by Kim Smejkal
You did steal it then, he said. It wasn’t yours to take, Diavala. But if a starving soul had happened along a loaf of bread, he would hardly blame them for taking it.
The memory continued.
Inside the chest was no treasure he could sell, but he learned to use the ink inside. At first the tattoos were ornaments that people paid well for, but that changed quickly: he listened to the people and made sure to give them images that would be precious to them.
“Regardless of what you and the inkling might think,” Diavala said, intruding on the memory, “I’ve always cared. I know you imagine me as a poor ten-year-old child, and except for the purple eyes, you are very close to the truth. I was exactly that, in the beginning. I was a child inking art onto people and making those people happy. I helped them realize themselves in this life, so they were unafraid of meeting the afterlife.”
Irritation hummed in his bones now. Distantly, he registered that Celia was asking if he was okay.
No, he wasn’t. The sun was too bright, and he missed his people. He ached for the stage. It was like a wasp sting in the center of his chest, and the pain of it spread every day.
But he nodded. “Diavala’s doing a lot of justifying without giving me actual information,” he explained to Celia. When would Halcyon enter the script?
“It was a thousand years ago,” Diavala said, affronted. “But fine, we can condense it.”
So you became famous for your tattoos quickly, he said, doing the condensing for her from what everyone knew of Profeta. People start to believe you’re an oracle of some kind. And then?
A brief pause, and then he was plunged underwater. His nose and mouth filled with water, and gasping for the breath he needed only made his lungs burn more. Panic consumed him, and he twisted to the side, trying to get free. But he couldn’t struggle long, the hands holding him were too strong. As the world stilled, he noted the snowdrops growing on the bank of the lake: clumps of small white flowers arching their heads down toward him. Swimming in his vision, they beckoned to him like nodding promises of life. If only he could get to those snowdrops . . .
But he didn’t. They disappeared into blackness as his eyes closed forever and the water won.
“My story should have ended there,” Diavala said. “Profeta should never have been named, and it shouldn’t have grown. It should have died with me, underwater, that day.”
The plague doctor pushed Celia away and bent over, gasping for breath, coming out of the memory with force. Lilies and snowdrops. Death and life.
With the snowdrop memory came Halcyon’s face: unchanged from then to now. His hands—pushing, holding, pinching—had been the ones making sure the water claimed her.
“Halcyon is the one who killed you,” he said. With those words, Celia—who’d bent with him, trying to figure out what was wrong—reared back.
Their charming host was a child killer.
“Because he blamed you for his lover’s death,” he finished. He kept speaking to Diavala aloud because there was no part of him that wanted to explain this to Celia over again. He would live it once and then banish all thought of lilies and snowdrops and child murder to the rooms in his mind that dealt with death and pain, and he’d shut them in tight.
“Yes,” was all Diavala said. A simple word, and the truth.
Still, although Diavala was finally being clear about the cause of their hatred for each other and how long it had festered, the plague doctor knew she was still withholding something.
“You know the place I went, plague doctor. You were a visitor there too.”
The afterlife.
All it had taken was one orange and white cat in a too-tall tree, and yes, he’d been a visitor there. He’d seen death before, he knew what to expect of the afterlife, and he wasn’t eager to return. The nothingness, the sorrow. An abject feeling of being lost while knowing there would never be a way to get unlost . . . Yes, he knew the place. And every moment Diavala possessed him, he was reminded of it. Every second his bones hummed, he felt Death calling him back: You belong with me . . .
He shook his head to drown out Death’s call.
“I escaped the afterlife through sheer luck, Diavala,” he said carefully. “How was it that you returned to us?”
The plague doctor braced himself for her answer by reaching for Celia’s hand and clinging hard enough to crack her knuckles.
“Ah, good question,” Diavala said slowly. “You see, I didn’t know it was Halcyon who’d killed me until he visited me in the afterlife to gloat.”
Given his experience with saving a cat stuck in a tree and dying and coming back, he’d known it was possible to see the other side and return. That was something he and Diavala had long had in common.
But who could “visit” the afterlife intentionally? The way Diavala so casually inserted Halcyon into her story suggested that he had the ability to travel back and forth at whim. That he was not a person nor a dead soul, but someone who straddled the line between worlds.
“I was not afraid of him there,” Diavala said. “He’d already killed me, how could I die again? And oh, that irritated him so: a child flaunting her bravery, defying him by not trembling at his feet. He’d come to revel in his power over me, but his revenge quickly turned sour.”
Diavala’s pitch had risen alarmingly. It was entirely possible that she hadn’t talked about this to anyone since it had happened more than a thousand years ago.
“Part of me remains there, in the afterlife. He pushed the rest of me out. I am not alive. I have no body of my own. My memories, my wants and fears, that’s all I’m made of now. That is my curse, and it will go on forever. Maybe you can see now why I wish for death. Only in death will I be complete. Only in the afterlife will I be whole. Yet it is the one place I will never see again.”
Celia was shaking him, and from the wide-eyed look of panic on her face, she had been doing so for quite some time. “Griffin, what’s wrong? Answer me! Griffin!”
What could he say? He’d never trusted Halcyon’s motivations, but the story he’d just heard—the truth of which he could feel in his bones just as clearly as Diavala’s constant humming—told him he’d underestimated his mistrust.
They were dealing with the overlord of the afterlife, the devil himself.
The plague doctor had seen his domain, and a worse place didn’t exist, even in his vast imagination.
“Oh, plague doctor,” Diavala said. The laughter from the purple-eyed child scared him, how wild it sounded, even in its silence. “Honestly. I didn’t emerge from the womb an immortal body stealer. Who do you think cursed me to begin with?”
Chapter 20
Celia pulled Griffin along toward the sound of softly lapping water. Every muscle in his body had fused into rock, and the smile had been smacked off his face; she’d never known him to fall out of character so fast and so hard.
She couldn’t imagine anything worse than finding out that Halcyon could travel to and from the afterlife, and that’s precisely what she suspected Diavala had just told him.
At least it saved her the trauma of being the one to break the news. Oh by the way, dear plague doctor, you’re now embroiled in a dispute that spans centuries AND worlds, including the one you’re so terrified of! Sorry I brought you here, my mistake!
Celia inhaled, readying herself.
He confirmed everything she already knew . . . and then some.
They’d come to Wisteria on the hope that Halcyon would have a way of saving Griffin from Diavala’s possession, and Celia had bet everything on it, including her future.
But it turned out that Halcyon was the one who’d cursed Diavala to begin with.
Celia might have laughed at the irony, if she didn’t feel like throwing up.
“I’m not going to say ‘I told you so’ about Halcyon,” he finally said, “but know that I’m thinking it.”
That was fair.
“And every few hundred years he hunts me down,” Griffin quoted
at one point. It sent quivers under Celia’s skin, hearing him talk as Diavala. “He has a bottomless amount of hatred for me, but his anger is a glacier . . . it builds over such long stretches of time that the force of it when unleashed is unparalleled. Your worst nightmares realized. Your fears, in the flesh. Though you might not believe me, plague doctor, there are so many things worse than death, and I’ve seen them all by Halcyon’s hand.”
And Celia reached for sympathy harder than she’d ever done before: if Halcyon became displeased with her, she might have exactly the same story to tell one day.
Both of them were tied to monsters now.
But why wasn’t Griffin’s monster leaving? This was her opportunity for freedom. The road out of Wisteria lay around a few bends. The horizon beckoned.
Celia’s suspicion flared anew.
“Does Halcyon still trust you?” Griffin asked Celia.
“As much as he trusts anyone, yes.”
“Make sure you keep it that way,” he said, squeezing her hand again. For all the shock this must have been for him, Griffin was handling it shockingly well. Only the briefest stutter, and he was back to swaggering and smiling as if he’d never gone off script.
Celia didn’t know who could possibly be watching them, but she suspected that at least Rian was. Maybe the entire town was in on Halcyon’s duplicity.
Celia tried to tell him about Rian—how she was, apparently, Halcyon’s executioner—but he cut her off. “I know,” he said with a wry grin.
“What?”
“There are no sick people here, no overly elderly ones. Illness and age aren’t exactly perfect, are they? Travelers are carefully screened. It makes sense. But the most obvious hint was that Lyric told me not to eat or drink anything Rian offered. They’ve been sneaking me food and water for days.”
Celia hissed through her teeth. “Well, isn’t that nice of them.” Hopefully, they were doing the same for Zuni. “I didn’t have time to grab any supplies, but I have a bit of money, and with how distracted everyone is by the party tonight, you’ll be able to make it pretty far before anyone notices.”
Griffin cleared his throat. “You want me to leave before a party? It’s like you don’t know me at all.” Anger rolled off of him in waves, but he skillfully hid it behind his fake smile. “You’re making it sound like you want me to leave without you.”
“You have to.”
He chuckled, as if she’d just told the most hilarious joke.
Celia yanked him closer to her side. “Nothing about this is funny,” she whispered fiercely. “If you’re staying because of some sense of duty or obligation to me, trust me, it’s not needed. I’m going to be fine here. He needs me, but you and Zuni are leverage.”
Griffin squeezed her hand tight again and brought it to his lips, as if apologizing for his noise. It was dizzying, living inside chaos and pretending everything was normal. “Ah, so Zuni’s here,” he whispered, as if that explained everything. He must have assumed there was something else keeping Celia there, and now he had his confirmation. “At Rian’s?” he asked.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she responded, glancing over her shoulder. No one seemed to be following them, but the show had to go on. “I’ll find her.”
“Or,” he said slowly, “you can stop being a stubborn mule.” Louder, he said, “Let’s put the past behind us and enjoy this expedition, shall we?”
Celia grumbled. How would you think this through? Celia asked Anya. She brushed Xinto away and put her hand to her stomach. How would you make him leave?
They approached a copse of trees toward the promise of river lobsters. The path underfoot had changed from dry grasses to damp moss, the surrounding landscape stretching out into trees and shrubs, all of it much more familiar to Celia and Illinia-like. They crested a small hill, and the forest opened up to a huge expanse of calm water. Even with the sun high in the sky, Celia could barely make out the opposite bank. The trees that dotted the far side looked like twigs.
Shimmering in the sunlight, the water looked nothing like the grungy canals of Asura, nor even the glimpses of sea Celia had seen at the port, with its bustle of ships, docks, and rough sailors. Celia’s breath caught at the beauty of it.
“This is the kind of hunt that’s better to do in pairs,” Griffin explained. “One stays on the shore, quiet and meek and completely still, while the other dives into the water and stirs it up, with the aim of making the most commotion possible. The instinct of a river lobster when faced with an unknown threat, Michali explained to me, is to seek out the familiar. They rush toward shore, where they breed and nest, and—hopefully—into waiting hands.”
Griffin didn’t stop to admire the view, but immediately jogged down the bank and stopped at the edge, where the moss gave way to mud and then deeper, reed-filled water. “They’re fast as hell,” he said, taking off the dangling plague doctor mask, his boots, his coat, and his shirt, and rolling up his pants. Damn, but his speed was impressive. He could be undressed in a matter of seconds if he wanted, which, she supposed, he’d learned through rapid costume changes with the Mob.
Then he squelched through the mud until he was in ankle-deep water. “If you try to catch them, they’ll only dart away. They’re smart and can’t be caught with conventional traps. So smart, Celia, that people call them river lobsters when they’ve never been known to live in rivers, only freshwater lakes.” He turned and smiled at her, admiring those clever, wily river lobsters. She recognized that false smile; it spoke of a hidden meaning, just for her. “It’s as if they fooled everyone, even the cleverest, by pretending to be one thing, only to be another thing entirely.”
Tears prickled at Celia’s eyes, and she had to look away from Griffin’s smiling face and shocking amount of bare skin, instead examining the lakeshore and surrounding forest. With Diavala between them, their relationship was impossible to nurture, but the hint of forgiveness was there. And more important, it amazed her how familiar his Riddlish was. How easily they fell back into understanding each other.
He’d led her here for a reason.
“Michali told me the far easier job is the catcher,” he said, “although I don’t think that’s true. I had much more success out there, causing chaos, than on the shore. You try it first.” He held out his hand as she shook her head. “Don’t worry about your clothes. I have no trouble with a little nudity.”
His tone was so light, but his offered hand was insistent.
Tentatively, she took off her hat and boots, added her folded coat and shirt to his strewn pile of clothes on the shore, and rolled up her pants. She hadn’t worn a corset since leaving Asura, so she matched him, skin for skin.
Their eyes didn’t leave each other’s, but it was a struggle. Griffin looked like he would combust. He grabbed her hand and pulled her in farther. At every handspan she walked deeper into the water, mud squelching between her toes until it turned to silt and then to pebbly rocks. She gasped at the shocks of cold water. When they hit her kidneys, she hissed and tried to turn around.
He didn’t let her. His grip had turned viselike.
“But I can’t do the chaos causing,” she said to his back, “because I can’t swim.” Illinia was as waterlogged a country as one could find, yet swim lessons had never been on the mistico’s list of priorities to teach little inklings.
Griffin laughed like he didn’t believe her. His hair hung loose, and she had some trouble looking away as it moved in waves across his bare shoulders. “You’ll have to learn,” he said.
He turned, scooped her up, and threw her into deeper water. Her scream didn’t have time to leave her throat before she went under.
Her eyes slammed shut while her arms and legs windmilled and kicked. She stretched out, reaching for the ground she knew had to be there, but she had no idea which direction it was. A bolt of pain knocked through her leg as she kneed a large rock, and she grappled for it, trying to orient herself to up. It was so cold, so dark. Her heart raced and her lungs screamed for
the air they knew they couldn’t have, but she forced herself to open her eyes. She forced herself still enough to notice where the glimmers of sunlight came from.
Directly in front of her, two legs, one boasting a beautiful plague doctor tattoo. The water was clear. Crisp. Perfect.
Like everything else in Wisteria.
Celia twisted and put her feet under her, then scrambled up. “You ass,” she said, sputtering and spitting, her hair dangling in her face. The water was barely to her armpits. “What part of ‘I can’t swim’ didn’t you understand?” It was a good thing the temple had taught her how to hold her breath, but then again, they’d also taught her it was possible to drown in a tiny amount of water.
“That was how Georgio taught me,” he said. “Don’t worry, I was ready to haul you out if you panicked even half the amount I did when they tossed me in.” Griffin’s laughter was full-bodied but sharp around the edges.
She shoved a wave of water at him, but all he did was step into it, coming closer. “I won’t lie,” he said. “I feel much better all of a sudden.”
“Vindicated?”
“A bit.” He was infuriatingly hard to stay mad at, with water droplets falling from his hair and down his chest, with a smile that, for the first time in a long time, looked completely genuine. Even if it was at her expense.
Her breathing had calmed enough from being underwater that it hitched again when he stepped closer. Right in front of her. Nearly chest to chest. Their tenors flickered against each other, pressing close enough to mix: his silvers with her bronzes and reds. If they edged even a bit closer, all manner of colors would tangle together beautifully.
He bent and whispered in her ear, drops of water from his hair falling on her exposed shoulder. She’d frozen like a rabbit, shivering from the cold, but not minding it too much at all. “I’m staying, but I’m not just staying for you. I’m also staying for Diavala, because there may be a way to help her. And I’m staying for me.”