The Cold Is in Her Bones

by Peternelle van Arsdale

  Milla wiped her mouth and face. Drank some water. Think, Milla. You say you’re not a child. Stop behaving like one. She reached into her hair and let the snake curl around her finger. Already the snake seemed longer than it had that morning. Her heartbeat slowed. The room straightened.

  She brought the tea to Gitta, and got her to sit up in bed to sip it. Gitta’s face was puffed and reddened, and her blue eyes were watery gray. “Why did we have to bring that wicked child here?”

  “Mamma,” Milla said. “Iris isn’t wicked.”

  “You don’t know what they’re like, Milla. The girls who turn. You only saw Iris at the start. But if she’d stayed, she would have gotten worse. Soon she’d have been howling through the night and swearing you were a monster with the eyes of a devil.”

  Something wasn’t right with what Gitta was saying, and at first Milla couldn’t puzzle out what it was. Then she realized. Just like Milla, Gitta was only ever here, on the farm. How could Gitta know what the demon-possessed girls were like? Yet Gitta didn’t talk about them as if she’d been told stories about them. She talked about them as if she knew.

  “You’ve seen them,” Milla said.

  Gitta began to weep again, and Milla took the tea from her, afraid she’d spill it. “It’s all my fault. My poor boy. In that horrible place with those demon-possessed girls. My child. My poor boy.” She brought her knees up to her chest and rocked and keened.

  Milla’s heart was only half warm toward her mother, but some deeper urge in her wouldn’t allow her to stand by while Gitta suffered. “Mamma. How can any of this be your fault? What have you ever done but the right thing? What’s happening in the village has nothing to do with you. And Niklas stayed with Iris because he’s a good boy, like you raised him to be.” It was true. He was a better, kinder person than Milla would ever be. She thought of her anger toward him, her accusations, and she was ashamed.

  “It’s because of what we did to Hulda.”

  “Hulda?” Milla said. “Who is Hulda?” Milla had never heard of anyone by that name.

  “The demon. We thought we could get away from her by coming here. But there’s no getting away. And now she’s taken my boy from me. My own sweet boy.” Gitta gripped her knees so tightly that the bones in her hands made sharp lines, and her veins wove over and around them like yarn. Her mouth opened and closed, and she stared ahead of her as if she were seeing something happen right in front of her, something she couldn’t stop.

  “Mamma, the demon hasn’t taken Niklas.”

  “She will,” Gitta said. “She ruins everything. She always did. That’s why I hated her so much.” Gitta looked at Milla now as if she were confiding something that Milla should understand. “I didn’t always hate her. When we were little I loved her. But she grew up wrong, Milla. She grew up all wrong.”

  Her mother’s anguish almost made Milla want to embrace her. But she didn’t. There were too many secrets sending up little shoots through the floorboards and into the room, wrapping around them, ready to bear fruit. The snake growing above Milla’s ear was restless, nudging her, its tiny hiss like a whisper, urging her to ask the question again. “Who is Hulda, Mamma?”

  Gitta opened her eyes, and the moment she did so she no longer looked like a child. She looked like a confused old woman who couldn’t understand how she’d arrived at this place. “She was my sister,” Gitta said, as if perplexed—surprised—that such a thing could be true. “She turned into a demon and she cursed the whole village. All because Jakob burned her snake.”

  Milla’s snake hissed so loudly in her ear that Milla thought her mother must have heard. The whole world must have heard. She fell back a step and her knees went soft beneath her. “Mamma?”

  But Gitta didn’t reach out for Milla, to keep her daughter from falling. Instead she shrank away. Then her eyes turned cold and small. “And now you’re a demon, too.”

  PART TWO

  10

  MILLA RAN INTO THE FOREST. She ran to get away from her mother, she ran to get away from her father, she ran to get away from what she was becoming.

  At first she didn’t know what she was running toward. And then she did. The spring.

  It was the snake, she thought. The snake had made her a demon. So she would drown it. Even if it meant drowning herself.

  She pulled off her boots and stockings and felt the coolness of the damp dirt and pebbles under her feet. She took off the apron that she hadn’t stopped to hang on its hook in the kitchen. She wouldn’t wear it anymore. She let it fall.

  She took off her dress and dropped it to the dirt, too. She stood there for a moment in her shift, feeling the warm breeze through the rough weave of the linen, aware that she couldn’t remember ever being so undressed outside. Her skin prickled, but not with chill; the day was still hot.

  Then she pulled her shift over her head and she was naked. She felt the snake rising from her head, and she knew it was tasting the air with its tongue. She opened her mouth and explored the air with her own. She felt the tickling mist of the spring, but that wasn’t taste. She closed her eyes, and there it was. Water mixed with moss mixed with rock. The specific flavor of the spring, forming itself on the tip of her tongue.

  She had the strongest impulse to continue running. Through the forest, and on. On to somewhere else. Or nowhere else. The only destination would be the running itself, the moving, the never stopping. The never being trapped in one place.

  But her fear came back to her. Her terror of the monstrosity she saw reflected in her mother’s eyes. And so she pushed herself toward the water. She put a foot in, and another. She felt the cold run up her calves. She went deeper. The cold traveled up to her crotch and stomach, where it chilled the deepest parts of her. Then she went farther in than she had ever gone before, to the part of the spring that dropped away and became bottomless. She would sink there, to drown out the evil that she was becoming. To kill the demon.

  Down she went. She hadn’t sucked in a lungful of air, because the intent hadn’t been to prolong, but to quicken. She pulled her knees to her chest, felt her hair swirl about her in the water, felt the cold in her heart like a stab. She tried to relax into the water, to let herself sink. She kept her eyes closed, willed herself to be heavy, heavy, heavy like the heaviest stone.

  Her snake—and it was, she realized, her snake—pulled away from her as if trying to lift them both up to the surface, to save them.

  She felt its panic. Its desire to live. Its will. She ignored it. She told herself no. That was the demon talking. Whether the demon was Milla herself, or the snake, or a creature that was once named Hulda—her mother’s own sister . . . none of that mattered. She would not be a monster. Still her snake pulled. She put her hand there, not to smother it but to calm it. To say: I know, I know this is painful, but it’s for the best.

  Then, a voice.

  I’m so cold.

  Iris.

  I’m so cold.

  Iris. It was Iris.

  Let me out.

  Iris’s voice was in her head again.

  Milla opened her eyes and the pain there was piercing and immediate. The water was dark and heavy around her, but her body was light and wanted to be lighter and she uncurled herself and rose. She stroked forward until her feet touched rock, and then shallower still until she reached the edge.

  She shivered and sucked in air and for a moment or more she allowed herself to bask on the rock where she and Iris had sat, to soak up the heat of the sun above her and the earth beneath her.

  Then the voice again. Iris’s voice.

  I’m so cold.

  I’m so cold.

  Let me out.

  Be my friend.

  Milla’s hand went to her head, searching. She found the snake, and relief brought tears to her eyes when she felt it curl around her finger. It was bigger than it had been even that morning. And stronger. Louder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to it.

  To Iris, she said, “I’m coming.”<
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  When she was warm and nearly dry, Milla pulled on her shift, dress, stockings, and boots. She left her apron where it lay. She knew what she had to do now, the promise she had to keep. She would go to the village, and she would free Iris from The Place.

  First, though, she had to find it.

  When Milla arrived at Trude and Stig’s cottage, Trude was kneeling in her garden tending to her leeks and carrots. Wolf lay in the late afternoon shade nearby. He lifted his head and regarded Milla solemnly, then rested his head down and went back to sleep.

  “Trude,” Milla said, and the old woman reacted with a start.

  “Oh, it’s you, Milla,” she said, a hand pressed to her heart. Her eyes seemed hesitant to light on Milla’s face for very long, either because she didn’t like what she saw there, or because she was protecting what her own might reveal. Milla wondered if she was ashamed. “How is your mother?”

  “I left her weeping,” Milla said.

  Trude nodded. “It’s a terrible thing to imagine Niklas there. That sweet boy.”

  “What about Iris?” Milla said. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to imagine her there, too?”

  Trude let out a lung full of air and her whole body seemed to deflate along with it. “Of course it is, child. She’s my granddaughter. My daughter’s only child. But she’s lost to us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Hanna’s not our only child, you know. We had another daughter. Leah.” Trude stood and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “What happened to her?” Milla said. Though she already knew.

  “One morning Stig and I woke to Leah screaming like she was being murdered in her bed. We ran in to her and found Hanna crying in a corner and Leah howling at her, calling her a demon. At first we weren’t sure which of them had been afflicted, but then we saw it was Leah. She wasn’t right, Milla. She wasn’t our girl anymore. She had this . . . this light in her eyes. There was something else in there with her, something wrong. Something mean.”

  Something else in there with her. Milla grew cold and then hot again, and her skin ached. Her body wanted her to leave, but she forced herself to stay.

  Trude didn’t sound like the woman Milla had known her entire life. She sounded like some other woman who had seen horrors, not the pleasant, chatty old lady who sat by the fire and told stories about princesses. “Hanna was just twelve when it happened. Our Leah was fourteen. The prettiest, sweetest girl she was. Never put a step wrong. That morning she wasn’t herself anymore. She screamed at us. Laughed and screeched and called us monsters.”

  It occurred to Milla that she hadn’t really known Trude at all. She didn’t know any of them. She only knew a version of Stig and Trude, and of her mother and father, that they’d constructed once they came here. A version that had been cleansed of the terrors that befell the village, a version that erased all the losses. But such things couldn’t be erased. They were still inside Trude and Stig, and her mother and father, and they’d passed it all on to Niklas and Milla whether they’d wanted to or not.

  Now Trude looked hollowed out and shrunken. “When the midwife came to take Leah away to The Place, I cried like your mother is crying now. But your mother is lucky. Her son will come back to her. My daughter never will. Nor my granddaughter.”

  Trude had called Milla a foolish little girl. Milla refused to be foolish again. She would know everything, no matter how frightening it was, or how much it hurt. “Mamma told me about Hulda and the curse. I must know. Did Niklas know the demon is Mamma’s sister?” Milla wasn’t sure why this was so important to her, but it was. She thought she might be able to forgive all the other things that Niklas had kept from her, but she wasn’t sure she could forgive that. The truth about Hulda—about the demon—felt so tied up with her own.

  Trude paled, shook her head at Milla. “Lord protect us from demons Lord protect us from demons Lord protect us from demons.”

  “He didn’t know?” Milla said.

  “No, child, no. Your mother and father would never. They don’t speak of that. Speak of evil and you call it to you. That’s what demons want.”

  Something inside Milla released at that moment, another tight little knot of resentment toward Niklas. She could cry for missing him so. She had to find him, to talk to him, to see him. “Have you ever been to The Place? Can you tell me how to get there?”

  “You’re talking foolishness again, Milla. You’re not listening. Why would you want to go where it’s not safe?”

  Milla could have said, because I hear Iris’s voice in my head, telling me how cold she is and begging me to let her out. But that wouldn’t get her what she wanted. That would get her tied up and dragged off, too. “Because Iris is there. And Niklas. And I can’t bear to be separated from either of them.”

  “Oh, child. I know you love them.” Trude seemed as if about to relent, but then she said, “You’ll never find it. Even if you made it all the way to the village, someone would have to show you where The Place is.”

  “What about Hanna? Would she show me?” The expression on Trude’s face told Milla something she couldn’t have imagined. “Hanna doesn’t know about Iris, does she?” Milla said.

  Trude moaned. “Stig couldn’t bear to tell her.”

  Milla latched onto hope. Hanna would help her—Iris’s own mother would certainly want to show Milla how to find The Place, and then they would rescue her together. “Trude, tell me how to find Hanna and Tomas, and then I’ll tell them what’s happened to Iris. And I’ll ask them to show me how to get to The Place.” Milla sensed Trude hesitate, and she took one of the old woman’s hands in her own. It was knobby and thin, as light and fragile-seeming as a bird. “I’m sorry for all that’s happened to you. And I’m sorry that I didn’t understand. Please let me try to help Iris.”

  “Your mother and father would never forgive me for telling you,” Trude said. “This is their farm. They brought us here, and they could send us away just as easily.”

  Milla closed her eyes, willed herself not to show anger. She reminded herself that she didn’t know what it was like to be Trude. To have seen and lived through what she had. “Then don’t tell them,” Milla said. “They don’t need to know. I’ll leave right now. They won’t miss me until supper, which is still an hour away. And they may not even miss me then. Mamma’s too upset to care what happens to me. Pappa will think I’m off sulking.”

  Trude nodded. “Come.” She led Milla inside and wrapped a hunk of cheese, bread, and two apples, then placed the bundle in a rough-woven bag and handed it to Milla. She pulled one of her own shawls from a hook and wrapped it around Milla’s shoulders. For just a moment, Milla let herself remember when she was a child and Trude told her stories by the fire. Milla would sit on a low stool next to Trude and put her head in Trude’s lap. Trude would rest a hand on Milla’s head in the exact spot where a snake now grew. Her snake.

  “You won’t make it to the village before dark,” Trude said. “Not on foot. Good that it’s summer so you won’t catch your death sleeping outside. You need only follow the road with the fresh wagon wheel tracks. It will take you straight to the village. My Hanna lives in the center of town. Tomas is the blacksmith, so you’ll see the smithy and then their cottage. You’ll know my Hanna. Our Iris looks just like her.” Trude’s eyes were damp.

  “Thank you, Trude.”

  “Tell my Hanna that I’m sorry. Tell her I thought we could keep Iris safe.”

  Milla thought Trude might embrace her, but she didn’t. Milla touched the spot over her left ear where her snake nestled itself, and decided perhaps it was better that way. She wasn’t a creature to be embraced anymore—if she ever was.

  11

  MILLA’S FEET FOLLOWED A ROAD worn smooth by her father’s wagon wheels, and it was all unfamiliar. With each step, her fear came back to her, washing over her like a stream, lapping. She held two thoughts in her head at once. There were the dark things that her mother and Trude had seen. And then there was her belief t
hat the same hadn’t happened to Iris. After all, Iris hadn’t howled at Milla or called her a monster. Maybe she was just . . . sick. Again the image of Iris’s too-bright eyes flickered across Milla’s mind and she willfully shoved it away. Her heart thumped in her chest, and the thought that she was doing something terribly stupid threatened to overwhelm her.

  No, she said to herself. Iris was Iris. She always would be. And Milla would always be Milla, and she would always be a friend to Iris. Milla’s mind was her own, she told herself. The voice in her head was Iris’s, and Iris was no demon. How Iris spoke to her that way, Milla didn’t know. But Milla knew so little about anything that she was willing to believe that a great deal was possible. She was also ready to doubt a great deal of what she’d been told. The rules she’d grown up with made the world seem like such a small place. And so explicable. But she had proof growing from her own head that the world was much different from anything she’d been led to believe. She touched her snake, which was now the length of her hand. It settled her, and Milla felt her heart slowing to match its coolness, its calm.

  The day had been very hot, but by the time the last light of evening turned to darkness, Milla was glad to have Trude’s shawl. The moon rose big and bright, and Milla walked long into the night, wanting to arrive at Hanna and Tomas’s as early the next day as she could.

  As if it knew they were safe and alone, her snake rose up from her head, freed from its camouflage of dark ringlets. It gently bounced and undulated and tasted the air as Milla walked along, and Milla felt its hunger and excitement. Milla felt both in her own bones—and then in her belly. It would be good to eat, she thought. She stepped off the road and sat at the mossy base of a large tree, two roots on either side of her like armrests.

  Crickets chirped around her and mosquitoes buzzed around her face. When one landed on her cheek, her snake snapped it up. She tasted its sweetness on her own tongue. She bit into one of the apples Trude had given her, then stuffed her mouth with cheese and bread, savoring fruitiness and saltiness and tanginess mixing together in her mouth. She couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed food this way, and then it came to her. It was back when she and Niklas were children, when they’d gone berry picking together and had eaten half of all they’d picked, the juice running purple and red down their chins. That was most certainly the last time. Since those days, meals had been about service and duty. She ate the food that she and Mamma made without thinking how she felt about it. There was no point, because there was no choice. It was what she was told to prepare, and then to eat. So she did. What was to taste?