by Sarah Chorn
“Cassandra,” I say. Her name is a whisper in the cradle of our shared darkness. She appears in an instant. Her eyes are ringed by dark circles, and her nails are chewed down to the quick. She looks put together enough to fool someone who doesn’t know her, but I have every part of her imprinted upon my soul. I can see how she is suffering.
Still, she smiles, that gentle, tender smile, full of shared secrets and intimate knowledge. “Yes, darling?” She asks. She sits on the edge of the bed, runs her fingers through my hair, and I let her. I savor her touch. I will never get enough of her. She is the sun that lights my days.
Something is wrong. It is plain as the nose on my face. Her gaze is haunted, her shoulders are stooped, and her back is bowed. Something is weighing her down. She sobs when she thinks I am asleep.
There is a certain dark beauty in ignorance, and it takes a bravery I’m not entirely sure I contain to break it. Still, I steel myself and ask the question. “What happened?”
Cassandra puts on a half-hearted smile that does not reach her eyes or calm her quivering hands. “Nothing, my love. Do not fret over it. Just a small thing that has shaken me a bit. Nothing more.” The lie rests between us, making itself comfortable in our small room.
There are things I want to tell her, secrets of my own I have been keeping, but I am too exhausted. The world fades, and sleep pulls me under.
My life fell into a routine, and the years passed in relative ease. I found my place in Annie’s family. I helped them welcome in another son, and I delighted at his chubby hands and kicking feet. I helped him take his first steps. I swaddled him when he took ill. I helped bury him when he did not recover. I wept. I picked posies and laid them on his grave. He was a small, beautiful thing, come too unexpectedly and taken unjustly.
Perhaps it was better that way.
Time slid past me with an ease only children seem to understand.
I was ten before I realized that Ianthe was ill. That is how good we are at keeping secrets. She was a child waging her own personal battle, so carefully protecting her sickness that not even I, her best friend, knew anything was wrong with her. If sometimes she seemed faint, or dizzy, I put it out of my mind, for who isn’t on occasion?
I believe the only reason I discovered her illness when I did, was because of Annie’s garden. Annie had a small kitchen garden outside the cabin, a bed which she lovingly tended, pulling the weeds, rubbing the leaves of her plants and smelling the perfume they left on her skin. The garden was her safe haven, and quickly it became mine as well. She was quiet there, lost in her thoughts, and I did not challenge her thus. I would kneel beside her on a small board, my dress carefully tucked around my waist to keep my clothes clean, as washing day was but once a week, perhaps less if the weather was foul.
I would mirror her movements, watching carefully. I learned which plants were weeds, and which were wanted. I learned how to cut, and when, and which to use fresh and which to dry. Miss Mary had left us her medicine book, and Annie found seeds for a few herbs which could be used as poultices, and other medicines to help along with healing without shine. The small garden plot expanded.
I spent many years like that, kneeling in the dirt while the sun, golden and new, rose in the East, bathing me with its morning glow. I would press my fingers into the earth and tend that which we desired to grow.
I found peace there, with dirt under my nails and birdsong filling the air.
On this morning, midway through spring, Annie was pruning some of her lavender bushes. She often used the buds for a tea to help her relax at night, and she would sew bags of dried lavender blossoms to hide in our clothes and trunks, which chased away the moths. Her lavender bushes had grown tall and ungainly and were covered in more blossoms than she could ever hope to use, so she hacked some off, filled a basket with it, and bid me take it to Imogen’s house.
It was a clear day, and warm. The world was green and verdant. The rivers and streams were full of snowmelt, the ground still moist. Spring can be a beautiful season, so full of promise and growth.
I chased butterflies through the meadow before I made my way up the three steps to Imogen’s door, and knocked, picking at the peeling white paint on the doorframe while I waited. When no one answered, I bent to leave the basket on the porch—Imogen would know who it came from—when I heard a rasping, watery cough inside. I knocked again. “Hello?” I called.
I tried the knob and the door swung open. I let myself in, the wooden floorboards creaking under my weight.
I had only been in this house a handful of times. It was not a place many people were invited into. Now, with nothing but my footsteps and that coughing upstairs to fill the silence, I felt like I was in a place where I was not wanted. I was trespassing somewhere sacred. So it was with a certain gravity that I made my way to the staircase and slowly up it, my hands gripping the polished railing, my footsteps echoing like thunder.
I had never been upstairs, and I took in the wide hallway with the pink runner down its center. There was a small table with a vase of tulips perched on it. A window at the end cast a long pool of melting daylight. There were four doors, and I made my way to the one where the cough was coming from, pushing on the door with a soft touch. I peered through the gap I’d opened up.
I must have gasped, for she turned to see me and our eyes locked. “Ianthe?” I asked, pushing the door all the way open.
“You—” she began coughing, her whole body trembling with the force of it. She held a kerchief to her lips. I saw the crimson stains, still wet, soaking into the cloth. Blood, and it terrified me.
“Don’t speak,” I said. I rushed to her side. She might have had the plague, for all I knew, but she was my friend and she was suffering. I perched on the edge of her bed. There was a basin of water scented with rose petals, a few drops of shine painting it with rainbows. A moist rag lay nearby. I soaked it, rung it out, and pressed it against Ianthe’s fevered brow, heedless of the shine. Heedless of my effect on it.
She relaxed into her pillows and closed her eyes, a sigh escaping from between her cracked lips.
I had never seen her like that. She was always pale, her skin was usually white, shot through with veins of gray. She was marble. That’s how I always thought of her. In a world of jewel-toned people, Ianthe was pure, untouchable, and beautiful for that.
Now, however, she wasn’t white, but a sickly gray, her blue veins tracing underneath like a map to her fierce lion’s heart. Her eyelids were so pale, I swore I could see through them. Her hands twitched, and were cold as ice, though her brow was so terribly hot, I could feel it through the cloth I was pressing against her.
I did not want her to try to speak. I wanted her to rest, so I sat there, perched beside her bed, whispering nonsense while running that cloth over her again and again. I only stopped when the steady rise and fall of her chest and her still body told me she was asleep. Then, I pressed myself onto the bed beside her, curled up, and watched while she rested, making sure her chest always rose and always fell, and her pulse beat in her neck.
I do not know what I would have done if she had ceased either of those functions. I doubt I could have done anything to help her, but I felt useful watching over her like that, the way she had watched over me all those years before.
“Cassandra,” I heard Imogen whisper. I must have fallen asleep, for from a glance at the slice of sky I could see from Ianthe’s bedroom window, the sun had progressed mightily on its journey across the heavens. “Come downstairs.”
“But—"
“She is resting, darling, just as she needs to. Come downstairs.”
I carefully got off the bed, taking every effort not to jar Ianthe, and tiptoed out the door, shutting it behind me. Downstairs, my basket of lavender waited on the floor, brought in from the porch.
Imogen was in the kitchen, setting a kettle on the stove for tea while Ben poked at the fire. He saw me, smiled, and motioned for me to take a seat at the table. I waited, wrapped up in discomfort, afraid to break
the tension that had settled between us.
We sat in a kitchen, full of windows and cheerful natural light, just the three of us, while we waited for the kettle to whistle and Imogen to pour hot water over our peppermint leaves before handing them to us.
When that was done, after I felt like I had memorized every feather on every rooster painted on the wall before me, Imogen finally sat. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was soft, cracking with the force of her emotion. “We were not prepared for this flare of her sickness. We had to run to town, to the sanatorium, and get…” her voice trailed off. “She should not have been alone, but we had no choice. I am glad you came. I am glad you cared for her. It eased her.”
I had not expected this. I was old enough to know when I stumbled into something I was not meant to be privy to, and whatever was wrong with Ianthe was that exactly. I toyed with my mug, watching the tea leaves float in the water. None of us were drinking. Imogen and Ben looked weary, dark circles around their eyes. “What is wrong with her?” I finally asked, tired of the quiet.
They exchanged a look that spoke volumes. An entire conversation in a glance. Finally, Ben sighed and shrugged one shoulder. “She’d find out sooner or later, Imogen.”
It was then that I saw Imogen lose the war she’d been waging with her emotions. Her shoulders drooped even more, and she covered her face with her hands. The force of her sobs shook her. Ben stood and pulled his wife into his arms.
“Ianthe has consumption,” Ben said over Imogen’s crown.
I ran the words through my mind. I knew of consumption. It was a horrible, slow, wasting illness, and incredibly catching. Those with consumption were often sent to a town in the foothills of the Teeth, where the air was thinner and purer. It was thought to aid them in their struggle against the illness. There was, however, a small sanitarium in Grove, to treat cancers and the like, and doubtlessly a few consumptive patients as well, though they were quiet about it. The fear of the illness was so great, anyone known to have it was driven out as soon as it was discovered they were ill. Ianthe would be no different.
But if Ianthe had consumption, this was the first I’d heard of it, and I was certain no one else knew, either, likely save Annie and Jasper. It was a terribly well-kept secret, fiercely guarded.
“She’s had it since she was a small thing, a toddler. Shine keeps it from spreading to other people and helps control her symptoms and pain, but sometimes the consumption flares up. This treatment is an experiment, Cassandra. Without it, she’d have died years ago. We didn’t know if it would work, and it’s Fate’s blessing that it seems to be, though we do not know for how long. There are a few other patients in the territory being treated this way,” Imogen said, wiping her tears away with her hands. Ben watched her carefully. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself that she was doing the right thing. Her voice had a note of desperation I did not like. “We had to leave her alone for a few hours because we didn’t have any crude shine in the house, and we had to visit the healer that supplies us.”
“But if she drinks shine…” my voice trailed off. I knew what that meant. Those who drank undiluted shine were addicts. That meant my friend was an addict. Addiction was nearly as fatal as consumption. Were they trading one death for another? Tears pricked my eyes. I pictured Ianthe in a casket, being lowered into the ground, and I wanted to scream.
“Cassandra,” Ben said, kneeling before me. “Sometimes what you crave, can also hurt you. Do you understand? The shine keeps her strong enough to fight the consumption, but in order to keep her alive to do that, we must make her an addict and sometimes her body fights against both, the consumption and the shine. Her life is a battle, darling, and no battle is ever beautiful.”
I nodded, but I was ten, and I did not understand. Not truly. I decided it was time for me to leave, that I would check on her in the morning. Imogen held me close. “You are a good friend,” she said.
Years later, I would comprehend their secrecy. It was a horrible decision for them to make, to decide which way they wanted their daughter to die, and still wanting their child to be a person in the world while she had life in her. I understand. To have a few more precious years with someone who sets my soul on fire, I would do absolutely anything.
I did not tell Annie what I had seen, though I suspect they already knew. I knew Annie often gave Imogen extra shine, taking some from our monthly allotment for them to use. Now, I knew why. Still, I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to give this tragedy the gift of my voice. I didn’t want to make it real by speaking of it.
I made time every day to stop by Ianthe’s house, to care for her at least for an hour. Her parents seemed to appreciate my ministrations. When Ianthe finally did wake up and start regaining her health, I regaled her with the stories my father had told me about the war before time, and the goddess who laid down her life to stop the fighting, creating mountains of her bones, and stories of the trickster wolves, and anything else I could think of.
I kept her company, helped her through more coughing fits, and tried to keep her mind on anything but the battle raging just beneath her skin. I did not ask her questions, and I did not demand speech. I just sat beside her on the bed and lent her my company.
I did not truly understand the tragedy of her plight until those days spent perched beside her on the bed, watching while she coughed up her life, helpless to do anything to stop it. While my own secrets were terrible and important to keep, they were at least known between our two families. I had some small safe haven here, in this pocket of the world, where I might be who I was without worrying about any prying eyes. Ianthe had been suffering alone. I could not fathom how hard that must have been, to be ill, and have no one to share it with.
And still, that fucking Boundary crept into my thoughts. If it were down, if we could but travel to the other side of it… There was an entire world out there with information about consumption. Perhaps there was someone who knew how to treat this terrible illness, and we may never know it because we could not travel beyond the Boundary, not without permission. As far as I knew, no one ever got permission unless they worked directly for Shine Company, and even then, how would we get any specialists in?
“Cassandra,” she whispered one afternoon. “You will not tell anyone, will you?”
“Of course not,” I said. It had not even been a thought in my mind.
“Oh, Cass,” Ianthe smiled at me. It was, perhaps, the saddest smile I had ever seen.
Her illness gave me something to think about, and I would spend hours upon hours in Annie’s small garden doing just that. Annie must have known something was on my mind, but she never pressed me. Never forced me to speak, just let me sort through my thoughts and emotions while I turned the earth.
One afternoon, I was in the herb garden watching butterflies flit from plant to plant while bees buzzed in the heather around me. The day was peaceful, and perhaps it was that peace that finally stirred me to speak. Annie handed me a small knife and pointed at one of the thyme bushes. I began trimming it down, getting enough to hang in the cabin. Already, our small home smelled wonderful, fragrant and full of earth due to all the bundles we had hanging from the rafters. “Annie,” I said. “Did you know that Ianthe—"
Suddenly Jasper and Jack appeared from the fields, both flushed, harried, and covered with dirt and sweat. “What’s wrong?” Annie asked, instantly alert. For a moment, I was forgotten.
“We found shine,” Jasper said, his voice the barest whisper a whisper, as though even out here he was afraid of being overheard and afraid of what it would mean if he was.
It was the worst possible thing for him to say.
Before any of us had the chance to discuss it further, we heard the clomp-clomp of horses on the road, coming closer. Annie shielded her eyes from the sun and brushed her hands off on her apron.
“Get out of here,” she hissed at her husband and son. “I don’t know who this is. Likely it’s no one important. There is no wa
y anyone knows about the shine. Get out of here and let us deal with whoever is coming to knock on our door.” Jasper nodded, and quickly he and Jack disappeared. Better if it was just the two of us. Better for whoever was approaching to fall upon a quaint family scene, women tending a garden, nothing more. It would color things nicely. We weren’t dangerous. No one could mistake us thus.
Shine. Jasper had found shine.
That knowledge chased itself around my mind, over and over again until I was dizzy with it.
I set about trimming the thyme. I tried to appear calm. Annie, beside me, was stiff and wooden, hands white-knuckled on her small knife, lips pressed tight. She was trembling.
“It’s lawmen,” Annie whispered after looking over her shoulder at the two approaching horses. I stood and turned to face our visitors. They both rode fine horses, brown and thickly muscled. I longed to touch them. “Be calm. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is wrong.” I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince herself, or me.
“Ho!” A voice called.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Annie replied. She sounded positively sunny. No hint of worry evident. “I’m afraid Jasper and Jack are out in the fields, and Harriet is in town, working in the general store. It’s just me and the girl here right now. What brings you this far out?”
One of the men stopped his horse and got down in one graceful motion. He had emerald hair and eyes, and thin lips. He was young and assessing. I watched him take in the cabin, the garden, our dirty hands, and dusty clothes. He dismissed Annie and settled his gaze on me.
His pistol glinted on his hip when his leather duster shifted, small vials of shooting shine lining his belt. Hardly anyone had the money for a shotgun, or the shine required to shoot such a thing. The fact that he had one meant he had company weapons, company money, company authority. He was important, and that frightened me.
My mind drifted to the guns that Jasper had hidden in the floorboards of our house and I forced myself to focus on the lawmen and their horses. Forced myself to think of anything but the anxiety that was filling me up like so much winter.
