Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, 28 Read online

  I pinched her, hard, to make sure she was breathing.

  “Petech!” My wife slapped my hand away with a maple branch as Melisande began to wail.

  “I had to be sure, Purla. Sure she was alive and real. She’s supposed to cry.”

  “Well, now she’s crying.” Purla rocked Melisande in her lower willow boughs, comforting her with a cherry blossom bud. Melisande suckled greedily at the bud and its sweet sap.

  “Now she’s not.” I reached to take the cherry blossom bud away.

  Purla uprooted herself, moved away from me. “Enough crying. She’s my daughter too.”

  “Mother’s son, father’s daughter. You may be a walking tree, but she’s bound to me, to be a curse-killer. A curse-killer must know the curse in order to learn how to kill it.”

  “She’s a baby. She doesn’t need to know how to kill anything.” Thick sap was running from her birthknot, and I worried at her being uprooted from the ground’s sustenance this shortly after giving birth.

  “Purla, please. To make another curse-killer is the whole reason we wed.”

  “The whole reason? Petech?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” The bark on her sapling boughs roughened.

  “Purla, you know how I feel about you. Never felt like a curse, falling in love with you. But you know as well as I do the need for a new curse-killer presses against all the watersheds, not just ours.”

  “What I know is that our child is bound to me as well as you, and that life will make her cry soon enough. To make her cry is cruel. What she needs now is love.”

  What could I say? I only had the truth to offer her. The only truth I knew then. “The sooner she cries, the sooner she’ll learn to kill the pain herself. To not prepare her for what she has to face, in the name of love, now that would be cruel.”

  Purla’s exposed roots trembled, and a cascade of maple, oak, and aspen leaves fell from her eyes. Something of her mother’s distress must have scared Melisande, for she cried again, a full-lunged colic cry. The sound killed me and made me proud, all at the same time. I reached for them both, to comfort and hold them, as I’d held them all through the long hours of labor. But Purla wheeled away, sending a spray of wet earth into my everyday eyes and metal mouth. The shock stopped me before the pain. Choking on mud, blinded by grit, I stumbled after my crying child and wife.

  By the time I cleared my eyes, and could breathe again, they were gone. I uprooted every ordinary tree in the orchard that day and night, searched all Loblolly watershed. Everyone I asked shook their heads no—in fear or denial or plain ordinary ignorance, I couldn’t tell—when I asked them if they’d seen my wife or child. The only one who might have known was Midas, but that night, he was nowhere to be found.

  Three months later, Midas went nowhere again. He and I were supposed to have one of our oasis feasts by the dipping pool—we’d promised each other we’d eat and drink until we didn’t care about our missing wives. I didn’t know which of us to feel sorrier for—me, having so recently lost a wife, or him, never having found one.

  But when the sun rose high above the inky waves and he still hadn’t shown, I worried. He’d been bothering me for several months about trying a resurrection—or ‘killing-curse-reverse’ as he liked to say—but I’d been putting him off, out of fear and my own concerns. Perhaps he’d been more desperate than I realized. When the sun began to sink, I went to search for my friend. He’d been headed for Tatouage and the Oasis, so that’s where I started.

  Tatouage’s entry point to the waterways was an open-air aqueduct, running through a canopy of tattooed redwoods. No sign of drought, thank the curses. But at the top of the disembarkment redwood, the scent of burnt anise dizzied me, and I nearly slipped. Mottling, here? I inhaled through my mouth, gripped the carved handholds, and let my fear focus how I put one foot below the other.

  The anise reek increased as I descended, troubling my breathing, but finally I reached the ground, only to find an unconscious Midas passed out beneath the laddered redwood, surrounded by spilled oasis fruit.

  Across his neck splayed the characteristic green-grey web of wormwood mottling. I knelt by him, pushing aside the hard coconuts and citrus-seeds, turned him on his back, grateful to hear him groan and find his face mottle-free. Not too late, I could still save him. But what of Tatouage? Fear iced my metal mouth, as I examined the grove.

  Mottling laced several of the tattooed redwoods. Were the mottling to reach the tops of the trees, the aqueduct would be vulnerable, and through the aqueduct, all of the watersheds. As soon as I saved Midas, Tatouage would have to be quarantined.

  I spiraled the metal sleeve of my mouth open, teeth interlocking and extending into the pinwheel form of my individual curse-killing sieve. Placing Midas’ thumbs in the sharp corners of the metal pinwheel, I put my knee on his chest, gripped his arms to have better control, and then bit down.

  Far off I heard Midas scream, but I was caught in the killing, sinking into its bloody immediacy as the mottling filled my mouth—anise languor, strangling, trade your death for eternal green, growing dreams—an old tooth ached with gold, burnished beyond sunlight, fire, hue of a fresh cut peach . . . and for a moment I was distracted, remembering my momma’s mouth had killed curses for Midas before—but then the mottling gushed again and my killing sieve snapped shut, sifting the curse from Midas’ blood. One heartbeat, two.

  His bleeding, but intact, thumbs dropped from my mouth, as the sharp pinwheels of my sieve sped up, spinning faster and faster as I killed the curse. My momma’s metal mouth whipped though anise, almond, grey webs, mushroom longing, smoke, parasitic clawing, regret—even an odd trace of honey. Finally, the killing puree frothed, the world whirled, and I fell backwards.

  “Petech, are you okay?” Midas knelt now, while I was the one prone.

  I swallowed—nothing left but my own tasteless spit. The purification killing was complete. “Small puree, but potent.”

  I sat, picked up one of the nearby citrus-seeds. “What a costly feast. I’m sorry, my friend, but I must quarantine Tatouage, close off its waterway.”

  “But—” he bowed his head, his silver bangs hiding his expression.

  “But what?”

  “I promised not to tell, but Purla and Melisande are rooted in the Oasis.”

  Some decisions only take a breath to make.

  “Burn the grove, Midas.” It might not save Tatouage, but it would keep the waterways safe until I returned. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Can you find fire?”

  “Fire’s just another word for gold.” Some spirit of his usual joy flared up in the words, made me think everything was going to be all right. He smiled his bee-yoo-ti-ful grin. “My name’s not Midas for nothing.”

  I ran towards the Oasis.

  As if nothing had ever been wrong anywhere, anytime, ever, the Oasis shimmered its garden of tiered pleasures—fresh blue water, neck-high wheat and millet fields, lush fig, plum, and apricot trees, all perpetually shaded by towering palms. No visible sign of mottling, thankfully. And while the palm trees and fields of grain swayed their dance of green and gold, they didn’t shimmer with milky smoke. I hoped it would stay that way—easier to find my wife and child if the Oasis didn’t move.

  I plunged into the fields, following the river—if they were here, they’d be rooted near water.

  Thwack, scratch. The boughs of cherryfern and fig scratched my face and limbs, snagging my tunic, closing me out. The risk of quarantine was fresh in my mind, so, after asking politely, and being denied, I extended a few metal teeth and bit the sapling bough of what I hoped was an ordinary cherryfern. Its creaking cry brought tears to my eyes. The orchard of trees thickened, circled me, boughs menacing. The Oasis still smelled of paradise—sweet apricot, fig, coconut, and through it all the clean burble of fresh wa
ter—but smoke rose from the trees in front of me. If ever I was to find my wife and child, the time was now.

  I fell to my knees. “Purla! Please! Don’t leave! Please, I only want to talk!”

  The smoke subsided, falling to a low mist on the ground.

  The Oasis orchard parted, and through it walked my once wife.

  She walked as a willow, aspen barked, with cherryfern boughs trailing behind her in a thick red and green train—her oh so human mouth and eyes peering out. Such evergreen eyes, amidst the wooden beauty of sap and sun, break a man’s heart.

  “What do you want?”

  “Tatouage is going to be quarantined. Come with me back to Loblolly where I know you’ll be safe.”

  “Why quarantined?”

  “Wormwood mottling, in the redwood grove that hosts the aqueduct. I can’t risk all the watersheds, even if it means losing Tatouage.”

  “Thank you for your concern, but we’ll stay in the Oasis.”

  “But if Tatouage is quarantined, you’ll be trapped.”

  “The Oasis is never trapped, have you forgotten? We walk wherever we choose.” As if to remind me of this, smoke curled around her lower boughs. “Besides, the Oasis is our home now. More so than any of the watersheds. Leave us alone.”

  With great dignity, she turned and walked away, as if having dismissed some rude stranger, not her once-husband. The shame of it drove me to my feet, and I grabbed a handful of her cherryfern train. Through the lifting canopy of her retreating train, peeked a pair of bright eyes, blinking beneath a crown of silverlaced leaves.

  “Melisande?” I reached out.

  “No! Don’t—” Purla whirled, but too late—Melisande had already crept free from her mother’s train, and was exploring my pale, freckled arms with the stiff twigs of her darker, barked limbs.

  Reunited with Melisande, joy rose in my throat, and I thought I might blossom into a walking tree myself. But something was very wrong. Melisande was too small, far too small. And quiet—too quiet—grey webbing covered her mouth. “Purla, what’s happened to her mouth?”

  “Mother’s son, father’s daughter. She’s growing a curse-killer’s mouth.”

  “No, Purla.” Ice curled around my heart as I felt the rigid strictures of what I feared were not my daughter’s bark. My heartbeat slowed, as if by force of will I could reverse time. “A curse-killer’s mouth is red not grey, and comes only after rites. This is something else.”

  “What?”

  I chipped off one of the outer husks of my metal teeth—a harmless red triangle glinting in the sun—and gave it to Melisande. She was as entranced as I’d been when my mother’d done the same for me. I covered the whorls of Melisande’s ears so she wouldn’t hear what I was about to say. “Mottle. Melisande’s caught the mottling. Purla, we . . .”

  I couldn’t finish the thought. Of everything I expected to have to deal with—not being able to find Purla, her refusing to talk to me, even both of them being dead—I wasn’t prepared for this.

  I cradled Melisande in my arms, savoring the smell of pine and almonds from her silverlaced leaves. No sign of mottling on Purla, or in the Oasis Orchard, but everywhere on my little girl, from the muzzle of her mouth to the twiggy tips of her toes, a mottling web so dense, I’d at first mistaken it as the bark of her skin.

  “How long?” Too long, I knew already, but I had to ask.

  “It’s only been visible the last two weeks, but I think it started before. She’s never made a sound since we left Loblolly. Could it have started as long ago as that?”

  “I don’t know.” But I was afraid. Holding my only precious child, cradling her as if she were still that slippery, perfect newborn, I knelt. I was scared to try, and yet I knew I must. I extended my killing sieve.

  “Petech, don’t—”

  “Purla, by all the curses, I promise I won’t hurt her. But I have to assess the mottling.” I placed the tip of the smallest twig of her arm in my mouth, and very, very gently, bit down. Nothing, no taste, no mottling siren cry, just tacky resistance and then, a snap.

  My heart shattered into its own mottled web with the sound of that snap. Melisande was the mottling and the mottling was Melisande—there was no separate curse to kill.

  “Petech!” Purla swept her lower boughs towards me, trying to knock me back, but I pivoted away.

  “Purla, I won’t hurt her! Now let me think.” With every ounce of my heart and mind, I thought.

  Was the mottling due to her not learning to kill her own pain, like the curse-killer she was supposed to be? Or was it an inevitable outgrowth of my and Purla’s match? Or of our fighting at her birth? More to the moment, could I kill her curse without killing her? How quickly her little twigs crumbled. Could I risk trying? Could I risk not?

  All the questions circled around, as if the tempest in my mind could somehow change the choice: How could I choose between killing my own child and letting her kill the watersheds?

  Damn the curses. Damn them all. My eyes stung and I told myself it was the damn smoke from the Oasis. Damn smoke. Damn milky smoke. Where had I seen smoke like this before?

  Maybe there was a way to beat this horrible spin, and these stupid, damnable facts. I took a deep breath. “Purla, is there a Quixote in the Oasis?”

  Her aspen leaves shimmered, milky smoke curled up around her trunk. “What are you talking about, Petech? Quixotes are extinct. There hasn’t been one seen for generations.”

  “Then he and I must both be lost on a caught-heart quest.” Harsh laughter scraped my throat as I heard my momma’s voice telling me to count my curses and wipe that foolish grin off my face. My laughter flared into a forest fire threatening to burn me down where I knelt, holding my wooden daughter, trapped in her own mottling curse.

  “Stop laughing, Petech. Do you smell something burning?”

  Not my laughter. The redwood grove. Midas. The echo of an idea trying to surface deep within my mind.

  Some choices only take a breath to make.

  “Come Purla, we haven’t much time.”

  We ran, Purla’s leaves streaming behind us, maple, aspen, oak—a trail of foliage reminding me of the day Melisande was born. Melisande’s bright green gaze never left my face—the only sign of life in her mottling-strangled face.

  The redwood grove was ablaze.

  “Hurry!” Midas was halfway up the laddered redwood. I pushed Purla up a nearby tattooed giant; her exposed roots wrapped themselves tightly around the trunk. She climbed to safety above the flames, but I knew she wouldn’t leave without Melisande.

  I had only one idea, strange and perhaps impossible, but my momma’s mouth itched and I hoped it knew something I didn’t know.

  “Midas, I need you to come down.”

  Thank the curses, he didn’t question me, but hurried down.

  “There isn’t much time. Take her.” I thrust Melisande into his arms before he could object. Curses forgive me, I knew I shouldn’t ask, but with the fire blazing all around, my wife crying, my daughter’s life at stake—I didn’t know what else to do.

  “You still want that resurrection?”

  “Killing-curse-reverse. About time. But don’t you think you’d better hurry?” He grinned his unmistakable grin, waved his arms at the approaching fire.

  “This may hurt. Close your eyes, and give me your free hand.”

  He closed his eyes.

  I extended my killing sieve. I placed his thumb in one corner, one of Melisande’s small boughs in the other. I bit down. With both in my mouth, his recently mottled blood, her nearly bloodless wooden flesh, I twisted open the old tooth that ached of Midas touch—a trickle filled my mouth—gold burnished beyond sunlight fire hue of a fresh cut peach dark stars you see when you close your eyes at night—and as my mouth filled, I counted the curses
we can’t kill, the ones I’ve survived—birth, breath, touch, sight, sound, smell, taste, love, thought, death—and with every breath I willed them to my daughter, so that she might have the chance to survive them too, win the long shot of being alive.

  What a froth.

  I never expected dying to take so long. But after the blended resurrection, the shared transfusion, the dual killing-curse-reverse, what will you, I lingered on in the blaze, my own limbs shining golden and I wondered if somehow I too had become a Midas, until the fire crackled, and dark smoke rose before my eyes. So thoroughly had I learned to kill pain that, moments from death, burning alive, all I felt was numbness.

  “Quest complete!” An old impossible voice cried, as milky smoke curled down from the aqueduct. A steely cataract gushed down the redwoods, followed by drifting clouds of coconut and figs, as my Quixote and his watery steed splashed down, his cirrus lance sweeping across the blazing grove, dousing the flames.

  He’d come—if he’d come at all—too late for me. My jaws still worked and words still formed, but I didn’t know how. “Purla said you were extinct.”

  “Extant indeed. As you see, at your service, caught-heart quest complete. Triumphantly I return; the wrong of your death righted, my debt discharged, and now, with your permission, I’ll be off to travel the waters, right wrongs not yet wrung.”

  Talking to a wet madman, who kept dripping on my skull, was actually rather peaceful. “May I join you in your quest now that I’m dead?”

  “No, no, no. Not dead. Right the wrong of your death, that’s what we agreed. If we right the righting, we’ll feel wrong. Besides, other quests await.” He galloped off on the roiling river of his steed, his oasis following.

  I would miss him. He always made so little sense.

  His watery departure quenched the last of the fires that had sprung up around the redwood grove. Seemed impossible that he could be the master of that much water. Where had all that water come from?