Chapter Thirty-Two Nina #3
Edith shrugged, her eyes straying over the factory.
“Don’t matter much either way. Coppers here beat anyone tellin’ stories about it.
The name Trent came from a woman named Joan, they say, who was one of the first Artisan daughters.
But we ain’t supposed to think differently.
Coppers even tried to cut down the tree, ’cause the kids would sit under it and make wishes. ”
“What tree?” Patrick asked.
“It’s a kids’ fancy. But some believe it’s where she’s buried,” Edith said in an undertone, as though policemen might thunder in even now.
“The thing is, the coppers can’t cut it down.
Not even the wood Masons they sent from the city.
Nothin’ fells it.” She said it with pride, a slow grin lifting a corner of her mouth.
“Don’t know if there’s a lick of truth to it.
The Stewards might’ve been a bunch of puffed-up fools, for all I know.
But there’s somethin’ about that tree. We used to sneak into the woods at night, dare each other to get close to it, you know?
” She shook her head. “Can’t touch it without gettin’ the shakes. ”
Even now, Edith seemed doused in chills.
She rolled her shoulders back. “If it’s a wish you’re wantin’, it still stands out there in the woods.
The fire didn’t touch it none. But don’t get your hopes up,” she said, the moans of a man rising as he convulsed on his pallet.
“Ain’t ever granted any fortunes to us lot. ”
Partway into the woods, an oak tree towered, unmarred by fire, just as Edith had promised.
There was nothing about it that should mark it as a grave. No engravings, no discerning features. But still, it stood before us as a monolith, and in turn, each of us shivered.
Winter had taken its foliage. What was left was the spine, its branches reaching desperately outward, and perhaps that was the quality that made it somber.
The clouds overhead pushed down, turning the snow ashen, dulling sound. There were cold fingers on my neck, tracing the shell of my ear, but when I turned, no one was there.
“Bad omens, Patty,” John said, his eyes lost in the network of empty branches. “Bad omens.”
Miners were a superstitious lot. A shiver of wind was a bad omen, a crying swallow meant death. I used to laugh at how grown men cowered at the breeze.
But I thought John might be right. There was decay in the air.
And yet, the oak tree stood taller than any I’d ever seen. Wholly alive.
“It’s only a tree,” Theo said, rubbing his bare hands together. “Doesn’t exactly prove the existence of the three daughters.”
The clouds parted then, weak beams of light dousing the oak.
It bleached and shadowed in the gnarled wood, turning it monochromatic, as though an artist had used it as a canvas, turned a tree into a woman.
A knot in the trunk became a hand clutched to her chest. The lines in the bark were now her head bowed, eyes closed, jaw defiant.
Her body cascaded into the earth and the heavens both.
I staggered backward, winded.
“Well,” John said. “Will ya look at that.”
The light dissipated, and the woman was gone.
There was a beat of silence. Logic failing to find its way to anyone’s lips, to offer an explanation. And then Theo sighed in a gust, eddies of snow spinning before him. “Just more myths,” he said calmly, his neck craning to see the tops of the branches. “It’s freezing. We should go back—”
“You don’t feel it?” I asked, my voice sounding distant.
The look he gave me was half pleading, half pitying. He shook his head. “Any decent Mason could’ve carved something like that into the wood, Nina.”
“There’s somethin’ here,” Patrick mumbled, as though to himself. Then he lifted his blue eyes to me. “Do you hear it?”
Of course I did. It was roaring in my blood, sparking my nerve endings. Something thrumming beneath the surface.
It was a sort of muted violence. A wave of it.
I felt it wetting my feet, poisoning my veins. In my mind, I saw men with blood beneath their fingernails, gorging on the body of a woman, burning her at the stake for the crime of having something they could not.
Acid coated my tongue, as though I’d bitten into rotting fruit.
I took in every branch of the ancient tree, every root delving into the earth.
The sound of the ground here was different.
It was festering, and I thought that if what the Stewards said was true, and Joan’s remains had been left to feed the soil, then she’d found no rest here.
No peace. She scratched from beneath the surface.
“Nina,” Theo called to me, blocking my view. “This is ridiculous. It’s near freezing. We need to get inside.”
“You don’t think it’s strange?” I asked him. “That the tunnel should collapse and bring us here of all places?”
“I think the struts were too far apart,” Theo answered, taking my shoulders in his hands as though he might shake sense into me. “Just as John said.”
Patrick reared up in my periphery, but I’d already knocked Theo’s hands away. I was thinking of wishes. Of retribution. Justice. I couldn’t feel the cold at all. “Go back without me. I’ll follow later.”
“You haven’t eaten,” Theo insisted. “You’ve hardly slept.”
“Careful now,” Patrick said slowly, his eyes hardened. “You’re oversteppin’.”
“She’s dead on her feet!” Theo said, his voice rising to the last crows still braving the frost. They went flying.
Theo lifted his arms and let them slap against his sides.
“This is madness,” he exasperated. “We should be moving. Every moment we remain gives the Lords’ Army a chance to catch up.
And thanks to the Colsons”—Theo waved his hand in Patrick and John’s direction—“we’ve got a trail of dead police officers in our wake. ”
“If it eases your conscience,” John said. “We only cooked ’em. Didn’t cut anything off ’em.”
Theodore shook his head, bewildered. “This is a fucking pointless treasure hunt,” he said, to no one in particular.
“You’re welcome to get off at any stop, Teddy,” Patrick said, blowing warm breath into his cupped hands. “Lord knows it’d spare us the sound of your whinin’.”
Puce-faced, Theo turned on his heel and stomped back through the snow. Polly followed, seeming relieved to escape the cold.
“Well,” John said, patting Patrick on the shoulder. “Think I saw a bit of brandy back at the factory, son. If you’re of the mind.”
Patrick let his father walk on. “You comin’?” he asked me.
“I want to stay here a while,” I answered.
He nodded, but he touched my hand as he left. A reminder. A reassurance.
I stalked back and forth in front of Joan’s tree, trying to find the curves and valleys of the woman that was now amorphous.
The sun remained obstinately behind the clouds.
Even the earth beneath my feet had turned quiet, restful.
I closed my eyes for a moment, tipped my head back so that I could see the last leaves clinging to the branches.
“I don’t know what to wish for,” I muttered.
In truth, I’d never felt more adrift. I thought of Theo, claiming that I’d lost myself, and worried that he was right.
That perhaps I was just angry enough, just broken enough, that I didn’t care for myself anymore.
I imagined Joan upon that pyre, slowly bled and devoured, and I thought if I were her, I’d wish for the men who feasted on me to be poisoned by my flesh.
I wondered why God insisted on leashing women with power only for men to come harvest it. Joan had been wrong to think that her rage would die with her.
It was in Edith wielding a carving knife.
In blunt-faced women nursing the injured.
In Polly, her tongue so bitten down she hardly spoke.
And it was in me.
The wind picked up. The last hem of light seemed to surrender to the blanket of cloud.
A howling ensued, first through the spines of black-trunked trees, then through my lungs.
I let it carry me back the way I’d come, like a hand between my shoulder blades.
I felt the whip of snow catch at the backs of my ears and hurried faster.
A feeling of urgency rose, from the ground, the air, and I felt like an animal scenting the first hint of danger.
I hastened, boots sliding, sinking.
Then, from Trent’s belly came the first labors of a dying siren, whirring out once more into a parish devoid of almost everything but its ghosts.