The Winter Triptych

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  Meg stood ringed and fixed by stares. She shut her eyes and slumped, then straightened. She braced. She must. “Isele,” she said.

  “What of her?” said Kay.

  “She – ” Meg swallowed “ – died.”

  The hand tightened on her hair. “How dead, witch?”

  Meg tried to make her face speak truth while her voice said, “Drowned. Better that than gallows, and a show, and her poor corpse a tool for lessoning, and the crows to have her eyes. I pray that at the last she understood.”

  Liese awakes, not in the kitchens. Hers is a bright room, the setting sun flung in her face through the biggest window she has ever seen. Through it she can glimpse treetops, the fishscaled roofs of outbuildings, the blinking of a pond across the grounds: she’s upstairs.

  “Fourth floor,” says a voice just at her elbow. Liese whips round and is brought up short by pain. Her breath catches. The voice chuckles. It says, “Wiser to keep still.”

  Liese groans.

  “Tell me.” The voice moves sideways into Liese’s field of vision and takes shape: a physician, dumpy, kindly, in a too-small jacket stretched taut across his shoulders, like a skin splayed on a rack in sun to dry. “What was it? Little scuffle in the scullery?” Liese dares to shake her head: her brain is pocketful of thorns. She reels. “Or perhaps some unkind carter ran thee down?”

  “What do they want of me?” Liese manages, recalling the ghost on the stair.

  “To become well, and return to thy duties. I’m to tend thee.”

  “Thou lives here?”

  “Yesterday. Today. Maybe tomorrow. I mend the ailing. For a time I have thy simple self to tinker on – then elsewhere onward. I wander.”

  “Oh.”

  Liese glances over. Beside, the physician’s implements arrayed neatly on a bench. Among these, a bowl of water vivified with blood. How long had she slept?

  “I stitched thee up,” he says, reading her face. “Set thy wrist and ribs. Drugged thee, for sleep, three days gone.”

  “My head – ”

  “ – Pains thee. Expect it. Thy wounds want time to knit.” He sets to gathering up jars and bottles in a calfskin case, then stands. “Now. Sleep. In the morning, when the cook brings up the bread, she will retrieve thee.”

  He goes out into the hall, then turns.

  “Has thou ever watched the stars?”

  Liese hasn’t.

  “Have a see.” His chin tips toward the window. “While thou’rt still here to see.”

  Then he is gone.

  Liese listens as his footsteps ravel down the corridor, as they slow. A door opens; his voice: No change in her? Another patient, Liese decides. Tally, she hopes: Kat finally made good her threat to punch her nasty teeth straight down her throat.

  When the footsteps head back toward her room, they are accompanied: Liese discerns a second, lighter-treading, pair. Unaccountably, a panic plays up through her, and it’s all she can do not to bolt, or hide under the bed. She stills her breath, feigns sleep, and wonders at her sudden fear.

  Presently – Liese slits her eyes to see – the physician passes, trailed by a waif in white shift and cloth shoes. Her hair is cornsilk, tightly updone, tightly capped. Liese nearly gasps, for she has seen her and her like: they bring the kitchen’s elaborate purees up somewhere – hearsay, to the ninth floor, the topmost of the Keep. Though Cook’s detailed a hundred times the ruination of the upper floors, the thorns and spiders. Sinkholes. Rot. Not ghosts. Not anything but trouble.

  The footsteps reach the stairs, begin to climb.

  Liese holds her breath to count the pauses between flights, the narrow landings while the staircase corkscrews up.

  The echoes stop. Ninth floor.

  “Ah,” she breathes.

  Then she hears the voices from outside.

  From small distance through the window the screams reach her, and the sobbing; and, beneath these, countless voices blur and mumble, a discourse like a swarm of bees. Pushing pain away, Liese swings her legs down out of bed and picks her way through tessellated twilight toward the wall.

  Reaching the window, she stops dead and she stares.

  There is a kind of stage erected over the roses in their field. No – she blinks – the roses are not there. Instead, the earth bears marks of scorch and snow, broken skeletons of rosebushes ranged in the suggestion of a maze. The stage is bare planks, and a huge crowd rings it round. And on it stands a kind of palanquin, a queue of prisoners flanked and hemmed by guards, a hut-sized bell of clay.

  Liese watches as men pile firewood beneath the bell, heap up kindling roundabout. Stacked grasses of dead summer, brittle brambles, sweet pale hay, bone-dry. She watches as the pile is doused with wine. She watches the torch fall.

  A man in livery begins a speech. This gangrenous limb in the body of the populace. This wound desperate to be cauterized.

  The crowd fidgets and roils. There are hisses and cheers. Liese is almost sure she can hear singing.

  A twitch of white in blue snares her attention. Her eyes draw to the silk-hung couch, half-hid behind the bell – and what perches on its edge in gown and diadem and sneer.

  Liese jumps back as if electrified. The lady phantom on the stair, but not a phantom yet. Liese acknowledges the crown, the place of honor, the deference of guards. The queen?

  Now she tracks the screaming to its source, counting twenty in that queue. Among the prisoners she spots a man in bandages, a woman in tears, a girl of likely less than ten. The rearmost is a woman with bright eyes. They’d shaved her head and dressed her in coarse sacking, but she stands tallest of all, and alone of all seems calm.

  The fire licks the curving of the clay.

  Altheia nods. The guard kicks open the bell door, and the queue is marched inside, is piecemeal muscled through the gap. From prisoners and crowd alike, the clamor swells and peaks, and one by one the twenty disappear.

  The screams intensify.

  Amid the crowd, Liese almost thinks she sees herself. She blinks and she is gone.

  At the queue’s tail, the woman starts to speak. Her voice is still and strong, and carries. “Don’t fear it!” she screams toward the queue’s frontmost. “Don’t give them that of thee! So we die. So others come! And we’ll be laughing down from heaven.”

  “Thou won’t,” one bellows back at her, his terror displaced by his rage. “It’s hell’s circles for thee.”

  “We’ll give Isele thy regards,” another says.

  At this the woman’s face falls, and she reaches for their hands. A guard shoves her back. She stumbles. None come to her aid.

  “No,” she cries out. “Kay – Bren – I –”

  The man nearest the woman whirls on her. “Shut thy filthy mouth,” he spits. “Thou turncoat witch. Thou murderess. Save Isele, thou says. So kill her. This – ” his gesture cups the bell, the flame, the shuffling queue, the unearthly shrieking from beyond the little door – “thou proves it is for nothing.”

  “Please,” she says. He slaps her full across the face. She shuts her eyes and weeps.

  When she opens them again, they all are gone. Altheia tips her head an inch, and a guard kicks shut the door. Liese watches as the woman bolts toward the bell, is caught and hurled down to the boards.

  “Thou let me go,” Liese hears her scream. “I will die with my own.”

  From the palanquin, Altheia smiles.

  Guards set the woman on her feet, while others keep the door. A sudden access of rage takes her, or of dignity. She brushes herself off. In tiny measured steps, she turns. From her window even Liese can hear her ragged breath, her words clotted with hate and tears. “I curse thee, Altheia,” she says. “And I curse thy child.”

  Altheia pales. Her arms clench over her stomach, like a shield.

  “Thy brat will undo thee and then be undone by thee. She will sleep, not dead, not quick, a hundred years – ”

  Guards dash to silence her, but dare not slay her as she stands. Suddenly she spook
s them and they find they shy to set hands to her wrath, like reaching through a flame.

  “ – to give thy wretched spirit hope, to churn thy black heart in the pit of hell – ”

  “Silence her,” Altheia shrieks.

  “ – then die. Or wake. Thou will be some time in knowing.”

  The rebel woman drops a curtsy at the queen. She laughs. The guards scatter away.

  “Thou take it back,” Altheia croaks.

  All innocence, for now she has the mastery, the woman says, “Take which?”

  “Thy witch’s malison.”

  “I’ll not.”

  “Thou will.”

  “Does beg me to?”

  “We’ll see.”

  Altheia signals, and a man comes forward with a jar. The rebel woman falters. Backs a step.

  He sets it down. He lifts the lid.

  And something reaches up and out of it. Sets a soggy feathered appendage on its rim. Flops out over the edge onto the stage. Raises itself up and staggers round to face the crowd. Throws back its head and screams.

  Quick as pain, the man bends and swipes to grab it. It spumes and spurns and lashes. The foot-long beak stabs out and punctures once, twice, before it is subdued.

  Even Altheia gasps. Then recalls herself.

  The man gouts blood from eye-sized holes: below the clavicle, behind an ear – but carries on undaunted. He is a ghost now, of course, Liese realizes, but hadn’t been when this occurred.

  Expertly, he tightens his grip and swings the thing, flopping, thrashing, screeching, up and over. Its arc takes it through the late light, where it shimmers, casts blue-black as crows. There ensues a flurry of what might be wings, and a sound Liese does not like. Then the man is gone: he is wearing the birdskin thing, his head cased in its hollow skull, the blood from his injuries gradually slowing to surcease. It screams again, but now the voice has changed: his voice and its, as one.

  The rebel woman (Liese glances) has gone grey as ash.

  Abruptly, the blue-black dagger of its head whips round toward Altheia. Gathering herself, Altheia tips her chin, and the man wearing the birdskull, or the birdskull wearing the man, turns softly round to face the rebel woman, and, showman-slowly, almost gently, to the tune of her terror, advances.

  Liese’s knuckles go white on the stone.

  Six months after Meg’s death Altheia joined her. She’d shown early and had been brought late to bed, but even then, the brat would not come out. Propped on the silk of pillows, stinking of sweat and shit and blood, Altheia listened, blank-faced, to the third midwife that entered, took one look at her belly and said the baby’d turned feet-first in her and could not come out of its own.

  Here Altheia was brought to mind of the greenwitch curse the rebel woman’d laid on her, just before she’d been relieved of her skin, by patches and by threads. Thy child will undo thee.

  Suddenly, her composure dropped in bits around her. She pushed and nearly fainted. Screamed. Gushed dark fluids on the brocade coverlet. The midwife came at her bearing a steaming cup. “To ease,” she said. Altheia knocked it from her hand. She’d caught the glinting on the knife the midwife thought she couldn’t see. Further witches. She could not trust a one.

  By morning she was dead, as prone and gone as conquered lands, drained pale. Before the midwife had readied her blade, the child somersaulted and slid out with apparent ease onto the swampy coverlet. The midwife crossed herself and voiced astonishment.

  In her sickbed, Liese dreams greenwood, ripe and plush and flaunting. But this time no ghosts await her; no ghosts pluck at her sleeves and dash off headlong through the moss. She sits, alone, on the snaggletoothed maw of a fallen well, brimmed with old rain. Flotsam dithers on the gloss. She dips a hand to stir the gathered water and discovers five pale leaves lined neatly in a row. Each has a letter inked on it. For it is a dream, she reads. L-I-E-S-E. Then a breeze disturbs the pattern. She looks back: I-S-E-L-E.

  The midwife called the child Ellinor, her own runaway sister’s name. She gave out that Altheia’d lived just long enough to kiss and christen the poor brat before collapsing from loss of blood, for none’d been there to witness, so none disputed what they thought Altheia’s word, and she was sure to dab her eyes and sniffle when she told the tale of it, and only smile when alone.

  Ellinor was raised in the tower by a young maid hired several months before Altheia’s death, kept on the payroll by the dead queen’s relations. She’d lost her own child the same week of Ellinor’s birth, so served as wetnurse, guardian, and chambermaid rolled into one. The queen’s huntsman also stayed: they feared him enough to pay him well, and they paid him well enough to keep him on. Much of the other help was put out into the street. The kitchens ran, of course, and servants kept the upper levels, but the lower floors had begun to give over to quiet disrepair by the time Ellinor had learned to walk.

  Whereupon the second half of Black Meg’s diptych curse ran down its clockwork and snicked shut.

  It grieved Ellinor to admit that, at the age of three, there was still much she did not understand. Once she was out of swaddling they’d moved her to the nursemaid’s room, which she’d had no qualms with; she’d noticed that the people of the tower kept her well at arm’s length, and the nurse, at least, was kind. Why, she’d even dropped a curtsy at the baby when they had first met. “Ellinor,” the nurse had said, and smiled – a truer smile than Ellinor was accustomed to. “A pretty name. It suits thee. Mine is Lill.”

  What her dignity did chafe at, though, was when that strange man with yellow eyes moved in with Lill – so also with Ellinor. He was kind enough, she thought, though he did stalk her nightmares, time to time, and when she saw Lill kiss him it was all she could do not to cry, for she thought she loved him too.

  He mostly only told her stories, though, when Lill was out. He told her how he dreamt that his skull became an eggshell, and then was tapped, then cracked, then exited. “What came out?” she asked, and he said, “Nothing.” Then he told her of a scholar so afraid of losing all the knowledge he had drunk that he’d tried cheating death, and so in turn was cheated: was granted life, he said, but one thralled to a knowledge of another kind.

  Though she pretended otherwise, she did not understand a word he said.

  “Never bargain with a witch,” he told her, and his eyes looked to her like amber, with things trapped inside. They stared through her, and through Lill beyond. Ellinor sulked. In truth he’d taken Lill to his bed out of pity, for he’d seen the grief that girdled her, like ice will lock a ship too long at anchor, wintering. It was a grief twined with a guilt and a regret, a black thicket of hurts that braced and devastated her by turns: a martyr’s strength. He could not guess the root of it, its fount and path and terminus – and so it called to him, he thrilled to it, as to any intrigue undivined. And once divined, it paled: as soon as he was inside her he immediately wished himself elsewhere; the demon-thing that tracked its footprints through his soul began to stir. All he could do was hold it fast in check and dread the day its own law bucked his discipline. It had lusts of its own. (“In God’s name,” he’d gasp, not looking down, not daring, “be thou still – ”)

  He brushed Ellinor aside. He whispered in Lill’s ear. Lill blushed.

  “Stay just here,” Lill sang at her. She dropped her embroidery on the divan and rushed out in a whirl of skirts. They disappeared together.

  Ellinor sighed. She dallied a moment, then picked herself up and cast about. Low ceilings, bare and unassuming walls, a coarse dress hanging on a peg, weeds in water: nothing entertaining. A divan, that big clay jar in the corner, Ellinor’s own bed. Lill’s embroidery.

  Its bright colors caught her eye. She took it up.

  Though she could not know it, the design was her mother’s portrait, a commission Lill had been paid to fulfill. “They think that if they hang this near the roses, they will grow,” Lill had told her, attempting a straight face.

  The likeness was flattering, if the concept a bit
absurd. Mesmerized – perhaps she recognized her mother clad in color and in thought, if not in flesh – Ellinor ran hands over the silk.

  She did not cry out when the needle pricked her. Only when she glanced and saw the blood upwelling from her fingertip was she upset – still, less panicked than annoyed: Lill’d betrayed her, left her here to bleed to death while she was off doing Ellinor had not the slightest notion what. She tossed the embroidery hoop to the floor and gave it a good stomp, then went over to the corner and, with only slight hesitation, kicked the big clay jar with all her force.

  It tipped but did not fall. Then it tipped back. It wobbled. Bounced. From within she heard, or thought she heard, a sound like cat’s claws scraping at a door. She began to back away.

  The jar flung itself into the wall and shattered. A soggy glob of crow-hued plumage righted itself from the shards. It cocked its empty head, the flayed birdskin, then rounded full about and lurched toward Ellinor.

  Perhaps it smelled the blood on her hand. Later, this would be the huntsman’s theory, given to the staring faces of the dead queen’s kin.

  Her shrieks brought Lill, pelting down the hallway, smoothing down her skirts as best she could, the huntsman at her heels. After what she’d seen these past few years, Lill was sure she was prepared for anything – first Altheia’s hunt, Meg’s gang dragged in for torture; then their execution, marched of their own power to the fire; then the bloody birth of her own child, the huntsman’s brat, premature and breached like the queen’s own, and given into hiding that same night. She’d dug a hole for witnesses and interred a bundled blanket weighed with stones, but wept real tears, her milk flowing for no child at all. She’d tossed down spades of barren earth and marveled at the fixity of her resolve.

  Even so, Lill’s mettle had its limits. She’d come here to kill the child, to bring an axe down on the mad queen’s lineage, but something – the time, the care, the milk, the sacrifice, all given freely – had made of Altheia’s daughter, in her eyes, a kind of agreeable changeling of her own.