A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  Otherwise, her only labor was to wait and see what might come about.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Heloise was tired. She could not remember ever before being this tired.

  Her clothing was still damp, but she couldn’t go home clad in Benedict’s garments. So, after dropping the tunic, the belt, and the slippers on the floor of Grandmem’s shack, she donned her shift and slipped into the overdress, making faces as she did up the laces. She hated the clammy feel of coarse, wet fabric on her skin. But there was nothing else to be done.

  When she finally arrived home, her mother was already up and bent at work over the hearth fire, stirring the great pottage pot. “Well,” she said when Heloise’s shadow fell through the doorway, “so you deign to turn up, do you?”

  “Sorry, Meme,” Heloise said. She hadn’t the energy to invent an excuse or explanation. Her feet dragging, she tried to step around her mother and slip up the loft ladder.

  But Meme caught her by the ankle. “Get down here,” she said. “You may think it fun to drive your father and me half mad with worry. You may think it a lark. But you’ll not have your larks and your laziness too. Get down and feed the pig and chickens. Then you’ll go to the pond and bring up the retted flax. All of it.”

  Heloise opened her mouth to protest. The bundles of flax down in the retting pond were heavy, and normally she had Claude or Clement to help her fetch it up to the spinning shed. But the look in her mother’s eye was not a look to argue with.

  “Yes, Meme,” Heloise sighed, and jumped down from the ladder, staggering several paces with fatigue.

  She couldn’t bother herself to scratch Gutrund after she dumped the slops in the sow’s feed trough. She couldn’t bear to look at her reflection in the water trough; the very idea made her shudder. Rufus the Red and his harem were furious at being kept waiting for their feed, and rooster Rufus was not one to restrain fury when it took him. He aimed a series of sharp pecks at Heloise’s feet and landed several of them. It was enough to make Heloise half wish she’d kept the slippers, just for the protection.

  These tasks complete, there was nothing for it but to make her way down to the retting pond. This was a bit of a walk, following the stream down to a low place where the water pooled in dark murkiness. Sometimes it seemed to Heloise that Canneberges was made up entirely of low places and murky pools. But the cranberry bogs were at least full of health and growth.

  The retting pond was meant for rot.

  The stink of rotted flax rose up to greet her as she approached. Usually Heloise didn’t mind it; to the stinks at the dye house, nothing the retting pond offered up could compare. But today, after she’d just worn Benedict’s sweet-smelling garments, the stink struck her as particularly loathsome. A few weeks ago her father and older brothers had bound great bundles of flax together and left them in the shallow pond to decay. The rot gradually ate away the outer sheath of the stalks, freeing the fibers inside.

  The bundles of flax were slimy and dirty after several weeks of lying in pond scum. Heloise could not think of a single task she hated more than fetching retted flax.

  The water was cold. But the early spring was already warmer now than it had been a few days ago, so stepping into the pond was disgusting, not painful. Heloise squelched down, feeling mud squeeze up between her toes, and grasped the nearest of the bundles. She hauled it up onto land, grimacing at the stench of it. But the stalks had broken, and the fine white fibers hung like the limp hair of drowned maidens, ready to be cleaned, combed, and spun.

  Blinking the exhaustion from her drooping eyes, Heloise hefted the bundle up across her shoulders. Just as well her garment was already soaked through, she decided as she plodded back upstream toward the cottage and the spinning shed. By the time she finished hauling all the bundles, she would be as drenched as she’d been the night before when she climbed out of the strange pool.

  This thought passed through her mind like a dream. She scowled and shook her head, not wanting to consider it. Everything that happened last night and the night before and the night before that . . . all those weary nights, they were so distant suddenly. Here in the real world were rotted flax and spinning sheds and bare cold feet on bare cold dirt. Here was the reality of her life, the life she had always lived, the life she always would live. Far from forests of silver or gold. Far from the sons of lords and tall, proud lion men. Far from—

  Far from Evette.

  Evette whom everyone had forgotten. Even Grandmem. Evette, who possibly never existed.

  Heloise paused, panting, feeling the soggy flax stalks dig into the back of her neck and shoulders. Her eyes stared on up the path to the cottage, but her vision was far away. She saw again the waterfall that was also a staircase. She saw the white phantoms and her sister, one of twelve, clad in a gown of brilliant starlight.

  But that wasn’t Evette. Evette would never wear such a gown, would never be happy in it.

  Her stomach clenched in a painful knot. Heloise closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see that memory, however brief; that memory of her sister on the stair, looking over her shoulder. That memory of a glimpse so swift it might never have happened.

  That glimpse of sorrow. And dread. And fear.

  “Evette,” Heloise whispered. The weight of retted flax seemed to double, bowing her shoulders. She braced herself. Simply keeping on her feet was a monumental effort in that moment. “Evette, what are they doing to you?”

  All manner of ideas flitted through her head, ideas half-formed and dreadful. They passed before her mind’s eye so quickly, skittering and growling like so many nightmares come suddenly to life. They resolved themselves at last into a single image:

  A face wrapped in a shroud so thin that the delicate child’s features could still be seen. A gaping grave beneath a cloud-covered sky.

  “Mortal! Mortal child!”

  The voice calling in the distance could not reach her. Heloise stood like one frozen, staring at the image that was only in her mind but more real than all the reality surrounding her. More real than the very ground upon which she stood.

  “Mortal child! I see you!”

  A wind stirred the treetops. It blew along the surface of the stream. It caught in the bundle on Heloise’s back and tugged so hard that she dropped it. Thus abruptly returned to the present, Heloise gave a scream of surprise and wrath as the cords securing the bundle burst, and rotted flax littered the path. “Oh, dragons and monsters and griffins and things!” she shouted, too tired to be eloquent just then. She whirled about, glaring up at the empty air and cried, “Is that you?”

  “If you mean me, yes, it is,” said the sylph, which was probably the most reasonable response one could offer to such a question.

  Heloise crossed her arms and kicked at a clump of wet flax. “Look what you made me do!” she snarled. “You’re useless, do you know that? You dragon-blasted sylph-beast! Why don’t you go away again? Go blow down a tree or drag in a storm or whatever it is wind-spirits do.”

  The sylph laughed. Delighted once more to be among mortals, it whipped through Heloise’s hair and tickled her under the chin. “I have something for you,” it said. “Open your mouth!”

  Heloise did not obey, but the sylph tried to stick something between her teeth anyway. She spat and slapped at the breezy being, which did about as much good as one might expect. But her hand connected with something solid, and she found herself holding a parchment scroll.

  “For you!” said the sylph. “A gift from the Dame.”

  “A gift?” said Heloise, staring at the scroll. There was a white flower tucked into the securing cord, and it gleamed as bright as her silver and gold branches, brighter even. Like a star fallen from the heavens themselves. “A gift from who?”

  “From the Dame,” the sylph repeated. “I told you.”

  “What dame?”

  “The Dame!” The sylph laughed again as though Heloise were truly the funniest, most foolish thing it had ever encountered. “The Dame of the Ha
ven. She bade me carry this message to you, for your support, she said. For your encouragement.”

  Heloise, her mouth gone dry, tried and failed to moisten her lips. “What is it?”

  “A gift,” said the sylph, and again, “I told you.”

  “But I can’t read,” said Heloise.

  To which the sylph replied with great delight, “Neither can I! It is a mortal magic. Do you know anyone who works such enchantment?”

  Heloise nodded slowly. “Yes. I think I do.”

  Benedict propped his elbows on his desk, held his head in his hands, and pretended not to sleep. It wasn’t much of a pretense, but as long as he kept on telling himself that he was working, he didn’t mind so much when his brain slipped into a doze.

  If he tried to lie down in bed, he knew he wouldn’t sleep at all. He would stare up at the canopy over his head and wonder how long now until he crawled beneath that canopy for the last time . . . and died.

  Like Victor.

  His head came up, and he drew a sharp breath, his eyes struggling to focus on the world around him. Then he cursed and sagged back in his hair, shoulders slumped. Victor. How vivid his friend’s face had appeared before his waking mind. Vivid and yet surreal.

  Victor as he had last seen him, standing before the simple pine coffins of Henri, Giles, and Luc. Coffins which were ready to be loaded into fine carriages and sent home to their families on various estates across the kingdom so that their remains might be elegantly interred in the tombs of their forefathers.

  Victor, who was always at the forefront in the maddest of all their games, stood beside those coffins as the winter snow fell silently on his dark cloak. He lifted eyes already bright with oncoming fever to meet Benedict’s gaze.

  “It could have been us, Ben,” he’d said. “We could be the ones in those boxes.”

  Only a week later, his words became a prophecy fulfilled. A fourth carriage set out through the university’s gates, bearing shroud-wrapped Victor home to his grieving father. Or so Benedict was told. He had been too sick in his bed at the time to know. It was nearly a month before he learned of Victor’s fate; nearly a month before he learned that a sad, snow-filled afternoon spent standing before the coffins of their dead mates would encompass his last memory of his best friend.

  Benedict realized he was staring blankly at the documents before him on his desk. He was recopying all that the sylph had destroyed nearly a week ago. Corrilondian declensions. A labor like no other, for Corrilondian was considered one of the most difficult of the Western languages to learn, full as it was of strong Eastern influences. Victor had hated it and goaded Benedict many a time for his obsessive study of it.

  “When the next war with Corrilond finally gets going,” Victor would say, “you won’t be better able to kill Corrilondian warriors by conjugating verbs as quickly as they do!”

  To which Benedict always laughingly replied, “A good ambassador to Corrilond might be the key to keep that war from starting, don’t you see?”

  Victor would then feign complete dismay at the idea, for it was always the way of boys among the great houses of the kingdom to pretend a longing for warfare and bloodshed; to pretend so hard that sometimes the longing turned real. Benedict played along to a certain extent. He listened to Luc and Giles tell gory stories passed down by their grandfathers of long-ago battles along the border, and he cheered with Henri and Victor when they made bold declarations of future warlike prowess, promising decimation of all that was Corrilondian and, therefore, evil. Why, he even made some declarations of his own, which were toasted among his fellows, and he wondered now if he had lied, or if they had lied, or if any one of them had really known what he believed about war and death.

  Now they were all dead. Even Benedict, really, though he remained upright and breathing. There was no need for a war to prove their courage. They had died gasping in pain, burning up from the inside out. And he had gasped the same as they, and he had cried out in fevered delirium, and he had learned just how far from glorious death was.

  He had looked into Death’s own face as he stood on the threshold of life’s end. But Death had blinked, and Benedict had revived. For a time at least.

  He shivered, though the air pouring through his window wasn’t as cool as it had been a few days before. Spring was already warming in Canneberges, promising a sweltering summer to come. It didn’t seem to matter; Benedict suspected he would shiver for the rest of his life, however long or short that life might be.

  He stared at the Corrilondian declensions so carefully categorized by his own hand: number, case, and gender. The Corrilondian language had many forms of gender—those for people, male and female; those for animals and objects, male and female; those for ideas, including ideas about people, animals, and objects; and those for immortals.

  It was confusing enough without random spirit-wind-monsters destroying his work. He picked up his quill and penknife, trimmed the nib, and reached for his inkwell.

  “Master Benedict!”

  Benedict paused, his quill in midair. He looked over his shoulder to his open window, half expecting to see Heloise’s curly head framed by sunlight. But the windowsill was empty.

  “Master Benedict, are you awake?”

  “Lumé love me,” Benedict muttered, rising from his chair and stepping toward the window. “It’s midday, you daft girl! Someone will see—Arrrrrrgh!”

  This last was as much a cry of rage as of dismay, for, with a sudden bang as it burst through the window and all but shattered the panes of glass, a tremendous wind exploded into his chamber, roaring around the bedposts and laughing like a maniac.

  “Oh, dragons eat—” Benedict cried, but didn’t bother to finish. He dove for his desk and, even as the sylph swept down upon him, tickling and pinching, flung himself over his work. He spilled the inkwell but managed to put his hand down fast enough to redirect the ink flow away from his documents. The last several lines he had written were probably even now emblazoned upon his linen shirt, but he didn’t care! At least some of it would be spared.

  “Get out of there!” Heloise shouted from beyond the window. “Get out of there at once, you wicked thing!”

  The sylph, still laughing, planted a blustery kiss on Benedict’s furious face and darted away again, out into the spring day. Benedict heard it giggling as it darted up the side of the house to play on the roof among the chimneys.

  Benedict wondered briefly: If he were to curse the wind-spirit in Corrilondian, would he use the gender form for ideas or for immortals? Then he shook the thought from his head and picked himself up, surveying the damage. The inkwell was practically emptied onto his floor, but he turned it upright anyway and grabbed a blotter to wipe his umber-stained hand even as he approached the window. He poked his head over the sill and scowled down at Heloise, who stood in muddy water up to her calves, holding her skirts up with one hand and what appeared to be a parchment scroll in the other.

  “What in Lumé’s name do you think you are doing?” Benedict demanded in a whispered shout (which is like a shout, only not so loud). “Did you bring that wind back here on purpose?”

  “Of course not,” said Heloise, scowling up at him from beneath her matted curls. “Don’t be an ox-head.”

  Benedict said, “Forgive me,” before he could stop himself. Then added, just to show he wasn’t a man to be pushed around, “I’m not an ox-head,” which made him feel far more foolish. He wanted to slam the window shut and stomp back to his desk, turning a deaf ear to any protests Heloise might make.

  But Heloise, he did not doubt, could make some noisy protests. And the last thing he needed was to call attention to himself or any of his recent doings, particularly where this wild girl was concerned. So he leaned further out, his stomach resting on the sill, and asked, “Why are you standing down there in broad daylight?”

  “I can’t climb the tree while carrying this,” Heloise said, waving the parchment scroll. As she did so, the little starflower gleamed brightly
. “Take it, and I’ll be up in a smidge.”

  Benedict obeyed almost without thinking, for the shining starflower had caught his eye, and he was interested to see it up close. He leaned out over the sill, stretched out his long arm, and caught hold of the scroll. Stepping back into the room where the shadows made the flower seem brighter, he studied it even as he half listened to the grunting mutters of Heloise as she scrambled up the tree and fell into his room. It was a beautiful blossom indeed, more beautiful even than the silver and gold branches Heloise had brought back with her from the mirror world, for it seemed more fragile somehow.

  Heloise picked herself up and approached Benedict. “Open it,” she said.

  “Where are my slippers?” Benedict asked.

  “At my grandmother’s house. Open it.”

  Benedict frowned but did as he was told, slipping the cord and blossom free and handing both to Heloise. “What is it?” he asked even as he unrolled it.

  “I don’t know,” said Heloise. She added in a mumble, as though she didn’t want him to hear but couldn’t deny the truth, “I can’t read.”

  Benedict shot her a quick glance then fixed his gaze on the characters written on the golden parchment in his hand. He frowned. They were like nothing he had ever before seen. As different from Corrilondian writing as Corrilondian writing was different from his own language. More so, perhaps. He could get no sense of whether they should be read right to left, left to right, up to down, or possibly in zigzags. He didn’t even know if he held the scroll the right way around and tried turning it several angles.

  “What does it say?” Heloise asked. He felt her eager gaze fixed upon his face and realized, rather to his surprise, that he didn’t like to disappoint her. She had come to him with so much confidence in his abilities, confidence he knew he didn’t deserve. After all, what had he done for her other than let her wander about his house in the middle of the night and use his mirror? But she trusted him, and he didn’t like to damage that trust. Though really, he asked himself, why should he care about the opinion of one scrawny peasant girl?