The Winter Triptych

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  She hauled open the door and passed out cold.

  Had the huntsman, the demon’s keeper and its kept, not been present, Altheia’s cousins would have gone to poisonings and duels over the crown. But:

  He grabbed the birdskull, hauled it up from where it fed. Its secret was no secret to him anymore, and while he revelled in what questionable freedoms it afforded, he never once forgave it for borrowing the time on which he lived. A knowledge of another kind, the skin-shawled witch had said. Of ink and blood and chrism from the fount that spits us all onto the earth. Thou drinks of it, and it of thee. All one, and all unending. And he’d laughed and gone his way, hefting the thing he’d bargained for, wending through those greygreen trackless hills.

  Recalling gave him pause. He glanced at Lill, stone-cold in the corridor, then glanced at Ellinor, splayed and glistening like a fruit dropped from a height. He took the birdskull by the blueblack snapping beak of it and jammed it down over her head.

  She convulsed once, let out one cry. Despite himself, the huntsman cringed to hear the voice of her – unearthly sound, he’d never before heard it from without. Then she went still, stayed still.

  Meantime Lill came round, saw the princess on the floor clothed in feathers and in blood, and dissolved. A quarter hour passed before he’d calmed her, and the limp thing on the floor had not yet stirred.

  Kneeling, he waved Lill away, lifted an edge of Ellinor’s new cloak.

  Underneath, she was all gore and ruination, unrecognizable; but as he further watched, her wounds did clot, did draw, did piece, did close, and her pulse leaped beneath his touch. From within the skull, he heard a snore. He rocked back on his heels and almost grinned for wonder.

  After a while, he took the birdskin by the skull and tugged: first as gently as he could, then harder as the panic rose, then madly with one boot braced against the mangled child’s back. But the thing would not come off.

  Waking, Liese recalls the dream, the physician’s visit, the sound of footsteps climbing to the Keep’s crown, which she’d assumed lay ruined all this time. She sits. No longer is she upstairs in her sickbed – someone will have brought her back down as she slept, though Cook hadn’t had the heart to cuff Liese to the wall, fresh from the physician’s stitchery and everything. She sprawls in straw beside the fading hearth. She stands.

  On the wall, the maids all sleep: catty Tally sucks a thumb; cold tears track down Elspet’s cheek; Nell kicks out in some dream. Liese tries the door. It does not give. She guesses Cook has had the way barred by night – has surmised, with her evil canny Cook-sense, Liese’s secret wanderings. So, cursing Cook’s unenterprising heart, Liese crosses back toward the other door, the door onto the outside waste of thorns and ash and snow.

  Waking, Isele recalled what she had seen: Ellinor ravaged by the huntsman’s kept, opened out on her own floor, her insides all disclosed, and with that demon like a headdress and a cloak on her, riding her like nightmares even as the huntsman looked on with his monstrous mild eyes.

  She recalled herself to herself, drew the guise of Lill back round.

  How many deaths now stacked against her name, her names? Meg’s band, and Meg herself, gone down despised by her people for a murder uncommitted, gone down cursed for witch and turncoat – all so Isele might escape. Now Ellinor, frail pink changeling of her own abandoned child, sent, like Meg had sent Isele, out of harm’s way. Where to? She did not know. Just as Meg, wishing for Isele a quiet life up in her garret, marrying and birthing, went serenely to her death, daring to think, at last, she had absolved her bloody-handed pride.

  Isele guessed that Meg’d not seen her amid the thunderhead of the crowd, down below the scaffold with its red clay bell, that day. With three left in the line, Isele had turned tail and fled. She never saw Meg die. But as she’d shouldered through the press the screaming tracked her, shrill and green, the sound of souls uprooted and undone.

  She’d buried her misery in the ineffectual arms of Saint-Gilles, who of his own guile had escaped; later, in the huntsman’s arms, her revenge’s enemy. One more betrayal. She told herself she’d only gone to his bed out of pity, for she found his posturing absurd, his self-assurance like a smooth sheen over rotten ice. She wrapped stories round her sins like poultices, but the guilt still paced her like a caged cat, far too wakeful for her peace.

  And now Ellinor was dead. The task of Isele’s vengeance, though she herself could not complete it, was accomplished. Altheia’s bloodline was quenched. And Isele was bound no longer. She was free to go. Descending the great stair, she broke into a run.

  Liese vaults a border of the collapsed maze and circles round the darkened Keep, sunwise, with one hand on the wall. She passes fallen topiary, scummed pondlings, spans of ice where paths might be. The earth leaches warmth out through her feet, the moon hangs like a grin behind a veil of cloud, and she wonders whether every twigsnap must bring creatures from the leaning wood. She speeds her steps, rounds a turning in the wall, brushes up against the double doors, braces to the nearest one and shoves.

  When the doors part, she slips through – into a throng of people, silent save for those who weep, all staring at a fixed spot on the floor. Unnerved, Liese looks down. There is something at her foot. A bit of embroidery: a half-finished portrait stitched on gossamer, bordered by white roses in a chain. One tiny blotch of crimson mars one petal of one bloom. The needle hangs forgotten on its thread.

  Liese knows the pregnant phantom’s likeness, and grinds it into the floor with her heel.

  Before long the keening crowd parts slightly in its shifting, and Liese peeks through, toward the focal point of that collected gaze. She sees two priests; a man with yellow eyes; a tiny girl in stockings, the remnant of a skyish smock, a blue-black feather mantle, and the head of a huge bird. All her soft parts have been ripped away. She lies scattered in her leavings. But even from her distance, Liese can see the child’s heartbeat in her wrist.

  Suddenly the yellow-eyed man turns and spots her. He looks at her first with vague familiarity, but then as he takes in her face, his own face drops its walls, and soon he’s staring at her the way Black Meg must have stared at him as he’d approached her, awful, graceful, dancing, almost, got up in his marvellous coat.

  Isele flung herself down the last wide stretch of stair, skidded across the foyer in her maid’s felt slippers, almost fetched up against the gathered crowd, pushed through. Her eyes nearly shut against what she must see if she looked into the huntsman’s face, looked toward that blackish blotch below, she lunged toward the door.

  And stopped.

  Half-shadowed, a phantom was on the doorstep.

  Half-shadowed, a phantom is on the foyer.

  Isele stared. A girl lost in a house of ghosts.

  Liese stares. A dream of leaves.

  Each is on the wrong side of the tower door. Isele runs out. Liese runs in. It is not until much later that they, minds flying, admit that the abrupt chill they each had felt upon crossing the Keep threshold, one out, one in, was due to their running straight through each other.

  So which, then, is the ghost?

  Isele did not check her pace as she vaulted a slouched place in the gate, as she tore down the avenues and alleyways of Queenskeep like all hell’s devils dogged her heels, as the malachite wood closed up like still water over her head, not slowing, not until a low branch caught her under the chin as she raced from her fetch through the gloaming, and dropped her in the mud in a heap.

  When she woke it was day, and other days had passed. She was filthy, bleary, famished, lying in sodden mosses under a greying afternoon. Hearing a commotion, Isele, recalling the events in the tower, stayed put. But she recognized the voice – it was Saint-Gilles.

  She’d no clue why he’d be out here, but neither did she know why she had headed for the greenwood once her panic flushed her from the Keep. Had he spotted her mad dash and trailed her? Why?

  Saint-Gilles was envious of her bed, she knew, since she’d taken to t
he huntsman’s – but what could she have done? The huntsman understood her marginally better, mind and body both. Had Saint-Gilles ever told her stories, ever taught her anything? Had he given her gifts? She still could see the huntsman’s roses – red roses, quite unlike the queen’s – with their petals like flesh. Their code, to liaise while Ellinor was asleep. A rose turned backward to the wall –

  Isele picked through underbrush, toward the noise, and fetched against a shallow-lipped ravine, not far from Black Meg’s clearing, though this she did not know. She had heard rightly: there was Saint-Gilles, and there were two of dead Altheia’s guard. And, improbably, Ellinor, alive and well, still in the birdskin. She kicked with her legs and shrilled with its beak. They led her like a wolfhound on a chain; and with her, they had cornered Saint-Gilles, had laid him out for her inspection.

  They held the chain taut, let her near – a little. She stood on his chest, peering down, the birdskull canted quizzically.

  Saint-Gilles gibbered, seeing his death in her cobalt marble eye, in the blueblack oily glinting of her head, in the inescapable beak affixed in it like a spike, breathing.

  They allowed him pause, to appreciate his situation. When they saw it dawning in his face they slacked the leash.

  Saint-Gilles had not time enough to scream.

  Isele had not the strength.

  She hid her eyes, she stopped her ears, but for some minutes she could hear the demon lapping at a sticky wetness, the queen’s men laughing as the princess gorged. When the horror bested her she peeked. Then she puked in a hedge.

  Only once the noise of their departure unravelled into nothing, and only once she’d mastered if not quelled the dread, Isele crept out of the briars, inching down through fractured sunlight, into the ravine.

  Liese runs across the foyer, elbowing through ghosts, dodging spots in the antechamber where the floor’s rotted through; she rounds a corner and dashes down some stairs to reach the kitchen door. She trips the latch, rushes inside, and collapses, panting, at the cold hearth, where she drops into a deathlike sleep, ashes in her hair.

  She does not dream. She listens. The voice is much like hers. A tale, she thinks, remembering.

  The voice speaks, and it brings to mind the dream of leaves, the ragbag scramble of her name. It discloses nonsense.

  It’s time enough, it says. She’s slept the hundred years she must, and now they all are dead, and she has wasted. It’s time for her to wake – or die. Death’s kiss to wake her other eyes. And it will not have been in vain.

  Ice water crashes round her. “Sweet dreams?” Tally inquires. She retches, a rooklike awking sound, and gobs into the ash near Liese’s head. Then she rights the empty ewer and sways back to her laundering. Cook glares. In recent days, Cook’s been browbeating Liese with what slim shreds of maternal instinct she possesses – poor child, and on the mend, and with such a fever. Clearly it’s not yet loosed its hold on her, for the light in Liese’s eyes is startling. Cook, on the verge of some misguided act of compassion, stops cold and withdraws.

  Liese knows what she must do.

  Above, the sun, the sky, the day. Roundabout, the trees. Beneath, lying in what blood the demon hadn’t time to drink, Saint-Gilles, or what remained of him. The only friend Isele’d had left, though she’d not realized it before.

  She fell to her knees in the mud and the blood and wept for all she’d lost. Meg was gone. She’d died to save Isele from the queen’s hunt. The others, gone. They’d died for an idea, an ideal – a barren one, a cursed. Ellinor was gone, alive or not, was gone. Saint-Gilles. There was no doubt in her mind that he’d come out of hiding to rescue her, to either seek her out or draw the guard from her pursuit, and had been cornered by the demon as Isele had dreamed beneath the thorn. Now, gone. And every bit her fault. It was her gift that brought them to this end, her gorgeous stupid gift that undid everything she touched. Hears voices, she could still hear Meg’s men scoff. Thou mind, or girlie’s ghosties come to snatch thee in thy sleep.

  She’d never asked for it. And what good had it done, could it possibly have done?

  She paused.

  There was one thing it still might do.

  She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. The tang of gore still on the air, this took some while. When her mind slowed and cleared, she relaxed and focused her efforts on picturing her baby. It was no task at all, remembering the last Isele’d seen of her: a linen bundle receding into a violet evening, clutched in a scared girl’s arms. And before that? Isele had barely got the chance to fix her face in memory. She imaged her lost child as best she could, then extrapolated: stretched her mind upon her daughter’s daughter, then her daughter’s daughter’s daughter, uncasing like a row of nesting dolls, aligned. She could see them clearly now. Like sparks, her mind had leapt that gap.

  She traced that path a bit. Then stopped. She whispered in a rounding mother’s ear: a daughter’s name. She watched the mother swell and bear. She watched the daughter grow. She saw that the girl’s eyes were good, keen enough to glimpse beyond the veil, betimes – and that she was alone. Isele paid visits, usually in the child’s dreams. She was lonely too.

  When the time was right, she whispered once more in the child’s ear. It’s time enough, she said.

  She felt the girl toss in her sleep. She thought she’d stay a while.

  Drawing Saint-Gilles’ dagger, Isele opened both wrists to the air.

  It is a hundred years to the day since the half-death of the dead queen’s daughter when Liese-Isele ascends the stair. She is ready. Heretofore it has been two halves of one picture, but now the jagged bits dovetail to seamlessness. Two sides of one coin, but it spins and lands on its edge.

  So:

  Liese has been cornered by a mad old loon, by night, on the stair. A new resident of the Keep, bundled in from the infamous asylum on the city’s hem. Terrified and snivelling, he’d known his task upon arrival. Ellinor, he’d wailed, weeping out of clouded yellow eyes. (Ah, says Liese-Isele. The same.) She’d seen him twice more, as a ghost. He’d stood above Ellinor’s mutilated corpse, explaining with hands and eyes to Altheia’s kin. And he’d danced on the scaffold, dressed in his wonderful coat.

  She understands now, he’s taken her for Isele. It is thee, he’d hissed into her face. She’s come upon the roses he still turns to Isele’s ghost. To her. He must still be here.

  Liese-Isele steps off the landing: ninth floor. Isele knows the way and steers her, finds the room. Liese’s physician is there, and Altheia’s huntsman. Also, Ellinor.

  The years have not been kind. Crowy plumage litters the floor in bloody clumps, for the sometime huntsman is tearing it out by the handfuls. The sickened physician moves to intervene, then recalls where they’d found the old madman, and leaves be. He cannot help her anyway, not now.

  The demon’s eyes are clouded as a misted glass. Even the beak has crazed and dulled with time. Its catatonia renders the thing powerless to hunt, even to eat: at Ellinor’s feeding-time, the beak is pried open, poured down. There rises from its bed a sicksweet decayed stench, not quite half-masked by the roses set in pails along the walls.

  Liese-Isele steps into the room.

  Perhaps, in the end, Meg had seen this coming. Giving herself over to death, maybe she had peeked beyond the veil and seen the curse fulfilled, barrelling along, inexorable. Perhaps she watched now, even now, as Liese-Isele (her protégé by half) grabbed the lamp down from the wall. As she torqued at the waist and pivoted with fire flinging from her fingertips. As she turned and ran. And ran.

  Perhaps Meg had seen, too, the room in which the twice-cursed thing would die. Foreseen the lamps and candles by the princess’ coffin-bed, at head and foot. If so, perhaps she knew beforehand that the lamp would strike the blueblack daggered skull full on, that the flames would leap to catch the other flames above, and that from there the glass would scatter and the fire spread, first to the huntsman and physician, then to the drapes and chairs and hangings in this room and
in the rooms below, for they rained fire as they fled. That, though winter rode the roofs in full array, Queen’s Keep would be razed.

  More likely, she had not.

  But Liese-Isele is out the door and gone.

  The tower burned and fell, in flinders, through the night. Some few had seen the fire go up, had seen the tower clad and crowned in flame, and flakes of fire descending, lighting windows – guttering – then out. They watched from roofs, from trees. Dawn brought expeditions of good citizens with spades, and looters with sieves, and dusk saw them all on their way, ashy and thwarted. The people, by and large, are not stunned by these happenings. Queenskeep’s name, now rendered obsolete, is changed back before the heir’s corpse (what of it was recovered, anyway, which wasn’t much: a blackish feather, blue in light; the buckle from a shoe) is cold in the ground.

  There is a new ghost askulk in the mirror-hall. The hall is now, of course, also a ghost, and very seldom seen. The hundred-year-old child paces there, but the demon’s burned away: where she is, she is alive, awake. She smiles at something unseen in the glass.

  And Liese is free. In the city she’s found herself a place that once, they tell her, belonged to a martyr’s cousin. They let her take the garret in exchange for maid-work in the new wineshop downstairs. They spent a morning hammering and prising just to clear the door. “Why’s it boarded up?” she asked, and was told, “Ghosts,” and nothing else. Later he told her of the girl who’d kept that room so long ago. They’d found her in the wood, wrists slit, lying across some rebel’s corpse. Her body and his had been burned together in the mad queen’s kiln.

  What had been real, Liese wonders, and what dreams? She remembers Isele’s presence – she’s never known which of them flung that fire – but when she shakes the whispers from her skull, they file out demurely. Her dreams are dreams of flying, romance, meadows, feasts, pursuit. No greenwood, and no ghosts. Her days are days of work like work she’s known, but paid. She has a roof that’s hers; she has some small coins in a purse. When the purse is full she might just up and disappear.