The Monster of Elendhaven

by Jennifer Giesbrecht

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve erased her from the memory of everyone who would have known her. If you said her name in the wrong company it would—” Florian’s good mood had evaporated. He made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and set the sole of his left boot on Johann’s chest. “It is better that Elendhaven forget the particulars of how my family died. Help me out of my boots.”

  Johann ran a thumb along the curve of Florian’s delicate ankle. “Only if you explain yourself,” he hummed, looking up at Florian beneath the shadows of his hair.

  “Nonsense. Oh, don’t be difficult, Johann. I’ve already explained more than you’re owed.” Florian ground his heel into Johann’s collarbone, but he was not nearly strong enough to inflict any harm. Johann caught his foot by the heel and pulled it to the side. He began unlacing the boot with a grin.

  “Come on, sugarsnap, you want to tell me. You’ve never told anyone about this, have you?”

  “I’ve whispered it to the dark,” Florian hissed, “which is the only confessor I need.”

  “I am the dark, Herr Leickenbloom. You can tell me anything you want.”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?”

  “Don’t pretend that your melodramatic ego isn’t flattered by the idea that I might exist to soothe your broken psyche.” Johann smoothly slid off one boot and began to unlace the other.

  Florian sighed and covered his eyes with the back of his hand. “My father caught the plague first, as he was always visiting the textile mills. He liked to envision himself as the sort of manager that peasants admired, that they spoke of fondly to their children: ‘Ah, Herr Leickenbloom is so kind, darlings. Today he slipped a silver coin into my palm, when he saw that my knees were shaking. He smiled at me when he told me I couldn’t leave work early, even when I coughed blood onto the sleeve of my tunic.’ He was the first noble in Elendhaven to get sick, so of course everyone thought—” Florian laughed darkly to himself.

  “What did they think?”

  “My family was once known to be filthy with powerful sorcerers. My house was founded in the Dark Ages, when magic was the key to power. Of course, after so many generations of intermarriage with other noble houses, our magical blood began to sour, but stories still propagated about our household. When my grandmother noticed her first son show signs of arcane aptitude, she picked him up by his chubby little legs and dashed his head against the stones in our garden. She told me this story proudly. Told me that she scrubbed his brains from between the grooves of our back step herself. Still … when my father’s skin began to blister, people began to talk.”

  Johann undid the silk bow at the top of Florian’s boot and dipped his thumbs under the lip of the leather. “They blamed the Leickenblooms for the plague?”

  “They barricaded us in our home,” Florian hissed. “Until we were all dead, save for me. On the mere suspicion—the absolutely baseless suspicion—that one of us might have been a sorcerer! Well, I decided that if Elendhaven wanted to see a magical plague so badly, I would do my best to show them one. And I see no reason to stop there. The landed gentry, the emissaries from Mittengelt, the southerners who stole our futures and picked our bones … no one is blameless.”

  “The suspicion wasn’t baseless, though. One of you was a sorcerer.” Johann trailed his fingers down the back of Florian’s silk stocking as he pulled his leg free of the boot. “They weren’t wrong.”

  Florian reared up in his seat, furious. “How dare you—!”

  “It’s funny, don’t twist my words—these assholes signed their own death warrant, but Florian: they weren’t wrong. They feared that the Leickenblooms were harbouring a magical child, a monster who would unleash a plague on them. Here you are.”

  “This game of deliberately provoking me has become tiresome, Johann. I don’t understand what you gain from it.”

  Johann looked at the arc of Florian’s pale throat, and the golden gashes his eyelids made when he blinked them shut. He hooked one of Florian’s wrists with his thumb. He kissed the Leickenbloom family ring with the affection of fealty. Then he kissed Florian’s knuckles, carefully and one at a time. He kissed the center of Florian’s palm wet and said, “You’re quite charming, you know, especially when you don’t mean to be.”

  Florian’s breathing hitched and he stared at Johann with impossibly bright eyes. After a moment, he yanked his hand away. “Stop this now,” he said. He stood and headed for the stairs. Johann was taller and faster, and he caught Florian by the arm. He tucked him beneath his chin. “C’mon, Florian. You’re so lonely. You live in a mausoleum. Surely a bachelor of your age has desires. Needs.”

  Florian squirmed in his grasp. “Let go of me.”

  Johann scraped his fingernails down the length of Florian’s throat. He ran his thumb over the lump in Florian’s jugular. “But that’s not the reason you’re a bachelor, is it?”

  “Don’t—”

  “No, no—I have this one figured out.” Johann kissed Florian’s jaw, fingers tight around his throat. “There isn’t anyone else, is there? There isn’t a woman in the world who can measure up to Flora.”

  Florian shivered and made a weak attempt to escape. “I will only warn you once, Johann.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Johann purred. He tightened his grip on Florian’s throat, indented his esophagus softly and sweetly, just like a kiss. Florian’s breath guttered inside his throat. His eyes rolled back as Johann pressed hard enough to leave long, worm-shaped bruises on his skin. Florian’s breath spooled out of him inch by inch, like a ribbon pulled from his mouth. Johann put his lips to the crown of Florian’s head and eased his palm back, rocking his hand, wrenching it around the delicate cartilage in measured strokes.

  The tingle started at the inside of his wrist, like someone had pressed at the tangle of capillary veins. The feeling itched and forced open the claw of his hand. The pressure crawled through his bones and trickled into his fingers until his hand flung out to the side. The force inhabited his entire body and, against his will, Johann released Florian and reeled back. He tried to fight against it, but it was like his joints were on invisible strings; every motion he made snapped back against itself twofold. He slammed himself against the wall. Twice. Three times, before crashing to the floor.

  Florian bent forward, gasping and pawing at his neck and mouth. He wheeled around and glared down at Johann. There was no fear rattling in his expression—rather, he looked irritated, as if Johann had merely inconvenienced him by nearly strangling him to death.

  “I told you,” Florian rasped. “Johann, you never listen. You want to see what my magic can do? You’re asking for an intimate demonstration?”

  Florian raised his hands like a conductor and Johann felt his own fingers move against him to clamp tightly around his neck. They cranked tight as vices and they wrung and wrested until something snapped and everything went black and empty inside his head.

  When he gasped back to life, Florian was above him, eyes hard and devoid of emotion. His hair was a circle of fire in the lamplight.

  “You obey my desires, Johann. It does not work in reverse.”

  “Right,” Johann gasped.

  “Is that clear?”

  “As glass, Herr Leickenbloom.”

  A very small, very cruel smile quirked the corner of Florian’s mouth. Slowly, he sank to his knees and pressed a soft, trembling kiss to Johann’s lips. “Good,” he whispered. “I needed to make certain that you understood the distinction.”

  — VII —

  FLORA

  When Florian was ten he and his twin sister, Flora, walked the entire length of the Black Crescent in the dead of a winter’s night. Flora’s hair was three inches longer and she often wore skirts, but otherwise there was no difference between them. She wanted to comb the beach and look at aberrations. “No one practises looking at them,” she said, “and so they can’t see them when they walk among us.” Florian had no trouble seeing aberrants, but no one in his family e
ver talked about why. Flora did not like that there was a part of her brother’s life that she could not touch.

  “I wonder if anyone’s ever found one shaped like a person,” she said, touching the slick skin of a beached shark.

  “That’s not possible, Flora,” Florian told her snottily. “It affects seals and sharks because the seals and sharks live in the ocean.”

  “Yes, but what if you threw someone in?” Flora’s wheat-coloured hair shone in the moonlight. “I hear that they throw prostitutes and orphans into the water.”

  “After they’ve died,” Florian pointed out.

  “But what if they weren’t dead yet? Then they’d come back all mutated and strange.” She kicked the shark and Florian winced, because he had heard stories about dead whales exploding on the shore. “And no one would know, because they can’t remember. Except you, Florian.”

  He took her arm and pulled her away from the corpse. “Why are you so obsessed by this, Flora?” He sighed. She whipped around and gazed at him with wide eyes gleaming and knife sharp in the silver light.

  “I want to know everything Grandmother won’t talk about. If you walk into dark places, I want to be with you. If I die”—she took a deep breath—“throw me into the sea, Florian, and I will come back to you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Flora. You won’t die.” Florian wrapped his arms around his sister and buried his nose in her sweet-smelling hair. “I plan for us both to live forever.”

  * * *

  Johann walked the coastline, whistling to himself. Since the dinner party, Florian had taken to sleeping until noon, waking to the tea and croissants he had Johann fetch him every morning. He wasn’t polite about it either. Florian hadn’t had servants since he was a young boy, but Johann suspected he’d treated the help poorly as a child, too. Surely he was just as rude and puffed up then, all self-righteous in plaid overalls and silk ribbons. The thought made Johann chuckle, and he ghosted the tips of his gloved fingers across the length of his neck. Of course, he did not bruise, or scar, but the memory of the wound remained like a collar.

  A woman stood where the shore began to curve. She was dressed in a long brown coat and she had waded ankle-deep into the black water. As Johann approached her, he recognized the glass-sharp cheekbones and the night-coloured hair—it was the southern woman, Eleanor, for once off the arm of her Ambassador. She wore no greasepaint that morning and her thick hair was pulled over one shoulder in a loose braid.

  She did not turn to look at Johann as he passed her. Her eyes rolled to the side before her attention returned to the horizon. Johann remembered what Florian said about him—tall as a signpost, practically translucent—so he stopped, picked up a large, round stone, and threw it into the water. In the silence of a windless morning, the sound was loud as a musket. Eleanor gasped and turned to him.

  “Wakey, wakey,” Johann said. He grinned, tried to look charming. As he looked at her now, without all the glamour and pretension, she was really quite beautiful with her long, narrow face and her russet skin. Without the artificial colouring, the natural darkness of her eyes and lips was apparent—Johann thought her Florian’s complement, this mature and poised statue of a woman who minced and tittered falsely.

  She tipped her head and examined Johann with a piercing gaze. “Excuse me,” she said, “but have we met?”

  Johann almost replied, More than once, you stupid bint, but thought better of it. Instead, he said, “You know, the water is poison. You’ll catch something nasty if you stand in it all day, even in your boots.”

  Eleanor brushed her braid over one shoulder and took two steps back onto the shore. “Ah, I see. I’m from the South—much farther south, I mean, than the Mittengelt provinces.”

  “The … colonies?” Johann ventured. He’d heard of the southern colonies in the papers, but they were so far away that they might as well not exist. Who could imagine a land with no winter?

  Eleanor nodded. “Where I’m from, the water is so clear that you can see the seabed on a bright day. It’s so warm that you can bathe babies in it and only worry about the salt. I’d read about the horrors of the Nord Sea, but there are some things that only become real once you see them.”

  She ducked down and plucked a hallanroe stone from the sand. She placed it in the center of her palm and held it out to Johann. “You are from Elendhaven, correct?”

  “Lady, I am Elendhaven.” She raised an eyebrow. “I mean”—Johann swept into a shallow bow—“that of all the people from Elendhaven you’ll ever meet, you’ll probably never meet anyone as from Elendhaven as I am.”

  “Somehow—” Eleanor winced and pressed her free palm to her head, as if something sharp had shot through between her eyes. It passed quickly. “Somehow I … knew that. Are you certain we’ve never met?”

  “I’m certain that you seem to be certain that we’ve never met.”

  “That isn’t any kind of answer, sir.”

  Johann grew bold and stepped close to her. He tapped the stone in her palm. Her hands were rough—far more calloused than any fine lady’s hands had business being. Even Florian—whose arms were cracked black with arcane cysts, who did horrible work with his own hands—had palms as soft as milk.

  “You want to ask me what this is, don’t you?”

  “I’ve heard the name: hallanroe. There is a statue of Hallandrette in the city square—I was curious about the myth behind the stones.”

  Johann snatched the stone from her palm, tossed it in the air, and caught it, holding it up between two fingers so that it aligned with her eyes.

  “If you lose something important,” he said, “you throw what you lost in the sea. Then you find one of these, and hatch from it a little slave, all for yourself, to do whatever you want with.”

  Eleanor’s pretty mouth twisted as she stared at the stone. It was so white that the light hurt the eyes where it curved. “In a city like this,” she murmured, “I could believe a story like that has some truth to it.”

  “‘A city like this,’” Johann echoed. “What’s a lady like you doing here anyway?”

  She laughed, but not kindly. “Believe it or not, I’m hunting something.” She patted down her thigh, and for the first time Johann noticed the pistol hanging at her belt. “I’m looking for a sorcerer.”

  * * *

  When their father developed boils on his lip, he hid away in his study, did all his correspondence from home. He hoped he might weather the illness without word spreading. Sometimes, if the right oils and teas were applied during the early stages, the plague would pass and the victim would recover. Not for the Leickenbloom family.

  It was a maid—or a cook, maybe the footman, one of the help anyway—who betrayed them, went crying in some pub downtown about how the witchy Leickenblooms had brought doom to the town once again. Foolish of them; the townsfolk trapped the servants in with the family, and Frau Leickenbloom locked every single one of them in the cellar without food or drink.

  When the pounding under the floorboards stopped, their mother said, “Good riddance,” and adjusted the fringe of her shawl. She didn’t cry when she threw her husband’s corpse down with them, either. That night, however, she started coughing, and didn’t stop.

  “It’s in her leg,” Flora said when their mother did not wake up the next day. Flora was hitched up on the bed, rolling up Mother’s sleep-clothes as Florian listened to her heartbeat. It was faint but steady.

  “I heard in school that if you can cut off the limb the plague began in, you can stop it from spreading. See here.” Flora tapped their mother’s left leg. “Her foot is black, and it’s all up this leg, to the knee. But not the other one.”

  Florian did not think that was true, but he could not argue with Flora. She was the sun and he was the moon. He receded whenever she shone bright, as sure as the passing of night into day.

  “If it spreads up to her thigh we can’t do anything, because that’s where the big vein is. The one that kills you if you prick it.”


  “I read that there are three big veins in the leg,” Florian mumbled, like reciting equations. He wanted to be a doctor someday. “The iliac, the femoral, and the saphenous. The last one runs all the way down, Flora.”

  She sighed. “You know what I mean. She won’t bleed to death if we cauterize it quickly, right?”

  “I … I think that’s how it works, yes.”

  “Stoke the fireplace, Florian; then use your sorcery to make her calm. I’m going to get a hatchet from the cellar.”

  Where the servants died, neither of them said. Where Father’s body is.

  Flora’s pink tongue peeked out from between her lips as she heated the hatchet blade. Florian watched her face in the flames, holding tight to his mother’s wrist. His mother was a cold woman, strict and pinched, but her skin was warm as a boiled egg just out of the pot. He wondered if it was the fever or if she’d always been this warm-blooded. He could not remember ever being held by her.

  The blade steaming, Flora staggered to her feet, dragged down by the weight of the axe head. “Hold her steady, baby brother.”

  Florian panicked. “W-we should move her to the floor. We need a … a stable surface. The mattress w-will absorb some of the blow. It won’t … it won’t be a clean cut.”

  Flora stared at him. Florian clarified, dumbly, “It needs to be a clean cut, Flora.”

  “Yeah … I know.”

  As Flora’s brow creased and the axe blade cooled, Florian took hope. Maybe Flora would change her mind with so many obstacles.

  “Okay … okay, take her shoulders. I’ll get her feet.”

  Of course she wouldn’t change her mind. Flora was so stubborn it was an affliction. They moved their mother to the floor and Flora took the hatchet back to the fireplace, just to be safe. It was too heavy for her, so heavy that it took her three tries to raise it above her head. Florian held his mother’s hand tight enough that his fingernails drew blood. She began to stir from exposure to the hearth’s heat and the pinch of her son’s desperate grasp. Florian tried to focus his power, to flood her mind with calm. But how could he make her calm when he was falling apart?