Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  “Go get Dr. Holm,” Helene barks at Declan. “Go!”

  “That girl,” Philip says sluggishly as they lay him on the table. “Was being attacked—I tried—” he says. “To fight him off.” He winces, and blood pours out from a slash in his side.

  The air around me stops, as if the very dust hangs suspended.

  What girl?

  Where is Eve?

  Why isn’t she with Helene?

  I am so afraid. Too afraid to ask. Fear is icy fingers, climbing up my spine one by one, reaching with its dark, frozen grasp to wrap around my heart.

  “What girl?” Brock says urgently, looking up from Philip, his voice rough. “What does he mean, that girl?”

  Helene takes a deep breath and a step forward. The look on her face, of aching sorrow, of sympathy, says it all. She seeks out Dorit’s eyes, placing a bloody, wordless hand on the cook’s, and then Brock’s.

  “I managed to get her into the carriage,” Helene says quietly. “But I’m sorry. It was too late.”

  “Oh, Ivy,” Nina says. “Oh—no,” and Dorit’s legs give out from beneath her as she sinks into a chair.

  The sounds of panic have drawn out every servant in the house, but suddenly we are all still. Frozen in horror. Brock turns and sprints back out to the carriage, with Dorit trying to rise and limp to follow, but Nina holds her back, saying, “No, Dorit. Stay here.”

  “What’s happened?” a voice says behind me. A small voice, frightened. Familiar.

  I whirl around and it is her.

  Eve.

  Terrified and so small, her muscles tense instead of the gentle way she usually carries herself. I bite back a cry and move through the throng of servants. Discreetly reach out and touch her wrist when no one is looking. Breathe in the scent of her hair oil, of the cream she works into the leather soles of her ballet shoes. Feel her pulse, beating strong and quick with fear.

  “What happened to him?” she whispers to me, her eyes fixed on the table as Philip yells out.

  I whisper, “Don’t look,” and pull her closer to me. Blood is beginning to spill out from the table and pool on the floor. The kitchen smells like iron. Something on the stove is starting to burn.

  “Find towels,” Helene orders Nina. “And Eve—can someone take Eve to the main house?”

  “I will,” I quickly volunteer. I’m starting to feel ill.

  “No, Marit. I need you here.” Helene meets my eyes and I try not to see the dark, crusted blood in her hair. “You’re going to have to sew him up.”

  What?

  No.

  I let go of Eve’s wrist and she slides down the wall to crouch in the shadows. Watching.

  “But I’m not medically trained,” I say. I look around desperately.

  “No one here is. But we have to stop that bleeding or he’s going to die, Marit.” Helene grabs my shoulders and looks into my eyes. “You must try.”

  I wring my hands and focus on the scent of her, the faint hint that remains of paper whites, of life. Rae and Declan bring towels, and the kettle starts to shrilly scream on the stove. With roiling nausea, I approach the table. Philip is writhing in pain. He seems only half-conscious. “Be still,” Helene says. “You’re losing too much blood.”

  “Some laudanum, ma’am,” Nina says, her hands shaking as she pours some for Philip and then pushes a spoonful toward Dorit. He chokes it down as I peel back the clothes on his torso, trying not to be sick. There is blood, and a mess of flesh. Several gashes go deep enough to expose what I guess must be muscle.

  I rip more of his clothes out of the way and, as I do, find a patchwork field of raised skin. Scars and scratches. Some of them look like burns and cuts. Some are fresh and barely scarred over, but some are old and faded.

  So many scars. I don’t have time to stop and wonder from what.

  “You can do it, Marit,” Helene says firmly. She comes and stands next to me. Lara hands me a needle and black thread. But I don’t know what I’m doing, don’t have any idea how to mend the mess in front of me. I blink and try a few tentative stitches, but there is so much blood pouring from his side that I can’t see anything at all.

  Philip groans and passes out.

  I don’t know how much blood a human body can lose and still survive, but I can’t imagine it’s much more than this.

  If I don’t do something quickly, he’s going to die. All my grudging suspicions about his mines, the Vestergaards’ hand in ruining my life, my distrust of him for Eve, come swirling to the surface. But enough to let him die in front of me? When I could at least try to prevent it?

  I set the needle down on the table and summon my magic, feeling its chill tingle through my fingers. I don’t let myself think about anything—not that I’m plunging my hand across skin that’s separated too widely, or into the deeper layers below it. I close my eyes and pretend the wound is just an awning, or the curtains Brock shredded. I remember running my fingertips over Mathies’s canvas, wishing to heal the rips in people. I need to bring Philip’s wound back together, create a seam, and as soon as I think of it like that, I feel the gash begin to gather and pull, to knot beneath my fingers.

  I’m swimming in my magic, pouring it out as I finish the deepest cut and move on. There are several more gashes, as if he was slashed and stabbed with a knife. I tend to the three deepest ones, and when I’m finishing the last one, my gaze happens to fall on Philip’s hand. To the ring with the red stone in it.

  And then I feel something between my fingers. Something small and sharp.

  I scrape the little object out of Philip’s side.

  What is it?

  A bullet?

  A piece of shrapnel?

  No, that doesn’t make any sense. These are stab wounds.

  I set the little object aside, then double my focus on bringing the wound together and healing it.

  When I finish, I sit back with a gasp.

  “You’ve done it, Marit,” Helene says. Her hand grazes my shoulder. “Thank you.” She suddenly looks exhausted. Nina pushes her way toward us with bandages and begins to wrap them across Philip’s fresh wounds. “Prepare the guest suite for him,” Helene announces to the rest of us. “He’ll stay with us to recover. And—” Her voice cracks, her jaw working, tensing. Her eyes are dark pools of sadness. “Someone should fetch the coroner.”

  Brock is backlit against the white snow, a dark shadow in the doorway. He staggers into the room, his arms full, holding his sister to his chest.

  Ivy is also covered in blood. Her hands and pale blond plait hang limply, her fingers lifeless and bone white.

  Those fingers that made the paperweights, the eyes that saw me, the kindness that bloomed under pressure, all snuffed out like a candle.

  I lean back, breathless, and Lara crouches next to me with a basin of warmed water. I scrub Philip’s blood off my hands, violently, until the skin is red and raw and the feeling of my magic is fading away. I quickly turn over my wrists and inspect the skin there out of habit.

  No sign of the Firn. I breathe a deep, shaking sigh of relief.

  But when I look up, Eve is staring at me.

  I almost forgot she was there. That she was crouched along the wall, watching me pour out the magic I swore to her I didn’t have. Her face is like the sun moving behind a cloud as understanding sets in, and I see a hundred variations of shadows—horror, anger, disappointment, disbelief. But the final look that settles on her is simply sadness.

  The kind that sets in like a deep stain and ruins something precious, until it can be remembered only for what it once was, and thrown away.

  * * *

  Dr. Holm, Liljan, and Jakob arrived a little more than an hour later, a thin sheen of sweat covering them despite the cold, their horses frothing at the mouth with exertion. Jakob had just finished his interview with Dr. Holm when Declan reached them, and they came bursting into the house together. Now the foyer and front sitting rooms swarm with policemen and the cremator from the morgue and curious ne
ighbors from the nearest estate a quarter mile away. Philip is moved, on an improvised stretcher of sheets and boards, upstairs to one of the spare bedrooms. He has fallen into a coma.

  “And you, Mrs. Vestergaard,” the chief of police says, crowded into the sitting room off the foyer. I recognize two of the policemen from the night when they stopped us in the carriage on the way back from Tivoli. “You didn’t see anything?”

  I’ve changed into a clean uniform and we are all scrambling to handle the tasks that would normally fall to Dorit and Brock. The orchids can’t mask the smell of burned coffee. I set a fresh silver teapot onto the serving table, positioning myself to hear as much as possible.

  “By the time I found them, the attacker was gone,” Helene answers. She has also changed into a clean dress, and Liljan took the blood-covered one to destroy. “He must have fled. Perhaps you should check the hospitals and infirmaries. See if anyone came in with injuries consistent with a struggle.”

  “We’re combing the entire area thoroughly,” the police chief says, putting away his notepad. “But allow me to suggest, Mrs. Vestergaard, that you refrain from traveling the roads alone until we have apprehended the culprit. We’ve had two missing persons reported between here and Copenhagen in the last month, and neither of them have been found. I don’t mean to frighten you, but it might be related.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” she says. When the foyer finally empties, Helene closes the door and double-latches the lock.

  I see Eve hiding in the shadows to eavesdrop, the way we used to at the Mill when Ness was speaking late into the night to prospective parents or her occasional gentlemen callers. I remember kneeling next to Eve on the staircase, the ends of her hair tickling my leg. Some nights I had to cover her mouth to prevent a giggle from giving us away. I won’t give her up now, either, and I offer her a discreet, tentative smile, but she abruptly turns away.

  Liljan and I light more candles than normal in the servants’ quarters, trying to keep the darkness from gathering in the corners and crevices of the house. Everyone is wearing that stunned expression of grief, the same one orphans always wore on their first days at the Mill, as though they are peering at life through a newly shattered window. Trying to make sense of the distortions, even though nothing looks quite right anymore.

  All I can think of is the way Eve looked at me as though I had utterly betrayed her.

  Every time I close my eyes, I see her face again, the slump of her shoulders, the rapid blinking of her eyes. A complicated knot forms deep in my stomach. Is there a word for when you devastate someone you love? It feels like the heaviest weight, a terrible, creeping coldness.

  It feels the exact opposite of the way hygge does.

  We’re finishing up with the last of the mess in the kitchen, and I gather a pile of bloody towels to be burned. But something falls out of them and hits the floor with a tiny clatter. I bend to retrieve it.

  What I find is small, sharp, and encrusted with blood: the object I pulled from Philip’s wound.

  I almost throw it in with the towels—just another part of today’s horrific mess that needs to be burned and forgotten.

  Instead, I walk to the sink. Hold what I found beneath the water, and begin to scrub and wash it. The red blood flows down the drain.

  Carefully, I turn the object over in my fingers. Now that it’s clean, it’s almost clear.

  I hold it up to the light before I realize what I’m looking at.

  It’s a tiny fractured piece of glass.

  Chapter Twenty

  I slide into bed that night, and when Liljan blows out the candle, I stare into the dark.

  “Liljan,” I whisper. “Something happened when I was sewing up Philip.”

  She instantly rolls over. “What?”

  “There was a piece of glass.”

  “Glass?” she whispers.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside his wound.”

  She sits up.

  “What I haven’t been able to reconcile is,” I say, “how . . . did it get there?”

  Death seems to follow this family at every turn. First, my father and the other miners. Then Ingrid, after those men came possibly looking for the stone. Aleks Vestergaard. Ivy. And now Philip has been left gravely wounded, close to death himself.

  Surely this much violence and misfortune can’t be coincidence?

  Philip was the person I’ve suspected most up until now, but this time, he was a victim. And if his story is to be believed, he almost gave his life trying to do something heroic. For a servant, like me.

  . . . Except for that tiny piece of glass.

  Liljan’s voice drops to a whisper. “Glass? Do you think it could have been Ivy?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. But he said he was trying to help her.”

  “Could he have been lying?”

  “But why? Why on earth would he want to hurt Ivy? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I look up at the ceiling and am quiet for a long moment.

  “There’s something else that’s bothering me,” I say, shifting with unease. “The timeline from the story Philip gave doesn’t add up. He left before Ivy. So how did he come across her being attacked?”

  “Not sure. And Helene didn’t see the attacker either?”

  Eve was here, safely sleeping, when Helene came upon the scene.

  Which means that no one knows what really happened today but the two of them.

  Helene and Philip—their word and no other witnesses.

  And someone else wound up dead.

  Liljan suddenly goes still at a noise just outside our room.

  I heard it too.

  The sound of a footstep, creaking on the old wooden floorboards.

  I bolt upright at a sharp knock on our door. Liljan leaps to her feet. Pulling her robe on, she opens our door a crack.

  There’s enough moonlight for me to glimpse the hem of Eve’s nightgown peeking out from under her coat as she pushes into the room.

  “Eve?” I ask, blinking, pulling free of the covers.

  “I need to talk to Marit,” Eve says to Liljan, her quiet voice prickling.

  Eve glares first at Liljan and then turns it full-force on me, sparing a brief glance around the room as I find a match and light a candle. “Eve, come here,” I say. I set the candle next to my bed and sit cross-legged, patting the spot on the quilt beside me. She stays standing, keeping me at arm’s length. Liljan scrunches down under her comforter, trying to make herself as small as possible.

  “No,” Eve says. Her brown eyes lick with fire. There’s a troubled crease in her forehead. “You lied to me, Marit.”

  “I’m sorry, Eve,” I say. “I—”

  “So she knows?” Eve asks, throwing a glance toward Liljan, who has become a small quilted ball. Her blanket is steadily turning to the pattern of our walls. “You’ve known her for barely a month and you told her that you have magic?”

  “Eve,” I try to explain. “It isn’t like that. She has magic too. Everyone who works here does—”

  Eve chokes on a laugh in disbelief. “So everyone here knew about it? Except for me?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “You’ve lied to me my entire life.” Her lips purse in that way they do when she’s so furious that she’s about to cry.

  I fall silent. I did lie. Right to her face, back at the Mill. And every day, the lie of omission. I am ashamed, and my excuses suddenly seem weak and not enough—that I lied, over and over again, simply because I didn’t want her to worry about me.

  “Marit,” she says. She takes a shaky breath and the words come tumbling out. “I know you think that everything must be perfect for me now, because I have a new family and more money than I ever dreamed of and I get to dance, but”—her throat bobs, her voice getting higher with the threat of tears—“the truth is, this is when I needed you the most. You’re the only thing I have left from my life before. Everything is different—everythi
ng—and I just wanted one thing to be the same.”

  It’s as if a thread is pulling out too fast from the fabric, and if the end sails right through the needle before I can catch it, I’ll lose the strand forever. At the Mill, I always thought the future would be what tore Eve and me apart—other people’s decisions that I couldn’t control. Instead, it will be the past. It will be my own decisions that undo us.

  “But you lied to me, my whole life. So that other part before doesn’t even seem real now. It’s like you made me lose that, too,” Eve says. Her eyes well with angry tears. The hurt that carves into her voice makes my heart curl up in a ball tighter than Liljan. “I used to know you loved me. In fact, it was one of the truest things I ever knew. Now . . .” She trails off with a sharp shrug.

  I suck in a breath. “It is true, Eve,” I say, trying to keep the edge of frustration out of my voice. “I know I lied, and I am very, very sorry. But you have to believe that every choice I’ve made has been because of how much I care for you.” Sometimes at the risk of my own life, I think, but don’t say.

  Her fingers are tapping absently along her coat, the way they do when she is anxious or upset, and I know I’ve hurt her deeply. “I always thought of you more as a sister than a friend,” she says, her voice shaking. “But now, Marit—you really aren’t either to me. So . . . maybe you should find somewhere else to work with your magic.”

  She draws her small body into that commanding ballerina presence and strides right out the door. Years of trust, of love, of relationship, broken and gone, just like that. It always struck me as unfair—how easily trust can be broken. How long it takes to knit together. How it’s ruined now, like a blade slashing through a gown. Like Ivy’s very life is gone. One moment here, then lost forever.

  Liljan finally peeks out from her blanket. “I didn’t know so much fierceness could come out of such a small person.” Then she sees my face and sits up and hugs her knees, her voice softening. “You know how young people are when they’re upset. She doesn’t really mean it.”

  Hot tears spill onto my clenched fists. I never wanted Eve to worry about me. To fear that the Firn might one day come and take me, just like it took her mother. I know what it’s like to live with the fear that magic could kill someone you love. All this time, I believed I was protecting her. Instead, I somehow turned the shield around and wounded her with it.