She takes a step to follow me.
“No. You will not enter here,” I tell her. “This space is mine.”
She shrugs as if it is no matter. “I came to ask a favour of you, Theodora, and you are being so rude to me.”
“Ask and be gone and consider yourself lucky when you leave.”
She pouts. “The archbishop.”
I say nothing.
“The archbishop is an especial friend of yours.”
I shrug.
She stamps her foot, small and damp, and water squelches. “He will not grant your husband a divorce.”
I laugh and laugh. I laugh until tears run from my eyes and my jaw aches. Her face, pale as her white silk dress, turns an angry red.
“And so you can’t marry him!” I say. “Ah, sister, you are just as much a whore as I.”
“If you ask the archbishop he will consent,” she almost shouts, remembers to be ladylike and lowers her voice—I’m sure my husband has yet to see one of her rages. “If you ask it of him, then I will be able to marry.”
“Oh, you idiot. You still think you can get your way as you did when we were children. Throw a tantrum and wait for everyone to give in.” I breathe deeply. “Polly, there’s no one here to make me give in to you now. No mother or father begging for a quiet existence. Let what you’ve already taken from me be enough.”
“I want to marry! I must marry! If I marry—” she stops herself, reeling the secret back into her mouth.
“What, Polly?” I scoff, unable to fathom this need of hers. “You’ll live happily ever after?”
Her blue eyes, paler than mine, narrow. “Do you like your daughter? Do you love little . . . Magdalene, is it?”
As if summoned by her name, my daughter appears at the open kitchen door. She stops when she sees the snowy vision that is my sister, her little face uncertain.
I stand so close to Polly that she can feel the heat of my breath on her face and the spittle that flies from my mouth. “If you so much as say my daughter’s name again, I will kill you, sister, have no doubt of that.”
“You’ve made your choice then,” she says flatly.
The clients have gone but the inn’s residents are awake late this night, children included, so we sit by the hearth downstairs, drinking warm goats’ milk made sharper by Fra’s home-made whisky. The children have straight milk and some crumbly butter biscuits. We are a strange little family, but a family nonetheless.
Kitty is singing: a soft, sweet song about a disappeared lover and his forever-faithful woman when the fire wavers and almost dies. The room goes cold and a frost creeps across the mirror behind the bar. We are silent, listening hard.
There’s a snuffling at the front door. The handle rattles but it has already been locked. Fra throws the sturdy bar down across it. The wooden shutters on the windows have been long-since pulled-to to keep the heat in. Whatever is outside grunts angrily, shakes the door again. Fenric growls but does not move; he is afraid, his fur in such sharp peaks that he looks like a large hedgehog.
“The back door!” hisses Kitty and Rilka bolts through to the kitchen.
We hear a thump as the bar slides into place there. The upper windows are out of reach.
We all cower by the fireplace, clutching our children and each other. It’s quiet. I creep to the front door and put my eye to the small hole Fra drilled there so we can see who comes a-calling. A yellow eye stares back at me. I scream, scaring the thing as much as it scares me. It stumbles back and I can see all of it, and know it’s the troll-wife come to sniff me out. It turns and shambles back up the street, away from the inn. It was hoping for surprise, to find me alone in my bed, asleep and vulnerable, not safely locked up with friends. It won’t risk confrontation with a crowd.
“It’s gone,” I say, voice shaking. Magdalene climbs into my arms and I sit by the fire; it takes me a long time to get warm.
Grammy asks: “What is it?”
“Troll-wife,” I answer. “I saw it last night. It’s got my scent.”
Grammy is quiet for a while. “Are you sure that’s all?”
“What do you mean? What more can there be?”
Fra hands me another cup of warm milk, but I can’t taste the milk for all the whisky he’s put in. Grammy begins to rock in her chair.
Fenric sits close, careful his tail does not get caught under the rockers, but close enough that Grammy can bury her hand deep in his thick, syrup-coloured fur and soothe him.
“I mean, Theodora, that everyone knows your story. A woodcutter father who took a runaway princess to wife. The girl who freed a lost prince from a wolf-trap and captured his heart so he brought her here on his gleaming white charger.”
“It was black, actually,” I say.
“A happy princess, wife, and mother you were until your sister arrived. We know your story, Theodora, but,” she pauses, rocks hard, “what’s your sister’s story?”
“That thing isn’t my sister,” I protest. “She’s mean and spoilt, but . . . ”
“Yes?”
“She stayed behind in the forest with our father when I left, to take care of him. I said they should come with me, but they both refused. My mother has been dead for . . . ” Something comes to me, drifting up from the depths of memory. “When we were small—I was three, she just a few months old—our mother was washing clothes by the stream. I was playing with a doll and Polly was sleeping in her basket. Mama turned away for just a moment and Polly was gone, basket and all. She stayed gone for the better part of a day, all the while mama held on to me and screamed and shouted.
“We found her, though, further downstream, in a place we’d already looked. One minute she was gone, then back, no different.”
Grammy speaks slowly, pulling old knowledge out of a deep well.
“Trolls will take human babies and leave their own offspring in place, re-shaping their children’s flesh and putting a binding spell on to hold it for sixteen, seventeen years, or until the troll-child is about to come to adulthood.
“Some troll-parents will come looking for the child. Sometimes not, and the troll-child has to find its own malicious way.”
“What happens to the human babies?” asks Kitty, holding her little girl close.
Grammy purses her lips. “Some are kept as slaves under the earth. Most times they’re eaten as tender treats. When it’s grown the troll-child learns to change back to troll flesh. Some choose to stay like that, retreat to the forests and mountains and caves and live out their long, miserable lives. Others choose to stay with humans, but some things they just can’t hide—even in human form, stepping on hallowed ground makes them sick as sick can be. And they don’t lose . . . their appetites.”
“All the missing childer,” moans Faideau from his corner. We jump, having forgotten he was there.
I shake my head. “No, Grammy, no. She’s mean but not . . . not my sister,” I finish lamely.
The Treasury is situated, contrarily, in one of the worst parts of the city. I like the irony, though, of the treasurer and his attendant parasites, bankers and moneylenders, daily making their way through a sea of honest thieves and pickpockets.
It is a newer building but that doesn’t mean it’s without hidden ways. I take the secret tunnel from deep in Bingle the wine merchant’s cellar. When I was princess, Treasurer Pinchpen entrusted me with the city’s finances—at least in word if not in deed—it was more for the sake of form, to honour the history of the thing, the princess’s purview has always been holding the city’s purse strings. Pinchpen didn’t show me the passages, I found them for myself, pushed by boredom into exploring on the days when all I had to do was wait for the clerks to count taxes, balance books, and the like, so I could stamp the seal into the hot wax gobbet on the records.
The passage comes out somewhat inconveniently behind a book-shelf in an antechamber, not directly inside the vault. In the dark, when I generally undertake these trips, it’s not a problem.
Today, in
the light of the afternoon, it is a problem because my husband stands at the tall French window that looks out onto the grubby street. I catch my breath and he turns.
“Theodora,” he says, the sunlight hits his blond hair and his tanned face gleams as if coated with gold dust. But he looks unwell. There’s something grey under his skin, dark shadows beneath the green eyes.
“Hello, Stellan.” Nothing for it but to brazen it out.
“You’re here. I haven’t seen you in so long.”
I give him a look that says quite plainly he’s an idiot and he has the good grace to seem ashamed. I don’t want to prolong this but still I say, “What are you doing here?”
“End of the month book balancing. I have to do it now you’re . . . ”
I am thankful, for once, for his self-centredness, which means he doesn’t think to ask me what I’m doing there. “I must go,” I say and turn on my heel, away from my goal, cursing silently. It will have to wait, until darkness falls and I must risk the streets.
“I sent Prycke to speak with you,” he said. I’m willing to bet Prycke didn’t tell him the details of our negotiations. “Was I wrong, Theodora? Was I wrong to listen to her?”
I stop. “If you need to ask, Stellan, then you know the answer.”
He grabs my arm, forces me to face him. Between his pearly white teeth he hisses: “Theodora, there’s something in the Palace.”
I cannot shake him off. “I know. I know.”
He drops my arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I laugh. “And how would I have done that? Since you banned me from my former home? Should I ask my loving sister to take a message to you? For her to whisper it in your ear at night as you lie together? Is she sweet and tender and loving?” I lower my voice. “Don’t you wonder that there are nights when she does not come to you? Does she go to the Cathedral with you, Stellan, every Sunday?”
His mouth moves but nothing comes out. His eyes are filmy with tears. How could I have loved him? How could I have thought him brave, charming, strong? I should have left him in the wolf-trap.
“How is Magdalene?” he whispers.
I step away. “Don’t you speak her name. You have no daughter and you have no wife. You have a city that’s losing its children, a palace that’s haunted, and a foul creature in your bed.” I don’t hate him anymore, there’s just a kind of sad, hollow pity. “I wish you joy of them, Stellan.”
“Hold her tight, watch her close.” My words circle around in my mind like confused birds, the words I spoke to Bitsy when I entrusted Magdalene to her earlier.
In the stables, Bitsy lies, torn from groin to sternum, innards spilling out onto the fresh straw. The black horses stand as far away as they can, both trembling. The air in the dim, enclosed space is rich, fœtid, choking.
There is no sign of Magdalene.
I told Bitsy to look after my daughter, and I condemned her to this, because Bitsy would never have let Magdalene go without a fight.
Kitty is frozen next to me, staring at our dead friend.
“Who came?” I ask, unable to breathe.
She doesn’t seem to understand. I grab her shoulders, shake her violently, unfairly. “Who came?”
“Your sister!” Two voices, Kitty and Rilka together, Rilka at the entrance to the stables, her shadow long, making Bitsy’s corpse almost invisible. “Your sister came.”
“I saw the carriage,” says Rilka, “but she didn’t come in.”
“Must have gone around the back,” gulps Kitty, tears starting. She falls away from my hands, sinks to her knees beside Bitsy.
“Where’s Magdalene?” I ask, and they both turn pale, even Rilka under her cedar skin. I moan, hold my head, feel sick, but I don’t indulge for long. I can’t.
I run, pushing through waves of people who seem to have materialised just to slow me down. My breath sounds loud to my ears and I’m sure everyone can hear the thud of my heart, matching time with the clacking of my boots on the cobbles. The knife in the pocket of my skirt thuds rhythmically against my thigh. The spire of the Cathedral comes into view, looming over other rooftops. I round the corner and cross the square, lungs aching, take the steps to the portico two at a time, ignore the shimmering shapes of the bored wolf-hounds pacing there.
Up the aisle, past silent, wide-eyed parishioners. Into the chapel, anxiously waiting for the stones to shift aside, not fast enough, not fast enough. Along the tunnel through cold, damp air, the flame of the hastily-grabbed torch flickering, guttering with my speed, but staying stubbornly lit.
I don’t know, I don’t know where they are, but this is the place I will start, the place where I first saw the troll-wife, the only place I can think of.
The panel to the fountain room slips aside. Heedlessly, I throw down the torch and without caution step from behind the screen.
Magdalene sits on one of the benches, nervously swinging her little feet, face pinched and pale, bright curls damp and darkened with sweat. One of her shoes is missing and there is a tear where one of the sleeves meets the rest of her dress. She sees me, face lighting up.
“Mama!”
“Oh, my heart.” The distance to her seems so long. I kneel down, hold her tight, blink away the burning tears. I pick her up, and discover why she did not come to me when first she saw me. A rope runs from her left ankle to the leg of the bench, which is embedded in the floor.
“Oh, how sweet! What tender motherly love! How delightful a reunion.” Polly’s tone is poison. She steps out from behind the little steam hut and stalks towards us. Her dress is pale pink, silky, her tooled leather shoes a matching hue. Around her neck is the diamond necklace, the master stone lying snugly just below the hollow of her throat.
“Polly,” is all I can manage.
“No, no, don’t thank me.” She gleams at me. “Really.”
“That was hardly the thing on my mind.” I push Magdalene behind me. She clutches at my skirts, tiny terrified hands pinching at me.
“I have tried so hard, Theodora. That is what you don’t understand.” She sighs. “What I am—what I was born—I have tried to escape, to change. If I try hard, ever so hard—if I live as a human, then perhaps I can become a human. Live a normal life, keep my human skin tight around me. Marry a human. Then maybe, just maybe it will rub off on me.”
Here is the heart of my sister’s desire: humanity. I push my daughter further behind me. “I’m taking my child, Polly, we’re leaving the city.”
“Oh no, not good enough. I’ve been thinking, sister dear, divorce really isn’t good enough at all. You’ll still be in his thoughts; he’ll always wonder if he was right about you or not. He’ll think about his little girl and how she’s growing up without him.” She smiles and it brings a cold rush of air into the fountain room. “Missing is better. Dead is best.”
She begins to change, to elongate, to increase in bulk; her skin loses its sheen and firmness, darkening and corrugating; her bright hair dims, becomes thin and black, writhes like snakes; her eyes grow wider, turn yellow and bloodshot; her teeth, no longer uniform pearls, grow sharp and brown; hands lengthen and nails turn into talons.
When her slender dress begins to split, I am released from my horrified fascination and pull the knife from my pocket to slice through Magdalene’s bond.
“Run,” I tell her, pointing to the gold screen and give her a push. I turn back to Polly, who is now half a human taller than me and looking at her new hands, flexing them, listening to the sound of her over-sized knuckles crack. She laughs and lunges.
I sidestep and jam the knife into her stomach. She roars and stumbles. The silver handle protrudes from her belly, black blood wells where the hilt meets her flesh. I am backing away. She looks at me, and quite deliberately pulls the knife out, slowly. The blade is gone, eaten away by the substance of her troll blood. I lose my nerve then and flee, gathering up Magdalene at the mouth of the tunnel, hitting at the lever to shut the door and running blindly down the steps into the darkness
.
I hear a grunt behind me and risk a glance. Polly has jammed her hand into the gap between the panel and the doorframe and thrust the panel back. I keep running as my sister’s shape fills the doorway and blocks out the light.
I am thankful, in some tiny, screaming part of my brain, that my feet know this passage, have the memory of it embedded in their soles.
I do not stumble.
Magdalene clutches tightly to my chest like a limpet.
I move through the tunnel, imagining hot breath and long, reaching fingers at my back. Soon, I see gentle light slowly seeping down to light my path. I swear I fly out through the opening, I swear I grow wings in that moment, until I trip, my foot catching at the top step just as something tugs at the hem of my dress from the darkness below.
I keep hold of my daughter, twisting in mid-air as I fall so as not to crush her beneath me. I slide along the smooth flagstones and watch as the troll-wife leaps from the hole, the remnants of Polly’s pink gown hanging in tatters on the grotesque form, the diamond necklace tight around the troll-wife’s much bigger neck, almost embedded in the flesh. She is all hunger, no caution, seeing only me.
She takes three thundering steps towards us before she falters, stumbles a little, senses something is wrong. Her eyes goggle around and she howls when she realises we are in the Cathedral. She tries to throw herself forward to get at me. She should have gone back down to the tunnel while she still could. Her fearsome noise is drowned out by the growls of the archbishop’s hounds.
They’ve become solid, substantial, heavy in the presence of the troll-wife. And they are hungry. All six wolf-hounds leap and knock her to the ground.
I hide Magdalene’s eyes.
It takes them a long time to eat Polly. She is alive right up until the end as they shred her flesh, gnaw on her bones, tunnel through her rib cage to get at her large, meaty heart, and slurp on her steaming, stinking innards.
A Feast of Sorrows, Stories Page 19
