Two worlds. Darla dead, Darla alive. One was a lie. But I could see both, feel both, experience both-and the huldra, it knew my name.
I looked, and I saw Mama and my boot, Evis and his men, and Father Foon backed into a corner. But there was no Darla.
There never was, whispered the huldra.
She is dead.
Make them pay.
I felt myself begin to change again, felt myself begin to rise into the night, to join the shadows in that high cold place where words flocked and fled.
Darla stood on tip-toe, I am told, and took my face in her hands and despite the pain of my lips on hers, she kissed me.
She kissed me, and there was no lie in it. And in an instant all the dark magics and the rage and the lust for vengeance cowered, overshadowed by a much older magic that smelled of perfume and was warm and yielding in my arms.
I do remember crushing the huldra. I do remember hearing it scream.
And then both worlds broke apart, truth and lies swept apart in a loud and rushing flood, and I tumbled along with both as the darkness closed swiftly over my head.
Chapter Fourteen
And now, it is summer.
Flowers bloom out of cracks in the sidewalks. Mama’s window box is a wild green shower of straggly looking herbs. It rains all the damned time, the days are hot and my back has been aching ever since that night I walked with the huldra.
I sat at my desk, nursing another cup of Mama’s foul black tea. I would pour the stuff out, back in the alley, but I must admit it does help with the dreams. If I skip a day of Mama’s tea, I walk Rannit in my dreams all that night. I walk with my head just below the clouds and a dry rustling voice whispering nonsense words singsong in the back of my mind.
Maybe the tea does other things too. For the longest time, Three-leg Cat arched his back and hissed when I came in the room. Now he’ll sit on my desk, purr and let me scratch his battle-scarred head, just like the old days.
A loaf of bread steamed on my desk, another gift from the grateful Hoobins. Bread and a pair of clean white long-sleeved shirts with fancy pearl buttons up the front and the button-down collar that Martha herself created. Elegance, as Martha named the dress-shop, was doing well. The pair of shirts she’d given me would cost fifty half-crowns, at any haberdasher’s on Bathways.
Martha had even smiled at me, for the very first time, when they’d dropped the bundles off earlier that day. Smiled, and said hello, and hadn’t rushed out of the room like I’d sprouted bright yellow fangs and big black bat wings.
Maybe it’s true, about Hoobin women and the Sight. And, if so, maybe she could see that the huldra was leaking slowly out of my soul.
I try not to think about the huldra, these days. I try not to entertain my suspicion that Mama didn’t get it from some nameless backstreet mojo man. I try not to ponder her mission that day we thought Darla had died, try not to weigh the likelihood that the name she had sworn never to share was that of Encorla Hisvin.
It made sense. Maybe I was still seeing things, in that strange sideways fashion the huldra showed me, that rainy night of the new moon. Because I could see how Encorla might find it amusing to toss such a powerful object in the midst of what must have been, from his perspective, such a petty squabble.
No, I decided, that wasn’t the only way I knew. I thought back to that night, back to the strange memories that had risen up like windblown dust before me. While I’d walked, I’d somehow become Encorla, or something equally monstrous. Or, more likely, he or it had nearly consumed me.
Had I not broken the huldra-had I embraced the dark-I believe it would have been Encorla Hisvin who would have walked out of that warehouse that night. He and he alone-Markhat just another whirlwind memory, just another anguished cry troubling Hisvin’s dark dreams.
I shuddered, yanked my thoughts back to the present and nibbled at the warm bread and sipped the bitter tea.
Mama would be back soon, with a fresh batch of the foul stuff. I knew she’d linger, hovering over me, fussing and griping and bossing, but watching with those piercing Hog eyes all the while.
Watching to see if the darkness had truly left me. Watching to see if I’d been tainted beyond the reach of tea and herbs and whatever simple magics she was slipping past my door.
Evis stops by too, doing much the same thing, though he brings middling good beer and sets Mama to fretting because we sit up and smoke expensive cigars and watch the dark get thicker. Mama thinks he’s a bad influence. Like we’ll set out at any minute to steal apples off market-stands and taunt passing ogres by dropping our pants and shouting out rude words.
I laughed out loud at the thought of it. Evis has no evil in his soul, save the same tired old evils all men bear. He’d met the huldra’s gaze dead on and not flinched. He even tells a good joke, when none of the lads are around.
Evis did, on occasion, keep me informed as to the progress of Miss Cant, the sobbing halfdead we’d rescued from the warehouse. The Avalante physicians, and I was still trying to become accustomed to the idea of halfdead doctors, were actually doing her good. She was talking again. She could speak a few words, and she no longer tore off the clothes in which they dressed her. Some days she seemed to remember who she’d been.
We’d made a toast, to that.
Remembrance, for the good and the bad.
Darla doesn’t like to talk about the men who had snatched her from her home, or the halfdead who had toyed with her. She does know they had been instructed to kill her, not hold her. The halfdead, never ones for unquestioning obedience of authority, had decided instead to keep her alive and on the warehouse menu when another of the captives died the day of the new moon.
I had no proof, would never have proof, but I was sure I already knew who had given the order to kidnap Darla and slaughter her.
I was sure of the who, but still unsure of the why. To drive me to take the huldra, which conveniently turned up in Mama’s possession right after Darla appeared to be dead? To make damned sure I drove headlong into that nest of halfdead, no matter the consequences?
Because it spiced up an otherwise dreary Thursday?
I never put a name to the corpse hurled at my door.
She might have been a poor soul who had died at the hands of her halfdead captors and thus indirectly saved Darla. She might have been a maid or a streetwalker, caught out after Curfew once too often. Or she might have been an acquaintance of Hisvin, who had, like so many others, eventually failed to amuse. That tattoo on her back, though, had convinced me the dead body was Darla-to me that smacked more of a creature known as the Corpsemaster than of a gaggle of blood-mad halfdead. Such attention to fine detail seemed a bit beyond their ken.
There had been no survivors among the priests or the halfdead. And the one other person who might have the answers is not the kind of person you ask them of.
Mama banged on my door and barged through, more hot tea emitting steam from the pot in her rag-shielded hands.
“Brung you some more.”
“Thanks. I was just wishing I had something to dip Three-Leg in, his fleas are back.”
Mama thunked the pot down and scowled. “You need to be drinkin’ all this. Today. My sageroot came in and this is full of it.”
I grimaced. “Sageroot? Isn’t that poisonous?”
“Nah, not if’n it’s dried before it’s boiled.” Mama sniffed. “Best drink it hot too.”
I sighed. “You really think this is helping, Mama?”
“I reckon it is,” she said. She sat heavily in my client’s chair. “Cat don’t run from you. Miss Darla don’t see them things in your eyes. Mostly, though, you’re nearly as big a smart-ass as you was before that night.”