Chapter 8
8
T HE SUDDEN PLUMMET startled Nyx awake. She flailed, scrabbling for any handhold to keep herself from falling. As her heart leaped to her throat, a part of her recognized this feeling. Many times in the past, half-asleep and adrift, she had felt the world shatter under her. In such moments, she would jerk in panic as she fell—only to wake a moment later and find herself safely back in her own bed.
Not now.
As she continued to plummet, she thrashed at the blackness around her—not to beat it back, but to hold it closer. Darkness was as familiar to her as her own skin. Below, a strange brightness grew. Kicking, gasping, she tried to stay in the comfort of the shadows. But there was no halting her fall into that light.
She attempted to cast an arm across her eyes, to ward against the brilliance, but something gripped her wrist and would not let go.
Words reached her, sounding both distant and at her ear.
Is she having another convulsion?
The answer calmed her panic with its familiarity. No, I don’t believe so. Nyx recognized Prioress Ghyle’s calm but certain voice. This is different. It’s as if she fights against waking back into herself.
With those words, memory flooded into Nyx, like a dam bursting, letting loose a roiling whitewater of terror.
—a flight up steps.
—a threat of violation and banishment.
—the wash of hot blood through her dread-cold fingers.
—a headless body.
—the mountainous shadow looming through the smoke.
—bone-crushing weight.
—fangs and poison.
—a violation unimaginable.
—then darkness.
One final memory swelled through her, pushing all else aside. Thousands of screams and cries filled her head, her body—until it was too much and finally burst out her throat. The world quaked inside her again, growing ever more violent. Still, beyond it all, she sensed the cresting of a silence without end. She cowered from its immensity and inevitability.
Then a cool hand rested atop her feverish brow. Words whispered in her ear. “My child, calm yourself. You’re safe.”
Nyx fought back into her body, not so much heeding the words of the prioress, but to argue against them. “No…” she croaked out.
Even that pained protest exhausted her. She breathed heavily, drawing in a scent of acrid tinctures, of steeped teas, of dusty sprigs of drying herbs. Still, the agonizing brightness refused to wane.
She tried to lift an arm—then the other—but her wrists remained gripped. She squeezed her eyelids shut and turned her head away, but the blaze was everywhere. It was inescapable.
“Unbind her,” Ghyle ordered.
A man responded, “But if she convulses again, she could hurt—”
“We must help her wake now, Physik Oeric, or she may never do so. I fear she is too weak. She has slept near onto a full turn of the moon. If she sinks again into her poisonous slumber, she will never escape it.”
With a tug, then another, Nyx’s wrists were freed. She lifted her trembling arms against the brightness. The prioress’s words settled to her chest. A full turn of the moon. How could that be? Nyx could still feel the crush of monstrous knuckles, the fangs piercing her flesh. She was certain no more than a bell had passed since the attack. Instead, if Ghyle spoke the truth, most of the summer was already gone.
Nyx’s hands reached her face and discovered a wrap already in place, bound over her eyes, around her head. She fingered its edges. Another tried to pull her hands away.
“Leave it be, child,” the school’s physik warned.
Nyx had no strength to resist him. Not that she truly tried. By now, darkness ate at the edge of the brilliance. She welcomed its return, its familiarity amidst all the confusion. She let her arms fall back to the bed. She was suddenly so tired, a stony torpor that weighted down her bones.
“No,” Ghyle snapped sharply. “Raise her head. Quickly now.”
Nyx felt a palm cradle the back of her neck and lift her head off of the pillow. Fingers unraveled the wraps around her eyes. Though it was done gently, her head lolled listlessly with each unwinding of the cloth. She grew dizzy from the motion. With it, the darkness coiled ever closer toward the brightness at the center.
“I thought you warned us to leave her eyes wrapped,” Physik Oeric mumbled. “To make it easier on her.”
“A precaution born of hope,” Ghyle said. “Now such caution presents too great a risk. She swoons even now back toward oblivion. We must do what we can to stop that from happening.”
With one final tug, the wrap fell from her face. The end brushed her cheek before being lifted away. She found the strength to shift an arm higher, to ward against the blinding light. She squeezed her eyes even tighter. Still, the radiance stabbed into her skull, driving the darkness back, burning it away.
Then fingers gripped her chin, and a damp cloth smelling of almskald softened the sandy crusts sealing her eyelids.
“Don’t fight it, child,” Ghyle urged. “Open your eyes.”
Nyx tried to pull her head away, to refuse, but those fingers tightened on her chin.
“Do as I say,” the prioress demanded in tones that underscored her lofty position at the Cloistery. “Or be lost forever.”
Nyx wanted to balk, but her dah had taught her too well, to always respect her betters. She peeked her lids open and gasped in agony. The light—as blinding as the darkness she had known all her life—stung with a nettle’s burn.
Hot tears burst and flowed, flushing away more grime and crusts from her eyes. The tears also melted the hard brilliance into a watery brightness. Shapes swam through the haze, not unlike shadows on a bright summer day. Only with each painful blink, the shapes grew sharper; colors she had only imagined bloomed into brilliance.
Her heart fluttered in her chest like a panicked flutetail in a cage. She scrabbled backward on the bed—away from the impossibility of the pair of faces staring back at her. Physik Oeric squinted at her, his countenance wrinkled like a marsh plum left too long in the sun. Her gaze traced his every line. With her vision always clouded in the past, any colors—the little she could see even on the brightest days—were always muted and muddy.
But now…
She stared, mesmerized by the shining blue hue of the man’s eyes, far brighter than any clear sky she had ever experienced.
As the physik turned to his neighbor, his bald pate reflected the sunlight through the room’s lone window. “It seems you were correct, Prioress Ghyle,” he said.
Ghyle kept her focus on Nyx. “You can see us. Is that not true, child?”
Dumbfounded, Nyx simply gaped. The prioress was darkly complexioned, her skin far darker than Nyx had imagined. She knew the prioress had been born to the south, in the lands of the Klashe. The woman’s hair, though, was white as chalk and bound up in a nest of braids atop her head. Her eyes were far greener than any sunlit pond.
The prioress must have noted Nyx’s attention. A smile played about the corners of her lips. Relief softened the prioress’s eyes. Though, in truth, Nyx could not be sure of any of this. Having never witnessed the subtlety of expressions, she could not know for certain if she was interpreting them correctly.
Still, Nyx finally answered the prioress’s question with a nod.
I can see.
While Nyx should have been joyous at such an impossibility, she now only felt dread. Somewhere in the darkness she had left behind, she could still hear screams rising from those shadows.
As if the prioress sensed her inner terror, the smile faded on the woman’s face. She patted Nyx’s hand. “You should mend well from here. I believe you’ve finally found your path out of the poison’s oblivion.”
Ever obedient and not wanting to appear ungrateful, Nyx nodded again.
But it was not how she felt.
Though she could miraculously see, she felt more lost than ever.
T HE NEXT DAY, Nyx sipped at a thin porridge, cradling the bowl between her palms. Still weak, she needed both hands to hold the bowl steady.
Her dah sat on a stool beside her cot, leaning his chin atop his cane. He gazed at her with an encouraging grin, but his eyes and brow remained pinched. “It’s a broth of hen bones mixed with oat grindings.” He glanced to the door and back again, then leaned closer. “With a few splashes of wine cider. Should square you off right quick, I just knows it will.”
Hope rang in his last words.
“I’m sure it will.” To reassure him, she drew in another long sip before turning to set the bowl on a nearby table.
As she straightened around, she took in the small cell in the physik’s ward, with its lichen-crusted stone walls, its high narrow window, and rafters hung with drying herbs. A lone flame danced wanly atop a tarnished oil lamp. She still felt overwhelmed by the very sight and details of the room: the wavering strands of spider silk in the corner, the dust motes floating in the sunlight, the whorled grain of the wooden rafters. It was too much. How did one cope with such an overload of details all the time? She found it dizzying and wrong.
Instead, she turned and concentrated on her dah’s eyes. She tried to soothe the worry shining there. “They’re taking good care of me here. Nearly the entire horde of the school’s physiks, alchymists, and hieromonks have traipsed through here.”
In fact, they had barely let her sleep.
Perhaps they fear I will never wake again and dared not lose this opportunity.
They hadn’t even let her dah visit until this morning. Once allowed, he had spared not a moment. With the day’s first bell, he had hobbled his way up to the fourth tier—where the Cloistery’s wards were housed—accompanied by Nyx’s brother. Bastan had carried a huge pot of porridge, resting in a bucket of coals to keep it all warm.
Her brother had already returned home to join their older brother in taking care of their duties at the paddocks. Apparently even someone returning from the dead did not slow the pace of the busy trading post. Still, before leaving, Bastan had hugged her in his beefy arms, grabbed her cheeks in his palms, and stared deeply at her.
“Don’t go a-scaring us again,” he had warned her. “Next time you go about tangling with a Myr bat, you fetch your brothers first.”
She had promised to do so, trying to smile, but his reminder of the attack had stoked the terror inside her. At least, the constant attention by the parade of physiks through her small cell had kept her distracted. The curious visitors had poked and pinched her all over, often leaving her blushing. Others had spent time examining the healing punctures in her throat, measuring the scabs, picking the edges, taking pieces with them. One pair—bent-backed with age—had placed leeches on her wrists and ankles, then whisked off excitedly with their blood-bloated slugs.
Prioress Ghyle sometimes appeared with the others, but she rebuffed any attempt by Nyx to get answers, to fill in the holes since that dreaded day. Still, Nyx knew word had spread throughout the Cloistery. Occasional faces would appear at her room’s high window, requiring a leap to the sill to get a quick peek at the miracle inside.
She knew the reason for all the attention—both in the room and beyond.
No one had ever survived the poison of a Myr bat.
It was a mystery that the alchymists sought to solve, and a miracle that the hieromonks wished to attribute to the correct god. To distract herself, she had eavesdropped on the conversations of those who trotted through here. She listened to their speculations and fascinations. They spoke as if she weren’t even in the room.
She could not have been properly poisoned. I wager it was the slightest envenomation at best.
Or likely some trickery, some feigned debilitation.
Or perchance the Daughter smiles darkly upon the child.
Or it could have been the Son’s bright blessing. Didn’t I hear that in the depth of her slumber, she cried out to the moon and—
This last conversation had been cut off by the arrival of Prioress Ghyle, who sent the pair of monks out with an exasperated roll of her eyes and a stern frown at Nyx—as if she had done something wrong.
But Nyx’s survival was not the only miracle hidden away in this room.
She rubbed her tender eyes, knowing her lids were bruised from the constant attention paid to her returned sight. Every time her eyelids drooped in exhaustion, someone would pry them back open.
Nyx had paid extra attention to any attempts to explain this particular miracle, a wonder that had still left her unmoored. It was as if she had come out of the darkest cave into the brightest day. While she should have been grateful, a part of her still wished to return to the comfort and familiarity of that cave. Even her first attempt at walking this morning, supported on the prioress’s arm, was as if she were a babe new to this world. She wanted to attribute it all to the weakness from being bedbound for so long, but she knew part of it was her adjusting to her eyesight. After so many years, her shadow-riven blindness was writ deep upon her spirit, on her bones, on how she moved through life. Now her mind struggled to balance who she was in the past with this newly sighted person today.
Ghyle seemed to innately understand. “You will find your equilibrium,” she had promised.
Nyx stared at the cane in the corner, the length of elm wood she had abandoned in the astronicum a lifetime ago. She still needed it, even with her sight miraculously returned to her.
With a sigh, Nyx placed a palm over both eyes.
Darkness still felt more like home to her.
“Awf, I’ve gone and overstayed myself,” her dah said. “Look at you rubbing your eyes and all. You must be tired. I should leave you to your rest.”
She lowered her hands, a smile on her lips and an ache in her heart. “Never, Dah. You could never overstay.”
She stared at the man who had rescued her from the swamps and offered up his home and all his love. In just one day’s time, her newfound sight had revealed details both subtle and profound in the world around her, but it had offered nothing new here.
Her father’s face was as she had always known it to be. Over the years, she had traced his every line, his every bump and scar of his past. Her fingers had combed through his hair as it had thinned. Her palms had felt the skull under his skin. More so, by now, his every smile and frown were as familiar to her as her own. Even his eyes were the color she had always imagined: a muddy green, like the quaggy bottom of a bright pond.
She didn’t need sight to know this man.
In this moment, she recognized how mistaken she had been a moment ago. She stared deeply at the man who mirrored back all of her love.
This is my truest home.
Her dah stirred, plainly readying himself to stand. “I should go.”
An objection came from the doorway. “Mayhap not yet, Trademan Polder.”
Both their gazes turned to the doorway. Prioress Ghyle stepped inside, leading Physik Oeric behind her.
“I would like to ask you about the day you found Nyx in the swamps, a babe abandoned in the fen.” Ghyle waved Nyx’s dah to settle back on his stool. “It could prove fruitful to understanding what has happened. Mayhap even in her care from here.”
Her dah yanked off his cap and nodded vigorously. One hand smoothed his bog-stained summer vest, as if ashamed to be found in such a state. “Most certainly, your prioress. Anything to help you or the lass.”
Irritation flashed through Nyx at her dah’s humbleness. He had no reason to bow or scrape before anyone at the Cloistery.
Ghyle crossed and sat on the edge of the bed with a tired sigh. The prioress nodded to Nyx’s dah, the two of them now eye to eye with one another. “Thank you, Trademan Polder.”
Her dah’s shoulders relaxed. Nyx realized she had never seen the prioress in any other posture but one of straight-backed authority. Her manner now was warmer, one of invitation versus command.
Physik Oeric joined them, but he remained standing with his arms crossed over his thin chest.
“What do you all wish to know?” her dah asked.
“As I understand, Nyx was a babe of six moons when you found her.”
“Aye, that’s right.” Her dah smiled, relaxing even more, happy to recount his story, one he gladly shared with anyone willing to hear it. He told again of hearing Nyx’s cries in the swamp. “’Course ol’ Gramblebuck heard her first. All but dragged our sledge straight to her.”
“And you saw no one else about?” Ghyle asked. “No sign of who left her?”
He shook his head. “Not a footfall or broken reed. ’Twas as if she fell straight out of the sky and into a floating bed of fenweed.”
Ghyle glanced at Oeric, who shared a silent pinched look, then spoke up. “And young Nyx was blind even then?”
Her dah’s smile faded. “Truth. Poor thing. The surfaces of her eyes were already clouded and blued over. Not clear as polished crystal like now. Maybe that was why the baby was abandoned to the swamp. It is hard enough to eke a living in the deep fen. But their loss was my gain.”
Nyx again wondered about her true parents. An old bitterness sharpened inside her. She was not as forgiving as her dah. She cleared her throat, wanting to turn the conversation from such a prickly subject.
“What does any of this have to do with what’s happened to me?” Nyx asked.
All gazes swung to her, but the prioress answered. “Physik Oeric and I believe you were not born sightless.”
Nyx flinched at such a claim. “I have no memory of ever—”
“You might not remember it,” Oeric said. “But plainly you always had the ability to see. It was the bluish haze across the surface of your eyes that hid the world from you.”
“And now it’s cleared,” her dah said. “A miracle. A true blessing of the Mother.”
Nyx kept her focus on the prioress. “What do you think happened to me, what blinded me all those years ago?”
Ghyle looked to Oeric, then back again. “We believe something in the swamps tainted you. A poison, perhaps. Maybe a pall of noxious air.”
Her dah nodded. “There be all manner of nasties out there.”
Oeric stepped closer, his voice sharpening with interest. “It could also be an ill reaction to something you encountered. I’ve read treatises about how the dust in ancient rooms can bring about a phlegmonous catarrh. It’s often ascribed to hauntings or to the presence of trapped daemons. But others believe it might be related to a similar affliction that strikes many in the springtime, due to the casting forth of a flower’s must during the blooming season, what those in the Southern Klashe call Rose Fever.”
Her dah’s confused expression matched her own. “But what does that have to do with Nyx’s blindness?”
Oeric answered, “Usually, if not proven deadly, such reactions fade on their own. But sometimes they can leave lasting debilitation.” He waved thin fingers at Nyx’s face. “Like blindness.”
“But why am I cured now?” Nyx asked.
The prioress turned to Nyx. “In fighting off the poison, we believe your body shook off this old taint, too.”
“If true, it has made us wonder,” Oeric added. “If perhaps the present might offer insight into the past.”
She furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
Ghyle patted her blanketed leg. “As you might suspect, I am not one to put much stock on fen-witches who read the future in a toss of bones. Instead, I look for patterns hidden in plain view. If the venom of a Myr bat cured you, it perhaps portends that what afflicted you as a babe was also somehow connected to that same denizen of the swamps.”
“Another bat?” Nyx frowned. She wanted to dismiss such a claim, but she also remembered the abject terror she had felt—far worse than her fellow students—whenever such a creature screeched past overhead.
Could it be true?
Ghyle wondered the same. “Do you have any recollection of such an encounter? If you had sight back then, perhaps you might have seen such a creature.”
Nyx glanced down. She pictured her dah’s discovery of her as a babe and his words a moment ago: ’Twas as if she fell straight out of the sky. She closed her eyes, imagining herself lying on her back in a bed of fenweed, staring up through the moss-shrouded branches. She was again blind, abandoned, angry, scared, squalling, searching those skies through clouded eyes. A brighter patch marked the sun—then a dark sickle-shaped shadow cut across the glow and vanished into the shadows.
She stiffened.
Ghyle noted this. “What is it?”
Nyx opened her eyes and shook her head. She did not know if what she saw was a true memory or one born of the prioress’s speculation. “Nothing,” she mumbled.
Ghyle continued to stare at her, her gaze as piercing as any fang.
Nyx kept her face lowered. She didn’t know what to make of that flash of memory—if it was memory. But she could also not dismiss it, especially with the feeling that had accompanied the recollection. As she imagined herself as a baby, Nyx hadn’t felt even a flicker of terror at the sight of that sickle shape passing over the sun. Instead, in the darkest recesses of her heart, she knew what she had felt at that moment. It made no sense.
She glanced to her dah.
It had felt like home.