The sword now rests in a scabbard once worn by an adventurer who perished in an attempt to protect one she loved. Both her sword and her love were lost along with the rest of her story.
(For a time songs were sung about this adventurer, but little truth remained within the verses.)
So clothed in history and myth the son of the fortune-teller looks toward a light in the distance.
He thinks he is almost there but he has so far to go.
en route to (and in) Sardinia, Italy, twenty years ago
It is a Tuesday when the painter packs her bags and leaves, intending never to return. No one remembers afterward that it was a Tuesday, and few remember the departure at all. It is one of many that occur in the years surrounding that Tuesday. They begin to blend together long before anyone dares use the word exodus.
The painter herself is only vaguely aware of the day or the month or the year. For her this day is marked by its meaning and not its details, the culmination of months (years) of watching and painting and trying to understand and now that she understands she can no longer simply watch and paint.
No one looks up as she passes by in her coat with her bag. She makes a single stop at a particular door where she leaves her paints and brushes. She puts the case down quietly. She does not knock upon the door. A small grey cat watches.
“Make sure that she gets that,” the painter says to the cat and the cat obediently sits on the case in a protective yet nap-like manner.
The painter will regret this action later, but it is not one of the things she has foreseen.
The painter takes a winding route to the Heart. She knows shorter ones, she would know them blindfolded. She could find her way around this space by touch or scent or something deeper that guides her feet. She takes final walks through favored rooms. She straightens skewed picture frames and neatens piles of books. She finds a box of matches laid out next to a candelabra and puts the matches in her pocket. She takes a last turn through the whispering hallway and it tells her a story about two sisters on separate quests and a lost ring and a found love and it does not resolve itself completely but whispered hallway stories rarely do.
When the painter reaches the Heart she can see the Keeper at his desk in his office but his attention remains on his writing. She considers asking him to find an appropriate place to hang the painting she has left in her studio, recently completed, but she does not. She knows someone will find it and hang it. She can see it already, on a wall surrounded by books.
She does not know who the figures in the painting are, though she has seen them many times in fractured images and half-formed visions. There is a part of her that hopes they do not exist, and another part that knows they do or they will. They are there in the story of the place, for now.
The painter glances up at the gently shifting clockwork universe. Through one eye she sees it shimmering and perfect, each piece moving as it should. Through the other eye it is burning and broken.
A golden hand points her toward the exit.
If she is going to change the story, this is where she starts.
(The Keeper will look up at the sound of the door as it closes behind her but he will not realize who has departed until much later.)
The painter passes the spot in the antechamber where she rolled her dice when she first arrived. All swords and crowns.
She sees more swords and crowns now. A golden crown in a crowded room. An old sword on a dark shore wet with blood. She has the urge to return to her paints but she cannot paint all of the things that she sees. She could never paint all of them. She has tried. There is not enough time and not enough paint.
The painter presses the button for the elevator and it opens immediately, as though it has been waiting for her. She lets it take her away.
Already her eye with its sight is clouding. The pictures are fading. It is a great relief and it is terrifying.
By the time the elevator deposits her in a familiar cave lit by a single lantern, there is only haze. The images and events and faces that have haunted her for years are gone.
Now she can barely see the door outlined in the rock in front of her.
She has never seen herself leave. She once swore she would never leave. She made a vow yet here she is, breaking it beyond repair. The achieving of this impossible thing emboldens her.
If she can change this part of the story she can change more of it.
She can change the fate of this place.
She turns the doorknob and pushes.
The door opens onto a beach, a stretch of moonlit sand. The door is wooden, and if it was painted once the sand and the wind have conspired to wear the wood bare. It is hidden in a cliffside, obscured by rock. It has been mistaken for driftwood by everyone who has glimpsed it for years, ever since the last time the painter was here, before she was ever called the painter, when she was just Allegra, a then young woman who found a door and went through it and didn’t come back. Until now.
Allegra looks up and down the empty beach. There is too much sky. The repetitive beating of the waves along the shore is the only sound. The scent is overwhelming, the salt and the sea and the air crashing into her in an aggressive assault of nostalgia and regret.
She closes the door behind her, letting her hand rest on the weather-worn surface, smooth and soft and cool.
Allegra drops her bag on the sand. The fur coat follows, the night air heavy and too warm for fur.
She takes a step back. She lifts the heel of her boot and kicks. A solid kick, enough to crack the old wood.
She kicks it again.
When she can do no more damage with her boots she finds a rock to smash against it, the wood cracking and splintering, slicing her hands, fragments stinging beneath her skin.
Eventually it is a pile of wood and not a door. Nothing behind it but solid rock.
Only the doorknob remains, fallen into the sand, grasping ragged bits of wood that were once a door and before that were a tree and are no longer either.
Allegra takes the matches from her coat and ignites the former door and watches it burn.
If she can prevent anyone from entering she can prevent the things that she has seen from happening. The object within the jar in her bag (an object she saw and painted before she understood what it was and long before it became an object within a jar) will be insurance. Without doors she can prevent the return of the book and everything that would follow.
She knows how many doors there are.
She knows that any door can be closed.
Allegra turns the doorknob over in her hands. She considers throwing it into the sea but places it in her bag with the jar instead, wanting to hold on to any part of the place that she can.
Then Allegra Cavallo sinks to her knees on an empty beach by a star-covered sea and sobs.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is being dragged backward, away from the rift that has torn open the Heart of this Harbor and into the Keeper’s office where the floor has remained intact, his feet slipping on the broken tiles.
“Sit,” the Keeper says, forcing Zachary into the chair behind the desk. Zachary tries to stand again but the Keeper holds him down. “Breathe,” the Keeper advises but Zachary can’t remember how. “Breathe,” the Keeper repeats and Zachary takes one slow, gasping breath after another. He doesn’t understand how the Keeper is so calm. He doesn’t understand anything that’s happening right now but he keeps breathing and once his breath is steady the Keeper lets him go and he remains in the chair.
The Keeper takes a bottle from a bookshelf. He fills a glass with clear liquid and places it in front of Zachary.
“Drink this,” he says, leaving the bottle and walking away. He doesn’t add “it will make you feel better” and Zachary doesn’t believe, not right now in this chair, that he will ever feel better but he drinks it any
way and coughs.
It doesn’t make him feel better.
It makes everything sharper and clearer and worse.
Zachary puts the glass down next to the Keeper’s notebook and tries to focus on something, anything that isn’t the last awful moments replaying themselves over and over in his head. He looks at the open notebook and reads, one page and then another.
“These are love letters,” he says, to himself in surprise as much as to the Keeper who does not respond.
Zachary keeps reading. Some are poems and others are prose but every line is passionate and explicit and clearly written to or about Mirabel.
He glances up at the Keeper who stands in the doorway, looking out at a chasm into which the universe has fallen save for a single star that dangles defiantly from the ceiling.
The Keeper hits the doorframe so hard that it cracks and Zachary realizes the apparent calm is barely contained rage.
He watches as the Keeper sighs and places his hand against the frame. The crack repairs itself, slowly mending until only a line remains.
The stones in the Heart begin to rumble and shift. Broken rock moves over the void in the floor, rebuilding the surface piece by piece.
The Keeper returns to the desk and picks up the bottle.
“Mirabel was in the antechamber,” the Keeper says, answering the question Zachary had not dared ask as he pours a glass for himself. “I will not be able to retrieve her body or what is left of it until the wreckage is cleared. The repairs will take some time.”
Zachary tries to say something, anything, but he cannot and instead he puts his head down on the desk, trying to understand.
Why only the two of them are here in a room filled with loss and books. Why everything that was crumbling before is broken now and why only the floor seems to be repairable. Where the ginger cat has gone.
“Where’s Rhyme?” Zachary asks when he finds his voice again.
“Likely somewhere safe,” the Keeper says. “She must have heard this coming. I think she tried to warn me but I did not understand at the time.”
Zachary doesn’t ask the Keeper to refill his glass but he does it anyway.
Zachary reaches for the glass but his hand closes over an object next to it, a single die, an older one than the dice from the entrance exam but with the same symbols carved into its sides. He picks it up instead.
He rolls it onto the desk.
It lands, as he expects it to, on the single carved heart.
Knights who break hearts and hearts that break knights.
“What do hearts mean?” Zachary asks.
“Historically the dice have been rolled to see what kismet has to say about a new arrival to this place,” the Keeper says. “For a time the results were used to gauge potential for paths. Hearts were for poets, those who wore their hearts open and aflame. Long before that they were used by storytellers and rolled to nudge a story toward romance or tragedy or mystery. Their purpose has changed over time but there were bees before there were acolytes and swords before there were guardians and all of those symbols were here before they were ever carved upon dice.”
“There are more than three paths, then.”
“Each of us has our own path, Mister Rawlins. Symbols are for interpretation, not definition.”
Zachary thinks through bees and keys and doors and books and elevators, reviewing the path that brought him to this room and this chair. The more he traces moments back the more he thinks maybe it was all too late even before it started.
“You tried to save him,” Zachary says to the Keeper. “When Allegra was going to shoot Dorian you stopped her.”
“I did not wish you to suffer as I suffer, Mister Rawlins. I thought I might prevent the moment we have found ourselves in now. I am sorry I was not successful. I have felt what you are feeling myriad times. It does not get any easier. It simply becomes familiar.”
“You’ve lost her before,” Zachary says. He is beginning to understand even if he is not yet certain that he believes.
“Many, many times,” the Keeper confirms. “I lose her, through circumstance or Death or my own stupidity and years pass and she returns again. This time she was convinced something had changed, she never told me why.”
“But…” Zachary starts and then stops, distracted by the memory of Dorian’s voice in his ear.
(Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again and Time is always waiting.)
“The person you knew as Mirabel,” the Keeper continues, “no, I’m sorry, you called her Max, didn’t you? She has lived in different vessels over the centuries. Sometimes she remembers and others…The incarnation before this one was named Sivía. She was soaking wet when she came out of the elevator, you reminded me of her when you first arrived dripping with paint. It must have been raining near Reykjavík that night, I never asked. I didn’t recognize her at first. I rarely do and I wonder after how I could be so blind, every time. And it always ends in loss. Sivía believed that could change as well.”
He pauses, staring into his glass. Zachary waits a moment before asking, “What happened to her?”
“She died,” the Keeper answers. “There was a fire. It was the first such incident in this space and there she was, right in the center of it. I gathered what I could to bring to the crypt but it was difficult to separate what was once a woman from pieces of former books and cats. Afterward I thought perhaps she had been the last. After the fire everything did change. Slowly at first, but then the doors closed one after another until I was certain she could not return even if she wished to, and then one day I looked up and she was already here.”
“How long have you been here?” Zachary asks, staring at the man in front of him, thinking about metaphorical pirates in basement cages and Time and Fate and burned places, remembering how the Keeper looked from across the gilded ballroom. He looks exactly the same now. There are more pearls in his hair.
“I have always been here,” the Keeper answers. He puts his glass down on the desk. He picks up the die and holds it in his palm. “I was here before there was a here to be in.” He rolls the die on the desk and does not watch it fall. “Come, I would like to show you something.”
The Keeper stands and walks toward the back of the office, to a door Zachary hadn’t noticed, tucked between two tall bookshelves.
Zachary looks down at the desk.
Faceup on the die is a single key but Zachary doesn’t know what it is meant to lock or unlock. He gets to his feet, finding his legs more steady than he expects. He glances out at the Heart where the floor is still slowly reassembling its broken pieces. He follows the Keeper, pausing at a bookshelf that contains a familiar-looking jar with a hand floating inside, waving hello or goodbye or some other sentiment in his direction. He recalls the heavy object in Mirabel’s bag after they escaped the Collector’s Club and wonders briefly who the hand belonged to before it was jarred and then he moves into the room beyond the office.
The Keeper lights a lamp, illuminating a chamber smaller than Zachary’s, or maybe so filled with books and art that it seems smaller. The bed in the corner is also covered in books. Books are stacked two rows deep on shelves and piled on all available surfaces and most of the floor. Zachary looks around for the ginger cat but does not find it.
He pauses at a shelf occupied by notebooks identical to the one on the desk. They have names along their spines. Lin, Grace, Asha, Étienne. Many names have more than one notebook. Several Sivías are followed by rows of echoing Mirabels.
Zachary turns to the Keeper who is lighting the other lamps to ask about them but the question dies on his lips.
Beyond the Keeper there is a large painting on the wall.
Zachary’s first thought is that it’s a mirror, because he is in it, but as he moves closer the Zachary in the painting remains motionless, though he is rendered with such r
ealistic detail it looks like he should be breathing.
It is a life-size portrait. The painting Zachary stands toe-to-toe with the actual one, in the same suede shoes, the same blue pajama pants that somehow manage to look elegant and classical in oil paint. But the painting Zachary is shirtless, holding a sword in one hand, hanging lightly by his side, and a feather in the other, held aloft.
Dorian stands behind him. Leaning in toward painting Zachary and whispering in his ear. One of Dorian’s arms is wrapped around him, palm tilted upward and covered in honeybees that dance on his fingertips and swarm up his wrist. Dorian’s other hand, held out to the side, is draped in chains with dozens of keys dangling from them.
Above their heads floats a golden crown. Beyond it is a vast night sky filled with stars.
It is all achingly realistic, except for the fact that this Zachary’s chest is cracked open, his heart exposed, the star-filled sky visible behind it. Or maybe it’s Dorian’s heart. Maybe it’s both. Either way it is anatomically correct down to its arteries and aorta but painted in metallic gold and covered in flames, glowing like a lantern, casting perfectly painted flecks of light over the bees and the keys and the sword and both of their faces.
“What is this?” Zachary asks the Keeper.
“This is the last piece Allegra painted here,” the Keeper answers.
“Allegra’s the painter.” Zachary remembers the basement room filled with paintings of the Harbor in the Collector’s Club. “When did she paint this?”
“Twenty years ago.”
“How is that possible?”
“I would think the child of a fortune-teller would not need to ask.”
“But…” Zachary stops, his head more drowning than swimming. “My mom doesn’t…” He stops again. Maybe his mother does see this clearly but doesn’t paint. He’s never asked.
This is stranger than reading about himself in Sweet Sorrows. Maybe because he can only assume that he is the boy in the book when he is absolutely, unquestionably the man in the painting.
The Starless Sea Page 32
