Crown of Stars

by Sophie Jaff

  “Hi,” she croaks, still holding Lucas, shielding him from the world as best she can.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” Sael’s face screws up with concern.

  “Oh, nothing, we’re okay.” Katherine wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands, and digs in her pockets for tissues, or paper napkins, or something with which to blow her nose, blow Lucas’s nose. “We just had a rough morning.”

  “Wow. It must have been.” Sael crouches down, and very gently he addresses Lucas’s small, woeful figure. “Hi, Lucas.”

  Lucas sniffs. Turns away.

  “Lucas?”

  Lucas stares at his sneakers.

  Sael stands up, wiping his hands on his legs. “Well, I’ll tell you what I do on rough mornings. I turn to hot chocolate. Sound good?”

  Katherine is about to decline when Lucas tugs at her hand. She looks down.

  “Want to go and eat something?”

  “Yeah.” He sounds so small and lost that she almost starts weeping all over again.

  “Well, I know of just the place. This cool little café. And you know what? I think they even have a cat there!” Sael sounds genuinely excited.

  I forgot how kind he can be, she thinks.

  “Really?” The idea of a café with a cat has momentarily distracted Lucas.

  “Yeah. Wanna see?”

  “Okay.” Lucas takes Sael’s hand, his little paw swallowed up by Sael’s larger one.

  Sael straightens, and then with his other hand he helps Katherine up. “You can tell me about it there.”

  The sun warms their faces as they walk to a small coffee shop. Katherine and Sael order croissants and coffee, and Lucas gets a hot chocolate and a donut.

  Katherine mentions in passing that it’s Lucas’s birthday, but downplays it. Please—she wants to beam her thoughts, laser-like into Sael’s brain—please don’t make a big deal about it. Sael, to his credit, doesn’t. He has, after all, just seen them sobbing on the street.

  They talk instead of comfortable meaningless subjects, the weather, the cat that is currently sleeping on the bench outside the coffee shop, until Sael asks, “Now, what happened?”

  Lucas shifts and shakes his head. He sits, mute and miserable.

  Katherine can’t bear it. “Want me to start?” She looks at him.

  He nods.

  “Well, we were planning on adopting a dog today, because of . . . Well, you know. But unfortunately, we didn’t find one. The dogs were sort of acting . . . strangely.”

  “They were scared!” Lucas is direct.

  Sael turns to him. “Scared? What were they scared of?”

  Lucas looks at Katherine. She’s too exhausted to keep making up stories, building walls against the growing darkness.

  “Lucas thinks they were scared of me,” she says. Voicing Lucas’s accusation is an unexpected relief. He hates her. She has let him down. She’s the worst excuse for a mother ever. Let the world know. She has nothing more to give, come what may. She leans back, emptied out.

  Sael has opened his mouth and he’s about to say something, but it’s Lucas who speaks.

  “No.”

  “No?” Katherine sits back up and stares down at him.

  Lucas is shaking his head, as though he’s a little surprised, maybe even annoyed, that Katherine got it so wrong. “They weren’t scared of you. They were scared of the baby.”

  Sael wields around to Katherine. “The baby?”

  She opens her mouth, but only a dusty squeak comes out.

  He turns to Lucas. “What baby, Lucas?” His voice is cool.

  Lucas is matter-of-fact. “The baby that’s growing in Kat.” But as soon as he speaks, he turns to Katherine, his eyes round, his hand clapped over his mouth, appalled. “Oh! I forgot! It’s a secret!”

  “That’s okay, love.” Katherine’s voice is weak. It would be comical if it weren’t so catastrophic. “I’m not mad at you.” Oh. Fuck.

  “Katherine? What baby?” Sael asks calmly, rationally. Somehow, this makes it worse.

  She turns to him. Panic makes the blood in her ears sing and her skin cold, as though she has been thrown into a swimming pool. “The baby that I’m having.”

  “My baby?” His eyes are wide, astonished. He asks not cruelly, but in disbelief.

  And then he sees the answer in her eyes.

  There is pressure on Katherine’s arm.

  “Kat?” Lucas’s worried face peers up at her.

  Some birthday, she thinks. “It’s fine, honey. It’s okay. We’re just talking.”

  It’s impossible to read Sael’s expression.

  Eventually, he says, “Okay. Katherine, we’ll talk later. I need to process this.”

  “Okay.” Her tone is as dry and practical as his.

  He gets up. “Happy birthday,” he says to Lucas, and then he’s gone.

  “Kat?” Lucas says again into the vacuum left by Sael’s abrupt departure. “I’m sorry.”

  “Lamb, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.”

  Katherine is reeling after this apocalypse. She takes a deep breath, then another. She can’t show Lucas how she feels. She has to keep it together.

  “But why do you think the dogs were scared of the baby?”

  She wonders if, maybe, Lucas is scared of the baby. Jealous? Unhappy? They haven’t talked about it since he mentioned it to her when they were sitting in the park, just over a month ago. She has no idea how he knew she was pregnant when she herself had only a glimmer. She hasn’t questioned him, though.

  After he’d begun drawing the murdered women, and demonstrating a preternatural ability to pick up on her thoughts, her energy, she just accepted it—whatever it was. She’d hoped that this frightening ability would recede like the tide when the terrible summer ended, that he would go back to being an “ordinary” little kid, preoccupied with superheroes or trucks or animals or the latest thing kids liked these days.

  Now, deeply troubled, she stares at him and waits for him to answer.

  “Boris told me.”

  “Boris? You mean the dog? He spoke to you?” How much more can she take today? Is this yet another form of regression? But knowing Lucas’s history, his ability, she can’t discount it.

  This actually, amazingly, brings forth a watery smile from Lucas. “No. Dogs can’t talk, silly.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” She tries to smile to show how foolish she was. Silly me.

  “No, no, he showed me.”

  She wonders if she should ask, how far she should take this. There will be no going back. “How, Lucas?” A pulse pounds in her temples.

  “When I put my face close to his, he showed me.” Lucas is becoming frustrated as he tries to describe it to her. “With pictures.”

  “Pictures?” “Like the ones you drew for me?” Katherine battles to understand. Her mind darts briefly to the drawings of “the ladies,” with their huge howling mouths and squiggled red lines but again Lucas shakes his head no.

  “Like on television or the movies.”

  “What did the pictures show you?” She can’t believe she sounds so calm. A spring of hysteria bubbles up in her chest. She fights to keep down the screaming spray of laughter.

  “They were . . . They were kind of fuzzy. There was light.” Lucas has forgotten his sadness for now. He is determined to explain this to her.

  “Light?”

  “Very light and it hurt my eyes and the ground shook and the sky . . .”

  “The sky?”

  He seems unwilling to go on. Finally, he mutters, “It was the wrong color.”

  Katherine swallows. She cannot show him how his words terrify her. She wrestles to get her voice back under control. “Well, I can understand why the dogs would have been scared.”

  He nods. “The dogs knew and they didn’t want to go with us.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” It’s true. I am more sorry than he could possibly know.

  He just looks at
her, his eyes warm with an awful understanding. It seems to Katherine that she is now the small, disappointed child and he the adult who must comfort her.

  “Maybe we can try again later, at another place.”

  Lucas is shaking his head. “No, they won’t ever do that. They’ll always be scared.”

  Katherine remembers the shivering dogs, the thick reek of fear, their total, paralyzing surrender. The howling as they left. She would like nothing better than to crawl into bed and pull the covers up over her head, but it is Lucas’s birthday after all. She must do what she can.

  “I know it’s been kind of a horrible day so far. What can we do to make it better?”

  Hours later, Lucas is almost asleep, lulled by the new book they bought and read twice through. They also saw a movie, an animated classic, and she hopes it was a balm, however temporary. Katherine begins to rise from the bed when he seems to jolt awake.

  “Kat? Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “What Boris showed me? The storm and the sky?”

  “Honey, I don’t know. But we’ll keep an eye out, okay?” How can she answer questions she cannot begin to understand? Please, she prays, please let him forget about that. Please let us leave this day behind.

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?”

  “I dunno.” He sighs. “I feel sad.”

  “I feel sad too.” What can I give you? Katherine wonders. What else can I give? A goldfish seems like a poor substitute.

  But then he’s asleep, and it’s just her waiting for her phone to ring. She sits and waits.

  Her phone rings.

  Still, she pauses. Ironic, isn’t it, that only yesterday she would have given anything for this call.

  She picks up.

  “We need to talk,” Sael says.

  6

  Margaret

  I never meant to come back to these woods, but there is nowhere else to go.

  I knew that they would come for me. I knew it as soon as I heard that the boy had died. They would come for me at night, out of respect for my father. They would come at night, and they would come quietly, but they would come. There is nothing else for it. I take what little I have and flee.

  I think about how it will unfold. They will knock, and my father will come to the door. He will tell them that he has not seen me since the morning, and it will be the truth. His manner will be grave, his mind puzzled. But underneath it all, I think he will be relieved. He has never known what to do with me. I have been a burden to him for so many years now. He will be a little sad, though, I think. At times I still remind him of my mother.

  Cecily will also appear saddened. Her eyes will be downcast and her mouth solemn. She will turn away, but inside I know she will be dancing with glee. It is Cecily who drives me out. She’s done it cleverly; I’ll give her that. She’s whispering tales to her mother, her friends, the women at the market, my father’s customers. She expels lies as easily as breath of how I stare at her and mutter incantations, how I draw strange symbols in the dust and how she fears for her child growing inside her. Her bastard child.

  Her lies are so wonderful that even I am tempted to believe her, to believe in my own power, that I would be capable of such acts. Her audience is a willing one, for they have never liked me and Cecily’s lies are vinegar, curdling their fear into hatred. No one will meet my gaze or even do business with me. Only their love for my father has held them back, but now Cecily has spun her web of deceit, and the boy is dead.

  I do not think they will search too hard for me here. They fear the woods. Sunlight must battle to pierce through the gnarled branches. Bandits are known to hide within these thickets, bandits and wolves.

  My mother loved these woods, and she would always bring me here.

  My mother, with her dark hair and shining eyes, her bright way of cocking her head to one side, like a robin. She laughed often, and my father said that when my mother sang, even the songbirds would fall silent with envy.

  The villagers loved my mother, although she was a Traveler and they usually hated the gypsies who came to the town to sell their colored beads and bangles, herbs and philters, to tell fortunes and trade horses. But she met my father and they fell in love and she stayed.

  She possessed knowledge, handed down through generations, of which plants could heal and which could harm, depending how they were used. The villagers would come to her with all kinds of troubles: their toothaches and heartaches, their backaches and sleepless nights. Sometimes she made up tonics and powders but most often my mother would listen and give counsel, how to flatter and bargain, what to say to sweeten a sullen spouse, how to catch the eye of an intended.

  She began to teach me the ways of her people early on. “Like most folk,” she’d warn, “flowers can do good or evil.”

  We would walk through the fields and woods and she showed me where to pick rose hip and hawthorn, how bitter rowan berries could be turned to sweet wine, and how to avoid the blood-red charms of the butcher’s broom and spindle.

  “Make the wood your friend, my Maggie,” she would say. “She is alive. Be good to her and she will be good to you. You must listen to her.”

  “Can she talk?” I would ask.

  “Yes,” she always responded, “but not with words of men. She will speak to you through the breeze in her trees, and the water over the stones in her brook. If you listen and love her, she will tell you her secrets and share her gifts with you.”

  More than once, we would see movement through the trees, a glimpse of fur, and while I always startled, my mother would just smile.

  Do not take fright, for they know we wish them no harm.

  With my hand in hers, I was never afraid. I loved and trusted my mother, and so I loved and trusted the woods too.

  Until the night she was murdered in the very place she had promised was safe.

  After that, I never went into the woods again.

  Now, I have no choice. The wood is a hungry mouth, and it will swallow me up. I am cold and frightened. I trip over craggy roots and twisted branches catch at me.

  “The trees will protect you,” my mother always said. “Let the trees stand guard.”

  But the trees did not protect her that night. Why would they protect me now?

  I run until I can run no more, and then I fall forward, curling up and covering my face with my hands.

  When I wake, the breeze is soft against my skin. A canopy of leaves glows green above me. A bird sings. Another answers. I am hungry and thirsty, but I am alive.

  I listen to the rush of water over stones. It grows louder and louder as I pick my way to a brook. The water is clear, icy, and sweet. I drink my fill. My thirst now slaked, I search for food. I stoop and find some berries, glossy and black. As I reach for them I hear my mother’s voice

  Belladonna. Deadly nightshade. My hand drops to my side.

  I remember the warm firm grip of her fingers curled over mine as we made our way through the woods. I remember the sound of her singing, the melody true and winding, clearing a path beneath our feet and how the trees bent their branches aside to make way for us.

  I know what I need to do.

  It is so long since I sang and it’s hard to begin. I cough and falter at first, but then a kernel within the seed sown deep down within me soaks and swells, grasps and curls, unfurls, sprouts pale shoots pushing through a deepening rosy pink, flood with color lengthens and reaches, buds burst up and out, and out rushes a song of green and growing. My gift to the woods. My song. I sing as I walk along the damp, leaf-strewn ground, and soon my foot kicks at something. A nest, two eggs remaining in it, and by their smell I know they are not rotten but abandoned. I can eat them. A brilliant cluster of rowan berries winks orange-red through dark green leaves. Pale mushroom caps peep up beneath my toes. They smell rich and of the earth.

  And so it begins.

  I remember a little more each day. Where the streams meander through, the trees that protec
t me from the wind, under the leaves, that give me shade. I offer up my song and am rewarded with mushrooms, berries, wild garlic, burdock, nettles, and dandelion. At night I sleep with moss and leaves under my head, the heavens spread out above me. I stare up and I can hear my mother as clear as a church bell, telling me about the night I was born, how, after the storm, the sky was aflame with stars.

  “My people once told me . . .” her voice had trailed off.

  “Told you what?” I had asked.

  “Never you mind,” she had said. “Only know that you are special, for upon your birth the heavens sang and rang with stars in an ancient and glorious song, a night song. You were surely meant for great things when the night sings and your destiny is writ golden in the skies.”

  My mother. The locked chest of my heart is slowly creaking open.

  And so it goes for eight nights; then I have the dream.

  He crouches over my mother’s body, holding his curved knife. Intent on working its blade, his face is creased in concentration, but still wears a little smile. I try to hold my breath, but a whimper escapes and he looks up. He has black holes instead of eyes. He lets her arm drop into a pool of blood on the ground. Dark and thick, it has left a smeary stain on his sleeve.

  “That boy was but nine years old,” he says. “His wounds festered and his tongue turned black. His mother is sick with weeping.”

  The man’s voice is light and tender and full of laughter as if imparting pleasant news.

  I wake up, my heart hammering.

  I remember the boy.

  I was returning to our village from the market when they began following me, a gaggle of urchins as small as sparrows, dirty and neglected. They kept a safe distance, whistling and giggling and calling out foul names, daring one another to go closer. It was maddening. I was hot and tired, and each time I swung around they would stop in their tracks, staring at me with insolent eyes. As soon as I turned away, they would begin again. The worst part was knowing that if I couldn’t stop them, no one else would. After all, it was their parents who had taught them to hate me.