Chapter Three #2
They call for the Deck and the Deck calls them back.
Unite us, they say, and we’ll cast out the black.
At the King’s namesake tree, with the black blood of salt,
All twelve shall, together, bring sickness to halt.
They’ll lighten the mist from mountain to sea.
New beginnings—new ends…
But nothing comes free.
I’d squealed, the eerie rhythm like silk in my ears. Ione and I had peeked at one another, our lips curling as we basked in the delicious darkness that bled out of the Shepherd King’s words.
“The Cards. The mist. The blood,” my mother had said, her voice so gentle it came as a whisper.
“They are all woven together, their balance delicate, like spider silk. Unite all twelve Providence Cards with the black blood of salt, and the infection will be healed. Blunder will be free of the mist.”
“But the Shepherd King did not lift the mist, nor heal the infection,” my aunt had said, her voice heavy.
“The Spirit tricked him, telling him how to lift the mist only after he’d bartered his Twin Alders Card.
Without his final Card, the Shepherd King could not unite the Deck.
And so he never lifted the mist. No King ever has. ”
“No King ever will,” my mother had mused. “Not until someone finds the Twin Alders Card and the Deck is completed. Until then…”
Ione and I had shared a somber glance. “The mist will continue to spread.”
I found my aunt in her garden, where her husband rarely visited, singing to herself.
She preferred it there, among the greenery—away from the noise of the house.
Her wiry gold hair rolled down her back in wild curls.
Dirt under her fingernails, crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, Opal Hawthorn was not as refined or delicate as the other ladies in Blunder.
It made her and my uncle—a man of limited scruples, whose desire to be a great man of Blunder had him spending more money than he earned—a decidedly poor pairing.
I loved my aunt’s wild beauty. I saw it in Ione. Some days, I could even see the shadow of my mother’s face in their shared features.
I picked a mint leaf, crushing it between my molars. The garden birds, sensing my approach, quieted. My aunt turned and smiled, beckoning me to her collection of herbs. “I’m making a tincture,” she said.
I looked at the mossy greenery she’d ground with a chalky substance in the bottom of her mortar. When I leaned in, the scent of feverfew met my nostrils. “What’s that other bit?”
“Bark from a white willow,” she replied. “For headaches.”
I folded myself onto the grass next to her. “About Equinox, Aunt,” I said. “I don’t think I should go.”
She snorted and leaned back into her work, the pestle scraping against herb and seed and stone. “Oh?”
Aldrich and Lyn flew through the garden, shouting and brandishing wooden swords. A moment later they were gone, crashing through the yard in a vicious campaign. When they’d vanished, I lowered my voice. “It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to court. Besides,” I muttered, “Nerium would hate it.”
“All the more reason to go,” she grumbled, her fingers tight around the pestle. “That young man will be happy to see you—the one who writes you letters. What’s his name—Alyc?”
I groaned. Lord Laburnum’s second son, the one with eyes the color of river rocks. The boy who’d sat next to me at the King’s table and made me laugh when I was seventeen—the last time I’d attended Equinox.
The boy I’d been foolish enough, bored enough, to kiss. “Alyx. Alyx Laburnum.”
My aunt faced me, an expectant smile lingering in the corners of her mouth. “And we no longer like Alyx, is that it?”
I waved my hand through the air, a dismissal. “Maybe I never liked him. Maybe he was just… there.”
My aunt shook her head, her tongue clacking against her teeth. But the smile on her lips bloomed. “It won’t always be so. Living like a hermit in your uncle’s house is no sort of life for a young woman.”
The old witch has a point.
I jumped, accidentally beheading a nearby flower.
My aunt did not notice. She pulled an envelope out of her apron. When she handed it to me, the dirt on her hand left a print.
But it did not matter. I knew the handwriting. It was from my father. And I knew what he would ask, just as he did every year when the King opened his castle for Equinox.
“He’s trying, Elspeth,” my aunt said, watching me.
I thumbed the letter, the oil on my skin smudging my father’s scraggly penmanship. It wasn’t just him and my stepmother and half sisters I wished to avoid. There was another reason I didn’t like to go to court or Equinox or town.
Degeneration. That’s what the Shepherd King called it in The Old Book of Alders .
The sickness of mind or body that came with the infection.
After the fever, the infection granted strange power, magical gifts.
But everything had a price. For some, that price was obvious, draining one’s life force in a slow, agonizing deterioration.
For others, like me, it was unknown, a weighted, invisible anvil that could drop at any time.
And it felt reckless, being around strangers, knowing, at any moment, degeneration could ignite in my blood.
I might do something horrible in front of the King and his Physicians and Destriers, and they would drag me away to the King’s dungeons.
Or perhaps I would grow sick and, no matter how I tried to hide it, waste away to nothingness.
Like my mother had.
I looked away from my aunt, my fingers tracing the purple petals of an iris. “I just think it would be easier for everyone if I stayed here.”
My aunt sighed, her voice delicate as she reached to stroke my cheek.
“I can never understand what it’s been like for you,” she said.
“Know that you are loved, and that you always have a place here, with me. But do not let a fever eleven years past keep you from living your life, Elspeth. You’re young.
You still have so much ahead of you.” She wrinkled her nose and lowered her gaze back to her work.
“If not for your own enjoyment, go for mine. I would pay good money to watch Nerium Spindle squirm.”
The night before we traveled to the King’s castle for Equinox, I had a dream.
I had not dreamed since touching the Nightmare Card. Whatever his faults, the Nightmare did not disturb my wakeless hours.
I didn’t know what he did when I slept, and he did not answer when I asked.
I used to think he slept, too, but after so many years together, I realized he did not sleep at all.
He simply disappeared into a part of my mind I could not reach.
There, it was quiet, and when I slept, he roamed freely, unhindered by the current—the utter noisiness—of my thoughts.
It was as if, for once, I was trespassing on him.
In my dream, I was in an ancient room covered in vines. The old wooden ceiling had rotted, revealing beams of light beneath a canopy of green. Birds chirped, rustling above me, the summer day warm and pure despite the cold, weathered stone around me.
I could not recall how I’d gotten into the room.
Like all dreams, it lacked a beginning and an end.
In the center of the room stood a stone, wide and tall as a table.
Seated upon the stone was a man decorated in gold armor that had long lost its sheen.
He was aged, older than my father, grisly and stern.
He bore the weight of his armor without wavering—his strength deeply rooted.
On his hip rested an ancient, rusted sword with branches twisted into a crook carved into the hilt.
Lost in thought, his head resting upon his gauntlets, he did not see me.
I waited for him to look up, shuffling my feet on the leaf-strewn floor.
When he finally saw me, I gasped, recognizing the sharp quality of his unnatural, feline yellow eyes—the irises wide and the pupils narrow.
For a moment he was silent. I realized I’d surprised him, intruded on a moment—a place—the Nightmare had not intended to show me.
The room vanished, the noise of birds muffling to silence. The trees were gone, replaced by tall shelves overflowing with books and tomes and scrolls. A sturdy desk forged from cherrywood replaced the stone. I stood in my uncle’s library, my breath hitching in my lungs.
The man and his armor had disappeared. In his place was a creature—more animal than man.
Coarse black fur grew up the ridge of his back.
He hunched over the desk, the long quality of his fingers making it impossible to tell where flesh ended and claw began.
His tail, furred and long, whipped menacingly—like an angry cat’s—and his ears, pointed, twitched at me.
I watched him, fascination and dread knotting in my stomach.
His yellow eyes narrowed. “You’ve come to spy?”
I stuttered, not knowing how to answer. He was angry, I could tell. Still, I had no hand in the making of my dreams. I inhaled, searching for courage. “Who was that man wearing armor?”
He drew a claw along the desk, scratching the wood. His lips, dark and thin, curled upward. “Someone long dead, I’m afraid.”
I stood in the center of my uncle’s sheepskin rug, the familiar texture cold beneath my bare feet.
So strange, to hear a voice and almost never see the face behind it.
I scrutinized his features, his dark mouth and short, jagged teeth.
Creature, Nightmare, man—whatever he was, he was surely made for hauntings, frightening enough to scare the skin off any man.
As the edges of the library faded, I blurted, “He had yellow eyes.”
The Nightmare clicked his tongue against his teeth and smiled. He sat, perched upon my uncle’s desk, looking down on me with those same gold-yellow eyes.
“Would you like to hear the story?” he whispered.
His words echoed, the dream already beginning to fade. I nodded, the library around me eclipsing into darkness.
All that was left was the Nightmare’s voice, silky and infinite.
“There once was a girl,” he murmured, “clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a King—a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same:
“The girl, the King… and the monster they became.”