Ekaterina Sedia: Bewere the Night

“He’s not the boy in your locket,” Mirabelle said.

“Don’t be stupid.” Alice wiped her reddened eyes. “Do you think that we’re supposed to marry them and be their wives? Do you think that’s why we have those lockets?”

Cecily had been about to say something and stopped. She’d always thought the boys in the lockets would be theirs someday, but she did not want to say so now, in case Alice called her stupid too.

“Imagine any of us married. What would happen then, sisters? We are merely knives in the process of being sharpened.”

“Why would father do that?” Cecily demanded.

“Father?” Alice demanded. “Do you really think he’s your father? Or mine? Look at us. How could you, Mirabelle, be short and fair while Cecily is tall and dark? How could I have breasts like melons, while hers are barely currants? How could we all be so close in age? We three are no more sisters than he is our father.”

Mirabelle began to weep. They went to bed that night in silence, but when they awoke, Mirabelle would no longer eat. She spit out her bitter greens, even when she became tired and languid. Cecily begged her to take something, telling her that they were sisters no matter what.

“Different mothers could explain our looks,” Alice said, but she did not sound convinced and Mirabelle would not be comforted.

Their father tried to force Mirabelle to eat, but she pushed food into her cheek only to spit it out again when he was gone. She got thinner and more wan, her shriveling, but she did not die. She faded into a thin wispy thing, as ephemeral as smoke.

“What does it mean?” Cecily asked.

“It means she shouldn’t be so foolish,” said their father. He tried to tempt her with a frond of bitter herb in a gloved hand, but she was so insubstantial that she passed through him without causing harm and drifted out to the gardens.

“It’s my fault,” said Alice.

But the ghostly shape of Mirabelle merely laughed her whispery laugh.

The next day Alice went out to meet the blacksmith’s apprentice and kissed him until he died. It did not bring her sister back. It did not help her grief. She built a fire and threw herself on it. She burned until she was only a blackened shadow.

No tears were enough to express how Cecily felt so her eyes remained dry as her sisters floated like shades through the halls of the estate and her father locked himself in his study.

As Cecily sat alone in a dim room, her sisters came to her.

“You must bury us,” Alice said.

“I want it to be in the gardens of one of our suitors. Together so that we won’t be lonely.”

“Why should I? Why should I do anything for you?” Cecily asked. “You left me here alone.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said Alice. Lack of corporeal form had not made her any less bossy.

“We need you,” Mirabelle pleaded.

“Why can’t you bury yourselves? Just drift down into the dirt.”

“That’s not the way it works,” Mirabelle told her.

And so, with a sigh of resignation, gathering up the lockets of her sisters, Cecily left the estate and began to walk. She was not sure where she was headed, but the road led to town.

It was frightening to be on her own, with no one to brush her hair or tell her when to sit down to lunch. The forest sounded strange and ominous.

She stopped and paid for an apple with a silver ring. As she passed a stall, she overheard one of the merchants say. “Look at her blue mouth, her pale skin. She’s the walking dead.” As soon as he said it, Cecily knew it to be true. That was why Alice and Mirabelle would not die. They were already dead.

She walked for a long time, resting by a stream when she was tired. After she rose, she saw the imprint of herself in the withered grass. Tears rolled over her cheeks and dampened the cloth of her dress, but one fell where ants scurried and stilled them. After that, Cecily was careful not to cry.

At the next town, she showed the pictures in each of the lockets to the woman who sold wreaths for graves. She knew only the first boy. His name was Vance—not Nicholas—and he was the son of a wealthy landowner to the East who had once paid her for a hundred wreaths of chrysanthemums to decorate the necks of horses on Vance’s twelfth birthday.

She started down the winding and dusty road East. Once she was given a ride on a wagon filled with hay. She kept her hands folded in her lap and when the farmer reached out to touch her shoulder in kindness, she shied away as though she despised him. The coldness in his eyes afterward hurt her and she tried not to think of him.

Another traveler demanded the necklace of opals she wore at her throat, but she slapped him and he fell, as if struck by a blow more terrible than any her soft hand should have delivered.

Her sisters chattered at her as she went. Sometimes their words buzzed around her like hornets, sometimes they went sulkily silent. Once, Mirabelle and Alice had a fight about which of their deaths were more foolish and Cecily had to shout at them until they stopped.

Cecily often got hungry, but there was no salad of bitter parsley, so she ate other leaves and flowers she picked in the woods. Some of them filled her with that familiar cold shakiness while others went down her throat without doing anything but sating her. She drank from cool streams and muddy puddles and by the time she reached Vance’s estate, her shoes were riddled with holes.

The manor house was at the top of a small hill and the path was set with smooth, pale stones. The door was a deep red, the color berries stained eager fingers. Cecily rapped on the door.

The servants saw her tattered finery and brought her to Master Hornpull. He had white hair that fell to his shoulders but the top of his pate was bald, shining with oil, and slightly sunburnt.

Cecily showed him the locket with Vance’s picture and told him about Alice’s death. He was kind and did not mention the state of Cecily’s clothing or the strangeness of her coming so suddenly and on foot. He told servants to prepare a room for her and let her wash herself in a tub with golden faucets in the shape of swans.

“If you kiss him once, then I will be able to kiss him forever and ever,” Alice told her as she dried off.

“I thought you liked the blacksmith’s apprentice,” Cecily said.

“I always liked Nicholas better.” Alice’s ghostly voice sounded snappish.

“Vance,” Cecily corrected.

Servants came to ask Cecily if she would go to dinner, but she begged off, pleading weariness. She planned to doze on the down mattress until nightfall when she could steal out to the gardens, but there was a sharp rap on the door and her father walked into the room.

Cecily made a poorly-concealed gasp and struggled to stand. For a moment, she was afraid, without really knowing why.

He pushed back graying hair with a gloved hand. “How fortunate that you are so predictable. I was quite worried when I found you had gone.”

“I was too sad to be there alone,” Cecily said. She could not meet his eyes.

“’You must marry Vance in Alice’s place.’

“I can’t,” Cecily said. What she meant was that Alice would be mad and indeed, Alice was already darting around, muttering furiously.

“You can and you will,” her father said. “Every thing yearns to do what it is made for.”

Cecily said nothing. He drew from his pocket a necklace of tourmalines and fastened them at her throat. “Be as good a girl as you are lovely,” he said. “Then we will go home.”

The earliest memory Cecily had of her father was of gloved hands, mail-over-leather, checking her gums. She had been very sick for a long time, lying on mounds of hay in a stinking room full of sick little girls. She remembered his messy hair and his perfectly trimmed beard and the way his smile had seemed aimed in her direction but not for her. “Little girls are like oysters,” he told her as he pried her eyelids wide. “Just as a grain of sand irritates the oyster into making nacre, so your discomfort will make something marvelous.”