Chapter 7 #2
Cybil lurched away from the source of the noise, spinning around. Richter was watching her, hands linked behind her back, head cocked at an unnatural angle.
For a moment, they stared at each other without speaking. Then Richter said, ‘When all else is ashes, my dear, yours may be the only face that I remember.’
Cybil had no idea how to respond to that. Her cheeks heated, and she took a deep breath, ignoring the hammering of her heart. ‘You were controlling Peter.’
‘Yes.’
‘How? What are you?’
Richter didn’t respond. Instead, she stepped forward and seized Cybil’s arm, pulling her closer.
Cybil was furious to find that Richter was just as handsome now, in the dim grey of dusk, as she had been beneath the moon. She was square-jawed, heavy-browed. There was something about the bluntness of her features that felt familiar, in the manner that a flame was familiar to burnt skin.
‘Release me,’ Cybil said. ‘How might you convince me to do anything, acting like this? I know not who you are—what you are. If you are a witch, you are not as my father was. And if you are something else…’
‘I told you; I am Miriam Richter,’ she said. ‘And I know who you are, Cybil Harding, now more than ever. I have found so many memories here in this orchard, buried beneath the leaves and mud. Break the bough, Cybil—is that not what your father wanted? Did you ever manage it?’
Cybil pulled away, taking a shaky step backwards. ‘How—how do you know of that?’
Richter hummed in thought. ‘He was clever enough, I suppose, to see the light in you, but still too foolish to understand its worth. How tragic. Would you have preferred if I had kept him alive? It would have been foolish. Who knows what else he might have summoned, if I hadn’t gotten here first?’
For a moment, Cybil didn’t understand. Then she remembered Sir Gilbert telling her father that such a summoning would cost too dear a price—and her father’s confident response: I will pay it. I have no choice.
Cybil took another step back, and she tripped over a root.
Richter lunged forward to catch her as she fell, one arm looping around her waist, bending her in a dance step beneath an apple tree’s heavy branches.
Ripe red fruit dangled like viscera above Richter’s head.
Cybil squirmed, trying to escape her grip. Richter grinned and tightened her hold.
‘What to do, what to do?’ she asked her. ‘Are you frightened of me, Cybil?’
She was playing with her, as a cat with a mouse. ‘Let me go,’ Cybil gasped.
‘You should allow me to help you,’ Richter replied. ‘It seems sweetness does not move you, nor does deception; perchance cruelty shall instead. If I took you apart, my dear, how much would you give to be put back together?’
‘Let me go!’
‘Stubborn girl. Ask me nicely, and I shall consider it.’
Cybil spat in her face and clawed at her hands.
It did not work. Richter was as cold and unmoving as marble; Cybil bowed her back further, arching upwards, thinking to slide out of Richter’s grip.
But it was futile. All that happened was that her viewing angle changed, so that she was staring directly above them: at the clouded sky, and her captor’s dark-eyed smile, and the tree branch looming over Richter’s shoulder.
Cybil focused on the branch. Richter followed her gaze, turning her head. ‘Ah, I see. Would you like my encouragement?’
‘If you do not release me, I shall…’
‘You shall what?’ Her grin widened. ‘It is when you are at your most furious, your most distraught, that the true light of your soul breaks loose. It is so beautiful to witness. Why fight it, my dear? The shadows wish to feed—you do not feel their presence? Give them what they desire, and they shall do anything you ask of them.’
Cybil squirmed again. Richter leaned in closer. For a brief, absurd moment, Cybil thought she was going to kiss her—she drew in a breath, lips parting, uncertain how to respond—but then Richter brought her mouth to Cybil’s ear instead.
‘Break the bough, Cybil,’ she murmured.
‘Hasten to hell, you—you bitch—’
Richter laughed, and she brushed her lips over Cybil’s hairline; the touch felt molten, searing, as if it would leave a burn scar behind it. ‘Break the bough,’ she said again.
‘I cannot.’
‘Perchance not, but the shadows will. You could hear the whispers of the darkness if you allowed yourself. Give yourself to them, and they shall serve you in exchange.’
Whispers in the darkness.
The moment Richter said it, Cybil knew they were there: a noise she had always heard but learnt to ignore, as one can fall asleep to the sound of the rain, although it grows no quieter.
The low hum of something hateful and hungry.
She had always assumed it was her own hunger, her own loneliness and frustration that she’d heard—as a sort of pull that rose and fell within her, ever since she had learnt of her curse—but no.
It was suddenly so clear. The darkness did not just follow her: it spoke to her, also.
‘What does it want from me?’ Cybil asked, half a gasp, trembling in Richter’s arms.
‘The same as I do. Your soul.’ Richter reached to tuck a lock of hair behind Cybil’s ear. ‘At some point, my dear, your family made a deal with the darkness, just as my creators did. A mutually beneficial arrangement: the ability to hear the shadows, to make further bargains whenever they wished.’
‘What sort of bargains?’
‘Power,’ Richter said.
‘And they received the curse in exchange,’ Cybil said, with dawning realisation.
Richter hummed. ‘Mayhap. Darkness usually desires light more than anything else. All magic is a balance, as much offered as gained. You have light, my dear, an extraordinary amount of it; more than I have ever seen. It would be a shame to waste it all on other shadows, but for something as trifling as a tree, they will require only a tiny piece of yourself—little more than a spark.’
‘Is that what you desire from me? A spark?’
She smiled. ‘I am no petty shadow, my dear. I will have all of you, and nothing less.’
Cybil closed her eyes. The shadows hissed to her, in a language she knew but did not know: the language of hunger, of desperation.
And, for a moment, she was tempted. She wanted to surrender to them, to allow them to find purchase in the fissures of her soul, to consume her and make every furious imagining of hers a reality.
But she did not. She could not. Instead, she opened her eyes, and her gaze met Richter’s. She said, quietly, ‘Let me go.’
Richter did not move.
‘You say I have light,’ Cybil said. ‘My soul is mine alone to give. My terms, my choice—and I choose to keep it as it is. I will not change my mind through fear alone.’
For a moment, Cybil was certain Richter would drop her—or dash her brains out against the tree trunk—but then, mute and frowning, Richter pulled her back up to standing and tugged her away from the tree.
‘You are stubborn,’ she said, not without admiration.
She reached out her hand, in a movement as coy as a blown kiss: the bough groaned as if in pain, then snapped cleanly at its base, falling heavily to the orchard floor.
‘That is natural, with such fire within you. But you need not deny your own power. It is a shame to do so.’
Cybil said, ‘The world is such an ugly place, Mistress Richter. I am not prepared to make it uglier.’
Richter clicked her tongue. ‘Ugliness is a human concern, Cybil. You needn’t debase yourself.
With my aid, your beauty would only become clearer.
’ She reached forward to press her hand against Cybil’s sternum, giving her a look that seemed almost fond.
‘You have never truly seen yourself before, I suppose. I shall show you.’
Cybil looked down at Richter’s hand, and a light began to bloom between them.
For a moment, Cybil flinched, fearing that she was somehow catching on fire.
Then she realised that the light was coming from within her own chest. Soon, it was bright enough that it began to hurt her eyes, and when she looked away, it left dark spots in her vision, as if she had been staring directly at the sun.
‘Is that… part of me?’ she asked Richter.
‘It is your soul, Cybil. Every person has one, but yours—I have never seen anything like it.’
Cybil stared at Richter, trying to see the same thing in her, but there was nothing. Only a strange, shifting darkness behind the woman’s eyes and within her chest, which seemed to grow darker and darker and bigger and bigger the longer she looked at it.
‘You do not have one,’ Cybil said. ‘At least—not one like mine.’
‘That is because I am not a person.’
‘What are you, then?’
She shrugged. ‘Whatever it was my makers made me.’
‘You said you were summoned. A demon? An angel?’
‘Either, neither. I was a shadow, once—perchance I still am.’
‘And you wish to make a deal with me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Because my soul is strong? Because my family made some sort of deal themselves?’
Richter reached out and drew a finger down the centre of Cybil’s chest. Cybil’s breath stuttered, and she felt her cheeks heat. ‘Yes.’
‘What will you do with it?’
‘Consume it,’ she said. ‘I have never wanted anything more. To have such a soul would be the greatest pleasure I have ever known. It would provide me with power for centuries.’
‘I would never agree to such a thing.’
‘Why not?’ Richter asked, with genuine confusion. ‘There is little need to rush. I can give you anything you want, Cybil. I find you fascinating enough to watch you for years; your anger, your sorrow, your beauty. I could break your curse, serve you, grant you your every desire, and eventually…’
‘Eventually you will eat me? You will kill me?’ she said, incredulously. ‘Just as you killed my father?’
‘You were always going to die regardless. This simply allows for more certainty. Tell me how much time you require, and I am certain we can negotiate.’ Richter offered Cybil her hand. ‘You need not be alone anymore.’
Cybil looked at her palm. It seemed, at first glance, an ordinary human hand.
Its nails were a little too sharp, mayhap, the skin too smooth.
She knew that Richter’s touch was cold, but not so cold as to be alarming.
She knew that her mouth was soft, from when it had touched her forehead.
Even now—even half breathless with fear and confusion—Cybil’s heart sped to think of that touch, to think of touching her once more.
Miriam Richter could certainly pass for human, if she wished to, if no one knew any better.
But it was her eyes. It was always her eyes.
When their gazes met, Cybil looked into that darkness, and she saw nothing human there.
If Richter had pupils, they were the same colour as her irises, or else they were blown so wide that even belladonna could not have accomplished it.
And Cybil wondered how she had never noticed it before: this woman did not have a woman’s face, but the expectation of one.
She was an abyss that promised a person at its end.
Cybil shook her head. ‘I know better than to make deals with the devil,’ she said. ‘I want you to leave my property, Miriam Richter, and never return.’
Richter sighed. ‘If you really wanted that, my dear, your magic would have kept me away.’ Stepping backwards, she lifted the felled bough from the ground with one hand, and she held it in front of her.
It was at least as thick as her torso, but she wielded it like a Myrmidon with a spear, raising it upright without effort.
‘It is a shame,’ she continued, ‘that you refuse to learn the wonders you could work.’
The gnarled bark of the bough shuddered and began to unfurl, stripping itself away from the pale heartwood.
That wood paled and thinned and hardened until Richter held a long, thin bone, sharp-tipped and slightly curved.
A whale’s rib, or else the talon of some indescribable leviathan.
The bone was already beginning to yellow and crack with age the longer Richter gripped it between her hands.
Cybil watched in horror and fascination as it darkened and went brittle, browned as if buried for fathomless years, and then—with hardly a whisper of sound—dissolved into dust.
Cybil felt something within her quail at this show of power.
She wondered if Richter would reach her hand out once more, close it around her own wrist, and consign her to ashes, also.
But Cybil allowed her fear presence for only a moment.
Then she bound it up again, tied it in ropes too tight to unknot.
Lifting her chin, Cybil said, ‘I wish to never see you again.’
Richter’s eyes glittered. She did not respond.
Cybil turned and walked away. Behind her, a crow cawed; but when she turned instinctively towards the noise, she saw nothing but the waiting dark.