by Allyse Near
Lileo grew paranoid that Isola’s fate was cursed by her name. She tried to push it away. She didn’t believe in the Children of Nimue anymore, although they hadn’t got the memo and continued to fiercely exist. She didn’t believe in prophecies. Her Isola, the Second Isola, would live past ten.
But everywhere she saw death omens for her daughter: coded in her breakfast cereal, scratched into the walls, written by invisible fingers in the bathroom mirror.
She was convinced. Isola would be ten soon, and the bargain had to be fulfilled. Death demanded a sacrifice, or else he’d take the Second Isola, too.
Silent Heart
Isola was back in the woods, unsteady on her feet. The vision of the past in her damaged eye was fading, and the present in her single eye was blurring. She couldn’t see either world properly anymore.
‘It was my birthday party,’ Isola whispered through numb lips. ‘I was turning ten.’
The last party Mother threw for her: summer, green grass, cake, children; the air was sticky and the sky was cloudless; the guests lolled in the sunshine. Isola remembered shy Grape and mouthy James there, and Rosekin fluttering round and round a blue balloon on a string tied to Grape’s thumb, entranced by it. Grape couldn’t see her – none of them ever could, and Isola smiled and felt secretly, smugly sorry for those who didn’t have Nimue blood running through them.
There was Mother, sitting at the roots of the plum tree. She leaned against the trunk, her eyes shut against the sun. When Isola approached, she woke up, smiled and opened her arms. Her eyes were dark. Her hug was weaker than usual. She was so skinny Isola could feel her ribs under her breasts, the steel bars of a cage.
Mother’s freckled shoulders were sunburned. She took Isola’s hand, pressed it to her clavicle. Her handprint smudged a pearly white shock in the scarlet, an opposite bruise, and then sunk into her skin, Mother’s body memorising the whorls of her fingerprints, storing her DNA.
‘I have a special present for you, Isola,’ said Mother, handing her the beautiful bound book of fairytales, handwritten by Lileo Pardieu herself.
Curious, Isola opened to the first page and a second gift fell out – a silver charm bracelet, each droplet shaped like the cycles of the moon.
While Isola exclaimed over the pretty bracelet and the extraordinary book, Lileo smiled, held Isola close and told her to live twice her life on behalf of the original, long-gone Isola Wilde. And then she left Isola to play; she’d spilled champagne on her dress and was going to change, maybe take a quick bath, she said.
Quick was too long, and Isola climbed the stairs in her grass-stained party dress to find her. Somewhere on those stairs she heard the mirror break, a splash of water. She paused, eyes skyward. Then bare feet trekked dirt up to the second storey.
Isola knocked. ‘Mum?’ she said, pushing open the bathroom door. The chandelier light blinded her, and she shielded her eyes for a moment. ‘Mum, what’re you doing up here?’
Mother was a triptych. Hair, toes, bubbles, shadow.
She lay perfectly still.
The hiss of candles extinguishing.
Her head, resting on the bath rim, was turned towards the door, as though she’d looked over at her knock. Her right eye stared unseeingly at the girl in the door, through her to a shadow world that had always seemed to press in on her, jostling for space in the room.
Mother’s dead eye fixed on Isola.
Then it happened. Mermaid fins surfaced in the bubbly water, and baby faeries dribbled from the lit candlewicks to munch on the rose petals floating on the water’s surface. A cloud of sparrows burst from Mother’s dark hair, swooping noisily around the ceiling. Everything beautiful was revealed as ugly at last. Fairytales were monster’s lullabies. Blood was running thick down the side of the tub, spelling ‘ISOLA’ across the chessboard tiled floor. The water was still running and it spilled over Isola’s feet, bringing the wash of blood with it.
Isola looked at her palms. Blood ran from her lifeline.
Footsteps pounded like heartbeats on the stairs, and Father was shouting no, no, no, but Alejandro got there first, hugging Isola to him as the last candle hissed out, telling her, ‘Everything will be all right, princess. I promise.’
The magic mirror was broken in the sink. The glass crucifix was clasped in Mother’s bloodless hand.
Isola pulled away from Alejandro, crossed the room. The moon bracelet slipped from her wrist – it was far too big, something to grow into, like an expectation or an heirloom dress. Falling to her knees, while Father lifted Mother from the bath, she heard it – the most horrible silence, echoing down the veins of the woman before her –
How silent the unbeating heart.
In the woods, Isola spoke. ‘My mother died,’ she whispered through a mouthful of sadness, ‘instead of me.’
Witch of the Woods
That was the only answer, whichever way she posed the question. The second Isola had outlived the first, and Lileo Pardieu-Wilde had died in her daughter’s place, a soapy and naked sacrifice stretched out on the bathtub altar, surrounded by fruit shampoos and scented candles – offerings to vengeful gods who demanded blood for their wine goblets, virgin or otherwise, give or take a few decades on the vintage.
‘But you’re nothing like her,’ said Isola tearfully. ‘My mother loved these woods, and you’ve been killing them.’
Lileo’s eyelids fluttered closed.
‘It’s because she’s toxic,’ muttered Florence, drawing the group’s attention again.
‘Please, Christobelle, Ruslana. Let her go,’ said Lileo. ‘She’s a good girl. She’s just upset.’
Hesitantly, they slackened their grips, and Florence scrambled free, falling sloppily in the grass, her torn dress heavy and her eyes shining furiously.
‘She’s not,’ said Isola tearfully. ‘She’s not good. She’s been possessing me.’ Nobody spoke, and she asked, ‘Who is she?’
It was Alejandro who answered. ‘I believe, Isola, that she is your ghost, in a way. A split –’
Isola remembered. They called them ‘splits’, or sometimes ‘echoes’; half-hearted hauntings, the kind her brothers had always warned her about . . . Unpredictable, confused, often caught in loops. Unable to change, unable to move on, a split infects their surroundings with their feelings – emotions so strong they anchored them to the earth.
‘– like a small piece of you that died,’ said Alejandro heavily, ‘when your Mother did.’
‘I’m not sure what I am, exactly,’ muttered Florence, her eyes like daggers. ‘What do you think – am I innocence? Am I childhood? What’ve you been missing, Isola? What is it that makes you less than human?’
Her princes all cried out instantly in her defence, but Isola couldn’t untangle their words; people had said that she’d changed, hadn’t they? That she’d turned strange and cold, Ice Girl Isola, after her tenth birthday?
‘We can’t be apart forever,’ said Florence, raising her raspy voice over the din. ‘But you refused to remember. And once you did, it would all be so lonely again – remembering me would mean remembering how we came to be apart, and why no-one ever seems to acknowledge dear dead Mother, why it seems Father hasn’t talked to her for years . . .’
Isola started. Had Father spoken to Mother lately or even looked at her? Had she imagined their minimal interactions? Isola shook away the thought. This wouldn’t do, it wasn’t Father’s fault her princes had been driven out – it was this dark girl before her! ‘But you made my life Hell! You took my brothers away!’
Florence snorted in disgust. ‘Yeah, and that clearly worked, ’cause they’re here now. Obviously they can avoid you if they’re given the right motivation, but they just can’t help themselves from rushing in. Gotta save the snivelling little princess from the bad old real world.’
Shocked by the venom, Isola took a step back.
‘You held them so close because, secretly, you knew you didn’t have a mother anymore. You only had her, the pathetic thing i
n the bathtub that has the nerve to call you daughter – not even a proper ghost, only a piece of what you remember, trapped in an endless loop!’
‘But –’
‘And Dad never acknowledged her, did he? For almost seven years, it’s been as if she doesn’t exist – because she doesn’t, Isola, she’s dead! And you’re keeping her here,’ accused Florence. ‘Who’s the evil witch here, huh? You’re so determined to hold on to her that you’ve kept this half of her, too –’ she jerked her head towards Lileo, who was teary-eyed in her dishevelled nature goddess dress ‘– the part she died trying to kill, to protect you from!’
Killing Loneliness, Eating Time
With that, Florence scrambled upright and fled, rushing past the Wish-You-Well and under the mossy Bridge of Sighs, vanishing into the dark.
Isola ran after her, under the Bridge. The vision in her left eye seemed sharper than usual. There were tree stumps around her, black and spindly like burnt-out wood, etched with jagged names.
Not tree stumps at all, but tombstones.
The centre of Vivien’s Wood was a graveyard.
‘This is where you buried me,’ said Lileo quietly.
Isola jumped; she didn’t realise the woman had followed.
‘Your father wanted me in the churchyard with my own mother, but the vicar wouldn’t allow it.’ She gave a sad little snort. ‘A suicide in hallowed ground! Imagine! So you had to bury me out here, with all these long-gone strangers . . . and you wouldn’t visit. You’d explore every inch of the woods, but you’d never pass under the Bridge. You stopped looking, and so you forgot how to see.’
The air beyond the Bridge of Sighs felt cold, away from the flaming tree, away from the princes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Isola muttered.
‘No, my princess, don’t be! I didn’t want you to visit. I always knew what I was – the worst part of Lileo, broken off, the splinter in her soul. So I left. I haunted the world. I never intended to come back.’
‘But I called you back. We held a séance…’
Lileo sighed heavily. ‘And she came, too.’
Isola went towards Florence, who was kneeling over a grave, crumpling up flower heads to scatter like confetti. ‘I hate her,’ sobbed Florence, ‘but she’s my mother, so I love her, too.’
Isola leaned over the tombstone. She didn’t read the name engraved. ‘The story about your death – why did you make it up?’
Florence shook her head vigorously. ‘I didn’t – it’s a story, it was all along – don’t you remember Wolverine Queen?’ She stifled a sob into her sleeve, and Isola felt something icy in her snap, a piece float away.
It was a story in her fairytale book, one she hated and had made herself forget. All along the truth had been ink and paper bound in a book on her bedroom floor – the visions and terrors like the proddings the real world inflicted upon the sleepwalker. Remember, remember . . .
‘I thought the story would help remind you.’ Her hands, clasped as if in prayer, were starting to shake. ‘I’m so angry,’ she whispered. ‘She didn’t mean to, but she killed me, Isola. Split my self up. Trapped with her illness, like you were still trapped with her in that house.’
A single memory floated feather-like through Isola’s thoughts: Father exploding with rage over a breakfast table when she mentioned her ‘imaginary friends’. It wasn’t Alejandro’s name he was reacting to, but the word Mother . . .
‘Don’t let her keep you in a cage,’ whispered Florence.
Isola looked at Florence. Her hair, Isola’s natural ashy, dishwater-brown, was stained darker with mud and sorrow. Underneath the accumulated dirt, Florence’s dress was cream with pastel ribbons – the dress she’d worn at her tenth birthday party.
She’d been trapped in the woods for so long. Screaming for Isola’s attention. Remembering, so Isola didn’t have to.
Isola had buried the truth with her mother, festering down there in a box, in the mud, in the dark of the woods. The illness. The stigma. The suicide.
She nodded at the ghost girl and straightened up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she called to Lileo. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened to you. About what’s still happening to you. I wish I could do something –’
‘So stay with me,’ whispered Lileo, and Isola clutched the top of the tombstone to steady herself. She felt crumbling rock, a creep of moisture – all the worldly remnants of her real mother.
‘Stay with us,’ Lileo reiterated. ‘We’ll live here. Nimue would have wanted that. Your princes – they can stay, too. It’ll be the world you’ve always wanted.’
‘But I don’t –’
‘Surely you know you cannot go back,’ she said with a bright laugh. ‘Your other mother is an echo, acting out her last years. She’ll never change!’
Isola moved past her, under the Bridge, back to the burning Vigour Mortis tree. Somehow it still stood upright, its uppermost branches clawing at the sky, fruitlessly trying to cut a saviour rainfall from the belly of the clouds. The Hindenburg moon sat between them, bulbous and burning white.
She saw a vision of herself, drawing back an arrow, setting the moon aflame, and wondered how she’d never noticed the way the Nimue world had bled into the other, through cracks in the walls of that house until she couldn’t separate the realities, like so much tangled thread.
‘Would you stay here?’ Isola asked her brothers, who were standing shell-shocked in a semicircle.
‘What?’ squeaked Rosekin.
‘If I stay here,’ said Isola desperately, ‘will you stay, too?’
The princes didn’t reply.
‘But you see now, don’t you, my princess?’ called Lileo. She emerged from under the Bridge, Florence skulking behind.
Isola met her dark half’s eyes, and Florence gave an infinitesimal shake of her head. Stay out of the damn woods.
Smiling, Lileo extended a hand, and for the first time Isola saw something of Mother in her. Something like love.
Isola could feel her pulse battering her throat like a trapped butterfly. By her feet was the bow Florence had knocked from her grasp while protecting a mother she despised. Isola picked up the last arrow. The tip was smeared pink.
‘Faeriedust,’ she said quietly. ‘They say it can heal the good and destroy the evil.’
‘Where did you get those?’ Lileo clasped her hands over her heart. ‘Those arrows – they’re made from my bones . . .’
Isola didn’t answer. She loaded the bow and drew back the string. She felt the company of five silent princes. The beglittered arrow tip began to glow as pink as Rosekin, and for the first time Lileo looked fearful.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Killing Loneliness,’ said Isola calmly, and she fired the arrow. Bright pink streaked through the night.
Right into Florence’s heart.
The Seventh Princess: An Instalment
‘The Seventh Dragon, Loneliness, faced the Seventh Princess and sneered.
‘“You cannot defeat me,” he boomed, the sound shaking his very scales like gongs. “The princes are gone, and you are more alone than ever you were before.”
‘“Maybe so,” said the little princess, “but you are the last of your brothers, too, and I? I will never be truly alone.”
‘The dragon laughed and smoke billowed from his nostrils, coasting over the cliff-top, shrouding the princess in black mist.
‘“I may be small!” yelled the princess, her eyes squeezed tightly against the burning black ash, “and I may be the last. I may not be the most kind, the most loving, the most steadfast – but I have a little of all those things, and while I have those qualities, and the memories of the people who gave them to me, why, then Loneliness can never hurt me!’’’
Goodbye-blood
Florence stood a moment, shock shivering down her limbs. Something poured from the wound in her chest, but it wasn’t blood – rather, it was a glittering, glowing pink, as the faeriedust ate her up from the inside.
Lileo sh
rieked with terror and rushed to Florence, her pale hands gripping the arrow shaft, tearing, tugging. The princes and Isola shouted ‘NO!’ in unison and there was a rush of shadow, a gold glint, a thrust – Dusk galloped out from his hiding place and impaled the storyteller on his golden horn.
Lileo screamed as she was knocked asunder, and the unicorn ripped his horn free. She scrambled aside, her shoulder dribbling blood, and dragged Florence with her. Lileo hauled the shock-frozen girl into her lap, afraid to touch the arrow in her daughter’s heart.
‘Don’t die, don’t die, my princess, don’t die,’ gasped Lileo, cradling the girl.
‘But see, Miss Pardieu,’ said Alejandro softly, ‘she is not dying.’
And at his words, the pink glow in Florence’s chest began to spread, enveloping the girl like the fire had the Vigour Mortis tree. The light was blinding – Isola could feel heat emanating from her and she cringed away, shielding her eyes until the warmth and the pink disappeared, and it was dark in the woods once more.
In Lileo’s arms lay Florence, still with wide, shocked eyes – both eyes. There was no arrow in her body, no blood and dirt in her hair. She was Isola again, but ten years old, with sleek hair and a bright dress and both her blue eyes spilling tears.
‘Thank you,’ she choked out, and her gaze left Isola and found Lileo’s, and she dissolved. Lileo clutched at nothing in the bubbling air.
Isola’s breath hitched – she felt something warm pass through her, something pink – then she was whole again, possessed forever by her forgotten half.
‘You’re welcome,’ Isola whispered, pressing her hands to her chest. Through her dress she felt the wedding ring, resting peaceful over her thumping heart.
‘I don’t get it,’ piped up Rosekin over Lileo’s quiet sobs. ‘Why didn’t you just kill the witch?’
‘Because,’ said Ruslana in a low voice, ‘she chose herself over her mother.’
