The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  Down on the ground by Snowy’s feet, Angeline felt her face growing hot—for no reason! She had been feeling sick this morning, too. Angeline frowned. She didn’t want to be pregnant if it meant being locked up with Gerta all summer. Silently she counted out nine months on Snowy’s toes. Why, she’d be cooped up here until next spring! No butterflies, no pretty birds, no real outside, and no friends.

  Snowy, awakened by the indignity of having his toes poked one by one, scampered to his feet and began to dart around his mistress’s heels.

  Snowy ready to play now.

  Angeline wasn’t. Her glance shifted from the little dog to the nearest of the fortress walls. Blocks of square-cut stone rose up and up into the pale blue sky. Dark, damp stone. After a moment Angeline looked at the adjoining wall, and then the next one, and then the one after that, spinning around until she was right back at the first one again. Apart from a few differences in arrow slits and crenellations, they all looked just the same. Like jailers.

  Funny how they hadn’t seemed that way when Ederius was here. The scribe would be in Izgard’s camp by now: his painting things getting dirty from lack of care, his cough getting worse from lack of her honey and almond-milk tea.

  Angeline contemplated the walls for a few seconds more and then made a decision. Pulling herself up to her full height, she turned to Gerta and said, “If I do get my menses, that means I’m definitely not pregnant, doesn’t it?”

  Gerta was in the process of tucking her thin cushion under her fat skirts. “Yes.”

  “And if I’m not pregnant, that means I’ll have to go and stay with Izgard until I am?”

  “It’s not what anyone wants, but it may well come to it, for the king dearly needs an heir.” Gerta crossed the courtyard as she spoke. “You shouldn’t worry about that happening, m’lady. My hopes are high that you’re with child.” Picking up Angeline’s two cushions from the bench, she said, “Come on, m’lady, we’ve had quite enough time out-side. It’s getting chilly now the wind’s started cutting from the east.”

  Although Angeline wasn’t feeling chilly at all, she patted her thigh to bring Snowy to heel. “What’s Rhaize like at this time of year?” she asked, following Gerta inside.

  “Use the peat salt, not the sea salt, for the filling,” said Mother Emith from her chair.

  “Peat salt?” Tessa said.

  “Yes. It’s in the jar above the mantel to keep it dry.” Mother Emith was giving Tessa instructions on how to cook plaice and shrimp dumplings for their midday meal. Tessa was anxious to get the whole thing over and done with so she could take a proper look, in full daylight, at the illuminations Marcel had dropped off last night. The manuscript press lay on the table, sunlight slanting across the etched-wood frame, pins loosened ready to be pulled. Emith had given her a peek at one of the patterns last night, but the light wasn’t good and it was very late and they had both decided that any serious examination was best left until the morning.

  Hurrying over to the mantel, Tessa grabbed the jar that Mother Emith had pointed out. Inside she found plain white salt, a little finer than table salt back at home, but essentially the same color and texture.

  Seeing her examining the salt, Mother Emith beamed with pride. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Nothing’s as fine for cooking as peat salt. It’s a little more expensive than the usual, but for special dishes like dumplings and savory custards I wouldn’t use anything else.”

  “What makes it so expensive?” Tessa asked, sprinkling a small portion into the creamy mix for the filling. Mother Emith liked to be asked questions about all things related to cooking: it was how they passed the time whenever Emith was outside chopping wood or scraping hides or seeing to his arlo stocks.

  “The trouble taken to make it is what makes the price so high. The peat burners first have to burn the seawater peat to get the ashes, then they stir the ashes in water until the mixture runs clear, and then boil the whole thing up for a day and a night until there’s nothing left in the pan, only salt.” Mother Emith shook her head in grudging respect. “The only task harder than burning peat is digging it out of the ground in the first place.”

  Tessa nodded absently, only half listening to what Mother Emith said. She’d heard enough stories by now about the way things were done to know that similar tales of drudgery, long hours, and complicated processes involving boiling, burning, scraping, and soaking lay behind even the simplest of household items. Mother Emith had yet to answer one of Tessa’s questions with a simple, “Oh yes, that takes but five minutes to make from scratch.” To her mind that would be sacrilege. Anything not laboriously produced at great expense by a team of hardworking professionals was not worthy of space in her kitchen.

  Transferring the saucepan over to the table, Tessa mixed in the mushrooms, shrimp, shallots, and flaked plaice that would make up the filling for the dumplings. As she stirred the mixture together, the manuscript press kept catching her eye. The corners of vellum peeked out from beneath the wood, their colors aging from snow white to warm amber. Two decades had passed between the painting of the first pattern and the last. Twenty-one years, yet Emith said he could remember the day his master picked up his brush and began the series as if it were yesterday.

  “Deveric chose red to begin,” he said. “I had six other colors mixed and ready, but his hand went straight for the red.”

  Tessa’s own eye fell on the one glimpse of color that was visible from the manuscript press: a thin curl of yellow reaching out toward the corner on the whitest of the leaves. A very bright, glossy yellow the color of her Honda Civic at home.

  “Saffron, my dear,” reminded Mother Emith from her chair. “Don’t forget to add a pinch or two to color the sauce.”

  Tessa blinked. An idea, half-formed in her mind—not really an idea at all, just one thought linked to another by a thread as fluid and tenuous as a string of saliva flashing between teeth—disappeared from her mind upon hearing Mother Emith’s words. By the time the blink was finished she’d forgotten what it was.

  The yellow color on the illumination was the same one used every day in this kitchen: saffron yellow. There was nothing unusual about it at all.

  Opening up the spice box, Tessa searched out a few of the golden crocus stamens and then flaked them into the sauce. Gradually, as she stirred the sauce, the cream took on a pale lemony hue. Mother Emith, had she been standing over Tessa’s shoulder, would probably have advocated adding more saffron to the mix: her eyesight was failing somewhat, and the more subtle tones didn’t register too well. Tessa glanced over at the old lady, remembering how she had taken care of Marcel last night. Perhaps a few more sprinkles wouldn’t go amiss.

  As Tessa’s fingers found their way back to the spice box, Emith walked in the door. He had been out in the yard, doing one or other of those unpleasant tasks that could only be done outdoors: skinning, butchering, plucking, scrubbing the pots with hay and ashes, boiling up bark and lye to make kindling for the fire. Judging from his red face, he had been doing something that involved steam or hot water. Tessa decided against asking him what he’d been up to. She didn’t want to know.

  “You sit down, miss. I’ll finish the dumplings,” he said as he rinsed his hands in small bowl kept by the door. “You’ve had no time to rest all morning.”

  Tessa opened her mouth to protest, but the edge of the manuscript press caught her eye: she dearly wanted a chance to look at the illuminations properly. “I’ll just put the sauce on the fire.”

  Emith moved over and took the saucepan from her. Tessa didn’t object.

  Reaching over, she grabbed the press and then dragged it across the tabletop. The metal pins rattled as it moved. Seen up close, the carvings on the wood were exquisitely detailed: serpents coiled around quills and paintbrushes, their fangs sinking deep into their own tails. Behind her, Tessa was aware of Emith rotating his mother’s chair, turning it away from the window toward the fire. In front of her, the sunlight moved to catch up with the manuscript press, cir
cling onto the frame, her hand, the pin between her fingers.

  She pulled out the first pin, sent it skittering over the table and off into the shadows. The second and third pins followed. The fourth pin was warm to the touch. It wasn’t as loose as the others and needed twisting before it came free. As Tessa pulled it from the frame, a fine mist of sawdust came with it. Free from its constraints, the press cracked softly like a ceiling timber at night. Tessa ran her hand along the top edge, feeling the serpents’ bodies as thin furrows against her skin, and then opened the press like a book.

  The sweet-sharp chemical smell of pigments and binders prickled the inside of her nose as five leaves of vellum fell like playing cards into her hand. The leaves were not large. Tessa had learned enough by now to know that their small size and smooth texture marked them as uterine vellum. Emith said only the most precious of documents were scribed upon the hides of stillborn calves.

  Tessa fanned the leaves out in her hand. It seemed important to see them all at once in her first real look; get a feel for the colors, designs, and patterns that ran through the series as a whole; work out their common elements; and discover how and why they were connected.

  The sunlight, having circled swiftly to catch up with the press, now seemed in no rush to go away. It shone on and through the five pieces of vellum, warming umber-toned inks, glowing on moss-colored greens, shimmering on amethyst and ruby glazes, but most of all glancing off gold.

  Threads of gold ink shot through the series like arteries through an outstretched palm. Lines were joined, bridged, severed, or diverted by hooks and knife edges of gold. The golden pigment seemed to feed the designs, sending spirals spinning and curved lines lashing and knotwork buckling across the page. Looking at the sheer movement in the illuminations made Tessa catch her breath. It was difficult to take it all in.

  Dipping her head downward, she moved even closer to the leaves. She wanted to breathe in the chalk smoke, see the details of the patterns up close. The sunlight reflected off the vellum onto her face, and only when she’d blinked away the dazzle in her eyes did she see the minuscule barbs on the gold. The golden thread that traced its way through each illumination, pattern, border, side panel, and interlace bristled with rosebush thorns.

  It had its tiny little hooks into everything.

  Tessa became aware of a dull weight around her neck. For a moment she thought it was just the strain of holding her head forward for so long, but then she felt something itch against her skin near the base of her throat.

  It was the ring.

  The sunlight slipped away between Tessa’s fingers, leaving the five sheets of vellum to the shade. The illuminations felt thick and rough in her hands, and suddenly she didn’t want to hold them anymore.

  Tessa shivered. She placed the sheets side by side on the tabletop, then reached for the ring around her neck. Its warmth wasn’t a surprise, but the color of the gold was. It matched the pigment used in the illuminations exactly. Its shades, highlights, lowlights, and middle tones were all captured, with perfect precision, on each page.

  And then there were those tiny little barbs. . . .

  Running a finger across the gold, Tessa recalled the image that had sparked an idea minutes earlier: the plume of yellow curling toward the manuscript’s edge. The saffron pigment the same color as her car.

  Even before she looked down at the illuminations, she guessed that the yellow thread would only be on the lightest, and therefore newest, of the leaves.

  She was not mistaken.

  The only illumination containing that particular color was the one Deveric had died completing. One of his drops of blood had splashed across a yellow curve.

  Tessa felt her scalp tighten. Her mouth was as dry as the chalk-finished vellum beneath her hands. Eye muscles aching, she scanned the pattern.

  Yellow spirals were interlaced with a zigzagging line of green. Odd, she thought, that color is usually reserved for plant forms. Yet the meandering peaks of green looked like no other plant designs she had seen. They looked like a string of miniature pines.

  Something shifted in Tessa’s brain. An idea—skirted around earlier but excused as nonsense before it was fully formed—unrolled within her mind like a bolt of cloth. Her car. The Cleveland National Forest. The ring.

  Tessa swallowed hard. She could hardly believe where her thoughts were pushing her. The idea was too fantastic, but even as she tried to dismiss it, it wouldn’t let her go. The pattern portrayed her drive through the forest. It was an illustration of the journey that had led her to the ring.

  A smooth yellow line weaving through a forest of green braid to a spiral of barbed gold.

  The hairs on Tessa’s arm bristled. Her scalp seemed to contract, pulling at her forehead and temples. The skin just behind her ears flushed hot. She could feel the blood pulsing past the tendons in her neck.

  Her eyes darted across the page, searching.

  There were some sections that meant nothing to her—spirals of red, knots of sea blue, and ribbons of waxen violet—but her gaze fell upon the single gold coil that formed the center of the illumination. Surrounding the coil was a fretwork panel of niello ink. The lead-based pigment, consisting of silver, copper, lead, and sulfur, had a drab plate-metal finish one shade darker than slate. The fretwork panel was little more than a ring of dull, gray squares: the safety deposit boxes.

  Tessa’s stomach condensed to a tight, heavy ball. She felt physically sick. Deveric had drawn her here. He had picked up his brush and quill and painted away at her life.

  This illumination was a summons. It was no coincidence she’d found the ring, no coincidence at all. Deveric had led her to it.

  “Emith!” she cried, angry, excited, breathless. “Come here and look at this!”

  Her voice must have sounded strange, for Emith was at her side in an instant. “What is it, miss?”

  Tessa hit the vellum. “This is me—the day I found the ring.” Her knuckle grazed along the yellow line. “This is how I got here.”

  A ripple of anxiety crossed Emith’s features. “I don’t understand, miss.”

  Tessa watched him closely. How much did he know? He looked worried, but then he often looked that way. “Deveric brought me here,” she said, testing the words as she spoke them, seeing if they sounded sane. “This pattern he painted guided me to the ring.”

  Emith began shaking his head.

  “How much do you know about this?” asked Tessa before he had chance to speak.

  “I never questioned my master’s work, miss. It wasn’t my place.”

  “You were afraid of knowing what he did, weren’t you?” Tessa was angry now. Someone had interfered with her life. Some man whom she had never met—and never would meet—had pushed her car along the freeway that day, sweeping everything else aside with the tip of his brush. “Mix your pigments, sharpen your quills, ask no questions, and take no blame. You knew Deveric was interfering in people’s lives. You just didn’t want to be burdened with the details.”

  Emith shrank back from Tessa, visibly upset. “No, miss. It wasn’t like that—Deveric wouldn’t do anything to harm anyone. He was a good man.”

  “He brought me here against my will.”

  “Did he?”

  Emith’s softly spoken question stopped Tessa in her tracks. It had been her decision to put on the ring; Deveric had not forced her hand. And in the five weeks she had been here, she had made no effort to get back. Annoyed at Emith for bringing up the subject and, if she were honest, feeling guilty for not thinking about home in so long, Tessa searched for something cutting to say. “Deveric did hurt me,” she said finally. “He brought on the noises in my head to force me to change my path.”

  As she spoke the words, Tessa’s gaze flicked over the remaining four patterns. A twenty-one-year series, Emith had said.

  The lead ball in Tessa’s stomach turned. The skin on her scalp felt as tight as a drum. Emith was speaking, but she didn’t hear a word he said.

 
; Twenty-one years.

  Grabbing hold of the newest illumination, Tessa brought it within blinking distance of her face and scrutinized the yellow-and-green weave on the page. Running alongside the saffron pigment was a fine corkscrew spiral of gray. Fine as a strand of hair, it was so pale that it looked more like a shadow than a line. Yet it had force. Like a cheese wire, it sliced through objects ten times it size, severing plump yellow veins and entrails of gold.

  Tessa looked down at the other four illuminations. This time she didn’t allow herself to be distracted by the gold, she just searched for more of the fine gray spirals. They were hard to spot at first. The silvery filaments had been applied with a quill pen, not a brush, and as the pigment itself was fluid ink, not paint, the lines produced were so fine that they almost disappeared into the vellum. Burnt in, Emith would have said. Yet once Tessa’s eyes spotted the first gray thread, twisting its way around a border like a chain around a gatepost, she began to see them everywhere. The whole series was marbled with the cobweb-thin coils.

  Taking a deep breath, Tessa told herself they weren’t what she thought. They couldn’t be. Turning to Emith, she asked, “Do you know the dates on these illuminations?”

  Emith, who had stopped speaking some time earlier and now stood over Tessa’s shoulder, keeping watch, didn’t hesitate before answering. “Before my master put ink to parchment, I always scribed the date on the underside. Turn the leaves over and look in the bottom left-hand corner.”

  Before Emith had even finished speaking, Tessa was looking at the date on the newest parchment. Fresh black script read: “At this juncture, being the first day in the Lord’s fifth month, in the thirteen hundredth and fifty-second year since He revealed His True Self, Deveric of Fale began this work with the intent of glorifying, not imitating, the Lord.”