Winterlong (7 page)

She smiled, and ran her tongue over her lip to lick away the blood. “Unprofessional? This has all been very unprofessional, Wendy. Didn’t you know that?”

“The tenets of the revised Nuremberg Act state that an Ascendant should not perform upon a subject any research which she would not undergo herself.”

Dr. Harrow shook her head, ran a hand through damp hair. “Is that what you thought it was? Research?”

I shrugged. “I—I don’t know. The boy—your twin?”

“Aidan …” She spread her fingers against the bed’s coverlet, flexed a finger that bore a heavy ring set with cabochons spelling
NASNA
. “They found out. Instructors. Our father. About us. We were betrayed by another—
promising student.
Do you understand?”

A flicker of the feeling she had evoked in bed with her brother returned, and I slitted my eyes, tracing it. “Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”

“It is—” She fumbled for an explanation. “A crime. They separated us. Aidan … They sent him away, to another kind of—place. Tested him.”

She stood and paced to the window, leaned with a hand upon each side so that the rain lashed about her, then turned back to me. “He went mad.

“You see, something happened that night in the woods.” Shaking her head, she pounded the wall with flattened palms. “He was never the same. He had terrible dreams, he couldn’t bear to sleep alone—that was how it started—

“And then they let him come home for a visit, in the spring. He wouldn’t leave his room. We went out one morning, Father and I. And when we returned, I looked for him, he wasn’t there, not in his room, not anywhere …

“I was the one who found him. He had—” Her voice broke and she stared past me to the wall. “Apple blossom in his hair. And his face—”

I thought she would weep; but her expression twisted so that almost I could imagine she laughed to recall it.

“Like hers …”

She drew nearer, until her eyes were very close to mine. I sniffed and moved to the edge of the bed warily: she had dosed herself with hyoscine derived from the herbarium. Her words slurred as she spoke.

“Do you know what happens now, Wendy? More janissaries arrived tonight. They have canceled our term of research. We’re all terminated. A purge. Tomorrow they take over. New personnel. Representatives of the Governors. Specially trained
NASNA
medics, hand-picked by Margalis Tast’annin.”

She spat the name, then made a clicking noise with her tongue. “And you, Wendy. And Anna, and all the others. Like the geneslaves: toys.
Weapons.”
She swayed as she leaned toward me. “You especially. They’ll find him, you know—dig him up and use him—”

“Who, Dr. Harrow?” I asked. Sweat pearled on her forehead. She stretched a hand to graze my temples, and I shivered.

“My brother,” she murmured.

“No, Dr. Harrow. The others—who. betrayed you, who—”

“I told you, we were friends,” she cut me off. “Aidan trusted him—”

“Who?”

“Margalis.” Her hand rested on mine now, and I felt her fingers tightening about my wrist.

“And the other—who was the other, the Boy in the Tree?”

Smiling, she drew me toward her. She reached for the
NET
’s rig, flicking rain from the colored wires.

“Let’s find out …”

I cried out at her clumsy hookup. A spot of blood welled from her temple and I touched my face, drew away a finger gelled with the fluid she had smeared carelessly from ear to jaw. Then, before I could lie down, she made the switch and I cried out at the dizzy vistas erupting behind my eyes.

Aniline lightning. Faculae stream from synapse to synapse as ptyalin floods my mouth and my head rears instinctively to smash against the headboard. She has not tied me down. The hyoscine lashes into me like a fiery bile and I open my mouth to scream. In the instant before it begins I taste something faint and caustic in the back of her throat and struggle to free myself from her arms. Then I’m gone.

Before me looms a willow tree shivering in a breeze frigid with the shadow of the northern mountains. Sap oozes from a raw flat yellow scar on the trunk above my head, where, two days before, our father had sawed off the damaged limb. It had broken from the weight. When I found him he lay pillowed on a crush of twigs and young leaves and scattered bark, the blossoms in his hair alone unmarked by the fall. One hand lay upon his breast, the Academy ring glittering in the sunlight. Now I stand on tiptoe and stroke the broken willow, bring my finger to my lips and kiss it. I shut my eyes, because they burn so. No tears left to shed: only this terrible dry throbbing, as though my eyes have been etched with sand. The sobs begin again. The wrenching weight in my chest drags me to my knees until I crouch before the tree, bow until my forehead brushes grass trampled by grieving family and friends from the Academy. I groan and try to think of words, imprecations, a curse to rend the light and living from my world so abruptly strangled and still. But I can only moan. My mouth opens upon dirt and shattered granite. My nails claw at the ground as though to wrest from it something besides stony roots and scurrying earwigs. The earth swallows my voice as I force myself to my knees and, sobbing, raise my head to the tree.

It is enough. He has heard me.

Through the shroud of new leaves he peers with lambent eyes. April’s first apple blossoms weave a snowy cloud about his brow. His eyes are huge, the palest purest green
i
n the cold morning sun. They stare at me unblinking, harsh and bright and implacable as moonlight, as languidly he extends his hand toward mine.

I stagger to my feet, clots of dirt falling from my palms. From the north the wind rises and rattles the willow branches. Behind me a door rattles as well, as my father leans out to call me back to the house. At the sound I start
to
turn, to break the reverie that binds me to this place, this tree stirred by a tainted wind riven from a bleak and noiseless shore.

And then I stop, where in memory I have stopped a ‘thousand times, and turn back to the tree. For the first time I meet his eyes.

He is waiting, as He has always waited; as He will always wait. At my neck the wind gnaws cold as iron, stirring the collar of my blouse so that already the chill creeps down my chest, to nuzzle there at my breasts and burrow between them. I nod, very slightly, and glance back at the house.

All the colors have fled the world. For the first time I see it clearly: the gray skin taut against granite hills and grassless haughs; the horizon livid with clouds like a rising barrow; the hollow bones and nerveless hands drowned, beneath black waters lapping at the edge of a charred orchard. The rest is fled and I see the true world now, the sleeping world as it wakes, as it rears from the ruins and whispers in the wind at my cheeks:
this
is what awaits you; this and nothing more, the lie is revealed and now you are waking and the time has come, come to me, come to me.
…

In the ghastly light only His eyes glow, and it is to them that I turn, it is into those hands white and cold and welcome that I slip my own, it is to Him that I have come, not weeping no not ever again, not laughing, but still and steady and cold as the earth beneath my feet, the gray earth that feeds the roots and limbs and shuddering leaves of the tree …

And then pain rips through me, a flood of fire searing my mouth and ears, raging so that I stagger from the bed as tree and sky and earth tilt and shiver like images in black water. Gagging, I reach into my own throat, trying to dislodge the capsule, Emma Harrow has bitten; try to breathe through the fumes that strip the skin from my gums. I open my mouth to scream but the fire churns through throat and chest, boils until my eyes run and stain the sky crimson.

And then I fall. The wires rip from my skull.

Beside me on the floor Dr. Harrow thrashes, eyes staring wildly at the ceiling, her mouth rigid as she retches and blood spurts from her bitten tongue. I recoil from the scent of bitter almond she exhales, then watch as she suddenly grows still. Quickly I kneel, tilting her head so that half of the broken capsule rolls onto the floor at my feet. I wait a moment, then bow my head until my lips part around her broken jaw and my tongue stretches gingerly to lap at the blood cupped in her cheek.

In the tree the Boy laughs. A bowed branch shivers, and, slowly, rises from the ground. Another boy dangles there, his hair tangled in golden strands around a leather belt. I see him lift his head and, as the world rushes away in a blur of red and black, he smiles at me.

A cloud of frankincense. Seven stars against a dormer window. A boy with a bulldog puppy; and
she
is dead.

I cannot leave my room now. Beside me a screen dances with colored lights that refract and explode in brilliant parhelions when I dream. But I am not alone now, ever …

I see Him waiting in the corner, laughing as His green eyes slip between the branches and the bars of my window, until the sunlight changes and He is lost to view once more, among the dappled and chattering leaves.

“R
APHAEL …”

The sigh came again. For an instant I paused with my head thrown back, the sweat on my shoulders cooling as I tried to recall who it was that moaned beneath me. Then a breeze stirred from the hidden panel left slightly ajar so that other Patrons might watch if they desired, and the chilly air wafted to me the scent of burned leaves and earth. A Botanist: Iris Bergenia, a friend of my Patron Roland Nopcsa and an exceedingly plain woman. The most memorable thing about her the ripe odor of loam clinging to the rough fingers that clutched me. I murmured some mindless endearment and slowed my movements, hoping this might hasten her climax so that I could join my House at last worship. Then, as an afterthought, I ran one hand across her scalp (her hair close-cropped like all the Curators’, and none too clean), and when her breathing came fast and shallow I tugged her hair as I whispered her name. She gasped and cried aloud. I pulled out of her and rolled aside on the bed. I moaned as in pleasure, hoping that no one was watching from the Clandestine Adytum to see my grimace of distaste give way to a grin as she continued to squeal and sigh.

“Ah, Raphael,” she murmured a little later, reaching to stroke the long russet tangle of hair spilling down my back. I yawned and stretched, mimed a perfect smile as I turned from her to pull on my tunic.

“That was lovely,” I said. I found my riband on the floor and braided my hair carelessly, tying the shining bit of brocade around the end. Then I stood. I pressed three fingers against my mouth in the Paphian’s beck and stared over her head at my reflection in the ancient ormolu mirror hanging from the far wall of the seraglio. It cast back my image: a slender gold-tipped shadow standing above Iris Bergenia’s stolid figure as she yanked heavy leather workboots back onto her feet. I repeated my comment, glancing down at her. But in pulling on her coarse dun-colored trousers and blouson she had also cloaked any hint of the desire that had kept her straining after me since we had met a week before at the Illyrians’ Sothic Masque. I made a face. Few of our Patrons had anything to say to us afterward.

Fewer still wanted to look at us and be reminded of their own ugliness of body and soul, forgotten for a few moments in the embrace of a pathic or little mopsy.

“Did you bring the tincture of opium?” I asked, tossing back my braid as I crossed the chamber to light more‘ candles.

“Why—no, I mean—” Iris stammered, her foot hitting the floor with a thud. She gazed at me abashed. “I understood from Miramar it was to be delivered later—”

“Oh,”
I said, investing the syllable with all the sneering doubt I could muster. As the yellow tapers threw more light into the chamber I was rewarded with her blush. The mere thought that their association with us consisted of anything but raw commerce mortified even the most devout Patron of the Hill Magdalena Ardent. I knew that Miramar would be furious if he heard I had embarrassed Iris Bergenia by this intimation of impropriety. I also knew that there would never be any punishment for Raphael Miramar, favorite of the House Miramar and Roland Nopcsa’s pet. “Well, if Gower Miramar is
expecting
it …”

I stretched, wondering if the exchange for my favors might also bring us more of the cosmetic madder the Botanists had given us at the last masque. “May I escort you to your friends, Iris?”

“No.” Hastily she collected her cloak and carrying pouch, the tarnished swivel gun that I knew wasn’t loaded but which all Botanists carried anyway when they visited our Houses. “I think I remember the way out—”

I walked her to the chamber door, enjoying her discomfort as I embraced her. I shut my eyes and sighed into her ear, felt her shudder as she pulled away from me. She bared her teeth in a false smile. She did have even white teeth, as so many of the Botanists did; Miramar said it was from chewing birch twigs. For a moment a hint of warmth flared in her eyes.

“Roland was right about you,” she said. She gave me a fleeting smile.