One Winter’s War
Alison Lanier
© 2010 Alison Lanier
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN: 978-160844-780-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 0000000000
This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this book are purely fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
For more information, including other works by Alison lanier, please go to www.alisonlanieronline.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author
As always, for my family.
In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection.
Arthur Miller
A Brief History
The United States of America was established in 1776, the dawn of the Revolutionary War. The newfound country had placed their trust in General George Washington, but in the wake of his death in pitched battle shortly before the army’s retreat to Valley Forge, the post of leadership fell naturally to the Marquis de Lafayette. After the triumph of the new nation at the British surrender in New York Harbor and the treaty made shortly thereafter at Madrid, the Marquis assumed the role of the nation’s first president.
Lafayette found himself under enormous pressure from the doomed Louis the Sixteenth, who had fallen fatally low in the public view, to convert the young country into a French colony, but to the disastrous disappointment of the King, the President maintained America’s independent status, though the culture of the thirteen colonies became predominately French. In the capital, La Ville de Lafayette, French arose as the dominant language. The President-Marquis enjoyed a luxurious existence, gratefully separated from his homeland’s revolution by the wide Atlantic.
When the Civil War arose, the scandalous resignation of General Grant in 1862 plunged the Union into disarray, which in turn allowed the Confederacy to sweep toward victory, establishing the Great North American Confederacy by 1865. However, the nation’s collective view towards the practice of slavery turned extraordinarily dark within the first several years of the Confederacy’s existence, and the Emancipation Proclamation was hurriedly reissued under popular demand.
With the frayed political situation at hand, the technology of the time consequently moved in leaps and bounds in some fields and sagged behind in others. Steam power was dismissed after a disastrous series of accidents that resulted in the death of several popular celebrities; the Age of Sailing raced on, the ships becoming larger and more elaborate by the year with improved engineering. Railroads were laid out beginning in the 1870s after funding for the project was renewed following Kanata’s failed invasion of the Confederacy, attempted shortly after the northern nation had procured its independence in 1868. The North American Confederacy found a foundation in its economy as a global power as it thrived in the glamorous style of Victorian times.
Hundreds of years previous, the Holy Roman Empire fell
to a technologically-advanced confederation of states that became
a single nation under the title of the Germanic Kingdom, dominating
central Europe into the twentieth century.
The Kingdom, under its monarch, generally maintained a technological advantage
over most other nations on the planet, excepting, in some regards, the North American Confederacy. New, extraordinary finds were made almost weekly in the fields of electricity, weaponry, and elemental-level substances. All of these revolutionary discoveries were thrust almost immediately into use in the military as the continent grappled with the violence and destruction of the War to End All Wars.
This World War erupted in the wake of the assassination of a Kingdom Prince, but a muddle of censorship and totalitarian government hiding behind a front of monarchy within the Kingdom’s borders had kept a portion of the population around München-Erste in complete ignorance of the conflict even as trenches were dug, tanks rolled out, and the Kingdom’s treasury sunk. The War’s international players, including the American Confederacy and the English Empire, gradually shirked their treaties of alliance and vanished back into their local and national concerns. The globe was left in an economic slump, masked by a concentrated outpouring of military production powered by deficit spending.
The relatively small country of the Estate, which seceded from the Kingdom early in twelfth century, remained greatly isolated from the majority of the conflict that is at the present— in this year 1899–raging primarily between the technology of the Kingdom, decades ahead of its time, and the military supremacy of Ruthenia to the east. The Estate preserves a policy of noncommunication with the Kingdom and its monarchy government, and consequently the smaller nation remains largely ignorant of many of the commonplace technologies such as automobiles that are coming into everyday use in the Kingdom and the nations of its allies.
0
The Witches of the Mountains leapt onto their branches of living willow and ash, maple and oak, box elder and pine, soared up into the chill, turbulent world of the night sky, twisting through the scraps of black clouds on the currents of air and moonlight, singing in high, wild voices, calling up the night.
The night was their breath and their heartbeat, their souls and their spirits, their undying lives. They relished the brightness of the sunlit day, when gold tinged the leaves and the sky was the color of periwinkle, and made their deep Caves ring in the symphony of their voices, the marble sanctuary in the Marbled Mountains’ valley echoing in an unearthly melody, secluded, undiscovered. When the sun sank silently to the blanket of the horizon, and the gold faded to yellow to orange to red to precious, dying scraps of brilliance, and daylight streamed away from its world, the Witches seized their living branches, coaxing the broken limbs to live and fly and carry them to the heights where stars seemed near at hand, and they flew up and up and up, higher, higher, farther, over the Estate, raising their moonlight voices in song, calling the night to life.
And the night, obedient, came into being, striving towards those chill, lovely harmonies driving the clouds across the sky, that tenderly played the night breezes like harp strings. The Witches were night themselves, their hearts untamed and ever-feeling, so passionate and acute that, at the most insignificant of tragedies—the death of a blade of dewy grass, the first frost that slaughtered a family of bees—their voices would scream in mournful horror and their hearts would shatter like frail glass sculptures.
But they felt joy, too, the greatest joy in the worlds, and the next instant, the entire Flock could be singing in delight, their hearts mended with threads of warm happiness, at the sparkle of melted moonlight on a lake’s face, at the budding of the smallest flower. This was how the Witches existed—passionate, loving, heartbreak and heartmake.
One Witch was young, but not the youngest, beautiful, but not the most exquisite of her Flock, and she trilled like a mockingbird in her laughter as the ash trees tried to keep secrets from her, because she, she of all the Witches, could hear the intent of those secrets that the leaves whispered, could taste the flavor of them on her tongue…her cheeks were white as alabaster, shining under the light of her ancient mother, the moon, her eyes alight with all the mysteries, all manner of unsolved whispers…and she soared, high and fast and flawless on the night’s breezes, leading her Witches on, for she, that young Witch who was not the youngest, was the Witch Kraljica, unremarkable among her sisters, if a Witch could be such a thing as unremarkable, but her gentling fingers that caressed her branch of willow wood and living leaves showed magic, in that simple, cunning movement, more clearly than it did at any of her fellow fliers’ touch.
She was ruling, but not superior, and though the Young Kraljica was the monarch of her Flock Witches, and though she wore the living Black Rose of infinite shades and hues behind her left ear, to remind her of duty with its thorns, she was as ungraspable as any of the other Witches, and as uncatchable with her silver-ebony eyes, caught up in the speed and the wind and the moonlight, she was not greater, for any one of her sisters could pluck that Rose from behind her ear at any time, and then that Witch would be her Kraljica, but the Witches were as true as their Song, and they would never take the throne without reason agreed to through the fluid melody of the nighttime symphony, and no Witch had a reason for displacing their young Kraljica.
Far below, a flower withered. The little death reverberated through the Witches’ living night. The hearts of the Flock broke like a thundercloud releasing its load, and the Song became a lamentation that made the leaves of the oaks whisper against one another like secrets. The wailing notes melted into the nighttime, stirred with the dark, celebrated growth and sprouting and being and beauty, and mourning its loss—
But their hearts healed at the next beat, and they soared higher and faster still, an owl calling fearfully from below as it saw the shadows on the stars, and the Witches sang to it in such soothing, calming harmony that the owl raised its tawny head and hooted in its clearest, purest note, the clearest and purest any owl had ever sung, and it made no comparison to the harsh, gentle, raging, calm, beautiful tones of the Mountain Witches, led by their young Kraljica.
It was a dark, tempestuous night. Vast tenebrous clouds raced across the heavens, obscuring the light of the stars.
Alexandre Dumas
I
Lucas
The world began for Beth in the early autumn of 1899.
What she knew before that was a honey-colored cottage, secluded but not dismal, simple and sweetly private, separated from the capital of her country, which she didn’t know the name of, by a dozen miles of manicured fields maintained by that country as a statement of order, that not even the grass would grow out of turn. This field, more rightly called a lawn, and the imposing purple-gray of marble-streaked mountains that infringed on the field with its rolling foothills, bordered Beth’s little universe like the picture frame of an idyllic photograph.
But she wasn’t entirely isolated herself, because living with her, existing within the same sphere of six rooms and wind and sun and seasons, was a compensation for everyone else she didn’t know.
She didn’t have a name like everybody else. Beth had never asked, but she knew explicitly that this being existed to fill the natural slot of mother in the little girl’s life. She was cool and quick and kind, clever and perfumed and airy, talented, and most of all, very lovely. Her child’s mind couldn’t conceive of any daydream that could surpass her. Ivory-skinned, slender, and emerald-eyed, with a halo of scarlet hair. She always seemed to shine the way dewy grass shone. Humble and slim and stunning.
The mother had a luster, something warm and flawless. Gentle. Sugared.
Beth was eight or nine—there was never any established birthday, nor did there seem to be a need for one. Life was timeless here, loose and disconnected. She could see the lights of the city reflecting off the sky at night, but she had no idea what the concept of a café or a hotel or a library meant. She was satisfied, though, to know that somewhere they did have a meaning, and satisfied to know that it had no bearing on her. She was almost proud of the luxury of being separate, that the world at large had nothing to do with her and that she had nothing to do with it, that there was fish from the river for her dinner, and that winter brought snow, and she could pass her days sketching crude, childish likenesses of fruit and trees and mountains, kicking her way through the snow that came inherently with short days, and climbing to the roof in the yellow heat of summer, perching there and hearing the crisp echoes of the city that was another world.
Her short existence had required very little thought, little concern, no stress, no wider terrors. She could pick it up between two fingers and drop it in a honey jar. Everything was fine. Perfect and true and unquestioned. No toys overburdening her attic bedroom floor, no satin sheets on the scratchy cot, no lacy curtains on the petit window that opened over the lawn. What was arithmetic to her? Literature? Politics? Society? People?
Just one person.
And Beth had loved it. Reveled in it. But she couldn’t believe it now. It was fairy-grace. It was gone.
It was that summer, late, with the falling leaves just beginning to flutter and glitter in their seasonal death. That summer, when Beth was eight or nine and happy, the season rolled in and out again like spiced satin. She imagined she could press it into perfume and preserve it in a bottle. She spent her lazy hours drawing with the juice of berries she crushed onto the surface of mossy rocks. But it was at the end of those perfect, scented days that she fell asleep on her cot without drinking the warm milk the mother left on her bedside table each night. The scent of flowers on her fingertips was too strong to smell the hot, whisked scent of the liquid, sweetness on sweetness.
The wind woke her around midnight. The shudders clattered against her window, angry, impatient, and hard, and she wrapped the faded quilt around her shoulders and buried her face with her chilled nose and raw skin against the pillow. But sleep wouldn’t come again. It seemed to be willfully dancing away, hopping backward and sitting down and feeling solidly distant.
Beth saw the grimy mug—had it always been grimy?—on her little table then, but the milk was cold. Her woolen shawl was folded clumsily at the foot of her bed, and she tugged it around her arms, scratchy and homey, as the wind assaulted the glass. The narrow stairway to the kitchen was chilled and dark; she wanted to go back to bed, slip into sweet dreams, but something was wrong, something was shifted…Something wasn’t the way it always had been. Maybe it was the milk.
She descended the stairs carefully, counting out the age-old steps by creaks and dips. And something—in her? Or was that only the wind?—was insatiably restless, tugging, nagging, shouting under its breath.
Should she wake the mother? That was instinct, hopeful and serene, but she didn’t feel serene—she felt like she was living within the moments after the passing of a nightmare, the first few instants of wakefulness, of irrational terror, but the terror wasn’t passing, and she couldn’t remember if it was her dream that it was rooted in or something else, one of the many mysteries in the universe she had no idea of.
She crept forward into the shaded kitchen. Warm more milk, drink it down, crawl back into bed—a rudimentary plan to ease the nightmare terror away, wash out the frightening echoes of the what she couldn’t grasp.
Beth threw all her little weight into opening the icebox, but the moonlight cut a sharp shadow across its interior, and her tiny, frozen hands couldn’t find the milk jug in the dark. And she turned, intending to kindle the little lamp on the kitchen table, but as her hands, rubbed hurriedly warm by the wool shawl, closed delicately around the flimsy matchbox, there was a sharp, definite sound outside the kitchen door, out in the night.
The child froze, her hand outstretched, her gaze fixed on the ripple-glass window in the door. It was lit with cool, constant silver, and for a moment Beth was no longer afraid. Was that her imagination playing with the moonlight?
But abruptly there was a shadow blotted over the silver.
And she was under the table a moment later, pushing the soft tablecloth aside and dropping it down behind her like a stage curtain. A creak, sharp and familiar but strangely distorted and disjointed from what she knew from all those infinite memories of coming and going from the cottage. The bottom of the door, just visible under the cloth, swung in and hesitated there. The silver, powerful and subtle, flooded in at once, lighting up all the edges of the kitchen, petite, geometric, toy-like. A light wind lifted the cloth.
Two slim, bare feet entered with the wind. Very slim. Skeletal, actually, all jagged bones and scarred skin stretched too tight and too pale.
Beth’s curiosity was almost a physical pain, nagging at her jumping pulse. She flopped onto her stomach, shuffled right to the hem of the cloth, rested her chin on the chilled wood of the floor.
And she recognized her mother’s scent, but the figure on the threshold couldn’t possibly be her mother, because where Mother was beautiful and graceful and full of lovely, soft kindness, this creature’s face was like a polished skull, pale as the naked bone with skin pulled taut over it, the eyes huge and owlish, pieces of hard, heartless jade in the moonshine. There was no hint of the warm gentleness that enveloped her mother, only bare, raw, brutal terror, a childhood fear made solid and permeable and so a thousand times more frightening.
Adults always remember childish fears with some measure of contempt or laughter or embarrassment, but their only entry was through memory or dreams or the shadows in the closet or under the bed, but just here, in the moonlight kitchen, the rules were turned around and torn to pieces. And tiny Beth watched the nightmare sweep into the cottage, held her breath against her pounding nerves as the ivory feet stepped soundlessly towards the table. A match was struck, the lamp lit, the silver melted into a cheap, imitation golden yellow, mingling smoothly with the chilly night sneaking in from outside.
The slim monster was illuminated, emaciated, gaunt, muscles straining like thin, strange snakes standing out underneath the pallid skin, as if a great, pent-up energy was contained within that terrible body, bending and straining and waiting for the most dreadful opportunity to strike out, to burn, to choke. The sound of its sharp, heavy breathing was on the air like humidity.
Beth felt so fragile, flat on the cold boards, watching the creature move back towards the door. She was barely concealed—the pair was close, and the nearness was conscious of itself, pressing its existence into awareness, like the force felt between two identical ends of a magnet. It was the risk, the danger in it, the verge of being found—
She felt as if the monster was breathing malice, could feel it rolling off the monster like the sweet scent it wore.
It was at the door again, and Beth thought she meant to close it against the wind, but she stretched one bone-pale arm outside and beckoned to something unseen.
And Beth held her hand over her mouth, because she knew that if she removed it she would scream, and she mustn’t make a sound—
Into the doorway slouched a humpbacked form, a tiny someone, a shadow caught in the moonlight, but then it took a wobbling uncertain step into the orange lamplight and Beth choked.
It was a boy—or something that might have once been a boy, once, but now it was pallid and slimy, its sandy hair fallen away in patches, its eyes too large and its nose broken and crooked. The mouth was huge and gaping and toothless, its fingers were bent and three were missing altogether, its legs were twisted, its right foot entirely absent, so that as it—he—staggered into the cottage’s bright little kitchen, its mutilated body slumped and swayed in rhythm with its crippled limb.
As the lamplight caught it, Beth saw that its skin, wet and glistening with glop, was composed of thousands of miniscule, yellowish scales.
The nightmare that resembled her mother reached out a bone-white arm to support the scaly, corpse-like thing further into the light and Beth recoiled underneath the table, fascinated and disturbed and mortified. She could feel the woman’s forceful malice, the needle-sharp intent, its intelligent focus, bending in around the creature. It was like a new sense, a terrible one, an awareness of the ideas and forces catching at the air, how they waned and waxed and grabbed and shifted. It settled on the boy thing, fixed on it, and she opened the delicate, cherry-red lips, curled cruelly—
The voice that issued out of that mouth was as frozen and relentless and biting as an Arctic ice storm. So cold that it burned against the sweat moistening Beth’s forehead.
And the monster crowed “Isn’t that nice, Lucas? Do you know where you are? You’re in that cottage that all you children are always talking about. But it isn’t very bad here, is it? Wouldn’t you like to stay here? Now, do you remember who I am? It’s only been a few moments Lucas—do you remember me?”
The hideous thing’s lip trembled, it twitched, and a wordless gurgle emanated from its throat, and one bone-pale, skeletal hand came to rest on its balding, slimy, scaly head—
The boy-thing fawned under the touch, quivered with delight as the white thumb, thin as bone, caressed its scalp. Beth shuddered with revulsion, but she saw that the boy-creature was flattered, pandering and groveling under the touch, as if the contact with that terrible attention was the greatest reward it could imagine.
“Good, good, Lucas,” whispered that stormy-ice voice. “Good…”
Beth was struggling to breathe, urging the air into her lungs—that command, that utter absolution—it was consuming, dark, seductively sweet and deadly, like thin ice you thought was a mile thick giving way under your feet, leaving you to plunge down into the lethal water beneath.
The boy-thing gurgled happily.
She wrapped a slender arm around the slimy shoulders and led the monster in its hobbling gait to the kitchen cabinets. She was like a mother, really, but a strange, unnatural, hateful one, like a lioness forcing a kitten on in front of it, and the kitten is wildly frightened, but at the same time honored and happy to be under the killer’s eye, so much larger and grander—terror subverting and overcoming and creeping and subjugating another terror, a more innocent, more kitten-like one.
The woman-nightmare opened one of the cabinets, a small one, one that held flour and sugar and a few jars and spices and a few potently-scented candles in their colored glass canisters, and she swept it all aside in an instant, with one smooth swipe of her skeletal arm, but none of the items came crashing down onto the counter—they vanished.
Beth’s finger squeezed her lips together, drawing back further into the shadows, and she let her hair fall closer over her eyes and her face so that less of her bare skin would be exposed to that awful pair; her heart in her throat was deafening in her ears.
I can’t breathe.
The woman, wrapped in the nightmare shadows, ushered the boy into the shadows inside the cabinet, and the wet, glistening body struggled into the small space, but it didn’t stop where it logically should have, it kept going, right through the back of the cabinet, and its stub of an ankle slipped out of sight last of all, and the face of polished bone leaned closer to the cabinet, the jade eyes sparkling with a hard, clever glint, the shower of blood-red tresses falling closer to the white face…
“Thank you, Lucas,” she hissed. “You’ve been a great help, and you will be again. Wait, little Lucas, be patient. Wait, little Lucas.”
I can’t breathe—
And she swept her arm across the space again. The sugar and the flour reappeared with the candles enclosed in colored glass and the spice jars, the green velvet cloak flowed around her legs like the twisting darkness in the outskirts of a bad dream. She tapped one bony, snowy-white fingertip on the top of one of the metal-capped spice canisters, and the hollow metallic echoed through the kitchen.
“Wait, little Lucas.”
A guttural gurgle answered from the solid back of the cabinet, deep, sandy, satisfied.
Beth stayed hidden under the kitchen table for three more hours, lying flat on her stomach long after the monster in the green velvet cloak had vanished back into the windy night, over the smooth lawns towards the Duke’s City and the cluster of apartments and businesses that made up the core of the Estate. What she was doing there, who she was meeting, what children she was kidnapping and bespelling, Beth didn’t care, she couldn’t think of that. What had been safe and secure and unquestionable was suddenly in ragged shards, and at the core of it was the flawless mother who was all in a moment a perfect monster.
She lay, shuddering uncontrollably, and she wrapped her drab woolen shawl more tightly around her scrawny shoulders and forgot how to weep. She felt grown up, too experienced and knowledgeable and burdened for her age, and she desperately wanted to lie there forever so that she wouldn’t have to face a world, armed as she was with this new, sharp, dreadful view of things.
But there was a refuge, a round-about kind of relief. Magic and monsters were children’s things, she thought, and the world belonged to grown-ups. So that rest of the world couldn’t be concerned with the mother-monster. It was separate, disconnected…she was safe in the wide world, somehow, but that option had to be kept, cherished, preserved, not wasted wantonly in a sudden escape. She’d keep that hope, she’d save it. It was a secret, a perfect thing like a gem cut into a personal kind of glory. A very, very small triumph.
Eventually, as the sky outside the tiny window of rippled glass turned pearly and peach and the stars and silver faded into a greater brightness, Beth had to draw herself up from the floor. She couldn’t stop trembling, could feel her heart shaking inside her, and she dragged her feet with ragged exhaustion back to the narrow staircase, back up to the attic, and collapsed onto her low cot. She had suddenly realized how shabby and cheap everything in the cottage was.
She glared at the mug of cold milk from the safety of her patched, sheer quilt. She would never drink that magic draft again, she swore silently, and she crawled out of bed again, her little frame not trembling from fear now but with fury at being such a toy, such a stupid little doll for the monster who called herself her mother.
She tipped the enchanted drink out her window before replacing the mug on the bedside table and crawling into bed, hearing the birdsong blooming into life outside and feeling bitter and angry and sorrowful and repulsed. She felt like an adult, cheated, too old for her age. The distortion that sprouted thornily out of all the charmed lies made her sick and solidly sour.
And she thought of little Lucas, and curled her knees into her thin chest before dropping off into sleep just as the first golden rays of dawn struck her frail, tensed body, soaking a little warmth back into her skin, sweet comfort.
When she rose the next morning, she saw that the roses that climbed the side of the cottage under her window had wilted and died in the night.
Beth wasn’t foolish, and over the long doleful years she formed conclusions, half from imagination and half from observation, and so bit by bit she pieced together the imagined tragedy of her little life.
She speculated a picture into being, the monster with the ivory skull and bloody hair carrying a screaming baby into her cottage, so far removed from everyone else, to administer that first terrible dose of warm milk from the hated mug that cast the stolen infant’s mind into an enchanted limbo of delusions, where the monster-woman is beautiful and her entire nature gentle and warm and motherly and benevolent, the way a mother’s should be, enveloping and loving, infinitely caring and graceful and clever.
And now ten-year-old Beth realized that she was never out from under those cold jade eyes. She always spilled the drugged milk out the window before she went to bed, to find in the morning that the roses under her window had wilted further in the night, their velvet beauty stumbling one step closer to death. Without the mercifully softening aspect of the spell, the woman who she had believed to be her mother was always pale and skeletal and nightmarish, always fierce and frightening, and she was always there, just around the next corner of the cottage, just beyond the next tree, a few feet away in a field of wild flowers.
So Beth retreated inwardly, into logic and childish imaginings, where she was safe, guarded by angels and large, ferocious dogs that bent their heads for her to pat after they’ve chased the nightmare away. The girl’s body, while her mind was so energetically seeking escape, withered, grew frail and fragile, like a leaf frozen over in winter. Her skin lost its flush and her eyes grew dull and tired, far away in that dream place of imaginings and light and friends.
And the monster still went on and on pretending to be the kindly, beautiful, gracious mother, a play-actor whose mask has fallen away without her realizing her audience’s disenchantment. Her captive daughter had opened her eyes to the dual, twisting deception knotting inside the honey-colored cabin that now stank of sordid herbs and biting, burning malice. But through her vivid world inside her head, where she made and lost friends she didn’t have in her true, captive life, blew on dogwood flowers and watched them fly away as butterflies. There, she lay on her back as the snow fell and listened to the voices whispering gentle, warming sighs to her happy ears as it fell, white and sleek and pure, all around her.
Outside, she was getting older. Life was dirty, contaminated by that pretentious line of lies. She was afraid to eat her oatmeal in the morning, because who knew what spells might be hidden underneath the basil’s sharp, clear taste? But there was never any poison, no enchantments to cast her back into delighted ignorance, only slightly burned oatmeal and another miserable day to face. She had come to realize that she was safe here, inside the web of deceit. It was a strange security, but she relished it. The lies were suddenly the buffer between her and the world outside and her identity there. Her imagination, held prisoner within the four walls of the cottage and the monster’s grasp, was her best friend in the world, a private, playful universe that opened doors to escape she could never begin to contemplate in real life.
It had happened that morning, before she climbed back up to take her familiar perch on the roof; she’d heard it as she ate her oatmeal breakfast. From the dreaded cabinet of sugar and flour and spices and scented candles, came the sickly, guttural, gurgling sound from Lucas’s throat.
Beth had puzzled out what Lucas was by then. He was a captive, like her, behind the false back of the cabinet. But he’d been plucked from home much later than she had, and the enchantment placed on him hadn’t been half as kind as the one still supposed to be blinding Beth.
Maybe that’s what she’s waiting to do with me—
No. No, it’s something different. But I don’t know…
And there was nobody to ask, and if there had been, Beth would have had no idea how to have a conversation with them. Her imagination-logic taught her guesses, slowly, delicately, but neither she nor that hopeful, separate world could be sure of anything beyond the four honey-colored walls.
Beth put down her spoon before it could clatter against the side of her bowl as her shoulders began to shake again. She could see his too-large eyes, grossly large, ghostly pale and soulless in the moonlight, smell the suckering slime on his scaly body.
Maybe I’m going to end up like that. Maybe she’s been saving me, raising me, like when you feed a cow before you slaughter it and grind it up.
The gurgle came again, but of the course the woman monster was there, and she swept forward in a movement of silent terror, a shade, and the grace Beth had watched with admiration and jealousy and patience—because, of course, she must look like her lovely mother one day too, and would be stunning and faultless just like that—was still there. But now Beth could see it as that powerful tension, like a snake waiting at the roadside for you to walk by before it bites your ankle with venomous teeth, just for the fun of it. The mother-monster placed her bone-white hand delicately against the cabinet door and cooed softly.
The gurgling subsided.
Beth’s mind formed the picture, the gross, damp creature coiled up in obscurity. She bent her head forward so that her pale hair fell in front of her face to hide the abhorrence etched there.
The woman-monster poured a cup of strong black coffee in a stained mug. Its pungent smell soaked through the kitchen air like oil seeping into a sponge. She drew out a chair from the table and sat down, leaning back like a contented tigress, the most gorgeous and violent and ruthless of its kind. Beth could feel the intimate darkness, that new sense, the scraps of malice draped around her slender figure. It was like poison on the air: breathe it and suffer or don’t and die and escape.
“You’re growing up, darling,” said the monster silkily, unpleasant, quiet, wild and tame, but only for the moment. Beth could hear the savage unhappiness at being chained into human words and civilities and manners and habits at this discreet little table, could feel the absolute satisfaction that the creature concealed in the cabinet gave her, knew how wild and open and grotesque she could be. “Would you like some coffee this morning?”
“No thank you.” Beth felt dizzy at the thought. Surely there was something more under that cover of choking smells than caffeine and energy and the elegant opportunity to tip the cup back and sip the strong black drink in that just-so way the nightmare was doing now…
So the coffee had been harmless after all, but Beth wasn’t sorry she’d refused it, and she remembered wanting so much to try the potent drink for so long, longing to taste just one drop of the sweet black stuff, but it was always out of reach, too high on the counter, forbidden.
“Do you know any arithmetic, Beth?” asked the monster on the other side of the small table, and Beth shook her head in return.
“Any letters, any sums?”
Beth shook her head.
“Any needlework?”
Shake.
“Good,” crowed the monster, all its filthy contentment brimming in the owlish eyes. “Those petty little skills are useless, in any case, pointless trifles to be tucked away and forgotten. Quite sad, really, that young, dear girls like you are wasting their fingers away, trying to master embroidery or some such nonsense, working themselves to the bone.”
And what she means is: thank goodness you didn’t pick those useful skills up somewhere, or they aren’t some kind of instinct in your mind, girl you are, foolish, trifling girl you are, or else you might try and venture out, make a stake. You are useless, and I do love to keep you this way.
“Perhaps we shall begin lessons one day soon. You are nearly a woman. We shall learn gardening and herbs, astronomy and astrology, of jewels and even how to tell when the weather is changing. Would you like that, darling?”
“Very much.” Beth sat very quiet and still, realizing that the next act of this tragedy was beginning, so slowly and sweetly, like maple syrup drizzling patiently from the mouth of the bottle onto a breakfast flavored with poison.
“I am a very good teacher, you’ll see. We’ll have fun.”
“Of course.”
“I will be gathering herbs from the foothills today. Will you come?”
“No, thank you. I’m very tired.”
“Then I will see you this evening. I’ve got a trout, fresh from the River, and perhaps I will buy some lemons for it today.”
Her skeleton hand folded its stark white fingers on Beth’s shoulder, and it might have felt like a mother’s wise, secure, parting touch had it not been for the way Beth’s heart wrenched inside her. Her stomach threatened to rebel, and there was something deeper, safer, which was sickened by the monster’s proximity.
“I’m going to the roof,” said Beth. Once she might have said Mother too, but those days were gone, the days where life had been sweet and good and unlocked, where the summering flowers in the trees brought the utmost joy, and that joy was tripled and intensified as her mother went to pluck the blossoms from the trees and crush them in her hand.
Up she climbed, up the rickety little stair that led through the ceiling of her bedroom and into the clear daylight. She crawled over the thatch, feeling the little pricks and pinches as the straw snapped and poked at her, feeling the wind twisting through her coarse hair. It was the closest thing to freedom here, the closest to the clouds and the closest to flying away from the skeletal terror with the voice like broken nails she knew was waiting for her when she went back downstairs. She ran her fingers over the Thatcher’s trademark pattern again, as familiar as her own shadow, wired in place, as she settled into the accustomed spot and looked out over the Estate.
The Estate had been a gift to some long-dead Duke in the long-distant past, perhaps for an act of bravery in war or for some personal service to the King or perhaps as a magnificent bribe for some dreadful secret uncovered, but no one could remember—it was too long ago, something momentous made sluggishly unimportant by the drag of time and the space history put between it and the present’s thinking, remembering minds. The Duke, almost forgotten, had built his remote Manor House in the core of his new property, close to the sea but just distant enough for a little dock town to sprout there, at the base of the cliff, decrepit from birth and slowly brightening.
The Duke himself set to creating a place that was a kingdom all its own. He bought deeds and woodlands, the Marbled Mountains and the Gillenti Sea’s coastline, hundreds of acres of beaches and farmland and villages and towns and woods and mountains and even a bit of barren, salted land, and then he sent out thousands of letters into the Kingdom, all on the same day, like hands reaching out across borders and distances, so that an army of postage flooded across the Kingdom in a papery conquest. Inside each parcel was the first of many payments for the recipient, and the promise of additional funds when the recipient and his family packed up their things and resettled in his vast Estate.
People cannot populate an area without the things that they live by—the mercantile enterprises, the farmers in their fields, the carpenters and potters and coopers, the artisans and poets and sailors and lighthouse keepers, all flocking to the Estate, nurtured their old lives into new growth within the Duke’s lands, and from his Manor House with the beginnings of a city blooming around it, his guiding finger prodded and directed and bullied and bribed every inhabitant of his new world into just the place he wanted them to go, so that artists’ studios were built on this boulevard, and schoolteachers set up their schoolhouses on the outskirts of this little village, and fishermen and tackle shops only ever cast their lines into this river or that river. It was all beautifully and craftily and subtly controlled, manipulated, like a painters hand or a sculptor’s chiseling, coloring the canvas and shaping the stone just so, so that his vision was perfected.
In twenty years, the Estate had its own interior governing body with a representative of the King present, a body of record-keepers, scholars and ambassadors, and visiting parties of leaders from other nations, come to revel in the quasi-nation born of a bloodless revolution. In thirty years it had its own messenger service and police. In forty years it had done away with the King’s representative, elected its own Prime Minister of sorts, and had raised its own private army. Set taxes were established, separate from the Kingdom’s, roads built, towns developed into budding cities surrounding the unofficial capital, where the Duke in his Manor House organized it all, his guiding mind moving everything into its place.
In half a century, the Duke’s Estate was more its own country than a noble’s property in the existing Kingdom. The citizens were content, the businesses thriving, the cities bustling, and its society kindled and blazing with hundreds of grand movements and intents and activities and reforms. Theaters were constructed in satin and gold, circuses rolled along the highways in their colorful wheeled train cars, monuments created, and a navy established. It was all functional and powerful and distant, smoothly run and firmly standing, unbreakable.
The Duke died, and his son took the Estate into his hands, and he continued in the way of his father, shaping and molding the privately owned kingdom from the safety of its heart.
The generations of Dukes pushed on, histories were written, philosophies were established, the Manor House was expanded and redesigned and expanded further, and the Estate worked like an enormous, well-oiled mechanism, efficient and prevailing, as the King watched with dismay from his Royal Palace, far away, as his courtiers brought back reports of the Estate’s grandeur, as his spies told him how flawlessly it was commanded and how practical and purposeful it was, all the money put to use, all the residents at ease, and the King dropped his head into his hands and groaned, the crown slipping lower over his forehead, as he admitted at last to himself that the Duke was now King himself in all but name.
Beth looked north towards the Marbled Mountains, content for the moment to sit and watch the eagles that soared like little pin-prick dots of ink against the blanket of white cloud pressing down over the peaks. Autumn was crisp and fresh in the valley by the foothills, but far away at the rocky crests of the natural marbled towers the winter snows were already pressing down like great ghostly hands. Beth imagined she could feel the snowflakes landing on her nose, on her cheeks, on her out-stretched arms, but life wasn’t sweet like that anymore. It was as if a barrier, as thin as the frailest pane of glass in an old drooping, molding window had been placed between her and the outside, blocking off the true depths of the sky and the vigor of the wind and the mix of spices that wafted with the wind to the cottage when the Ducal City sat down for teatime. It was a veil, a hard and unhappy wall.
She watched the shadows shift across the mountain peaks and the lawns, one to the north and one to the south, looked over the miniature forests that coated the lower portions of the mountains, traced the lines that the low stone fences formed over the abandoned fields and the Duke’s lawns, and she tilted her head back to drink in the sunlight that filtered through the thick clouds.
It was the greatest joy she knew to be here and forget that nameless fear that hid between the name of Mother and the broken mask of striking and gracious grace. What made the fear all the more real and close and cruel was that Beth didn’t have a name for the creature that held her captive, and she couldn’t invent one that encompassed all the terror that the monster inspired. A false name would only delude the truth instead of enhancing it, and the truth was the most precious thing that Beth knew.
It was this precious truth that had her heart thudding now, perched on the rooftop, wondering whether or not to throw herself down to her death, to end this mysterious imprisonment called life. But she was frightened of death too, and she clasped her hands in her lap and held back the sobs. The monster called Mother had never seen her cry once since that horrific night when she was eight, when the illusion shattered, and Beth knew that she was watching now, somehow, in one of her witchy ways, with those jade owlish eyes. She was careful not to shudder because she knew that the creature would see.
Her greatest fear had been that the monster was her mother, that this fearful captivity was justified in some merciless way, but her imaginative logic had expelled that idea. That monster couldn’t possibly be a mother.
Not after what she did to Lucas.
The sunset was long that night, throwing the Marbled Mountains into dramatic contrast. Beth breathed in the fading sunlight like she would tea with six cubes of sugar stirred in.
But something else was throwing a shadow across the world, over the neatly cropped grass of the Duke’s rolling lawns that led up to the City. A little cluster of long shadows hurried across the grass. Beth twisted and squinted on the roof, trying to get a better look, and saw a pack of nine children scurrying over the lawn.
Beth knew she was supposed to be a child, but, she often thought, and her logic confirmed it, that she wasn’t really anything. She wasn’t a child—she was too frightened all the time, too anxious, too aware and disconnected. She wasn’t a teen, because she was responsible and reserved and unwaveringly strict, and she wasn’t an adult, because she was too tiny and dependent on the outside world of the real grown-ups. She was a quandary, she decided, unsolvable.
But these were true children, slinking over the grass in the gathering dusk as the sunlight slipped away like honey slipping over oil. The dying gold was pale on their faces, illuminating the pale skin against the gloom and the shadows collecting themselves into night. Their clothes were neat and beautiful, rich and smooth. Their eyes were wide and eager, playful, thoughtless, intensely focused with silly ideas that they hadn’t considered head on, but rather had formed in a round-about, glance-in-passing sort of reasoning. They were children, kids, bright with life and vigor and sweet exhilaration at a new night and a new sunset.
And they couldn’t know what sort of nightmare they were racing towards.
Beth wanted to stand up on the roof and scream to the entire Estate, to warn them away, to send them so far away that the stars stood between them and the monster, but then one of the innocent, sneaking creatures on the ground drew something out of his trouser pocket and with a quick, practiced motion, lit a match. He was holding a matchbox, and the newborn orange flame was licking his eyes with a devilish light, and he didn’t look boyish and young and ignorant and playful anymore, but sly and crooked. Beth hesitated.
He passed the matchbox around to the other children, and Beth watched as she slid onto the other side of the roof peak, hiding for a reason even her trusted imaginative intuition, which had explained away her life and all its flaws, couldn’t fathom. These weren’t the guiltless, loving, tender creatures she’d imagined the children outside of the monster’s control to be. The tinge on the evening breeze was malicious, not kindly, dark, not warm and light and fleeting.
The children were stifling elated giggles as they stooped through the shadows, catching up long, thin sticks from the rough earth around the cottage, tugging at each others’ arms. They were hissing in each others’ ears, laughing easily through the muffling darkness, being quick, noisy, and happy, and Beth perceived the game they were playing as they touched the lit match to each branch in turn, the girls squealing in gleeful mischief as the boys lit the twigs.
Beth felt a strange kind of disgust, something akin to the deceit that the monster spread, the same sort of false front—
“Ready?” whispered one of the boys, loudly, and she caught that same note in his voice, that note that suggested, although he spoke in a whisper, he didn’t honestly mean to be quiet, not at all—it was all a farce, a show, trying to play along appropriately with his role at the moment for his friends.
“Ready!”
“Ready!”
“Ready!”
“Ready!”
It’s that same voice, that same deceit. Maybe there isn’t anything outside of the cottage, nothing in the whole world other than this deceit.
The children crept closer, the darkness pressed in more densely; Beth sank lower onto the thatch.
Those flaming branches, those bright eyes, those bent, slinking bodies, all bore down on the cottage from the shadows.
Beth was shuddering with a strange mixture of repulsion and unease, watching them come nearer and nearer, feeling their malice prickling over her skin like the thatch poking at her, tugging at her attention—
And then the boy with the matchbox raised his head, dark ringlets falling backwards from his face, glowing with golden red and orange and yellow. He looked jubilant, wild, mindless. He opened his mouth and let loose a cry that was gross because the passion behind it was false, the untamed ferocity backing it, pretending, the courageous adventurer, but only acting—
“WITCH! BURN THE WITCH!”
“WITCH, DIE, WITCH!”
“KILL ’ER! KILL THE WITCH!”
“DIE!”
“DIE—!”
“DIE! DIE! DIE!”
It was a chorus, one with blood strung in with the words, and in children’s voices it was doubly as awful. The boys and girls raised their torches into the night’s quick breeze and the evil flames tossed like horses’ manes, and the leader screamed hard defiance into the creeping twilight—
“BURN!”
Beth understood what he meant to do a moment before it happened, and by the time she realized it, there was nothing to do but sit hidden and frozen in horror.
The boy flung his torch up and up and up into the descending dark, spinning like a rampant comet, forgetting the rules by which the world operated, and the comet fell, all the fury and power and brilliance of a star too close, into the straw thatch.
The fire snapped and reared and spread at once, swallowing the straw greedily, running up the thatch towards Beth. She could feel the heat on her hands and her neck and her cheeks, feel the smoke stinging, pressing sharply at her eyes—
She threw her hands up as it raced for her, scrambled backwards over the delicate little strands of straw that were feeding the fire, passive, waiting to be consumed as they urged it on, and it was moving faster than she was, and the fire’s crackling laughter and the screams of birds and the children were splitting the night wide, and the flames was swarming closer, pitching forward with stretching, gripping, pressing heat. She made up her mind in an instant, trapped between two deaths—
She clenched the straw between her fingers, savoring the prickling sensations between her fingers and flung herself backwards, off the roof—
“BURN THE WITCH!”
“DIE DIE DIE DIE!”
Beth’s body hit the ground beside the wilted roses twining up the honey-colored wall of the cottage, the living things she had poured all the stupefied torment of drugs and spells into, all the terrible aspects of her life that she had balanced so long on the brink of ending, and now she had, finally been given no other choice.
But Beth’s eyes were not glassy and empty, but alert and aware and defeated. They were lost in some distance, where no one else could see, the world of the overwhelmed and the crushed.
I’m still here.
A few words. A universe of loss and disappointment. All the waiting and judging and deciding, to fall or not to fall, it had all been wasted. The fall hadn’t robbed her of the life she hated.
She lay flat on her back, staring at the stars as they twinkled into life, new glorious lives, so bright and hopeful, nothing like her own, and listened to the hateful screams rending the night.
The house is burning.
But it didn’t matter. The house wasn’t a home, it was a prison.
“What’s that? Who’s that?” shrieked one of the children.
“It’s behind the house—”
“WITCH!”
Beth lay still as a corpse as the boys and girls with their false, vicious voices and bravery and spirits swarmed in on her, lifting her up with hands that were rough and bruising and used to hurting, handling her like they would a new present, testing, observing the quality, ruthless as they examined it with spoiled criticism.
I’m still here.
“It’s a ghost!” squeaked one of the girls, and Beth looked despairingly up into her eyes and saw that they were traced with heavy make-up. She was very pretty, the sort of girl Beth’s mind, now so hollow and distant, told her a boy would like to hold hands with, would like to ask out on a summer picnic, would like to kiss. She was lovely and young, and the hate and fear blooming in her eyes at the thrill of the violent game and her friends’ discovery was making her eyes glisten in the night, reflecting the blaze and the sharp pearly moonlight as one.
“She’s already dead.”
“We’ve done it! Killed the witch!”
“Dead!”
“DEAD!”
“DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD—!”
Beth stared at the sky, forlorn, wishing it was true.
“Not so,” whispered a voice like the night itself, but shattered, irrevocably separated from its original, pure, silent, peaceful shape, pieced together crazily, so that the sharp bits stuck out like glassy needles.
Beth knew it at once and thought to the stars, Please, take me away, as far away as you are.
The flames were rising into the night in a powerful pillar, haloed by black smoke, blacker than the velvety night, obliterating the stars.
Good-bye.
The mother-monster slipped from the darkness and into the firelight’s flaring intensity, a bone-pale specter. Her vivid red hair was rippling behind her like the fire itself made solid, framing a face from a nightmare. Beth felt the hands holding her stiffen, their fingers squeezing in horror on her tired limbs.
“Are you frightened?” jeered the monster, contempt on every syllable. “Are you afraid, little fools? Do I scare you?”
One of the boys let go of Beth, the leader, and stumbled away. His companions were paralyzed, their grips like warm granite. Their eyes were transfixed on the jade owl eyes, the skull face, the polished bone.
The boy tripped over his own feet, unable to look away from that malevolent pair of bottle green orbs, and he fell hard, undignified on his back. Beth heard the breath leave his lungs, hiss out of his chest, heard him yelp as he fell, painted in the bloody-red light of the fire.
It cast every detail in pitiless clarity, every line of dread and panic and alarm and dismay on the children’s faces. On the boy’s face. His dark curls gleaming with firelight.
“You are afraid.” The monster drew closer, its white hand stretching towards them, grasping, keen, fervent. “And your fear is what will kill you. Burn you.”
The pretty girl let go and then another boy and another girl, and all the hands fell away as they broke away and retreated.
Beth fell to the ground, limp, miserable, looking up towards the stars, erased.
One of the girls sobbed—
“Do not cry,” whispered the ivory monster, her green cloak like the deep shadows in a dense forest clinging to her slim legs, wrapping her form in mossy darkness, making her a figure of sinister obscurity, a patch of shadow in the luminosity of the fire and moon, blood and silver, unnatural. “Do not cry girl, do not weep…”
And her hand reached for the sobbing girl—
“Don’t touch her, Hedgewitch!” A boy leapt forward, and his hand shot out and grasped the slim wrist—jerked it aside—
His body shuddered, and the monster raised her slender, bone-pale arm high, the boy’s hand was still fastened around it like a fish caught on a line, and he couldn’t let go, and he couldn’t look away as the skin on his hand began to glisten wetly, slimily—
The skin shifted, and, illuminated in the golden red, cloaked in choking smoke, it changed to tiny, interlocking scales, and a shocked memory rose in Beth like a disease resurfacing.
Lucas.
The boy’s eyes opened impossibly wide, insipid under the too-bright jade gaze scorching into them, his mouth opened, the lips curled in—
A hand grasped Beth arm, another on her shoulder, and they weren’t like the others, they weren’t bruising, they were careful and tight and frightened and sure—
They were dragging her over the rocks and grass, the dew sizzling off the thin blades, and the hands that held her were dry, robbed of moisture by the heat. She didn’t resist. Anywhere and anything was better than this twisted and anxious existence.