Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Sorrow stares at her for a long moment, furrows his brow uncertainly and blinks his yellow eyes, and “Wouldn’t you want me to?” he asks her, finally.

  “It wouldn’t bother you, eating your best friend?”

  Sorrow pulls another plate from the washtub and frowns, looking down at the dishwater now instead of Starling Jane. He scrubs halfheartedly at the bits of meat and gravy and potatoes clinging to the dented tin and then drops the plate back into the tub.

  “That wasn’t clean, and you know it.”

  “It’s just not a fair question, Jane. Of course, I’d eat you. I mean, speaking hypothetically and all. I’m not saying I wouldn’t miss you, but – ”

  “You’d eat me anyway.”

  “It’d be awful. I’d probably cry the whole time.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Starling Jane says with a sigh, pulling the plate Sorrow didn’t wash out of the tub again. There’s a piece of burnt potato skin big as her thumb stuck to it. “I hope I’d give you indigestion. You’d have it coming.”

  “You really are scared,” Sorrow scowls and spits into the washtub.

  “You’re a disgusting pig, you know that?”

  “Oink,” Sorrow oinks and wrinkles his nostrils.

  “I’m not scared,” Jane says again, because she needs to hear the words. “There’s no reason for me to be scared. I’ve made it past the Harvest Moon and the full Frost Moon. I know my lessons – ”

  “Book lessons don’t get you past the moons. You know that, Jane. Nobody’s ever been confirmed because they got good marks.”

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “It doesn’t help, either.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt,” Jane snarls at him and flings her wire-bristle brush at his head. Sorrow ducks, and it hits the wall behind him and clatters to the floor.

  “You’re crazy,” Sorrow says, and then he hops off his stool, knocking it over in the process. “I might be a pig, but you’re crazy.”

  “You want me to fail. You want me to fail so you can go through all my things and take whatever you want.”

  “You don’t have anything I want,” Sorrow barks defensively and takes a quick step backwards, putting more distance between himself and Starling Jane.

  “Yes, I do. That owl skull the Bailiff brought me from Salem. You want that. You’ve told me more than once that you wish he’d given it to you instead of me.”

  “I just said I liked it, that’s all.”

  “And that Narragansett Indian arrowhead I found in the tunnels last summer, you want that, too, don’t you?”

  “Jane, stop and listen to yourself,” Sorrow pleads and takes another step or two away from the hearth. “I do not want you to fail your Confirmation and die, just so I can have your things. That’s crazy. You’re my friend. And I don’t have a lot of friends.”

  “Friends don’t eat each other!”

  “Someone’s gonna hear you,” Sorrow hisses, and holds a long finger up to his thin black lips. “If old Melpomene finds out you’re making such a racket, we’ll both be scrubbing pots and plates from now till Judgment Day,” and he glances nervously over a shoulder into the shadows waiting just beyond the firelight’s reach.

  “So maybe I don’t care anymore!” Jane shouts at him, and then she reaches into the washtub and yanks out a particularly filthy plate. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life washing dishes for that old bat than wind up in her stew pot or roasting on her spit with a turnip stuffed in my mouth!”

  “You’re not going to fail,” Sorrow says, glancing over his left shoulder again. “You’re not going to fail, and no one’s going to eat you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Go away. Leave me alone,” Jane says, letting the filthy plate slip from her fingers. Soapy, lukewarm dishwater splashes out onto her patchwork apron. “That’s all I want, Sorrow. I want to be alone. I think I’m going to cry, and I don’t want anyone to see. I especially don’t want you to see.”

  “You sure?” Sorrow asks. “Maybe I should stay,” and he sits down on the floor as if she’s just agreed with him when she hasn’t. “I don’t mind if you cry.”

  “Lockheart wasn’t ready,” she whispers. “That’s the difference. He wasn’t ready, and I am.”

  “You bet. I’ve never seen anyone so ready for anything in my whole life.”

  “Liar,” Jane says and glares at him. In the hearth, one of the logs cracks and shifts and, for a moment, the fire flares so brightly that Sorrow has to squint until it settles down again.

  “I wouldn’t eat you,” he tells her. “Not even if they stewed both your kidneys in crabapples and carrots and parsnips and served them to me with mint jelly, I wouldn’t eat you. I swear.”

  “Thank you,” Jane replies, and she tries to smile, but it comes out more of a grimace than a smile. “I wouldn’t eat you, either.”

  “Are you going to throw anything else at me?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m not going to throw anything else at you. Not ever,” and she gets up and retrieves her brush from the floor behind Sorrow’s stool.

  In a life filled past bursting with mysteries – a life where the mysterious and the arcane, the cryptic and the magical, are the rule, not the exception – if anyone were to ever ask Starling Jane what one thing she found the most mysterious, she would probably say the Bailiff. If he has a name, she’s never heard it, this very large, good-natured man with his shiny, bald head and full grey beard, his pudgy link-sausage fingers and rusty iron loop of keys always jangling on his wide belt. Not a vampire nor a ghoul nor any of the other night races, just a man, and Jane’s heard rumors that he’s a child of the Cuckoo, too, a changeling but also something more than a changeling. And there are other rumors – that he’s an exiled demon, or a wizard who’s forgotten most of his sorcery, or an ancient, immortal thing no one’s ever made up a word for – but to Starling Jane he’s just the Bailiff. A link between the yellow house on Benefit Street and other dark houses in other cities, courier for the most precious packages and urgent messages that can be trusted to no one else.

  On the last night before her final rite of Confirmation, the ceremony on the night of the full Hunger Moon, the Bailiff returns from a trip to New Orleans, and after his business with the dead people upstairs and his business with the hounds downstairs, he takes his dinner in the long candlelit dining room where the changeling children and the ghoul pups are fed.

  “You’ll do fine,” he assures Starling Jane, nibbling the last bit of meat from a finger bone. “Everyone gets the shakes before their third moon. It’s natural as mold and molars, and don’t let no one tell you any different.”

  Sorrow stops picking his teeth with a thumb claw. “You heard about Lockheart?” he asks the Bailiff.

  “Everyone’s heard about Lockheart,” a she-pup named Melancholy says and rolls her yellow eyes. “Of course he’s heard about Lockheart, you slubberdegullion.”

  Sorrow snorts and bares his eyeteeth at Melancholy. “What the heck’s a slubberdegullion?” he demands.

  “If you weren’t one, you’d know,” she replies brusquely, and Sorrow growls and tackles her. A moment later and they’re rolling about on the floor between the dinner tables, a blur of fur and insults and dust and someone starts shouting, “Fight! Fight!” so everyone comes scrambling to see.

  Jane keeps her seat and picks indifferently at the green-white mound of boiled cabbage on her plate. “You have heard about Lockheart?” she asks the Bailiff.

  “As it so happens, and with all due respect paid to the sesquipedalian Miss Melancholy down there,” and he glances at the commotion on the dining-room floor, “no, my dear, I haven’t.”

  “Oh,” Starling says and jabs her cabbage with the bent tines of her fork. “He failed his second.”

  “Ah, I see. Well, now, I’d have to say that’s certainly a bloody shame, of one sort or another.”

  “He was scared. He froze up right at th
e start, didn’t even make it past the sword bridge. They had to bring him down in a burlap sack.”

  The Bailiff belches and excuses himself. “Was he a friend of yours?” he asks her.

  “No,” Jane says. “I always thought he was a disgusting little toad.”

  “But now you’re thinking him failing has something to do with you, is that it?”

  “Maybe,” Jane replies. “Or maybe I was scared to start with, and that only made it worse.”

  On the floor, Melancholy pokes Sorrow in his left eye, and he yelps and punches her in the belly.

  “Don’t seem fair, sometimes, does it?” the Bailiff asks, and then he takes a bite of her cabbage.

  “What doesn’t seem fair?”

  “All these trials for them that never asked to be taken away from their rightful mommas and brought down here to the dark, all these tribulations, while others – not naming names, mind you,” but Starling Jane knows from the way he raised his voice when he said “others” that he means Sorrow and Melancholy and all the ghul pups in general. “All they have to do is be born, then watch their p’s and q’s, keep their snouts clean, and not a deadly deed in sight.”

  “Madam Terpsichore says nothing’s fair, and it’s only asking for misery, expecting things to turn out that way.”

  “Does she now?”

  “All the time.”

  “Well, you listen to your teachers, child, but, on the other hand, Madam Terpsichore never had to face what’s waiting down in that pit during the full Hunger Moon, now did she?”

  “No,” Jane says, pushing her plate over to the Bailiff’s side of the table. “Of course not.”

  “See, that’s what really draws the line between you and her, Miss Starling Jane. Not a lot of words written in some old book by gods no one even remembers but the hounds, not the color of your eyes or how sharp your teeth might be. What matters…” and he pauses to finish her cabbage and start on her slice of rhubarb-and-liver pie. Jane pushes Sorrow’s plate across the table to the Bailiff, as well.

  “Thank you,” he says with his mouth full. “I do hate to see good food go to waste. Now, as I was saying, what matters, Miss Jane, what you need to understand come tomorrow night…” and then he stops again to swallow.

  “You really shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” Jane says. “You’ll choke.”

  The Bailiff takes a drink from his cup and nods his bald head. Now there are a few beads of red wine clinging to his whiskers. “My manners ain’t what they used to be,” he says.

  “You were saying, what I need to understand…”

  The Bailiff stops eating, puts his fork down and looks at her, his moss-green eyes like polished gems from the bottom of a deep stream. “You’re a brave girl,” he says, and smiles, “and one day soon you’ll be a fine, brave woman. That’s the difference, and that’s what you need to understand. Madam Terpsichore won’t ever have to prove herself the way you already have. What makes us brave isn’t lacking the good sense to be afraid, it’s looking back at what we’ve lived through and seeing if we faced it well. The ghouls are your masters, and don’t you ever forget that, but they’ll never have your courage, because no one’s ever gonna make them walk the plank, so to speak.”

  And then he reaches into a pocket of his baggy coat and pulls out a small gold coin with a square hole punched in the center. The metal glimmers faintly in the candlelight as he holds it up for Jane to see.

  “I want you to have this,” he says. “But not to keep, mind you. No, when you offer your hands up to old Nidhogg’s mouth tomorrow night, I want you to leave this on his tongue. I can’t say why, but it’s important. Now, do you think you can do that for me?”

  Starling nods her head and takes the coin from his hand. “It’s very pretty,” she says.

  “Don’t you get scared and forget, now. I want you to put that right there on that old serpent’s tongue.”

  “I won’t forget. I promise. Put it on his tongue.”

  The Bailiff smiles again and goes back to eating, and Jane holds the coin tight and watches Sorrow and Melancholy tumbling about on the floor, nipping at each other’s ears, until Madam Melpomene comes to break up the fight.

  In the dream, she watches the children on the beach with their dog, and the crimson thunderheads piling up higher and higher above the darkening sea. Her mother has stopped talking, and, because this has never been part of the dream before, Starling Jane turns to see why. But there’s no one standing behind her now, only the tall grass and the wind whispering furtively through it and the world running on that way forever.

  And then there are no more nights left between Starling Jane and the full Hunger Moon, no more anxious days or hours or minutes, because all moons are inevitable and no amount of fear or desire can forestall their coming. This is the year of her Third Confirmation, her time for the Trial of the Serpent, because she’s survived the first two rites, the Trial of Fire and the Trial of Blades. There are no lessons or chores on the day of a trial, for Jane or any other changeling child, and by the appointed hour the warrens have emptied into the amphitheater carved from solid stone one hundred and fifty feet beneath Federal Hill.

  Jane wears the long silver robes of passage and waits alone with blind, decrepit Master Solace in a tiny curtained alcove on the northern rim of the pit. The air stinks of wet stone and rot and the myrrh smoldering in a small brass pot on the floor. Her face is a mask of soot and drying blood, the red and black runes drawn on her skin by Madam Hippodamia, that she might make the descent with all the most generous blessings of the dark gods. From the alcove she can hear the murmuring crowd and knows that Sorrow’s out there somewhere, crouched nervously on one of the stone benches, and she wishes she were sitting beside him, and it were someone else’s turn to stand before the dragon.

  “It’s almost time, child,” Master Solace barks and blinks at her, his pale, cataract-shrouded eyes the color of butter. “If you are ready, there’s nothing to fear.”

  If I’m ready, she thinks and shuts her eyes tight.

  And then the horn, and the ship’s bell, and the steady thump-thump-thump of the drums begins.

  “Walk true,” Master Solace says and blinks at her again.

  Jane opens her eyes, and the tattered curtain has been pulled back so she can see the torchlight and shadows filling the amphitheater and the pit.

  “Walk this path with no doubt in your heart,” Master Solace says, and then he ushers Starling Jane out of the alcove to stand on a narrow wooden platform jutting out over the abyss. Above and all around her, the murmuring rises to an excited, expectant crescendo, and ghul drum-wraiths hammer at their skins so loudly she wonders that the cavern doesn’t collapse from the noise and bury them all alive. That would be preferable, she thinks. That would be easier than dying alone.

  The drumming stops as abruptly as it began, and gradually the murmuring follows suit, and for a moment or two there’s no sound from the great chamber but Jane’s heartbeat and Master Solace sucking the dull stubs of his teeth. And then one note rings out from the ship’s bell, and “All stand,” Madam Terpsichore says, shouting to the assembled through her bullhorn.

  “Tonight we have come down to this sacred place of truth and choice to witness the deserved confirmation or the just rejection of Mistress Starling Jane of the Providence warrens. It has been eight years since she was delivered to us by the grace of the Cuckoo, and on this night of the full Hunger Moon we shall all know, once and for all, whether she will serve us until the end of her days.”

  “Watch your step, girl,” Master Solace whispers. “It’s a long way down,” and then Jane hears the curtain drawn shut again, and she knows that he’s left her alone on the wooden platform.

  “Go down, Starling Jane,” Madam Terpsichore growls. “Go down into the dark and find the hungry jaws of Nidhogg, the dragon that gnaws the very roots of the world tree, drawing ever closer the final days. Find him, changeling, and ask him if you are worthy.”

  T
hen the ghoul bows once before she pulls the mahogany lever on her right, and far overhead secret machineries begin to grind, the hesitant turning of iron wheels, the interlocking teeth of ancient, rusted gears, and somewhere on the surface a trapdoor opens and moonlight pours into this hollow place inside the earth.

  “Walk true, Starling Jane,” Madam Terpsichore says, and then passes the bullhorn to an underling before she sits down again.

  The moonlight forms a single, brilliant shaft reaching from the vaulted ceiling of the amphitheater to the very bottom of the black pit, argent lunar rays held together by some clever trick of photomancy Jane knows she’ll probably never learn, even if the dragon doesn’t take her hands. The crowd makes no sound whatsoever as she turns right and begins her descent along the steep and rickety catwalk set into the walls of the pit. The drum-wraiths begin drumming again, marking her every footstep with their mallets of bone and ivory.

  Starling Jane keeps to the right side of the catwalk, because she’s afraid of falling, because she’s afraid she might look over the edge and lose her balance. She places one foot after the next, and the next, and the next after that, walking as slowly as she dares, spiraling around the pit, and each circuit is smaller than the last so that the distance to the moonbeam shrinks until she could reach out and brush it with her fingertips. The old planks creak and pop beneath her bare feet, and she tries not to imagine how many decades, how many centuries, it’s been since they were anchored to the rock face.

  And then, at last, she’s standing at the bottom, only one final moment remaining to carry her from the darkness into the blazing white shaft; Jane hesitates a second, half a second, takes a deep breath and lets it out again, and then she steps into the light of the full Hunger Moon.

  It’s stolen my eyes, she thinks. It’s stolen away my eyes and left me as blind as Master Solace. This pure and perfect light distilled and concentrated, focused on the dingy reflecting mirror of her soul. It spills over her, dripping from the silver robe, burning away anything less immaculate than itself. She realizes that she’s crying, crying at the simple beauty of it. When she wipes her cheeks, the light dances in furious motes across the back of her hand, and she sees that she hasn’t gone blind after all. So she kneels on the stone, and the dragon rumbles beneath her like an empty belly waiting to be filled.