The Clockwork Crown (27 page)

“I . . . I remember almost nothing of my time between life and this half-­life.”

“I know.” The Lady sounded supremely disappointed. “But the fact that you returned at all is vital. Your body's song went somewhere and it came back—­reluctantly—­but it came back.”

The floor groaned beneath Octavia. Leaf squawked and took flight. Branches emerged from the smooth floor and, in the space of seconds, formed a high-­backed chair.

“Sit.” The Lady pointed at Octavia. “Your legs are hurting.”

“I—­I'd like to stand, I don't know how much longer I—­”

“Trees stand. They don't have the luxury of sitting.”

Octavia sat. The chair was smooth, the green wood stripped of any twigs or leaves. It perfectly fit the curves of her hips and buttocks. She was reminded of how Alonzo's body fit against hers—­his lips, his height, his hands on her waist. Grief clogged her throat.
I'll never know more than that.

“If you see dozens of paths into the future—­”

“Octavia.” The Lady said her name, and Octavia felt like she'd smacked her head into a metal beam. Suddenly she was glad she sat. “You were born to be the next Tree. I didn't shift your cells. I didn't make you a medician. The magic was there, brought together by your parents. When you were able to float a patient beyond a circle—­when you listened to the rhythms of zymes—­I was amazed along with you.”

Octavia froze. That sense of isolation she had known her whole life had always been balanced by the surety that the Lady knew, she understood.

“Of course I knew and understood.” The Lady flicked a wrist as to dismiss the thought. “I understood you were here to take my place. In that, maybe there was divine intervention. I have already gone fifty years longer than I should, and with Kethan's burden and the factories and the war . . . I think I only have a few days left. The roots are rotting out.”

“Lady, I don't want—­”

“Do you think I care what you want?” The spirit of the Lady rounded on Octavia as her words quaked through the walls, the floor, shivered moss from above. Leaf squawked from up high—­she could spy him as he clung to moss near the ceiling. “I'm not God, to satisfy all your wants and wishes. I can heal. That's all I can do, and I can't even heal everyone. The shortage of blessed herbs—­that's not simply because of the war. It's my own weakness. There were days, in the Tree's youth, when medicians planted full fields of pampria. Row upon glorious row. Now there's no magic left in the soil to spur the growth. I can't even deny all healings to those who I wish to die—­those Dallowmen, harvesting the very signs of my death, my peeling bark, and making tea from it.” Octavia felt flecks of spittle from her vehemence. “It takes more effort to kill than to let live.”

“She wants to live and love.” That came from King Kethan. He still knelt on the floor, his gaze level.

“Yes! Everyone wants the same, and what can I do? Almost nothing, even as I'm aware of everything from the bud of a single larkspur to an old man's final breath. Even more, I know them at the very end and they know me, even if they never heard of the Lady and the Tree.”

Like the boy who died in Leffen, who spoke of her; Alonzo's message when he returned by the grace of the Tree's leaf; the woman at the sod house.

“This is cruel,” said King Kethan.

“LIFE IS CRUEL.” The Tree convulsed. There was a long pause. Octavia felt a cool breeze again, like the long breaths of Al Cala meditation. “Octavia knows the value of the lives she saves because she knows her own loss. She knows that her whole village burned in the span of minutes, and who was left to mourn? Her, the Garrets, and the families of the thirteen Dallowmen of the
Alexandrio
. No one else in Caskentia cared. They each knew their own grief. She's a good medician because she cares. She
remembers.
”

The Lady turned to her again. “I know you want to continue as a medician, but you can't. Without a Tree, there are no more herbs, there is no more healing magic. I am not even sure if you would still be able to hear bodies' songs here. Perhaps if you went across the sea, to the land of another Tree, but not here. But even if you could hear them, soon enough there wouldn't be any blessed herbs. You might be able to hear and do nothing.”

Octavia wanted to coil into a tight ball of agony. “If you haven't always been here, what kept the land going before? Was there another Tree?”

“Of course. Otherwise medicians would have not existed. But he was weak, as both a medician and as a Tree. His legacy was the jealousy of Caskentia, the curse on the Dallows.”

“And you,” Octavia said.

The Lady laughed like a gale at sea then stopped, her expression one of surprise at the sounds she herself was making.
Does not know how to laugh anymore.
Octavia took care to edit her own thoughts to keep them her own.

“Yes, I suppose I am his legacy. I know what the tales say of me. ‘The mourning mother.' ‘The one who begged God that she might treat the suffering.' ” Venom dripped from the words. “When I talk about the cruelty of life, I know it. Yes, I mourned. Yes, I mothered. But becoming the Tree is not a proclamation of morality, no more than surviving a threem is proof of virginity. The Tree creates magic, and the magic creates herbs and medicians, and the best of medicians becomes the next Tree, and so the cycle continues.”

“Who were you, Lady? Before?” asked Octavia.

The spirit's mouth opened, her expression one of puzzlement. “I . . . I've been called Lady for so long. I don't remember my old name.” She shook her head. “But I . . . I had three children. Their names, I know. Cameron, Aidan, and Cassandra.

“When they call me the mourning mother, it's because my grief shook through the land. It haunted the dreams of medicians. It caused pampria to weep red. I was forced to leave my children as orphans. It's because I had to know their laments to the Tree—­because I raised them with faith—­and could do nothing to help when Cassandra died in child labor at thirteen, when a wagon crushed Aidan's spine at eighteen and left him paralyzed until he brought a knife to his gut three months later, when Cameron strangled five consecutive wives and cursed them for his impotence.”

Octavia's lungs felt heavy, her body cold.
No sympathy toward me. No choice.

King Kethan bowed his head, a fist pressed to his chest. The Lady faced him with a tender smile. “Yes. You know what it's like, to a degree. To lose a child and be powerless against it. To be bound in one place when your mind is everywhere else.” The Lady rested a hand on the top of his head again. “So many thousands of books are bound to your soul and memory. Their ultimate loss is the only reason I grieve to do this.”

There was a split second when Kethan frowned in puzzlement, and then a spine of wood erupted from the floor at a ninety-­degree angle. It impaled Kethan with a horrible crunch of atrophied organs and flesh. Other branches spontaneously crackled forth and grabbed hold of his shoulders to clutch him upright. His song wailed, the screech of a toddler blowing into bagpipes. Even knowing this was the Lady, Octavia couldn't help but lunge forward, her hands reaching to open her satchel.

The chair bound her. Green branches snared her ankles, girthed her lap, and forced both arms back to their rests.

“Kethan!” His name sobbed out of her. Octavia needed to be there, to lay her hand on his brow, to ease his passing as she had eased that of so many soldiers at the front. She craned against the restraints and screamed. “Peace to you, Kethan! Go to Varya! Allendia loves you. She's never forgotten you.”

Octavia knew Kethan heard her by the shift in his song as it softened—­that through the frenzy of his pain, there came the peace of a steady flute. His agony didn't ease. His wound didn't heal. This time, he was truly dying.

The Lady stood between them, her expression impassive as she watched Kethan. Her hands rested atop her rounded hips.

“Let me go to him!” Octavia yelled.

“
I
have him.” The Lady said it with tenderness.

The spear of the Tree moved. It retracted and traced a circle like an oversize scalpel. Kethan moaned, his frail form falling slack in the branches' grip. His lungs, his body, deflated.

Leaf squawked and dove downward. One of the branches lashed him aside. He impacted on the far wall with a fleshy smack.

“Leaf!” Octavia screamed. Her wrists and shoulders burned as she tried to thrust herself forward in little jolts. In response, the branches squeezed. She couldn't so much as wiggle. Octavia knew by Leaf's song that he was merely bruised and dazed, but that didn't stop her rage.

“Chimeras.” The Lady shook her head, her lips curled. “Men meddling with things they shouldn't. But I can't stop all life. It just happens sometimes, even in a circle.”

Kethan's song dimmed.

Leaf crawled to her. He dragged his wing, the one that wore the silver fork. “Come on, Leaf, come on,” she whispered.
Alonzo could have been swatted in the same way. Still could. Death is harder, but she can still kill.

The branch withdrew from Kethan. Its forked end balanced a nugget the size of a hulled almond. The Lady plucked it up and held it to the light. “So many years since it was stolen. So many years it has been in the wrong vessel. But now . . . now. Peace to you, Kethan,” said the Lady.

Hot tears streamed down Octavia's cheeks. “Good-­bye, Grandfather,” she whispered. As if he'd been waiting for the words, his soul departed their world.

“Soon enough, peace for me as well. Once you're rooted, Octavia, my time is done.”

The Lady walked to Octavia, smiling, the seed cradled in the plush nest of her palm.

 

C
HAPTER
20

Octavia fought against the
branches of her chair. The green tendrils tightened their hold. “Lady! Please, no!”

“Octavia, you want to save everyone. You've told me so many times.”

“Not like this. I never thought . . . not like this.”

“I know it's hard. I don't think it means as much without that sacrifice. I fought the seed, too, just as Kethan did.” The Lady nodded to where the King knelt. As Octavia watched, his body sifted into mere dust.
Just as the Tree's leaves disintegrate after being used. That's all we are in the end. Dust.
“However, in our case, we're alive when it goes in. It hurts. Every sort of birth hurts. I was told that if you give in, the process is done in a matter of seconds.”

The Lady stood directly before Octavia. The seed in her palm looked benign, like a green almond out of the hull, its surface rippled with long vertical lines. Her touch had evaporated the leaf's toxins and Kethan's remaining viscera as if she had used a medician wand. A vine slithered around Octavia's ribs, then another. A twig twined around her neck; another circled the top of her head like a diadem. She couldn't move.

“You're the finest medician magus I've ever seen.” Tears glistened in the Lady's eyes. “Thank you.” The dankness of the earth lingered around her like a perfume.

A branch, a vine, something wrapped around Octavia's chin and pulled her mouth wide open. The Lady's fingers touched her lip, the texture cold like roots on a winter morning. Octavia shivered. The seed was pressed onto her tongue. Octavia immediately tried to shove it out. The Lady tsked and rested her hands on Octavia's throat. The muscles contracted.

Octavia swallowed the seed.

I don't want this, I don't want this, I don't want this.
She wanted to chant the words endlessly, as the branch used to speak, but sudden dizziness overwhelmed her. Even restrained as she was, the world swam for a moment.

Her legs and back impacted on the floor, the satchel smacking heavily beside her. The chair was gone. She rolled to stare up. The lichen draped and swayed. She felt the seed in her gut. It wanted to grow. The potential was so
there,
like the taste of rain before a storm. She just had to acquiesce—­ha! This wasn't acquiescing, as a patient did in a circle. The seed needed her to give up.

Octavia.
Pain stabbed through her head again.
I imagine you'll fight awhile more, so I must preserve my energy until you root. Bless you, Octavia Leander, and blessings to our land.

The Lady was gone. Gone in her human form, in any case.

Leaf faintly chirped.

“Leaf?” Octavia whispered. She rolled to her side to find him. He crawled closer, his song battered but still strong.
Concussion, bruising to the membrane of his wing, bloodied nose.

“We have to get back to the settlement. We need to get to Alonzo. I wanted . . . I should have given him a proper good-­bye before. Now's the chance. I can get you to Miss Percival, little one. She'll set you right. I . . . I don't think I'm up to healing anyone right now.”

Nausea didn't adequately describe how she felt. Her gut seemed strangely full, as if she'd starved all day in the bustle of the wards and then eaten a full loaf of bread at the end of her shift. That sense that she didn't feel sick yet, but she would suffer very soon.

Here I thought Miss Percival's betrayal was the worst that could happen. That was like stubbing a toe; this is an amputation. Of the foot, leg, everything.

Octavia crouched. Her head still swam a little, but she no longer felt like she was on a crazed buzzer ride. Her fingers clumsy, she opened the main pocket of her satchel. “Here, Leaf.” She scooped him up. The tips of his ears trembled. “I know. We were both betrayed. You worked hard for her. We both did.” She tucked him inside the satchel. Leaf emitted a soft chirp.

Walking took extreme focus. Left foot, right. Left foot, right. Rest. Walk. The dark passage didn't seem quite so impenetrable with the gray of the outside world directly ahead. She stepped outdoors, drenched with sweat.

Screams lit up the path ahead. The girls, idling beneath the rotting redwoods, stared at Octavia in utter horror.

“Glad to see you, too,” she mumbled.

“How are you here?” cried the yellow-­haired girl.

“I walked.” Chocolate and Doxy stared at her, ears perked. “I might need help mounting.”

“You shouldn't be here!” shouted the shortest girl.

“Did the Lady tell you that?” asked Octavia.

“She doesn't say much anymore,” said another girl. “But we know she's dying. We know you're the new Tree, but you're still walking around!”

“Terribly sorry to disappoint.” Octavia leaned on Chocolate. She pressed a hand to her face. The skin felt sweat-­soaked and rough, even through her gloves. The gloves—­how pointless now. She discarded them. Mottled green and brown bark covered the backs of her hands, her palms discolored but still flexible. She touched her face again and felt the fissures. A low moan escaped her throat.

Octavia gripped the saddle horn. She managed to get one foot into the stirrup, but weakened as she was, she couldn't lift the rest of her body. Chocolate danced sideways and almost sent her face first into the dirt. She scrambled up, panicked.
No. I don't want to touch the dirt.
“Help?” she whispered to the girls.

They were gone. Fled down the path.

“Well then. What now?” In the deep shade, it was impossible to tell the time of day. Leaf pried himself partially out of the satchel. A loud chirp erupted from his little body, then another.

“Leaf, what is it?”

Flapping wings and murmured songs filled the air overhead. The sky turned green with gremlins. Huge gremlins and small, full chimeras and natural-­born ones. Their bodies told the strain of days of flying, hours of hunger.
All to come here, to help me.
They hovered to grab her robes, her arms, the backs of her legs. Octavia was lifted upward, and her screech of alarm turned into a wild laugh.

“What, am I made of silver instead of wood?” she asked.

A scarred gremlin the size of a four-­year-­old child cradled Leaf in her arms, her broad wings fanning Octavia with each mighty stroke. Like Prime back in Tamarania, her wings and arms were separate.

Octavia rose higher and higher. Some of the little gremlins even gripped her satchel so that she didn't feel its weight. She twisted to check on her bag and found that someone had even shut the top flap for her.

They hovered as high as the lower branches of the Lady's Tree and flew forward. She could see the winding footpath she had followed with Kethan. Doxy and Chocolate galloped with dust in their wakes. Cold wind blasted Octavia's face and reminded her of the open windows on the
Argus.
Though I won't be pushed out a window this time.
In fact, she had no worries of falling at all. Treetops passed just feet below. Birds cried greeting. Smoke rose from the settlement ahead.

“Dis.” It took Octavia a moment to realize the large gremlin was speaking. Through the fog of bodies and songs, she made herself focus. This gremlin had vocal organs like Prime and a bowed pelvis that indicated that she had borne offspring. “Dis dank you.”

The cold air blasted tears from Octavia's eyes. “And thank you.” The gremlin grunted and turned away, Leaf cradled to her chest. Thick seams lined the protruding ripples of her vertebrae.

They all came from afar. Leaf's work—­maybe Chi's as well. If we had still been at the homestead, or farther away, I imagine they would have guided or carried us all.

The gremlins cried out en masse. From the distance came an answer—­another flock, green specks against a cloud. Gratitude welled up in her chest—­no, not gratitude. Love. The pressure filled her chest as if with a life debt, but she knew this was something more.

“I bless you. I bless you all. Every gremlin,” she whispered to the wind, willing power into the words as if she were an aether magus. The gremlins shivered, though their hold on her never weakened. She heard their weariness, their aches, as it all faded. A cry came from afar—­an acknowledgment.

She closed her eyes as if falling into her Al Cala meditation, but this time she didn't see the Tree. Now she
knew
the map of Caskentia and the Waste and how the current of her thanks flowed over the plains, eddied around and over the Pinnacles like a tidal wave, dipped into the saltiness of Nennia Bay, coursed through the smoke-­thickened skies of Mercia. Her gratitude swirled among the towers of the southern nations to those alcoves above the clouds, and north to Frengia, where gremlins numbered few, but still mewed their thanks in a small chorus.

They said her name, whatever it was in their speech. She knew by the way the sound made her head throb.

“To me, you're all living creatures. Yes, you were created out of cruelty, but that makes you no less valid,” she whispered.

A lightning bolt of pain shot through her abdomen. She screamed. The world wobbled again, dismayed cries of gremlins all around.

The seed is sprouting. By using the potential of its power, I gave in a little without it even being a conscious decision. Oh . . . balderdash.
She didn't even know how to call on a higher power now, without the Lady to rely on.

Octavia breathed through the pain as she had asked women to breathe through labor, and soon it faded back to a dull ache. “We're almost to the village. Set me down in the woods. I know how men treat gremlins, and this lot's ready to fight. There. The path.”

She alighted on the trail with surprising grace—­grace that vanished the instant they let go. Her rubbery legs dropped her straight to the grassy earth.

Whereupon her blood tried to burst out of her skin.

It was like the urge to bloodlet, but it welled up wherever her body touched the ground, even through cloth. Screaming, she shoved herself upright and grabbed hold of a sapling. The pressure in her skin abated. Her boots, at least, granted her an adequate buffer. The gremlins fluttered around her like oversize green butterflies.

I need a walking stick.
Octavia looked around and breathed in the glorious fragrance of jasmine. She was steps away from where her mare had joined the forest. There had been long sticks there among the horse's bones—­likely created to reinforce the structure as the flesh failed. Carefully, she staggered to where the jasmine mounded as if it had flourished for years. From the blooms, she pulled forth a curved green stick that resembled a spine. It quivered in her hand but didn't speak.

Her power is fading quickly. When she manifested and acted physically, it sped her end all the more.
Octavia couldn't help but look back toward the looming Tree. Evening light cast it in pale yellow.

Evening light. Alonzo.
I can still see the Tree.

“Oh no. Oh no. I have to get back. Gremlins, you need to go away, far away. Don't try to steal any silver from here. I—­if I—­there might be a battle here. You don't need to be caught in it. Please, go!”

At the word, the flock took off. She felt a backlash of dread, wondering if the order to the gremlins carried a consequence, but she didn't feel another direct pulse of pain.

The gremlins had listened because the request came from her, not because of the will of the Lady.

Two gremlins remained: the large one and Leaf.

“Leaf, you need to go, too,” she murmured as she started to walk. The large gremlin picked up Leaf and waddled alongside Octavia. “I love you, little one. I don't know what will happen here. It's enough that Alonzo is here and at risk. Go southwest. Go to Mrs. Stout in Tamarania. She'd love to see you. There's a lovely cheese shop there. Oh, Leaf . . .” He chirped and held his arms out to her like a babe. Leaning on her stick, she scooped him up from the other gremlin. He cuddled against her shoulder and mewed, his long ears rubbing and bending against her jaw. The pain in his song broke her heart. “I want to heal you, but I'm afraid to. I'm afraid of what would happen if I drew on . . . that power right now. I'm glad you have a friend to help.”

The older gremlin returned Octavia's grin with a fang-­tipped smile.

Octavia could see men and horses on the full street ahead. She stood at the edge of the woods. “You might be able to fly in a few hours, but take it easy.” A pause. “This is where we need to say farewell.”

His little catlike mouth pressed against her neck in what was clearly a kiss. Her throat burned with checked tears as she passed Leaf down to the mother gremlin. The big gremlin chirped and took to the air. Blinking, Octavia walked on. She didn't look up as she heard his mews, his battered song, as they faded away.

As she entered the village, men slowed in the midst of loading wagons. Machinists froze as they leaned into the engine compartment of a steam car. Horses stopped, ears perked, not responding to the goads of heels and spurs.

“Be nicer to that horse,” she snapped.

“Yes, m'lady. Of course, m'lady,” the Waster stammered, shame coloring his song and speeding his heart.

The throb in her gut worsened.
I imagine the Caskentian soldiers poisoned by the Waste felt like this as their symptoms began. If only my ailment could be treated by a scoop of bellywood bark.

She sensed the approach of Lanskay and an aether magus before they emerged from a building. Lanskay froze, shock evident on his face, before he continued forward. He waved the other magus away.

“I'd appreciate it if you could tell me where Alonzo is,” she said.

“Good God. What happened to you in there?” he whispered.

“You're a married man. You should know better than to say something like that to a woman.”