One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (35 page)

“
Onyx,” said the walnut-cracking boy from his eyrie. “His eyes are so dark.”

“
Calabry,” suggested Alabast. “Farrant, perhaps. Or Torren.”

“
What does that mean?” I asked. “The last one.”

“
It means ‘white bough’. No particular relevance there, I will admit.”

“
I like it,” I said. “That is all the meaning it needs to have.”

Cianda lifted the baby from my arms. Kneeling beside the fire, she laid him down on the warm hearthstones. She took a discarded walnut shell and laid it hollow side up on his forehead, like a small boat, into which she dropped a crumb of bread and a corner of yellowed paper. We watched her without speaking, sensing ritual even though we didn’t understand what it meant. Torren flailed irritably and Cianda took the walnut boat away, floating it in a shallow bowl of ink. Flames were reflected in the dark liquid, fleetingly bright. For a long moment Cianda kneeled, watching the reflections dance, then she sighed and rocked back on her heels.

“
He’s too young,” she said, obscurely.

“
A seer,” Alabast whispered to me. “She sees the future in reflections.”

This entire evening had felt dreamlike, unreal, with me playing along as a woman who celebrated her baby like she should. Watching Cianda, however, I was gripped with a sudden conviction. It was not alarm. I could not feel anything so strong. All I knew was that if I looked into that ink, I would see my reflection. My shadow over Torren’s boat.

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“
You decided, then.”

I had been looking for the sorcerer all day, prowling along galleries and stairways, always circling back to the courtyard where I had heard his voice in the hope he might once again be there. He was not. By evening I had given up and returned inside to the empty study, rocking the fretful baby mechanically while I stared into the embers. At the sound of Forsythian’s voice, I half turned before remembering it was no use and made myself look back at the fire.

“
Yes,” I said.

“
He’s quite pretty, your son.” Something soft brushed across my cheek and Torren suddenly stopped crying, staring wide-eyed into space. He snatched at something I couldn’t see and the sorcerer laughed softly. “I’d forgotten how peculiar babies are.”

“
I want to love him,” I said quietly. “I try. And all I have is emptiness.”

Forsythian sighed. “Very well,” he said. “You’d best come with me, then.”

I stood quickly, looking around for a clue. “How?” I demanded. “How can I follow you when I don’t know where you are?” There was only silence. “Forsythian?” I called. “Are you there?”

In my haste I had unsettled the strata of books around my chair. They tumbled to the ground, sending papers floating through the air like ink-pattered snowflakes, and when one page drifted to the ground it landed on a foot that had not been there before. I looked up.

The sorcerer looked back at me.

I thought at first he wore a feathered cloak. Wizards often do, at least in stories. It was only when he moved, a restless shuffle of his feet, that I realised the fall of feathers down both sides of his body were in fact wings; great dark wings where his arms should have been. His hair was the same black, a wild crown of it that spiked and streaked across his tawny eyes. His chest was bare despite the cold, almost gaunt in its thinness, his legs encased in tattered grey and his feet bootless. He looked feral.

“
You can stop staring now,” he said.

“
You were supposed to be old,” I said. It sounded more critical than I had intended, as though he had failed a personal test.

“
I am,” he said, without inflection, and left the room without waiting to see if I was behind. His wings trailed their feathered tips in the dust, but his bare feet left no prints. I gathered Torren more securely against my chest and followed.

I had spent two and a half seasons in this place, searching its many rooms and passages, but I had never before seen the door Forsythian opened. Had the stacks of books concealed it all this time, or had it simply not been there until the sorcerer wanted it to be? Inside was a short flight of steps into a large tower room, which overlooked the apple tree courtyard from an unlatched window on one side and the forest road on which I had arrived from the other. The arrangement should not have been architecturally possible and bothered me more than it should.

There was a fireplace here, left unlit. It seemed Forsythian did not feel the cold. A long, scarred artisan’s workbench was positioned underneath the courtyard window, scattered with open books and unrolled maps, brightly coloured bottles and squat beeswax candles in small glass bowls. In the midst of it all was a large clay dish of ink.

“
I will need blood,” Forsythian said.

I nodded, laying Torren down on a nearby chair and crossed the feather-scattered floor to the bench. There was an ivory handled lady’s hunting knife laid out beside the bowl of ink. “Where do I cut?” I asked practically.

Forsythian’s eyebrows might have risen then, although it was difficult to tell beneath his crows-nest of hair. “I’ll do it,” he said, and raised a wing. Fingers emerged from the feathers like a hand pushed from a sleeve, but the grimace of pain on the sorcerer’s face told me it was nowhere near as easy. He snatched the knife from my hand and slit a line at the base of my earlobe. His thin cold fingers thrust my head downward so that the welling blood dripped into the ink, and then it wasn’t fingers holding me there, but the awkward pressure of a wing.

“
Remember your heart,” he whispered in my bleeding ear. “What did you love? What hurt so badly you couldn’t bear its weight any longer?”

Logically enough, I started with small things. The tart sweetness of the first apples of the year. Blankets warmed by the fire in my childhood bedroom, scented with sprigs of dried lavender to help me sleep. But small pleasures, I knew instinctively, would not be enough. I remembered my mother’s face as she was lain out for her funeral, waxen pale and unapproachably beautiful, as though she had already metamorphosised into her own stone memorial. My first love, clear blue eyes and a teasing smile that would turn as quickly to a scowl or a kiss. It had been I who left him and he’d tried so hard to hide his tears. I remembered the face I had chosen instead, lit gold with lantern light in an autumn night. Seeing it wax pale the day my betrothal to the king was announced and we had looked at one another, desperate to forget, knowing I never would.

My reflection melted in the still ink, ripples of light drifting into a new shape. There was a lake, an island, a stone chest shrouded by five years of encroaching thorns.

The weight on my neck was withdrawn and I staggered stiffly backward.

“
Is that where it is?” I asked. Torren was crying behind me. The sound was distracting. I put my thumb in his mouth to quiet him and he sucked the salt from my skin, small teeth biting fretfully. If the sound of his distress had not interfered with my thoughts, I wondered if I would have gone to him at all. It was hard to manage a conscience with only the phantom of remembered emotions to guide me.

Forsythian had his back to me, bending his head so low over the dish that when he looked up his hair dripped black as though his own colours were leaching away. There was ink on his lips and his eyes were half-closed, unfocused. I said his name and he looked at me as if he could not imagine who I was, or why I was there. It was as though he had gone somewhere else, become someone else. I knew I should be afraid then. I backed towards the door and was almost there when I remembered Torren, still swaddled on the chair only a few feet from the empty-eyed wizard, and I knew I should go back. I stopped where I stood in a moment’s indecision.

And Forsythian blinked. He recognised me. The moment of danger passed.

“
Come on, then,” he said, flinging open the window.

I stared. “What do you mean?”

“
The lake,” he said. “Do you want to find the lake or not?”

“
What has that to do with the window?”

In response, he spread his wings. His thin nose narrowed further, hooked, darkened to a wickedly sharp beak. The whites of his tawny eyes were swallowed by predatory yellow. Feathers sprouted from the bare skin of his chest, until I was not looking at a man any more, but a bird — a bird large enough to carry me on its back.

“
My son,” I began.

The bird tossed its head impatiently. A feather flew into the air and trailed downwards onto Torren’s face, into his open mouth. He went instantly limp in my arms, the warm weight of deep sleep. The feather had disintegrated on his tongue like ash. It did not seem hygienic or responsible, and the duty I had built to replace my conscience warned me of the wrongness of what I was about to do. Babies should not be left untended. I should go to Alabast or Cianda, but there was no time.

I laid the sleeping baby between the broad arms of the chair and climbed onto the sorcerer’s back.

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I thought I would die on that flight. Somehow, I survived it.

It was still dark when we reached the lake, the grey-edged dark of the hours before dawn. Forsythian alighted on the stone arch of a ruined pavilion, which trembled beneath his weight, and allowed me to climb down before transforming back into a man. For a moment I thought he would stumble off the arch and I spread my arms to catch him. It was not fear for him that motivated me, but the knowledge he was the only way I would ever leave this island. But he did not fall. Regaining his balance, he swung himself down into a crouch on the overgrown ground beneath, and gestured silently.

The stone chest was at the centre of the pavilion. It looked to me like the coffin of a person so unloved their grave had been entirely forgotten, left to the briars and snow.

I looked to Forsythian for instruction. He simply nodded again towards the chest, his assistance apparently at an end. The cold still air sank quickly through my layers of wool and linen, snow and mud darkening the hem of my skirt as I crossed the pavilion. Having left my gloves behind in the hurry to depart, I wrapped my hand in the already soiled cloth to sweep the lid of the chest clear. Thorns bit through the pitiful protection, dripping blood a stark red against grey stone and white snow. I braced my hands against the icy lid and pushed with all my strength.

It slid backward, unresisting, and fell to the ground with an echoing crack of splitting stone. Inside the opened tomb was a box. I remembered very little of my visit to the necromancer, but the box I knew. Small and silver, encrusted with diamonds. It had been a wedding present, of all ironies, given what I had asked him to put inside. I had worn the key to its ornate lock on a ribbon around my neck for more than half a year, in hope. My fingers shook as they lifted it from beneath my bodice, letting the tiny silver key fall into my palm.

I knelt on the frozen ground, barely noticing the cold, and placed the box before me. After all that I had done to be here, I felt now like a puppet, going through the predestined motions of another’s decision. The key turned in the lock. Bloodless fingers opened the box and reached inside.

I felt something as light and fragile as a captive bird between my hands. In the dim grey gloom of impending sunrise, it looked like a vast ruby and was almost as cold. I knew then something was wrong, terribly wrong. My hands tightened their hold instinctively. And the heart I held, poor broken thing, crumbled away to dust.

It was as if the puppet’s strings had been cut. I fell. Crumpled sideways in the snow, I felt my blood turn stagnant, freezing in my veins. Something dark crossed my vision and I was lifted on soft black wings, my head lolling backwards to stare blankly into the burning sunrise, my mouth open, shaping words I couldn’t say. The hollow in my heartless chest widened into a cavern and engulfed me completely.

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Hearts are heavy. They ache and fracture. They fail.

They forget.

Meriel opened her eyes on a moth-eaten settee that was both familiar and unfamiliar, something she had seen in a dream. She wore a white linen chemise that was stained with dry mud; a green woollen dress lay draped over the blankets at her feet and it too was stained with mud, and blood. Her hands lay atop the covers on either side of her body, scratched and sore, but intact.

She watched the winter sunlight pattern the walls as though it might write out what it was she couldn’t remember. Her chest ached, a slow throb like a bruise. Then she heard the crying and sat up quickly. In a nest of blankets in the chair beside her was a baby —
her
baby. Without thinking she threw back the covers and stepped out of bed to take Torren into her arms. He grabbed at her loose hair with tiny flailing fingers and Meriel laughed, dropping a kiss onto his downy dark head.
 

“
You’re going to drive me mad,” she predicted.

Later she put on the green dress and gathered up the few things left scattered about the room that she recognised as her own. Wrapping Torren securely in a shawl, she left the strange, cluttered room in which she’d woken and went through the quiet corridors of the even stranger house. She could not quite remember how she had come to be here and it seemed the best thing she could do was leave. She thought once, as she passed through a canyon of unshelved books, that she saw a hem of black robe disappearing between the stacks, but when she reached the same point she could see no one there and no door through which they might have disappeared.