A Mischief in the Woodwork Read online

  But not everything made it in because, sometimes...

  Sometimes, there were just no words.

  *

  Unlike some others, Johnny had seen things shift. He knew what it looked like. He knew what it felt like. He knew how it tasted on his tongue, how it smelled in the air. He knew it like a sailor knew the ocean, like a mystic knew the stars.

  Nothing that vast could be documented. Nothing that great could have any justice done to it.

  Nothing that terrible could be fully disclosed in good conscience.

  Some things were never to be spoken of, even for the great voice of an era. Some things would never translate on paper. They would never let a voice speak them.

  So Johnny stood at the precipice of these things and watched them, solemn and darkly privileged, brokenly rooted with his heart both numb and raw at once as they played out before him. Here was the womb of history, and he was a witness – charged and tried.

  Maybe he was even a child of it. A nurtured specimen of this tumultuous womb. A small, untouched heartbeat in the midst of it, as chaos reigned around him.

  Untouched, that is, except for the illness that plagued him. But that was a secret he did keep. It would not make it into the paper that the man behind the voice that so many clung to had been stricken. They depended on him, and he would not have them worry.

  After all, 'stricken' didn't mean dead.

  But because of it, some things made it into the paper that might not necessarily have happened at all. Feverish things. Episodes that might bear resemblance to one Avante of Manor Dorn's kitchen nightmare dealing with spidery demons and phantom fingerprints.

  So perhaps 'compromised' would be a better word.

  Never mind that Avante maintained traces of evidence on her person.

  The newsboy had been compromised.

  F I f t e e n –

  The Seeds of Sabotage

  Since Letta was out, Enda took her old fingers to stitching me up where I needed. They were not quite as steady, but they knew what they were doing.

  As I was lying there, suffering freely in the post-adrenaline pain of it all, wincing tears streaming down my cheeks, Tanen appeared at the doorway. In all my rawness, I was pummeled by a mix of emotions at the sight of him. Frustration at him seeing me like this. Shame at my lack of gratitude and the way I had treated him before now. Embarrassment that my tears showed no reservations in his presence, and pride to override the embarrassment. The distinct wish, above all other feelings, that he would just go away, or simply had never come at all. Then none of these other feelings would matter.

  And I'd be dead.

  Because of that one redeeming reminder, I allowed him his presence at the door. He stood there a moment, recognizing my suffering.

  In his bandaged hands was a token of sorts. One customized, reinforced silvery garment. I recognized it immediately.

  Without a word, he cast it to the ground there, pointedly, and then left – leaving it at my feet, so to speak. No words were necessary.

  My initial reaction was a tentative flare. But there was no 'I told you so' written on his face. Only something grave in its own triumph.

  I snuffed my welling eyes closed, slicing off the last tears and tying off the rest that were pending. Creating a moat about myself would not help anything. Tanen's offering would.

  Might.

  It was not something that I took to, but he had made a fair enough statement. When Enda was finished, I limped to the discarded garment and went through the resigned, painstaking motions of lacing it onto myself, so that no one else had to know of it. Tanen may have earned himself a chance to be heeded in this, but I was not going to have 'Tanen is Right' laced all over me for the whole of the house to see.

  I hid it safely under my tunic, knowing it would probably be discovered soon as I was treated for my ailments, but determined to keep it in perspective while I could.

  *

  'Keeping things in perspective' was not something that came easily in Dar'on in that time, however. If one attempted such a thing, he would likely only be laughed at. Perhaps corrected, or left in the dust entirely.

  For in patterns of change, things have the nasty habit to do just that – change.

  Dice in the wind.

  You might keep the game in perspective, but then the dice are rolled.

  And then the game changes.

  *

  My fever dreams were gone, but they were replaced by nightmares with new faces. It seemed it was simply one great masquerade conspiracy, an onion that peeled off one mask after another, a snake that shed its skin only to be renewed.

  I went to sleep at night and could not shake one very haunting image: that which painted a vivid landscape of the wardog's attack.

  But it was not my own endangerment that spurred the dream. Instead, it was Dani and Viola on that doorstep, at the mercy of the rampant beast, pitiful in their defense. I couldn't say where my perspective was rooted, but I was aware of Tanen's. He watched from the window, not moving a muscle. I screamed at someone to do something, because I seemed anchored in helplessness, but no one came to their aide. The door could not be forced open against the resistance of the children's pummeled bodies, and where Tanen had crashed through a window in my interest, he did nothing but stand and watch as the children faced the same fate.

  I screamed at him. I pounded my fists against the restrictive membranes of the dream, but they held me fast. Thank the gods I could not interpret the gritty details of the children's demise through my frustration, panic, and tears, but the horror of it took place either way. Raucous oaths ripped from my throat, clawing at the walls that kept me from doing what Tanen wouldn't. I shredded him with my shrieks.

  But he remained stoic, composed and horrible. Still as an unfeeling statue.

  I bloodied my hands on the invisible walls around me, but it was no use.

  Tanen would not do for the children what he did for me.

  *

  I had the dream three nights in a row. My singing voice had returned – enough that I could charm the weedflowers again, so I needn't worry about that. But I could not shake the bother of Tanen rooted within the issue.

  On that third night, I awoke from the horrible dream gasping and sweaty. I could not breathe beneath the tight laces of the corset Tanen had devised. I felt caught in a web. His web.

  I launched from my pallet, stumbling away toward the door, tugging at my laces to loosen them as I went. I fumbled with the lock on the door and threw back the latch, and then spilled out onto the porch and into the predawn mist. The gloom was icy against the beads of sweat on my skin as I went to my knees there, but I sucked in great gulps of the cold to refresh me. Then I drew myself up and sat on my legs, and stared out over the eddying land and calmed myself. It was mystic and peaceful, a calm sea of ghosts and angels walking among us.

  I stayed there without the chill penetrating me, my flesh fiery, my core feverish. To the touch, my skin turned cold, but it was only a shallow frost. I did not feel it within. I was effulgent.

  I heard the floorboards creak in the house. A look over my shoulder saw the faint silhouette of someone coming to check on me. I'd left the door cracked. As the figure drew nearer, dawn whispers painted telltale details onto his face.

  Dismay sank a ship inside me, but the cold numbed the outer traces of its presence.

  Tanen came to the door.

  “Are you alright?” he inquired quietly.

  I looked out over the land, trying to center myself. I hated his concern. I could not deal with the possible sincerity of it, when in the back of my mind was the image from my dream of him standing there, watching as a wardog tore the children to shreds in my place. Not doing for them what he had done for me. It haunted me.

  I'm sure he could not understand the raw hatred in my eyes as I turned to look at him. Maybe he was blind to it. That would be for the better, I supposed, even though I wanted to spit at him. Concern remained lodged unfairly in his
woken eyes.

  “I just needed some air,” I managed to say without sharpening each word with derision.

  He eyed the roving mist. A sorry excuse for air, he seemed to be thinking.

  A sorry excuse for most things, these days.

  “It doesn't bother you to be sitting here?” he asked instead of his apparent musing. At my quizzical look, he explained, “Where it...happened.”

  It wasn't me, Tanen, I wanted to say. It was the children. And you left them. How could you?

  I swallowed that. It tasted like lemons and rust.

  Not a real taste.

  “The Serbaens say that the greatest thrones to be sat upon are the ones where we sit ourselves down and realize we are masters in our own right. There are many thrones to be taken in life. If you sit at death's doorstep and look it in its face, that doorstep becomes a throne. You have made peace with it. You have mastered it. So I sit at the doorstep where death came knocking.”

  The concept that this doorstep could be a throne was not something that seemed to readily translate to him, although it did seem to intrigue him. But in all honesty, I could see that he was unable to see it as anything other than the estranged scene of the crime that it was, that anyone else would see it as.

  “Fear sits on many thrones,” I said, looking at him. “It is crowned king over and over again. The greatest tyrant you will ever know in this life.”

  “Do you have a throne in the city, too?” he asked, and I sensed a mocking tone in his voice. The implication was, seemingly, that I was a fool to claim peace could be made with that. That I had mastered any of it. If I thought that, I was clearly delusional.

  “Anything can be a throne.”

  He shook his head. “To claim that any of that death-heap is a throne to be sat upon is an insult to those destroyed by it.”

  Do not talk insults with me, Tanen of Cathwade.

  Yet, of course, his perspective was one of decency. I granted him that.

  Until I remembered that he would not say the same thing if darkskins had been the majority of the casualties.

  After all, I may sit on a throne and make the best of the world that I lived in, but I would never watch from a window while children were being mauled.

  I told myself: That wasn't real, Vant.

  But it was real to me. It was not born of nothing. I'd seen the pattern of this man's thoughts.

  His decency was one-sided.

  As for me, the fact that I had perhaps become two-sided did not occur to me. The seeds had been planted in me. Tanen could not help it; every time the tree that was his person grew, it was irrevocably born of the roots that I had already named. Quick-spawning roots that tore up the pavement of their groundwork before I could walk down that road.

  But that's how things went in Dar'on. Pavement buckled, and roads were never traveled the way they were meant to be.

  Thus was born a forest of obstruction around the person that was Tanen of Cathwade. And since I was not entirely malicious, I would never take an ax to those trees, regardless of how I wanted to be.

  No. I would have to discover Tanen's true colors another way.

  S I x t e e n –

  The Ravine

  One thing was certain, I decided as I looked in the mirror before departing for my next trek into the city – I was no longer an Albino. Of course, I never started as one. It was a transformation that took place as the day went. But now, not even the thick powder of the city could override the vibrancy of my cuts and bruises. I was a smattering of blacks, blues, and crimson stripes.

  “Tanen will go, minda,” Letta tried to convince me. She was recovered from her fever now, and only plagued by turmoil in her throat and lungs.

  “Like the gates of hell, Tanen will go.”

  “I've wrapped his hands from the glass. He is in far better shape than you. Please, Vant, let him take your place today.”

  “Hasn't he already done enough, saving my life?” Take my place? I don't know why, but those words lodged. Like swallowing something sharp, they went down slowly, and, inwardly, I hunched.

  “We would not want to see that wasted by sending you to your death because you are in no shape to handle yourself in the city.”

  “He doesn't need to go.”

  “Neither do you. And he's the better choice of the two of you.”

  “I'll be fine.”

  “You aren't fine. You are alive. Breathing. Not 'fine'.”

  “As long as I'm alive and breathing, I can do my job.”

  There was a blur of motion and the plunking of footsteps, then, and the next thing I knew I had been wrestled to the ground by a mass resembling Tanen Nysim and sat upon.

  My first reaction: confusion.

  My second: resistance. It was little use, though.

  I was on my back, but my hips and legs twisted onto their side. Tanen had himself a seat on my hip, which saw the other one digging into the floor. It precisely upset one of my worse bruises. I wriggled in protest, trying to get my wits about me to voice a more vehement objection, but Letta was already objecting.

  “Tanen Nysim!” she scolded, but in a tone that blamed it as being unnecessary, rather than anything truly unacceptable.

  “You can't do your job,” Tanen countered my claim.

  I had dreams of snapping him in two with a flick of the legs that he sat on, proving him wrong, but my crushed bruises would not allow my nerves more than a twitch. They were seared.

  He stood, freeing me, but his point was made. “Or is the floor your throne too?” he taunted.

  My eyes were hot on him as I pushed myself up from my place of disgrace. Curse him. Who had given him leave to come into our home and act like he not only had rights, but was some lord of authority? And Letta – she posed no relevant defense on my behalf. Had I lost favor with the people I thought were my family, to this..this...stranger? Lost it to this fresh new upstart? It didn't strike me with any sense.

  It merely struck me.

  What had I done to warrant this treatment, and what had he done to escape it?

  “I'll bring back what you need,” Tanen told me reassuringly, as if to validate himself now that he had pointedly crushed me into the floorboards. In my mind, it was a little shabby in the ways of redemption. I was reassured of nothing except the fact that this man now knew he could manhandle me and get away with it.

  I felt betrayed. Letta had no stance against it.

  I set my shoulders, fiery with defiance. Fine. “Half a dozen lanterns,” I said, starting a list. “A dozen books. A shovel, clothespins... Chandelier crystals. A writing quill. Cloth. Tile. A new pair of boots.”

  Although evidently a little overbearing as I meant it, as if he could just trot down to the corner store and request the specifics from inventory, the list did not faze him. He blinked knowingly before responding, seeing what I was doing, but resigned himself to it. Nodding, he accepted his fate. “So be it.”

  “And – a bird's nest.”

  “What do you need a bird's nest for?” came the objection at that.

  I smiled smugly inside at having cracked him. Outwardly, however, I remained all business. “Just get it.”

  I saw the slight grinding of his teeth. Bone on dust.

  Good. Two could play this game.

  “Fine,” he said.

  I gave him a slight challenging nod, and then he was off.

  Half amused, half disapproving, Letta turned to me after he was gone. But I raised an eyebrow at her, and perhaps she recalled Tanen taking a blow at me first, for she said nothing.

  Let's see you come back with even half of those things, Tanen, I thought. I knew it would be better not to underestimate him, because he had already proven he was resourceful, but I could not help being smug with the list I had presented to him.

  My only regret was that, in hindsight, I ought to have made him wear the armored corset.

  *

  It was almost twilight when he came, laden with clinking odds and ends. In
the sinking quiet, we could hear him from inside, coming down the road: the faint sound of wind-chimes in a time of no such thing.

  Drawn by the off-key music, I abandoned my station at the sink, forgetting my wet hands. They were dried unconventionally on my hair as I absently smoothed it out of my face. Onto the porch and around the side of the house, and there he was:

  A drifter and his wares, wandering down our road.

  I blinked against the smearing gray of the hour, ascertaining that it was indeed Tanen. For a moment it didn't look like him, but in the end – who else?

  He neared like a boat on lapping waves, something summery about him in his laden slowness. I recognized it a moment later:

  The summery feeling of cheer at the end of the day, of relief, relaxation – triumph.

  He had done it.

  He can't have done it.

  I narrowed my eyes at his load, attempting to discern the things he carried for what they were. Lanterns, I saw, strung on a pole that he carried over one shoulder. That was all I could make out, as the rest was a jumble under his arm or in the sack that crossed his chest and hung at his waist lapping his leg – all except...

  The bird cage.

  I didn't see it at first, strung on the end of the pole in line with the lanterns. In truth, from a distance, it resembled them. But I caught wind of a flutter within its boundaries as the contraptions all swayed from side to side, and disbelief shuffled a deck of pure face cards inside me.

  Impossible.

  He sauntered up, weary but buttered with cheer.

  I looked at him. I had no other greeting.

  He shucked his armload to the ground, then let the pole slide off his shoulder – but caught it before it could join the pile with a clatter. The lanterns swayed. The bird cage swung.

  My eyes stung the path of the bird as it ruffled from one side of its cage to the other.

  “It's not a nest,” Tanen spoke. “But I thought it might do. I found the cage. The bird, I caught.”

  My skepticism flew in bigot fashion to his face, all too ready to denounce him. This joker could not play me, would not find his way into my deck of cards. But his eyes were sincere as any blue sky, graced by the sun, open and pure, and I choked on the idea of my doubt, unable to fling it at him. One didn't challenge the sky that way. It was intimidating.