My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(107)

Life would do the same. Neve couldn’t pretend otherwise. In truth, she dreaded the lonely penury of Fog Cup almost as much as she dreaded the breathing weight of a man she couldn’t love, and if there was a token on her porch, she knew in her secret heart she’d be a fool not to consider it. But she didn’t want to consider it. She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave—brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.

Holding the dead flower, she squared her shoulders. Brave, she thought, and went to the door. Brave, she thought as she opened it.

But brave she was not when she saw what was sitting there, incongruously fine against the buckled boards of her rotting, charity-shed porch.

It was a Bible bound in red leather and stenciled all over in gold.

Only one man would leave such a gift. One man had done so, in fact, three times before—three times for three wives whose graves now stood in a row, and with plenty of space at the end for that row to grow and keep adding to its collection. Who’s next? called the cemetery earth. Why, the last of the orphans, the artist, the girl with the honeysuckle hair.

Neve clutched her frail lily and stared at the Bible whose pages had been thumbed by dead women. So Spear wanted her after all. In that place inside where her fear was caged like a creature, something stirred and rose, and she spoke a new plea without pausing to think. Not to God, Spear’s coconspirator. God was a newcomer here, carried over on the same stinking ships as the orphans and livestock.

There were older powers in the world than Him.

“Please, Wisha,” whispered Neve, and she felt the forbidden word part the air like the wings of a bird and go forth from her. Wisha. Dreamer, it meant in the old tongue. It was an execration to speak it, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt like power, like the birth of a small wind. Neve imagined it skirring its way into the world, new-alive and wild with her own desperate thrum, kicking up eddies of air that might grow, some day, into thunderheads and sink a fleet of ships half a world away. But what good was that to her? Much nearer and in that instant, at the threshold of her freezing shed while rain hissed at the roof and the heavy air pressed down, dense with its absence of voices, she saw something happen. The red leather cover of that unwanted Bible flapped open in a violent gust. Pages riffled and came loose, rising into the air like a flock of something freed. First the pages, then the rest.

All of it rising, swirling, gone.

“Please,” Neve whispered in its wake. “I am alone.” If her fear were a creature, this would be its bones. Alone. Alone. This was the fear that wore all other fears like skin. Her next words sounded like a bastard version of the catechisms she’d been forced to recite for twelve long years, but they felt truer. Cleaner. “To your protection I commend myself, soul of this land. Wisha.”

And there came a change in the atmosphere, a … tautening, as though the land itself were baring its teeth. Neve felt it.

She welcomed it.

Wisha.

*

When the first ship made landfall here two hundred years ago, its crew found no sign of folk—nary a chopped tree nor a circle of stones to hint that men had ever walked here. The land was fertile and primal and deepest green, untilled, ungroomed, and as wild as the Gliding itself. But for one thing.

The black hill.

It was perfectly symmetrical, wider than it was tall, and taller by ten than a haystack. It looked, at a distance, like a miniature volcano, and its true curiosity was its covering. It was dressed all over in strange plumage: feathers, oil-black and overlapping as neat as fish scales. Far too large for crows, each plume was as long as a man’s arm, and some said that only a bird as big as a man could have plumes so very long. Of course, no such bird existed, and because of that—and because of what was inside the hill, under the plumes—the sailors set fire to it.

And died.

It was the smoke, said the survivors. Oil-black as the feathers themselves, it … writhed.

It hunted.

The sailors who were upwind of the fire saw what it did, and ran for their ship.

Some of them made it.

It was a full twenty years before another ship came, and this one came ready, armed with God and shovels, and they didn’t burn the feathers this time but buried them, and they built a church on the hill and filled it with saints’ bones and imprecations against evil. They divvied the dark green land among themselves, taming the place with prayer as they shaped it with labor, and the long black feathers became a thing of myth. Children might play at “quicksmoke,” chasing each other with burning crow feathers and acting out gruesome deaths, but the true accursed plumes had not been seen for near two centuries.

No one was afraid anymore, not really.

On this first morning of Advent, though, as the isle folk stirred awake and girls darted barefoot onto porches to find what was left for them, the isle stirred too. Only a little, and only Neve felt it. The old hill—long since defeathered—was a lonesome spot, far from any farms, and its bare stone church saw visitors but rarely. It would be Christmas day before the damage was discovered—the floor caved in, a pocket of deep, dark air opened underneath—and by then the events of this Advent would be done and known.

By then, everyone would know that the Dreamer had awakened.

*

In the harbor town, the folk were decorating. Swags of limp tinsel wove down both sides of the high street, and dames were up ladders, skirts tucked tween their knees as they stretched to hang up fishing floats and old baubles of scratched mirror glass. Every door wore a wreath and red ribbon, and hunchback Scoot Finster was making his way from shop to shop with stencils and a bucket, dabbing scenes onto glass with his own recipe of fake snow.