Chapter 26
Eldest
Eldest’s fingers found the ruin of the garden: that shared and sacred secret held only between her, Tune, and Milk-Eye.
Her fingertips explored the vandalism, discovering the fragmented stumps of three stalks and of the fourth and newest, growing between them.
For a moment she thought that she herself, in the delirium of her starvation, might have dared their flesh, and somehow forgotten the act, though a life sustained by such destruction held no value to her.
Whether rats, or Father’s rage, or mere accident, her fingertips couldn’t read the story. But the tears that had remained uncried through terror upon terror, grief upon grief, made their message clear in their coursing. She could stay no longer.
All the children had attempted at one time or other to escape the mansion.
The books they had access to spoke of a better, bigger world, even if Father assured them it had been swallowed in a lake of fire.
Even Tune saw the fallacy in that. If the mansion lay surrounded by fire, why did it get so cold for months on end?
None of them had come close to freedom, though.
Their efforts had to focus on avoiding being caught at night.
Any slow progress towards the outside would be uncovered, undone, and punished.
How these labours were detected or attributed to the correct child Eldest didn’t know, and not knowing was, to her, even more frightening than the immediate consequences, terrible as they were.
Eldest had set the others to their tasks.
Lip-Scar had argued, called her plan stupid.
Eldest had been prepared for this. She knew Lip-Scar’s complaints would escalate by stages to violence.
Her weakness meant she could not allow him to strike first, and so, bypassing all the usual stages of confrontation, she attacked.
She slashed him across the face with a crescent of glass fractured from the bedroom mirror.
In the dark she couldn’t see the damage she had wrought.
She could hear the patter of blood, though, in the shocked silence that followed his shriek.
“Challenge me again and it will be your throat.”
Now she stood alone in the kitchen’s tiled hall, a place of echoes, somehow still haunted by the smells of actual food that called to her belly far more strongly than the gruel she had refused for nearly two weeks.
The room had not, in all of Eldest’s time in the mansion, been used for its intended purpose, and in the earliest days that she could recall she had established through diligent searches that it held nothing she could eat.
The kitchen boasted, amid its treasury of pans, pots, platters, and pitchers, the largest fireplace in the whole mansion, save for the hearth in the great hall.
Like all the other fireplaces, a set of iron bars sealed it just a couple of feet up the flue, preventing its use as a place to hide or, potentially, as an escape route. Bending the bars had proved far beyond the combined strength of the children, even with chair legs used as levers.
In the hearth a faint glow showed the fire-blackened bricks, a whisper of the day’s light reaching down from above.
Eldest crouched and let the daylight’s echo play over her dirty hand.
Showing her the many small cuts that had felt much larger and deeper in the darkness.
She was about to move away when she saw something, a white line against the sooty bricks below her fingers.
She picked the something up. And found it to be a feather, white quilled, the rest a devouring black in which, at certain angles, the light found shades of deepest blue.
She took it for an omen. The promise of flight.
She had to escape now, while some semblance of strength remained to her. Whether the others would pull her down before Father discovered her starvation, she didn’t know, but either Father or her siblings would bring an end to her ambitions soon enough. Probably a permanent one.
As Eldest felt her way around the kitchen, seeking the pieces of her freedom, the famine that she had imposed on herself carved another piece of truth from the obsidian that imprisoned her memories.
For the first time she saw her brother Strong. He had been golden, brave, tall. If they hadn’t called him Strong they would have called him Brave. And then he had been Eldest and the burden of their future sat upon his broad shoulders and for a short time she had felt almost safe.
She had fallen in the chase once, and somehow Strong had known and thrown himself at Night-Father.
He had lost that contest, of course, and his screams had echoed through the house until dawn.
The next day, though, despite his bruising, his bloody eye, and his limp, he had smiled at her across the parlour in Day-Father’s lesson.
A small, lopsided grin, but a grin even so.
That same morning, they had fed him the meal that had erased him. Father had called him from the trough to eat from a porcelain bowl. Eldest remembered now how blue that bowl had been, inseparable from the summer sky.
Eldest ran her hands across the kitchen work surface, heavily scarred by absent cooks.
These were memories that predated her own and might well outlast them too.
As her fingertips tried to decipher the alphabet of scars, another image surfaced from her past, one that sucked in her breath in a faint exclamation of pain.
She saw Strong, glimpsed him from eyes that weren’t aimed his way.
He looked younger than she remembered him, yet it was the day of his erasure, the day after he had sacrificed himself to free her from Father’s claws.
He had been crawling. Inching his way blindly across the parlour floor, grey with pain.
The others had moved around him, seeing him only with the part of their mind that steered their feet.
He crawled beneath Father’s gaze without those dark and wicked eyes so much as flickering his way.
Eldest hadn’t seen him then. This was more than memory.
The images were written into the Ingredient itself.
She was reading her mind’s own scars. The last she had seen—or rather, not seen—of Strong were his heels as his faltering progress took him from her line of sight.
He had been struggling towards the door.
She hadn’t seen Strong, none of them had, but he had seen her.
His gaze had found her and for a moment held her, and for a moment, there in the kitchen, trapped by the memory, she felt the protection of his arms again, the most bitter and the most sweet moment of safety.
And then he had looked away, hung his head, and crawled from view.
Feeling utterly alone, Eldest hugged herself tight, shocked at her thinness. She reached the kitchen fireplace, the stones still coated with hints of the grease from a thousand roasts.
She reached out with both hands, searching blindly.
Cold iron links met the fingers of her right hand.
Eldest took the chain that had once been used to suspend a cauldron above the flames.
She wrapped it around two bars, securing it with a bent nail, and trailed the remainder across the kitchen floor.
She added to its length the chain that had once turned a rotating spit from which all trace of meat fat had long ago been licked by rats or children.
She added to that the thinner but still sturdy chain that had once drawn heaped loads of silverware up the service shaft to the higher floors.
She doubled this one for strength. Another length of the chain she used had been found in one of the bedrooms, purpose unknown.
Finally, won at the highest of costs, were three yards of heavy chain retrieved from the cellars during the previous year.
This last section allowed her to reach the basement door.
It had never been locked, to her knowledge, but it felt capable of withstanding any assault if it ever were.
The thing was riveted iron, thick plates of the stuff sandwiching two inches of wood.
She could feel the rust beneath her fingertips.
What the previous owners might have kept in their basement that required such security she didn’t know, but pressing her forehead to the gritty surface, she wondered how long it might resist Mother.
The door opened inwards and on both sides had an iron handle with which to heave it back and forth.
Eldest pulled the chain taut and carefully adjusted its length.
Before laying her clanking burden on the ground, she looped it around one half of the double hook that had once allowed the cauldron in the kitchen to be dangled over the fire.
No physical restraints kept Mother below ground, but only in her fiercest rages had she emerged to prowl the corridor and venture into the nearest storage rooms. It seemed almost that she was a creature of the earth, constrained to dwell within it.
All of which meant that Eldest would have to enrage her.
Carefully, Eldest oiled the rusty hinges using the inedible grease she had long ago found in a tub within the kitchen cupboards.
Easing the door open brought with it that familiar stink of damp soil, mould, and decay.
Eldest could see the waiting stairway only in her mind’s eye.
She had never seen it with her actual eyes.
Save the parlour, the mansion lay in darkness, but it seemed to pool in the basement, so thick she could feel it all around her like a mist.