Grim (16 page)

 

The sun set long before Jeremiah finally made it back to Limbo, so when he saw lights glimmering over the city wall, they surprised him. He slipped through the gate and peered down the main street into the square.

A figure in white stood on a makeshift stage. He gripped a spitting torch in one hand, his other fist raised above his head. Jeremiah recognized him as a councilman and a friend to his brother Michael.

A crowd, made up of the city's charges, pressed close. At first glance, Jeremiah thought that it may have been a few dozen people, but then he saw a glitter in the dark, and realized that it was the flame of the man's torch reflecting in the eyes of a hundred hungry souls. Of a thousand. They faded into the blackness of the night, snaking into the alleys between buildings, perched like gargoyles on the eaves of tenements, hanging out of windows to catch the angry words that this courtier shouted.

“But he does not only claim rights to the throne! No! He takes in a human soul! Never has this been done in all the millennia of the three Kingdoms! Why that one over you, I ask? Why that one over any of you here?” The councilman's voice dropped, and the crowd huddled forward with anticipation. “The balance, then, is broken forever by these rash actions,” the man said. “By his stupid self-importance!” The mob leaned back out and hummed to itself, thinking. Believing.

Jeremiah shivered.

Then he saw the horses.

Michael's train appeared at the top of the northern hill and started down, his black carriage surrounded by low-cut chariots of gold. A flag, emblazoned with the original five-part crest, flew at the back of each. As the procession neared the stage, a hand darted out from the prince's coach, and the speaker caught the cloth thrown at him.

“Look now!” he cried. “The second prince offers a gift to you!” He unfurled the cloth and held it up at arm's length; the six-part crest hung limply from his fingers. “What shall we do to the sign of the traitor?”

The crowd hesitated as it turned over his question. Since entering the Kingdom, it had never been asked to form an opinion. Then one man leaned out of an upper-story window and called out the answer: “Burn it!”

The councilman pointed at the window and held the flag higher.
“What shall we do?”

The crowd answered, eager:
“Burn it!”

“For Jeremiah!” he screamed. “The boy who wants to steal the crown!” He brought the torch to the heart of the flag and held it there until the center had burned away and the flames were beginning to lick his fingers. “Will he ever steal it?” he yelled, throwing down the last scraps.

“No!”

“Will you ever call him king?”

“No!”

Jeremiah turned and fled, clutching Kala safely against his chest.

When her master came in, Martha continued to refill the water dish in Kala's cage. Her eyes flicked up to him, but she didn't smile.

“Erika is in the study,” she said.

“Why did you let her in there?”

“Because you did. You said that she had range of the house. I knew that it was a bad idea.”

“No,
I
did.”

Martha's eyebrows drew up to the lace of her cap. “Sir?” she asked.

“That was rude.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“I know it was.”

“Apparently.”

Jeremiah held Kala out to Martha.

“Put her away, please,” he said.

“Of course.” Martha took the bird in her wrinkled hands and gently smoothed the white feathers.

“Did Jegud come by?”

“No, sir.”

“Did Uri?”

“Only if Erika let him in.”

Jeremiah hissed and clamped a hand over his own mouth.

“You're having a bad day, sir,” Martha said quietly.

“I know.”

“Apparently.”

He groaned and left the room, tearing off his scarf as he went. Martha returned to her work without a word, her transition as tactful as a housemaid and as blind as a rogue.

 

When Erika ran her forefinger over the mantelpiece, she came away with a thick pillow of dust. The hearth looked too clean for anything to ever have been burned on its polished black stones, but a pretty rack of cast-iron shovels and pokers stood ready, just in case. Erika wiped the dust from her hands and stepped back for another look at the portrait that hung over the mantel.

The woman, dressed in dark blue, her hair twisted up and held with gold-and-amber netting, sat perched on a patio wall that overlooked an expanse of gardens. She held her right hand posed in midair, but the trinket she dangled had been painted over since the original commission. Her thin white fingers were smudged from the poor touch-up job and detracted from the beauty of the painting as a whole. A lovely piece, but not a happy one. The gentle smile on the woman's lips never reached her eyes. Erika thought that the painter must have been very brave to have captured the emptiness there.

Behind her, the study door clattered open.

“Leave, Erika,” Jeremiah said, tramping in. He had a black scarf balled up in one fist and tossed it to the side as he struggled to pull off his jacket.

“Excuse me?”

“Leave,” he repeated. “Go to your room. I've had a bad day.”

“You sound like my husband.”

“Your ex-husband. You shouldn't have divorced him if you didn't want him to leave.”

Erika's mouth flew open.

“I'm not my mother's son today, and you've had enough of my brothers to know that the alternative isn't lovely.”

“What are you saying?”

“That you, as I have now mentioned twice, need to leave.”

“This morning —”

“We cannot talk about this morning, Erika. Not now. I should never have let that happen, and it will not happen again.”

She squared her jaw, stood up straighter. “I stayed up to talk to you. You don't understand —”

“No, Erika, I understand perfectly,” Jeremiah said. “I wished before that my mother had been like you, but I take it back. It isn't love that's driving you, it's selfishness, and your selfishness is oppressive. Overwhelming. You're in a house full of slaves who would read your mind and do whatever you asked before thinking twice, and you still aren't satisfied. I've pampered you like a queen and you haven't even married my father yet. I've given you everything and you've never thanked me.” He threw his coat down on the back of the sofa. “All you can think about is your children, and all they want is to move on. God, the Striplings are a stubborn family. I don't know who's worse, but it
must
be you because at least
they
listened when I said no. You certainly haven't shown the courage to do that. I'd even say that —”

“Yet?”

Jeremiah planted his palms on the couch back and let his shoulders slump.

“I haven't married your father
yet
?” Erika clenched her jaw. “You make it sound like I'm going to, Jeremiah.”

He glanced from Erika to the portrait on the wall. After a silence, he risked the question.

“And?”

Erika paled. “What have you done?”

“I haven't done anything, Erika,” he said. “I haven't done anything at all, except what you asked. You wanted your children, so I nearly killed them.”

“What?”

“
Nearly
,” Jeremiah barked. “I said ‘
nearly
.' If you're going to pick words to overanalyze, you might as well choose important ones. You wanted me to make sure they were all right, so I risked my head and theirs to see them. I've spent half of my day wandering to cover my trail, and then I come back to the city and you know what I see? I see my big brother in full regalia on the streets, trying to rally the entire Kingdom against me. I'm a traitor now, or didn't you realize? And I'm housing
you
, which makes things unfair and unholy and unprecedented and every other damning ‘un' that the court can think of.” He waved a finger at her. “And then I come home, and I find you, here, in my study, touching my things, and wondering where your children are. Well, I don't know, Erika, and I'm sorry. Sorry because I know that that's going to piss you off, and sorry because it makes my own job a damn sight harder. So please, in honor of everything good left, just go to your room and leave me be.”

“I need to know what you mean about your father.”

“No,” Jeremiah answered, “you don't. If you
needed
to know, then
I
would know, but I don't. You can't see, can you? I don't have all the answers. I don't have
half
the answers. Maybe you shouldn't ask for things if you won't accept the consequences. There are things that I'd like to have happen too, you know. I'd like to have a biologically stable mother, for one. I'd like to have a dad who actually acknowledges me, for another, and I'd maybe even like to have a family that doesn't want me spitted and charred. But I don't ask for any of that, because I know that everything has consequences. It's cause and effect and it always has been, even on Earth. I know that you died young, but for God's sake, you'd think you would've learned a few things. Like how having sex gets you pregnant and running off with an alcoholic gets you disowned.”

Erika had gone red faced, half shocked and half enraged. She spun out of the room and into the hall, slamming the door behind her so that the bookcases rattled. She wasn't there, then, to see Jeremiah collapse onto the sofa with his hands over his face. He felt sucked dry.

 

Shawn spread out the blanket that Baba Laza had given them and lay down beside Megan. It felt awkward, sleeping so exposed in the woods during midday, but he was too exhausted to care. They'd taken Jeremiah's advice and walked as long as their legs let them. It was rough going, since they were barefoot.

The forest had changed. A bed of underbrush crept in, and the canopy thickened out. Brambles and sticker weeds lay buried in the carpet of dead leaves. Shawn carried Megan on his shoulders when she became too afraid to walk.

“My feet hurt,” Megan whimpered against his ear.

“My skin hurts,” Rebecca said. She reached over and squeezed her brother's shoulder and then pulled Megan to her in a hug. “You've been a good brother, Shawn,” Rebecca said. “And you've been good too, Meg,” she added before being prompted.

Shawn covered his face with the crook of his arm.

“And you've been good too, Becky,” Megan whispered.

Rebecca and Megan giggled together for a little while, their voices low and strained. As Shawn drifted off to sleep, he wondered how much longer the water would last.

 

Erika knelt on the floor in the middle of her bedroom, hunched over a white porcelain bowl. She dipped cupped hands into the cold water and dampened her bandages until the edges started to come loose.

When she found the end of the wrapping, she peeled it back, following the trail in circles around her head, unraveling the clean cloth gauze. Finished, she gathered the long rope of it into a pile beside her.

Her fingers shook as she dipped them back into the water and touched the side of her head, where her hairline turned down toward her left ear. Her curls were knotted there, but she wanted to credit that to the baby-fine texture her mother had given her. She pressed through the knots and felt where the blood had clotted and dried. The black dust that came away on her fingers touched the water and melted, swirling down to the bottom of the bowl, trailing red.

She bit her bottom lip as she felt along her scalp one last time, and now she found the paper-dry edge where skin met bone. She sucked in a tight breath.

Erika realized that the cut didn't hurt at all. That it would never hurt again. That she belonged on those streets with rags and filth and an empty tin cup, begging for money that she didn't really need, eating food to make her feel less hollow, sleeping in rooms to make her feel more human. Hopeless with fear either way, because the fear she ran from was folded deep inside.

 

Erika came back into the study, with her bandages trailing from one hand. Jeremiah sat on the sofa, with his head in his palms, staring at the fire that crackled in the hearth. He looked up when she opened the door, and then turned back to his own thoughts. She walked over to him, stone-faced, and dropped the long string of linen at his feet.

“You lied to me.”

He wanted to say that he had not lied, because bending the truth was not the same as breaking it. He wanted to say that, of the two of them, only he knew what the limits of reality were. He thought better of it. He could tell that she was too upset to listen, and since he was too tired to argue, he only hoped that, eventually, she would see this all on her own. Instead, he said, “I hoped that I could send you back. But I can't.”

Erika took this without comment. She wasn't thinking about herself right now. “Is that why my kids can't come through?” she asked. “Because they're still alive?”

“Yes,” Jeremiah said. “And I would send them back, but it's too late now. I thought that I could change things, but I can't. It's not my place.”

“Whose place is it, then?”

“I don't know.”

“You
do
know,” Erika said. “It's your father's, isn't it?”

“I suppose.”

“Don't
suppose
, Jeremiah. Not now.”

He looked up from the floor and took in her face, so thin and worried, and her long, swirling hair. His mother's portrait smiled coolly over Erika's shoulder: navy dress against alabaster skin and a piled cap of copper hair. The hair that was her trademark. They said that it used to burn in the sunshine. They said that the king kept a lock of it in his bedroom, tucked away in a small wooden box.

“It's my father's place,” he said. “He's king of the dead, and if anyone can get your children home safely, it's him. But he doesn't make allowances for anyone but family.”