Chapter 8
Cressyda
SHE HAD NOT stopped thinking about the creature. That thing. The red-eyed, shadowed woman from the Sanctuary. Its shiny, pearlescent skin and hollow, unnatural face. Its thin, bloodless lips and long, wet strands of hair. The terrible pitch of its hissing voice: Greetings.
The memory had haunted Cressyda for the last few days.
She had dutifully paraded through the gruesome rituals of the Maiden Sacrifice ceremony: witnessed the Mountain girl announced, sat through the feast, watched the dancing, and responded to Queen Flavria’s every beck and call as usual, but always she had been thinking of that awful being.
Always she had been wondering what it could possibly be and why only she seemed able to see it.
Shadowed beings had lingered at the edges of Cressyda’s vision for as long as she could remember.
Faint, shifting figures that no one else noticed.
Smoke-like shapes watching from corners, trailing her through corridors, melting away when she turned her head.
She had learnt to ignore them, to keep her eyes fixed forward and her mouth shut, pretending they were no more than tricks of light.
She had hoped they would one day disappear into nothing.
But this red-eyed creature had looked solid and real – clearer than any shadow she had ever seen before.
And it had spoken to her in that strange, vibrating whisper: Greetings.
It meant something. There was a reason that she could see these shadows, whatever they were. Perhaps demons or spirits or figments of a madness. And Cressyda worried that it meant the very thing she most feared – that she did not belong here.
Finally, she could not stand it any longer.
Three days after the Maiden Sacrifice ceremony, Cressyda lay curled in her bed, waiting.
When the footsteps of guards trudging past her chamber on nightly patrol had ceased and the muffled giggles of courtiers embracing on balconies had quietened, she crept from beneath her woollen blankets and tiptoed into the corridor.
In the gloom of midnight, Syonno Castle looked different, and at first Cressyda hesitated.
She rarely ventured around the castle alone and never at night, but desperation had made her bold.
Dark passageways wound away like twisting caves, torch brackets stood empty, their iron mouths gaping, and the moonlight that bled through narrow windows lay in long, pale bars across the terracotta floor.
But Cressyda gripped her nightrobe around her shoulders and willed herself forward, scurrying down hallways and scampering up stone steps, knowing that she had to do something.
She could not ignore the shadows any more.
Spotting the door to the castle’s library ahead, Cressyda rushed towards it, bare feet pattering.
Slipping inside, she peered around the dim, oval room lined with shelf upon shelf of books, inhaling the scent of dusty parchment, aged leather and old candle smoke.
She had studied in the library a few times over the winters during lessons, and she had aways thought it a calm, peaceful place, but she had never come here alone before.
Padding across the thick rugs scattered on the floor, she approached one of the bookshelves and squinted at the long line of spines.
She did not know what she was looking for exactly – perhaps something that might explain what the shadowed beings were – but she had no idea where she might find such a thing.
Scanning a row of titles, she pulled out a few volumes on zoology and beast studies, carrying them to a nearby chair.
Clambering into the seat, she took the first book and began flicking through the pages, tilting it towards the moonlight peeking through the shutters.
She carefully leafed past illustrations of deer, elk and moose before reaching the end.
With a sigh, she cast it aside and pulled the next volume on to her lap, skimming through descriptions of bison, buffalo and cattle.
Then the next book. And the next one. With a sinking feeling gathering in her stomach, Cressyda leafed through all the volumes she had carried from the shelf, but none of them held what she was looking for: no strange, slithering creatures with hunched, peculiar bodies or shadowed, ethereal beings.
She glanced across the room to the zoology section and began counting the many volumes on the shelf, stopping after she had reached fifty.
It would take a long time to look through them all.
And that was before she had even started on the other sections: histories, biographies and magical basics.
Carrying the stack of books back, Cressyda carefully replaced each one, stifling a yawn. She was about to turn to the next pile of tomes when she noticed pale, yellowish light drifting across the room. Turning, she saw daylight peeking through the chinks of the shutters at the window.
Morning.
She bit her lip, heavy disappointment churning with panic in her chest. She had been so sure that she would be able to find the answers she was looking for tonight.
She had hoped for so much more. Looking around at the vast, floor-to-ceiling stacks of books, she realized the immensity of the task that lay ahead.
It would take many moons – probably many winters – to search every book.
With one last longing look at the shelves, Cressyda turned away and slipped out of the room.
As she crept back down the castle corridors, dodging a gaggle of scullery maids striding about to begin their morning chores, and a lone guard patrolling a hallway, she promised herself that she would return to the library again at nightfall.
She would come back day after day if she had to.
She could not let herself give up. The truth must lie somewhere in there. She just had to find it.
Cressyda trudged into her chamber, rubbing her eyes.
She stumbled towards her bed, wondering if she could snatch some sleep before the morning Sanctuary bells started ringing, but when she reached the soft, inviting warmth of her blankets, she paused.
Longing tugged at her chest like an itch.
She turned and crossed to the far wall instead, where a heavy tapestry concealed a recess.
Sweeping it aside, she opened a narrow cupboard set deep into the stone and pulled out a wooden box brimming with ribbons.
Bright silks tumbled one on top of another, frothing over her wrists in a cascade of colours.
She flicked them aside, digging deep inside the box until her fingers closed around what she was looking for.
She lifted out a long, frayed ribbon of pale pink and held it up to the golden light of dawn that seeped through the shuttered windows.
Its faded edges caught the sun, glimmering in places where the weave had thinned.
It was the first ribbon Cressyda had ever owned and the reason she had started collecting them.
Her most prized possession. More precious than the gowns hanging in her wardrobe.
More treasured than the jewellery in her dressing table.
She brushed a thumb down one buttery, soft edge.
Her old nursemaid had once said that she had arrived at the castle with this ribbon clutched in her tiny, newborn fingers.
‘We tried to take it away, but you screamed,’ the woman had told her, shaking a head at the memory.
‘You cried and cried. My, how you grizzled as a babe. Such a colicky little thing.’
‘Where did the ribbon come from?’ Cressyda had asked.
Questions like this could only be whispered in Queen Flavria’s absence, and only if the nursemaid was in a rare, obliging mood.
All in the castle, attendants and courtiers alike, knew they had to play along with the Queen’s farce.
It was unspoken law, woven into the rituals and patterns of the Calestran court.
‘Never you mind, Princess,’ the nursemaid would mostly reply, brushing away speculations with a flick of her hand. ‘You’re the Queen’s daughter now. It’s no matter where you came from.’
But Cressyda could never stop herself from asking. Time and again, she would return to the same questions. ‘Who gave me the ribbon?’ she would plead. ‘Where did I live before I arrived here?’
Sometimes the nursemaid would laugh the enquiries away, sometimes she would scold Cressyda for naughtiness, but more often she would simply turn back to her work, lips pressed into a thin line.
Still Cressyda persisted.
The old nursemaid was gone now, retired to a town further south, like many of the other senior attendants Cressyda remembered from her early childhood. But just once, when pressed, the nursemaid had said more.
It had been late. The corridors beyond the nursery were dark, the only light the flicker of a single candle on the table.
The old woman had been mending a hem when Cressyda had asked her questions again.
For a long moment, there had been no answer, just the soft, steady snick of needle through fabric.
Then, slowly, the nursemaid set her work aside and leant in close, so close Cressyda could see the milky sheen in her wide, unblinking eyes.
‘I think she gave you the ribbon,’ the old woman had hissed. ‘The one who left you here. Your real mother.’
The words had landed hard and sharp, ringing with truth.
And Cressyda had never forgotten them.