Arc 9: Root and Vine

“Friends, it would be foolish of me to reveal all of how I will lift us into glory. Trust that I have many ways. Some, you will see. Others, pray you don't.”

-Merigold Thresh

- - -

A little girl trembles behind the wall of her mother's arms. She stares hollow-eyed at nothing while one vicious, hiccupping sob after another tears itself free of her. They all but fold her body around them with their strength. In between, she struggles to breathe, gasping like she flounders at the very edge of drowning. Her mother murmurs soft, sweet words into the crown of her head; of safety, of comfort, and of love.

All the while, a stream of dark red flows. A thin river that seeps through a saturated cotton nightdress to follow the turn of a small, dangling foot. One after another, drops fall to puddle on the floor, each landing with a quietly deafening plop.

There are no other sounds. Not until an urgent stride begins down the hall and grows louder, until a door is flung open and the girl's father enters. He carries with him a large and well-stocked kit of bandages, salves, and medicines. For the second time in as many days he sets it down on the dining table. This time, in his urgency, he drops it. The kit lands heavy and shakes the table. Adelaide hisses, “Milo!” He ignores her, unrolling the kit with a swift and steady hand. His gaze flickers over his wife and daughter, brow drawn and mouth pursed in thought. She hisses again, “Milo!”

Milo removes a pair of scissors, a roll of fresh bandages, and a pair of small jars, thickly glassed and sturdy. He ignores Adelaide, or didn't hear her, and strides around the dining table to kneel in the slowly growing puddle of blood beneath Lavinia's foot. This too, he pays no mind. Without a word, he begins treating his daughter's wound, first cutting away the nightdress where it stuck and peeling it away from her skin. She whimpers, from pain or the cold touch of the scissor's steel.

The wound is revealed. A hole, as wide around as a man's thumb, had been punched into Lavinia's leg. High up, near to where thigh met hip. The deep, dark wound wept blood freely, no longer dammed by cotton cloth. Milo tosses the scissors aside, uncaring of where they land with a jarring clatter. He picks up one of the jars, then sets it down in favor of the other. The first was filled with salve. The second, with a pale gray powder. With fingers made slick by his daughter's blood, he struggles with the cap for a moment. It would be easy to fall to frustration. He doesn't. He's careful and steady and the cap comes off in short order.

That pale gray powder pours into the cup of his palm, more than half the jar's contents. He looks up to meet Adelaide's eyes, and it would seem she knows what's to come. She slides forward enough to plant her feet on the floor and pulls their daughter close to her side, binding her in a cage of her mother's arms. She nods to him, and he claps that powder-filled palm to the wound. He grips tight, tendons flexing in finger and wrist, as the powder is pushed deep.

Lavinia shrieks, hollow-eyed no longer. Now they shine with pain, fear, and a need to flee, come from the very depths of herself. She kicks and claws wildly, scoring her mother's arms with thin cuts and driving her free heel into her father's cheek. She cries out, “No!” and “Let me go!” and “Please!” Her parents weather the storm of each panic-born strike and scraped-raw plea, sorrow and love visible in the lines around their eyes.

All the while, Milo counts. He wrestles with blood-slickened hands to hold his daughter still, and he counts: twelve...thirteen...fourteen...fifteen. By the time he's reached twenty, Lavinia's struggles have slowed. That desperate, ancient need sinks beneath the weight of a returning clarity and awareness of where and when she is. She lifts eyes made red and swollen by tears to Adelaide, eyes of a shade they share. “Mama?” she asks, doubtfully.

Adelaide nods, pushing sweat-matted hair from her child's brow. “It's me, baby,” she promises, eyes a-shine and smile tremulous. “It's me.” Milo's count reaches twenty-five, and she swallows thickly. “Deep breath, baby, it's almost over.” Lavinia pulls in a shaky breath. The count reaches thirty, and Milo pulls his hands away, diving for the roll of clean bandage set nearby.

The wound is smaller, purple-dark, its depths filled by the application of that pale gray powder. It bleeds sluggishly, trickles where once a river flowed. Its edges look angry, disturbed by struggle and medicine. Milo returns, and she lifts her leg without prompting so he can start wrapping it. Soon, all that remains of the injury is the blood that stains skin, cloth, and wood. Lavinia's breath steadies, some measure of calm returning to her.

Milo's breath hitches, the last of his leaving him. His head drops as his shoulders hitch and the first gasping, hard-fought sob is finally allowed to come. His slickened hands shake at his sides and his eyes are tightly closed. He weeps, knelt on the floor, until Adelaide guides him to his feet and into her embrace. His tears fall onto her shoulder, his arm around her waist. Lavinia, the Queen of Splinters, scoots in. She hugs her parents as widely as her short arms will allow. He chokes out a sigh, his other hand coming to cup the back of her head.

Still and silent, I stand in the room's corner and bear witness to what my presence has wrought.

- - -

Lavinia tells her story in pieces, holding and held by her parents. It's not confusion that makes her pause and frown at the distant wall, but something akin to it. Doubt, perhaps, as if she struggles to believe that what she survived had happened at all.

She'd woken from the depths of sleep to a scratching at the her bedroom's window. With curtains drawn and thinking mind a-fog, she had thought little more of it than an errant leaf or branch. That her home stood some sixty feet from the nearest tree was, in that moment, forgotten. “It feels stupid now,” she confesses, “but...” she lets the word hang.

Words of assurance, of support, are thick on my tongue. Would she even want to hear them, knowing from whose mouth they come? I wouldn't, nor would anyone possessed of sense, I should think. So I seal my lips and swallow them, guilt's acid burn in my throat and the churn of my gut. I wish Clarke were here with me, not sealing the broken window as best she could with her magic. Her presence, her touch, would help me. Help that I do not think I deserve.

The story goes on. When there was not another sound from her window, Lavinia had fallen back into a lighter slumber than before. So the scrape, when it came, gained her immediate and fully woken attention. It had started in the high corner of the window, then dragged to its opposite side. One full trace of the frame had gone by before the scrape became a keening screech, then a splintering crackle of breaking glass.

Not a loud break, though. Oh no, those talons are far too sharp and well-guided for that. A gentle, tinkling rain of moon-glittering shards had fallen from behind the drawn curtain. Lavinia had frozen, body and mind, and watched as the night's breeze had made that once-still cloth billow. Through the flutter cames rays of moonlight and a brief glimpse of its favored son.

A long and narrow face, framed by the horns of a ram and maned in dead, thorning brambles. Its lipless mouth of jagged and broken teeth had seemed to smile at her, the shadowed pits of its eyes both empty as the starless night and filled with amusement. It had reached through the now-broken window and stretched its eight-fingered hand across her room. The sight of its talons had jarred her to scramble and curl against her bed's headboard. She had thought herself beyond its reach.

It had held one of those long, viciously curved talons a mere hair's-length above her as it reached, and reached, and reached. The night's cold had blown into her room, pushing her nightdress up her ankles, past her knees. The talon had followed, pushing higher and higher up her leg, until it stopped just short of where thigh met hip. “Then, well...you know the rest,” Lavinia finishes, shrugging with a carelessness she does not at all feel.

Horror in the eyes of her parents, in bright green and dark, dark brown. They know, even if their daughter yet does not, the intent of her injury's location. They know, as they are meant to know, that if that talon had risen a touch higher and just a hand's-breadth more to the side, it would have gone beyond mere injury and become violation. Hatred, in the flare of Adelaide's nose and the tremble of Milo's shoulders. They believe now, in a way they only understood before, the nature of that which hunts us.

That which haunts us. “This is what it does,” Clarke says, quietly. She stands in the open door to the rest of the house, the last gleam of magic dying in the heart of her piece of ice. She looks pale and drawn, hunched at the shoulder and arms folded across her belly. “I fixed the window, but...” she lifts her shoulders and lets them drop, a gesture so helpless it's heartbreaking.

I know what she means. It is strong enough to tear through bone and flesh with ease, to uproot a grown tree and hurl it like a river-stone. Glass didn't stop it. Wood won't, either. “We're not safe here,” Adelaide says. She separates from husband and child to pace in agitation. “We need to leave. We need to go...” she draws in a deep breath. Lets it out when she can't think of anywhere safe. “We need to go.”

“It paced a horse at full sprint,” I say. Her eyes snap to me, glittering. Fear is in their depths, and desperation. “We can't run. We'll never make it.”

“What do we do, then?!” she snaps. In me, she finds a way to give vent to what she feels. “This is your fault! You brought it here, you're the reason my daughter almost – !” She cuts herself off, lips sealing into a pale line. She hadn't meant to, I don't think. She was right to, though.

“I'm sorry,” is all I can say. “Truly.” My sorrow isn't and won't be enough. A fraught silence falls. Adelaide returns to pacing, watched by Milo and Lavinia. Clarke looks to me. She looks small, shrunken by the terror of this monster and the pain of her monthly. I may have gotten her killed. I may have gotten them all killed. “I...” I break the silence, drawing all eyes. “I may have an idea.” I swallow. “If one of us – if I distract it, maybe the rest of you can make it to safety.”

A sacrifice, born of guilt. Senseless, unless the monster toys with me long enough. Shock ripples across Clarke's face, surprise across the rest. Then, Adelaide says, “Don't be ridiculous.” Turns to the room at large and asks, “Why didn't it come during the day?”