Splinters of Scarlet

by Emily Bain Murphy

  The sound ricochets and I jump. But the vine keeps coming, tightening around his leg. Advancing with purpose up his torso.

  “It was you,” Brock says from the shadows. A second vine is climbing now, creeping up Dr. Holm’s trunk, reaching for his neck. Brock steps forward as Dr. Holm drops the gun and tries to grasp at the vine with his bare hands. “You were the one who attacked Ivy,” Brock says, seething at Philip. I think back to him at the glass shop that day in Copenhagen. Perhaps he was already scouting her then, making his plans. Perhaps he even wanted her to recognize him. So that when he met her alone that day on the road, she would make the fatal mistake of stopping long enough to greet him.

  One of the miners now enters the ballroom with a yell and runs toward Dr. Holm, trying to slash at the tightening vines with his knives. It hits me with a pang that he looks about the age my father would have been, if he had lived.

  Brock’s face tightens with fury as he turns toward Dr. Holm. “And you were in on it. You used them. You killed her.” Dorit, Rae, and Nina step forward to form a barrier around Brock as he grimaces in concentration, and with one look at his face I know exactly what he is feeling. Firn is sharpening like glass knives in his veins. He’s reaching down into all the magic he has. Just like I did for him. Just like Ingrid did for me.

  With a single snap, the vine around Dr. Holm suddenly jerks. It’s enough force to yank him backwards. It pulls him toward the blown-out frame of the window. Toward the last jagged piece of glass that slices up, its edge glinting in the moonlight.

  He drops onto the glass with a sickening sound of something being punctured. Then his body falls soundlessly from the window, into the snow-covered night.

  Philip goes pale.

  It’s as though time in the room stops at that moment.

  Brock’s chest is heaving. The room goes completely still, and Brock closes his eyes, spent.

  I always pictured the color of vengeance to be deep crimson red. The color of anger and blood, of proustite, and sometimes of magic.

  But today, vengeance is Brock’s.

  And its color is ivy.

  * * *

  Everything is so eerily quiet around me, even as there is blood and fighting and fear and weariness.

  Declan bursts from our hiding place to help Dorit and Nina and Rae.

  There are only three adversaries left—Philip and two miners.

  For the first time, the battle is shifting in our favor.

  We could outlast them and the storm. We could make it out of here.

  The two miners are fighting hand to hand with Brock, Dorit, Nina, and Rae.

  Declan doesn’t reach them in time before Rae’s blood goes spattering across the floor.

  She falls, forever.

  Helene still has her knife to Philip’s throat. The weapon trembles. “You’ve done all this for nothing,” she says in a low voice. I creep a meter closer to them, keeping to the shadows. “The king is going to want to know where the magic comes from.” Her delicate throat swallows, and I realize: she’s stalling.

  She doesn’t really want to kill him.

  “No, he won’t,” Philip says simply. “Because do you think he cares where his sugar comes from, Helene?” he asks. “Do any of us? Every day, it makes our Danish tea and cakes sweet. Yes, I know that emancipation was signed decades ago. Yet how many people still probably died for the sugar in your own kitchen? For your cacao, your coffee. The cotton and silk in your dresses, Helene. The king will not question where the jewels came from or what they really cost. The more people want something, the less willing they are to find out the truth. They simply choose not to look.”

  Yet my father did, at least when it came to magic. He looked at the truth square in the face and he did not turn away. He risked and lost everything for it. Perhaps simply because he was a good man. Perhaps because the daughters he loved had magic pulsing through their veins, and he knew that someday the victims could easily be us. My eyes well up with a fierce swell of pride. I know the truth now. The choices my father made turned me into an orphan. But they made him a hero.

  In that moment, Philip manages to escape Helene’s knife hold.

  He turns on her.

  It has been clear, from the beginning, that she is no match for him physically.

  And still. I wait in the shadows. Dorit is holding up Nina, who is limping and looks deathly pale. Everywhere, shattered glass is crunching beneath the scuffles. Declan and Brock are still fighting, but Declan is bleeding from his side and Brock seems exhausted. I can see the Firn inching and curling beneath his skin.

  I look from my hiding place to the door. To the promise of safety and escape. To Eve.

  Philip knocks the knife out of Helene’s hand and sends it clattering across the floor. Furious snow is coming in through the shattered windows, and I think of that night at the ballet, with the royals and Hans Christian Andersen. When Eve and Helene and I all dreamed about the future.

  Philip has managed to restrain Helene, and now he pushes her toward the broken window so he can finish the job.

  She doesn’t even know that I’m here.

  Maybe she never has to. Another ounce of magic will kill me. I could hide in the shadows and wait.

  But that is a decision too.

  Helene is fighting her best as the snow swirls in to bury the parquet floor around her. She is starting to falter, her energy failing. Philip jolts her wrists in front of her. Begins to methodically tie her up.

  I look at my own wrists, at the mark of the Firn, as he binds hers.

  Eve’s mother.

  Don’t use magic, my father always told me. Be a Gerda, he wrote.

  Which do I choose?

  I know what choice these miners made. They took and spent the lives of others to get magic for themselves. But I have the chance to do the opposite. Sacrifice my own magic for the life of someone else.

  All this time, I’ve been clutching so tightly to a selfish love for Eve, to a future together.

  And now, as simply as letting out a breath, I let it go.

  Eve can’t go back to being an orphan again.

  I’ve worried all along that if she had to make the choice, she would choose Helene over me. But now she won’t have to.

  I step out from the shadows and reach down for the full force of my magic.

  I know what a true older sister would do.

  Because my older sister did it for me.

  It’s as if a space has opened up in my lungs from the last time. As if the magic is quicker to go down to that deep level. Magic is singing through my veins in pleasure and excruciating pain as I untie Helene’s binds from across the room. Loosen them enough for her to slip out of them, all without ever touching her.

  “Marit,” Helene chokes out when she sees me. Philip turns to look at me, surprised. I’ve caught him off-guard. Bought just enough time for Helene to escape her binds. He whirls around to face me, the knife appearing in his hand.

  “Magic is the future of Denmark, Philip,” Helene says from behind him. “It has saved Denmark from you.” She grabs a shard of glass and thrusts it deep into his side.

  I stop holding on. To my magic. To the future. In a mirror of each other, Philip and I both sink to the floor. I can feel the Firn race through me, and I wonder what mine would look like as a jewel. What color it would take.

  For the first time in my life, I am not afraid of it.

  Perhaps because I willingly chose it—and because choosing it meant someone else is going to live—for the first time, maybe I could actually even find the Firn beautiful.

  * * *

  Eve curls up beside me. I feel the familiar weight of her, just like all those nights at the Mill, as she lies down next to me here one last time.

  “You’re going to be all right, Eve,” I whisper. “With Helene.”

  “Marit, you’re going to be all right,” she says fiercely.

  But I’m not, and I think she knows that too, because she leans to cover
me with her body, shaking, and I smell her familiar smell, the one that reminds me of rest and happiness, of a thousand nights falling asleep at the Mill. I touch her hand as she runs it, so tenderly, over my cheeks, and I remember what she looked like in all those moments our lives overlapped. Holding Wubbins up to me uncertainly, leaving traces of biscuit crumbs in my sheets, pushing Sare over, scheming about Ness, defending me from Brock. That look of wonder on her face that first night at the theater. Dancing in the light from the street lamp at the Mill when she thought she was alone. Those quiet, vulnerable moments when she was falling asleep next to me and already half dreaming. If all our memories are a duet, now she will be the only one singing. And the song that was mine to sing, the memories of her as a little girl, of Ingrid, of my father, will die now, with me.

  Eve traces so gently along my eyebrows.

  “There,” she says. “I’ve brushed away anything ugly or bad left over from today. Now go to sleep.” She wipes away one of her own tears that falls on my face, and her voice breaks when she lies: “And we’ll both wake up fresh tomorrow.”

  I close my eyes, and suddenly I’m on the staircase and I’m five years old. My sister is humming and making a flower crown. My arms are twining around the banister at my home; the edge of the wood is leaving a mark on my cheek. “For you?” Ingrid says, handing me the crown, her laugh like wind chimes. My father is at the stove, and I can smell the warm milk, the orange zest of Mother’s old whipped custard cream.

  “I love you, Marit,” Eve whispers in my ear.

  I feel warmth flooding through me. Because all my life, I was afraid of the future. Afraid that when the end came, I would be alone.

  “Eve,” I breathe. What more could I ask for than this? The most precious gift.

  To spend the last moments of my life with the one who, for me, made it all worth living.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Philip

  I was listening on the day the miners found out the whole truth.

  The day that sealed everything, that meant there was no more turning back for me.

  Half the miners wanted to tell someone the truth—the police, the king. Half wanted to continue the secret and get in on the action.

  Their voices rose and echoed off the limestone.

  “No one leaves here without agreeing,” Steen declared.

  I listened to all of it. What happened next. All I did that day was listen.

  Sometimes the biggest decisions you make come by doing absolutely nothing.

  The miners split.

  And half of them killed the other half.

  And made it look like an accident.

  There was so much blood on all their hands.

  There is so much blood on all our hands.

  There is blood on me.

  My blood.

  Helene is looking at me in judgment, watching me from steps away, in her deep purple silk, as I bleed. While she lives in this house built because of the things I did, wearing clothes paid for by the choices I made. Eating food that was made by other people’s sacrifice. She asks servants for that in her own house, by using their magic. Trading their lives for her comfort. How is what I’ve done that different, when it comes down to it?

  I’m just willing to look at my hands and see how truly dirty they are. She gets to pretend hers are clean because she doesn’t watch it happen right in front of her.

  Don’t act like you are better than me, Helene, I think but am too weak to say. Or that what you do is any different.

  At least I have integrity about it.

  At least I’m being honest with myself.

  Two of my men are lying motionless on shattered glass. One of the male servants is dead beside them.

  “We have to help her.” Eve is sobbing over that dying seamstress as though the child has lost her own mother.

  I miss my mother.

  “Eve,” that servant Jakob says, cracking open a case filled with medical supplies. “Do you remember what I taught you about variolation in our lessons? About the woman who used old smallpox scabs on her son?” He looks around frantically. “We need weakened Firn.”

  I’m in so much pain. There’s blood coming out of my side that I try to hold with my hand, but there’s a lot of it. It feels like another lifetime that I was a young boy, holding my arm behind my back, with my mother’s blood on my sleeve. Just wanting not to feel so afraid. Just wanting my mother to stop crying.

  “She always carries that red stone from her father,” says Jakob’s sister, Liljan. She ransacks the seamstress’s pockets, but they are empty. Everything around us is shattered glass, stilled bodies, mangled vines, wreckage.

  “It must be in her room,” Jakob says urgently. “We don’t have time.” He falls down beside the seamstress’s limp body and plunges a syringe into her. Draining out the Firn, just like Tønnes and I used to do.

  Liljan is doing the same to that male servant who killed Tønnes with the vines. My eyes blur. Tiny shards of Firn glitter in the light, like fool’s gold in a bloody stream.

  “I think I know,” Eve suddenly breathes, crawling over the seamstress, “where she might keep it.”

  Eve turns over the hem of the seamstress’s dress. Finds a small secret pocket.

  I blink and she pulls out a scarlet stone tucked inside.

  “Yes, Eve!” Jakob says. He finishes extracting Firn-filled blood from the seamstress’s arm, and then begins to transfuse her with his own blood. “Now we need it weakened—”

  “I know,” Eve says, and holds the stone over a candle flame, grimacing only slightly when the jewel blackens and the heat burns her fingers. What is she doing—releasing all the precious magic into the air, making the stone as useless as a lump of coal? I always buried my spent Firn deep within the mines.

  Except Eve starts to scratch the girl’s arms with the stone. Scrapes off pieces of it and nicks her skin.

  “Don’t go, Marit,” Eve murmurs gently. “Stay and we’ll fight for each other, like we always do.”

  Jakob leans down and kisses the servant’s eyebrows and the tips of her eyelashes. Liljan wipes tears away into her sleeve.

  That seamstress ruined everything.

  I was so close. To what I’d worked so hard for. Spent all those lives for.

  I would have made it worth it.

  Will I see my mother again? Surely, if there is someone or something out there waiting on the other side, they can find it in them to understand why I did what I did?

  I remember being on the battlefield.

  I remember watching the little boy with magic.

  Aleks watching the ballet.

  My mother, with jewels in her hair.

  I’ve lost so much blood. It’s making me unsteady.

  But I think the last thing I see, before it all goes dark—

  That seamstress.

  How could one person, one single girl, destroy everything I tried to do?

  I might have imagined it. It’s hard to tell anymore.

  But the last thing I think I see is that seamstress gasp and open her eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Marit

  June 29, 1867

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  The bookstore smells like lavender, fresh paper, and old leather, and a small brass bell tinkles over our heads when we walk through the door. It’s dim and cool, a reprieve from the sticky summer air outside, and the bookstore owner grunts at us from the counter. Jakob walks to the oak panel holding the new arrivals. His fingertips dance along the shelves, and he gets a shy smile when he touches a certain crisp green spine. “This one,” he says. His eyes crinkle with pleasure behind his spectacles and he pulls the book from the shelf. “You’re going to love this one,” he whispers, and asks the owner to ring it up. “It has everything you like.”

  I tuck the book under my arm, feeling the same way Ivy’s orbs must feel when the sun floods through the glass and turns them to pure gold. We make our way across the street to the tin
y, unassuming brick office on the corner.

  The office sits at the outskirts of northern Copenhagen. It is set in a small, shadowed nook next to a bakery, so it always smells like rising bread and flaky cinnamon pastries. The sign on the front of the office has no words. There is just a symbol: a rope that curves like a lemniscate, the sign of infinity. If you look closely enough, you can see that the rope is actually a vine, sprouting with tiny ivy leaves.

  When we step over the threshold and close the door, we both hesitate. Then Jakob gives me a lingering smile and crosses to his side of the office, where he is surrounded by a hundred tumbling books, his cabinets of glass test tubes and cannulas, and various microscopes. I have to force myself toward my own desk to abide by our rule.

  No kissing allowed during work hours.

  I trace my fingertips over the gold words stamped into the cover of my new book and have just sat down to open it when a small shadow pauses in front of the window. I can see the outline of her through the diamonds of colored glass. She hesitates, and then with the lightest knock, the door creaks open.

  It’s a young girl, around nine years old. Her dark hair is slightly matted. Her clothes are brown and threadbare.

  She takes a tentative step inside. “I heard . . .” she says nervously. “I heard you can help me.” She turns in the scuffed toes of her boots and extends a coin with the ivy symbol etched onto it. The coin is our secret signal that she’s been sent by someone in the magical community who knows about us. Knows what we can do.

  She looks so young.

  “May I see?” I ask gently. She nods and pulls up her sleeve.

  Blue is edging in a pattern of crystallized frost under the skin on her wrists.

  “What’s your name?” I ask her.

  “Elise,” she whispers.

  I don’t even need Jakob’s microscope to see that she’s ready. I give him a single nod from across the room.

  “Come with me, Elise,” I say, offering her my hand. When I send her to change into a plain cotton gown in our washroom, I run my fingers over her clothes. By the time she emerges, the fabric has knit itself back together, stronger.