CHAPTER 54
BURNT AS A WITCH
It was, as Charlie had said, a sad town. The buildings weren’t especially mean, and it didn’t seem more afflicted by poverty than any other place they had visited, but it did have a heavy air of melancholy which bore down on everything within it: dark gabled buildings jutted over the pavement like storm-clouds, and the trees lining the wide main street were sickly and beginning to lose their prematurely yellow leaves even though it was not yet autumn. The people who walked beneath them all had faces like closed doors, faces that gave nothing away, neither a smile nor a scowl, and the shopkeepers watched passers-by as if they were something to be defended against rather than welcomed as potential customers. The smell of the local brewery was equally oppressive and entirely unavoidable to anyone possessing a functioning nose: its musty sourness mixed with a heavy sweetness was so thick it seemed to stick to your skin.
Maybe that was it, thought Lucy, maybe the smell is why they all look so miserable. Maybe they need the money from the brewery and just have to bear it; maybe their faces are so blank and shut because they’re trying to seal out this horrible and invisible malty cloud they’re living in.
She felt the money in her pocket and looked at the signs jutting from the louring buildings in the hope of finding a shop selling gloves. She threaded her way between the trees all the way to the town hall at the end of the street, and then retraced her steps up the other side in case she’d missed something, but there seemed to be no haberdashers or clothes shop of any sort. She went into an ironmonger in case they had any work gloves, but all she was shown–grudgingly, by a suspicious looking shopkeeper–was a thick pair of rough suede blacksmith’s gloves. She might as well have tied flour-sacks to her hands, she thought. She asked if there was a more suitable lady’s shop somewhere off the main thoroughfare and he admitted there was, without offering to tell her where it might be. When she asked for directions he bristled as if spotting a ruse, perhaps one by which she was trying to lure him into the street to point the way while she darted back in and stole a barrel of penny nails or a bundle of mattock handles. With a knowing sigh, he stamped on the floor which produced–with startling rapidity–a small defeated-looking boy who he directed pointedly to “watch the blessed shop” while he stepped out from behind the counter, shooing Lucy ahead of him as he leant into the street and grudgingly pointed her on her way.
She thanked him and walked into the narrow side-street he had indicated. She was so busy trying to remember the intricate sequence of lefts and rights he had fired at her that she stopped watching where she was going. Her foot hit something and she stumbled forward, going down hard on one knee before bracing herself with her hand to stop pitching all the way onto the ground. She winced and stayed down for a moment, rubbing the pain away.
It was because she was hunkered down that Georgiana Eagle didn’t see her. Georgiana was standing in front of a shop and rattling the door-handle, evidently frustrated that it was closed. She stood back, clearly hoping to see someone moving inside. Frustrated, she turned away from the locked door, looked quickly up and down the dim alley and then hurried off without a backward glance. Lucy was a connoisseur of furtive glances, having spent much of her life hiding and watching people who didn’t think themselves observed, and there was something in the hot immediacy of Georgiana’s look that piqued her interest so sharply that she forgot, for the moment, all thoughts of gloves and began to follow her.
Lucy stayed far enough back not to be seen, but just close enough not to lose her. This worked well enough until the narrow alley they were walking down ended in a small open square with a tall crumbling stone cross in its centre, overlooked at one side by a squat ill-favoured church, and on the other by a low bow-fronted shop whose double windows advertised “Finest Wines” in flaking gold leaf on one side of the narrow door, and “Remedies and Cure-Alls” on the other. It was into this establishment that Georgiana disappeared, with a cheery tinkle of the bell on the shop door. Lucy thought she saw her flinch at the bright tell-tale noise, but that might have been just her fancy. From the glimpse of bottles and jars stacked within, she could see it was an apothecary shop. Why Georgiana was being so circumspect, when all the show-people drank freely, was another mystery to her. In order that she wasn’t discovered when her quarry retraced her steps, Lucy slid into the square and walked along the side towards the church with the intention of sheltering in the mouldering shadows of the lych-gate until Georgiana emerged with whatever it was she was so keen not to be seen buying.
It was that cheery bell that almost saved her. She heard it ring behind her, and without needing to think or turn, stepped quickly sideways into the nearest doorway. It was the door to some kind of shop because she saw a thin mirror on the side lintel with lettering on it, but she did not read what it said at first, instead using it to observe Georgiana’s progress across the square over her shoulder without having to expose her own face.
She saw her gripping a small blue bottle, a squat thing, not a wine bottle at all but the kind of thing used for potions or medicines. It was quickly disappeared beneath her cloak and stowed somewhere safe. Again Georgiana checked the ground around her for observers, and then she suddenly felt something in her dress, squirming as though a mouse or some other unwelcome creature had just announced its presence in her underclothes. She gasped and reached within her garments and removed the offending object.
It was Lucy’s turn to gasp. Held in Georgiana’s open palm was a piece of liquid fire, the grey-green colour of a midwinter wave: it blazed light across the dim square for an instant before Georgiana clamped her fist shut on it, but in that moment Lucy not only knew exactly what it was, but felt the answering heat in her pocket. She looked down and saw the amber light of her own heart-stone flash an answering warning. She closed her hand over it on reflex but there was no doubt in her mind, though the fact of it hit her like a poleaxe, stunning her for a moment: Georgiana Eagle also had a heart-stone.
This must explain the connection she felt towards her. It was not just the common or garden attraction to a superbly beautiful person that anyone of either sex might feel.
It was that Georgiana was also a Glint.
She saw Georgiana turn towards her and realised she must have betrayed herself with a gasp. She flattened herself further into the dark alcove of the shop door, and in so doing reached back with her hand and felt the narrow, twisted pillar behind her through the hole in her gloves, rough stone worn by the passage of weather and time. It was clammy with damp, but it was not that that made her shiver and give herself away. What did that was the old thing, the bad thing, the blood-curse she always tried to guard against, the treachery of her ungovernable ability to touch the past hidden in stone and have it rear up and bite her.
She stiffened and felt her face jolt into a stiff rictus of anticipation before the pain itself hit as the past slammed into her in the familiar, hated series of shards and slices. Her neck jerked painfully as she saw—
The same church–
But the stone lighter
Less aged
Emptier churchyard
Wider spaced graves
No lych-gate
The same square–
But younger
Fewer houses
Built lower, built differently and thatched.
In the middle of the square–
No ancient stone cross. Instead a pile of sticks and branches
Lashed into faggots
Piled up like a bonfire.
It was not a cold day.
It was summer, and flowers bloomed around the bottom of the houses in the sunlight.
A sweating man was unloading another bundle of sticks from an ox-cart and laughing with a young boy who stood at the foot of the pile, catching the bundles and piling them up on the fire.
A woman walked straight through Lucy and offered them each a leather tankard of ale.
The man drank all of his and half the boy’s share.
They all laughed and nodded to the priest who emerged from the church.
Then time lurched again with a sickening thump in the pit of Lucy’s stomach
and there was a sudden crowd
and much more noise
and in the square the pretty flowers were being trampled as more and more people mobbed in.
Carts had been pulled up so that those at the back of the crowd could stand on them and see over the heads of those in front of them.
The man and boy upending wicker-wrapped demijohns of oil
Soaking the waiting pile
The hungry wood
The priest stood on the now empty ox-cart at the centre of the square, in a crisp white surplice with a garland of bright cornflowers round his neck, as if the day were a holiday.
The man beside him was, in contrast, dressed in black leather, scuffed dull with long use, as was the sword handle that hung on his hip.
The priest looked at the man in black
“Finder–if you please…”
The witchfinder raised a hand and pointed at Lucy.
And his voice cut through the hubbub of the crowd like a hatchet:
“Bring her.”
And again someone went through Lucy.
Not the serving girl
Another girl
Pulled by her arms
Her bare feet skidding on the ground
Her body scarcely covered in a rough linen shift
Her face not quite right
Not quite adult
Not yet a child
Not all there
Simple
Unguarded
Screaming
Stumbling
Caught up by the men on either side of her
Carried through the crowd
The mob silent now
As if holding its tongue so as to hear her shrieks all the more clearly
“Please!” she cries raggedly. “Mercy!”
A gloved fist rises
Falls through the sky
A shriek cut off in a thwack of leather on bone
Lucy tries to close her eyes.
Can’t close them
Can’t even wince
The mouth of the man in leather
Wet and red
Fragments of words spilling from behind his white teeth
“—most abhorred and unnatural creature—”
“—abnormal and detestable powers—”
“—affront to the godly—”
“—friend of shadows—”
“—damnable witch, condemned by statute, punished by custom—”
Tongue darting forth to wet his lips
Snake-like
Hungry for the last
“—most blessed and purifying fire—”
Time slices again
She fights the urge to vomit
As everything goes slow.
So slow she sees it all
A branch
In silence
Dipped in pitch
A torch now
Now afire
A flame
Cartwheeling through the air
A child’s eyes follow it above the crowd
The only sound the no-noise of one giant held breath
So slow she can see the torch’s smoke-trail leave a smear on the world
Heading for the ladder in the woodpile
The girl tied to it
Arms above her head
Mouth slack
One eye bruised shut
Leaking blood thinned pink with tears
The other bright with the incoming fire
The torch lands in a shower of sparks
as
The oil-soaked faggots
WHUMP
Ablaze
The sound dam bursts
The crowd yells
An animal roar
A holiday roar
The man in black leather whoops and lifts his hand to the sky
Conducting, exulting
The impresario of incineration
The priest softer-eyed, shudders, turns away, clutching his throat
The cornflower garland breaking
Falling
As the girl on the ladder bucks and shrieks
Time slices
Out of the fire and the thick oil smoke a reaching hand
Already a black claw
And with it
In terror, pure as silver
The voice of any girl
Any boy
One thing from the fire
One last word-bullet that hits the hidden everychild in each man and woman in the crowd
Killing the holy roar dead in their throats.
“Mummy!”
Turn away
And the world kicks again
And Lucy drops to her knees, held upright only by her hand, still stuck to the pillar by the past flowing from it, like a magnet.
It’s dark.
The square is almost empty
There is light from the tavern at the far end, the end where one day an apothecary’s shop will stand, and from it leaks the growl of men drinking and arguing.
It isn’t a happy sound
The fire is gone
A hummock of ash sits in the centre of the square.
The priest sits awkwardly in front of it
Legs akimbo
A bottle clutched to his chest
The witchfinder walks across the square
His son at his side.
They reach down to help the priest to his feet.
He waves them off.
Mumbles something. The witchfinder says,
“It was God’s work, Father”
The drunk priest chokes out a bitter laugh and shakes his head.
“No, my child–”
He is pulled to his feet.
He sways.
“–it was man’s.”
He tries to drink
The bottle is empty
He tosses it.
“We have cursed ourselves, Finder Templebane. We have cursed ourselves.”
The bottle shatters on the ground, splashing sharp fragments into the ash and breaking the connection with the past.
Lucy’s hand came unstuck from the pillar and she knelt there, head down, panting, looking at the ground until her stomach rebelled at what she had seen and she convulsed, retching her lunch onto the cobbles.
“Sara,” said a voice.
For a moment she forgot her name was meant to be Sara, and just stayed where she was, on all fours, waiting to see if her stomach was going to turn any more somersaults. Then she heard the voice again and looked up.
Georgiana was looking down at her with a mixture of shock and something close to disgust.
“What is it?” she said. “My heavens! Are you ill?”
Lucy spat a thin ribbon of sour bile into the gutter and shook her head.
“Why are you here?” said Georgiana, a flicker of suspicion overriding the distaste in her voice.
“I shouldn’t be,” said Lucy. Now the past had gone and she was getting control of her own head back, she remembered the heart-stone she had seen in the other girl’s hand what seemed like centuries before, but was in fact only seconds ago. She pulled the stone out of her own pocket.
Georgiana’s eyes widened in shock, and Lucy saw her instinctively tighten her fist over the stone she knew she held there.
“What,” said Georgiana. “What—?”
“I shouldn’t be here,” said Lucy, as the shadows bounced around them. She pocketed her stone. “And neither should you.”
The light around them was not coming from either of their stones. It was coming out of the mirror on the side of the doorpost. Lucy saw it faced a matching mirror on the other side, a mirror reflecting a parallel world of infinitely receding images of itself like a tunnel. And, just as she had seen in the Murano Cabinet, the otherwise unbroken repetitiveness of those images was being walked through by a dark figure holding a bright torch in its hand as it seemed to step effortlessly from reflection to reflection, as simply as a man stepping through a door.
“What is—?” began Georgiana, seeing the fear in Lucy’s face, but not what was provoking it.
Lucy stared at the relentlessly approaching figure for one more breath, just long enough to see the unmistakeable shape, and then the light flared off the blade held in the man’s hand, and she was suddenly convinced it would be very bad if he was to reach the front panel of the reflections and step out into this world.
So she tore her eyes away and did the only thing she could think of.
She raised her leg and hacked her heel into the mirror, shattering it.
“Sara!” yelped Georgiana. “What—?”
“Just run!” gritted Lucy, dragging her by the arm as she ran for the narrow alley leading out of the hateful square.
They ran.