Darkwood

by M. E. Breen

  “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked.

  Annie shook her head and the woman left, closing the door smartly behind her.

  The room looked out over the stables behind the inn. She could see Baggy, Serena’s horse, munching hay with the other horses. Annie pressed her nose up against the glass. There was Izzy, an orange crescent on the floor of the stall, and Prudence, harder to distinguish from the matted hay, curled around him.

  Annie sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed. Every time she opened Page’s book she felt the same irrational burst of disappointment that the words hadn’t magically resolved themselves into sense. But this time she saw something she had missed before. At the bottom of the paper Page had penciled a few lines, then rubbed them out. Annie squinted at the words: The cion preserves its natural purity and intent, though it be fed and nourished by a mere crab.

  Below the quotation Page had written: Scion? Fruit Trees? What mark? What!

  None of it made sense, but Annie liked the evidence of her sister’s impatience. It made her seem alive.

  Serena, meanwhile, had challenged the stable boys to arm wrestling. She came up the stairs humming the strains of Schragg’s “Triumphal March” and opened the door with a flourish, brandishing a loaf of bread and a round of cheese.

  “Behold! The spoils of—Child! What are you doing here in the dark?”

  Annie raised her head and looked at Serena blankly.

  “Child?” Serena’s voice quavered.

  Annie answered in a rush, fumbling and babbling.

  “Serena, hello! It has gotten dark … must have dozed off … Sorry about the cold, I meant to call the maid. Let me get the …” But Serena had already crossed the room in a swish of skirts and ale fumes and yanked the curtains shut.

  “Let’s have some light then, anyway.”

  Warm light filled the room. Serena glanced at the book in Annie’s lap. She opened her mouth, then shut it. She raised her fingers to her eyes and pressed them closed. Then she began to laugh, a big, shaking belly laugh.

  “How Beatrice would chew my ear if she knew! Not the drinking. After such a long day on the road even she might take a drop. Still, that’s no excuse.” As she spoke she began to fumble with the buttons at the neck of her dress, then stopped in the middle to take off one shoe, then stumped around in her stocking foot because she decided she had better wash her face.

  “They’re all abuzz downstairs, Annie. The king’s marriage this! The king’s marriage that! There’s a grand party tonight to formally introduce his betrothed to the court. A foundling they say, turned up at the palace gates these two years past, and now the king in love! Of course she’s the picture of beauty. They’ve been carting food and frippery up the hill all week—even a cage of live peacocks, someone said! Oh!” Serena grinned through a mask of suds. “Do you think the clock is for his bride? A wedding gift? How romantic!”

  Ghastly romantic, Annie thought, but she nodded and smiled. When Serena’s back was turned she rolled to the side of the bed closer to the door and eased under the covers, fully dressed.

  The bed gave a deep groan and Annie smiled despite herself at the sight of Serena swathed in yards of white nightgown—easily enough fabric for a full set of sails—her long red hair undone around her shoulders. She’d made a kind of poultice, smelling damply of chamomile and some stronger, more bitter herb, which she laid across her eyes.

  “Keeps off the headache, no question.” She reached out to pat Annie goodnight and nearly broke her nose.

  She fell asleep like that, one arm across Annie’s sternum like a lead weight, snoring so loudly that Annie half expected the innkeeper to come up and boot them both out into the snow.

  Annie lay there thinking for a long time. She didn’t know what to do. She knew what she should do, what she had been planning to do, but now that the opportunity had finally arrived—the perfect opportunity, really—she felt afraid. Not of what might happen to her, but of what would never happen. She would not wake up to Serena clucking about the snow. They would not play cards and eat warm dinners until the roads cleared. She would not try and fail to get an audience with the king. She would not return with Serena to the cottage. The little room with the bird-patterned quilt would not be hers.

  Annie squeezed her eyes shut, but it wasn’t Serena laughing or Bea combing her hair that she saw. It was Gregor, with his old man’s face and his child’s body. She had to tell the king about Gibbet and the children at the Drop. She had to do it tonight.

  Annie lifted Serena’s arm from her chest. It took both hands to do it. She had no paper or ink to write a note, but she did have a hard cheese and a dull knife. “My thanks” she carved into the top of the cheese. Then she cut a big piece off the bottom and popped it into her mouth.

  The front door was heavily barred, but the bar wasn’t as heavy as Serena’s arm. The outside air hit her face, swept into her lungs, and made her ribs ache. Snow was falling thick and fast, brittle flakes that stuck to the fabric of her cloak like burrs. As she crossed the yard, her feet left dark prints that filled in with snow almost as soon as she made them.

  The cats were waiting for her by the stable. Prudence waved her tail.

  “Are you ready?” Annie whispered, more to herself than the cats. Isadore turned and trotted out of the yard. Annie couldn’t help smiling at the familiar sight of his orange hindquarters bobbing along in front of her.

  They followed the same road Serena had driven during the day, heading steadily east. The dark here was nothing like the dark of Dour County. Torches burned in every doorway. Lanterns hung on posts along the road. The firelight confused her. Could others see as well as she could? She hugged the ditch, the darkest part of the road, and stopped often, vainly, to listen. The white noise of falling snow swallowed every other sound.

  Once inside the city proper, the road branched off a dozen times or more, each route marked with a sign. Annie’s heart sped up when she saw the name of the road they were on: Royal Way.

  Quite suddenly, the road flared into a semicircle and ended. No, it didn’t end, exactly, just narrowed as it wound around the sides of the hill like a white ribbon. Serena had not exaggerated: the road was so narrow and the switchbacks so tight that only the lightest, nimblest carriages could navigate it. Tradespeople, unless they wanted to proceed on foot, would have to wait at the bottom for someone from the palace to come to them. When the snow cleared, Serena would be waiting here to deliver her clock.

  They had taken three turns of the switchback and already Annie was out of breath. She counted fifteen more turns to the top.

  “Izzy, slow—”

  But he had already stopped. His ears stiffened. The tip of his tail flicked from side to side. An odd sound reached them. Like Aunt Prim sifting flour, Annie thought as she turned. Royal Way stretched out below her with its dozens of small roads branching off. From every road, at every turning, kinderstalk appeared, until the avenue was filled with black bodies, all running toward her. Their feet sifted the snow, shush, shush, shush.

  “Hurry!” Annie cried to the cats. “This way!”

  But they didn’t hurry. Only when Annie left the road to clamber up the rocky hillside did they follow her, and still they moved as if half-asleep.

  Snow stung her bare hands. The rocks were all roughly the same shape and size, and she began to be familiar with their spacing—hand up, foot up, push with other hand, straighten leg. This wasn’t a real hill at all, but man-made. She remembered what Beatrice had told her.

  Can you still visit the mine?

  Of course not, dear. That’s where they’ve built the palace.

  The kinderstalk were close now. She couldn’t see them, couldn’t afford to stop long enough to turn around, but she knew they were on the road. The shushing sound grew louder as they reached the turns nearest her, then faded as they followed the switchback in the other direction.

  Finally, finally, she saw the sharp crest of the hill above her, and then, as
she dragged herself up and over the edge, she saw something else: a pair of boots. With a gasp, Annie ducked back down. The guard, standing in a pool of torchlight, hadn’t seen her. A match hit the snow near Annie’s face and flared out. The guard inhaled deeply on his pipe, stamping his feet to bring feeling back to his toes. Snowflakes dusted his cap and the shoulders of his coat. Couldn’t he hear them? Couldn’t he feel them coming?

  The guard stood in the lee of a stone arch, a high wall stretching away on either side of him. The gates were open, and getting around him was easy enough as long as she stayed out of the light. She hoped he would hear them in time, hoped his weapons might protect him, but she couldn’t risk him stopping her.

  When she was safely past, she cried a warning. “Kinderstalk!”

  The kinderstalk poured over the edge of the plateau. The guard screamed. She ran faster, fast as an animal. Torches burned at intervals along the avenue. Annie burst into a pool of light, then burst back into the visible darkness as she ran toward the next light. She couldn’t see the cats anymore; she couldn’t see anything but the wavering lights lined up ahead of her. Somewhere beyond her were the palace doors. How much farther?

  The kinderstalk pounded down the road after her. Now Annie could make out a second sound: panting. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

  She looked.

  I am going to die, Annie thought.

  Ahead of her were the gleaming brass and ringstone doors of the palace. Annie heard laughter, music, the tinkle of silverware against china. The party. And someone, drunk, happy, reckless, had left the doors open. This was just the kind of mistake she had been counting on, but not now, not with a hundred kinderstalk to follow her inside.

  With the last of her breath, Annie screamed again, “Kinderstalk!” The word hung in the air for a moment, like the last, long note of a song.

  Something cold and wet grazed the back of her hand, followed by hot breath where the coldness had been. She tried to jerk away, but there was tugging now at her cloak, at the hem of her dress. A weight pressed against her knees and she stumbled backward, her legs rising level with her body. For a moment she seemed to float.

  Warm breath touched her skin again, this time at her neck. In a burst of panic, Annie fought her way upright and threw herself toward the doors. Her palms smacked cold brass. They had heard her in time. They had saved themselves.

  They had left her to die.

  Desperately, she pounded on the doors, and, though she refused to look, she felt the creatures around her, pressing against her, and smelled their sharp, wild scent—earth and blood, moss and pine.

  “Help me!” she cried. “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

  Help her! Help her! Help her!

  A second voice joined hers, or seemed to, and then it was impossible to know, for the kinderstalk started to howl. The sound traveled like a shadow over the earth, back over the road, back past the inn, past Beatrice and Serena’s house, back, back, back, all the long way she had traveled, back to Dour County and the very heart of the forest. The ground shifted under Annie’s feet and she felt herself falling. So this is what it is to die, she thought. I wonder if she is here. Annie turned her head to look, and there, hovering above her, pale and wet with tears, was Page’s beloved face.

  Chapter 9

  It was not so bad to be dead. Everything smelled of lavender. The blankets felt soft as fur. Annie opened her eyes. The sun had turned pink. No, the glass in the window was pink, and the sun streaming through it tinted the walls. She was in a room, a large room, and very grand. A rug in a geometric design of purple and gold occupied the middle of the floor. Fragile-looking chairs were grouped around it. In one of these chairs, pulled a little apart from the others, sat a cloaked and hooded figure.

  Annie struggled into a sitting position. Her whole body ached. It more than ached—each of her limbs felt connected to her trunk by a wire that had been pulled too tight. Even her tendons ached. Even her teeth.

  As soon as she sat up, the person in the chair rose and hurried for the door.

  “Wait!” Annie wrestled with the bedclothes, but they proved too much for her. She sagged against the headboard, exhausted.

  When she opened her eyes a second time a stern-looking gentleman was sitting where the cloaked figure had been. The light in the room had turned from pink to gray.

  “Ah,” the man said, peering at Annie through little round glasses, “finally ready to face the day, are we?” He gave her a sour smile and approached the bed. She shrank away from him.

  “Now, now. Doctor is your friend.”

  He took her wrist between his fingers and put his other hand to her forehead. His skin felt like the shed skin of a snake.

  “No apparent disease. No significant injury. And yet they insist on these repeated examinations, as though I, I, had missed something!”

  He had been speaking to the headboard, but now he looked at her irritably. “Have you sustained any puncture marks or lacerations? Are you hiding from me any wound festering, suppurating, or otherwise consequential? Well? Well?”

  Annie shook her head. She wasn’t sure she didn’t have any of those things, but she was sure she wouldn’t tell him if she had.

  He dropped her wrist on the bed. “I’ll have some food sent up shortly. In the meantime, drink this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s medicine, which Doctor prescribes and Patient takes.”

  “I thought you said I wasn’t sick.”

  “I spoke only of the body. The mind, however”—he tapped her forehead—“what you experienced would drive most people quite mad.”

  “I am not mad.”

  “Drink! Drink, drink, drink. Or Nurse will have to come and make you drink.”

  When she woke a third time it was with the feeling of having slept for days. The muscle aches were gone, replaced by a strange puffy feeling, as though her skin was only just holding her insides in. Vaguely she remembered a nurse helping her negotiate a chamber pot and spooning something sweet into her mouth. She could taste it now—awful.

  With a mighty effort, she got both feet onto the floor and staggered over to the window. The pink sun shone in the pink sky. Annie opened the window and stuck her head out. The air was cold. Delicious. Many stories below lay the gardens. Wildflowers grew in tidy rectangles around a fountain. She could pick out some of Gregor’s favorites: jewelweed, skullcap, bloodroot, baneberry. The lawn spread like a skirt around the palace walls. Vivid green grass showed through the snow in patches. The color of the grass reminded her of something, though she couldn’t say what. At the end of the lawn a forest grew thick and dark. A pleasure forest, it must be, where lords and ladies could hunt or picnic in the safety of their own grounds. Odd. The whole garden was beautiful and odd.

  A few feet beneath her window clustered the fluted leaves and delicate pink-tinged flowers of a bindweed vine. She leaned down to try to pick a flower but couldn’t reach far enough.

  In addition to the bed and chairs and a number of comically small tables, the room contained a wardrobe. Her clothes had been washed and ironed and hung on satin hangers. Her dress looked like a flat, headless girl. Annie felt in all the pockets. Gregor’s rock and the ringstone she had stolen from Uncle Jock were still hidden in the hem. The lock of Page’s hair was safe, too, somewhat curlier for having been washed and dried. But the book—the paper crumbled at her touch. The ink had run in gray streaks down the page. Even the gold had flaked off of the letters in Chilton Smalle’s name. It was ridiculous to feel so sad. She hadn’t been able to read it anyway. She set the book down beside her neatly folded, lavender-scented socks.

  She searched the wardrobe and then the room, but the ringstone from the pit was missing, and so were the red shoes.

  The room had two doors. One, which the hooded figure had passed through, was locked. The other led to a cold staircase that ended discouragingly at the lav. There was nothing to do then but wait. At last the nurse appeared carrying a bowl of
some kind of custard, but as soon as she saw Annie up and about she turned around and left. The doctor arrived a few minutes later. He took her pulse.

  “Hmm, somewhat thready. Too much activity today.” The doctor patted the mattress. “Back to bed, young lady.”

  “I want to know why the door is locked.”

  “I’ll have the nurse come up with a proper meal for you immediately. Make sure you eat everything. You are looking poorly.”

  “I feel good. I just want to know—”

  “One does not feel good, one feels well.”

  “I feel well, then!”

  “You do not feel well. You remain in a mentally weakened state. It has only been …” He caught himself.

  “How long?”

  “The nurse will be back soon. Eat everything.”

  “How long!”

  But he had gone.

  As promised, the nurse returned with a tray crammed with weird delicacies: chicken livers in wine reduction, rabbit fricassee with orange jelly, green beans heaped with onions curled like bows. She stayed to watch Annie eat, but Annie spent so long carving a single green bean that finally the nurse scraped her chair back with an impatient noise and went to the door.

  The key she took from her pocket was made of iron. It was three inches long with rounded sides and a single tooth at the end about the length of a thumbnail. The nurse turned the key left in the keyhole, jiggled it a bit, then turned it farther left, revolving the lock. She repeated the motions on the other side of the door, locking Annie in.

  Annie sighed and pushed the tray away. If only she had something to use in the lock. If only the green beans weren’t so salty. She eyed her water glass. The water had a milky tinge, and when she dipped her pinky in, yes, sweet, horrible. In the end, she drank as little as she could, but it was enough.

  She awoke to darkness. The air in the room was frigid. The window, she thought. I must have left the window unlatched. The curtains sighed against the casement. She felt the mattress give slightly beneath her.