The world felt the way Emily did inside, as if it were teetering on the brink of a bottomless chasm, waiting for the merest breath of air to send it tumbling down into the dark fathoms below.
She wondered what that breath would be. Would she awake in some hospital room with a stranger’s face hanging over her, saying there’d been an accident? Would she awake in the old warehouse, cold and tired, and have to face the aftermath of her flight from her stepfather’s wrath and her mother’s death?
Or, as she was coming to believe more and more with each passing day, would she simply carry on, day after day, in this strange world, until the sorceress decided to take her on or send her away? What would that life be like? A life of a sorceress’s apprentice. The thought both excited and terrified her.
She brushed her tangled hair back from her face and sighed. The other girls would be rising soon. Another day would begin. There was still a week before their meetings with Marianne.
A sound broke the stillness below, echoing faintly off the stone walls of the fortress, and she glanced down into the courtyard.
A figure was making its way through the garden. It was hard to tell from this distance and in the deep shadows that still pooled beneath the cluster of towers, but she thought it was a man. He stopped beside the fountain, and Emily could see he had been carrying something in his arms. He leaned it against the side of the fountain then backed away, moving down one of the myriad paths that wended between the neat rows of vegetation.
She watched, leaning farther out of the window, and strained to get a better look in the dim light. At first, she wasn’t at all sure of the man’s next actions. He unslung something from across his shoulders and seemed to be fiddling with it intently.
It wasn’t until the morning air brought a twang and thump that Emily finally realized what he was doing. He was practicing archery.
Without giving herself time to think about it, she turned from the window and hurriedly dressed herself. Celine slept on. She wasn’t sure how much time she had before Caireann would come to rouse the others, but she would make the most of whatever time she had.
Quietly, she slipped from the room and hurried down the spiral stairs and out into the garden.
The soft leather of her boots scarcely made a sound on the stone paths, and she was nearly upon the tall, gaunt figure before he realized she was coming. He whirled around on his heel, raising his bow slightly, an arrow already nocked.
Emily found herself staring into a worn and lined face, framed by long dark hair. He glared at her over his graying beard through one blue eye. The other one was hidden behind the folds of a black silk patch. His right ear was little more than a misshapen lump of scars and mangled cartilage. His fearsome appearance, coupled with his dark attire, exuded an almost piratical aura.
For the space of a heartbeat, they stared at one another, the sun’s rays inching their way down the tower wall behind her. His appearance was certainly intimidating, but she didn’t get any sense of malice from him. On the contrary, he looked as much at a loss as she was herself.
“Going to shoot me with that?” she asked, one corner of her mouth twitching.
“No, I very well am not,” the man grunted, and he lowered the bow, looking a trifle embarrassed.
Emily stepped past him and surveyed his target where it stood against the fountain. It had the rudimentary outline of a knight painted on it, little more than a stick figure, but the scale was all wrong. He was cute, like a child’s crude drawing, and in fact she rather thought shooting at it would feel like peppering a child with arrows. A half dozen of them already jutted from various places of his anatomy.
She turned to look at the man, who glared at her and seemed at a complete loss as to what to do now that she was there.
“I’m Emily,” she said, and she held out her hand. The man only stared at it, utterly baffled. After a second, she let it fall back to her side.
He blinked, scowled, and then, as if he was resigned to an unpleasant chore he said, “Marcom.”
They looked at one another.
“Could I try your bow?” she asked.
“No, you very well may not. You’d be as likely to take my eye out as hit the target, and I’ve only got one eye left to spare, thanks.”
Emily straightened indignantly. “Excuse me,” she said, “but we did archery three times at school last year, and I was top in the class. The teacher said I had an unfair advantage because I … ”
She broke off. “Because I played hockey” was what she was going to say, but of course, that was unlikely to mean anything to anyone here.
Marcom was looking at her curiously now, apparently surprised and intrigued by her outrage.
“All right,” he said at last. “If you can hit the target, I’ll give you a holder.” He paused as if considering, then a mischievous smile cracked his face, and all at once he was almost handsome. “Provided you don’t get to the target by way of my flesh, of course.”
Emily scowled at him again, and this time he actually laughed. Still grinning, he offered her the bow.
She took it and turned to face the target. As she did, the sunlight reached the garden at last and seemed to give everything a golden glow.
She planted her feet, raised the bow, and pulled back on the string. Marcom stepped back a couple of paces, and though Emily rolled her eyes at the sound of his boots on the stones, she did not look around.
She steeled herself, staring intently at the target and letting it fill her world for the space of a second.
And then, she let go of the string.
The arrow soared smoothly through the air, thudding into the target, and quivered slightly as it struck home, right in the painted knight’s throat.
There was silence for a moment, and then Marcom said in a wondering voice, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
She started to turn toward him, but before she could, something flashed before her eyes in the sunshine, and there was a tinkle of metal on stone. She looked down to see a heavy gold coin spinning to a stop at her feet. She stooped and picked it up.
“What’s this?”
He gave her a strange look. “It’s a holder, ain’t it? Told you I’d give you one, didn’t I?”
“No, I couldn’t…” She tried to give it back, but Marcom took the bow from her with one hand and, with the other, gently folded her fingers over the coin.
“Take it,” he said. “It was worth it to see one of Marianne’s new’ans shoot like that.”
She watched as he slung the bow back over his shoulder and walked back to the fountain to collect his target.
As he passed her again, heading toward one of the towers across from her own, he said, “Come out an hour earlier tomorrow, and we can have us a little tournament, mayhap.”
As she made her way back up the stairs, Emily turned the gold coin over between her fingers. Stamped on the front was the face of a woman with a rose and a clover intertwined in her hair. On the reverse, superimposed upon a representation of seven towers, was a mermaid, clutching her decapitated head to her bosom.
She reached the top of the stairs, and Caireann’s voice came to her from below.
Another day was beginning at Seven Skies.
Chapter Nine
The sunlight that drifted in through the window had the dim, almost unreal quality of late afternoon as Emily and Celine lay side by side on Celine’s bed. A book sat open between them, its pages painted a dull yellow in the twilight. Soon, they’d be forced to fetch candles.
Celine ran a finger across the line she was reading, her brow furrowed in fierce concentration, and Emily marveled at the girl’s tenacity. She’d never seen anyone so determined about anything before.
“…looked around, she could see nothin’ but the great gray…” Celine stared at the next word, her lips quivering on the edge of sounding it out, but at last she scowled and looked over at Emily for help.
“Prairie,” Emily supplied. “It’s like…flat land for as f
ar as the eye can see for miles around.”
Celine frowned, apparently trying to imagine such a thing, and rubbed one temple absently. After a moment, she shrugged and read on.
“…prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a ’ouse broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun ’ad baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with li’l cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere…”
She stopped again, slapping a hand down on the page, as if to hold the narrative right there, and looked at Emily with wide and curious eyes.
“What is it?” Emily asked, trying to think which word had tripped her up this time.
“Yeh said this book is from where yeh’re from.”
Emily nodded. “It is. I read it when I was a kid.”
“Does it really look like that? All gray and nothin’ and more nothin’ for miles and miles ’til the world just stops at the sky? Jaisus, sounds like ’ell itself, it does.”
Emily smiled a little, thinking back on the streets of Minneapolis as she’d seen them last, covered with blankets of snow.
“No,” she said. “It’s all white, not all gray.”
Celine raised her eyebrows.
“Well,” Emily amended, “it was when I left, anyway. It snows a lot there.”
Celine shook her head. “What’s ‘snow’?”
“You’ve never seen snow?”
“Not so far as I know it.”
Emily frowned, trying to think how to explain. “It’s soft and white and it falls from the sky…like rain…but only when it is very cold. It’s really tiny bits of frozen rain…sort of.”
Celine’s eyes went out of focus, as they often did when Emily was trying to explain a word she didn’t understand. She supposed she was trying to envision what Emily was describing when she did that, but it always made Emily feel a little uncomfortable, like Celine had just checked out entirely. “The lights are on, but no one’s home,” that look said.
“It sounds like a queer place,” Celine murmured, her eyes slowly focusing again on Emily’s face. “Didn’t yeh ’ave any friends there? Or fam’ly? Or nothin’?”
Every time they’d approached that question, Emily had always steered the conversation in another direction. She hadn’t been ready to explain about her mother, her stepfather—her life, such as it was.
She realized now, staring at Celine across the old and brittle copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, that that wasn’t fair to either of them. If she was to stay here, she wanted Celine as a friend, and she wanted her to be more of one than she’d ever allowed Casey to be. Now that Celine and Caireann knew about what she could do, Emily could no longer remember exactly why she’d never confided it to Casey, and she regretted the missed opportunities bitterly. It felt like a betrayal of the one true friendship she’d had in that other life.
She looked at Celine for a few more seconds, remembering how the girl had simply accepted the knowing in stride. She thought about Casey; she thought about the other girls on the hockey team, and the boys they’d played with when they were young; she thought about her teachers; she thought about her coach. How many of those people could she have turned to on that terrible night when she’d found her mother’s lifeless body on the floor outside her room? All of them? None of them? She would never know because she had never been able to let anyone that close. There was always a reason to keep them all at arm’s length. Sometimes that reason was the knowing, and sometimes it was her crazy, fucked up family.
Maybe this was her chance to start again. Maybe she could put her old life behind her and be someone else—be the person she wanted to be instead of merely the one that dumb luck had made.
She stared into Celine’s kind, patient eyes and realized it was time.
Emily rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. A breeze floated in through the window and blew a lock of hair across her face. She didn’t brush it away.
“My dad died when I was just a baby,” she said, her eyes tracing one of the countless cracks that etched the stone ceiling. Celine rolled over too, following Emily’s gaze.
“Mom…” Her throat closed around the words, and she felt her eyes begin to sting. She swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump that was locking everything inside. She could feel the thud of her heart beneath her ribs, in her face, against her throat. Instinct, cultivated by the years of silence, warred with her desire to open herself up at last, and she fought to bring down the wall inside her.
“Mom died a week ago. Right before I found myself…here…”
Her voice trailed away and she blinked. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and fell into the cups of her ears, but she did not wipe them away. She felt Celine’s tiny hand enter hers, felt the girl’s fingers squeeze her own.
“Mom was…was a drug addict,” she said. More tears found their way from beneath her lids, and she squeezed Celine’s hand back. “That’s someone who takes…potions and things…to see stuff that isn’t there…or to feel better about themselves…or to escape the world. Someone who does it all the time and can’t help themselves…until they aren’t really in the world anymore at all…”
The wall came down, crumbling slowly one brick at a time, and Emily began to cry. Unlike the tears she’d shed lying on the dirty floor of an old warehouse, these were not blunted by shock and terror. They came, thick and fast, and with them came all the pent up grief and confusion of the last week—of a lifetime. Blindly, she reached out to Celine, and Celine held her as she sobbed.
She cried for the loss of Casey, who had been her friend since first grade. She cried for the father she’d never known and had lost fighting a war in a country she’d never seen. She cried for the game she’d loved and that had carried her through the darkest moments of her life with the promise of rewards she could never find at home.
Most of all, she cried for her mother, the woman she had been and could have been again—but now never would be. The woman who was taken from Emily by demons that had been every bit as real as the monstrous creatures that inhabited this insane world.
She cried until there were no more tears, and when at last they slowed to a trickle, she felt better than she had in days. It was as though she’d been hollowed out, and the worst of her pain had finally escaped.
They lay that way for a long time, holding one another as the room grew darker. Outside, they could hear the familiar sounds of the market coming to life for another evening of music and hocking. In some ways, they were familiar sounds; they brought back images of summer evenings spent at the county fair with her mother, before things had turned bad.
“I never knew me parents,” Celine said into the darkness after a time.
Emily propped herself up on one elbow and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Her face felt hot and stiff, and her eyes were sore. She pulled her hair back behind her ears and looked down at Celine’s dark shape in the gloom.
“I guess they must ’ave died, but no one ever tol’ me. An ol’ man and an ol’ woman tended me when I was li’l. I don’t remember nothin’ much before them.” Celine paused. There was no sorrow in her face, only a kind of resigned recounting of facts that made Emily’s heart ache a little.
“When I was but four or so, some men came to our li’l cottage. I saw ’em beat the ol’ man. Dunno what for. The woman, she took me out of the room then and pried open a window and pushed me out of it. Told me to run as fast and as far as I could and not to come back. Said she’d find me when she could.”
Elsewhere in the tower, they heard Josephine’s raucous laughter. The image of the wealthier girl in her fine clothes superimposed itself in Emily’s mind with the pathetic portrait of Celine as she’d looked, malnourished and dirty, on the boat, wrapped in her filthy sheet.
She’d thought she’d been cried out, but tears stung the corners of her eyes again, a
nd she blinked furiously to keep them at bay.
“After that, I just sort of drifted, yeh know? Never in one place long. Some people were kind and some were cruel. That’s ’ow the world works, ain’t it? Most people weren’t neither. Most people just want to get on with their own lives and not be bothered with anyone else’s troubles.”
Darkness had well and truly fallen now. The fiddler’s music drifted to them on the night air. The caw of a bird echoed off the stone walls, turning into a cascade of ghostly laughter. Time seemed suspended, as if this twilight was a place outside—a haven from the pain of the past and the trials of the future.
“A man let me stay with ’im for a while. He taught me how to tend a garden and ’ow to read and write a li’l. He were poor, but he took as good care o’ me as he could. Shared ’is food with me and all. Then her men came for me, and he said I should go with ’em and see what kinda life I could make for myself ’ere.”
The silence spun out between them then, and Emily only looked at Celine as she lay there with her eyes closed and her face composed.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said at last. “You’ve had a worse time of it than I have. I was so wrapped up in my own … ”
“Emily?” Celine interrupted, and her voice was unusually gentle. Emily fell silent. “Shut up.”
Emily lay back against the pillow again, staring into the dark. This time, Celine was so silent and still for so long that Emily thought she must’ve fallen asleep, and she was just about to slip off to her own bed, when Celine spoke again.
“Tell me more about it.”
“About what?”
“About where yeh came from. Tell me somethin’ nice about it some.”
Emily thought for a long time. She thought about Casey and coach Anders; she thought about gingerbread lattes and hot fudge sundaes; she thought about Harry Potter and Jason Mraz and Saturday morning cartoons.
And then, she smiled.
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