Entwined

by Heather Dixon Wallwork

  “No, nothing of the sort,” said Mr. Bradford. “I just didn’t think you knew how to shoot.”

  “She doesn’t,” said Bramble, from the sofa behind him.

  Azalea-Keeper flicked the pistol around her finger, spinning it so quickly it flashed in the lamplight, a circular blur of metal. She threw it into the air at a spin, snatched it with the other hand, spun it, and stopped it barrel up with a smack.

  The girls’ jaws dropped. Mr. Bradford blinked, looking Keeper over from skirt to tangled hair, with a slightly bewildered—then suspicious—expression.

  “Only one shot?” said Keeper, fiddling with the pistol in shaking hands. His voice sounded strikingly like Mother’s. “They haven’t invented pistols with, say, thirteen shots yet? Ha! Joking! One is grand!”

  “I think you’re ill,” said Mr. Bradford, advancing on Keeper. He made to take the pistol. “Miss Azalea, the regiments will be here in hardly twenty minutes—you don’t need it—”

  “Yes, I do!” Keeper snarled, backing away toward the draped piano, green eyes looking wildly around the library. He raised the pistol away from Mr. Bradford’s outstretched hand, above his own head.

  A firm, stiff hand grasped Keeper’s wrist from behind. Keeper blanched, which made the scratches on his—Azalea’s—face stand out even more. Azalea could see how he tried to struggle against the King’s grip, but he was either too weak or the King too firm. Possibly both.

  Even so, Keeper did not drop the pistol. His dainty fingers wrapped around it so tightly the knuckles glowed white. The King sighed and made to pluck the pistol from Keeper’s hand. When Keeper would not release it, the King’s brows furrowed.

  “Miss Azalea,” he said, in a clipped, impatient voice. “We are all frightened, but now is hardly the time. Give me the pistol.”

  “No.”

  “Azalea, let go of the pistol.”

  “No.”

  “Azalea—”

  “I won’t!” said Keeper, writhing against the King’s steel grip. He kicked back against the King’s legs, driving the boots’ heels into him, but the King showed no signs of feeling it. He was the most solid gentleman Azalea knew. Azalea slipped closer.

  From the sofas, the girls watched, both fascinated and ducking behind them, eyes peeking above the backs of the chairs. If the pistol went off now, it would hit the ceiling.

  “Miss Azalea,” said the King. “Let go. If your mother were here—”

  “Don’t tell me what Mother would or would not do!” Keeper snarled. “She’s dead!”

  Azalea winced. For a moment, the King’s hand gripping Keeper’s faltered. Then it was back to a steel clamp.

  “Azalea—”

  “She’s dead!” said Keeper, the green in his eyes blazing, intense. “Dead, dead—”

  Azalea gripped the cloak at her neck. It was like she was being slapped.

  On the sofas by the fireplace, Kale and Jessamine curled up into little balls and began to cry. Jessamine in her delicate, crystalline wails, and Kale in her piercing sobs. Lily, in Clover’s arms, sensed discord and began to cry, too.

  “Lea, stop,” said Clover.

  “Miss Azalea,” said the King, who kept his hand firmly around Azalea’s wrist. “I think we are all aware of that. For now we will have to bear up—”

  “What the devil for?” said Keeper. Her voice rang through the room. “It won’t be the same. Not with you.”

  The King’s hand at Azalea’s wrist shook. There was an odd, awkward moment, a hiccup of time, as though the air were being turned inside out. The King’s face seemed far more lined, and as Azalea drew close to him, she saw how old he suddenly looked. Azalea was reminded of the uncomfortable moment, last summer, when his internal thread twisted so; and now it seemed twisted so much, it made all his features taut and strained.

  “We must do what we can, Miss Azalea,” he managed to say. “In this family we—”

  “You are not,” Keeper spat, “a part of this family.”

  The King released Keeper’s hand, sharply, and Azalea realized, with a flash of memory like a slap across her face, those had been her words.

  “How dare you!” Azalea screamed. She threw herself at herself, the wraith cloak fluttering to the ground behind her, and pummeled Keeper to the ground, before he even had a chance to raise the pistol. It clattered across the floor. “How dare you! I’ll tear your eyes out!”

  “Oh—oh—” Keeper cried. “Oh—ow!”

  Azalea had punched him across his dainty scratched face.

  Instantly the gentlemen pried them apart, gripping their arms behind their backs, looking both horrified and slightly fascinated. Both Azalea and Keeper didn’t need much binding—they shook from both weakness and anger.

  The King, whose features still were twisted with tightness, took charge.

  “What is all this?” he said.

  Both Azaleas broke into yelling, Azalea furious and Azalea-Keeper defensive, and both of them wincing at the gentlemen’s grips over their sore wrists. The girls behind them broke into cries. The King held up his hand for silence.

  “Miss Azalea,” he said.

  Both Azaleas broke into cries again.

  “Sir, can’t you see, I’m the real Azalea—that’s Keeper! He’s using magic!”

  “You rotter!” said Azalea. “You ghastly—He’s trying to kill you!”

  “You sound nothing like me!”

  “Enough!” said the King.

  “Oh, sir!” Lord Teddie bounced on his feet. “Sir, I read about this sort of thing once, sir! The only way to solve it is to kill both of them. It was in the Bible!”

  The silence rung. Lord Teddie cowered at the King’s look.

  “Ah, never mind,” he said.

  “Sir, here is evidence,” said Keeper, writhing weakly against Mr. Bradford’s hold. “Keeper took the wraith cloak, and he has it now!”

  “Sir, here is evidence,” said Azalea. She raked her mind for the object of hers that Keeper had taken and was using now. But then, another thought arrived, and Azalea lifted her chin.

  “The handkerchief,” she said. “You know about the magic.”

  The King turned to her, as though seeing her for the first time. His eyebrows rose.

  “Yes,” said the King. “Yes.”

  And from his waistcoat pocket, he pulled out the wadded silver handkerchief. Azalea remembered now, seeing him pluck it from the end of the fire poker. In the stained-glass lamplight of the library, the silver shone. Keeper’s green eyes flashed at it.

  “Fold this for me, will you?” said the King, crisply, to Keeper.

  Azalea found it oddly delightful to watch the color drain completely from his already drawn face. His eyes flitted from the door to the pistol on the ground in front of him, then back to the handkerchief.

  “Him first,” he said in Azalea’s voice, jutting his chin at Azalea.

  The King, without taking his eyes from Keeper, gave the handkerchief to Azalea. She folded it smartly, pressing the seams at each fold, and raised it for the King to see. The King’s voice was hard.

  “Captain Bradford,” he said.

  Keeper writhed against Mr. Bradford’s hold and shoved back. In a hard glissade, Keeper broke free, hitting the piano before crumpling to the ground. Before Mr. Bradford could help Azalea-Keeper up, she stumbled to her feet and raised her chin.

  “Of all the silly—” she said. She thrust out her hand to Azalea. “Give me the handkerchief.”

  Her hand quavered. In the other, hidden by the folds of her skirt, Azalea caught a glimpse of steel.

  The pistol!

  Azalea did not even think. She lunged at Keeper before he had a chance to raise it. They fell on the rug together, and the pistol skittered out of reach underneath the piano. Azalea grasped at Azalea-Keeper’s black skirts, pulling her back.

  Keeper twisted around and lashed at Azalea’s arm. Drops of blood smattered across her cheek, and she lost her grip. He stumbled to his feet and leaped for
the door.

  “After him!” the King commanded. He swept the pistol from the ground and lunged after Keeper through the sliding door. “No—the gentlemen! Ladies stay here!”

  “The devil we’re staying!” Bramble cried.

  As they took off in a mass of skirts, Azalea ran after them, clutching her arm. By all rights, her feet shouldn’t have carried her up the stairs in sleek, dancelike steps. But her temper seared, the heat in her veins overpowering the ache. She passed the girls, the gentlemen, and even the King, taking a great lead and leaving them behind. She ran through the unfamiliar palace of white gilded walls and haunted portraits.

  At the end of the hall, she paused, breathless. A timid light clicked out from underneath a white silk sofa. It pointed a stubby leg toward the stairs. “Many thanks!” said Azalea, leaping up. Keeper was headed for the tower.

  Several minutes later, a fizz in her blood, Azalea leaped onto the creaking tower platform, heaving for air. Everything felt stifled, as though the tower held its breath. The gray-blue of the snowstorm through the clockface cast shadows of numbers across the floor. Smaller shadows whorled past them in pinpricks.

  A sharp clang sounded, along with a wretched eeEeeErrEEEuh. The clock, a waking giant, creaked to life. Azalea had a moment to realize that Mr. Bradford’s clock stopping had been undone before skirts rustled behind her; Azalea ducked. The hearth shovel brushed past her head and smashed against the clockface.

  The glass showered Azalea in prickles, tinkling against the wood. The blizzard billowed onto the platform. Azalea pulled away as Keeper yanked the shovel from the broken clockface and slammed it where her form used to be. She ran, leaping up the spindly stairs of the bells platform at the side, retreating into carriage-wheel-sized gears. Keeper sprang after her in graceful bounds, shovel raised.

  Grasping her skirts to keep them from getting tangled, Azalea picked her way among the gears and dangling counterweights, squeezing between the dusty, metallic-smelling bells. A click sounded, and Azalea sensed the impending strike of the clock’s quarter-to peal. She threw herself to the gritty floor, pressing her skirts down as the bells creaked and swung above her in a rain of dust. The dong was so loud it seemed to pierce through her mind.

  Scrambling to her feet, streaked with dust, Azalea had a moment to twist out of the way of Keeper’s swing, stumbling backward into the grinding mass of gears.

  The clock creaked to a halt. Azalea tried to get to her feet, but they slipped from under her. She craned her neck at the gears behind her, and saw her skirts wedged in the teeth, a mess of crinolines and hoops. Azalea clawed at the caught fabric, twisting for a better grip. Keeper appeared above her, smiling a sweet Azalea-smile. His teeth glinted in the dim light. He raised the shovel.

  “Azalea—”

  Both Azaleas whipped their attention to the lower platform, visible in pieces through the gears. The King!

  Keeper’s emerald eyes flashed. He dropped the hearth shovel with a clang and squeezed through the tangle of machinery.

  “Sir!” Azalea cried. “Look out!”

  The King whipped about, holding the pistol. His eyes caught Keeper, rushing to him, skirts snapping behind.

  “Sir!” he said, breathless and panting. “Shoot him! Shoot him! Hurry!”

  He pointed a delicate, shaking hand at Azalea. The King peered through the mechanisms to see Azalea, caught on her knees. Their eyes met. The King’s face lined.

  Azalea held up the handkerchief.

  Whap.

  The King threw Azalea-Keeper against the floor and held him down, pistol pointed at his pretty head. His auburn hair tendriled over the dusty wood. Snow swirled over them through the broken clockface.

  “Up here!” the King yelled, not moving a muscle. “Up here!”

  Keeper struggled weakly beneath the King’s grip and let out a strangled noise. He began to cry.

  “Please,” he said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  The King wavered.

  Keeper writhed, and for a moment even Azalea felt pity for him, a mewling kitten, tangled auburn hair and scratched face, pretty cheeks wet.

  “Please,” he said in Azalea’s voice. A sob choked his throat. “Please, Papa—”

  The King dropped the pistol. It clattered against the wood. He pulled back.

  “No,” he said. “Azalea—”

  “It’s not me!” Azalea cried.

  Keeper’s eyes glinted.

  “God save the King,” he said, and he raised the pistol to the King’s chest.

  Crack.

  As slow as a nightmare—so slow the snowflakes hung in the air—the King fell forward.

  Keeper caught him in the chest by the flat of his boot, and kicked him back, hard. He hit the floor. The limp thumph echoed through the tower.

  No—no—

  “No!” Azalea screamed. She wrenched her skirts with her full weight. They ripped free with a stark tearing sound.

  The clock groaned to life. Gears whirred and ticked. Azalea clawed her way through the pulleys, stinging all over, and hardly feeling it.

  Keeper, gaunt, slipped back into his own form with the ease of a breath. He threw the pistol to the side with a clatter, tried to get to his feet, and fell on his hands and knees, coughing, hacking. Horrified, Azalea pulled back, watching as Keeper began to change.

  His hair turned silver white, then tangled into stringy clumps, falling to pieces in the storm’s wind. His skin clung to his skeleton face. Azalea choked as she recognized the ancient Keeper—identical to the portrait hidden in the attic.

  The blood oath. Azalea reeled, watching years of being kept alive pour over Keeper. He writhed, pockmarked, the skin melting from him like a candle. In the dim light, his black, sagging eyes flicked to the King’s limp figure, then to Azalea. They danced with triumph. His voice was like the pages of an old crinkled book.

  “I win,” he said.

  Azalea dove at him, but not before the wind eroded him, blowing him into streams of dust, his arms and head, blowing away into nothing. Azalea, stunned, pulled back. A final gust of wind snatched the handkerchief from her hand, out the clockface, and into the blizzard.

  It flashed silver in the wind, and disappeared.

  Dong. The tower chimed.

  Azalea swallowed, backed away from the ledge, and scrambled to the King’s side.

  “Sir,” said Azalea. “Sir!”

  She touched his cheek. It was clammy. The King did not move.

  Mr. Bradford arrived at the top of the stairs, out of breath.

  “Fetch Sir John!” said Azalea. “Hurry!”

  Mr. Bradford disappeared down the steps in an instant. Azalea tried to think. Hold a mirror to his face, it would fog—no, she didn’t have a mirror—staunch the blood—she hadn’t a handkerchief, and there was too much—far too much. She felt for the pulse on his wrist, but her hands shook too hard to feel anything.

  Azalea’s sisters arrived at the tower platform, and their eyes widened when they saw the King.

  They didn’t make a sound. Not a gasp, not a scream, not a cry. Snow streamed and whirled around them as they stood, frozen. Flora held her hands over her mouth. Kale and Lily clung to Clover’s skirts. Clover shook. Bramble was so white, the snow looked gray.

  From a memory deep inside her, so faint it only held sounds and slips of color, a tiny, three-year-old Azalea wailed, “Papa.”

  “Papa,” said Azalea to the lifeless form of the King. The word was so foreign, it choked her throat. “Papa…you can’t leave us, Papa…It would be very…out of order—”

  Bramble knelt opposite her, grasping the King’s bandaged hand.

  “She’s—she’s right, Papa,” Bramble stuttered. “We have…rules….”

  Clover fell to her knees and pressed her handkerchief to his chest. Blood soaked through.

  “Papa,” she whispered.

  The girls knelt around the King, their skirts spread out like forlorn blossoms, swallowing, and whispering one word.
/>   “Papa.”

  “Papa.”

  “Papa.”

  It whispered among the gusts of wind stronger than the whistling gales of snow or the creaking, ticking of the clock, which felt strange and distant. Azalea gripped the King’s lifeless hand.

  “Papa,” she said.

  Through the broken clockface, the wind gusted stronger, and became—

  Warm.

  The snow, which had been sticking to Azalea’s skin, cold and icy, burned. The storm burst, bright, and Azalea realized it wasn’t the storm—it was her.

  Inside her chest, a warm, billowing something swept through her, to the tips of her fingers, the bottoms of her feet, shining like a brilliant beam of light. It wasn’t the hot, boiling feeling of her temper, nor was it the cold wash of tingles that Swearing on Silver brought. It was deeper. It didn’t just pour through her body, but penetrated her soul.

  Azalea gasped.

  The feeling faded until it was just a flicker of warmth inside her chest, lighting her heart like a candle. The wind howled, cold again now, and snow flurried around her, landing cold on her cheek—but the warmth was still there.

  Breathless, Azalea looked at her sisters.

  Clover had one hand pressed over her heart, breathing tiny gasping breaths. Bramble’s thin eyebrows arched so high they reached her hair. The twins grasped each other’s hands, and Hollyhock rubbed her face with her skirts. Even the little ones, Kale, Jessamine, and Lily, didn’t cry anymore, but blinked wide-eyed at one another. Delphinium was so pale that if she fainted, no one would believe it fake. They all looked as stunned as Azalea felt.

  “Great waistcoats,” Bramble managed to choke. “What was that?”

  Between Azalea’s hands, which grasped the King’s hand so tightly she wrung his fingers, something twitched.

  Azalea clasped a hand to her mouth.

  His hand was warm. So warm, in fact, that it matched the flicker within her chest.

  The King’s weak voice matched his limp attempt to push himself up. “Ow—”

  “Sir!” cried Azalea. She threw her arms around him. “Oh—Sir! Papa!”

  “Ow—”