Sin Eater's Daughter 2 - The Sleeping Prince (5 page)

He has barely started to close the door when there is a loud crash from my mother’s room.

In an instant he’s back over the threshold, his head tilted, appearing to look at me from inside the hood. Then he closes the front door and strides across the room. I throw myself in front of the bedroom door as he reaches for the key in the lock.

“Don’t,” I say as I realize why she banged, what time it is. I haven’t brewed her tea.

He looks down at me and then I’m painfully aware of how little space there is between us. I can’t look up at him.

“Please don’t. Please go,” I beg.

Silas shakes his head and takes me gently by the shoulders, moving me out of the way. I close my eyes briefly as he opens the door.

She is sitting on the bed, her water cup on the floor beside the door, the contents spilled. Her grey hair is wild around her head, her eyes focused on Silas as though he’s prey, and my heart lurches.

Silas seems not to notice, approaching her quietly and crouching beside her. “Hello,” he says softly, and then, in an action that shocks me, he pushes the edge of his hood back a little and shows her his face. I catch a glimpse of cheekbone, high and sharp, the tips of pale lashes. “I’m Silas, a friend of Errin’s. You must be her mother.”

There is a bone-shaking moment when I think she’s going to lash out at him. But instead she gapes, her mouth an “O”. I wait for her to move, and when she leans back against the pillow, her eyes drinking in his face, I rush into the room to examine her.

Her eyes are still red, still feral. Nothing has changed.

When they move to me, they narrow and I step back. “I’ll get you some tea, Mama.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her while you make it,” Silas says. He’s lowered his hood again, hiding all but his mouth, which gives nothing away. I look back at Mama to see her gaze fixed on him once more, settling down, watching him, but not in a way that suggests he’s prey. “Has she eaten?” he asks.

“Yes. Before I left for the meeting I gave her some bread and stew. She won’t want to eat until tomorrow, now. She never does.”

He nods, and I watch the two of them, looking from one silent figure to the other, neither of them paying any attention to me. It’s stupid, so stupid to leave him with her, but I do, tottering back to the main room and stoking the fire, filling the pipkin with water, adding valerian and chamomile to the nettle leaves, along with the last of the honey and a good dose of poppy. When I look back at the doorway he’s still beside the bed, and she’s still gazing at him with a docile expression, her face slack, and human. There’s something sinister about the tableau: a hooded figure kneeling beside a prone woman, and for a moment I forget which of them is the dangerous one. I hurry the rest of the preparations, straining and stirring sloppily and making a mess on the countertop. I have a brief flash of my old teacher tutting at me, and my lips quirk into a guilty smile before I remember Silas and Mama in the other room and I rush back to them.

I almost drop the cup when I see that he’s holding her hand, her frail fingers resting limply in his gloved ones. He gestures for me to pass him the cup, and I watch as he blows on it carefully before holding it to my mother’s lips. She sips obediently and he smiles at her in encouragement. I move back to the doorway, watching him lift the cup up to her and her fingers curl over his to hold it. A sour pain blossoms in my chest and I realize I’m jealous of how easy he is with her. My feelings for Silas have always been complicated, but this is a new low: jealous of my own mother because he is holding her hand.

And because she’s letting him. I’m jealous because it seems that all of her hatred is reserved for me. For Silas she can be calm, even when the sun is setting and the beast is stirring in her. By rights she ought to be clawing his face off, not watching it as trustingly as a baby bird watches the sky for its mother. Perhaps it’s me who she wants to hurt. Perhaps there is no curse; it’s that she hates me for being the one she’s stuck with. We are all the other has left, and yet she’d happily rip my throat out if she could.

Flashes of our life at home, of the four of us sat around the table a year ago, Lief and Papa enthusiastically debating some method of cow husbandry while Mama and I rolled our eyes at each other.

Of me, in the kitchen on my thirteenth birthday, unwrapping my gifts: a real apothecary’s apron with a dozen pockets; a set of glass vials; a notebook to record my experiments. Lief giving me seeds wrapped in twists of paper. My father guiding me outside, hands over my eyes, to a patch of land he’d dug and hoed for me.

Of Lief and me lying in the newly scythed fields and staring at the stars after the May celebrations the year I turned twelve, watching bats swoop low, picking insects out of the air, my jaw aching faintly because of their calls, calls I couldn’t hear but could feel. Then Mama and Papa appearing with hot cocoa and slabs of buttery, crumbly cake. Of the four of us lying back on blankets, looking up at the sky, tracking a barn owl ghosting across the moon. Of Papa’s arm, or Lief’s, around my shoulders, keeping me upright as we walked back to the farmhouse, exhausted but happy.

Of waking in the night to see my ten-year-old brother slumped at the end of my bed with a small shovel in his hand, almost asleep on his feet.

“What are you doing?” I’d asked.

“Go back to sleep,” he’d mumbled. “You’re all right, I’m here.”

But he’s not here now. He’s not here now.

A wave of grief hits like pain and threatens to knock me off my feet. I lean against the door frame, watching as Silas puts the cup down once she’s finished. He pulls the covers up, tucking them around her chest, and I have to fold my arms over the agony inside me.

Another flash: of Mama reading to Lief and me, before he moved into a room of his own; of Papa standing in the doorway listening, a glass of brandy in his hands, his eyes soft and fixed on Mama, of her faint blush under his gaze, her lips curving from the joy of his attention.

Of Lief and me tucking her into bed the night after my father died. Of the two of us looking at each other over her shaking form, and then, without speaking a word, getting into bed either side of her. Of her arms wrapping around me, Lief in turn holding us both. Of the smell of my father on the pillow. By the time the sun rose his scent was gone, replaced by our tears, salty and bitter.

I walk away and wait for Silas to leave her, locking the door behind him. When I turn to him his arms are crossed, his fingers tapping them swiftly.

“What’s wrong with her?”

I take a deep breath. “After … the Sleeping Prince invaded Lormere, she … I think she went after Lief. That’s all I can think of, that she tried to get to Lormere to find him. She’d been strange since he went there, quiet and distant, but I put that down to Papa’s death, and the move here, taking their toll. I had to prompt her to eat most of the time, but she was better than she is now. She’d wash and dress herself. Then when we received word that the Sleeping Prince had taken the castle, and had… That was when she stopped. Everything. One day I went to the well to get water and when I came back she was gone. I found her in the woods. She’s been like this since.”

“And the scars, on her arm? Did she do that to herself? Is that why you give her that herbal tea?”

I shake my head. “No. She was scratched when I found her. An animal, maybe?” I try to keep my voice even, try to sound reasonable. “Thorns? Who knows? She won’t say. I cleaned them up and thankfully there was no infection, though as you saw, they scarred.”

There is a long pause, and my heart beats too hard, too fast.

“Can you not… Is there no help for her, a place she could go, a convent or the like here?”

I almost laugh. Yes, there are places; this is Tregellan. If you have the money, then your loved ones can be sent to a convalescent home by the sea. But if you don’t, then it’s the asylum, or the vagrant’s prison.

Besides, she’s not mad. She’s a beast. There is no place for that.

“No. There isn’t. Not for us.”

We both lapse back into silence, me squeezing my dress through my fingers, him staring at the door. Then he speaks again. “What else was in the tea you gave her?”

“Chamomile and valerian. Poppy. To help her rest,” I add hurriedly. “I don’t think she sleeps, not really. I don’t think she does anything other than grieve. The tea at least buys her a few hours of rest.”

“What about you?”

I turn back to him. “What about me?”

He seems to look at me, chewing his lip before he speaks. “Are you—Do you—How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

His voice is painfully kind when he next speaks. “This isn’t fine, Errin. This is far from fine. Surely you can see that?”

Suddenly I can’t stand the sight of him and I want him gone. I don’t want to think about all the ways in which this isn’t fine; of course I can see it isn’t fine, I’m not stupid. It hasn’t been fine since Papa died and it won’t be ever again.

I don’t want to think about Papa, and I certainly don’t want to think about Lief, don’t want to think about him in Lormere, in prison, or trying to fight golems, don’t want to think about them cutting him down.
No. He’s alive.
I feel it begin to bubble up inside me, something like a scream, or a geyser, something I can’t think about because if I do… I wrestle it back down, pushing away images of Lief’s eyes staring blankly, of wounds in his chest, of his head… His head—
No, Errin. Enough
.

That doesn’t stop my throat and eyes from burning, and I charge to the front door in three steps. When I throw it open in a clear gesture of dismissal, he sighs. His hood hangs low over his face and suddenly I hate it, want to rip it away. What is he hiding? Who is he?

“Leave,” I say harshly. “Leave, Silas, please. And don’t come back here.”

He seems to look at me for a long moment, chewing his lip, before he nods and walks past me, stopping on the doorstep and turning back.

“I think I could help you,” he says softly.

I want so much to believe him. Instead I close the door, even as he stands there, and sit down by the fire, shivering in a way that has nothing to do with coldness. Loss washes over me, breaking like a tide, my insides feeling hollow, my eyes smarting, and I fist my hands and rub them angrily.

Enough. I don’t have time for this; self-pity’s a luxury that I can’t afford.

Like bread. Or pride.

Enough, Errin. There’s work to do. Get up.

I start to rise but find myself leaning against the table, unable to straighten up, some invisible weight crushing me; the pain in my chest strains against my ribs and they feel brittle suddenly, and fragile, and not able to keep me together. My eyes fill with water and the room blurs around me.

I am alone. I’m so alone. Everyone is gone.

No
, I tell myself.
Do you want to end up like Mama? Do you want to go mad and run wild in the forest? Stop this. Stop this now. Lief will come back. He will. He has to. Then it’ll be fine again.
The feeling of breathlessness grows and grows and I’m gasping, my hands curled into claws, my heart beating so fast it’s going to explode. I turn hot and cold, sweating and then shivering, trying to breathe, while bone-deep dread courses through me. I sink to the floor, pressing my forehead to the dirt.
Enough
, I repeat, over and over.
Please.

Little by little, the vice around my ribs opens, my heart begins to slow and I can see, and hear, again. I stay down, breathing in and out, not caring about the soft stink of the rushes, or the mud on the ground. It’s enough to be able to breathe again.

I survived.

And I hope I have the strength to do it when it happens again.

Eventually I manage to stand, and set about my chores, half furious with myself for wasting the last of the daylight, my body feeling tender and used. The cheap candle stubs flicker violently as I move about the room, trying to work away my fear, all the while feeling as though I’m not wholly here, in my own body.

I shake out the tunics and blankets that are hanging to dry – forever hanging to dry and never likely to – rubbing dried lavender into them before moving them closer to the fire. I sort through the rushes on the floor and throw the worst of them out. I cover the windows as best I can, plugging the gaps in the shutters with old rags; then I make a pot of thin soup.

I sit on the bench with my bowl in my lap, examining the room. It looks as forlorn as it did before, worse even, for the sparse rushes, and the empty spaces. None of the furniture is ours; the table, the bench, the pallets, and even the battered rocking chair were all here when we came. All that belongs to us is the old chest in the alcove by the fire, its contents, and the battered pipkin.

I toy briefly with the idea of making some stock potions or tinctures, items that I could use on the road, or sell. But for the first time ever I don’t have it in me, to weigh and measure and lose myself in my craft. I don’t have it in me to do anything. I look down at my watery soup and feel a lump form in my throat. Oh for the sake of the Gods…

So, even though it’s still early evening, I stoke the fire and crawl into my pallet, pulling the blankets up and over my ears. I’ll get some sleep while I can. Tonight is the second night. Tonight she’ll start speaking to me.

For the last three moons, the man has been in nearly all of my dreams. He’s tall, at least as tall as Silas, and slender as him too. And as with Silas, I don’t know his face; I never see it. Sometimes I catch the glint of an eye, or have the impression of a smile, but always as a fragment, in that strange way dreams have, where you know something without knowing it. If I think about it, I suppose it’s no coincidence that the dream man appeared in my life shortly after Silas did.

But it doesn’t matter, because whoever the man is, his presence is familiar, comforting. He talks, but as soon as he’s spoken the words vanish, leaving behind a feeling of well-being. I know him. He’s my friend.

He takes my hand sometimes, rubs my shoulder encouragingly. Once, he stood behind me as I worked at a bench in the old apothecary and wrapped long arms around me, fingers splayed over my waist with a possessiveness that thrilled me. I woke up from that dream with my heart racing in a different, forbidden way.

Tonight, I dream of home. Once again I am in the apothecary, mixing a cure. These are the dreams I love and hate the most: love because I’m back where I belong, and doing what I love; hate because they are just dreams, as lost to me as my father. Tonight the man stands over me, nodding and smiling his encouragement, as my hands reach to add a pinch of this, a sprinkle of that to my remedy. He calls the recipe out to me and I obey him, doing as he says, and I sense his pleasure in it. I’m dressed in my favourite blue tunic, the pockets of my apron heavy with ingredients, and I’m concentrating fiercely. I know that this mixture is the most important thing I will ever make. It will heal my mother; it will bring my brother back to me. This is the potion to change everything. And I can do it. Only I can do it.

The man says something and I look up in time to see a flash of white as he turns away. I look back at my potion to see it bubbling over, ruined, and now the man is shaking his head at me, his frustration so evident that I can almost taste it. Then the banging starts; the Council are at the door, calling me a witch, a traitor, screaming that they know I’ve been making poison, that they’ll hang me. Burn me for it. I see torchlight flickering in the windows; the glass starts to bubble and melt under the heat. Hundreds of fists bang on the apothecary door, calling for my death, and the man says nothing, his back to me, shoulders drooping in disappointment.

Of course when I wake the banging isn’t a lynch mob, but my mother. The fire still burns steadily. I can’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours, and I sit up, breathless, still half caught in the nightmare, watching the shadows play around the room like children dancing. My hands are shaking, my fingers still curved as though around a spoon.

The banging changes, becoming deliberate, and it sends a chill down my spine. Like the opening music of a performance, she beats in time, one-two-three, one-two-three. And like a play, she has her opening lines, and it’s those I wait for in the dark.

“Wake up, little one,” my mother says in a parody of affection. “Rise and shine, my daughter, my sweetling, my baby girl.”

“Stop it,” I whisper, covering my ears with my hands. I don’t know if she ever remembers what she says and does when she’s like this. I hope not, please, I hope not.

“Errin,” my mother coos from behind the locked door. “Can you hear me, my dear, my darling? I’m lonely, Errin. I miss your father. Oh, how I miss him! And Lief. Do you remember your brother? Your beautiful, clever brother. Was a mother ever so blessed to have two such bright, brilliant children? Won’t you open the door, my child? Won’t you sit and let me hold you, let us cry together for our lost boys?”

I feel my lip tremble, fresh tears prickling in my eyes.

“I can hear you, my beautiful girl.” She scratches at the door. “I can smell you. Listen, my daughter, the Sleeping Prince is coming. He’s going to come here with his army. I don’t want him to take you too; I don’t want him to take both of my babies from me. Come to me, child, let me protect you. Come to your mother, Errin.”

I hear the faint sound of pawing against the door and swallow.

“You don’t have to be alone, little one.”

“I don’t want to be alone,” I whisper, the words spilling out unwanted, barely audible even to me, but the beast hears them.

“Then open the door, Errin. Open the door.”

The tears make tracks down my cheeks as I stand, kicking the blankets away and making the wooden floor squeak.

“Good girl.” There’s a smile in her voice. “That’s my good girl. Come to me.”

When the sound of me pouring myself a cup of water reaches her, I stop being her good girl.

As she rages I do my best to ignore her, trying to focus on drinking my water, each gulp mercifully silencing her for a second. The first moon this happened I came so close, so very close, to opening the door and letting her do as she would, for nothing could be as bad as listening to her tell me Lief and my father were gone because of me. She spent hours telling me how she hated me, how she’d never wanted me, how my father had wept with sorrow when I’d been born and begged her to drown me. Then it changed, and she told me she loved me, that we only had each other, and that was all she ever wanted. She told me she’d been chosen, and I’d been chosen too, and if I’d open the door…

Then, as I do now, I stuffed bits of rags soaked in wax into my ears, tying strips of fabric around my head to hold them in place. It doesn’t drown her out completely, but it muffles the worst of it. When the banging becomes violent enough to shake the pipkin on its hook I turn to watch the door carefully, but so far she hasn’t had the strength to break it down. I wait for her to exhaust herself, for the violence to tire her, and when it has – and knowing the respite won’t last for long – I tiptoe across the room and open the chest. As I do, memories wash over me, pressing against me and crowding my senses.

My father’s cloak is in here and I think I can still smell him as I lift it out, the scent of hay and earth still embedded in the thick woollen fibres. As I press it to my face it feels like beard scruff against my cheeks, as if I’d leant in for a goodnight kiss, and loss twists in my heart again.

I paw silently through the chest, moving old books, texts and lists and charts from my old life, a velvet-wrapped pair of bronze scales, too precious to use here, too important to sell, a present from Master Pendie when I passed my third-year tests with full marks.

And at the bottom, buried, as it always is now, is the thing I’m looking for: Mama’s huge leather-bound book of tales. The edges of the spine are frayed and worn, the binding peeling away where the spine is separating from the pages. Dark prints stain the leather where our fingers have grabbed for it, the prints of adults and children marking a tapestry of us across the once-pristine cover.

I learned the old stories before I learned to milk a cow, and I take it back to my pallet nest, opening it by instinct to the story of the Scarlet Varulv. It’s become a ritual, digging the book out from the bottom of the chest when the moon is full and reading the story version as the real-life beast plots in the next room. The reality of a curse is different from the storybook version, something the whole realm is learning now.

In the story “The Scarlet Varulv”, a young girl is lost in the woods and rescued by a beautiful woman, taken to her castle, and feasted and feted. Only to be woken in the night by the feeling of sharp teeth on her leg, red eyes glinting at her under the bedclothes. She runs for her life, finally making it back to her home, where she collapses into the arms of her relieved father. A moon later she goes to bed early, feeling strange. When she wakes the next morning, she finds blood on her nightgown, gristle between her teeth. And when she leaves her bedroom, she finds her poor old papa dead, all the doors still locked from inside. She runs into the woods, hiding amongst the trees, where she bites a lost woodsman the next moon. He escapes with his life, tells his friends and fellow villagers of the attack, and they hunt through the woods until they catch her.

She is tied to a stake in the town square and a pyre is lit beneath her. And as she perishes in the flames, the villagers light torches and carry them to the home of the woodsman, deaf to the pleas for mercy from the terrified family within, their faces pressed against the windows as they watch their friends and neighbours burn their home, knowing they were all inside.

The cursed girl in the book grew russet fur and pointed ears on the nights when the moon was full, but my mother doesn’t change, physically at least. As the moon waxes and rounds, she starts to become restless, her gaze darting around the room, hands suddenly reaching out with unnatural, jerking movements. Then the whites of her eyes turn pink, then red, paling again when the full moon passes. On those nights I can’t go near her after sundown; though her own skin doesn’t split and her bones and teeth don’t lengthen, whatever is human in her is swallowed by the need to bite and tear, both with fingers and words.

The first time the beast was on her, I went in too soon after sunrise and she lunged, locking a hand around my ankle and pulling me to the floor. I’d chipped one of my teeth as my face had smashed into the filthy rushes coating the old wood. If it had happened a few seconds before, if the sun hadn’t been as high over the horizon, if I hadn’t been wearing two pairs of woollen stockings, so many ifs and so much luck… Maybe I’d be like her now too.

In the beginning, before I knew what I was dealing with, I’d tried to find a cure, scouring my old books for any mention of her symptoms. I thought it was a matter of finding the right page, finding the right recipe. I truly thought that this time I wouldn’t fail. But the only thing that matched was in a story inside the book I was too afraid to open until I was desperate and terrified, and when I finally did, I already knew that there was no cure.

Then I hoped to quell the beast, to put it to sleep: camomile, hops, lavender, lemon balm. But she burned through even my most powerful sedatives – even when the doses were dangerously high, she’d be banging at the door again within an hour or two.

Finally I became desperate and turned to the nastier plants: poppy, wormwood, even small, diluted tinctures of aconite. I broke the law time and again gathering dark weeds and berries: half terrified I’d kill her, half terrified she’d kill me first. You have to treat those plants the way you’d treat a beast. You shouldn’t seek them out, and if you do you must never take them for granted, or trust them; you have to respect them, fear them. I feared her more.

None of them worked anyway. Her eyes followed me hungrily around the room as the full moon approached, her fingers curled like claws, and she sniffed me when I tucked her into bed. After realizing I’d failed, I stopped trying to help her any further than buying myself a few hours of respite. If my apothecary master, Master Pendie, could see me now, he’d be sickened.

She still looks mostly like my mother when she tries to hurt me. She doesn’t howl; she whispers my name, begging me to open the door and hold her, imploring me to be with her, to comfort her.

It’s the only time she speaks to me any more.

I turn the page over and come face to face with the Sleeping Prince. I stare down at the illustration of him, his silver hair whipping out behind him and across the page. In his arms is a beautiful dark-skinned woman. He looks out of the page, his face proud and protective, and she gazes up at him. One of his hands rests on her face and she seems to lean into it, eyes half-closed in pleasure.