Painted devils, p.26
Painted Devils, page 26
The mirror. I see her in the mirror, in my bloodless face, my wild black eyes.
I snap it shut, heart racing.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I could be wrong, this could be wrong, what are the odds that I would wander into a town in the middle of nowhere and land in my brothers’ home—
I need the truth.
I don’t trust Helga. Erwin is gone.
But there’s one brother Ros still in reach.
Five minutes later, I’m standing in Liebeskind’s Pest Control once more. “Sorry to bother you,” I choke out, “but I need directions to the workshop of Ozkar Ros.”
* * *
Welkenrode is—well, I’d like it a lot more if I weren’t walking in a single-purposed fog. I register that the buildings are newer on this side of the Trench, the streets smooth cobblestone instead of hard-packed dirt. Even the food stalls look cleaner. The Konstanzian Imperial Abbey surveys it all from the crest of a shallow hill, and I suppose I could try going to Henrik Ros there, but—Helga’s steered me away from Ozkar, again and again, for a reason. Now I think I know why.
It’s an hour or so past noon. I should be starving. Instead my stomach is a knot too tight for anything but air. A glut of questions is screaming through my head:
Do you remember me?
How long have you known?
Above all: Does she regret it, my—our—mother, leaving me in the woods?
Ozkar’s workshop doesn’t immediately stand out, one more gray stone façade along a long lane. Then I see the iron bars over the windows. They’re not just for human intruders: Runes and bones are wrought into the metal, glowing a faint yellow.
A soft bell chimes as I push the iron door open. The interior is lit by the steady colorless lights I’ve seen only with the prefects, burning in glass fixtures along the walls. There’s something that seems like it ought to be a shop front counter, if a counter moonlighted as a kitchen table, had a side gig as a workbench, and freelanced as a garbage bin. Shelves are bolted to nigh every wall and overflowing with glass jars, wooden boxes that have persisted through five different label regimes, miscellaneous tools, and other inventive paraphernalia. Any empty wall space is crammed with tacked-up notes and a strange miscellany of pinned objects: a little wooden doll, a worn charm from a temple, dice, folded letters, a rat skull with a pin through its eye socket. Even what look like tiny milky stones, until I realize they’re finger bones.
“Damn you, Betze.” I didn’t even notice the man standing at a long workbench in the far corner, his back to me. Not until his voice cracked across the room like glass. “I needed that filament twenty minutes…” He trails off as he turns and sees me.
Ozkar Ros looks to be in his midtwenties, with the same narrow build as Dieter and Erwin. He has Eida’s narrow face, a dusting of freckles, vivid ginger hair cropped efficiently short. The leather apron covering his shirt and trousers has a rich topography of stains and singes, as do his buckskin gloves. A spectral mantle clings to him, twin round yellow eyes burning over his head. I make out the faint ghostly lines of striated primary feathers and the great disc of an owl’s face, much larger than life.
Ozkar snaps his fingers, and the phantasm vanishes. Yellow lights ignite in Ozkar’s pupils as he blinks at me, strolling around a defeated-looking arcane apparatus to dock himself by the front counter. “Ah. You must be Vanja. My word, you are just like her.”
I ask, “Who?” not because I don’t know but because I need someone to say it.
“Why, dear old Marthe, of course.” Ozkar strips the gloves from his hands and lets them fall to the countertop, airing a bleak little chuckle. “Our mother.”
THE THIRD LIE
HOME
Once upon a time, there was a helpful little girl.
Her first mother told her she was bad luck walking, the thirteenth child of a thirteenth child, that whatever she touched would turn to ruin. And then her first mother left her.
So the girl insisted on helping her second mothers, her godmothers, because she did not want to be sent away again.
Her godmothers, Death and Fortune, found this very confusing.
They were gods, after all, and the girl wanted for nothing. The three lived in a little cottage that was somehow always clean and big enough, in the heart of a yew thicket, and the world beyond the thicket changed every morning. Some days, a great empty seashore stretched and roared beyond the trees and the little girl could play in the waves. Others, they were planted atop a snowy mountain, or nestled deep in a forest of oak and ash, or rooted in a courtyard in a strange city, one empty of people but full of voices, where yews grew straight from the stone.
At first their only guest was Time. His gown would change each visit, sometimes shimmering, sometimes a waterfall of lace, once dazzling gold like the rays of the sun. He would sit with the girl and ask how she liked her home, if her godmothers were kind, her favorite food—little measuring questions to gauge how she’d grown. And then he would speak with Death and Fortune outside, bid the girl farewell, and vanish like color shifting through a prism.
The girl had as much to eat as she wished, as much to drink, soft and sturdy clothes, toys and books and bedtime stories. But she wanted to be helpful so she could stay.
At first it was just a game: Fortune gave her coins to flip, dice to roll, bones to throw, and laughed at how they fell. Fortune grew to like it very much, tsking or clapping and never telling the girl that she was casting lots for crowns and calamities, riches and ruin. Fortune said it was much more interesting this way.
Then Death, too, found a way for the girl to be helpful: She brought children to the cottage to play. They were sleepy and weeping, or wide-eyed and fearful, or sometimes screaming, and those were the worst of all. The little girl would tell them stories or show them her toys or teach them a clapping game she’d learned from her sister long ago. When the children had calmed down, cheered up, or simply had their fill of games, Death would take them away.
The little girl never saw them again. After a few months, she understood why. Once, she asked Death if the ghost children could linger a little longer, and Death only shook her head.
“Humans are not meant to stay after they are cut free of your world.” She ruffled the girl’s braids. “Be proud. You’re making their passage much easier.”
The girl, of course, was happy to be helpful.
One day, Time came to the cottage. He did not sit with her. The girl listened at the door as he spoke with Death and Fortune instead.
“… too long,” he was saying. “She’s already changing. If you don’t return her soon, it will be too late.”
“She’s happy here,” Fortune insisted. “She’s useful.”
“She’s a mortal girl with a full mortal life to live. If you love her, you won’t take that away.”
The girl did not understand.
At least, not until the next day, when Death and Fortune came to her. They had no ghosts, no coins or bones, only deepest sadness when they said the girl would have to leave.
The girl understood, suddenly, why some ghosts arrived screaming.
She asked what she’d done wrong. She asked if she hadn’t helped enough. She said she would do anything, anything at all, if she didn’t have to leave and be left again. She promised she would be good—not just good, better—if she didn’t have to go, she would work twice as hard.
But Death and Fortune promised her a home in a castle, with a warm fire and a place to be helpful. They said they would still be with her, even if no one else could see, like a special game.
She still didn’t understand. If she hadn’t done anything wrong, why didn’t they want her anymore?
The night before that awful morning, Death tucked me into bed, looking a little sadder than usual. Sometimes I liked to imagine that my birth mother looked that way when she remembered me. Other times I wondered if she was happy to be free of me. Me and the ruin that followed.
“Death,” I asked, “what happened to my first mother?”
Death smoothed my blankets and didn’t answer for a long, long moment. Death cannot lie, you see, so she had to pick her words carefully so as not to upset me.
“It is as I said.” She kissed the top of my head and blew out the candle by my bed. “After she left the crossroads, one of you went home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DEADWEIGHT
“You’d be Marthe’s spitting image if she was still alive,” Ozkar says blithely. “Let’s hope the resemblance ends there.”
Dead.
My mother is dead.
All I wanted was to hear her say it was a mistake, that she never should have abandoned me, that I haunt her like she haunts me.
And now I never will.
There’s a flat buzzing in my ears, punctured only by the hardscrabble clatter of Ozkar’s metal tools on the counter. I don’t even have a crate to sit on this time; the one seat in the workshop is a stool in the back, by the workbench. My knees lock up as I fight to breathe through this.
Marthe. I thought—I thought I picked that name by chance—
What a fool I’ve been, this whole time.
“Don’t tell me that’s news.” Ozkar tilts his head in disbelief.
There’s a chime from the back workbench. Ozkar starts, then snaps his fingers. The massive ghostly owl reappears over him as the yellow lights in his eyes extinguish. “Grandfather, the balance fork’s done. Bring it here.”
The owl shifts its weight, eyes trained on me. Its beak clacks open. “Van … ja?”
“Now,” Ozkar orders. The owl flaps across the room as he sighs. “Don’t mind Grandfather. Great-Great-Grandfather, technically. You were too young to remember, but you’re named for his wife.”
It’s like—like a pin is being stuck through parts of me, fixing me to a wall I’ve never seen. The name I was given is not my own. The name I made into a mask—stolen from a long-dead memory.
Grandfather alights on a shelf and drops a small steel bar from his beak into Ozkar’s outstretched hand. Then he resumes staring at me.
Ozkar snaps his fingers again. As Grandfather disappears and the yellow light kindles in Ozkar’s eyes, more magic gathers around the counter, pulling bits and pieces from under crumpled papers and out of tiny glass jars.
He’s a warlock, I realize. For some reason I assumed he was a witch, like Jakob or Helga, whose raw power is limited to the witch-ash they ingest. But warlocks draw their power directly through a contract bond with a supernatural entity. Their only limits are the spirit’s strength and the price their contract extracts.
“What happened to…?” I croak out, but can’t finish.
“Grandfather? Don’t feel bad for him. Old bastard’s why our great-great-grandmother had to come south to the empire back in the day. He wouldn’t stop moving his neighbor’s boundary stones, got himself killed over it, and wound up one of the Deep North’s deildegasts. Our blood tie makes the warlock bond vastly more potent, so it was worth the hassle to seek him out. Besides…” Ozkar squints at a configuration of tiny metal parts dancing between his hands. “Innovation demands a certain disregard for boundaries.” He glances at me. “Or did you mean Marthe? Do you know anything about our family at all?”
It’s the same tone Dame von Falbirg used to take with me when she’d demand to know why I hadn’t finished a task she’d never asked me to do. All I can think to stammer out is “I—I was four.”
Ozkar doesn’t look to be softening so much as recalculating. “Right,” he mutters. “Betze is late, and I’m not getting anything important done until that useless girl gets me my filaments, so I may as well, yet again, make up for everyone else’s shortcomings. No interruptions. And I’m only going to say this once.”
I nod, still numb, still utterly adrift, still famished for answers. I don’t even realize I’m clinging to one of my ribbons until I feel the bumps in the weave beneath my thumb.
Ozkar twitches two fingers at a collection of pinned items on one wall. They lift free, wheeling around him. For all the emotion in his voice, he may as well be sifting through someone else’s rubbish. “Both our parents are gone. Father drank himself to death a year after Marthe died. Marthe took you away the night before my twelfth birthday and didn’t come back. In fact, that was my birthday present: helping Father track down her frozen corpse in the woods. Her lantern wasn’t far away. We think she dropped it, lost the trail without a light, and tried to wait until morning. There was no sign of what happened to you.” He shrugs and selects a folded piece of paper. “Personally, I thought … Well. There’s plenty of hunger in the dark.”
The note crumbles to ash in his hand. For a moment, Grandfather appears behind Ozkar, ablaze in yellow fire, beak open in a shriek. Then he’s gone again. Ozkar’s hands ignite with power.
“Don’t feel bad for Marthe either,” he says harshly. “All she ever wanted was attention. She did nothing for any of us, just kept dumping out babies so Father and the village would fuss over her. Nothing was ever good enough for her, and nothing was ever her fault.”
“She said I was unlucky.” The words escape before I can stop myself.
Ozkar’s nostrils flare. “Last warning, and only because I heard that horseshit from her myself: Interrupt again and we’re done. Marthe blamed everything on Luisa until Erwin came along, and then she blamed him for everything until you came along, and the midwife said she wouldn’t survive another birth, so you got stuck with the short straw.”
He goes quiet, staring intently at the cluster of metal pieces. They spin into a hypnotic whirl—then hitch, falter, and fall into his palm. With a scowl, Ozkar slashes a hand through the open air to his right. A bright yellow line carves in its wake, then pops like a seam, revealing an endless void of star-studded dark. He flings the pieces into it and, with another flick, stitches reality neatly back together.
I have stayed silent the entire time, still winching the ribbon around my finger, so tight it’s digging into flesh.
“Get that kicked-dog look off your face,” Ozkar snaps. “There’s nothing worth sulking about, especially not in our family. In fact, if you’re smart, you’ll get far enough away that they can’t off-load their deadweight on you. Now, let’s settle the other business. Helga told me of this ludicrous … blood drop thing. That’s going to be a pass from me, thanks.”
A thrust of alarm finally pierces the cold haze. “B-but,” I say cleverly, “we need it.”
“What you need,” he sneers, “is one single person with an ounce of sense in their empty skull to ask, What can you do with a drop of someone’s blood? Or perhaps, Why does it have to be seven brothers? Or—here’s a wild one—What will it cost?”
“It—it’s to save a whole town,” I force out. “People are going to die. Udo and Jakob—”
“People die every day,” Ozkar says, unimpressed. He picks a glass jar off a shelf and shakes it, frowning. “If Udo and Jakob let themselves be at risk, that’s their concern. I’ve had enough of picking up my family’s slack, and just because you’re late to the party doesn’t mean you get a handout. Where is that Betze?”
I swallow. One last card to lay on the table. “The boy I … I love,” I confess. “It’s to save him too. Please. I’ll give you anything.”
A half-fogged memory stirs, too distant, too deep to make out the edges: Me, pleading a lifetime ago, begging, I’ll do anything, just let me stay.
Ozkar looks at me as if sizing me up for the first time. His gaze falls to my hand, still anchored in ribbon, and I remember there are finger bones on these walls. “‘Anything’ is a dangerous promise, Vanja.”
“I have money,” I sputter, “I can—I can pay you in rubies—”
He points. “Your ribbon.”
I take a step back without thinking. “… What?”
“It’s from him, isn’t it?” Ozkar doesn’t ask so much as appraise. “It’s important to you. Important things can hold a great deal of power. Nearly as much as a drop of blood.”
Suddenly, horribly, I realize what every last pinned thing is in this workshop. Hopes, dreams, little treasures and memories. Things that matter to someone.
And he burns them for power.
That is Ozkar’s price.
“I told you to stop the kicked-dog look,” he scolds. “I want only the one. You can keep the other.”
It’s just a bit of ribbon.
It’s the first gift Emeric gave me simply because he felt like it.
He’ll give me other ribbons, he’ll understand.
When he ties my bows each morning, he’s saying, As long as you’ll have me.
A ribbon doesn’t matter more than his life.
But it matters to me.
And that’s why Ozkar wants it.
It’s for Emeric, I tell myself. Weighed against the staggering magnitude of what he is to me, I can give up this one small, priceless thing for him.
Hands shaking, I untie the ribbon.
After I hand it over, Ozkar makes me wait while he folds it, chooses a pin, chooses a place on the wall. I can’t stop looking at it, even as he impartially jabs a finger on the bone awl, stamps his blood drop on my cambric.
The bell above the door chimes just as he lifts his hand away, and a frantic feminine voice rises behind me. “I’m so sorry, Weber’s was out of the right fibers, and I had to try three different—”
“Excuses, Betze,” Ozkar scoffs as I fumble with the leather bag where I keep the awl and the cambric. “Vanja … I believe our business is done.”
I want to say something scathing and pithy, but I have nothing, nothing but the overwhelming sense that I am a disappointment to him, a fool, a failure for giving up the ribbon. I nod wordlessly. There’s a jagged rock in my throat, and I may bleed if I try to speak.
I push past a round-faced, harried-looking young woman and stumble out the door, shoving the leather bag into my satchel, only to nearly collide with a man who snarls, “Watch it.”
