28. The Sorrow
The Sorrow
The fear was beginning to return as her hand slipped away from the grand handle, closing the door behind her. She took a breath, and the panic subsided.
“Tell me something,” Flora said as he led her into the foreboding woods. “If you have Feya, with all her memories intact, why did you have to do so much to find me? Wouldn’t she have just told you who I was and where?”
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” he said, peering off.
“Feya may still have her principles, or at least what lingers of the principles she once had. Or perhaps she just didn’t care enough to speak up.
Mother would have made her speak if she had known what she knew, but she didn’t.
” He sighed and added, “Besides, Feya is mine.”
“Yours?” Flora asked, the boiling returning beneath her skin.
“She was a child when I found her, scared and alone,” he said. “My mother knows that harming a child such as her would risk losing my support.”
“Why have you been helping her at all?” Flora pried.
“She’s my mother,” he said quietly. “And the only person in the world left who cares for me.”
As much as Flora hated his conviction, she believed what he said to be true. The only other souls he knew were hollow, unfeeling. Flora looked into his haunting eye as he trudged forward, and she saw that the ring of fire was dim.
“I know more than anyone how twisted her heart has become after my father’s passing. I could never leave her alone, not when this is all because of me.”
He glanced briefly at her, feeling the weight of her eyes on him in the silence.
“I don’t want your pity,” he said, spitting the last part.
“I didn’t want yours either, but here we both are.”
He rolled his eyes and scoffed.
“I should never have carried you to safety,” he said. “I should never have touched you.”
“Can’t say I disagree,” she said, her hands clenched in her pockets, just like his.
They continued their journey, each patch of trees exactly like the last, though for every step they took, the strange, melodious hum grew closer.
“What would you do,” Siren asked suddenly, “if I killed Noec? Gutted him before your eyes?”
Flora felt a twitch in her lip as her teeth clenched. She looked at him, and made damn sure he was looking back. Coarsely, she replied, “I’d set the whole world on fire just to burn you.”
“Good,” he said, swallowing. “Then you’ll understand my mother just fine.”
As the mysterious sound grew closer, the words of the incoherent voice never quite solidified, sounding as though it were a song being sung in a million different languages and none all at once.
“What is that?” Flora wondered quietly.
“Squirm, you vile, insignificant pest. Squirm and beg beneath their talons.”
Flora’s feet came to a halt before a narrow stream of flowing water. The woman’s harsh voice was in the same direction as the low hum, up ahead where the dim green light grew blue and vivid.
Siren let out a deep sigh. “She’s been quite busy,” he explained. “The king has been sending battalions into our forest. Mother’s pissed.”
“Why would he do that?”
“The king has a foolish tenacity for finishing what he started.”
“What you started,” she snipped, her fear still more dulled than maybe it should be. His frigid glare told her she should be dead for saying that. Very dead.
“If I were you,” he advised, “I’d bite my tongue before we go any further.” Flora stiffened, though the harshness of her glare remained. “That is, of course, if you prefer to keep the skin on your bones.”
He walked on ahead, and hesitantly, she followed.
“Here we are,” he said, with not a hint of expression on his face. “The Well of Eternity.”
The humming song came from somewhere beneath this large pond of water, which had narrow paths of irrigation branching off in every direction as though it were the submerged center of a spider’s web.
The well ahead glowed with a faint blue light, its reflection dancing along trails of steam that swirled from the surface, glistening along the black leaves above.
Night lilies gathered nearby, their vines creeping around the stone that lined the shallow water, rooting beneath the surface.
“The Sorrow,” Heron had called this place.
And looking out, she could see why. Poking out from the dim light of the well were what looked like sun-bleached pieces of driftwood, some pieces large and knobby, some small and delicate, and some spiked and rounded like a cage.
Bones, Flora thought. Those are human bones.
At the center of the well sat a woman, her eyes glowing like the paleness of a full moon.
“It’s as if they will do nothing on their own,” she said as Siren approached.
Flora thought she heard some sort of accent, French Canadian maybe.
“Stupid, blind, useless idiots,” the woman seethed.
“I order them to keep Velo’s soldiers out of my Forest, so what do these scythes do?
They start grabbing Hunters by the scruff, ferrying them back to safety like puppies.
Soon, I’m going to have to do everything myself.
” Her voice was hoarse and grated in pitch, guttural and angry like a scythe.
A stringy, glossy membrane ran along her cheeks, coiling down her neck and feet toward the water below, glowing with a faint blue.
She scolded, “You’d think their keeper would give them a little more motivation to fight. ”
“I can’t give what I don’t have,” he said plainly. “I’ve brought you the Sleepwalker.”
Her growling teeth slipped into a grin. “Florabelle.”
“That’s me,” Flora said, disturbed but intrigued.
“I’ve been eager to meet you,” the woman said.
“Please excuse the wait. I’ve been... occupied, squashing soldiers into pulp at the edge of my Forest.” She added, “You must have friends in high places. As did I, once.” The light danced through the fog, casting glowing phantoms on the trees above.
“But, with a shift in the wind, the fire that once warmed you will burn your home to the ground.”
Flora wondered at the blue light trailing from her eyes, at the way the night lilies seemed to reach for this place, and at the jumbled voices emanating from the well below.
“Before you do as you will with me,” Flora started, her courage still inflated and her curiosity piqued, “you might as well entertain me with some answers.”
“Oh?” The woman asked, rising to her feet as the gelatinous web around her stretched.
She blinked, and the white haze was gone.
In its place was a deep brown, eyes so human that she was more unsettling than before.
“Quite bold of you to assume I’d entertain a thing. Or is your boldness my son’s doing?”
“His doing, maybe,” Flora replied. “But I’ll ask you regardless: are you like me?”
The woman smirked with a devil’s lips, just like her son’s. She tilted her head, and her gray hair tumbled over her shoulder, earrings swaying against sunken cheeks. “Indeed, I am.”
“And do you still… return home at night?”
“Have you never considered that you don’t have to return to the water? As I see it, this is home. He is my home,” she said. Flora assumed that she referred to her son, but the woman gestured to the water below. “Here, in this well.”
It looked as if the woman was standing on a shelf of glass just an inch or so below the water.
Far beneath the invisible barrier, the water was clear, speckled with distant and colorful lights like glitter stuck in black upholstery.
The blue vines that crept from the corners of the woman’s eyes wove down through the water, dancing deep beneath her toes with a warped light.
Deeper, the glowing web of vines entangled what looked to be a crimson flower, its ruby petals tinted and distorted under the cool tone of the surface.
“My name is Elizabeth,” the woman said. “In your world, I was a pitiful woman, the property of a man whose only gifts to me were bruises and a haunted bed chamber. I awoke each night to another world that did not want me. In this world, I was an outcast, a leper. But then my love found me, and I was made real.”
“Tell me why,” Flora said, tugging hazardously at the end of her leash. “Why did they cast you away?”
“Because I existed,” the woman, Elizabeth, hissed. “By the same ungodly witchery that you do. Except, after all they did to crush me into nothingness, they took one look at you and had the audacity to protect you, as if somehow that could atone for what they had done to my family.”
“Geno,” Flora muttered. Elizabeth groaned at the name, the air in her throat rasping into a hiss. “Geno hurt your family?”
“He saw my husband shielding his son from his Hunters. He saw him weakened with fear, with love. And rather than seeing the man before him, he saw an opportunity. Geno bled him dry before our child’s very eyes.”
Flora studied the woman’s pale face, her features sharpened and warped by the weight of grief.
Her arms were feeble, and her spine was sharp beneath the skin of her neck.
This woman appeared brittle, yet somehow, she had used her anguish to amass more strength than Flora would have thought possible, peering through the white eyes of scythes and driving them to do her bidding.
Flora looked at the strings of blue light that crept down from her eyes, as if their path had been forged by countless tears.
Pity—that’s what it was. Flora still felt pity.
“Don’t worry darling. In time, I returned the favor,” the woman sneered dryly. “One by one, I claimed his Hunters, saving Geno for last, so that he would know I was coming for him. When I finally caught him, I made him and his family suffer more than he could have ever feared.”
Noec. Flora thought about Noec. He had watched his mother die at the hands of a scythe, or rather, at the hands of Elizabeth. Flora’s pity ran dry, though the sadness of leaving him, the same sadness she had used Siren to shake, crept back in through the fissures of her mind.