Dead of Winter Page 4

  Instead, she focused on her own.

  As her spell left her lips, it took shape in the air. Jacques clung to her, his little bones pressing against her like a kitten pressing against its mother for protection from a cur, but irresistibly the incantation pulled him away. She stood beneath the stone wings of her husband, over the cooling body of her youngest son, while the dragon’s heart beat a desperate and unheard appeal, and watched the hex settle over the skin of her oldest child.

  His golden hair turned snow white, his skin a pallid, perfect gray. Every wound on little Peter’s face found an outline on Jacques’, scarlet lines of injury forever imbedded. His eyes, those warm hazel eyes she had loved so, were the last to fade. As she looked coldly into his ebbing gaze, she saw every shared silly laugh, every bedtime story, every drowsy unspoken avowal of love. She saw the milky-mouthed babe at her breast, the curious infant, the affectionate child. And then she saw the blue-eyed revenant, emptied of his soul, imbued only with his solitary and awful purpose.

  He would be a collector of souls, a purveyor of justice. His duty would be to garnish those who had committed his own sin. What had once been Jacques would never grow, never age, never die. He would wander forever from damned to damned.

  The cursed creature who looked so much like her son opened his mouth. Who knows what he would have said. If he would have pled, uselessly, still, for mercy. But Margritte raised her hand, and the boy fell silent. Those blue, blue eyes clung to hers a moment more, then he turned and trudged away, into the wood. Already the short day was ending, pale-faced stars looking down with grim silvered light.

  Margritte gathered the broken remains of her dead child into her arms, rocked him close as she stumbled back to Goldgrym. She buried the little one beneath the stones of her husband’s richest treasure hall. It took a long time, perhaps, but she had no thought of time. Every moment was an eternity, every eternity lost in the next hated breath. She measured the night in handfuls of dirt and the weight of stone.

  The moon and the sun were rising together by the time she made her way back to the clearing. The mud and running water had turned to solid ice in the bitter cold. Margritte wrapped her fur cloak around her and sat down against the massive unmoving talons that stood fast still. Above her, beneath the stone scales, the dragon’s heart beat slow and unstoppable, at once comfort and reproach.

  They sat that way together, over the bloodstained ice, for days and nights and days again. At last, on a night with no moon, Margritte made her way to the clearing’s edge and spoke the words that turned the stone to dust and set the dragon free.

  Gregor shook out the great wings till they rang like bells then stood before his wife as a man. He raised his arms as if to pull her close but dropped them empty. His voice was low, graveled with agony.

  “You have robbed us of both our sons.”

  Her answer came as barely a whisper.

  “I am a Bane-Witch. I cannot allow evil to go unanswered. Not even evil innocent and unintentional. I must bring balance.”

  Margritte sensed a thousand arguments press against Gregor’s lips, but he spoke none. What remained to be said? A Bane-Witch’s curse could not be undone.

  “I am a father. I cannot allow him to walk alone.”

  Hot tears flooded Margritte’s eyes, tears she thought long dry. They poured unchecked down her cheeks. “He must walk forever.”

  Gregor shrugged. “Who knows how long a dragon might live if only he would not fight? I will find him. Where he travels, I will travel with him.”

  “His task is grim.”

  “My heart is black enough to bear it.”

  Margritte’s own blood felt thick with the hatred and rage, the adoration and adulation, of her husband. She struggled to breathe. Found just enough air.

  “You know my days are short. I can only be an hour to your week. Will you carry my grimoire with you?”

  Gregor’s hand tightened into fists. She didn’t know if he ached to hold her or to hit her. His eyes glistened like emeralds when he spoke.

  “Bring me your book. I will carry it with me.”

  As she spun to hurry back to the hall, she heard him mutter fiercely, “Always.”

  Which brings the story back to me. When Margritte reached her own library, she hastily cast the spell that stole her life and granted mine. Gregor tired of waiting and came and found me there on my pedestal, Margritte’s blood already absorbed in my thirsty pages. I don’t know what became of her husk—her body seemed to simply fade out into the air. Perhaps some element of her even remains in that sad empty hall, bereft of all but its treasures and a tiny body buried under the stone.

  I don’t know Gregor like I knew Margritte, but even I experienced a thrill of terror at his towering grief when his fingers closed on my cover. I wondered how the castle did not fall.

  He carried me with him down to the stables. Normally Margritte and the boys cared for the beasts; neither horses nor donkeys are much fond of dragons, whether they can see the scales or only sense them. But a handful of sugar and much soothing finally coaxed the stout little Panga to assent to the wagon. Gregor surprised me, taking his time loading the tin-roofed contraption with mattresses and gold and books, with food and wine and ale. I supposed he’d had time to make his plans while trapped in stone. I soon realized his new story would be that of a tinker and his son. Basic tools hung from the canvas walls of what was rapidly transforming from simple wagon to caravan.

  It took us nearly two weeks of traveling to find Jacques. The sapphire-eyed revenant wasn’t really Jacques, of course, but what else could we call him? And while he plainly experienced no real love or affection for Gregor, he assented to both the company and the deceit, playing the role of tinker’s son as if it cost him nothing. And perhaps over time, the continual fellowship did transform into something close to comfort.

  This new Jacques did not eat or drink, but sometimes he read the books Gregor had brought. When he’d read them all, Gregor would trade for new ones in the villages we passed through. In his soft, high-pitched little boy voice so uncannily familiar, Jacques would regale us with the horrors of the souls he harvested as he directed us to pause at this farmstead or that castle. He would unload his small wagon with its cheery little bell and ramble up, his welcome never questioned in spite of his eerie appearance. I don’t know if that was some aspect of the magic, or just the weakness of the mortal mind for the figure of a child.

  Soon enough he would return, his little tin teapot swinging from his fist or resting in the wagon bed. With every garnished soul, its patina grew darker.

  Over the centuries, we settled into a sort of normalcy. Gregor no longer took his dragon form. I think he feared that as dragon, he would not resist his bellicose nature and might leave what remained of Jacques alone in the world. It did not seem to matter that Jacques was no longer a son; Gregor was still a father and could not be anything else. Perhaps some trace of kindness lingered in the ghoul, because he allowed Gregor to play the role without argument, consenting to the treatment of a child though by now he was hundreds of years old.

  At night, Gregor slept on a narrow mattress in the caravan, or sometimes, when the air was hot, beneath the wheels where the starslung winds could gust unhindered over his skin. I wondered if he longed for the skies or if he had somehow killed that part of himself. Regardless, I was there, tucked up under his arm, against his chest, as he tossed and turned in restless dreams. I listened to his heart beat and thought of all the times Margritte had done the same, resting her head on the rise and fall of his breaths until all her existence became that steady pounding. I thought of her fingers curling through the hair on his chest, her nails tender knives against his skin, and wondered if Gregor thought of her, too, if he found in the weight of my pages the weight of that beloved head, if he imagined her breath sighing from my words to rest in his hands.

  In all these centuries, he has taken no other wife. No friend has joined our ragged band. His is a loneliness complete. Fitting that the husband of a Bane-Witch would become a bane unto himself. He was the only one not cursed in the end, but that exception was its own hex, one he could not allow to stand. He has made shrift more devoutly than any penitent monk, and yet he will not forgive himself.

  I do not know how he might explain Jacques to someone who spent more than a few minutes among us, anyway. These days, at least, his strange appearance is not so strange. Gregor is the odd one now. Some new pestilence has swept the world, a virus that leaves survivors scarred and marked by the ravages of the disease. It was highly contagious, infecting nearly everyone and killing many, but dragons are impervious to the illnesses of men. So Gregor’s smooth skin is an aberration now, and Jacques’ scarlet lines less so. Even his gray pallor is more easily accepted, put down to an unusual manifestation of the disease everyone knows too well.

  Still, any who shared our journey would soon notice the child has no similarity with any other child on the earth. He never plays or cries, requires no food or drink or sleep. Aside from the stories of his collection, he is mostly silent. At night, while Gregor sleeps, he either lies wide-eyed in some unspoken communion with the stars or else walks soundlessly through long grass or dark trees, along river banks or bounded by the sea. He seems never restless, never lonely, never sad, never regretful. He only is.

  We have come upon another Winter’s Turning. You might think, after all these years, the bite of such an anniversary would have gone toothless, but it is not so. Gregor’s countenance on this day is so dark, even I in my leather binding am inclined to shudder. His eyes recall the stone behind which he was imprisoned, and I swear I see dragon-fire flash beneath his skin. He always tra
des the traditional feast for fast, though I do not know if this is a deliberate act of contrition or simply an abhorrence of flesh on this day of all days.

  For my part, I am consumed with thoughts of Margritte as winter and spring exchange their places. Her memories, her timbre beneath the spells, even the smell of her skin and hair, rise so powerfully within me I almost wonder if she is not truly caught somewhere in my glue still. I ache with a hollow womb I do not have. I weep dry tears for children lost I do not know. I thrill to the brush of Gregor’s cold hands when he clutches me tight to his chest and stares at ghosts I do not see.

  Jacques does not share the unease of the calendar. He notes Gregor’s condition with his hard blue gaze and does not remark on it. For him, it is only another day among uncountable days.

  No snow this year. I want to believe that will make it easier for Gregor, some disconnect between the feast-day of the past and the present. And this world is so different from the one where our story began. Most of what remains of the world’s population is hunched in cities, living, dying, working, eating, sleeping in shifts intended to limit their exposure to one another. Society has become a strange machine intent only on its own survival as a machine, all its persons reduced to cogs and wheels and gears with their precise duties to perform. Those who live in the countryside still are less altered, more easily able to avoid new infection without drastic measures.

  New gods have risen, and the Bane-Witches and Boon-Witches have vanished entirely or retreated into hiding. But some magic cannot be denied. This new society has given Winter’s Turning a new name, but they celebrate the Solstice much the same. Instead of bonfires, the cities are strung with lights. Feasts and dances and gift-exchanges mark the celebration of day’s return.

  Here, in the south of the continent, the frigid air is wretched with rain instead of the snow of Gregor’s beloved mountains. Our caravan now is a tiny wooden house built on the back of an old pickup bed, all the Pangas long since dead. We rumble slowly through the city streets, the insistent cheer of all the many-colored lit windows a painful contrast to the unrelenting gray grief of the mourning sky. I lie on the bench seat between a hard-jawed Gregor and an incurious Jacques. As always, we follow his direction, turning when he says turn, driving till he says stop.

  Soon enough we leave the city behind, just as the bells ring out the changing of the shifts. We pass those waiting to enter the city where raincoat-clad guards stand with thermometers, checking each of the travelers for any sign of infection. Though almost all the population who survived the first wave of the virus are immune to its return, it has proven unusually wily in its adaptation and mutation, and new, deadlier strains continue to cast out their long tendrils. Perhaps the virus will scour the earth clean of these mortals eventually, and the dragon-lords will return to the skies. If any of them but Gregor even remain. They were so few in number to begin with, and rather prone to death in battle. We have not met another in our travels for at least three hundred years now.

  We are well out of town when Jacques rouses. He points to an old farmhouse standing alone in the pouring rain, and we turn onto the long drive without question. Gregor parks the pickup under a copse of weeping trees and shuts off the engine.

  Jacques jumps down and goes to the back to unload his wagon. He trudges through the cold rain in his small boots as if he cannot feel the icy cold, a cap obscuring the snow-white hair so he might appear to be only a tow-headed blond. I hear the little red bell ringing merrily beneath the roar of the rain and the gusts of the wind and wonder if the soul inside those doors knows it is being summoned by that call.

  Jacques clambers up the wooden steps with the tin teapot clutched in his hand and knocks on the door. A willowy young woman with long black hair opens the door and stares down at the child in surprise.

  She lets him in, of course. They always do.

  Perhaps only a few minutes later, or perhaps hours, I shake myself from drowsiness as the chiming of the bell marks his return. He puts his wagon away and climbs up beside me, a gentle warmth emanating from the teapot on his lap.

  Gregor starts the truck, and we pull away from the farmhouse. Jacques leans back against the seat and closes his eyes. I have never known if he is truly tired, if the act of gathering these souls draws some of his own eternal energy, or if he has merely learned the subterfuge. His childish tones begin the tale of his latest acquisition, and my ink flows across an empty page.

  Stefana inhaled deeply, drawing the fragrance of cinnamon and oranges into her lungs as if it might carry the peace of the season into her trembling belly. Festive music poured from her small speakers, and every corner of the room was festooned with lights. The table, garnished with pine boughs, and set with red-ribboned china, invited all to sit and be filled. Platters of cheeses and sweets and yeasty breads covered the thick oak, and glasses brimming with red wine perched at the edge of every empty plate.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d felt compelled to put on such a feast. Outside, rain pounded against the windows so that she could hardly see even a few feet into the yard. Moated by cold and solitude, she drew her sweater more tightly across her shoulders and sank into the old wooden rocking chair, staring at the empty chairs surrounding the set table.

  This was the first Solstice without Mama and Raquel. Papa had been the first to die, shortly before the last Solstice. He’d fallen ill while delivering produce to the city. No visitors were allowed in hospitals: too much chance of contracting the disease themselves and then continuing to spread it to the community outside. They’d called him several times a day, but every day the calls grew shorter and more difficult as his lungs labored to hold air. Then came the day a nurse answered the phone and explained how Papa had been intubated and could no longer speak. Sometimes, if the nurses weren’t too busy, they would hold the phone to Papa’s ear for a while and let them talk to him, at least, even if he couldn’t answer. Raquel and Stefana wondered privately if Papa were even truly conscious, or if the nurses only offered a compassionate fiction to his wife, but they shared their doubts only with each other, never with Mama.

  Then came the night when the phone rang in their house instead of in Papa’s room, and he was gone. There could be no funeral; aside from the transport of food and supplies and such necessaries, the city was shut down. Even burials were an unaffordable luxury; crematoriums smoked day and night. Postal service had been severely restricted, so ashes were scattered in the rivers and canals of the city, an awful anonymity as ubiquitous as death itself.

  Neighbors left notes and letters and drooping flowers on their doorstep. If Papa had died just a few weeks earlier, people would have brought casserole dishes and baked goods, but already the virus had stolen such impulses. Who knew what infection lingered on a dish, and who dared return one? Along the fence that marked the beginning of the drive, friends tied bright-colored ribbons, a silent tribute to Papa’s life.

  Raquel, two years older than Stefana, was subsumed by grief. Every night, she tortured herself with replaying their father’s final lonely days. Stefana would climb into her bed and rock her sister in her arms while she wept, frightening, convulsive sobs so strong Stefana feared her heart might burst from the pain. The sterile hospital room, empty even of nurses aside from the most urgent of tasks, the sounds of the respirator as it forced air into Papa’s mucus-filled lungs, the intrusion of tubes and needles, the indignity of dying only as a punctured husk under a sheet.

  “Did he know?” she begged Stefana, a hundred times. “Did he know we loved him? Did he know we were here, thinking of him, every minute? Did he think we had abandoned him? Did he know?”

  Stefana, her own eyes blind with tears, stroked her sister’s sweaty hair and promised her he knew, he had to know. But she felt she lied, and Raquel felt it, too. How could they ever be forgiven? It didn’t matter that there’d been no way to break into the hospital, to sit by his side until his heart finally failed. What was possible was irrelevant. All that mattered was loss, and the loss was complete.