A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  The sorrow of a sacrifice.

  “Evette!” she cried.

  Her sister stumbled. She caught herself, not quite falling. She turned and saw Heloise burst through the center circle, running toward her, hands outstretched. “Heloise?” Evette gasped, horrified.

  Suddenly she saw. She saw all that Heloise saw and more besides.

  She screamed.

  Heloise flung herself forward, hands grasping for her sister. She caught hold of Evette’s shoulder, and Evette caught hold of her head.

  But then the shadows leapt within the circle and swarmed over all, obliterating the torchlight, obliterating the whiteness of the phantoms. Heloise opened her mouth, shouting in rage and terror, and felt the darkness swarm down her throat and wrap around her heart. She tightened her grip on her sister.

  Then she opened her eyes and found herself lying upon the foot-trampled lawn, surrounded by a crowd of confused and angry faces.

  “Heloise?” It was her father’s voice floating to her from far away. It sounded furious. Distant, but furious. “Heloise, what, by Lumé’s light, are you doing?”

  Heloise coughed. She pushed herself upright even as her father stepped out of his part of the dance and knelt beside her. She felt paternal wrath radiating from his every movement. She didn’t care.

  “Evette!” she cried. “Where is Evette?”

  “You’re not supposed to be here!” her father growled. “You’re not old enough yet for Le Sacre! Get back to your mother and leave the maidens to finish what they started.”

  Heloise found she was on her feet again, pushed from behind. Her head spun, her braids, having lost their pins, fell about her shoulders. The eyes of watching Canneberges were fixed upon her—this wild-haired girl without even a cap on her head, her hair flying madly about her face. This barmy child who dared to interrupt Le Sacre, the sacred dance!

  She thought she might curl up and die. But no. No, she couldn’t do that. She must find—

  “Papa!” she cried, whirling around and grasping her father by the hand. “Papa, where’s Evette? Where did she go? They took her! They took her, Papa! We’ve got to find her!”

  Her father glared at her. “What in Lumé’s name are you talking about? Who is Evette?”

  Let us look away. Let us leave the child gasping and shouting and making a fool of herself. It is an embarrassing scene, and I do not like to observe it.

  For now I will send my gaze across the fields and bogs. I will look beyond into the Oakwood and, in memory if not in fact, hasten along its paths, on to the much greater Wood beyond this world. I will catch hold of a wind and follow where it flees through shadows, skirting the boundaries of night, pursuing paths so winding, so complex that they would be an impenetrable labyrinth to any mortal hero who fell upon them.

  I will follow the sylph with my long gaze, and I will not be lost. Nor will it, for its purpose is fixed firmly in the center of its breezy being, drawing it swiftly and surely onward . . .

  Until at last it reaches the Haven deep in the heart of the Wood Between. There the Dame dwells as she has for centuries now—though this is not so great a span of time to immortal thinking, and she still often feels a veritable newcomer. Nevertheless, she has made a place for herself, and she is known by many names and performs many roles.

  ELEVEN

  The Dame of the Haven sat at her high desk, her slippered feet not quite reaching the ground, her back hunched as she pored over the parchment before her. She was making a copy; before her lay some tale of some distant kingdom, scribbled down in a hasty, unskilled hand, and she struggled with the language in which it was written.

  But slowly the document gave up its secrets to her, and as it did she wrote them down in a much neater hand in a much clearer language. She wrote in the language of Faerie. She was quite possibly the only person in all the worlds—Near, Far, or Between—who remembered how.

  Once upon a time, the Dame had been mortal. But that was several centuries ago now, and she had lived in the Between for so long that her mortality seemed to her like something from a distant dream. A dream she must take care never to forget for fear of losing her heart and soul entirely, but a dream nonetheless.

  She worked in her library. And such a library it was, beyond all compare! For, like all the Between, it was made up of several worlds at the same time, and everything altered depending upon the viewer’s immediate perspective. One moment it would seem a great, towering forest of gold-tipped pine and silver-boughed birch. The next, it was a chamber of magnificent proportions supported by tall carved pillars, with a polished floor of tiny, shining, mural stones depicting scenes fantastic, grotesque, and beautiful by turns.

  But it was almost impossible to notice these strange wonders, for to step into her library is to be immediately overwhelmed by the sight of all those books. All those scrolls. All those carved tablets. Tucked away in the branches and hollow places of the tall trees, lining bookshelves, in many places piled up on the floor or leaning against the pillars. Most of them were written in the Dame’s own hand. (She’d been busy these last few centuries.) Others had been brought to her from far-off places and worlds unimaginable, by people more unimaginable still.

  The library was quiet, as a library should be. Now and then a gentle wind—which may or may not be living—would murmur through the branches, stir the pages, move through the Dame’s long black hair then away again; and she was still at her task, a stern line between her brows as she struggled with the strange language.

  Suddenly small voices exploded all around her, up in the trees and down the passages and corridors of the Haven. At first they were so tiny, she paid no attention. The beings who lived with her in the Haven were chattery by nature, and most of the time their chatter was so inane that she must either laugh or groan or send them from the library. She’d sent them away only moments ago, but they weren’t an altogether obedient lot and were invisible besides. Thus many of them had simply crept between the pages of books or into the cavernous rolls of the larger scrolls and hidden there until the Dame was caught up in her work and forgot them.

  They all began to chatter now, both those within the library and those without. Ten thousand little voices saying: Look what’s come! Look what’s come! Look what’s come to see us!

  The Dame pretended not to hear. But soon enough a dozen or more tiny hands plucked at her sleeve, and some more daring pulled at her hair and the long scarf that covered it. See! See! See what’s come! they said in their many voices.

  “I told you to go away and let me work,” the Dame snapped, shaking a hand as though to wave away a swarm of gnats. But the little ones grabbed at her fingers and laughed. They were invisible, but now and then, when they were excited, their souls gleamed in many-colored lights. They glowed now so that her hand looked as if it were covered in its own miniature Aurora Borealis.

  See what’s coming! they cried.

  The trees up above groaned, their branches moving with sudden violence, and showered leaves down in twirling storm upon the Dame’s head. Startled, she leapt from her stool—then darted back just in time to place a few handy stones over her work before it, too, was strewn across the library floor. She stepped back from the desk, her hands, still covered in little gleaming spirits, clenched into fists.

  “Who is there?” she demanded with no fear in her voice. Here in her library she was strong, and few could enter without her say-so.

  “Please, please!” cried a voice of wind and storm. “Please, I bring a message for you, Dame of the Haven!”

  She recognized the voice of a certain sylph. (She may have been the only person in all creation who could tell one sylph from the next. The sylphs themselves cannot.) “Come down to me,” she called, and raised her hands.

  The sylph, invited in, darted through what was, momentarily at least, an open window. It leapt into her arms like a frightened puppy. Anyone observing would have thought it strange to see the Dame standing there in the middle of the floor with
her arms wrapped around nothing while a wind stirred violently in her hair and blew the scarf from her head. But she was used to this sort of thing, and she cradled the wind and crooned comfortingly to it. She sensed fear radiating from it like fever heat.

  “Now, now,” she said. “What has frightened you so?”

  “Mother Nivien!” the sylph moaned. “She caught me and she hurt me!”

  The Dame frowned at this. She knew, as everyone did, that nothing could catch a sylph, much less hurt it. At least, nothing she had ever before encountered.

  But Nivien . . . it was a name she believed she had heard but one with which she was unfamiliar. The Far World beyond the Wood Between was vast beyond even her comprehension, and she had been laboring to understand it ever since she left her mortality behind.

  “Who is this Mother Nivien?” she asked. “Is that her real name?”

  The sylph shuddered. Granted, as a wind, the difference between its shudder and its natural state was difficult to tell. But the Dame was sensitive, and she felt it.

  “Mother Nivien . . . She Who Walks Before the Night . . .” The sylph’s voice dropped to the merest breath. “Queen of the Nivien Family.”

  “The Family of Night.” The Dame’s frown deepened. “Why would she hurt you?” Tactfully, she did not add the next question that sprang to her tongue: What did you do?

  “I saw her curse,” the sylph replied, wrapping itself around the Dame’s neck. “I saw her curse upon her mortal kin, and I heard her Song, and it was so—”

  “Wait, wait,” the Dame interrupted. “Mortal kin? A Faerie Queen with mortal kin? And what do you mean, a curse? My great Lord forbade fey-kind from working such evil influence upon mortals long ago, back at the very founding of the Near World. Any queen of the Far World knows this well. If she dares to defy my Lord, she will suffer a reckoning!”

  With that, the Dame dropped the sylph (which didn’t matter since a wind can’t fall) and stepped to a nearby cluster of bushes which might, from a slightly different perspective, look like a small-arms cabinet. She pushed aside the branches and plunged her arm inside, withdrawing a long, shining knife. She was much more a woman for the pen than the blade; but she had absolutely no patience for Faerie-kind who tormented mortals. She had seen too much of that, both in her mortal life and since.

  The knife clutched in her hand, she strode toward the library door, ready to go to battle against any and all Faerie queens and their armies. Her invisible companions, moved with pride, gleamed and cheered in thousands of high-pitched Huzzahs!

  But the sylph whipped around to bluster between her and the door. “No, no!” it protested. “She has honored the Law! She has commanded me to tell you, to warn you not to interfere. She has placed a powerful curse, but all according to established Law, which she has honored all these years.”

  “What law is this?” the Dame demanded in a voice as sharp as the blade she clutched. “What law is this that allows mortals to be persecuted? I know of no such law!”

  “It is an old one, older even than sylph-kind,” the sylph told her. “It’s Nivien Law, the Law of the Night. If the Nivien queen places a curse upon mortal-kind, she must allow for a cursebreaker. So long as she provides for the curse’s undoing, she is free by law to work whatever influence she chooses.”

  “A cursebreaker?” said the Dame. “Can anyone serve this role?”

  “No,” said the sylph. “You cannot break the curse yourself, Lady Knight. Only one of the family on whom the curse has been placed. But so long as the cursebreaker fails, the curse may live on . . . forever.”

  “How many cursebreakers have attempted to undo this evil?” the Dame demanded.

  But the sylph did not know the answer to this. It may have known it once, but it wasn’t a remembering sort of creature. It shrugged after the fashion of a wind and moaned sadly.

  So the Dame, her supply of information run short, returned the dagger to its shelf and went instead to root among her many scrolls. She had not yet chronicled anything about the Family of Night, but she did not doubt that something somewhere in the midst of all these piled-up documents could give her more information.

  There was no apparent order to these scrolls or to any of those lying about the library. But the Dame kept them carefully categorized in her mind (and, of course, made many promises to herself to one day get it all shelved and cataloged correctly, promises she’d been making for a good two hundred years at least). She set to work on a pile she mentally classified as the Dark Magic scrolls, unrolling each one in turn and studying its contents.

  Suddenly, she turned and scowled up at the seemingly empty branches and shelves around her. “Make yourselves useful, why don’t you?” she said.

  Ten thousand tiny flutters and ten thousand pairs of hands swooped down and began unrolling scrolls and opening books, gleaming here and there as they worked.

  Whoever this cursebreaker may be, the Dame was determined he or she would be given all help or information allowable. Law or no Law, this curse must not be permitted to continue!

  TWELVE

  Rats were living in the thatch. Heloise was sure of it, because the sound of scurrying feet above her head was bigger and more awful than ever before.

  Mirror.

  Yes, there were certainly rats, and they’d chased off all the mice. Wicked things. She heard them squeaking now and then, and it made her shiver.

  Mirror.

  But she preferred that scrabbling and squeaking by far to the sound of her mother’s voice rising up through the floor beneath her.

  Heloise lay in the dark on her pile of straw, her woolen blanket pulled up to her chin. She stared at the empty straw pile where her sister should be, the abandoned blanket left neatly folded beside it.

  Her mother’s voice sounded furiously beneath her head: “I have never been so humiliated in all my life! That girl deserves switching!”

  A deep rumble from Papa, probably asking Meme to hush, the baby is asleep—

  “I don’t care if I wake all Canneberges! How could she do such a thing? Our whole family will be talked about for months, for years! What young man will ever come calling on her now? We’ll never be able to live this down. We’ll be stuck with her for the rest of our lives!”

  Rumble, rumble, rumble.

  “And what was all that raving about some sister?”

  Rumble, rumble.

  “No, she did not mean Hélène. If she’d meant Hélène she would have said Hélène. She was raving, I tell you. What was that name she kept saying? Evette? Who is this Evette? She’s as crazy as your mother!”

  Heloise squeezed her eyes shut and wished for some way to squeeze her ears shut as well. She stuffed her fingers in them and curled into a tight ball, burying into the straw, roasting under the blanket. She felt as though she ought to remember something, something just on the edge of her memory. Something . . .

  Mirror.

  For the first time ever, possibly since the beginning of the world (or at least the founding of Canneberges, which was practically the same thing in Heloise’s mind), her family had left Le Sacre Night before dawn. Well before dawn. Before midnight, even. The dance would go on, the maidens, only four of them now, taking each other’s place at intervals, the men clashing their canes, the shawm sighing to the heavens. Canneberges would bid in the new season.

  While the Flaxman family stormed home, Heloise caught firmly between her father and her mother.

  She had protested, of course. She had argued and even tried to fight, giving her brother Claude such a punch in the arm that he would have an impressive bruise for weeks to come. But the strength of her limbs was no match for her powerful father; and her spirit was no match for her mother. She wasn’t certain her ears would ever recover from the blistering of Meme’s tongue.

  And all the insults, all the bitter accusations, all the furious demands of “Don’t you ever know your place?” couldn’t overwhelm the one phrase that continued to echo over and over and over in
Heloise’s brain:

  “Who is Evette?”

  None of them had seen it. Not one of them. They all believed her sick with madness to have run out into the middle of Le Sacre like that. None of them remembered Evette.

  Mirror!

  Her heart raced as though she even now fled slavering predators. She needed to remember. But what? What was she forgetting? The rats scurried and squeaked, and her parents argued and growled, and the people of Canneberges went on dancing, dancing, dancing, and not one of them cared about what truly mattered. Her sister. Her sister was . . .

  “No! My sister! My sister! Don’t throw away my sister!”

  A little girl falling, rising, running, falling again. Grey clouds overhead, grey soil under hands. Loose soil recently turned and tossed aside from the gaping hole.

  So dark, so dark, it’s so very dark down in that hole.

  “No, no, no!”

  “. . . my sister.”

  Heloise’s stomach heaved as though she would be sick. But it was just a sob wanting to come out. She swallowed it back, nearly choking on it.

  Then a small, secret, dangerous part of her brain whispered, It’s all your fault. Just like last time.

  Heloise was on her feet in a moment, tossing aside the blanket, scattering straw. She still wore her too-short overdress, not having bothered to remove it before crawling under her blanket. Her hair was wild, pins and braids long since abandoned. And her cap? Where was her cap? The cap Evette had made for her. It was gone . . .

  But it was real! Missing, certainly, but real. She hadn’t made it up, that gift from Evette, given to her on the road to Centrecœur. She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t, and she would prove it to them. And when she had proven it, they would all be amazed, absolutely amazed, that she alone, out of all them, had the presence of mind to . . . to . . .

  MIRROR!

  There it was. Clear in her memory, as clear as though it had just been spoken. In the darkness of the loft Heloise whispered as though in echo, “Mirror.”