One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (33 page)

I laid the sleeping baby between the broad arms of the chair and climbed onto the sorcerer’s back.

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I thought I would die on that flight. Somehow, I survived it.

It was still dark when we reached the lake, the grey-edged dark of the hours before dawn. Forsythian alighted on the stone arch of a ruined pavilion, which trembled beneath his weight, and allowed me to climb down before transforming back into a man. For a moment I thought he would stumble off the arch and I spread my arms to catch him. It was not fear for him that motivated me, but the knowledge he was the only way I would ever leave this island. But he did not fall. Regaining his balance, he swung himself down into a crouch on the overgrown ground beneath, and gestured silently.

The stone chest was at the centre of the pavilion. It looked to me like the coffin of a person so unloved their grave had been entirely forgotten, left to the briars and snow.

I looked to Forsythian for instruction. He simply nodded again towards the chest, his assistance apparently at an end. The cold still air sank quickly through my layers of wool and linen, snow and mud darkening the hem of my skirt as I crossed the pavilion. Having left my gloves behind in the hurry to depart, I wrapped my hand in the already soiled cloth to sweep the lid of the chest clear. Thorns bit through the pitiful protection, dripping blood a stark red against grey stone and white snow. I braced my hands against the icy lid and pushed with all my strength.

It slid backward, unresisting, and fell to the ground with an echoing crack of splitting stone. Inside the opened tomb was a box. I remembered very little of my visit to the necromancer, but the box I knew. Small and silver, encrusted with diamonds. It had been a wedding present, of all ironies, given what I had asked him to put inside. I had worn the key to its ornate lock on a ribbon around my neck for more than half a year, in hope. My fingers shook as they lifted it from beneath my bodice, letting the tiny silver key fall into my palm.

I knelt on the frozen ground, barely noticing the cold, and placed the box before me. After all that I had done to be here, I felt now like a puppet, going through the predestined motions of another’s decision. The key turned in the lock. Bloodless fingers opened the box and reached inside.

I felt something as light and fragile as a captive bird between my hands. In the dim grey gloom of impending sunrise, it looked like a vast ruby and was almost as cold. I knew then something was wrong, terribly wrong. My hands tightened their hold instinctively. And the heart I held, poor broken thing, crumbled away to dust.

It was as if the puppet’s strings had been cut. I fell. Crumpled sideways in the snow, I felt my blood turn stagnant, freezing in my veins. Something dark crossed my vision and I was lifted on soft black wings, my head lolling backwards to stare blankly into the burning sunrise, my mouth open, shaping words I couldn’t say. The hollow in my heartless chest widened into a cavern and engulfed me completely.

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Hearts are heavy. They ache and fracture. They fail.

They forget.

Meriel opened her eyes on a moth-eaten settee that was both familiar and unfamiliar, something she had seen in a dream. She wore a white linen chemise that was stained with dry mud; a green woollen dress lay draped over the blankets at her feet and it too was stained with mud, and blood. Her hands lay atop the covers on either side of her body, scratched and sore, but intact.

She watched the winter sunlight pattern the walls as though it might write out what it was she couldn’t remember. Her chest ached, a slow throb like a bruise. Then she heard the crying and sat up quickly. In a nest of blankets in the chair beside her was a baby —
her
baby. Without thinking she threw back the covers and stepped out of bed to take Torren into her arms. He grabbed at her loose hair with tiny flailing fingers and Meriel laughed, dropping a kiss onto his downy dark head.
 

“
You’re going to drive me mad,” she predicted.

Later she put on the green dress and gathered up the few things left scattered about the room that she recognised as her own. Wrapping Torren securely in a shawl, she left the strange, cluttered room in which she’d woken and went through the quiet corridors of the even stranger house. She could not quite remember how she had come to be here and it seemed the best thing she could do was leave. She thought once, as she passed through a canyon of unshelved books, that she saw a hem of black robe disappearing between the stacks, but when she reached the same point she could see no one there and no door through which they might have disappeared.

“
Come on, Torren,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Only she took a wrong turning. The wrong set of steps, a mistake anyone could make. Instead of reaching the road outside, she found herself in a courtyard, where a bare-branched apple tree stretched bony fingers towards the pale winter sky and impossible red apples lay on the paving stones around its roots.

Meriel’s heart leapt. She caught her breath and dropped to her knees, clutching Torren against her chest, reaching out to take an apple into her gloved hand.

“
It was the best I could do.”

She twisted around at the voice, familiar and not familiar, but knew even as she did that she wouldn’t see him. “Forsythian,” she whispered, remembering.

“
Apples and blood,” he said. “I’ve never made a heart so quickly before. I refuse to be held responsible if you find it loving all the wrong things.” He paused for a long moment. “Though it seems someone has already found their place in it.”

Meriel looked at Torren, small and red-faced and hers. “Yes,” she said quietly. “Thank you, Forsythian.”

“
If you want to leave,” he said, “it’s the other stair you want.”

He didn’t say goodbye. Meriel stayed in the courtyard for a few minutes, waiting, then eventually went back inside and found her way to the right passage, where golden-spined suits of armour stared open-mouthed. She let herself out and stood on the top steps, looking at the road. It led away through the forest to towns and castles and people she had once used to love.

She lifted her foot to step down. Her chest contracted painfully.

She looked up and saw black trailing from a window. It might have been a sleeve, or a wing. It didn’t matter. Cradling her sleeping son in her arms, Meriel turned around and stepped back through the open doors into the house, her home, where her heart was.

And when the soldiers later came in search of the queen and her son, all they could see where the sorcerer’s fortress should have been was an apple tree and a laughing crow.

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I
’d c
ome for a reason, although that was easy to forget now I was actually here.
 

The walls towered over my head, red brick pocked with last century’s unsuccessful cannonfire and entangled in a web of lush summer-green vines. I smelled damp earth from the night’s rain and sulphuric residue, like the dust of fireworks. Arched windows, some shuttered and some open, peered between strands of ivy and climbing rose. I saw a black sleeve trailing across a jutting sill and couldn’t help wondering, a little pointlessly, if it belonged to him.

The sleeve disappeared. I reached up to knock at the brass-studded ebony doors, a good two feet taller at their peak than I was myself, and flinched back reflexively when one swung inward at my touch. For the residence of a man in such demand, it didn’t seem very well protected. Perhaps reputation was guard dog enough. I drew up my skirts to step over the threshold, as though the thick dust on the other side of the doorstep might be impetus enough to ignite them. For all I knew, it might.

Suits of armour lined the musty hallway on both sides. Spikes jutted from their strangely shaped spines; the elongated helmets gaped jaws that did not look designed for a human head. Pushing through the unlocked doors at the other end of the hall, I found myself in an enormous circular chamber where diagonal stairways cut a wide wooden
X
between floor and ceiling. Light filtered from windows so high up I had to tilt my head back as far as it would go just to ascertain their existence. Green vines poured through their arched mouths to claim the inside of the fortress as they had done the outer walls.
 

There was no one in sight and nothing for me to do but choose a stair. Bearing in mind the telltale sleeve I had seen, I chose to go right. My footsteps echoed in the great empty chamber; when I laid my hand on the bannister, it came away grey with dust. If what I saw and felt was an enchantment only, the illusion of abandonment, I was in skilled hands indeed.

The upper gallery was at least inhabited, if the teetering stacks of cobwebbed books obscuring the walls and their civilisation of spiders could be counted as such. Here and there a door was visible enough to be opened, and none were locked, but neither were the rooms beyond occupied. The light filtering through their diamond-paned, dust-coated windows was waning from afternoon into evening when at last I found the owner of the black sleeve upon which I had placed such faith. I knew the moment I saw him that he was not who I had come to find.

For one thing, he was aged in his fifties at the oldest and therefore far too young. For another, he seemed to have been as oblivious to my presence as I had been to his. When I opened his door he jerked around in astonishment, dropping the slender blue-bound volume he had been reading. He dived immediately to retrieve it before straightening to look at me.

“
How long have you been there?” he asked, brushing off the book and laying it down on the nearest lectern. There were at least five of these scattered about the room, some displaying open books, others piled up with loose maps and sketches. It was a scene of total disarray, not power at all. The man himself was tall and gangling, his bald skull ringed with woolly brown curls, his eyes a milky, mildly inquisitive blue. His black robe was too large for his thin frame and streaked with dusty handprints.

“
I arrived an hour or more ago,” I said. There was a broad brocade chair heaped with more of the sorcerer’s interminable supply of books close at hand; I shifted the pile onto the floor and replaced them with myself, too tired to care about the inevitable cloud of dust. “Is the sorcerer Forsythian in residence? I have business with him.”

“
Oh,” said the black-robed man. “I thought you might be a student. They turn up every so often, you know, though it is terribly easy to miss them. Sometimes months go by before I realise they’re here at all, but when we meet I do try to help. It’s such an effort to get this far, and I have been here the longest, after all.”

I frowned, sure I had misunderstood. “You are a student yourself?”

“
I didn’t think so,” he said, “until I came here. I intended to challenge Forsythian to a sorcerer’s duel — very melodramatic, I know — but when I arrived he was nowhere to be found. I stopped looking eventually and started reading instead. I’ve been here ever since.”

“
And how long has that been?”

“
Around twenty years, I should think,” he said brightly. “Oh, forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Alabast Tern.” He held out a bony-knuckled hand. Ensconced in the surprisingly comfortable chair, I accepted it briefly.

“
You may call me Meriel,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken my name aloud since I was married and it sounded a little strange, exposed to the open air. “But you must have seen Forsythian since you came? He can’t be dead.”

It was a singularly stupid thing to say, since at any time any one can be dead. Just because the sorcerer had not lived long enough to answer my request did not mean he had to be alive. To my relief, however, Alabast was nodding.

“
Eventually, yes, I did,” he said. “In this very room, as it happens. I was reading a book of Galadean poetry aloud and stopped halfway through a rather fine ballad to tend the fire. When I returned for my book, he was there. He didn’t like the way I was reciting and insisted on doing the rest of the ballad himself.”

The man seemed inclined to wander from the point at hand. I tried to usher him back to the line of questioning I really wanted answered. “Where is he now?”

Alabast looked around vaguely, as though expecting to find the sorcerer folded up somewhere on a shelf. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “How long has it been, then? I’m afraid I lose track of time quite often. I’m sure he was here in the summer.”

“
It’s summer now,” I said patiently. I was glad I had elected to sit. It felt as though I might be asking questions for some time. “Do you think Forsythian is here?”

“
Oh, bound to be, bound to be,” Alabast assured me. He took up the little blue book he had been reading when I had interrupted him and thumbed through the gilt-edged pages for his place. “He never leaves the fortress, that I know of. He’ll turn up when he wants to talk to you.”

My right hand rested against the slight swelling of my stomach. I could feel the hollow inside my chest where fear should have been. “How long will that take?” I demanded. “I need to speak with him now.”

“
I’m sorry,” Alabast said. He looked at me over the top of his book and smiled a little ruefully. “If he wants to see you, you will see him. If he doesn’t want to see you, you never will. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course.”