A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “When at last my ranting calmed, she took me by the hand and led me to this selfsame meadow. There, to my surprise and delight I beheld none other than my oldest daughter! Seated there upon a low stool, her hands busy—as they often were back in her own world—with needlework.

  “‘Ayodele!’ I cried and ran to her . . . only to discover, alas! She was not fully present in this world. Indeed, she was held in some prison of mind or matter (it hardly makes a difference which in Faerie), unaware of all around her, all time, all thought, all hope or fear. She worked upon her tapestry.

  “‘It is a great magic, this magic of mortals,’ Mother said, standing back and watching as I tried in vain to catch the eye of my daughter. ‘They put down in words or pictures all their memories so that when they die, the memories live on, passed down from generation to generation. It is a weird sort of echantment, but powerful.’

  “I saw then what Mother had done. She had stolen my mortal daughter and harnessed her abilities, abilities beyond those of Faerie-kind. Ayodele stitched at her tapestry, depicting the Sacrificial Dance—and with every stitch she made, she held my spirit close.

  “For there I was in the center of the image, invisible at first glance, but present. The dancers themselves became the folds of my gown, the sky and stars my face, my skin, my eyes. A perfect portrait of me, caught in the magic of mortal memory—and worked to evil purpose by Faerie hands.

  “I whirled upon Mother. Though once I had loved her dearly, in that moment I believe I hated her for what she did to me and to my child. ‘It cannot work forever!’ I declared. ‘Mortal magic does not last throughout all time. It will fade away and be forgotten, and then I will be free.’

  “‘No indeed,’ Mother replied. ‘For you have begun a line of children who will carry your memory down through the ages of this world. You will see, my darling Alala. My plan for your rescue is strong, and it will not be broken.’

  “She left me then in this prison she had crafted for me with such tender care. Though I explored its every corner and crevice for some sign of weakness, I found none. The most made available to me was a single window—a window to the Near World, with a view that looked out upon Canneberges.

  “So through these long centuries I have watched the generations of my line. I have watched sisters stolen. I have sent out my voice to whisper in the ears of the cursebreakers, to aid them as I can. I have learned many a secret and studied the law which binds me.

  “And here I remain, neither dead nor alive. A prisoner of Mother’s love. A prisoner of mortal magic.”

  As Alala told her story, Heloise gazed out the window upon the nighttime landscape of Canneberges. The moonlit fields and peasant cottages, the dye houses, the bogs, all those things so familiar to her, displayed in unreal detail before her new Faerie eyesight. She clung to the sight as she might cling to a lifeline; for out there, in that world beyond this one, was the reality she knew, the reality she had always known, and she longed suddenly to be Heloise Flaxman again, with Heloise Flaxman’s small troubles, hurts, and irritations.

  Heloise Flaxman, with Evette always at her side.

  Alala finished speaking. Heloise felt the princess’s clear eyes fixed upon the side of her face, but she couldn’t make herself look back. Instead she turned away, moving from the window back into the meadow surrounded by the twelve fluttering tapestries. Six hundred years, and still they remained incomplete! Either the maidens were very slow seamstresses or time moved at a different pace where they dwelt.

  Odd, though . . . Evette could not have begun her work until a few days ago, and yet . . . Heloise approached the final of the twelve tapestries, her sister’s handiwork, and saw that it was as near to completion as Ayodele’s. It vividly depicted the peasants of Canneberges performing Le Sacre, and Heloise recognized each face. There was her father clashing canes with Alphonsine Millerman’s oldest brother. On the outskirts of the dance stood the lads with their torches, among them Claude and Clement. She even saw Meme with baby Clive in his sling and Clotaire and Clovis sitting at her feet.

  The tapestry fluttered again in that strange wind which Heloise could not feel. As it moved, she saw how the images and the landscape shifted and whirled—she saw how they took on a new shape and became, however briefly, a perfect image of Princess Imoo-Alala herself, caught forever in mortal memory by this mortal magic worked by Evette with such skill.

  Evette, who now had her dream come true.

  Heloise scowled at this thought, her fist clenching the three-part branch tighter than ever. This was so wrong, so evil! Such a cruel way to twist the simple desires of a kind girl’s heart, to . . . to . . . to punish her for wanting to be something more than she was! This, of all the cruelties wrought by the Family of Night was, Heloise decided, the absolute cruelest. And to Evette, of all people!

  For a moment she was so lost in her anger that her Faerie sight clouded over with a red haze. But then she felt Princess Imoo-Alala’s hand on her shoulder, and the princess whispered softly inside her head, “Look again. Look at what your sister has done.”

  Drawing strength from that ancient, ageless voice, Heloise breathed deeply, shook her head, and did as she was told. She looked at the tapestry, which hung motionless again.

  She saw little red cranberry blossoms.

  They were rendered so small compared with the hugeness of the tapestry, it was easy at first to miss them. But there they were, picked out in bright scarlet thread, bright as the finest thread brought up from the south-end dye house, brighter even.

  Heloise stepped closer. The tapestry hung in another realm or world, but unlike her phantom sister, it displayed every color in brilliant hues. The cranberry blossoms edged the border even as they edged the border of Heloise’s own shift and the linen cap her sister had given her on her birthday. Following that trailing edgework, Heloise’s gaze traced the top of the tapestry, down the long side.

  Then the cranberry blossoms led her gaze into the heart of the tapestry, like a path drawing her eye. They trailed delicately through the many dancing feet, and Heloise could almost hear the Le Sacre song playing as she followed those blossoms, followed Evette’s sure hand. The rest of this work may be wrought of magic . . . but the only magic in those blossoms was Evette’s humble sweetness, her eye for simple beauty.

  The blossoms led to the centermost ring where Evette danced. Except it wasn’t Evette who Heloise saw depicted there in silken detail.

  Heloise gasped and took a step back, then another, then a third. She stepped back far enough that she could take in the whole of the image, the many dancers, the stones of Centrecœur, the green grass of the lawn.

  But in the center she saw herself; her own wild head of hair, each curl rendered in perfect clarity with threads of gold and brown and copper. She saw herself dancing Le Sacre, her hands upraised, her feet stamping the ground until they bled drops of blood as bright as the cranberry blossoms. On her face she saw . . . she saw . . .

  “How many died, did you say?” she asked. “Trying to save their sisters?”

  “Three,” Alala answered. “And the other three wished they had.”

  Grandmem’s voice in her memory spoke with shuddering truth: “Better to die than to fail.”

  Heloise whispered in echo, “Better to die . . .”

  Her image in the tapestry gazed out at her from the swirling dance. She saw that her face was twisted with pain.

  The candle stub in his pocket was cold and dead as a stone, and Benedict hadn’t thought to bring a flint with him. So when Heloise carried her three-part branch with her into the Tower chamber and the door shut behind her, he was left at the top of the narrow stairwell in absolute, pitch blackness.

  He wasn’t scared of the dark. He wasn’t scared of many things. But the Tower was very old, and he suspected that many men had died on this narrow spiral staircase in battles of ages past. When the wind moved outside, one had the strong sensation that the whole structure was going to crumble to the ground, drag
ging with it the sighing souls of ghosts long dead.

  “Iubdan’s beard,” he growled. He couldn’t say how long it had been since Heloise vanished into the room. He’d fumbled his way up to the door and tried the latch, but it was locked again. Several heartbeats passed, and they seemed to count by hours.

  “Heloise?” he called softly, wondering if she could hear him through the heavy wood. Probably not, but he daren’t raise his voice. He didn’t want it to echo down the stairwell and capture someone’s attention. He tapped gently on the wood with his knuckles. “Are you in there?”

  The door swung open, and Benedict was blinded by the brilliant light shining out. He vaguely discerned a scrawny form crowned in wild hair. “Heloise?” he hazarded.

  “Dragons!” she snapped, and it was definitely her voice. But the next moment, she slammed the door, and he was plunged again into darkness.

  Well. She was alive. That had to be good, right? And there was definitely something in that chamber, something beyond stone walls and cold floors. So maybe that was good as well?

  Benedict sat down on the top step. It was very cold, which, despite Doctor Dupont’s advice to the contrary, he didn’t think was good for him. He was so tired, though he knew there was no chance he would sleep that night even if he left Heloise where she was and made his way back to his bed. No, he would have to wait for her. He had to make certain she was . . .

  Perhaps he dozed off; not in sleep exactly, but in a sort of numb daze. In that daze the cold felt strangely pleasant, a sweet cooling on his skin which still bore the memory of that red-lattice rash and that inside-out burn. It was so dark up here, one had to wonder if this was what it would be like to die. Henri, Giles, Luc, and Victor—is this what they felt, deep down under the earth, wrapped in their shrouds?

  The door opened again. It swung so quietly on its hinges that Benedict didn’t notice and remained where he sat, gazing into the darkness.

  Then Heloise growled behind him, “You’re blocking my way.”

  Benedict spun around on the stair, gasping, “Oh, forgive me!” on reflex. He nearly slipped down several steps in his haste to rouse himself, to rise. Somehow he got himself upright and made room for her, though there was little enough room to be made. Briefly he glimpsed the chamber behind her—and there was no light, no warm glow such as he believed he’d seen when she first entered. There was only a pale square of moonlight falling through the window upon a cold, bare floor.

  Heloise, her face illuminated by the silver-gold-and-diamond branch, scowled at him. Or rather, not at him, he decided the next moment as she slipped past, drawing the door shut behind her. This was an expansive sort of scowl aimed at the general world, at whatever chanced to fall under her eye.

  Heloise stomped down the stair, and Benedict, compressing himself into the smallest shapes he could manage, squeezed after her. “What did you see?” he asked, eager to hear her answer but just as eager not to be overheard by anyone else. When she refused to reply, he reached out and caught her by the shoulder. She stopped moving, frozen in his grasp. At first he thought she was angry, never a bad supposition where Heloise was concerned.

  But then he thought, She’s frightened. She’s more frightened than I have ever seen her. And he had seen her dissolve into a quivering lump of tears, sobbing even as he held her. But that had been . . . nerves, maybe. Or another manifestation of her ever-present anger. A touch of fear, to be sure, but nothing like this. Nothing like this dread so palpable that at the merest touch he felt a jolt of terror shoot up through his bones and tingle in his brain.

  “What did you see?” he whispered, putting his head down close to her shoulder and ear so that he need not speak too loudly. “Did you find your sister? Did you—”

  “I learned what I must do,” Heloise answered. She seemed to shrink under his hand. “I learned how to rescue Evette.”

  “How?”

  She turned her head to the side so that she could look at him. The three-part branch illuminated only half of her face, leaving the other half in deep shadow save for the eyes, both of which shone with brilliant force.

  “I must dance Le Sacre,” she said. “I must dance it all night through.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The sylph wound its way with deep sighs and low whispers across the rooftops of Centrecœur, around the chimneys, over the eves. It felt the pulse of Nivien wrath, the potent power of the curse shimmering over all of Canneberges. The memory of Mother’s hand grasping its breezy body made it shudder, and it found itself creeping with unprecedented caution up one side of the house and down the other, skimming along the fetid moat and through the clusters of false-unicorn flowers. Its memory was too short for it to recall why it was there exactly—but it recalled Mother well enough.

  And it recalled the Dame of the Haven’s final injunction: “Help the mortal girl if you can.”

  “Help her, help her, help her.” The sylph repeated the phrase to itself as it blew ripples across the surface of the moat and, rounding a corner of the house, approached the window through which the mortal girl had disappeared. But how could it help her? What help did she need? Perhaps it should catch her up, carry her away to the Haven, and deposit her before the feet of the Dame herself. That would be helpful. The Dame was kind, and she would take good care of the mortal.

  With this thought half-formed in what passed for the sylph’s mind, it crept up the tree, skipped along the branch, and pushed at the window. It was shut and fastened. With one really good blast the sylph could probably get it open. But some sense almost akin to reason kept it quiet. Rather than blasting, it peered quietly through the glass and into Benedict’s room.

  There sat the mortal girl and another of her kind (sylphs struggle with the concept of gender, so this one thought of Benedict as “the other her”) on the floor before a flickering hearth fire.

  “Help her, help her,” the sylph whispered again. But it had already forgotten its intention of moments earlier, and no new idea presented itself. What could it do to please the Dame? What could it do that wouldn’t also incite the rage of Mother?

  So it wafted outside the window in a tangle of uncertainty, while Heloise and Benedict, unaware of their invisible observer, pursued their heated, low-voiced discussion.

  “You know it’s impossible,” Benedict said. He sat cross-legged, wrapped in his cloak, and couldn’t help the occasional shiver that started in his gut and unfurled itself through his veins and limbs. He ignored it as well as he could and leaned closer to Heloise, seeking a better view of her face behind her curtain of hair. “No one can dance Le Sacre all night through. You’d faint from exhaustion before you made it halfway.”

  Heloise shook her head. She held the three-part branch in her lap and turned it gently so that the firelight would flicker first on the silver then on the gold then on the diamond twists and leaves. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think, since it’s a Faerie dance, I’ll be able to keep going.”

  “Because you’re part Faerie yourself?”

  Heloise’s gaze flicked to his face. “You are too,” she said. “We both are, from way back when. We’re both from the line of Rufus the Red and the Princess of Night.”

  Benedict stared at her, his mind spinning with these new thoughts and ideas. Just a week ago if anyone had told him a story so daft, he would have laughed outright. But now . . .

  “So we’re some sort of cousins?” he said. Though he was surprised to realize it, he found he didn’t like the idea. At first he thought this was pure snobbery, the distaste of learning his blood was not so far removed from that of this dirty urchin girl. But on second thought, no. No, that wasn’t the reason he disliked the idea. Not even close.

  He blushed and scratched his ear. “I suppose six hundred years is a bit of a gap. Not much family connection by this time, right?”

  Heloise paid him no heed. She seemed to be studying the branch with an intense fixation, though in reality she didn’t even see it. Her mind was too busy
forming thoughts, making connections, considering all she had learned both from Princess Alala’s story and from conjecture. Since leaving the Tower behind she hadn’t heard even the faintest murmur of the princess’s voice in her head, and she half-wondered if she was alone now. If, having told her tale, Alala’s role was finished, leaving the rest up to Heloise to figure out on her own.

  Well, she would figure it out. She’d managed to come this far, hadn’t she? Sure, she’d had help along the way, but she’d done it. She was the strong one. Stronger than she thought, even. Strong enough to dance a Faerie dance. She knew the steps well enough. Every girl in Canneberges knew the steps of Le Sacre.

  The Sacrificial Dance.

  Perhaps that was the secret to breaking this curse: death. A willing death, a sacrifice, so that her sister could be free. A death for a life. Alala could then be liberated from that beautiful pocket world, liberated to die at last and pass beyond the Final Water. A death for a death. There was a strange and awful symmetry about the idea, a sense of rightness that fit with the rest of this weird adventure. Perhaps she was meant to die.

  Except . . .

  “Three died,” she whispered. “Three wished they had died.”

  If the other cursebreakers had tried to dance Le Sacre as she even now intended to do, their deaths had been insufficient. Three had given their lives, and the curse had lived on. In Mother’s eyes, a mortal death could never suffice for the life of her beloved daughter.

  What was the answer then? Le Sacre for sure, but not the sacrifice?

  She felt Benedict’s gaze on the side of her head. She looked up at him, scowling. “What?”

  He turned away toward the fire, and his cheeks were brightly flushed. “I was just wondering,” he said softly, “if all the . . . the cursebreakers of your family . . . if all of them were like you.”