Author: Ryan Covington
Josephine introduced a match to the profound darkness with a flourish, carving a lonely sphere in the black. The darkness remained at bay as she rifled through her knapsack for the candle that would tenure the light. She felt the silver inlay of its base and pulled it free, lighting the wick as the flame reached her fingertips. With a puff of breath and a flick of her wrist, she sacrificed what was left of the matchstick to the darkness it had insulated her from.
“Only seven left,” she muttered to the darkness. “I hope she’s coming.”
“Don’t worry dear” it said. “I’m sure she is.”
Its words comforted her. How many weeks had she spent cooped up in this attic before the void had grown a mouth? Who cared? She appreciated the company. The darkness knew things about her no one else could, things she couldn’t even remember. After all, it had watched over her every night since she was born. But it didn’t know where she had thrown the chest, and so she turned to the light. That was scarcer, more precious: a dearth of unstruck lucifers and surplus of boards covering the dormer window guaranteed that. She had ventured a glance outside only once since the first wave of them had washed over the village, and that only on accident as she tried to shoo away the crow.
Josephine’s reluctance to see Therin as it was stemmed not only from a fear of being spotted, but a desire to retain in her mind a stock image of the village as it had looked every other year as winter came on—bustling with traders making their last stops before heading for the Pearls, skirted by icy mists that kissed the rooftops before climbing Mt. Krall to overlook the vale—beautiful. The smells and sounds had made it hard enough to maintain the image. But then Robert had come. Suddenly doubting her sanity, she reached into her pocket and produced the letter, relieved to find it was real. She unfolded it:
Dear Hugh and Madeleine,
I hope this letter finds you well! It’s been too long since I’ve seen you or little Josephine. Please express to her how sorry I am for missing her birthday. I was promoted to head archaeologist at the excavation site in the Seran after the previous head passed, and I couldn’t get away. I have a gift for her that I hope will compensate. Thirteen is a special year; I can’t wait to hear how she did in her assessment. In any case, I’m now on my way. The research has proven fruitful, but the magisters insist on reviewing our expenses before agreeing to further funding—pedants, the lot. But I relish the opportunity for a visit! Winds willing, I’ll arrive in three days’ time and should be able to winter in Therin with the three of you. Please feed Robert (the crow) a meal, if you would. He has flown a long way. Cheese is his favorite, but he’s not picky. See you soon.
Love,
Dinah
Josephine refolded the letter and placed it back in her pocket. She smelled anew the stench wafting up through the floor boards, as if she had yet to grow accustomed to it. Her stomach had hardened. Or perhaps it was just too empty. Either way, she felt no need to contribute to the dried vomit littering the corner where she had given up dumping the chamber pot. The pile of biscuit tins picked clean and that corner were all that remained of a modest mountain of foodstuffs. Robert had gotten his cheese. She made sure he ate his fill, scrounging for whatever scraps and crumbs she could muster. Three hours he had spent pecking at her window to deliver hope, and he had hazarded entry through it when she removed a board, even as she aimed to beat him to death with it. That was reason enough to make him a meal of her meager supplies; delivery of her response was merely the prayer that accompanied it. She hardly blamed Robert for corrupting the last vestige of her memory of Therin. One mustn’t shoot the messenger. The other crows, however, the ones that preferred to make meals of the countless bodies piled up rather than cheese, she was going to kill. Their ubiquitous presence may have been, and likely was, the only reason the roving bands of arkads hadn’t noticed her or Robert. But it didn’t matter. She was going to kill the whole murder, even if she had to do it as a vengeful spirit. The letter she attached to Robert’s leg contained only the essentials:
Dinah
Arkad attack. In attic. Help.
Jo
Those words cost her twelve matches’ worth of ashes to write. She didn’t care. It was her only hope. Light had proven a fickle friend anyway, the sun failing Therin just as the arkads were beginning their assault.
“I’ll never leave you.” The first thing the darkness ever told her.
Before Robert, Josephine’s only notions of escape had been suicidal fantasies—making a run for the wilderness while fending off pursuers, or sneaking past the sentries during one of their drunken revels. Either plan, followed to its ideal conclusion, left her to trek alone nearly forty miles through the frozen Ipsith forest and Cairn mountains, sustained only by what she could forage. At this time of year, nothing and mushrooms would be her most common discoveries. The thoughts of actually surviving that the letter fomented ignited her psyche, and sitting still, waiting on a response she knew might never come did nothing to extinguish it. By the time Robert returned the next day with
Jo,
I’ll be there late tomorrow night. Can you get to the roof?
-Dinah
Josephine felt as exhausted as if she had scaled the peak of every mountain surrounding the vale. She barely managing to scrawl yes on the recycled note and reattach it to the crow’s leg before joining the darkness in its slumber. She hadn’t had any food to give Robert this time, and when she awoke hours later, it was with a stifled scream, the image of a bloody beak corrupting her dreams of floating away with Aunt Dinah.
Josephine took the tarnished pocket watch out of the pouch she had sewn to her shift and checked the time. From her estimation, she only had a couple of hours before she needed to be on top of the house. She had considered her options many times, but the only feasible route required descending from the attic into her home and sneaking to the backdoor. If she were to go out the window, she would have to wrench free several boards and expose herself to the main thoroughfare; it was not a choice, but a death sentence. From the backdoor, however, she could enter the alleyway, climb the lattice of the stables next door, and leap to the arch of her roof. Willem and Dana—the blacksmith’s children—and she had made the ascent many summer evenings to watch the sun fall into the maw of the mountains. But there had been no snow or ice then. She would have to be careful.
The timing had to be just right: she could neither miss Aunt Dinah, nor expose herself too long to the elements or the potential of discovery. She gave herself an hour to find the little chest. It had been over a week since she had thrown it into the wasteland, but if she was never going to see her house or her parents again, she had to at least look for it. Josephine kicked herself for having lost her temper in the first place. The dim orb of light she held hardly made a dent in the void, but her memory compensated. The layout of her necessities was simple: the little of her supplies that remained, she kept in the knapsack next to her scant bedding (a thick but moth-eaten blanket and a couple of bundled up petticoats). Both were kept as far from the corner of excrement as possible, which served as a repulsive beacon, guiding her by scent if she became disoriented. Lucky for Josephine, the smell of putrefying shit was nothing novel for arkads, so it blended right in with the smell of the corpses. There were three leaks in the ceiling that she had mapped routes to, the biscuit tins she had placed underneath them collecting up to half a pint on good days. Would the mists that heralded winter grace her rooftop less if they knew they were keeping her alive? She asked the darkness once.
“Darling, don’t think like that,” it said.
The rest of the attic was a treacherous waste. She seldom dared to navigate it for fear of making too much noise, but she was going to have to brave the chaos if she was to find the chest. For the first couple weeks, the slightest creak had sent her heart racing. Calm only came when she acknowledged death as a neutral alternative to life in her state. Still, she preferred it remain her decision to live or not rather than the arkads, and so she took precautions: chewing and defecating she would reserve until she hadn’t heard a sound in hours or the arkads’ festivities grew so raucous that she felt assured she wouldn’t be detected. On a few occasions, exceptions had to be made, the terror of the exercise doing much to facilitate the process. The arkads that had taken up residence in her home seemed blessedly obtuse—maybe all arkads were—but every time Josephine considered testing the limits, she thought about the crows. She had come to know her tenants, which horrified her. She recognized their voices. They had names for each other: Molt, Crotchett, Tork, sometimes guests. Mostly they spoke in a grotesque, guttural tongue, but occasionally a word or phrase in Torvellan would make the rounds, each of them trying it out. They would fight often, but their tone gave little indication of when a blow might land or a window might shatter. Every conversation was a shouting match to Josephine’s ears. She started to think of them as a mockery of her own family, herself the monster in the attic.
What would the arkads think of her? she wondered, beginning to tiptoe into the wasteland, candlestick held low to consult with her feet on their placement. They wouldn’t be afraid. She recalled the sounds she had heard coming from the smithy across the street that first night. Anything that could make Willem and his father scream like that would lose no sleep over the idea of Josephine bumping into things at night. She lifted an overturned box and sifted through its scattered contents—books her parents had read to her before bed (Legends from Beyond Torvell, The Good Child, Secrets of the Magisters, etc.)—nothing she would take with her. She had to pack light. She saw something glint a few yards away and moved toward it.
What did the arkads think of each other? Did Tork consider Molt and Crotchett good parents? Sure, Molt beat them, but he hadn’t killed either of them. In fact, Josephine had only heard him kill one arkad, and that one sounded like it was trying to rape Crotchett. Did that make him peaceful by arkad standards? Was peaceful good? She thought of her own parents. If they had beaten her like Molt and Crotchett did Tork, she might have been better prepared. Had she been able to prove she was as cruel as them, maybe they would have even accepted her; then, she wouldn’t be starving in this attic, sustained only by the slim chance that her estranged aunt might descend in a balloon and whisk her away. But Josephine couldn’t say. She wasn’t even sure Tork was their child, or which of them, if either, were female. Tork’s voice just sounded younger, and they only called its name in anger, never during sex.
The glint materialized. It was a piece of the bottle she had broken. “I think I’m close,” she told the darkness, careful to step over the shards.
“How would you know?” it asked. “You were drunk.”
“Because both of them hit the same rafter,” she said. “I remember that.”
The little chest had been her prized possession, the first item she had thought to grab when packing her knapsack. It contained letters and poems—a particularly funny ballad from Aunt Dinah—but those weren’t what Josephine was hazarding the wasteland for. She was after the brass locket. All she needed, was that, Aunt Dinah, and her balloon. Hang the rest.