Chapter 17 #2
Strong was gone now, leaving nothing but another hole cut into her memory and a name cut into a rafter.
He was a lesson. A broken promise. His strength had been an illusion, a fragile lie, his protection forgotten.
She was the Eldest now. Before she’d been Eldest she’d worn other names, handed down by her predecessors.
For a time, she had been Lucky. Not that any of them were lucky, but somehow she always came out near the top of any scramble while stronger, faster, cleverer siblings fell foul of the constant dangers.
For a time she had been Hard, though whether she’d earned the name for her endurance or because her brothers and sisters found little comfort in her, she didn’t know.
The last letter hurt the most and bled the least. She finished the g, teeth gritted against the pain. With her brother’s name burning on her arm, she looked up and shook herself into the now.
“Are we all here?” She looked around at the vacant faces.
“Are we here?” Had Strong vanished into nothingness, or had they simply forgotten him as he forgot himself?
Had his strong body lain at their feet on the dirty floor, misplaced, unremembered?
Had they stepped over and around him as they left?
Was he there now, reduced to unnoticed bones by the rats?
“Lip-Scar!” She shook the boy’s shoulders. “Say my name!”
When she had made each of them say her name and then their own, she stood back to address them all.
“Follow me. We’ll block the west door to the Music Room first.” She led off into the gloom at a brisk pace, aware of every obstacle, stepping over or around the delicate piles that might warn of Night-Father’s approach should he brush against them.
Behind her, broken crockery slipped to the floor, fragments clacking against each other.
“Idiot! Who was that? Was it Tune?” She called that sister Tune because she would sing a faint and trembling little song when terrified.
At least she had until Eldest beat the habit out of her.
Better a beating than Night-Father’s tortures.
“N…no.” Tune’s voice. Eldest could still see the girl silhouetted against the parlour’s glow, standing beside the warning pile she’d toppled.
If Eldest were the eldest of them, and she thought she was, then Tune might be the youngest. Perhaps not even six, capable of holding a tune but little else, be it a lesson or a silence.
“I should…” Eldest stopped, seeing the child flinch.
She should beat her again. Sometimes she thought that while Day-Father taught them many lessons, how to read, how to reason, even how to fight, that Night-Father had only one lesson to teach.
He wanted Eldest to beat Tune. He wanted both of them to learn to hate.
“Build it back, then come to the Music Room to help us.”
They crossed the Dining Hall, took the East Corridor, ascended a flight of stairs, and entered the Music Room.
“Get chairs. The least broken ones. Interlock them like I showed you. Scab and Finger, you wedge the door first. All the way up, especially where the hinges were.”
A voice rose, sounding dissent. “It’s stupid to block this door. There’s more routes out of the Library. The ceiling hole’s too slow. The North Stairs are rotted through on this level, so—”
Eldest silenced Grumble with a swift, sharp slap, finding his face in the blind dark.
“When he tries the doors, and they’re blocked, he’ll spend time forcing one of them. Time he could have been hunting us.”
“But…” Grumble must have decided to bite his lip, remembering the slap’s lesson, at least while it still stung on his cheek.
“We won’t be in there. We’ll already have climbed up into the Clove Room, taking as much time as we need.”
“He won’t bother with the door if there’s nobody in there.” This from Round, from the back of the group, safely out of slapping distance. He had been round once. Now he was as skinny as the rest of them.
“I’ll be in there while you’re all erasing yourselves. I’ll stay in the Music Room and let enough show to waste his time.”
“But you’ll get caught,” Milk-Eye gasped.
“I won’t.”
“Where will we hide?” Lip-Scar asked.
“I don’t care, but in the West Wing, he’ll come from the east. Best I don’t know where you are. Then he can’t make me tell.”
At first the fear of Night-Father’s cruelty had been crippling.
Fear had drowned Eldest’s mind and like the rest of them she had been nothing but a victim, as surely as if she were chained to the wall.
She had bent herself into whatever shape she imagined might save her, done whatever she thought might placate him, however much it shamed her.
But nothing had made the slightest difference.
“Why do you do it?” Milk-Eye asked as she rummaged through the broken chairs, hunting splinters large enough to make good wedges. “You could just run. You’re the best at hiding.”
“Because I’m the oldest.” Eldest couldn’t see her sister’s face in the dark, couldn’t know if she would see suspicion there, or admiration, or perhaps that tight satisfaction the parlour’s light sometimes showed in the twist of Lip-Scar’s mouth when he thought she wasn’t watching, the look that said he was happy to use her, to profit from her foolishness.
“That’s no reason,” Runner said, passing by with a burden.
“We can’t all run,” Eldest said. “And besides, there doesn’t have to be a reason for everything. Why does Father change at night? Why does he hunt us?”
“If we lost you…I wouldn’t be able to do what you do,” Milk-Eye whispered. She was probably the closest to Eldest in age, though it was hard to tell. Of all of them the girl seemed to be the one who most shared Eldest’s burden of care. “I couldn’t…”
“Because I’m the oldest,” Eldest repeated.
But a truer answer might be Because I am me.
Perhaps there was a reason for the horror that was their lives.
Day-Father taught them to read, to fight, to think.
Night-Father taught different lessons. Where Day-Father used words, examples, slaps, and diagrams to make his points, Night-Father simply applied pressure, squeezing them into what he required, forcing them to quiet their souls, erase themselves, become nothing so that as he prowled they might remain unnoticed while he passed by.
With his howling and his cruel nails, with his sniffing in the dark, wild laughter, and whispered threats, Night-Father sought to make them bury themselves in the void.
He forced them to dig so deep that they erased not only their presence but their present, deleting who they were so that they could be further moulded to suit his purpose.
Eldest had always known that while her body screamed that escaping the agony was the most important part of her fight, this more subtle struggle was the real one.
Father, Day or Night, did not want her to save her brothers and sisters.
And while the fear of being caught in their place ran so deep it could spill the contents of her bladder down her legs, she still clung to that deeper fear that who she was might run from her just as easily and more completely.
Night came, too soon as it always did, and Father became the thing that hunted them.
The mansion had many places to hide—twenty-six rooms, and that was only the above-ground ones.
In the cellars there were dozens of small chambers.
Eldest would almost rather let herself get caught than risk the cellars, though. Mother lived there.
The detritus of a former, brighter life crowded every room.
More furniture than Eldest could imagine a use for: rugs, pots, pans, chandeliers, iron suits, screens, rotting tapestries, even paintings that when carried into the light of the parlour revealed the stern faces of grand lords and ladies, all of them spotted with mildew as if it might be the disease that had carried them away.
Thousands of places to hide. Even so, with Father unsleeping, ceaselessly searching, the nights were a torment and sleep a prize that mixed danger with release.
Eldest often felt that her days were the fever dream, and that Day-Father’s cane, keeping her awake during the constant lessons, was worse torture than any at Night-Father’s disposal.
“Take her.” Eldest, standing on the flower table, hefted Tune towards the ceiling hole where waiting arms would reach past the sharp and splintered edges to haul her through.
“I can’t…” Tune sobbed as they took her.
“You can.” Milk-Eye’s voice in the darkness.
Milk-Eye would be a good leader. She still made mistakes, but she would try.
She would try to save them. Not like Lip-Scar.
He would have them work for his benefit, then abandon them all, scattering them as offerings to delay Father.
Even without the benefit, Lip-Scar would want to rule them.
He saw it as his due. You could see that in his eyes.
“You can. You will. You must.” Eldest pushed Tune’s feet, losing contact as the others lifted. “Find the blackness.”
It was an old mantra. Find the blackness.
That was the poison that Father put into them, that was the dark forgetting that coiled around their bones.
The art to releasing it was to release yourself, to let go of any holds that might offer safety and to drown in the oblivion, knowing that it didn’t want to ever let you go again.
To do that was like deliberately burning yourself or pushing a needle into your own eye.
The body doesn’t want to do it. The mind doesn’t want to do it.
But in that oblivion sanctuary lay. Erase yourself and Father could no longer find you.
All his sniffing, all his poking his sharp stick into corners, throwing back covers, tipping over tables, all of it would avail him nothing.
Embrace that blackness and you would be gone.