocket and opened a small hinged box. He motioned for her to come near. He placed a gold medal on a purple ribbon around her neck. She reached to hold the medal in one hand, her amulet in the other. Nikolas stared at her until she met his eyes. “Thank you, Harmyn,” he whispered as he bowed.
She stepped forward to hug him. He held her head against him until she moved away.
“Thank you. Everyone,” Harmyn said with tears in her eyes. “To the reign of love,” she shouted.
The children were the ones to answer her call, “To the reign of love.”
Nikolas waved to the crowd, shook hands with Lord Sullyard and the other men, and turned to Harmyn, Father, and me.
“Breakfast, anyone?” he said. I accepted the offer of his arm as we descended the stairs.
That first day at the castle, as it was throughout Rothwy
ke, no one was expected to return immediately to their homes, assuming they could. We napped, we took short walks, and we visited with our caregivers and those who shared our rooms. We read letters sent to us as we slept, and we waited to hear word of what happened to people we knew.
I spent the morning in the kitchen garden with a cat on my lap, content in the sun among the growing vegetables, budding roses, and blooming tulips and daffodils. That afternoon, Father and I sat together with the past and future between us but the practical present at hand.
“For what I’ve done which hurt you, if it has ever made you question my love, I am sorry. Please, return home with me, and Harmyn. There’s plenty of room, and we’ll not want for the necessities. We need time to see what’s ahead,” he said.
I had no idea where I would go next. To stay at the castle now seemed undue. I didn’t have the means to have my own apartment again, but I could return to Old Woman’s cottage. As I pondered Father’s offer, I waited for a feeling of contraction, but it didn’t come, even though I knew I would go back to a place where dark memories remained.
“Your apology is accepted. I know you love me, as I love you. I will go home,” I said. Father cradled me like a child, to which I gave no struggle.
That evening after dinner, one served to everyone in the Great Hall, Nikolas asked me to join him for a ride in the woods. Once Father and Harmyn went off to amuse each other, I waited for him at the stables. In the fading light, a host of sparrows descended to the roof’s edge. One lit on my finger.
The plants are sick north of the river, moving east to the mountains, she said without saying.
Not south? I asked.
For now, the river marks the border, she said.
Nikolas approached as the birds took flight again.
“How far now?” he asked, and I told him. “Do you think it will spread beyond Ailliath?”
“I do. We’ll know more soon enough.”
We mounted our horses, crossed through town slowly as he waved and stopped to talk to people in the streets, then raced across the green. We rode far into the woods, into the night. When we stopped to stretch and let the horses rest, Nikolas caught me from behind and turned me around for a kiss. I let my cloak drop and yanked the coat off his shoulders. We tore away at buttons and hooks until we fell on the cool ground.
The Plague Diaries Page 45