Down Among the Sticks and Bones

by Seanan McGuire

  She was still thin, for while her belly was generally full, she did not have the luxury of second helpings or sweet puddings with her tea; she was still fair, for daylight was rare on the Moors. Her hair was still long, a tight blonde braid hanging down the center of her back, picked free and retied every morning. Alexis said that it was like butter, and sometimes cajoled Jack into letting her unbraid it so that she could run her fingers through the kinked strands, smoothing and soothing them. But it was never loose for long. Like everything else about Jack, it had grown into something precise and organized, always bent to its place in the world.

  The newest things about her were her glasses, the lenses milled and shaped in Dr. Bleak’s lab, set into bent-wire frames. Without them, the world was slightly fuzzy around the edges—not a terrible thing, given how brutal this world could sometimes be, but not the best of attributes in a scientist. So she wore her glasses, and she saw things as they were, sharp and bright and unforgiving.

  She found Dr. Bleak inside the windmill, a large brown bat spread out on the autopsy table with nails driven through the soft webbing of its wings. Its mouth was stuffed full of garlic and wild rose petals, just as a precaution. There was nothing about the bat to prove that it was a visiting vampire, but there was nothing to prove that it wasn’t, either.

  “I need you to go to the village,” he said, not looking up. An elaborate loupe covered his left eye, bringing the internal organs of the bat into terrible magnification. “We’re running low on aconite, arsenic, and chocolate biscuits.”

  “I still don’t understand how we even have chocolate here,” said Jack. “Cocoa trees grow in tropical climates. This is not a tropical climate.”

  “The terrible things that dwell beneath the bay scavenge it from the ships they wreck and trade it to the villagers for vodka,” said Dr. Bleak. “That’s also where we get rum, tea, and the occasional cursed idol.”

  “But where do the ships come from?”

  “Far away.” Dr. Bleak finally looked up, making no effort to conceal his irritation. “As you cannot dissect, resurrect, or otherwise scientifically trouble the sea, leave it alone, apprentice.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jack. The rest of Dr. Bleak’s words finally caught up with her. Her eyes widened. “The village, sir?”

  “Has your time with your buxom friend destroyed what little sense you had? I’m of no mood to take a new apprentice, not when you’re finally becoming trained enough to be useful. Yes, Jack, the village. We need things. You are the apprentice. You fetch things.”

  “But sir…” Jack glanced to the window. The sun, such as it was, hung dangerously low in the sky. “Night is coming.”

  “Which is why you’ll be purchasing aconite, to ward off werewolves. The gargoyles of the waste won’t trouble you. They’re still grateful for the repair job we did last month on their leader. As for vampires, well. You haven’t much to worry about in that regard.”

  Jack wanted to argue. She opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it again, recognizing a losing proposition when she saw one. “May I walk Alexis home?” she asked.

  “As long as it doesn’t make you late for the shops, I don’t care what you do,” said Dr. Bleak. “Give my regards to her family.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jack. Giving Dr. Bleak’s regards to Alexis’s family would probably mean coming home with a pot of stew and a loaf of bread, at the very least. They knew that he had given back their daughter, and more, they knew that Alexis was beautiful: her death and resurrection had probably protected her from an eternity of vampirism. For that alone, they would be grateful until the stars blew out.

  Jack picked up the basket from beside the door, and counted out twenty small gold coins stamped with the Master’s face from the jar that held their spending money. Then, shoulders slightly slumped, she went to tell Alexis that they were leaving.

  Dr. Bleak waited until she was gone before he sighed, shaking his head, and reached for another scalpel. Jack was an excellent apprentice, eager to learn, obedient enough to be worth training, rebellious enough to be worth caring about. She would make a good doctor someday, if the Moors chose to keep her long enough. And that was the problem.

  There were very few people born to the Moors. Alexis, with her calm native acceptance that this was the way the world was intended to work, was more of an aberration than a normalcy. Unlike some worlds, which maintained their own healthy populations, the Moors were too inimical to human life for that to be easily accomplished. So they sent doors to other places, to collect children who might be able to thrive there, and then they let what would happen naturally … happen.

  Dr. Bleak had not been born to the Moors. Neither, truth be told, had the Master. The Master had been there for centuries; Dr. Bleak, for decades. Long enough to train under his own teacher, the bone-handed Dr. Ghast, who had trained under her own teacher, once upon a time. He knew that one day, he would die, and the lightning would not be enough to call him back. Some days, he thought he might even welcome that final period of rest, when he would no longer be called upon to play the lesser villain of the piece—who was, by comparison, the unwitting hero. He had not been born to the Moors, but he had been there for long enough to recognize the shape of things.

  The Master had taken Jill as his latest daughter. She walked the battlements nightly, smiling and humming to herself; her regard for human life dwindled by the day. She was not yet a vampire, nor would be for several years, but it was … troubling … that a door should open and deposit two so well matched, yet so suited for opposing roles, into the Moors.

  Did the Moon, all-seeing and all-judging, tire of the Master, as She had tired of so many vampire-lords before him? Jill would make a truly brutal replacement, once the last of her human softness was stripped away. Dr. Bleak could see the story stretching out from the moment of Jill’s transformation. Jack, for all that she had little to do with her sister anymore, preferring to avoid the cloying glories of the Master’s regard whenever possible, was still of the same blood. She wouldn’t forgive the Master for taking her sister away from her. A determined mad scientist was a match for any monster—they were the human side of the essential balance between the feudal houses that ruled these shores—and he could easily see the Master destroyed, while his bright new child ascended, callous and cruel, to his throne.

  Jack and Jill were a story becoming real in front of him, and he didn’t know how to stop it. So yes, he was trying to force Jack to see her sister. He needed Jill to remember that Jack existed, that Jack was human, and that logic said Jill must be human as well.

  It might be the only thing that saved them.

  * * *

  ALEXIS SAT UP AGAIN when she heard Jack approach, and frowned at the expression on her face. “That doesn’t look like ‘everything’s fixed, now kiss me more,’” she said.

  “Because it’s not,” said Jack. “Dr. Bleak wants me to go into the village for supplies.”

  “Now?” Alexis made no effort to conceal her distress. “But I’ve only been here for an hour!” Which meant that—after the bath, and the physical exam, and the cleansing of her teeth, and the gargling with sharp, herbal disinfectant, to make sure that no bacteria had been knocked loose when she flossed—she had only been clean enough, by Jack’s standards, for about five minutes before they’d been interrupted.

  “I know,” said Jack, kicking the floor in frustration. “I don’t know why he’s so set on my doing this now. I’m sorry. At least I can walk you home?”

  Alexis heaved a put-upon sigh. “At least there’s that,” she agreed. “My mother will try to feed you dinner.”

  “Which I will gratefully accept, because your mother boils everything to within an inch of its life,” said Jack. “If she asks why I don’t remove my gloves, I’ll tell her I’ve cut my hand and don’t want to risk the wound cracking open, bleeding, and attracting the undead.”

  “That’s what you told her last time.”

  “It’s a valid concern. S
he should be pleased that you’re stepping out with such a conscientious young apprentice, instead of one of those village oafs.” Jack offered Alexis her gloved hand.

  With another sigh, Alexis took it and slid off the bed. “Those ‘village oafs,’ as you like to call them, will have houses and trades of their own one day. You’ll have a windmill.”

  “A very clean windmill,” said Jack.

  “They’d be able to give me children. That’s what Mother says.”

  “I could give you children,” said Jack, sounding faintly affronted. “You’d have to tell me how many heads you wanted them to have, and what species you’d like them to be, but what’s the point of having all these graveyards if I can’t give you children when you ask for them?”

  Alexis laughed and punched her in the shoulder, and Jack smiled, knowing that all was forgiven.

  They made an odd pair, strolling across the Moors, neither of them looking like they had a care in the world. Alexis was soft where Jack was spare, the daughter of wealthy parents who made sure she never went to bed hungry, trusting her to know her own body and its needs. (And if the local vampire favored willowy girls who would die if left outside in the slightest frost, well, loosen your belt and pass the potatoes; we’ll keep our darling daughters safe at home.) Jack’s hair was tightly braided where Alexis’s was loose, and her hands were gloved where Alexis’s were bare. But those hands were joined as tightly together as any lover’s knot had ever been, and they walked in smooth, matched steps, never turning their ankles, never forcing the other to rush.

  Occasionally, Jack would stop, produce a pair of bone-handled scissors from her pocket, and snip off a piece of some bush or weed. Alexis always stopped and watched indulgently as Jack made the vegetation vanish into her basket.

  When they resumed, she said lightly, teasing, “You can touch every filthy plant in the world, but you can’t touch me without a bucket of boiling water on hand?”

  “I don’t touch them,” said Jack. “My scissors touch them, and my gloves touch them, but I don’t touch them. I don’t touch much of anything.”

  “I wish you could.”

  “So do I,” said Jack, and smiled, a wry twist of a thing. “Sometimes I think about what my mother would say if she could see me now. She was the one who first told me that I should be afraid of getting dirty.”

  “My mother told me the same thing,” said Alexis.

  “Your mother is a reasonable terror of a woman who frightens me more than all the vampires in all the castles in the world, but she has nothing on my mother when there was a chance one of the neighbors might see me with dirt on my dress,” said Jack darkly. “I learned to be afraid of dirt before I learned how to spell my own name.”

  “I can’t imagine you in a dress,” said Alexis. “You’d look…” She stopped herself, but it was too late: the damage was done.

  “Like my sister, yes,” said Jack. “We would be two peas in a terrible pod. I don’t think I’d make a good vampire, though. They never seem to have a napkin on hand when the spurting starts.” She shuddered theatrically. “Can you imagine me covered in all that mess? And they haven’t reflections. I’d be unable to tell whether I’d wiped my face clean. The only solution would be dipping myself nightly in bleach.”

  “Hard on the hair,” said Alexis.

  “Hard on the heart,” said Jack. She gave Alexis’s fingers a squeeze. “I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”

  “You say that, and yet I’ve seen you leap into an open grave like it was nothing.”

  “Only with the proper footwear, I assure you.”

  Alexis laughed and stepped a little closer to Jack, hugging her arm as they walked toward the looming wall of the village. She rested her head against Jack’s shoulder. Jack inhaled, breathing in the salty smell of her lover’s hair, and thought that there was something to be said for worlds of blood and moonlight, where the only threat more terrible than the things that dwelt in the sea were the things that lived on the shore. Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.

  The walk was too short, or maybe their legs had just become too long: both of them were still so haunted by the ghosts of childhood that they had yet to learn the fine art of dawdling, of stretching things out until they lasted as long as they would ask them to. In what seemed like no time at all, they were standing in front of the great wall.

  Alexis let go of Jack’s hand. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called, “Alexis Chopper, returning home,” to the sentry.

  “Jacqueline Wolcott, apprentice to Dr. Bleak, escorting Miss Chopper and purchasing supplies,” called Jack. Residents always spoke first—to give them the opportunity to scream for help if they felt that it was needed, she supposed. The “help” would probably take the form of scalding oil, or possibly a rain of arrows, but at least the residents would die knowing that they’d protected the rest of the village.

  It was fascinating, how frightened people who lived in a vampire’s backyard could be of the rest of the world. Just because something was unfamiliar, that didn’t mean it had sharper teeth or crueler claws than the monster they already knew. But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself.

  “Watch the gate!” called the sentry. There was a lot of shouting and creaking of wood, and then the gate swung open, heavy and slow and supposedly secure.

  Alexis, who had been born behind that gate, knowing that the Master watched her every step, walked through serenely. The fact that she was willingly strolling into a vampire’s hunting ground didn’t seem to trouble her—and maybe it didn’t. On the few occasions when Jack had tried to speak to her about it, she had spoken darkly of the werewolves in the mountains, of the Drowned Gods under the sea, of all the terrible dangers that the Moors had to offer. Apparently, being a prey animal living under the auspices of a predator was better.

  Maybe it was. Jack had only spent a single night under the Master’s roof, and while she was sometimes sad that she hadn’t been able to save her sister, she was never sorry that she’d gotten out. Jill had made her own choice.

  Jack chuckled to herself. Alexis glanced at her.

  “Something funny?”

  “Everything,” said Jack, as the doors swung shut behind them. She offered Alexis her hand. “Let’s go see your parents.”

  * * *

  THE SUN, ALTHOUGH FADING, was still in the sky; the Master was deep inside his castle, resting up for the night that was to come. Jill was not allowed in his presence for another two days. It was always like that after a feeding. He said she needed to reach a certain age before he could stop her heart in her chest, preserving it forever. He said she would be happier facing the unending night as an adult, with an adult’s position and privilege.

  Jill thought it was really because he was afraid. No one had ever heard of a foundling going back to their own world after their eighteenth birthday: if you came of age in the Moors, you stayed there until you died. Or undied, as the case might be. She was only sixteen. She still had two years to wait, two years of him leaving her alone for three days every two weeks, two years of walking the battlements alone, feeling the cruel kiss of the sun on her skin. The Master insisted. He wanted the people to grow used to her, and he wanted her to fully accept what she was giving up.

  Nonsense. It was all nonsense. As if anyone could be offered an eternity of privilege and power and refuse it on a whim. Anyone who walked away from the Master would have to be a fool, or worse—

  There was a flicker of motion down in the square. Two people had entered via the mountainside gate. The fat girl from the i
nn, and a skinny figure in a black vest. Light glinted off Jack’s glasses when she turned her head. Jill felt her hated, hated heart clench in her chest. Her sister, here.

  This could not be allowed to stand.

  9

  SOMEONE’S COMING TO DINNER

  THE INN OWNED by Alexis’s parents was small and cozy and reasonably clean, as such things went. Jack could be in it for hours before she started wanting to scratch her own skin off, which was remarkable for anyplace outside of the lab.

  (Alexis had remarked once, after a particularly tense visit, that it was odd how Jack could handle working in the garden for Dr. Bleak, but not the idea of sitting on a seat that another human had used without first scrubbing it to a mirror sheen. Jack had attempted, not very well, to explain that dirt was dirt; dirt was capable of being clean, if it was in its native environment. It was the mixture of dirt and other things—like sweat and skin and the humors of the human body—that became a problem. It was the recipe, not the ingredients.)

  Alexis’s mother looked like her, but older, and when she smiled, it was like someone had lit a jack-o’-lantern fire in the space behind her eyes. Jack thought she could endure any amount of dirt for the warmth of Ms. Chopper’s smile. She had searched her memory over and over again, and never found anything that even implied her own mother had been capable of such a smile.

  Alexis’s father had been a woodcutter before he’d settled into the innkeeper’s life: hence the family name and the axe that hung above the fire. He was a mountain of a man, and Jack thought he might be the only human in the Moors who would stand a chance against Dr. Bleak in a physical contest. (The werewolves would win, no contest. Fortunately, werewolves were less interested in wrestling and axe-hurling than they were in mauling people and fetching sticks.)