by M. K. Hobson
At the back of the cabin, there was a sound; the slow creak of the door. Emily tensed, looking up—but it was only Mrs. Lyman, the red-faced mining widow who had taken to keeping house for Pap. When she saw Emily, she dropped an armload of firewood with a resounding crash and clatter. She then burst out in screams of delight, enfolding Emily in a bark-dusty embrace.
“Emily! Why, I can’t believe it, you’re home! Oh, we read the book!”
She babbled more words as she spun Emily around the small room, but Emily could barely hear them, for Mrs. Lyman was squeezing her so tightly that the blood was beginning to pound in her ears.
“Abby …” Pap said. When the words and spinning didn’t stop, he barked, “Abby! Enough!”
Mrs. Lyman stopped and stared at Pap in surprise.
“Why, Ignatius, I don’t—”
Pap made his voice milder. “Could you give Em and me a little while to talk? Then she can tell you all about things later. Over dinner, maybe?”
Mrs. Lyman was silent for a moment, then nodded.
“Why, sure. Dinner! That’s a lovely idea. I’ll run back over to my place and chop the head off that old hen that’s stopped laying. And there’s new potatoes from the garden, and half a pie left …”
Muttering to herself, Mrs. Lyman bustled out as quickly as she’d bustled in. Emily rubbed her cheek with her hand to see if the old woman’s kisses had left bruises.
“Emily, come on over here.” Pap reached for Emily’s hands. When she gave them to him, his fingers traveled inquiringly over the smooth ivory of her prosthetic.
“What’s this?”
“I lost my hand.” Emily always hated saying that. It sounded so careless, as if she’d just misplaced it. But she didn’t want to explain what had actually happened—the clang of steel, the smell of blood … not to Pap, most of all.
“That’s the hand the stone was in,” the old man said softly.
“Yes.”
Pap said nothing for a moment, letting his calloused thumb play thoughtfully over the intricately carved fingers. Then he let out a long breath.
“But you’re all right now, Em? You’re not … you’re all right?”
“I’m all right,” Emily said softly. “Tell me what’s happened.”
Pap was silent for a long time, as if debating something with himself. Then he made a decisive movement.
“Em, you know how you came to me. You were just a little thing, not five years old. Your mother, she came through the pass in the middle of winter with you wrapped in her coat, and then she died without saying a word. That’s what I always told you.”
“Yes,” Emily said warily, not liking the sound of Pap’s last sentence.
“I didn’t tell you everything, Em. I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to grow up remembering—” He stopped abruptly. “There was bad things around you, Em. I had to protect you from them. If you could have seen yourself, just a little girl, sweet as could be—you’d understand. You’d forgive me. You’d understand that I couldn’t let anything hurt you. And after what she’d done to you—”
“She?” Emily interrupted. “My mother?”
“She was bad, Em.” Pap’s voice became a whisper, as if the very air around them could coalesce into the remembered badness just by speaking of it. “And it wasn’t just bad around her, it was bad in her, bad down to her bones. Wicked bad.”
“Wicked bad?” Emily echoed softly.
“Evil, Em.” Pap clenched her hands hard. “I know evil. I seen it, in the eyes of the men who tried to burn me back in Kentucky, all them years ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your mother, she was on her way to San Francisco. To be with them Russians who come to see me … the Sini Mira, they call themselves.”
He paused expectantly, waiting for her to make some sound of astonishment. But Emily had already met the Sini Mira—a shadowy group of Russian scientists who had tried to kidnap her on her way to New York. She remembered the iceberg-blue eyes of their leader, a man who called himself Perun, whose white hair and pale skin made him seem to be carved of snow and frost. But he’d said they just wanted the stone, the fragment of the Mantic Anastomosis that had been lodged in her hand. Now that that was gone, what could the Russians possibly want with her?
“I don’t know how they found out about her, after all these years.” Pap continued hesitantly, through Emily’s heavy silence. “They came up here and asked about her—what did she say, and what did she have with her when she died. I told them she didn’t have nothing with her, that she didn’t leave nothing behind. I wasn’t going to tell them about you, Em, honest I wasn’t! But they already knew.”
“They have ways of knowing things,” Emily said. She was thinking suddenly of the brown man, the Russian in San Francisco who’d given her the too-convenient train ticket. Then it had seemed strange. Now it seemed downright sinister.
“Have they been back?”
“No. They rode off, and they ain’t been back,” Pap said. “But it made me scared, Emily. It made me scared that I ain’t told you everything you need to know. Secrets don’t die. You can bottle ’em up, but they don’t die.”
Pap stood, dislodging the last of the grumpy cats, and felt his way to the locked cupboard. Emily knew it well; it was where Pap always kept his most dangerous and precious magical supplies. He fumbled for a key around his throat and unlocked the cupboard. He felt around within it until his fingers found a small bottle. He carried the bottle as if it were a poisonous snake that might bite him.
He gave the bottle to Emily. It was very heavy glass, cobalt blue, with an iron stopper. Around the bottle’s throat was tied a card. It was hard to discern in the half-light of the fire, but it was, she realized, a calling card like the ones the ladies in New York traded as a part of their mystifying rituals. On it was engraved four small words in thin, elegant type:
Miss Catherine Kendall. Boston.
“What is it?”
“The card, that was your mother. The bottle … that’s you. It’s you at five years old, Em,” Pap said softly. “It’s all your memories.”
Emily swallowed hard, turning the bottle over and over in her hand.
“It’s called a Lethe Draught,” Pap said. “It’s memories distilled down. The light and sweet ones float to the top. The bitter and dark ones sink to the bottom. It’s everything I didn’t want you to remember. It’s all the nightmares you had, those first few weeks you was here. It’s all your fear, and all your misery, and—” He faltered, rubbing his hand across his eyes. “I had to do it, Em. Those memories, they’re all so bad. I don’t know the half of them and I never wanted to. I just wanted to see you happy. And you were once I took them away and locked them up. Then they couldn’t hurt you anymore.”
Emily held the bottle away from herself, looking at it with horror.
“I hoped you’d never need them back,” Pap continued. “But if these Russians … these Sini Mira … if they’re after you, and looking for you … you may have to know, Em. If you don’t know, then you might not know how to stay away from them.”
“If I drink this, I will get the memories back?”
Pap nodded.
“It was all right, you not knowing, while you was staying here in Lost Pine,” he said. “Bad things can’t hurt you if they don’t know where you are. But now they do. And even if they didn’t …” He paused. “Well, you ain’t back to stay. Are you?”
“I’m going to marry Mr. Stanton,” Emily murmured, still staring at the bottle.
Pap smiled. “Decided to fall in love with him, did you?”
“Afraid so,” Emily said, and Pap chuckled, nodding. He let his thumb play over the ring she wore on her thumb, the Jefferson Chair ring Stanton had given her.
“Tell me you forgive me, Em,” Pap said. “Tell me you don’t hate me.”
“I couldn’t hate you,” Emily said. “And there’s nothing to forgive. You did what you thought was best.”
But as
she crouched there before the man who had been the only father she’d ever known, she was painfully aware that doing one’s best was never assurance that it wasn’t the wrong choice anyway.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dmitri
Mrs. Lyman returned a few hours later with a fresh-plucked chicken and some garden vegetables in a basket. She’d also tucked in half a pie, some biscuit dough in a cloth-covered blue bowl, and a bottle of whiskey. It was clear she meant to make a party of Emily’s homecoming.
And indeed, they had a merry afternoon, with the savory smells of the chicken stew on the stove—and Mrs. Lyman’s garrulous stream of conversation—filling the warm cabin. The little thimblefuls of whiskey Mrs. Lyman kept pouring out were the chief fuel of her discourse; the chief subject was a pulp novel entitled The Man Who Saved Magic, a highly colored recounting of the adventures that had driven Emily from Lost Pine. Emily was astonished that the book had made it back to Lost Pine before she did.
“Heck, everyone in Lost Pine’s read the book by now,” Mrs. Lyman affirmed as she dipped a string-tied bundle of sage into the chicken stew. “Mrs. Bargett down at the boardinghouse, she raised her prices by a dime just ’cause that stuck-up Dreadnought Stanton stayed in her establishment. Puts the book into the hand of everyone who walks through the door.”
Emily flushed, mortification and whiskey reddening in her cheeks. The book, which had been put out by the Institute’s publishing arm, Mystic Truth, was an overwrought piece of melodrama designed to thrill readers with precisely calculated measurements of excitement and adventure. The particularly thrilling chromolithographed cover featured lions (though to the best of Emily’s recollection, she and Stanton had not encountered a single lion on their trip, much less three leaping with jaws a-froth). It had been carefully crafted to have the maximum impact on the minds of readers like Mrs. Lyman, who dreamed of great adventures and great men to pursue them.
The more powerful people believe we are, the more power we credomancers have, Stanton had once told her.
Books like The Man Who Saved Magic were designed to make people believe that little, if anything, was outside the realm of possibility for the type of Warlock who was to be found within its pages.
“But no one understands why you weren’t in it!” Mrs. Lyman said indignantly, placing her hands on her hips and glaring at Emily, as if the faults of the book could be laid at her doorstep. “There was just some swooning nitwit named ‘Faith Trueheart.’ Who’s that, I’d like to know? What about good old Emily Edwards, from Lost Pine, California?”
Emily bit her lip to keep from commenting on the particular prejudices of the editors at Mystic Truth. It had been their decision to leave her out of the epic retelling. Given that it was Stanton who would be Invested as Sophos of the Institute, they were more concerned with building his power. Indeed, in their eyes, his contribution to the adventure was the only thing of credomantic worth—given that he was the credomancer, after all. No use diluting his share of the glory to give it to someone who’d have no use for it.
“I guess they left me out for modesty’s sake,” Emily said finally. “To keep my name from being sullied, or something like that. People in New York have some funny ideas about ladies and names.”
Mrs. Lyman crossed her arms disapprovingly. “Well, people in Lost Pine have some funny ideas about girls who run off with traveling Warlocks.” She paused. “But since you’re going to marry him, I suppose it all turned out for the best.”
They enjoyed themselves well into the evening, finishing the bottle of whiskey and the chicken stew, laughing until the coals on the stone hearth glowed orange and Emily could hardly keep her eyes open. How she longed to climb into her old bed up in the loft and fall asleep, her belly full and her head pleasantly addled. But she knew that she couldn’t stay even a moment longer. She had to get to Dutch Flat to catch the midnight train back to San Francisco. Mrs. Stanton’s lunch was the next day, and even leaving now, she’d be hard-pressed to make it.
“You sure you have to go, Em?” Pap murmured sleepily as Emily banked the fire. “It’s so late. I wish you could stay till morning …”
“The moon’s full, and you know I can get anywhere in these woods even without it.” Emily tucked the warm Indian blanket around him in his chair, and scratched a fat old tabby, one of Pap’s favorites, between the ears. On the rocker by the fire, Mrs. Lyman snored. Emily lowered her voice to keep from waking the old woman. “I have to get back to New York.”
Emily thought about telling Pap about the hideous anticipated lunch with her future mother-in-law, but decided to leave him with a more inspiring image. “Mr. Stanton is being rewarded with a special position at his Institute. There’s going to be a big ceremony. He wants me there.”
“Oh, well, if Stanton wants you …” Pap whispered good-naturedly, chucking her under the chin. He was silent a long time. His face became thoughtful, almost the way it looked when he scryed something. “He’s a complicated knot, Emily. Be careful how you untie him. You’re a hothead. All on the surface. You’ll always say too much and at the wrong time, too. But your Mr. Stanton … he’s all underneath. Like a fish deep underwater. He’ll keep secrets.”
Emily pressed her lips together, shivering despite the extreme warmth of the room. She’d already found out how closely Stanton could keep secrets. Like failing to tell her that he’d once studied to be a sangrimancer, a blood sorcerer. And when she had found out, he’d refused to speak of it more, as if life could be sectioned into neat post-office boxes that could be closed with finality, at will. Emily knew it wasn’t so, but she wondered what it would take to get Stanton to believe it.
“That bottle, Em …” Pap’s voice broke through her thoughts. “If you do drink it—and I ain’t sayin’ you should, but if you do—don’t drink it all at once. And don’t drink it alone. You tell him he has to be there with you. Mr. Stanton. He’ll watch over you, and fix it all up if I’ve got it wrong. You promise?”
“I promise,” Emily said.
Emily rode the poor rented nag hard down the mountain, making good time to Dutch Flat. She hitched the tired beast outside the shut-tight livery, then sat on the platform waiting for the midnight train. She tipped her hat down over her eyes, blocking out the yellowish light from the lantern that hung from the platform’s wooden rafters.
She drew out the blue bottle from her inside coat pocket. It was heavy and warm from her body. She held it up in her left hand, letting the lantern light shine through it.
She searched backward in her mind as far as she could go. She’d never remembered much from her childhood, but then, she didn’t know that people were supposed to. Sometimes flashes of memory would come to her, but they would pass and leave no trace, like a leaf thrown in a running stream. The only things she remembered with any clarity revolved around Pap’s cabin: gathering up a handful of pinecones when she was very small, and bringing them to him with great seriousness. She remembered cold winters and brilliant springs, mud on boots and the smell of wood smoke. But before she’d come to Pap’s … nothing.
She opened her eyes again, and the bottle was still in her hand. It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true. She felt angry—not at Pap, but that such a decision should exist to be made. Angry that she didn’t know what to do. She wanted the memories. She wanted to know about her mother, and what had happened to drive her to such desperate straits. But she didn’t want the memories just exactly as much. Memories changed a person. What if she didn’t like the person she became after she drank the contents of that little blue bottle? What if Stanton didn’t like the person she became?
She dozed during the train ride to San Francisco; there were plenty of empty seats going into the city, so she could put her feet up. Just outside of Sacramento, she heard someone in a seat nearby speaking Russian. She looked up in alarm, eyes searching wildly, but it was only an old woman in a headscarf parceling out a picnic breakfast to a pair of leg-swinging chi
ldren. Emily relaxed, but only slightly. She laid her head against the glass, watching as dawn stretched pink fingers over the land.
The Sini Mira were Eradicationists who wanted to bring a halt to the use of magic and replace it with the advancements of science. She’d run across the shadowy consortium of Russian scientists once too many times for her liking.
She remembered her encounter with them in Chicago. She particularly remembered their leader, the ice-white man who called himself Perun.
I can tell you where you came from, Miss Lyakhova. Who you really are.
His voice, like exhaled smoke.
The most puzzling thing was that Komé—the Indian Witch who had transferred her spirit into an acorn—had told Emily that she should go with them. But why would Komé want her to go with Eradicationists who had hired a brutal bounty hunter to capture her?
Emily jolted wide awake as the train rattled over some connections. The image of the white-blond man danced behind her retinas. She touched the bottle in her pocket, satisfying herself that it was still there. She needed to speak with Komé. She needed to know what the Holy Woman knew.
But just as Stanton had been commandeered by the Institute, so had Komé—and even more completely. It had been determined that her spirit could not survive long in an acorn, so Emeritus Zeno had the nut placed into a rooting ball—a hermetically sealed device filled with nutrient fluid. It was hoped that the acorn would sprout and grow, and Komé’s spirit could survive in a new form.
It seemed an excellent plan—the least they could do for the Witch who had given her body to speak for the consciousness of the earth. But more than once, Emily had found herself wondering whom the actions were truly intended to benefit. Emeritus Zeno now kept the rooting ball on his person at all times and was so zealous in his protection of it that one might suspect that he had ulterior motives—motives other than Komé’s future health and happiness.
