Heir of Scars I: Parts 1-8 (16 page)

A festival of sorts was held not long after Adria and Hafgrim were brought to Windberth as children. Their father was there, resplendent in his ceremonial armor, and all his closest Knights with their purple sashes.

Matron Taber was there as well, with her black-sashed Sisters, and it was they who led the formal ceremonies, but a great many had been taking part in festivities in prior days, as Adria had been told, especially children.

A tree stood at the heart of Windberth, the heart of the festival and its ceremony, the smooth bark if its trunk glistening in strange light. All about, torches and lanterns shone with blue white flames, and sent quicker sparks up among the stars, with the sound of milk scalding in a hot iron pot.

Adria had seen nothing like this tree, in years before or since. Its apples were green, some fading to gold. And the leaves of this tree were all white, and some few had fallen about, and were picked up by young children within the ring of Sisters and their guardian Knights, and who danced in circles with them and chanted a song.

Ring around the apple tree,

Crows singing in the leaves,

Ashes... Ashes... They all fall down.

Like… Paper Ghosts,
Adria thought.

As instructed, Hafgrim and Adria sat quietly beside their father and the Matriarch on the pavilion, decorated with ivy and black and violet banners.

“That is not a song for this,” Matron Taber said quietly, without expression.

“And yet it fits well,” Father answered, also without certain feeling.

Taber nodded slowly. “Let us pray none too well.”

Curiously, no one touched the tree itself, except for the few fallen leaves, though its limbs hung low, its fruit in easy reach. Any child who stumbled looked up and about nervously, fearing to touch the tree itself, fearing any Sister or Knight who may have seen.

It must be forbidden,
Adria realized.
Like so many things and places here.

Adria’s stomach tingled and turned, missing her home from before. She looked to Hafgrim for comfort, but he watched silently.

Adria looked to her elders beside her, and might have asked, or simply looked askance enough that Matron Taber explained, “This tree is from my homeland. It is a legacy, and a gift to any named Idonea, to the Sisterhood, and to the people of Heiland. It is the only one of its kind, and the fruit it bears is… unique.”

The Matriarch made a motion with her hand, and the Sisters in their ring all came forward, to undo the dancing of the children, and to return them all to their parents beyond the circle. Now all who had gathered, from what Adria could tell, all of Windberth, stilled and watched.

“Three years ago we planted this tree, upon the founding of Windberth,” Matron Taber continued. “And for three years it has put forth leaves, and we have watched them grow white again each autumn, and then fall, and we have gathered to celebrate.”

Now a young Sister who served the Matriarch approached her. Unlike the others, she wore a pale green robe, and a white sash about her hips.

“But this year is special,” Taber whispered now, nodding to the young woman as she removed her green slippers and slowly climbed the stair, head down.

Taber rose from her chair, took up a wooden bowl from beside her, and then knelt before the young Sister, offering the bowl. Taber may have spoken to the Sister, or to Adria, as she spoke the last, “This year is the first year that it has borne fruit.”

The young Sister raised her eyes to meet the Matriarch’s, and she lowered her hands to the bowl between them, and spoke, as loudly as she could, though her voice trembled.

“I clear my eyes to know the nameless one.

I cleanse my face to ready to be seen.

I wash my hands and still my memory.

I kneel and wait to meet The-One-Who-Comes.”

Her motions followed her words, and when she knelt, Taber lowered the bowl of water, and smiled, and leaned over to kiss the top of the girl’s head, her silver-gold hair tinted blue-green in the strange torchlight.

The Matriarch took the Sister’s hands, and together they rose. She turned the young woman to face the circle, the tree, and the citizens of Windberth. Gently, Taber unlaced the back of the girl’s dress, and let it fall about her feet.

Naked and trembling, the young Sister managed her way down the steps and across the flagstones, among falling and fallen paper leaves, where a rising wind now wound among the branches.

Now Taber raised her arms and addressed the people of Windberth.

“Just as there are many who have left us, there is One-Who-Will-Come.” She paced her voice with the girl’s footsteps. “Just as there is death, there is life renewed.”

And the Sister reached and plucked a golden apple from among the paper leaves, as the Matriarch continued, “Just as leaves are fallen, there is fruit which gives us life.”

The girl turned, her face red with nakedness, and as she returned to the Matriarch, the remainder of the white leaves fell about her, each one of them turning to ash upon the stone tiles, upon her hair and body, and within the hands of children who gasped or cried in horror or wonder at the loss.

Now half-covered in ash, face streaked in grey-black tears, and half-stumbling with every step, the young Sister brought the apple to Matron Taber, offering it to her in her cupped hands.

Matron Taber looked upon the fruit, looked about at the small lake of ashes, and looked at last upon the face of the Sister, and smiled, gently waving her hand.

“Let this be my gift to you,” Taber said.

And the Sister bowed low, and she raised the apple high for all to see. Again, there was absolute stillness. Even the children watched, and waited, in silence.

Adria held her breath for whatever might be next. Her stomach still turned, and her arms and legs felt as if they were shaking. She felt the wind rushing about her face, though her hair remained still. She heard the calls of hawks, or doves, or ravens. She saw apples rotting upon their dark limbs.

The young sister took a small bite from the golden fruit in her hands, her eyes held surely by those of Taber.

It took only a moment for those eyes to widen, in what seemed to Adria to be a certain pleasure, like the perfect sweet of summer honey. She felt perhaps she could hear the Sister swallow, even in what Adria felt to be a stormy wind that somehow found only her, when even the violet banners of the pavilion lay slack.

And the girl blinked, and her eyes fluttered down to consider another bite of the fruit, and then widened even more, rising again to Matron Taber in every shape between pleasure and pain.

Her limbs tightened once, suddenly, her fingers clutched the apple, piercing it’s flesh in ten places. Taber leaned forward, taking the girl’s arms in her hands, her own limbs offering support.

But the girl’s face reddened again, and then shaded through purple and to blue, as the ash on her face and body thickened and ran with a sudden flush and an outpouring of sweat.

Perhaps it was the fruit rotting upon the tree, but there was a scent now, that sickened Adria where she sat upon her chair, trembling in wind and the sound of strange birds, eyes transfixed upon the ashen girl.

Taber struggled to hold the Sister where she stood, and then to help her gently to the cold floor as she fell, horrifically and silently trembling. She tore herself from Taber’s grasp, then, and what was left of the apple’s flesh scattered across the pavilion in ragged rotting fragments. Ashes smeared the marble top of the pavilion where the girl writhed, clawing red traces along her arching throat and across the too-beating flesh of her breast, her mouth open and taut to receive the breath that would not come.

Taber rose again, slowly, struggling to control her own gentle trembling, as the young Sister settled into sleep at last, a lump of bruised, bloody, and ashen limbs.

The wind about Adria subsided, the crying of birds which were only hers faded. She looked from the girl, to a now very still Taber, and then to her father.

King Ebenhardt Idonea as well was lost in though, his chin in his hand, now watching the Matriarch, waiting. It was somehow not his place to speak.

After a long moment, Taber half turned, but did not look full upon him, nor again consider the dead young Sister at her feet.

“Once more for the crows,” Taber whispered, and made a sign with her hands that Adria would never see from her again. And again she nearly turned to look upon Adria’s father, and again failed.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty.” And she turned away and made her way back to the citadel above, her Sisters and half the Knights falling in line behind her.

Slowly, unceremoniously, the people of Windberth dispersed, but the King and his princes remained. None approached the tree again, even as the last of the Knights gathered on either side of the pavilion to await their Lord’s command. And no one dared to touch the remains of the young Sister, and Adria had wondered more than once if she had simply lain there, rotting upon the marble to this day.

“It was the first time I’d seen someone die,” Adria whispered as she approached the center of Windberth after her exile, her memories from so many years before only slowly finding resonance in the stone around her.

Adria had been only four or five years of age when she had first set foot inside the city. As Adria took that same pathway now, she felt a sickening knot in her stomach, like serpents with wings. Now wondering if the tragic ceremony she remembered from her childhood was simply the final scene in the unfolding of the tragedy of Windberth’s creation.

I know there is more,
Adria thought.
Far more to this history of stone and paper, of apples and ashes.

She said an Aesidhe prayer for all those Aeman whose lives may have bought the inception of city and citadel, this place which, for much of her childhood, she had known only to call
home
.

And even as her stomach turned, Adria’s heart still leapt to remember just how much she had loved these walls, this city, her brother and even her father.

On the surface, Windberth seemed pleasant enough, its people happy enough as they went about their daily duties and pleasures, bright-clothed despite the layers needed for warmth. They greeted one another more often than not, enjoyed the clean and spacious beauty of the boulevards, courtyards, and marketplace.

Children played throughout, soldiery kept order, and there seemed to be, above all else, a sense of peace. The streets were swept clean each day, and the dust and grime of the day before found its way into sewage drains which ran below the ground and into the river in the chasm which separated the two plateaus.

And as she neared the center where her first strangest memory lay, she found even a park with a few budding trees and other greenery, and at its center a fountain with the statue of a beautiful young woman, robed and sashed, a crow upon her shoulder. The girl’s basket of marble apples had overturned, frozen in stone cascade, and a steady stream of water spilling out among them and into the pool below, where the King’s pavilion once stood.

More marble apples seemed to bob upon its rippling surface, and Adria reached over the iron railing to touch one, but found it just out of reach, suspended on the end of a slender iron rod from the base of the fountain.

I dream of this, or of stories that inspired it…
Adria wondered.
More than the memory, more than a song… but…

Something else just beyond the reach of her fingers slipped away, enfolded under water into darkness.

And Adria turned away upon her path, beyond the fountain, where her eyes found what remained of the actual apple tree, blackened and withered, with no hint of bud or leaves or former fruit clinging to its skeleton.

Adria blinked away a sudden swelling of tears, for sadnesses returned and others only dreamed.

A fitting monument to what I remember, and to whatever remains unknown.

And still Adria wondered,
Where did my father spread the ashes of those before, those he had sacrificed for the sake of the order of Heiland, the grandeur of its citadel, and the structures of its faith in him and his Matriarch?

Adria
had not crossed these ashes upon her approach. But then she realized that the forest below had been mostly overgrown.

Ashes, when left to lie, become branches and leaves again, and borders are forgotten in time. And how long shall we mourn? We all walk in the shadow of death. It creeps behind us as the sun rises, and looms before us as it sets. Who are we to wear black and smear our faces with ash given the self-same sacrifice of those who came before?

Adria was glad she had never walked this way before, in her own secret wanderings of the city of her childhood. She was glad to have this new memory as she reconciled herself to the path which led her to her brother, to her father, to the Matriarch and her future which lay beyond.