Chapter Thirteen Chime for a Change #2
A pot and tea leaves were already laid out, as was the milk.
What’s more, when Kensa searched the larder, she found Wenna had made scones prior to being throttled and lumped onto the carpet.
Oh, mused Kensa. How thoughtful. She could think nothing else.
Her mind was one big Oh-shaped chasm. Her hands began to shake as she carried the tray, heaped with what Merrin had asked for.
As for the asrai, she had placed herself once again on the settee, wearing only blood and churlish glee.
Outside, the rain hardened to bruising taps on the window panes.
Icy pellets shot down the chimney and melted, spotting Mr Aldridge’s trouser legs.
‘Do – do you take sugar?’
Merrin bared her teeth to mimic a smile. ‘I will take it.’
There were bits in her canines. Kensa wondered where the bits had come from and grew determined not to roll Wenna onto her back, lest there be pieces missing from her front.
Merrin waited with a child’s impatience. ‘What are you named?’
A hard swallow, mouth dry. ‘Kensa.’
The ivy-painted cups rattled on the tray and Kensa’s own teeth rattled in their gums. She carefully negotiated around Wenna’s remains and placed the tray upon a low table.
Merrin, with spidery movements, assigned cups to each person sitting, including Mr Aldridge.
His parched skin was mask-like, his molars on show in a never, never, never-ending grin. Kensa matched it.
‘Yes,’ the asrai encouraged, rocking in her seat. ‘Pour.’
Kensa did not refuse. She tried to. As soon as she did, there was a pull in her consciousness, body reacting and mind dampening. Was this how sirens sang sailors to rocks? Even now there was a humming noise emanating from a pit in the creature’s throat, the same note reverberating over and over.
Did either of them scream? Or did they lie there, contentedly, while she killed them?
‘Say when,’ muttered Kensa. She heaped sugar into Mr Aldridge’s cup. Spoonful upon spoonful upon spoonful. Only after there was a small heap did her movements jar and she was able to stop serving the dead man.
Merrin grinned as a toddler might who has roped an adult into her game. Only, she was a toddler with fangs and a monster’s appetite. Her uncrossed legs were impossibly long, back straight, as she dipped her fingers between the sugar bowl and her mouth.
She offered the bowl to Kensa. ‘Eat?’
‘No, thank you.’
Kensa’s spine tingled. Her movements were blunt. She clumsily poured her own tea and kept pouring, hot liquid blooming over the cup, saucer, table and onto the rug. A hot trickle, fibres soaked, tea and blood.
‘We are fine ladies,’ repeated Merrin.
Kensa squelched her shoe against the carpet, watched it bubble brown over the worn leather that encased her feet.
I ain’t cleaning that up.
Anger came at the prospect. It was raging fury, one that overrode her fear. Snap, and her mind cleared. Crack, and she dropped her cup. Whack, and the asrai struck.
Merrin launched herself across the table, sent the teapot spinning and showered their laps with sugar.
A blunt force, the creature’s hard palms, smacked into Kensa’s chest and sent her body careening backwards.
She did not land on a hard surface. Wenna, or what remained of the housemaid, cushioned her fall.
A weight landed on top of her: Merrin, knees on Kensa’s stomach, a hand around her throat.
With the pressure on her windpipe came a harsh burning.
It was not hot, like the tea that scalded her legs as it splashed across them.
No, this was cold. As raw as the polar sea under snow.
It brought a lung-shredding pain. Kensa scrabbled at the asrai, whose long arms easily kept her back.
Panic had her buckle and arch, splayed over the housemaid’s body, yet Merrin did not budge.
She brought her face close to Kensa’s and watched, carefully.
Stroked her free hand down warm flesh. Merrin’s breath was rotten.
It stank of fish guts, far stronger than the salting cellars when the catch came in.
‘Sink, yes, with me, a fine lady.’
It was hard to see, to feel, to move.
Kensa’s vision began to melt at the seams, popping with light.
The asrai’s sharp teeth neared her, pressed onto her cheek, almost a kiss.
Kensa’s arms dropped to her sides. Her hand grazed an edge.
On the rug, tassels wet and cold against her palm, was a shard: a split saucer and hope in its sharp edge.
Kensa grabbed it. With a final effort, she swung upwards.
The cracked porcelain caught Merrin’s cheek, sheering her from Kensa’s body.
Coughing, heaving with drool, blood running down her chin, Kensa pedalled back to the room’s corner. On the floor, the asrai cradled her face.
‘I was not going to kill,’ snarled Merrin.
Kensa made a sound that almost could have been a curse, had her bruised throat allowed it. She dragged herself to standing, using the curate’s fireplace to do so.
‘Bucka won’t allow it,’ came the hiss. ‘Soft, he is, as chalk.’
‘Why did you do this?’ Kensa would not release the split porcelain saucer. It was her only weapon. Her fingers were tired from holding it and her legs tired from holding her up. ‘Mr Aldridge did nothing to you.’
‘Do you not need to eat? I do.’
‘You do not eat here, not from my people.’
‘If they are yours, then why hate them?’ Merrin’s face was open and heart-shaped. ‘I can smell it on you.’
It was a simple question from one who lived simply, with rules and knowledge far beyond Kensa’s understanding.
‘I – I don’t,’ she answered.
‘Lies.’
Kensa raised her chin. To her left was the door, leading into the hall. Beyond that, outside. Rain-soaked grass, a breeze that swept in and chilled her wet woollen socks. It called to her: Run.
Merrin smiled, too wide, disconcerting. Sank her shoulders down and shifted to a crouch, boxed and ready to pounce.
Kensa had always assumed she would be courageous in a moment such as this.
As brave as her father, who laughed even on the scaffold.
The door was there and Kensa could not move.
She was barely eighteen and two people she had known since childhood were slumped, dead, in the room with her.
Was this what being a wise woman was?
Kensa could not do it. Had already failed.
Mr Aldridge began to slowly lean forwards, dislodged by the asrai’s sudden flex as she primed herself to leap. His doll-mask face did not change. Was this what Merrin would do to her? The floor groaned. Kensa held up her porcelain shard, ready to fight, ready to die.
Let her be buried by the Weaver’s ewe, let her be sung to, as she lay in the soil, let her—
‘I think that’s enough,’ came Isolde’s thundering voice.
Nought but the rain dared answer.
The wise woman was tall and furious, filling the doorway as though she had lengthened her bones since last Kensa saw her. Merrin’s feral nature thinned. She bowed, trying to look penitent, her long, seaweed hair falling demurely across her face. Kensa, meanwhile, did not dare move.
‘You should leave here, Merrin.’ There was no heat behind Isolde’s order, only sadness. For the second time since Kensa had known her, the wise woman looked her age. ‘What led you from the sea – why now, tell me?’
‘Mr Aldridge has been keeping me,’ said the green-hued creature. ‘He taught me to act well, wear a dress, talk on weather,’ she stuck out her tongue, ‘pray at night.’
Isolde withdrew the bone-handled knife. Its hammered metal glinted dully. ‘The Bucka will kill you when he learns what you’ve done.’
A hiss, attention on the blade, and the reply, ‘I know no father in the Father of Storms.’
‘You will leave,’ Isolde repeated, firmer now, as the wind rose.
Merrin seemed to consider the wise woman’s words. ‘No,’ she said, as the fishy smell in the room grew fishier. ‘Stay.’ Slim gills on Merrin’s neck opened. She took a breath, filled her lungs and pursed her lips to sing.
Kensa clapped her hands over her ears, forgetting she still held the saucer.
Drink tea. It dug into her eyebrow. She felt the same sway over her body once again, a tug at her consciousness.
Fine ladies. One that overrode her sense of who was friend and who was foe.
Fine ladies drink tea. Isolde was the one with the knife.
Was she not the danger here? Fine, fine, fine.
And poor, innocent Merrin, who only wanted to wear pretty dresses and drink tea and – eat people – that last point stuck, had Kensa hesitate.
Isolde, on the other hand, wasted no time.
She rolled up one sleeve and brought the bone-handled knife down onto her flesh.
As soon as the asrai’s first sour note filled the room, blood poured.
Isolde’s own, rich and dark. It streamed from her arm to lather on the rug, joining the puddle-water.
Her mouth moved quickly against Merrin’s wordless song.
One that had already begun to warp Kensa’s thinking.
Eat, was the asrai’s next instruction. Lift porcelain shards from the sugar heap.
Swallow them down. A sharp piece after a sharp piece.
Then the silver spoons and the shattered glass.
Take it, there’s a girl, fine lady. Rip a smile in your belly.
Tear a hole in your chest. A puncture is slower than poison.
Kensa put the split saucer to her mouth. It was cool against her lips. She could taste sugar, blood, cold tea and a thread of carpet.
‘I call on the Pact between Land and Sea, made when the last horse ran through the Mounts Bay forest and Lyonness lay above the waves,’ intoned Isolde, as she bled freely.
Die, the asrai’s last instruction.
Rain heaved even harder and the front door swung on its hinges. The wispy hairs on Mr Aldridge’s head began to rise up, though he remained as dead as ever.
Instantly, the song faltered. Kensa dropped the cup shard and collapsed inward, elbows braced on her knees.
The room smelled like burnt skin. And something else, perhaps, that was distinctly Isolde.
Her act was no herbal remedy, no vervain to tonic a wound, no hawkweed to still soreness.
This, here, was the Old Ways against the Old Ways.
‘Ankevi dha davas ha ty a wra ankevi an pyth a’th kelm,’ spat the wise woman, curling a hand over her arm and the wound she had made.
‘Forget your tongue,’ Kensa echoed, ‘and you’ll forget what ties you.’
Merrin grasped her neck with her green hands. Her throat was soundless and scratching. She swallowed with a dry click. Her face looked as gaunt as the curate’s.
‘Should ever I see you on this shoreline again, I will touch my blood to the sand and you will be banished,’ said Isolde. ‘Here be your only warning.’
With that curse on her heels, the asrai streamed into the rain with not a single look back. If anyone in Portscatho saw her seal-skin rush into the waves, none spoke on it. The Cornish had long ago learned not to look too long at sea-folk and their kin, lest they look back harder.