Five Stories for the Dark Months (10 page)

The words stopped coming. Magda
bowed her head.

For a moment the
Blue Child was silent. Then he laughed. “Is that all? So far I’ve
heard nothing from you that I hadn’t heard already from a
thousand
others. You should be thankful
you’re still alive. Rejoice—you were spared! Chosen, in a
way—granted the privilege of watching the end of the world with
your own two human eyes.”

Magda closed her eyes against
another rush of tears. “Sir, I thank you, but I am very lonely. I
cannot conceive—since it happened I’ve been barren...” (And hadn’t
she tried, in barns and back-rooms, with friends and whores and
strangers, all without a single pregnancy...)

The courtiers laughed again, as if
they could hear what she was thinking. Since the voices of the
Iubar were never heard by mortals, Magda knew it was the humans who
were mocking her.

“So you want a child?” When Magda
opened her eyes, the Blue Child was studying the ranks of thralls
that crowded the back of the hall. “I don’t believe we can raise
the baby you were carrying—the unborn aren’t terribly useful,
anyway—but I’m sure—”

“No!” Her voice
came out almost as a shriek. “No, sir, I beg
you—
please
, I
don’t want a thrall.”

He turned to her
with a very curious look on his icy face. “Did you...
interrupt
me?”

Magda bowed her head, knowing that
he might well kill her now. “I meant no disrespect, sir. I pray
you, pardon my... impropriety.”

“Sit up,” he said, tapping her
head with a burning-cold finger. “Don’t be tiresome. What about
your husband? Wouldn’t you rather have him, after all? Raising a
man is a simple thing, and he wouldn’t be so very different. You
might even get him to speak to you, once in a while.”

Magda thought of all the thralls
she’d seen—poor slobbering, shuffling things, unable to remember
their own names, or follow any but the simplest instructions. Some
of them had been put to work, tending gardens and stacking
merchandise, while others were left to act out poor facsimiles of
the lives they must once have led. She’d even seen an old dead
grandmother, once, rocking in a wooden chair before the fire, her
slowly-thawing flesh filling the house with the smell of
decay.

The thralls came bound with bright
silk ribbons, which were supposed to keep them docile (though Magda
suspected they were a cruel joke). You had to feed them bread, with
a touch of your own blood—and if ever they tasted flesh, they’d
slaughter you, and return to the Blue Child’s castle with your guts
hanging from their mouths.

If they gave her Peter like that—a
half-rotted corpse at the end of a ribbon—she would kill him, then
kill herself.

She took a deep breath. She might
as well ask. The worst the Blue Child was likely to do was kill
her—and that would almost be a blessing. “My lord,” she said, “the
boon I want to ask for is... a living child.”

Whispers broke out all around the
hall. Behind her, the last petitioners muttered nervously, as if
they feared that Magda’s brashness would get them all thrown
out.

The Blue Child
stared, as if she’d tried to bite him. “A...
living
child?”

“Yes, my lord.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes, for fear she’d lose her nerve. “I don’t
need a thrall—I can do my own work. I want a
companion
. Someone who can speak to
me.”

The Blue Child was
silent for some time. At last, slowly, he nodded. “Your request
is... unusual, but I believe I can grant it. Not a
true
child,” he added,
before Magda’s heart could surge too high, “for that is not where
my power lies—but I believe I can give you what you need. Wait
here.”

Then he clapped his hands,
summoning a page—a little thrall girl with only one arm—and
murmured instructions in her shriveled ear. Then, as she tottered
off into the darkness, he summoned the next petitioner.

An hour later, Magda staggered
home, cradling the Blue Child’s strange gift between her mittens.
It was a tiny, lumpy package, wrapped in an onion skin and tied
with red string. Magda dearly wanted to could look inside, but knew
that doing so would break the spell.

All the way home, she recited the
Blue Child’s instructions:

‘Plant this bulb at midnight in
soil from your husband’s grave. Water it with snow, and a bit of
your own blood. You must put the pot on the windowsill, in a room
where it can hear you breathing, and tend it faithfully for one
hundred days. If you do as I have said, the flower will grow. When
it opens, you will have what you desire.’

That night, humming a forgotten
song, Magda retrieved a long unused flowerpot from her dusty
toolshed. She lined the bottom with rocks, and added a layer of
sand from the garden path (down which Peter had carried her, drunk
and giggling, on their wedding night). Then she carried the pot to
Peter’s grave by the snow-covered seawall. The wind off the frozen
sea was so cold it burned like acid, but Magda gritted her teeth,
scraped away the snow, and dug out enough of the icy soil to fill
the pot.

At home, she set the pot before the
fire, and waited several hours for the earth to thaw. It gave off
an odd, musty smell as it grew warmer—not bad, but unexpected. At
midnight, though the soil was not quite thawed, she dug a hole in
it with her fingers and buried the ‘bulb’ inside.

She’d prepared a cup of snowmelt,
and a knife to open her skin. Letting her blood drain into the
chilly water, she thought how strange it was to water a flower this
way, and wondered if the bulb would grow at all. However, she did
not dare disobey, and after quite soaking the soil, she set the pot
on her bedroom windowsill and went to bed.

For ninety-nine days, nothing
happened at all. Each morning Magda checked the pot first thing—and
each morning she was freshly disappointed, for the earth was always
damp and dark, unbroken and unchanged. Oddly, it never stank,
though the smell of her blood should have brought the flies
swarming. When the soil dried—as it always did, though there was
never any sun to warm it—Magda watered it again with blood and
melted snow, then went to bed.

News of her situation had spread,
and often her neighbors paused outside the fence to peer at the
empty flowerpot on her windowsill. Most of them shook their heads
and clucked their tongues. “That’s what happens, dear, when you try
to outwit Hel’s Children. Better to have asked for your Peter back,
or even some stranger’s child. At least a thrall could have helped
you do your work.” Whenever they said this, Magda would look at
their own stinking thralls, and nod politely, and bid them good
day.

In fact, she was glad that she had
no servant, for she found that work took her mind from waiting.
There was little enough to do, at first, but when she started
looking she found things she’d let slide: the cluttered toolshed,
her indoor garden, the frayed hems of her clothing. She cleaned,
mended, moved furniture around, and found excuses to talk and trade
with her neighbors. Every night, no matter how tired or lonely or
mournful she felt, she opened a new cut on her arm and fed the
lifeless pot its portion of bloody snowmelt.

On the morning of the hundredth
day, a shoot appeared.

When she woke up, Magda didn’t know
immediately what she was looking at. Surely this was a dream—the
flowerpot was empty, as it had been empty every day before this,
and would be empty till the world finally ended. But when she
touched the shoot, it was cool and waxy and solid, and seemed to be
quite real. A neighbor, passing by, confirmed it: Magda’s boon was
growing.

Word spread, and soon everyone in
town had come to look. Many had thralls in tow, and the poor dead
things displayed odd energy at the sight of the shoot—hooting and
grunting, as if they’d encountered a kinsman. Magda let them all
stay awhile, then shooed them off, afraid that too much attention
would disturb this bright new magic.

But the shoot, though pale, was
strong—and grew quickly. Within weeks, it had developed into a
hardy green stem, surrounded by long, sleek. It looked a little
like a tulip.

For a while it stayed like that—a
little taller, day by day, but not changing much. Impatient now,
Magda began adding more of her blood to the nightly infusion, and
many days walked around so weakened that she felt like a thrall
herself. It seemed to be helping, though—for at last a bud began to
form.

It was a tight furl of crimson
petals, half the size of her fist. She was confused, because she
recognized it as an iris bud—but the plant, quite clearly, was no
iris—and never in history had an iris been so red. To be safe,
though, she started adding compost to the pot, and closed the
shutters to keep it warm.

At last, a year to the day after
she’d returned from the Blue Child’s castle, she woke to see the
flower opening.

She could barely eat, barely
dress—this was the day, surely, when her child would arrive. Would
it come to the garden gate, as if arriving home from school, or
descend from the heavens like one of the Iubar? Should she cut off
the flower—offer it as a posy? Or was the flower just a harbinger
of the time?

All day she paced beside the
flowerpot, offering a little blood and water whenever the soil
looked dry. Her nearest neighbor, as it happened, owned the
county’s only surviving nanny goat. For the price of her last
silver teapot (her mother’s prize possession, but never mind) he
sold Magda a bucket of milk. She could only hope the child would
drink it.

As night fell, the falls of the
iris dropped, and its standards stretched to their full, radiant
extent. It was a glorious thing—a perfect, rippling blossom the
size of Magda’s hand, with velvet petals the color of fresh blood.
In the center, beneath a golden crest, its style-arms clustered
close together, protection the organs within.

The flower itself would have been
worth a dozen silver teapots, as flowers never grew in the shadow
of the Blue Child’s castle. That thought barely occurred to her,
however—for she’d opened the window, and could see that no child
was coming.

The flower waited. The air was
still. Magda moaned, impatient, agonized. She tried to sit and
wait, but her cozy house seemed suddenly stifling. At last she put
on her threadbare coat and went outside.

She stood for hours in her
snow-covered garden, shifting and shivering as the lights went out
in all her neighbors’ houses. From time to time she could see the
thrall guards passing up the street, dragging their truncheons
behind them as they staggered through the snow. Would they bring
the child, when it came? Or would they stop it on the street, and
keep it from coming at all?

The village clock struck midnight.
Magda took a last look at the street, but it was empty. Even the
thralls were gone now, brought inside to rest while the next shift
of corpses was polished up.

Depression settled over her like
frost. There was no child. It had all been a cruel game—a
punishment, perhaps, for Magda’s impudence. She should have known
better than to trust one of Hel’s Children, should have—

Something rustled behind her. She
spun, and saw that the iris was moving.

She ran to the window so fast that
she tripped, and fell hard on the frozen ground. As she looked up,
she saw the inner petals pushing outward, as if something deep
inside the flower were trying to get out.

A sweet, delicate scent began to
pervade the air. After a moment, she placed it: it was the perfume
Peter had given her on the night when she’d told him she was
pregnant. Recognizing it, she finally understood.

“Hello?” She leaned towards the
flower, listening so hard she barely dared to breathe. “Are you in
there?”

For a second, the petals stilled.
Then, slowly, a little naked creature, barely the length of Magda’s
thumb, crawled out from beneath the petals.

It was a girl—not a baby, but a
little damsel fully-formed. She looked about ten—the age Magda’s
own baby would have been, had it survived. Leaning closer, Magda
studied the girl’s face, and gasped: the child looked exactly like
Peter.

For a long time, they watched each
other without speaking. Then, very carefully, Magda set her hand
palm-up beside the flower. “Come, darling,” she whispered, afraid
the full force of her voice would shatter the child. “Come,
darling, let’s get warm.”

The girl stepped daintily onto
Magda’s palm. Though the flower was only cold—chilled by its
exposure to the winter night—the girl’s tiny feet burned like chips
of dry ice. Wincing, Magda cupped her hand around the child to make
a windbreak, and carried her into the house.

The girl’s eyes were the color of
pomegranate seeds. Her skin looked like dirty snow. Her lank
hair—the same mouse-brown as Peter’s—fell like petals around her
face.

“You must be cold,” said Magda,
although the girl had not shivered once. “Let’s get you
dressed.”