Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy) (43 page)

So Silas would not go home. Not yet.

His shoulder blistered and burned. The place where Cabel had struck him and dragged his sharp nails through his skin was sore to the touch and burned like a hundred wasp stings. The pain went deeper into his bones. Silas rubbed his shoulder and sucked in air quickly through his teeth. Maybe Mrs. Bowe could help. No. He wouldn’t go to her begging. When the night’s work was done he’d go ask Mother Peale for help. He tried to push as much of the pain from his mind as he could, and, as if in response, the wound began to numb. He knew he should go home and rest, but his heart, rousing itself at the thought of Beatrice and the hope of seeing her, spoke and lied to him:
If you could only see her again, all might be well. When you look into her eyes, everything shall be restored. Call her back to you. Summon her. Bring her back and your joys shall banish everything else in the world. There shall be no more pain. No more pain. Only love.

As he turned down Fairview Street, he glanced back toward the millpond and said softly, “I will come for you,” before he started to run. With necromantic intentions burning at the edges of his mind, Silas ran down Fairview toward Temple Street and his mother’s house, where his uncle’s rarest and darkest books were still kept, locked away in the north wing.

As he ran, he briefly noticed the awkward weight of the scepter he’d taken from Arvale had vanished from his coat pocket. The scepter had not come with him beyond the gate.
Forget it,
he told himself, starting to run a bit faster. It was the smallest item on his growing list of losses.

W
HEN
D
OLORES
U
MBER HE
ARD THE FRONT DOOR
open, she knew it was her son. She was relieved he was back; part of her worried he was not ever going to come home. He’d been gone for a month.

As Silas walked into the parlor, Dolores could see by his face that he was in pain, and his clothes were torn at the shoulder and stained with blood.

“Christ, Si, what happened to you?”

“Nothing,” he said distractedly, “I’m fine. I fell. I’ll be okay.”

But Dolores could see he was not okay. Her son’s face showed it, and every time he moved his arm, he grimaced and squeezed his eyes closed tightly.

“Take off your coat, Silas.”

“Mom, I said I’m fine. I just fell.”

She walked over to him and started pulling off his coat.

“Mom! I said—”

“I don’t care what you said, Silas. You show me, or by God . . .”

“All right, all right.” Silas removed his coat and jacket and then, with difficulty, unbuttoned the top of his shirt and slid it down.

Dolores’s heart nearly stopped at what she saw. “Jesus Christ! Silas, what the hell happened to you?”

“I told you, I fell and hurt my shoulder.” He wasn’t even trying to lie.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the malicious glyph burned into her son. All about the lines torn through his flesh, the skin rose up red and angry. She didn’t know what kind precisely, but she knew this was a cursing mark. Someone was trying to kill her son. Her face paled as she pulled his shirt back up over the wound.

“Silas, we need to see someone about this,” she said, stumbling over her words. Who could help them? Mother Peale? Possibly, but this was no Narrows shanty spell.

Silas kept looking back at the stairs with an anxious look.

“Mom,” he said, “I don’t want you to get worried, but I need to go upstairs.”

“Those doors are locked, Silas, and they are not going to be opened again.”

He looked at her, all expression gone from his face and said, “It’s important. Please.”

“Silas! You know what went on up there. That’s all in the past. We don’t go into that wing.”

“Mom, I just want to read and rest. I am not of afraid of this house or anything that happened in it. Please.”

But then Dolores thought if he went upstairs and relaxed, it might give her a chance to go get help. Maybe, if Silas stayed put, she could run out without worrying he was off getting into more trouble. “All right, Silas, if it’s important to you, you can go up there for a bit, but why not rest downstairs first.” She didn’t think he’d wait, but it was worth a try to buy her more time. “I was just about to go out. How about when I get back, I’ll unlock the door for you? I won’t be gone long, and when I get home, I’ll dig up that key. How about that?” She could tell he wasn’t listening to a word she said.
Fine,
she thought.
I’ll go get help and fight with him later.

“Silas, please wait for me. You look terrible. Sit down here and wait. Please say you will.”

“I will.”

His answer was cold, mechanical. A portion of light had left his eyes and he stared at her, unblinking.

Without another word, Dolores went into the hall and grabbed her coat, calling back over her shoulder, “I’ll be back real soon, Si. Fix yourself something if you like. You just relax until I come home!”

As she went out the front door, she could already hear him on the staircase. Was he going to break down the door up there? On the sidewalk, she looked back and saw lights on now in the north wing.
How the hell . . . ?
She mustn’t stop. She started to walk fast.

Dolores knew that her son was in bad trouble. She knew it. As she walked, her mind started to play out every horrible scenario it could imagine. She saw herself walking back into the house and finding Silas cold and dead on the carpet of the parlor. “Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ . . . ,” she said, and before she could stop herself, she was sobbing. She knew she wasn’t going to Mother Peale’s.

There was only one place in Lichport where she might find the kind of help Silas needed.

“
W
ELL, THIS IS QUITE THE SURPRI
SE,”
said the first of the three.

“Indeed,” said the second, “especially considering what you said to us on your last visit. We thought you’d brought your baby to us for a blessing . . . because he’d gotten such an awkward start in life.”

“But she called us meddlers,” said the first.

“So long ago,” whispered the third. “Hardly worth mentioning.”

“We’d thought you’d forgotten about us,” the first said.

“No. I have not forgotten you,” said Dolores in a low voice, her eyes running wildly over the tapestry. There were hastily stitched depictions of a dark figure striking someone wearing a large coat. Was it Silas? There was the same youthful form, leaning over a desk covered with books. Several unknotted threads still hung from it, as though it had only recently been stitched down. In the scene, a menacing shadow of black wool was hanging from the ceiling of the room just above the figure’s head.

Back and forth, Dolores’s eyes scanned the tapestry for signs of her son.

“Can’t you look upon us, even now?”

Dolores raised her head and looked at the three women. They were cloaked in tattered sackcloth and their faces were streaked with ashes. In their hands they held an unfinished winding sheet. While they stared at Dolores, their hands continued embroidering its edges.

“So, Dolores Umber, you have come to observe with us the ancient rites of passage? That is good. To have the mother of the Janus present as we weave and embroider his burial shroud is indeed an honor. Will you take up needle and thread and join our work at last?”

“No . . . I cannot. I have come to ask you—”

“She is here to sue for his life,” the second of the three interrupted with disappointment weighing down her words, her needle pausing its work.

“Is this true, Dolores Umber?” the first asked. “Do you come here on behalf of your son, to beg? It is too late. The curse will hold. His spool has raveled down to thrums. A great pity, for we had such high hopes for him.” And the first glanced at her sisters with a knowing look in her eyes and nodded slowly as if to say,
Almost there.

“Besides,” said the second, “you should be grateful. Had Amos not been so talented, Silas would never have lived even this long.”

“Silas does not know I am here. I have come because I have failed him so many times and now I must . . . if I can . . . I must help him. You must help him!”

“Does she ask us or tell us?” said the third, raising an ash-encrusted eyebrow.

“She would do better to beg,” the second said to the third, “for we find compulsion a most unsavory dish, even here, upon the eve of the funeral feast.”

“I
am
begging you! Please!” Dolores cried, falling to her knees on the floor. She struck her breast with her fist and cast down her eyes. “I know you owe him something. He is important to you. I know that.”

But the third corrected her. “That depends on where you’re standing. We might, however, agree to an exchange. We cannot annul the decree, that is not within our power. The curse is a terrible one, wrought by a powerful spirit, and its price must be paid . . . one way or another.”

“But,” said the second, relishing the words, “if there were another sacrifice who was willing . . . a worthy sacrifice . . .”

The aspects of the three were growing darker as they spoke. Older, wilder. A fire leapt up in the cold hearth at the center of the room.

“Only fair,” said the third.

“A life for a life,” added the second.

Her heart almost stopped when she heard those words. Still, something in Dolores had known that it would come to this, that an Umber man would be the death of her one way or another. It was for her son. She was ready to do whatever was required. She opened her mouth as if to argue, but then thought,
For my child, anything, anything.

“You realize,” said the first, “we would do this only for a woman, and a mother, someone with strength. You know this seals it?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dolores said, resigned. “I’ve always known that.”

“Then it’s a bargain?” the first of the three asked, leaning in close to her.

“Yes.” Dolores nodded slowly in assent, but quietly thought to herself,
We shall see.

“You know there must be blood,” stated the third. It was not a question.

“I understand.”

The first of the three bent down and pulled a long thread from the hem of Dolores’s dress. She cut it in half with small silver shears and handed one part to the second of the three who held it briefly while she began to pull out the stitches depicting Silas in the tapestry. Then the second drew up another spool from the floor, black flax, and used it to stitch down the piece of thread from Dolores’s dress, quickly covering it over, embroidering the shape of a woman upon a bier.

The first examined the new stitches on the tapestry. Tiny particles of ash fell from her face as she pulled a thread from the now ripped-out embroidered form of Silas that hung loosely from the weaving. Turning back, the first then plucked a hair from Dolores’s head. These she twisted together with the piece from Dolores’s dress into a tight, thin thread. She drew a tiny bone needle from her gown and stood next to Dolores.

“Dolores Umber, do you come here of your own free will?”

“I do.”

“And do you make this sacrifice willingly?”