An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 3

  “Right,” I said.

  He nodded and set his glass aside. “I’ll be back in a moment, then.”

  I waited in that dim room by the crackling fire. The dry fruit-and-wood scent of the brandy mingled pleasantly with the resin heat of the fire. I had never noticed the smells quite so strongly before. Come to it, I could smell the cold and organic remnant of mud on my boots. The whisper-faint remains of my sweat, nearly obliterated by the dowsing in the evening rain. Some side effect of my multiple seizures? I found it both intriguing and unnerving.

  Stirley returned with a small vial and a folded sheet of paper, both of which he tucked into a pouch. He handed it to me. “There. That should do for several doses.” When I grasped it, he didn’t let go until I met his eyes. “And Morgan, I expect you to take it if things go from bad to worse. You understand? This disease may not make you insane, but enough pain... that does drive men to madness.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  He nodded and helped me up. I still couldn’t quite believe my feet and even for me my clumsiness was acute. I often wondered if I would have been graceful had I been born without the burden of this ailment; if I would have moved with Radburn’s easiness, Guy’s lazy power, or Chester’s fencer’s quickness. As it was, I had long since developed an economy of motion, abrupt and cautious. There was nothing of pleasure in it, no animal health in it.

  It made me think again of Ivy.

  Stirley packed me into a carriage and sent me on my way. I hunched in the back with my cold and nerveless fingers clamped on the bag, damp hair clinging to my back. The driver left me on my stairs much poorer for the trip, and I made my laborious way up them to my flat. Inside I rebuilt the fire, ignoring the bag on my table. I continued to ignore it while tugging off my wet clothes, pretended I had forgotten its presence while wiping myself off with a damp rag and didn’t even look at it after putting on clothes to sleep in and a dressing gown.

  But then I surrendered and allowed myself to stare at the bag, so innocuous. As if I needed a new vice with all the weaknesses I already struggled to control. I imagined myself as a poppy addict, my already pale skin gone nigh translucent, black hair dull and uncombed, a tangled mess falling over staring eyes to shadow knife-slash ribs. The eyes would be the worst; the gray of my eyes lost between their black rims and the ink-spill dilation that poppy inspired.

  I pushed my glasses up my nose and drew the robe close. The pain had not been unbearable after all. I could imagine suffering it if I could avoid drugs.

  And yet I left the bag there, in plain view.

  Much as I wanted to make the morning lecture on poesy, I found myself too distressed to venture from my flat—what was to say that I would not find myself afflicted with a new, unexpected episode? For the entire morning, then, I waited for any signs of weakness, any warning that I was due for my one episode of the day... but aside from a frisson of sensitivity that lingered from my previous seizure, my body remained unmoved.

  Consequently, I arrived at Leigh in time for the afternoon class on battles of historical significance, relieved that the pattern of years past had reasserted itself.

  My friends acted none the wiser, of course. As far as they were concerned, I’d had a single unfortunate reaction to chocolate blended with spoiled cream. I did not enlighten them; my distaste for falsehood, even falsehood by omission, was easily overborne by a far more powerful need for privacy and a hatred of pity.

  Late that afternoon I went my way through the hallways on the third floor of the library, seeking my master professor. I needed few excuses for these visits, for he was always glad to host me: our rambling discussions had inspired my choice of dissertation topic, and he was so broadly read that it was a rare day I did not learn something by listening. That I could also rest for a time was not a small factor in my decision; the trip up the stairs was arduous, but my welcome certain.

  His door was open when I arrived, but when I glanced inside I didn’t find him. I had to search—the clutter in his office had long since conquered the furniture. Books were stacked in untidy columns where they weren’t perched in unlikely corners; sheaves of parchments nested on every flat surface including all three chairs, and folios in various states of disrepair were scattered hither and yon. The casual observer might have guessed this chaos, but somehow it was all cataloged in Professor Eyre’s mind; he knew where everything was, and to clean the mess would have rendered him mute with helplessness.

  Of course, I was no casual observer, which is how I knew the folio spread on top of the precarious desk pile was new. I navigated the short distance from door to desk and craned my head to see if I could catch some of the text.

  There was no text: only pictures. Not just sketches, but full miniature paintings in something that flaked with age around its edges of gold and silver leaf. They were nothing less than illuminations, but without the stylization typical of that art; they were very concerned with proportion and naturalism, even if they failed in that aim. The people dancing in the illustrations were too lithe, their limbs a touch too long, their necks more akin to a swan’s than a person’s.

  Eyre would have my eyes for it, but I turned the pages anyway, looking at each succeeding depiction of these gracile dancers lounging beneath trees improbable in girth, being dressed by servants, holding balls in enormous rooms clustered with beautiful people. I paused over those depictions, for among the crowds were people short, thick-bodied and coarse: an error in the other direction, too ungainly to be normal rather than too lissome. It was a deft and subtle stylization, then; I was impressed.

  Professor John Eyre walked in on me studying a picture of two of these angels in each other’s embrace, lurid enough to serve in a man’s black folio. He leaned against the doorframe, one hand in his pocket and a quirked smile on his mouth: a middle-aged man in his prime with dark tawny skin and hair gone white at the temples and sideburns, and hazel eyes that sparkled behind his spectacles.

  “Ah, so what do you think of those, my student?”

  “They’re excellently done,” I said. “Something new in the library?”

  “Sent from Vigil,” he said. “They just unearthed it in one of the sealed rooms in their library.”

  Vigil’s Athenaeum was legend. Perched on the northern border of the country, the city faced the barren winter wilderness from which, folklore maintained, demons and dark wizards crawled to feast on the blood of the living and weave abominations from their magic. History had little to say on the subject of demons and dark wizards, yet entire sections of Vigil were built on inexplicable ruins too recent for paper to have disintegrated, and the city had basements and vaults not only locked against intrusion, but cemented shut.

  “From Vigil,” I said, suppressing a flutter of excitement. “Were there more?”

  “They sent only this folio, but you’ve been looking at the paintings only,” he said. “There’s a text...” He flipped forward in the text, and something about his grin warned me. “Here.”

  His ink-stained fingers twirled the page around to face me.

  ‘On Elves and Their Ancient Magics.’ Script bold as you please. The first sentence ran: “Once elves were our allies before they betrayed our trust and we drove them from our borders. Let them find their own country, the King said.”

  “Well!” I exclaimed with a laugh. “This is a new variation on an old story.” I turned a few more of the pages to face me. “Yet another variation on fairies, it seems.”

  “I think you should take it with you, give it a good reading,” Eyre said.

  “Sir?” I asked, surprised. “You want me to take this out of the library?”

  “You’re not going to drop it in mud, are you, my student?”

  “No!” I exclaimed.

  “Set it on fire?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Lose it? Sell it? Crumple it up and throw it at your classmates?”

  I gave up and laughed. “No, no and no. But accidents hap
pen.”

  Eyre closed the folio, revealing a second one beneath it made of stiff oiled leather, one that sealed along its edges with lips that folded in toward the center. “This should keep it safe enough from light and rain. You’ll want to read it... it will give you very interesting grounds for research.”

  I received it gingerly. The oil smelled rich and musky, slick beneath my fingertips. “I imagine so. Something completely new! Have you read anything about these creatures before?”

  “Yes,” Eyre said. “In histories.”

  I looked up at him, stunned.

  “We have reason to believe they were real,” Eyre said. “They are just no longer discussed.”

  Had there been a place to sit, I would have sunk onto it. “Then the folklore about faerie kings and demons...?”

  “Did you think we dreamed it completely?” Eyre said. He removed his spectacles and wiped them absently with a sleeve.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Most everyone, I suppose,” Eyre said. “But no, there is strong evidence that men are not the only race to have walked the earth.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” I asked, irritation clipping the words. “You’ve known for months this was my area of interest. Is there some sort of academic conspiracy to hide the evidence of other races from humble students of history?”

  “Of a sort,” Eyre said, sitting.

  I gaped at him.

  “It’s not intentional,” Eyre said. “Not on our part, anyway. What manuscripts exist describing them are so few I can only imagine that they were destroyed, for what reason we can only speculate. There is the occasional mention of a betrayal but never of its nature, despite that it must have been vile indeed to inspire such vituperation. What you hold in your arms there is unusual in the extreme. It is otherwise so difficult to engage in any research at all in this arena that few people try. Those of us who chose to grew... rather protective of their memories. Ridiculous, really, given how few people care. Something with so little relevance to our contemporary lives, and the elves well and truly gone if they existed as we suspect. What is there to care about, then?”

  “This is... “ I shook my head. “Staggering.”

  “You’ll take good care of the book, there?” Eyre said, turning his attention to some of the papers on his desk.

  “Of course,” I said, holding it against my chest.

  “Then I shall see you when you’re done with it. I expect we’ll have much to discuss.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said and let myself out. In the hall I looked down at the folio. If Eyre was correct, what I held in my hands would show evidence of a real link between history and the genesis of the folk stories I studied. It was beyond price.

  I hurried as much as my limbs permitted. My table, lamp and notes awaited me.

  The journey home seemed impossibly long, and I begrudged every moment of it. I had my coat off before the door slammed shut behind me, and such was my distraction that I didn’t even exchange the uncomfortable layers of my street clothing in favor of a dressing gown. I lit the oil lamp on my table, grabbed my notes and sat with my find to read.

  I refilled the lamp twice while reading, my quill forgotten on my notes. And I read... and read….

  My God, these people. I could hardly believe they’d existed; they would have been a wonder walking on earth. And the first time the text mentioned magic, I leaned back in my chair and squeezed the bridge of my nose. How much of this particular folio was history and how much of it fancy? Magic belonged to folklore, and if one believed, to the canon of the Church, which had been founded on the premise that St. Winifred had been divinely empowered to fight the powers of evil. But such things were no longer the province of civilized conversation. We had moved into a more enlightened age, and magic was an artifact of earlier, more barbaric times. One saw belief in magic only in the credulous.

  It was not difficult, however, to posit the existence of other races. Indeed, the absence of them posed far more interesting questions. I flipped through the pages, seeking any information on what had happened to the elves, but beyond that first sentence about being driven from the kingdom the author offered no hint as to what had become of them or where they’d come from. The King in that opening paragraph was later referred to as “King R----”, which described a good nine kings I could recall without consulting my references.

  I looked again at one of the paintings. An unlikely man with hair trailing past society’s fashions down to the hip; my own, considered an extravagance at just beneath my shoulder-blades, wasn’t as long as the shortest mane depicted on the men of the race. And his was painted in silver leaf, a radiance that gathered the light from my lamp and set it sliding like a halo around his brow.

  No, not solely the light’s play. I focused on his yellow eyes, my fingers drifting over the page. I could feel the tooth of the paper through the paint, as if my skin had become as sensitive as another pair of eyes. I read the caption beneath the image with them alone, merely by brushing my fingertips across it: “The King of Elves could call upon the magic of any of his subjects, were they willing.”

  His honey irises lost their crisp edges. My hand slid off the desk as I fell from the chair. Crumpled on the ground, I reflected that when I woke from this seizure I would be cramped from having landed so gracelessly. I waited for it to commence.

  But instead I lay there as in a torpor, my body deaf to my commands. I tried reaching for the chair’s leg; my fingers responded not at all, not even with a flutter. I could not stretch myself out of my awkward slump, could not tilt my head to relieve the crimp in my neck, could not even flick my eyes in another direction. My body had become a prison.

  The seizures had always been frightening. Yesterday’s pain had been unbelievable. The insanity unthinkable. But this... would I lie here, mind active but body catatonic until someone thought to find me? Would I be able to move again? I imagined a life constantly arranged by servants like an overgrown doll and could not even open my mouth to moan.

  It was just a spell. It would pass. I forced myself to believe.

  When I became aware of the patterns in the floor, I could not say. But presently I felt them snaking beneath my hip and thigh. Each narrow line in the wood pressed on my flesh, as separate as thin knives. The longer I focused on the grain the more of it I sensed, like a maze beneath my side, up through my shoulder... God, my cheek. The pattern was so sharp I wondered if I would rise with a knot scarred into my jaw and temple. And yet, where I expected hardness, I found the floor giving beneath me, just the faintest suggestion.

  From there the world engulfed me, drowned me. The thin satin threads of my own hair strewn over my neck. The pungency of the open ink bottle and the barely palpable scent of the ink from the parchments. Their dust-and-age smell. The shift of the air currents running above me like the precursors of breezes. How had I failed to notice the intensity of the world? I could barely see for the weight of it. I longed to close my eyes—

  —and managed. The sensations faded, leaving behind a peculiar musky scent and the feeling that I’d been wrapped in fur. I sank into it and hoped for oblivion, and for once someone listened.

  The seizure came after I woke. I weathered it well enough and rolled onto my knees, spreading my palms on the floor. Now it seemed hard, the grain barely noticeable. I frowned. What was happening to me?

  And then the pain came again.

  Somehow, in the space of a day, my mind had shed all memory of how bad it had been. Even as it flooded my limbs and blinded me, I found myself disbelieving it. Flesh simply could not feel so much agony without dying. It couldn’t be possible. And yet it was. Oh God, it was. I pitched forward, head first, and fell into a trembling ball. I had the wild idea of knocking myself senseless, but that would have required standing and my legs would not cooperate. Nothing answered me, except with incandescence. I wept and my tears fell like lacerations across burning skin. This time there were no demons.
No hissing dialogue to focus on; no battle-torn field, gruesome with storm and gore. No distraction at all. As sweat slicked my blouse to my skin and matted my hair against my neck, I desperately wished for someone, anyone to take shape out of the shadows to make sense of it... but nothing came, and no one came, and I suffered alone.

  The release was abrupt, so abrupt my body flopped against the floor. No more heightened sensations, no more spastic movements, no more pain. And still I wept. My isolated episode had repeated itself.

  How often? Every day? More than once? Would the seizures increase or would these new ones replace them? And how, how could I live with them every day?

  Would I ever live a normal life?

  Could I even return to the life I had before?

  I did not rise to change. To eat. To sleep. Not even to read. There on the floor, disconsolate, I lay without the will to rise. And there I slept.

  The following morning I paid for my indulgence in self-pity with a body so stiff I might as well have had a new seizure. The fire had died in the hearth, leaving the flat cold and unwelcoming. I used the chair to pull myself upright and found the manuscript awaiting me on the table.

  Elves. I had been reading about elves, a possible footnote to history. It should have excited me anew, but all I felt was exhaustion. I forced myself to peel off my rumpled clothes and heat water for a bath, and even that effort left me shaking, my hands barely able to close. I fell more than stepped into the tub, steam breaking around my ungainly body.

  Beneath the water I could barely see my own lines: muscle, bone, the crease of skin at hip and knee. It wasn’t an ugly shape. Soft perhaps, for I couldn’t indulge in the sports that kept my peers fit, but thin because I could barely keep food in my body. In repose, sculpted, painted, people might even have called it beautiful. But my clumsiness and pain, my fear of the lurking seizures and the spastic tension they left behind, all of it had stolen my trust. My body was not a vessel; it was an instrument of torment, teasing me with its fine shape while ruining me for any enjoyment of it.