by Alex Gordon
“I sat with him, yes, until the men came for him. Unlike his loving brother, who couldn’t be bothered even once to cross the prison threshold to visit him.” Eliza looked them in the face, her accusers, at least the ones she could see. The others remained just beyond sight, in the darkness, their whispers as soft as the rustle of rats in the straw. “So Adam died. And nothing changed.”
“He was guilty!” Nan cried.
“He was a distraction!” Eliza hesitated as she realized that all watched her, that even the animals had gone silent. “The money was found in his rooms. The clothes. Jane’s locket and Kat’s silver. Under his mattress, where a child could find them. He was smarter than that.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Nan sneer. Heard the mutters of the others. Felt Laura Petersbury’s level examination. “As for gossip, when do any of us recall him saying more than three words together. Our lives held no interest for him. He didn’t care.”
“Interesting.” Laura had resumed her mending. Even during convocation, she had to have something in her hands. “So, who committed those crimes against us? And why?”
Eliza felt Ann Cateman’s dead stare. “The one who did it burned today.” She saw the tension leave Ann’s shoulders, sensed her relief. But she also sensed watchfulness, a renewed sense of alertness, and knew she needed to take care as well. “Discord was as meat and drink to Nicholas Blaine. Our pain sustained him. But like a glutton, he required more and more nourishment as time went on, and that led to his downfall.” She thought back a year, to a party held in the very barn in which they stood, the dancing and the laughter. “Life here was good. We didn’t all love one another as sisters, but we got on. Then he came.” She looked at her jury now, and found a little softening, a slight bend in the rod. “We were played by a master. But now he’s dead.”
As one, all turned to Laura. Even Mistress Ann, who for once seemed almost deferential in her silence.
The woman worked the needle. Then she tied a last knot, cut the thread with her teeth. “You’ve stated your case, Eliza Blaylock, such as it is.” She folded the shirt over her arm, stroking it like a cat. “Time will tell, won’t it?” She turned, the hem of her skirt kicking up dust. “Time will tell.” The others followed her, the mutterings more muted, the animus in backward glances tinged with doubt. Then came the cry of babies, the rattle of pots.
“It’s your turn to choose the afternoon’s reading, Eliza.” Ann Cateman picked up her skirts and followed the rest. “Something humorous might be welcomed, I think. A light tale.”
“Yes, Mistress. Thank you, Mistress.” Eliza kept her eyes lowered until she heard Ann’s footsteps recede. The prickling had deepened to a throb, like a harbinger of a summer storm, and she raised her head slowly to thwart any dizziness.
“You bought yourself a little time. At least until Nan decides her grievances require another airing.” Maude’s voice crackled like straw. “You think the truth will save you?”
Eliza tried to nod, stopping as her head pounded and the floor seemed to shift. “Truth always comes out eventually.”
“Yes. After the lie gets you hanged.” Maude’s gnarled hand shook as she pointed to the departed women. “I will see to you, Eliza Blaylock. I will keep them from you as best I can.” Her hand dropped. “But in return, you will see to Nicholas Blaine.”
Eliza shivered as the wind once more rose and another draft brushed her cheek. She imagined Blaine’s face and form, saw him as clearly as if he stood before her in the flesh. Tall and slim, his hair blacker than Tom’s, his eyes the dark blue of deepest seas. He had cut a fine figure, yes, but his had been the surface beauty of a statue, all marble hardness and chill, a façade behind which lurked cruelty of a sort that Gideon had never experienced. But he’s dead now. And with his dying breath he had struck down Gideon’s menfolk. Surely he had nothing left. Surely his strength had been spent. “The men saw to him. He’s dead.”
“You don’t believe that.” Maude lowered her voice as Timothy Waycross, a half-grown gangle a-swim in his father’s hand-me-down coat, ambled past with a bucket of slop. “And neither do I. It will take more than a lick of flame to vanquish that demonspawn. You told me yourself that he planned this, that he needed to die by fire in order to work his spell.”
“I said so many things.” Memories returned before Eliza could close them off, of the silence that had grown and deepened between her and Tom, until she had felt like a spinster in her own house, untouched and unloved. “Sometimes I think I spouted crazy talk just to goad Tom into speaking to me.”
“You saw him at the end.” Maude’s eyes flickered as the barest hint of envy showed through, the wish that she’d been allowed her own farewell. “He came to you as he died, and that means his last thoughts were of you.”
“I heard him. He asked me to forgive—he asked—” Eliza choked back a sob.
Maude took her hand, squeezing it hard enough to hurt. “Tom was a good man, but his love for you was his weakness as well as his strength, and they turned it against you both.” Shadows hollowed her cheeks and shaded her eyes, rendering her thin face hard and skull-like, a face of judgment. “Think on that, while the storm winds blow. Mourn your Tom while one who helped plan his death doles out your biscuit and salt pork.” She tugged her cloak tighter as another gust shook the walls. “You are the only one of us she fears. Show her that her concerns are not unwarranted. Show her, for your Tom and my George and all the rest. Because she chose that murdering degenerate over her husband, and felt our mourning a fitting dowry.” She turned and strode toward the other side of the barn, where the rest of the women had gathered.
Eliza watched Maude fade into the dimness. Her throat still ached, her limbs felt chill and heavy as stone. She recalled Tom’s voice as she heard it through the mirror, weak as a whisper.
Forgive me.
Eliza closed her eyes and cursed Tom’s weakness even as she longed to see his face, feel his touch. Instead of your own wife, you believed them. She felt it form then, in the center of her heart, like a crystal of ice. The hatred, fed by misery and loss and anger as frigid and raging as Blaine’s magicked storm.
Think on that. Maude Hoard’s voice in her ear.
“I will.” Eliza stood in the darkness as around her, wood walls shuddered and groaned, and Blaine’s winds blew, and Blaine’s snows fell.
THREE DAYS LATER, the storm ended.
Eliza pushed open one of the barn’s side windows and stuck her head through the gap. The cold, fresh air stung her eyes, but she breathed deep even as the tears ran, felt the chill wash away the stink of animals and slop and stale bodies. She had always been sensitive to odors. Pleasant aromas like baking bread turned to songs in her head, soft tunes sung by gentle voices. But strong smells, bad smells, changed to shouts and screams, the clatter of metal and breaking glass. Weeping. The snarls of wild animals.
Eliza had suffered from the affliction for as long as she could remember. As a young girl, she had tried to explain it to her parents more than once. But her mother had scolded her for lying, and her father had warned her never to tell other people such tales lest they call her a witch. And you know what they do to witches, don’t you, my girl? He had towered over her, dark eyes alight with the truth as he knew it to be. They light them like kindling, and laugh as they burn. When he had learned that the traveling farrier who seemed so taken with his only daughter had come from Gideon, he forbade the relationship. A place of strange doings it was, he declaimed, and no child of his would take part in such a sinful exercise.
So we eloped. Eliza had confessed her strangeness to Tom Blaylock, and he called it a gift from the Lady, then asked for her hand. When he told her about Gideon, she thought that at last she would be with people who understood her, that she had found her true home.
Could I have been more wrong? She had been branded an outsider from the first, accused of plundering Gideon’s men and flouting their traditions, their sacred trust. The arrival of the Blaines only sealed her fate.
/>
Eliza rested her elbows on the sill and buried her head in her hands, which already ached from cold. She dreaded what the day would bring, even as she realized that she, that they all, had no choice but to follow the path to the painful end. For a mad moment, she debated crawling out the window and walking to Gideon on her own, even though the cold burned and the wind bit like fangs and she would meet the same fate as Tom before she had gone a half mile.
“At least we won’t have to listen to little Ginny Blake’s incessant howling any longer.”
Eliza flinched, banging the top of her head against the window frame. “Is it time already?” She eased back inside, and massaged her scalp in search of splinters. “How will we get there? There aren’t enough wagons.”
“The older girls will stay behind with the youngest.” Maude Hoard had already donned her coat and muffler. She now pulled on thick gloves, eyes on the task. “The rest of us will head out as soon as the boys clear the way in front of the main doors. Laura and I tried to move the snow ourselves, but we had trouble concentrating.” She turned and started to walk away, then stopped. “You best get ready yourself.”
Eliza pulled shut the window. “I’ll never be ready for this.” She followed her friend to the other side of the barn, and gathered her things.
As the boys cleared the area in front of the barn’s double doors, the women hitched Eli Petrie’s mules to a trio of buckboards, then loaded all the spades, rakes, and hoes they could find. Wheelbarrows. Buckets. Anything that could be used to move snow, clear doorways and alleys so that buildings could be opened, damages assessed.
But there’ll be no graves dug until spring. Eliza fastened her coat, then wrapped her muffler around her neck. The ground is frozen now. At best, they could move the bodies into the meeting-hall catacombs, then spell the rooms so that the temperature remained below freezing until the first thaw.
The bodies. . .
Eliza’s eyes filled. She gripped the skin of the back of her hand and twisted, as she had so many times over the past days. Gasped at the pain, and concentrated on it. Anything to keep her tears from spilling.
But it found her anyway, the image of what awaited her somewhere in Gideon. The body of a black-haired young man bedecked in his Sabbath best, frozen in a witch’s snow.
“Tom.” Eliza’s chest heaved, the first sob escaping.
“Save your tears.”
Eliza turned to find Maude standing in the half dark, watching her.
“Keep your face dry, or the wind and cold will chap your skin.” Maude held a dried apple, a bribe to quiet a child or coax a stubborn beast. “Let him see you at your best, one last time.”
“I shall break down when I find him.” Eliza wiped her eyes. “Will that give her joy, do you think?”
“Let her rejoice as she will. It will make her downfall that much sweeter.” Maude glanced around, then beckoned Eliza closer. “She bit into this.” She held out the apple. “You can see the marks of her teeth.”
Eliza shivered as her hand closed around the dried fruit, its surface as smooth and leathery as old skin. She turned it over, saw the gouging and the ridges. “Why didn’t she finish it?”
“I willed it turn bitter in her mouth. She spit out what she’d bitten, and threw this to the floor.” Maude smiled. “I thought you might find it useful.”
Eliza tucked the apple in her coat pocket. Then she wiped her hand against the rough wool until her skin burned, pulled on her gloves, and swept past Maude while avoiding her eye. If anything angered her more than Ann Cateman’s smug dominion, it was Maude Hoard’s equally smug assurance that Eliza Blaylock could vanquish it.
I can do nothing. Eliza stepped through the barn door into the winter brightness. The sun hit her full in the face, and her eyes stung as though someone had flung acid into them. She had tried to find the words, the strength. She had focused her hatred, probed every part of the shield that Ann Cateman had constructed around the barn, but could find no gap, no weakness. It’s not her power alone. That, she knew as well as she knew what awaited her in Gideon. Blaine gave her something. His talent. His knowledge. Sustenance to see his mistress through until they met again.
Eliza heard the creak of wheels, and stepped aside just as one of the buckboards emerged from the barn. The mules whinnied and snorted, breath shooting from their nostrils like kettle steam, harness bells jingling.
“Eli loved the bells.” Jane Petrie, Nan’s sister-in-law, reined in the beasts while Maude gave Eliza a hand up into the back of the wagon. “I want him to hear us coming.” She twitched the reins as soon as Eliza sat down, and the buckboard lumbered forward, snapping crunches sounding as the wheels broke through the snow crust. “Work your will, my ladies. Lighten this wagon. I don’t relish the thought of spending the morning digging us out of a snowbank.”
One of the boys piped, “I can dig!” The eldest Waycross but one, cheeks reddened and nose like a beet.
“You’ll need your strength to help your mother, James.” Maude leaned close to the boy and tucked the ends of his scarf inside his coat.
“James could dig all day.” Kat Waycross, his mother, forced a smile. “All the way to China and back.” She tugged at the brim of her son’s cap, then ruffled the hair that stuck out from beneath. “All the way to China.” She looked up the road, then closed her eyes and draped her arm across her stomach, six months big with her and Will’s fourth.
“Can we hold firm until we reach town, Janie?” Maude looked over the side to the snowpack beneath, the narrow grooves cut by the wheels. “Two miles is a long way. We’ve never attempted such a distance before.”
“We will hold.” Jane Petrie guided the wagon to the road’s center, well away from the ditches that lined either side, the fallen trees and buried rocks. “If you concentrate, we will hold.” She looked back toward the barn as the second buckboard broke into the light. “We are weightless as feathers, and so we’ll ride atop the snow to Gideon. By the Lady.”
“In her name,” Eliza called out with the rest.
In response to their words, the crackling crunches of hooves and wooden wheels against snow ceased. One of the mules tossed her head as she sensed the sudden lightness, and danced off to the side until Jane reined her in.
Eliza pulled her coat tight around her. A light breeze wafted, but the dry and the cold gave it the bite of a gale. She glanced back at the third and last buckboard, and saw that Ann Cateman had taken the seat next to Nan Petrie. She sat straight and silent, her hands clasped in her lap, expression blank.
Eliza felt in her pocket for the dried apple, clasped it, tasted the bitterness that Maude had willed into it. May you know our grief. May it clothe you like a coat that gives no warmth. As the last words of the curse settled like the snow, she sensed a glimmer of bewilderment, and looked back to find Ann staring at her. She forced herself to nod a greeting, to hide her loathing behind a veneer of regard. Felt the other woman’s probing, hard as a slap, and allowed it in, clearing her mind ahead of it like a bird taking wing ahead of a marauding fox.
As though reading her thoughts, a crow burst out of a thicket, wings beating like a broom against a carpet. It flew alongside the road, coursing the buckboard until they reached the pile of stones that marked the outer boundary of Gideon. It veered off then, and Eliza watched it vanish into the trees. Then she settled back, concentrated on the to-and-fro waft of the buckboard, and tried not to think of what awaited her at journey’s end.
Gideon stood wrapped in silence, a doll’s town swaddled in cotton and packed away. No hoofprint or wheel rut marred the blanket surface of the streets, the alleys between buildings, the wooden sidewalks. Nothing had walked there, on two legs or four, since the day of Blaine’s death.
The buckboards pulled up near the edge of the square as all stared at the stake and the thing tied to it, the only dark amid the whiteness. Any snow that had touched the corpse of Nicholas Blaine had melted, or blown away, or, Eliza suspected, never lit upon it in the fi
rst place.
He controlled it all, even after death. The water that formed the snow. The air that formed the wind. Even as he let the flame consume him. Eliza stepped down from the buckboard, which shuddered as the women and boys disembarked and the spell that had lightened it dissipated.
“Eli!” Jane Petrie’s shout was muffled by the snows. “Where are you?” She headed toward the pyre, Maude at her heels.
“Wait.”
They all stopped, and turned.
“There is a proper way for things to be done, Jane Petrie!” Ann Cateman stood atop her seat, hands on hips.
“We have more pressing matters than propriety, Mistress.” Jane gave the younger woman a look of disgust, then turned back to the square. “Eli!” The other women chimed in, calling their husbands’ names until the air shook with their cries. Then they fell silent. Some looked to Eliza, their expressions hard. Others looked lost, as though they wandered through a place they’d never seen before.
Ann waited until everyone else had disembarked from the buckboards before stepping down. “We must find the Book first.” She strode toward the pyre, brushing past Jane. Then she stopped, surveyed the expanse of blank whiteness before her, and spread her arms wide. “Show me.”
The air, already still, seemed to freeze. Then a pinpoint of light formed near the pyre, shimmering like a star. Ann headed for it, so intent that she lost her power over the snow and sank into it up to her knees. “The one who holds the Book controls Gideon.” She stopped when she reached the light, then knelt and commenced digging with her gloved hands, plunging her arms into the snow to her shoulders. “I am Mistress of Gideon, and the Book is mine to protect. Mine to—” She gasped. “I have it!” She struggled to her feet, the tome in her grip. “I have it!” She raised it above her head, eyes bright. “I will take it for safekeeping.” Before anyone could interfere, she darted atop the snow to the far side of the square, like a water bug across a still stream, and disappeared into Petersbury’s saloon.
