Chapter 8 #2
The sky was clear of clouds, the stars glorying in their freedom.
Up here, the wind was biting, the cold unerring.
Cybil shivered in her nightgown as she stepped shoeless toward the balustrade.
There was no one here—at least no one whom she could see—and she cursed herself for her naivety.
It’d serve her right if Richter appeared behind her and shoved her over the railing.
Her father had performed experiments up here: rituals beneath the stars, with salt circles and half-shouted incantations. ‘What are you doing, Father?’ she had once asked, when she was still a child and had not understood the sheer depths of his disdain, or his delusion.
‘Calling the angels,’ he had said. ‘Now leave me, Cybil. There is much work to be done.’
Calling the angels. Sometimes, Cybil wished she could have the same faith that Christopher had in their family’s holiness, in the purity of his powers; she might have still been cursed, the Seed of Eve, but at least then she would resent him less.
Cybil shut her eyes and opened her arms to the night.
She pictured shucking the curse off, like chaff from wheat, the darkness being pulled apart by the wind.
She would be left clean, normal, with the shadows sent away, and the fear in her heart carved out.
Perchance, if she wished it enough, she could make it so.
The wind blustered, her white nightgown drawn against her by the breeze. There were whispers, plaintive, seeking; Cybil responded instinctively and listened.
A sudden heat flared across her palms and wrists, crawled up her arms and concentrated in pockets of flame.
It hurt, but in a manner that was satisfying, glorifying, an anointment of pain.
The fire seared lines into her flesh and burst it open.
And although her lids were closed, she saw—she saw—dozens of eyes dotted her skin, open and shining, staring up into the sky.
Across her arms, her collarbones, on her open palms, each the golden brown of those on her face, each with pupils blown belladonna-wide, each glowing with their own inner fire, embers of the light that burnt sun-bright within her chest—
‘Cybil,’ a voice came, and Cybil’s eyes flew open.
She was still on the rooftop. The night air was still and indifferent. She looked desperately to her hands, her arms, but there was nothing unusual there. A waking dream?
Miriam Richter was standing atop the balustrade, unconcerned by the danger of falling. She cocked her head, smiling darkly. ‘You should not feed them without asking for something in return.’
‘Feed… the shadows, you mean?’
Richter stepped onto the roof. Cybil shrank back from her. ‘They will grow attached to you,’ Richter said. ‘Although… I suppose they already are. Have they been doing you favours, Cybil, in hopes of a meal?’
‘I thought you were a shadow.’
‘I am,’ she purred. ‘Of a kind. But you have yet to feed me anything at all.’
‘And yet, you are still attached,’ Cybil said, her voice shaking a little. Hide your fear, she told herself. She enjoys it when you are afraid.
Richter sighed a breath—it felt odd to witness, Cybil realised, because she had never seemed to breathe before—and then gave Cybil a tender look. ‘I am fond of you, Cybil Harding. You charm me. It is a shame I shall know you so briefly.’
‘What do you mean?’
Richter shrugged a shoulder. ‘Once the witchfinder has you…’
Cybil froze. ‘The witchfinder?’
‘You did not know? Henry Martingale is starting an inquisition. It seems poor Peter Oswyn was bewitched.’
‘But—but—it was you that…’
‘Was it?’ Richter laid a hand across her chest in faux surprise. ‘And now you shall take the blame? Tragic.’
Cybil snarled in fury, running a hand through her hair, tugging hard in her frustration. It hurt, but the pain helped: it focused her, allowed her to tamp down the burning panic growing in her gut. ‘I thought you wanted a deal. Is this really intended to endear me to you?’
‘Fear is the greatest motivator of all, is it not? You will require my help if you wish to escape the noose. You know not how to deal with darkness; you are powerful, but that power is raw—unformed. It is not enough to save your life.’
Cybil swallowed, clenching her fists. ‘I am a Harding. I do not need you to save me.’
Richter chuckled. ‘Shall we test that theory?’
‘What?’
‘Let us see together,’ she said, ‘whether you can save yourself.’
Richter took a step forward, and suddenly she was standing behind her. Then she shoved Cybil, so that she stumbled forwards, over the balustrade and the edge of the roof.
Cybil fell.
The fall itself must have lasted only a moment, but it felt like eons.
Wind sharpened with frost battered her as she tumbled; above her, the light of the stars streaked and bloomed as her vision was warped by her speed.
The moon melted into a haze of indistinct silver, like the liquid mercury her father had once used at his ritual table.
Possessed by some futile instinct, Cybil raised her arms above her head, feeling her sleeves fluttering, imagining she would take flight.
But she did not. She kept falling, and the cold grew colder, and she thought, I am going to die.
Arms caught her in a bridal carry.
‘There,’ Richter said, tone satisfied.
The impact had dragged all the air out of Cybil’s lungs. She slumped, limp, her back arched over Richter’s forearms, hair falling in a red curtain towards the ground. She was too stunned to speak or struggle. Richter’s fingers pressed into her waist, and for a moment both of them were silent.
‘Put me down,’ Cybil said.
With uncharacteristic gentleness, Richter lowered her to the ground. Cybil stood on shaking legs, ears still ringing.
Richter said her name, and Cybil turned to look at her. She did not look ashamed, or regretful; but there was concern, perchance, in the way she sighed, reached out a hand, then allowed it to drop to her side.
Cybil wished to scream; she wished to cry. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘To show you.’
‘Show me what?’
‘Your weakness,’ she said. ‘Your magic is not advanced enough to save you, from yourself or from others. Without my help, you will die just as all the others have done. For now, you remain a woman, and a woman merely.’
‘Of course I am a woman. What else could I possibly be?’
‘Much more than that, my dear, if you allowed me to show you.’
‘You—you are confounding, and absurd, and— You threw me from the roof. Would my soul still be yours to take, I wonder, were I flattened into an oatcake beforehand?’ Richter’s lips twitched, and Cybil gave a cry of fury. ‘You—are you laughing at me?’
‘I cannot help it.’
‘You find joy in your cruelty.’
‘I find joy in your reaction to it,’ Richter corrected. ‘It is quite marvellous—the more distressed you are, the more amusing I find it.’
Cybil turned away from her.
‘Are you angry at me?’ Richter said, sounding pleased.
‘Of course.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Your fear is beautiful, but your anger is even more so.’
Cybil closed her eyes. She was so exhausted that it hurt to do so, lids prickling, tears welling; opening them again felt like ripping open a wound.
‘This is not a stage play, Mistress Richter,’ she said, quietly. ‘This is my only life, my only home, and I must live in it, tragedy or no.’
‘What home? This place?’ Richter gestured to Harding Hall. ‘This empty palace you wander alone, without hope, waiting to die?’
‘I loved this Hall once, you know,’ Cybil said.
‘Years ago, when I was young. When still I had my mother and I was not so alone. There was beauty in it; the flowers bloomed every spring and the forest grew green. They still do so, but at some point, it all became ugly to me. The seasons turned and all I felt was fear for the coming of winter. And now winter has come—you have come, Miriam Richter—and I think I have lost all hope of loving it again.’
Richter shook her head, dark hair swimming about her as if she were underwater; it looked to Cybil as if she almost had no weight at all, as if she would float up into the sky. ‘I mean not to take your hope, Cybil. I mean to give it to you.’ Richter reached for her hand. Cybil shrank away.
‘Still afraid, I see,’ Richter said. ‘Good.’
‘I have the notion,’ Cybil said, ‘that the only reason you would ever leave me alone would be if you saw me dead.’
‘Perchance not even then,’ Richter replied, as much a threat as a promise.
‘Light chases away shadows. Is that not the case for you?’
‘Light creates shadows,’ she corrected Cybil.
‘No absence without presence. But if it would be a comfort to you, to pretend you are blind to the dark—then I will allow you that comfort, if only tonight.’ She took a step back.
‘I believe I have made my point. The witchfinder will be here soon. When he is, I will call upon you, my dear, and see how desperation changes your tune.’
Cybil did not reply. She watched Richter fade away, just as the shadows around the table had—a blurred silhouette, losing form and clarity, until nothing remained.
Cybil pressed her hands against the wood of her mother’s door, imagining entering the room and screaming at Bess to wake up, wake up, please, Mother, wake up—but she did not.
The witchfinder was coming; Cybil needed to prepare.
She could not leave for Court, not yet, not even to ask for succour.
She could not convince Bess to come with her—Bess who could not leave her own chambers, let alone the building.
Left alone here, her mother would succumb to her madness entirely.
She would take all her mandrake tincture in a single swallow and welcome her end; the witchfinder would take her; or else she would die of the withdrawal, slowly, painfully.
Cybil could not do it. She could not leave the one person she had ever loved to rot.
So, she could not leave; she would instead do all she could to ensure their survival.
Christopher Harding had spent a lifetime making this place an altar to his own ambitions: marking it with rituals and spells, filling its shelves with potions and grimoires. There was more than enough evidence to convict her, and her mother.
Cybil had to destroy it all.
She was not frightened: she was angry. She was poking her head through the bars of her cage and biting those who came near.
If this place was to be the mechanism of her downfall, she would bring it down with her.
She went first to the hawk-head tapestry, half-unpicked and marked with her own blood.
She pulled it down—Troilus and Criseyde, too, which was pagan and thus tainted, and she tossed them into the fire.
The scent of the tapestries burning, rich dyes and ancient wool, was indescribably awful.
Cybil ran to the window, choking on the smoke, and cleansed her lungs with the frozen night air.
Then she went to her office, with its endless ledgers of numbers, accounts marking the purchase of henbane and mandrake and phosphorus: to the fire she fed those, too.
Other documents—letters from mystics on the Continent, recipes for tinctures and powders—she tore into pieces before burning, throwing the scraps of parchment around her like snowflakes, watching them flutter to the floor.
In the hallway, she smashed three windowpanes in the east gallery that had been painted with ritual grids.
Then to her father’s study: the codices and potion bottles.
The bottles she smashed in the garden—all but the mandrake tincture—flooding the soil with noxious liquid that made her head swim.
She could not bring herself to destroy the books, precious as they were, beautiful as they were.
She left them there on the shelves, keeping silent vigil over the dust and the darkness, telling herself she would deal with them later.
At first, the destruction felt rational, sensible; these things, these artefacts and pages, were the shovels with which the witchfinder would dig her grave.
But as she continued to smash and tear and burn, she became less discriminatory, consigning almost anything her father had touched, anything his magic had made or affected.
As the sun slowly began to rise, clay cauldrons were thrown from windows, poisonous plants pulled up by the root, Cybil’s own virginal, her childhood instrument, smashed to wooden shards and loose catgut strings by the blade of an axe.
She used music for her rituals, Cybil thought, delirious with fear and anger and exhaustion, imagining Jane Lennard giving testimony at a courthouse: Lady Harding oft played for empty chairs, sirrah, for the chairs were laid out for the devil, and she was awaiting His arrival.
The servants thought her mad already—what difference would this carnage make?
Accepting this, destroying the trappings of her childhood, Cybil found she was almost relieved.
She found, by the time she was through with it all, that she was almost giddy.
She felt freer than she ever had. She was the hedgehog in her cage, prying the bars apart.
Cybil went through Harding Hall and destroyed it like an animal at a carcass: pulling it to pieces, scooping out the innards. And once she was finished, once the Hall had suffered sufficiently at her hands—she sat at her mirror and smiled.