Page 20

But it isn’t the orange light of the lanterns that illuminate the top of the tower. An eerie blue glow washes over me, along with the smell of something stale and ancient.

I stretch up on my toes so that I can see over the edge of the trapdoor into the room beyond.

It’s clearly the room behind the clockface, far above me in the hollow of the tower. The lanterns float on their own, suspended by magic, swimming through the air around the mechanisms of the clock—golden gears, springs, and pulleys as long as my body emanating a low hum as they shift and tick. A great pendulum swings behind the clockface. Its base is as tall as I am, shaped like a shield. It falls and rises like a swinging axe, each time coming so low that I feel the urge to duck.

Back. Forth. Back. Forth.

I push myself through the trapdoor to stand fully upright in the enormous room. I wonder when someone last came up here? How long has this room existed undisturbed, collecting dust and time? My attention is so fixated on the functioning of the clockwork that I almost miss a flash of movement.

Something shifts in my periphery. I jump, whirling toward a dark corner that I’d thought was empty. But now, in the shadows, a rocking chair so small that it might belong to a child creaks back and forth. In it is a figure huddled into a ball, covered in a ragged black shawl. The only part of it that’s visible are the hands—bony and gaunt, with translucent skin. Even in the darkness I can make out the blue-and-purple veins in its hands as they operate a worn and rickety spindle, working furiously away at a long thread that trails to the floor. Beside it, a basket rests, filled to the brim with bloodred yarn.

I take a single step toward the door, hoping the creature hasn’t spotted me. Though I’m sure the opening of the trapdoor made a terrible noise, it hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken. It keeps spinning, paying no attention to the newcomer in its presence.

Tentatively, I take another step toward the trapdoor.

And a length of yarn levitates from the basket. I watch it rise into the air, not daring to move. It’s the wrong decision.

The yarn whips toward me, slithering across the dusty floor like a loosed serpent. I stumble backward toward the door, but it lashes toward my legs, wrapping around them, then loops taut around my wrists, tying me tight from behind.

An involuntary squeal is all I get out before I am jerked across the room, yarn cutting into my wrists. It knocks my shins into wood beams, snags my clothes on loose floorboards, covers my face in dust, until I tumble to the feet of the rocking chair.

Finally, the yarn releases me, coiling back into its basket. Slowly, I lift my head to look up at the creature in the chair. From this angle I can see into that hood, and oh, how I wish I hadn’t looked. An unfathomably old face stares back at me. Human, but ancient. Skin hangs from her skull in paper-thin curtains. It isn’t until I look closer, into the shadows of that hood, that I realize her eyes are open sockets, depthless pits somehow still watching me.

“Hello,” the woman croaks. And she smiles. Saints below. Her teeth are stacked rows of hundreds of needles, nestled together in a mouth too small to contain them all. They jut and poke at her bluish lips and skewer her gums, covered in scabs and open wounds from past dental assaults. Her cheeks stretch around them like hardened rubber as she speaks, yellow spittle flying from between the spades. “What brings you to my tower, child?”

I lurch away from her, scrambling across the floor, but then I feel something wrap around my wrists and snap taut. The yarn has slithered back out of its basket, keeping me in place.

“Have I frightened you? Oh, I’m so sorry.” She sucks air in through her teeth, making a wet, hissing noise. I’m not sure how she even breathes through those fangs. “Calm your pretty head, child. I don’t eat human flesh.” Something about the way she says the words makes it sound like she left off the word “anymore.”

I watch her hands work away with the spindle in fluid, practiced motions, over and over, spinning thread into yarn. And it’s only up close and watching carefully that I realize she isn’t spinning yarn at all. The stringy substance in the basket is oozing with coagulated blood. The rocking chair creaks steadily back and forth while she spins, the fleshy string turning the palms of her hands bloody. “Well?”

I can’t respond. My voice is stuck in my throat.

She smiles disturbingly. “I am Nona. What is your name?”

“Vesper,” I whisper.

She chuckles, her voice cracking like clay. “Like the eventide.” She tilts her head. “Why are you in my tower, Eventide?”

“I’m sorry. I was locked up here.”

“Oh, don’t be sorry. I love company.” The old woman smiles. The yellowed needle teeth are too terrible for me to look at directly.

The old crone rises from her rocking chair. Bent at the waist and shrunken to a skeleton, she hobbles toward me. I twist at my bonds until the yarn cuts into my wrists as she approaches. I struggle to reach for my scythe.

“None of that,” she says. “Not that it would work, but best you not hurt yourself in the effort.” She pats her leg the way one might to call a dog, and the rocking chair careens across the floor toward her, scooping her into its seat and resettling near where I’m bound on the floor.

“You know what I am, don’t you?” she says as she resumes her spinning. What, not who. She raises her eyeless gaze to mine and says in a softer voice, “You know. All who find me only do so because it’s me they’re seeking.”

An answer is birthed in my heart, a strange and terrible one, frothing to my mind’s surface as easily as bones in a boil. This woman isn’t some wraith, some ghost or demon. She is something else. Being in her presence makes my very soul stand still. “You’re a Saint.”

Her smile spreads impossibly wider. “Not just any Saint, deary. I am one of the Sisters of Necessity. A spirit of Gossemort. This school is under our watchful eyes.”

My throat thickens. How could I not recognize her face? It stared down at me from the stained glass of the chapel just a little while ago.

Most of our Saints were historical figures, people whose living and dying were recorded by historians with some accuracy. There’s always been a level of mythologizing—when you craft fantastic stories from the lives of ordinary people, it’s impossible to stick to the facts. But this, the story of the Sisters of Necessity, is an old one, a fable so ancient that I believed, as most do, that the Sisters were not ever living beings, but an invention born of time and imagination. They are peerless entities, the closest thing a meiga has to divinity. But she’s real. I can smell the dust and mildew of her rotting cloak, see dried blood coating her lips and hands, hear the rattling breath emanating through her teeth.

“They call me Nona the Spinner. You know me. Tell me, child, do you believe in destiny?”