She glanced quickly at the keyhole in Erris’s back, and her lips pinched in. She tossed her head and left the room at a hurried shuffle. She ought not to even be out of bed, I thought. But if she wanted to constantly endanger herself, well, I didn’t care.
I frowned. It was true-no one would care if she endangered herself except her absent father. She likely never left this house, and never had visitors. Violet was as much a secret as Annalie had been, except she had no spirits to keep her company.
Well… that wasn’t my affair either.
I found Celestina in the kitchens, wearing a linen shirt, men’s trousers, and boots, which she nearly jumped out of when I said good morning.
“My goodness. You scared me. I’m not fit for company yet.”
I smiled. “I don’t care. Where I’m from, girls, even queens, wear trousers. Of course, they’re more likely to be made from colorful silk than brown wool, but either way, I don’t care if you dress like that all day.”
“Really?” Celestina flipped her frying bacon. “Because, when Mr. Valdana’s gone, this is exactly what I do wear all day. You know how long it took me to come to the door when you first knocked? It’s because I was scrambling into a dress.” She laughed.
I laughed too. “I wonder if fairy women ever wear trousers.” I adored my fine clothes, the dresses made of silk and good wool Hollin had bought me, but sometimes I dearly missed having a good lounge. You couldn’t lounge with a corset around your ribs and a collar around your neck, and it seemed that the lower the neckline of a Lorinarian gown dipped, the smaller the waistline became, so any comfort you may have gained was lost.
Erris walked in a moment later, moaning at the aroma. “Must you make things that smell all the way from my bedroom?”
“What do you think of trousers?” I said, changing the subject before Erris’s teasing tone turned into melancholy.
“Trousers?”
“Did fairy women ever wear them?”
“Not often,” Erris said. “Fairies are vain and prefer looking fancy, but we don’t have such moral ideas about clothes as humans do, so I wouldn’t be offended.”
“In that case,” Celestina said, “I will continue to practice shocking behaviors.”
After breakfast, Erris went out for more foraging. Outside, the morning fog had vanished from the lawn, but it still swathed the bottom half of the trees, and I peered through the curtains as he vanished into it.
Celestina came back down from bringing Violet breakfast, scooping the cat up from the rag rug so his limbs dangled from her arm while she scratched his round cheeks. “Would you like me to measure you and make you some trousers?”
I laughed again. “Oh, I couldn’t really…” I hesitated. There was no logical reason I shouldn’t wear whatever I liked out here. The rules of Lorinarian society had clearly seeped into me almost unnoticed, like a disease.
“You might as well,” Celestina said. “When winter comes, and there is work to do, it’s so much easier.”
I suppressed a bristle that she assumed I would do work during the winter. It stirred bad memories of the farm. But I was going to be more useful here. I wouldn’t be complaining about every little thing like Violet.
Celestina motioned me from the kitchen. “Come on.”
I followed her to a small room, feminine, but not overly so, with a sewing machine and a trunk spilling fabrics by the window. A bird perched on the branch of an apple tree outside the window but flew away when we drew near. Celestina whistled at it, almost absently, but it didn’t come back. In the corner was a heavy wooden chair with plush green padding, facing a card game that seemed long abandoned-in fact, a few cards lay scattered on the floor now, and Celestina stooped to pick them up. A guitar leaned against the wall by the chair.
“Who plays the guitar?” I asked.
“Oh, I do, a little bit.” She shuffled through a mess on the table by the sewing machine to find her measuring tape. “It belonged to my brother. And before that, my great-uncle. My brother left it behind when he went to the city, ‘seeking his fortune,’ which apparently meant a job at the slaughterhouse.” She made a face, then unfurled a measuring tape between her hands and measured my inseam in a casual way, through my skirt. Precise measurements of these trousers didn’t seem terribly important. “What’s your waist measurement without your corset, would you say?”
“Twenty-two inches?”
“You tiny thing!” She scribbled down her numbers. “We’ll make it twenty-three. You’ll get fat with all the pie.” She pulled some coarse brown wool from the middle of the pile of cloth spilling from the trunk.
Determined to be helpful, I asked if there was anything I could do while she started to measure fabric. I couldn’t make clothes, but I could mend and sew buttons, and so she gave me one of Violet’s dresses with a hole under the arm, followed by a shirt with two buttons gone.
“We should probably go into town soon,” Celestina said, an unvoiced sigh hovering around her words. “I need some supplies anyway, but especially with two winter guests.”
“I don’t think the locals thought much of us,” I said. An understatement.
“No, well, they don’t think much of anyone who knows Mr. Valdana.” She was facing the window, but I saw her shoulders tense. “I used to belong there, and now I don’t like to go to market or anywhere. They really aren’t bad people at heart… but they don’t think beyond this village. Or at least the district.”
“Are your parents still living?”
“Yes. My parents and two younger sisters and two younger brothers. And my older brother who works at the slaughterhouse. All still living. I don’t see them much. They wish I had stayed home. I could care for them in their old age, I suppose.” She snorted.
“Will you marry?” I was being more forward with her than I had been with another girl in a long time. But then, few girls were so immediately open with me. “Surely some young man would appreciate your pickles.”
She laughed. “No, no, no. He must like me for more than my pickles! Oh, come to town with me and just see if there’s a boy I would look twice at even if he would look twice at me. A lot of young men have been leaving, anyway, ever since they extended the train line. It became rather a highway to temptation, I suppose. The old men are forever grousing about it.”
We both stopped at the sound of soft footsteps on the hall rug. Violet appeared, looking pale and peevish, swathed in a shawl atop her nightgown, skinny legs in whimsically striped socks.
“Get back in bed!” Celestina said. “You can’t always be getting out of bed and wandering the house.”
“Shouldn’t I be out of doors like Erris said?”
“We’ll wait until he gets back. It seems chilly to me, but we’ll see. I can’t go right now.” Celestina talked to Violet like she was still a child.
And Violet responded accordingly. “Well, I want something to eat. I’m hungry. That nasty salad stuff isn’t any good. I want blueberry bread.”
“Erris said you can’t have any.”
“What does he know?”
“You must think he knows something if you want to go outside,” Celestina said, with a tone of someone who has easily bested her opponent. “Anyway, he’s a fairy and your mother’s brother. Don’t you think we should trust him? So go back to bed and when he returns, we’ll see.”
Violet’s lips compressed and her pale face turned red rather abruptly. Her eyes cut to me, her rage plain, as if I had anything to do with it. I kept my face blank, and she turned with a toss of her hair. I felt I had been involved in some argument I did not clearly understand.
Neither of us spoke until the sound of Violet’s footsteps had shrunk into nothing.
“I’m sorry about her manners,” Celestina said.
Celestina didn’t like Violet either, I realized. She had been so solicitous to her, I had assumed her to be the sort of person who lives to care for others, but it was an incorrect assumption. I could see now that Celestina loved so
mething here, the house and maybe even the romance of working for a man the villagers regarded as dangerous, but whatever the appeal was, it wasn’t Violet.
“Mr. Valdana is a wise sorcerer in many matters,” Celestina said, “but he’s blind to her. You should see the instructions he always leaves. ‘Buy her oranges. Read to her at night. Help her wash up.’ He seems to think her constant sicknesses have denied her so many things that he can’t possibly deny her anything.”
“But how can she grow up if he spoils her like a child?”
“I guess he thinks that will come when she is of age. If she comes of age.”
“What does Ordorio intend for her, eventually? She’s fifteen. I mean, most girls are beginning to be courted by then, aren’t they?”
“He’s mentioned that she might be able to return to the fairy kingdom and perhaps become queen, but not until she’s grown.”
“She can’t be a good queen if she can’t do anything for herself,” I said.
“Maybe not a good queen,” Celestina said. “But certainly she wouldn’t be the first pampered and sheltered queen in the world. Perhaps it won’t matter, now that Erris is here.”
Yes. Erris might be the one to inherit the throne and all its troubles. I was not sure if this thought was especially comforting either. I changed the subject to music until the noise of the sewing machine forced us into silence.
By lunchtime, Celestina was handing me a simple pair of newly made trousers and one of her own shirts. I slipped up to my room to change, a flush on my cheeks, as if I were still in Hollin Parry’s house and any moment he would turn the corner and say that I was a lady and should have fine things.
And I loved fine things, it was true. Since I was a girl, I had been attracted to a flash of gold or the shimmer of silk. Clothes do not change a person’s appearance only, but their feelings as well. Now I changed from well-to-do girl of Lorinar in a fine full skirt and puffed sleeves, with my hair swept over my ears and demurely pinned, to a creature of the forest, camouflaged in cream and brown, rough and quick and ready. I looked ridiculous now with my hair neat and ladylike. I pulled out the pins and let it tumble down. The girl who looked out at me from the mirror was no longer a shadow of my mother or a foreign girl pretending to be a lady of Lorinar. She was wild. She was strange.
There was something about her I rather liked.
I plaited my hair, for the hair of a wild girl would quickly get knots and fall into her food, and went down for lunch.
Chapter 7
After lunchtime, Erris still hadn’t returned from foraging, so I set out to find him somewhere in what Celestina said was a hundred acres of forest and rocky shoreline.
The fog had vanished; the sun shone at last on trees just beginning their autumn transformation. It was not only that the day looked bright; it felt bright, sweeping into my lungs, scented by ocean, filling me with strange vigor. I started running just to feel my legs and heart pumping and my braids flying. I leaped over a fallen tree trunk, fleet as a deer, and then I stopped, gasping for breath. I wanted to feel like a child again, but my body seemed shocked by it; it had grown used to stately movement and stuffy rooms. Even dancing was something I rarely did anymore.
I recalled playing in the gardens as a girl, ducking under bushes, seeking hidden places. I remembered clambering up mountain paths and slipping off my shoes to cross the wide but shallow river near Shala, where the court went in summer. When had my limbs grown long and stiff and unable to slip under and over and through? My heart was pounding in my chest still. I didn’t want to feel as tired and grown-up as I did.
My steps tugged me toward the shore. I crossed a plank thrown across a trickle of river and passed through a grassy patch that had been cleared of trees once, and where only bushes grew now. The trees turned to dwarves near the shore, and then the sky opened completely, a bowl of blue above the deeper shade of the sea.
Erris didn’t hear me approach over the pounding waves. And for another moment, I let him be alone. I was alone too; we were alone together with the waves beating stronger than my heart. I had crossed the ocean, I realized, but I had never seen the shore. I had only come on and off of ships.
I made my way across sun-warmed rocks that separated the stubby trees from a slick world of tide pools and algae. Erris had a basket at his side, with seaweed and shells, but he was very still, looking out at the islands that rose from the water like giant turtles sunning themselves, carrying tiny forests on their backs.
“Erris?” I finally said.
He rose and turned in one motion. “Oh… it’s you, Nim.”
“Who else would it be?”
He shrugged a shoulder, then grinned. “I see Celestina dressed you up.”
“Do I look terribly silly? Like a little boy?”
“Never like a little boy. No, not at all. You look naughty. Like a runaway.” He walked near enough to touch me.
“I suppose I am a bit of a runaway,” I said, looking at his hands. I wanted to touch them. I knew they would feel warm and alive. I didn’t care if it was all an illusion. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t run away from home.”
“But you won’t run away anymore?” he said casually, now looking at my hands. I wondered if it was something he truly worried about.
“You don’t think I would abandon you, do you?” I answered.
“I wish I could abandon myself,” he said, and suddenly we weren’t casual at all. “Do you really think there could be a good outcome to any of this?”
“Well, yes. I mean, Annalie told us to come here.”
“The spirits told her to tell us to come here. Who knows about spirits. What if that spirit was my sister? What if Annalie misunderstood? Maybe I’m just supposed to help Violet.”
“You don’t think you’re here to help yourself at all?” That was, admittedly, a bit of a horrifying thought.
“I have to be realistic. If I start hoping to have my real life back, I think I’ll break down entirely. Hope is painful. I waited all those years to be freed from clockwork, and I don’t think I can wait anymore. I can’t imagine that my body is still alive somewhere. This is it. This is all I’ve got, Nim. I’ve got to deal with that.”
“So, you’re just giving up?”
“I’m trying not to give up,” he said. The cries of seagulls around us seemed to echo the desperation inching into his voice. “I’m trying to find some purpose, some rhyme or reason for what happened to me. If I’m here to help my sister’s child, then that is something I can do even as I am.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Where does that leave me? I can’t just… go back to dancing in penny music halls.”
“I told you I love you,” he said, putting his firm hand atop mine. “And I meant it.” He started again. “But a clockwork man obviously can’t marry. I know we’d prefer… I mean, in different circumstances I would certainly court you, Nim.” His eyes traveled along my boyish garb, the braids that draped across my chest, to my face, and then the back of his hand moved to my cheek. My hands fell away, and my breath came quick as he let his fingers slide down my neck, and now they hovered there, and I could hardly bear it. I wanted so much for him to be real flesh and blood. I wanted so much to pull him closer.
Abruptly, he shut his eyes, and his hand drew back a moment later. “I can’t stand it. When I think about all the little flirtations and kisses with girls back home, and this is the first time I’ve felt like it actually meant something, and I can’t do anything about it.”
I put my hands over his now. “I still think you’re giving up too soon on the idea that you might live again.”
“Stop!” He was suddenly ferocious. “Please stop. Do you honestly think there is a chance the human sorcerers that enslaved me actually saved my body? That they’ve been keeping me preserved and no one knows about it? I’ve gone over every possible circumstance, and I can’t imagine any in which that would be the case.”
I was left briefly speechless. “But why did
they save your soul at all? Do we understand any of this? Why make an assumption?”
“I told you. Hope is painful. I want to be myself again, or as close to myself as I can manage, and I can’t do that if I’m thinking I might get my real self back. I have to be myself like this. I have to try. Otherwise I can’t bear it. Does that… make any sense?”
I was afraid that everything he said both made sense and did not make sense at the same time. I could imagine his plight-and often did-but I would never have to live it. Maybe I could never understand the weight of it. Maybe I didn’t want to.
“It does.” The fresh sea air blowing across my face somehow helped keep away the tears.
He put his hands to my cheeks, cupping my face, looking tender and sad. I wanted to return the touch, but of course, he didn’t want to be touched. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
His hands lowered. My eyes opened. He smiled a bit.
“I’ll walk back with you,” he said.
Even now, I hoped he would take my hand, and when he didn’t, I felt my empty hand as if it were missing a finger. But the day was lovely, and Erris pointed out the bright rowan berries and a whistling bluebird perched in a tree. He was trying so hard to cheer me, so I made an attempt to smile.
“I’ve been thinking about my magic,” he said. “I wonder if it’s gone only because I’ve been cooped up for so long.”
“Do you think it could come back?”
“Well, does magic come from the body or the soul?”
“The soul, I would think,” I said. “Only, the body must have something to do with it or fairies and humans would have the same magic, wouldn’t they?”
“But are our souls fairy or human or… just spirit?”
I laughed. “Too philosophical. I don’t know. But if you’re asking whether or not your magic will come back, I say it will.”
“You are an optimist,” he said. “I didn’t take you for one at first, but…”
Magic Under Stone Page 5
