The Crimson Skew (30 page)

Borage was unexpectedly abashed by the compliment. She took her creation back and looked at it fondly. “Thank you. I call it a ‘mirrorscope.' There are mirrors inside, and they combine with the light and the map to show its contents.”

The images were still behind Sophia's eyes. “Can I put
any
map inside it?”

“Of course. That is the idea.”

She fumbled in her satchel for her worn pocket map of upper New York. Rolling it carefully, she tucked it into the empty scope that Borage handed her and replaced the glass lid.

Falling leaves, a path through the woods, a bridge over a rushing river, a cluster of houses nestled in a valley at dusk, a mountain pass in the snow: as she turned the cylinder, one image after another appeared. These were not memories, for
the map was not a memory map. It carried no sounds or smells, no sentiments; but it nonetheless conveyed a crystalline sense of how the paths rendered on the map would look to a traveler.

“So wonderful!” Sophia exclaimed, smiling with delight as she lowered the scope. Then she paused. “But how can we use it to make a memory map of the Clime?”

“I don't know,” Borage said matter-of-factly. “That is your part.”

Sophia stared at her, aghast. “What do you mean?”

“Just that. I know my scope is the receptacle for the map, but the map itself has to be made by you.”

“‘From then on, the map you follow must be your own,'”
murmured Sophia. She felt a sinking sensation.

For the first time, Borage looked puzzled. “I thought you would have the map that goes inside.”

“I don't! I have no idea what it even looks like.”

The old woman was silent for a moment, and Sophia wondered if she would fly into a sudden rage. But instead she burst into laughter. “Well, well,” she said, grinning widely. “You'll have to find the answer before tomorrow, then, won't you?”

T
HE MEAL SAGE
and Ash had prepared was waiting on the table. Sophia recalled Smokey's warning as she looked at the food and wondered where it had come from: corn porridge with mushrooms, bread and butter, summer apples baked with honey. Still, she was very hungry, as Sage had predicted. Casanova had already served himself a full plate; he seemed to have accepted the three sisters' hospitality entirely. She took his cue, gratefully, and joined them.

“Sophia does not know what goes in the mirrorscope,” Borage announced, helping herself to bread.

“What does that mean?” Theo asked, his mouth already full.

Sophia held up the mirrorscope and explained its purpose. “I suppose I am meant to create a map of the Clime, but I have no idea yet how to do it.” She shook her head, dejected. “Shadrack never got to that part in our lessons. I've only ever learned to read memory maps, not make them.”

“Well, you'll have to learn yourself,” Borage snapped.

Sage gave her a look. “Yes, Borage, she knows that.”

“Perhaps we are to help her,” Ash suggested quietly. “After all, it is the three of us who converse most with the old ones. We know their thoughts quite well.”

“We
did
help,” said Borage. “Sophia would never have known to make the mirrorscope, would you?”

“That's certainly true. I wouldn't even recognize this as a map reader if you hadn't told me.”

“Knowing their thoughts is not the same as mapping their memories,” Sage reflected. “I am sure Sophia will discover the way.” She held the basket of bread out toward Theo, whose plate was already empty.

“But there's no time!” Sophia's stomach was in knots, and she was having difficulty eating, though the food was delicious.

“Here's what we will do,” Sage said, pushing back her chair. “Sophia?” She went to the tapestry that hung at the left side of the fireplace. “This map shows where we are—here.” She took up the poker and pointed to a gray circle in a tear-shaped blue lake. Narrow blue passageways fanned out from the lake in every direction, including south. “These are the streams that wind through the Stone Age,” Sage said, tapping some of the
blue ribbons. “And here is the glacier, to the southeast. Birke will carry you this way, southwest, to avoid it altogether.” She trailed the poker along a riverine route that cut through the gray Stone Age and into the green lands south of them. “This stream runs quite far, look. All the way here, through upper New York, and into . . .” She pointed at a green shape that looked vaguely familiar to Sophia.

“Turtleback Valley!” she exclaimed.

“Precisely.”

“Birke can carry us all the way there?” Sophia wondered.

“What she means is: Does our sorcery extend into New Occident?” Borage commented from the table.

“I—” Sophia began. “Well, I didn't mean sorcery, but I do not even know where your realm begins and ends.”

“It is a little grand to call it our ‘realm,'” Sage said with a smile. “I don't know what you heard in Oakring, but I suspect they remember things rather differently than we do.”

“They said you were banished here,” Theo put in bluntly, “for attempting to remake New Occident.”

“And,” Sophia added, “that you came here to make your own Age.”

The three sisters exchanged glances, and Sophia saw in their eyes many years of disagreements. “That is true, in a manner of speaking,” Sage said.

Borage frowned and stared at the table with an embarrassed air.

“It took many years for the Stone Age to become what you see now,” Sage added gently.

“It was a disaster,” Borage said curtly, not looking up. “Or, rather, many disasters, one after the other.”

Sophia waited, hoping for more explanation.

“It is more true to say that we have exiled ourselves here,” Ash said. She reached out and tenderly covered Borage's hand with her own. “The fewer people who come here, the better. Apart from the three of you, no one has come to the Stone Age for more than two years.”

“We did see someone,” Casanova commented. “In what you call the Stone Age—following us along as the canoe carried us northward.”

Borage chuckled. “One of Ash's tree-children snuck out after all,” she said, squeezing her sister's hand. “Sage has tried to keep all this as decorous as possible, but truth will out.” She grinned.

“What do you mean?” asked Sophia.

“We did not wish you to be alarmed as you traveled here,” Sage explained. “Let us say that you are only seeing one side of our world. Not all of it.”

“My tree-children are not alarming,” Ash whispered.

“Not to you, my dear,” Borage commented, pushing her plate aside. “But that is the point. Most people
do
find animated bundles of roots disconcerting, especially when they are bound up with string in that way. And their voices are a bit odd, you have to admit. Like creaking floorboards.” She sighed. “But I admit some of my experiments had even worse results.”

“But then the people of the Indian Territories have it wrong,” Sophia said, surprised. “Even the Eerie.”

“Of course they have it wrong.” Borage scowled. “They are ignorant. What they know about the workings of our Age would not fill this cup,” she said bitterly, holding up her cup of water. There was a long silence as Sage and Ash looked at their sister, waiting.

Finally, when Borage seemed unwilling to say more, Sage spoke. “What Borage does not say,” she put in gently, “is that we were ignorant as well—at first. We shared the assumptions of our fellow Elodeans, and those assumptions turned out to be wrong.”

“What assumptions?” Sophia asked, intensely curious.

“The easiest way to think of it is as a room,” Sage said, gesturing to the space around them. “If someone from your city of Boston were to imagine the relationship between a people and their Age, they might think of it as a person inside a room. What the Eerie know is that this ‘room' is sentient. The Eerie imagine a living, waking room that can hear you when you laugh and shout inside it.”

Sophia nodded. “Yes—that fits what Goldenrod has told me.”

“And this is why we hoped to make an Age,” Ash put in quietly. “For cannot the occupant change rooms, and even create a better, more beautiful room?”

“This was the mistaken assumption,” Sage continued. “For, as we learned, it is not accurate to imagine the Age as the room. It is more accurate to imagine the Age as
another person
in the room.” She paused and looked at them for acknowledgment.

Sophia, Theo, and Casanova looked back at her in silence,
dumbfounded. “I don't understand,” Theo said frankly.

Borage let out a low, bitter laugh. “Imagine how annoying it is to be in a room with someone who ignores you completely. You talk to them and they seem not to hear you. You try to persuade them not to light a fire on the floor, and they do it anyway, and then when you stamp the fire out, they look around shocked, trying to figure out what happened to their fire. Or,” she said, growing more animated, “they start swinging an ax in every direction, smashing the furniture and the walls, and finally hitting you in the shoulder.
More
than annoying!” she fumed.

“You mean,” Casanova said slowly, “that the actions we take have consequences for the Clime. They upset the Clime.”

“And that what you see happening in the Age around you are responses,” Sage said.

“The rain of ash,” Sophia said, with dawning realization. “The char.”

Borage stormed to her feet. “Among other things. This war is wreaking havoc on every Age it touches,” she raged, stamping over to the tapestry map. “Sinkholes, storms, weirwinds, and more, I'm sure, to come.” She jabbed at the map with a broom. “There is a crack in the earth—
here
—that runs a mile long, and no one seems to wonder where it came from!”

“So the war is causing all of this?” Theo asked, perplexed.

Borage whirled to glare at him. “You can't keep firing a pistol in a closed room without consequences. Keep firing that pistol and you're going to hit someone. And make them very,
very
angry.”

• • •

THE THREE SISTERS
walked with them all the way down to the island's shore, where the canoe waited under the starry sky. “Sleep as much as you can,” Sage advised. “You can trust Birke to carry you safely.”

“I hope you find the solution, Sophia,” Borage said, her voice unexpectedly earnest. “We have mostly left your Age behind, but some part of me still grieves for the destruction I have seen in it—past and future.”

“Certainly you will find it,” Ash said. “This is for you,” she added, handing Sophia a roll of paper. “For the map you are making of the way through the glacier and the Stone Age. It will preserve the memories more clearly.”

Sophia realized that it was a roll of birch bark. “Oh, thank you!”

She had packed the mirrorscope in her satchel, close to hand, and as she said good-bye to the feared, disowned, and outcast sisters who had given them such an unexpected welcome, half of her mind was still turning over the problem of the memory map, as it had been ever since she and Borage had left the turreted workroom.

She intended to ponder the question more fully as they traveled.

Casanova pushed them off, stepping quickly into the canoe and taking his seat at the stern. Theo had already curled up against the hull. Sophia settled herself so that her head was at the bow and her feet lay parallel to Theo's. Facing northward, she saw Casanova's silhouette and, behind it, the larger shape
of the island castle. Only one light shone in it now, pale yellow but steady. As they began to move, she glanced upward at the clear sky, almost aglow with starlight. There was no moon. The constellations appeared motionless, despite the speed of the canoe.

The murmuring sound of the water beneath them shifted as Birke left the lake and entered the stream that led southwest. It was a low murmur, quiet and calm, and Sophia imagined it was how the three sisters would sound now, sitting around their fire, talking of the travelers who had visited their realm.

Without meaning to, Sophia fell asleep. Her dreams were strange and vivid. She heard high-pitched laughter that sounded almost like birds chirping. A forest came into view, and among the trunks, children were running, chasing one another. It was their laughter that rose and fell, giddy and gleeful. One of the children ran toward her and threw his arms around her. Only then did she see that he was not a child, but only moved like one. Every part of his body was a tangled cluster of roots, and he was clothed in a fine film of thread like a cobweb. His eyes were little brown nuts, and his laughing mouth had no teeth, only a green leaf of a tongue. He pressed his head against her side and cried, “Hiding, hiding!”

The dream shifted, and now Sophia looked out onto a flat plateau of stone, where a giant made of rock tipped his head back and raised his arms high. He seemed about to summon the sky, but instead he suddenly swung down and smashed his head against the ground, as if intent on breaking himself
to pieces. The ground trembled, and the giant raised his head again and brought it down once more, and again and again and again, until his great forehead shattered and the splintered fragments cascaded outward like the shards of a broken vessel. Then Sophia heard the voice that had been calling uselessly to him all along, wailing now with anguish, “No, Rore, no! How could you? How could you?” The words trailed off into weeping, and Sophia felt a deep pang of grief, for the stone giant and for the woman whose wordless lament went on and on.

In the last dream, there was a storm. Sophia felt the ground beneath her rumbling. The sky was heavy with rain, and the clouds seemed to press down upon her. They were there, just beside her: great angry clouds of fury, in which the lightning shuddered like a spasm of violence. Sophia felt herself pushed back, and back. The clouds would pin her to the ground, they would eat her alive, they would destroy her. Her mouth was filled with water. She could not breathe. All the air was gone, and the lightning flashed now through water, a cruel stabbing of light that was meant to end her, end her completely.