Mackenzie Kincaid - [BCS281 S02] - Across the Bough Bridge (html)

by Across the Bough Bridge (html)

  She stopped in the middle of a close, turning to find her bearings, and the shop she’d been looking for was suddenly there behind her, sitting innocently along the street where she’d just come from, as if it had slunk in cat-like while her back was turned.

  The darkness made the toy shop’s windows appear that much brighter, with warm lights glowing from within and brightly colored displays arrayed invitingly with children’s toys of every size, style, and description. It was an eerie sight in the silence and the gloom; she’d been in Underhill for what was nearly the entire day but had yet to see a single child.

  She pushed open the door, a little bell jangling cheerfully at her entrance, and stepped inside.

  “Hello, hello!” called the proprietor cheerfully. He dusted his hands together, as if he’d been interrupted from some invisible task, and met her just inside the door. “I bid you welcome to my humble shop. Is there anything particular that I might help you to find? I have many wonderful toys, from this world and others beyond it—under hill, over hill, the wriggling space between them. Oh! I have just the thing for you, I’m sure of it.”

  He bustled away again, searching a set of shelves behind the counter, which were crammed full of toys of every description. The whole place was filled with other shelves just like them, listing slightly under the weight of their contents. The place should have been cheerful, filled as it was with toys, but it had only given that impression from outside the window; inside, it was dim and cluttered, not so much a child’s playground as a collector’s hoard.

  “Ah, here,” the shopkeep said, turning around with an object in his hands, which he unveiled with a flourish.

  It was a little dragonfly, made of tiny clockwork pieces, with wings of metal filigree so fine it was a marvel they didn’t bend just from the shopkeep breathing on them. He raised it up near his face, turned some mechanism at the toy’s tail end, and it whirred gently to life, wings fluttering seemingly of their own accord.

  “Marvelous!” the shopkeep said, apparently riveted by his own wares. “Is it not marvelous, my lady? An appropriate gift for any child, but especially wondrous, I should think, for a little human across the river, who has never seen a toy such as this. It’s wonderful of you, to journey to Underhill just for a special gift.”

  His dark eyes glittered like edged flint in the lantern light.

  “It is a beautiful thing,” Hawthorn conceded, and it was; though the shopkeep hadn’t so much as re-wound it, it was just barely hovering now over his palm. “But I’m afraid I’m after something different.”

  She could already picture how the dragonfly worked, how it really worked, not the mechanism of it but the intention. It would flutter, and fly, and absolutely dazzle, until eventually it led an enraptured child right across the Bough Bridge and into Underhill.

  She’d seen no children, but there were plenty who went missing every year; every parent had a whole collection of cautionary tales, though they weren’t always heeded. No child had ever returned, not even the ones who had traveled in the company of their parents, and the tradesmen had learned not to bring any young assistant with them when they delivered their goods to Underhill.

  Hawthorn suppressed a shiver and said, “I need fine marbles.”

  “Oh, of course, of course, I won’t be but a moment,” the shopkeep said, spinning around on his heel to put the dragonfly back and examine his shelves all over again. He placed a couple of boxes onto the counter, then disappeared deeper into the store, muttering to himself.

  Hawthorn was only just holding in the shiver that wanted to rattle its way out of her body; whether it was the shop that made her dizzy or the loss of blood and lack of food, it hardly mattered.

  “Here we are,” the shopkeep said, rounding the counter again and placing another half-dozen boxes on the surface. He removed the lids from each one, revealing a dazzling variety of marbles in all shapes and sizes, a few of them full matching sets—she put these aside immediately—and others a mismatched hodge-podge of smooth little stones.

  “If I might look through them myself?” she said, hoping to escape his steady stare and search in peace for exactly what she needed.

  He only said, “Of course,” and took a single step back, his eyes never leaving her, apparently with no intention of letting her alone.

  She tried to ignore him as she sifted one-handed through the boxes. Some of the marbles were plain, like the ones any child from across the river would play with. Others were compelling, as if they were urging her to hold them in her hand, and those she had to nudge away, though she found her eyes straying to them time and again. There were marbles that looked like an array of stars trapped in glass, marbles with objects at their centers—clockworks, little balls of silver filigree, a tiny delicate skull—and one that shone softly with its own light.

  Finally, her fingers touched a smooth white stone marble, its surface translucent; inside, where the light caught it, shifting shades of blue seemed to move as she turned it in her hand. It was moonstone, she knew that much, and not a terribly expensive one. She could feel that it was right, and she also knew that she could afford it.

  She tucked it into her palm and kept sifting through the box until she found its twin. Then she set the two of them very carefully on the counter-top and said, “These two.”

  The shopkeep’s smile widened into something nearly leering, looking at the pair of them.

  “And for your payment, my lady?” he asked.

  She pulled a carving from her sling and held it out over the counter, balanced on her palm. It was the likeness of a horse, long enough to span her hand from heel of palm to fingertips. Its neck was proudly arched, chin drawn to its chest, powerful haunches rippling and hooves arrested in mid-motion. Its surface was stained a deep red, finely oiled to a glistening sheen as if its exertions had left it slicked with sweat. Its eyes were little black beads of onyx, set with masterful care into delicately crafted sockets. It looked almost as if it could come to life and step down from her palm. Every line of it was designed as a prayer for strength, but Hawthorn had learned in the making of it that prayers were worthless.

  This was the last of her bargaining goods. It would have to be enough.

  She said, “It is carved by my own hand, and blessed with my own blood.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” the shopkeep said, squinting at it. “It’s a bit of a plain thing, isn’t it? Please, don’t misunderstand me! It is a lovely little object, for what it is, and clearly crafted by a skilled hand, but do you think it a match for these?” He waved his hand at the two fine moonstone marbles, their surfaces shimmering.

  Hawthorn blew out a breath. “It is a gift never given, and steeped in thwarted love. It is richer than you give it credit for. And I know very well that moonstone is not so precious as this.” She stretched her hand out to him, a clear offer for him to take the object, and he delicately lifted it from her palm, turning it this way and that in his slender hands, his fingertips brushing over each carefully carved line. She’d carved it for a loved one, and it pained her to see it in the hands of a stranger, but her quest in Underhill was as much about letting go of the past as it was about creating a new future. The things had had been precious to her mattered little next to that.

  “The craftsmanship is magnificent,” the shopkeep conceded, his perfectly manicured fingernail tapping hollowly against one of the stone eyes. “I commend you, my lady, for your skill. But I think... no.”

  He held the horse back out to her, smiling a sharp, cunning smile.

  She was tempted not to take it back, to insist on its worth, but in Underhill such an action would be considered unforgivably rude, and that wasn’t something she could afford. She took the horse back with hands that felt half-numb and put it back mechanically, fumblingly, into her sling. She’d kept her right hand in her pocket before, but now she exposed it, like a fool, the bandage still bloody.

  “Oh, come now, my lady,” the shopkeep said, in a gentle voice that
rang utterly false, with that parody of a smile still fixed on his face and his eyes latching immediately onto her wounded hand. He leaned over, elbows on the counter, trying to create a sense of intimacy that she certainly didn’t feel. “Please don’t fret. I’m quite happy to make a bargain with you. I only require some other form of payment. As you can see here, my shelves overflow with toys like yours. To trade trinket for trinket would hardly benefit me, would it?”

  He knew exactly what she needed those moonstones for. And he had to know how desperate she was to have them. Unless she was willing to return another day, to try to find another toy shop like this one, to acquire another chamber-fruit after the one in her bag inevitably rotted—

  No. She needed a bargain today. It was the only option she had.

  “What price would you ask, then?”

  He leaned a little closer, tongue wetting his lips, expression turning flirtatious. “Only your name, my lady. I wish to hear it fall from your sweet lips.”

  She swayed, growing dizzier and more disoriented by the moment. She had to strike the bargain and get out; she felt she was beginning to suffocate in the musty air.

  “My name is Hawthorn,” she said.

  The shopkeep frowned. “I mean your true name,” he said, with a little affected pout. His voice deepened, and his smile seemed to soften, losing its sharp edges. “I only wish to know you, my lady, as women so beautiful do not enter my shop every day. I am enchanted by you. Will you save me from my misery?”

  “My name is Hawthorn,” she repeated, even as the shop seemed to waver before her eyes. The lights had been brighter, she was certain, only a moment ago. She looked down and found fresh blood seeping from beneath her bandage.

  “Well,” the shopkeep said, and rocked back a little, as if to give her space, gentleman-like. “I understand your reluctance, of course. You must have many suitors pining away for you, on your side of the river. Very well, then. I insist that you take these marbles as a gift, to remember me by, and perhaps one day you’ll be tempted to return and consider me. I am only a humble shopkeep, of course, but I would offer you every treasure I possess.”

  “You flatter me,” she said, but his was the sort of hollow praise that was deployed for manipulation, with no sincerity whatsoever. “But I would never take advantage of your hopes. I’m already married, I’m afraid. I insist on offering you a proper price.”

  His game ruined, the shopkeep sighed and rocked back further, bracing his hands against the counter, the charming façade dropping away. The air in the shop seemed cleaner when it entered her lungs, the lights glowed a little brighter, the slow and dizzying spinning in her head settled.

  “Well,” he said, “how disappointing. I suppose we can settle on a suitable price. Perhaps a favor, to be redeemed in the future?”

  “No.”

  “A dance, then. There will be a procession and a fête tonight, in the square. If you would do me the honor—”

  “I cannot,” Hawthorn said.

  “An oath.”

  Hawthorn shook her head: no.

  The shopkeep tapped his long fingers against the counter-top and regarded her as if he could stare into her soul. Perhaps he could.

  “A man recently visited this shop,” he said at last. “This man selected a very special toy for his first-born son and offered me his seventh-born daughter in payment.”

  Hawthorn tried not to gape, but she wasn’t entirely successful. “That’s reprehensible,” she said.

  “It is,” the shopkeep agreed. “I accepted the bargain, of course. A child deserves better than such a father, don’t you agree?”

  “I suppose it depends on what ‘better’ entails,” she said, cautiously. “What exactly becomes of a child bargained away to the fair folk?”

  “We cherish them,” he said, with a soft little smile that seemed almost genuine. “Though we may come by them through somewhat unconventional means. I think that you of all people may understand that.”

  “I do,” she conceded. “But why have you told me all this?”

  He sighed, leaning back against the shelf behind him. “It is merely to say that I understand you,” he said. He grinned again, that same disarming, lopsided grin that had probably turned many a customer’s legs to jelly. “And that I admire your stalwart negotiation skills. You have worn me down with your considerable charms. Give me the damned horse.”

  She traded for her prize and kept her head up until she’d exited the shop. Then she staggered sideways into the wall outside, letting the cold stone prop her up just for one long, weak moment. The pair of marbles glinted in the palm of her good hand. She was a little stunned to be holding her prize at all; she stared at them as if somewhere in their milky depths the secrets of the universe might reside. Perhaps it was merely the dizzying pain, but she felt almost as if they stared back.

  By the time Hawthorn made it back to the main square, the half-light had begun to give way to true darkness. In the gathering dusk, everything she had seen in the square only that morning was so much duller, the shine rubbed off. Whether she was becoming immune to it or the fair folk were simply tiring after a long day of projecting an image of flawlessness, she could not say.

  She had no time to dwell on it, regardless. She had one last errand, before she could finally return to her own little piece of the world and let her real work begin.

  She approached the bridge but didn’t step onto it, turning instead to descend along its side, following the pilings down toward the river. In the shadow of the bridge, the dark water churned in strange, unsettling ways; eddies formed where there should have been none, hints of some unseen obstruction beneath the water. She searched the bridge’s underside, scanning among the cross-beams, but there was no sign of the troll.

  She stepped off the worn-smooth collection of stones that formed the high-water mark and onto the wet bank. Now that she was nearer to them, she could see other people already toiling in the same way that she intended. Whether they were human or fair folk, she could not say; the half-dozen of them were naked and covered head to toe in streaked mud; only their steady movements showed them to be living things and not statues. They looked up as one and stared at her until she found just the right spot, a few yards up the riverbank, and dropped to her own finely dressed knees in the mud. She unbuttoned her cuffs and rolled her sleeves up to her elbows.

  All of the others went back to their work, apparently satisfied that she was one of them, and ignored her entirely.

  The ground along both sides of the bank was a strange milk-white, with the faintest blue cast. As working clay, it also required no processing at all: no sieving, no drying and crushing, no reconstituting; it came from the ground somehow miraculously ready to use. When she pinched a bit of it up and rolled it between her palms, it was the perfect mixture of silky-smooth and elastic. On the opposite side of the river, she could see the human clay-cutters working, their massive spades cutting the bank in ready-made blocks that they’d sell on to other artists—ones much richer than Hawthorn. That bank was badly eroding, receding as the clay-cutters chopped it away bit by bit, but she doubted they’d ever start venturing across the bridge to take their cuts from the Underhill side. They aggressively defended their own stake to the riverbank, but they also performed warding-off hand gestures each time they so much as looked across at the far side of the water.

  At home, it would take a month’s savings to purchase a single block. In Underhill, the only cost was the artist’s own labor in cutting it free. For her masterwork, the most important piece she’d ever sculpt in her life, no other clay would do.

  From her sling, she removed a hand spade—one of her wife’s, normally used to tend their little window box full of vegetables—and began to cut into the wet earth.

  She was sweating by the time she was done, gasping with exertion, and her now-filthy bandaged hand was singing with a whole new level of pain, but she had a block of clay, just the right size and utterly flawless. Pale mud streaked u
p her arms to the elbow, stark white like chalk against the darker tones of her skin, and it felt almost like a mark of honor, the result of hard and honest work.

  She carefully packed the clay in with the rest of her bargains and re-tied the sling carefully across her front, where she could wrap her arms around her precious cargo to prevent anything from being broken.

  Then she stood on wavering legs, pain roaring through her hand, hunger twisting her stomach, and walked back up to the bridge to make her way home. She could put Underhill behind her at last. The day was nearly done, but night was only just beginning, and her most difficult task lay ahead of her still.

  Sorcha wasn’t on the landing this time, but the door to her rooms was standing open, waiting, so Hawthorn let herself inside. She was crouched on a little stool, mending a shirt by candlelight, but she looked up as Hawthorn came in.

  “Name yourself,” she said, wary.

  “My name is Josina,” Hawthorn replied, and felt the false name drop away from her like a cloak discarded. She put down her bundle, too, very carefully, and felt a far greater weight than that of the clay lift from her shoulders.

  Sorcha stood, crossed the room in three swift strides, and threw herself into Josina’s arms, heedless of the mess. “You’re late,” she said, her voice choked with almost-tears.

  “You should have seen the way people looked at me, muddied and wild-eyed. I’ve never seen anyone in this city make way so quickly.”

  Sorcha choked out a laugh against her throat, then stood back, grasping Josina by the shoulders. “You’re hungry,” she said. “You sit down, and I’ll bring you food. I’ve laid out a tarpaulin, and your tools.”

  Josina waved her away, moving instead to the space Sorcha had set aside and the cluster of lanterns lighting it. She laid her burdens down and began to draw out her prizes. The bundle of twigs cast strange shadows on the wall, and within the marbles something seemed almost to move.

  “I’ll eat when it’s done,” she said, settling in cross-legged.