16
I awoke blank and frightened. Not blank as you wake from a dream—dazed and groggy—but as if my mind had been scraped bare, skinned by an expert knife. I was aware of a chunk of time gouged from my life, a gap where something should have been. I couldn’t help trying to explore it, prodding and poking at it with my mind like you’d investigate a missing tooth with your tongue, but there was nothing to find.
My eyes flashed light-dark, light-dark, before focusing, and my heart gave a jagged, sideways leap in my chest as it seemed to start beating again after that terrible nothing . My breath came in pieces, too, juddering and shuddering until I feared it would never settle back into rhythm.
I had never before realized how crowded and rich sleep really was, even when it seemed dreamless. I had thought, before this terrible morning, that I closed my eyes at night and fell into oblivion. Now that I really had fallen into oblivion for a period, I knew that time spent asleep was still time spent alive.
Sleep had depth and texture and purpose. The dreadful empty place where I had been had none of those things. I even missed those old familiar nightmares in which I had wandered the long, black corridors and had pushed the twisting vines from my face.
Now awake, or what passed for it, I scrambled for even the simplest memories—who I was, my name—and found nothing. My consciousness came back in little pieces, as if the monsters, or whatever they were, had scissored it into strips. There was one advantage to the nothingness, though: for just a few moments, I had forgotten all the events of the past months, and it was a blessed relief.
My heart felt ordinary, just for a moment, as I wondered what orders Da and I had to fill on the morrow. I hoped it wasn’t hunting season, with deer and quail to dress, because their wild, dark eyes made me a little sad.
Of course, that relief lasted about a minute before the wrenching pain in my chest made me remember that, oh, yes, a sorcerer had bespelled me to fall in love with him; I had left Da and my whole life to trail after him and act as a servant in his enchanted House; and my heart was probably about to be cut out and pickled in a jar, leaving me as some kind of inhuman thing that would leak green slime and die in a stinking puddle.
I could have been safe in my own little trundle bed at home right now, rather than slumped in the corner of a dark room like an old sack of bulbs.
But where was I, exactly? The magic-workers had clearly found me—Clarissa, or one of her sisters—and so I was probably either imprisoned in one of their houses, or in the king’s palace itself. My guess was the palace. I roused myself enough to look around.
The dark seemed impenetrable at first, but I could tell from the feel that I was chained up. My wrists and ankles were in shackles. I almost laughed. Me, in chains! As if I were some sort of dangerous criminal who needed to be restrained. Locking me in a room would have been more than enough. Hell, in the state I was in, you could have left the door unlocked; I wasn’t going anywhere.
Cornelius was nowhere to be seen, and I hoped he was all right. He probably was, I told myself. Cats were notoriously difficult to capture, slippery as ink. I didn’t have time or the leisure to contemplate his fate, however, because I had to concern myself with my own.
Someone had stripped me down to my underdress (I filed that particular shame away for another, less urgent time), and my knife, the heart, and the precious paper—with the map! I could have cried—were gone.
Weftwitch , Weftwitch , Weftwitch —I repeated the name I had read to myself, making sure I remembered that, at least. I still had the little raven seal; I suppose they hadn’t seen any use for it.
I took a cautious inventory of my body, searching for injuries. I found an uncomfortably dry mouth, and aches and pains all over, but nothing all that serious as far as I could tell. The heartsickness was still there—mild enough that I knew Sylvester’s spell to alleviate it was still in effect.
This surprised me. Didn’t he know yet that I had run away for good? As soon as he found that out, he would surely whisk the spell out from under me and send me sprawling back into the agony of separation.
I tried pulling on one shackle, then the other, because I would feel silly if I didn’t at least try to wrest myself free. Of course, they stayed put. There was nothing to do but wait and hope that they would let me use the privy eventually, because my bladder was knocking urgently on my stomach to let me know it was ready to relieve itself, thank you very much.
As I sat there in the dark, I started to feel very sorry for myself, and very homesick.
Oh, Da. How I missed him, in his great filthy apron and clogs, beaming ear to ear and telling me always how beautiful I was, and how lucky was he to have such a blessing of a daughter to help him in the shop and keep him company at home.
How could I have left so blithely, leaving my dreadful scribble of a note, and not think about my Da lonesome at home, getting his own tea of an evening and drinking it by himself, while the room darkened, and the fire died? Did Basil ever send my letter to Da?
Well, I knew the answer. I had been more concerned with ridding myself of the pain of the sorcerer’s enchantment than I had been with doing the right thing by my Da. That bloody sorcerer and his bloody spell, intentional or not.
A teaspoonful of early-morning light had started to trickle in through a grate high in the wall, just enough to show me that I was in a stone room—probably the palace dungeon, as I had thought.
I had imagined dungeons as dank and noisome places, but this room didn’t even smell damp. It was dry and stale, the air unmoving. Sawdust coated the floor, but it seemed fresh and swept, for the most part.
To my horror, something shuffled about in the sawdust on the other side of the room. A rat? I shivered. I’d seen my share of rats in the shop, of course, but I hated the things. The thought of little pink feet scampering over me while I was chained up—well, it made the urge to urinate even more pressing, I can tell you.
I peered into the darkness, however, and could just make out another figure—not shackled, as I was, but sitting in the dust with their knees drawn up to their chest, which is what had made them difficult to discern at first.
It was the feet I had heard rustling in the sawdust. I could see them squirming about, toes white with cold. A fellow prisoner, I guessed, and I wondered how they had stayed so still all that time. Someone who was used to remaining quiet and unnoticed, I supposed.
“Who are you?” I asked, loudly enough that the sound of my own voice startled me.
The shuffling stopped. The feet drew in closer to the body again. I wondered why the other prisoner was not chained, as I was.
My senses had been deadened by my time spent asleep—if you could call it that—but they stirred enough now for me to smell the sweet stink of body odor coming off my roommate. It mingled with my own nervous sweat and the mustiness of the sawdust to create a cocktail of scents that, if I had to bottle and label it, I would have called, “Fear.”
“Don’t be frightened,” I said helplessly, having no idea whether the figure was frightened or not, as I couldn’t see their face. I was frightened, however, and I suppose I was trying to comfort myself.
The other prisoner shuffled themselves forward a little on their bottom, just enough for the dim light from the tiny window to illuminate them.
It was a girl, as far as I could tell. I’m not much good at judging the ages of sprouts, as I think I’ve said before, but if I had to take a guess, I would say she was perhaps seven or eight years old, judging from the level of wary intelligence in her eyes, but undernourished enough that she could have passed for five. She had a small, heart-shaped face surrounding big eyes, with petals of darkness underneath them, and skinny ankles protruded from her grubby, oversized dress.
The girl looked over at me without much interest, seemingly so resigned to her fate that she didn’t even look frightened. I was just one more potential threat in a lifetime of potential threats, and her flat stare told me I was by no means the worst of them.
“Why are you here?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine that such a waif could have committed much of a crime. Stealing food from a market stall, maybe, or picking pockets—that would be the extent of it. Certainly nothing bad enough to warrant being locked up in the palace dungeon.
She kept her mouth pressed shut and did not answer me, but her filthy toes twitched a little. The nails on them were ragged. Their uneven edges caught the light, what little of it there was.
“I’m Foss,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Millie,” she said, so quietly that I almost didn’t catch it.
“And what are you doing here, Millie?”
“ They told me to wait,” she said, placing a sinister emphasis on they .
“Who are they? ” I asked.
She did not answer.
“Do your parents know where you are?” I tried.
“I don’t have any,” she said.
She was a street urchin, it was clear. That haunted little face and the ragged clothes; that elderly way of shrugging off fear and resigning yourself to your fate.
A terrible thought occurred to me. I remembered the portrait hanging in the sorcerer’s room and the face of a little boy who had that same air of old-soul resignation about him.
“When did you come here, Millie?” I asked.
Another shrug. “I’m not sure. They bring me food sometimes.”
I tried to tell myself I was jumping to conclusions, that she could be here for any number of reasons, but it made terrible sense, after what the sorcerer had told me. Easy enough for the king to buy another child off the streets, or lure one in with the promise of food and a place to sleep, as he might have bought the boy in Sylvester’s portrait.
I didn’t know what dark alchemy turned these gaunt, hollow-eyed children into gorgeous magic-workers, but it seemed like none of the child itself survived the process. Quiet, world-weary Millie would die, essentially, and a beautiful sorceress would be born from her ashes.
Perhaps the new sorceress would wonder a little about the child who had given her life, as Sylvester did, but mere nostalgia seemed a poor exchange for a real life fully lived, even if it was a meager, short, and lonely one.
“Do they treat you well?” I prodded. Surely, they wouldn’t abuse the child if she was going to become one of their own.
“I get food,” she said again. She seemed to be entirely focused on food to the exclusion of everything else, but I suppose that was natural for a sprout who’d been foraging on the streets for most of her tender years.
Being indoors with a regular supply of victuals and water was probably enough, after her experiences, to put up with all manner of oddities and strange folks.
“How long have I been here?” I asked next.
“Not long,” she answered. “I don’t know. I’ve been asleep. I woke up and you were here.”
The light coming through the slit of the window grate now had a cold, daylight quality, and I supposed it must be the next day. I had been unconscious for several hours, then.
I wondered again where Cornelius was, and hoped that he was safe and had found shelter. It was likely. He was a cat, after all, in a city that was teeming with food and potential hiding places. Still, I missed him.
I was not surprised when the heavy door opened on a waft of honeysuckle-scented air to admit one of the sorceresses, but I was relieved to see it wasn’t Clarissa.
The room seemed to glow as soon as the magic-worker stepped in, and even Millie’s sharp little face took on a sort of beauty in the reflected light. As usual, when confronted with one of the magic-workers, I felt a queasy blend of inferiority and mindless adoration.
This one had black hair as rich and iridescent as oil, and eyes like copper coins. Although she and Clarissa looked nothing alike, there was an affinity between their two faces that I could not explain: not just the unnatural gorgeousness, but an exquisite ferocity, an unidentifiable sense of threat that set the heart to beating faster.
And yet I was drawn to her—wanted to draw near to her as you would creep toward the warmth and light of a fire.
The sorceress looked at me with disgust. The ugly expression sat oddly on her beauty, like a skin forming on custard, and let me better shake off her spell and force my face from gaping with awe into something more like a glare.
Millie shuffled herself back against the wall and turned her shoulder to me, seeing that I was in disgrace with the pretty sorceress, and distancing herself from her disapproval. Millie was under their spell, for certain.
“ You ,” the sorceress said to me, with loathing.
“Me,” I said, agreeably, striving to keep myself from smiling at her. There was still that terrible instinct to please, to worship. I was a mouse mesmerized by a cat, a ferret paralyzed by the sweep of an owl’s wings above. She stood there and stared at me, flexing her long fingers with their pointed nails.
“Does Sylvester know I’m here?” I asked her.
“ Sylvester ,” she spat, “knows nothing. That is why we are in this ridiculous situation in the first place.”
Ridiculous, indeed, because even though I knew I was chained to the wall and probably about to be butterflied like a piece of meat, I still felt a surge of specialness and, yes, joy, to be in her presence and to be the object of her undivided attention. I could have slapped her just for that.
Would they ever just leave me alone, these magic-workers? Was my heart to be pushed and pulled and worried about by them until the end of my days (which was probably rapidly approaching)?
“Why am I here?” I demanded. “Why not just let me leave? I was trying to go home. I would have been out of your pretty hair for good.”
She gave me another flat stare.
“If it were up to us, you’d be dead already.”
“Charming.”
“The king wants you here and alive,” she said, giving me a look that indicated I should consider it an honor that he bothered with me at all. For a moment, I almost believed it was an honor myself—that’s how powerful her presence was. I could look at her and know she was a monster, but still want to throw myself on her bosom and have her stroke my hair.
“What am I here for, then?” I asked. “If he’s not going to kill me.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” she said. “He just wouldn’t let us do it.”
Oh.
“And he will likely do it soon,” she added, “because we will all be riding out before long. Enjoy your last few hours.”
The sorceress turned on her heel and left the room. It was sudden and left me disappointed, as I was ready for a good fight. I had hoped she would stand there and explain, even out of spite, exactly what was happening, but I supposed I would have to wait.
My bladder, sadly, didn’t have that patience. Frightened, and not knowing when it would be able to relieve itself somewhere respectable, it loosened and spilled itself all over the floor under me, until I sat in a pungent, yellow puddle with islands of mushy sawdust floating about in it. Just one more shame to add to the mounting list.
Millie drew her ragged skirts away from the spread of it, but surreptitiously, as if she didn’t want me to know she had noticed. That small kindness wrenched at me, from someone in such dire straits themselves, and a child at that.
From the looks of the stone and straw in one corner, now that I could see better with the daylight, she too had been reduced to relieving herself almost where she sat. That bastard the king wasn’t content with snatching sprouts and slicing them up to make sorceresses, or however he did it—he treated them like animals in the process it seemed.
“Wasn’t she pretty ,” gushed Millie, startling me. Her little face was glowing. She gave a great, gusty sigh, as if yearning after the sorceress.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” I heard myself say. One of Da’s sayings.
“They’re so shiny ,” said Millie.
“They’re not to be trusted,” I said, more sharply than I had intended. “Do you hear me? Don’t trust them.”
Millie recoiled, folding into herself, her face going still again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I had been too harsh. If a grown adult fell under their spell as easy as winking, how much more deeply would a little girl fall in love with the beautiful ladies? Especially a little girl who had seen few shiny, beautiful things in her short life, and probably saw in these women the sort of sweet and pretty mother she had dreamed of having since she was little. I know I had had the same dream, once upon a time, although I had never mentioned my missing of my mother to Da for fear of hurting his feelings.
I don’t know how long I sat there in my own filth—it was hard to gauge time down there, especially with the last groggy dregs of magic oozing out of my mind—but after some time had passed, a fellow in a fancy uniform came and unshackled me. Millie watched expressionlessly as he turned a key in the metal at my wrists and ankles.
“Wait,” I told him when he hauled me to my feet. I held out my hand to Millie.
“Come with me,” I said, more from desperation than any hope I would actually be able to help her. “I’ll take you away from here.”
“Girl stays,” said the guard.
Millie shrank back from me, tucking her bare feet under her skirts, flicking an apprehensive glance at the guard. I didn’t know what exactly I planned to do if she came with me, but I felt a desperate need to keep my eyes on her and, therefore, somehow, stop whatever horrific thing the king had planned.
“I am a friend, I promise,” I said to her, wondering how frightening a sight I was to the small child in my current state—filthy and half-dressed, and stinking of my own urine. I wouldn’t trust me, either.
“Please,” I said, trying not to let my desperation creep into my voice. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.” Somehow. “You’re not safe here. I’m sorry I was short with you before.”
“Girl stays,” repeated the guard, grasping me by the arm and pulling me after him. Millie kept staring at me with her big eyes.
“I will come back for you,” I told her as I was pulled away, but the words rang hollow.
The guard very determinedly avoided looking me in the eye as he led me out of the dungeon and up several flights of stone steps, and I was very conscious of the stench of urine that wafted up to him from my soiled skirts. Still, he probably deserved it.
Just as Sylvester’s House had been unmistakably a part of its master, I could sense the character of the king all around me. The palace was made of the usual human materials, as far as I could tell, but there was a sharp, cold quality to it all.
The stones were laid in thin, vertical lines, and the width of the steps up which the guard was pulling me felt pinched and ungenerous, with cunning little pits and bumps placed perfectly for tripping. I stumbled up thousands of them, it felt like, the guard gripping my upper arm so hard that I could almost feel his fingerprints impressing themselves onto my skin.
We walked on, and the absence of any other human began to nag at me—just at the back of my mind, at first, and then becoming more and more prominent as we passed through dozens of rooms and passageways without seeing another living soul.
I had imagined that courts would be full of people: the king himself, of course, but also all sorts of courtiers, ladies-in-waiting, seneschals, guards ... Where were all the servants, even? The guard who had brought me out of the dungeon was the only such person I had seen.
I knew that servants, especially those of very high nobility, were meant to stay out of sight as much as possible, but I would have expected to run across at least one under-housemaid or a scurrying pageboy. I neither saw nor heard so much as a whisker of anyone. It became eerie.
The guard was silent, and all I could hear was the slap of our footsteps on bare stone, turning to a soft shushing when we crossed carpet. We spiraled up and up through the palace, until I wondered whether he was trying to walk me in circles so that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back.
Finally, we reached the end of the last hallway—not black and stark, like Sylvester’s, but paneled in rich wood and hung with tapestries—and faced an ornate door. He pushed me through it.
Another long, unfriendly corridor, and another door, and then I was in a surprisingly luxurious room: a reception room of some kind, with a large, long table surrounded by perhaps a score of chairs, uncomfortable-looking sofas against the walls, and a puce carpet that prickled at my bootless feet.
Unusually for a room like this (I thought, at least, although who knew what royalty got up to behind closed doors), there were more shackles set into the walls, and the guard fastened me into them again.
I had recovered myself enough by now to feel thirsty, my whole body shriveled up with the want of water, and when he offered me a skin of cheap wine, I drank it gratefully—if clumsily, without the use of my hands—feeling it spill over my face as he tipped it into my mouth.
His face twisted in disgust as he poured out the skin, but I did not care. I was so grateful to have the liquid; I felt myself coming to life again, like a plant greening in the rain. After that, he left me alone and seemed relieved to do so.
This room was more comfortable than the dungeon, at least, and although there were no windows, the guard had left a lamp burning, so I could look around at the unwelcoming furniture at my leisure. After an hour or so, I had memorized every ugly but intricate pattern of the various upholsteries.
I could have been there for hours. I slept for a while again, I know, because I encountered those old dreams about the vines and the long, black corridor. The patterns of the vines got tangled up with the ugly botanical embroidery on the fancy couches and sent me wandering through tunnels of misshapen maroon flowers and bulging velvet fruits. Even so, it was a relief to dream again after that stretch of nothingness the night before.
When I woke, there was still no sign of Cornelius, which I hoped was still a good thing. I found I had wet myself again, which wasn’t a good thing at all, but seemed unavoidable. The thirst was back, along with the ever-present heartsickness, and now hunger had joined it—a gnawing, painful hunger that made it feel like my belly was sticking to my backbone. My mouth became very dry again, so that I could feel every contour and detail of my tongue, palate and teeth without the softening of saliva, which was a lot more unpleasant than it sounds, I can tell you.