A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “I wonder if Meme hates me?”

  The words slipped out before she could stop them and hung in the silence before her. Heloise gripped her knife harder. No. She couldn’t think about that right now. She couldn’t allow this sudden rising anger in her heart. Besides, who was she angry at? Her mother?

  No. Not Meme. She couldn’t be angry at Meme . . .

  Three baskets of oak bark to the dye house meant three separate trips back and forth from the Oakwood. The walk to the dye house wasn’t short, and by the time she completed her third delivery, the sun was already high. She paused just out of range of the dye house’s stench, her empty basket on her hip, and considered the prospect of returning home. Meme would probably be out of the spinning shed by now, preparing a meal for her husband and sons.

  “And me,” Heloise whispered. “But I’m not hungry.”

  What a lie that was! Still, Heloise meant to return to Centrecœur that night, and she thought it pointless to walk all the way back home and make a pretense of going to bed when she would only be sneaking out again a few hours later. Better to not return at all. Papa would worry, but Meme would assume she was having herself a good sulk somewhere and would tell him not to go out searching.

  So, her basket still on her hip, Heloise set out for Centrecœur once again.

  Benedict lay in bed. He didn’t like it. Evening had not yet turned into night; there was still plenty of light in the sky. He should be up and hard at work, for he was only getting farther behind. How could he expect to return to university and keep pace with the other lads if he didn’t push himself? That dragon-blasted wind had ruined weeks’ worth of efforts!

  But he couldn’t quite make himself rise.

  Doctor Dupont had looked in upon him a few hours before, tapping his fingertips together and nodding solemnly as though heeding some secret voice of wisdom and doom which Benedict could not hear. He’d checked inside Benedict’s ear again, but apparently the fires of fever and the fever spirit had not yet returned. Which was good, Benedict supposed. Except that it seemed to prove the value of the doctor’s awful prescriptions, which was not good.

  Still, once Benedict downed his dose, the doctor had left, and Benedict was free to sleep.

  In his dreams he thought the shadow figures watched him. But they said nothing, and really, what were dream shadows going to do to him anyway?

  He woke at dusk and stared at the canopy above his bed. He tried to think, but nothing happened, so he simply stared, counting his heartbeats as though each one would be his last.

  Someone had brought him a platter of food and left it on the table at his bedside. Nothing much, he saw upon dull inspection. Doctor Dupont prescribed a strict and unsatisfying diet of fish broth with “healthsome” herbs. Benedict didn’t mind the healthsome herbs so much (though healthsome seemed to be synonymous with bitter in Doctor Dupont’s vocabulary), but he would have liked it better if the fish were still in the fish broth.

  “Are you going to eat that?”

  “Heaven help me, no,” said Benedict. He turned his head on his pillow to look at the girl perched in his window. There wasn’t much point in being surprised at seeing her, so he didn’t bother. “You can have it, if you like boiled fishy-water.”

  “Is there bread to go with it?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  Heloise swung herself down from the window, a more graceful entrance than her previous two, though she exposed rather more of her leg than was quite decent. Benedict, always the gentleman, shut his eyes until he heard her stomping footsteps round the foot of his bed and approach the table and food platter.

  “There’s a bun,” she said. “Looks a bit hard.”

  “Help yourself.”

  Heloise hesitated. It didn’t seem quite the thing, to eat in front of the lord’s son. But her stomach growled, and the bowl was still steaming . . .

  She dunked the bun in the broth to let it soak then ate with a will. Benedict observed her from the corner of his eye as he lay there in bed. Peasants apparently weren’t picky about what they ate. Nor how they ate it for that matter. Lumé, did she not know what a spoon was for?

  Heloise finished sipping the last of the fish broth from the bowl itself and wiped her hand across her mouth. “When does everyone bed down for the night?” she asked.

  “Soon after sundown,” Benedict replied.

  “But you’re already in bed?”

  “As you see.”

  She made a face at him. “My Meme says that those who go to bed before the sun aren’t worth a bowl of pottage come dawn.” She paused before adding, “I think it’s supposed to be a rhyme.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” said Benedict. Slowly he sat up. His trousers were nowhere in sight, but he lacked the energy to be bothered at the moment. His limbs felt shivery, and a certain numbness throbbed in his veins. Nothing much, nothing worth complaining about. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the carved headboard, which proved singularly uncomfortable.

  Heloise watched him, her eyes keen and quick. Benedict was a pale man by nature though blessed with an abundance of freckles. But behind the freckles lurked more than paleness, she thought. Behind the freckles was . . .

  “Here now,” she said, taking a step forward and frowning sternly. “I thought you said you weren’t sick.”

  “I’m not.” Benedict opened one eye and squinted at her. “I’m fit as a fidget.”

  “No, you’re not. You’ve got—you’ve got—” She stopped. For a moment she feared her knees would give out, so to keep herself from landing on the floor, she sat down hard on the edge of his bed, too stunned in that moment even to be surprised at its delightful softness. She stared at the cold color behind his freckles, and she knew exactly what she was looking at.

  “You’ve got the Winter Fever,” she said.

  “Technically, it’s got me,” said Benedict. Then, because he was Benedict, he added, “Sorry. That’s not very funny, is it?” He opened both eyes and gave her a hard look. “I say, you’re not—Oh, dragon’s teeth, you’re not crying?”

  “I’m not,” Heloise snapped and angrily brushed the two tears away. “I’m not. It’s just . . . I didn’t know the gentry folk got our sicknesses.”

  “Don’t be daft,” said Benedict. He reached under one of his pillows and produced a handkerchief which he handed to Heloise. “Here, blow your nose. You look ghastly.”

  Heloise honked loudly, glaring at him as she did so. “How’d you get it?” she asked. “The fever, that is.”

  He shrugged and leaned his head against the uncomfortable carvings again. “It went around at university,” he said. “All my mates . . . well . . . It struck our hall, and three were dead before the Black Tops—that’s what we call our professors, you see—knew what was happening.”

  Suddenly he was talking. Suddenly he was spilling out names he hadn’t spoken in months. He said things he’d scarcely allowed himself to think, all of it pouring from his lips in a quick tumble he could not have suppressed had he tried:

  “Henri, Giles, and Luc. They were dead so fast, I didn’t have time to think about getting sick myself. And then I was sick. And so was my best mate, Victor. And Victor died. And I survived, and they packed me up and sent me home. Sent me here. My father was away at court, and he didn’t come back when he heard. My mother, when she learned I was coming, removed to her people’s house, the Bellamys’, you know. Father doesn’t want to see me sick. Mother doesn’t want to catch my sickness. But they sent Doctor Dupont at the recommendation of the king’s own physician. So that’s something.”

  His voice was heavy and dull, but the words continued to fall from his tongue. “I haven’t heard from any of the lads since. I told Serge to write to me, but he hasn’t, and that was four months ago now. I sometimes wonder if it spread to the other halls. If Serge got it too.”

  Benedict shuddered again and shifted in his bed, trying to find a comfortable position. He had never spoken of these things. N
ot to anyone, not to his manservant and not in any of his stiff and formal letters to his parents. Certainly not to Doctor Dupont. Indeed, he’d intended never to speak of that dark time again, of his loss. What did it matter anyway? It couldn’t be long before he too was dead and joined his fellows.

  Yet here he sat in the gloom of dusk, listening to the echo of his own words poured out into the ear of this grimy peasant girl who sat on his bed and watched him with such wide, knowing eyes.

  He realized there were tears on his own face. “Blast it all,” he growled.

  “Here,” said Heloise, offering back the used handkerchief.

  “Thank you. I’ve got one,” Benedict assured her, and fumbled under his pillow for a spare. He didn’t use it, merely mashed it up in one tight fist. “They say it hasn’t left my body. Not really. The fever, I mean.” His voice was little more than a whisper. “They say it’s gone into . . . hibernation, I think is the word Doctor Dupont used. But it’ll wake up one day, and I probably won’t survive next time. I don’t know when that’ll be. Doctor Dupont thinks it’s a miracle I’ve lasted this long.”

  “Doctor Dupont is a dragon-kissed idiot,” said Heloise.

  The vehemence of her voice startled Benedict, and he looked up sharply at her dirt-streaked face. She gestured furiously, as though wishing the good doctor was in smacking distance even now. “He thinks you’ve got a fire devil in your head, and that’s just stupid! The Winter Fever isn’t a devil. Any simpleton knows that!”

  “I thought all peasants believed . . .” Benedict stopped himself, realizing how desperately condescending he sounded. “Um. So you know about the Winter Fever then, eh?”

  “It killed my sister.”

  “What?” Benedict frowned. “Hold on. Aren’t we wandering about with mirrors and dealing with other worlds to rescue your sister? You’re not, as it were, trying to”—a cold chill ran up his spine—“raise the dead, are you?”

  Heloise didn’t answer this. One hand clutching Benedict’s handkerchief, she wrapped her arms around her skinny body and stared at the pattern on Benedict’s thick counterpane. It was a pattern of running deer. She wondered vaguely what they ran from.

  “It came when we were small and took many of the little ones that winter,” she said softly. “But I was always the stronger one, from the time we were born. I came first, and I was stronger, and I cried, and I ate more. I took all her strength. Hélène didn’t cry, and she ate very little, but she was so good. And I wasn’t. I couldn’t be. I’d got all the strength; Hélène got all the goodness. When the Winter Fever struck, I was so strong, it couldn’t catch me. But Hélène . . . she died in two days.”

  She was buried in the graveyard where all the Flaxmans were eventually laid to rest. A younger Heloise, small and strong, hadn’t understood. She’d never known anyone to die. She’d cried and screamed at her mother, standing over that shallow grave.

  “Don’t throw away my sister!”

  How hard had her small fists struck her mother’s weeping body? Not hard, she was certain. She was strong, yes, but still not yet six years of age. Surely she couldn’t have caused more than the smallest bruise. Yet her mother had crumpled before her on the ground, wailing like a lost soul in the depths of the night.

  “Cruel child!” her father had growled, dragging her back even as she continued to shout and scream for Hélène. “Have you no sense? Have you no pity?”

  Heloise realized that she was no longer staring at the pattern of deer. She was gazing into Benedict’s eyes and he into hers. She saw there, deep down in his gaze, the death of Victor, his best mate. He saw the death of Hélène. Two more dissimilar souls could hardly exist. But in the face of death, they were kindred.

  “Heloise Oakwoman,” said Benedict, and his voice trembled with the intensity of his words when he spoke. “We’re going to find your sister. We’re going to find Evette. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes,” said Heloise. “We’re going to find her all right.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  An awkward silence followed these bold declarations, because while both parties spoke with passion, one was a dying youth and one a ragged peasant girl with straw in her hair and no shoes. Neither was the stuff of heroes and legends, and both knew it. So, though their eyes burned bright for a moment, at the next moment each looked away from the other, Benedict to study the canopy above his bed, Heloise to study his counterpane. A low fire in the hearth provided the only warmth and almost the only light in the room, which fell more deeply into night by the moment.

  “Where’s the branch?” Heloise asked to fill the silence as much as anything.

  “What branch?”

  “The silver branch I showed you last night. The one I brought back from the forest.”

  “Oh. That. I put it in the armoire with the mirror.”

  Heloise waited for what she felt was a patient interval before prodding, “Aren’t you going fetch it?”

  “I’m not wearing my trousers.” Benedict scowled at her but without malice. “And I don’t have the strength to get out of bed just now. You get it.”

  “Really?” Her eagerness propelling her, Heloise sprang to the floor before Benedict could change his mind and hastened across the room to the great armoire. It was an enormous paneled structure, as big as the entire Flaxman fireplace and hearth, built of solid oak harvested from the Oakwood itself and carved by a master craftsman of Canneberges. It had to be a century old or more. All three of its doors were adorned in patterns of wood thrushes and cranberries, and the handles were polished brass.

  Heloise, recalling from which section Benedict had taken the mirror the day before, put up her hand to the middle door. She paused, however, suddenly unwilling to open it. One could almost believe whole kingdoms were contained in such an old and enormous trove! After her visions of the day before, this was not such an odd thought as it might have been.

  “It’s on the middle shelf. You’ll see it right away,” Benedict called from across the room. He was hardly visible in the evening shadows now, for the light from the fire couldn’t quite reach his face. Heloise, looking over her shoulder, could discern only a vague lump in the bed. But she knew she herself was fully visible in the firelight. Unwilling to let the marquis’s own son see her hesitate, she grasped the brass handle firmly and swung the door open.

  The middle portion of the armoire was made up of a row of shelves upon which many fine things rested. Heloise glimpsed these out of the corners of her eyes: elegant belt buckles, embroidered and fur-lined gloves, bottles of ointments the purposes of which she could not begin to fathom (hygiene not being a particularly important aspect of life in the Flaxman household). These and many more treasures, like a whole dragon’s hoard belonging to one young man . . . and yet none of these could capture her attention.

  For the silver branch resting atop the ebony-framed mirror’s glass was the only sight truly worth gazing upon in all that chamber. Possibly in all Canneberges.

  It didn’t look like a real twig. Or rather, Heloise decided at second glance, it looked more real than real. As though some master silversmith had formed every little twist and turn and knob and bump with expert care. Its unfurled leaf, the most delicate filigree, as fine as spider webs, gleamed unnaturally bright.

  Reflected as it was on the surface of the mirror, the branch’s silver light filled the whole armoire and nearly blinded Heloise with its brilliance until her blinking eyes had a chance to adjust.

  “It wasn’t doing that when I put it in there,” Benedict said. He sat upright and, his blankets wrapped in a bundle around him, shuffled down to the end of his bed to gaze over the massive footboard. “It looked fairly normal. Silver, but normal. It didn’t glow.” He glanced nervously toward his door. “Lumé! I hope no one sees the light and comes knocking.”

  Heloise, having no answer to this, reached out one hand which, despite her best efforts, shook. But she plucked up the silver branch. Strange—she could have sworn it had been much bigger
the night before, when it aimed right for her eye! Yet she knew it was the same branch.

  She took up the mirror with her other hand. The room was cold, but both branch and glass felt strangely warm. Not hot, not uncomfortable to the touch. They simply felt as though they had not been sitting in the cold space in which she stood. The early-spring chill of Canneberges did not affect them.

  She held the branch up between two fingers, turning it slowly. It seemed to her, though she could not have said why if asked, that it was somehow incomplete. Not simply that it had been broken off its tree; it seemed to her that it was meant to be part of a whole, the shape of which she could not quite guess.

  It was a puzzle. But then, everything was a puzzle these days.

  Since she couldn’t guarantee that her pockets sported no holes just then—Evette was always the one to check and make certain Heloise was properly mended and put together—Heloise tucked the silver branch into the thickness of her braid. The braid itself was partially undone but still secure enough. She doubted the little coiling twig would easily work itself free of the tangles. Besides, she rather liked the idea of wearing shining silver in her hair. She wondered if it made her look like a Faerie.

  Then she lifted the mirror by its handle and looked into the glass.

  “Oh, dragons!” she cried, whirling around to stare at Benedict.

  He, wrapped in his blankets, frowned back at her. “What’s wrong? What did you see?” He shivered, and not from cold. “Is it . . . is your forest in here as well?”

  “Um,” said Heloise. She didn’t like to answer. She didn’t want to tell him that in the mirror world, yes, his reflected bed stood in the middle of a green glade, the four posters each themselves tall trunks of trees, the canopy a sweep of green branches all intertwined.