The Crimson Skew

by S. E. Grove

  To settle herself, she practiced the approach to map-reading that Bittersweet had begun to teach her. Instead of falling entirely into sleep, she tried drifting into a frame of mind that he called “discernment”: a state in which her active senses fell asleep, in a way, so that her sense of perception could fully waken. She hardly understood it, and as yet she’d had no luck finding her way into such a state, but she practiced it nonetheless. Bittersweet said that she had to “stop seeing and begin perceiving,” a suggestion that did not, unfortunately, make things easier.

  The air was damp with condensation, and Sophia felt the clouds amassing overhead. Every step Nosh took seemed to add to the suspense. Sophia took a deep breath.

  “Use your dream eye, not your outer eyes,” Bittersweet murmured.

  “I’m trying,” Sophia replied.

  “It’s very hard to do when you’re so tense.”

  Sophia shot him a look over her shoulder.

  “Sorry.” He looked genuinely sympathetic. “We’re almost there. Please don’t hope for too much,” he said earnestly.

  “I know.”

  Sophia gave up on using her dream eye and instead looked closely at everything around them. The path was crumbly and dry, stony on the incline. A few wildflowers grew sparsely amid the maples. Nosh had been climbing steadily all morning, and the forest was thinning. Now he stepped off the path, heading right, toward a slow rise.

  Suddenly, between the trees, a great valley came into view. The hills below were dark green. The flattened mound that gave the valley its name lay to the north: a hill shaped like a crawling turtle, its arms, legs, and head just visible. At the valley’s base, the ground was rocky. A gray river wound along it, flat and colorless beneath the heavy clouds.

  “There’s the grove,” Bittersweet said, pointing. But Sophia had already felt its presence. A tight cluster of dark trees interrupted the stream, surprisingly tall, their trunks dark red. They seemed misplaced, as if they had been dropped there, whole and intact in their incongruity, by a stranger with no knowledge of the valley. Tree-Eater’s red trees, Sophia thought.

  Looking at the grove, she felt a storm of feelings that she knew with certainty were not her own. They belonged to the Clime, the old one. And the sense of intention behind them seemed so familiar that she wondered how she had never observed its source before, for surely this was the wellspring of the pressure, reassurance, suggestion, and guidance that she had known all her life. She recognized its influence in a hundred minute decisions that had seemed on the surface to be hers: an unspecified suspicion of another person; a trenchant unwillingness to make the choice that seemed by all other signs obvious; a desire to look farther into a deserted place. She remembered vividly hearing this voice-that-was-not-a-voice only two months ago, when she searched for the Nihilismian ship known as the Verity: it formed as a sense of excitement, urging her onward. The old one had been speaking to her all along.

  In that moment, she understood what Bittersweet meant by perceiving rather than seeing: it meant to know something without questioning how one knows; to accept the intuitive sense one has of what is right; to bypass the slow steps of seeing, judging, and deciding. She perceived what lay before her as clearly as if the old one had spoken it in her ear: This grove was secret. It was too dear, too fragile, too dangerous. They were not to come near.

  This was why the old one had fallen silent. Everything for miles and miles and miles had gone quiet and still for the sake of this place. The fear was not about the grove; it was for the grove. It had to be protected at all costs.

  “Bittersweet,” Sophia whispered. She found that she was standing next to him, and she did not remember having dismounted.

  “What is it?”

  “The Clime is guarding this place.”

  Bittersweet looked out toward the grove, and a sudden flash of lightning shuddered across the valley. Several seconds later, the thunder echoed, low and muted. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. The sense of it is sharper now. Things have changed. I wonder what has happened.”

  “It is so palpable here,” Sophia said, still whispering.

  Bittersweet glanced at her. “It is. Perhaps because the old one has drawn all its attention here, to this place, its presence is very strong. Had you never sensed it before?”

  Sophia shook her head. She continued staring as splinters of lightning cracked the dark sky. Move on, move on, move on, they seemed to say. This is not the time. The grove stood, dark and impenetrable, still untouched by the coming storm. At such a distance, it seemed a slight and frail thing: tiny in the vastness of the valley.

  The rain reached them before it reached the valley floor, and it began to fall in cold, hard pellets. The droplets pattered on the leaves overhead, and then they began in earnest, falling with a roar. Almost immediately, the valley was obscured from view, but Sophia still saw it clearly in her mind’s eye: the secret grove of Red Woods; the great valley that drew the wailing Lachrima to its center; the place so vital, so cherished, that the burden of protecting it had awoken fear in the heart of the old one.

  “We can go now,” Sophia said loudly, over the crashing rain.

  “Really?” Bittersweet asked, surprised.

  “The Clime doesn’t want us to go near. Maybe later, but not now.” She turned to him, feeling elated, so clear was her sense of what to do. Then she realized that the falling rain had grown sharp and leaden. Looking up, eyes half-closed, she felt the hail pelting against her skin.

  When she turned back to Bittersweet, he was standing motionless, staring at his outstretched hand.

  She at first did not understand what she was seeing. Bittersweet’s palm was filled with black pellets. His face was streaked black, as if with paint.

  “What is it?” Sophia asked, horrified.

  They looked up at the trees around them and saw the green leaves smeared with black. The trail before them was already flooded; the hail made a black path leading into darkness.

  “Char. It is raining char upon us.”

  27

  Oakring

  —1892, August 12: 14-Hour 22—

  Every story tradition is different, I have found, but there are noticeable similarities among them. Elodean (Eerie) stories all have endings with morals, but these morals tend to be enigmatic and open to interpretation. Stories from the Closed Empire dwell upon the fantastical, relying upon it to explain things that seemed inexplicable in ordinary life. Stories from the Eerie Sea come in light or dark—light with comic characters who seem to find favor with the world despite many mishaps, or dark with tragic characters who fall deep into grief, no matter what they do.

  —From Sophia Tims’s Born of the Disruption: Tales Told by Travelers

  THEY HAD MOVED Theo’s bed out of Smokey’s kitchen into a separate room as soon as he could get up and walk about on his own. Most of the day he spent resting, staring up at the ceiling and trying to ignore the throbbing in his left shoulder. But now he stood by the window, watching the charcoal hail pelt the flowers and herbs of the garden until they lay crumpled and beaten.

  It was after fourteen-hour when he saw Smokey coming up the slow incline across the field. She was draped in a thin rubber tarp that made her look like a shapeless shadow drifting steadily uphill. Theo left his room and joined Casanova, who was waiting by the front door.

  Smokey threw off the rubber tarp, hanging it on a peg. “No one knows what it is,” she said at once. The black pellets rolled off her clothes like tiny marbles.

  “Any idea how far it reaches?” Casanova asked.

  She nodded. “Hardly anyone out, as you can imagine, but a pair of travelers came in this afternoon, and they said they saw the hail start in Turtleback Valley. About three miles southwest of here.” She moved over to the cold hearth and began to light a fire. “If this ever clears, we can go down to the ring. The travelers will be there,
I’m sure, and we can hear the rest. No sign of Entwhistle, though he’s due to come in tonight. If the storm hasn’t stopped him.”

  “What’s the ring?” Theo asked.

  “We have a circle of stepped stones near the great oak—not unlike a little theater. Whenever travelers come, they give us news there at sunset. You would be surprised how hard it is to stay connected with the world in a place like this. It’s not Boston,” she said, smiling. She had stacked the wood and now she lit the fire; she knelt before the hearth until the flames caught. “I don’t know the girl,” Smokey continued, “but Bittersweet travels through here often. He is the only remaining Weatherer in these parts, since the other three disappeared.”

  Theo felt Smokey’s words come into sharp focus. “A Weatherer?” he said.

  The other two looked at him, noticing his change of tone. “Yes.”

  “I must speak to him,” Theo said. His heart was suddenly pounding. It threw him off balance.

  “Easy,” Casanova said, reaching out and taking his arm. “Have a seat here by the fire.” He steered Theo into a chair and looked at him closely.

  “I have information about the other Weatherers,” Theo said. He felt dizzy, and his breath came with difficulty, as if he had just been running.

  “He’ll want to hear that,” Smokey said, now hovering over Theo, too. “You can tell him when we gather at the ring.”

  As Theo nodded and made an effort to calm his breathing, the other two exchanged a look. “Maybe we could ask this Bittersweet to come here,” Casanova suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” agreed Smokey. “As soon as this hail stops, I’ll go find him. For now, Theo, you just rest. Don’t worry—he’s not going anywhere in this storm.”

  “Okay,” Theo said. “Thanks.” He sat by the fire, feeling his heartbeat slow. Casanova began helping Smokey with the cooking, and their conversation drifted to people in Oakring that Theo did not know. He listened to the steady pattering on the roof and stared at the fire, hoping it would calm him, but fire these days did not seem peaceful. He still had Casanova’s story ringing in his ears, and he remembered too clearly the memories from the wooden ruler-map: a girl tied to a chair; a bright fire too close to her singed skirts.

  —16-Hour 6—

  AT SIXTEEN-HOUR, the hail finally stopped, turning to a thin drizzle of ordinary, clear water. Smokey was ready. “I’ll be back with Bittersweet before long,” she told him.

  “Thank you,” Theo said. He had not moved from the chair. Now he watched the doorway, where the fading light tinted the passing storm clouds a bright purple. The discoveries he had made in Boston seemed somehow to have taken place years earlier. Thoughts of Winnie and Nettie made him smile, but his memories of them seemed distant and unclear. Even Broadgirdle, the man he knew as Wilkie Graves, had faded somewhat; the fury Theo had felt realizing Graves would go free had diminished to a rumble of discontent. And yet the memories from the wooden map were still clear and bright: perhaps it was the nature of maps to make them so.

  He heard Smokey’s voice as she climbed the hill back toward the house, and he realized that a good half hour had passed. Casanova rose to his feet. “Do you want to stand up?”

  “Yes.” Theo got up on his own and stood by the chair, ready to sit when he needed to.

  Smokey arrived with the travelers: not one, but two. Talking to her was a tall young man Theo’s own age with a calm face and a steady gaze; he had the aspect of a man much wiser than his years would allow. On her other side was a young woman with braided hair and a tanned face; she wore a raider’s cape strung with silver bells. She was smiling at something Smokey had said, and her eyes were lit with laughter.

  “Sophia?” Theo breathed.

  They all stopped. Sophia looked up at him, frozen for a moment in shock. In the next instant she had crossed the room and thrown her arms around him. Theo held her tightly, certain that if she pulled away, he would fall back, for he could hardly stand. With her familiar face so close to his own, everything about his past life in Boston that had seemed so remote suddenly rushed back to meet him, proximate and full of life. He realized, with faint surprise, that there were tears running down his cheeks. “Ow,” Theo said finally.

  Sophia drew back, her own face damp with tears. “Oh, Theo! What happened to you? You look terrible.”

  He laughed shakily. He sank back onto the chair but held Sophia’s hand tightly. “A lot has happened. A lot. You have no idea.”

  • • •

  IT TOOK SOME time for Sophia and Theo to recount the passage of the last two months. They had much to tell each other and even more to explain for the benefit of their friends. At times giddy and incoherent, at times sober and slow, they related all that had transpired since the fateful day in June when they failed to meet at Boston Harbor. Theo began by explaining why he did not arrive, and then he had to tell them about finding the body of Prime Minister Bligh, Shadrack and Miles’s imprisonment, the involvement of Gordon Broadgirdle and the Sandmen, his own knowledge of Broadgirdle as Wilkie Graves, and the long route that led to his capture and conscription, even as Miles and Shadrack were finally freed. Then he told Sophia about his time in the army, about Major Merret and Casanova, and how he and Cas had found their way to Oakring and to safety with Smokey.

  Sophia described her journey with the Nihilismians, and her meeting with Errol Forsyth, and her encounter with Goldenrod. She answered many questions about the plague and the Dark Age and Ausentinia. She showed them the Ausentinian maps and the purse full of garnets. She explained the significance of meeting Richard Wren and discovering her mother’s journal. And she related how all of them, including Calixta and Burr, had come to find themselves once more in New Occident.

  Theo, Casanova, and Smokey listened in rapt silence as she described Burr’s capture, Goldenrod’s revelations aboard the train, the crimson fog in Salt Lick Station, and the arrival of Bittersweet and Nosh. Finally, she told them what they had seen that very day in Turtleback Valley: a grove of trees that held a secret, a place she hoped might hold the answer to her parents’ disappearance.

  It was hard for Theo to believe that circumstances had carried them both to this place, the safety of Smokey’s home, in a small town by the Eerie Sea—a place neither of them had ever heard of before. “It’s no coincidence,” Bittersweet said. “I am sure it is the old one guiding us all here. This is always the way with circumstances that seem coincidental. Sarah knows Shadrack, Sophia’s uncle; she knows Casanova; she knows me. The old one guided each of you to people who would find their way here.”

  “But what does it have to gain?” Theo wondered.

  Bittersweet smiled. “We are all pieces of a complex puzzle. Who knows? Perhaps something we do is of use to the old one, however small we might be.”

  Theo looked at him appraisingly, somewhat surprised by how likable the Weatherer was, despite his earnestness. “And I have a piece of the puzzle to give you,” he said. “It is the reason Smokey asked you to come here.”

  “Yes. She said you had something to tell me.”

  “It has to do with the other Weatherers.” Bittersweet tensed. “In the course of trying to find how Broadgirdle was responsible for Bligh’s murder, I found a wooden ruler. It was among Bligh’s possessions. He said in a letter that he had gotten it from the Weatherers themselves, and when I looked at the ruler closely, I found that it was a memory map. The memories showed a girl and an old man—but those memories belonged to a third person.”

  “My mother,” Bittersweet said eagerly. “They must be hers. My sister and my grandfather are the two people you saw. What was in the map?”

  Theo hesitated.

  Bittersweet leaned toward him. “Are my grandfather and sister alive?”

  “Yes. In these memories, they were alive. All three were captives. They were kept in a closed room. It seemed to be underground. One of the memo
ries showed your sister being . . . threatened with fire. As the fire came closer, flowers bloomed in her hands. In the last memory, I saw the Sandmen making boxes. I think to keep them in winter sleep.”

  Bittersweet looked down at his hands, his face creased with worry. “That explains it.” He looked up.

  “What does it mean?” Sophia asked softly.

  “Mother and Grandfather in winter sleep . . .” He swallowed. “Winter sleep can offer renewal and rest. But when it continues too long, it can lead to death.”

  Sophia gasped.

  “No plant can live underground forever. This Broadgirdle is keeping their lives hostage. I knew only something terrible would drive my sister to such desperate lengths.”

  28

  Pip’s Delivery

  —1892, August 13: 7-Hour 23—

  Stories from the Baldlands, perhaps predictably, are difficult to characterize. Some are ominous; some are humorous; some seem simply to recount the past and offer no conclusion or argument. There is one I did not include here about an old woman who trades a penny for a pie, then a pie for a ham, then a ham for a saddle, then a saddle for a cart, then a cart for a horse, then a horse for a house. Apart from describing the old woman’s impressive bartering abilities, I cannot tell what the purpose of it is!

  —From Sophia Tims’s Born of the Disruption: Tales Told by Travelers

  SMOKEY TRIED TO order Theo to his room, seeing the exhaustion on his face, but he would not move from Sophia’s side. Even after everyone else had gone to bed, Sophia and Theo sat comfortably together on a pile of blankets before the cooling fire in the kitchen, unwilling to part. They had too much to talk about.

  Finally, past twenty-hour, Theo fell asleep with his head on Sophia’s shoulder. She moved out of the way carefully, lowering him onto the bundled blankets. Beside him, she tried to sleep, but her weary mind ran in circles. She tried to make sense of all that had taken place in Boston without her: Bligh’s murder, Shadrack’s arrest, and, especially, Theo’s long confrontation with Gordon Broadgirdle. She wondered what it was about Broadgirdle that unsettled him so deeply, for she had seen it in his eyes. He had said only that he knew the man as Wilkie Graves, a scoundrel and villain from the Baldlands who had no right to be Prime Minister in Boston. But she could sense that there was more, and it worried her to see Theo keeping secrets once again. He’ll tell me the truth when we’re talking alone, she thought.