Maria Isabel Pita

by As Above, So Below

  “Loric,” he said. “The name given to me by my mother at birth is Loric. Now you know.”

  “Loric… I love you, Loric.” The words tasted bittersweet and she knew it wouldn’t be wise to say them too often. They struck her as having the same sort of ambiguous nature as herbs with the power to both give life and take it away depending on who handled them.

  “I never really know when to expect them.” He answered her question now as if they hadn’t spoken of anything else in between. “They always come at the heart of the season, four times a year as a rule, more often if the mood strikes them, and always at night.”

  “The White Lord told me he has seen stars falling into your room. Is that how the Lords visit you?”

  One of his legs unconsciously shoved her aside as he slumped deeper into the chair. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Whatever he suspects, it won’t do him any good.”

  “So you do talk to the Lords?”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t find our conversations very exciting, Mirabel. Lately all we’ve talked about is the growing restlessness of the plains people and your lovely self, naturally.”

  This revelation made her nervous so she concentrated on the first part of his statement. “Why are the plains people so restless?”

  “Because that’s their nature.”

  “To be always restless?”

  “You can’t have a garden without weeds, as you well know. Up here in the kingdom we believe in the Lords and hope for an eternal spark within us. The plains people don’t. They eat each other’s hearts.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pretend to be so shocked.” Grasping one of her hands, he stood up and began dragging her across the floor without giving her the chance to follow him in a more dignified fashion. “Sometimes I think you’d like to rip my heart out of my chest just like you do your precious roots, Mirabel, but I won’t let you!”

  “My lord, you’re hurting my hand.”

  “I’ve noticed that, even after I nearly beat you to death, there isn’t a mark on you two nights later, Mirabel.”

  She didn’t want to think about this. The idea that in some sense she was stronger than him upset her more than anything else ever had.

  *

  Before she left his chambers, well before sunrise, she asked him, during the brief peaceful time she lay in his arms, “Why is there always a plant latent in a seed?”

  “Mirabel,” he replied gently, “I suspect not even the Lords know the answer to that. But perhaps the universe itself is a seed that burst into stars and worlds are their flowers, through which this original mystery forever keeps on blooming.”

  “But doesn’t that mean the universe will also die one day?”

  “Who’s to say?” He sounded tired.

  “Doesn’t it worry you?”

  “It’s hard to care about something so vast. It’s much easier to care about little things like myself.”

  “But there’s nothing little about you, my lord. The whole universe fits in your head.” She caressed his smooth, unscratched chest, the faint scars from some of their other nights together not visible in the healthy glow from an oil lamp.

  “I love you, Mirabel, but you have to go now.”

  “Why can’t we ever watch the sunrise together?” she asked even as she moved to obey him.

  “Because that is a privilege reserved for my future wife.” His eyes closed.

  She stared down at him where he lay on his bed, the fallen columns of his muscular legs half tangled in the violet sheets, and her voice was slightly hoarse from all the emotions crowding her throat.” Everyone says you will never marry.”

  “Do you believe that?” he asked quietly, smiling a little but keeping his eyes closed.

  “I don’t know… Megran is very angry with you.”

  He opened his eyes. “How much have you told her?”

  “Nothing, she just knows.”

  His eyes closed again. “She doesn’t know you’re not a normal girl, Mirabel. She doesn’t understand that I’m protecting my subjects.” He smiled faintly again. “You’d kill any other man.”

  She left him. There wasn’t any more to be gotten out of him tonight, in any sense. She already had more than enough information to digest. There was so much in the little he had said she didn’t have the appetite for any more questions. The young men of the Brown guarding the entrance to the towers thrust six hard stares into her as she hurried away from them with a shy smile. She knew from their purportedly idle comments whenever she passed them that they didn’t approve of the fact that their prince had privately entertained no other woman in seven whole moons.

  Chapter Six

  Mirabel was working in the garden, pondering the prince’s few well-chosen words.

  “Mirabel! Mirabel! Come quickly!”

  She was astonished to see Megran’s rotund form running toward her. She gaped at the impossible sight until concern and curiosity propelled her to her feet. “What’s wrong?!” It had to be something very serious to get the chef’s heavy bulk moving so fast.

  “It’s little Ebonlee, the youngest son of the Green Lord. Do you remember? We went to his christening.”

  “Yes.” Mirabel was relieved—she had instantly feared for the prince.

  “He fell down his tower stairs!” Megran gasped for breath, clutching her massive chest.

  “All the way?” They had already started walking toward the kitchen door, the fastest way back into the keep.

  “No, he and his nanny were halfway down when he ran ahead of her and tripped on his bootlaces. Landru has already set his poor little bones. He only broke an arm and a leg, thank the Lords, but…” She had to pause to catch her breath again. “There’s a terrible wound in his head.” She squeezed her eyes shut and Mirabel couldn’t tell if it was grief for Ebonlee or a pain in her chest that contorted her features for an instant. “Landru has cleaned and bandaged it but…”

  Mirabel was silent. Blows to the head were the most dangerous of all. The victim could appear perfectly well yet a few days later suddenly grow delirious and die. “Is he conscious?”

  “No. Landru is trying to make him swallow some potions, without much success, and his poor mother is hysterical.” Megran swallowed dramatically as Mirabel pulled open the heavy wooden door leading into the kitchen. “It was she who asked for you.”

  “For me?” A great lady of the keep was asking for her?

  “Well, she didn’t exactly ask for you,” Megran explained reluctantly. “She demanded the witch be sent for. She said it didn’t matter what forces cured her son as long as he lived.”

  Markan had also thought of her as a witch. Perhaps those who were skilled in a particular activity—as she had been at preparing food and was now at caring for and understanding plants—were considered witches by the people. If so, she was proud to be one. Yet if this was truly the definition of the word, Landru was a far greater witch than she, so perhaps it was a rank reserved for women and their work. But she had no time to ponder the matter now, not when a lady of the Green was asking to see her. With a murmured apology she broke into a run, leaving Megran behind. She was stunned and thrilled to be needed by one of these taller and sturdier versions of her beloved plants whose brains were such strange, heavy seeds even though it was only the mortal skull’s husk that weighed so much.

  *

  There was a crowd gathered outside the Green Lord’s chambers but for the first time since she arrived at the keep she did not fear making her way past thorny stares.

  “She’s here!” someone cried as she paused for breath at the top of the stairwell. “Make way! Make way!”

  For a disorienting moment Mirabel feared she had only dreamed she woke up that morning. It couldn’t really be true, the sight of people staring at her with a new and curious respect. They were merely the shadows of her own eyelashes, insubstantial reflections of her longings, about to vanish…

  But they remained wher
e they were, a miniature forest of lords and ladies she hesitated to enter until Landru’s silver head rose behind them, then she found the courage to make her way down the path they opened for her.

  “Mirabel!” The old healer grasped her arm with a temporary strength born of fear and frustration. Anger made his clear gray eyes look like glass and she suffered the terrible impression that his vision was about to shatter. “There’s nothing more I can do for him,” he whispered into her hair so no one might even chance to read his lips. “But his mother will not accept this and for some reason she seems to think you can help him.”

  “I know—Megran told me.” She followed him into the dark chamber. “Why?”

  “Because everyone believes you’ve cast a spell on the prince. They think you have strange powers!” he scoffed.

  She said nothing. The people knew more about her relationship with the prince than she had believed.

  “Save him!” Ebonlee’s mother rushed toward them, her long green sleeves evoking large leaves blown by a strong wind. “Please, you must save him! I don’t care how you do it, just do it!” She pointed blindly at the bed. “He’s dying!”

  “Calm yourself, my lady,” Mirabel commanded quietly. “You are disturbing him.”

  “He cannot hear us.” The Green Lord stepped up behind his wife and gripped her shoulders as if to support her or perhaps to help hold himself up.

  “Yes, he can.” Mirabel walked around them toward the young lord who looked like nothing more than a small, moss-covered log under his blanket until she saw his little head wrapped in white bandages like a spider’s waiting meal. He was tangled in the haunting web of physical forces that had sewn his body together and which his naked energy was impatiently trying to wriggle out of. These were concepts she had learned from the prince and they had helped define feelings that had always lived inside her. She was so certain of her diagnosis that she scarcely needed to feel his erratic, frustrated pulse to confirm it.

  Seating herself on the edge of the bed beside him, Mirabel sensed little Ebonlee couldn’t decide what to do. Should he shrug off this new but nastily torn garment or make the annoying effort to mend it? All he desired was to go out and play, yet now his injured limbs were in the way instead of the keep’s black walls. He was locked in the lonely space of his skull, the bright windows of his eyes closed and shuttered and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t reach them to pull them open… And there was a jug of wine he had accidentally knocked over—the only object in the shadow-filled space—rapidly spilling its contents all over the floor. The dark liquid wouldn’t stop pouring out, it was up to his knees already yet he couldn’t find his voice to yell for help. Someone had to come and set it right. Someone had to put the stopper back in its evil black mouth. Where was his mommy? Why didn’t she come and let him out?!

  “Mirabel?”

  She discovered that Landru had gripped her arm again and was bent over her in concern just as she was crouched over Ebonlee.

  “Let her be!” his mother demanded. “She can help him—I know she can!”

  “You are asking for the impossible,” the old man told the lady firmly over his frail shoulder. “He is in the Lords’ hands now.”

  “Damn the Lords if they take my little boy!”

  “Lemaine…” Her husband attempted unsuccessfully to sound angry with her.

  “Silence.” Mirabel gently pushed the healer away. She could see in images what was wrong with Ebonlee. There was a growing pressure inside his head. When she closed her eyes she could see him standing in a spherical room pulsing with shadows in which a slender wine jug had shattered and was spilling its dark contents in a growing pool around him. But how could she help him? Her hands were not able to actually reach into his head.

  Even as she thought this she placed her palms lightly against his temples then raised them somewhat so she wasn’t actually touching him. It was as if a current of water rushed between his flesh and hers that was warm and yet as invigorating as a cold mountain stream. She gasped because the sensation surging beneath her fingers was so wonderful she couldn’t resist following its swift course down around his face to his neck. It was moving too fast, like a ribbon madly unwinding from its spool when a playful cat catches the end in its mouth and runs. The forces that had threaded themselves together and become Ebonlee were unweaving at an alarming rate. Then she felt it, the way the flow dammed where his arm was broken, swirling around the fracture like a whirlpool, pure pain its dark and vacuous heart.

  “Hold him up,” she instructed Landru abruptly. “Make him sit up and hold him.”

  He obeyed at once, perching on the bed facing her.

  Ebonlee’s heavy little head fell forward and clearly exposed the stained bandage just above the nape of his neck. That was all she needed to see. Closing her eyes again, Mirabel placed her palms, her fingers barely brushing his skin, just over the wound and there it was…nothing. Her hands hovered over a cold, black hole. She felt as if a door had been kicked open onto a freezing winter night and all the hard-earned warmth in a fire-lit hall was being sucked out. Ebonlee’s heart was the blaze in the keep of his chest and it was struggling now beneath a blizzard of stars sucking his unique warmth back out amongst them.

  “This is the door through which he is running out,” she informed Landru without opening her eyes, because the vivid images in her mind were much more real and vitally significant than the little boy’s bloodstained head and broken limbs. “I am going to try to close it.”

  “What? Mirabel, what are you talking about?” the healer whispered. “What are you doing?”

  She ignored him. She used all the strength of her willpower as though it was a muscle to slowly, with an effort she scarcely knew how to make, to close what she chose to picture as double redwood doors. She put all the weight of her determination into it and then called upon his mother’s and his father’s love to reinforce it. She absolutely had to stop the pool of blood from deepening. She had to use the infinite threads of energy composing him to mend the fray in their flow. Just as Janlay had taken excess material from the hem of a dress to add to the bodice if necessary, her daughter could draw on all the surplus, burgeoning power in Ebonlee’s growing limbs to mend the tear at the base of his skull.

  “He is bleeding on the inside,” she heard her own voice state calmly, “and the spilled blood is putting a fatal pressure on his brain. I am trying to mend the broken vessels to keep it from getting worse…” Her explanation faded away as she concentrated on the metaphorical jug of wine spilling its contents inside the shadowy chamber of the little boy’s skull. The jug was covered with delicate cracks that branched outward and into each other and she clearly saw where some of the infinitely tiny stems had snapped and overflowed. Yet even as she noticed them they twitched like luminous blue worms raising blind heads and began writhing toward each other. More swiftly than she had dared hope, the web was made whole again. The irreplaceable vintage labeled Ebonlee was no longer pouring out of the vessel forged to contain it but damage had already been done.

  Mirabel no longer felt her hands hovering over him, or even her own body sitting on the bed. The entire universe was a gleaming blue pattern of such complexity she was lost in it but there was one annoying fray in the endlessly interconnected tributaries. All it would take to cut it away, she suddenly knew, was to combine the strength of her willpower with the sharpness of her desire, like the twin blades of a pair of scissors. With absolute calm she absorbed the mess he had made—as though her awareness was a mysterious sort of sponge—and after just a few moments she felt the pressure ease then dissipate. Little Ebonlee was no longer caught in the embrace of flickering shadows. His pulse steadied and she saw him racing down the steps of consciousness into a deep and healing sleep.

  *

  The prince placed four guards outside Mirabel’s door. The keep was in an uproar.

  Megran was beside herself with concern and pride, which put an even greater strain on her heart.
r />   Landru disappeared into the drying rooms to bottle herbs as if nothing had happened.

  The Green Lord and his lady offered Mirabel so many gifts she didn’t have enough space in her room to accept them all.

  Little Ebonlee slept a full day and night then suddenly woke up complaining that he was hungry and ached all over. His plaintive voice broke the suspense into which Visioncrest had plunged after Mirabel was carried down out of the Green Tower by the White Lord, who had joined the bystanders outside the injured child’s room. Everyone had been waiting to see what would happen. Would Mirabel herself recover? Whatever she had done to the little lord seemed to have weakened her considerably. Only a few people had actually witnessed the way she caressed Ebonlee without touching him and how, after smiling, she suddenly collapsed into a black-and-violet heap on the floor. The White Lord had rushed into the chamber then and scooped her up into his arms before Landru could examine her.

  After the initial united awe Ebonlee’s miraculous full recovery inspired, the keep split in half like an acorn and the dangerous seed of conflict was sewn. One faction was certain Mirabel had really done nothing and that Ebonlee would have recovered anyway under Landru’s care. The other faction—headed by the entire Green Tower—was positive Mirabel had saved Ebonlee’s life, even though only the ones who had seen the old healer’s hopeless eyes had any proof whatsoever to support their position. And the prince was the one expected to decide which side was right. Speculation on the matter ran higher than it ever had on any issue.

  Yet the person most troubled by Little Ebonlee’s recovery was Mirabel herself. The entertaining battle of opinions raging in the halls and towers above her was nothing compared to the one her own emotions were waging. Of course she was happy the child was alive and healing rapidly but she was also troubled, perhaps because she was more tired than she could ever remember being and definitely because she hadn’t seen Loric in three whole nights. Instead she had four young men of the Brown barring her door, there to protect her from the curiosity raging like a fever in the cool, black corridors. Every hour or so there was a muted commotion outside her heavy door and once two different voices yelled loud enough for her to hear what they said, “My daughter is sick and I’ve come to see the new healer!” and “She’s not a healer—she’s a witch!”