“I’m catching up with myself,” I said, which made Eldric laugh.
At least we wouldn’t be going into the heart of the swamp, which meant I was unlikely to hurt anyone. The fighting lesson was to take place in a meadow called the Scars, not because we were interested in acquiring any, but because it was dryish and largish and free of crops. At the far end of the Scars rose the pumping station, or at least what was left of it.
“Funny about the pumping station,” said Eldric.
“Funny,” I said.
The pumping station was already being rebuilt. As soon as it was all brash and red-brickibus, Rose would fall ill. I had another plan, though. We could stow away on the London-Swanton line, once it was up and running. It was behind schedule, which was troubling. Rose had to leave the Swampsea while she continued well. No matter how far we traveled, Rose would die of the swamp cough if the Boggy Mun infected her again before she left.
It turns out there are two ways to make a fist. If you make one sort of fist, you punch your opponent. If you make the other sort, you break your thumb.
Eldric curled my fingers into place, set my thumb upon them, just so. How casually he did it, as though he touched girls every day. Perhaps he did. Had he ever really touched a girl, touched her in the Pearl and Artie way?
Such a nosy parkerium, Briony!
“Soften your knees, sink into your heels. You want to keep yourself low.”
“I have an advantage there.” I softened, I sank.
Eldric punched, slowly, just to show me, keeping his arms close to his sides, turning his fist to make the punch, turning it back when he snatched it away. “It’s the snatching away that gives it power,” he said. “Also, by pivoting from the hip. Never punch from the elbow.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Only a stupidibus would fight like that.”
Guess what? I can punch as well as make people laugh.
Soft knees, weight low, sink into heels. Hips pivot—wham! My fist flew forward.
“Nicely done!” said Eldric, although it had glanced off of his palm like a pebble.
“Why aren’t you begging for mercy?”
“I make a point never to do so,” said Eldric. “It puts one at a disadvantage.”
He laughed and I laughed, but the clergyman’s dutiful daughter didn’t laugh. That girl was gone; wolfgirl had returned. Wolfgirl, who was leaf dance and moon claw and tooth gleam. When Jupiter sizzled the air with lightning bolts, she caught them on the fly.
“Nice throw, Jupiter!”
“Nice catch, wolfgirl!”
Her mouth was a cavern of stars.
Eldric adjusted my hands. “You want to draw your right hand in a bit.”
The witch nodded. Eldric assumed she was right-handed. But the witch was left-handed, and she had the second sight, which meant she saw the Strangers wriggling from beneath the great stones that dotted the Scars. She saw the Strangers weaving and wobbling toward her on their tiny string legs. But Eldric hadn’t the second sight; he was blind to the Strangers, so she pretended blindness too. She showed him her new fist-making skills; he gave her fist his undivided attention.
One doesn’t laugh at the Strangers, despite their spaghetti arms and legs, despite their outsized heads that loll about on spaghetti necks. The Strangers are proud and powerful. The Strangers control the harvest.
“Excellent fistibus,” said Eldric, but he wasn’t done with my hand. He inspected my left palm, the pucker of scars.
“There’s no fortune to be read in that palm,” I said, but of course he wanted to know about it; of course he’d been dying to ask since we first met. “Do you want the version of the story in which I’m a hero, or do you want the true version?”
“Both,” said Eldric.
“Greedy!” I said.
“I was quite ill,” I said, which I mentioned not because it’s true, although it is, but because it makes people feel sorry for me. Even a witch wants sympathy. “My memory of the event is rather foggy.” This is also true. “But I know I was writing one of those stories Rose is forever mentioning, and I suppose I smelled the fire—in any event, I found myself at the library door.”
Here’s where my account of the fire diverges from the truth. I had, indeed, been writing, but the Horrors alone know what possessed me to stumble into the library. What made me call up the fire?
I don’t think I’ll ever know. Not even Stepmother could venture any theories. And burning my hand—well, I’d been ill, and perhaps I hadn’t been strong enough to control the fire.
“You must remember,” I said, “that this is the heroic version.”
“I have it well in mind,” said Eldric.
“I attempted to rescue my stories, not for my own sake, but for Rose’s. The stories soothe her, and there are so very many she loved. I knew it would take me years to write them all again, and even then, they’d never be the same.”
“I believe that,” said Eldric. “Heroic version or not.” He curled my fingers into a fist.
“As for burning my hand in the attempt,” I said, “I think I must blame my illness.”
It’s unsettling to straddle two worlds, one foot in the human world, speaking to Eldric of scars and fires, the other foot in the world of the Old Ones, where the Strangers look at me all slanty and sideways beneath their toadstool bonnets, their tongues flapping from their lolly-bobbing heads.
It seems odd that a day given over to bad boys and boxing should turn into a day of memories. But so it was. My memories were dull and gray, like a photograph. The books were black, the fire gray. A cloud of white lace rushed into the library. I didn’t recognize her at first, not Stepmother, because it wasn’t possible that she be there. She couldn’t rise from her sickbed. Her bracelets were the color of cinders, although they jangled in the key of gold.
Flames leapt into the room. They sharpened their teeth on the floor. And then I couldn’t see, there was only sound—a jangle of gold, a woman’s voice, a girl’s screams. The girl had burnt her hand.
How much pain, though, must Stepmother have endured to rush to the fire? To try to save me? I never asked, of course.
“My turn.” I’ve always wanted to know about the scar that dips into Eldric’s eyebrow. Eldric treated me to an account of the Great Pudding Caper, which made me laugh so hard I had to stop fighting to catch my breath.
“Mistress!”
Now the Strangers spoke. “Make us our story, mistress!”
They spoke one at a time, their voices identical, one picking up precisely where the last left off. If you were to close your eyes, you’d think it a single voice.
Punch, kick, block. I must get rid of my skirts if I am truly to kick.
“Make us our story, mistress! Our story, it need must be telled. The story o’ the dark earth, o’ the roots, the roots what us tends all the spring long that you fo’ak might have victuals an’ beer.”
Kick, punch, block, punch. All those stories, the stories of the Old Ones, they burnt in the fire.
“Scribe it to us, mistress. Scribe o’ the clay. Clay, it be right comely, but you fo’ak doesn’t see it. You doesn’t see the crystals what it got, you doesn’t see ’em sliding and gliding.”
The Strangers are the ones to know such things. The Strangers rule the underground, not the Devil. They ripen the corn and paint colors on the flowers and gild the autumn leaves.
“Make us stories o’ the underground. Make us the story o’ the Unquiet Spirit what tosses in her winding sheet. She be lying with them cold worms an’ don’t nobody hear her shrilling.”
Punch, block, kick.
“The Unquiet Spirit, she be shrilling out a name. Tha’ knows it fine, that name. It be tha’ own particular name. It be
Stepmother screamed my name the day of the fire. Stepmother, who ran to the library despite her injury. I have a theory about how she might have managed to pull off such a feat. It comes in the form of an equation: Love + Fear = Herculean Strength. It’s how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from their children. It’s how . . . well, actually, I oughtn’t to speculate, never having experienced the Love portion of the equation. But I did read
