The Clockwork Crown

by Beth Cato

  “Miss Octavia Leander. Granddaughter.” King Kethan opened both arms in an unmistakable gesture. She didn’t hesitate with her hug. His arms were thin cords, gentle in their strength. Leaf hopped to his shoulder and did a quick circuit around both of their heads. “ ’Tis my sincere hope you shall ride away, and ride on with Mr. Garret. You possess my eternal gratitude for your kindness to me, but even more, to the land I love greatly and have burdened so.”

  “Peace and mercy to you, Grandfather.” She pulled back, the dust of his deteriorating clothes falling away from her enchanted robes. With a small chirp, Leaf leaped from Kethan and glided to Octavia’s shoulder. He sat upright, his wings tucked close.

  Side by side, Octavia and Kethan walked into the darkness.

  THE ENTRANCE TO THE Tree evoked the blackness of a dank basement at the end of a long, wet winter, when the root vegetables are starting to soften and the mold grows fuzzy and bold. A cold breeze stroked Octavia, like the breath of a frozen god. Even if she had pulled out her glowstone, it would have done little good against the spirit of this place.

  Octavia’s feet knew to walk on. She could hear Kethan beside her, his new Waster boots clomping heavily. His song showed anxiety and calmness together. She waved a hand in front of her, worried about walking into something. Her steps slowed at the thought of walking into nothing at all, even if it seemed unlikely at this stage. Make it this far, fall into a crevasse. That does seem like my sort of luck. Leaf chittered by her ear.

  Soft light lay ahead, like the first blush of dawn behind thick clouds.

  Rough cloth brushed her face. She recoiled with a gasp, swiping it away. The object tore off in her hand and she recognized the smell then—­tree moss. It fragmented in her grasp. Against the light, she could see more swaths of moss ahead. They fell in mighty tufts, like heavy curtains in a fancy hotel. She tried to dodge the moss, as did Kethan, but it seemed to dangle every few feet. Looking up, she couldn’t see a ceiling. Moss stretched up as if it attached to an invisible sky.

  They emerged in a domed chamber. Polished wood formed the walls, the brown and red whirls begging to be touched. Swaths of moss dangled down but most of it stopped well above their heads. The floor was the same wood as the walls, though covered in a sheen of dust and disintegrated moss. Theirs were the only footprints.

  “Foremost of all, the answer is no.” The woman’s voice emerged from nowhere, everywhere. She sounded young, her accent foreign.

  “No?” echoed Octavia, spinning around to find the source.

  “You are the most appropriate vessel for the seed. You have been since you were born. I knew the instant your mother and father came together. I knew you in the womb. I knew your first breath. I knew that someday, you would come here. I would make sure of it.”

  How, Lady? Why me?

  “I will answer the best that I can. Yes, I heard your questions. I can hear you when you think of me, just as you now hear ­people close by when they speak of you.”

  A spirit Octavia’s height formed in the center of the chamber. The white mist was tinted in color as if the being stood in fog. Beautiful caramel skin and luxurious thick, coiled hair showed her Tamaran heritage. She wore an antiquated version of medician gear, the robes accented in Dallows sky blue, the body beneath curvaceous and strong. As she stepped forward, the contents in her pockets chimed in various notes, the sounds of glass jars and coins and various other treasures.

  Beyond that, the Lady had no song. No life.

  “My human body, of course, is long gone. I am projecting my form as I best remember it. It took me centuries to make this sanctuary, a place to house the echo of my humanity, the only place where I can still speak aloud.” She faced King Kethan. “No, no. I’m not ignoring you. Never. Not even when you were locked in the vault. I couldn’t afford to ignore you, or the seams of life would have utterly unraveled.”

  “I am sorry.” The words escaped his throat with a sob. King Kethan collapsed to his knees.

  “Oh, Kethan.” The Lady said his name with the intimacy of a wife, a mother, a sister. “This was never any sort of judgment against you. No karma, no divine retribution. This was all Evandia’s very human desperation to have you live again as king, and her impatience as you fought against the seed. I have seen many ­people die when they chewed the Tree’s leaves, but not even I knew what would happen to someone who ingested both the seed and leaf.”

  “I have only yearned for mercy. For my Varya and Allendia,” he whispered.

  “I know.” The Lady walked up to him, jingling with each step. She glided like a dancer, no footprints in her wake. She laid a hand atop his head and he leaned against her hip as he sobbed. Though she appeared vaporous, the Lady was solid to him.

  “There was no way to save him from afar?” asked Octavia.

  “You are going to learn that there are great limits to what we can do. We encourage life. We’re zymes in the soil, chewing through decay. We’re gremlins, and know each piece of their living flesh.” The Lady grimaced. “We’re aware of everything, but it’s impossible to focus on more than a few things at a time.”

  “Hence the use of a circle,” said Octavia.

  “Yes. Circles grant us a space to focus. To act outside of a circle, to act outside of our direct influence, is draining. To scratch your cheek to save your life, to make that boy in Leffen speak with you, taxed months of my life away.”

  Scratch my cheek? Octavia struggled to understand, then remembered the odd sensation of a branch scraping her face when she stood on the street in Leffen—­it seemed like so long ago. The invisible branch at her cheek had caused her to turn just in time to dodge an assassination attempt.

  Minutes later, Octavia thought she had saved a small boy struck down in her stead. The boy had come back to life long enough to utter the enigmatic phrase “Listen to the branch, look to the leaves.”

  “You prognosticated,” said Octavia. “You knew I would encounter the Tree’s branch and the leaves.”

  “No, I didn’t,” the Lady corrected gently. “Nothing is as straightforward as that. I see dozens of paths. I saw many where you may have met with either the branch or leaves, or none at all. As Kethan astutely noted, the Tree is finite. I don’t see beyond my continent. I have lived. I will die.”

  “What of God and—­”

  “God? What of God?” The Lady burst out laughing. The hysterical pitch of her voice caused Kethan to jerk away and Leaf to edge back on Octavia’s shoulder. “Don’t go into this expecting divine insights from above. The prayers you hear—­and the curses—­are the ones that go to you. That means very few outside of the battlefield wards, these days. As for what comes beyond life, Kethan would know more than me.” She shrugged, her black hair swaying. “In all my years, he’s the only one who fully crossed beyond and returned to stay.”

  “I . . . I remember almost nothing of my time between life and this half-­life.”

  “I know.” The Lady sounded supremely disappointed. “But the fact that you returned at all is vital. Your body’s song went somewhere and it came back—­reluctantly—­but it came back.”

  The floor groaned beneath Octavia. Leaf squawked and took flight. Branches emerged from the smooth floor and, in the space of seconds, formed a high-­backed chair.

  “Sit.” The Lady pointed at Octavia. “Your legs are hurting.”

  “I—­I’d like to stand, I don’t know how much longer I—­”

  “Trees stand. They don’t have the luxury of sitting.”

  Octavia sat. The chair was smooth, the green wood stripped of any twigs or leaves. It perfectly fit the curves of her hips and buttocks. She was reminded of how Alonzo’s body fit against hers—­his lips, his height, his hands on her waist. Grief clogged her throat. I’ll never know more than that.

  “If you see dozens of paths into the future—­”

  “Octavia.” T
he Lady said her name, and Octavia felt like she’d smacked her head into a metal beam. Suddenly she was glad she sat. “You were born to be the next Tree. I didn’t shift your cells. I didn’t make you a medician. The magic was there, brought together by your parents. When you were able to float a patient beyond a circle—­when you listened to the rhythms of zymes—­I was amazed along with you.”

  Octavia froze. That sense of isolation she had known her whole life had always been balanced by the surety that the Lady knew, she understood.

  “Of course I knew and understood.” The Lady flicked a wrist as to dismiss the thought. “I understood you were here to take my place. In that, maybe there was divine intervention. I have already gone fifty years longer than I should, and with Kethan’s burden and the factories and the war . . . I think I only have a few days left. The roots are rotting out.”

  “Lady, I don’t want—­”

  “Do you think I care what you want?” The spirit of the Lady rounded on Octavia as her words quaked through the walls, the floor, shivered moss from above. Leaf squawked from up high—­she could spy him as he clung to moss near the ceiling. “I’m not God, to satisfy all your wants and wishes. I can heal. That’s all I can do, and I can’t even heal everyone. The shortage of blessed herbs—­that’s not simply because of the war. It’s my own weakness. There were days, in the Tree’s youth, when medicians planted full fields of pampria. Row upon glorious row. Now there’s no magic left in the soil to spur the growth. I can’t even deny all healings to those who I wish to die—­those Dallowmen, harvesting the very signs of my death, my peeling bark, and making tea from it.” Octavia felt flecks of spittle from her vehemence. “It takes more effort to kill than to let live.”

  “She wants to live and love.” That came from King Kethan. He still knelt on the floor, his gaze level.

  “Yes! Everyone wants the same, and what can I do? Almost nothing, even as I’m aware of everything from the bud of a single larkspur to an old man’s final breath. Even more, I know them at the very end and they know me, even if they never heard of the Lady and the Tree.”

  Like the boy who died in Leffen, who spoke of her; Alonzo’s message when he returned by the grace of the Tree’s leaf; the woman at the sod house.

  “This is cruel,” said King Kethan.

  “LIFE IS CRUEL.” The Tree convulsed. There was a long pause. Octavia felt a cool breeze again, like the long breaths of Al Cala meditation. “Octavia knows the value of the lives she saves because she knows her own loss. She knows that her whole village burned in the span of minutes, and who was left to mourn? Her, the Garrets, and the families of the thirteen Dallowmen of the Alexandrio. No one else in Caskentia cared. They each knew their own grief. She’s a good medician because she cares. She remembers.”

  The Lady turned to her again. “I know you want to continue as a medician, but you can’t. Without a Tree, there are no more herbs, there is no more healing magic. I am not even sure if you would still be able to hear bodies’ songs here. Perhaps if you went across the sea, to the land of another Tree, but not here. But even if you could hear them, soon enough there wouldn’t be any blessed herbs. You might be able to hear and do nothing.”

  Octavia wanted to coil into a tight ball of agony. “If you haven’t always been here, what kept the land going before? Was there another Tree?”

  “Of course. Otherwise medicians would have not existed. But he was weak, as both a medician and as a Tree. His legacy was the jealousy of Caskentia, the curse on the Dallows.”

  “And you,” Octavia said.

  The Lady laughed like a gale at sea then stopped, her expression one of surprise at the sounds she herself was making. Does not know how to laugh anymore. Octavia took care to edit her own thoughts to keep them her own.

  “Yes, I suppose I am his legacy. I know what the tales say of me. ‘The mourning mother.’ ‘The one who begged God that she might treat the suffering.’ ” Venom dripped from the words. “When I talk about the cruelty of life, I know it. Yes, I mourned. Yes, I mothered. But becoming the Tree is not a proclamation of morality, no more than surviving a threem is proof of virginity. The Tree creates magic, and the magic creates herbs and medicians, and the best of medicians becomes the next Tree, and so the cycle continues.”

  “Who were you, Lady? Before?” asked Octavia.

  The spirit’s mouth opened, her expression one of puzzlement. “I . . . I’ve been called Lady for so long. I don’t remember my old name.” She shook her head. “But I . . . I had three children. Their names, I know. Cameron, Aidan, and Cassandra.

  “When they call me the mourning mother, it’s because my grief shook through the land. It haunted the dreams of medicians. It caused pampria to weep red. I was forced to leave my children as orphans. It’s because I had to know their laments to the Tree—­because I raised them with faith—­and could do nothing to help when Cassandra died in child labor at thirteen, when a wagon crushed Aidan’s spine at eighteen and left him paralyzed until he brought a knife to his gut three months later, when Cameron strangled five consecutive wives and cursed them for his impotence.”

  Octavia’s lungs felt heavy, her body cold. No sympathy toward me. No choice.

  King Kethan bowed his head, a fist pressed to his chest. The Lady faced him with a tender smile. “Yes. You know what it’s like, to a degree. To lose a child and be powerless against it. To be bound in one place when your mind is everywhere else.” The Lady rested a hand on the top of his head again. “So many thousands of books are bound to your soul and memory. Their ultimate loss is the only reason I grieve to do this.”

  There was a split second when Kethan frowned in puzzlement, and then a spine of wood erupted from the floor at a ninety-­degree angle. It impaled Kethan with a horrible crunch of atrophied organs and flesh. Other branches spontaneously crackled forth and grabbed hold of his shoulders to clutch him upright. His song wailed, the screech of a toddler blowing into bagpipes. Even knowing this was the Lady, Octavia couldn’t help but lunge forward, her hands reaching to open her satchel.

  The chair bound her. Green branches snared her ankles, girthed her lap, and forced both arms back to their rests.

  “Kethan!” His name sobbed out of her. Octavia needed to be there, to lay her hand on his brow, to ease his passing as she had eased that of so many soldiers at the front. She craned against the restraints and screamed. “Peace to you, Kethan! Go to Varya! Allendia loves you. She’s never forgotten you.”

  Octavia knew Kethan heard her by the shift in his song as it softened—­that through the frenzy of his pain, there came the peace of a steady flute. His agony didn’t ease. His wound didn’t heal. This time, he was truly dying.

  The Lady stood between them, her expression impassive as she watched Kethan. Her hands rested atop her rounded hips.

  “Let me go to him!” Octavia yelled.

  “I have him.” The Lady said it with tenderness.

  The spear of the Tree moved. It retracted and traced a circle like an oversize scalpel. Kethan moaned, his frail form falling slack in the branches’ grip. His lungs, his body, deflated.

  Leaf squawked and dove downward. One of the branches lashed him aside. He impacted on the far wall with a fleshy smack.

  “Leaf!” Octavia screamed. Her wrists and shoulders burned as she tried to thrust herself forward in little jolts. In response, the branches squeezed. She couldn’t so much as wiggle. Octavia knew by Leaf’s song that he was merely bruised and dazed, but that didn’t stop her rage.

  “Chimeras.” The Lady shook her head, her lips curled. “Men meddling with things they shouldn’t. But I can’t stop all life. It just happens sometimes, even in a circle.”

  Kethan’s song dimmed.

  Leaf crawled to her. He dragged his wing, the one that wore the silver fork. “Come on, Leaf, come on,” she whispered. Alonzo could have been swatted in the same way. Still could. De
ath is harder, but she can still kill.

  The branch withdrew from Kethan. Its forked end balanced a nugget the size of a hulled almond. The Lady plucked it up and held it to the light. “So many years since it was stolen. So many years it has been in the wrong vessel. But now . . . now. Peace to you, Kethan,” said the Lady.

  Hot tears streamed down Octavia’s cheeks. “Good-­bye, Grandfather,” she whispered. As if he’d been waiting for the words, his soul departed their world.

  “Soon enough, peace for me as well. Once you’re rooted, Octavia, my time is done.”

  The Lady walked to Octavia, smiling, the seed cradled in the plush nest of her palm.

  CHAPTER 20

  Octavia fought against the branches of her chair. The green tendrils tightened their hold. “Lady! Please, no!”

  “Octavia, you want to save everyone. You’ve told me so many times.”

  “Not like this. I never thought . . . not like this.”

  “I know it’s hard. I don’t think it means as much without that sacrifice. I fought the seed, too, just as Kethan did.” The Lady nodded to where the King knelt. As Octavia watched, his body sifted into mere dust. Just as the Tree’s leaves disintegrate after being used. That’s all we are in the end. Dust. “However, in our case, we’re alive when it goes in. It hurts. Every sort of birth hurts. I was told that if you give in, the process is done in a matter of seconds.”

  The Lady stood directly before Octavia. The seed in her palm looked benign, like a green almond out of the hull, its surface rippled with long vertical lines. Her touch had evaporated the leaf’s toxins and Kethan’s remaining viscera as if she had used a medician wand. A vine slithered around Octavia’s ribs, then another. A twig twined around her neck; another circled the top of her head like a diadem. She couldn’t move.

  “You’re the finest medician magus I’ve ever seen.” Tears glistened in the Lady’s eyes. “Thank you.” The dankness of the earth lingered around her like a perfume.