The green woman, grumbling, shaking her head, looks at me again, more intently, squinting so hard that the wrinkles around her eyes make a crackling sound. She stares for an inordinately long time, and gods, I wish she’d make up her mind to interfere or not. To bring me back or to say definitively that I need to wait for my soul to learn how to fly.
‘You don’t think, do you,’ the mari-morgan wheedles, ‘that she’s not in this odd state, this ridiculousbetweenery, for a reason? How often have you seen one like this? Hmmm? How often? Ever?’
More grumbling.
‘I’ve had her blood, I know her history. Her early life, plucked from poverty, her power sensed by another, elevated in the court of a far-flung land – precisely the sort I once walked – doing good and ill.’ The mari-morgan holds up a finger. ‘But even when she did ill? She always thought it in the pursuit of good.’
‘There’s none more dangerous…’
‘I know!’ The tone’s almost gleeful. ‘The things she’s done! Changed faces on would-be assassins to let them slipby. Mended bones so poor folk could walk and work and not lose their livelihood – did that without payment or prompting. Changed the faces on some so their own people wouldn’t recognize them, would cut them down. Her master’s enemies. And the last thing she did, across the sea. The seed she sowed. The mess left behind. Ones such as her don’t die like this. They make amends. They must or the whole world is thrown out of balance.’
‘She’s taken my trees, turned them to her own purpose.’ A shiver would run down my spine if it could, if I had any vital reaction left, at that ominous line.
‘See? You do know who she is then!’ A gleefulI-told-you-sofrom the mari-morgan. ‘And I know, I know she is problematic. She loves what she fears and fears what she loves! But men and things shaped like men have done worse in your woods and you’ve left them be. The things she’s done wrong, the worst things… that was long ago. She needs a chance to do better. Be better – and her blood has shown me she’s been trying. If you don’t give her that chance, you take a light out of the world. And sheisa light, though sometimes a dark one, but a light nonetheless.’ The mari-morgan lowers her voice, but I can still hear when she says, ‘And you – we – need a light.’
There are long moments filled with moreummingandahhing, then the green woman gives an exasperated sigh. ‘Whatever she does wrong,Fishwife, I’ll never let you forget.’
The mari-morgan, having gotten her way, lets that one slide, and the green woman kneels beside me. She reaches one large hand – nails black and obsidian-sheened – out and grabs my soul, which squeaks when it realises it’s too late to run, and thatenormous hand closes around its ephemeral shimmer as if it’s as solid as the dead body it sits on. The other hand pries at my mouth – stiff with rigour, which doesn’t seem to bother her – and when the lips are parted, she stuffs the soul inside me, and I can feel but not feel it wiggling down my throat and back to wherever it spends its days. The green woman lays both hands on my chest and that’s when the pain begins. I would scream, if I could, if I lived, and I imagine I would sound like those I’ve healed and hurt over the years.
I’m dead, aren’t I? Yet I feel every agony and it takes so long that I pass out, with the vague hope that I’m properly dead.
***
I dream of a place I left a long time ago. I dream of a night I’ve tried to block from my thoughts for two decades. I dream of a deed that will haunt me forever.
Here is the palace that’s been my home for most of my life, where I fell into luxury like I’d never known – never would have known but that the high sorceress saw me and knew what I was, what I might become, and took me away from the slums and hardship of my childhood. All because I’d chased the moon that night.
And I do not believe I ever said ‘Take me back home’ or ‘Let me go, return me to my mother.’ Not even that first night, nor the second nor the third, nor any after that. I said ‘Thank you’ many times because I could never imagine the life I’d have had in the lower city – or rather, I could imagine it far too well. And I never saw my mother and sister again – or perhaps I lie, perhaps I did notice them once, as I was carried through the streets in a sedan chair (because what simpler way to show folkthat you’re better than them than by making them carry you?). Wherever I went in that city, I would give out alms because I never forgot what it had been like to be poor and hungry, how a single brass coin could be the difference between a meal or a hollow gnawing pit in your stomach. Perhaps that was why, when the time finally came for revolution, no one looked too hard for me even as they threw the bodies of the royal family and the high sorceress on that pyre fuelled by books.
When, in the early days of my tenure in the palace, the high sorceress said, ‘You belong here, little one,’ I never contradicted her. I called herMotherwhen she bid me to, I obeyed her wishes even when I questioned them, when they seemed wrong. I held her head when her magics made her ill, when the darkness in them threatened to eat her from the inside out. And I laid hands on her each and every time she seemed to be too close to death, and I mended whatever was ailing within her body though her screams echoed in my ears.
Thenthatnight…
I all grown, but still her obedient child…
When she came to me, dragging another child behind her. A little girl, perhaps eight or ten, terrified, a daughter of some kitchen-maid or other, tunic torn, dried vomit in her hair, the red imprint of a hand on her cheek where she’d been slapped to subdue her. Smelling truly awful.
Poor girl, poor mite.
When the High Sorceress Almira came to me and the city was burning, when the gates had been broken down, when those we’d served were already dead or dying – all but one, all but one…
She said, ‘Change her face. Make her look like the other.’
And I did.
Oh, I hesitated, just long enough to make the old woman scream. Long enough for her to slap me so that the child and I bore matching hand marks on our faces. Long enough that I could hear doors being battered elsewhere in the palace, long enough to know I was wasting time. But I still did as bid because the habit of obedience was too ingrained.
Because she said it was what was needed. That it would ensure the future. That this night of loss and blood and rebellion would not be in vain, that there would be a return. So I did it. I did it and listened to the screams, which are the worst I’d ever heard before and since. I do not believe they’ll ever be surpassed. I watched the terror in that girl’s eyes, the pain, her incomprehension that it was bad enough she’d been born into poverty and deprivation in a city where rulers grow more and more heartless and greedy, but then to be hurt like this? To have your own face taken from you?
I wept the entire time, but still I did it, and my tears earned me nothing except the hatred of a child. And when I was done, the High Sorceress Almira handed the weeping girl over to the heavily disguised Chamberlain – the last noble still breathing – and he hurried the child away and into the night. Not long after, the throne room’s doors below were broken down; my surrogate mother cried,Flee!
And I did, around the viewing balcony that looked down on the throne room, while she remained in place, too old to run, too proud to do so, and awaited her fate. And when I paused, oh-so-briefly, when I turned back it was to see her body in allits finery thrown from the balcony, down onto the room below, her head connecting with the great throne itself of marble and silver and gold and gems – that noise! the echo! – and then I ran even faster, found the entrance to the secret passages that honeycombed the palace, into the ways beneath the rock upon which the city was built. Found my escort waiting, followed them to the harbour…
Sailed and ran and trekked far away. Found another ship, to another continent entirely. Into the hands of one such as Fenna to help me onwards, then another and another Visiting Sister, until Fenna her very self took me to another life, handing me over to Yrse. But always with the old burdens carved upon me, the screams of a child the heaviest among them.
Running and fearful of being hunted, found, though no one could have known where I’d gone. To the realisation that I’d outrun everything but myself. Doing my best to forget, to suppress, to be and do better. Finding Faolan, loving him, thinking I’d been forgiven perhaps – or that maybe my sins hadn’t been noticed – and then losing him. Making a life here, hidden. Knowing my secrets were my own.
And now, a mari-morgan who apparently knows everything.
