My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (41 page)

He’d lost his third wife this year—to the same fever that took Ivan and Jathry—and he made it no secret that he’d be choosing another for Advent. Why pay a charwoman for work a wife would do for free? And besides, wives were more than just unpaid charwomen, weren’t they? Neve saw him looking the girls over in church like they were his own box of chocolates—
eeny meeny, who am I in the mood for next?
—and she’d felt his gimlet eye settle on herself a few too many times for comfort.

His pupils always looked tiny to her, like painted-on dots.

She told herself she didn’t have to worry. Spear liked to claim that pretty girls made troublesome wives, he’d learned it from experience, and had even said once, for all to hear, “Beauty is free to the eye to enjoy, and the bedroom is dark, after all. But just try pretending your dinner unburned, or your house clean and your children tended.”

In essence, wasn’t their good man of God saying to close your eyes and picture some other man’s wife while you grunt atop the poor homely slave who’s your own?

Neve hated him, and she was honestly sorry for whoever got his gift this morning, but she didn’t think it would be herself. She knew she was pretty, and if she’d never had cause to be grateful for it before, here was proof that there’s a first time for everything. Maybe she’d be the one he pictured in the dark, and that was a notion vile enough to choke on, but she wouldn’t be the one he courted.

She just wouldn’t.

She dressed herself. The shed was frigid; dressing quick was an art learned early. Washing quick was harder; you had to really care to even bother. Neve cared, Lord knows why. At least her basin wasn’t skimmed with ice yet. That would come by January and last through April. Still, this water was kissing cousins to ice, and she was shaking with chill when she yanked on her stockings and slip, her dress and kirtle, her many-pocketed apron, her old, dull boots. Even numb-fingered, it was the work of a minute to bind up her hair, honeysuckle bright, and cover it with a kerchief the color of mud.

And then what? She glanced at the door. On a normal morning, she’d tromp out to the henhouse first thing—not that her sad hen Potpie had been laying of late, but she still checked as a matter of course—but she found herself hesitating and knew well enough why. She was wondering at the state of her porch.

Was it as empty as she’d left it the night before?

“Please God,” she whispered, and right away it struck her as the wrong plea. If there
was
a god, then Neve’s whole life was a crime He had committed against her, and she dared attract no more of his attention.

She looked to the milking stool that served her for a bed stand and drew some strength from what lay upon it.

A dead flower.

How many girls on the Isle of Feathers had a dead flower ready this morning? And then, how many knew there was no courtship so bad that she could afford to reject it?

That was how it worked: You woke on the first of December to find—or not find—a token of affection on the porch. A paper cone of sweets or a whittled bird or a posey, maybe. To reject the suit, you left a dead flower in the spot for the fellow to find the next night. Acceptance was tacit. You did nothing, just rose each morning to see what your future husband had left for you, twenty-four days in a row until the Christmas Eve gather in Scarman’s Hall. That’s where the couples came together under a lacework of paper snowflakes and frosted lamps and sealed their fates with a dance. You set your hand in his and that was it: contract sealed with the clamminess of a girl’s despairing sweat.

How romantic.

Neve had no expectations, but she had a dead flower ready, just in case. It was a thorn lily, left over from summer.

From before the fever.

She lifted it gently. It was crisp as paper, light as nothing. When this flower was alive, Ivan and Jathry were too. Neve had picked it on a Sunday when the three of them climbed up to Fog Cup to inspect the land the boys were going to take. They’d been closing in on Age, though Neve still had nine months to go; the three of them were the youngest and last of the plague orphans, she herself the very youngest, the very last. She’d always known she’d be alone here at the Graveyard sheds for a time before they set her “free” too, but that would have been a different kind of alone: just waiting, just biding time before she could claim her own plot up by the boys’.

She was still going to take the plot, even if it didn’t make sense anymore. The boys had been the farmers. What was she good for? Needlework. That was what they did at the factory. They embroidered lace tablecloths for ships to carry to rich folk on every shore of the Gliding, and Neve was better than passing fair; she was better than good. She was an artist. Even Dame Somnolence said so, calling her “Crow Food” with at least a hint of respect. But a great lot of good were needle and thread when it came to building a house in a drear damp valley and tilling stony soil without a mule, and all the other things she’d have to do to live.

If you could call it living.

Neve was scared clear down to a deep place inside where a part of herself was caged like a creature, mute and huddled and numb. She’d been numb since the heat of August mingled with the heat of fevers, but even so she knew that as long as she kept breathing, life would keep coming at her—like the swarms of beetles when you’re harried enough to take the shortcut through Nasty Gully in springtime. They come flying in your face, loud and buzzing, and get tangled in your hair and in your skirts. They even push their way into your
mouth.

Life would do the same. Neve couldn’t pretend otherwise. In truth, she dreaded the lonely penury of Fog Cup almost as much as she dreaded the breathing weight of a man she couldn’t love, and if there
was
a token on her porch, she knew in her secret heart she’d be a fool not to consider it. But she didn’t
want
to consider it. She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave—brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.

Holding the dead flower, she squared her shoulders.
Brave,
she thought, and went to the door.
Brave,
she thought as she opened it.

But brave she was not when she saw what was sitting there, incongruously fine against the buckled boards of her rotting, charity-shed porch.

It was a Bible bound in red leather and stenciled all over in gold.

Only one man would leave such a gift. One man had done so, in fact, three times before—three times for three wives whose graves now stood in a row, and with plenty of space at the end for that row to grow and keep adding to its collection.
Who’s next?
called the cemetery earth.
Why, the last of the orphans, the artist, the girl with the honeysuckle hair.

Neve clutched her frail lily and stared at the Bible whose pages had been thumbed by dead women. So Spear wanted her after all. In that place inside where her fear was caged like a creature, something stirred and rose, and she spoke a new plea without pausing to think. Not to God, Spear’s coconspirator. God was a newcomer here, carried over on the same stinking ships as the orphans and livestock.

There were older powers in the world than Him.

“Please, Wisha,” whispered Neve, and she felt the forbidden word part the air like the wings of a bird and go forth from her.
Wisha. Dreamer,
it meant in the old tongue. It was an execration to speak it, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt like power, like the birth of a small wind. Neve imagined it skirring its way into the world, new-alive and wild with her own desperate thrum, kicking up eddies of air that might grow, some day, into thunderheads and sink a fleet of ships half a world away. But what good was that to her? Much nearer and in that instant, at the threshold of her freezing shed while rain hissed at the roof and the heavy air pressed down, dense with its absence of voices, she saw something happen. The red leather cover of that unwanted Bible flapped open in a violent gust. Pages riffled and came loose, rising into the air like a flock of something freed. First the pages, then the rest.

All of it rising, swirling, gone.

“Please,” Neve whispered in its wake. “I am alone.” If her fear were a creature, this would be its bones.
Alone. Alone.
This was the fear that wore all other fears like skin. Her next words sounded like a bastard version of the catechisms she’d been forced to recite for twelve long years, but they felt truer. Cleaner. “To your protection I commend myself, soul of this land. Wisha.”

And there came a change in the atmosphere, a … tautening, as though the land itself were baring its teeth. Neve felt it.

She welcomed it.

Wisha.

*   *   *

When the first ship made landfall here two hundred years ago, its crew found no sign of folk—nary a chopped tree nor a circle of stones to hint that men had ever walked here. The land was fertile and primal and deepest green, untilled, ungroomed, and as wild as the Gliding itself. But for one thing.

The black hill.

It was perfectly symmetrical, wider than it was tall, and taller by ten than a haystack. It looked, at a distance, like a miniature volcano, and its true curiosity was its covering. It was dressed all over in strange plumage: feathers, oil-black and overlapping as neat as fish scales. Far too large for crows, each plume was as long as a man’s arm, and some said that only a bird as big as a man could have plumes so very long. Of course, no such bird existed, and because of that—and because of what was
inside
the hill,
under
the plumes—the sailors set fire to it.

And died.

It was the smoke, said the survivors. Oil-black as the feathers themselves, it … writhed.

It
hunted.

The sailors who were upwind of the fire saw what it did, and ran for their ship.

Some of them made it.

It was a full twenty years before another ship came, and this one came ready, armed with God and shovels, and they didn’t burn the feathers this time but buried them, and they built a church on the hill and filled it with saints’ bones and imprecations against evil. They divvied the dark green land among themselves, taming the place with prayer as they shaped it with labor, and the long black feathers became a thing of myth. Children might play at “quicksmoke,” chasing each other with burning crow feathers and acting out gruesome deaths, but the true accursed plumes had not been seen for near two centuries.

No one was afraid anymore, not really.

On this first morning of Advent, though, as the isle folk stirred awake and girls darted barefoot onto porches to find what was left for them, the isle stirred too. Only a little, and only Neve felt it. The old hill—long since defeathered—was a lonesome spot, far from any farms, and its bare stone church saw visitors but rarely. It would be Christmas day before the damage was discovered—the floor caved in, a pocket of deep, dark air opened underneath—and by then the events of this Advent would be done and known.

By then, everyone would know that the Dreamer had awakened.

*   *   *

In the harbor town, the folk were decorating. Swags of limp tinsel wove down both sides of the high street, and dames were up ladders, skirts tucked tween their knees as they stretched to hang up fishing floats and old baubles of scratched mirror glass. Every door wore a wreath and red ribbon, and hunchback Scoot Finster was making his way from shop to shop with stencils and a bucket, dabbing scenes onto glass with his own recipe of fake snow.

The harbor folk loved their Christmas, and it was no secret that they loved it like pagans. They wanted to dance and drink, put on their oversize saints’ masks and caper about frightening babies. Unlike the First Settlers, who were of Charis stock and came into the world, so they said, with their hands folded in prayer, these latecomers were mostly descended from Jhessians, those sharp-eyed folk of old tongue and older gods, and they wore their civility as light as summer shawls. But life was hard here and the myths were dark, and the Church kept them proper, most days.

“Mornin’, maidy,” Scoot called to Neve as she passed him on her way to the factory. “Find ought on your porch this drizzle-blasted morning?”

His smile seemed genuine, so Neve guessed he didn’t know. The fishwife behind him, though, sucked in one cheek to chew and looked caught between pity and envy, and that’s how Neve knew the word was out.

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t very well lie and say no, but neither could she bring herself to admit it, at least not without making clear how she felt about it, which would simply not do. Girls were supposed to be happy that someone wanted them, as though they were kittens in a basket, and any left by day’s end would be drowned in the pond.

Scoot misread her silence. “Well, maybe the ghosts of your boys haunted off all your suitors,” he said kindly. “It’s the only explanation, a sip of honey like you.”

Neve murmured some response, though she couldn’t have afterward said what. She cast down her eyes and kept going, glancing back at the turning of the lane to see the fishwife talking in the hunchback’s ear, and him looking rueful after her, like she was a kitten already sinking beneath the water.

Was she?

No.

Because she was going to refuse.

“You’re going to
what
?” demanded Keillegh Baker when Neve told her.

It was midmorning, and they were at their hoops in the longroom, needles busy. All down the row girls blushed and purred and crowed and gloated and wept and sulked, just as Neve had known they would. Irene had a length of lace from her sweetheart, Camilla a comb from hers. May’s too-straight back told her tale of woe, while Daisy Darrow had gifts from three boys, and the delicious drama of a tussle on her porch, too, when they bumped into each other at midnight, all surly fists and mayhem.

“I thought Caleb would
kill
Harry,” said Daisy, eyes shining with the thrill of it. “But then Davis broke a pot over his head. Oh, Mam was mad. It was her strawberry pot from Cayn.”