‘Paler,’ repeated Maud. ‘Much paler.’
Ambrose had no notion what to say. He glanced at his hands, found them to be much the same as they were yesterday, and returned to savouring his cordial.
He had brought a fresh supply of honey to Maud’s cottage, as he did towards the end of every season. He had brought two large baskets laden down with jars for Maud’s pantry. She in turn baked it into bread, cakes and pastries for Goldwyne’s Bakery, and to Ambrose’s gratification she had always declined to employ any honey but his, naming it by far the most superior in Berrie. They had grown close over the years and regularly shared a cordial in her tiny, colourful parlour. He appreciated her plain-speaking and practicality, and she seemed to find his calm manner agreeable.
‘It is not just you,’ said Maud, rocking slowly in her chair. ‘Ferdinand looks stranger by the day, though not in a bad way either. I cannot describe it. And the Aelfwines! If they grow any thinner I swear they will blow away with the next gust of wind. But they are not frail. Not in the least.’
‘I have not noticed,’ Ambrose confessed. His friendship with Maud was a rarity, for he was never much inclined for company. He took his flowers to market once every week, enduring the bustle for the sake of his livelihood. Then he was well contented to return to Sevenleaf and the peaceful company of his wife.
He had noticed other changes, however. There was no escaping the mist; he could not remember so heavy or so pervasive a fog in all his life. It never lifted, shrouding every familiar thing in a heavy pall of white. Southtown had abandoned all expectation that it would soon disperse; the streetlamps were left alight all day as well as during the night, in a mostly vain attempt to lighten the fog-wreathed paths.
‘Does it seem to you that…’ Ambrose hesitated, unsure whether practical Maud would think him mad.
But she looked steadily back at him, and he felt that she knew what he was going to say.
‘Helewise saw a tree in our parlour,’ he said. ‘A fine birch growing in the corner, its branches spread all across the ceiling.’
Maud nodded.
‘I saw a stream in our garden,’ Ambrose continued. ‘Between the sweetpea grove and the rose arbour. Its waters flowed blue, and the stream-bed was all quartz. Its banks were grown over with moss.’
‘Is it still there?’
Ambrose shook his head. ‘That was yesterday. When I returned this morning it was gone. And Helewise never saw it at all.’
‘I saw a door,’ said Maud. ‘In my kitchen, where there was never a door before. It was painted red, like wine, and it had a great bronze handle in the centre.’ She took a sip of cordial, her eyes narrowing. ‘I caught but a glimpse of it, and then it was gone. And then there is Ferdinand’s cottage.’ She got out of her chair and went to the window, but soon turned away from it with a shake of her head. ‘This morning it looked twice its usual size, and it had coloured glass in the windows. Now it is as it ever was.’
A moment later, Ferdinand Crowther himself appeared at the open window, with a suddenness that startled both Ambrose and Maud. ‘Maud,’ he said, his eyes glinting eerily jewel-green. ‘What is it that you’re burning?’
‘Nothing,’ said Maud. ‘It is too warm for a fire.’
Ferdinand blinked. ‘But there is smoke pouring from your chimney.’
‘Is there.’ Maud said the words flatly, her gaze turning towards the ceiling.
‘It is purple,’ said Ferdinand.
One of Maud’s eyebrows went up. ‘The smoke, or the chimney?’
‘The smoke.’ He paused, and then added, ‘The chimney is, um…’
Maud’s other eyebrow went up. ‘What? My chimney is what?’
‘It is difficult to describe,’ said Ferdinand. ‘You ought to see for yourself.’
Maud went outside at once, and Ambrose followed. They stood in the middle of the lane, and through the cloaking mist they could discern a stream of purple smoke rising from the roof of Maud’s cottage. The chimney itself seemed to be expelling it, for its sides swelled and contracted as though it breathed.
Maud took a long look this oddity, then stalked back inside and curled up once more in her rocking chair.
‘Strange,’ said Ambrose unnecessarily.
‘I am growing used to strange,’ said Maud with a faint smile. ‘Normality will seem sadly flat, whenever it returns.’
Supposing it does, thought Ambrose, though he did not say it aloud.
He left Maud soon afterwards and walked back to Sevenleaf, his mind settling back into the comfortable haze in which it usually rested. He watched the fog as he walked, mesmerised by the silvery glitter of droplets upon the air, enchanted by the graceful coils of mist which wreathed the streetlamps and clung to the roadsides.
The bees called to him the moment he came within sight of home. He felt their collective voice swell with approval at his near approach, a comforting hum at the back of his mind.
They had never spoken to him before, that he could remember. Not until the mists had rolled in and life had become smaller, quieter — and stranger. But it seemed natural to Ambrose. He was less inclined to consider it another oddity, than to wonder at his never having noticed their songs before.
He went straight out to the hives. Helewise would be somewhere deeper in the gardens, hard at work, and he wished that he could join her as of old. But the farther he ventured into the flower fields, the harder he sneezed, and the more his eyes and nose watered and ran. He was not safe from it even here, close to the house; before he reached his hives, he was obliged to retrieve the ever-present handkerchief from his pocket and mop up a succession of sneezes.
Ambrose blotted at his eyes and sneezed a little more, and so preoccupied was he with this that he did not immediately notice the stranger who stood in the centre of his circle of hives. When the motley-dressed man at last caught his attention, his first thought was a bemused impression that the bees ought not to be greeting this stranger with the same warm approval they showed to Ambrose and Helewise.
Nonetheless, they were. More than that: they were humming in concert with one another, singing a thrumming, soothing melody for the stranger’s entertainment.
‘Good day,’ said Ambrose, unable at that moment to remember — or discern — whether it was morning or afternoon.
The man executed a graceful turn and swept straight into a fluid bow, rising with a smile. ‘Ambrose Dale?’ he said, his black eyes scrutinising Ambrose with alert attention. He wore mulberry trousers and a many-coloured coat, and he carried a set of silver pipes in his hand.
‘I am,’ said Ambrose, returning the scrutiny with a frown. ‘You are at Sevenleaf House, sir, which I regret to inform you is a private garden. May I be of assistance?’
The man smiled, and tucked his silver pipes into a pocket of his coat. ‘I apologise for the intrusion. I was drawn here by the bees, you see, and we were delighted to see one another.’
Ambrose nodded doubtfully. ‘Normally they only sing so to me,’ he said. ‘Or to my wife.’ Which was not strictly true, as he had never heard them sing precisely like this before.
‘All creatures sing to Pippin Greensleeves,’ said the man with a crooked smile. ‘He is the only one who sings back, you see.’
Ambrose could not imagine himself singing to his bees, not least because he was a poor singer, and could not maintain a melody no matter how he tried. He opened his mouth to invite the stranger — Greensleeves, if that was his name — to depart, but closed it again without speaking, for yet another oddity caught his attention. He kept the circle of hives largely clear of plants, partly out of a sense of neatness and partly by design. But the flagstones were no longer pristine, for in between each grew a profusion of borage plants, fully mature and already budding. Ambrose could almost see them growing, for they seemed to swell with every breath Greensleeves took.
‘Curious,’ said he with a frown.
Pippin Greensleeves glanced down at the plants near his feet, and a flurry o
f buds opened into vivid blue starflowers. ‘They used to be predominant, in these parts.’
‘When?’ Ambrose was intrigued by the words, for how could Greensleeves know more of Sevenleaf and its environs than he did himself? The Dales had owned the land hereabouts for generations, and Ambrose had grown up in the old stone house he still called home. He could not remember a time when borage had been profuse; he had coaxed his present stocks forth from a mere few, straggling plants, and they had been slow to thrive.
‘Long ago,’ said Greensleeves. ‘Before your time, or your father’s either.’ His brows drew together, and he surveyed the tiny, bright flowers with as much disfavour as satisfaction. ‘They were not blue, then,’ he added.
Ambrose remembered the long, rambling walk he had taken with Helewise a day or two before, and the seeds they had strewn by the waysides. ‘Soon they will be prevalent again,’ he suggested.
Greensleeves nodded with a catlike smile. ‘It is right that they should.’ He drew forth his pipes once more and played a swift, lilting tune, and another flurry of buds opened. ‘I thank you for your hospitality,’ he said, which puzzled Ambrose considering he had offered none. ‘I will be on my way.’ He bowed, a salutation which Ambrose barely had chance to return before Greensleeves was away, striding through the starflowers with jaunty step. More blossoms opened as he passed, releasing wisps of sweet fragrance into the air.
Ambrose sneezed, and sneezed again.
His eyes streamed water, and as he raised his handkerchief once more to his face, he thought he saw a vision of Sevenleaf far different from any he had ever glimpsed before. His tidy fences and neat borders were gone; his lavender shrubs, the rose arbour and honeysuckle bower, the distant sweetpea and cornflower groves, all vanished. Instead he saw a woodland of ancient trees sparsely grown, the ground beneath their verdant branches carpeted in starflowers. Beehives hung from every bough, and the scent of floral honey hung heavy upon the air.
The flowers were not the rich blue he was accustomed to, but a bright, delicate silver.
Ambrose blinked, and the vision was gone in an instant. He saw again the wooden hives he had constructed with his own hands, and the tidy proportions of the garden he knew.
Chapter Three
Some unknowable number of days later, Helewise gathered the remnants of her sweetpeas early in the morning, her coat buttoned close against the chill. The fog was thicker than ever with the approach of autumn, but the burgeoning cold was welcome after the heats of summer, and the crisp, fresh scent to the air gladdened her heart.
The fate of her flowers pleased her rather less, for they were fading early, and fading fast. Starved of sun and light and even rain, they could not thrive, and her livelihood must suffer for it. Only the starflowers grew, bursting forth in ever greater profusion even as the rest of her garden withered.
The rambling rose bushes seemed similarly unaffected, for they continued to flourish along the waysides. Helewise walked to market with a large trug upon each arm, laden down with what she feared must be the final harvest of the season. It occurred to her to wonder whether she would find the market square still in place when she arrived, for everything about her continued to shift and alter in ways she was slowly growing used to. Perhaps she would find a pond instead, or a grassy valley, or a castle.
The roads were quiet and largely empty upon most of her way, but as she neared the market she began to pass other travellers. Some of them were familiar to her; people she knew, or at least faces that she recognised as regular market-goers.
Others were less so. Most of them came on foot, a few mounted upon ponies or fine, elegant horses. Their clothes were strange: they comprised more colours than might be considered either customary or entirely respectable, and they were cut in ways that had never been fashionable. Their hair was richly adorned and oddly styled. Everything about them was colour and vibrancy; beside these newcomers, the residents of Berrie appeared sadly drab.
Sometimes they spoke to one another, in lilting words Helewise could not understand. She could not imagine where they had journeyed from, or how so many had come to venture into Berrie all at once. When she tried to ask one of them, she received a startled stare, as though she had been a deer or a rabbit with remarkable powers of speech. No answer was given, and Helewise did not again venture to disturb any of the motley folk.
They were all going towards the market, and Helewise could only imagine that they were destined for disappointment. Berrie’s produce had always been fine, but it was not extraordinary. How could such splendid, outlandish folk be satisfied, even with the town’s best?
She was relieved to find that the market square had yet to reinterpret itself as something else, and a number of stalls were already set up. Maud Redthorn was there with Dunstan Goldwyne, selling crumpets, muffins and seed-speckled loaves; Nathaniel Roseberry sold his best wines, as always, alongside Ferdinand Crowther’s ales; and Lavender Blackwood had an early crop of pumpkins to offer, together with beets, redcurrants, colourful bunches of carrots and striped marrows. The reassuringly familiar sights and scents eased Helewise’s spirits.
Maud approached as she set down her baskets, and nodded at a nearby knot of motley folk. ‘What do you make of them?’
The two women wore gowns of cerulean and azure, their tawny-gold hair decked in flowers. Their male companion wore a coat as vividly red as their dresses were blue, and a forest-green ribbon was woven through his long braid.
‘I have never seen their like,’ said Helewise.
The three approached soon afterwards and fell to inspecting her wares, with a minute attention which puzzled her. Clearly they were not satisfied with what they found. They threw down her sweetpeas in disgust, and began speaking to her in fluid strings of words she could not understand. Berating her, for by their manner they were much displeased. They gestured at the market with great sweeps of their arms and expressed their dissatisfaction at great length.
Eventually it occurred to one of the women that Helewise did not understand, for she cut off her flow of words and began again, haltingly, in Helewise’s own tongue. ‘Where…’ she said, and frowned. ‘Where is the…’ A word followed in that other language, and Helewise was lost again. It sounded like alorin, but she could make no guess as to its meaning.
‘I do not know what you mean,’ Helewise told her, careful to keep her tone polite but firm. She was beginning to feel alarmed by their clear dissatisfaction, so far in excess of anything she had expected, and she could not understand why it appeared to be directed at her.
The woman let out a great sigh, and dismissed Helewise with a wave of one bejewelled hand. She and her companions moved away, but their place was soon taken by others, and the peculiar scene was re-enacted over and over again during the course of the morning. Helewise alternated between selling her flowers to the residents of Berrie and answering the same question from the market’s outlandish visitors: ‘Where? Where is the alorin?’
Then came a lady whose appearance cut Helewise to the core, for she was no bejewelled vision like the rest. She was scarcely taller than Helewise, thin to the point of frailty. The men and women thronging the marketplace varied greatly in appearance: some of them were as pale as Helewise, with yellow or golden hair and bright blue eyes. Others were as brown as her best honey or darker still, their hair painted all the rich tints of autumn, or as black as the ink with which she wrote her letters. They made a fine sight, and Helewise did not tire of admiring them, regardless of their behaviour.
The woman before her now was… colourless, like a clear glass emptied of its contents. Her skin was pallid to the point of translucency, blue veins marking her face and neck in an exquisite, but shocking, tracery. Her eyes were ice-white, though the left was graced by a faint hint of sea-green on the wane.
She was not in good health. Her movements were stiff and halting, and she took sparse, shallow breaths through cracked lips.
‘Alorin?’ she said, her voice barely a whisper.
Helewise shook her head, and felt, for the first time, a sense of compunction for her inability to satisfy the incomprehensible request. The woman did not berate her as the others had, nor did she appear to feel any anger. She merely gazed at Helewise with infinite sadness, and bowed her frail head in a gesture of exhausted acceptance. She moved away without another word, and Helewise could only watch her go, and regret.
‘Right,’ said Maud from behind Helewise. ‘This is ridiculous.’
Helewise turned. Maud Redthorn stood with arms folded, watching the colourful visitors with an expression of disgust to match their own. And no wonder, for the pallid woman’s weary composure was at odds with the loudly-voiced dissatisfaction of her fellows. Their collective anger was growing; soon, thought Helewise, they might progress from aggrieved words to a more direct expression of vexation.
‘What is alorin?’ said Helewise. ‘I think it must be important.’
‘Obviously,’ said Maud. ‘But I’ve no more idea of what it might be than you do.’
‘Did you see that woman?’
Maud looked about, frowning. ‘Which particular one?’
‘The pale one.’
‘I do not know who you mean.’
Helewise glanced about, hoping to see her, but the lady had gone. ‘She was ill, in some strange way. I am sure of it. And, Maud…’ Helewise hesitated, afraid that if she spoke her thoughts aloud they might in some way become more real. More true. ‘Maud, have you noticed that Ambrose is looking different?’
‘A bit pale,’ said Maud.
‘Yes. Exactly.’ Helewise thought also of the paling of Bellerose Woodbriar’s formerly red hair, and the increasingly frailty of the Aelfwine sisters. She sought futilely for words with which to express her concerns, only half understanding them herself, and at last gave up the endeavour. There was no making sense of it.
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