And after dumping their armloads of seasoned oak and green birch, they’d go back outside, to see to the sheep again and frown at the threatening mingy gray skies. Later, Jane might seek out Trevor, asking his advice about some herbal remedy for distemper or scabies. But she never took to Fossa.
“I can’t stand them,” she confessed to me one night after we’d shared another bottle from Trevor’s cellar. “The animals, the ones like Scarlet—they don’t upset me. But those things—”
She grimaced, took a swallow of wine. “—Those mutants —ugh.” And shuddering, she passed the bottle to me.
That was on a rare evening Jane and I spent together. The truth was, her happiness wore at me, made me bitterly aware of all I had lost. And I couldn’t bear to be with Miss Scarlet, either. At first she sought me out often, especially early in the morning when the sun set our frozen windows afire.
“Bad dreams!” she’d gasp, letting the door to my room slam behind her as she pattered across the floor. “I can’t bear it, Wendy, I wake up and the sun makes me think of flames….”
She would crawl into bed with me, her small body shivering despite its coat of fur and a shabby nightshirt. But I offered her scant comfort, only let one hand fall nearly weightlessly upon her little head. My own nightmares kept me tossing until dawn, but I would not share them with anyone.
And so we grew apart, we who had been inseparable, before the feast of the Winterlong cleaved love and friendship from us. The change was hardest on Miss Scarlet. Unaccustomed to spending months alone, without the buffer of an audience or rehearsal between herself and her demons, she grew depressed. Like myself, Miss Scarlet had been the subject of experimentation—in her case, research that had gifted a chimpanzee with human speech and emotions. But it was her great and lifelong sorrow that she was never to be truly human. And despite her grace and effort onstage, many in the City had seen her as only a freakish heteroclite, a trained monkey mouthing ancient scripts. Now, far from her paints and powders and crinolines, she languished in front of the fire in Seven Chimneys’ main room, wearing the child’s clothes Trevor had found for her. There she would sip her tea, or a mild broth made from those mushrooms called Life Away, which induce soft dreams.
“I think the Goddess has forgotten we are here,” she said to me once, her small black eyes reddened beneath drooping lids and her voice drowsy. “All of us, in the City and all across the world; else so many people that we loved would not have died.”
I said nothing. I feared what she said was true, and after a moment she turned away. Gradually it grew harder and harder for Jane or me to rouse her from these sad reveries. Only Fossa seemed able to talk to her at those times. As the weeks passed, I watched in growing dismay as the two of them would sit together on the worn brocade sofa, while Trevor’s collection of skulls grinned down at them from the mantel. Fossa’s gargoyle head would bend over Miss Scarlet’s small dark one, and the even current of their conversation would course on until broken by the chimpanzee’s sudden rapturous quoting of some new text, or Fossa’s low, urgent growl. Sometimes Trevor joined them for these discussions, easing himself onto the edge of the couch as though for a quick word and then staying for hours. I tried not to think about what all this meant, and avoided Trevor’s quietly triumphant looks when I passed through the room.
And myself? In one quick year I had gone from being incapable of feeling any independent emotions, to fairly drowning in them. Every night I forced myself to stay awake, drinking Trevor’s previous coffee, walking outside till the cold nearly killed me, dipping into a horde of candicaine pipettes I found in one of the empty guest rooms. Anything to keep from sleeping; anything to keep from dreaming of him.
But it was no use. Each snowfall made me think of Justice: those hours before a performance when we would huddle together before the little fire in Miss Scarlet’s grate, the grand entertainments we had from the Paphians in the weeks preceding the feast of Winterlong. Everything had his print upon it, as though his ashes had drifted to earth here, touching that lamp, those clothes, covering the floor so that everywhere I walked, tracks remained to remind me I was moving further and further away from him. Then when exhaustion overtook me, I would drink wine or Trevor’s raw, strong brandy until I fell asleep, shoving the pillows from my bed lest I wake with one in my arms, tearstained and bearing the mark of my kisses. And I avoided Giles, whose gentle features and gray-blond hair put me in mind of my lover’s.
Later, I wondered sometimes whether Trevor meant for it to be like that. Jane in her little world in the barn; Scarlet and I alone with our miseries. But even Trevor Mallory couldn’t change the weather: the worst winter he had seen in a lifetime (and Trevor’s lifetime was thrice any of ours).
“It’s changed,” he muttered one evening, staring out to where a brutal gale tore branches from the oaks. Wind and ice had already felled an ancient chestnut tree. “The bastards have done something to the weather again—seeded the clouds over Kalimantan, probably, or done something to choke the air with ash.” He glanced over his shoulder and started to see me there, then smoothed his features and smiled slightly. “But our time will come, Wendy; it will come soon enough.” I gave him a curt nod and quickly left the room.
While Trevor’s geneslaves never appeared, there were a few other visitors to the inn that winter. One February twilight the dull whine of a snowmobile echoed through the still air, and two black silhouettes appeared against the snow drifted along the front walk.
“Go to your rooms!”
Giles’s anxious voice interrupted me where I hunched over a monitor in the kitchen, playing the intricate game called Horlage. In the background the shortwave radio hummed to itself, a song I had heard in the City, an aria from The Gods Abandon Antony. Without a word Giles strode to the radio and switched it off.
“What is it?” Jane stood in the doorway that led outside to the barn. She shook the snow from her coat. “That lamb’s going to have twins—”
“Not now!” hissed Giles. Miss Scarlet padded into the room, frowning and looking up at him questioningly. Giles pointed silently toward the front of the house. My hand froze on the monitor’s dials.
Voices. Two men, asking loudly for a night’s lodging. I heard the nasal twanging of the server, Mazda, begin to reply, but then Trevor’s welcoming tones boomed out. Moments later we heard footsteps heading up the main hall.
“Quickly now,” breathed Giles, hurrying all three of us toward the stairs that led to the back wing of the house. “They’re Ascendant janissaries. There’s been trouble in the City.”
For an instant his gaze caught mine. “Rebels,” he whispered as he held the door for us to go upstairs. “A small armed band of aardmen attacked the Ascendant barracks and was killed—”
Miss Scarlet gasped. “The monsters!”
“Aardmen! Well, thank god for th—” Jane began, when Miss Scarlet broke in.
“How could they murder them? Venceremos! Death to the human tyrants! The Ascendant monsters will pay—like he says, our day will come! ”
Jane stopped in the dim stairwell and stared at her, open-mouthed. “ What? ”
“Not now!” said Giles, yanking Miss Scarlet after him; but not before she bared her teeth, as though at an unseen enemy.
“What the hell was that about, Scarlet?” Jane exploded when we were safely in her room and Giles had left. “ Human tyrants? Is this something Fossa’s been whispering in your ear? What’s going on?”