My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (42 page)

Neve did not join in, but only whispered her news to Keillegh, the baker’s daughter, who was the closest she had to a friend anymore, and not quite a friend at that. The thing about having friends who are as close as blood, as true as your own heart—as the twins had been to her—is you don’t bother much with other people. And if you’ve the misfortune to get left behind, well, you’ve made yourself a lonely nest to sit in.

“I’m going to refuse him,” Neve repeated.

Keillegh was shocked, and Neve in turn was shocked by her shock. “Do you really think I could say yes?” she asked, incredulous. “To
him
?”

“Yes, I think you could say yes! What else will you do? You’re not still thinking of killing yourself at Fog Cup.”

“Not killing myself, no.”

“Not outright maybe. Just a slow death by mildew, if you don’t starve first. Ilona Blackstripe lost the rest of her toes, did you know that? And have you ever seen sicklier babies?”

“Well, I won’t be having babies, so it’s not my main worry.”

“No babies.” Keillegh shook her head, fingering the little silver chain that was her gift from her own boy. “I’ll never understand you, Neve. It’s like you’re another species. You had those two strapping boys out there and you never even kept warm with them, and you don’t want babies either? What
do
you want, may I ask?”

What did Neve
want
? Oh, wings and a hatful of jewels, why not? Her own ship, with sails of spider silk. Her own
country,
with a castle in it and horses to ride and beehives in the trees, dripping honey. What use was wanting when a full belly was as remote as a hatful of jewels? And she did want babies, truth be told, but in the same way as she wanted wings: in a fairy-tale version of life, where they wouldn’t look like those poor Blackstripe sicklings, and she wouldn’t be digging tiny graves every couple of years and pretending life went on.

And what about love? Did she want that, too? It seemed an even wilder fairy wish than wings. “Nothing I can have,” she replied, before the sparkle of senseless wanting could grow too bright.

Keillegh was blunt. “So take Spear and count your blessings. He may be a misery of a man, but his house is warm, and I happen to know he eats meat every week.”

Meat every week. As though Neve would sell herself for that! The rumble of her tummy just then was happenstance—a result of forgetting breakfast in all her nerves that morning, not to mention that her hen had dried up, poor Potpie, destined soon to fulfill the promise of her name.

The reverend, Neve knew, had a dozen hens and a strutting rooster to rule them.

The reverend had
a cow.

Butter,
thought Neve.
Cheese.
“That’s all lovely,” she said, settling her grumblesome tummy with a firm press of her palm. “But there
is
the matter of that row of graves. How many wives should a man get to put in the ground before someone tells him to get a new hobby?”

“So suppose
you
put
him
in the ground.”

“Keillegh!”

“What? I don’t mean by murdering him. Only outlasting him. It has to be easier than Fog Cup.”

Maybe so. Easier didn’t mean better, though. Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and—butter and cheese notwithstanding—Neve had no question that Spear was the latter.

But what if … what if … there was some other future lying up ahead for her—one without any misery in it at all—and even now it was trailing its way backward in time to meet her, and take her hand, and show her how to find it? It was funny. In life as perpetrated against Neve, there were only bad surprises, never good, but as the day wore on, she had a fancy that the queer small wind of the morning—kidnapper of Bibles—was circling round to check on her. Sure she was imagining it, but it didn’t feel like the usual longroom drafts. Those were errant shivers, chaotic, like little boys darting up to slip an icicle down your back.

This circling gust, this curious breeze … it wasn’t even cold.

*   *   *

The Dreamer could not have said how long he’d slept. He opened his eyes from dream to darkness, and to stillness—stillness like death, but he was not dead. The air around him was, and the earth that wrapped around that was, too, and something was wrong. He should have felt the pulse of life in it, in soil and roots, and seen the memories pulled down through grass and seeping water and burrowing beast. It should have been a symphony of whispers in his chamber, echoing and glorious with life. But all was silent.

Except for the call.

The language was strange to him; the words were just sounds, but they pierced him with such an urgency that he sat up on his catafalque—too quickly. Head spinning, he slid to his knees, and he knew a moment of panic so profound that his shock painted the darkness white. Behind his eyelids, inside his head: trembling, blinding white.

Something was wrong.

He had slept too long. On his knees in the dead dark, he knew—he
knew
—that the world was dead and he had failed it. Above him, around him, the veins of the earth had ceased to pulse. If he emerged he would find a vast waste, the gray dead hull of a dried-up world.

His heart that had beat so slow for so long: now quickened. His lungs that had lain airless for time indeterminate now wanted to gasp. Asleep, the Dreamer could abide inside this hill of earth. Awake, he could not.

But he dreaded what he would find if he emerged. Failure and death and
ending.
He felt it. It oppressed him with a heaviness he had never known.

In the end, it was the call that gave him courage. It had pierced him awake, and now it drew him up. He didn’t know the language, but this was a plea deeper than words, and his soul strained to answer it. Summoning all his strength, he burst upward. The hill should have opened for him like a flower, but it resisted. Something
weighed
on it. On him. He couldn’t breathe. With a savage effort, he broke through.

And discovered that the world was not dead. He stumbled out into it, drunk with gratitude, blinded by even the dim winter sun, and fell to his knees in the grass. He sank long fingers in and felt the pulse and drank the memories, so many, so deep—how long? As his senses grew accustomed to the outside world, he saw and smelled many things that had not been here before.

The stone building that squatted on his hill, for one.

People, for another. When he had made ready his place of rest, humans had dwelt along the green coasts of southern lands, but these islands had been wild, the province of petrels and seals. Now he scented smoke on the wind, the warm odor of manure, the sharper reek of cesspits. The wildness had been broken.

Had
he
? What had they done to him, these folk?

They had stolen his feathers and smothered him under some blunt sorcery of their own. They had broken, for a time—how long?—his connection with the earth.

But …

He turned in a new direction. There stood a fringe of trees so green they looked black in the soft light, but beyond them, rolling away, where once had been forest, now all was plucked, carved into corners, scraped into furrows. Wisps of hearth smoke rose at intervals, and the Dreamer sensed the coursing of many lives. But one most brightly.

The one who had awakened him.

*   *   *

Two things, at the end of the day, in case Neve hadn’t made up her mind.

First, Dame Somnolence held her back when the other girls left. “Here,” she said, thrusting a flower at Neve. “In case you don’t already have one.”

Fumbling to take it, Neve saw that it was dead. She looked up, right in the old woman’s globe-round eyes—too large, too unveiled, the lids never quite seeming up to their job.

“You think I should refuse him, then,” she said.

Dame Somnolence gave a snort. “I think he’s due a nice long tour of that Hell he loves to preach about, that’s what I think. Or maybe he’s been there already, to know so much about it. Take this, Crow Food. Put it on your porch. There’s not a bird in the world that would eat his brides. You think you know bitter now? You’ll taste like ash before he drops you in a grave.”

Neve already had a dead flower. She tried to return the dame’s, but she wouldn’t have it. “Take it,” she said. “I killed it special for whoever got his gift.”

And so Neve did take it, and she was glad to have it when she found the man himself waiting for her just outside of town.

This was the second thing.

He smiled when he saw her coming. His teeth were so white and square they looked chiseled out of walrus ivory. “Good evening, Neve,” he said. This was a liberty. He ought to have called her Miss Ellaquin.

“Sir,” was all she managed, and it was the best she could do to keep her feet moving forward.

Right past him.

He fell into step beside her. “I hope you liked the Bible,” he said. “Which passage did you read first? I always like to know.”

As though she’d sat down on the spot, keen to know more of the Lord’s rules and punishments? “I didn’t read any,” she replied. “The wind carried it off before I even stepped onto the porch.”

Between them, silence twisted, and Neve did not look up to see his eyes with their painted-dot pupils. His shadow, cast ahead, was so much larger than her own. “Excuse me?” he finally said, as though he might have misunderstood her.

“The wind,” she repeated. “I’m sorry. The Bible’s gone.”

He stopped walking, and when she did not stop with him, he reached for her arm and made her. His big fingers splayed from her elbow to her shoulder, and his grip was not gentle. “That was a family heirloom,” he said, and she had no choice but to look at his eyes now. Glassy, she thought, and imagined flames reflecting in them as he scouted the geographies of Hell. “It was precious to me.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have left it on a porch,” she said, trying to pull her arm free. “It wasn’t my doing.”

When he still didn’t release her, she panicked and thrust Dame Somnolence’s flower at him. A rose, and red, it made a more striking display than her dainty thorn lily would have. “Here,” she said, voice shaking. “You honor me, but I don’t mean to marry. My answer is no.”

He didn’t take the flower, and he didn’t let go of her arm, and when Neve met his eyes again, growing more panicked by the second, his look spoke. Some looks do, the way she remembered her mother’s eyes telling her as plain as happiness, in the time before grief, “I love you more than life, my sweet girl.” Or how Ivan’s dying eyes had said his greatest desperation was in leaving her alone.

Spear’s look was eloquent. “I will have you, and I will hold you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you weep. Your tears will be the sugar in my tea, your misery my delight,” he promised, while his lips said, “I wasn’t asking, Neve. I’ve made my choice.” His fist closed on the dry-dead rose and ground it to a dark red dust.

He finally released her arm, and his parting words, before he turned back toward town, were, “When I greet you tomorrow I expect a smile. A blush if you can manage it.”

Neve walked home stumbling-fast, the mud sucking at her boots. Coming into the yard, she spotted Spear’s bootprints among the usual fox tracks, and saw with fresh eyes what a poor sanctuary was this row of shanties. In her shed, she was like a nut meat to cracking teeth. Spear could eat her for breakfast if he wanted. Worse, he could have her for a midnight snack.

This midnight. Any midnight. Who would come if she screamed?

She shivered and barred her meager door. She built a meager fire and cooked a meager meal. Her ears were tuned to the night outside, but she only heard the rain. There was nothing for her fretting but to get out her book, her treasure, her one thing from home: true home, long lost, the Failed Colony. It had had a real name, once, but all those decades of striving and living and building and planting and loving had been reduced in a single season to that wretched word:
failed.

The book had eighteen stories in it, and when she read them—aloud, always—it was with her mother’s cadence, which was imprinted on her heart. She turned to the one that suited this night: a maiden, pursued by an ogre, transforms herself into a doe rather than become his wife. Her eyes were tired from a long day squinting at stitches, so she let them flutter shut. But she knew the story by heart and it kept going, into the woods on fleet deer feet and down a mossy slope.

And all of a sudden she was in Nasty Gully. She knew she was dreaming, because her book had nothing to do with Nasty Gully. The spring beetles were there, all glint and shimmer in the ferny half light, but they weren’t flying at her face. They weren’t flying at all. They were motionless in their hundreds, and when Neve stepped in close, she saw that they were jewels. They were beetles made of jewels, and when she took one up it was a ring for her finger. Another, it was a brooch. The gully was quiet and the light was soft, and she sensed that she was not alone.

“Hello?” she whispered, and woke in her chair, no sound besides rain and the pop of the dying fire, but a whisper seemed to follow her out of sleep. It wasn’t that she heard it so much as felt it.

It felt like a breeze through a forests’ worth of leaves.

“I will free you, and I will lift you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you laugh. Your smiles will be the honey in my mead, your enchantment my delight.”

And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.

She slept. She dreamed. There was music such as she had never heard, and singing in a language as far from her own as the spitting rain was from the roar of the sea. Dancing, too. A hand held hers, and she couldn’t see whose it was but only felt herself spinning spinning spinning, safe in a circle made by strong, dark arms.

But in the morning, the yard held a fresh set of preacher tracks and another gift on the porch—a framed miniature of the man’s own smug face—so Neve knew it had been all and only dreams, all and only her own fool hopes, coaxed up out of hiding and tricked into dancing, dancing all alone.