Текст книги "My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories"

Автор книги: Stephanie Perkins

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“Sir,” was all she managed, and it was the best she could do to keep her feet moving forward.

Right past him.

He fell into step beside her. “I hope you liked the Bible,” he said. “Which passage did you read first? I always like to know.”

As though she’d sat down on the spot, keen to know more of the Lord’s rules and punishments? “I didn’t read any,” she replied. “The wind carried it off before I even stepped onto the porch.”

Between them, silence twisted, and Neve did not look up to see his eyes with their painted-dot pupils. His shadow, cast ahead, was so much larger than her own. “Excuse me?” he finally said, as though he might have misunderstood her.

“The wind,” she repeated. “I’m sorry. The Bible’s gone.”

He stopped walking, and when she did not stop with him, he reached for her arm and made her. His big fingers splayed from her elbow to her shoulder, and his grip was not gentle. “That was a family heirloom,” he said, and she had no choice but to look at his eyes now. Glassy, she thought, and imagined flames reflecting in them as he scouted the geographies of Hell. “It was precious to me.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have left it on a porch,” she said, trying to pull her arm free. “It wasn’t my doing.”

When he still didn’t release her, she panicked and thrust Dame Somnolence’s flower at him. A rose, and red, it made a more striking display than her dainty thorn lily would have. “Here,” she said, voice shaking. “You honor me, but I don’t mean to marry. My answer is no.”

He didn’t take the flower, and he didn’t let go of her arm, and when Neve met his eyes again, growing more panicked by the second, his look spoke. Some looks do, the way she remembered her mother’s eyes telling her as plain as happiness, in the time before grief, “I love you more than life, my sweet girl.” Or how Ivan’s dying eyes had said his greatest desperation was in leaving her alone.

Spear’s look was eloquent. “I will have you, and I will hold you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you weep. Your tears will be the sugar in my tea, your misery my delight,” he promised, while his lips said, “I wasn’t asking, Neve. I’ve made my choice.” His fist closed on the dry-dead rose and ground it to a dark red dust.

He finally released her arm, and his parting words, before he turned back toward town, were, “When I greet you tomorrow I expect a smile. A blush if you can manage it.”

Neve walked home stumbling-fast, the mud sucking at her boots. Coming into the yard, she spotted Spear’s bootprints among the usual fox tracks, and saw with fresh eyes what a poor sanctuary was this row of shanties. In her shed, she was like a nut meat to cracking teeth. Spear could eat her for breakfast if he wanted. Worse, he could have her for a midnight snack.

This midnight. Any midnight. Who would come if she screamed?

She shivered and barred her meager door. She built a meager fire and cooked a meager meal. Her ears were tuned to the night outside, but she only heard the rain. There was nothing for her fretting but to get out her book, her treasure, her one thing from home: true home, long lost, the Failed Colony. It had had a real name, once, but all those decades of striving and living and building and planting and loving had been reduced in a single season to that wretched word: failed.

The book had eighteen stories in it, and when she read them—aloud, always—it was with her mother’s cadence, which was imprinted on her heart. She turned to the one that suited this night: a maiden, pursued by an ogre, transforms herself into a doe rather than become his wife. Her eyes were tired from a long day squinting at stitches, so she let them flutter shut. But she knew the story by heart and it kept going, into the woods on fleet deer feet and down a mossy slope.

And all of a sudden she was in Nasty Gully. She knew she was dreaming, because her book had nothing to do with Nasty Gully. The spring beetles were there, all glint and shimmer in the ferny half light, but they weren’t flying at her face. They weren’t flying at all. They were motionless in their hundreds, and when Neve stepped in close, she saw that they were jewels. They were beetles made of jewels, and when she took one up it was a ring for her finger. Another, it was a brooch. The gully was quiet and the light was soft, and she sensed that she was not alone.

“Hello?” she whispered, and woke in her chair, no sound besides rain and the pop of the dying fire, but a whisper seemed to follow her out of sleep. It wasn’t that she heard it so much as felt it.

It felt like a breeze through a forests’ worth of leaves.

“I will free you, and I will lift you. I will learn a thousand ways to make you laugh. Your smiles will be the honey in my mead, your enchantment my delight.”

And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the dream, that she was not alone. But it wasn’t a lurking feeling, as a figure in the night. It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing.

She slept. She dreamed. There was music such as she had never heard, and singing in a language as far from her own as the spitting rain was from the roar of the sea. Dancing, too. A hand held hers, and she couldn’t see whose it was but only felt herself spinning spinning spinning, safe in a circle made by strong, dark arms.

But in the morning, the yard held a fresh set of preacher tracks and another gift on the porch—a framed miniature of the man’s own smug face—so Neve knew it had been all and only dreams, all and only her own fool hopes, coaxed up out of hiding and tricked into dancing, dancing all alone.

“Stupid,” she whispered, and gave the portrait a nudge with her toe. She wanted to kick it out into the mud but didn’t dare. Tricked by a dream into hoping, and hoping for what, dancing and a pair of strong arms? “Stupid,” she said again, with more venom. You’d think she was new to despair and just learning its tricks. She stumped into her boots and made for the hen house. The axe was in the chopping block, and she thought maybe today she’d do it. What good is a hen that won’t lay?

About as much good as a girl who won’t marry, said a voice inside her, and she rousted Potpie, who gave a sleepy blink. “What do you say, old girl? Did you make me any breakfast today?”

There would be no egg. Neve knew it. It was pathetic that she still checked—proof that hope had its hooks in her, whatever she might think—

She let out a chuff of surprise. There was an egg. “Well done, you,” she said to Potpie, unreasonably pleased for such a small thing as an egg. She reached for it. Took it. She picked it up and held it and knew that it was not an egg.

It looked like an egg.

But it wasn’t an egg.

An egg feels like nothing but what it is. This was too light. It was air and shell and something, but that something was not yolk and fluid, and Neve should have wanted to drop it—not even wanted to but just done it instantly, instinctively, as a reaction to a wrongness. But she didn’t drop it. She did not, in fact, sense a wrongness. She held the egg, and it was warm and smooth, and it fit her palm like a rightness.

Breakfast forgotten for the second day running, she carried it back across the yard, and once she was inside she looked at it some more and weighed it gently, hand to hand. Something shifted in it when she moved it, and she wondered what to do. She could leave it as it was, intact. But eggs aren’t meant to remain intact, are they? They’re meant to open. To disclose.

So she cracked it, gingerly, and the sound it made knocking at the rim of her old clay bowl was like a note of music. The eggshell split and opened and the something inside it … sparkled. Neve spilled it into the cup of her palm and couldn’t believe her eyes.

It was a beetle.

From her dream of Nasty Gully. Here was one of the jewel beetles, and it had a diamond for a body—as big as her thumbnail, and as dazzling as a star encased in crystal—and two half moons of milky jade for wings. They were set on cunning hinges and opened at her touch, and its head was an emerald with cabochon eyes of some stone she couldn’t name, soft pearl pink and flecked with gold. Like in her dream, it was set on a ring and fit her finger just right, as though faeries had measured her for it in her sleep.

At first there was only wonderment, her staring at it and opening and shutting its jade wings in slow, astonished delight. Then the questions crept in.

How?

And, of course … who?

*   *   *

So the world was not dead, but it was so altered as to seem a new place—and not a better one. It was dirtier, paler, tarnished with sadness, and the Dreamer felt himself lost in it. He still didn’t know how much time had passed, but he understood that it was too much.

That the Dreamers had, by their absence … forfeited.

But how had it come to pass? Where were the others, and why had none of his brothers or sisters come to wake him? Did they sleep too, in their own far-flung hills? Had their feathers been stolen as his had, their wits and senses dulled? He would have to find them and draw them out of the earth, but first, something bound him here.

Someone bound him.

She had asked for his protection. No. She had done more than that. She had summoned him, even through the barriers of the colorless, choking sorcery that had held him in its stupor. He owed her for that. When he went to find her, it was to settle a debt.

And then he saw her.

He saw her, and the clamors and stinks of this new world fell away, as murmurs overcome by a bright surge of song. He saw her on her lonesome road, her brightness ill-concealed by the dun disguise of such dull clothes, her grace scarcely hindered by the mud-caked weight of boots, and his panic died away. His was the panic, you understand, of one who has overslept and is late for work … when the work in question is the making and keeping of the world. It would return, and all the world-clamor with it, but for now, it was silenced by the sight of a girl.

She was so alone, so brave and so afraid, and so beautiful. His heart—that had beat with the earth’s slowest pull since it first tested its turning—slipped into a new register, as sweet to his blood as birdsong to his ears, and it liked it there.

She was not his subject. He had conjured green in its every variation and carried it with him out of dreams. He had given storms to the world, and riverbanks, and bees. But the shape of this girl, the fierce gloss of her eyes, and the layers and treasures of soul and mind that were in her to discover, that was none of his doing. The Dreamers were the gods of all things but mankind. All the rest they had made, but not these striving things, that had made themselves.

For better or worse.

He was the god of tide-lap and wingbeat, talon and pearl. She was the goddess of … herself. And he could not look away from her.

*   *   *

Neve went through all the paces of an ordinary day: the walk to and through town, the row of girls at their hoops, and tiny stitches on an altar cloth for some far-off cathedral she couldn’t even imagine. Nothing was different, but something was different. She had put Spear’s miniature into a pocket of her apron, and the jewel beetle into another. Into one pocket—can you guess which?—her hand slipped again and again, and, each time, her cheeks flushed with the confirmation that she hadn’t dreamed the first good surprise to ever come her way.

She tried to stop herself from wondering what it meant, to take it like a story from her book, where logic could find no firm footing. It wasn’t easy.

Who?

All day long, that one word lurked behind every other that she spoke, and when she wasn’t speaking—which was most of the time—she was wondering, dreamily, Who?

“Well?” Dame Somnolence wanted to know. “Did you give him the flower?”

Neve nodded. “He ground it in his fist and came again last night.” She took out the miniature and let it dangle from its chain.

Seeing that she was not distraught, the old woman misunderstood the reason. “Well, won’t the coffin maker be pleased,” she sniffed, her big, doleful eyes going narrow with the affront of advice ignored. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Neve didn’t try to explain. What could she say? That she’d called for protection and been answered? When she even dared to think it, she saw how preposterous it sounded, doubted it all anew, and had to slip her hand into her pocket and cup the beetle in her palm.

She was so preoccupied that when, walking home that evening, she passed Reverend Spear on the high street, she unthinkingly did as he had bid her the day before. Half of it anyway.

She smiled.

Oh, the smile wasn’t for him. It was on her face already when she chanced to turn his way—it was slight, and quizzical, and dreamy, but certainly a smile—and with difficulty she kept it from sliding off. She didn’t blush, as requested, but the smile seemed to suffice. He stood in a company of men—leering, knowing looks from all of them—and didn’t stop her but only nodded, gentlemanly, though his eyes burned at her, hot with something that was not anger. That was worse than anger.

Never mind. It was best not to draw his ire.

I’m not for you, Neve thought. She had twenty-three days till the Christmas Eve gather, and the understanding had come to her slowly through her wonder that the beetle in her pocket—worth such a fortune, she didn’t doubt, as had never been seen on this island before—meant her freedom from both Spear and Fog Cup, even if it meant nothing else. She could take ship any time she wanted and set sail toward any life she wished, and that was a reason for smiling, certainly, but it wasn’t the best reason.

Someone had given it to her. Someone was out there. She felt him. I will free you, and I will lift you. Those were his words from her dream. He had freed her already.

What now?

*   *   *

What now?

A chain of mornings, and the Dreamer made the world anew, in miniature, for her. On the third morning he gave her a bottle that held every birdsong in the world. Each time it was opened, a new one floated out, and her favorites could be called upon at will.

A spider next, that would weave her wonders: gloves of gossamer enchanted against chill, and such lace as human craft could never equal.

On the fifth morning it was flowers. That is to say, she opened her door to find her mud yard in bloom: an impossible winter garden, blossoms from all the world’s array. His favorites were here, dreamed in another age and so extravagant and improbable that beside the isle’s hardy vegetation, they were like dragons among donkeys.

It thrilled him to see her wade through them, vivid with delight and lost to her waist in a bay of color, dressed half in petals over her usual drab. She cut a bucketful of stems and took them in to brighten her poor room, and so the next day he gave her a tapestry to hang: a scene in vibrant colors that would change day by day, and show the world to her in glimpses.

On the seventh day—it shamed him to the roots of his teeth that it took him so long to think of it—he gave her food to eat.

She was hungry. This bright and wondrous girl. The Dreamer had no words for his dismay.

He made her a basket that replenished itself whenever its lid was unlatched, and which yielded something new each time. Like the jar of birdsong, her favorites could be called upon, and within a few days she had favorites—a luxury she’d all but forgotten.

And every day that passed, he found it harder to keep a distance between them, but he did keep it, and watched as wonder brought new light to her face. Her eyes had been brilliant the first time he saw her, but that had been the sheen of unshed tears.

This was happiness.

She spoke to him—from the porch, or on her walks to and from town, as though she knew he could hear her. Soft thank-yous at first, and then words strung together, her shyness wearing off until, a few days in, it was natural to her to speak to the air, to the wind that escorted her, warmer than the isle’s salt breezes.

As the Dreamer’s heartbeat had slipped into its new rhythm, so did he slip into this ritual of courting. What did he know of humans? Here was time to learn: twenty-four days until the cycle came to its end, and what then? He had decided. He would stand before Neve and hold out his hand, in the way of her people, for all to see.

So would the other man, who walked in such arrogance and pride that he didn’t guess he wasn’t Neve’s only suitor—let alone that her other suitor was a god.

The Dreamer watched him come each night and leave his dry and useful tokens on her porch. A wooden spoon, a bottlebrush, an apron of sturdy gray. He watched him pause, every time, and stand in the yard, staring at the door as though he could see through it.

Considering. Considering.

Considering too long before finally going away. On the eighteenth night, it was raining hard, and the Dreamer watched him stand in the downpour, jaw clenched and water coursing down his face as he struggled with himself … and lost. He turned his head slowly, first one way and then the other. To be certain he was alone before he stepped onto the porch.

He was not alone.

He didn’t reach the door.

The Dreamer didn’t kill him, though it would have been so terribly easy. Fragile flesh, fragile spirit. Where is your god now? Will he come to protect you, or is that not his way? Does he only appear when it’s time to punish, or is it simply that that’s when you summon him?

He contented himself with spinning the reverend toward home and planting a fear in his gut like a canker: from this day on, whenever he sought to master a woman, whether by threat or strength or even with a look, the fear would flare and overtake him—so wild and sudden it would drop him to his knees to cower in terror, gibbering for solace from his distant, punishing god.

One supposed his life would be quite different now, and his parishioners’, too.

And then it was the Dreamer’s turn to stare at Neve’s door, rain coursing down his face, the feel of her radiating outward as though she were a sun and he a flower. He understood temptation, but not the weakness that would succumb to it. He turned his back to the shed and stayed there through the night, standing guard in the rain, which, though it was his own creation, he’d never felt in quite this way before.

Six more days, he thought, and wondered what Neve would make of his final Advent gift to her.

And wondered, with a frisson of nerves, what she would make of him.

*   *   *

Scarman’s Hall was the grandest structure on the Isle of Feathers, and never grander than on Christmas Eve. The gather was the social event of the year, and the betrothals were its heart. Every marriageable girl had been planning her gown for months, and every suitor his final gift: a ring.

Neve had a ring already. It had been her first gift from the Dreamer—the jewel beetle—and she’d carried it in her pocket ever since.

Tonight she would wear it on her finger.

She would also wear the dress she’d made of fabric he had given her. It was blue as the sky and as cunning as all his gifts: it wasn’t one blue but every blue—all the hours and moods of the sky. From minute to minute, it changed its hue, deepening from cobalt to midnight and setting out stars. And when she smiled—she discovered, looking at herself in the mirror that had also been a gift—it flushed to sunset orange, as bright as flame.

Imagine: the last of the plague orphans turning up at the gather in such a gown! It was like the story from Neve’s book, about the cinder maid and the fairy godmother. She didn’t have a pumpkin coach, though, or slippers made of glass—only of spider silk, with a sheen like dew on a petal—but she had her old cloak and boots for the long walk, and when had she ever had qualms about mud on her hem?

She looked in the mirror and wondered if it were true or enchanted. How could she know if this was herself reflected or some dream version. Did it matter? She smiled, and watched her dress again flame from midnight to sunset. Her heart felt like an ember in her chest, ready to catch fire and throw sparks.

What would happen tonight? She didn’t know. Spear’s hand would never hold hers. She knew that much, and Fog Cup would never be her home. A mere twenty-four days ago, those had been her only two choices. Now miracles were her daily fare and her pulse still beat its one simple question: Who?

She understood that he was the Dreamer, whom she’d called upon in her despair. But how could she know what that meant? What was he? She’d felt his presence in her dreams but had never seen him, and he didn’t leave tracks in her yard as the reverend did (or as the reverend had, anyway, until six nights ago, when his gifts abruptly ceased).

Once, she’d dreamed she embraced a hill of black feathers and felt the pulse of a heartbeat deep within.

And then last night, a miracle unlooked for: she’d opened her book to read a story and found in it not the eighteen that there had always been, but nineteen, and the last was called “The Dreamers.”

He was one of ten, born before time, who had, through the millennia, taken it in turn to sleep, and dream. It was they who conducted the symphonies of growth and death that turned the world. They were gods from before there were men to invent the word god, and they cared nothing for worship or thanks. Only for the act itself: creating.

Sometimes destroying.

And so she knew who he was, but not what form he might take. There had been no illustration to accompany the tale, and no description, either. It didn’t matter; by now she loved him in any skin. In her book there was another tale—one of the original eighteen—of a dragon who had a human wife, and Neve had never understood it before, at least from the wife’s point of view. But she did now. Love was love.

But she hoped that he was not a dragon.

She stepped onto her porch, ready to walk to town, and found there was a creature in her yard.

It gave her a start, considering her train of thought, but then she had to laugh at herself, because this was only a mount to carry her. It was a buck, a splendid beast, all white, its antlers festooned with ribbons, and its tack and bridle glittering silver. It dropped a knee for her to mount, and Neve laughed again at the wonder of it. Would she become numb to wonder, if this kept up, as she once had been to misery?

Never.

She rode and it was like gliding, down the long sodden lane from Graveyard Farm into town. Either the drizzle stopped or an unseen bubble curved above her, but not a drop fell on her the whole way. The beast carried her to Scarman’s Hall, right up the broad stone steps to deliver her to the door, and it was as though the scene froze around her and became a painting, and she the only moving figure in it.

As many candles flickered in the hall’s hoisted lanterns on this one night as had burned in all the previous six months together. Mist diffused the light to haloes, overlapping by their dozens, and the pangs of a solitary cello wove among them, sweet and pure.

Neve dismounted. Everyone else just stood and stared. There was Keillegh Baker and her boy, both agog, and Bill Childbreaker, ill at ease in his cheap Sunday suit. There was a gaggle of First Settlement girls in matching crowns of holly berries—their shock held no wonder, only envy—and Dame Somnolence, whose eyes had never looked larger or less doom-struck.

And then there was Reverend Spear, as motionless as all the rest. He stared and stared, Neve’s splendor diminishing his own. He seemed to shrink before her eyes like a shadow at the rising of the sun.

Neve faced them all and smiled, and beheld the deepening ripple of their shock when her dress flushed from blue to flame, and when she walked past them, she felt like she was floating.

Maybe she was. Nothing seemed impossible now.

The corridor was wide, its ceiling vaulted high, and at the end of it, the ballroom glowed with a light too bright for lanterns.

He was already there. She felt it even before she heard the singing—the language of her dreams, wind through a forests’ worth of leaves—and she knew that the isle folk were crowding behind her as she drifted; she felt them, too, but with nothing like the pulse of radiance that drew her onward. They were the past, already receding.

In her spider-silk slippers, she came into the ballroom.

And there he was.

The senses have their limits, and we can never know how short they fall in revealing to us the truth of a vision, a scent, a sound. Gazing on the Dreamer, Neve felt herself careen into the boundary of her human limitations … and push past it. The others were left behind. They saw him too, but only a mirage of him.

Perhaps they saw a man.

He was not a man. Had she really thought he would be?

She had never been able to imagine him, but when she’d pictured this moment, Neve had thought she would go to him, that he would hold out his hand and she would take it. But how could she go to him when he did not stand on the ground?

He drifted above their heads, up amid the glittering bowers of paper snowflakes, precious glass icicles, and lanterns whose copper chains swayed with the draft of his wingbeats. The Dreamer had wings.

Of course he did.

He had found his black feathers, wherever they’d been buried, and they were as glossy now as they had been the day ages past when he shook them off to lay down to his dreaming. His hair was black, and wasn’t hair … not only. In one glimpse it was pelt, the next feathers, the next the bright obsidian of scales, and then again the long luxuriance of new-spun silk. He was dragon and bird and wolf and orchid and lightning bolt—and he was man, too. A thousand facets, he was like a jewel of infinite dimensions.

The facet he turned toward the gathering crowd was human, and so that was how Neve perceived him … mostly. He was darker than any person she had ever seen, his skin a deep umber, so rich with hue that the shadows cut by the planes of his face read as color to her artist’s eyes, too: indigos and violets, shades she associated with rarity and riches, because the dyes were so precious that only the best of embroiderers were allowed near those threads. His eyes weren’t color, though; they were black, in the way the sea is black under starlight, and she beheld the form and limbs of a man—though not clad and hidden as was “decent” and “proper” to human society as she knew it. She saw his body. His chest. The dip where muscles met to form a smooth channel to his navel.

His navel.

Looking up at the Dreamer, her head tilted back and every nerve alive, Neve became aware of her hands. The whole surface of them from palm to fingertips began to tingle, petitioning to discover the texture of those dark contours. This was a new sensation, and her lips were not immune to it.

Nor the tip of her tongue.

I wonder what his skin tastes like.

Neve’s face grew hot. She had woken the Dreamer, and now it was her turn to wake. It was like hatching out of a small, dark life into a great, unfathomable one, and the man before her, the god before her—above her, adrift in a sphere of his own radiance—was waiting to take her hand.

But how could she reach him?

She needn’t have worried. No sooner did she lift her own hand toward him than the rest of her began to rise—

I will lift you …

–and … to change. Her honeysuckle hair came unpinned, transforming, as it tumbled free, to a sheath of pale yellow feathers. For an instant, this concealed her other transformation, but only for an instant, because wings such as these could not be hidden.

A god of the old world took a girl into his arms, and she was no longer a girl. She was still herself, still flesh and blood, and still lovely—eye-bright, slender, smiling—but Neve was no longer human, not quite, and she was no longer bound to the earth. She beheld the sweep of her own new wings—the same pale yellow as her hair—and remembered when wanting had seemed futile. She reached for him.

Her hand, his hand—finally. The Dreamer drew Neve close and whispered his true name in her ear. Mystery flowed into her like music. The paper snowflakes detached themselves from the ceiling of Scarman’s Hall, and by the time they fluttered down to the upheld hands of the isle folk, they weren’t paper anymore.

All evening long, real snow would fall from the ceiling to glitter on the lashes of dancing girls and ardent boys, but Neve and the Dreamer didn’t linger.

They had other things to do: all of them. All the things, dreamed and undreamed, in the depth and breadth of the whole spinning world.

Amen.