Tales from the Hinterland
Page 11
“Who are you, old man?”
“One like you, once,” he said. “I sought to raise myself above my station. But I was cured of it.”
“And? What was the cure?”
“This,” he said, pressing something into her hand. “Drink it, and find the path you seek.”
His smile was not a kind one. Ilsa was too hungry to notice. She looked at what he’d given her: a cut-glass vial the size of an acorn. Inside it swam liquid as thick as her hair.
Ilsa had seen the four corners of the Hinterland and the spaces between. She’d stolen the violet life-light of a despot prince, and descended a staircase into the sea, to walk among the gardens there. But she couldn’t envision where the contents of the vial might take her. And if the old man was lying, and it was poison, well, she’d meet Death one way or another.
She tipped the vial to her mouth. Its liquid slid over her tongue and peeled back the skin of the living world, turning all its movement and color to shadows and smoke.
Among the shadows hovered a fine golden cord. It began just there, beside her hand. It felt alive as she wrapped her fingers around it and took one step, then another, following it hand over hand through the fog of the vanished world.
Her boots tumbled and turned over the unseen ground. After a time a pond appeared at her feet, glowing like quartz in the gloom. She followed the cord into the water until it closed over her head, and the mud disappeared from beneath her feet, and she dropped lightly into the land of the dead.
Death’s realm was a silent one. She followed the shining cord through hematite forests, past lakes of frozen fire. She walked beneath the cut-crystal leaves of a grove of hazel trees, where misty figures spied on her from behind tourmaline trunks. Her heart beat faster to know she was close, that Death must soon receive her. The waterskin around her neck sloshed with its burden of lives, growing heavier as she approached his castle.
It was an ugly place, a crouching animal bristling with spires. The cord led to its iron doors and ended at a ruby knocker. Shoulders aching with the weight of the waterskin, Ilsa heaved herself onto Death’s doorstep. She knocked.
She waited.
An insubstantial figure opened the door and beckoned at her to enter. She followed it, boots echoing on the agate floors. She was led to a cavernous chamber whose ceiling was freckled with gemstones that glowed like stars. Music wound through the air like black flags, and the floor was full of slow-turning dancers. At the room’s far end a figure sat easy on an onyx throne, eyes burning in his face like pale planets.
Death looked different in his own hall. He did not seem like a creature you could court or catch, or seek to make a rival. He looked at Ilsa and the music cut out, the dancers going still.
“Here I am,” said Death. “Are you glad? You, who have sought me out and made a mockery of the gift I gave you. Does it bring you joy to see my face again? Does it make you proud to look at theirs?”
The dancers turned toward Ilsa, and terror spread through her like wildfire. She recognized each one, because she’d killed them all. The man she’d slain her first night in the forest stood just there, holding a glass of something red to his lips. The child who looked like her brother sat on a table top, swinging his legs. Their faces were empty without their life-lights, their mouths filled with darkness. Ilsa took a step back, then fell to her knees, stricken by the weight of the lives she carried. With shaking fingers, she tugged at the strap of the waterskin.
It snapped. The skin tipped on its side as it fell, all the lights it carried spilling out. They spun over the floor and massed into a glittering fog that illuminated the faces of the dead before it swallowed them.
When the fog cleared away, the dead had changed. Their lights flickered from their faces, but what had been restored to them was only a kind of half-life. The sight of it stripped the blood from Ilsa’s cheeks.
Death held up a hand, staying the crowd. “She is not yours to punish.” He slid toward her and tipped her chin in his long fingers.
“The punishment must fit the crime. A theft for a theft.”
The thing Death took from Ilsa wasn’t her life-light. It was something that hid in her iris like a moon in eclipse and took the form of a fingertip-point of black glass. When it was gone she sensed a hardening come over her. She felt impervious, untouchable.
Death rolled the stolen thing over his palm. “This is your death,” he said. “You wouldn’t wait for it—you wouldn’t wait for me—and so have lost your right to it.” He popped it into a blank space between his molars for safekeeping.
“I promised you would see my face again, and so you have. You will not see it again.”
You may find Ilsa, if you seek her, sitting in a tavern or on a stone overlooking the sea. Following a plague wagon, lingering by the beds of the dying. If she looks back at you, you’ll sense the hole in her, the nameless, missing something that makes you pull away. Her face will fade from your mind in time, until the moment of your own passing. And there she’ll be, standing just behind Death’s shoulder. Shake her off if she comes too near. Death won’t let you into his kingdom if Ilsa walks beside you. Until his heart softens, she must make her long walk alone.
THE SEA CELLAR
At the edge of a great wood, on the shore of an inland sea, is a house where daughters go to die. But they go in lace and satin, with wedding rings on their fingers, so nobody dares complain.
In that house lives a man, some say. Others say a monster, and a few claim it’s a woman who lives there, year after year, throwing out offers of good fortune to hook the desperate parents of unwed girls by the mouth.
And for every bride thus caught, traded for her weight in wealth or a business contract or a fleet of ships, there are those who come after her. The brides’ secret sweethearts, grieving mothers, intrepid sisters and brothers prowl around the house at night, their footprints marking the sand, their horses breaking the branches. But none can find their way in without the house’s leave. Though they can see the door right there, hung invitingly ajar, and the torches lit beside it, they could walk a day and night by torchlight and never get closer. It’s on this threshold, weary and defeated, that the brides’ lost loved ones stop, drop their sorrowful heads, and weep.
Sometimes over the sound of their own grieving they hear something else: a distant rush and fall, an endless shush as of one thousand men and women whispering. Not quite the water, not quite the woods, but something deeper, older. The voice, perhaps, that taught the sea to sing. Once this sound curls inside their ears, it will follow them to their final hour.
Alba was fourteen when her sister became a bride of the house. The dark dream of her sister’s marriage began the night their father came home, as he often did, wet-lipped and stumbling. He pulled his eldest daughter from her bed by one soft arm and looked at her in the firelight. Her red hair and frightened eyes, the bloom of her hips.
“How old are you?” he said, and answered himself. “Old enough.”
He’d wept then, molding his hands into a cup to hold her face. That was the most frightening thing to Alba, watching them from beneath the blankets. Their father was rarely cruel, but nor was he ever tender. He paid his daughters as much mind as he would a pair of barn cats.
“You were a pretty thing when you were born,” he whispered, “hair red as a rose. Perhaps you’ll be luckier than his other brides. At any rate, you’ll be rich.”
It wasn’t until he slid a band of blue-green metal onto her finger that his daughters knew what he’d done. Everyone in that part of the world knew what the ring meant, whose suit it represented. Where it sat the girl’s hand grew red with cold, then white. Try as she might, Alba could not warm her shivering sister. Nor could she remove the ring.
It took some listening at doors for Alba to learn the whole sordid story of how her father traded her sister away.
He was sitting at the tavern in his usual spot, arguing over an unpaid bill, when a stranger approached. This man had yellow hair,
the uncallused hands of a prince, and a blue silk top hat embroidered with sea nettles. He settled her father’s account with a handful of gold. The two men then drank to each other’s health, told tales, played dice, all without the other man revealing his name or his purpose. Over the sodden hours he prized from her father the long history of his failures, one confession after another.
Then he told him how he could make them go away. “It would be so easy,” the stranger said, “to make you fortunate. You have two daughters, do you not? I need only one of them. Oh, no,” and he laughed. “Not like that. I speak as a proxy for one who wishes to make your daughter a bride.”
And he revealed on whose behalf he had come: the unseen resident of the house between the woods and the inland sea, which swallowed white-dressed girls and then sighed as if sorry for it.
How Alba’s father must have paled! His blood run cold, his swimming head clarified. But the hook was already in him. How could he turn down good fortune, if all he must give for it was the hand of a daughter?
And maybe she would live. Brides went into that house, it was said, and did not come out. One each year and sometimes more, but it was possible that they lived. That they were cherished and rewarded. A desperate father might imagine many hopeful things while wriggling on the hook. The ring was taken and the promise made.
The next morning a coach stopped in front of their house, dispensing a messenger bearing a long blue box. Alba watched from the window as the messenger, in hooded cape and gloves, knocked on the door. When she reached the front room, her mother was lifting a dress from the box. It was a shapeless thing of aged white silk, stained dark at the cuffs and smelling faintly of storms.
“You must stop this,” Alba said. Fourteen years old and not yet hardened to the ways of the world.
“Who am I to stop what’s already in motion?” Her mother spat on the floor. “I curse the one who sent this. I curse your father. As for your poor sister…” By then she was crying too hard to speak.
The messenger leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets. “What will happen to her?” Alba demanded. “Who is the bridegroom?”
“She has an hour,” he replied. “I won’t wait.”
Alba found her sister in bed, beneath the blanket, and put her mouth close to the older girl’s ear. “Run,” she said. “To the woods. I’ll gather what you need and follow after.”
Her sister only sighed, and plucked at the ring, and turned her face away. Their mother stripped her down and tugged the dress over her head.
The family climbed into the carriage, silent as it carried them to a narrow house at a wooded crossroads where a judge answered their knock. They looked in dreadful anticipation for the bridegroom, but even the house’s marrying was done by proxy. The one who took the groom’s place wore a rippling water-blue coat and a mask that covered all but their lips. The bride shivered and wept and whispered her vows, holding tight to her mother when it was through.
Now, the proxy told them, the bride would travel alone, on horseback, to the house. She was allowed no belongings from her old life. She would wear the wedding dress and her hair combed down, left unpinned for the breezes to wind themselves through.
To her father, the proxy offered congratulations. “Go home,” they said, “and see what fortune has delivered to you.”
Alba watched with an aching heart as her sister was hefted onto a gray gelding. Courage, she thought, take courage. The weeping bride clung to the animal’s mane, and their mother clung to Alba, and their father clung to the shrinking conviction that he had done the best a man in his situation could do. Alba fixed her eyes on her sister until she was too far gone to be seen.
When the family returned to their house, it had been transformed. Its two stories were four, its leaky walls snug brick, and every room was filled with riches and beautiful things. Her mother drifted through the house, tears drying. Her father seized up an overflowing coin purse and headed back out the door.
Alba walked the house’s halls until she found the room that was meant for her, full of books and candles and jewels and dresses, carpeted in the gray of her sister’s gelding. She moved past these treasures, to the new looking glass that hung on the wall. To her face in the glass, she made a promise.
She would not be so foolish as the other brides’ sisters and sweethearts. She would not follow her sister uninvited, only to wander the woods and shore until the house’s sighing drove her away. She would bide her time, plan and wait, and discover exactly what became of its brides.
* * *
Wealth was a balm to her mother’s grief. Her father had no grief to remedy, and it did not take him long to imagine he’d earned the riches he traded a daughter for. The pair of them spent their days like they did the coins they hadn’t worked for: without heed.
Across two long years Alba gathered whispers about the house that stood between the wood and the inland sea. She listened for tales of the brides it had taken before her sister, and for rumors of those who came after. Just two seasons after her sister’s hasty wedding, a young woman from a nearby village was wed and fed to the house, following her father’s loss of his fortune at sea. A year after that, the village cobbler abandoned his trade and set himself up in an opulent manor. He had a daughter of seventeen who had not been seen since before her father’s sudden rise in life. Alba had a guess as to where she’d gone.
When Alba turned sixteen her mother began to chatter of this eligible young man and that, without even the grace to blush over the subject of weddings. Alba, too, thought it time she marry, but her plans took a different shape.
She knew how it began. A man deep in his cups, heavy with desperation. A stranger’s approach, and a bargain struck. Thus armed, she slipped from the house one night when she should have been sleeping. She walked to the tavern where her father had promised her sister away, and there watched for a man with yellow hair, smooth hands, and an embroidered blue top hat.
Many men came and went beneath her careful scrutiny. It was near dawn when she realized she was being watched, too, by a woman sitting in the farthest corner. Her hair was dark and her skin was rough, and her hat was blue silk and sea nettles. Alba looked back so boldly the woman laughed and moved to join her.
“Here you sit in this disreputable place, a lovely young woman, alone and”—she glanced at Alba’s hand—“unwed. How did you fall so far?”
“I seek a husband,” Alba said shamelessly. “I wish to marry a rich man with a big house, and no neighbors near enough to bother us. Do you know of such a bridegroom?”
The woman raised a brow. “You’ll forgive me for not trusting a rabbit who lays its own head in the trap. What do you know of my business? What do you know of the house in the wood?”
Alba dropped all pretense. “Is it the house, then, that the brides marry? Or is there truly a groom inside it? Is he a man or a monster?”
“Or a woman, some say.” She looked Alba over. “It’s not a husband you’re seeking, is it? It’s one of the brides. Your sister, was she? Your friend?”
“My sister.”
“Steer clear of the whole dirty business, then. Your family does not need to sell two daughters.”
“If it’s such a bad business, why have a hand in it?”
The woman’s mouth tightened. “Same reason as whoever sold your sister: I’m under a debt. Once I deliver a bride to the house, my debt will be settled. No one who works for the house does it for long, or knows any more than I do. If you wish to be the daughter who saves my neck, so be it. But I’ll warn you once more. I believe the darkest things they say about that house are the truest. Let me feed to it a girl a bit more seasoned than you. Your courage can be turned toward better things.”
Alba held out a hand. “I have waited two years to follow my sister, and answers are all I want for my dowry. If you’re not the messenger who will deliver me, I’ll wait for the next. But if you’d like to give your conscience a bride who went willingly, make your choice.”
“May you discover the secrets you seek,” the woman said. “May you make a joyful bride.”
* * *
All that night Alba spun in the grip of strange visions. Of a house where blue light rippled on the walls and every room opened onto another in an endless twisting chain, and each bowl and basin clattered with wedding rings. She dreamed of orange and yellow creatures swimming through vaulted cathedrals, and woke with the taste of salt on her tongue.
At breakfast her mother’s eye fell on Alba’s new ring. She dropped her teacup to the floor, seized the girl’s fingers, and wept.
After that it all happened quickly. The dress was delivered, stained and stinking, by a messenger who gave Alba an hour to prepare. On her sister’s wedding day she’d watched as her mother did up the dress’s long row of coral buttons. Now she had a lady’s maid to do the work, with nervous fingers and a crooked hook. Once dressed she stepped alone into the waiting carriage, lit blue by the sun through its curtains. Waiting for her at the judge’s chambers was another masked proxy, wrapped in a familiar coat.
Alba watched herself be wed from a distant place, lace scratching at her wrists and throat. The judge’s voice traveled many leagues to reach her. At the end the proxy pressed their mouth to hers, lips warm with beeswax. Then she was lifted onto the back of a gray gelding.
Across two years she’d held fast to memories of her sister, as the passage of time tried to steal them away. Now the lost girl seemed to ride behind her. Alba recalled her sister’s kitchen scent of tea and thyme, the way she bit the knuckles of her right hand when she was nervous. Her habit of sleeping each night with a stitched fox on her pillow, left over from babyhood. If Alba never saw her again, she would always be the age she was when she left. Alba’s age, sixteen.