There were dozens of them. Hundreds. I could see clearly now that they were in pairs, but even when I looked up and up, I could not see where the pairs joined. They snapped open and shut, clicking toward us, slicing up the mist. Were they machinery, or living creatures?
They were just close enough to human form to be unnerving, shifting in and out of shape so that one minute they appeared to be headless, the next limbless. They reminded me of the chains of paper dolls I used to cut out when I was a sprout, flimsy and wavering and misshapen.
“They look and smell pretty real to me,” said Cornelius.
“Smell?”
“If they were phantasms, they would have no scent. I’ve seen my share of ghosts. These are real, whatever they are.”
“And what do they smell of?” I knew I would not like the answer.
“Sulfur,” he said. “And bone.”
“Lovely. I was getting a whiff of the sulfurous smell myself now. They surrounded us, impossibly tall, impossibly sharp, slicing the mist itself into vertical ribbons that floated around us like ghostly prison bars.
“Run!” mewed Cornelius.
“I can’t,” I said, moving my mouth with difficulty, so that the words came out sounding slurred and drunk. I blinked, and my eyelids slid down as slowly as a sunset over my already-dry eyeballs. I was preserved in amber, swirling in a sticky oil like a heart in a jar. The world around me had become thick and viscous. “Cornelius ...”
I was going to tell him to run, if he still could. But before I could say anything, the terrible, life-sucking slowing down reached my belly and my chest. Breathing felt like inhaling molasses, my heart strained to beat, and when my eyelids finally closed, it was a relief.
16
I awoke blank and frightened. Not blank as you wake from a dream—dazed and groggy—but as if my mind had been scraped bare, skinned by an expert knife. I was aware of a chunk of time gouged from my life, a gap where something should have been. I couldn’t help trying to explore it, prodding and poking at it with my mind like you’d investigate a missing tooth with your tongue, but there was nothing to find.
My eyes flashed light-dark, light-dark, before focusing, and my heart gave a jagged, sideways leap in my chest as it seemed to start beating again after that terriblenothing. My breath came in pieces, too, juddering and shuddering until I feared it would never settle back into rhythm.
I had never before realized how crowded and rich sleep really was, even when it seemed dreamless. I had thought, before this terrible morning, that I closed my eyes at night and fell into oblivion. Now that I really had fallen into oblivion for a period, I knew that time spent asleep was still time spent alive.
Sleep had depth and texture and purpose. The dreadful empty place where I had been had none of those things. I even missed those old familiar nightmares in which I had wandered the long, black corridors and had pushed the twisting vines from my face.
Now awake, or what passed for it, I scrambled for even the simplest memories—who I was, my name—and found nothing. My consciousness came back in little pieces, as if the monsters, or whatever they were, had scissored it into strips. There was one advantage to the nothingness, though: for just a few moments, I had forgotten all the events of the past months, and it was a blessed relief.
My heart felt ordinary, just for a moment, as I wondered what orders Da and I had to fill on the morrow. I hoped it wasn’t hunting season, with deer and quail to dress, because their wild, dark eyes made me a little sad.
Of course, that relief lasted about a minute before the wrenching pain in my chest made me remember that, oh, yes, a sorcerer had bespelled me to fall in love with him; I had left Da and my whole life to trail after him and act as a servant in his enchanted House; and my heart was probably about to be cut out and pickled in a jar, leaving me as some kind of inhumanthingthat would leak green slime and die in a stinking puddle.
I could have been safe in my own little trundle bed at home right now, rather than slumped in the corner of a dark room like an old sack of bulbs.
But where was I, exactly? The magic-workers had clearly found me—Clarissa, or one of her sisters—and so I was probably either imprisoned in one of their houses, or in the king’s palace itself. My guess was the palace. I roused myself enough to look around.
The dark seemed impenetrable at first, but I could tell from the feel that I was chained up. My wrists and ankles were in shackles. I almost laughed. Me, in chains! As if I were some sort of dangerous criminal who needed to be restrained. Locking me in a room would have been more than enough. Hell, in the state I was in, you could have left the door unlocked; I wasn’t going anywhere.
Cornelius was nowhere to be seen, and I hoped he was all right. He probably was, I told myself. Cats were notoriously difficult to capture, slippery as ink. I didn’t have time or the leisure to contemplate his fate, however, because I had to concern myself with my own.
Someone had stripped me down to my underdress (I filed that particular shame away for another, less urgent time), and my knife, the heart, and the precious paper—with the map! I could have cried—were gone.
Weftwitch,Weftwitch,Weftwitch—I repeated the name I had read to myself, making sure I remembered that, at least. I still had the little raven seal; I suppose they hadn’t seen any use for it.
I took a cautious inventory of my body, searching for injuries. I found an uncomfortably dry mouth, and aches and pains all over, but nothing all that serious as far as I could tell. The heartsickness was still there—mild enough that I knew Sylvester’s spell to alleviate it was still in effect.
This surprised me. Didn’t he know yet that I had run away for good? As soon as he found that out, he would surely whisk the spell out from under me and send me sprawling back into the agony of separation.
I tried pulling on one shackle, then the other, because I would feel silly if I didn’t at least try to wrest myself free. Of course, they stayed put. There was nothing to do but wait and hope that they would let me use the privy eventually, because my bladder was knocking urgently on my stomach to let me know it was ready to relieve itself, thank you very much.
As I sat there in the dark, I started to feel very sorry for myself, and very homesick.
Oh, Da. How I missed him, in his great filthy apron and clogs, beaming ear to ear and telling me always how beautiful I was, and how lucky was he to have such a blessing of a daughter to help him in the shop and keep him company at home.
