An Enchantment of Ravens(14)
Three days later, I pressed the half dozen preparatory charcoal sketches I’d done of him between sheets of wax paper, bundled them up, and hid them at the back of my closet, resolving not to look at them again until I no longer craved seeing his face like prodding a fresh bruise. The golden afternoon was over. By the time Rook remembered me, if he ever did, I’d be long dead.
I ate. I slept. I got out of bed in the morning. I painted, I did dishes, I looked after the twins. Every day dawned bright and blue. During the hot afternoons, the buzzing of the grasshoppers blurred into a monotonous throb. It was for the better, I told myself, swallowing the mantra like a lump of bitter bread.
It was for the better.
Two weeks later, Fern arrived as promised and took the portrait away in a crate packed with cloth and straw. After the third week I’d started feeling a little like my old self, but there was something missing from my life now, and I suspected I’d never be exactly the same again. Maybe that was just part of growing up.
One night I went into the kitchen after dark to find Emma asleep at the table, her hand curled around a tincture bottle in danger of tipping over, with pungent half-ground herbs sitting in her mortar and pestle. It wasn’t an unusual discovery.
“Emma,” I whispered, touching her shoulder.
She mumbled indistinctly in reply.
“It’s late. You should go to bed.”
“All right, I’m going,” she said into her arms, muffled, but didn’t move. I took the tincture from her hand and sniffed it, then found its stopper and set it aside. I knew what I would find if I smelled Emma’s breath.
“Come on.” I draped her limp arm over my shoulders and pulled her upright. Her ankles turned before she found her footing. Going up the stairs proved as interesting as I expected.
People mistook Emma for my mother all the time. Children, mostly, and out-of-towners—people who didn’t know what had happened to my parents, or that as Whimsy’s physician Emma had been the one who’d tried to save my father’s life and failed. Unlike my mother, he hadn’t died instantly. To all accounts, it would have been better if he had.
So I suppose I couldn’t stay angry at Emma for her vices, even when they occasionally made me her keeper rather than the other way around. A patient must have died today, though I’d long ago stopped asking once I’d made the connection. Most of all, I could never forget I was the reason she was still in Whimsy. If it hadn’t been for me, the responsibility of raising her sister’s daughter, the child of the man who died in her arms, she would have left for the World Beyond as soon as she could. In a place where enchantments reigned supreme and the creatures who traded them had no use for human medicine . . . well, her ideal life lay elsewhere.
Emma was missing something too, and I’d do well to remember that.
“Can you take your shoes off?” I asked, lowering her to the edge of her bed.
“?’M all right,” she replied with her eyes closed, so I did it anyway, and tucked them under the bed skirt so she wouldn’t trip on them if she got up during the night. Afterward, I leaned down and kissed her forehead.
Her eyes squinted open. They were dark brown, almost black, like mine—large and intense. She had the same freckles spattered across her fair skin and the same thick, wheat-colored hair. Before everything happened, I remember her and my mother joking that the women in our family reigned supreme: they passed their looks down without any input from the men whatsoever.
“I’m sorry about Rook,” she said, reaching up to give a strand of my identical hair an affectionate tug.
I froze. My mind reeled, teetering at the edge of a precipice. “I don’t know what—”
“Isobel, I’m not blind. I knew what was going on.”
Acid soured my stomach. My voice came out thin and tight, prepared to rise stridently in defense. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Her hand flopped down to the coverlet. “Because I couldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. I trusted you to make the right choice.” Lanced with guilt in the face of Emma’s understanding, my hostility deflated. Somehow the emptiness it left behind felt far, far worse. “Also, I worry about you. Your Craft keeps you so busy and isolated you haven’t had a chance to experience . . . well, so many things. We’d have a hard time getting by without the enchantments. But I wish—”
A thump shook the ceiling, followed by a maniacal cackle. I welcomed the interruption. The more Emma spoke, the harder I wrestled with the tears prickling the backs of my eyes.
“Oh, hell. The twins.” Her voice scraped like sandpaper. She gave the rafters a resigned look.
I rose swiftly. “Don’t worry. I’ll check on them.”
The old stairway to the attic creaked beneath my weight. When I entered the twins’ bedroom, a tiny slope-ceilinged nook barely large enough for two beds and a dresser, they’d already initiated a pretend sleep routine, which wouldn’t have fooled me even without the stifled giggling.
“I know you’re plotting something. Out with it.” I went over to May and tickled her. Rarely did she confess without torture.
“March!” she shrieked, thrashing beneath the covers. “March wants to show you something!”
I relented, and regarded March with my hands on my hips, trying to look stoic. Judging by the way her cheeks were ballooned out, she was about to squirt water all over my face or possibly something even less pleasant. I couldn’t show weakness. I tapped my foot and raised an impatient eyebrow.