“Could this really be that spinning wheel?”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Before Trix could protest, Sunday reached out and pricked her finger on the spindle.
“No!” Trix cried, and immediately lanced his finger on the spindle as well.
Sunday watched the blood well up on Trix’s fingertip. Shed meant to scare her brother with her story, but shed never meant him harm. “Why did you do that?”
“If you fall asleep for a hundred years, then so will I. When we wake up, we can hunt down the spinning wheel together and make sure it’s destroyed.”
Trix was never one to question love or loyalty. If more people like him existed in the world, it would be a much nicer place. “Oh, Trixie. You’re the best brother ever.”
His face fell. The magic they’d woven between them blew away on the wind. “But I’m not your brother.”
Sunday looked down at her fingertip with the bright red pearl of blood on it. She took Trix’s hand in hers and pressed their two wounded fingers together. “You have always been family. In my heart, you have always been my brother. Now our blood is shared again. You have mine, and I have yours. You are my brother and I am your sister. Don’t ever let anyone say otherwise.”
“As it was, so it will be forever,” he said solemnly.
Sunday’s body tingled. She was working some small magic with her words, but she didn’t care if she got in trouble. She wasn’t changing anything major, just reinforcing a bond that had always been between them. If it made Trix feel better, it was worth it.
Trix pulled his finger away and wrapped it tightly in the hem of his dirty shirt. “So what are you going to do now that you’ve completed your task?”
Sunday looked down. The strands of gray wool she’d started with were now covered in a thick layer of fine golden yarn. She wasn’t sure what exactly she’d learned, but she must have learned it all the same. Perhaps Aunt Joy wasn’t as lazy as Sunday had originally thought.
She smiled at her brother-once-before and her brother-again-and-forever. “I expect I’ll go find out what my next task is.”
The afternoon sun burned high in the sky, Sunday’s white pigeon cooed in the garden tree, and Aunt Joy made the beans grow. It was beyond strange to witness the beans they had planted only a few days earlier sprout and climb the sticks and strings that stretched down each row. The leaves uncurled and spread out in the sun; the vines wound around and around one another, flowered, and then sprouted fat velvety pods all over. Joy handed Sunday a basket. “Your next task.”
“Picking beans?”
“Every last one,” said Joy. “And while you are picking, think about how I just did that.”
Sunday stood, dumbstruck, as her aunt turned to leave. Trix tugged on Sunday’s sleeve, shaking her awake. “Can she have help?” he called to Joy.
Joy smiled benevolently and said, “Yes, she may,” before disappearing back into the house.
Trix ran for another basket and joined his sister in snapping beans off the vines.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
Trix picked beans with both hands. “I want to.”
“Thank you.” The sun warmed Sunday’s neck, and sweat trickled down her back. When her basket was mostly full, Trix emptied it into his and went to fetch another. He returned with a cup of water for her, and she gulped it down.
“Save some!” Trix said before she drained the cup.
Startled, she asked, “Why?”
“For your bird.”
From the row of vines beside her, the little white pigeon stared at her quizzically. Sunday stared back. A few hours earlier, it had been a piece of paper with a futile dream written inside it. Now it was flesh and blood and feathers and bone. Sunday hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with it.
“I’m not even sure it is a bird,” said Sunday. “Aunt Joy made it, but I never meant to keep it.” She flapped her hand. “Shoo! Go away, bird. You don’t belong to anyone, least of all me.”
Trix laughed at her.
“What?”
“If the bird was made, it chose to be made. It’s here because it chooses to be with you.”
“I don’t have any say in the matter?”
“You never did.”
“Spectacular. I can’t even take care of myself. What am I supposed to do with a bird?”
Trix put his palms together and cupped them. “Here. Pour what’s left of the water into my hands.” Sunday did. A few fat droplets escaped between his fingers. The bird hesitantly hopped forward and then fluttered to Trix’s finger, where it perched itself to drink. Sunday studied its tiny eyes, its beak, its perfect, smooth feathers. They were impossibly white, like Sunday imagined an angel’s might be.
“You should give her a purpose,” said Trix.
“She’s a bird,” Sunday said. “Her purpose is to be a bird. I’m guessing she knows how to do that a heck of a lot better than I do.”
“You should ask her for help.”
“I am not talking to a bird.”
“But you just did,” said Trix. “When you told her to go away.”
“I was being silly.”
“You talk to Grumble.”
And there it was. Sunday forgot all about the bird. Her eyes got misty, and her heart was suddenly too heavy for one person to hold. “I miss him, Trixie.”
“Then go see him.”
She had lessons to learn, a life’s worth of magic to control, and an entire field of beans to pick. From here on out, her life would be one never-ending series of tasks after another. She was caught in a prison forged at her birth. “I can’t.”
Trix pulled his hands slowly apart and the water rained to the ground. He moved the finger where the bird was perched carefully toward Sunday. Despite wanting nothing to do with the animal, Sunday raised her hand and held out her fingers. The plump little bird hopped into them. It weighed so little, she almost couldn’t tell it was there at all. Its tiny feet tickled slightly.
“Ask her,” said Trix.
Sunday exhaled. She could do this. Trix asked worms and moles for help, didn’t he? Sunday finally spoke as if addressing a letter. “Dear bird, I would really appreciate it if you would help us pick all the beans out of this field.” Had the bird bobbed its head? Sunday looked to Trix for guidance.
“Ask if its friends would like to help, too.”
“And if you have any friends, we would be very grateful for their help, too.” She whispered an aside to Trix. “Shouldn’t we offer them something as payment?”
“Tell them they can have a basket of beans for themselves when they are done.”
“Did you hear that?” Sunday asked. The bird bobbed its head again. “All right,” she said, but the bird didn’t leave. “Thank you very much.” The bird flew away into the trees.
Sunday felt a fool. Talking to birds indeed. Enchanted men were one thing; wild animals were completely another. Trix was going to laugh himself silly. Sunday moved back to her row and started pulling more beans.
Trix put a hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said softly. “Just wait.”
So Sunday waited. The sun beat down on them as they stood in silence.
The small white pigeon flew back to them, alone. She landed on the row beside Sunday and Trix, snapped a fat pod off the vine, and dropped it into the basket on the ground.
“Thank you for helping us,” Sunday said to the bird, “even if your friends didn’t want to. More beans for you.”
“Sunday, look.” Trix pointed to a fluttering in the leaves three rows over. A starling poked its head out, flew straight for them, and dropped a bean in the basket on his way past. Everywhere Sunday looked, there were busy vines and shuffling wings. There were so many birds: martins and larks, turtledoves and jays, robins and snowbirds. They filled up Sunday’s little basket in minutes. Trix fetched a few more.
“I don’t believe it,” Sunday said.
“If you want anything to work, Sunday, you’re going
to have to believe it.”
Sunday laughed. He was right. Clever brother.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll watch the birds for you.”
Sunday ran for the Wood without looking back. She was sweaty and dirty and her hair was full of feathers, her hands were chapped from spinning, and her dress was old and worn, and she had forgotten her book on the table in the kitchen, but none of that mattered. There was so much to tell Grumble. So much had happened in the short time—the eternity—they had been apart. She needed him to keep her sane, to make her laugh, to feel complete. She was so happy, it made her eyes water. She skipped through the lengthening shadows of the trees along the overgrown path and thought about what she would tell him: the family secrets, her strange powers, Aunt Joy’s unorthodox methods of teaching...
What had Joy taught Sunday? She had spun gold, miraculously enough, but where had it come from? She’d felt magic when she’d named Trix her brother, but the gold had been spinning for some time before that. Both of them had been so wrapped up in her story, neither had noticed when it had begun.
That was it!That was where the magic was!The same magic that had pulled them into the story had changed the wool as she’d spun. For one spins a tale, doesn’t one? Weaves it. And it hadn’t been someone else’s tale; she’d made up her own, as Aunt Joy had suggested. Sunday laughed at how obvious it was to her now. The lessons didn’t have to do with writing because she had the ability to change things without writing them down.
Sunday pushed aside some branches and let them spring back behind her. So how had Aunt Joy created the harvest full of beans? The answer came as she thought the word: “created.” That was her power, the crux of what Joy was teaching her. Sunday was a Creator.
Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both. Sunday had been teaching herself the rudiments of creative expression every time she scribbled in her journal. The beans had not changed on a basic level; Aunt Joy had merely let them be what they would inevitably be. Just like naming Trix her brother: Sunday had never believed for a moment of her life that he wasn’t. Now, as it was, so it would be forever.
But the bird and the yarn had changed at their core. That was scarier. One day, Sunday would have the ability to turn men into animals. And one day, she would also know how to change them back. She wondered what Grumble would say to that.
“Grumble?”
Silence answered her. She called his name again, but suddenly she knew he would not answer. She could feel his absence like a tangible thing, knew it just as she knew her own name. She walked over to search the well, and when she saw the smashed remains of the tiny water bucket, despair clawed at her. She called his name a third time, in a desperate voice as broken as that bucket. There were no ripples in the water of the well, filled to the brim as it was from the storm two nights earlier. The rocks had been disturbed, either by tempest or wild beast in rage. She hoped Grumble had run away and hidden somewhere, found an underground spring far beneath the well and swum to safety.
Silly girl, making up stories, her mind scolded. He’s dead and gone and you just don’t want to admit it.
I hope he went quickly, wept her heart.
She missed him with her whole body. And as that empty body turned to leave the well and the clearing and all their fond memories, she could almost hear him say, Goodbye, my Sunday.
The walk back to the towerhouse lasted an eternity. She felt neither sadness nor pain, only a thick numbness that wrapped itself in a cloak around her. She was not happy to see her garden gate again, nor was she surprised or excited to see that Trix and the birds had finished their task. Baskets and bags overflowing with beans lay in a heap by the edge of the field. She didn’t care.
Sunday walked into the house through the kitchen, but she did not hear Trix’s cheery greeting or her mother’s mumbled complaints. She picked her journal up off the table and walked through the sitting room, past Papa with his pipe and Friday with her mending. Her melancholy march unaltered, she trudged slowly up the stairs. She did not stop until she had reached Wednesday’s aerie, the topmost room in the tower, and there she sat at the window and looked out. Sunday did not see Wednesday curled up on her bed scratching down her latest lament on scraps of parchment; she saw only the clouds as they sailed by and turned gray and then pink and then gray again as the world succumbed to shadow and the gods sprinkled stars across the velvet sky.
She opened her journal and stared at the blank pages. She should force herself to write, she knew, to purge these feelings so that she might grieve and move on. But she wanted neither of those things. Right now the pain was a comfort. Right now he was still alive in her heart, closer than he would ever be again. Right now she needed her best friend, the one friend in the world she could no longer speak to. He was gone, and she had not kept her promise. She hadn’t even said goodbye.
Perhaps she could say goodbye to him now.
Her pencil met the paper, but it would not write. Tears of frustration rolled down her face as she tried desperately to move the stubborn instrument. Her shoulders shook, her vision blurred. She closed her eyes to blink away the tears so that she might forget she had shed them at all. When she opened her eyes again she found that she had indeed written words on the page, but they were not the farewell she had been laboring toward. In a light, uneven, barely legible scrawl before her, the words she did not want to feel read: I love you.
Sunday tore the offending page out of her book and threw it out the window.
Sometime in the night she fell asleep on the hard window seat. Sometime before dawn Wednesday covered her with a blanket so that the dew wouldn’t chill her as it beaded upon her skin and hair.
She awoke to the warm sun on her face and the soft cooing of a pair of white pigeons.
8. Portrait of Sorrow
ALWAYS.
The fire had gone out again. He tried to hide inside the warm cocoon of blankets, but the cold seeped into his bones. When the whispers came, they scraped like steel down the length of him.
Rumbold. Rumbold.
His body shook. Before he’d gone to bed that night, he’d made the decision that if the whispers came again, he would not succumb to fear. With eyes closed so his imagination could not draw more monsters out of the shadows, he counted out the steps from the end of the bed to the wall and then along it, until his shin collided with the neat pile of wood Rollins had replenished. He fell to his knees in the ash and felt for the tinderbox. Beside it, Rollins had left two long, oil-soaked rags.
Free me.
The rags caught so quickly that Rumbold had to snatch his hands away. A circle of golden light surrounded him as the flames burned into the kindling. He tucked his skinny legs up and wrapped his thin arms around them, resting his chin in the ash on his knees. Boldly he peered into the whispering darkness, at the foot of his bed where the mysterious shape had formed the night before. He needed to know if what haunted him was old or new, mundane or otherworldly. It might have been pulled out of Hell during his transformation and given form by his fears. The stories of Soul Riders were gruesome tales ending in madness and death. Considering the power of his curse, it was entirely possible that a demon had followed him up the Fairy Well. If so, he bore the responsibility of seeing it returned.
A more frightening prospect, he thought as shadow began to resolve itself into shape, would be if it was neither ghost nor Rider but something else entirely.
He squeezed his legs until he felt bone against bone through skin and muscle. He tasted the cinders on his already dry lips. The form stretched and grew until it was roughly the size and shape of a man. The chill in the air deepened. Rumbold could see his breath before him; the translucence of it was only slightly more substantial than the presence at the foot of the bed. And then slightly less. In four frigid breaths, the shape had some semblance of a face; in five, a mass of brown hair formed on its head. What if it was him? What if the thing haunting him was his former self,
wanting to be remembered? At the seventh breath, the hair grew long and spilled down the shoulders of the lithe figure in fat dark curls. Chestnut curls.
His mother wrapped her arms around herself and looked down upon him, her face a mask of love and fear.
There was no ninth breath.
She was more beautiful than he remembered. The firelight turned her skin and blue eyes golden. A shimmer of ghostlight upon her cheeks and temples made tiny white feathers across her brow; her sheer gown was also white beneath her sable cloak of hair. Great white wings spread out behind her and lit the room, far brighter than Rumbold’s humble fire.
They stared at each other, not speaking, not touching, not daring to move and shift the impossible balance that had brought them together. Rumbold ached with shaking, silent sobs and shallow breaths. Tears soaked his nightshirt, but he let them fall, not wanting to turn his eyes from the sight before him. She cried, too, in her own way, her tears vanishing back into shadow before they hit the ground.
I will always be with you.
They stayed that way until the dawning sun’s rays dissolved her image into daylight, until she faded so completely that Rumbold wondered if he had really seen her at all.
***
Rumbold woke on the flagstones again. His rumpled hair was matted with ashes, and cinder dust coated his tongue. This time it was Erik who roused him from the hearth. The guard stepped over Rumbold and unloaded an armload of fresh wood. He did not offer the prince his aid.
“May I?” Erik gestured to a chair at the small breakfast table. Rumbold nodded and the guard sat, stretching out his legs and lacing his fingers behind his head. He gave the room the same courtesy glance that he’d given Rumbold. He picked up the golden ball in the middle of the table and tossed it from hand to hand. “Rollins said you needed more firewood. He’s fetching your breakfast.” He snorted a half-laugh. “I’ve seen finer meals served to the damned.”
Rumbold forced his sticky tongue to work. “I ahppreciate it.”