16. 2
Eventually, the black-haired sorceress returned—but she was not alone this time. She sashayed in with ten others, differing in the color of their skin, hair, and eyes, but essentially just the same, with that same power to entice and enchant.
They filed into the room in a line, bringing sunshine with them, as I sat helplessly and stared. There were as many different colors among them as a bed of wildflowers, from slippers to shining headdresses, and the effect was dazzling.
All of them together was overwhelming. I adored them, haplessly, helplessly. I was bathed in a love that was motherly, sisterly, and loverlike, all at once, rocked by the gentle waves of an ocean composed of eyes in shades of gray, green, blue, brown, and hazel, and strands of hair that were golden, chestnut, brilliant red, and equally brilliant iridescent black. All sisters.
How could we not have noticed this before, back in the village? It seemed so obvious, now, seeing them together. I could not distinguish the sorceress I had met earlier from the other black-haired ones. That was how similar they were.
I searched for Clarissa among their ranks, but she was absent. And where was Sylvester? Why was he not among them?
“This is the girl?” said one.
“Yes,” said another.
I felt the burn of eleven pairs of perfect eyes assessing me for specialness and coming up with nothing. They could have harvested me in a second, all of them.
“Father is coming,” said one of them.
“He’ll deal with her.”
I felt dizzy, drugged, drunk. Their perfume and their presence filled me up like wine in a glass, so that there was no room for anything else. I felt myself smiling a wide, foolish smile. False well-being warmed all my limbs and fluttered in my stomach. It reminded me of those old tales of mortals who wander into a faerie glade, eat the enchanted fruit, and find themselves dancing until their feet become bloody stumps. The sorceresses gazed at me with loathing, and I gazed back with servile adoration.
Through my haze of enchantment, I noticed two more people enter the room: a final sorceress, this one with hair as yellow as a sweet lemon—Clarissa!—and a man.
Of course, I knew it was the king at once. Every public establishment in the kingdom has a painting of him on a wall somewhere, copied from the one perfect oil painting that I assumed resided in his palace.
Some were good copies, but others made him look like a goat in a robe—and those, I was discovering now, were possibly more accurate than the perfected versions.
He wore a gown that could have been an elaborate cake, it was so curlicued and decorated, set all about with bright jewels and woven with glinting, heavy thread. His headdress must have been a foot tall, wobbling about up there like a dab of cream on a jelly. And I had thought the sorceresses’ gowns were elaborate! I had no idea how they all moved about in those contraptions.
My head cleared a little as I looked at him, because he was certainly no unearthly beauty. Quite ordinary-looking, in fact, aside from the magnificent garb—and his shadow, thrown on the wall behind him by the lamplight, behaved strangely, seeming larger and more complicated than it should have been, and moving a little more than it should.
Clarissa flickered her green glance over me. I saw triumph there, and spite. Despite my bedazzlement, I roused myself enough to say, “Where is your brother?”
She smiled and said nothing. The king waved her over to the table and then walked to where I knelt chained to the stone wall.
His eyes were colorless and clouded, as if by cataracts, and his head moved with snappish speed as he looked this way and that. He could have been an automaton, for all the human warmth he exuded. Even his skin was colorless, shadowed almost blue under his jaw and in the gaunt hollows of his cheeks.
He was an unassuming, almost comical figure, if you took him at face value—skinny, pale, balding, with a pronounced belly and birdlike legs not concealed by his rich fabrics and jewels—and yet there was something about him that stopped my breath.
I suppose that was what real power felt like—not seductive, sinuous power like Clarissa’s magicks, or playful, erratic power like Sylvester’s, but the harsh, inhuman strength of the truest power that had spawned them both.
He smiled, showing his yellowed teeth. “You poor thing,” he said, looking at my soiled underdress and general state of disarray (to put it mildly). He didn’t have to speak or make a gesture; quick as thought, my underdress was as clean and fresh as the day it was made. I didn’t see this as any kind of charity; he just wanted to stop me from stinking up his fancy palace.
“Why am I here?” I asked. “Why bother with me? I just wanted to go back home.”
I still couldn’t quite believe I was talking to the king. The actual king , whose (inaccurate) picture hung in every tavern and shop, glowering over me since birth. No one I knew had ever even seen him in person; he rarely went on procession and seemed to stay within the confines of the city.
Yet here he was in front of me, talking almost like a normal human being and smelling faintly of perfume that even I could tell must be expensive, with a base note of perfectly ordinary human sweat.
There was something exceptionally odd about his face, though. Not its ugliness, because I was used to ugliness, and even found it a little comforting now, after the malicious beauty of the magic-workers—but a flickering in its expressions.
It was as if two beings occupied the exact same space, rather like the House and the Other House. Flick: a goatlike old man with a discolored beard. Flick: a grinning death’s head. Flick: an avuncular smile. Flick: teeth like knives in a cavernous mouth. It made me dizzy to look at him directly.
He turned away from me, which was a relief, and spoke to Clarissa. “We must begin the council meeting,” he said. The sorceresses moved as one, graceful and united as blades of grass bowing to the same wind, and filed out. The king followed, and then Clarissa, who cast one last, triumphant glance at me.
Despite myself, I felt the melancholy of their absence. Their color and brightness had filled the room, heady and golden as wine in a glass, and I was left alone and depleted.
A shadow flickered. I stiffened, but it was Cornelius this time, popping out of the thin air, it seemed, and trotting over to me.
“Cornelius!”
He gave a brief nudge of his head against my calf, but then was all business.
“You have to get out of here,” he said.
“Well, I know that .”
“They’re going to cut you open. I heard them talking about it.”
My heart, I supposed, although if that were the case, I didn’t know why they hadn’t done it already. “Any ideas?” I asked, a bit snappishly.
“Think sideways,” suggested Cornelius. He twitched his tail and vanished, then reappeared. “See?”
“That would work here?” I felt a swelling of hope, which I quickly tamped down. There was no room for hope, only surety.
“Of course,” he said. “I just did it. This is a sorcerer’s house, like any other. And because it’s the absence of magic, none of them can see it.”
“Not even the king?”
“Not even him.”
I took a deep breath, trying to clear away any remnants of the fog and confusion from the night before, and tried to push away my fear, exhaustion, and hunger. I didn’t succeed.
It took several deep breaths, and Cornelius sitting in my lap and purring vigorously, before I was able to clear my mind enough to do the requisite twists and turns to enter that Other place.
Thinking sideways here felt entirely different. Stepping into the Other House had felt like stepping into an abandoned, but still living, place. Whatever was left under the king’s palace was dead. There was a building there of some kind—I feel a floor under my feet—but the air felt stale and poisonous at once.
It reminded me of the time Da and I had helped lay out Goodwife Tilly’s husband when he died, helping her wash the body, wrap it, and position it on the kitchen table. He had been a drunkard and a violent man in life, although Tilly would never admit it, and to hear her now, you would think she had married a saint on earth (although she was notably plumper and happier since he had gone).
As I had helped Da sponge his yellowing skin and thumbed his eyelids closed, I had still felt a sense of malice about him. Even in death, the husk of his body seemed imbued with a poison, a stench of who he had been in life. The Other Palace felt like that—a husk, a dead thing, but one with a lingering and wicked animus. I felt like I was feeling sick, just sitting there.
I clutched at a wall to steady myself, and it was so cold, it burned. In doing so, however, I realized that my shackles didn’t hold me here, and I was free. I took some satisfaction in imagining the sorceresses coming back to see the shackles emptied, as if by magic.
“Now let’s go,” urged Cornelius, appearing beside me. His fur rose along his spine, and his tail turned into a bottlebrush. Clearly this place was as comfortable for him as it was for me.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Are you mad?”
“I have to find a heart,” I said, “to take to the Weftwitch, the person Basil said could mend my heart.”
“They’ll be back soon. They’ll see that you’ve gone,” mewed Cornelius, his tail puffing out even more.
“If I don’t find a heart, I’ll be just as badly off when I get out of here. I have to break the spell somehow, or I’ll turn around and come right back.”
Cornelius huffed out an irritated breath. “Fine,” he relented.
“Can you help me find one?” I asked.
“I can help you find hundreds. They’re stinking up the whole place.”
“What?”
“There’s a room full of them. I can smell it, rotting away down there.”
“Can you find it? Can you take me there?”
He snorted, as if that should be obvious, and started walking, tail up. “Come on,” he said, without turning.
Walking through the king’s Other Palace was no picnic. I felt blind—even though shadows of the walls, floor, and ceiling remained—because it was so difficult to think, let alone see, through the sickly miasma. I might as well have been wandering through one of the city sewers.
I concentrated on Cornelius’s upright tail, like a soldier focuses on his flag bearer in the midst of battle chaos, until I grew somewhat used to it, and the sickness eased enough for me to look about a bit.
It was still recognizably the palace, and so I suppose there had been a fairly solid castle here onto which the king had simply superimposed his magic, rather than a chaotic and overgrown mess like Sylvester’s House that had strangled the structure beneath. All the rooms seemed to still be there, just a little shadowed, with an odd halo around the edges of all they contained.
I discovered quickly where all the servants had been lurking. Evidently, the king didn’t like to see the commoners wandering about his palace, for there were doors hidden behind tapestries that led to a rabbit warren of narrow, evil-smelling corridors and rickety back stairs, the ceilings almost black with lamp smoke.
There were no windows that I could see, and so I imagined the servants breathed the sooty air in all day, every day, scurrying about in the dark and stink like a panicked litter of mole pups.
Plenty of them passed by us, and through us, because here in the Other Palace, they were as insubstantial as the choking smoke that was probably blackening their lungs every working day.
I felt a chill when they passed through me, and they seemed to shiver a little as well. I wondered if they thought we were ghosts.
Like Colin, they seemed mazed and absent to varying degrees, some with a little more life in them than others, but all were clearly missing part or all of their hearts. I seemed to have developed a sense for it: sniffing out those who had been snagged, or worse.
“How much further?” I asked.
“It’s right down underneath everything,” said Cornelius. For a moment, he became a shadow cat as he passed back through to the king’s palace to snap up a slice of ham one of the kitchen maids had dropped, and then he reappeared in the Other Palace with it lolling from his mouth like an oversized tongue. A manservant that had been about to trip over Cornelius righted himself and looked about for a moment, puzzled, before continuing.
There were definite advantages to being a cat. No one batted an eye at a cat wandering about the palace—I’m sure they had dozens, official and unofficial, for the inevitable army of rats that lived in any such large household. And no one batted an eye at a cat suddenly disappearing, either. It was just what they did.
I was starting to feel dizzy again from the noxious air. I made my way down another few flights of steps. The scurrying of shadowed servants increased the farther down we went, and I felt their rush and urgency even from the Other Palace, shivering the air around us like a heat haze. Something was clearly going on down there.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I asked Cornelius, whispering even though no one could hear us. He shot me a look of utter contempt over one shoulder.
At the base of the last staircase was a door, humble, as befitted a servants’ entrance. Everyone who entered and left through it closed it very carefully behind them.
“That’s it,” said Cornelius.
I had imagined the Room of Hearts as some dank and secret cellar, not a thoroughfare. I pushed against the door of the Other Palace, and it opened sure enough, but into nothing.
The shadow servants passed through us with trays full of food and glasses, setting the air to shimmering, but the ones who went into the nothingness just disappeared. There must be a banquet taking place in the room.
“It must not exist here, whatever it is,” said Cornelius. “I can still smell it, though. It’s that strong.”
I supposed that made sense. Somewhere that stored that many hearts, if Cornelius was right, was bound to be warded with powerful magicks and perhaps entirely made of the stuff. So, I would have to pass back to the king’s palace in order to find it.
Cornelius could probably pass unnoticed as one of the palace cats, and the worst that could happen to him was being shooed away. I, on the other hand, could hardly stumble in wearing my shift, appearing out of thin air.
I stood in the doorway and thought, shivering now and then as the servants passed through me. Dozens of them. Scores, even. They had probably called in extra help for the occasion, because this seemed like an excessively large staff, even for the palace. That gave me an idea.
“Can you take me to the kitchen?” I asked Cornelius. Silly question—he could sniff out bacon anywhere.
We wended our way through the labyrinth of back stairs until we reached the kitchens—a vast and bustling space fogged with steam, that probably felt warm and muggy and smelled wonderful on the other side of whatever barrier we had crossed.
Cornelius and I found the busiest, steamiest spot where we would least likely be noticed. I took a deep breath and managed to sidle my way into the king’s palace again, bumping into a thick-armed cook who was elbowing her way to the sink.
“Watch it!” she said sharply, but otherwise gave me nary a second glance. I fit in down here, among the plainly dressed, harried, and sweating kitchen maids—as I had hoped—and everyone was far too busy with what seemed to be a grand banquet to be concerned with me.
I spotted a mobcap and apron drying over the range and snatched them up quick as winking; with the apron tied over my underdress, it could pass for a servant’s outer garment if no one looked too closely.
My bare feet I could do nothing about, but the dress brushed the floor and hid them well enough. Cornelius kept close to my heels.
I saw the finished plates for the banquet lined up and waiting on a long table, resplendent with elaborate garnishes and fiddly bits of decoration. I grabbed the nearest one and did my best to blend into the hustle and bustle, as if I was just another servant taking a dish to the banquet.
When I entered the Room of Hearts this time, I took a deep breath and pulled the mobcap a little lower on my head. Because of that, I couldn’t get a good look around at first. I followed the line of servants to the great, shining tables that lined the walls, groaning with food waiting to be served.
Most were dropping off their trays and immediately scurrying back to the door behind the tapestry to fetch another, but some were doing complicated-looking finishing touches on the plates, so I hovered by the table and tried to look busy and purposeful.
Under the cap, I was sweating profusely. When I had calmed a little, I dared to look up. And saw absolutely no hearts. All I saw was a large banquet hall, dark and ornate. An ordinary room—for a palace.
I looked about at ankle-level for Cornelius but couldn’t see him. He might not have followed me in. His nose couldn’t have been wrong, surely—this had to be where the hearts were kept. Why else would this room have been inaccessible from the Other Palace if it contained nothing more eldritch than a ridiculously long table? I would have to wait, and watch, and hope that I could find some way to find them.
The king and his daughters were already seated, most looking bored or impatient, some rat-tat-tatting their long nails on the polished wood. I quickly turned my face down again, lest the sorceresses’ beauty enchant me ... or lest they recognize me.
Was this the meeting Clarissa had talked about, to which all the magic-workers were to bring their harvest? It was certainly a bit grander than I had imagined from her description.
And was this where they planned to bring me, their little prisoner that they still imagined safely shackled to the wall? Was I to be some kind of grand finale to the sharing of the harvest, like a primitive sacrifice? Was Clarissa going to finally rip out my heart in front of all her sisters? It seemed a tad excessive to throw a party for it when she could have done the job just as efficiently behind closed doors. And why wasn’t Sylvester here?
When the king and his daughters had been served with goblets of clear, honey yellow wine and plates of cut fruit, more servants began to pour in, all with the absent looks of those under the sorceresses’ spell—a good thing for me, because I could lose myself among them.
They came bearing great wooden chests with brass handles, which they stacked against one of the walls until it was almost completely covered. I could not count them all, but I would guess there were at least a couple dozen of them.
The last servant to enter bearing a chest was Colin. I was glad to see him alive, I suppose, but he might have been better off if he had died with the rest of the Snagged.
More thralls followed him and lined up against the walls in their dozens.
I looked about. The kitchen servants had slipped away, their job apparently done for now, and only the thralls were left to serve the banquet and perform whatever doubtless sinister duties the magic-workers commanded. I mimicked their distant stares as best I could.
When all the chests were in place, Clarissa stood and walked with a sense of ceremony to the one Colin had brought in. She lifted the lid. I craned to see as best I could while still keeping my face in shadow, although I already suspected what would be inside.
I saw jars, stacked neatly, as many as if someone had been busy turning their strawberry harvest into jam. Instead of preserves or pickles, though, each one that I could see contained that same yellowish oil, and a heart.
Some were whole, and looked like the hearts I saw in the butcher’s shop back home. Some looked like the little, wizened one I had found in the square. Some were partial, cut in half or smaller. Some were little more than nuggets of flesh. All were floating in that golden, viscous liquid, something like dirty honey.
More chests, and more, and more, each filled with a clinking, sloshing mass of jars. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.
“It’s more than we have ever harvested before,” announced Clarissa, taking out one of the jars and turning it in her hand. The heart inside revolved slowly, looking like a hairless baby bird. “As you can see, Father, we have all worked hard.”
The king stood and walked along the line of chests, opening one here and there to glance inside, then continuing to stroll with his hands clasped behind his back. The sorceresses watched him. When he came to the end of the line, he turned.
“It is not enough,” he said.
Clarissa seemed startled. “It is all we could take,” she said. “If we had harvested any more, the people would revolt. We cannot take too much from each person, from each village. They would notice. They would rebel. This is already more than we would bring to you in a year or more.”
“And yet it is not enough,” said the king. He tapped a long, yellow fingernail against the glass of one of the jars. It gave off a hollow clonk clonk , its resonance dulled by the oil inside.
He then did something I couldn’t quite see, something that made his heavy coat lift and settle as if caught by a gust, and then the whole back wall of the room seemed to rush away into the distance, as if a hand had whisked it away like a cloth, revealing an immense chamber beyond. I braced myself for a room of nightmares—blood, needles, even a butcher’s block where humans would be chopped up like so much meat.
It was nothing like that. It was a wide, utilitarian room—more like a barn than the sort of room you would find in a palace, if a barn were the size of a cathedral.
Several bright lamps placed on a long, plain table near the front of the room gave some light, but the room stretched out so far to either side that the light of the lamps faded into darkness long before it hit the far walls, wherever they were.
There were scores of rows of shelves, and dozens of long tables between each, and all of them were crowded with jars of varying sizes, thousands upon thousands of them. They were filled with hearts. Of course they were. Each column of shelves went all the way up to the high ceilings and stretched the length of the room, groaning under the mass of the jars.
I couldn’t even begin to guess how many were there—thousands upon thousands upon thousands, as I said—and each of them had once been a person, or part of a person, with wants and wishes, and a warm body, and the right to grow old and die naturally rather than being gutted like pigs for a holiday feast. I forgot to hide my face as I stared, but none of the thralls around me reacted at all.
The sorceresses gasped and murmured among themselves. There was something wrong with nearly all the hearts that we could see. Some looked like the fresh jars brought in by the servants, but most of them did not. The thick, golden liquid that kept them floating was only halfway up the jar, or less, rather than filling it to the lid, and the space above was furred with a powdery green mold, the texture of a moth’s wing.
All about me, overwhelming even the sorceresses’ sweet perfume, was the stink of decay, a scent like vinegar, like fruit fallen to the ground, and like spoiled meat, all at once. No wonder Cornelius had been able to sniff this place out through who-knew-how-many thick stone walls.
“I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was as bad as this,” said Clarissa.
“And it is spreading, no matter what I do,” said the king unemotionally. “The hearts you have brought today will replace some of the store, but as you can see, they rot as rapidly as I can replace them. And the kingdom rots with them.”
“What if they were stored somewhere else?” asked another sorceress. “If the tainted jars are separated from the new?”
“It makes no difference,” said the king. “The corruption is not spreading from one to the other as they touch. Somehow, it is in the hearts themselves, even those that have been here for a hundred years.”
“Then how?” cried Clarissa. “How is that possible? The jars are sealed with magic, protected by magic wards! Nothing should be able to touch them!”
“It is a magic-made sickness, but I know not by whom,” said the king. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked a little on his feet, surveying the vast storeroom of corrupted hearts. “I have used all my skills to try to find out what exactly is causing this, and how to stop it. But even with my centuries of knowledge, I have found nothing. How any magic but my own could possibly have entered the kingdom, I do not know.”
The sorceresses murmured among themselves, sweet as a morning chorus, if you didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Luckily,” he said, “Clarissa has discovered that Sylvester’s little pet has some kind of resistance to magic. She is harder to bespell, and appeared to lose none of her heart at all when Sylvester accidentally caught her in his enchantment, leaving her untouched by the mold. If we can’t stop the corruption from spreading, we can at least inoculate new hearts against it, using whatever we can find out from hers.”
Resistance? That was something to chew on later, when I had time to think. Certainly, Sylvester hadn’t actually taken any of my heart with his wayward spell: just hooked it like a fish on a line. If I had been more susceptible to enchantment, would his magic have torn out a piece? Would I be like Nat or Jol right now?
“For now, we will keep these new hearts separate from the others, and hope that we will be able to treat them with that inoculation. Even if we are able to replicate whatever it is that gives this girl her resistance, however, we have lost far too many hearts for this harvest to be enough. We are losing a century’s worth of them, or more.”
The sorceresses were silent.
Only Clarissa spoke up. “It is impossible to replace that many,” she said. “And without them, we will never be able to keep the kingdom protected.”
“Protected? My dear, we won’t even be able to keep it alive . And it is not impossible,” said the king. “Just costly.”
“You have always told us to keep the balance,” said another one of the sorceresses. “We can’t take too many.”
“We shall start at the outskirts of the kingdom,” said the king, “We need fresh meat and produce to supplement our magic, and the closest farms and villages can bring it to us much quicker. We need as many workers there as possible. Farther out, we don’t require such a ... dense population.”
“We could survive without the food,” said Clarissa.
“ We could, for a time, but the city folk wouldn’t last as long on our enchanted produce before their bodies needed the real thing. And what is a king with no subjects?”
A moment of silence—and then Clarissa said, “Then we must take the girl’s heart as soon as possible, before we leave, or all our efforts will be in vain.”
“I quite agree, my dear,” said the king.
He turned, and his eyes fixed directly on my face. And he smiled.