Ash & Bramble

  “No, no, Dulcie,” Precious is saying patiently. “You can’t wear brown slippers with a blue dress to the prince’s ball. Hm.” She pauses. “Silver would be lovely, though.” She looks at the tall old man, who is holding a set of metal calipers and a measuring tape. “Can the elves who work in your shop do them in silver, Shoemaker?”

  “Yes,” the old shoemaker says. “They can.”

  Keeping my head down, I get on with my work, scrubbing the ash from the grate, then using the rag to apply the brass polish. Behind me, the shoemaker is slowly measuring each of Dulcet’s stocking-clad feet, and then Precious’s. I polish the brass grate until it shines, and then I gather up my brush and my rag and my bucket and leave the room.

  The shoemaker’s servant follows me into the hallway.

  “Pin,” he whispers.

  I stop and turn. He is about my height, slim and straight. He’s got one of those thin-skinned faces that show every blush. Something about that bothers me, though he’s quite good-looking, too. “You’re mistaken,” I tell him. “My name is Penelope.”

  He frowns. His green eyes are very serious. “You don’t remember me.”

  “I have never seen you before in my life,” I say. The bucket is heavy, and I set it on the floor between us.

  “Yes you have.”

  “No I haven’t,” I insist. Talking to him is making my head hurt, and that makes me snappish. “And I didn’t like you staring at me like that, either.”

  “Pin, it’s me,” the young man says, a hint of desperation in his voice. “Shoe. Do you really not remember?”

  “Oh, you’re Shoe?” I say. “You’re the one who sent the message with the ratcatcher.” I narrow my eyes, suspicious. “What do you know about my thimble?”

  “You don’t remember,” the young man named Shoe mutters, as if talking to himself. His face has gone rather alarmingly pale.

  “I don’t remember a lot of things,” I say impatiently. “Now, what about the thimble?”

  He blinks. “I’ve got it here.” He puts his hand into his coat pocket and brings out my thimble.

  “Where did you get that?” I ask, and reach out to take it from him.

  He closes his hand around it. “You gave it to me, Pin,” he says seriously.

  “Pen,” I correct. “Penelope. Lady Penelope, actually. And I didn’t. You must have stolen it.” It’s the only explanation, because I never would have given my thimble away to anyone.

  “No, I—” There is the sound of a door opening from down the hallway, and he lowers his voice. “Pin, you have to get out of this house,” he says urgently.

  Well, I know that perfectly well. But what has it to do with him? “I think you should give me the thimble—my thimble—and go away,” I say.

  “Will you come with me now?” he asks, holding out his hand.

  “No,” I say, and take a step away. He tries to follow and trips over the bucket I’d put down between us, lurching into me; we both stagger back until I bump into the wall, and he bumps into me. We stand there nose to nose for a moment, panting. I feel the length of his body, pressed against mine.

  “Pin,” he breathes.

  “Pen,” I tell him.

  “Pin,” he repeats.

  “Oh, you are stubborn, aren’t you?” I say.

  As an answer, he leans closer and his lips brush against mine. A kiss. I am so surprised by it that I can’t move. The kiss deepens. My lips tingle and warmth spreads through me, and I savor it, the touch of another person when I’ve been alone for so, so long. I close my eyes. Somehow my arms have gotten around his neck and I am kissing him back.

  At that moment a door slams, and I look over Shoe’s shoulder to see my stepmother coming down the hallway in full sail.

  “Oh, curse it,” I mutter, and shove him away from me. He stumbles back and trips over the bucket again, landing sprawled on the floor before Stepmama.

  “What are you doing?” she shrills. “Penelope!”

  Shoe’s face is scarlet, and he scrambles to his feet.

  “You slut,” Stepmama says, kicking the bucket aside and bearing down on me. “Carrying on in the hallway with a”—she looks Shoe up and down, sees his raggedly cut hair and his shapeless coat—“with a common servant. I might have expected it!” She raises her hand to strike.

  Shoe steps in front of me, holding up his arm to block the blow.

  Stepmama’s face turns red and she looks as if she might explode.

  Then the shoemaker pokes his head from the drawing room.

  Stepmama lowers her hand quickly and draws herself up, but continues to glare past Shoe at me.

  It’s all I can do to lean against the wall and try to catch my breath.

  “Shoe,” the old shoemaker says, “I’m finished with the measurements. Come along now.”

  Shoe has gone pale again. He turns to me. “I’m very sorry,” he blurts, backing away, and he takes the wooden toolbox from the shoemaker and they go down the hallway and out of the house.

  I, of course, am given the usual punishment.

  Only tonight, as I curl on the mattress of my prison room, my cheek throbbing with a new bruise, faint with hunger and aching with weariness, I think about Shoe, a mystery himself, who stole my thimble and who calls me by the wrong name and who is so sure he knows me, even though I am absolutely certain that he does not.

  And as I am falling asleep, my thoughts drift to the velvet-voiced tea shop man. I feel the gentle touch of his fingers on my face. I want to see him again. Somehow I know that I will. Our next meeting has a kind of inevitability about it.

  CHAPTER

  18

  AS SOON AS THEY COME OUT OF THE FINE MANSION, SHOE opens his mouth to tell Natters what happened in the hallway with Pin.

  “Not here,” Natters interrupts, with a glance around the busy street, wary of listening ears. “Not until we’re back at the shop.”

  Shoe walks with him in frozen silence along the wide, well-patrolled, well-lit streets and graceful bridges of the upper city, past the market square, and into the winding, darkening streets of the lower city, where the river smells like dead fish and open drains.

  All the way, he’s cursing himself. Pin is in trouble and it’s his fault, and now he’s made her trouble even worse, very likely, and she thinks he’s a thief and—and he kissed her and she probably hadn’t liked that at all—and she will never trust him to help her get away, not after this.

  At the shop, Natters hustles Shoe inside, and then locks the door behind them.

  “She’s—” Shoe starts.

  “Wait,” Natters interrupts. “The Missus’ll want to hear it, too.”

  They go up to the kitchen. It is fragrant with the smell of bean soup on the stove and of freshly baked bread, and it’s warmly lit by candles and a coal fire in the hearth.

  Natters points to the table and Shoe sits and drops his head into his hands.

  After a moment, the Missus sets a cup of hot tea before him and she and Natters take their places at the table.

  “Well?” the Missus prompts.

  “I can’t believe how stupid I am,” Shoe mutters.

  “What is it, lad?” Natters says with surprising gentleness. “She was Pin, wasn’t she?”

  Shoe looks despairingly across the table at them. “She doesn’t remember me. She doesn’t remember any of it,” he says, his voice rough. “The Godmother must’ve used her magic to take all of her memories away. The fortress, the wall and the thorns, the forest, all of it.”

  Natter and the Missus nod, as if this isn’t unexpected. “So she’s not your Pin,” the Missus says.

  “She was never my Pin,” Shoe says. “Now she’s Lady Penelope, she says.” He curses himself again, and presses the heels of his hands over his eyes. In the darkness there he sees her again, her pale face bruised, her eyes sharp and suspicious, and smudged with weariness, too. And she wore shoes that looked like they didn’t fit her very well; it’d been the first thing he’d noticed. He
takes a shuddering breath and then opens his eyes. “She doesn’t remember me at all. She—” He takes the thimble out of his pocket and sets it on the table. It glows warmly in the candlelight. “She remembers this.”

  “A thimble,” says the Missus, with a meaningful look at Natters.

  “No matter,” Natters says to her. “The girl’s forgotten him. Shoe is well out of it now.”

  No. He’s not. Shoe stares at the thimble. He takes another deep breath and wraps his hands around his mug of tea.

  Oh, you are stubborn, aren’t you, she had said to him.

  True enough, he is. He takes a sip of the hot tea and it burns a trail down to his stomach. Even if she doesn’t remember it, she’s still herself; she’s still Pin. Nothing has changed. He has to get her out.

  AFTER BEAN SOUP and bread for dinner, Shoe drags himself down to the shop. All night he and Natters work on their long list of orders for shoes made by elves, dancing slippers, mostly, for the prince’s ball at the castle. Shoe tries to think of how he’s going to get Pin—Lady Penelope—out of the fine house she’s imprisoned in, but he’s gone too many nights without sleep, and his thoughts are fuzzy.

  After Natters has nudged him awake for the third time because he’s fallen sound asleep sitting up, he goes to his cubby, where he collapses into bed.

  In the morning his head is clearer and he knows exactly what he’s going to do. At breakfast, he tells Natters and his Missus that he has a plan.

  Natters shakes his head, gloomy. “I’m telling you, Shoe,” he says. “You’re better staying out of it.”

  “I’m already in it,” Shoe says. “Whatever it is.” He bends his head and rubs his eyes, still tired. “Natters, I have to know. What am I fighting against?”

  Natters shakes his head. “Fighting, he calls it,” he mutters grimly. “You can’t fight it, lad.”

  “Is it some kind of magic?” Shoe asks, stubborn.

  Natters shakes his head. There is a long moment of silence. Faintly, in the distance, Shoe hears the castle clock striking eight. Past time to open the shop.

  “Story, we call it,” the Missus says unexpectedly.

  “No, Missus,” Natters protests.

  She reaches across the scuffed wooden table and pats Natters’s hand. “We can’t keep quiet any longer. It is time to act.”

  The Missus is small and stout and she wears a flowered kerchief over her graying hair, but to Shoe she suddenly looks wise and strong, and in her eyes he can see her sorrow for their lost apprentices. She folds her arms and nods at him. “Story.”

  “It’s the Godmother’s magic?” Shoe asks.

  “It’s much more powerful than that,” the Missus says.

  “What is it, then?” he asks. “How does it work?”

  Natters and his Missus exchange one of their looks. She nods at him to speak. Natters sighs. “You know stories, right? Ordinary ones. They have a kind of shape to them.”

  Shoe nods. “Beginnings, middles, and ends, you mean?”

  “Yes.” Natters raises his empty cup and the Missus pushes herself from her chair and goes to fetch him more tea. “It’s well enough when an ordinary story is told. Happy endings and the like. But what if . . .” He trails off.

  The Missus sets the teapot on the table. “Help yourself, Natters,” she says, nudging the sugar bowl closer to him. Settling herself in her chair, she nods at Shoe. “What if the stories aren’t told? What if they’re lived? What if you were forced to live your life in the shape of a story that is not your own, with no choice about who you are and where you’re going?”

  Shoe thinks about this. His life doesn’t really have any story to it at all. He can’t remember its beginning, before his enslavement in the Godmother’s fortress. Maybe this is its middle. And he doesn’t want to think much about an ending.

  The Missus pours herself more tea. “What we think happened is that—at the beginning”—she gives Shoe a meaningful look—“at the beginning of it all the Godmother used the stories to give herself more power. There was a kind of dark witch who thwarted her, so the stories couldn’t take over. But then something changed.”

  “A plot twist,” Shoe puts in.

  “That’s the idea,” the Missus approves. “The stories have a kind of power in themselves, and as they were told and retold they grew too powerful. They became Story; they became real. The witch tried to fight Story and was killed. Story uses the Godmother, now, to achieve its endings. Story warps the world around it, forcing people into the shape of it.”

  Shoe frowns. “Pin’s stuck in a living Story, is that what you’re saying?”

  The Missus gives a grim nod.

  “And there’s no way to get her out?”

  “The wheels turn, Shoe,” Natters says. “Story is a meat grinder. Those who are caught up in it are ground down and put to use. One way or another, it uses all of us; we all serve it whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. Not even the Godmother can truly control it.” He shakes his head. “There’s no escaping it.”

  “In the Godmother’s fortress we were outside Story,” Shoe corrects.

  Natters shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Maybe you were. Or maybe you helped it turn, making the shoes, and all the rest of it.”

  “Maybe,” Shoe agrees, thinking of all the slaves in the Godmother’s fortress, spinning away like tiny gears in a giant machine.

  “At any rate, you’re a shoemaker, Shoe,” Natters adds. “There’s no other place in Story for the likes of you. If you try to change it, it’ll grind you up and spit you out, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “I have to try to get Pin out,” Shoe insists.

  Natters shakes his head sadly.

  “What are you thinking, sneak into her house and spirit her away?” the Missus asks.

  Shoe nods. “The prince’s ball is tomorrow night. I’m guessing her stepmother will be invited to it. It’s the only chance I’ll have to get in there.” And this time he’ll give her the thimble, to convince her to come. He leans forward, elbows on the table. “And then we’ll have to get out of the city somehow.” He’s seen the bramble-covered city walls and the guarded gates. “It’ll be tricky.”

  “You’ll go down the river, of course,” the Missus says.

  “But there’s the waterfall,” Shoe says, remembering the view of the city he had with the Huntsman.

  “There’s a way down,” the Missus says. “A path. It’s a bit slippery, but it’s not so bad if you’ve got good sturdy shoes. We can have a boat ready at the bottom.”

  Shoe blinks. “We? You and Natters?” It’s too much to ask of them.

  The Missus shakes her head. “There aren’t many of us, but my Natters and I are not the only ones in the city who notice that the wheels are turning.”

  “What wheels?” Shoe interrupts.

  “The story is told and retold, didn’t I say?” the Missus answers. “It ends, and then it begins again. Every time the Godmother finds new people for it to grind up and reshape. The main characters change, but the rest of us stay here, playing our parts.” She nods wisely. “Now, Shoe, Natters has given you the dark truth of what you’re caught up in, and there is little hope, but it’s clear this girl is important to Story. We will do whatever we can to disrupt it.”

  “Who is the we exactly?” he asks.

  The Missus nods again, and he sees not just wisdom, but hidden power, too. “We who know what we have lost to Story. There aren’t many of us. Your friend the ratcatcher is one. Another is a street sweeper who watches the castle for us, a few maids and footmen in some fine houses, one or two of the lords and ladies living in those fine houses. We secret few know that the Godmother used her magic to rip us out of our lives. She takes the very best craftspeople for her fortress, and the rest of us, along with the lords and ladies and the important ones, she brings here, to her city.”

  “You remember, then?” Shoe interrupts. “Your life Before?”

  Natters shakes his head, an
d the Missus answers for him. “No, we don’t remember. Her magic is too strong for that. But we know about the Before; we know how much we’ve lost. We can sense the turnings of Story’s wheel. We haven’t resisted before, but now, perhaps, it is time.”

  “You said it’s impossible,” Shoe says. Natters had made it very clear about the crushing and grinding and the hopelessness of it all.

  “Maybe it is,” the Missus says, with a shrug of her broad shoulders. “But this time we will fight it.”

  “Sand in the gears,” Natters puts in.

  The Missus holds out her knobbed, age-spotted hand to her husband—and he takes it in his. “That is why we will help you, too.”

  “Thank you,” Shoe says. Story sounds huge and unstoppable, but maybe they will find a way to escape it. Once they’re outside the city he might be able to find the Huntsman and his band of rebels. “I have a lot of gold coins that you can have,” he remembers. “Can you get us supplies?”

  “Leave that to me,” the Missus says.

  They discuss the other arrangements to be made, the path and the boat, and the rest of it.

  “And you think she’ll come with you?” Natters asks, his voice doubtful.

  “I hope so.” He takes the thimble out of his pocket. “This will help, I think.”

  Then Shoe goes down to the workroom to spend the day sweeping the front step and helping Natters match the elven-made shoes with the people who come into the shop to pay for them. He goes out to the tavern and leaves a message for Spanner with the flirtatious tavern boy, and, blushing, comes back home. The Missus reports that a boat has been found and is to be packed with supplies. By tomorrow night, all will be ready.

  That night after dinner he goes down to the shop again and lights a candle. He remembers Pin’s measurements exactly. He chooses the finest, most supple leather and softest sable for a lining; he cuts carefully and stitches soundly. He makes her a good, sturdy, warm pair of boots. They are boots for climbing down a slippery waterfall path, for walking long distances, boots for running while being chased by trackers.

  Boots for her escape from Story.