Across the Darkling Sea Page 3

  Evelyn blinked, trying to adjust her mind to the unexpected season.

  “What are you making?” she finally asked, jutting her chin toward the fire.

  “Potion.”

  “Of course a potion. You are always making potions. What kind of potion?”

  Witch shrugged her shoulders and took a sip of her tea, leaving Evelyn’s question unanswered.

  Evelyn shifted her weight, leaning back against her chair.

  “She would have killed me.”

  Witch lowered her gaze to her mug as she lifted it to her lips and drained it. Evelyn watched as she used the pot to refill her cup. “She can’t kill you. But aye, she’d have tried.”

  “So I can’t die?”

  “I don’t know that for certain. But not the usual way, girl. You know as well as I do, you don’t break. You don’t bleed. I’m not sure you have anything inside you that I do. You can’t even cry, child.”

  “Or breathe. I don’t need to breathe, either.” Evelyn could barely wrap her mind around the thought it was so foreign to her. “Witch, what am I?”

  “Child, why do you call me such after all these years? I don’t call you changeling, though indeed you are one, if not of exactly the usual sort.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Evelyn’s nostrils flared, and her breath rushed in and out of her chest. Beneath her palms, the wood of the chair arms was smooth except for a narrow ridge, some scratch or imperfection in the wood, and she rubbed her finger back and forth across it slowly.

  Witch sat quietly, her mouth relaxed, eyes gentle. She could have been a painting she was so placidly still. A marked contrast to the desperation that stormed inside Evelyn. She felt as if all the air had somehow been sucked out of the room. She wanted to vomit.

  Changelings existed, of course. Every parent in Brielle used the stories to keep their kids in bed at night, and they were all the same: the dark creatures from Dreggs would come and take you away if they found you wandering outside after sundown. They’d take you to Dreggs and keep you there forever, leaving fleshy husks in your place, empty figures that looked somewhat like the child they’d replaced, but with nothing behind their eyes.

  They didn’t run and play. They didn’t laugh and speak. They certainly didn’t feel and remember. She did all of those things. There was simply no way she was a changeling. She remembered everything about her life. At least she thought she remembered.

  No tears, not a single one. Her mother had pointed it out, and she’d been right. Evelyn had sobbed, but no tears had leaked from her eyes. Even her nose had refused to run, and though she had felt pain, it was now obvious that her ribs had not broken despite Hanner’s crushing strength.

  And I never passed out. All that time the fabric had held her lungs closed, all that time without a single breath, and she’d never passed out.

  “An uncomfortable truth. But truth, nonetheless. You never believe it at first. But you will come to realize it in time. You always do.”

  “I always do?” Evelyn’s question hung between them, and though they sat within arm’s reach of one another, Evelyn felt as if she were speeding away from Witch, from this cottage, from everything she had ever known. The life she’d always believed she would have now seemed completely out of her reach. She sat quietly, eyes on the floor in front of her, staring at a stray sprig of mint that had somehow escaped Witch’s sharp eyes and thorough broom.

  “This is not the first time you have learned the truth of it.”

  Evelyn studied the sprig of mint ever more closely as the cottage spun around her. It seemed only yesterday she’d lingered around the table with her parents, studying and painting an exotic flower her father had brought home from one of his trips. It was the strangest thing any of them had ever seen, and Evelyn had secretly wondered where it had come from. She knew better than to ask, though. They had laughed and talked about it well into the evening as Evelyn had worked furiously to capture it on canvas. But it wasn’t yesterday. It was much longer ago. Five years, according to her mother. Five years of her life, gone. Missing.

  “Every day is a bit different, but you always wake up believing you’re Evelyn and with no memory of the time that has passed since the change. To you, it’s the first day of summer, the day Evelyn’s memory stops, but to everyone else it’s been five years since the real Evelyn fell asleep and you showed up. You end up here almost every day, seeking solace from their cruel treatment.”

  “Has my mother...is it always like that?”

  Witch’s eyes hardened. “She loves you, Evelyn, well indeed. So much she’ll do anything to get her daughter back.”

  “But I am her daughter, Witch. I have all of Evelyn’s memories, all of her feelings.”

  “You are not a monster, but neither are you her daughter.”

  Evelyn could hardly believe what she was hearing. How could a small seed do so much? The truth broke out of her.

  “I snuck a seed from the Shadow Market, Witch. The woman I bought it from said it was just a flower. A big, beautiful, enchanted flower. She told me to plant it in dry dirt and water it only a little bit and it would grow to be the most beautiful flower I’d ever seen. But it backfired. It never grew into a flower, but it somehow convinced you, convinced everyone, that I was a changeling. I’m not a changeling, Witch. I’m just…I don’t know, it’s put some sort of a spell on all of you!”

  Witch stared at her for a moment before her raisin face collapsed into a smile. She reached out, putting her wrinkled, knobby hand over Evelyn’s. “I know about the seed, Evelyn. Everyone does. We’ve followed you to that derelict raft a hundred times trying to find some hint of what happened that day. The truth is, you never made it to the raft that morning.”

  “But, that’s not possible.”

  “Evelyn, you are not a typical changeling, but you are most definitely a creature of magic. You’re something I’ve never seen before. Something I suspect no one has ever seen before, except for the one that made you. Your mother knows it, too, but can’t accept it. To accept that truth would mean accepting she’s lost Evelyn forever.”

  Witch climbed to her feet and began bustling about the kitchen, gathering things together on the tabletop as she talked.

  “This is why she tried to hurt you today. That is why she will try again tomorrow. You are not safe here any longer, Evelyn.”

  “This is not possible. Why are you saying these things?” Evelyn jumped to her feet, knocking the chair over behind her.

  Witch stopped gathering materials together and sighed, her shoulders slumping heavily. “Go to the attic, child. You’ll see for yourself.”

  Evelyn frowned a bit at Witch’s strange instructions, but went to climb the staircase to the attic anyway. At the top of the steps, she pushed the door slowly open. The attic in Witch’s cabin was one of her favorite places. As a child, she had loved playing there during the wet season. As she’d grown older, it had turned into her favorite place to paint. The light fell perfectly from the long row of dormer windows.

  She stood in the open doorway. The smooth planks of the attic floor spread in long, straight lines from where she stood. The familiar roof climbed sharply until it peaked at the top. The large windows, standing out from the roofline like exclamation points, were spaced evenly from one end of the room to the other. Light spilled in through those tall windows as it always had, leaving puddles of sunshine all along the floor.

  Witch’s attic had always been a warm and comfortable place. But as she set her feet on the attic floor, she felt a deep chill, despite the warm light filling the space. Many things had called this room home over the years, but now it was empty save for a large four-poster bed resting in the middle of the room.

  Evelyn felt a sudden stab of fear. What if it were all true? What if what she saw here confirmed her growing fear that she was some magical monster? It would change everything. She would have to flee. She’d never see her parents again, never see Rudy or Shera again. She’d have to leave Brielle
or live every day in fear. Anyone in Brielle would destroy her if they discovered what she was. They would hate and despise her.

  Her feet shuffled forward. She hadn’t realized she was moving until she saw the bed draw nearer. She felt nauseous. Her bones could not break, her eyes couldn’t leak water—she wondered if she could throw up.

  She was at the side of the bed in two breaths. Nestled in a down mattress rested a figure with soft brown skin, a smooth round face, lightly flushed cheeks as if she’d only recently been running, and long chestnut hair that fell loosely around her face and shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but Evelyn knew their deep caramel tones well. She knew the soft swell of the small breasts beneath the pale yellow dressing gown and the well-muscled legs that jutted out from the bottom of the gown.

  She looked as if she slept, but her repose was anything but natural. Her chest did not rise and fall with breath, her eyelids did not flutter in a dream. She looked like an exquisitely painted doll for all the life she displayed.

  She’d never see Brisia or the Woedenwoud, never cross the Brielle border and travel up into the towering white mountains of the North Country. She’d never again smear paint on canvas or laugh with Rudy as they wandered the raised walkways of Meuse, the Lisse River flowing slowly beneath them.

  All those dreams Evelyn had entertained, all gone. Did she still dream beneath those stilled eyelids? Or was she closer to death than sleep?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Evelyn wanted to scream. To beat the figure on the bed in front of her. A loss deeper than anything she’d ever felt overwhelmed her. She was not Evelyn. She was not human. She was something else. A monster. For the first time in her life, she knew what it was to hate herself.

  “Why is she here?” Evelyn asked, her voice barely above a whisper as she studied her own body lying there.

  “Your parents kept her in your home for years. But it became too painful for them. She loved to play here, as you well know. I could not deny them when they asked to house her here.” Witch had followed her up the stairs.

  “Too painful.” Evelyn tasted the bitter edge of those words as she considered how this must have affected her parents. They were a close-knit family, and she was their only child. What pain this must cause them. Their human daughter, physically so close but lost to them through magic. Moving among them instead was a creature of magic, an abomination, something forbidden in Brielle. A construct who moved like Evelyn, sounded like Evelyn, thought she was Evelyn, but was something else entirely.

  Perhaps worse, this monster was an eternal child who would never grow up, never change, and never get beyond her first day of awakening because she never remembered the day before. Their lives went on. They aged, people married, people died. But they could not move on emotionally. She held them captive in her own nightmare. Their lives were as frozen as the young woman on the bed in front of her, despite their physical freedoms.

  She had turned her mother into a monster. She had broken her father. She had twisted Rudy’s guts into knots and had driven Shera to emptiness. She remembered the growling faces of the townspeople as Hanner had dragged her along, as Witch had dragged her back out. She had destroyed all of them in one way or another.

  “I cause them all such pain,” Evelyn said, her voice quivering.

  “Not you, child. The one who made you is to blame, not you. You are as much a victim as they.”

  Evelyn spun to face the older woman. “Who was it? Who did this? And why? Why do such a thing?”

  Witch shrugged her stooped shoulders. “We don’t know. He was a stranger, passing through like so many others. Called himself Grag. He lingered for a day or two, and then he was gone and you were here.”

  “What else? There must be more.” Evelyn felt as if her very life depended on the words Witch uttered next.

  “He was a ragged and filthy man, not a penny to his name. But he carried the most beautiful amethyst I’ve ever seen, big as a man’s fist. Magic, without question. A warlock, too. He had the stained chin, and I could smell it on him besides. None here would touch such a thing, of course, though he struggled hard to pass it on to anyone who might take it. Rather than arrest him, your mother chased him out of town. He was none too pleased by that.

  “The next morning we found River and Dom twisted up horribly. And a bit later we found you. Out in the swamp. I think you were on your way to the seed when you crossed his path.”

  “River and Dom? Fernon and Bran’s daughters?” Fernon’s face had been carved with hard lines when she’d seen him in the crowd outside the lockup. Bran’s too had deep creases to either side of his mouth that hadn’t been there when she’d seen him last.

  “They were found dead. Every bone in their bodies broken. Only magic can do a thing such as that.”

  Evelyn looked down at her hands, clasped together now in her lap, and then back up at Witch’s crumpled face. “It was because of me.”

  Witch nodded, her eyes softer than Evelyn had ever seen them. “Folks here like to think magic’s easy. That it gives something for nothing. But it’s not so. It costs, just like anything else. It took some real magic, making you. In a place with almost none of it, it’s likely he needed them to do what he did.”

  “My mother was right. I am a monster.”

  “You raised no finger against them, girl. You are no more a monster than I am.”

  “River and Dom...they died because of me.”

  “They died because of some damn fool of a warlock. Had nothing to do with you.”

  But it had everything to do with her. The warlock who had made her had used River and Dom to do it. They would be alive if it wasn’t for her. Fernon and Bran knew it, her parents knew it, and she knew it. Her mother had been right to try to kill her. She had no right to exist.

  But it wouldn’t have worked, she reminded herself. She didn’t break. She didn’t bleed. She had no right to live, but no way to die, either. Except…

  “If magic made me, perhaps it can unmake me.”

  “It may be so,” Witch said, rolling her shoulders as if they pained her. “But there’s not enough magic in all of Brielle to find out.”

  “But you have magic!” Evelyn said.

  “I mix some herbs, child, but nothing more. They’d have stretched my neck long ago if I had.”

  Evelyn was surprised at the older woman’s honesty. She looked into Witch’s face to find her eyes distant as she thought back to some old memory.

  Magic was forbidden in Brielle, but she didn’t believe they’d hang a person for having it. Not anymore, at least. Anyone with a shred of magic had fled Brielle ages ago. There simply wasn’t enough left here to appeal to those who could work it. Those who’d stayed worked the sloppy mud and brackish floodwaters the zildeschor tree loved so well. The people of Brielle raised the trees, harvested them, made schor thread and cloth or traded it. No one had been hanged for magic in Meuse or Brielle for centuries.

  “But you have all these books—”

  “Books on herbs and healing, all. I’ve searched, child, but there is nothing here that can help you.”

  “You’re telling me to leave.”

  “I’m telling you I can’t help you. What you choose to do about that is up to you. But if you stay, your mother will hurt you in ways you can scarcely imagine. She can’t kill you, but she will try, and she will keep trying. You’ll suffer, your mother will drive herself and everyone else in this town mad, but Evelyn will remain asleep.”

  “But how can I leave when I can’t even remember what happened yesterday? How can a person live like that?”

  Witch studied her for several minutes, and Evelyn waited. She had to be unmade—it was the only way. She had to find someone who could do it. And the one person almost certain to have the power to do it was the one who’d made her. She had to find Grag. She had to force him to destroy her in the hopes that doing so would reverse the curse on Evelyn. She’d never be able to restore River and Dom to Fernon and Bran, but maybe she could g
ive her parents their daughter back. She had to find a way.

  “They are coming for you, Evelyn. You need to decide now. I can help you escape, I can hold them off for a time, but I can’t protect you. Not here. Not in Brielle. Come, I have something for you.”

  Evelyn followed as Witch moved back across the room, down the stairs, and into the study. Witch pulled a leather pouch from a high shelf and made her way over to the desk.

  “Traded some healing salve for this ages ago. Never had much use for it before now, and even if I had, I didn’t want to use it. Hanner’d love to chase me out of this town, and this book would be a right good excuse for him to do it. But for you...it might be just the thing.”

  She opened the pouch and pulled a book from its shadowy depths, setting it on her desk. “I’ve never given this to you before. I thought it would be too hard. But with your mother...I think it’s time. Come here, child. Place your hands so.”

  “What will it do?” Evelyn approached the desk. The book was bound in plain brown leather, a small pen and inkwell held tightly in a pocket formed by the cover as it wrapped around the book.

  “Put your hands there, like I showed you.” Evelyn moved both hands until they were resting on the cover. The book somehow grasped hold of her hands, sealing itself to her, and burned as if it were on fire. She yanked her hands from the cover, but the book came up with them, attached through some strange magic.

  “They’re burning!” she cried. “Get it off!” She threw her weight back, desperately trying to separate her hands from the book. And suddenly it was done. The heat disappeared and the book fell from her hands and settled onto the floor, its plain cover now marred with the imprint of both her hands. Every whorl and loop present on her fingers and hands was accounted for in the cover of the book.

  Evelyn cautiously reached out and traced the pattern with a finger, marveling at the fineness of it, the exquisite detail. “What is this thing?”