“Yeah.” Scarlet warms to her theme. “One of those fancy gates, with all the pretty swirls and curly bits. You know what I mean?”
“The finials and curlicues?” The blacksmith folds his arms. “Well, I admire your ambition, Miss Thorne, I do. But I’m afraid that might be a tad much for a day’s work. We’ve only got five hours.”
“Oh, right.” Scarlet glances at a hammer hanging on the stone wall. “I see.”
“But we could make a part of a gate,” he suggests. “How’d that be?”
Scarlet brightens. “Great.”
“So, what d’you favour?” he says. “A curly bit or a pointy bit?”
“Yes, that’s right, use the corner when you’re drawing down—good, that’s good technique. Yes, that’s it, bit slower now.” He nods. “You’re a dab hand with the hammer, Miss Thorne.”
Scarlet looks up, grinning, face flushed. “Really? I’ve never—”
“No, don’t stop now!” the blacksmith says. “Don’t let it cool. That’s it, not the flat, the corners—you’re wanting to push the metal along, like a rolling pin does to dough, or so the wife tells me.”
This comment misses its mark, so intent is Scarlet on the pull of her arm, the upswing of the hammer, the crack as it hits the burning metal bar, the shock of hammer on anvil if she misses her target.
“Right, bring it back to centre, that’s it—remember the flat of the hammer now, start refining the shape. Lighter blows, or your point’ll snap.”
Scarlet tumbles the bar, tapping out the slope—first one side, then the other—stretching the metal thinner and thinner towards the point. She hopes they’ll have time to make another, to plunge more metal into the furnace, to see the flames leap and spit with delight to have a thing to burn. Scarlet wants to watch the fire till it’s embers and ash. She wants to strike hammer to anvil, again and again, to feel the power of the blow as she brings it down, the glorious crack that shudders through her from tip to toe. Strangely, Scarlet finds she wants to immerse her hand in the flame, wants to feel the scorch on her skin. She believes, impossibly, that the fire will be kind to her. That it will lick her warm, that the warmth will spread and rise, till she’s white hot at her core.
By rights Scarlet should be fearful of fire, should hate it, since it took her mother and her home. But she finds, perhaps because she has no memory of the event, that it’s only when she thinks of fire that she feels scared. When she sees it, she’s fascinated.
“Whatever are you doing with that frightful spike?” Her grandmother shrinks back in the chair, as if Scarlet had held the finial to her throat. “Put it away.”
“I made it,” Scarlet says, hugging the spike protectively to her chest. “With the blacksmith this morning.”
They sit now in the café’s kitchen, eating buttered crumpets for dinner. A weekly treat.
Esme Thorne’s brow furrows. “The blacksmith?”
Scarlet bites into her crumpet, suppressing a flush of sorrow. “You bought me an apprenticeship for my birthday, remember?”
Her grandmother’s eyes cloud and Scarlet curses herself. Why did she use that bloody word? She should know better by now. But, too often, she forgets.
“But it’s not your birthday.” All at once, her grandmother looks like a child: wide, anxious eyes, a smattering of freckles across her nose—the same nose that had been bequeathed to three generations of Thorne women. “Is it? I—I didn’t forget your birthday, did I?”
“No, no, Grandma,” Scarlet says quickly. “Of course you didn’t. It’s not till the end of the month.”
Her grandmother relaxes. “I knew I couldn’t forget my own Ruby’s birthday.”
Scarlet puts down her crumpet. “No, Grandma, I’m not Ruby,” she says, already regretting the words. “I—I’m Scarlet.”
“I know,” Esme says, suddenly irritated. “That’s what I said.” She pulls back her long grey hair—at seventy-eight she’s only lately lost the last wisps of red—and tucks it behind her ears. “I wish you’d stop correcting me. It’s most obnoxious.”
Scarlet waits, poised to douse the flames of the fire she’s just ignited. But then it seems to snuff out. Her grandmother licks melted butter from her thumb.
“When you were a little girl you wanted to be a blacksmith.”
“Really?” Scarlet says, relieved but unconvinced. For the past few years it’s been trickier to distinguish fact from fiction in her grandmother’s mind. Still, Scarlet plays along. “Did I?”
Her grandmother nods. “Oh, yes. I even bought you an anvil and hammer once—for your twelfth birthday, I think—a small set, but real enough.”
“That’s amazing, Grandma.” Scarlet smiles, helpfully. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t? Gosh, I . . .” Esme falls silent, gazing down at her plate. “You’d gone on a school trip. Afterwards you begged and begged me to buy them for you.”
She still has no memory of the event, but somehow Scarlet feels that this time what her grandmother’s saying is true. “So, what happened?” she asks. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know.” Her grandmother looks thoughtful. “I think . . . you didn’t want them. You said it wasn’t the same.”
Scarlet frowns. “What wasn’t?”
“I don’t rightly know.” Her grandmother looks up from the plate, squinting as the memory slithers away. She reaches into the air, grasping for it. “I think . . . I think . . . you didn’t want the tools. You wanted the fire.”
3rd October
Twenty-nine days . . .
1:03 a.m.—Leo
After settling his parents back at the hotel, Leo returns to Saint John’s. Tonight the moon is at the first quarter and the nearest gate into Everwhere is the one guarding the Master’s Garden. Tonight Leo must hunt, to sharpen his skills, and kill, to fuel his fading light. After observing Goldie for a few days, and continuing to dream about her at night, Leo knows that he must prepare diligently for the forthcoming fight to stand a chance of survival. For, even though she’s forgotten herself, Goldie is still the most powerful Grimm girl he’s ever seen. It’ll be close combat, but at least he’ll have the element of surprise on his side.
It’s after three o’clock when Leo steps out of his room. Occasional blurts of sound punctuate his walk along the student-populated hallway—drunken laughter from one room, enthusiastic copulation from another. Leo hurries on. He’s taking his degree at Saint John’s since it’s one of the few colleges with a gateway on the grounds, meaning Leo doesn’t have to roam the streets of Cambridge on moonlit nights.
Only the most ancient and prestigious colleges contain such doorways: those whose bricks, towers, trees, and soil have been steeped in thought for several centuries. Unfortunately, Saint John’s is also one of the largest colleges and Leo’s room is far from the Master’s Garden, so he always risks being seen by an overvigilant night porter.
Leo notices, speeding along stone corridors and darting across forbidden lawns, that he’s feeling out of sorts. Ordinarily, this is his favourite night of the month, but tonight he’s not buoyed by his usual enthusiasm. Which is strange, since Leo is the best of them, the brightest star, his demon father’s top recruit. He has the highest number of terminations of any soldier. And at only eighteen, depending on the world in which you’re counting.
Leo has heard that it’s possible, theoretically at least, for a soldier to travel to Everwhere on the coattails of a Grimm girl’s dreams—thus not limiting his entrance to an exact date and time—but he won’t manage this method himself, since it requires certain skills and deep intimacy with the girl in question. And Leo could never countenance loving a Grimm. Not truly. Not after what their kind has done to his.
Ten minutes later and a little breathless, Leo stands before the gate. He glances at his watch. At 3:33 a.m. he reaches up, pressing his palm lightly to the elaborate wrought-iron curls. The gate shimmers silver, as if brushed by moonlight. Leo pushes it open and steps through.
6:35 a.m.—Goldie
By now my thoughts of commanding armies and toppling nations have passed, replaced by the usual worries about providing for Teddy, avoiding Garrick, paying the rent . . . and I’m grateful. There was something slightly unsettling in feeling so powerful.
“G-G, come here.”
“What is it?” I shift from the kitchen to Teddy’s bed—everything in our flat is only a few steps from everything else—to see what he wants. Although I already know, because we go through the same routine every morning. And, sure enough, I find Ted naked, except for Batman underpants, beside a pile of discarded clothes.
He gives me a look of lament. “What can I wear today?”
I survey the situation. “Green trousers with red T-shirt and blue jumper?”
The look on Teddy’s face tells me I’m a frump.
“What about your favourite jumper?” I point to the puff of soft blue cashmere acquired from the child of a Swiss banker (room 23) a month ago. It was one of half a dozen identical jumpers—I could have taken two, no problem. But thieving is all about limits; once you get greedy, you get caught.
“I’ve worn it nearly every day.” Teddy regards it. “Yesterday, Caitlin said she’d lend me a tenner to buy a new one.”
“Little bit—” I bite my lip. Kids. Some are sweet; most need a good slap. I think of the French family staying in room 38, with a boy Teddy’s age.
“I’ll get you something new soon,” I promise. “Don’t worry.”
“You will?” Teddy barrels into me, arms flung wide. I hug him back. He’s slight as a fresh-planted sapling, limbs so thin I worry they’ll snap if I hug him too tight.
“Yes,” I say. Something so stupendous even that goblin child will have to admire it.
7:07 a.m.—Bea
“Get up, get up, get up.”
The elongated lump beneath Bea’s bedcovers groans.
“Come on”—she finds his thigh with her heel and gives it a hefty kick—“You lazy sod.”
A matted head of hair, along with a face she vaguely remembers from last night, emerges from under the blankets and squints into the milky morning light. “Have a heart.” He drops his head back to the pillow. “It’s barely dawn.”
“No, it’s not,” Bea snaps. She wishes, not for the first time, that she’d been able to sneak Little Cat into her college room since he gives comfort without reciprocal demands. “Now fuck off, I’ve got a lecture.” This isn’t true and they both know it. But, though Bea wants to get rid of him, she also has a standing date with the University Library. Every morning, as soon as it opens. To study philosophy. She chose this subject in order to entertain and evaluate ideas that might, in another context, raise questions about her mental health, since she still worries that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.
Her mamá is the first to remind her of this. Her falcon-featured mamá, whose nose is nearly as sharp as her tongue. “This isn’t your purpose, niña,” she says. “You’ll find that out soon enough.”
She speaks, every time, with such authority that Bea sometimes finds it hard to disregard her. Cleo García Pérez always sounds sincere telling tales she claims are true, of invented places she claims are real. As if she isn’t either teasing or mad. When she’s both. Which is why she spent Bea’s childhood in and out of Saint Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital, while Bea spent it in and out of foster homes. Cleo also spends an unusual amount of time extolling the virtues of vice, insisting Bea follow in her murky footsteps. Unlike other mothers, Cleo approves of bad behaviour and admonishes good, praising her daughter for selfish acts, for anger and unkindness, while chastising slips of thoughtfulness or generosity. Her mamá, a chill wind of cruelty blowing through an otherwise calm world, a textbook example of how human beings can be so fucking foul to one another.
“Life is a fight for survival,” her mamá says. “Good, by its nature, will lose this fight, leaving the rest to win. ¿Entiendes? So you can’t be good, if you want to survive.”
Fair enough, Bea thinks, though it’s not an opinion she’ll be sharing. It’s always struck her as funny that, in all her ardent ramblings on the war between good and evil, her mamá has never tried to claim that these Sisters Grimm of which she speaks, of which she claims Bea is one, are fighting for good. For why be good when you can be great? Evil, she always says, is greatness. Evil means having the courage and ability to do what’s needed in order to triumph: to rid the world of the weak.
“If you leave the future of humanity in the hands of the good,” Cleo says, “they’ll create a piteous race: people crippled by compassion, tolerance, empathy. People who accept what is instead of fighting for what’s possible. Leave the patetica human race in their hands and we’ll be wiped out—by the elements, the animals, any invading alien race . . .”
When her mamá talks like this, Bea has learned to nod along and say nothing. Arguing only means she won’t shut up. Bea came to Cambridge to escape, to distance herself from Cleo’s fascist opinions, to steep instead in gentle rumination, speculation, consideration. Socializing, except for the purposes of physical satisfaction, is not something that interests her.
Finally managing to extricate the interloper from her bed, Bea cycles (too fast) to the library, only slowing as she crosses Queen’s Road to glance back across the river and inhale the beauty of King’s College Chapel, its intricately carved spires reaching like immortal fingers towards the curve of the rising sun. Sometimes Bea imagines that the spires are trying to pull the great weight of the college into the sky, to fly like a majestic migrating bird to warmer climes in winter—Paris, perhaps, to sit beside Notre Dame, or Barcelona, for the illustrious company of La Sagrada Familia.
Every day, Bea feels grateful to be here, among such beauty and inspiration. Grateful to sit in the University Library, to immerse herself in the opinions of Bertrand Russell, who, predictably, proves far better company than the fumbling student she kicked out of her bed.
11:48 a.m.—Liyana
Liyana balances her sketchbook on her knees to draft the next panel of her graphic novel, the one she’s been working on for nearly two years. With ink and pen she depicts BlackBird hurling LionEss from the top of the tallest oak tree in Elsewhere. BlackBird laughs as LionEss, flailing and unable to fly, plummets to the stones below. When Liyana has shaded in the last leaf of ivy, she starts to write the story of how BlackBird came to be.
BlackBird
Once upon a time there was a girl born with ebony skin, jet-black hair, and inky eyes. She was so dark that she could slip into any shadow unseen, so dark that she shone almost blue in the moonlight. She was also the most beautiful, enchanting, and wisest girl in seven kingdoms—far more beautiful than her pale stepsisters, all of whom had ashen skin, bleached hair, and chalky eyes; all of whom were slightly dull and dim.
The girl had one great delight in life. On nights when the moon was full, she could fly. She stood naked in their garden, her black skin brushed with a sheen of blue, waiting for her curls of jet-black hair to catch the wind and transform into magnificent wings. Then she would soar above the lands and seas, her feathers glinting in the silver light, gliding on currents of pure joy.
Her sisters couldn’t fly. They were as fixed to the ground as the cows who grazed the fields. But, rather than admit their jealousy, the sisters pretended that they simply didn’t care to fly, that walking through the grasses was grander than swooping through the skies.
Her stepsisters were so jealous of Bee—as they named her, since they claimed she was nothing more than an insect—that they fashioned a plan to convince her that she was an ugly fool. Every day they told her so, inventing elaborate reasons and echoing each other’s examples. At first, Bee, wise as she was, saw through their efforts. But, as the days and months passed, she began to waver and doubt herself. And, since there was only one of her and three of them, eventually she started to believe her stepsisters. Until Bee was convinced that she was indeed an ugly fool.
And so,
feeling embarrassed, Bee flew only in secret now and then and found, when she did, that it didn’t bring her the delight it once had. Months of unseen moons turned into years, until she no longer went out on moonlit nights at all. Until one day, Bee had forgotten that she could grow wings, had forgotten that she could fly, had forgotten the one thing that had brought her such joy.
Almost a lifetime had passed, when, walking in the woods, Bee met a stranger with skin, hair, and eyes as dark as her own. After they’d exchanged the usual pleasantries about the weather, the price of cows, and so forth, the old woman dropped her voice to a whisper.
“You’ve forgotten yourself,” the stranger said. “So much so that you can’t even remember your own name.”
Bee had to admit that this was true, since she could not recall, no matter how hard she tried, any name other than the one her stepsisters had given her.
“It’s time to remember,” the old woman said. “Before it’s too late.”
“But how?” Bee asked. “How can I?”
“Climb to the top of the tallest tree in this forest,” the stranger said. “Then jump from the highest branch. As you fall, you will remember who you are.”
Bee regarded the woman with horror. “You think it’s worth giving my life to remember myself?”
The woman considered this for only a second. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
For many months, Bee ignored the woman, thinking her mad. But, as months again turned into years, and she found herself growing heavier with sorrow, Bee finally decided that she had nothing to lose, for she no longer cared if she lived or died.
So she found an ancient oak in the forest, as high as three houses, and, branch by branch, climbed to the very top. There she sat, catching her breath and gazing down at the ground far, far below. Bee waited, until day turned to night, then she stood. She whispered her goodbyes to the living and said her greetings to the dead.
The Sisters Grimm Page 3
