Chapter 20 Maeve
Maeve
The walk back to the house passed in a blur.
Maeve was vaguely aware of Jude pulling Siobhan’s scarf off her arm, of guiding her from the pub and onto the muddied streets of Oakmoor.
She remembered checking her hands almost compulsively, scraping them up and down her sides until Jude trapped her wrists together in one of his hands.
The ghost of his soft reassurances was like a lost melody, like something sweet she’d once tasted – the product of a half-formed dream, where the rest was a nightmare.
It came in flashes and starts, disappearing just as quickly.
A verdant forest made rotten. A town left to crumble.
Maeve rubbed her hands up and down her thighs until her chafed skin began to burn.
Jude’s face wavered into focus as he held them down, stilling the frantic motion.
She was sitting in a chair with him kneeling before her.
Books surrounded them. Fine gold powder spun in the sunlight, as vivid as the water gild she used in her paintings. A mark of his magic or of hers?
He was his icon for a heartbeat of a moment – a holy replica, perfect in its distance.
Then, the sun shifted, and Jude returned. The catalyst for every painful moment of deconstruction she’d felt since entering his home. He had been marked as a saint in name, yet Maeve was beginning to believe he was anything but.
Still – she couldn’t look away.
Gold dust coated his hair and the tops of his shoulders. The bow of his lips. She eased free of his hands to brush the top of his cheekbone with her fingertips. He inhaled sharply, something soft and begging in his eyes before he pushed to his feet.
‘I need you to tell me what you remember,’ he said without preamble. ‘Quickly.’
‘Of what?’ Maeve breathed, still staring up at him.
Jude made a frustrated sound deep in his throat. He began pacing around the room, stirring up a cloud of gold as he went. ‘Siobhan, Maeve. The memory she showed you. Was it of the Goddenwood?’
The Goddenwood…
Memories of the fabled town slipped away faster every second. Water from a drain, smoke in the wind. There one second and gone the next, too fluid to grasp and too swift to chase.
‘We went to the pub, she wasn’t – her mind,’ Maeve choked. ‘She didn’t seem okay. At all.’
‘She’s not.’ Jude stopped walking. ‘Not at all.’
Maeve closed her eyes. She used to pray to Siobhan’s icon in the Abbey, didn’t she? She’d liked the colour of her robes – cadmium yellow. ‘She’s a saint,’ Maeve said, her voice cracking.
‘Was,’ Jude corrected. ‘Was a saint. The Abbey broke her mind when they discovered she had the memory magic. She lived in the Goddenwood for years before she escaped.’
Maeve swiped fretfully at her damp cheeks. ‘How? How did they break her mind?’
Jude studied the sky from the window. The subtle rise and fall of his chest drew her attention. Maeve brought both hands to her sternum, just below her collarbone. Right where the tattoo marking sainthood would go if she were one.
‘The Goddenwood,’ he repeated, turning to face her. ‘What do you remember?’
‘A forest, a river. Cold water. The village was…’ she shut her eyes.
‘Perfect. Clean, silent. No one was around, but it felt – peaceful?’ She gritted her teeth as pain glittered behind her closed lids.
She’d been in Siobhan’s memories less than an hour ago.
It shouldn’t be this difficult. ‘No. Not peace. Frozen, almost.’
She opened her eyes to Jude holding out a torn page from a book and a stump of charcoal. ‘Sketch it.’
Maeve took the items. The texture of the charcoal was comforting in its familiarity. ‘Sketch the Goddenwood? Why?’
‘I use books to trap memories. Siobhan knits. I think your painting, or drawing, in this case, might be how your magic controls its outbursts,’ Jude said.
‘Memories are fragile things our magic loves to eat, whether that’s by our own hands or the Abbey’s.
The books are how I both siphon off the excess and preserve my remaining memories.
’ He took a deep breath. ‘Before I skim off the unruly bits, even after, if I’m not careful, my magic has outbursts.
Times where I leap into someone else’s memories, when my…
emotions become hard to handle. I think painting is your version of that. ’
‘Outbursts like when you grabbed my wrists or pulled me from the bog?’ she asked.
‘Something like that.’ Jude considered her.
‘And it can show you the truth of a memory if it’s different from what you might believe.
Your painting might be an even greater link between memories and the Abbey than my books or Siobhan’s knitting.
There’s a connection there, something I’ve been exploring.
I’ve been researching it here—’ he cast his hand across the expanse of the library.
‘Not all of these are my memories. Many of them are books. Abbey books. Your icons might allow the Abbey to control those of us who hold the memory magic and—’ his throat worked. ‘And those of us who are saints.’
Saints—
Despite their similarities – the memory magic they both held, the gold dust, the expulsion from the Abbey – he could answer prayers where she could not.
He bore a mark on his chest. The Abbey had chosen him, seen the power in him and venerated him because of it, only to send him away when they learned of his ability to influence memories.
Had they sent him away so they could use him?
And did her icons help in that manipulation?
Suddenly, Jude rounded her wrist with his fingers, pulling her hand into a shaft of sunlight.
‘Will you?’ He skated his thumb over the edge of her forefinger, rough from holding a paintbrush.
Maeve fought a shiver. ‘Sketch Siobhan’s memory.
Sketch the Goddenwood. See if the theory holds true and your memory magic manifests through your art. ’
The weight in his gaze, in his touch, was too much to bear. Maeve pulled away. She moved towards the small desk under the window. ‘I can try.’
She’d done a little sketching since her arrival.
Quick, messy studies of the moors, of Olive and blackbirds and turbulent skies.
Of anything she could see, save Jude. She’d tried not to think too hard about why she’d avoided pressing him to sit for his icon.
She’d told him she wasn’t sure if she would continue reporting on him, that her clawing belief hadn’t decided what to latch onto.
But that wasn’t true, not anymore. At least not entirely.
She wasn’t choosing Jude or the Abbey. She was choosing the truth, no matter where that lay.
Maeve set her charcoal firmly to the paper.
By the time she straightened, dusk had deepened the library into a study of shadows and fading orange light.
Her stomach cramped with hunger. She sat back and studied her sketch.
Her whole body ached. Her shoulders from hunching, her fingers from gripping the charcoal.
The soft hollow of her wrist where it had dug into the tabletop.
She dug her thumb into the offending muscle as disappointment filled her.
‘As I said.’ Her voice cracked unsteadily. ‘A perfect town.’
Jude brushed his forefinger over the edge of a building. Charcoal blackened his skin like a bruise. ‘Is that what you see?’
Maeve studied her drawing. The peaked roofs, the glistening river, the uniform pattern of shadow and light. Exactly like the paintings she’d seen of the Goddenwood hanging in the Abbey. ‘Yes?’
‘That’s not what I see.’ Warmth coated her back as he leaned down. ‘Look again.’
The paper shivered. She ran her fingertips over the edges.
‘Look at it from the corner of your eye,’ Jude murmured.
She obeyed. The drawing changed shape slowly, moving faster.
But when she returned her gaze to it, the town was perfect once more.
She sighed. ‘Maybe… maybe my memories are false, somehow. Like there’s a distance between what I remember and what I draw.
Drawing the town – it just felt like sketching.
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. What the secret is. ’
The sketch wasn’t her best work, admittedly. Maeve had never enjoyed drawing anything that wasn’t people. It felt so lifeless. Mechanical.
An idea occurred.
Immediately, she tried to swallow it.
She must have made a sound or stiffened in her seat, something, because Jude dropped to his knees beside her, putting their faces level. ‘What is it?’
‘I need to sketch her,’ Maeve said. ‘Siobhan. What I experienced in her memories, I won’t find it in a drawing of a town. I’ll find it in her – a saint.’
‘An icon,’ Jude repeated.
‘Yes.’
He stood, pulling a book free and tearing out a page near the back. She cringed—‘Jude!’
‘The book’s empty,’ he said, dropping the page before her. ‘I wouldn’t ruin it if it were not.’
‘Still,’ she grumbled. She picked at the corner of the paper. ‘What if it harms her? If icons allow someone to drain magic, wouldn’t this put Siobhan at risk?’
‘We’re not elders,’ Jude replied. ‘I don’t think someone can unintentionally steal magic. There has to be a process behind it. I’m sure of it. Otherwise, it could happen accidentally…’ He paused, frowning down at the paper. ‘Right?’
She met his eyes, seeing a flash of anxiety there before he dropped his gaze.
He cares for her, she realized. Despite the saint’s eccentricity, Jude genuinely cared for the elderly woman, with her scarves and her cadmium yellow. The thought of bringing Siobhan harm pained him.
‘I’m sure the elders have their own way of accessing the magic,’ Maeve agreed. ‘I don’t think it could happen accidentally. Their harm feels… deliberate.’
Jude nodded, exhaling heavily. ‘Even so, I worry that even the very act of creating the icon will drain her.’
Maeve turned back to the paper. She hated what she was about to say. Hated it. She didn’t want to see Siobhan harmed, didn’t want her actions to drain the saint even more. But she couldn’t see a way around it. Whatever Siobhan had shown her was important, and Maeve needed to recall it.
‘Is it worth it, even if it is a small risk? To remember what Siobhan showed me. To see if there’s something there that could help her far more than it could hurt her.’
Jude searched her face for a long moment before drawing in a short breath through his nose. His gaze moved to the window. ‘Just destroy it after. The sketch.’ His lips tugged down as his voice dropped. ‘The icon.’
He returned to his window-side vigil as she picked up the charcoal and tried to forget about her pounding heart. Tried to leave everything behind that wasn’t her memory of Siobhan, both as she was in her icon in the Abbey and the version of her Maeve had met that morning.
Maeve’s hand moved quickly over the page. The slight curl to the edge of her lips. A precise crosshatch of shading under each eye. Each fine detail sprang faster and faster into existence.
And, there—
A low buzz. Faint at first, growing louder as gold settled finely across the desk. A swirling tide, drawing closer with every feature that fell into place. Distantly, she heard her name being called. A frantic plea, one she had no choice but to ignore.
Siobhan’s voice trickled into her ears.
No safe place, daughter of memory.
Maeve’s head tipped slowly forward.