Chapter Seven Simran
Chapter Seven
Simran
They’ll tell you the tales don’t exist, but I assure you they do!
Lost tales, secret tales, from Elsewhere lands, exotic and strange. For a price, you can find them. Make a deal with a cunning woman Dockside, and she’ll tell you the way.
But I warn you—the archivists won’t think much of you. Look out!
Source: Secret Tales of the Isle Revealed!!, Pamphlet of unknown provenance, discovered at Leadenhall Market
Archivist’s Ruling: For retention as evidence of treason. Review in 6 months. Further investigation required. Interrogation of local vendors recommended.
Where the hell had her magic gone? Her heart was pounding, blood roaring, and she couldn’t feel any magic at all.
Maybe it was the shock of seeing Hari’s carefully hand-rolled cigarettes in the palm of the stranger that had twisted her witchcraft from her grasp.
The sight had hit her stomach with a cold gut-punch of dread that had nearly leveled her.
Bess’s death had been something she’d been braced for—nothing could have prepared her for the sight of Bess’s corpse, waxen on a bed of leaves, but at least she’d known it was a possibility.
She hadn’t been prepared for anything to happen to Hari.
That wasn’t how it was meant to be. She was the one who courted danger, who carved spells into bones and limni ink into flesh, who stole from knights and merchants to maintain the life she and Hari had cobbled together.
It was Hari’s role to run from danger; to be her heart and her home; to work tiring jobs and sleep like the dead, and still smile at her when she slunk in at twilight with ink under her fingernails.
The stranger had rewritten that story she and Hari had written together, and it had left her with fury and grief churning inside her, and no magic.
“If you could find your magic swiftly,” the knight gritted out, wrenching Bess’s rusted axe from the trunk of the tree, “that would be—ideal!”
“Shut up,” said Simran, crushing her panic. “I have to think.”
From the axe wound that knight had made in the tree, ink oozed out, a mingling of black and ichor red.
Simran could only think of real sap, the way it could smear like blood.
Trees could be naturally cruel creatures, any tale could tell you so.
To have a forest turn on you was a risk of life on the Isle. Cruel trees, cursed woods.
This was different from all of that. This was a tale collapsing.
Think. Think!
Witchcraft needed conduits. Earth, blood, trees, bones, guts, flowers. The best witchcraft took time to cultivate and grow.
Simran had left her marks here. Fresh marks: her own hair, plucked from her head and knotted into a charm; spells scuffed into soil with her own feet. Bird bones, taken from an abandoned nest, buried carefully to the sound of a song from her own lips.
But she’d also cultivated magic here for years.
Her whole childhood had shaped this forest, and been shaped by it in turn.
There was magic in the shape her footsteps had left in the soil on rainy days, when she’d been twelve, then thirteen, then fourteen, as the seasons turned.
There was witch-strength and witch-knowledge in accidental blood from scuffed knees, and then later from deliberate blood, when Bess had told her the magic of flesh and a knife.
Her childhood magic had dug its claws into this place. She knew how to draw her strength from these woods. The fact she couldn’t was more than strange, and no grief should have blotted that old magic out.
There. The answer. As the trees shuddered, creaking out of shape into spasms of ink, it came to her:
Her magic wasn’t gone. In all the ways that mattered, the forest was.
“Stop cutting that tree,” ordered Simran. “Put the axe down.”
The knight gave her an incredulous look.
“I’m afraid if we don’t have your magic, lady witch, we’re certainly going to need the axe—”
“Simran. I told you my name is Simran.”
“Simran, Simran,” the knight parroted back, her voice timed with each furious thud of the axe as the ground shuddered and the trees screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
The knight was sweating visibly, her face shining and her curling brown hair plastered to the shape of her skull.
Her eyes, when they cut to Simran, were determined, and her full mouth unsmiling.
“Why do you want me to stop?”
“Because in a moment it isn’t going to matter,” said Simran. Her voice was grim. “Can’t you see? The woods are dying. There’s no saving them.”
The knight paused, then flinched. Cursed. She flung the axe from her hands as if burned, and Simran watched it fracture, prismatic, then collapse into pigment and smoke. Bess’s axe, she realized. Fading out of the world along with Bess’s tale.
The trees in front of them snapped entirely out of shape, spidering into ink in the vague shape of trees. And then suddenly, simply, they were not even the suggestion of trees anymore—just ink, a mist of black, a darkness falling down. The knight hissed with obvious pain as the ink touched her.
Simran grasped the knight’s wrist, and in the gap where the woods were dying and nothingness was growing, she ran.
The trees were snapping around them, twisting out of shape, turning to liquid and ether.
They ran, and Simran tried not to consider what would become of them if they did not escape the woods before the woods died along with Bess, withering without her tale to nourish their bones.
The darkness grew denser, and the knight was running with her, steady thudding footsteps and steadier breaths as she matched Simran step for step.
If she was still in pain, she was hiding it well.
They weren’t going to make it. They had to try.
Around them, in the dark, lights were glowing. The lights were moving in closer, and as they did so, Simran began to discern glowing shapes.
Deer.
One careened in front of them, stopping in their path. A ghostly doe, ears flicking, its golden skin glowing like a lamp in the inky darkness.
“My friend!” the knight crowed, her mouth shaping into a grin as she stepped forward and out of Simran’s grasp. She bowed to the deer, and the deer watched her back with what Simran would have called bemusement. “It’s good to see you again. Have you come to lead us to freedom?”
The deer shook on those light, leaping legs. Uneasy.
The knight kneeled and held out her hand.
“We need to run,” Simran began.
“No,” the knight said, voice still level and gentle.
Ink brushed her in a coiling wind. She flinched but didn’t move.
“Not yet. Wait.” To the deer, she said, “You needn’t fear me now.
We are friends, aren’t we? I wouldn’t have found your lady Bess or the witch without your help, and I’m thankful for you.
I know you’re afraid, but you came to us for a reason.
Please. Will you help, as I know you want to? ”
Her voice was soft and deep. It made Simran’s skin electrify strangely.
The deer, hesitantly, moved forward. And touched its soft nose to the knight’s waiting palm. The knight’s smile deepened.
She was so absurdly lovely, in that moment: the noble angles of her jaw, the softness of her dark-lashed eyes, the faint curl of her hair, her body limned in darkness.
All of it could have been an oil painting, and if Simran had possessed any gift for art she would have wanted to paint her, preserve her.
Simran’s admiration was quickly followed by a stab of envy. Surely the deer should have been Simran’s friends? She was the one who’d watched them for years, drifting between the trees, always darting out of reach. Why did they come so easily to the knight’s hand?
Simran had never been so… so open. So soft to anything, anyone.
Only perhaps to Hari—and look where that had got him.
Envy curdled in her blood as she looked at the knight’s soft and noble face.
Envy and fear, as if she were standing on a great precipice, and one gust of wind would send her hurtling into the unknown.
Some unspoken understanding had clearly passed between knight and deer, because the deer drew back its head. Unburdened by the trees, the ghost deer leapt. Its herd joined it, running forward, carving a path through the trees like a golden arrow dispelling the dark.
The knight grasped Simran’s hand.
“Now we run,” she said.
They raced forward. Simran’s lungs burned.
She stumbled, and the knight steadied her, practically lifting her from her feet with breathless strength.
“A little farther,” the knight urged, which was a lie—how could the knight know how much farther they had to go?
But Simran found her feet, and suddenly they were free, blazing sunlight above them.
Simran wrenched free from the knight and fell to her knees on the grass. She had a second to breathe, inhale and exhale with relief—and then she heard a crash, and a helpless noise from the knight behind her.
The herd was crashing against the edge of the woods, beating their bodies against an invisible barrier. They were crying out, and Simran realized with horror that they could not cross the boundaries of the woodland.
The deer herd belonged to the woods. They belonged to the tale that had made them, as much as Bess. None of them could escape.
The knight was staring at them, naked horror on her face. Her jaw hardened. She took a step toward the woods, reaching out a hand. Simran lurched forward and caught her by the leg.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, tightening her grip.
“I can’t just leave them,” the knight protested.
“You have no choice,” said Simran. “You can’t help them. You can only save yourself.”
The knight was breathing hard, hands flexing. But she didn’t try to pull away again. Simran stared at her own hand like it was a traitor.
She should have let the knight go. What did she care, if the knight lived or died? The knight was going to kill her.