by S. E. Grove
“It was then they let me go, and I sent the letter that brought you here. The following week they sentenced him. His sentence was cruel. He was condemned to cross the stone bridge, so that he would suffer the same fate Pantaleón suffered.”
Bronson and I gasped.
Rosemary covered her eyes with her hand, aggrieved. “That was before they truly understood the consequences of passing into the Dark Age.”
“What consequences do you mean?” I asked her—
My account is interrupted. I have no more time. I must write my final thoughts, and I hope that someone—perhaps the sheriff, who has been kinder than I expected—will see that these pages are safeguarded. I will be able to write nothing more in them.
We have been condemned for witchcraft—for resisting the plague by means of dark arts. At noon we will be taken to the stone bridge. If we are able to avoid the Dark Age, we will follow the lost signs to the city of Ausentinia. It is our only chance of finding safety. Perhaps they are still there, beneath the dreaded darkness.
I wish I could say otherwise, but I confess that as the hour draws near, I am afraid. I see my husband sitting across from me, as handsome as the day I met him. His skin is powdered with dust from the dry air; his gentle eyes are filled with sadness. He tries to smile at me. . . .
What will become of us? Will we survive, and what does survival through such a trial mean? I wonder what our Sophia is doing at this moment. Drawing at her little desk, perhaps. Walking with Shadrack by the river. Sleeping with that look of surprised calm that overtakes her.
I promise you, dear heart, that we will find our way to you again.
Minna Tims
March 17, 1881
Murtea, Papal States
26
Goldenrod’s Cure
—1892, June 30: 4-Hour 11—
And yet the people of the Papal States are far more divided as to the plague’s cause and its treatment. Some believe it is a curse sent northward from the Early Pharaohs. Others, particularly those sympathetic to Nihilismian explanations, believe it is essentially a fatal melancholy brought on by the grief of inhabiting the world of the Great Disruption.
—From Fulgencio Esparragosa’s
Complete and Authoritative History of the Papal States
SOPHIA REELED AND fell backward. She felt as though all the air had been wrenched from her lungs in one solid mass. From a great distance, she heard an insistent pounding and a loud voice calling her name: Errol. She realized that she was not on the floor but was being held—cradled. The strange woman had caught her. “What—” she said thickly, trying to raise her head.
“It will take a few moments,” the woman said, in her low voice. “I have called it away and it has obeyed me, but you will need a moment to recover.”
“Sophia!” Errol shouted. “Sophia, answer me!”
“Called what away?” Sophia asked weakly.
“The wanderer that was beginning to make a home inside you.”
Sophia shook her head. She was feeling better, but the woman’s words confused her. “Wanderer?” she repeated.
“What people here call a sickness—the plague.”
Horrified, Sophia sat up suddenly, still dizzy and dazed. “I had the plague?”
“A wanderer crept into your head a few hours ago, and it was thinking about staying a while.” The woman smiled. “I called it away.” She looked around her with a sense of observation. “This house is full of them.”
“Sophia!” Errol pounded on the door.
Sophia scrambled to her feet. “My friend—Errol—might be sick, too. Please, can you help him?”
The woman rose to her feet and without a word threw back the bolt and stepped aside. The door flew open. Errol leaped forward, his sword held high. Seneca beat the air over his head and whirled, screaming, into the dark hallway. “No!” Sophia cried. The woman’s back was already to the wall, the point of Errol’s sword at her neck. She eyed him coldly.
Sophia rushed between them. “She didn’t hurt me! She didn’t hurt me, Errol.”
Errol had not taken his eyes off of the woman. Slowly, he lowered his sword, but only by a little. He pulled Sophia toward him and held her protectively. “Who are you?” he growled at the woman. “And where did you come from?”
A slight smile pulled at the edge of her mouth. “Goldenrod,” she said quietly. “I come from the Eerie Sea.”
“How did you get here?” Errol demanded.
Goldenrod motioned with her chin. “I came across the ocean in a wooden coffin.”
Sophia gasped. “You were in the planter!”
“I was fading—I had been for months. You, Sophia, gave me sun and water, and they revived me.” She gave a slight bow. “I owe you my life.”
Sophia blinked. “Sun and water?”
“People of New Occident know little about us,” Goldenrod said, “and I suspect you cured me by chance.”
“You are one of the Eerie?”
“That is your name for us, yes.”
“I thought the planter held . . . plants.”
Goldenrod smiled. “You were not entirely wrong.” She held out her hands. It was difficult to see in the dawn light that seeped into the corridor, but Sophia thought that Goldenrod’s hands looked faintly green.
Errol had relaxed his grip, though he still had one hand on Sophia’s shoulder and the other on his sword. “What manner of creature lives on sun and water?”
Goldenrod reflected. “The wanderer has been with you longer. In a few hours, you will begin to feel its presence.”
Sophia whirled and looked up at Errol’s scowling face with concern. “He has it? He’s sick?” She turned back to Goldenrod. “Please help him.”
“What do you mean?” Errol retorted, raising his sword again.
“She means the plague.” Sophia wrapped her hands around his arm, lowering the sword. “Let her help you, Errol. She can make it go away. The whole house is contaminated.”
“I have withstood the plague for two years,” he scoffed, “and it seems unlikely I would fall to it now.”
“Sophia, step aside,” Goldenrod said calmly.
“Stop!” Errol commanded, raising his sword.
Sophia pulled away, and in the same moment Goldenrod raised a cluster of blossoms in her open palm. Errol’s eyes opened wide. With her slight toss, the petals expanded, enveloping Errol in a pale cloud that clung to the air around him. “Be gone,” Goldenrod said quietly. “Find another place to wander.”
Errol sneezed violently and staggered backward, dropping the sword. Sophia jumped forward and tried to catch him, but his weight was such that they both collapsed. Seneca, from where he perched in a windowsill, gave a brief squawk of disapproval. Errol sneezed again. “Good God,” he said. He put his hand to his head.
Sophia waited, partly crushed by the weight of Errol’s head and shoulders, which she had at least prevented from hitting the floor.
Errol shook his head once or twice and opened his eyes. He struggled to push himself upright, fumbling for his sword. “You’ll not bury me in your foul powders again,” he said, eyeing Goldenrod threateningly. “My sword will find that hand before you can use it.”
“We should leave this place,” Goldenrod said, ignoring him to peer into the rooms on either side of the corridor. “There are wanderers in every room, and they are restless.”
“All right,” Sophia said, looking around worriedly. “Are you feeling better, Errol?”
Errol reached out his hand, still sitting propped up against the wall, and seized Sophia’s arm. “What did I tell you about trusting too readily? You have only just met her.”
“From what I heard as I awoke in the streets of Seville,” Goldenrod said calmly, “Sophia has only just met you, as well.”
Errol clambered to his feet and gla
red at the Eerie. Sophia watched them with apprehension. He seemed as tightly wound as a spring; his fists were clenched, and his eyes were narrowed to slits. Goldenrod stood with her arms at her sides, but her still face shone with a quiet intensity. The air between them in the narrow corridor seemed to grow heavier; the silence deepened.
As Sophia considered how best to disturb it, an urgent pounding on the front door reverberated through the house. Errol scowled, not taking his eyes from Goldenrod. The pounding continued. At the sound of a shout, Errol turned his head, his expression altered. “It is the Golden Cross,” he said quietly. “Wait here.” He took a few steps toward the stairway, but the barked commands, clearly audible if not intelligible to the other two, stopped him in his tracks. He turned back and stared at Sophia. “They are looking for a girl—a foreigner, who was seen lying in the street last night speaking with a lamplighter. An informer has accused her of carrying lapena.”
Sophia gasped. “How did they know I was here?”
“The informers are paid in gold for their intelligence. They will go to great lengths for it.” He walked brusquely in his bare feet to the bedroom. “Get your things. We have less than a minute before they break down the door.”
Sophia rushed to her bedroom and collected her things. Without bothering to change out of her nightgown, she stuffed her strewn clothes into her pack and pulled on her boots. She hurried into the hallway to find Errol already dressed, wearing his cape and carrying his bow and quiver. He pointed down the corridor. “There is a back stairway in the last room on the right. It leads down to the courtyard, and from there we exit onto a narrow alley behind the house.”
The pounding on the door and the shouted commands stopped. A sudden crash of wood against wood broke the dawn air.
“We are out of time,” Errol said. He rushed down the corridor, entering the room on the right and racing down the narrow stairway in the corner. Sophia plunged after him with Goldenrod in her wake. They emerged in the stone patio, where the broken planter lay as if exploded. From the shouts behind them, Sophia could tell that the Order had made their way inside. She heard them crashing through the rooms as Errol opened the door to the alley and ushered them through, closing it carefully behind them.
“Now we do not run,” he said. “We walk calmly. Hood up,” he said to Goldenrod, giving her a sharp look. “And conceal your arms, for God’s sake.” Goldenrod pulled her brown hood over her head and withdrew a pair of long brown gloves from her cape, which she pulled on swiftly. “Take Sophia’s hand. We are a family of travelers heading east.”
“But anyone can see that we do not belong here,” Sophia whispered frantically.
“That is why we are leaving the city,” Errol said, pulling up his own hood. “We head east, toward Granada, on the road that circles north of the Dark Age.”
—5-Hour 32—
ERROL FORSYTH HAD always heard about the Faierie from his mother and father when he was a child, and more especially from his grandfather, who maintained that the soul of a childhood friend had been stolen by one when they were both in the forest, climbing a tree. But he had never seen one. Nonetheless, Errol believed in their existence just as he believed in the existence of people from the Russias: though he did not know any personally, he accepted that they were real.
As the dawn light met them on the streets of Seville, Errol took the opportunity to study the woman who called herself an Eerie. She wore long, green robes and a hooded cape of dark brown. Her hazel eyes had a disconcerting stillness to them that mirrored the calm of her face: a slight nose, a wide and firm mouth, and prominent bones. Her face was pale, as were her neck and shoulders—pale and white. But at the edges of her forehead, where her brown hair began, the skin was brown, and her long hair seemed to shift and spin unlike any hair he had ever seen. Before she had donned the gloves, he had seen her hands: where her arms tapered at the wrists her skin became green, so that her fingers were as bright as new maple leaves. She claimed to be human, Errol reflected, but clearly was not.
“How did you come to find yourself in a wooden coffin?” he asked, as they walked steadily through the winding streets.
Her expression was aloof. “I do not know. I presume someone familiar with our ways placed me in it, because I was buried in soil. It would have been the only way for me to survive a voyage of such length.”
Sophia, despite her pounding heart and her worries about the Golden Cross, looked up at her in surprise. “Remorse did that?”
“Who is Remorse?” Goldenrod asked.
“The woman who put us on that ship.”
“I do not know her. I remember nothing after the attack in Boston.”
Sophia’s eyes opened wide. “What attack?”
“At the outskirts of Boston, I was attacked in the darkness. A single attacker, but with more strength than I expected. I resisted for some time. Eventually I was too injured and fell into unconsciousness. Then came a long sleep from which I awoke in Seville.”
“And why were you traveling to Boston?” Errol asked. “You said you came from the Eerie Sea.”
For the first time, Goldenrod looked troubled. “I thought I would find what I had been seeking for months. Three of our people have disappeared, and we are in search of them. I had received word that they were in Boston. Now that so much time has passed, I am certain others have gone there in my place. I only hope they fared better. I am sure they have,” she murmured, reassuring herself.
After a brief pause, Errol made a noise of assent. “I see.”
He could not deny, with a wry smile inside his hood, that there was something fitting in the predicament of three travelers, all of them from distant Ages, all seeking people dear to them. But Goldenrod’s explanation of her circumstances struck him as entirely improbable. There was something more to the story, he felt certain. Perhaps a Faierie with no weapons could in fact have resisted a surprise attack in the darkness, but why had she been placed under lock and key in a wooden coffin? Was she so dangerous that she had to be not only locked up but shipped across the ocean? Or could it be that the very sight of those green hands had frightened the Bostonians into taking unnecessary measures?
“Why are we going to Granada?” Goldenrod asked.
“Sophia has an urgent mission there, and we cannot stay in Seville. You need not go with us.” Sophia gave him a look of admonishment. “In fact, now that we are clear of the house and immediate danger, you are welcome to leave at any time.”
Goldenrod, untroubled, did not flinch. “We are not out of danger.”
“We will be out of the city in fifteen minutes. As long as we do not encounter any others from the Order, we will have no difficulties.”
“I believe you will need my help.”
Errol snorted. “I don’t see why.” He looked up briefly and then held out his arm. Seneca, who had taken flight once they reached the patio, descended smoothly onto his leather-bound forearm.
“You may think you know this land better than I do,” Goldenrod replied calmly. “But believe me—I know it in ways you do not.”
Errol paused in his thoughts. That could be true, he realized. If she was Faierie, there were probably many things about her he did not yet know. “I suppose it would do no harm to have a Faierie on our side.”
“I am not a Faierie, any more than you”—she paused, glancing at Seneca—“are a falcon.” She fixed her brown eyes on Errol’s. “But I understand how to you it must seem a likely explanation.”
“You may travel with us. But you must wear your hood and your gloves at all times. Your appearance will draw the suspicions of the clerics.”
Goldenrod did not reply.
They were reaching the city limits. The bells of the cathedral and all the churches tolled laudes, and already they sounded distant. Errol felt the first rush of heat as the sun began to warm Seville in earnest. “This will be a difficult fi
rst day,” he said, pausing where the last few houses gave way to scrubby grass and dusty olive trees. “We must walk at least as far as the first inn, and in less than an hour the sun will be scorching.” He held out a leather water sack to Sophia. “Drink. There are wells along the way.”
Sophia obligingly took a long drink of water and then passed the sack to Goldenrod. She lifted it, turned her face upward, and with her mouth open poured water over her face and head. Errol watched her, eyebrows raised. “Faierie ways,” he murmured, shaking his head. He took the water sack back and tied it to his belt. “If we are approached by travelers on the road, let me speak to them. And if we see the Order approaching from either direction, get off the road and take what cover you can. They will meet a steel-tipped arrow of mine before they can come near us.” He stepped forward onto the dry road.
“Falcon ways,” Goldenrod said quietly.
27
Following the Mark
—June 7: 12-Hour 31—
The Remember England Party is the oldest, having been founded in 1800 on the first anniversary of the Great Disruption. Its founders, poignantly, could themselves remember the England of 1799 and earlier, having traveled there or even, in some cases, being of English birth.
—From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident
MRS. CULCUTTY ENTERED the parlor, carrying a tray loaded with tea things and a fair-sized cake. “Good afternoon, Charles,” she said with a smile. Though Mrs. Culcutty tended to be rather overprotective of Nettie, Charles had struck her from the first as a very amiable, polite young man. Most young men who visited Nettie were either wolfish fellows who took too many liberties or sheepish fellows who brought too many flowers. Charles was neither: while scrupulously proper in his behavior, he seemed pleased but not overawed in her company. When they visited together she could always hear them talking seriously, and that was a good thing. Dear Nettie had precious few moments of seriousness in her life.
