Teeth in the Mist

by Dawn Kurtagich

  Her future looms in gloom.

  Time has ceased to have meaning.

  Her mind spins and whirls and the thoughts are chaotic and fragmented. She sees a shape move away from her, but not too far. It stops and stands, watching. Waiting.

  She recognizes his proud horns.

  She can see, through the fog, a glimmer of sharp red, and she rolls over to vomit. His smell is more toxic, more noxious than the slums of London.

  Get away, she wants to say.

  But he stands unmoving.

  She begins to shiver even though the heat pulses through her skin. Everything hurts, everything is sharp and intense—like fire ants crawling and biting from toe to chin. Fleas scamper over her lungs, worms writhe in her brain.

  And then, his voice.

  Daughter, mine.

  She turns to look at the ram, and one word forms.

  “No.”

  Abandoned, abused, admonished. Would I treat such a jewel so poorly? I should burn them in their sleep.

  She is tempted to say it, one little word. Yes. Instead, she closes her eyes and begins to pray.

  Kill me. Let me die.

  Suddenly the ram is at her face, lips pulled back on long yellow teeth, blazing red eyes with their inhuman pupils not two inches from her face.

  I will never let you go. You are mine.

  She screams.

  And screams.

  Yet the mountain remains, insistently silent.

  “Roan—”

  Go away.

  “Roan.”

  No… She wishes to be left alone. To sink into the mire beneath her, to feel the cool turn to cold and then to nothing as she decays. But the voice calls her name again, urgently, and there is pain on her cheek. Someone is shaking her. Or perhaps the mountain is shaking her.

  Time passes. Darkness becomes light becomes darkness again.

  At some point, Roan becomes aware that she no longer feels the damp air on her face and that a warm glowing light is nearby. Warm… so warm. And hot. Too hot.

  She struggles against some kind of confine—a blanket, maybe? Groans when fluid seeps over her lips.

  “You must drink this,” says a voice.

  “Rapley?” she murmurs, and the liquid slips in. She swallows, gags on the bitterness of it.

  “Drink, fey girl. Drink.”

  She opens her mouth and obeys before the darkness swallows her once more.

  The book is rough in her hands, paper crinkled like old skin, heavy as stone. She steels herself before she lifts the cover, straining with the effort. She turns the next page, and the next, and keeps turning, not allowing herself to read the words that were forbidden long ago by the one who taught her.

  I forbid it!

  —But Father—

  Never again! Do you hear me?

  Never again will these Cursèd

  words be read or spoken in this

  dwelling. By God, heed you not?

  —Why then teach me at all?—

  Heed my words, child, or be

  it on your head. And mine.

  We tamper with much worse

  than fire. Speak no more.

  Less than a fortnight hence, he was dead.

  Something compels her to keep turning, as though searching for a favorite page or passage. At last she finds it.

  Not ten pages in, Cage has left scrawled notes in the margin beside a text written in Latin. In places the writing is tidy, controlled, neat. In others, however, the writing is chaotic, scrawled across the text heedless of what it obscures.

  She reads it three times, but her brain is full of cottonweed and thoughts run vaguely into the wind of her mind. One phrase sticks, though: Sickness with use.

  Seamus and his snakes. Her snakes. The spiders, the scorpions, the bats… Had Seamus made himself sick somehow? But use—use of what? She squints and reads the scrawl again. Distinct Conjures. As in, magic. As in, what she was doing… what she and her father had always been doing simply referred to as “Conjuring.”

  Seamus was making himself sick by using—what? His gift with snakes? His—his… Conjure.

  She finds another note and leans close to read it.

  Seamus. Emma? Roan. Rapley? Dr. Maudley?

  Which Conjures? If any?

  She thinks back to every conversation she and Seamus ever had. Conversations about his snakes—the way they came to him when he wanted them. Sometimes when he needed them most. How they kept coming, more and more snakes, as he grew weaker. And when he lost consciousness, they had left without warning. Had his call been cut off?

  She remembers how they had been a kind of barrier to his body, letting only her near. Yet why her? Why did they not let Emma near, though she loved her brother best of all?

  Whatever meaning there was, one thing is confirmed: Seamus was Conjuring. He was like her, as she had sensed from the beginning. And he had been Conjuring the night of his first seizure.

  And Cage had been watching them the whole time. But then why not give Roan lessons too? Why not keep her close? Nothing makes sense.

  A persistent thought racks her: Perhaps the things that slithered, crawled, and skittered had been placing their trust in her. Trusting her to look after Seamus, as they could not do. If so, she had failed them. Seamus had been taken in the night by… something.

  The ram. It was the ram.

  She had seen it. Ram-like.

  Even now, sitting in the dark, knowing that something is wrong with the house—with the whole mountain—she cannot abide it. Is it not more likely that she, the girl who had been taught to Conjure, is the reason such tragedy has befallen her new friends? Is it not more likely that Cage, a man of God, had simply sensed the evil within her? For would not a man of God, working against evil, appear evil to the girl he worked against?

  “That was real,” she whispers to herself. “Seamus is gone. He was taken. It was real. I saw it.”

  She knows he is there before she turns.

  The ram stands eerily still in the raging winds. She can see his nostrils flaring as he scents her on the air. He is waiting. The beast is patient, as God knows well.

  She stumbles from their shelter, leaving Rapley exhausted and asleep on the pile of furs and blankets, and moves forward as one swimming toward the shore.

  She is exhausted, drained, empty—and he knows it. This trial will be hers alone. Even now, the fever, which had burned her skin for near on a week, begins to fade in the cruel winds, which lift her hair from her neck and wash her clean.

  Come, daughter, she hears him say. Come.

  She is ten paces away, can smell his hide; when he turns away, she sees his horns curled and proud and magnificent.

  “Wait,” she calls, but it is not even a whisper. She stumbles, and carries on.

  The ram walks steadily upward, heading for the concealed darkness of the caves at the summit of this Cursèd mountain. At the edge of the blackness, he turns back to look down on her, judging, disapproving.

  “I am not weak!” she calls, her voice carried away on the wind. “I am not weak!” Spittle flies from her chapped lips, landing cold and sticky on her chin.

  The beast stares for one moment and then is gone, disappearing into the dark spaces as if he had never been.

  A blanket comes around her shoulders. “What are you doing?”

  Rapley’s voice, hot in her ear.

  “Do you want to die?”

  “Yes,” she spits. “Yes, I want to die.”

  His lips thin, he gathers the blanket around her roughly, yanking her as he wraps her like a package for the postmaster.

  “I will never let that happen,” he says, his voice low as he trusses her up. Once he is finished, he pulls her closer by her shoulders, his teeth bared. “Never.”

  She stares at him, black eyes meeting gray in a searing battle. Then she spits in his face.

  He yanks her up over his shoulder and lugs her back to the shelter before unceremoniously dumping her beside the embers of
the rapidly cooling fire.

  “You’re a fool,” she says, her mouth contorted into an ugly scowl. “You’re an oaf and a fool!”

  He ignores her and builds the fire up again, strong and steady against the wind.

  Roan’s body gives out after a few moments and she collapses back onto the furs where his body has just lain. She tries not to think about that, but finds that it is all she can think about.

  His face, in slumber, had been softer. Lax with exhaustion, and free of the harsh tension that angles his jaw and digs a line deep into the space between his thick brows.

  “You disgust me,” she says, when she means to say, You’re beautiful.

  “Good,” he mutters. “You’ll stay to tell me so, then.”

  She laughs, bitter and harsh like the winds beyond the slate. “Never. I shall leave this mountain. I shall leave this island. I shall leave this life and I shall leave you!”

  She is satisfied when his hand clenches into a fist and she sees his jaw work beneath the skin.

  “Oh, yes, fool. I shall leave you behind.”

  And she allows herself to relax. If he would force her back to health, she will be damned if she lets him do it with any ease. Damn him! Damn his will to save her. Damn him all the way to hell!

  Later, when the fire had once again cooled to glowing embers and Rapley was somewhere out on the mountain, Roan tries to wriggle herself free of the blanket and Rapley’s damned knots. He had done well, but the blanket is soft and supple, and after much effort and biting with her teeth, she gets an arm free. From there, the rest is simple.

  She pushes the blanket aside and hunches on her haunches, searching the night beyond the opening of the shelter for signs of movement. For signs of the ram. Her eyes are wolfish, her sight good—she has always known this. Nothing stirs but the heavy mists as she pushes off the ground with all her might and races through the opening and into the night like a wolf.

  She has a moment’s delirious freedom before she hits a barrier and flies backward, landing hard on her back. It knocks the wind out of her, paralyzes her, and she can only lie there staring at the sky, mouth wide, willing the air to come. And then his face appears above her, one eyebrow raised.

  “Really?”

  She wheezes in a garbled breath and manages to roll to her side. “Pigeon-livered, gibfaced fool!” she manages.

  He kneels beside her. “I am not above dueling with a girl. If you wish to insult me, then accept the consequences.”

  She leans closer. “Gib. Faced. Fool.”

  He looks down his nose at her. “You’re a child.”

  The last of Roan’s fever blows away with the storms and she regains her appetite. She eats to spite Rapley, knowing that without her strength, she will never get close enough to stab him in the neck. But really, she eats because her hunger is profound, and though she wants to die, her un-willed instinct for self-preservation is fierce. It sickens her.

  Daily, she watches him, observing how he moves, what he eats, where he goes. She sits in the shadows of the shelter each morning before the sun rises and watches him practice with his knives and his small axes. He is precise and strong, but she would be quick, and that is all she needs. He aims high and is a fair bit taller than her. Maybe she would be able to undercut and get him in the armpit. Cut down, deep down, to his heart.

  When he finishes practicing, he always goes hunting or to check his traps, whatever it is he does to bring them the rabbits and small game he has been keeping them alive on. When he is gone, she climbs from the shadows, stretches, and watches for the ram.

  Where did you go?

  There is no reply.

  I am not weak, she thinks again. And she runs over the mountain, back and forth, strengthening her muscles, regaining what has been lost, prepping her lungs for the task ahead.

  Before he returns around sunset, Roan climbs back into the shadows, stacks the fire, and reads the Unbound Book. She has discovered a clasp at the opening of the tome with a small hole for a lock. Since it is unlocked, it is unbound, and so she calls it thus.

  The more she reads, the less she wants to live. The book itself drains her energy, something she realizes on the fourth day of reading it. It is as though the book itself were breathing something out of her. As though reading these cursed pages demands a price. She ought to stop altogether, but finds she cannot. In all her years of asking, or wondering, and of blindly training with her father in dark arts and alchemy, she has never once been given answers.

  Yet here is a book. A living, diseased book that seems to know all about her. She bends low and studies it until she can no longer stand it, and then she closes it, burying it beneath the furs, and collapses into fitful sleep until Rapley wakes her with some new thing to eat.

  Tonight, though… she feels her need for answers outweighing her fatigue. She bends closer, squinting to follow the small, peculiar writing.

  The Unclosed Conjures, she reads, number six. Six unhallowed, unholy gifts for his children, those cursed in this life and the next. Poor, damned souls. Conjure, Rapture, Soother, Corder, Sighter. And the sixth, one that binds them all: Breaker—the most cursed amongst those Unclosed few.

  She looks away and shuts her eyes. Seamus is a Soother. She knows it now. The way he had called the serpents and calmed them so. How scorpions slumbered on his arms and never once stung—how spiders nested in his hair, contented as little kittens.

  And she is now certain Emma is Unclosed as well. Her vague unease in the house and the way Roan had seen her hide inside the wardrobe on one occasion—and how she often flinched when nothing was there. She had thought the behavior odd and superstitious, but now she has to wonder. What had Emma seen—or sensed? Being Unclosed is the only connection she can find among them all, and it fills her with dread.

  Connected by cursed Conjures. Children of devils, indeed.

  Had this been the reason they were chosen? Had Dr. Maudley known? How? Why then had he vanished like those mill workers in the tale? Why then had Seamus been snatched away?

  Who is the grand orchestrator?

  She closes the book, trying to unsee the sigils and symbols that had accompanied the six Conjures—tries not to think about what her Conjure might be—but they seem to be burned into her memory. Indeed, she sees echoes of them hovering before her as though branded in the air the same way she had been branded.

  Crawling forward, she pokes her head around the slate and up toward the caves, now nothing but darkness above. If the ram is there, she cannot see him, but she feels that she is beginning to understand what he was waiting for.

  Chapter 31

  ADAM

  With her returning strength comes a desire to provoke the man who had rescued her. He’d had no right, and she couldn’t help sniping at him until one day he withdraws a long knife. She anticipated that he might try to scare her. He had been using his knives to cut up roots and butcher the rats he caught in his snares for their meals, and she had stolen one two days ago, anticipating this very moment.

  She does not wait for him to attack. Instead she strikes out with her knife, as if to stab him in the chest. He is fast—faster than she expected—and dances out of the way, smacking her knife with his own as he would slap the hand of a naughty child caught stealing. Gritting her teeth, she circles him, then attacks again, faster this time.

  Again, he dances away and slaps her knife down.

  “Fight!” she yells. “Damned coward.”

  He laughs. Laughs.

  She circles, then changes direction and attacks again, this time keeping her knife low and going for the only part a man considers valuable. He dances away again, but she anticipates it and sticks up in a skyward jab, but he moves away again, spinning and tapping her knife twice.

  “Fight me!”

  He seems to still, but doesn’t, and his eyes focus. Then he is at her, spinning his blade around and behind her so fast she can’t keep up. She feels her anger rise—he is playing with her! She is nothing b
ut a toy. She moves as fast as she can with the knife, but he is always there to counter her. In one move that sends her over the edge of her restrained anger, he spins away from her and taps her on the bottom with the knife as he passes by.

  She feels it happening in the same way she did before, with Cage. The power unclenching in her body like a fist opening, like those ropes melting away. She feels the energy rising and knows that she will lift from the ground as before and that, in that moment, she will lose control.

  And as she realizes it, she no longer wants it.

  Oh no… Rapley, no!

  But it is too late.

  She manages to drop the knife and push away, but the power is strong and all consuming. It devours thought, empathy, reasoning, and all emotion except rage. One word pulses in her mind before she loses control completely: Breaker. Breaker. Breaker. The worst of the six and also the culmination and combination of the six.

  As her heels begin to rise from the ground and her arms begin to open and strain against the power, Rapley rushes forward, his eyes full of something unspoken. He grips her arms, and then—she can’t say what happens first. His arms come around her, his eyes blaze, his lips are on hers, and then—the power flees, engulfed and drowned by something much more powerful.

  Their kiss is wild and desperate, something that Roan had been longing for without knowing it. Something she needed, but had denied herself. And Rapley… He kisses her like someone insane, desperately, uncontrollably insane. Then he breaks the kiss and holds her to his chest fiercely, trembling, his hands tangled in her hair. Roan can feel his heart pounding behind the muscles of his chest, and her own is no slower.