Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy) (44 page)

“I do.”

The first of the three smiled, threaded the needle, and then took up Dolores’s arm.

“This will only hurt a little. . . .”

Almost instantly, the thread was stitched through her flesh in the shape of the curse-glyph. Dolores’s skin rose up in a red sore all about it, as though the thread were being absorbed into her body. A moment later, the thread was gone, but a bloody scar stood upon her skin in the shape of the same sigil she’d seen on her son.

“It is done,” the three said as one.

“Do you promise? Is he safe?”

The three spoke together. “He will never be safe, but he will live tonight. The curse is no longer upon him. Who knows what tomorrow may hold for him?”

“It is broken, then?” Dolores asked, already knowing the answer.

“No. The curse is not broken, but has been lifted from
him
. Now you must leave us. Travel well, sister. And return to us when you can.”

Dolores Umber made her way slowly down the stairs.

After Dolores had gone, the three spoke among themselves.

“Well, that’s something,” said the second of three.

“Indeed,” said the first, “only two more to go and then perhaps we may walk a little and be free of our troubles.”

“May it be so!” the three said in chorus.

“And what of the other two?” asked the second. “The Bowe woman and the Mother of the Narrows? Will she bring them?”

“They would be fine choices, but who can say?”

“There must always be three,” said the third.

“Indeed,” said the first. “That is law.”

“They are all moved by their love of the boy . . . ,” suggested the second.

“This has not escaped my notice,” replied the first of the three.

“But enough! We’ll keep on until the others come. They are close. Very close. None are so very young, and they keep dangerous company. Patience. Patience. Even now, the scene is changing.”

And the three took up their needles and returned to the tapestry.

A
S
D
OLORES LEFT TH
E MANSION OF THE
S
EW
ING
C
IRCLE
, the wind was coming in from the east, carrying the smell of the sea. She looked at the marking on her arm. It no longer hurt, but the rest of her body ached with chill.

She just wanted to get home.

It was almost over.

She was nearly to the end of Prince Street. Not much farther.

Dolores looked up as she walked. She wanted to see the stars, but the moon’s light outshone them. There was only the moon. Ahead, she thought she saw someone, maybe Silas, go running up Fairview Street and swiftly pass out of sight again. Dolores called out to him, but the words fell back in her tightening throat. Had it even been Silas?

The moon seemed too bright now, as though it had swung too close to the earth, as though it were stooping to crush her. Her chest pulled tight and her teeth crashed together as the pain shot through her like a dozen barbed arrows. She knew where Silas was going eventually. To the millpond. He was always going to
her
. She put her head down.
But my son is still alive,
she thought. No matter what followed, at least he was alive. Dolores began to sob. The millpond. Christ. She had saved and failed him both at once.

The pain pulled her down to the sidewalk. She closed her eyes and saw her son’s face. In her mind’s eye, he was kneeling next to her. She held the vision for as long as she could, but the curse knotted her body with anguish and poison. The moonlight spilled across Dolores Umber’s form, and her cooling skin appeared to glow against the dark stones of the street. She shook her head slowly in self-reproach. She wished she’d worn her pearls. With her last remaining strength, she tried to move her limbs to her sides so she wouldn’t appear so pathetic when someone found her body.

L
EDGER

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born.

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

—f
ROM
W
ILLIAM
B
LAKE,
A
UGURIES OF
I
NNOCENCE
,
TRANSCRIBED BY
A
MOS
U
MBER

A
UGUSTUS
H
OWESMAN HAD LEFT
HIS HOUSE
to find Silas. He had seen his great-grandson pass by his house on his return from Arvale. Why hadn’t he come in? He’d wanted to follow, but he was moving slowly again, and knew he wouldn’t be able to catch up. Yet the more Augustus thought about Silas, tried to see him in his mind, the more his limbs eased, allowing him to move more quickly.

It was a bad night. There was a bite in the freezing air, and something worse. They were all bad nights now. What had happened up at Arvale since Silas had set him free from the Doom? He’d make sure Silas was safe with his mother and then make his way back to Fort Street and wait this night out. He stood still, and his eyes paled to white stones. He could see Silas in this way. Ease his own mind.

The vision came rising up behind his rheumy eyes.

First he saw Silas sitting in a room lit only by a candle. Old books lay open on a table before him, and he was furiously writing on a notepad. Then the vision turned, and Augustus could see only ice, but the angle of sight pulled back suddenly. He saw his great-grandson not at Delores’s house on Temple Street, but standing by the edge of the millpond. Silas was speaking into the air, on and on. Then Silas leaned over, put his hand on the ice, tilted his head back, and shouted again into the night. The ice covering the pond cracked.

Beyond the vision, in his mortal hearing, Augustus heard a clap like thunder break the air. Before the vision dissolved, he saw a shadow rise up in front of his great-grandson, a familiar form coming up from below the waters, taking shape upon the rising vapor. In his vision, through their shared blood, he could feel Silas’s heart and hear his voice crying out a terrible spell, dark with words of summoning, and command, and a love from which no good comes. Words to break the binding of the dead. Words to summon shades up from the murk places of the earth. Words of love and longing to call the dead back into the circle of the sun. And something else, rising above all the others. A name.
Beatrice
. But was the vision showing him the present or the future? He couldn’t be sure, but he prayed none of it had happened yet.

Either way, Augustus Howesman knew he had to go to Silas, to warn his great-grandson, or, if it had already begun, to cover the boy’s mouth with his hand, to make him swallow those awful words, and hold him back from that grim path that led to perdition.

He was about to begin walking again when he heard a loud howl, maybe over on the Beacon.
A black-dog night to be sure,
he thought. Augustus turned his head slowly toward the sea, toward the sound of the night-cry, and saw something on the sidewalk farther down Prince Street. He stared for many moments and finally, realizing what he was seeing, choked around the lump in his throat, and tightened his hands. Silas would have to wait.

Augustus Howesman walked slowly toward the corpse of his granddaughter.

He leaned down, careful to keep his balance, and stroked the side of her face with his large hand.

“Child, child . . . ,” he said, the dry skin of his lips and throat straining the words into a low rasp. He put his hand under Dolores’s head and began to lift her as though she weighed nothing. He put his other arm under her knees and stood up, cradling her against his large chest. “. . . Child, come away with me. Blessed child of the people of the barrow, be easy within your limbs. Child of the dawn and the twilight, may you rest in the shade of the cedar. May you be content until you wake again, at home and forever in the house of your eternity. Little daughter, how I love you, now and always. Look, I shall carry you home.”

And as dry sobs wracked his body, Augustus Howesman carried his granddaughter back to her house on Temple Street, hoping that Silas would be there.