by N. D. Wilson
“Be silent, Caleb,” said Mordecai. “We don’t know her.”
“We know that she didn’t tell anyone after she found us in the barn. We know that she brought us chicken.” Caleb scooped up the plate and swabbed a finger loaded with mashed potatoes into his mouth. “And I know that she was right about you and losing. You’re a quitter, Mordecai. This girl just called you a quitter.”
Mordecai let his chin fall to his chest. “Stop,” he said. “Please.”
Caleb’s face grew serious, but his eyes still laughed as they searched Hyacinth’s.
“He’s not really a quitter,” Caleb said. “But he’s very serious all the time, and now he finally has good reason to be. He’s badly hurt, and I think being angry will help him fight harder.”
“It will not,” Mordecai growled.
“I disagree,” Caleb said, and he crossed his legs, dropping onto the ground with the plate in his hands.
Hyacinth lowered herself down onto the ground facing the boys. As she crossed her legs, Squid snorted over to her and flopped his head onto her lap.
“Girl,” Caleb said, chewing, “does your family have any enemies?”
“Her name is Hyacinth,” Mordecai said, but he didn’t look up.
“The Smiths?” Hyacinth almost laughed. “How would we have any enemies? We hardly know anybody. We’ve never lived in one place long enough.”
Caleb stopped chewing and stared at her. “After watching your father, I knew your family had old wars. They weigh on him. And what you just said proves it. No matter,” he added quickly before Hyacinth could object. “Our family has enemies.”
“Enemy,” Mordecai said. He finally looked back up at Hyacinth. “One enemy.”
“And she,” Caleb said, glancing at his brother, “has thousands who serve her. Whole nations. So we have enemies.”
“She murdered our father,” Mordecai said, and his words were like cold stones. They pressed against Hyacinth’s heart. “Brutally. She made a spectacle of him in her city square. Our cowardly allies knelt on his body, swearing their loyalty to her.”
Hyacinth was barely breathing. She looked from one brother to the other. What they were saying didn’t fit in the world she knew. But they were telling the truth. She knew they were. And she felt like a fool. The wounded boy was justified in his seriousness, in his sadness. And she had taunted him. He was hurt, and she had taunted him.
His father had been murdered? She couldn’t even imagine that kind of pain. The story was like something from the Russian court. Or the mafia. She’d read about the first New York mobsters and the things they would do, and she knew people like that still existed.
But there had been a monster with two mouths.
And fungus was growing from the boy’s wound.
Those were not things she understood. They belonged in the bedtime stories her mother would never let her father tell.
“Our older brothers are all gone too,” Caleb said. “Killed or lost. We are the last two.”
“We didn’t think we could win,” Mordecai said. “But…”
“But we had to fight,” said Caleb.
“All we did was annoy the witch-queen,” said Mordecai.
“And run,” said Caleb. “It was madness. There were wolves and witch-dogs and wizards and dark faeren and hunters—so much barking and screaming and magic flying that it’s amazing we didn’t lose each other. Mordecai was tearing down walls and I was shooting at everything behind us when we crashed through into a garden full of twisted trees.”
“It was a labyrinth,” Mordecai said quietly. “A maze of arches and tunnels woven from living branches.”
“And people,” Caleb said. “People with their arms and legs grown into the trees, but we didn’t have time to stop and wonder. The garden had guards. Hunters with toadstool flesh who were fully possessed by their mother, the witch-queen, the one who had grown them in some dark place.”
Hyacinth’s mind was swimming between horror and disbelief. These boys were not Russian. They were from somewhere well beyond her imagination.
Caleb looked at his brother, giving the telling of the story over to Mordecai as he chewed another bite of chicken.
“In the maze, we found seven open doorways, sealed with darkness only. Nothing was visible through them. Desperate, I chose one. We plunged through, thinking that we were entering some mysterious and twisted corner of the witch-queen’s creation—a dungeon, a trap, a death sentence.” Mordecai stopped his story and looked up at the dusky sky.
“And?” Hyacinth asked. “What happened?”
Caleb laughed. “We fell through an empty door frame, hanging on a hook in your barn, and landed in old hay. We had no time to be confused. Four hunters fell through after us. We fought our way outside, and my brother was bitten. Your dogs came to our rescue. The hunters have no minds of their own, and they were disoriented by this place. Perhaps their witch-queen mother lost her possession of them for a time. They scattered, one racing away to each point of the compass.”
“First, they attacked the old woman,” Mordecai said. “The dogs defended her, but she was bitten. It was not until she burned three with loud fire from metal tubes that they scattered.”
“We hid,” Caleb said. “But Mordecai was unconscious. I couldn’t carry him far. So I watched the old woman—still bleeding from her own neck and shoulder—drag the doorway we had entered out of the barn. She chopped it up with an ax and then lit the pieces on fire. And I was relieved.”
“For a while,” Mordecai said. “It may have been a door into nightmare and the witch-queen’s garden maze, but it was also our only way home.”
Both brothers looked at Hyacinth, waiting.
“So…,” Hyacinth said. “A witch? A real one?”
“The witch,” Caleb said.
“Nimiane, witch-queen of Endor.” Mordecai spoke the name quietly, as if the woman he feared might appear at the sound of her syllables.
“With actual magic?” Hyacinth asked. “Is she human?”
“By birth,” said Mordecai. “But she is undying, as are all of her family’s blood—blood indwelt by dark incubi. That is the source of her magic.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Hyacinth said.
“And I don’t believe it,” said Caleb. “Demon blood or no, she is killable. She was born mortal, and so she will end.”
A spotlight swept across the tree trunk above Mordecai and moved on to another, splattering bright light across peeling bark before vanishing again.
“Hy!” Albert Smith’s voice rolled through the dead forest. “Hyacinth!”
Hyacinth gently removed Squid’s head from her lap and scrambled to her feet. Caleb handed her the chicken plate, now bare.
“Say nothing of us,” Caleb said. “Please.”
“Hyacinth?” Albert yelled. “Are you out there?”
“Coming!” Hyacinth yelled. “I’m coming!”
Mordecai and Caleb were both looking at her, waiting for a promise, for assurance that she would keep the twin brothers a secret.
“No promises,” Hyacinth said, and she stepped around Caleb. “And I’d put slugs on that fungus, not a rag.”
The spotlight found Hyacinth before either boy could answer, painting her a ghostly blue shade of white. Squinting, she raised a hand to shield her eyes and made her way into the brightness, between the trees and over piles of loose sandy soil.
Her father was waiting between the house and the barn. Behind him, a gentle slope rolled down and away toward the cliffs and the sea. As Hyacinth approached, he lowered his flashlight, letting the brightness pool around his feet.
“How about those trees?” Albert asked. To his daughter’s eyes, he looked nervous. Uneasy. And his smile was unconvincing. “There are easier things to collect.”
“They make me sad,” Hyacinth said. “The trees.” The admission surprised her. As true as it was, she hadn’t even noticed her sadness until the words came out.
Albert scrat
ched at his unshaven jaw and studied his daughter as she stopped in front of him.
“Are you sure it’s the trees?” he asked. “There’s been a lot going on.”
Hyacinth nodded. She didn’t need to be more specific than that.
Albert sighed. If the trees made Hyacinth sad, she could see that she made her father sad. But which part? Leaving her? Hiding her from people like Thor?
“We need to talk,” her father said. “But where? The barn? You’ve always liked barns. Somewhere away from your sad trees.”
“No,” Hyacinth said. “Not the barn. The cliff. I want to watch the waves.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“You have a light. And I have a lot of questions.”
Albert nodded. Turning, he pointed his light toward the cliff and held out his other hand to his daughter.
Hyacinth set the plate on the ground and took her father’s hand. Even though he wasn’t a big man next to someone like Thor, his hand still swallowed hers up easily.
“There’s a lot you need to know,” her father said. “But only some I have time to say.”
THAT NIGHT, MORE THAN an hour passed as Hyacinth and Albert sat and talked on a broken-down bench at the cliff’s edge above a foaming high tide. It had been months since Hyacinth had spent a quiet hour alone with her father, and this one was peaceful—an hour in which every word mattered.
Which is why she couldn’t stop reliving the scene…starting when Albert had flicked his light off, and together they sat in the cool darkness.
“Your mother and I will be back as soon as we can. Hopefully, this will be quick and easy. A day or two of explanations should make the Order happy. We’ll be delivering the body, so that should help. It’s not as if we’ll have to describe it.”
“And then the Viking will fly you back?” Hyacinth asked.
“The Viking?”
“Thor,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t know his last name.”
Albert laughed. “Yes. The Viking has agreed to bring us back. We’ll drop Daniel and your sisters at a camp up north by sunrise tomorrow and then fly on to Lake Michigan. From there, we’ll come straight back to you and Lawrence.”
“And to Granlea,” Hyacinth said. A large wave launched itself up the cliff and died, but cool mist found her face and she licked the salt off her lips.
“Yes,” Albert said. “And Granlea. I’m sorry about her. And her forest of dead trees that makes you sad.”
“They aren’t dead,” Hyacinth said. “That’s what makes me sad. Most of the ones I touched still have so much life in them. More than normal trees, even. They survived lightning strikes and then she cut them down and they’re just starving slowly in their holes.”
“Starving?” Albert asked.
“No leaves to feed on the sunlight. No roots to drink or feed in the soil.” Hyacinth looked up at her father’s shadowy profile. “I might try to help them.”
“It is our house now, Hy. And I would prefer a living wood to a dead one. Help them if you can.”
A cold wind swirled up the cliff, and Hyacinth slid down the damp bench a little closer to her father.
He was wearing a rough canvas jacket that he had worn for as far back as Hyacinth had memories. It smelled of dirt and sun and motor oil, of fire and sweat and exhaustion. It held, for Hyacinth, the distilled aroma that was her father.
“You’re gifted,” Albert said. “And it’s the kind of gift that would upset some powerful people.”
“People in your Order,” she said. “But what does the Order do? I know that lots of rich people with planes and houses are members, and they need people like us to tidy them up and fix things. But that’s all I know.”
“Do?” her father asked. “I’m not sure I understand you. What does a city do? A state?”
“You said the Order made you track down that monster, and now they’re making you explain its rotten body to them. Dan and the girls have to go train for the Order, and I have to be kept secret from the Order.”
Her father glanced at her in surprise.
“I heard you telling the Viking all about me,” Hyacinth continued. “I know I’m not just staying behind to take care of Lawrence. He’s actually staying behind for me.”
“Hy…,” her father said.
“Just tell me what this Order is for,” Hyacinth said. “Please. Especially since you’re sure people in it won’t like me.”
Her father shrugged and sniffed at the wind.
“It was founded centuries ago to be a defense against monstrous evils that threatened or twisted the natural order. In the beginning it consisted of explorer monks who set themselves on a ceaseless quest to carry light into the darkness. They became collectors and caretakers, and when needed, conquerors and killers. Our family has been connected to the Order for centuries; your mother’s too. I have never conquered, but I have killed. And when the evil is unkillable, it is collected and Buried, imprisoned and bound as permanently as possible. It isn’t easy, but it can be done, even to history’s biggest nasties.” Albert Smith blinked against the wind and once again set to scratching his jaw. “If our double-mouthed monster had only died more quickly, your Viking might not have come to assess his carcass, and your mother and I wouldn’t have been summoned to give a full report. But he survived so much, I thought he might be one in need of Burial. It doesn’t happen often.”
“So the Order is good,” Hyacinth said.
“Well…” Albert scrunched his face. “Yes. But it is made up of people. And people can be the biggest monsters of all. Although they are more often just petty and selfish. Monstrous men do happen, but foolishness is more frequent. And it would be the fools who would misunderstand my daughter, the fools who would lump your gifts in with those who set out to destroy the world. I will keep you from those fools as long as I can.”
“Do we have enemies?” Hyacinth asked.
“Enemies?” Albert said. “Us? Why would we have enemies?” He tucked his hands into his jacket pockets.
“The fools. Are they our enemies?” Hyacinth asked. “You know they would misunderstand me because they misunderstood you. Right? You’re like me. You can tell.”
With an explosion like muffled thunder, a wave shattered against the cliff, and spray rocketed straight up in front of Hyacinth and her father like a sheet.
They both ignored it.
“I am not like you,” Albert said. “Not nearly. I have only a whisper of what you have.”
The water kept rising. Mist swirled around them both on the bench.
“But you know what Granlea’s doing with her wood,” Hyacinth said. “You can sense that.”
Albert rose to his feet. Seawater and foam began to rain down around him, but somehow it didn’t touch Hyacinth.
“Obviously,” Albert said. “Granlea is attempting to open doorways between worlds and times using the power contained in lightning trees. She has already let in two boys and four monsters, and if she is insane enough to keep trying, the Order will have her killed or imprisoned and all her wood will be burned.”
“How do you know about the brothers? And what do I tell them?” Hyacinth asked. “Can they get back? How do I get fungus out of a person? I can help things grow, but I’ve never tried to make things die.”
“I wish you’d asked me all of those things before I left,” Albert said. “I wish you’d told me that you heard me talking about you and the Order. I wish you’d told me about the brothers and the door that they entered and the witch-queen who grew the monsters and the wounded boy’s fungal bite, because I never would have left. I wouldn’t be on the Viking’s plane and Granlea wouldn’t be attempting to open another doorway right now. I would be here to stop her.” Albert backed toward the cliff. “But I am not.”
Hyacinth jumped to her feet.
“Wait!” she said. “Don’t go!”
“Too late,” her father said. “I did. Make sure Lawrence changes his socks. Socks. Please. Fresh socks.”
With t
hat, Albert Smith stepped backward off the cliff, vanishing into an impossible torrent of water. The cliff shook and cracked. The bench and the ground began to slip into the sea.
And Hyacinth jerked awake.
Breathing hard, she sat up and scrambled backward on her itchy orange sofa, kicking her blankets onto the floor. They landed on Lawrence, who was snoring peacefully on the landing with one hand dangling through the stair rail.
Honest memory crept slowly back into Hyacinth’s world. She had talked with her father on the cliff. He had told her about the Order and how long their family had belonged and how he was sorry to leave her with Granlea even for a couple days, and she had listened, but her thoughts had been on the brothers. On their story of stepping through an otherworldly doorway into the barn. On lightning wood and the strength she had felt in it.
She hadn’t said anything to her father about the brothers or the fungus bite or their strange story of the witch-queen who had killed their father. And now she wished she had.
Hyacinth looked down at her brother, sleeping in a stripe of moonlight that spilled in from the open bathroom window. After the family’s midnight farewell and departure with the Viking, Lawrence hadn’t wanted to be alone. So he had dragged a pillow and blanket onto the landing to camp out on the floor beside the couch. Now Lawrence seemed to have flopped almost completely free of his bedding. His face was pressed directly against the old wood planks, and his arm was dangling down the stairs. Given the moist sputtering in his breathing, Hyacinth was sure that her brother was drooling.
As the dream adrenaline faded and reality settled in around her, Hyacinth lowered her feet to the floor beside her brother. She should wake him up and drag him to a real bed. Or at least get his pillow back under his head. She slid off the couch and knelt on a pile of blanket beside Lawrence. Peeling his sticky face up off the floor, she quickly tucked the edge of his pillow back under his cheek. And as she did, a hot wind rose up the stairs and inflated around her, filling the space.
The wind smelled of tar. Of smoke. And its heat quickly became more than an enveloping warmth. It had edges like blades, frying every invisible drop of moisture out of the air. It pressed in against her, digging, testing every nerve on her skin.
