Heart of Stone (14 page)

21.

Tamsin

Provence de Frontiere, Gemmes

She’d busied herself by brewing her favorite ginger tea for Rémy, whose hacking seemed to have disappeared, when the Hedge Riders returned. It surprised her that they were returning so soon. She shouldn’t have been. She’d sent the Hedge Rider’s away a day before, time enough to prepare her mind and heart for the impending fact: she would trade herself for this elusive princess as soon as they found her.

              Bedside’s preparing for death, she should have at least told Rémy the truth. She knew this … she did, but she didn’t want to lose this precious time with him. In twenty-four hours he had turned a corner physically, thanks to her salves and simple spells. She saw, once again, herself with this rough and tumble man. She wanted to see it.

              Her loneliness had lasted forever.

              She knew the Riders were here by the freezing-warmth that slid through the door and past the open window. All at once the warmest day and the coldest night poured through her, and she shivered and sweat at the same time. Things were different in the Hedge. The Hedge was day and night, and good and bad, and black and white all at the same time. The in-between and the gray.

“Can you bring me a blanket?” Rémy asked as he rolled his shirtsleeves. Tamsin knew he too felt the Hedge Riders before he saw them.

Tamsin braced herself by clenching her jaw, knowing she needed to say something, at least one thing, before Victor walked through the door.

“Here you go,” she said handing him a worn quilt. So many pieces of fabric were stitched together making it one piece. This story she needed to explain was much the same. The story had taken years to write, had connected many people, and yet a single thread held it together, one thread that made a story at all.

Her.

“I suppose I don’t need it anymore,” Rémy said, changing his mind. “It feels warmer now. Maybe I am the old man Tristan teases me to be.” Rémy smiled warmly at her as he sat next to the fire. Although it was the middle of the day, he was still in recovery, and so Tamsin had kept the fire stoked for him. His smile and warm-heartedness toward her made what she had to say all the worse. He would be disgusted with her once he knew.

She was.

“Rémy, I need to tell you something,” she started. She wanted to explain herself, explain the night she changed.

The king had left the room to acquire a gem, leaving Tamsin to prepare. She set the swaddled baby on the bed next to the queen. The resemblance was clear. The baby had wisps of black hair and a small rounded nose, red lips pursed perfectly.

Tamsin took a small vile of oil from her satchel and opened the queen’s dressing gown. She poured it across her unmoving chest, and then drizzled the oil on the child’s chest as well. The air filled with lemongrass and sandalwood. She withdrew her enchanted dagger from her bag and steadied herself with the words of the ancient folk who came before her. The words were perhaps never intended for this sort of cruelty, or maybe they were.

Tamsin had never devised a need for such dark spells. She dug roots and mixed salves to cure people not able to pay for medicine at a traditional doctor. She healed, but no one had forced her to heal someone by putting an expiration date on another. Until now. If she had a choice, she wouldn’t. She looked at the open window and thought if she weren’t so scared of the king’s men and their long drawn swords, she would scoop up the child and leap.

But she had been too scared to run away with the princess nearly eighteen years ago, and she was too scared to speak the truth aloud, now. In her hesitation, Victor appeared at the door, Treala by his side.

He looked like he had the other night, un-human yet completely so. People might imagine those who were not of this earth to be either divine or demonic like the fables in books, but Victor was neither, yet both. He was terrifying in his beauty.

“I have news,” he spoke solemnly and bowed his head to her. The sacrifice she was preparing to make demanded to be recognized when he spoke. It paralyzed Tamsin, that sort of authority.

“Who is this?” Rémy asked, fearful. He didn’t know. Of course, he wouldn’t. He wasn’t a part of the people Tamsin’s long family tree grew from. He was not a cunning folk or healer, no midwifery with magic or divine healing pulsed through his veins. He was a man. A man so unlike her, pure and good. Her dark practices were unknown to him. The practices that haunted her.

“I am Victor, and this is Treala. We come from the Hedge. You must be a valued man to be here, with her. A woman able to conjure me up, and bring me forth from the other-side. A strong woman indeed.” He bowed his head once more to Tamsin. His words caused her to imagine he thought her worthy. His words gave her hope.

Tamsin looked past him through the door and saw the dozen Riders perched upon their steeds.  They were stoic like Victor; though perhaps not quite as large in stature; the women Riders were most striking. Their silvery hair blew in the wind they created, with stardust swirling round them. The Hedge didn’t come from a place with time and hours charted like Tamsin did. Time was intangible in the Hedge. Another thing she would need to get used to.

Looking at her own drab self, knowing she could never be like those women. A long dishwater blond braid hung down her back, a shawl knit by her own distracted hands draped across her shoulders. Her plain skin smooth and dewy from the creams she made for herself, but nothing else defined her.

Nothing but her deeds.

“Rémy … they are here because I called them. I will explain it all soon enough I promise, but I need the news first.”

Rémy nodded in understanding, but also in confusion. He was like the Hedge in that, if nothing else.

“What have you found? Victor? Did you find the girl?” Tamsin’s brown eyes filled with hope, with fear. She might, once and for all, as hard as it was, be able to make her first wrong right.

“No, but it isn’t a surprise. After all, she is not a girl of this world; her heart beats not of life, yet not either death. Her heart beats for the in-between. Because of the stone. Because of you. It makes her harder to trace.” Victor said this plainly, without judgment.

Shame flooded Tamsin’s cheeks. She
did
feel judgment; her own heart
did
beat with life. Life is filled with wrongs the same way it is filled with rights.

Tamsin began to cry, and she hid her face from Rémy, so ashamed. She would be leaving this earth soon, she knew it no longer mattered what he thought. But it did. Oh, how it did.

“We wanted let you know that she is not in the north. We will be travelling south to seek her out. We understand time is of the essence. That is why we came here, to you, so you wouldn’t be worried.” Victor spoke softly, and Tamsin saw the terrifying man she thought he might be, wasn’t so. He was also gentle when he spoke to her.

Her eyes filled with tears as she allowed herself to see that perhaps this man was a creator. Because he didn’t claim either the beginning or the end. He claimed the middle, and he offered her reprieve though he didn’t owe her anything. He had come when she called. He was merciful.

Saying good-bye to a world was intrinsically difficult. Especially a world Tamsin felt she never had the chance to live in. It would be easier to die not knowing what was happening.

“What girl?” Rémy stood from the chair, coughing in his arm.

“I’ll explain,” she looked at Rémy, pleading with him to have patience. “Victor, Treala, did you find any clues? I can try to conjure a finding spell … I can try, something!” Tamsin moved to her bookcase, started flipping open pages of books frantically. This was all life and death to her, and to Sophie. This wasn’t something the Hedge understood, they were eternal.

The Hedge didn’t play with such ugly magic themselves. She was the only one who did. Shame kept her from admitting her actions aloud. Never as dark as the first deed, but still dark enough to hide.

She had become a woman who reattached limbs with the whispers of spells. A woman who crept in the forest dirt, finding bones to replace the broken ones inside the bodies of men and women. A woman who poured the blood of birds in the mouths of men, reviving them as she whispered incantations over their bruised bodies. A woman who became a monster.

“There were whispers, in the north, of her and a boy. A Gem Tracker,” Victor offered.

Tamsin stopped pouring over her book and looked at Victor and Treala, their words hanging in the air and she realized who they spoke of.

“Tristan,” she whispered, holding her hand to her mouth.

Remy looked at the woman who had carefully created a balm for his chest, who had brought healing to his weathered frame. The woman who made him strong again.

Tamsin couldn’t answer, couldn’t form words with her lips, and couldn’t make her voice crack open for fear of what would come out.

She knew, in an instant, the reason she and Tristan held a connection all these years. The stones led him closer and closer to the girl. All for this moment.

This tragic revelation.

She knew where the final stone that Tristan searched for lay, and it was within his grasp. It was horrifying and beautiful. It brought sense to everything and nothing. Just like the Hedge.

“I knew he would get himself in trouble. I told you as much, didn’t I, Tamsin?” Rémy spoke, with finality.

“Tamsin,” Victor bowed his head once more. “Bonds are incredibly important to the Hedge. We ride with our partners,” he held his hand out to Treala. She took it. She smiled and frowned at the same time. She was marvelous to look at, the stardust still floating in the air above her shoulders, through her hair.

“We bond for eternity,” Treala said. “We would want the same for others if they so wish. If a bond has been made on this earth, with this boy, perhaps severing it wouldn’t be in the best interest of the girl. She may be worthy of the Hedge when she dies, maybe it is
her
home that is there … not yours. Perhaps you should reconsider your plan to interfere with life and death. Perhaps it is not your place to decide.”

Tamsin looked at the Riders, then shook her head in anger. To ask her to reconsider, now, was ludicrous. They needed to move, fast … to find the girl, to find Tristan.

Remy came to Tamsin’s side, trying to calm her, but she wanted none of it. She needed Victor and Treala to understand her.

“She will die, unless I do something. This is all I can do!” Tamsin hadn’t looked at the situation the way Victor pointed out, but still, none of it mattered if the unclaimed princess was in the ground, buried with no life’s breath emitting from her lips.

“It is your life, the consequences are yours alone to bear. What do you want to do, Tamsin?” Victor asked calmly, his resplendent spirit shuddering throughout the room.

“We must go. I must speak to Tristan. Now!”

Victor and Treala nodded. “We will come, only to find the girl, because we are bound to protect her if we are able.”

She was put to the test once more, just as she had so many years ago in the Palace. Forced to choose this girl’s fate she didn’t want the power to decide. Life and death or death and life and none of it was easy and none of it was good.

22.

Queen Cozette

Palace Royal, Gemmes

He walked in her chambers as she dabbed dust of onyx on her slender neck. Looking through the mirror at him, she smiled. She had gained the thing she longed for. A soft-hearted husband, one who wouldn’t push her away when she was gentle, and instead would draw her near.

With a quick motion she pulled out of her dressing table drawer a small hematite stone. She was still young enough to long for intimacy, and hope for an heir. The hematite might help her cause.

“Cozette.” Marcus stood at the door, still as the rock in the mountains. She hadn’t realized the stony look on his face and she let out a small sigh, realizing perhaps she had hoped for too much too fast.

“What is it, My Lord?” she asked, walking toward him in her soft pink taffeta dress, with small pale garnets dripping from her earlobes and a necklace splayed across her décolletage.

“Garnets?” he asked in a whisper. His eyes, Cozette now realized, were not hard as a rock as she first thought– they were broken pieces of granite, grey swirls swimming in a bath of tears.

“Do you not like them?” she asked, touching the necklace delicately. She had never seen emotion like this from him. Angry outbursts, yes. Battle cries, surely, but feelings wrought from brokenness, never.

“They are beautiful. You are beautiful.” Then he began to sob. His body fell over, and he clutched his face with his hands, and he wept.

“Oh, darling, what is it?” she implored, growing frightened at seeing him so undone. “Is it the trade routes? The ball? We can cancel. We don’t need their admiration; it was a foolish idea of Drake’s anyhow.” She tried to soothe the cries with words, hoping any of them might attach to his suffering and ease his pain.

It did no such thing. He grabbed her shoulders and brought her close. She breathed him in deeply, not wanting to exhale for fear he might tear apart from her at any moment, change his mind.

“The garnet,” he cried. Cozette pulled back, wanting desperately to hang on to his words, understand the train of thought so difficult to decipher.

              “What of it, my dear?”

“It is in her chest. The stone is in her. Our child!”

Cozette stood still, now she had become the stone and he the melting steel, moldable in his pain. His eyes were emblazoned with guilt.

“What are these words you speak, My King? I can’t understand you, though I try.” She steadied herself, knowing whatever words came next were important. The most important.

“You will never want to understand me again. Not after I tell you this.”

She took the hands of the broken man she yearned for, and brought them to her beating heart.

“As long as I live, as long as my heart beats, I will always, always want to understand you. You are the one I am bound to love and I swear to you, Marcus, our love lives as do I.”

The words meant to console, did. He closed his eyes, his hand still steady on her beating chest. Breathing in deeply, he whispered words that would change everything for everyone in Gemmes, forever.

“Our daughter lives.”

Cozette’s chin quivered, and as her heart split, the world split. She became two.

Marcus lifted his head and looked at her, a shattered man with fractured eyes. It hurt to meet his gaze, but Cozette did anyways.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said, sitting beside her. “The night she was born, I thought I lost you. You were so close to death, you floated toward the hope of the Hedge, even before the child was born. The midwife called the only person left to call upon, a
devins-guérisseur
. She arrived, gave you a potion to drink in your listlessness, and quickly the babe was born.”

Cozette listened, utterly frozen, as she hung on the words
devins-guérisseur
. Those words implied madness, desperation. The words that were reflected in Marcus’s eyes as he spoke.

And he recounted the night for his bride, trembling on every word. Cozette sat motionless, as she absorbed the story.

The king entered the queen’s chamber once more, holding a garnet, the size of his palm, to the witch. She shook her head, no. If this deed was his will, he must do it himself, she’d said.

“Be still and do as I say,” she whispered. “It must be perfect.”

She murmured unusual words, words of the devins-guérisseurs before her. The king watched as she conjured up the force, which held the queen at bay. She opened a bag with powdery dust, and blew it in the air above the two vulnerable bodies before her. The powder was held in the air, suspended above them.

The king and Tamsin watched as time stopped for but a minute. In those precious seconds Tamsin drew the dagger above the child, and she sliced her chest, breaking open the cavity holding her pink, fleshy, beating heart. Tearing it out, she handed it to the king. The pulsing bloody mass was as real as life itself.

His face turned to ash, and the night became darker than the most moonless eve ever witnessed. This was his doing.

“Hold it securely, if it drops, this is over. The queen, the baby, it will all be for naught.”

Marcus mumbled words of panic, but held the pounding heart with steady hands as he watched Tamsin slice the queen’s chest with the same veracity. He would do anything to spend all the days of his life with the blank woman before him. He choked back fear as the blood from within her pooled over the bed, but not a sound emitted from either mother or child. Instead, it was as if they had transferred themselves to a distant place where time did not exist.

Tamsin took the queen’s heart from its body, leaving her empty for but a moment. They saw with horror the black tinge of this queen’s heart. She was still young enough that her organs should pulse with life, not dark and full of decay. The heart of the babe was a beautiful, flawless pink. The queen was gaining a heart she didn’t deserve. Discarding the broken, limp heart in a bedside bowl, Tamsin turned to the king.

“Put this perfect heart where you believe it must go. This work is of you, my hands are clean.”

The king tenderly placed the beating heart of his child into the chest of his bride and watched as Tamsin continued to blow the powdery dust over the open chest. As the dust settled, so did the disconnected vessels join, until the heart was pounding in place, perfectly mended. Perfectly whole.

The baby’s heart, though much smaller than the one discarded, managed to fit in the cavity of her chest just so.

“Now for the child.” Tamsin bowed her head and watched as the king took the garnet and placed it in the tiny child’s limp body. It fit, but it looked foreign.

A cold stone in a place where a warm fleshy organ should dwell. As if on cue, the veins within the babe wrapped themselves tight, securing the stone in place. Joining together until the jewel was beating as a real heart should. Tamsin’s magic worked.

“It is done.” Tamsin raised her hands; speaking the words that would bring time back, once more, for the two exposed.

“Stop.” Panic flooded through the king’s face. “You must take this child, and flee.” The king grabbed Tamsin’s hands and spoke with authority only a young king could muster at a time like this. “Take her anywhere. I won’t murder her, but only because I don’t want the queen to die. Murdering you, however, is not out of the realm of possibility, if I ever hear word of her breathing in my country. The queen will never know I carved her child’s heart, giving her an expiration date before she had a chance to live.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Tamsin stood over the bodies, with exposed hearts, one warm to the touch, the other icy cold. With fear and great trembling, she spoke the words that would seal the fate of this child, the fate of this queen.

“A heart of stone will die alone,

this heart of blood will live in love.

Separated at their core,

death brought to life to perish no more.

Seal the bodies, seal the fate,

where love once joined, now it must break.”

A strong gust of wind broke through the window, breaking the eerie silence covering the room as Tamsin and the king watched in wonder. The flesh wove together once more, closing around the heart and stone. Leaving not a trace of a scar of this night upon the exposed chests of mother and child.

“The child cried, breathing in life, but there you lay, lost to me. I looked at the child and I looked at you. And….” Marcus stopped; he put his hands on Cozette’s cheeks, stroking the smoothness, looking deep inside her as he confessed this hidden truth.

She didn’t pull away, though her body shook as she listened. She couldn’t break from him if she wanted to. She needed this story.

“Remember the love we had in those days?” Marcus asked her softly. “Remember our planning for the future? How recklessly hopeful we were? We wanted everything, we craved whole countries and power and it was all in our reach. I was the man I was because of your belief in me. I couldn’t lose you.

“So I chose to lose her. Our daughter. The
devins-guérisseur
had a dark spell, the one thing that would keep you bound to this world. Your heart was broken, and the only way for you to live was for a new heart to be placed in your chest. I traded the child’s heart for a stone. Her heart was placed in your body and you both lived.”

He stopped speaking and Cozette drew a deep breath, the pain of the past seventeen years apart from her child clearly written across the tablet of her heart. She was broken now, too. 

“Why is she not here? You gave a gift to us both, made the choice that was hard, yes, but gave us both life. Where is our daughter?” she begged, desperate tears falling down her cheeks.

Marcus tried to turn away, but Cozette wouldn’t let him, not now. He couldn’t retreat within himself. She needed him.

“It wasn’t a gift. It was magic. The sort of magic that kept you alive was dark, the blackest kind there is.”

“What did you do?” Cozette covered her mouth in fear, stepping back as the blood drained from her face. The magic must have been very dark indeed to keep the secret of his child away from her this long.

“Her heart is made of stone, and she cannot love, accept it, or return it. The stone heart will expire on her eighteenth birthday.”

She gasped, the shock of her babe alive was too much to absorb. The tears fell as she remembered the weeks, months, and years of crying alone in the child’s empty nursery. Her womb longing for the child that was never to be. She hadn’t died. Yet.

“You should have let me die! You should have let me die for her! Marcus, she will be buried in a grave, in a few short days! Where is she? I need her to be brought to me. You can’t tell me my child lives and then not let me see her face, see her likeness to me, to you.”

Cozette’s cries were stifled no more, Marcus grabbed her arms and pulled her to himself, trying to comfort in ways he hadn’t for so long. She thought of beating against his chest and yelling words of hate, but she couldn’t if she wanted to. He told her of a child.
Her child
. He gave a gift she would not,
could not
, reject. The words meant everything.

“I never realized with a new heart you wouldn’t be the same woman I met and fell in love with, the queen I wed. You changed. The night you gained a new heart, you became a person I no longer recognized. Imagine, each time I looked at you, the guilt I’ve felt.” He held his head in his hands, as though unable to look at his wife.

“Where is she? I must believe there’s some new spell, a way to keep her alive. Or give her a new stone before this one expires!” Cozette wasn’t interested in Marcus’s personal reflections. She cared for one thing, finding her daughter.

“I had sent her away with the
sorcière
, but I have my men out looking for her now. I will join them today. I just––”

“You wanted me to know. So you came to me now for forgiveness. I understand Marcus. You did the right thing; you wanted me to see her before she may die.” Cozette wiped her eyes, steadying herself.

“Don’t forgive me. Can’t you be angry, hateful? Hate me! Scream and claw out my eyes. That is what I deserve, Cozette. Not sympathy. Not understanding!” Marcus yelled, as if wanting the reaction from his wife to match the atrocious crime he committed against her.

She would not give him what he wanted.

Cozette turned away from him, knowing this was the moment that would define her. Remembering the long years alone, she knew what she needed to do. Being alone in grief was not a sorrow she would wish upon anyone. Not even Marcus. She would not make him bear this alone any longer. She would be there for him, forever. Besides, she knew she needed Marcus now, more than ever.

She knelt before her king, at his feet. She pressed her face to the floor, as if praying to the Hedge, a place she didn’t believe in.

“Find her, Marcus. Bring her to me,” she begged.

“You pitiful woman. You can’t muster the strength to despise me. You should loathe me! Maybe this will cause your bleeding heart to turn to stone, like your daughter’s--”