Chapter 29
Eldest
In a dark corner of a dark room, soot-black hands found the ruin of a garden and understood the shape of a betrayal that had been too large to comprehend.
Eldest ran, and stopped only when her legs and lungs refused her. She stood propped against the wall of a house, gasping. She had expected to reach a city wall or fields before exhaustion trumped her fear, and yet the metropolis had kept on going, street after street, block after block.
She’d passed people and houses, men and women, children from rich to poor, though none quite as ragged as her. Several women had called at her to stop. One fat man had tried to block her path, grinning broadly. Another had shouted, “Thief!” But she had left them all behind.
She’d ended up in an area dominated by warehouses whose gaping mouths seemed ready to swallow her. None of the workers appeared much bothered by her presence, save to wave her away from the stacked crates, lines of barrels, and heaps of mysterious bundles.
A light rain had started to fall and although the cold numbed her aches and pains, it had also begun to sink through her tired flesh towards her bones.
New sights, sounds, smells all threatened to overwhelm her. But overwriting even her astonishment were the faces of those she’d left behind. Father’s manic, twisted rage, and the look Milk-Eye had given her at the last.
Milk-Eye had called her “traitor” and told her to stop. But what if that had been for Father’s benefit while he could still reach into the chimney and catch a trailing foot? What if she’d trusted Eldest to see past the words? What if—
Eldest doubled over, leaning against a wall, and vomited the acid emptiness of her stomach.
She pushed away thoughts of what she’d left behind and looked around.
As she’d run she had let chance decide her path, or rather, she had surrendered those choices to the deepest part of her mind, beneath the layers where words and images swim, the place where the most basic, instinctual foundations of thought hold sway.
Eldest might swear that she had never seen this place, never walked this street or viewed those distant towers.
But even so, there was something familiar here.
Nothing specific, but something general and pervasive.
She turned from one path to the next, aiming herself at one alley, a tower top, a road, a gap between two buildings hardly wide enough for someone to walk.
If she tried to argue a case for any one of them, she would drown in “maybes.” Instead, she chose without thought, pushing away “what ifs” and setting off on sore feet.
Constantly she looked behind her, expecting to see Father’s tall figure looming. Time and again there was nothing, or just more suspicious strangers whose stares told her to keep moving. She kept moving.
Her chest hurt, bright needles of pain jabbing inwards with any deeper breath, her hip ached, she had cuts in places she didn’t remember getting hit, and every other spot was tender to the touch.
She picked up the pace, struggling to keep hope at bay, fighting to keep the smile from her lips so as not to tempt the gods’ malice.
Had she escaped? Had she truly won free?
The sun, hidden by clouds, slipped across the sky.
Eldest’s feet walked unaccustomed miles, sometimes circling the same area two or three times.
Trying a path, losing the feeling, retracing her steps.
And at last, with the light failing and lamps starting to flicker to life behind the shutters, she began to grow sure.
This she had seen before. This she had touched before.
This was the reason that the outside had not left her shocked at every turn, undone by each simple problem of navigation. She had seen it before. Somewhere beneath the memories that would come when called, all this was wrapped around the bones of who she was.
She turned left at the square where the old man’s statue stood glaring at encroaching bushes.
She turned right down a small alley rank with used ale.
She hurried along a street where tall houses huddled shoulder to shoulder in a long terrace.
Somehow, she knew that a different family inhabited each floor.
Another right took her into a narrower terrace where shorter houses scowled across a street more mud than cobbles.
She remembered washing strung between opposing windows.
The lines lay bare now save for a lone off-white shirt flapping in the damp wind.
The sun burned red at the end of the street as she turned to face the door whose image had floated into her dreaming when starvation thinned the veils.
The door had come first, the family behind it later.
It would be the same now. In her mind she had already walked to the steps, gone up, and knocked.
But here she was, still shivering in the street.
What if they were gone? Worse, what if they were still here but didn’t recognize her? What if they didn’t want her?
Eldest heard coughing. A shutter shuddered open, the dim glow of a candlelit room beyond. A girl stood there, her head and shoulders silhouetted in the window frame. “…Mol?”
Someone moved in the space behind her. “Godsakes, close that window, Rebekka!”
“But she looks like Mol…”
“Who does?” The larger figure came to the window. A thin woman with grey in her hair and tired eyes leaned out, staring. “Little Mol?”
“I…” Eldest found it hard to speak. “I…don’t know.” But she knew her mother’s face, and her sister’s. The fantasy that had crystalized into memory as starvation bit now stood before her, reality, flesh, blood, and all the more delicate for it.
“Mol!” The woman vanished. “Cocran, it’s Mol!” Her voice muffled in the house. A moment later bolts clacked back, the door opened, and in a swirl of skirts and scarves this new Mother, or this old one, had swept Eldest up into a hug.
The hard, sharp-angled shape within Eldest, the one that had been built to brace her against the waking nightmare of her existence, melted. Even the scar tissue from the basement where the monster dwelt couldn’t armour her against this moment her heart had forgotten.
Eldest breathed in the smell of home, of cooking, of security, the scent of it all unlocking more memories than she could process, flooding her with belonging. She had crawled in this place before she could walk. She had gathered language to her within these walls. Tasted life.
She broke then. Eldest who had been so strong, so relentless, implacable in her desire.
She fractured in the softness of her mother’s arms, crying so hard she could scarcely breathe.
She felt herself carried, glimpsed their small room, felt the crackling heat of their fire as Rebekka threw sticks into the hearth, and saw her father’s lean form follow them in, lifting his round, wireframed spectacles to run a hand down his careworn face.
Time passed in a whirl of questions and hugs and laughing and worried talk of how thin she was, concerned glances passing between her parents.
The night thickened outside behind shutters Eldest would have rather had been left open.
She’d never felt so warm as she did beside the red embers of that fire.
Rebekka sat with her, braiding her hair, having spent an age combing loose whatever mats didn’t need to be cut out.
They fed her too. A bowl of beans seasoned with salt and accompanied by a heel of hard black bread. Eldest devoured it, her attempts to pace herself abandoned when she discovered it to be the most delicious meal she could remember.
Later, Mother sat in her chair with Eldest at her feet. Eldest rested her head on the cradle of her arms, supported by her mother’s knees. Weariness weighed on her, making any movement an effort.
“One morning you were gone from your bed,” Mother said, beginning as if she were retelling one of the old hearth stories. “Your sister didn’t wake up, and she was sleeping under the same covers. But you were gone…” She trailed off, her voice constricted by emotion.
Eldest sat up sharply. “They came here?” Her heart, which had been slowed by the warmth, lurched back into racing pace. Night-Father could be approaching down the street even as they talked.
“No.” Her true father, a thin man with kind eyes and ink-stained hands, shook his head.
He exchanged a glance with her mother. Eldest remembered him as given to wearing waistcoats, and jackets with patched elbows.
“You used to sleepwalk a lot. So I put bolts on all the doors. That morning we found the bolts on the front door undone, but you were too small to reach the top one. We didn’t think you could do it.
Not at six years old. Not while asleep. But you must have got a chair… ” He hung his head.
“Whoever took you must have snatched you from the street.” Mother kept very still, eyes down, hands knotted in her apron.
“They won’t know where you live.” Father nodded.
Rebekka, frowning, went to the window, trying to see through the cracks in the shutters. “I always keep a knife under my pillow. If they come back, I’ll…”
“The only one coming back is little Mol,” Father said. “Time for sleep. It’s dark outside and we don’t have money to burn.”
Eldest followed Rebekka up the creaking stairs to the tiny room dominated by their bed.
Across the hall, her parents retired to the other small bedroom.
After the mansion it all seemed very cramped, which felt better in that there were fewer angles of attack, and worse because there were fewer angles of escape.
The unfolding within Eldest’s chest that had started when her mother’s arms wrapped her continued slowly with each small step towards this once and future normal.
“This will be strange.” Rebekka huddled under the thin covers. With just the fire glow from the main room downstairs for light, everything was shadows and suggestion. “Five years…I’ve missed you. Every day.”