A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  Heloise sat still as a statue, still scowling. But her mind exploded with sudden thoughts, sudden ideas. With the memory of something Alala had said—said almost in passing, but certainly said: “My youngest daughter, on the morning of her fourteenth birthday, discovered she could understand the languages of trees.”

  Heloise had thought nothing of it at the time beyond the fact that Adanna and she were so much alike, both discovering strange abilities on the same morning of their lives. And yet . . .

  “She had a different gift,” Heloise whispered.

  “Pardon?” Benedict glanced at her again.

  “Adanna,” Heloise persisted. Suddenly excited, she reached out and grasped Benedict by the arm. “The Princess of Night’s youngest daughter. She had a different gift! She didn’t have the mirror magic! Oh, why didn’t I think of it before?”

  Then she was on her feet, pacing the length of Benedict’s room to his bed and back again, her bare feet making no sound on the cold floor. As she paced, she muttered, not to Benedict but to herself: “We all have Faerie gifts, but they’re not all the same. Grandmem had the mirror magic like me, but she never even made it up to the Tower. She never saw the tapestries, she never learned about the dance. Who knows if any of the others had mirror magic? Who knows if those who did knew about Le Sacre? I might be wrong, but—”

  But she couldn’t be wrong. This must be the answer!

  “I am my reflection. My reflection is me.”

  Benedict got to his feet, holding his cloak at his throat. He put out a hand as Heloise passed near him and restrained her by the shoulder. He meant to be gentle, but she whirled upon him and wrenched against his grasp with such force that he had to tighten his grip. “I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice low and urgent, “but you really must be quiet. It’s almost dawn, and the housemaids will be up soon. If they hear you, if they find you—”

  “Don’t you understand?” Her voice nearly strangled her in its effort to keep from shouting. But she couldn’t express what she needed to say in a whisper, so it came out in a garbled gasp. “Don’t you see? I am my reflection! And my reflection doesn’t die! I was squashed by trees, I was drowning in a well, and I didn’t die! Benedict”—in her excitement she completely forgot to call him ‘master,’ and her eyes sparkled with a bizarre combination of triumph and terror—“I can dance Le Sacre all night through!”

  With that she started toward the door. But Benedict’s grip on her shoulder restrained her, and she came to an abrupt halt. “Let me go,” she hissed.

  “No,” said Benedict. “You can’t go out there now. The household will be rising soon, and they’ll find you. You’ve got to hide until nightfall.”

  For a terrible instant he half expected her to bite him or claw at his eyes, so fierce was the expression that flashed across her face. The instant passed, however, and she sagged in his grasp. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll wait. It’s got to be all night, anyway. No use in starting now. I’ll wait until sundown.”

  So the sylph, watching through the window, saw Heloise accept a pillow from Benedict and crawl under his bed to hide. Benedict himself scraped his fire until it was nothing more than a pile of glowing embers. Then he climbed into his bed and buried himself under the covers.

  Silence fell upon the room. At first neither of them slept. But as the moments slipped into hours, both eventually slipped into unconscious exhaustion. The sylph kept watch and whispered to itself again, “Help her. Help her . . .”

  Help her. Help her.

  The prayer in my heart rises up, even as it has for many generations now. Help her. Please! Let her succeed. Let this one, this brave young fool, discover the power of the three-fold branch and learn the truth of her sisterhood.

  But she’ll never succeed on her own. She’s strong, but not strong enough. They were all of them strong, and all have failed.

  Oh! Help her. Please, help her.

  And help me as well.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Heloise woke up with a start, a single thought blazing bright in her head:

  They’re going to be so mad!

  At first she couldn’t decide whom she meant exactly. The thought was there, brilliantly present in her mind, but without clarity. She lay quite still, staring at the corner of the soft pillow on which her head rested. A decoration of candlewicking depicting a pattern of running deer adorned its edge, similar to the design on Benedict’s counterpane. Heloise stared at those little deer rendered in elegant curls and knobs, wondering yet again what they fled.

  Slowly her waking thought crystallized into more solid substance. They’re going to be so mad. Meme and Papa. The boys too.

  Could she blame them? She hadn’t been home now for another full night, and what would Meme be thinking or guessing of her behavior? Nothing good, that was certain. If she wasn’t careful, Papa would raise a hue and cry across all the south-end, and they’d start dredging the bottoms of the deeper bogs, and her brothers would go plunging into the darker reaches of Oakwood, calling her name . . .

  But what could she do? If she went home now there would be only questions and scoldings, and they’d probably set one of her older brothers to watch her like a hawk. She’d never slip back to Centrecœur, never have a chance to try her plan. No, she couldn’t go home. She daren’t risk it.

  They would forgive her, though. When Evette was safely home among them, and they remembered, and they held her in their arms and wept with joy . . . then they would forgive her for everything. Everything.

  Even Hélène.

  Lifting her face from the pillow and rubbing her eyes hard with one hand, Heloise gauged the light pouring through the window onto the bedroom floor. She guessed the time at mid-afternoon already, well into the day. She whispered, “I have to dance all night.” Which meant beginning at sundown.

  Suddenly wide awake, she scrambled out from under the bed and, moving stiffly, stood up. Benedict was nothing more than a series of odd lumps under his blankets, but she could hear him snoring. Feeling altogether wicked for taking such liberties with the son of the Marquis of Canneberges, Heloise reached for a lump she thought likely to be his shoulder and gave it a shake. “Wake up, sir.”

  “Rrrrrmph,” said Benedict, and she realized she had grabbed his head.

  She let go, backed away, and folded her arms. “Master Benedict,” she persisted, determined despite her embarrassment, “I must be off. I have to be ready to dance when the sun sets.”

  Benedict made a series of noises both pathetic and grouchy before finally emerging from his blankets and blinking blearily at her. “Where—where are you going?” he stammered, forming words with difficulty through a haze of sluggishness.

  “Up to the Great Hall,” she said.

  “What?” He sat upright, still blinking, but more awake than he’d been a moment before. “Why?”

  “It only makes sense,” Heloise persisted. “I saw Evette and the others—the phantom girls I told you about—climb the waterfall stair the other night. Remember? I tried to follow them, but I couldn’t make it up the falls. Grandmem warned me not to try again, but she said, ‘Not on the mirror side.’ So I’ve been thinking, and what I need to do is climb the stairs in this world. Before I look in the mirror. That way I will be there waiting when Evette and the others arrive.”

  Benedict nodded, though Heloise could tell by the half-empty expression on his face that he was still too much asleep to make sense of her words. Eventually, though, they seemed to line up properly in his head. “And you think . . . you think you’re to dance Le Sacre there? In the Great Hall? Or rather, on the mirror side of the Great Hall?”

  “I heard them singing,” Heloise said. “The other night after I tried to climb the falls and you found me wet at the bottom of the stairs. I heard them singing through the ceiling, and I think they were dancing. Last night . . . remember I told you that I saw Evette and Ayodele and Cateline and all of them pass from the Tower chamber out into the silver forest. It was like they we
re answering a summons. I heard a note of music play, as though the Family of Night was calling them. I think Mother makes them perform Le Sacre every night.”

  “You think so,” Benedict said, “but you don’t know. This is not what the princess told you, is it?”

  “No,” Heloise admitted. “The law doesn’t permit her to tell me much except her own story. It’s just what I believe. But I’m right. I know I am. I’ve got to be.”

  Despite the confidence of her words, Benedict could see the doubt in her eyes. Doubt combined with that same dreadful fear he had sensed in her on the Tower stair but a few hours ago. She masked it well, but he saw it shimmering behind her scowling determination.

  “If we go to the Great Hall now we run the risk of being caught,” he said. “The household will be up for hours yet. I don’t know how I’ll explain you to them should they find us.”

  “You won’t have to,” Heloise said. “I’ll go alone. If they catch me I’ll . . . I’ll just . . .” I’ll end up in a gibbet! “I’ll say I got lost. Or something.”

  “No, that won’t do.” Benedict sighed and rubbed his forehead, which was wrinkled in concern. “I don’t know how they’d react if they caught you sneaking around, but I can guarantee it wouldn’t be pleasant. You’d better stick with me.”

  He blushed then and couldn’t meet her gaze, which struck Heloise as odd. But she didn’t have time to worry about such things at the moment, so she shrugged and said, “All right. Fine. We’ll go up to the Great Hall and hide until sundown. Then I’ll dance.”

  Then she would break the curse. Somehow.

  They would hide in the old minstrels’ gallery, Benedict decided as they prepared themselves for the next stage of their adventure. The gallery overlooked the Great Hall, but it had been ages since anyone but rats or spiders went up there. They should be safe enough if they were quiet and lay low for a few hours. Heloise, who had no idea what a minstrels’ gallery was but who hated to appear ignorant, agreed to this plan without question.

  With a candle in his pocket and the lion mirror hidden close to his breast, Benedict led the way from his room into the long gallery, Heloise keeping pace behind him. Though Heloise felt a strong sensation that something was following, watching them through the windows—something invisible, perhaps—they met none of the household staff on their way.

  They came to the big stairway, which Heloise had not yet seen by daylight. What a massive structure it was, with two enormous rails, the newel posts carved as rampant lions, one male, one female. Though she did not look into the mirror, Heloise could almost hear the rush and roar of the waterfall which even now, on the other side of the glass, poured in torrents down stone tiers.

  But not on this side. Gripping her grimy skirts in both hands, Heloise followed Benedict as he mounted the stairs, his long legs taking two steps at a time. She tried to mimic his stride but hadn’t the length of limb and was obliged instead to take shorter, faster steps in order to keep up.

  At the top of the steps, a heavy wooden screen blocked Heloise’s view of the Great Hall. She wanted to peer around the screen, but Benedict beckoned her instead to a humbler stair which led up to what she assumed must be the minstrels’ gallery. This proved to be a landing which looked out upon the Great Hall from above. In the glory days of Rufus the Red, feasts held in the hall would have been graced with sweet music falling as though from the heavens above as musicians plucked and played upon their instruments.

  It was quite a gloomy little alcove now, thick with spider webs and the droppings and gnawings of rats. The floor did not feel entirely stable either, and it creaked ominously as Benedict crossed it to sit along the far wall. Heloise moved to join him but first crept to the rail for a quick glance down at the hall.

  “Oh, Lumé!” she whispered. She had thought she’d seen greatness when she walked with Benedict in the long gallery down below, hung with its tapestries and brilliant with its glass-paned windows. She had thought she’d glimpsed grandeur in the massive dining hall with its yawning fireplace and massive table. But none of those sights had prepared her for Rufus’s Hall.

  It was so red! Redwood rafters supported the vast arched ceiling, and pillars as thick as a grown tree’s trunk and painted a brilliant scarlet rose up at the far end to frame the lord’s dais. The floor was of treated redwood with patterns of crimson wrought into fantastical depictions of the sun or of a series of red stars.

  On the dais stood Rufus’s chair. Not a throne, for he was no king; a mighty chair from which he passed judgment on his people or took counsel from his trusted advisors as the threat of Corrilond loomed and he sought to protect king and country from disaster. All happening six hundred years ago . . .

  Behind and above this seat, hung upon the wall, was a huge mirror of perfect, clear glass. It too was framed in redwood. It was as tall as Heloise herself, taller even. It reflected the whole of the hall so that the space appeared double in size.

  Heloise had lived a small and simple life, her world made up of the immediate needs of now. She rarely stopped to consider the past (which was painful in any case) or the future (which was frustrating to contemplate and therefore better ignored).

  But standing here in the gallery, gazing at all the redness of the Great Hall below, she was struck suddenly by the enormity of History. History which was her own. History which made up as much of her purpose and existence as her name, as her dreams, as her hopes and fears. She was part of a much greater whole. She was part of Rufus. Of Alala. Of Ayodele and Grandmem and Adanna; of all the warriors who had fought against invading Corrilond and of all the farmers who had plowed the fields of Canneberges for centuries.

  “A mortal magic,” she whispered.

  “Psssst!” Benedict beckoned to her. Heloise, with a last glance over her shoulder at the great shining mirror, hastened to join him in the shadows by the wall. “I’m sorry,” he said, making her roll her eyes. “But you need to stay out of sight. I don’t think anyone comes into Rufus’s Hall often, but you never know, and you’re a bit conspicuous standing at the rail.”

  “Fine!” Heloise said, and drew her knees up to her chest. She lapsed into silence which Benedict did nothing to disturb.

  So they sat together, and the hours passed by. Other than the occasional creak of the gallery floor as one or the other of them shifted to a more comfortable position, all was as still as a grave. Through the long windows on one side of the hall (which had within the last century acquired shiny new glass panes), the sun deepened in the sky. Spring lengthened out the days, and Heloise was glad. Even a week earlier, night would have fallen much sooner.

  She had never before feared nightfall. Now she sat with her back to the wall, watching the gloom deepen, and she trembled.

  “Master Benedict,” she said suddenly, her voice creaking with disuse, “I have a question for you.”

  He sat with one leg out before him, the other bent at the knee, his head leaning back against the wall. His eyes were closed, and he did not open them to look at Heloise when she spoke, saying in answer only “Yes?”

  “Are you afraid to die?”

  For a time he didn’t speak. Both of them felt the looming presence of his impending doom, the shadow of the Winter Fever that was never far from his thoughts. The shroud which covered the whole of his life, the whole of his future, however long or short it may prove to be.

  He said at last, “Always.”

  Even as he spoke, the long, sighing note of summoning moaned from an unseen instrument. Benedict did not hear it, or did not seem to, for he sat in the same position, unmoving, un-startled. Heloise, however, jumped in her skin, for it sounded to her as though the instrument had been played right next to her ear.

  She stood up and paced to the gallery rail. She looked out upon Rufus’s Hall, at the mirror hung behind his chair. Where before she had seen the hall itself reflected in redoubled splendor, now she saw . . . she saw . . .

  “Night,” she whispered.

  The su
n sank to the very rim of the horizon, casting the Great Hall into intense gloom.

  “Master Benedict,” Heloise said, turning to him and holding out her hand, “I need your mirror now.”

  Le Sacre was about to begin.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The floorboards creaked like the breaking of branches in a high wind as Heloise crossed the gallery. In the profound silence following that single note of summons, even her own breathing filled her ears like the gusts of a summer storm. So she held her breath and tried to keep her footfalls as light as possible as she made her way down the steps from the minstrels’ gallery.

  The heavy screen separated her from the Great Hall. Though earlier she had been eager to look out, now she felt as though this was the final shield between her and . . . and who could say what evil forces? Her hands shook, and she pressed Benedict’s mirror hard against her heart, afraid she might drop it in her fear.

  With a quick, sharp inhale of air, she opened the screen door and stepped into the hall.

  The sun’s dying rays fell through the long windows at a strange angle, and the red floor was alive with burning light. But the light was of a sort that promised to go out at any moment, and the shadows all around seemed like predators ready to leap. Though she could not see them, Heloise knew that on the other side of the mirror glass, many invisible figures stood in those shadows, black figures like shades themselves. A great, dark audience, come to watch the dance.

  She couldn’t allow herself to look at the big mirror beyond Rufus’s chair. So, her head bowed to stare at her own feet, she hastened out to the center of the floor, under the heavy red ceiling beams.

  “Heloise!” said a cautious voice, not loud but carrying in the silence of the hall. She turned to look up over her shoulder at the minstrel’s gallery rail. There Benedict leaned out to watch her from above. He said no more but raised his hand and clenched it in a fist, a symbol of encouragement.