Deep Is the Fen, page 25
She doesn’t look up as I slide into place next to her, but her head turns just ever so slightly, so I know she’s seen me.
The woman opposite me smiles. She’s wearing a white blouse with a scalloped collar, her hair pulled back in a neat braid underneath a white lace cap.
“Hello,” she says to me. “It’s lovely to see you.”
I don’t reply.
The bell chimes again, and witches reach forward to remove the tureen covers, revealing hot rolls, baked potatoes, a rich-looking stew and green beans. I sigh with longing. I know I shouldn’t eat it. I should have learned my lesson. But honestly I could use a little enchantment right now. Anything to take me away from the horror of what happened in Deeping Fen.
I copy the other women, helping myself to food until my plate is full. The food looks incredible, straight out of a catalogue or magazine. Too perfect, I realize as I take my first bite.
Bloody Ilium food again. It is as tasteless and disappointing as the instant stew I had back in Deeping Fen—in fact, I’d swear it’s the same stuff.
Once again, magic makes promises it cannot deliver on.
The witches eat like dainty feminine robots. Nobody talks or makes eye contact. Gold flashes on each left hand—every single one of the women wears an identical wedding ring.
“Creepy, isn’t it?” Sweetpea says to me.
I’m startled to hear a voice in among the gentle clinking of cutlery on china. None of the other women seem to have noticed.
“Are they…okay?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Depends on what you mean by okay.”
I take another mouthful of tasteless potato. The woman opposite me dabs at her mouth with a lace-edged napkin and takes a sip of water from her glass.
“Can they hear us?” I ask Sweetpea.
“Oh, sure,” she responds, then raises her voice. “Hey, Iris, how’s your lunch?”
The woman looks up and smiles. “It’s delicious, thank you for asking, Sweetpea.”
Then she looks back down at her plate. Somehow this makes everything even creepier.
“Are they all witches?” I ask Sweetpea.
“Yep. The most dangerous women in Anglyon, if you believe everything you read in the newspapers.”
“What’s made them like this?”
Sweetpea points to her own bare finger. “You gotta honor and obey, once you get a ring.”
“Dr. Veil said they are all here voluntarily.”
Sweetpea snorts. “Not exactly.”
“You don’t have a ring, though. Is that why you’re not like…them?”
She nods.
The bell chimes again, and the witches neatly place their napkins by their plates and stand.
“What now?” I ask Sweetpea.
“Half an hour taking the air in the gardens,” she says. “Then back to work.”
I follow her out another door and into the neatest, prettiest cottage garden I’ve ever seen. Tidy garden beds overflowing with peonies and hollyhocks, each one perfectly formed. At the bottom of the garden I can see tomato cages and trellises of beans and peas, and straight rows of carrots and radishes.
All at once? Peas are a winter crop, and tomatoes shouldn’t be fruiting for at least a few more weeks.
I bend my head to smell a particularly plump rose, but it has no scent. Looking closer, I see no bees. No crawling insects. Not a single weed or a blade of grass out of place.
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” Sweetpea says. “Might as well be plastic.”
“It’s all fake,” I say. “Like the food.”
Sweetpea nods. “Everything here is fake,” she says darkly.
The other witches are walking in pairs, often linked at the elbow. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d see friends strolling through lush gardens. But the women don’t speak to each other. They don’t look around at the flowers. They smile contentedly but don’t seem to be very interested in anything.
“So are you going to tell me why you didn’t get a ring?” Sweetpea asks.
“I’m not a witch,” I explain.
Sweetpea raises her eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”
I don’t want to talk about it, but there’s something about the set of Sweetpea’s jaw that makes me think she won’t let it go.
“You know the Toadmen?” I ask, and Sweetpea’s expression goes dark.
“Sure,” she responds.
“I—I went to their big Toad Prom event as a guest of one of the high-up Toadmen’s sons, Caraway. And…well, it all went very wrong. They took my father, and made him…different. I made so many mistakes. In the end, they wanted me to pledge myself to their King Toad—who I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually exist—to be his bride.”
Sweetpea frowns. “The Fox Bride?”
“How do you know about the Fox Bride?”
“Everyone knows that story,” Sweetpea says, but something in her tone is off. “The three toads and the Fox Bride. I’m assuming you refused.”
I nod. “Caraway convinced them to send me here instead of killing me, and then he gave me a—” I break off.
“A what?” Sweetpea’s eyes are sharp.
I shake my head. “Nothing. He gave me a kiss, that’s all.”
I’m not sure if she believes me or not. I snap the head off a poppy and examine its perfect crinkled petals.
“Then they killed my da in front of me.”
“Bummer.”
I swallow heavily. She doesn’t care. Why would she? But it hurts so much to say the words out loud.
“What about you?” I ask, to change the subject. “Why are you really here? Dr. Veil said you were kidnapped by witches, but I saw you last week at the Candlecott fair.”
Sweetpea’s face remains neutral. “No you didn’t,” she says. “It must have been someone else.”
But I know it’s her. I remember that hard glint in her eyes.
“You’re not a witch,” I say. “You don’t have a ring, and only witches get rings, right?”
She nods. “Right.”
My shoulders sag with relief. “Good.”
“I’m not completely powerless, though,” she adds. “And neither are you.”
I don’t want power. I just want to go home.
We keep walking, past a witch sitting alone on a wrought iron garden bench. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes vacant. She doesn’t ever seem to blink.
“What happened to her?” I ask Sweetpea under my breath.
“She’s a husk,” Sweetpea replies at normal volume. “Lost too much mettle.”
I swallow, thinking of the mettle tide, the terror of being unmoored from myself. “Do they…cut strings here?” I ask.
“Only if you’re naughty.”
“And that’s legal?”
“Nobody in here cares about what’s legal. And nobody outside cares about us.”
Her face is hardened against the cold, her lips a thin line.
“So why did you come here?”
Sweetpea stares up at the bright blue sky. “There are worse places to be imprisoned,” she says.
“Do any of them ever…” I wave a hand suggestively.
“Do magic?” Sweetpea responds. “No. The rings prevent that.”
“Even the Spitalwick Hag? She escaped from prison, surely she could escape from here.”
“She can’t do magic,” Sweetpea says. “They made sure of that.”
“Where is she now?”
“Basement,” Sweetpea replies. “Chained up in irons.”
“Good,” I say. It’s what she deserves.
“Friend of yours, is she?”
“She killed my mother.”
“Huh.” Sweetpea glances at me speculatively. “So I guess you don’t like witches.”
“There’s a reason why they’re all here.”
Sweetpea says nothing.
“It’s safer for everyone if they are locked away,” I add.
Sweetpea pulls a trumpet-shaped blossom from a spike of hollyhock. “Imagine if someone were to let them all go free. A whole army of angry witches.”
There’s a glint in her eye that I find unsettling.
The bell rings again, and the women all turn immediately and head toward a large barn without hesitating.
“Back to work, I guess,” Sweetpea says.
* * *
—
I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE whether I should go into the workshop—after all, I’m not a witch. But Sweetpea is going, and she’s the only other normal person here, so I follow her.
The building looks like a storybook barn—rough timber with a bright white trim. Inside there are workstations, each with a simple task laid out on it. The witches file in and stand in front of a workstation.
“Are they going to do magic?” I ask Sweetpea, who shakes her head.
“Just grunt work.”
The work is tedious and repetitive. I see one woman sprinkling Ilium-branded sachets on tray after tray of seedlings. Another pulls the petals off daisies and lines them up on a sheet of wax paper to dry. Yet another uses a tiny syringe to extract the nectar from honeysuckle flowers, filling a row of little glass vials.
“Here,” Sweetpea says, passing me a broom. “Make yourself useful.”
I spend the next few hours sweeping up discarded stems and leaves and placing them in plastic garbage bags. I guess magical gardens don’t need compost heaps.
The women work methodically, without speaking. It’s like being in a room full of robots. Sweetpea slips away at some point and doesn’t return.
Who would have thought I would end up here, surrounded by witches?
I glance down at the flagstones beneath my feet. Is that where she is? The Spitalwick Hag?
I shudder, and hope that Dr. Veil’s rings are as effective as Sweetpea says they are.
By the time of the first bell, my hands are blistered and my feet ache from standing. I follow the other witches back into the dining hall and eat my tasteless magic food along with the rest of them. Sweetpea is still nowhere to be seen, but I’m too tired to wonder what happened to her.
The final bell rings, and I follow the other women back upstairs and fall into my bed, sliding my hand under the pillow to make sure Caraway’s toadstone is still there. I close my fist around it and feel weirdly comforted by its presence. I don’t know why. I should definitely hate Caraway more than I do.
I’m bone-weary, but sleep is elusive.
I try to think of anything but Da, but the alternatives are not particularly calming either. Perfect, scentless flowers. Vacant robot-witches. The Spitalwick Hag down in the basement.
Eventually I drift off into a restless sleep, haunted by dreams of a woman with stringy dark hair and a cruel, shrill laugh.
14.
I wake early to find gray light seeping in through lace curtains. For a few brief moments, I don’t remember that both my parents are dead.
Then everything rushes back, and the world ends all over again.
I’m tempted to stay in bed all day and hide from the world, but I need to get out of my head, so I drag myself down to breakfast and face another room full of strange, placid witches. We eat, then head off to work, where I polish the windows in the barn with some fancy enchanted no-streak spray, then sweep up the scraps again and dust the windowsills.
After lunch, Sweetpea joins me at a deep sink and we wash little vials and jars until they are sparkling clean.
“There aren’t any guards,” I remark.
“Nope.”
“So what’s to stop all the witches from just leaving?”
Sweetpea looks at me like I’m a fool. “The rings?” she says.
“You don’t have a ring,” I say. “Why don’t you leave?”
Sweetpea scowls. “You don’t have one either,” she says. “But I don’t see you strolling out the door.”
I have nowhere else to go.
Suddenly, one of the women nearby lets out a hoarse cry. I look up to see her clutching her hand, blood pouring down her wrist. A bloody pair of garden shears lies discarded on the floor next to her.
I try to close my eyes against the bright red of it, but memories project themselves on the back of my eyelids. It’s unbearable.
“Lobelia, no,” mutters Sweetpea, grabbing a cleaning rag and rushing to stanch the flow of blood.
I see a flash of gold under the blood and realize that the wound is on her ring finger.
Did she try to cut it off?
A few of the witches near her have stopped working and are staring blankly down at their stations. I see a few trembling hands. One witch has tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Get it off me!” Lobelia cries, her voice ragged and strained. “Get it off!”
“This isn’t the way,” Sweetpea whispers urgently to her.
Lobelia lashes out, and Sweetpea goes crashing into a table, scattering scissors and rose petals.
With a muffled sob, Lobelia starts to rush toward the door, but the other witches close ranks to block the way. She wheels around, shaking her head like she’s trying to clear it of something. I’m suddenly reminded of taking the Sebrium at the Toad Ball, the jarring stench and horror of it all. Lobelia staggers toward me and grabs me by the collar. I smell the sweetness of her breath, mixed with the hot tang of blood.
“Get out,” she snarls between clenched teeth. “Get out while you can.”
Two witches appear behind her, their expressions mild. They don’t say anything as they snap iron cuffs around her wrists and place a snaffle bit in her mouth, working the awkward spikes in between her teeth. She tries to fight them off, but they are implacable, buckling the strap tight. Lobelia’s cries turn to incoherent grunts and gasps. The witches take an arm each and drag her from the workshop.
There’s a long pause, the remaining witches still and silent. Then, one by one, they resume working. None of them speak, although I see eyes drifting toward the smears of blood on the table, and the discarded gardening shears.
Sweetpea picks herself up off the floor and dusts petals from her dress. She looks devastated.
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask.
“No,” Sweetpea replies, her voice low and dark. “She isn’t.”
That night, my bloodstained clothes vanish while I’m in the bath, replaced by soft new linens, laid out neatly on my bed.
* * *
—
LOBELIA REAPPEARS THE NEXT day, and I can’t help but gasp when I see her. Her cheeks are hollow, like she hasn’t eaten in weeks. Her eyes are sunken, her skin pallid and stretched thin over her bones. There is a vacancy in her eyes. The other witches may be docile, but they’re still alert and responsive. I don’t need to turn threadwise to see that she’s alive, but not really living.
“They took her strings,” I murmur.
“Another husk,” Sweetpea says, her voice bitter.
“We have to get out of here,” I tell her. “Let’s just leave.”
Sweetpea snorts. “You think you can just walk away?” she says. “He won’t let you.”
“There are no guards,” I say. “No fences.”
“You’re deluded,” she hisses, grabbing me by the elbow and yanking me away from the other women. “This place looks like something out of a catalogue, but it’s still a prison.”
“Dr. Veil said—”
“Dr. Veil is a monster. He takes their strings. He takes their mettle. He takes these women—these intelligent, powerful women full of fire—and he breaks them.” Her fists clench.
“Why were you looking for the Hag?” I ask her. “Why come here? Are you trying to help the witches?”
“Of course I am,” Sweetpea responds. “They don’t deserve this. No one does.”
“They’re witches,” I tell her. “Criminals.”
Sweetpea’s mouth twists. “They’re heroes,” she replies. “They’re all that stands between us and the enemy.”
“You’re just a little kid,” I say. “The world is complicated. It’s not all about heroes and enemies.”
“Oh, wake up,” Sweetpea says. “You think the Toadmen are bad? They’re just a cog in a much larger machine. Ilium. Moracle. Welch. All the big magic corporations. Auditors. They all serve one master.”
“You’ve been listening to too many fairy stories.”
“And you haven’t listened to enough.”
“I wish there were no magic,” I say bitterly. “Magic ruins everything.”
“Magic is the only thing that’s going to get us out of here,” Sweetpea says. “I need you to help me.”
I stare at her. “You want me to help you break a hundred witches out of a recovery center?”
She nods once, sharp and fierce. “There must be something you can do. What’s your gift?”
I shudder as I remember the inexorable pull of the mettle tide, whisking me out of my own body and into the cold mountain air.
“I don’t have a gift.”
“Then something you have. Some way in.”
The toadstone, tucked under my pillow. Could it help Sweetpea? Her eyes narrow as she watches me.
“What is it?” she says. “Tell me.”
More witches in the world isn’t going to help anyone.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s nothing.”
She growls with frustration. “Fine. Then help me break into Veil’s office. There must be something in there—some device or potion that can get the rings off.”
I shake my head. “I’m going to leave,” I tell her. “You can come with me if you want, but I won’t stay here another day.”
