Noah. Could it be? I turned to the window, where I saw three words drawn into the frost on the glass.
I’m still here.
The frost receded as the presence of the Undead shrank back, beckoning me to follow it.
On the other side of the room, Ms. Vine tossed in her sleep, but did not wake. I slid out of bed and snuck into the hallway. The hotel was empty, the attendant sleeping in the back office as I walked through the lobby and out into the night.
The air rearranged itself, forming a narrow path toward the evergreens. I walked toward it until I saw a figure standing by the foot of the woods. A flash of wavy auburn hair, now wet with snow. A swath of smooth skin, now pale in the moonlight, his cheek punctuated by a dark freckle.
Noah.
Seeing him stirred something inside me. I froze, unable to believe that he was here, standing, breathing in front of me. A few weeks ago, I’d thought that I would never see his face again.
At first glance, he looked the same, though on closer inspection something had changed. His skin was now a clean white, and the dark constellation of freckles strewn across his face were even more beautiful than they had been before. Everything about him was more saturated, as if all of his features had been soaked in melancholy. His auburn hair seemed a deeper, darker red, just overripe, like the color of wet autumn leaves after they fall from their branches and collect on the curb. His boyish face was now mature, handsome, the way I’d always imagined he’d look as an adult.
But before I could walk toward him, I heard footsteps in the snow behind me. Noah receded into the woods. I backed through the trees in the opposite direction, watching as six elders of the High Court strode past me, their faces shrouded beneath their collars, their eyes darkened by the brims of their hats. At first I thought they had felt Noah’s presence, but they didn’t turn in the direction where he’d been standing.
I waited until they disappeared into the woods, then followed their tracks. They led me far from the castle, the silhouettes of the treetops standing tall against the moon. The temperature dropped. A voice rang out through the trees, first loud, then muffled. I crept toward it until I saw six more figures materialize through the trees. The others joined them. All twelve elders of the High Court. Their backs were turned to me, their gray overcoats sweeping the snow as they huddled in a circle over something lying on the ground.
I hid behind a tree and watched them, trying to figure out what they were doing, when I saw a pair of feet twitching through their legs. They were small, as though they belonged to a boy. An Undead.
“You know more,” one of the elders said, his white tuft of hair blowing in the wind. My grandfather. “Tell us.”
When the boy said nothing, my grandfather nodded to one of the other elders, who then began to slowly wrap the boy’s hands with gauze. The Undead cried out, his body trembling as the skin on his arm turned blue.
Two other Undead boys were pinned to the snow beside him, their feet, their hands, their thighs partially wrapped in gauze.
I watched them, confused. The method in which the boys were being wrapped wasn’t the proper way to mummify an Undead. Surely, the High Court knew that, which made their hasty work all the more baffling. I thought back to what Clementine had told me on the balcony. Could these be the Undead from the camp of the Liberum that the elders had been meeting with?
“You’re lying to us,” one of the elders said, dangling the gauze over an Undead boy’s chest. “You must know more.”
I shrank back. The elders weren’t trying to kill these boys. They were torturing them.
W
E SET OUT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
the line of gray cars waiting for us like an extension of the stone castle. While we packed our things in the trunks of the cars, my grandfather peered up into the mountains.
“The Liberum are no more than a day ahead of us,” he said. “If we hurry, we may be able to reach them.”
I glanced at Clementine wearily, who was standing by the car behind mine. I thought of Noah, of how his auburn hair had hung by his face in the moonlight. Had he really been there, or had I been seeing things?
Tonight,
Clementine mouthed, and stepped into the backseat behind her father.
My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve brought along some gear for you, as I assumed you would not be prepared.”
I studied him as he slid into the car. I didn’t thank him.
Just before we pulled away, the concierge emerged from the lobby, holding an envelope. She ran up to our car, wobbling in her heels, and tapped on my grandfather’s window. He rolled it down. She handed him a white envelope, his name written on the top. I recognized the handwriting immediately. Monsieur
.
Had he been sending my grandfather notes this entire time, too?
While we drove away, he tore it open and removed the note within. He held it discreetly, angling his body so that I could barely make out Monsieur’s swooping penmanship. His face drained of all its color as he read. When he was finished, he slipped the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat.
My grandfather barely acknowledged my presence on the drive up into the Bavarian Alps, in the direction of the Liberum
and the twin peaks we’d seen from the second point. He sat on the other side of the car, his eyes out of focus as they stared out the window. Every so often he slipped his hand into his coat, feeling the weight of the note within. But he never took it out.
I sank back into my seat, exhausted from barely sleeping, my mouth dry, my hearing muted. The only sound in the car was the vibration of the wheels beneath us. I closed my eyes and listened to it, wondering if my grandfather was feeling the same way I was—for he, too, couldn’t taste or hear well, nor had he slept a wink last night. We had been in the woods together, though only I knew it.
“What was that note?” I asked, opening my eyes.
If he heard me, he didn’t let on.
“What did that woman give you?” I repeated.
“What’s that?” he said.
I sighed. I hated when he pretended not to have heard me. “The letter,” I said. “It’s incredible that they have mail out here.”
“Mail?” he said. “Oh, yes. It was just a private matter. Nothing pressing.”
I watched him turn to the window, the scenery speeding past us like a film in fast forward. Perhaps they were beautiful, the majestic Alps, but I felt nothing. “You look tired,” I said. “You must have been up late last night.”
My grandfather frowned. “No, I wasn’t. I am merely preoccupied. There is a difference.”
He was lying, though I didn’t have the energy to argue with him, and frankly, he didn’t look like he had the energy to argue back. “Preoccupied with what?”
He turned to the snowcapped peaks in the near distance, his cheeks sunken, his eyes tired. “With matters that don’t concern you.”
The road was carved tenuously into the side of the mountain, with a small stone barrier separating us from a free-fall into the rocky valley below. As we wove around it, the twin peaks that had been etched into the chest kept flashing in and out of view, growing larger, closer. The trees grew thinner, their branches starved for air. Just as we crossed the tree line, my grandfather leaned over the front seat and muttered something to the driver.
We pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. The earth outside was rocky and layered with snow, barely a tree or plant to be seen. The line of cars pulled in behind us, parking on the side of the road. The twin peaks that matched the etching from the chest jutted up through the mist in the distance.
“Why are we stopping?” I asked.
“We aren’t going to find the Liberum by sitting in the car,” my grandfather said. “We walk from here.”
I thought back to Clementine’s story from the night before, and to what I had witnessed in the woods. He already knew where the Liberum were camped; he and the elders had been tracking them this entire time. So if he wasn’t searching for them, then what exactly was he looking for?
I grabbed my backpack from the trunk and slung it over my shoulder. It was lighter now without the weight of the chest and the black box. My grandfather now kept the latter in his own rucksack. He handed me a tent and a sack full of gear, along with my shovel. “This will be yours. I don’t know what lies ahead,” he said. “Best to be prepared.”
My grandfather led the way, his Spade clinking against the ground with every step like a walking stick. Behind him, everyone followed by rank—the oldest Monitors of the High Court first, followed by the younger members, then finally by Clementine, the junior Monitors, and me.
We must have made headway with the car, for I could now feel the distant pull of the Undead on me as we trudged through the snow. The landscape was icy and stark, dotted with jagged boulders. As we ascended, the weather began to turn. The dry mountain air felt coarse against my throat, so thin that I had to take two breaths instead of one. With every step I sank up to my calves in snow, my gear weighing down my shoulders, digging into my skin through my coat.
The longer we walked, the more the landscape began to blur into one endless stretch of white. The lack of trees, of any kind of landmark, eroded my sense of depth. I couldn’t tell what was close and what was far. The twin peaks in the distance seemed to waver, first growing larger, then shrinking back into the horizon. Ledges of ice and rock towered around us, balancing so tenuously that any gust could have knocked them over. My clothes were caked with ice, the snow clinging to my hair until it crystalized into heavy white strands. My lips were so chapped they stung.
I placed one foot in front of the other, imagining I was stepping into Dante’s tracks, that he was just a few steps ahead of me. Every smudge of dirt in the snow I mistook for a scrap of his shirt left behind; every chill I mistook for his presence reaching out to me. I tried to remember the feeling of warmth. The kiss of the summer sun on my shoulder. The heat that bloomed inside me every time I felt Dante’s lips press against my skin. I only drew a blank.
Ahead, my grandfather and the elders hiked tirelessly through the cold, showing barely a sign of fatigue. As we pressed against the wind, which whipped against my face and made my cheeks burn, I wondered what was propelling them forward. At the front of the line, my grandfather paused and closed his eyes while he teased out the sensation of the Undead ahead of us. “They are moving quickly,” he said. “We must pick up the pace!”
The elders closed in around him. They weren’t just the most talented members of the Court, I realized. They were also the oldest. So close to death. Maybe they wanted to find the Netherworld, too, and were using this hunt for the Liberum as a way to search for it.
I leaned against a boulder for a quick rest, when I saw the white face of a girl peer at us over the side of a rocky overhang. Her hair fluttered in the wind as she disappeared behind it. She looked just like the girl I had seen flitting past the window of the house by the well, and darting through the trees in the birch forest, and yet her face looked slightly different. Older maybe, like a sister. But when I leaned forward to get a better look, she disappeared.
I turned to the others to see if anyone else had seen her, but all eyes were on the ground or the rocky ledge of the first peak in the near distance.
Who were these girls? They haunted each point like apparitions, and yet they weren’t dead; I couldn’t sense them at all. I knew they were following us, watching us, and yet they never revealed themselves. I thought back to the places where I had seen them: the house near the well, its kitchen floor inlaid with a mosaic of a canary; the birch cabin with the canary weathervane. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that the canary was also the sign of the Nine Sisters. Were the girls I was seeing somehow related to them, to Ophelia Hart?
I searched for them on the cliffs as we walked onward. I knew then that we had to be nearing the third point, for the girls only seemed to reveal themselves as we neared each point on the map. We had almost reached the valley in the middle of the peaks when the air began to rearrange itself.
The line of Monitors slowed. “Do you feel that?” one of them said.
A murmur rose over them as the others agreed. It didn’t feel like the Undead. It felt like plain, stagnant death.
We moved faster then, walking toward the vacancy. At first, I thought it might be the pull of the third point, when I heard a shout up ahead. The elders had gathered around a patch of snow. Between them, I could just make out a leg protruding from the snow. It was clothed in a pair of wool slacks and tattered leather loafers, a sliver of skin peeking out beneath the hem of the pants.
I recognized those shoes, though they were now scuffed and soaked through from the snow. Pruneaux.
My grandfather bent over him, examining his mouth, his throat, his pulse. “The Liberum have discarded the cartographer,” he said. “He’s only been dead for a few hours.”
While the other Monitors gathered around him, a flash of something white caught my eye. I turned to the rocky ledge in the distance and saw the face of the pale girl disappear over a crest in the mountainside, her long blond hair trailing behind her.
Ms. Vine froze. “Did you see that?” she said, her eyes glued to the same outcrop of rocks.
“See what?” said Mr. Harbes from beside her.
“A girl,” she said. “She looked like an Undead, but I couldn’t feel her.”
“A girl?” Mr. Harbes said. “All the way up here?”
“I saw her, too,” said another Monitor. “So did I,” another chimed in.
“Search the area!” my grandfather said. “The elders and I will go forward toward the peaks in the wake of the Liberum’s presence. The rest of you spread out across the slope!”
The Monitors dispersed, some huddling over Pruneaux while the others backtracked, taking the steep route up the mountaintop to get a better view of the horizon. Amid the disorder, I slipped away and crept behind my grandfather up the icy path.
The air thinned, its freshness fading until the mountain breeze smelled stale. With it drifted the gritty smell of the mud and debris around me, then the damp scent of my backpack, which had carried the odor of rain and snow and heat, the sweet smell of my sweat, all the cars and trains and lodgings I had stayed in—it all grew muted.
I thought back to Descartes’s riddle.
The nose, it next
decays, death the only stench to stay.
The lines in the scenery began to converge into a familiar pattern, one that I remembered from the etchings in the chest. The jagged scar between the peaks of the mountains was far more terrible in person—a rocky gash that dipped so deep into the earth that it looked endless. My grandfather and the other elders gathered around its edge. I snuck to the far side, staying close to the rocky face of the mountain so they wouldn’t see me, until I saw a ripple of water. It was black and still as glass. I leaned over it, my face appearing in the pool below.
The water trembled, making my reflection quiver. The Renée that stared back at me was gaunt, her expression lost. Her hair blew in front of her face in a breeze that I could not feel. She took a breath in, then another. Her chest heaved as though she couldn’t inhale.
As I watched her, I felt my lungs compress. A thin stream of air curled up my throat. It seeped through the seam of my lips, through my nose, my pores. It folded in on itself, softening and rounding out until it transformed into a scent imprinted on my soul.
Dante. I could smell him, as clear as the winter morning, the woods clinging to his clothes, his hair as sweet as pine. I could smell his breath, cold like the wind in December; his skin, as clean and fresh as ice. The smoky smell of cabins and cozy wool blankets, of the wet pavement and the snow melting off the evergreens around us in the winter sun, of his scent still nestled in the bed beside me. I remembered the rustic smell of his shirt as he scooped me up from the lawn outside of Gottfried just before the Brother of the Liberum had lowered his face to mine in a kiss, and carried me through the woods, the wild scent of him filling my lungs with life.
But the memories soon faded into the autumn leaves of Montreal; the smell of thick sweaters and baking croissants and coffee brewing in the corner of a bakery. Of Noah, the waning fall afternoon clinging to his clothes and filling me with warmth. I almost believed that he was still sitting across from me, his legs tangling with mine beneath a cramped table at a patisserie.
Snap, rewind, and the scent was replaced with the crackling heat of Gottfried, of dusty chimneys and Eleanor’s saccharine perfume. The aroma of steam and shampoo wafting down the hallway. Of chalk and pencil grindings, of musty books and the stillness of the library, of the pine still fresh in Dante’s hair as he leaned over my shoulder...
That, too, unraveled, until I was left inhaling the salty breeze of the Pacific Ocean, the sticky scent of sunscreen and aloe vera, of charcoal crackling in the barbecue. Of California: the smell of the dew on the football field at night, of cheap beer foaming out of a bottleneck and cigarettes singeing the grass. One by one, the memories faded, stripping me of every rich smell and foul odor and comforting scent until there was nothing but a blank void.
I blinked, my reflection mimicking me, and backed away from the ravine. The air around me was odorless and thin, the wind so flat I barely registered it at all. I took a deep breath, trying to inhale the aroma of the mountains, but I smelled nothing. On the far side of the valley, my grandfather knelt over the pool. His long coat swept the ice as he stood up, his face startled. The elder Monitors of the High Court were all close by. Behind him, I spotted a pale cabin, the color of snow, nestled into the far side of the valley. It looked just like the cabin I had seen in the birch forest. The shape of a canary was etched into its door.