I’ll just take a look.
I creep up the stairs and emerge behind the reception desk. The stone steps beyond the wide foyer draw me to them – I scamper up, eyes wide, checking each window as I scuttle past. When I peer from the central window at the top of the first set of steps I see a guard out front. I edge away from the window carefully, towards the exhibit of the stories that has been calling to me from the moment I set foot in the museum.
There are ghosts here. Shimmering silhouettes of the past. There is one in my mind’s eye whose outline is sharp – my father leading the way, turning his head to smile at me, telling me to come on, this is the best bit. Every Saturday it was like the first time he saw the display – his eyes big as a toddler’s, his smile wide like someone in love.
Maybe it was love – maybe it was his way of seeing her again, in the illustration of the White Witch. Miranda – my birth mother, born in the White Witch’s image. She was beautiful, they say. That was part of my story that took a long time to surface – the truth. The truth is messier than fiction. I was born amongst the blanks, and my mother was driven out for loving a marked man.
I stand in front of the White Witch now and wish I had known my birth mother, who died so soon after I was born. Moonlight comes through the skylight and she is paler than ever. I wonder that I never noticed the similarity until Obel made me draw the White Witch that day in his studio. It was like drawing a self-portrait without a mirror. And Obel told me that my mother was even more like her.
I’ve only known one mother – my mum, stern and quiet with a love for me that I truly thought I could never run too far from. She is the mum I miss, the one whose embrace and forgiveness I am longing for – to me she means safety, she means home. And Dad loved them both. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have loved two people in the way Dad loved my mothers. Did the memories overlap? Did he miss the kisses of the one even while savouring the caress of the other?
I press my hand to the glass and another ghost appears. Oscar, his hand next to mine when we barely knew one another. I wish I could go back to that moment. I wish I could go back just a few days, even. Would I have done things differently if I had known that our farewell might be for ever?
My hand clenches into a fist and I want to slam it through the glass. These stories – these tales we have been told – they’re the problem. We fight, blank and marked, over which sister, which lovers, which saint – if we could just be rid of them all, our fights would be over. I wish I could visit those sisters like I have in my dreams. I would hold their hands and tell them what a mess they’ve made, beg them to unite once more.
Because that’s what I’m here for, so they say. I am the sisters; I am them both, Moriah and the White Witch – a bridge, a lifeline, a rope across perilous waters. I went to Featherstone thinking I might be a light to them – that I could guide them back to the truth – Saintstone’s truth. But now I know them; I’ve met the blanks and they are not walking in darkness. They are not blinded to the truth. They have plenty of truth of their own – they are awash with it. It’s just that it’s not our truth. And the idea of the two coming together is like mixing water and electricity. A storm is brewing, and when the spark of lightning hits the ground, there will be fire.
Chapter Seven
The cold of the stone floor rises through my legs and my feet stiffen, threatening to cramp. I need to get back. But, as I pass the front window, movement outside catches my attention. I stand, back to the wall, peering across my shoulder out of the window in a way that hides me in the darkness as completely as possible. The guard has been joined by another person – a person whose shape and gait has become synonymous with danger to me. Jack Minnow is talking to a guard; he passes him something and then dismisses him.
He watches as the man leaves and for a few quiet minutes he is still and alert. I feel surprised that Minnow takes a watch; I would have imagined standing guard at the museum would be a job for his lackeys – a role far beneath his station. He does love to be in control, though. I am about to resume my return to the study when Minnow looks left and right and then moves. I watch as he passes swiftly across the square. With another glance around, he disappears into the hall of remembrance – the place where our town’s readers take turns to speak the names of the dead.
There’s no rule against it – the names are spoken constantly, and the hall is always open for mourners and worshippers. But visiting the hall in the dead of night is unusual practice, even for the most devout. For some reason, Jack Minnow needed this action to be secret, and whatever he is doing is worth risking leaving the museum – and me – unguarded.
A person with secrets is a person with vulnerabilities. I tuck this information away in my mind, and once I am back in Mel’s study I sleep and dream about a cat and mouse in a maze, only this time, the mouse is chasing the cat.
Chapter Eight
I am woken at dawn by Mel. She looks as though she has dressed in a hurry.
“You have been sent for,” she tells me.
“So soon?” I rub my eyes and stifle a yawn.
Mel nods. “We will eat a quick breakfast and then go.”
I wish that we would walk through the museum and across the square – I had been hoping for that quick lick of sunlight. Instead, we go through the door at the near end of the corridor, through the underground passage that lies beneath the town square and leads to the prison. As we walk through the cold tunnel I think of Saint and the statue that stands somewhere above us. I imagine being crushed by Saint’s heavy bronze feet. The heroes of my past now loom over me nightmarishly. And I know about nightmares.
Jack Minnow waits at the entrance to the jail. His posture reflects his face – confident, assured and superior. What were you doing last night? I think. He doesn’t speak, just opens the door and we follow.
It is clear that today I will have to visit the prison.
Guards let us in through heavy, locked doors, and with each new corridor, the sense that we are walking further away from light and hope increases. Finally, we reach the cells. They are cave-like and dark – there is no privacy, just a gloomy space cut off by bars. Some cells have two or three people sharing them. No one makes eye contact with us as we pass.
This place exudes absolute loss of hope – all these lives, all this potential, has been locked away and left to decay. At the end of the passage there are more doors – through to private rooms, perhaps interrogation cells. The final open-fronted cell we come to is darker than the rest. This is the corner of hell, where no light or colour can exist.
Jack Minnow stops and peers into the cell.
“Not hiding, I hope, inker?” he taunts. “Come forward and be seen.” A scuffling and a groan and the shadow of movement. Obel. He comes crawling, with his eyes screwed up against the pitiful light.
Obel is like an angel whose feathers have been plucked. His hair is longer, brown and straggly. He stinks, and his lips are dry and cracked. The arms that once flexed with power when holding the machine are gaunt and grey. Everything is grey.
Every bright and beautiful colour, every word, every shape and image has faded like a flower that was picked and allowed to slowly die. All his marks are wearing away, the blank spaces spreading like a forest fire.
And when I look closer at the hand that used to create worlds – the one that was crushed by Minnow’s rage – I see the fingers that have not been set, the bruising which has become a permanent swelling and the scar that is red and blue as though showing the rage that broke it. There are new marks too – not ink, but a catalogue of bruising in all its miserable shades. Obel, my Obel, is broken. And his skin tells it all.
Down on my knees, I reach out my hands to him through the bars and he lets me hold him.
“You were meant to run.” There is a scratch to his voice – thirst or the result of screams, I don’t know. He sounds bewildered, confused and small. It feels as though something within him has been replaced by a child whose soul doesn�
��t fit right inside his skin.
“I’m safe.” I whisper into his ear – not knowing whether it’s true or not, but he needs some hope. “And I’m going to help you.” Another promise I have no means of keeping. But I can’t tell him the truth; that I am as helpless as he is.
Obel tries to stand, hauling himself up. He is weak. I force myself to look at him again, to take in the full horror of how changed he is, how beaten down. Dread shivers through me – I can’t let this happen to Gull. I look around, as though I will find an escape route or a way forward, but of course, all I see are bars and locked doors.
I catch a glimpse, then, of Connor Drew, Oscar’s father, in a nearby cell. I haven’t seen him since that day – a day that feels as though it was years ago even though it was only last autumn. That day he was publicly marked with a crow – and watching him be branded so cruelly brought back old and buried memories of my dad and his matching mark of the forgotten. Our eyes meet, and he nods. I remember Oscar saying that his father had told him about me. He was the one who tried to help my dad by hiding the illicit mark.
The sound of footsteps breaks our connection and a man wearing all black approaches.
“Jack Minnow looks at me. “I didn’t just bring you down here for an emotional reunion. There is work to be done.”
Jack Minnow seems to fill up with life on seeing how empty Obel is. He positively glows down here in the dark. A parasite who feeds on misery.
Obel stares, barely blinking at the ground. His every breath seems to squeeze his body of energy. Even in the half-light I see Minnow’s eyes gleam with pleasure, seeing what he has done to diminish this man.
“I need you to make him presentable.” Minnow turns to me and smiles snakily. “Clean him up and get those marks painted on him again. I don’t care how you do it, just get it done. You have three days.” I stare at Obel, confused, then turn back to Minnow. He smiles. “Come on, inker. Show us how good you really are.”
And with that, he is gone. Mel is bewildered too, I can tell – she stares after him, confusion written on her face. Minutes later a prison guard comes with food – good food, not prison slop.
“I will return at the end of the day,” Mel tells me. She seems as though she wants to say more – to stay, even – but then she shakes her head and leaves. The guard opens the cell door and I go into the den, hoping that I can make Obel ready in time.
In time for what, I have no idea.
I call for hot water, for clean linen, for oils.
I bathe Obel’s skin.
Skin. It’s become a theme to my life.
Rubbing oil into Dad’s weak arms when he was dying – letting the ink that covered his wasted wrinkles gleam.
The feeling of Oscar’s hand that first day we met – his fingers on mine, gripping me tight, taking me with him, away from the questions at the museum. Drinking coffee together in the little coffee house, windows fogged up, trying to dance round each other’s words to know how much of our true selves we could show.
Stop it. Don’t think of him.
I remember the first mark I made, under Obel’s watchful eye. I loved the click and buzz of the machine in my hand as I held that pale woman’s skin taut with my left hand and inked into it with my right. A leaf for a baby. A forbidden mark for a lost life. Obel condoning it. Drawing me in. Into his web of rebellion, hoping I would help him weave it into something wonderful.
Broken ceramic slicing across my hand; blood in the washing-up water.
Gull’s skin bubbling in agony as she tried to mark it with dust and ash.
Karl’s strong hand pulling me to face him as we argued, his fingers digging in to my shoulder as I slipped and fell.
The smell of lavender as Mum bathed my tender skin.
The marks that grew alone, telling me my story before I understood what it would be.
I think of these things as I work so that I don’t think about Obel.
I tend to him as though he is a customer at the studio, a stranger. It is like when Dad was ill: losing him bit by bit, seeing him become watered down until all we had was diluted – a hint of him, a memory of a flavour.
But this is different; Obel is not dying. Over two long days I wipe decay from his skin and feed him with water and bread, sips of beer and slices of apple. And as the grime is rinsed away, I think I begin to see him emerge. His back straightens, his teeth bite the apple and the juice drips from his chin. Shoulders back, eyes clear, and with a sigh I hear the whisper of my name. I smile grimly. How’s this for a resurrection, Longsight?
The guards bring me balm for Obel’s sore skin, clippers for his nails, and clean clothes for him to wear.
On the second day, I ask him why he is still here. What purpose he is going to serve.
“I don’t know,” he mutters. “No idea.”
Connor Drew laughs then, a harsh sound in the inky dark. “Don’t play ignorant, Obel,” he calls out. “Why would Longsight keep an inker under lock and key? An inker who is utterly at his command, who can be made to do whatever the mayor demands?”
He comes forward and leans against the bars. Underneath the grime and stubble, I think I can see Oscar in his face. I look away. “What does Longsight want, then?” I ask them both, trying to keep my tone gentle, attempting to hide the fear and dread. “Why does he want you cleaned up and marked again? Obel – what’s going on?”
Obel only glares at Connor.
“It’s not over yet. You’re a fighter,” I murmur and rub balm into his right hand. The bones have set crooked, leaving his fingers splayed and weak – I ask him to move them, to grip my hand, and he turns his head away. His fingers shake as he attempts to make a fist – his fingertips don’t even reach his palm.
“We need to get this reset,” I tell him. It feels oddly maternal to be handling him in this way, and I think of his mother, Tanya, back in Featherstone, and how this would break her heart. She has lost both Obel and Gull.
I wonder again where Gull is. She must be alive – she must be. Longsight said she would be safe.
Because if she isn’t, then it’s all my fault.
Later that day I take up scissors and start cutting his hair. When I first met Obel his hair was shaved, then he let it grow to a neat crop, but now it’s a straggly, matted mess.
I know I am doing it badly – too short over the ears, raggedly cut over his eyes. But I carry on cutting, snipping away the tangles.
“He wants me to mark you,” I tell Obel. “To paint you like you were before. Why?”
“Because he wants a public marking.” I almost drop the scissors in shock, but Obel raises a hand. “Oh, not for me – he wants me to make the mark. I don’t know who will be marked, with what or why. A new teaching, he said. He will – what was it – ‘take the people’s pain away’.” He shrugs. “I’ll do as I’m told.”
“Obel,” I chide. I hate the defeated tone of his voice. It scares me – like he has lost enough hope to make him reckless. It both frightens me and thrills me. I want to be brave. I will make my own armour and fight by his side. If only I knew what the war was.
Obel and I are sitting next to each other, leaning against the stone wall of his cell, when Mel comes to collect me. I’ve done enough today – tomorrow is for marks and I can only hope his skin settles well enough overnight for the inks to go on smoothly and cover the gaps.
That night, I wander the museum again, and again I see Jack Minnow and watch as he treads guiltily towards the hall of remembrance. No one is so faithful as to visit the hall every night, and especially not Jack Minnow
Whatever he is hiding in these night-time shadows, I will bring to light.
Chapter Nine
I dream about Oscar – dream that he is on a hospital trolley. The nurses shake their heads and tell me he is gone, and they pull the sheet up over his face. I shout and draw back the cotton cover and his face is a mask – a mask only. I tear it off and beneath the mask is a grinning Sana.
“Dead? Alive? It make
s no difference in Featherstone.” She smiles a horrible smile. “Join me, Leora. Take my hand and walk with me.” And she towers over me, a giant – a monster. A warrior. She holds out her hand to me.
I reach out.
I wake before I see what happens next – whether or not our hands touch. I don’t go back to sleep after that. I just wait for dawn, letting my mind paint Obel’s marks over and again. I will make him perfect.
Obel is a different man when I go to him on the third day. He is himself again, somehow. The dignity of being clean. Guards have already brought the dyes and inks, brushes of all sizes, and he eats his breakfast quickly, keen to get started. I feel relief start to creep back in. I recognize this Obel.
Like I do when I’m inking with a machine, I begin with the lines. Some, I trace over the faded marks that still show on Obel’s skin, but in other places I rely on memory and Obel’s guidance.
“Keep the linework clean, Leora,” he tells me, watching carefully, ever my teacher. “Make sure the swallow is – no, a bit higher than that – so it moves with the muscle. Yes, good.” He’s desperate to do this himself, I can tell, but his wings are clipped. He has to rely on me.
Painting skin is nothing like inking. I have to consciously remind myself not to instinctively wipe with every pause of the brush, as I would with needles and ink. I have to learn a new language of skin and resistance and softness. There is no blood. There is no pain. And I miss it, that bite of pain inflicted. I miss knowing I am doing deep work, a mark which means more because with every gasp, every bitten lip and sigh, the person lives their ink – earns it. It’s the pain that makes it matter. The swelling as your body fights against the intrusion, the brightly coloured scabs, the sting of remembering your mark when you run your newly inked arm across the edge of a table or pull on your coat too roughly. What is the tickle of a brush and dye that will dry in an instant? You have not earned those stripes.
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