At the Edge of Waking

by Holly Phillips

  The warmth of the house behind Berd could not combat the dreadful cold of the ice. The music faltered as the cold bit the musicians hands. Laughter died. And yet, and yet, and yet in the distance, beyond the frozen tents and the frozen people, a light still bloomed. Cold electricity, as cold as the unrisen moon and as bright, so that it cast the shadows of Baer and Wael and Isse before them up the stairs. The aerodrome, yes, the aerodrome, where the silver airships still hung from their tethers like great whales hanging in the depths of the clear ocean blue. Yes, and there was room at the right-hand edge of the stairs where Berd could slip between the balustrade and the still summer statue of Wael, her cousin Wael, with his hair shaken back and his dark eyes raised to where Berd stood with her hand in her pocket, her ticket and travel pass and letters clutched in her cold but not yet frozen fist. The party was dying. There was a quiet weeping. The lights were growing dim. Now or never, Berd thought, and she took all her courage in her hands and stepped through the door.

  My darling, my beloved Berd,

  I wish I had the words to tell you how much I love you. It’s no good to say “like a sister” or “like a lover” or “like myself.” It’s closer to say like the sun that warms me, like the earth that supports me, like the air I breathe. And I have been suffering these past few days with the regret (I know I swore long ago to regret nothing, even to remember nothing I might regret, but it finds me all the same) that I have never come to be with you, your lover or your husband, in your beloved north. It’s as though I have consigned myself to some sunless, airless world. How have I let all this time pass without ever coming to you? And now it is too late, far too late for me. But I am paid with this interminable waiting. Come to me soon, I beg you. Save me from my folly. Forgive me. Tell me you love me as much as I love you . . .

  Castle Rock

  Claude propped the flashlight on a rock and put a match to the fire, urging the damp tinder to catch. Flames nibbled at the edges of the kindling, reluctant, then hungry, then bright and dancing. The night eddied around him, smelling of frost beyond the smoke. The tarp overhead rustled with rain and falling needles from the autumn larches. Claude hovered over the fire, nudging the sticks into a better arrangement.

  Making his way through the orchard and into the woods had only been ordinarily spooky, no worse than being sent out to the woodshed after dark, but now that he was here, in this place with the night’s work ahead of him, the fire was essential, a defense against the night. More than that, a companion to someone who had never been alone.

  Provisionally satisfied with the fire, he turned to the bag he had stashed here after school. Having a secret was as strange as being alone, but here it was, his bag full of stolen things, elements for the final spell. They didn’t look like much tumbled out onto the ground. A jumble of clothes; a tangle of leaves and moss; a book; a mask. Only the mask looked magical, better even than it had in the art room at school. Claude held it up against the fire so the new coals gleamed through the eye holes, and shivered. He had been doubting the magic; now he doubted any of this was a good idea. But no. That thrill of danger was vindication, proof he was right and Paul was wrong. His brother had always had the power to ruin a story, to spoil the game. Well, tomorrow the game would be finished, but at least Paul would know what it was he had betrayed and killed. That was Claude’s promise to himself: for the rest of their lives, Paul would have to know.

  Claude laid the mask aside and began stuffing the stolen clothes, to make them look like a body.

  Paul dreamed of a fire burning in a stone hearth, people coming and going at his back, a subterranean mutter of a voice. He woke so gradually he was still halfway in the dream place even as he stirred, rediscovering his limbs under the weight of the blankets. It was early—he could tell by the cold on his face that his mother had not yet got up to turn on the furnace—and he might have slipped back into the dream-muttering darkness of sleep, except . . . Except the house shifted, or the air did, or Paul’s own bones did, whispering to him that his twin was awake. Or maybe he just heard the subliminal squeak of a floorboard. His door opened. He let his mouth go slack and pretended he was still asleep.

  If Claude had said his name he might have gone on pretending, but instead of trying to wake him, Claude was moving around the room, rifling through Paul’s dresser drawers. Quietly. As though he was trying not to wake Paul.

  “The hell do you think you’re doing?” Paul said, keeping his eyes closed for effect.

  Claude’s reply was a flop of clothes across the bed. Startled, Paul jerked up onto one elbow and glared. But Claude only gave him a cool, remote glance and said in his game voice, “Get up. It’s nearly dawn. There’s no time to be lost.”

  “It’s dawn?” Paul’s voice cracked, violently enough to give him pause. Changing at last? Then he took another look at his brother’s face and his heart sank. Claude was pale, his eyes dark with fever and his lips bitten and chapped. You couldn’t argue with Claude when he was like this, you could only fight, and Paul was starting to dread their fights. So although he couldn’t dredge up any enthusiasm, he did at least wrestle his clothes under the covers where he could dress in the warmth of his bed.

  He let Claude haul him downstairs, pretending he was still half asleep, hoping his inertia would slow Claude down enough that he’d get fed up and quit. But Claude shoved an egg-and-ham sandwich into Paul’s hand, and he had to juggle it while he worked his feet into his shoes. The cat got in the way, scavenging for dropped bits of scrambled egg. He wolfed down what he could and was still licking ketchup off his palm as his brother dragged him out the door.

  The stupid thing was, Paul was actually enjoying himself. It felt good to throw water on his brother’s fire, to be the brake on his brother’s runaway train. And the thing that let him enjoy it was the fact that Claude’s fire was proof against anything Paul could throw at it. Claude was like a force of nature, and even if Paul was sick of their games, even if he was growing up and moving on, there was something reassuring about Claude’s refusal to leave it all behind. Really fucking annoying, but also reassuring, as if Claude were holding their boyhood treasures safe, refusing to change even in this season of changes. Fighting to keep just one important thing between them from changing.

  So he let Claude drag him past the frost-burned garden and through the orchard where the late apples hung like pale winter suns among the dying leaves.

  But then the Tyrant made his fatal mistake, Claude said, building the story the way he built the spell. The story was the spell. They stopped in the orchard to pick apples mealy with frost, because the orchard and garden were the domain of the Cooks, and the Cooks’ support was food. Sustenance, Claude said, for the final battle, but Paul was checking the frosted grass for bear shit: the bears always got over the orchard fence in the fall. But there are no bears in the castle kitchens. Claude wanted to give his brother a shove, a kick in the ass, but that would end everything, making them nothing more than quarreling boys. He was sweating with the effort of building the castle around them, the castle-keep they had lived in most of their lives. Here, hidden in the apple trees, were the kitchens with the vast smoke-blackened beams overhead all hung with hams and sausage links and herbs. It was perpetually firelit and smelled like the farmhouse kitchen when their mother used the big wood-fired range for cooking Christmas dinner, roast turkey and fried onions and smoke. The vast structures of the keep had once been so real they had almost blinded him—them—to the outer world, so they could creep down corridors and scale towers and serve, disguised, in banqueting halls without having to acknowledge the trees and fields hidden in the stony walls. Now, without Paul to help him summon it, the keep eluded him, thin as a ghost in sunlight, and the apples were only apples, the floor frosted grass, the ceiling the brightening sky.

  But the magic was there. It had to be there. Claude reached for it with everything he had.

  Even after their long resistance, the story went, the good people of the keep were unprepa
red. It was the best fortune they could have asked for, the Tyrant’s arrogance that let him risk this momentary weakness for the sake of greater power, but their subtle, resisting magics were still piecemeal, scattered in their hidden places. They needed to be gathered, quietly, secretly, into the weapon that would bring the Tyrant down before he could attain his greatest power and hold the keep forever in his iron fist.

  The end, Claude thought. One way or another, the end.

  “C’mon, Paul,” he said, risking the entire spell. “Give me some help here.”

  Paul sighed, his breath making a cloud in the air. But then he said, offhand, as if it didn’t matter, “We have to see the Cellarer.”

  That was all Claude needed, the open door to the keep. He took a deep breath and felt the morning come alive with the rising sun.

  “The Cellarer, yes. His magics are the deepest and darkest. The Cellarer, and then the Lady of Fountains for her blessing and her shield.”

  “Come on!” Claude said, like a much younger boy, and he took off running.

  For a split second Paul thought about just standing there and letting Claude run alone. But it couldn’t be done. When his twin ran, he felt it in his bones. They couldn’t run alone; he couldn’t trail behind. Your twin ran, and you ran, and the running was like a twin-engine boat carrying you both along. You had to win, but the need was inseparable from the knowledge that so did he, and that if you ran like hell and won this time, next time it would be him. Which was frustrating—knowing you could never, ever really win, for good and all? Infuriating!—but also essential. They were two horses in harness, a matched pair, running.

  They reached the orchard fence at the same time, but Paul made a cleaner vault, putting him a stride ahead. He slanted across the lower field where the mown grass hid treacherous hollows. He ran with his arms out for balance, the air sharp and cold in his lungs, and scarcely noticed when the sleepy magpies started up from the fence at the edge of the woods and flew up toward the head of the valley.

  Claude, close behind him and breathless, said, “The Tyrant’s spies. They won’t be able to tell him exactly what we’re doing, but we’ll have to be fast.”

  Paul, spurred by annoyance, ran harder, but he couldn’t widen the distance between them. And then there was the fence, barbed wire rusted and broken with age, and the trees where you couldn’t run. Well, you could, the undergrowth wasn’t heavy, but the forest was for silence. Woodcraft. Ghosting through the trees. Paul negotiated the aged wire and slipped through the bushes with the barest rustle of cloth. Hoping to spot some wildlife, he told himself, but with Claude’s breath panting in his ear and his own heart pounding, it really was like old times.

  And the Cellarer, great, brooding, temperous man, was not to be approached lightly.

  He was dark as old tree roots, narrow-faced and tough with blazing black eyes. As with all the keep’s people, Claude could see him only from the corner of his inner eye. It was a face he’d only ever known from the inside. (He thought of the mask he’d made, the Tyrant’s face modeled in plaster of Paris on his own, and felt a sharp heart-thump of . . . something. Fear? What comes before fear, when it might turn out to be excitement after all.) But the cellar door was one of the realest things about the keep, based on an old miner’s test shaft carved out of the valley wall.

  The steep rock face rose out of the trees, gray granite under a collage of lichen, ferns, miniature trees. It smelled different from the woods, a cold mineral scent, and it seemed always to cast a heavy shade whatever the time of day. This early in the day, the mine opening was black, so dark he could barely make out the rough stones choking the sloping shaft a few meters in.

  “The door’s open,” he whispered. He did not have to say that was a good sign. Paul knew the Cellarer’s ways as well as he did.

  They crept inside, something they had done so often it could have been an everyday sort of thing, but it never was. Some places have a soul, and the Cellarer’s door was one. There was always an awareness here, a listening silence, and all the years of the game—the time they’d built a snow rampart across the cave mouth to defend the Cellarer’s realm against the Tyrant’s arrogant new captain of guards; the time they had spent the night watching their too-small fire die and knowing the coming darkness would herald the Cellarer’s most potent initiation—had only deepened the life of the place, focusing that awareness until it was intense enough to burn the heart or the mind. Claude slipped into the darkness with all his skin tingling with life, and when he felt Paul moving at his side, he knew that the magic would speak.

  The choked shaft was not deep, but it was deep enough for echoes.

  We know your need, and will meet it, but there is a price to be paid.

  Paul knew it was Claude’s voice, but the echoes took the words and gave them back changed, alive. It was the darkness speaking rather than the boy, or the boy speaking for the dark. Paul felt his own throat resonate to the echo, a shaft no different from the mine’s.

  The price of freedom, the Cellarer said, and both boys listened, shivering, to hear what the price of freedom was. Then Paul realized, and whispered with something like real awe, “Freedom is the price.”

  Claude caught his breath, and for a moment past and future balanced like a pair of scales. For a moment, Paul could sense the honorable end to the game, the farewell, the free passage through the open door. That was what the story meant—what Claude meant—of course it was. The Tyrant’s final mistake. Paul got it. The game worked; their life worked; what had been out of gear was meshing smoothly again. He could play the game, yes, and love it the way he used to do, and then—not quit—but lay it down like a book they had read to the satisfying conclusion. The End.

  The release from guilt, from resentment, was like a benediction. Like (not that he would never think this in words) love.

  “Come,” said the Cellarer/Claude. “Take what you need. You may only use it this once, but if you strike hard and true, that once will do for all.”

  So they moved forward to gather up the talismans, the weapons, the rocks glinting like the Cellarer’s eyes with pyrite and quartz.

  The keep was all around them then, a shadow so vivid in Claude’s mind it turned the trees to ghosts of themselves, cobwebs and tapestries on the ancient walls. Sunlight was striking the ramparts on the far side of the outer bailey and the lesser denizens of the keep were beginning to stir. Yes, they cast shadows like birds and deer, but the keep was half wild and all magic, and what would you expect? Claude had lost track of how many innocent forest creatures had been turned into voiceless slaves, how many treacherous servants had been transformed into mule deer, coyotes, grouse. If trees and bushes clung to the cracks in the old walls, what did that say but that the Tyrant had stolen even the gentle power of the woods to build his stronghold, or that the woods were slowly wearing away at the Tyrant’s cruel power, or both. So it was right, it was fitting, that the outer bailey had the appearance of a hay meadow ringed by trees and hills, and it was right that the great gate leading into the inner bailey seemed like a rocky ridge cutting the valley farm almost in two. And it was obvious, if you know how to look, that the magpies chuckling in the shorn grass had human shadows, and that the shadows hid whispered comments behind their hands. The Tyrant’s spies. They would steal even your thoughts if you had not learned how to hide them behind a screen of words.

  “If anyone asks,” Paul said as they jogged across the field, “we’re just taking the banqueting cloths to the laundry.”

  So they became pageboys with license to go anywhere, easy even for the magpie-spies to overlook. The Laundress was one of the Lady of Fountain’s guises, her humblest, as the pageboys were their humblest, and Claude was a little disappointed—a little irritated, in fact, that Paul’s contribution to the story had them taking the path of least grandeur. Didn’t he understand this was the great climax of all their stories? Didn’t he get that this was the end?

  But maybe—Claude’s heart gave another
of those out-of-rhythm bumps—maybe Paul didn’t get it. Maybe he thought he was coming back to the game. Maybe it didn’t have to end.

  Instantly Claude’s mind was racing through the possibilities, trying to find the path that would let the story continue past this day’s assault. But for the story to go on the Tyrant would have to survive. He was the reason for all the quests, the secret tasks, the battles. He was the force that drove the entire game. And in his potency he could survive, Claude knew. This was a desperate chance, the Cellarer’s magic weapons cobbled together in a hurry to take advantage of this one instant’s vulnerability. So it could fail. Looked at logically, it probably would fail, and the Tyrant would keep his power and his throne.

  But if he did, what would the consequences be?

  The Lady, the Cooks, all the lesser denizens who came and went according to the story’s demands. Even the Cellarer. None of them was powerful enough to best the Tyrant or even defend against his full wrath—if they had been, there never would have been a story or a game. So to attack the Tyrant openly, and fail . . . Even if they survived, what kind of story would remain to be acted out? The Tyrant’s evil had always been mostly potential, the threat they dodged or foiled in a thousand subtle ways. To unleash it in all its power, to expose themselves to the full force of the Tyrant’s hatred and rage, the hatred and rage they had been provoking and evading all these years . . .