“I’ve been screaming; this whole time I’ve been screaming.” Her bracelets were the color of cinders. “What else can you do, lying in the cold clay, the worms sewing up your shroud?” Her teeth were straight and white, horrific to see in that storm of decay.
“I don’t understand.” My voice had gone funny and distant. I heard it as though I were listening to myself listen to myself.
“No?” The wind tugged at her flesh, spattering gobbets into the night. “Even though you called me from my grave?”
Or perhaps it was my ears that had gone far away. “You, an Unquiet Spirit?”
“Spirit?” Stepmother paused; fat maggot-tears oozed down her cheeks. “I don’t believe that’s the word your father would use. But restless, yes. Exceedingly restless. The situation at hand—well, I believe your father would call it ironic.”
It was impossible, I know, but my faraway ears heard Father’s throat stick together.
“Ironic that after all your attempts to slip away from me, burning your hand when I first turned to you, and then when I turned to Rose—no; let’s save that for later.”
Stepmother’s face was a howling wilderness, but she spoke in her tea-party voice. Could the others hear? They were quiet as death.
“Ironic that after all you did to destroy me, you should call me from my grave. That now I may scream out to the world the name of the person who murdered me, that then at last, I may depart this world.”
Murdered. I’d known Stepmother wouldn’t kill herself.
“Even we Old Ones—yes, even we are unable to depart this world with our business unfinished.”
“Old Ones?” said my faraway voice.
She took a step forward. “Aren’t you afraid, Briony? Afraid of what I might say?” Her jaw dropped, and she was once again a black squall, howling into the crowd.
“You are fools, all of you. I didn’t take my own life.”
Stepmother’s cheek slipped from her bones, splatted onto the gallows floor. “My murderer stands before you. Her name, Briony Larkin.”
Briony Larkin? My mind could not react to Briony Larkin . But my body could. I felt the shock of it, cathedral bells clanging at my neck and wrists.
“Peace at last,” said Stepmother, and it happened all at once. Stepmother’s skin wilted from her bones. She turned to a pile of petals.
A regular girl would feel something. She’d feel something as the petals crumbled into dust. But a witch merely looks away. Father’s face was a crumpled page. The rest of the faces were a blur. The ghost-children had vanished. They’d set themselves free. They too might now leave this world.
The wind whipped across the gallows floor, snatched at the dust that had once been Stepmother.
“Murderess!” shouted someone from the crowd.
Stepmother eddied about my feet.
“Witch!” shouted another.
Stepmother dissolved into the wind. She was gone.
Now a chorus: “Hang the witch!”
The chorus’s eyes were slitted windows.
“No!” Cecil blasted through the crowd, but a clot of men grabbed his arm.
“Leave me be!” Cecil struggled, but the men held tight.
“Easy, lad. It be us grown folks as doesn’t be fooled by no witch.”
Cecil. Cecil, who did a mysterious favor for Briony. Cecil, who’s addicted to arsenic.
Stepmother died of arsenic.
I jumped back as a figure leapt the gallows steps. But only one person could make that lion’s leap. “Stand back!” The memory of Eldric’s hand shone on the back of my neck.
The crowd surged forward, growling and clawing.
“Hang her!”
“I always suspicioned her for a witch.”
Eldric raised the pistol. Silence crackled through the crowd. “I’ll shoot the first person to move.”
“She don’t need no trial,” said the constable. “Us all seen she be a witch.”
“No!” shouted Father.
The constable looked about from under his inside-out eyelids. “Us seen what us seen, hey?”
The crowd growled and pushed closer.
“Look at them eyes she got,” said the Reeve. “Black as Hisself they be.”
The crowd turned into one great beast with a single mind.
“I always did mislike them eyes.”
The crowd tossed its horns and pawed the ground. Its jowls shook.
It ran at the stairs, but Eldric’s lightning hand struck. The pistol leapt. The night went white and blank. Reality shattered. I kept picking up bits and putting them together in the wrong order.
The constable reeling back, hand to shoulder.
But that must have happened last.
The constable climbing the gallows steps—
That must have happened first.
The pistol cracking—
That must have happened in the middle.
And over everything, the smell, the tongue-curling tang of gunpowder. That, at least, was as it should be.
“Next I’ll shoot the Reeve,” said Eldric. His gaze roamed the crowd. “Then I’ll have to decide.”
“He don’t got no more than five shots,” said the crowd. It licked its lips. It carried torches that blazed with yellow tulips.
The crowd crashed forward.
Yellow tulips with crimson hearts.
“Go!” Eldric bumped me with his shoulder. I staggered. White nothingness blasted the night.
The tulips paused, their hearts pulsed.
The wind whistled beneath its breath; the first raindrops fell. Eldric shouted, “Run fast as ever you can!”
I ran across the platform. White nothingness blasted a hole in the crowd.
“Run, wolfgirl!” shouted Eldric.
I leapt into the hole. The air shattered. I ran.
30
Eels in Eel Broth
The sky wrung itself out like a sponge. Rain fell like daggers; I shielded my eyes. The sky flashed white, silhouetting twisted trees. Lightning played darts on the Flats, with wolfgirl as bull’s-eye.
Despite the trees, the Slough provided no shelter. The wind tore at the treetops, tossed about handfuls of oozy leafsplats. I’d never known such dark. It leaned in all about me. It pressed at my eyes with great, hard thumbs.
Expose my murderer.
Her name is Briony Larkin.
The memory came to me in bits.
I’d never tried to kill an eel. I could not have imagined it would be so hard, that it would wriggle and writhe and slam itself about. I had to skewer it to the table to cut off its head. I skewered it through the middle, but still, it thrashed and writhed. It writhed when you cut off its head; it writhed when you gutted it; it writhed when you skinned it.
What got ye for your supper, Lord Randal, my son?
How can you skin an eel when the skin is tough as leather? When even after it’s dead, it thrashes about? Here’s how I did it.
What got ye for your supper, my bonny young man?
I fetched Father’s pliers. The eel flung itself about, but I grabbed its skin with the pliers, tore it off in strips. The pot was already on the fire. I tossed in the eel. Oh, how it jumped!
I got eels boiled in eel broth; Mother, make my bed soon,
For I’m sick at the heart and I fain would lie doon.
I’d sung “Lord Randal” dozens of times, never once thinking about Lord Randal’s sweetheart making that eel broth. I’d sung it before I knew the writhe and grit of eels. Before I knew their stink sinks into your skin, that you scrub and scrub but can’t get it out. Before I grew afraid of my own hands, afraid I’d carry the eel-stink forever. Before I discovered the lemon juice that washed it away.
Remember when you asked yourself why you hadn’t turned into Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Why you hadn’t tracked Stepmother’s murderer down?
That’s poetical irony for you.
“Mistress!”
I whipped round, into the smell of algae and dead fish, into the foam and roar of Mucky Face. “Mistress, tha’ lad be busking the swamp for thee, an’ the Dead Hand, it be draggling behind.”