The Glass Casket

by Templeman, Mccormick

  As if reading her thoughts, Henry Rose held up a finger to her, and with his other hand rustled through some papers.

  “Since we’re speaking of Midway texts, I wondered if I might talk with you about your work on The Book of Widows,” he said.

  Rowan felt her palms growing sweaty. She had given her father her notes on a translation she was helping him with, and while she had hoped he might look them over before she continued with her work, she had not expected a formal review.

  “Is … is something wrong?”

  He furrowed his brow and smiled at her. “Quite the opposite, child. I was examining it this morning, and frankly, I am stunned. When I gave you the piece, I thought I might do so as a training exercise, but you’ve discovered something in here that I missed.”

  Rowan felt the anxiety draining from her as she processed his words.

  “You’re pleased, then?”

  “To say that I am pleased would be an understatement. Tell me, though,” he said, resting his chin on his palm. “How did you arrive at your conclusion?”

  Rowan cleared her throat, trying to keep the excitement from her voice. “Well, I suppose it was instinct, mostly. After really looking at it, I just knew that a mistake had been made somewhere along the way. The version we have is in the ancient Luric, but the story itself reminded me of something I’d read about the Midway peoples and one of their creation myths. That made me wonder if it might have originally been composed in a Midway tongue and since then translated into the Luric. So I began looking for words that might have been mistranslated, and I found two. It all comes down to a simple homophone, really. Lan Ce Sai, meaning ‘bloom colors’ or ‘colors bloom,’ but Ce Sai, when translated into the dialect of the Midway peoples, is the word tsvety, meaning ‘colors.’ Since the word tsvety has the homophone tsveti, which means ‘flowers’—I began to wonder if the word in the poem was not colors, but flowers. Flowers bloom. When you think about it, it seems rather obvious, and I don’t imagine that it changes much, but I thought I should make a note.”

  Her father stared at her with a mixture of surprise and delight. He shook his head.

  “Really, Rowan, I cannot tell you how impressed I am with what you’ve done. Whether the change is important or not is not for us to say. Our work is in the discovery. I’m going to send what you’ve done to the duke conservateur right away.”

  Rowan could barely believe his words. “You are?”

  “I am.” He smiled. “I am very proud of you, my child. Your gifts seem to grow with each passing moon.”

  “Thank you, Father,” she said as she watched him set her notes to the side.

  “Now,” he answered, “why don’t you eat with Emily. I’m afraid I won’t be joining you. I have far too much work ahead of me.”

  Pride filling her chest, she left her father’s study and went to wash up.

  Supper with Emily was stew again, and although Rowan could think of little other than her translations, Emily seemed able only to speak of Fiona Eira.

  “So lovely, she is. Tall for a girl. Funny, your being cousins.”

  “Why’s that?” Rowan said, taken aback by the perceived insult.

  “Oh, no, not that you’re not lovely, Ro. It’s just that you are so scrawny and pale. It’s like you’re all one color—like mashed potatoes—while her colors are so vibrant, all black and peach and red. She’s almost like a painting. And hearty. She’s got lovely curves, that one.”

  Rowan thought about her cousin long after supper and was still thinking about her, up in her room, as she dressed for bed. She resented her father for preventing her from speaking with the girl. Fiona Eira was family, after all, and they were practically the same age. She might make for a good friend; although, looking at the girl today down by the well, Rowan wasn’t sure the two would have much in common.

  She changed into her nightgown and turned down her bed. On her desk, beside the candelabra, sat the remainder of The Book of Widows. Perhaps just a little translating before bedtime would calm her. After lighting the candles, Rowan was gazing through the picture window and out into the woods beyond when she was overcome by a sudden chill. She felt almost exactly as if someone was watching her. She stood still a moment and nearly moved to blow out the candles, but then she decided she was being ridiculous. Shaking it off, she pulled out her chair and sat down. With the lush green lacquer of her desk smooth beneath her arms, she lost herself quickly in the motion of the pen over paper.

  She did not stop until she was satisfied with her work, and when she laid down her pen, she looked out the window to see the nearly full moon stretching high into the sky. But just as she pushed her chair in, she thought she heard something outside her window. She froze, peering through the panes into the moonlight-dappled darkness beyond. Pema, who had been asleep under the desk, jumped onto Rowan’s bed, startling her.

  “Pema, girl, you frightened me,” Rowan said, but she knew it was not Pema that had scared her. The dog curled up at the foot of the bed.

  “You’re staying in here tonight, eh?” she said, petting the dog’s head. “I suppose Emily won’t mind.” Pema hadn’t heard the noise, Rowan told herself, and Pema could hear a northern squirrel scuttle up a pine from hundreds of yards away. Her mind was playing tricks on her, that was all. Nodding to herself, she climbed under the covers and blew out her candle. She lay there a moment, listening to her breath, until she could take it no longer. In a flash, she was up again and at her window. She drew down the curtains against the night, against the unknowable. Finally content, she climbed back into bed and drifted off to sleep.

  3. THE EMPRESS

  FIONA EIRA COULDN’T stop thinking about the boy in the square. When she’d looked up to see him, when her eyes had met his—it was as if something inside her had changed. There was a kindness to his face that she’d not often seen in young men, and when he’d laughed, it had awakened something in her, and she realized that their shared moment was the first time she’d laughed since her father had died. As she walked back home, she noticed that she still felt him with her, lingering in her mind’s eye.

  She wanted to meet him, but she would need to discover his name without Seamus, her guardian, finding out. She knew she ought to be grateful to Seamus for providing for her and Lareina after her father’s death, but the truth was he made her nervous.

  She walked on, concentrating on the ground beneath her feet, listening to the solid crunch of the snow and focusing on the scent of the rich oils of pine that lingered in the breeze. She filled her belly with air and softened her lungs, slowing the rate of her heart, which had crept ever steeper since thinking of her father.

  Before he died, she had been a happy child, an uncomplicated girl. She loved her father and her stepmother almost as much as she loved swimming in the sea and playing chase with the village children. But when her father died, everything changed. Seamus Flint had shown up almost before the man’s body was cold, promising money and comfort, protection. Lareina had no family, after all, and had a girl to look after now—a girl who wasn’t even her own, he had said. How that had angered Fiona, for Lareina was her mother, if not by blood, then by spirit, and as Lareina often said, a woman need not birth a child to feel a mother’s love.

  Before their journey to the mountains, Seamus had told them that they were leaving to be closer to Fiona’s family. He had intimated that her long-lost relatives would greet them eagerly and with open arms, but they had done no such thing. The scholar, her uncle, had turned them away with barely a word. And just now at the square, the look in her cousin’s eyes … she recognized it. Her cousin had been told not to speak to Fiona—that she was dangerous. But what dangers could she possibly present?

  As Fiona walked the forest path back to her new home, her mind drifted to memories of her father. He had been a quiet man, a man not accustomed to showing affection, and yet he had been a good man, providing for her, always giving her a kind word when she was most in need. She missed her life by th
e sea—the warm winds and clear blue ocean swells.

  Her heart ached when she thought about the morning walks she used to take with Lareina, their bare feet sinking into the sand still cool from the night. There, they would comb for seashells to string into necklaces that her father might sell at the weekly open market. In the afternoons, they would sit in the sand outside their cottage, the warm sun beating down on Fiona’s shoulders as they worked. Lareina made a habit of setting the loveliest necklace aside for Fiona. Fastening it around her neck and kissing her on the cheek, she would say, An ocean bloom for my ocean rose. Those necklaces were gone now too. In the end, Goi Flint had sold even those. The past year had been a dark one, but Fiona was beginning to suspect that things might be changing. Perhaps her gentle stranger, that solid, earthbound boy, augured the start of a new kind of happiness.

  Lareina looked up from her sewing the second Fiona pushed her weight against the heavy wooden door. Setting down the needle and thread, she smiled at her stepdaughter.

  “Hi, Mum,” Fiona said, and kissed her on the cheek. “You were worried, weren’t you?”

  Lareina laughed and shook her head. Fiona’s eyes fell to the knitting needle on the hearth, and a heaviness settled over the girl’s face. Her mother, Malia, had died an agonizing death—sepsis—and the root of it had been the prick of a simple knitting needle. Such a small thing to destroy the lives of a woman and child.

  When Lareina had first met the girl, she was barely a slip of a thing, ashen and traumatized, huddled by the hearth fire, in need of attention and serious grooming. She had been five, and it had been three months since her mother’s untimely death. Her black hair had run wild, and her large coal eyes had pockets of gray beneath them. To Lareina, she’d looked like a withered and grieving old soul trapped within the body of a child. Lareina’s first thought upon seeing Fiona was that she was somehow cursed—a witch’s spell gone awry. The girl had looked at her new stepmother with unseeing eyes, and Lareina, being not much more than a girl herself, and not knowing what she could possibly do to help the child, had sat beside her, removed a comb from her bag, and had begun the colossal task of untangling the child’s obsidian nest of hair.

  Since that day, the two had engaged in this ritual whether or not Fiona’s hair was in need of combing, and so the girl, now nearly a woman, undid her braid and sat at her stepmother’s feet. Picking up the comb that lay beside her, Lareina lifted her stepdaughter’s hair and ran the fine ivory teeth through it with care while Fiona rested her cheek on her stepmother’s knee.

  “How was the square?” Lareina asked, and the girl sighed.

  “Fine, I suppose. Not much of interest, and no one will talk to me. They stare at me, though.”

  “That’s to be expected, my child. You are growing to be quite lovely. People are bound to appreciate it,” she said, but her heart was heavy at the prospect. She’d been noticing for a while that Fiona was no longer a child, that before her eyes she was transforming into a truly beautiful creature. Yet Lareina also knew that too much beauty could be a dangerous thing, and that often it was best to be just on the pretty side of plain. The pretty side of plain was no longer an option for Fiona, however, and now more than ever, Lareina wanted to keep the girl in her sights.

  “I don’t think they like me,” Fiona said, staring into the fireplace, her eyes dancing along with the flames.

  “They will once they get to know you.”

  “I’m not so sure. They look at me like I’m an infection,” she said.

  “You must be imagining things,” Lareina said, massaging her stepdaughter’s shoulders. “We will grow to like it here. I promise you. We just need to settle in.”

  “I’m afraid,” Fiona said without really meaning to. Sometimes when she was with her stepmother, her heart opened up and unexpected things came spilling forth, things she herself did not know that she felt.

  “Shhh, now,” Lareina whispered. “Everything will be okay. You’ll see.” And sitting there by the warmth of the fire, gazing out the window and through the veil of snow, both believed that it just might be true.

  That afternoon, Tom and Rowan walked south through the woods to Seelie Lake. Wolves be damned, she’d declared, setting off through the trees. When they reached the edge of the frozen lake, he and Rowan lay on their backs atop the cold rocks that stretched along the icy banks, and stared up at the clouds. Crows were gathering up in the branches of a high-reaching pine, and Tom couldn’t help wondering if the birds were watching them as they seemed to watch all the forest creatures. If there really was a wolf about, the crows would know. Would the birds give them warning, he wondered? Or would they watch the humans be slaughtered on the shores of the lake?

  “What did they look like? The men who died on the mountain?” Rowan asked, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Oh, that,” he said, cringing at the memory. “It was awful, Rowan. You don’t need to hear it.”

  “Sometimes you can be so tiresome,” she said, hitting him gently on the shoulder.

  “I’m protective.”

  “You don’t need to protect me,” she laughed. “I’m older than you.”

  “By three months.”

  “A lot happened in those three months, Tom,” she said, turning to face him, her clear blue eyes squinting at him through pale lashes. “I didn’t want to tell you this before, but a lot of secrets were divulged. I was inducted into some really high-ranking societies, stuff you’ll never understand.” Her lips quivered as she suppressed her laughter.

  “Is that so?” Tom laughed. “This explains why you so often need me to point out when you’ve failed to twin your stockings,” he said, pointing to her mismatched pair.

  “Mine is a life of the mind,” she proclaimed, making a grand gesture with her arms. “Let others worry about my feet! Now, please, Tom. My curiosity is killing me. Tell me about Beggar’s Drift.”

  Tom’s eyes grew dark. “Ro,” he said. “What I saw up there, I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a bad place, everyone knows that, but if you could have seen that man … his eyes, his tongue—they were gone, torn from him. What could do a thing like that?”

  Rowan cocked her head to the side. “But everyone’s been saying it was a wolf. That doesn’t sound like the work of a wolf.”

  Tom nodded, relieved to hear her speak aloud what had been troubling him. “That’s what I thought. It seemed to me that it was something … beyond wild animals, but no one wanted to hear it.”

  “Something beyond? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly—something not born of the Goddess; something not of this realm.”

  “Forest things, then?” Rowan asked, trying to keep an open mind. “Goblins and the like?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t get that impression.”

  “Well, what impression did you get?”

  He thought for a moment, and staring out at the icy expanse, he chose his words carefully. “Evil,” he said. “All around me up there, I felt the presence of evil.”

  Rowan’s features were knotted with concern. “Have you spoken with an elder about it?”

  He sighed. “No one would listen. It’s as if everyone wants to blame it on a wolf because although we fear wolves, we understand their ways. But whatever happened up there is beyond comprehension. It was something wicked, Ro, and I think the elders know it. Paer Jorgen was with us, and I think that what we saw up there, it scared him—scared him so much that they’re lying to us about the danger.”

  Rowan shivered at Tom’s words. She didn’t know what to make of his theories, but it was clear that his experience up on Beggar’s Drift had frightened him more than she’d ever seen him frightened. “But what do you think, Tom? What do you think killed them?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s a reason no one goes up to Beggar’s Drift. Whatever’s up there, it’s not the same as the forest things down here. It’s like the land—icy and foul.”

  “You’re talk
ing as if you saw something.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, his eyes distant. “No, it wasn’t what I saw; it was what I felt. It’s bad land up there.” He ran his hands through his hair and shut his eyes as if to close them against the memory. “Tell me something, Ro. Tell me something good.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, wanting to help him but not knowing how.

  “I don’t want to think about that place anymore.” He sighed. “Tell me something silly and sweet and mundane.”

  She bit her lip, searching, and then raised her eyebrows. “Well, I think our Emily’s going to marry Bill Holdren,” she said.

  “That’s good news. Bill’s a nice fellow.”

  “Yes, he’s nice. That’s not the point. I don’t want him to take my Emily away.”

  “It’s time enough,” Tom said, starting to feel more like himself. “She’s getting on twenty.”

  “But what will I ever do without her?” Rowan whined.

  “More housework, I suppose.” He laughed. “Those little scholar hands of yours might actually get a callus or two.”

  “I do housework,” she snapped, feigning outrage.

  “Chatting to Emily while she does housework is not in itself housework.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him, and he laughed. “Perhaps I’ll leave.”

  “And go where?” he asked, surprised.

  “The palace city,” she said, sitting up. “I’d love to see it, to meet all the different sorts of people who live there.”

  “Aw, Ro,” he said, gazing at her with pride. “They’d be lucky to have you. Anyone would.”

  “So let’s do it, then. Let’s run away.”

  “You must be joking.” He snorted at the idea. “I’m never leaving Nag’s End.”

  “You don’t even dream about it, about seeing far-off lands?” Rowan asked, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  “Nag’s End is good enough for my father, and it’s good enough for me.” Pushing himself up to sit beside her, he stared at the sky a moment, as if pondering something wondrous. “Rowan,” he said, “do you think it possible to love someone upon first laying eyes on them?”