A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  The next moment she was across the loft, kneeling at the cedar box, her mother’s box. She flung open the lid and hauled out the white linen wedding dress that was supposed to be Evette’s. That would be Evette’s, dragons eat it, just as soon as she was safely back home! Heloise checked all the folds. She checked them again.

  She tossed the dress aside and reached into the box, feeling all around, into every corner.

  “Dragon’s teeth!” she cursed when her fingers found nothing. She remembered a sight she had scarcely noticed only three days ago after just coming home from the Great House: her brothers sitting quietly. Too quietly. As though they’d just done something very wrong indeed.

  “They broke it. Those dragon-blasted boys broke Meme’s mirror!”

  The dance of Le Sacre goes on forever. Mortals do not know, but this does not change the truth of it. Throughout that long winter night they dance their own small echo of the song, but it never ends. Even when they have finished their paces, packed up their instruments, and gone home to their beds . . . even then the song goes on. The song and the dance.

  I know. I am as much a part of Le Sacre as any of them.

  If only she could hear me clearly! The strain on my spirit is so great, I feel I cannot fight this battle. If she will but come to me, perhaps then I can help her.

  But she must find the mirror.

  THIRTEEN

  Grandmem never went to Le Sacre Night. She hadn’t gone since . . . well, many years ago now. She couldn’t. Especially not the year she’d turned eighteen. That Le Sacre, so very long ago, she’d run away and hidden in the abandoned mill up at north-end. In those ruins she’d crouched all night, listening to the distant wail of the shawm, weeping alone, and whispering over and over again, “Forgive me! Forgive me, Cateline!”

  She’d returned home the next day, offering no answer to any of the questions put to her, no explanation. At last her mother had slapped her face, called her a disgrace, and . . . that was it.

  No one spoke of her absence again. No one asked her why she never went to Le Sacre.

  She lay on her musty pallet this night so many years later, listening to the dark song as it soared and murmured by turns throughout the night. Her eyes were open, staring up through the many cracks and holes in her roof to the stars turning slowly in their own dance high above. But she didn’t see them. It was a different dance that whirled and gyrated across the eye of her memory.

  A timid knock was not enough to draw her attention away from the fantastical visions upon which she gazed. A more forthright tapping made her stir, and she blinked. Then a violent pounding and a desperate cry of “Grandmem! Grandmem, are you awake?” brought her sitting bolt upright.

  “I am now!” she shouted back, her quivering old hands searching about in the dark. “I’ve only got me drawers on. Give me a moment to get decent.”

  “Hurry! Hurry, please!”

  It was Heloise’s voice. Why was she not surprised by this? Grandmem found her shawl and tucked it around herself; not that so flimsy a garment could do anything against the constant cold that shivered her body. But it made her feel more confident. Now why was it she’d expected Heloise to come tonight? Because she had expected her. She’d told herself at sunset, just as she was lying down, “Heloise will be at your door by midnight.”

  It was just midnight. And Grandmem opened her door and gazed down into the face of her granddaughter. Exactly as she had expected. Only she couldn’t guess why.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “You told me to come, Grandmem!” Heloise gasped. She took several steps back. Her grandmother looked quite dreadful in the starlight, her undergarments and long loose hair as white as a ghost’s shroud, her face sagging with shadows. Heloise wasn’t scared, but no one could blame her for being a bit startled. “You told me to come. You told me to bring a mirror, but . . . but I think Clotaire and Clovis broke it! I think they broke it, Grandmem, and—”

  Suddenly she was crying in great, ugly, hiccupping sobs which quite horrified her grandmother, who stood in the doorway and watched this display of emotion with eyes that didn’t see as well as they once had but also with an intuition that had only improved with time. She was horrified because the girl’s breakdown was not unexpected, out of character though it was for sullen Heloise.

  She was horrified because she recognized it. She recognized herself standing there in her granddaughter’s ungainly body.

  “Ah,” she said, placing a shriveled hand on Heloise’s shoulder. Heloise gulped, choked, then flung herself into her grandmother’s arms and clung to her, still sobbing. “Ah,” Grandmem said. “What is her name, then?”

  “Evette!” Heloise wailed. “Evette, Evette, her name is Evette, and they’ve all forgotten!”

  “I’m afraid I have as well,” said Grandmem sadly. “Can’t recall ever meeting an Evette. Other than I think there was a girl on the farm next door when I was growing up, a real brat of a thing and fat as a pig—”

  “No!” Heloise cried, pulling out of Grandmem’s arms and shouting up at her face. “Our Evette! My Evette! My sister, Evette!”

  Grandmem nodded and adjusted her shawl. “I understand, child. I’m sorry that I don’t know her. I’m sure I did once. I don’t anymore though, and I can’t help it.” She leaned down, her cloudy eyes lost in the night’s shadows. It didn’t matter; Heloise felt the intensity of her gaze like the crackle of lightning heat on a dark summer afternoon. She spoke in a whisper, though there was no one around to overhear, at least as far as could be seen: “Unlike the rest of them, I believe you.”

  “Because of Cateline,” Heloise said, choking around remnant sobs. “It happened to Cateline too, didn’t it. And you’re the only one who remembered.”

  Grandmem nodded. “Quite close to right, child,” she said. “Not quite right, but quite close to it. I was almost the only one to remember.”

  Heloise felt her heart rise. The idea that someone, anyone else in all of Canneberges might not have forgotten her sister filled her with such a hope as she couldn’t fully understand just then. “Who else remembers?” she asked. “Who else remembers Evette?”

  “You do,” said Grandmem.

  Heloise thought perhaps her ears were broken or at least a little bent. “Um. No, Grandmem, I asked who else remembers. Besides me.”

  “You do,” Grandmem repeated. The creases around her mouth deepened with a frown. “Where is the mirror, Heloise? I asked you to bring the mirror when you came, didn’t I? I’m almost sure I did.”

  “It’s broken, I told you. I tried to find it, but it’s not where I left it, and I know Clotaire and Clovis broke something the other day, I just know it, and I think they were up in the loft, and I think they dug it out to play with, and . . . it’s . . .”

  Grandmem let out such a sigh and sagged so heavily where she stood that Heloise feared she’d gone and died right there on the spot. But she didn’t die; she merely lost the strength to stand and sat down rather too quickly on the doorstep, groaning in pain. “Grandmem!” Heloise cried, reaching out in a futile effort to catch or support her somehow.

  Grandmem smacked Heloise’s hands away then bowed her head, clutching at her thin hair and skull. She groaned again, and it was a most dreadful sound. It was some while before she could do anything besides sit there and groan.

  At last, however, she managed to raise her face, giving her granddaughter such a baleful glare that Heloise took several paces back. “I told Berthe!” she growled. “I told her when I gave it to her on the day she married that son of mine! I told her to keep it safe! I told her she must give it to her daughter one day! I told her again and again! Why does that fool girl never listen?”

  Heloise felt her throat grow dry. “It—it wasn’t Meme’s fault,” she said. “She kept it hidden from the boys as best she could . . .”

  “Fault? Fault? Who cares about fault?” Grandmem wrung her hands then, and the menacing glare melted into an expression of
sudden pleading. “Tell me, child, please tell me this: Have you met yourself yet? Have you at least done that?”

  “I—I—” How was she supposed to answer such a question?

  Grandmem cursed roundly by the Dragon, rattling off various bits of draconian anatomy fast enough to make Heloise’s head spin. Then she demanded, “Did you ever look into the mirror and see, suddenly, that you were looking back at yourself?”

  Heloise opened her mouth to answer. Her breath caught for a moment. The wink. The wave. She’d tried very hard to forget them, to ignore them. To pretend they’d never happened.

  “I think . . . I think so, Grandmem,” she said slowly. “I think . . . yes, I have met myself.”

  Her grandmother let out a sigh and leaned against the door post. “Oh, great Lights Above be thanked! Small blessings, but we’ll take them.”

  She reached out then and took Heloise by the hand, drawing her closer. “You must find a mirror,” she said. “Somewhere, somehow. The mirror holds the image long after the body is gone. Find a mirror and look inside, look somewhere your sister has been. Anywhere. It’ll show her to you, and you must follow her.”

  Her grip tightened, and her voice became thin and small, almost like a child’s. “You must follow her, Heloise, and don’t stop. Don’t let anything or anyone deter you. All the way to the end, and try not to be frightened. You must, you must. Better to die than to fail. Believe me, I know. The mirror showed me Cateline, and I almost got her back. I was close, child. I was very close. Better to die than . . . better to die . . .”

  Her mind was slipping away. Her gaze, no longer fixed upon Heloise’s face, wandered up to the stars, down to the ground, out across the moonlit flax fields and bogs. Her breath came from her mouth in pale, wafting curls.

  “Grandmem,” Heloise whispered, “who took Evette? Who took Cateline?”

  Grandmem let go of her hand and wrapped both her skinny old arms about herself, rocking to and fro upon the doorstep. But she answered in a voice clear and cold on the dark air: “The Family of Night.”

  FOURTEEN

  As this dire pronouncement fell upon Heloise’s ears, a series of potential reactions presented themselves before her. A distant, quiet part of herself, a piece of her soul that was always watching her over her own shoulder, considered these reactions calmly and thoroughly, all in the space of an instant.

  Fear. That would be a good one. Quite reasonable too under the circumstances. Yes, fear manifesting itself in a mild hysteria would be perfectly—

  Oh no? Well then. Confusion, perhaps. Confusion would fit nicely into this empty headspace where a reaction of some kind must go. Confusion followed by a series of questions: Who? What? Why? Excellent questions all, each of which would need answers sooner or later. Confusion would—

  All right. Fine. But some reaction must be had, and soon now, before another breath was taken. How about numbness? Why not dissolve into a puddle of useless, numb quivering, there on Grandmem’s doorstep? Plenty of advantages to this, the foremost being a lovely excuse to not actually do anything. That’s right. Let the breath out of those tight lungs. Succumb to—

  No! No! Oh, great Lumé . . .

  Heloise exploded.

  “This is all so stupid! Stupid! Wretched! Stupid!” Her voice rang through the night, momentarily drowning out Le Sacre in the distance and filling her own head with a lion’s roar. She couldn’t have said whom she addressed: herself, her grandmother, Evette, or possibly this Family of Night, whoever they were. It didn’t matter. Rage had taken hold now, and she expelled it from her core in great gasping gusts. “Stupid! It’s wrong! It’s wrong and not real and I won’t! I won’t!” What she wouldn’t, she couldn’t say. It didn’t matter just then. “Wretched, stupid . . . Dragons eat it, I won’t, and you can’t make me!”

  Next thing she knew, she was halfway down the dirt path from Grandmem’s shack, still shouting, though as far as she could tell there was no one to hear. She paused, still within sight of Grandmem on the doorstep, and she felt the old woman’s eyes on the back of her head. She waited for Grandmem to call out to her, to summon her back with words of comfort or explanation.

  But it was Grandmem’s silence that reached out to her through the darkness. Silence and nothing more. No answers. No solutions.

  Foolish.

  There went her thoughts again, thinking things she hadn’t meant to think.

  Foolish!

  “Dragons eat you,” Heloise growled, for the rage was still hot if not as high in her head. She kicked a stone just to feel the pain as her bare toe connected with the rough surface. The stone skittered off into the long grass. Limping, she continued down the path and soon felt the night close in behind her so that she was free of Grandmem’s gaze.

  Foolish! Mirror!

  “There isn’t any mirror,” Heloise said. “It was broken! Broken and gone, and I don’t have it anymore! So stop thinking about it. It’s over.”

  Over?

  A long silence followed this thought. A tense sort of silence like water building up behind a dam, mounting more and more pressure until at last—

  FOOLISH!!!

  It was only one word. One thought. But the force of it hitting her head from the inside out sent Heloise staggering and gasping. Though she knew she was alone, she turned in place, staring into the murk around her, searching for something that might have struck her. Anything, beast, man . . . or phantom.

  But all was perfectly still. Or as still as Le Sacre Night can be, with the distant moan of the shawm rising up in the distance. Though she knew it must be false, Heloise couldn’t help feeling that the ground beneath her feet reverberated all the way out here, in this remote corner of the estate, with the beat of peasant footsteps performing their mad dance. In her immediate vicinity, however, there was only the emptiness of cold fields tilled but not yet sown. There was only open countryside full of the expectation of spring not yet realized. There was only loneliness.

  Yet Heloise knew she wasn’t alone.

  The voice in her head—the voice which, up until a moment ago, she had thought was her own—whispered to her again, weakly now, as though the effort of the last blasting word had sapped a great deal of strength. It said: Centrecœur.

  Heloise didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I can’t go back to Centrecœur,” she whispered. “Everyone saw me. Everyone saw how I disrupted the dance, how I spoiled Le Sacre. They’ll . . . they’ll . . .” What would they do? Laugh at her? Point? Shake their heads?

  Did any of these reasons count in the face of her sister’s loss?

  Centrecœur, said the voice in her head. A voice very like her own, but much older, much sadder. Heloise wondered if Grandmem had heard this same voice. She gazed back up the path to her grandmother’s shed, debating whether or not she should return and ask her. But the insistent plucking in her brain increased, impatient for her to be on her way, to waste no more time.

  Mirror!

  “I could find a mirror at Centrecœur,” Heloise whispered. “Master Benedict said he had one.”

  No answer. But the silence was full of anticipation.

  “Why do I need a mirror?”

  Still nothing.

  “All right.” Heloise scowled up at the star-filled sky, scowled at the stars themselves. They didn’t seem particularly intimidated. “Seriously, why do I need a mirror? It’s all stupid! Mirrors and meeting myself and . . . and this Family of Night and whatnot! It’s stupid, and I won’t . . . won’t . . .”

  This time she didn’t need the voice in her head to fill in the answer. She answered for herself, “. . . won’t try to save Evette?”

  The words hung white in the air before her face, spoken softly but with such accusation. Heloise stared at nothing, but it was herself she saw. As though she stepped outside her own body and beheld her small, scrawny, barefooted form standing there at the crossroads. Standing there in that place where the dirt track from Grandmem’s house led on back to the Flaxman cottage.
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  And where the wider road wound away, across the fields, and on at last to Centrecœur.

  Heloise knew suddenly that the seasons had turned. Spring had come. Her feet were flat upon the ground, and she felt the cold rising up through her soles, her knees, into her stomach where it shivered out to every extremity. Really, there was nothing to differentiate between yesterday’s winter and this predawn spring.

  But Spring had come, gently stepping into the place of Winter. Not for any work or summoning on Le Sacre’s part, but simply because that’s what she must do. She was Spring. She would dance her intended dance apart from all care of mortals or immortals alike.

  Le Sacre soared on, lonely and dark, and Heloise knew it suddenly for the lie it was. Le Sacre did not bring the spring. How could it? It was nothing compared to the greatness of turning seasons. Le Sacre—the sacrifice—it was a lie.

  It was a trap.

  Heloise listened to the deep rumble of the timpani rolling across the sky, reaching out to her. There were still tales told in this region, tales of ancient days and ancient practices. Tales so blood-curdling, Heloise found them impossible to believe (though she was no less eager than the next child to lap them up in all their gory glory). These tales spoke of sacrificial drums and the satisfaction of Winter’s wrath. But it wasn’t Winter who had taken Evette.

  Heloise stood in the cold, listening to the distant music, her eyes closed but her memory full of images. She saw again how the shadows of the dancers came alive. She saw the pale white phantoms in the circle with her sister.

  “The Family of Night,” Heloise whispered. At long last the question came, the reasonable question she should have asked right away: “Who is this Family of Night?”

  And what did they want with Evette? What had they wanted with Cateline? Her imagination leapt in at once, offering all sorts of hideous suggestions. Heloise choked on a gasp and opened her eyes to stare down at her own blue-tipped toes.