The Hollow March

by Chris Galford

  That night, she found herself wandering, lost to trails that were at once familiar, and frightfully unknown to her. The trees were hers, though she had never seen them, towers that stretched higher and higher into the sky, until the tops were lost and sun smothered so utterly that she found herself ever roving through darkness. Winter seemed a distant memory. Life was all around her, though she could not find it, for at every touch she felt no warmth, and the bark broke away from her, gray and rotted. On and on she walked, following a trail to its heart.

  It seemed to her that many days were in each moment, and that she ought to be wearied from her march, but though the needles and the branches tore at her feet and her dress, she felt no pain. She stumbled into a field ringed with orchids, a disheveled mess, and she winced against the light, which was sudden and blinding. She held her hand to it, and in its shade, she found a woman bared to her, at rest upon a rock in the center of the field, looking to her without expression, as though her appearance had no meaning.

  Charlotte stepped toward her, crying out for help, but the woman’s eyes fell down toward her feet, and she was silent. Charlotte followed her gaze into the grasses and found her feet, no longer clad in silk or sandal, had grown bloodied with their march through nature. Needles had plunged into them and mud clung to them, and it seemed to her that they were rotted, twisted things, and as she screamed, she saw that they were bleeding into the dirt. She ran for the woman, but the blood followed her, and in her wake the blood seeped down and smote the earth. Dirt charred and grayed, and the grasses and the orchids bloomed in death around it, blackening as though by fire, and wafting dead into the wind. Mortified, she ran on, but the corruption only spread, further and further, and the darkness began to race about her, threatening to overtake her.

  The trees reached for her, their scraggly limbs clawing at her skin. They circled her and boxed her in, until there was no light, no salvation but the rock. Faces carved in the bark cried out, in voices known to her. The orchids bloomed thorns and stung at her like bloody roses. She tripped through them and they stung her hands as well when she crawled through their vines. They constricted her, and as she reached for the space to press herself up by, she felt chill, moist flesh. Matair’s head caved to her hands, its breathless lips opening to consume her, his eyes hollow, gaping voids beckoning from the abyss. It called to her, but she tore free, in desolate panic. The world died around her, but the rock held firm, and its crags heralded her salvation.

  When she leapt, she felt the whole world giving way beneath her, and it was only the woman’s hand that saved her, as it speared her own. She shrieked, dashing against the rock that held against the void, held up by the hand alone. Yet for the woman, it seemed an effortless task. The woman settled against the rock, and held her, swaying, cocking her head in contemplation.

  Charlotte knew her. The storms in her eyes. The bronze of her skin. The blood on her hands.

  “What is this light,” the spirit asked. “What is this flame, breaking yet upon my breast? Nothing burns so bright as love, and nothing so consumes as those flames stoked on love yet unrequited.” The woman tittered, closing her eyes as if to some invisible embrace, and she seemed to sink into herself.

  Clutching for her arm, Charlotte heard herself call out, “If for only love could be so true.” The void beckoned, calling out her name. Below, the wind howled over flames, kicking up the ashes. “But love is a lie we tell ourselves to feel alive.” She choked through the nauseous terror, desperate to pull herself up. For all that she tried, however, she could not seem to gain a hold on the spirit woman, the rock around her smoothed flat. Her hand slid from it as a dejected lover.

  Usuri stared ahead, not looking at her. “Fire? No, it is a plague, a virulent corruption of the soul, of whose sweet touch is also cure. Such malice. Such malice in a look. You kill us, lovers, with your eyes, and desecrate us with your touch.” She shuddered, and Charlotte felt herself slipping. She clawed at Usuri’s arm, but her nails broke upon her skin and slipped in the blood they wrought. The witch’s eyes drifted down, seeming at last to regard her. “This one is a blight. It knows not love. Is that its father, or its own? Does it have its own thoughts, or is it nothing?

  “Fly, nothing, fly. Pass into the wind. You try so hard to be, you put them all from thee. The world, at a distance, it rots and burns, and there it stands upon the rock, thinking it safe from harm. It sees not what it does. No. It does. It does not care what it does. Its blood will break the world, and bend it to its knee, but it has no room for love. There is nothing here. It is what they want it to be. Its wants are their wants, and it is nothing for it. Fly, nothing, fly. One cannot trust the breeze, or hold it in their hand.”

  Charlotte was as a castaway, adrift upon a storm, an insignificant figure gripped by wind and wave, who could not but cling as the world ravaged all around them. She did not let go, but suddenly she was falling, down into an endless expanse of nothingness. Screaming, she plummeted, and though she fell, the witch never seemed to grow any further from her, nor any nearer. Darkness rose up around her and swallowed her whole.

  Charlotte bolted upright in her bed, but only darkness and silence greeted her momentary panic. No one moved nor stirred, and she sat alone as ever. Though sleep had seduced her mere hours before, now it seemed a far and terrible thing, and she could not bring herself to surrender to it again. The night came and went, and she was ragged for it in the morning.

  The next day came to her as through a lagging haze, and she found she had to drag herself from one task to another. In the morning, she spent her time playing harp and flute under her mother’s tutelage. Charlotte drifted through the notes and let them lull her through the sheets, unmoved by the repetition. After a light lunch, unable to bring herself to hunger, she spent her early afternoon ahorse, riding as far as the snow and her keepers would allow, hoping that the wind on her face would shiver and shake the life back into her bones. Snow whipped against her, and the wind howled, but the chill only further drugged her mind.

  The rest of the daylight hours might have otherwise been spent with tutors, or lost to embroidery, but her mother, thoroughly mortified by her display of etiquette during the Empress’s visit, had arranged for Charlotte to be reminded of her duties to Jurti under the biting rod and poisonous words of her childhood governess. The woman was a short, venomous creature with squat shoulders and an even shorter temper. Charlotte went through the motions with her, but their session was interrupted by the rattle of shouts and horses’ hooves in the yard below. Dartrek returned with word of a messenger come for her father, and with all manner of politeness, Charlotte took the opportunity to escape from her instructor’s care.

  The messenger, near broken from his wild ride through wind and snow, was ushered dripping from the gates. She caught a glimpse of him as he was ushered into one of her father’s sitting rooms. Despite Dartrek’s warnings, Charlotte listened outside the door while her father exchanged words with the man, shamelessly nestling herself into the arch of the doorway.

  Joseph Durvalle, crown prince of the Empire, had died as they had been shown—ensconced in flame. His brother had likewise died in the confusion, to the unremitting horror of their party. In the madness that reigned thereafter, some were crying witchcraft, and others pointed fingers to the Farrens among them, which was to say the Empress and her step-daughter. The Empress, in her terror, had broken into a sobbing, senseless mess. Ser Bidderick and a loyal retinue of knights had remained with her and her son under strict command from Princess Sara, but the messenger did not know where they intended to flee. For the moment, they had taken refuge in a roadside inn, after evicting or conscripting most of the previous occupants.

  Her father phrased it politely, but Charlotte could hear the restrained anxiousness behind his voice as he asked whether any other riders had been dispatched. There was no surprise to either father or daughter when the man assured him others had been sent to Anscharde, Redmond, and Grenheidt. Her father thanked t
he man for his hard work and gave him his assurances and his hopes that the others would swiftly find their place.

  Charlotte supposed the Empress and her entourage would eventually decide to make for the capital, for the daughter she had left behind if nothing else. Word of the princes’ mysterious deaths would have gone before her, and it would only look worse if she did not return, for in the passions such news would undoubtedly spark the madness would sweep over that little girl and tear her asunder. The innocent were often the first to suffer for the actions of their elders.

  For the princes, she felt no sympathy. They had chosen their paths in life, had set their feet upon the necks of those she held dear, and more importantly, made the gross if unconscious mistake of standing between her father and their family and their ambitions. Even the Empress, should it come to that, earned none of her empathy. She had lived her life, however empty-headed. If she had to die for them to live theirs then so be it.

  Little Rosamine, however, was another story. Certainly, she was as solidly in their way as any other of her blood. Even so, she was a child. Charlotte whispered that to herself as though it meant something, but she clung to that. Rosamine was a child. She had not yet lived. She had not yet made her choice. Yet that was a counterintuitive, the more she thought of it. It was true, Rosamine had not made the choice. The choice had been thrust upon her by her very birth. She never had the choice to begin with.

  Just as Charlotte.

  She slipped away before the men finished, and paraded herself down the hall so as to run into them seemingly by chance alone. Cocking his chin as though to raise himself above his own daughter’s station, her father begrudgingly introduced her, and promptly excused himself with the messenger in tow. Charlotte didn’t take it to heart.

  “Your father will not like you spying on his affairs,” Dartrek told her as they marched back toward her room.

  She shrugged it off. “Father raised me to be curious. If he did not wish me in his affairs, he would say it plain.”

  “And Master Boyce?”

  “I should suspect he was doing the same as I. The difference is he skulks about the shadows, while I lug you around.”

  Dartrek, as usual, seemed unable to determine whether to take her assertions as insult or jest. He lapsed back into the silence to which he best belonged. She smiled and touched his arm as they set off through the halls. There were times, in truth, when she longed to have a conversation with the man, but often enough what speeches he managed proved but disappointment. Her father had not hired Dartrek for his ability to hold a conversation. He was hired for his skill with a blade. That, and a quiet man, dedicated first to duty, was less likely to be coaxed, as he saw it, into anything his daughter might demand.

  Charlotte liked to think she could wrap any man around her finger, if given ample time. She did not say as much to her father, though.

  “Liar!”

  They were passing near the witch’s room when she heard the sharp snap of the accusation at their backs. Charlotte twisted on her heel to find a gaunt Usuri trailing them, face red and eyes narrowed with hate. Dartrek put an arm before her, his other falling to his sword. “Desist!” He shouted back, but Usuri was undeterred. She pounded forward, snatching at her brightly colored skirts as she descended on them both.

  “You are a traitor!” the witch screamed back, voice trembling with the power behind it.

  What now? Charlotte made a point of looking down her nose at the woman as she replied. “Charming. To what do I owe this blatant show of disregard?” She crossed her arms, unwilling to be moved by this woman in the waking realms. Let her have the scope of dreams, but this world was hers. The woman might be capable of smiting her at a glance, but she would see Hell blossoming before she ever let herself be cowed by it. Her father treated her with enough disrespect. She was not about to be shown it by this creature.

  “You lied to me,” the witch hissed back. “You lied. Burn, you said. They’ll all burn. Two brothers and a sister, down under the sea of white. Yet one of these—she still draws breath.” She closed the gap between them, jabbing at Charlotte and her bodyguard with her finger.

  Charlotte attempted to rebuff her. “I am certain I do not know what you mean. Calm yourself, woman.”

  “I burned them. I burned them and you lie—where is my justice?” Usuri was near hysterics as she screamed.

  Charlotte stepped around her shieldman’s protective gesture and seized the woman by the wrist. She could feel the fire on her as she did, but she shrugged it off and drew the woman close enough that she could feel the tempered breath flooding from her lungs. “There is time and place for these talks,” she whispered, voice edged with a fury of her own. “Now is neither time nor place, witch.” She could feel her nails digging into the other woman’s arm. She did not particularly care.

  Usuri’s voice lowered, with an effort, but the venom clung to her words. “You said she would be with them. But I felt them go. Each a man, died screaming in their terror. Yet their blood is in her and she walks, walks free as the birds that soar.”

  “Who walks?”

  “Sara,” Usuri spat. “The whore princess.”

  “Traitorous.” Charlotte released her hold on the woman’s arm, looking down on her with disgust. She turned on her heel and made to go. “I’ll not listen to such blasphemies in my presence. Restrain yourself and take you to your chambers, or I shall have you removed to one of the towers.”

  Usuri surged after her, shouting. “You promised me—!” As she lunged, however, Charlotte’s shieldman threw himself into action. He did not bother with the blade. Dartrek simply drove his fist into the witch’s gut. A soundless gasp escaped her. Her eyes bulged wide as she crumbled to the ground, clutching at her gut and crying out as her body shook.

  Charlotte did not even look at her. Keeping her back between them, Charlotte drew herself up to her full height and brushed at a ruffle in her dress. When she spoke, it was with measured calm, though the undertones ran with an edge. “Do not mistake your place, witch. I am a loyal servant of the Empire, and you are given worth solely as guest of this home. You are less than nothing. If you address me as such again, I shall have you soundly beaten. Am I understood?” Down the hall, a few of the household servants had crept out to see what all the commotion was. They backed away again as her gaze drifted across them. “Take the lady to her room,” she called out to no one in particular. “She is quite maddened of the moment. She requires rest.”

  “Promises,” the woman rasped behind her. “They all make promises.” Her words paused as she winced, trying to drag herself up to her knees. “Promises break. They turn to threats. Darker words. Still words.” Usuri drew herself up, swaying as she leaned defiantly toward Charlotte’s shieldman. “Sing little sparrow sing. What is it it sees? Oh this creature, poor and lowly creature. All it is is hate…”

  But Charlotte had enough. “Shut her up.”

  “…the song will be free, the creatures will be free. Fly, fly. B—”

  Dartrek backhanded the witch with his mailed fist, scattering spittle laced with blood across one of the curtains on the far wall. The witch clattered against the earth, twitching once, and falling silent. Already a bruise began to swell along her cheek.

  Charlotte rounded on the gathering crowd. “I told you to take her. If someone does not bear her to her room, I shall have you all lashed in her place.” Two of the maids scurried forward, heads bowed. Usuri lay still, very still.

  “All I want…” the witch whispered. Her voice was nearly breaking.

  Charlotte was finished. Dismissing Usuri wordlessly, Charlotte started down the hall, Dartrek trailing behind. The servants parted for her, bowing as she passed. She was shaking. If her father heard of this, and she was certain he would, she could not predict how he would react. He could beat Usuri for her audacity. For aggravating his particular weapon, however, he was just as likely to have Charlotte beaten.

  Charlotte was nearly around the corner when
she realized one of the servants wasn’t bowing. Intending to strike, she twisted on him with all the force of a gathering hurricane, but the words went out of her as soon as she caught a look at his face. The man smirked up at her, and stooped slightly in mockery.

  “A pleasure, my lady,” Boyce said dryly.

  She recoiled from him, nearly snarling at the sight. Dressed as one of the house’s butlers, he bent back up to his natural slouch as she pulled away.

  “Did you see everything?”

  “Enough,” the spider replied with a shrug.

  “She has gone mad.”

  “Was she ever sane?”

  “She needs to be locked up. As is, she is a risk to you and me and everyone else here. My father must see reason.”

  “Reason?” Boyce scoffed, still smiling. “That’s subjective. She makes a point, lady. You did make her a promise.”

  Charlotte wanted to scream. “Promises are mine to make and mine to break. Who is she to hold me to them?”

  “Oh, of course, Your Highness. And it would be far beyond a man of my mere station to say otherwise, but…I would advise you to take care. We do know what she can do. And her talk, though blasphemous…” Boyce let the words trail, staring off at something behind her. He frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you know.”

  Boyce’s overwhelming sense of smugness was fast grating on her. Small doses—that was all the man was good for. Without purpose he was merely a nuisance, an active participant in annoyance, rather than a merely incidental one, as Dartrek could be through his resolute and gargoyle-esque presence. She could toady with him all day, but there would be no gain in it. Boyce had nothing to give and she had nothing to take. Each was just cycling through the motions of their being, less living than repetition.

  What patience she might have had was already worn thin from her encounter with the witch.

  “Should you not be spying for my father? Surely he has better uses for you yet.”