She considers this for a moment before shaking her head. “It’s all ludicrous,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m even acting like it isn’t.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m not sure I truly believe it myself. Which is why we need answers.”
SOMETIMES, THE TIME I SPENT in the mine filters in like sunlight through a curtained window, diluted and soft-edged and incomplete. But other times, the curtain shifts and light pours in, sharp and jarring. I remember darkness; I remember being cold. I remember my mother.
The memory hurts, forcing its way into my mind like a dagger into flesh. Unlike a dagger, though, it is impossible to pull out again.
* * *
—
She tended to her gray garden, though nothing grew there anymore.
I remember trying to tell her this, to explain that the Kaiser had burned everything, that the dirt is mostly ash and not even weeds are able to force their way through the dry ground, but she wouldn’t hear it. She continued to dig with her hands, placing seeds deep in the ground before tucking them in beneath a blanket of dirt.
Even in the mine, I knew my mother was dead, though sometimes, when I just saw her out of the corner of my eye, I would forget for just a second. The woman before me with her dirt-caked hands was not my mother—was not a woman at all, really. She was a product of the mine or a product of my mind or perhaps some combination of the two. She was not real. I knew this but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Instead I crouched beside her and dug my hands into the dirt as well, feeling it wedge beneath my fingernails. I pressed seeds into the pockets of earth, just as my mother had taught me.
She watched me, her eyes appraising, and when she smiled, it was so warm that I didn’t miss the sun.
“Nothing will grow here,” I told her again. “The Kaiser made sure of it.”
“All it takes is one seed, my love,” she told me. “One sprout to push through the earth, to dig its roots deep and wide. If I have to plant a million seeds to find that one, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Time became liquid, slipping through my fingers whenever I tried to get a grasp of it, but my mother never left my side and I never left hers. We kneeled together in the dirt and ash of her garden, digging and planting seeds. Dirt swallowed my skin, smothered the color of my dress—was it red before? I couldn’t recall. My stomach was gnawed by hunger and my throat was so dry that it hurt to speak, but I couldn’t complain because my mother was beside me once more and so there was nothing to want for.
I plunged my hand into an untouched bit of earth, but this time, when I scooped out a clump of dirt, a quiet sob reached up from the ground and grabbed hold of me. It was pure anguish, reaching into my chest and twisting my heart. I remember how I froze at the sound.
My mother began to sing.
“I once knew a girl with hair like night,
With eyes that shone like stars so bright,
Kept the moon on a string round her wrist,
Passed its magic to each soul she kissed.”
I tore my gaze away from the ground and found her watching me.
There was something I needed to be doing, somewhere I needed to be, but that slipped through my fingers as well.
“With each soul kissed, the moon did wane,
And the girl’s magic continued to drain
Until naught was left but bones and skin.
The girl was no more but only had been.”
Something stirred in my memory, pushing through the din of my mind. That wasn’t right. It had been some years since my mother had sung that song to me, but that wasn’t how it ended. The girl’s magic drained as the moon waned—I remembered that—but the ending wasn’t so macabre.
“Until naught was left but bones and skin,” I sang, my voice hoarse and dry. “And once again the world did begin.”
I looked back down at the patch of dirt before me and began to dig again. Each handful of dirt unearthed a new sob, a wail, a scream. Each one twisted my stomach and dug its nails into my heart. My hands shook, but I forced myself to keep digging, to find the source of all of that pain.
“My love,” my mother said, struggling to be heard over the cacophony. “Stop that now.”
I paused, but I couldn’t look at her. I knew that if I did, I would falter.
“They need me,” I told her. I don’t know how I remembered that suddenly, that there were people who needed me, but the certainty was bone-deep.
“You need me,” she countered, her voice breaking. “Stay with me and I’ll keep you safe.”
I looked up at her then, and the sight of her knocked the breath from my lungs. The gash at her throat had grown wider, but the blood was gone, leaving a hole of black nothing. Her bright eyes were dull and sunken, her skin like old paper doused in water and left to dry in the sun.
To keep you safe while your world burns, a voice deep inside me whispered. To keep you safe while those you love die.
“They need me,” I told my mother again, but the words were harder to say this time. “They’re calling for me. Can’t you hear them?”
“Stay with me, my love. Stay safe and never want for love. Stay with me and never want for anything.”
I dug more until I reached for dirt and my fingers touched only air. I looked up at my mother, who watched me with wide eyes and a solemn mouth.
“I love you, Mother,” I said, swallowing back tears. “And I hope I won’t see you again for a long, long time.”
And then I pitched myself forward and into the hole I had dug, and fell into a vast nothingness.
WE HAVE TO PUT OFF our departure for a few hours. It’s unlikely that the messenger traveled entirely by himself—if I were Cress, I would have sent spies with him, to monitor our movements. And sure enough, when we send scouts to the mountains, they count twenty men watching us. They’re killed instantly—we don’t have food to waste on hostages. It’s Maile’s call, but I can’t bring myself to protest too strongly.
As we ready to leave in the afternoon, Artemisia finds me in my tent, her expression as guarded as ever, but with a vague hint of curiosity twisted in the corner of her mouth. I look up from the weathered map spread over the floor—the only thing that hasn’t been packed yet.
“Any news from Heron?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “When I saw him this morning, he had that lump of gold clutched so tightly in his hand, I thought he would break it.” She hesitates, glancing over her shoulder at the closed flap of the tent, where a figure waits, outlined in shadow. “I did find something, though…or, rather, someone. A woman who was in the mines when the Kaiserin came a month or so back.”