Work Text:
No one told her that it would be like this.
Her son is born as blue as a thing pulled from the drowning depths of the river. She does not get a chance to truly look at him. The midwife takes the tiny body away, and her eyes slide off like oil slick and flick up to the rune of bone that hangs above the bed (the rune was supposed to bring an easy childbirth; nothing was supposed to be like this). And before the doors close, she hears the woman muttering that this small death is a mercy.
She wraps her hands around the charm in her hand. Whalebone. Blessed to bring happiness, freedom from pain, joy. Passed down from her mother and her mother before her. Since she was a small girl she has been taught the proper prayers, and the tides of the sea, and how to smile and stop her ears from the Overseers that passed by their door. Good luck has hung over their family for generations. They court it and channel it with prayers in the dark. It was never, ever supposed to be like this.
She digs her nails into the heel of her palm, adds another few drops of blood to the tang of so much blood in the room, taints the charm with red.
If the midwife knew mercy, she would not go around smearing her family’s name in the mud, spreading gossip of a daughter who had a child off a dead whaler from Tyvia whose name she never knew.
If she knew mercy, she would not go to the Abbey. She would not speak of the rune that hangs above the blood-smeared bed.
No, she will think (later, much later). No one told her. But she supposes (when the Overseers come knocking three days later for one reason or another) that she should have seen it coming.
*****
She’s lead away by the grey light of dawn and the red light of fire licking at her back. There are ropes around her wrists and a gag in her mouth. She had been reading when they broke open the door, and the book had tumbled from her hands, and she’d not had time to hide the bloodstained charm that hung around her neck. They had ripped it away from the cradling hollow of her throat and offered her a choice – this, or pots of oil and a locked door and books and bodies used as kindling.
They had offered her parents no such choice.
The screams grow distant behind them.
“You’re lucky you’re young,” says the Overseer who leads the patrol. His voice is flat. His golden mask glares. Behind it, his eyes look through her as if she does note exist. “Not like your parents. There’ still hope for you.”
If he had said this is a mercy, she would have broken from their ropes and run down the beach until their bullets sent her tumbling down.
They take her to Whitecliff. The walls here are cracked and slumping, ancient, weighed down by tears of girls like her and boys who are so much younger.
There is training, then. There are trials.
She was raised on a litany of whispering waves and shadow and denial of the greatest litany of them all, and so she knows exactly what to expect. She was raised that knowledge was a virtue, not what the men in gold masks teach – and so she knows exactly what they will ask of her, and ask her to do, and what they will take without asking. She knows what all her options are. She knows that she has none.
This does not make it any easier.
*****
They do not allow the initiates books; the boys are given liturgical texts, but the girls are denied even this for reasons that are obvious. She must learn to read other things. She studies the sea outside the narrow windows and reads the passing of the seasons. She studies the masked faces of the Overseers who guard them and the blind Sisters who teach them and who they will become. Notes the way that no one seems to look at the girls – that observers’ eyes seem to slide off and land just beside, or beyond. All of the young women and girls between these walls are carefully watched yet unobserved. They exist, always, in a deliberate blind spot.
It is far too fitting.
She reads the faces of these women and girls, her soon-to-be Sisters of the Order; and she learns their stories, because there is no one else.
There is a young woman very much like her, who lifts her tunic one evening and shows her the scar tracing up her belly where a lover had tried to cut the child out of her. There is a girl who cut and dyed her hair and worked at the Golden Cat for a few scant months, sending money back to a family in the country, until the family and the suitors grew too demanding to bear the shame. There is a widow who is here for pride and fear of being sent slinking down to the gutter after her husband stripped her from his will. There is a girl who is here through pure devotion. There is a girl who watched her three brothers get shot in the head for witchwork. There is an old woman who loved a young one. There is a young woman who is sharp and beautiful and mad, who murdered her husband under the Pandyssian sky.
Alba. Violet. Rose. Maev. Evelyn. Cordelia. Vera. She remembers their names, because no one outside these white walls will.
Those walls are crumbling and bowed in the middle with the years. They let wind and whispers creep in through cracks at ceiling and floor. The Abbey mutters in the dark. No one sleeps well here. The boys cry in the night, often; the girls wake up screaming. They toss and turn. They twist the sheets around them like hangman’s ropes. The nights here on the seashore are cold, and at midnight they all dream of the sea rushing in, of shadows reaching up salt-rimmed fingers and wrapping around their throats. The dark is full of the sound of babbled, frantic Stricture.
The Overseers stand outside their doors every night and listen to the nightmares, and their masks are impassive, and no comfort is given.
She was raised on the sound of the waves. After a year at the Abbey she sees them streaming across the floor whenever she closes her eyes, and sometimes when her eyes are open – gold and shining, half-visions and echoes of water eating away at everything it touches. Water flooding the breakfast hall, leeching in around their beds, flowing down the stairs in a flood. Down, down, always down.
One day, when she is not watched, she follows the vision where it leads – where the afterimages of water pool beyond a locked door.
She prays that night. The prayers hold nothing of Stricture. They taste of ocean water, dripping.
When she returns, the door is unguarded and unlocked. And inside she finds a room of bone. The designs are so familiar, and cover every surface, and the hundreds of confiscated runes and charms are a sea upon the floor.
It is exactly underneath the room where the female initiates sleep.
*****
The tide rises. The tide falls. The golden tides that she sees in shadow of the real world do not return her to that room.
She sees another woman find it; and she sees a curious blot grow upon her left cheekbone, a gaping hole of spilling gold like spilling blood that becomes more solid as she watches. It is only a day later (as the woman is found out and dragged away screaming and a distant shot rings over the sand) that she realizes that it is a vision of the things a bullet can do to the face.
She begins to see the future superimposed upon the real-world like shadows thrown upon a screen.
She finds that she can see places men look, as if they are a light and their eyes are the lamp where it spills out. She finds that she can see in the dark, perfectly, as if she is an owl or a crawling thing. She finds, when a young Overseer comes to fetch them all for breakfast, that she can see the shadow of his death mapped out in slashes on his skin – and she takes him aside and tells him this, and sees the eyes behind the mask look at her for the first time.
“Can you still tell the difference?” he asks her. Flat. “Can you tell the difference between the waking world and the dream one? Between the Void and the truth?”
She shakes her head.
“You don’t have to ask me this,” she replies. “I know what you are doing.”
She dreams of a storm that night: water licking and shattering the walls and dashing them all to pieces, of the sea devouring all until nothing is left. She does not expect to wake. She expects to wake to a pistol pressed to the base of her skull, or a sword at her throat, or a funeral pyre at the break of dawn.
She did not know that it would be like this.
They are very gentle. They restrain her hands, and feet, and neck. The hands that tilt her head back are soft. The clips that hold her eyelids open only sting for a moment. It is only a single drop in each eye (and a scream, and a thrashing, and a fire that scalds away). And then it is done.
*****
There are trials. There are tests.
Now that she is helpless as a newborn and the Void is the only thing her eyes can find, her instruction can truly begin. In the moments that are left to her, she feels her way to the window and turns her face toward the wind of the ocean she cannot see. Listens to the seasons turn. The prayers of her childhood fade from her tongue.
Books are not precisely forbidden to her, now; but they are nothing to her. When she holds them and runs her hands over the pages she does not need to see to understand what they hold. Because the Abbey holds only liturgical books – because each end every word of these books is imprinted upon her as surely as a brand.
She is a Sister of the Oracular Order, mantled and gloved and veiled.
The years go on. She cannot see them in the seasons outside. She can see them, only, in the way she forgets color: the blue of a child’s dead skin, the red of blood, the white of bone in hand and heretical bone above the bed.
It was not supposed to be like this.
*****
She prays.
She prays, and she still wakes up screaming in the night; even though the rooms below are not filled with bone, even though she is far too holy and far too lost for the Void to want one such as her. She leans on the arms of Overseers and seeks out magic with her dead blind eyes, and she hears the barking of hounds and smells the smell of smoke. Burning houses. Burning flesh. Witches shrieking and the smell of charred bone.
(They do not burn the bones. They cart them home, and bury them deep, and stable young women within their thrall, and call themselves wise).
She is sick and shaking with it, but she finds the witches and regales her keepers with her visions. The words taste like ash on her tongue. She is an intelligent girl, still. She knows her options. She knows that she has none. She knows that salvation only lies in the Strictures that come so easily to her lips.
She prays, and prays, because is has been many years and she is no longer a child and she can still remember the feel of a charm in her hand those years ago –
Good luck. That was what her family had thought they courted and danced with under a crescent moon. She is a horrible daughter, to have broken such a chain. She is such an awful witch. She is such a perfect heretic. She is such a desperate, dutiful Sister.
Restrict an errant mind, she mutters in the dark that is always dark. Can two enemies occupy the same body? No. Never, never, never -
She has not seen her own face in ten years.
“I wanted,” she tells the Sister on the rickety bed across from her late one night, “to be a mother. To be a good wife. I had a boy from Tyvia who had saved up enough that after his last trip he was going to come back and ask Father for my hand. We’d have a flat in the city, and I’d teach our son all the songs for the rain, and at nights he’d take me dancing –”
She feels the woman’s hand grope out and find and close around her own, cool and dry, thin fingers lacing through thinner fingers. No answer comes. Her throat works. “What is your name?” she asks.
“Does it matter?”
*****
She has a vision of a great ship torn asunder. It is all in gold. The whale had been great and shining and the ship had been ripped apart like paper, the bubbles of breath from the drowning men flowing upwards like shimmering jewels. She wakes, shrieking. It is not because of the horror of the leviathan or the terror in the dead crew’s eyes – it is because the vision fades, and the light drops away, and she is left blind once more.
There is a hand over her mouth, though. Her shriek is stillborn. A son born blue.
“Shh,” come a voice. Soft and musical. Male. She can sense no body in the dark before her at all, no one leaning over her bed – just a hand, strangely cool, tasting perfectly of cool brine and cool weeds and cool half-rotten half-sweet things. Gentle against her mouth. “Shh. I believe we will let this particular prophecy come to pass.”
She sits up. Tears the hand away. “Wait – !”
But she can tell – from the chill of the room, from the way her voice echoes back to her against the emptiness, from the stirring and confusion of the women beside her – that there is and was no one there at all.
*****
She finds an Overseer at the dawn. She confesses, voice breaking like glass on the cool air.
She does not tell him of her vision.
She tells him of the dream of a hand sliding over her mouth, of skin against her lips. Her tongue is clumsy on the words. She finds, after she is already done speaking, that she has left out the details that matter the most – the way he’d vanished like mist, the way there had been no body above her. The way that when she woke in the morning she found that he’d left a thin layer of sea-salt on her lips, crusted and tasting deliciously of the sea. All the things that outline what he is.
The Overseer does not care. The Overseer is bored.
Her vision, the story that she tells, holds nothing of the Void and the secrets the Abbey wishes to unearth. And so she is only a girl to him, and the sea-flavored touch on her lips is only a girlish fancy, and he mutters something brief about the Sixth Stricture. And that is meant to be the end of that. And she hears him gets up to close the window; but still the morning breeze whispers through the cracks and twines around them, and the wind is so purely and wonderfully cold.
*****
“Wait,” she insists. She runs down the street, trips on cobbles, bruises her hands on stone. Gets up. Keeps going. “Wait!”
She runs through a Void of perfect, eternal darkness. She runs on blind. In her dreams, as in waking, she is always blind.
She runs until she falls.
Arms come out of the empty air to catch her, wrap around her and pull her to standing again. They do not seem to be solid. They do not seem to be real. They vanish as soon as she is steady. She reaches forward and finds her hand caught by a half-remembered superstition, something heard from her mother and her mother before her.
“Most blind women,” he observes, quietly, “would stop.”
She can only shake her head.
There are Strictures on her tongue, sharp and bitter, but the only one that comes bubbling up is for the eyes are never tired of seeing – and she nearly laughs, hand to mouth, because here in the Void in the Outsider’s wake it sears as it leaves her tongue. Because those are the only words she can remember and they are nothing suitable at all. Fear has made her lightheaded, giddy, cold and jubilant. She has nothing to lose. There can be nothing worse than that fall. She catches her breath. In. Out. “Why am I here?”
(If he says because it amuses me, as her mother and her mother before her had warned, she will throw herself from the cliffs of the Void and never, ever allow him to catch her)
“Because you are errant,” he says. “Fractious. Divided.” A pause. “And because it amuses me.”
And she does laugh, then.
Because she cannot cry. Not after the things they dripped into her eyes. Not after what they did to her.
She reaches a hand forward, maps the contours of his face with the tips of her fingers. She expects him to feel skeletal, or ghoulish, or anything the Abbey teaches and that they’ve beaten into her brain for ten years, and her hand shakes; but the face she finds is perfectly human, and his smile is ordinary, and her fingers do not sink into the empty hollows of his eyes.
“Why?” she asks. Her voice cracks. “Why now? Why not when I was –”
“Why not?”
He takes her chin in hand and he brushes his lips over her closed eyelids, one after another. A simple thing. It is no blessing, no magic; her sight does not return. The Void remains in shadow. She can see nothing here, not even the gold of her visions, just darkness that is as boundless as the sea in which he resides.
And then he takes her thin-boned hands in his. And he takes her dancing – and she cannot see the way the Void tilts crazily around her and the way the shadows are crooked and wrong, cannot see the sharklike smile on his face or the depth in his black eyes, can only be spun back through the years through a laughter and a wish she was never allowed to possess.
(If they told her he was like this, she would never have believed them)
*****
When she wakes, she finds that the world is all in gold. The vision is stronger than ever. The window into the Void that she sees is stronger than the waking world. The Void is the world.
She follows the premonitions of cascading waves down and down and down. But the door to the room of bone is locked. And she claws at it, and pulls at it, and beats her fists against it –
She will burn all the bones and runes inside before she sees them used to take the minds and eyes and lives of another girl like her. She will build a glorious pyre in his name. She will. She will. This is what she sees in the shadows of the future that they’ve trained her to see. In the shadows that he’s shown her. She will. She believes this, utterly – even as the Overseers come and drag her away.
They take her down the beach, around a cliff beside the sea. It is far enough away from the Whitecliff Abbey that the sound of gunfire is distant, not enough to truly frighten the girls who had been brought in just the day before. She is unseeing and unknowing all the while. She believes, utterly –
That he’d kissed the sight back into her eyes, that he’d shown her what was to come.
That she’d always seen a vision of the waves devouring all the crumbling walls of the Abbey. That the Void will one day devour all lights in her sky.
That the blood that bursts from the back of her head is red; that her wide-open eyes are white as bone. That the sea that rushes up to cradle her corpse is blue, perfectly blue, blue as a stillborn child and death in birth and birth in death, a blue that she can finally, finally see.