Tell her I love her, said Alala. Always.
“She loves you,” Heloise sang in time to the dance. “She loves you always.”
“And I,” Mother whispered, “love her. Always.”
Her words melted into the night. The fire surrounding the two of them softened from scarlet to white. It was not the same white fire Heloise had witnessed earlier, sprung from the strange coals. It was more like the white flame flickering in the heart of the silver lantern. For a moment it flamed bright and strong.
It went out. In the darkness that followed, Heloise felt the hands she held slip away and vanish. Though she cast about, turning her head this way and that, she could find no trace of her poor, sad enemy. When she turned her head for the third time, she found that she stood, not in the broken Hall of Night, but in Rufus’s Hall, upon Rufus’s redwood floor.
Someone was calling her name. Her sister. Her sister was calling her name. Her sister was . . .
Heloise turned around so sharply she almost fell over. “Evette!” she cried, but the name died on her lips.
For before her stood, not her lovely young sister, but some strange old woman whom she did not know.
I stand upon the shores of the Final Water. I stand with the silver lantern in my hand and gaze out upon that endless flow where life and time run into eternity and are lost. I cannot see the Farthestshore from here, but it does not matter.
I am full of joy. And I am full of sorrow. Just now, it is enough to stand here, held close in this brilliant light, and to watch.
A boat approaches. A boatman in a long white robe pushes the craft along, and a maiden sits in the prow, gazing out with eager, searching eyes. She is one of mine, one of my lineage, though I do not know her name. Her face is very like the cursebreaker’s.
“We thought we’d wait for you,” the girl says as the boat draws near to this shore. “We thought you might be coming soon and perhaps you would like company on the voyage across the Water.”
“Yes,” I reply, “I would like that very much.” The girl extends a hand, but I do not take it at once. I pause first to look back into the darkness of the Netherworld behind me. Will they come? Will they join me?
“Mother!”
Ayodele, her eyes bright with the lantern’s light, emerges from the darkness and runs to me, her arms outstretched. My eldest, my beautiful firstborn! We hold each other there on that shore, reunited at long last. “Mother, Mother, I’m so sorry!” Ayodele whispers. “They made me help, they made me hold you, and I could not fight them.”
“Hush, my darling,” I say, stroking her hair, cradling her as though she is a child. Here, perhaps, she is a child again, a little one I might carry in my arms. “There is no need for sorrow or regrets, no need to ask forgiveness. All has been restored! We will journey together to find your father, your brother, and your two sisters.”
Even then we wait. Others join us, one by one, following the light of the lantern. My daughters of all those long generations, each more lovely than the last, each bearing a mingling of my blood and Rufus’s. They follow the lantern light, and they greet us with glad cries.
“Come now,” says the girl in the boat, and she beckons to us. “Come, we must sail away. The Farthestshore awaits, and your Beginning is at hand!”
One by one, my daughters climb into the boat, assisted by the boatman and the girl. I wait until last of all, turning my gaze back into the darkness for a last time. “Are there no more?” I ask.
“Some have unfinished business to end before they pursue this journey,” says the girl in the boat. “They will be along soon enough. You will see!”
Before there can be a beginning, there must first be an end. So let the cursebreaker live out her end with courage and with hope ever shining in her heart! Thank you, child, for your sacrifice. Thank you, sisters three, for your three-fold bond of love, hope, and strength.
Thank you, Song Giver, for the new song we sing.
So I climb into the boat and sit with the girl in the prow. I will see my Rufus soon, upon the Farthestshore.
FORTY
In the last several days Heloise had experienced her share of terrible moments. Each of those moments flashed across her heart in a single, painful beat: the moment she first saw her reflection move on its own, the moment she heard the shadow sing at her back, the moment she saw the phantoms close in upon the Le Sacre circle, the moment she knew she would have to face the Night Hunt. These memories and many more crowded into her head, culminating in that most terrible moment when, at the final beat of the Faerie drum, she felt her body betray her, felt it break and crumble.
Yes, life had been full of terrible moments in recent days. But not one of them, no matter how strange, frightening, or painful, could compare to that moment—that heartbeat—when she turned to find her sister and looked instead upon the haggard, age-uglied face of the old woman.
There was no time for thought. So, with a sickening plunge of her stomach, she felt rather than thought: It’s all been for nothing. They’ve taken her youth. They’ve left her like this. They’ve spoiled all her—
Then two arms caught her from behind and pulled her into a hug. The young, fresh voice she knew so well cried out, “Heloise! Dearest!”
There had been terrible moments without number, moments which would come back to haunt her in the small, secret hours of the night for years to come, perhaps for the rest of her life. But not one of them compared to the sudden, glorious, fountaining joy of her sister’s voice, her sister’s embrace. Then Heloise pulled out of the hug, turned around, and beheld her sister’s face. Plain and pretty, tired and rundown, yet glowing with a smile that might burst in its efforts to express the surpassing joy of that moment.
And Heloise discovered she still hated to be called “dearest.” The moment was perfect.
It couldn’t last, of course; no perfect moment can. Even as Heloise drew breath to exclaim, to speak Evette’s name, a tremendous gust of wind blew down upon them from the rafters above and knocked both girls from their feet so that they fell in a tumble on the floor; and the old woman standing near threw up both hands and cried out, “Lights Above, save us!”
Insane laughter surrounded Heloise, and breezy hands plucked at her ragged skirts and tangled hair. “Mortal girl! Mortal girl!” the sylph exclaimed. “You survived! You survived the Nivien curse! You killed Mother, and you survived! Oh, great and powerful and wonderful and beautiful mortal who deals death even unto Faeries!”
“What? No!” Heloise exclaimed, scrambling upright and trying to slap the sylph away with both hands. It caught her hands and pulled her around the floor so swiftly that she had to jump and skip to keep from falling. “Let me go!” she cried irritably. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
Then she thought, Alala.
“You have killed her. You have killed my Alala.”
But Alala had already died, hadn’t she? She had been a ghost trapped in the Tower and the world of Mother’s invention. Surely, no matter what the Family of Night claimed, Heloise could not justly be called a killer, a murderer . . .
The wind-spirit, still singing, dropped its hold on Heloise and whirled about first Evette and then the old lady, both of whom gasped in surprise but no fear. After what they had seen and experienced in the realms beyond, they hadn’t much fear left over for a being like the sylph. Looking at them, Heloise realized suddenly that she knew who the old woman was. “Cateline!” she exclaimed.
The old woman raised her head and spoke in a quavering voice, more aged even than Grandmem’s: “Yes. Yes, I am. I haven’t heard that name in—in—well, it seems now, in a long time.” She stopped and, lifting her wrinkled, blue-veined hands, studied the age that had come upon her since she’d stepped into the Faerie realm. There was sadness in her faded eyes but no surprise. “Yes,” she said, addressing her hands more than Heloise just then, “I am Cateline.”
Heloise thought, I killed the other ten. My sisters of ages past. Ayodele and the rest. They we
re too old. They couldn’t come back. So when I broke the curse, they all . . .
It was a not a thought she wished to complete. Not then. Perhaps not ever.
Evette approached, her hair loose and whipping in the sylph’s wind. She took Heloise by the hand and gazed into her eyes. She was Evette. She was truly Evette. Not aged more than a week, though fear and captivity had added a certain graveness to the soft skin of her cheek and brow. Her fingers, Heloise noticed (with that unconscious sort of noticing one doesn’t recognize until hours later), were callused along each fingertip with the excessive use of needle and thread, and the thumb of her left hand was swollen from frequent, accidental stabbings.
“They knew,” Evette whispered, squeezing Heloise’s hand. “They knew they were old, though they did not look it. They knew time had moved on without them in the mortal realms, that their loved ones were dead and gone. I could not speak to them when in—when in that place. But I could see it in their eyes when we danced each night. They longed for release.”
She didn’t try to say, “It wasn’t your fault.”
She didn’t try to say, “There was nothing else you could do.”
And, because she was Evette, she wouldn’t lie and say, “You didn’t kill them.”
She said, “No one who enters the Faerie realms expects to return unchanged.”
Heloise looked from her sister to Cateline, and she saw no accusation in the old woman’s face. Sorrow, yes, but also a melancholy sort of gladness.
Moving with great hesitancy on limbs not as strong as those she had recently used for dancing, Cateline approached Heloise and Evette. “I have to ask,” she said in her brittle voice, “if my sister is still—”
But Heloise did not hear the rest. A thrill of fear ran through her veins, sprouting from the soles of her feet and racing up to burst in her brain with a sudden clarity of thought. Something was missing. Something was not right, something that had been plucking at the corners of her brain for some moments now.
Forgetting Cateline, forgetting even Evette in that terrible instant, Heloise whirled about and addressed herself to the invisible wind wafting dust in clouds across the floor. “Where is Master Benedict?” she cried. “Sylph, where is the other mortal?”
“What other mortal?” said the sylph, still chuckling to itself. “There are many mortals here! So many, many mortals!”
“The one who was with me,” Heloise persisted. “The guards came, and the doctor, and they . . . what did they do to him? Did you not help him?”
The sylph twirled about her skirts, catching the ragged hem in its many fingers. “Mortals are not my business,” it said with no malice but with great cheer. “Only you, for the Dame asked me to help you. I helped you, didn’t I?”
Heloise stared at the movement of her skirts. Her stomach dropped in a cold lump. Evette, seeing her sister’s dreadful pallor, took her hand. “Dearest, what’s wrong?” she asked.
Heloise met her sister’s confused gaze but found she hadn’t the words to answer. So she turned away and told the sylph, who was plucking at Cateline’s thin hair, “You’ve got to help me again. We’ve got to save him!”
“The shrivening rites are now complete,” said Doctor Dupont, standing with his back to Benedict, gazing out the window. The light of the rising sun cast his tall form into silhouette; not even daylight could soften his ghoulishness but rather emphasized it. “When Lumé’s light shines its brightest, we will begin.”
Benedict looked around the room from his vantage lying spread-eagle on his bed. The three guardsmen each stood at a bedpost, and his manservant, Hugo, stood at the fourth. Hugo’s face was grimly determined, but a few of the guardsmen at least had the grace to look uncomfortable. The youngest in particular—a fellow by the name of Briant with the most impressive Adam’s apple known to man—kept casting uneasy glances at the doctor’s tools that lay in gruesome display on the bedside table. He looked as if he would faint at any moment, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and up and down again, as he struggled to swallow back his horror.
Horror. That was a good word for it. That’s what he should be feeling for himself, Benedict thought. But he couldn’t. He was too numb just then, numb with exhaustion, numb with whatever strange sedative Dupont had fed him during the night’s “shrivening rites.” Even his hands and feet were numb, for the bindings securing him to the posts of his bed were too tight and cut off his circulation.
Or perhaps the horror he felt was simply so big that it had burst out the other side, leaving only a hollow shell of numbness in its wake.
Either way, Benedict lay upon his bed, his gaze moving from Doctor Dupont at the window to the men surrounding him. Never to the tools on the table. Never there. Numbness was better than horror, and he was pretty sure the numbness would vanish instantly if he allowed himself to look there.
“I am sorry it has come to this,” said Doctor Dupont. He stood with his hands behind his back, very tall, very straight. “I had hoped to put off this task for many months yet. But you would defy me. You would resist me. And defiance and resistance are the very food upon which devils feed.”
The doctor turned then, his face lost in shadows, so bright was the light through the window behind him. His voice, the last word in sepulchral, rumbled up from the cavern of his throat. “Your lordly father entrusted me with your care and keeping. His one desire is to see his legal heir someday ascend to his own high place in the courts of Bellevu. He said to me, ‘Good doctor, by whatever means necessary, save my son.’” The doctor sighed and shook his head slowly, the peak of his black cap turning like the point of an upside-down wooden top. “That is a task bordering on the impossible. But—” Here he raised a long finger, and his teeth flashed in something that might have been a smile. “But my order is in the business of working miracles! So perhaps a miracle we will work this day.”
He approached the bed. Though they wore stout leather armor and were all them both younger and broader than Dupont, the three guards drew back from him, some more quickly than others. Young Briant practically leaped like a grasshopper to remove himself from the doctor’s path, and Hugo made a sorry effort to hide himself behind the bedpost.
Benedict, however, was too numb to react. Somehow he couldn’t make himself believe that what was about to happen was truly about to happen. It couldn’t. Or if it did, it would happen to someone else. He must be someone else, some stranger lying here tied to his bed.
Doctor Dupont’s hand trailed across his assortment of tools. “The nightshade should be taking effect,” he said. “I cut it with no other herbs, and the full power of its potency must even now be upon you. It will help with the pain, of which I fear there will be much. But in pain alone can the spirit of fire be extracted from your head . . .”
Benedict tried to speak. But the extra dose of nightshade had numbed his tongue along with the rest of his body, and he found he could not remember how to make it work. But his eyes were wide as he watched Doctor Dupont select the first of his tools, watched the bright point of that metal instrument flash in the morning sunlight as it was upraised above his head—
The door burst open.
“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” cried the sylph.
The three guardsmen screamed and raised their weapons ineffectually against the uproarious wind that plucked the lances from their hands and, with another mad laugh, plucked the instrument from Doctor Dupont’s hand as well. The guards went on screaming as they ducked their heads and flung up their arms to ward off stray blows from their own weapons, which careened around the room in the invisible grasp of the sylph’s many hands. Hugo dove to the floor and tried to stuff himself under the bed.
“The evil spirit!” cried Doctor Dupont, and took up another of his tools. “It has grown in strength and malicious intent!” His voice was almost lost in the roar of the sylph, but Benedict heard every word. “I must work swiftly if there is to be any chance of your salvation!”
With a mad gnash
ing of his teeth, Dupont leaned over the bed, his new device of choice poised for its lunatic work.
But a new voice—a girl’s voice—bellowed into the chamber, rising even above the laughter of the sylph. “He’s got another one! Stop him!”
The sylph dropped its collected weaponry with dangerous clatters across the floor, darted across the room, caught up Doctor Dupont, and dragged him to the far side of the room, plucking the cap from his head in the process and displaying the doctor’s bald, mole-spotted scalp to all.
“Heloise?” The name came thick and bloated from Benedict’s swollen tongue. He turned and twisted in his bindings, trying to sit up. He saw her step into the room, short, barefoot, ragged, and alive! More than alive; she was completely, quakingly furious.
Even as the doctor fought and wrestled with his unseen enemy, Heloise pointed at the guards crouched in various positions of dread upon the floor. “What do you think you’re doing?” she cried. “Are you really going to let him cut into the head of the marquis’s only son?”
“Who are you?” the captain of the guard cried even as he scrambled to his feet, losing his helmet in the process.
“A witch! A witch!” the doctor cried. His robes were pulled away from his body on all sides, making him look like a big black sheet hung out to dry in a high gale. But he pointed at Heloise, a blaze of hatred in his eyes. “It is the witch we saw last night! The mirror witch who escaped through the glass! It is she who has—”
“Don’t be stupid,” Heloise growled, crossing her arms. She addressed herself then, not to the captain, but to Briant. “You know who I am, Briant Pigman,” she said. “You’ve known me all your life, and you know I’m no witch!”
“Heloise, I—” Young Briant stopped. He stared beyond her to the doorway of the chapel-chamber, where Evette had suddenly appeared. His Adam’s apple bobbed up then down in an enormous gulp. Heloise watched as an overwhelming wave of emotion washed over him.
A Branch of Silver, a Branch of Gold Page 37
