Bridget Collins - The Binding

I bowed my head and waited for the sudden sadness to pass; but it didn’t. Something gave way inside me, and I started to cry.

At first it was as involuntary as being sick: great paroxysms like retching, each spasm driven by an unpitying reflex that made me gasp and sob for air. But slowly the urgency eased, and I had the time to catch a lungful of air between sobs; and then at last I wiped the wetness and snot off my face, and opened my eyes. The sense of loss was still sharp enough to make the tears rise again, but I blinked them away and this time I managed to master my breath.

When I raised my head the world was empty, clear, like a cut field. I could see for miles, I could see where I was. There’d been shadows at the corners of my vision for so long I’d grown used to them, but now they had gone. This quiet room wasn’t terrible, it was only a room; the chairs where two people could sit opposite each other were only chairs.

I paused for a moment, testing the place where the fear had been, as though I was checking a rotten tooth with my tongue. Nothing – or no, maybe a sharp faint echo of pain: not the dull ache of decay but something cleaner, like a gap that was already healing. There was a scent in the air like earth after rainfall, as if everything had been freshly remade.

I picked up the keys and left without locking the door behind me.

I was ravenous. I found myself in the pantry, gorging on pickles out of a jar – and then, sated, I was so exhausted I couldn’t see straight. I’d meant to take a bowl of soup up to Seredith, but I fell asleep at the kitchen table with my head on my arms. When I woke up the range had gone out and it was nearly dark. I lit it again – covering myself and the clean floor with ash – and then hurriedly warmed the soup and carried it up to Seredith’s room. The bowl was only slightly hotter than tepid, but no doubt she’d be asleep anyway. I pushed the door open with my foot and peered round.

She was awake, and sitting up. The lamp was lit, and a glass bowl of water was perched in front of it to focus the light on a shirt she was patching. She looked up at me and smiled. ‘You look better, Emmett.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’ She peered at me and her face changed. Her fingers grew still, and after a moment she put the shirt down. ‘Sit.’

I put the tray on the table next to her bed and drew the chair up beside her. She reached out and pushed my jaw with one finger, tilting my face towards the lamplight. It wasn’t the first time she’d touched me – she’d often corrected my grip, or leant close to me to show me how something should be done – but this time I felt it tingling on my skin.

She said, ‘You’ve made your peace with it.’

I looked up, into her eyes. She nodded to herself. Then, with a long sigh, she sat back against her pillows. ‘Good lad,’ she said. ‘I knew you would, sooner or later. How does it feel?’

I didn’t answer. It was too fragile; if I talked about it, even to her, it might break.

She smiled at the ceiling, and then slid her eyes sideways to include me. ‘I’m glad. You suffered worse than most, with the fever. No more of that for you. Oh’ – she shrugged, as if I’d spoken – ‘yes, other things, it won’t ever be easy, there’ll always be a part of you missing, but no more nightmares, no more terrors.’ She stopped. Her breath was shallow. Her pulse fluttered in the skin above her temple.

‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. It took an effort to say it. ‘How can I be a binder when I don’t even know how it works—’

‘Not now. Not now, or it’ll turn into a deathbed binding.’ She laughed, with a noise like a gulp. ‘But when I’m well again I’ll teach you, lad. The binding itself will come naturally, but you’ll need to learn the rest …’ Her voice tailed off into a cough. I poured a glass of water and offered it to her, but she waved it away without looking. ‘Once the snows have gone we’ll visit a friend in Littlewater. She was my …’ She hesitated, although it might only have been to catch her breath. ‘My master’s last apprentice, after I left him … She lives in the village with her family, now. She’s a good binder. A midwife, too,’ she added. ‘Binding and doctoring always used to go together. Easing the pain, easing people into life and out of it.’

I swallowed; but I’d seen animals being born and dying too many times to be a coward about it now.

‘You’ll be good at it, boy. Just remember why we do it, and you’ll be all right.’ She gave me a glinting sideways look. ‘Binding – our kind of binding – has to be done, sometimes. No matter what people say.’

‘Seredith, the night the men came to burn the bindery …’ The words came with an effort. ‘They were afraid of you. Of us.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Seredith, they thought – the storm … that I’d summoned it. They called you a witch, and—’

She laughed again. It set her off coughing until she had to grasp the side of the bed. ‘If we could do everything they say we can do,’ she said, ‘I’d be sleeping in silk and cloth-of-gold.’

‘But – it almost felt like—’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ She inhaled, hoarsely. ‘We’ve been called witches since the beginning of time. Word-cunning, they used to call it – of a piece with invoking demons … We were burned for it, too. The Crusade wasn’t new, we’ve always been scapegoats. Well, knowledge is always a kind of magic, I suppose. But – no. You’re a binder, nothing more nor less. You’re certainly not responsible for the weather.’ The last few words were thin and breathless. ‘No more, now.’

I nodded, biting back another question. When she was well I could ask whatever I wanted. She smiled at me and closed her eyes, and I thought she’d fallen asleep. But when I started to rise she gestured at me, pointing at the chair. I settled myself again, and after a while I felt my body loosen, as if the silence was undoing knots I hadn’t known were there. The fire had nearly gone out; ash had grown over the embers like moss. I ought to tend to it, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. I moved my fingers through the focused ellipse of lamplight, letting it sit above my knuckle like a ring. When I sat back it shone on the patchwork quilt, picking out the curl of a printed fern. I imagined Seredith sewing the quilt, building it block by block through a long winter. I could see her, sitting near the fire, frowning as she bit off the end of a thread; but in my mind she dissolved into someone else, Ma or Alta or all of them, a woman who was young and old all at once …

The bell jangled. I struggled to my feet, my head spinning. I’d been drowsing. For a while, on the edge of wakefulness, I’d heard the noise of wheels and a horse, trundling down the road towards the house; but it was only now that I made sense of it. It was dark outside, and my reflection stared back at me from the window, ghostly and bewildered. The bell jangled again, and from the porch below I heard an irritable voice muttering. There was a glimmer of light from a lantern.

I glanced at Seredith, but she was asleep. The bell rang, for longer this time, a ragged angry peal as if they’d tugged too hard at the rope. Seredith’s face twitched and the rhythm of her breathing changed.

I hurried out of the room and down the stairs. The bell clanged its impatient, discordant note and I shouted, ‘Yes, all right, I’m coming!’ It didn’t occur to me to be afraid, until I had shot the bolts and swung the door open; then just too late I hesitated, wondering if it was the men with the torches, come back to burn us to the ground. But it wasn’t.

The man in front of me had been in the middle of saying something; he broke off and looked me up and down. He was wearing a tall hat and a cloak; in the darkness only his shape was visible, and the sharp flash of his eyes. Behind him there was a trap, with a lantern hanging from the seatrail. The light caught the steam rising from the horse, and its plumes of breath. Another man stood a few feet away, shifting from foot to foot and making an impatient noise between his teeth.