House of Sand and Secrets

by Cat Hellisen

  “So where are yours hidden then?”

  “Felicita. In your head, you don’t have to do anything as prosaic as set your secrets on paper and stuff them in a locked drawer. It’s your mind. You can do whatever you want.” He stands, folds his hands behind his back. “The birds.”

  I look again, just as a flock of bumble-bee sized finches hums past me to land on Jannik’s shirt. The whir and whisper at him in their high bee voices. “Every bird is a secret – a thought?”

  He nods.

  And now it makes sense, the sombre hulking pied-crows, the owls secretive in the whorls of the ceiling; the black gatherings of ravens – the dark thoughts, the happy ones, the scared and lonely, the night-time-never-spoken-aloud thoughts. I laugh. “So, show me something.”

  “What do you want to see?”

  I don’t know, and here, in this place where I am a guest, I don’t want to ask. “Whatever you want me to know.”

  One of the little finches leaves Jannik’s collar and flies over to settle on my shoulder. It hop-walks along my shift, pin-sharp nails poking through the thin material. Its tiny heart is vibrating against my body – a thrumming that matches my own – and then the room is gone. The bird, Jannik, the heat. All obliterated.

  I am standing in misty drizzle, breathing in salt-tinged air, looking at myself. A younger self, with my hair bound up and my dress damp despite the whalebone and oiled-silk umbrella I’m holding. The memory-me frowns, her face tight and wan as she pulls away from the crowd around her. The umbrella shivers, sending spray dancing in spirals as she folds it closed. And then she smiles, leans back against the wall of one of Pelimburg’s old buildings and she lifts her face to the clouds, and she doesn’t look like a spoiled House daughter but a girl in love with the rain.

  The image of me greys, fades, and I am back in a golden room filled with heat and feathers.

  Jannik is watching me, waiting. His hands are behind his back as if he doesn’t want me to see them. “So?” he says, but his voice is too controlled, too light.

  “Memories.”

  “I know what they are, Fil.” He smiles awkwardly. It is the first time he has called me anything but Felicita, or the fake name I used when I ran away from home. Something so small and intimate, and it destroys my desperation to not rely on anyone but myself, as if doing that would make me as pathetic as my brother thought I was.

  My fear of weakness falls away from me. It is a strange and innocent truth, that although I can do things alone – we all can – together we are stronger. “You’ll help me?” I ask him softly.

  “Of course.”

  The little finch flies away from me to join the flock and I reach up just as it opens its wings, catch it as easily as a dandelion seed. The tiny creature goes still in my cupped hand and I think it into a new form. When I open my palm, the finch is blue, a strange dusky colour like the sea in the rain. I let it go and it flies back to its yellow-barred flock.

  “And that?” Jannik says.

  I shrug, and almost smile. “A thank you, of sorts.”

  “Of sorts?”

  We say the things we can’t say with memories.

  * * *

  Carien is still here when we come back downstairs. Whatever was said in our absence, it has left her white-faced, her eyes glassy. She keeps twisting the woven silver at her throat, tangling her fingers in the fine chains.

  I stand stiffly before her. Her fingers press against her neck as she goes still. My courage returns, and with it my knowledge that I must confront my own capacity for cruelty. “I apologize.” The words hang cold and stark in the room. “It was a vile action – an unworthy one. You did not deserve my anger.”

  The room is silent with expectation and the vampires are watching her with a slit-eyed patience, like hunting animals.

  She breathes in deeply through her nose then nods once, a curt little acceptance.

  “It seems,” says Guyin slowly, almost as if he cannot believe it himself, “that the Lady Eline had no knowledge of her husband’s actions.”

  She swallows and drops her fingers. “Please, just Carien.” Her eyes close slowly and deliberately. When she opens them again the amber is muted, a forest brown full of shadows. She’s in hiding. “The Lord Guyin – Harun–” She smiles thinly. “–told me that you have in your possession a bat that belonged to my husband. I would like to see it.”

  * * *

  Merril is barely fit to walk. Just watching him stumble forward, wincing with every step taken, makes the guilt in me fester. He hurt Jannik, that is true, but all I can see is a child destroyed by a man who truly believed him nothing more than an animal. He’s a wild thing – a feral dog, starved and kicked. He took his chance when he saw it. It could have been anyone of us he attacked. Jannik was simply the closest. I check my thoughts. Is House Eline’s prejudice tainting even me? He’s not a dog. But something will have to be done and for now, I have no idea. We can’t keep him caged up forever. “Merril?”

  He looks up at my voice, lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. He lunges back as I reach out one hand to him.

  “Felicita, what are you doing?” Jannik holds Merril still, keeping his grip tight on the boy’s bound arms.

  Merril’s cheek is rough, slightly pocked and badly shaved. The hollows of his eyes are purple-black, the skin stretched too-tight over his bones. His broken nose is swollen and the bridge is skew, the bruise bloody. There are scrapes on his mouth where the flesh is raw. My fingers run lightly down his cheek, and I think of the child he must have been, bought and sold. This close I can hear the uncomfortable wheeze of his breath, smell the curious damp must, as if there is no way to scrub clean the taint of that cellar, and I realize what we have done to him. He is still a prisoner, but we have taken him away from his own version of safety. I can’t give him back, even if that’s what he wants.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him softly. And it’s for more than hurting him; it’s for being born one of them – a Lammer whose belief in my own superiority is so ingrained it never even occurred to me that others suffered merely so that I wouldn’t have to think. “I will make Eline pay for this.” I drop my hand.

  He stares at me, eyes unguarded and dark.

  Jannik looks at me over Merril’s shoulder and he smiles just slightly, enough to let me know he understands what I mean. Then, with a gentleness to match my own, he pushes Merril forward, nudging him into the room where Carien is waiting to see this relic of her husband’s perversities.

  Her face doesn’t change when we enter. She looks Merril up and down, appraising him like a nilly at a market. Finally, satisfied, she takes out her small pipe and pinches poisonink into the bowl, and lights it with a match. She takes a long thoughtful drag on the pipe and hides herself in a cloud of iron-grey smoke before talking. “You belonged to my husband?”

  Merril nods, and a small muscle in his cheek twitches, jumping under the discoloured skin.

  “I see.” She blows more fumes around her, wrapping her indecision in the sharp smell of a high. I can almost see the questions she wants to ask him but cannot bring herself to say out loud – not here, not in front of us. None of us have had the cruelty to ask Merril how he has been used. I think we all already know. He is, after all, a rookery vampire. Perhaps that is another reason why Isidro hates and fears him so much. Merril is a reminder of his past, of what he has been and done. All the things he has tried to forget about himself. It’s harder to hate someone when you see through to their fears.

  She sniffs, thoughtfully. “He likes to own things. It makes him happy. Did he make you sing for him, little lark?”

  Merril bares his teeth.

  There is an understanding between them. Harun looks out the window, preserving some kind of dignity. It’s easy for men to be weak and merciful when it suits them. The burden falls on me to stab the knife deep.

  “So now, as awkward as this is, I must ask where you stand,” I say to Carien.

  She draws her gaze away fr
om Merril to stare at me with a mulish unblinking gaze. “With regards to?”

  “This.” I sweep my hand across the room. “Us, and your husband. Are you for us, against us?”

  Another deep drag on her pipe. Her teeth click against the ivory and the smoke pours from her mouth and nose. “I must admit that games have never taken my fancy. I always preferred to watch from the side lines.”

  “This is not a game,” Harun says. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Is that so?” Carien lifts one arched brow. “And what then do you plan to do to me – am I to stay here a prisoner? I could have lied. But I offered you the truth. I am not interested in your bats, in who owns whom. Is that not enough for you?”

  “You lie,” I tell her. I walk across the room, away from her and from Merril. Next to Jannik, I thread my arm through his. The warmth of his body through the wool of his jacket strengthens me. I have agreed to be cruel only for the sake of those I love. After this is done, I will scour out this beast from me, this part of my nature that wants to rise so easily, champing to destroy others under its sharp and pointed hooves. “You lie because I know the things you cannot ask Merril. I know you do not want to be tied to House Eline by the child you carry. If I were to offer you something that Eline cannot, would you choose a side then?”

  Carien stoppers her pipe and sets it down on the table. Like a jackal surprised by a gardener in the early morning, she is a creature in a liminal time, out of place and wary but not yet afraid. “What,” she says after many minutes have slid by, “exactly can you offer me?”

  I hold up my hand, fingers raised. “Two things.”

  Carien waits with a curious stillness, watching me as if all her future rests on what I say next. Perhaps it does, more than even she realizes.

  The thing I am about to offer her is immense and ugly, as only the greatest bribes can be. I lower my hand slowly to her belly, pointing. “I can rid you of that.” Next to me Jannik’s muscles tense under his coat. He stamps down quickly on his anger and shock, but I can feel it still, scraping at the inside of my head, sand on raw flesh.

  “How?” she snaps, the eagerness in her rising.

  “Yes, Felicita, how?” Jannik speaks between gritted teeth.

  “With your help. With magic.” I keep my eyes open and my chin raised, because if I close them – if I let myself weaken even the slightest – I will fall. I can feel it already sweeping up in me. I thin my lips and manage something that is not a laugh, not quite. The cold beast, rising. “It can be done.” I am always so sure of the things I can do, because failure would leave me nowhere. I once held a storm of nightmares contained, I can scrape away this little gobbet.

  “Interesting,” says Harun. “You consider your control so delicate.” He’s still looking out the window, keeping up his pretence that this conversation barely interests him.

  “It will be.” Do not falter. “And I can offer you a death.”

  “If I wanted my husband killed I think I would have done better than come to you.” She sneers.

  “Not his.” I stare at her face, unblinking. “Yours.”

  “My own?” Her expression has not altered; her wild eyes are the emotionless amber glass of a child’s doll.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  And I have, oh dear Gris, I have. “If you’ve no ties that bind you here, we can dispose of you. There can be an accident. We then set up a body to take your place, suitably disfigured, of course – fire would work well, especially if Eline chooses such a weapon against us; it would be easy to assume you no more than an unfortunate victim of some inter-House rivalry.”

  Harun stops looking out the window. “A body?”

  “We have an entire city of plague-corpses at our disposal,” I say. “No point in letting the dead go to waste.” The words come up choked and tight, though I’m aiming for a kind of grim humour.

  “And I am to be an unlucky accident?” Carien laughs hard and bright. “How very fitting.”

  “Just so. What is that you want, Carien – art, freedom? I can give you these things. In Pelimburg.”

  “I have no desire to starve to death in some stinking Pelimburg hovel.”

  “I would not allow that.” For the first time it feels that instead of sentencing her, I am offering her a choice better than the one I made. She will run, that much is true, but she can also shake off the mantle of her old name and re-invent herself. I would be able to convince Mother and Lenora to take in an artist. Mother especially would love to be seen as some kind of patron. “Who do you want to be?”

  * * *

  The night falls late, the sky rain-cleaned. We sit in silence. Harun has given us the use of a private set of rooms. Everything in the bed chamber is blue, and the candle holders are the only bright point. The furniture is dark, but comforting. The room has a serenity like the final moment of drowning.

  It is only Jannik, me and Carien in the bedroom. It is so still that I can hear the rustling of silk as we breathe, our collected air mingles, and in a way the three of us are closer than any person can be. We are bound in guilt.

  For those who haven’t had the foresight to take rake’s parsley, or have fallen to ill luck, there are places tucked deep into alleyways that will take care of those unwanted unborn children. Desperate Hobs and low-Lammers will go to them.

  Some of them even live. It’s not a chance taken lightly. My faith in myself drops a notch, and I shore it up. “Jannik?”

  “I do not want to do this,” he says, but the protest is tired. He will do it, because I have asked. We have. Some of Carien’s wild animal must have spoken to him. I wonder if Jannik saw the thing in her that I did – that Dash-like need to claw at the world and to have it take him on his terms only? Jannik was in love, once. He has always fallen for the wild creatures, the ones which refused to be tamed. If he’d met Carien on a rain-drenched street in Pelimburg – if she’d been the one standing there with her umbrella – would it have been her and not me that he married?

  Or would the whole world have been different? Carien‘s a Reader. What use would she have been to Dash – he wouldn’t have bothered to snag her, to fall a little in love with her. He and Jannik might still be passing books of poetry back and forth, meeting in shadows and stolen moments.

  Where would I have been?

  “Carien,” I say and my voice ghosts about the room, trembling at the lit fatcandles, making the flames dance. “You’re certain you want us to do this?” All I can give her is this last moment to make sure the decision is hers and hers alone. I sit at the foot of the bed on which she’s lying, while Jannik - who seems desperate for a chance at flight - skulks by the locked door.

  She raises her chin, not looking at either of us, staring instead at the stained geography of the ceiling. She drags her hands through her curls, freeing them. When she turns her head to us, her eyes glitter with the candle-light. “There is nothing I want more,” she says in a low cat’s hiss, as if she is about to start a fight, claws out.

  There, it’s said, and now we must press on. I can do this. I have practised a little with Jannik in preparation, using his magic to move things, to test my control. It has been something like joy. And something like terror. To use his power my mind needs to be completely open. No secrets.

  Just magic. There is a well of it within him, deep and dark and sweet.

  “Drink,” I say and pour her a strong infusion of willow-bark. It will be little enough help. I’m loath to give her lady’s gown too – although it will help her sleep. I need her to be with me while we do this – at the slightest chance I am doing something wrong, she needs to be able to tell me.

  Her fingers tremble against mine as she accepts the drink, but that is the only sign she gives. Her face is calm, her body limp with a resigned expectation – a strange lethargy that I put down to that moment when one realizes they have changed their future irrevocably.

  I’ve been there – it’s l
ike being drugged, shifted out of your body and mind, and walking alongside yourself, watching everything you do with curious detachment. “You need to tell me if you experience any pain worse than cramping.” I take the cup from her hands. She’s drained it.

  “I understand. Must you repeat everything as if everyone around you had merely a child’s mind?”

  I flush. “Lie back, close your eyes.” Carien does as she’s told and when she’s no longer looking at us, I turn to Jannik. “Please?”

  He crosses the room to stand next to me, one hand resting on my shoulder. The weight of it comforts, but also leaves me with a flickering sense of unease. I feel pinned in place, committed now to what I have offered. When Jannik drops his mental guards I am unprepared for how much power he is offering. The hiss and slide of sand pours through the room, and I look down involuntarily, expecting the ground to be covered in beach-white sand, dry and unforgiving. There is nothing. Only the plush pile of a woollen carpet woven of Ives blue and Mata gold

  “Let go,” says Jannik.

  “Of what?”

  “Indecision.”

  He’s right, I am still holding my house—my room – tightly locked up, like a music box holding childish secrets. I fling open the door of my mind and I am immediately caught in two worlds. Jannik’s labyrinthine mental house folds my room and my secrets into his. My childhood bed sinks into white sand, and the sea mews fly in through the open window. They bring the wind with them, and all the drawers of my bureau rattle open, sending paper whirling about the room. The breeze smells of heat and river water instead of the cold salt sea.

  My secrets dance about the room, written in a black slanted hand that I have perfected to appear less childish than it used to. The papers fold themselves, take on new shapes, spread their sharp hard wings and fly out into the desert.

  “Are you ready?”

  I turn. Jannik, barefoot as he always appears here, is waiting for me, one hand held out. Faint after-images dance around him, snaking ghostly ribbons between us. I wonder if this is some outward sign of our bond, if these ribbons will grow deeper and darker the longer we are together. I take his hand and his magic surges through me, freely given, unbelievably powerful. I suck in a gasp of air and find myself back in the closed chambers of Carien’s room. The air is damper here, filled with our exhalations, with the humidity of MallenIve in summer.