With Enda and Letta both tending to the girl, I backed off. I was both taxed and a little bit haunted by the encounter, recalling the nature by which I discovered her, by which I delivered her. In hindsight I found the bemusement that the incident was due. It may have been better to leave well enough alone, and I may have had a fair grasp on practicing such, but this felt different than regular mischief, at the end of the day. It was one thing to get caught in something in the city – another entirely to be led into it straight from my doorstep, clear from my doorstep, as if by prestigious invitation with my name written all over it. Pains taken to see it delivered.
At least, that it was another thing entirely was my theory. My feeling.
“We saw the dominoes,” Letta mentioned, bent over the girl. She was not letting me retire to the shadows completely.
I glanced up, pulled from my thoughts, feeling caught in the act of meddling with mischief as if it were forbidden to find oneself struggling to put a name to it in the privacy of her own head. Also as if the dominoes I had left in my wake gave away some secret, when the product of their trail was before her now. I shook the misplaced feelings of being caught from my head, and waited for her to continue.
“We're glad you returned to us,” she went on pointedly, assuring that I saw she had been concerned. “In one piece, as is becoming increasingly less of a given in our every-day anticipations.”
“Two pieces,” Enda interjected in her more raspy, blunt voice, and a hint of a good-natured smile tugged at Letta's tolerant lips.
“Two pieces,” she acknowledged with evident compassion, turning her attention back to the girl ailing before her. She sighed, though her lips had pursed. It gusted out her nostrils, considering. “Where does the cold come from?” she asked, staring down at the girl. It was time for the relevant questions, at least.
As had been the case with my encounter with the Ambassador for the Angel of Death, I did not know how to explain what had happened. There was nothing but the fact: “She was in the snow”, which I relinquished with rueful, inadequate honesty.
Letta looked to me for confirmation, and found it in my lacking stance and expression.
Wearily, I composed myself, to better dredge up the necessary details. “I was in the city during a shift. It triggered the dominoes, and when it all stilled...they led to a door propped in the rubble. She was on the other side”–I nodded toward the girl on the cot–“In a land of snow and ice. Winter and...blizzards...” I shook my head, trailing off. Letta saw my weariness, that I could not explain, and did not press me for more. I shifted my focus, dropping any further obligation to continue. “Will she come through?”
“Hard to say,” Letta replied. “Her ailments run deep. It's difficult to say how long she has been immersed in this cold.”
“Too long,” Enda suggested. “Her soul is near frozen.”
“But if her soul is near frozen yet she still maintains the bodily function of breathing, that is surely a sign that she is a fighter,” Letta overrode encouragingly.
“Is she a halfbreed?” I hazarded next.
This she considered more carefully, though it would seem there was little debate, that her consideration was little more than discretion, perhaps even sorrow, of a kind. “It would seem so, yes, minda.”
I nodded once, though it was pointless. No one was looking at me. It just felt necessary, to formally acknowledge the fact somehow, to come to terms with it, so to speak. Not because I had issue with it, but for the complications that could very well come along with it. To accept what those might be, ahead of time. I did not know what they would be, in our situation, but the potential was there. The danger. The recipe for grave things.
But it was impossible to dwell on any grave implications when, after three days of unconscious struggle under our hopeful watch and care, the girl pulled through, and awoke.
*
There was a cough, and I was on my feet by the time Letta called my name from that space beyond the kitchen. The fireplace was abandoned as I hastened toward the sickroom, and as I came around the door frame Letta was already at the girl's side. Confused, crimped amber eyes blinked blearily out at the world, and another weak cough chortled through her lips. I slowed my advance and halted in a gentle fashion at the foot of the bed, peering over Letta's stooped shoulder at the waking child.
Letta was smiling, pure kindness and encouragement as the girl reentered the world. “Hello, minda,” she offered, smoothing the girl's unruly hair from her forehead. “Some water, Vant,” she cast over her shoulder. I reached for the pitcher, kept nearby for the occasion, and poured a cup. “You've been on quite a journey,” Letta was saying to the little halfbreed. “Welcome back to a shore almost abandoned.”
Disorientation was clear on the girl's face, but as she came to she at least seemed to come to terms with the fact that she had been out of it, in some form or another, and recognize that the faces surrounding her were well-wishing ones, there to guide her back through her return and the process thereafter, whatever that may be. That was all she needed to conclude to relax, at least to a manageable point. It was inevitable that she was still spliced with confusion, but I could see the acceptance, if a little uncertain, of concentrating on breathing and taking one thing at a time.
Good.
And the next step, Letta provided for her. “What is your name, my dear?” she inquired, her head tilted kindly in a way that magically seemed to eliminate any threat that could ever be conjured into her being. How could she always execute such perfect, effective body language on demand? I marveled. She never placed one foot wrong, always knew exactly what to say and do. Sometimes I fancied myself composed, but I was a grasping, reckless fault-line compared to her. Prone to all sorts of tremors and cracks.
The halfbreed swallowed, a small sound in her throat, and parted her lips around a breath. She breathed again, through her lips, as if working up her voice, or perhaps even the memory of her name itself. Still a bit inhibited, she spoke for the first time, and to this day her name is a breathy, frosty impression in my mind. Cold like icicles, rooted in my memory. Icicles and death.
But I think only of the first. The first cold I knew her by.
“Ombri.”
T w e n t y - T w o –
Privileged
Ombri had been on that ledge a long time. There was no telling how long; she couldn't remember. All she could remember of her past life, at first, was her seemingly endless time in that snow. Her mind was all white inside, its catacombs freeze-branded with distilling polish, scarred. The memories were frozen, locked behind the mental ice that hadn't yet thawed.
Her life had been an eternity of clawing cold. But even a day in that place of deadly chill could quickly come to seem like an eternity, I knew. It could quickly brainwash a person.
We were not impatient for the recovery of her real past, though we did wonder. I could see it in all our eyes; the desire to understand where this girl among us had come from. When she was able, we approved the wandering from her cot to the porch, where she could get some fresh air. 'Fresh' was always debatable, of course. What was there to breathe in but the mischief in the air? But she seemed to appreciate filling her lungs with their regular food instead of icicles and wind, for a change. Armed with a borrowed shawl, she alighted on that porch each afternoon and took to distance-gazing, as if one could hope to find themselves across the miles of cursed land that we sheltered within eyesight.
I joined her on the porch one afternoon, alighting beside her and appointing my gaze likewise. The weed-swept fields around the house were golden. Nothing had ceased looking golden since I returned through the doorway of Ombri's cold, dark prison-world.
“Do you find anything out there?” I inquired, curious what she saw.
Her eyes shifted back and forth over the distance as she searched for an answer. “The stillness...” she began. “I cannot make it speak to me. I don't remember such a stillness. It just...sits there, doesn't it? Always. S
o stagnant.”
I thought a moment. She said it as if that were an unfavorable quality. As if she could not quite come to terms with it. “On the contrary. Stagnancy, if it came to that, would be a miracle upon this land. What you see now is only the calm before the storm. Ominous,” I differentiated, looking at her. “Not stagnant. Many a thing of mischief comes out of that stillness in any given week. You do not want that stillness to speak to you, or it may contrive to sniff you out and swallow you, in addition, in the same exchange.”
With that, I left her to it, returning to the ongoing list of tasks for the day that, upon prudent completion, would ensure no one found themselves at the receiving end of an impromptu speaking-to, sniffing-out, or swallowing issued by that ominous stillness by day's end.
*
With the pipes fixed, I aspired to take my first respectable bath in a matter of years. It had been a rare luxury even back in the day, as there was little need to afford luxuries to the slaves. The bath was upstairs, in a room most easily accessed by the Masters who normally occupied that floor. There was one in the master bedroom, and one in between bedrooms in the hall. I, of course, went for the latter, stuck behind closed doors and in the midst of the holed-up Masters as the other one was.
The weedflowers were glowing for the night, and, free of my duties, I found my way down the hall by candlelight and set the glowing sticks around the washroom to make it comfortable. I shut the door, turned the old lock, and regarded the old tub in the corner. It was dusty, and brittle looking, somehow. Scuffing through the decayed pieces of floor, I went and knelt by its side to pump the water, and to flush out the dust.
I began to pump, paused... Shook it off and continued. But there was no denying it, in the end, and after ignoring the task at hand only to end up eyeing the pump with wariness as I sought to charm forth water, I left off, slumped over the side of the tub. Weary, now, in place of wary. I could feel it in the pump, same way I felt things in everything these days. That additional sensation, the extra substance. There was something in the water. Or things in the water. Who could say for sure, but I could feel it where others were completely oblivious. I could feel the foreign presence rushing up the pipes, through the bones of the house, toward me in that room, seeking to spill out in the bathtub.
I left off just shy of that climax, as the water gurgled in the spout. What manner of minions churned there, protesting their captivity? I was not one to let them out and find out, not that night. But another idea did come from the close encounter. I withdrew my head from my hands, eyed the grumbling spout, thinking. I did not want to know what was in the water, as I was not always so eager to taste the essence of the other things I seemed privileged in discovering, but there was something at my fingertips that I did want to know.
Ombri.
It seemed almost scandalous, contriving to actually use this strange quirk fastened to my fingertips, but for the first time the uncouth ability and my interests collided. I had used it before, I remembered, with Tanen's boots, but that had been a strange uncontrollable urge. Now I was faced with the untainted, logical idea of it. I could look into this girl's past, discover the lost pieces for her. Or for myself. It was perhaps the better route to let her recall her past of her own accord, but that did not mean I could not begin to understand where she came from.
It was strange, knowing I could charm her secrets from her. I could touch her and see things about her that she could not even remember. I looked at my hands, then closed my fingers and pushed myself up from the side of the tub. She would be sleeping now; each evening got the better of her rather swiftly in these, still her early days of recovery. It had been my routine to check on her every night before I retired anyway, so I made the trip downstairs only with slightly altered intentions. I would have done the deed without any outside influence from the beginning, simply out of a sense of responsibility, but Tanen had swiftly given me reason to become protective of her.
I tried not to think about it, but it was impossible to forget the look on his face when he had seen her. Impossible to forget, impossible to decipher, and impossible to ignore. I could only imagine, though I tried hard not to, what he made of the halfbreed. He had stilled, certainly, and gone somewhere far away in his eyes. Some place of hate that did not exist in Manor Dorn? Some place far away simply to escape the reality of his close proximity to these things? He had left her alone thus far, though. Probably because he could never touch such a thing.
She was at peace on her cot, her covers fallen off of one shoulder, her hair sprung across the pillow. I knelt tentatively beside her, considering. Was this a violation I was about to partake in? Did the ability mean I was privileged, or ought I to treat it like a responsibility, a test, and practice discretion?
I had naught the answers, of course, to anything, and so I settled on going through with the experiment. I reached out, and very gently gripped her shoulder.
*
Discretion was not something dead to me, and so I did nothing with the things that I gleaned from Ombri that night. I told no one what I now knew, and it helped with the notion of violation. Her secrets were safe with me. I had done what I needed to investigate what I had brought into our midst, and now things could continue to develop naturally.
I by no means knew everything about her, but I had seen traces of where she came from and who she had been conditioned to be. I was left intrigued, for some of the glimpses I had certainly never expected and could not explain, but as far as I could glean I had at least not drawn something terrible after me by springing her from the prison-world and bringing her here.
When things began to come back to her and a meeting of sorts formed in the room to hear of it, my mind wandered. It was hard to say if it was because of the matching visions that came to me with her story or if it was because I felt a little guilty for already knowing, perhaps unworthy to hear it. I listened along with the others, but was not fully present.
“When the mischief got bad,” the girl said, “the masters removed themselves as best as they could from the infection. They retreated into hiding to preserve themselves, letting the brunt of survival fall to us.”
“They could never be the ones to face the infection head-on,” someone else said in understanding. “That fell to the slaves.”
“Better to compromise you,” someone else said.
“To me, less supervision meant...freedom,” Ombri said. “A chance to get away. So I ran away to the city. I survived there.”
“You lived in the city?”
She nodded. “I survived many shifts. At first, that's all I did – survive them. Then I got a feel for them. I began to ride them.”
“What do you mean 'ride' them?”
“I was good at it. It became like a...sport. I started to call myself 'Shifter'.”
For whose benefit? I wondered in a moment of lucidity. If she was out there all alone, there was no means to document 'calling' oneself anything. But I didn't know how long she lived out there, I reminded myself. One could grow very lonely out there, and begin to question their own motives for survival if they did not glorify their existence somehow.
But 'Shifter' she had been, and worthy of the title. My visions of such could attest to that. I had seen her, in my mind, riding the destructive evolution of the city like a dancer who could walk on water. Like a sport it had been, surfing the movement, always coming out on top.
“And how did you come to be in the snow?” someone prompted.
“A shift put me there,” Ombri responded. “It caught me sleeping, and I couldn't recover in time. I did try, but... this one was a wild stallion. It was not to be trifled with. I rode it, and fell from its back, and it slammed the door in my face.”
*
For the second time, I dreamed of elephants. They assaulted me, and I was forced to throw my hands up in defense, which brought on the visions as my fingers were pummeled by violent, leathery flesh. Two of the great creatures herded me into the city, causing shifts with
their quaking steps. I fell to my knees, my hands hitting the ground, jarring the secrets of Dar'on through me. The elephants reared up and came down, one after the other, to pin my wings to the ground.
The shuffle of glossy feathers fell around me, free at my shoulders. They strained to a rest, a heavy shawl, and I wept ash-dry tears where I had been driven to my knees.
Caught.
Anchored.
Privileged.
T w e n t y - T h r e e –
Arrows
It came to pass, in the days that followed, that Ombri's memory seemed to return in full, along with the rosy glow of life to her cheeks. Now that she was herself again, the perks of her being began to shine through. She was most handy at mending, lending a deft hand to Enda's designated pastime (which had suffered, lately, from arthritic fingers), and she was a whistler. She whistled while she worked, aimless little tunes that passed the time, and switched to more keening tunes when she took to the porch at night to distance-gaze.
It was here that her own quirky little pastime proved itself a true talent – gift, even – when it lent itself to awakening the weedflowers. It was eerie, and beautiful – and, seemingly, possessed with just the right quality of charm to do the trick.
Ombri was a saint. A charming, mystifying little saint delivered to us on the current of blizzard winds, through rubble doors, in the guise of a forsaken halfbreed slave. Guises were big in Dar'on, but things had decidedly taken to speaking for themselves. She was no exception.
*
I came out on the porch for the evening, my calling working like clockwork inside me, and that's when she said it; “Look.”
A Mischief in the Woodwork Page 17
