The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  The ability is in the blood, Millsy had said. It’s in the blood.

  Did Wraiths have trickster blood, one and all, men and women? How could that be?

  Jacithrew called the daemons’ names aloud again, sending them back to their corner. Crispin breathed out.

  “You’re mad!” he said to Jacithrew. “Mad, mad, mad! And you talk nonsense! You’re so arrogant! If it weren’t for the trickster women you wouldn’t even be alive! I don’t see your people keeping you in food and necessities.”

  Jacithrew sat up straighter. “You think the pale bitches do it for me? They do it for the child.”

  “Can’t argue with that!”

  “I’m not a fool, you know,” Jacithrew said with a crafty gleam in his eyes. “There’s a reason I keep the brat around! If he were older, they’d have left us both to die in the wilderness. Pale women care nothing for Wraiths.”

  “Wraiths, it seems, care less!”

  “My people are dying,” Jacithrew said faintly. Crispin thought he was going to cry. “They have destroyed us. It has taken ten thousand years, but they have finally accomplished their goal. Ah!” He sat up straight. “But when the bells toll, they will die! All of them, as one!”

  Is he a cultie? Crispin thought disbelievingly. “Where did he hear that?” he muttered to Orpaan.

  “There was a girl said it,” Orpaan whispered back. “A girl with the tricky ladies that came to visit us. Her name was Sarah.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Buried in the forest. We buried her.”

  “What?”

  “She died. She was all eaten.” Orpaan scowled.

  Crispin thumped Jacithrew on the knee. “Old man! Old man! Have the—the pale bitches—ever threatened you and Orpaan? You see, my girl—” He had not yet mentioned Rae to Jacithrew. But if the old man hated the trickster women as much as he said he did, perhaps he would help Crispin against them. “They have her—”

  But Jacithrew had not heard a word. As was his habit, he had slowly worked himself up to an outburst, and now there would be no stopping him. He spat freely as he talked. “Ferupians have ruined my people. Anything they offer us now is no more than an insult. They have pushed us back and back. Ah! My people are living all on top of each other among the dead trees. Our tribes have been torn apart. We have forgotten everything we once knew. We flee from their armies, and die at the hands of their common folk if we try to leave the Waste. Useless! Therefore, I say: we were born in the Waste, and we will die with the Waste. Ferupe has been our death, but we will be Ferupe’s death when the bells toll. Ah!”

  “If you hate all Ferupians that much, why don’t you hate me?” Crispin asked angrily. Orpaan moaned.

  Jacithrew wiped his mouth. Saliva gleamed on his chin. “You are not Ferupian!”

  “Not Ferupian? My father was a native of Linhe Domain. An Easterner. Easterners are snow-white under their tans, and their hair is as pale as the sun—I’m a bit of a mishap, all right, but I’m as Ferupian as they come.”

  Jacithrew laughed. He reached out and traced a wet trail on Crispin’s arm with his finger. “That is what you think. Let me tell you a secret, boy-oh boy-oh! Pale people hate dark ones. You can’t trust them. Have you made the mistake of trusting them before? I see you have. But I know about the outside world. Hannah told me. And she is dark, too, she is! She knows! The Ferupians and the Kirekunis have carved the world into halves between them. Ravening white monsters, they are as heartless as the wind! And you have made the mistake of trusting them!”

  Crispin rubbed between his eyes. When he was six years old, Anuei had said to him in a moment of anger: If I could do one thing for you, my son, I would take my blood out of your veins. Crispin had never forgotten that. The words echoed in his mind, and his mother’s face gave way to the faces of girls from the east, the west, the north, the south, the heartlands, the capital. Blood out of my veins. Plump and slender, fair-haired and dark, tanned faces and winter-pale, and all of them white as the insides of figs underneath their clothes. Limbs intertwining with his. Blood in my veins.

  He hadn’t made love to a stranger since his early teens. With Prettie’s eyes on him, it wouldn’t have felt right. Now Prettie was dead, and all of those girls melded into the only other girl, into Rae. It had been pitch-black night the only time they touched. But in memory he could see her breasts lolling from her dress and taste her tiny nipples.

  He opened his eyes. Madness shone in Jacithrew’s black-currant pupils.

  “If you knew what I know, you’d be the happiest man alive,” Crispin said, smiling.

  Jacithrew let out a strangulated shriek and launched himself off his stool. Crispin had to stop himself from laughing as he fended the old man off. The only danger was that Jacithrew would call his daemons, and he was clearly too confused and angry now to do that. “Fly now,” Crispin taunted. “Fly! Fly through the roof, why don’t you!”

  Love and hate. Dark and fair. Rae!

  In his struggles Jacithrew kicked the fire. It collapsed, and a rain of sparks flew up into the wall. Orpaan cried miserably, “No, no, no,” and hit at Crispin’s legs. Crispin let go of Jacithrew. Propelled by his own momentum, the old Wraith staggered halfway across the root room, stumbled on the base of the central ladder, and collapsed. Crispin wrapped an arm around Orpaan. “It’s all right! All right! He’s not hurt!”

  Orpaan clung to him, weeping frantically. Jacithrew lay prone, fingering the bottom rung of the ladder. Suddenly he bounced upright. Tears mixed with smiles on his face. “Come on! Bring the child! We can get my flying machine up into the tree!”

  “No!” Crispin said.

  Orpaan tugged frantically at him. “We’ve got to do what he says! Got to! Come on!”

  Suddenly Crispin felt exhausted. “Suit yourself then. All right.” He passed his hand over his face. What’s to be done?

  Jacithrew was already halfway up the ladder. “Ropes!” he shrilled. “They’re in my bed! Find the ropes! Bring them! Quickly, quickly!”

  Searching in Jacithrew’s bed, which was in the brightest part of the dazzling room, Crispin thought: I can’t stay here any longer. Gonna rescue her and get out of this ferret hole. He may knife me in my sleep tonight, not because he remembers we quarreled, but just because he thinks for a moment that I’m someone else! How many people has he really been talking to, all the time I thought he was talking to me?

  From above, Jacithrew shouted shrilly. “Come on, my children! What are you waiting for?”

  “Please,” Orpaan whispered.

  Crispin saw tears shining on the boy’s cheeks. He was crying soundlessly. In the daemon glares, his face looked like a carving of wet teak.

  Crispin scooped him into his arms. “Your head!” Orpaan sobbed, too late. A root-knot caught Crispin in the top of the skull, and he saw stars.

  “Help me find those ropes,” he said over the ringing in his ears. “We don’t want your dadda to do himself in trying to climb that tree.”

  “He’s not my dadda,” Orpaan sobbed. “My dadda’s dead!”

  Fresh air! Fresh air! Crispin thought desperately as they rooted in Jacithrew’s reeking blankets. Fresh air! The night outside was cold and clear and dizzy with daemons snapping, darting, chasing each other, filling the space between the earth and the stars with their own particular brand of terminal confusion. What’s to be done?

  A frost had struck the forest during the night. The front garden looked as though it had been coated with sugar.

  Rae stood under a yew, holding a cup of hot tea, watching Sally and Millie, on the other side of the bare potato patch, yank winter artichoke roots out of the earth. She had offered her help, but they had refused. They were talking so softly that although the garden was as quiet as the rest of the Waste (the trickster women apparently hadn’t bothered to entice birds and animals to inhabit their patch of reclaimed flora) Rae could only just hear the buzz of their voices. She knew they were talking about her.

  All aro
und the potato patch, boughs rustled in the hint of a breeze. She shivered and thanked the Queen that she had not been sleeping outside. After only a few days in Holstead House, the ordeal of the past couple of weeks was coming to seem more and more like a nightmare. And indeed, her nights were full of memories. The blood spurting out of her rude captor’s eye mingled with the flames spurting from the windows of her room. The murdered man’s shriek became the voice of an Apocalypist calling to her. Sister . . . sister . . . And then it was Crispin calling while she fled from him, weeping, guilty, through the forest. Rae, where is my ray of light?

  It had all happened. But it seemed implausible that it had happened to her. She, Rae Ash (not Rae Clothwright, not anymore) wasn’t made of such resilient stuff. Look how readily she had trusted her life to Crispin. A complete stranger! If she had been stronger, she would have taken responsibility for herself. Look how he had deserted her at the first sign of difficulty—as all her road companions had, all her life. No man could be depended on. Yet she had kept hoping, to the point of risking her life. What if he’d decided to leave her stranded in the middle of the Waste? What if Anthea, Liesl, Hannah, Mother, and the twins hadn’t been there to save her?

  But perhaps she had been guided here. Perhaps transcendence had finally pushed her to a place where she could have the peace she needed if enlightenment were to blossom in her. The trickster women did not flaunt their wealth, but they were as well-heeled as Valestock’s richest daemonmongers. The Fewman brothers; Riddlebird; Gurrey; they, and perhaps three others, were each worth more than any heartlands squire. So, apparently, were the trickster women. The sheer numbers of priceless objects laid out haphazardly in the dusty drawing room told Rae that here she would not have to worry about making a living. Anthea’s “working girls” were ladies, or as good as, after all.

  And—her frivolous side briefly reasserted itself—it stood to reason that there must be a few bolts of good material somewhere in the house. Perhaps she would even be able to do something about the women’s lackadaisical style of dress. Just because you were not on parade before hundreds every day was no reason to neglect your appearance! (Rae herself had spent an hour before the mirror this morning. After two weeks without soap, the state of her hair and skin was deplorable. She longed for rouge and hair oil.)

  How would she dress them? For Anthea, dusty pastel hues. For Hannah—it would be a challenge to find colors that would set off her dark skin, and Rae hadn’t seen enough of her to know what jewelry would suit, but she would love to get the chance to make her over. She could be beautiful. For Liesl—dark colors, certainly; but what material? Velvet, perhaps. For the twins—

  She looked across at the winter artichoke bed, where the two fair girls were dawdling over their task.

  Chance would be a fine thing!

  Well, it’s no business of theirs whether I gather artichokes or not—

  She sauntered around the potato patch, and feeling their eyes on her, got down on her knees and started systematically digging the knobbly roots out of the clods of earth.

  “Here.”

  Millie, who was slightly taller and had a scattering of acne on her chin, tossed a trowel across the fallen stems.

  “Thanks.” Rae smiled. Without looking up, she knew the twins were watching her, unmoving.

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Most people don’t know what to look for. They get stones in with the ‘chokes.” Sally’s voice held the hint of a sneer.

  Rae sat back on her heels. “Where I grew up, we children had to do the gardening. We were the only ones who did any work.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Plum Valley Domain.”

  “That’s a long way from here.”

  Rae tossed a double handful of artichokes into the bucket.

  “You’re spoiling your dress,” Millie remarked after a moment. “You’ll have to wash it yourself, you know.”

  “I’m pretty familiar with the way things are done here, I think,” Rae said amicably.

  “That’s what you think,” Sally sniggered.

  “‘Choke sap is so hard to get out,” Millie said.

  Rae brushed earth off the brown wool. Its serviceableness frustrated her beyond words. “I’ll manage.”

  “You talk like a Wraith,” Millie said.

  “What’s a Wraith?” Rae asked.

  “No,” Sally said. “She talks like a man.”

  “Oh, my, that’s what it is!”

  Both of them laughed. Rae winced. She was no match for the two of them. The only way she knew how to meet sniping was with silence, and she did so.

  “You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you,” Millie said suddenly.

  “No, I don’t.” Rae looked up, alarms ringing inside her head.

  “Huh. Just as I thought. We were different; we guessed. That’s why we didn’t—”

  Sally elbowed her twin.

  Millie flushed. “Me and Sal grew up on a farm. Near Valestock. That was before we ran away.”

  “Why?”

  “We were different. We always knew that.”

  I always knew that, too, Rae thought with sudden bitterness.

  “The thing that makes us different, it’s a kind of—of—”

  “Strength,” Sally said.

  “Yes. You have to have it. To do what Liesl and Anthea and Hannah do. You can’t be one of us unless you have it.”

  The obvious implication was that Rae didn’t. She felt bruised. Why did they hate her? She had tried to be friendly. Her nails were packed full of dirt. She picked up a broken bit of stem and scraped. The silence of the garden, which for all its greenness contained no living things except insects, was unbearable. “How old were you when you ran away?” she asked them. It seemed the most innocuous question possible.

  When Sally spoke there was wariness in her voice. “What do you want to know that for?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Because we aren’t telling you!” They held on to each other’s arms, shaking. “We can’t tell you that, so stop asking!”

  Why are they afraid? Rae wondered in confusion.

  “Girls.”

  Rae had never been so relieved to hear Liesl’s deep voice. She stumbled to her feet, dropping the trowel and her lapful of ‘chokes, and turned. Liesl was holding something that looked like two yards of expensive silver lame scrunched up in one hand. It would have made an attractive bodice, though there wasn’t enough for a whole dress. She jerked her head. “Rae. Come with me.”

  Rae cast a glance around the potato patch. She felt like a wild deer brought to bay: no way to escape.

  Liesl frowned. “Don’t be afraid. I’m giving you a chance at the real thing. Whatever Anthea has shown you, it was just pussyfooting around. I know she hasn’t taken you into the Waste.”

  Where was Anthea? Rae’s protector, the only one of them who stood wholeheartedly behind her—

  “If you refuse... It’s a responsibility,” Liesl said. “Some of us can handle it. The rest”—she looked at the twins and smiled unexpectedly—“let their prey get away, and have to stay home and dig the garden.”

  “Oh, Liesl,” Millie said, and laughed. “That’s not fair!” After a minute Sally joined in, giggling hysterically. They clung to each other.

  “Go on, take her then!”

  “We don’t want her!”

  “Leave us alone!”

  “You’re so mean, Leeze!”

  Liesl laughed and blew them a kiss. She started off across the potato patch, then looked back impatiently at Rae. “I thought you were coming?”

  Rae gulped and followed her, stumbling across the potato rows.

  Women are truer, they never accept you on face value, the way men do, she thought desperately. They see deeper, straight to your weaknesses, and before they accept you they’ve got to make you feel like nothing, like a child! Oh, I pray I’m not wrong about them, I pray it’s worth it in the end to be humiliated lik
e this—

  Tears pricked her eyes. Was she wrong? Did Liesl, Sally, and Millie really hate her? But if Lies! hated her, why was she “giving her a chance at the real thing”?

  “Hurry up,” Liesl said from the blinding, blurry greenness ahead.

  Liesl and Rae came through the Waste to the daemons’ dell in a matter of twenty minutes. Today there were no daemons picnicking on the grass; in fact the place was nearly deserted. Liesl lowered herself cross-legged to the ground, hid her piece of silver cloth inside her coat, and buttoned it. Her eyes were the color of blue chalk. Red holly berries glowed like frozen fireworks over her head, only a little brighter than her hair. “There’s a good-sized one in the water. A Jaseras. Go look.”

  Rae moved cautiously to the edge of the pool. The surface was like smooth black rock. Tiny daemons circled above the water, slowed down by the cold, their wings layered veils. “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s lying low. It’s eaten. That’s why everything is so quiet. The little ones won’t come back out until it’s gone. That makes your task easier.”

  “Couldn’t you show me how it’s done first?” Rae said desperately. “And then I’ll do it? I mean, I’ve never seen—”

  “Daemons are not like fancywork, girl,” Liesl snapped. “One chance is all you get. There’s no unpicking.”

  “I don’t even know how to begin!”

  “Right, then!” Liesl folded her hands on her crossed ankles. “You have to listen for it. You’d never have got this far into the forest unless you had some kind of an affinity for them. They’d have driven you mad otherwise. But now you have to listen with your whole self, not just your ears. That’s important. When you hear a red, round, oily mmm like a Jaseras, call to it by name... Jaseras... Jaseras... like that.” Liesl’s voice was meandering. “And summon it. Summon it. Summon it.”

  “How do you know its name?”

  “Practice.”

  “But—but—I mean—why do they even have names?”

  “They are their names. You’ll hear. You’ll see. In a better world we would merely be witnesses to their names... ”