Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet (12 page)

“Oh, I know,” she assures me, and my gut unwinds. “But . . . he said you had a gift.”

I nod.

“If . . . if they could just
smile
at me. I would be so happy to see that.” She looks away, toward the floor, thinking thoughts I can’t begin to fathom. Perhaps dwelling on losses I have yet to lose. “Yes. Little boys that could smile at me. Goodness, this is silly, isn’t it?”

I shake my head. “Not silly at all.” I, too, have craved children of my own, although I’ve yet to find a suitable partner to sire them. I’ve had options that I’ve hesitated to explore, Cleric Tuck included. Why I’ve kept space between myself and these men, I’m not sure. Perhaps it dwindles down to the gap within my memory, of my unwillingness to hand over that enormous, unknown space to a person unable to fill it.

But I do love children. They’re so innocent, so pure, so loving without needing a reason. The thought of growing old without becoming a mother—without experiencing the joy Arrice has found in her brood—saddens me. I think of Cleric Tuck for a moment more, but I struggle to picture him away from his shrine and free of his robes of worship. Though I’ve never struggled with the image before, at this moment I can’t picture him in my bed.

I peer out the window, but there is no one waiting outside for me.

“I might be able to do something.” With frosting, maybe. Can I coax frosting to move? I’ll make cookies—they’ll hold the shape best, and I’ll infuse them the way I do my love cake. Then, should Daneen decide to taste one, she can feel all the lovely things I feel from being in her home. It’s the least I can do.

“Do you mind gingerbread?” she asks. “I love gingerbread.”

Inwardly I cringe. The words
Are you sure you don’t want something with lemon? Or chocolate? Maybe cinnamon—the smell of cinnamon would fit so well in your home
rise up my throat, but I swallow them and answer, “Of course.”

I get to work straightaway, measuring out what I need, requesting a few extra ingredients from Daneen, all of which she has ready. As I work, I imagine Arrice and Franc and the taste of chocolate. I think of Daneen and imagine myself a child in her home, raised by her in this haven of warmth and dried flowers. Her calloused hands smoothing back my hair as she tucks me in at night. Picturing Arrice, I pour love into the dough, and as I roll it out, I imagine children playing in the street, a toddler’s laughter, and little girls clasping hands and swinging each other around until they’re too dizzy to stand.

I try to imagine a child of my own.

Franc helped me make cookie cutters for my bakeshop, but though I have plenty of stars and circles and squares, none are shaped like a human. I’ve never thought to shape cookies in such a way. I select a butter knife and carefully cut into the dough in small, smooth strokes. A circle for the head, soft slopes for the shoulders. I make little nubs for thumbs on the rounded hands, carve the dough upward for the arms, downward for the torso and hips. This one will be a boy.
A little gingerbread boy
, I think, smiling to myself.

I carve out the feet next, making notches for the toes, and as I finish the first cookie, I think,
Be real
, even though I know it won’t be. For the icing, I’ll make—

Pain pulses at the front of my forehead. Chills like cool rain wash down the sides of my neck and over my chest and arms, raising sharp gooseflesh. With it comes the distinct thought,
Something about this is familiar.

I drop the knife. It clatters against the floor.

“Here, let me,” Daneen says, bending over to pick it up, but her voice blurs inside my ears. I stare at that unbaked cutout and back away from it. My hands start to shake. Something is rising up within me, pressing against my chest, strangling my air. The ache in my head hammers harder and harder and harder and
I’ve done this before
and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe
.

Daneen says something to me. Her brown eyes widen. She reaches for me.

He’s coming for me.

“
No!
” I scream, and the pain splits the center of my head. Sweat trickles down my back. My hip hits the stove. Out of space. Nowhere to retreat. I’m trapped, I’m trapped,
run run run run run run run
!

I run.

Not the way I came. I don’t know where. I can’t
see
, I can’t
breathe
, I can’t
think.
Pain shoots up my leg as my weight slams onto its break, forcing me into a desperate limp. I stumble into a dining room, an alcove. See a door.
Run run run.
I burst through it and rush outside.
Run run run run.

Sweat stings my eyes. I cry it out, scrambling across grass and flowerbeds. Grip the post of a fence and propel myself forward. My ankle screams. My head is hammering. I’m cold, so cold. The edges of my vision warp and shadow. I push myself faster, faster, faster—

My foot creaks, my knee buckles, and I fall, hitting something hard, barely catching myself with my hands. I cry and shiver and shudder and gasp for air, in and out, in and out. Press my forehead to cool stone.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Tears settle against the sides of my nose. Gradually, the breaths come easier. The pain recedes in my head and collects down in my ankle. A long moment passes, then another. My eyelids flutter. Stairs. I’m strewn across a small set of stone stairs. I’m all in one piece. I don’t remember how I got here.

Pushing myself up, I look around. I can see the shingles of Daneen’s house behind me; I didn’t get far. Alger will soon find me and throw a fit.

My arms shake as I push myself up. I favor my good leg. I’m in front of a shrine, a small one set in a garden between homes. Old, cold sticks of incense sit in a brass cup on the top step, and there are a few kneeling pillows nestled around the gazebo-like shrine.

I shield the sun from my eyes and peer inside of it. A small altar holds a wrapped offering of some sort. Behind it is a statue of three deities, two goddesses on the outside and a god in between them. The goddesses look off to the side, an unfelt wind tousling their long hair. The god in the center looks forward, his hair carved into soft curls, his nose straight, lips firm, eyes steady.

I lean against the rail to the stairs, studying the god who studies me. No, this is wrong.

That’s not what that god looks like.

But how would I know the face of a god?

I don’t like the whips. They snap and jerk and break. My eyes cry all the time. She is not here.

CHAPTER 12

This is not what this god looks like.

I don’t know what is wrong with the sculpture, only that it is
wrong
. The face is wrong. The body is wrong. Everything about it is
wrong wrong wrong
.

There’s movement behind it. I push myself off the stairs when I realize I’m not alone, but my leg sears and drops me down again. A man with a long beard and crinkled face peers at me from beside one of the goddesses, and from behind the other figures, I see a dark-haired man wearing a brown farmer’s smock, his dark eyes bewildered, his brows drawn together.

I gape at him, frozen, my heart rushing. My tongue feels too large for my mouth, but I manage to stutter, “C-Cleric Tuck?”

His brows lower. There is no recognition in his eyes, and I don’t understand it.

I push myself up, slower this time, leaning on my good leg. “Grace of the gods,” I whisper, “You escaped.”

Then his eyes widen, his face pales, and his chest sucks in a breath. “Maire?”

He is not the only one to call out my name.

Alger’s footsteps fall heavy and uneven behind me. Panting, he snatches my wrist and turns me around. “No escaping! What did you—”

We see it at the same time. My hand.

My hand is
red
.

Not bloody, but
red
. My skin has always had a ruddy tone reminiscent of the earth of Carmine, but either the tan has receded or the red has brightened, leaving my skin nearly the color of currants. My arm, too. Both arms. Both hands. All of me?

Suddenly Cleric Tuck’s expression makes sense.

Alger’s grip on my wrist tightens until I wince. “No!” he growls, yanking me forward. I cry out as I stumble over my gimp leg.

“Stop!” Cleric Tuck cries, rushing around the shrine. “Unhand her!”

I writhe against Alger’s grip, freeing one finger, then another. I reach out to Cleric Tuck. “Tuck!” I cry. “
Tuck!
”

Our fingertips brush, just as they did in the slavers’ pen, and then the world around me swirls into wild blurs of color, and my stomach lurches into my mouth.

I drop onto the floor of Daneen’s kitchen and wretch.

“What’s going on?” Daneen cries as Alger grabs my wrist and hauls me to my feet.

“I wasn’t escaping!” I cry out. Bolts of agony shoot up my leg. “I was . . . I don’t know! Please—”

“No no no no no.” He drags me past the stove, past the place where Daneen is worrying her hands. She calls out to me, asks if I’m all right, but Alger shoves her out of the way and takes me to the sink. He pins me against the cupboards with one hand and uses another to plug the sink and pump water into it. He drops an entire bar of lye into the basin and grabs a bristle brush.

“No. No. Off, off,
off
!” he shouts, scrubbing the brush over the back of my hand. Back and forth, harder and harder, faster and faster. I gasp and pull back, but his hold is relentless. His hold is
steel
. Tears fall from his eyes. He dunks my hand into the water and scrubs. Scrubs. Scrubs. The soap burns, and each bristle of the brush is like a tiny knife, piercing and grating.

I cry out, “Alger! You’re hurting me!”

He wails, “It’s only getting redder!” and sobs, scrubbing and scrubbing. Blood seeps into the bristles, red and redder and reddest.

“Good gods, stop!” Daneen shrieks, and somehow she yanks Alger back from the sink. He drops the brush and my hand and collapses to the floor, covering his face with his arms and bawling like a punished child.

Dozens of stinging hairline cuts crisscross my hand. Daneen studies it, clicks her tongue, and leads me back to the sink. I soak my hand while she retrieves a salve and bandages. Alger doesn’t stop us, only cries into his sleeves.

The moment Daneen is done bandaging me, Alger leaps to his feet and loops an arm around my waist, half carrying, half dragging me out the door and into the village. He ignores my protests and wrestles the bag over my head.

My stomach flips, and for a moment I’m weightless with bile burning my throat. Then I’m back at his house, his cold, heartless house, stumbling down the stairs into the basement.

The cellar door closes before I reach the floor.

“Maire.”

A dream fades in my mind’s eye. Something about cake. There’s cool stone beneath my face. My shoulder hurts.

“Maire.”

The cellar. I blink. A few skinny strips of light peek between the boards that make the cellar door. I sit up and rub my shoulder. My bad leg tingles, and my left hand stings.

I realize then that I roused because I heard something. I look around. For a moment I think I’m alone, but on second glance I see him, Fyel, in the corner farthest from the stairs. Little glimmers of him. It’s too dark to see more.

Despite myself, the skin of my neck and cheeks warm. I tense for a moment and pat down my shirt, letting out a long breath when I feel the crystal still hanging against my stomach.

“I haven’t found it yet,” I whisper, glancing toward the cellar door. It’s quiet above me, but that doesn’t mean Alger isn’t nearby. I can’t depend on anything, with him.

I remember Daneen, the shrine, and Cleric Tuck, and everything but my skin and bones turns to dust. So close. I was
so
close—

But Cleric Tuck is alive. Alive and well. Thank the gods.

“Keep searching,” Fyel says, matching my hushed pitch. He hovers a little closer, also eyeing that door.

I notice more small pains as I become aware of myself—an aching in my head that might be from dehydration. The tightness of an empty stomach. The radiating soreness of my leg. The stiffness of my shoulder trails into my neck from how I slept. But I don’t think I’ve been down here for longer than half a day. Alger has to let me out eventually.

“I don’t suppose you could open the door,” I ask.

“No.”

I take a deep breath and let it out all at once, then curl my knees to my chest. “Something’s wrong with me.”

He waits, and I’m glad for it. Time to collect my thoughts. As if he knows I need it.

“Would you deny it if I said yes?”

I study him, seeing a bit more now that he’s closer to the light. I feel warm again.
Would I?

I reach for the stairs, leaning on the third one up as I find my feet. Stand up. Fyel is only a few inches from the floor. Any higher and he’d brush the ceiling. Were he level with me, I think he’d be about a hand’s length taller.

My foot feels especially heavy as I approach him. I wave my hand through him. Once again, it passes without hindrance. For a fleeting moment, I wonder what he would feel like solid. How warm he would be, and whether his face would be rough or smooth against my palm.

He floats away a pace. “You really should not do that when your hands are dirty,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s being mirthful or not.

I look at my hand, not that I can see anything beyond its general shape in this gloom. “Why?”

“I am not part of this world,” he explains yet again.

I rub my fingers together, feeling a little grit there. “You can’t touch it.”

He nods.

“Then how did you get in here?”

I detect a smile, I think. “I appeared.” Then, more solemn, “Tell me what happened.”

I limp back for the stairs and sit. “Alger . . . He changed his name, did I tell you? Alger took me somewhere. I’m not sure where. To make cookies for an old woman. And I just . . . Something went wrong. My head hurt and I . . . panicked.”

He’s quiet for a moment before asking, “Why?”

“I don’t know.” I shrug. “It felt like I was remembering something. Something scary, maybe. I don’t know what. I just tried to run”—I chuckle once and heft my splinted leg—“and I found this shrine of three of the gods, and somehow I knew it was wrong.”

Fyel hovers closer. “Wrong?”

“Just . . . the middle one. I didn’t think it was what that god looks like.”

He’s close enough to the weak light for me to see his smile. I like how he looks when he smiles. It eases the somberness of his face and my own tension.

“Is that funny?” I ask.

“No.”

“Then what?”

He doesn’t answer.

“You know something.” I lean forward on the stair. “How do I know what a god looks like?”

He doesn’t answer.

I flip the question around. “Do
you
know what gods look like?”

“Yes, some.”

I perk. I had expected more stubborn silence. “Some?”

“There are many gods,” he says. He drifts a little. His wings flap—glimmering just a bit as they do so—and he steadies himself. “I have seen the faces of many.”

He says it almost casually. I stare at him, waiting for a grin or something else to give away the joke, but there’s none.

I whisper, “What are you?”

Now he hesitates. Floats a little closer. There’s only about two or three paces separating us. “I am a crafter.”

“A what?”

“A crafter,” he repeats. “A creator of things.”

I grab the rim of the stair beneath me. My pulse quickens. “I don’t understand.”

He thinks for a moment before saying, “My kind creates. We create many things, both in this world and in others. Plants, animals, mountains, rivers. We fashion them. We craft them.”

My mouth has gone dry. I stare at him, taking in his whiteness and his bizarre wings, and croak, “Then . . . you’re a god.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Gods are far greater than the likes of me. They are omnipotent. They are ever reaching and bodiless. Crafters create things, but gods create
souls
.”

He’s quiet again, giving me a moment to process his words. “Then you . . . are a builder.”

“Yes.”

“You build . . . everything? All of this?” I make a wide gesture, but I don’t mean this dank cellar. The trees and the sky and the birds and the sun.

“Not all of it, no. That is far too great a task for any one being.”

“Then what?” I’m at the edge of the stair. My skin pebbles into gooseflesh.

“Earth, stone. Rock and sand and hills.”

I think about this. “Did you make this cellar?”

His lip quirks. “Man made this cellar, not I. Just its components.”

“You helped make Raea.”

“You have many questions.”

“When I actually receive answers, then yes, I have many questions.”

And I realize something, pieces of my memory sticking together at the back of my tongue. My pulse picks up even more. My chest heats and my fingers freeze.

“It was you.”

He doesn’t answer.

“In Carmine, when the marauders came,” I clarify. “The very ground came up and blocked one from me. In the cage, too, before I met Allem—Alger. And when I fell in the forest.” My foot throbs in agreement. “The earth . . . That was you.”

He nods once.

I cradle my head in my hands for a moment and close my eyes, trying to sort through all of these revelations. So bizarre. So outside my expectations. And I wonder,
How much more is there that I don’t know?

I backtrack. “If gods don’t have bodies, then how do I know what one looks like?”

“They have forms.”

“How many are there? Which one have I seen?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

Fyel takes another moment of silence. “I cannot . . .” A pause. “I cannot tell you, Maire.”

“Why?”

“If you deny—”

“I won’t deny anything.”

He takes a breath deep enough for me to hear it.

I rub the bandage on my hand and remember that I haven’t yet finished my story. “But . . . I saw it, and I knew something wasn’t right. And then Alger . . . He was so angry with me. Scrubbed my hand raw. It’s red. All of it is.”

“He hurt you?” His tone lowers, tightens.

“Yes . . . I don’t know if he meant to, but . . . He was crying. It upset him that I was . . .”

I lift my arms and twist them toward the tendrils of light. It hasn’t receded. They are still . . .

“Red.”

Fyel reaches forward a translucent hand but pulls back before it can pass through me. “Gods, Maire,” he whispers.

“I know—”

“No . . . this is wonderful.” His words are whispery and restrained.

I look into his odd-colored eyes. Despite the darkness, I can see them better than I have before because of his closeness. They’re wide and hopeful and . . . familiar.

“Why?” I ask, low-voiced, but as the word escapes my lips, the floor above us creaks with uneven footsteps. Bits of dust fall from the rafters.

Fyel hovers away from the door. “Find it,” he whispers, and he vanishes.

Alger opens the cellar door, blinding me with morning sunlight.