فصل 26

26.

In Which a Madwoman Learns a Skill and Puts It to Use

When the madwoman was a little girl, she drew pictures. Her mother told her stories about the Witch in the woods—stories that she was never sure were true. According to her mother, the Witch ate sorrow, or souls, or volcanoes, or babies, or brave little wizards. According to her mother, the Witch had big black boots that could travel seven leagues in a single step. According to her mother, the Witch rode on the back of a dragon and lived in a tower so tall it pierced the sky.

But the madwoman’s mother was dead now. And the Witch was not.

And in the quiet of the Tower, far above the grimy fog of the town, the madwoman sensed things that she never could have sensed before her years there. And when she sensed things, she drew them. Over and over and over again.

Every day, the Sisters came into her cell unannounced and clucked their tongues at the masses of paper in the room. Folded into birds. Folded into towers. Folded into likenesses of Sister Ignatia, and then stomped upon with the madwoman’s bare feet. Covered over with scribbles. And pictures. And maps. Every day, the Sisters hauled paper by the armload out of the cell to be shredded and soaked and re-­pulped into new sheets in the binderies in the basement.

But where had it come from in the first place? the Sisters asked themselves.

It’s so easy, the madwoman wanted to tell them. Just go mad. Madness and magic are linked, after all. Or I think they are. Every day the world shuffles and bends. Every day I find something shiny in the rubble. Shiny paper. Shiny truth. Shiny magic. Shiny, shiny, shiny. She was, she knew sadly, quite mad. She might never be healed.

One day as she sat on the floor in the middle of her cell, cross-­legged, she had chanced upon a handful of feathers left behind by a swallow who had decided to make her nest on the narrow windowsill of the cell, before a falcon had decided to make the swallow a snack. The feathers drifted in through the madwoman’s window and onto the floor.

The madwoman watched them land. The feathers landed on the floor right in front of her. She stared at them—the quill, the shaft, each filament of down. Then she could see the smaller structures—dust and barb and cell. Smaller and smaller went the details of her vision, until she could see each particle, spinning around itself like a tiny galaxy. She was as mad as they come, after all. She shifted the particles across the yawning emptiness between them, this way and that, until a new whole emerged. The feathers were no longer feathers. They were paper.

Dust became paper.

Rain became paper.

Sometimes her supper became paper, too.

And every time, she made a map. She is here, she wrote, over and over and over again.

No one read her maps. No one read her words. No one bothers with the words of the mad, after all. They pulped her paper and sold it at the marketplace for a considerable sum.

Once she mastered the art of paper, she found it was ever so easy to transform other things as well. Her bed became a boat for a short time. The bars on her windows became ribbons. Her one chair became a measure of silk, which she wrapped around herself like a shawl, just to enjoy the feel of it. And eventually she found that she could transform herself as well—though only into very small things, and only for a little while. Her transformations were so exhausting that they sent her to bed for days.

A cricket.

A spider.

An ant.

She had to be careful not to be trodden on. Or swatted.

A waterbug.

A cockroach.

A bee.

She also had to make sure she was back in her cell when the bonds of her atoms felt as though they were ready to burst and fly apart. Over time, she could hold herself in a particular form for slowly increasing durations. She hoped that one day she might be able to hold her form as a bird long enough to find her way to the center of the forest.

Some day.

Not yet.

Instead she became a beetle. Hard. Shiny. She scuttled right under the feet of the crossbow-­wielding Sisters and down the stairs. She climbed onto the toes of the timid boy doing the Sisters’ daily chores—poor thing. Afraid of his own shadow.

“Boy!” she heard the Head Sister shout from down the hall. “How long must we wait for our tea?”

The boy whimpered, stacked dishes and baked goods onto a tray with a tremendous clatter, and hurried down the hall. It was all the madwoman could do to hang on to the laces of his boot.

“At last,” said the Head Sister.

The boy set the tray on the table with a tremendous crash.

“Out!” the Head Sister boomed. “Before you destroy something else.”

The madwoman scuttled under the table, grateful for the shadows. Her heart went out to the poor boy as he stumbled out the door, clutching his hands together as though they were burned. The Sister inhaled deeply through her nose. She narrowed her gaze. The madwoman tried to make herself as small as possible.

“Do you smell something?” the Sister asked the man in the chair opposite.

The madwoman knew that man. He was not wearing his robes. Instead he wore a fine shirt of lovely cloth and a long coat of the lightest of wool. His clothes smelled of money. He was more wrinkled than he had been the last time she had seen him. His face was tired and old. The madwoman wondered if she looked similar. It had been so long—so very, very long—since she had last seen her own face.

“I smell nothing, madam,” the Grand Elder said. “Except tea and cakes. And your own excellent perfume, of course.”

“There is no need to flatter me, young man,” she said, even though the Grand Elder was much older than she. Or he looked much older.

Seeing her next to the Grand Elder, the madwoman realized with a start that after all these years, Sister Ignatia had never seemed to age.

The old man cleared his throat. “And this brings us to the reason I am here, my dear lady. I did what you asked, and I learned what I could learn, and the other Elders did the same. And I did my best to dissuade him, but it was no use. Antain still intends to hunt the Witch.”

“Did he follow your advice, at least? Did he keep his plans a secret?” There was a sound inside the voice of the Head Sister, the madwoman realized. Grief. She’d know that sound anywhere.

“Alas, no. People know. I don’t know who told them—he or his ludicrous wife. He believes the quest to be possible, and it seems that she does, too. And others now believe the same. They all . . . hope.” He said the word as though it was the bitterest of pills. The Grand Elder shuddered.

The Sister sighed. She stood and paced the room. “You really don’t smell that?” The Grand Elder shrugged, and the Sister shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. In all likelihood, the forest will kill him. He has never endeavored such a journey. He has no skills. He has no idea what he is doing. And his loss will prevent other, more—unpleasant—questions from being raised. However, it is possible that he may return. That is what troubles me.”

The madwoman leaned as far out of the shadows as she dared. She watched the Sister’s movements become more abrupt and chaotic. She watched as a slick of tears glistened right at the bottoms of her eyes.

“It is too risky.” She took in a breath to steady herself. “And it doesn’t close the door on the question. If he should return finding nothing, it does not mean that there isn’t something to be found by another citizen so foolhardy as to take to the woods. And if that person finds nothing, then perhaps someone else will try as well. And soon those reports of nothing become something. And soon the Protectorate starts getting ideas.”

Sister Ignatia was pale, the madwoman noticed. Pale and gaunt. As though she was slowly starving to death.

The Grand Elder was silent for a long moment. He cleared his throat. “I assume, dear lady . . .” His voice trailed off. He was silent again. Then, “I assume that one of your Sisters could. Well. If they could.” He swallowed. His voice was weak.

“This isn’t easy for either of us. I can see that you have some feeling for the boy. Indeed, your sorrow—” Her voice broke, and the Sister’s tongue quickly darted out and disappeared back into her mouth. She closed her eyes as her cheeks flushed. As though she had just tasted the most delicious flavor in the world. “Your sorrow is very real. But it can’t be helped. The boy cannot return. And it must be evident to all that it was the Witch who killed him.”

The Grand Elder leaned heavily upon the embroidered sofa in the Sister’s study. His face was pale and gaunt. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Even from her tiny vantage point, the madwoman could see that his eyes were wet.

“Which one?” he asked hoarsely. “Which one will do it?”

“Does it matter?” the Sister asked.

“It does to me.”

Sister Ignatia stood and swept over to the window, looking out. She waited for a long moment. Finally she said, “All the Sisters, you understand, are well-­trained and thorough. It is not . . . usual for any of them to be overly upended by the protestations of feeling. Still. They all cared for Antain more than the other Tower boys. If it was anyone else, I’d send any Sister and be done with it. In this case”—she sighed, turned and faced the Grand Elder—“I shall do it.”

Gherland flicked his eyes to dislodge the tears and pinned his gaze on the Sister.

“Are you sure?”

“I am. And you may rest assured: I will be quick. His death will be painless. He will not know of my coming. And he will not know what hit him.”