Seventh Bride

by T. Kingfisher

  She stared at it for a few moments, transfixed, and then dragged her eyes away. It’s like staring into the fire. Always moving, always changing, and hours could go by before you notice…

  The sky overhead was white with cloud. The water was grey. The small black stones slid underfoot.

  She turned, feeling her feet slide in opposite directions, and let out a yelp.

  Ice hung over her.

  It was a mountain of ice, a shattered cathedral of ice, pressed into fantastic blue green shapes. It leaned out over the beach and arched over Rhea’s head.

  Rhea’s mind skittered frantically and landed on the word glacier.

  She scrambled backward, practically falling, trying to get out from under the leaning wall. It looked as if it must collapse at any instant and bury her under unknown tons of ice.

  But it did not fall.

  When she finally tripped over her own feet, she fell backward, with the shadow of the glacier just touching her skirts. Her breath whooshed out and she panted, staring up at the ice wall…and still it did not fall.

  Gradually her breathing slowed. She got to her feet and thought I am running away from ice. What do I expect it to do, bite me?

  Why is there a glacier and a beach inside the clock?

  She shoved stray bits of hair out of her face and stared up at the ice. Oh. Oh. Maria said the clock-wife was from up north. And Sylvie said there are things in the ice…

  “This is where she’s staying,” said a voice, just over her left shoulder.

  Rhea whirled.

  Sylvie was standing behind her.

  It took Rhea a moment to recognize her. She was not wearing a bandage. This Sylvie had clear grey eyes and gazed at Rhea steadily. When Rhea shifted on her feet, Sylvie’s eyes moved to follow.

  She can see. She isn’t blind.

  “Sylvie?” asked Rhea. Her voice cracked a little. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Do I know you?” Sylvie tilted her head. “Did Maria put you in the clock, too?”

  The words slipped into Rhea’s mind like a dagger slipping between her ribs.

  Did Maria put you in the clock, too?

  Too?

  Too?

  Rhea swallowed hard.

  “Yes…?”

  Sylvie nodded.

  There was no sound on the beach but the slopping of water against the shore. Rhea wrapped her arms around herself to keep out the cold. The stupid red dress flapped around her knees.

  Sylvie was wearing a white dress. Combined with her white skin and white hair, she looked as colorless as the sky.

  “Did she…did you…?” Rhea made a useless little gesture with one hand and felt desperately foolish.

  “Yes,” said Sylvie. “I couldn’t find her. I went out again.” She lowered her head, gazing at the ground. “Most of me did. I’m still here. But I’m out there, too.”

  The words chased each other around in Rhea’s head and she struggled to catch them and string them together in a way that made any sort of sense at all.

  She went out again. She went into the clock and went out again—and she’s not blind here and—

  Oh Lady of Stones.

  Had Maria put Sylvie into the clock before she’d gone blind? On her own wedding day, perhaps?

  Had she tried to wake the clock-wife already?

  But she came out—but she’s still here—!

  “How is that possible?”

  “Ask Maria.”

  Sylvie didn’t sound angry, Rhea noted. She sounded rather distant and matter-of-fact about it.

  Time is strange in the clock, Maria warned me—but she didn’t warn me that I wasn’t the first!

  Had Sylvie tried to warn her? She had said that Maria could be ruthless. Was that what she had meant?

  If Sylvie failed—but of course she failed—but she’s been married to Crevan for years—

  Oh, Lady of Stones, how many other wives have tried this? Has she been throwing us all into the clock in hopes that one of us will succeed?

  “Have you been here long?” asked Rhea. She thought that her voice was remarkably steady, given the circumstances.

  I am not curling into a little ball and screaming. I wish someone else were here to be impressed by how much I am not screaming right now.

  Sylvie looked up at that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I went out just a little while ago, didn’t I? The rest of me? We must have met then, because I don’t remember you.”

  “Yes,” said Rhea. “Yes, we met then. It’s—ah—it’s been a little while since then.”

  “Oh,” said Sylvie. She looked out over the water, which was the same color as her eyes. “Maria said time might be strange here. Are my parents well?”

  “So far as I know…” Rhea wracked her brain for anything that Sylvie—her Sylvie—might have said about her parents, and could only remember her saying not to judge them too harshly. “I haven’t heard anything bad.”

  “That’s all right then,” said Sylvie.

  She said nothing more for a few moments, which was long enough for Rhea to think a great many frightening things. If time is strange here, and Sylvie thinks she just left, then how long have I really been here? What if I was riding the tile for hours—weeks—years? What if everyone has died of old age out there?

  Then Crevan will have, too, she thought tartly, and my biggest problem will be solved.

  Sylvie looked away from the water and smiled at her, Sylvie’s familiar, slightly worried smile. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  “Just now…” said Rhea.

  “Oh. Did Maria put you in the clock, too?”

  Rhea inhaled sharply.

  This Sylvie is not all here. The one outside isn’t either, but...

  If I get out of the clock, will I leave something inside that thinks it’s me?

  I suppose I’ll worry about that if I ever manage to get out of the clock.

  “She did. I’m supposed to let the clock-wife out,” Rhea said cautiously. “Can you help me?”

  “She’s in there,” said Sylvie, pointing to the glacier. “I found her eventually. She’s very angry and she shakes the clock. Most of the time, though, she just wants to curl up in there.”

  “Can you show me?” asked Rhea.

  Sylvie nodded.

  They picked their way across the stones, parallel to the glacier. “Down here,” said Sylvie. “It goes a long way, but she’s not far. The ice sticks out and it meets the water in the inlet, and she’s inside.”

  Not far seemed to be about half a mile, which would have been easier if the beach had not been sliding, ankle-turning stones. Sylvie forgot Rhea twice as they walked, and had to be reminded again, and then reassured that her parents were well.

  I hope she remembers where we’re going. I wonder how many times I’ll have to introduce myself before it sticks.

  A long finger of land stuck out, away from the glacier, and they turned to cross it, putting the sea at their backs. Rhea was glad to leave the strangely moving water. It seemed to her that Sylvie grew more forgetful when she was looking at the waves.

  The rocks underfoot grew larger and were nearly the size of Rhea’s fist. She had to work her way carefully across them, and they jabbed into her feet as she walked, through the thin soles of her shoes.

  “There,” said Sylvie, and pointed.

  Rhea looked up.

  The glacier reared in front of them. It was a deep green color, utterly unlike anything Rhea had ever seen in nature. There were no flowers that color, no leaves, nothing she recognized.

  From where they stood, the sea came in on the right, into a shallow inlet. The glacier met the sea and ended in a rounded nub, polished by waves. The pool at the base was cloudy white, like milk.

  “In there?” said Rhea.

  Sylvie nodded.

  Rhea stared at the uncompromising ice.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” she said aloud. “Build a fire and melt her out?”

  She glan
ced up and down the beach. There was nothing to burn.

  Sylvie’s gaze strayed toward the water. Rhea cleared her throat loudly, and the woman who was not blind here looked back. “Yes?”

  “How do I get her to let me in?” asked Rhea, clinging to the last shreds of her patience.

  Sylvie shook her head. “I haven’t figured that out,” she said. “I don’t think…unless I forgot…” Her gaze grew unfocused again.

  Great. If I leave part of me in the clock, apparently that chunk will lose its memory. My memory. This gets better and better all the time.

  She wondered how long it had been. It didn’t feel like that long.

  Apparently it doesn’t feel like that long to Sylvie, either…

  There was a large stone on the beach that stuck a little way into the milky white pool. Rhea stepped out onto it and reached a hand up to the slick knob of the glacier.

  It was very cold.

  Well. What did I expect?

  “Let me in,” she said hopelessly. “Let me in, clock-wife, if you can hear me. It’s me. I slept against you all this week. I don’t know if you remember…”

  And then, because she could not think of anything else to do, she balled her hand into a fist and knocked on the ice like a door.

  The return knock was so immediate that it startled her. She jerked backward, windmilling her arms to keep from falling into the water. Hypothermia might not be real in the clock, but she didn’t want to take a chance.

  The knock sounded like someone on the other side of a door. Rhea lifted her hand and tapped again.

  Was it an echo? It didn’t sound like an echo—

  The knock was returned, first one soft tap, then two.

  Rhea tapped twice.

  A flurry of pounding came from under the ice, so loud and sudden that she retreated back from the ice, her eyes wide.

  Clearly it was not an echo.

  “When someone knocks,” said Sylvie, “you should let them in. As long as it’s before dark.”

  “What if it’s after dark?” asked Rhea. She glanced up at the sky, which was still pale grey.

  Sylvie considered this. “They might be monsters, then,” she said. “Things melted out of the glacier…”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she is,” said Rhea, fighting an urge to laugh hysterically. “Let her in! How do I let her out?”

  Another knock, tentative. Was the clock-wife afraid she had left?

  She squared her shoulders and knocked back. “I’m still here,” she said, putting her face so close to the ice that she could feel cold air against her lips. “I can’t open the ice. You’ll have to open it. Please, come out—or let me in—or just open the door—”

  Silence.

  Rhea let out a long sigh and saw her breath melt a tiny slickness on the ice.

  The wall cracked.

  It made a sound like a door slamming closed—or open. A lightning bolt crack appeared on the surface and skidded up and down, splitting into a hundred cracks as it went.

  Rhea retreated to the beach. Bits of opaque green ice calved off the end of the glacier, pattering into the water. The white pool frothed.

  The large crack—the one she’d been watching—split open. The interior was not dark but lit with a crazy quilt of reflections, as light struck the faceted ice and bounced.

  Curled up inside, her knees drawn to her chest, lay the clock-wife.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  If Rhea had thought about it at all, she would have expected the clock-wife to be pale the way that Sylvie was pale, a creature of the northern ice and pale northern sun.

  But she was not. Her skin was dark blue-grey, the color of flint, a color found on no human being that Rhea had ever met. When she opened her eyes, they were the shocking green color of glacial ice.

  The clock-wife lifted her head and looked directly at Rhea.

  Rhea said “Hello?”

  “You have knocked,” said the clock-wife. Her voice was deep and resonant, like the clock’s chimes. “It was you.”

  “I did,” said Rhea. She could not tell if the clock-wife was angry or pleased or if she felt anything at all. Her face was finely carved and expressionless.

  The flint-skinned woman unfolded herself from the ice and stood up. She left a neat hole behind her in the ice, like the hollow left by a peach pit.

  She towered over Rhea. Rhea took a step back. Was she that tall before? Did she just curl up very tight in there, or is she growing?

  The clock-wife caught her arm.

  Rhea had expected that the other woman’s touch would be cold, like the ice, but it was burning hot. Her grey fingers lay across Rhea’s wrist, and Rhea’s brown skin looked as blazing red as the wedding dress by contrast.

  “This is still the clock,” said the clock-wife. “I was in the ice, and then I was called out. Then I was in the clock. I went back to the ice, and I waited to be called out. But you have called me out and this is the still the clock.”

  Her grip tightened as she spoke, until Rhea gasped. She could feel the bones in her wrist creaking.

  “I’m trying to get you out of the clock,” she said. “I’m in the clock with you. My friend is going to get us both out if she can. Please, you’re hurting me!”

  The clock-wife’s impassive green eyes bored into her, and then the cruel grip released.

  “This is not how it was,” said the clock-wife. “You are not who it was before. That was another one, and I now do not love him. This is a new happening, not the one before?”

  “Yes?” said Rhea, cradling her arm.

  The clock-wife nodded. “Very well.”

  She stepped away, scanning across the beach. Rhea swallowed a few times.

  Now what do I do? I thought if I found her, I could tell her what I needed, but she seems even more confused than Sylvie in some ways…

  The clock-wife bent down and picked up a stone. She turned it over in her hands, as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.

  “I need your help,” said Rhea.

  “Now?” said the clock-wife.

  “Err…yes? Or soon, anyway.” Rhea licked her lips, trying to decide how to continue. “I’m supposed to marry Lord Crevan—”

  “Him!” said the clock-wife, and the stone was crushed to powder in her hands and sifted down between her fingers. “He called me from the ice. I was grateful then, but the one who is I now is not grateful. I would go and tell the one who called herself I then, but there is no changing the past except by reliving it.”

  Rhea had to stop and work that one out in her head. “Err. Yes. Well, he’s out there now. Outside the clock.”

  “Yessss….” The clock-wife made a stroking hiss of the word. “Yes, he is. I can smell him in the air around the clock. I have tried to pull the world away from him, but the clock prevents me. There is only one gap, and no matter how often I relive it, I cannot get to him.”

  Is she…is she talking about making the floor fall?

  One gap…Does she think she’s only done it once? Has she just been re-living it over and over, trying to get to him?

  Maria said time was strange in the clock, but this is making my head ache!

  “I want to help you get to him,” said Rhea cautiously. “If I can.”

  “To do that, I now must leave the clock.” She dusted sand from her hands. “And I now am in the clock. Perhaps I should go back in the ice and wait again…”

  “No!” said Rhea. “That won’t help. My friend can get you out of the clock—I think—but you have to come out and face Crevan if you do—”

  “Crevan?” said Sylvie, looking up. She had been watching the tide. “Is he here?”

  “I will unmake him,” said the clock-wife simply. “I will pull the marrow from his bones and pour lead into the spaces left behind. I will make his dying into a place and visit it every day until the end of eternity. But he is not here.”

  “I don’t think he’s that bad,” said Sylvie doubtfully. �
��My parents liked him.”

  “He has taken my death,” said the clock-wife grimly. “My death, which walked with me from the moment I was born. He wed me and took my death as a wedding gift unasked. I do not forgive. I then was foolish with gratitude for leaving the ice. I now do not make this mistake again.”

  Sylvie’s eyes were round at this. She looked at Rhea. “Did you understand that?”

  “I understood enough,” said Rhea. She squared her shoulders. “If you come out of the clock and help me, we’ll—we’ll try and get your death back.”

  “I now do not ask this,” said the clock-wife, folding her arms over her breast. “My death is gone. It became someone else’s death. I now am no monster, to take it back from one who it loved. A poor gift that would be, for an old friend.”

  Rhea took a deep breath. “Then will you help me anyway?”

  “You ask?” said the clock-wife.

  Rhea nodded. “Please. He’s going to marry me, and do something terrible to me. I need your help to stop him.”

  The clock-wife rubbed her hands through her hair. It was very short, Rhea noticed, and moved strangely under her fingers, like a cat’s pelt.

  “He would not take your death,” murmured the clock-wife. “Your past is short. The one who was you has barely stepped aside from the one who is you. That is what he would take, that shortness. You understand?”

  Rhea shook her head hopelessly. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  The clock-wife folded her hands together, fingertips touching her lips. Her expression was one of fierce concentration.

  She’s trying…I think she’s really trying. I think it’s hard for her. Maybe she’s not confused like Sylvie, maybe it’s just really hard for her to talk to people who can’t relive time. I now, I then…those must mean more to her than they do to me.

  “Time,” said the clock-wife. “Not the place. The happening of it. That is it. Yours. He will take the days of your life to come so he lives them instead and you will have nothing to relive. He has drunk too much of his time, and needs to pour more days into his cup. You understand?”

  Rhea nodded.

  Youth. That’s what she’s talking about. He’s going to take my youth to make himself younger, like Maria said. That’s why he wanted to marry me so young.