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I like to think Yana planned all of this far in advance. That panel with the scissors symbolizing a death scythe and the tailor’s tape symbolizing the cinematic record, with Claudia possibly centered and Vincent right next to her, feels like foreshadowing of what we’re seeing now... that when it was time to reveal Undertaker’s past as a Grim Reaper, it would also bring Claudia’s backstory with it.
Essentially, they’re likely to be revealed as a pair because they were together (or in love if you will - it did take two people to tango Francis and Vincent into existence), basically confirming the fandom’s long-standing grandfather theory.
Additionally, the panel in chapter 103 makes even more sense now, as it connects to the first one I mentioned. The only three names listed are Claudia's, Cedric's, and Vincent's, and it explicitly refers to his lineage.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume Undertaker is canon Cedric at this point, unless Yana pulls a last-minute curveball nobody saw coming in the chapters ahead.
It should be a non-issue, of course. A mere triviality, nothing more and nothing less. The briefest of touches, the lightest of kisses – even more so than Cloudia’s kiss from last Christmas. But his face was burning red, and his heart was hammering in his chest louder than the bells at St Anne’s.
Cedric shook his head and took a deep breath. He couldn’t possibly appear in front of Newman and Milton, or anyone, in his current flushed state. There was no reason at all to get so worked up about this. Hadn’t he done that and more in his human life before already? It was nothing new; and still and still…
He shook his head again, clapped his hands against his cheeks for good measure. Damn his traitorous body for having moved by itself in Cloudia’s room. Damn his mocking mind for circling around that memory.
Damn his heart for aching for her already, a few minutes after having left her room and being a handful of steps away from it.
Cedric stopped halfway down the stairs to compose himself properly before he continued his descent, with Milton’s tinderbox clutched tightly in his hand. The shimmering metal dug into his palm and kept him focussed on what he had been meant to do.
With wide, quick steps, Cedric went to the kitchen but only found Newman and Lisa there preparing dinner.
“I took him to the wine cellar earlier at his request,” Newman told Cedric without much preamble, for he must have read the question and the slight worry in Cedric’s eyes.
Newman missed the naked anxiety in them, however, when Cedric nodded absentmindedly in return and bolted to the basement.
Shouldn’t Al have been able to guess that Milton should be anywhere in this house besides the wine cellar?
Why, why hadn’t I warned Al about Milton earlier? About the drinking – party trick or not? About the scar?
Cedric opened the door to the wine cellar with such ferocity that he nearly fell into the room. He caught himself on time, staggered for a moment before he pulled himself upright again right in front of the doorsill. And that’s where he remained for now, taken aback by the sight before him.
It was better than he had feared, but worse in a manner too.
For one, Milton wasn’t in the wine cellar at all, strictly speaking; he was in the adjourning room, very much alive, with no empty bottle in view.
The sight of him made Cedric’s heart sink nonetheless, for Milton was scurrying around the sitting room, almost more of a blur than a person, doing this and that and muttering something under his breath that Cedric could barely make out. It was as if whatever thing that usually kept all that nervous energy within him contained had cracked, and it was now flowing out of him uncontrolled and untamed.
Milton halted abruptly in the middle of the mess he had created and looked right at Cedric. It made Cedric’s skin crawl when Milton’s gaze locked with his. His eyes were so blank in that moment, and he was standing so still and quiet in a sea of dissections, pieces strewn haphazardly all over the floor and lying half-assembled atop the table.
Dissections. What a terrible name for something so very mundane and so very harmless. A litter of hardwood scraps, not a mixture of blood and bones and intestines, was covering every centimetre of the ground. Where would have Milton even got the latter from, with every person within the townhouse accounted for, and his own chest intact and not hollowed out?
Cedric very much preferred the word this game would have in the future – puzzles – and could not wait for it to become commonplace in about half a century’s time. It conjured less unfriendly images in one’s mind, though Milton somehow managed to look unsettling right now, nevertheless.
Cedric exhaled slowly when Milton slid his eyes away from him and to something behind him instead. “Kristopher,” he said with a strangely faraway voice. “It is good to see you. Would you mind closing the door?”
Cedric blinked at him before he turned and did as requested.
“Thank you,” Milton said and then straightened up ever so slightly. “Ah – there you are.” He fetched a piece from the other side of the room, clicked it together with the one in his hand, and linked them to a bigger piece that laid on the table. He did that with absurd casualty as if he hadn’t looked like a nightmarish deer in the headlights a mere moment beforehand.
Cedric wanted to point out just that – minus the headlights – when the remark died in his throat. He stiffened when he registered the bottle of wine on the table.
“Ah, that,” said Milton. Cedric hadn’t even noticed that he had turned his attention back to him.
Milton reached for the bottle, resting his hand on its neck. “Do not worry; I do not mean to drink this,” he said. “The Flajolet simply caught my eye earlier. It used to be my cousin’s favourite, and I pulled it out of the shelf because I briefly contemplated asking Mr Newman to share it with me. I swiftly changed my mind though, remembering that it would be unwise and unfair to request such a thing from Mr Newman when he is working. I would wager that Lady Cloudia would not mind much, but Mr Newman certainly would. I also decided to pause my experiment. Going any further with it in someone else’s wine cellar would be tremendously rude. After all, I don’t know how many bottles I would have to drink to get drunk – which is, as you know, the reason why I am conducting this experiment in the first place – and I cannot with any good conscience decimate the Marchioness’ collection in any significant manner, especially not without her explicit consent.”
When he was done with his explanation, Milton tilted his head a bit, hazel eyes bright with curiosity and concern. It confused Cedric for a moment until he realised that he must have blanched while Milton had talked.
“Kristopher, are you all right?” Milton asked.
What a question to be spoken by someone who looked like he could fall apart at any minute; what a question that could only be spoken by Milton in such a state.
“I am fine,” Cedric replied slowly. “What about you?”
“I’m doing well.” Milton turned the puzzle piece he was holding in his hands and raked his eyes over the ones on the ground. “I’ve been busy. I helped Mr Newman clean the kitchen. I helped to check the remaining inventory. I reorganised the pantry six times…”
“Six times?!”
“…and the Marchioness possesses an awe-inspiring number of dissections.”
“Milton.”
“Don’t worry. I will tidy up everything when I’m done. I…” He trailed off when something caught his attention, and he went to set the piece in his hands against another.
Cedric ventured very carefully into the room. “Milton,” he said softly and gestured to the masses of assembled and disassembled hardwood maps. “Would you call this ‘doing well’?”
“Hm,” made Milton and linked together a few puzzle pieces in quick succession. “Yes, it’s as good an activity as any.”
Cedric ran his hands through his hair. “Milton, you are looking especially pale – as if you have seen a ghost or your life pass in front of you. You cannot tell me that excessive pantry organising or dissecting is not frantic behaviour. Earlier, you were even murmuring something while you were buzzing around like a deranged bee.”
“Oh, that? I was reciting a book.”
Cedric stared at him.
“It is a very long poem, really. I memorised it alongside some others for Pa… for my father.” Milton paused briefly before he continued, sorting and connecting pieces with a slightly more increased speed as he did. “It keeps my mind busy, and my thoughts focused. It’s… it’s also soothing despite everything and even if the poem is not the most calming content-wise.”
“I think the only words I caught were ‘sin’ and ‘death’ and ‘sufferance,’ so I believe you on that front, yes,” Cedric replied.
He watched Milton for a while in silence thereafter, a few soft clicks filling the air as pieces were merged back together. Only when Milton completed a puzzle did Cedric realise that these weren’t the shambles of one enormous map at their feet: It were the parts of many. All mixed up together and waiting to be sorted like the peas and lentils in Cinderella.
“Milton,” Cedric tried again. “Would you mind answering me this question plainly and truthfully: Are you losing it?”
Milton stopped mid-movement, let the piece in his hand hover over its neighbour without reconnecting them before he put it down very gently. “No, not exactly,” he began and sacked against a shelf behind him. “It’s… it’s just that the headache hasn’t faded yet,” Milton told him, looking straight back at Cedric again. “It’s… all a bit much, and this is simply what I do every time such a thing happens: I try to find a distraction, and I try to lose myself in it.” He fumbled with his right sleeve. “I know it must look bewildering to others. This is part of the reason why I am here and not upstairs.”
Cedric mustered him intently. Milton didn’t seem to be lying, and he did not know him to be a liar. However, given the fact that he had kept silence about knowing that Cloudia was the Watchdog for two years and told them all that he was in France for a mere “business reason” with barely even alluding to the true extent of it, to Townsend and the weapon smuggling, Cedric was well aware that Milton liked to keep most of the truth to himself. That he preferred telling white lies and half-truths over outright fabrications. He also seemed more off than usual right now too which did not help matters. Cedric was sure that, again, Milton had only described the tip and left out the rest of the iceberg.
“I see,” Cedric said slowly. “I cannot help but feel that it’s our fault – in part at least – that you are doing so poorly right now. Maybe we shouldn’t have taken you with us…”
Milton shook his head. “No. I insisted. You didn’t ‘take’ me. Not exactly. I made you do it. Even if you had continued to refuse, I would have come on my own.”
“We should have tried harder to make you reconsider anyway. Watchdog work is a lot to take in after all. Most would feel unsettled and overwhelmed if they got thrown into a situation like this one as you were, though not even we could have anticipated the scale of this mission beforehand. Who could have foreseen an uprising happening just when we’re in Paris?”
A little smile tugged on Milton’s lips then. He turned his head downwards and ran his fingers over the puzzle pieces next to him. “No,” he said softly. As he went on, his voice grew more robust, his presence more palpable as if he was a ghost and materialising right before Cedric. “I did not mind any of that, actually. You forget that I keep my ears open to underworld business and nothing about it is news to me, and that I put myself very knowingly and very willingly in this particular crossfire. When I found out about Townsend’s pretence and his small success at misusing the resources of the Salisbury Company right under my nose, I didn’t have to go after him personally. It didn’t have to be me who would chase him in France. I could have gone to the police; I could have asked anyone else I knew who might have expertise in such matters. And if you ask Bram, he will agree that I should have stepped back from this matter and let someone else handle it, but…” Milton picked up one of the wood pieces and turned it around in his hand. “This was a mistake I have made. The company and its people were given into my care. This was my responsibility alone, and not something I could have asked anyone else to risk their life for. My life is not more precious than anyone else’s.”
He palmed the puzzle piece and raised his head.
“I meant what I said to Lady Cloudia back in the château before our departure to Paris,” Milton continued. “I have never thought lowly of her because she is the Queen’s Watchdog.
“While the exact circumstances of her work might be inglorious to many, the essence of it I believe to be quite noble. To keep the order of things in balance and punish those who do evil. Of course, everything she does is done at the Queen’s behest – but have the people not benefitted from it all, nevertheless? A change of fate for a potential victim? A little safer world?”
Cedric stared at him, stunned speechless for a moment, before he chuckled briefly, amused. “What a way to look at the Phantomhive family and the Watchdog duty. You would have great difficulties finding someone who shares your sentiments, Milton.”
“I do not mind that too.” Milton opened his hand again and trained his eyes on the puzzle piece on his palm. “What I am and what I do is not noble at all. I am barred from doing what I do; I cannot simply go and hunt down a criminal myself, especially not in this manner, not in this scope. This is not my place, not my right. I am neither a police officer nor anything like the Watchdog. The police would not be pleased if they knew of my actions, and the Queen might not be either – haven’t I, by sheer coincidence, interfered with her Watchdog’s mission in a way? I helped Lady Cloudia, yes, but my ineptitude also extended this case. The police might have difficulties arresting me for this alone because of the status and title I hold, but Queen Victoria might see me punished despite that.”
Cedric stood up a bit straighter. Milton leaned forward to affix the piece in his hand to one on the ground before he, at last, combined the parts next to him, the ones abandoned some minutes back. He ran his fingers over the pieces, smoothed them down, and picked up the next puzzle piece. “If you ask Bram, he will list this as one of my hobbies he dislikes; perhaps, he would even proclaim it his least favourite of them all. Of course, I understand the danger too, and that I am barred from carelessly throwing away my life as well. I’ve only done something like this – looking into a matter of relatively large scale quietly by myself – a few times for that reason. I shouldn’t do it at all, but this is the least I can do with my existence. And…” He bent his head down; his voice was a little fainter, a little quieter, when he continued. “And I like it too. What a terrible thing, is it not? To like something that always starts with someone else’s suffering? Terrible – and selfish too, to put my life on the line when I am not meant to and make Bram and others worry about me just because I like something that I shouldn’t.”
Milton looked up at Cedric again, his eyes soft even though a slight strain brushed the lines of his face. “I have never done Watchdog work, naturally. This is the first time I have run into a revolution too. However, I am not fully unfamiliar or inexperienced in matters like these in general. The matter with Townsend is not the source of my headache, I assure you, Kristopher.” He tilted his head. “Now, what is bothering you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were grasping my tinderbox very tightly when you entered, and your grip has never relaxed since. Not even a fraction.”
Cedric glanced at his right hand at Milton’s words. His hand was balled into a tight fist, knuckles white, around the tinderbox. Earlier, the box’s metal digging into his palm had served him as a sort of anchor. He hadn’t registered the moment the pain had shifted to numbness; he had even been too distracted to notice that he was holding it still. “Ah, right,” Cedric said at last and opened his stiff hand with great difficulty. The tinderbox glistered grey and blue in his palm. “I’ve come here because of it, actually. The Countess mentioned that it used to belong to your mother, and I thought it best to return it to you immediately in that case.”
“You did not have to hurry to me just for that,” said Milton, his eyes fixed on the tinderbox. “I said it was fine for you to safekeep it, but thank you for making the effort nonetheless, Kristopher. You can place it on a shelf or on a table.” He lifted his head. “So, all that has been ailing you is your worry about Lady Cloudia and your worry about me?”
Cedric glanced once more at the tinderbox before he went and returned it to its original position on the table in the sitting room. “Yes, that’s all,” he said without taking his eyes off the little metal box.
“That’s all, truly?”
Cedric met Milton’s gaze. They were now about a metre apart at maximum; Milton looked at Cedric with his eyes oddly alight. “Yes, that’s all that’s weighing on me right now,” Cedric told him. He pointed a finger at Milton. “Between a bullet wound and whatever is ailing you I don’t need any other worries. It’s more than enough.”
Milton mustered him for a moment before that bright look in his eyes faded; only then did Cedric understand that it had been something like curiosity or expectancy.
How weird. Did he want me to be bothered by something else? That was rather unlike him.
Milton hauled himself to his feet. “That’s good,” he said, sounding just the slightest bit absent-minded like before in the kitchen when he had asked Cedric, “When do you think this will end?” Milton reached out for the tinderbox but let his finger hover above it instead of giving it a little tap. Then, he suddenly pulled his hand back and made a step backwards.
Cold surged through Cedric. “Milton…?”
“Hm?” He craned his head to him before he rubbed his eyes and held his face in his hands for a moment. “Sorry, Kristopher. Just a little stab of pain. What were we talking about?”
“How I’ve got enough to worry about between you and the Countess.”
“Ah, yes, right.” Milton’s eyes fluttered closed. Cedric wondered for a moment whether he should ignore Milton’s request from earlier not to touch him. However, before he could close his internal debate, Milton exhaled and muttered something to himself – certainly the continuation of the poem; the bits and pieces Cedric caught of it sounded the same as before, “sinful” and “aethereal” and something about Heaven. Then, he rubbed his eyes again, and his temples too.
“I’m sorry, Kristopher,” Milton said when he reopened his eyes. For a second, Cedric thought they were wet with unspent tears; one blink later, the tears were gone as if they had never existed at all. “It’s a bit…” Milton grabbed a puzzle piece from the table, gyrated it in his hands as he searched the ground for one of its neighbours.
“It would be very helpful if you could just tell me, or anyone else, what is wrong,” Cedric remarked. “So far, you only told me you have a headache and that it’s not because of the situation with Townsend. But what is its source? No one can help you if you don’t confide in anyone.”
Milton halted, froze in his movement – stepping towards a corner, a promising piece of hardwood in his sight. It did seem as if he was considering it for once, telling Cedric what was wrong, and it became Cedric’s turn to look at Milton with great curiosity and expectancy.
In the end, Milton shook his head and pulled on his right sleeve. “I’m sorry; I cannot,” he said quietly. “I can say this though.” He looked directly into Cedric’s eyes. “I am not well now, but I will be again. I cannot say when, only that I will be.”
***
Cedric closed the door behind him, took one step into the corridor – and then another and another and then he was climbing the stairs, out of the basement and to the ground floor. His steps were becoming ever the slightest bit quicker and louder with each one.
He had rounded half the ground floor without aim before he realised that he was brimming with rage. That it was anger that was pushing him forward and forward. One part of him wanted to turn around, return to the wine cellar, and shake Milton. Another wished to run into the cool night, to kick against a façade or wander the unfamiliar dark streets until he couldn’t find his way back anymore.
Not that I ever could.
He did neither, however. Instead, Cedric leaned his forehead against the closest wall and took a deep breath – again and again.
That idiot, that utter fool.
Maybe, it had been my mistake too – to seek him out, knowing a piece of his ailment so well, too well, right after I had recalled the loss of my sister and of my friend. To seek him out, and see him again so battered and so lost, when the memory of that day had been so fresh, that wound rubbed raw anew.
And another about to burst open too.
Cedric buried his face in his hands, inhaled deeply and exhaled lengthily.
Too close, too close. It had been too close together.
He groaned and slammed a hand against the wall; it only made the paintings along it shake but did not allay his heart. He couldn’t calm it, couldn’t prevent it from pumping fury-heated blood through his veins.
Cedric peeled himself away from the wall. His body was shaking and burning so much with seething rage as he headed to the stairs and up to the first floor that it came as a surprise that he wasn’t setting the townhouse on fire while making his way through it. Cloudia’s room came into his view at last. He would have entered it without another thought if his senses had been fully melted away already. They had not been though, and he halted right in front of the door. Lisa or Newman had hovered before it last night; now, it was unguarded. Cloudia was better now; of course, there was no need for this extra precaution.
But Kamden might be feeling differently.
Cedric dug out the necklace, wrapped his fingers around the skull pendant – and recalled suddenly and violently Florentin’s words: of the skull necklaces being a danger, a risk. His grip tightened around the pendant, its edges digging into his flesh. He would never be able to reconcile the pendants’ true identities as instruments of death with all the good they had brought him. Cedric closed his eyes as the anger surged in his chest, set aflame by the memory of when he had first received the skull pendant necklaces.
What is wrong?
He reopened his eyes with a gasp. Cloudia’s voice had just rung loud and clear in his head.
Is Kamden inside? he returned with slight hesitation, having laboured over the right question for a minute.
No, come in.
Somehow, Cloudia had managed to sit herself up enough to light the lamp on her bedside cabinet between her enquiry and Cedric’s entry. She had been covered in a ridiculous number of blankets and pillows before, but Kamden had added a few more since.
“I know,” Cloudia sighed and rearranged the superfluous bedding atop and around her so that it didn’t completely swallow her up. “I just can’t bring myself to protest properly; he’s been so very antsy about this after all.” She met Cedric’s gaze from across the room. He had remained by the door, fearing – faintly, stupidly – that he might hurt her if he approached her now, so full of boiling fury as he was. She had only just recovered; he didn’t want to take a risk, no matter how idiotic it might sound. There was no actual fire in his veins after all. That was an impossibility; he was merely filled with feelings he could not handle. It was too much, this singing heat that wouldn’t be extinguished. He could hardly blame Milton for wanting to numb his senses, to try, even in vain, to lessen the pain, to bury it underneath another that was easier to bear. The thought of Milton only ignited the anger within Cedric further and twisted his stomach.
“Come here now,” Cloudia commanded. Her steady voice made Cedric snap out of his thoughts. She extended her arm out to him and kept her calm gaze on his, beckoning.
He took a few steps forward, clasped her hand in his – he was bracing himself for a burn, for a singe, that, of course, of course, didn’t come to be –, and let himself be pulled into that chair next to her bed.
He expected an interrogation, but Cloudia didn’t say a word. She merely held his hand, her lips pressed into a thin line, and watched him with her dark eyes.
Waiting and waiting until, at last, the fire within Cedric decreased a bit – a little, little bit. The whole of him cracked like firewood. “It’s never been a fairy tale, Countess.”
***
Somewhere, Scotland, Kingdom of Great Britain – December 1753
Heat reached out to his back, but he kept on moving.
He couldn’t remember getting to his feet, couldn’t remember starting to walk.
The night was dark and cold ahead and bright and warm behind him. Smoke was drifting through the air.
He couldn’t remember where he was even heading to. He might have never known at all.
The shouts and cries were muffled in his ears. The fire had been noticed – how could it not have been? It was a fire like a lighthouse, far away but breaking apart the night with its beam and beckoning people towards it – and sending him away.
His movements were sluggish; something within him was forcing him to drag himself forward. He was limping a little; he couldn’t remember when and how he had injured his foot, his leg.
If anyone saw him now, stumbling farther and farther away from the castle with accelerated speed, would they assume that he had set the fire?
Would they think that of the gentleman too as he passed through the night in his carriage?
Though, of course, he wouldn’t be in a hurry. His horses and his carriage would carry him through the dark as leisurely as he had folded his papers and blown out his lantern in the garden.
As if he had all the time in the world.
As if this was yet another ordinary day for him.
His blood was rushing in his ears so loudly that he could barely hear the distant shouts, the crackle of the fire, his feet dragging on the frozen grass – his knees colliding with the ground.
He couldn’t remember tripping, couldn’t remember falling – or getting up again. A moment, numbed, dulled, erased by the fire that ate at him from within. It feasted on his thoughts, his tears, his wants until all that remained was the need to go forward and away.
Away from the castle, away from the bodies, away from his failure.
Even if he longed to head back too. To find that man, to return to their bodies, to embrace that fire as well.
But he was forced ahead and ahead while part of him clung to the castle still, and it tore him up inside, this tugging war.
And now there he was, unable to get up – though he should – and either turn around or move forward, unable to do anything at all.
The world ahead was an inky blur his ears were ringing his bones were creaking his muscles screaming and Cesca was dead and Chester was dead and the castle was burning and he had to leave them behind was now wandering and wandering and he didn’t see where the gentleman went didn’t know where he was going and his sister was dead everyone was dead dead dead dead…
***
He woke up and was blinded by a changed world. Overnight, a blanket of snow had been laid over everything; the white sheen a gentle hand that dampened all sounds, softened all edges, and led all to tranquillity.
He pressed his fists against the frozen ground. It was still greyish brown beneath him, covered in pieces of fallen leaves, not painted white like everything beyond the underside of this bridge.
And everything within him remained ablaze, not soothed into calmness.
Cedric had slept but hadn’t rested. He had moved but was still there. He was in the castle, running around, wondering and wondering and hoping and hoping. He was outside it too. He was in the garden, standing over them, kneeling by them. He was watching the gentleman. He was staring into the fire and watching the castle burn.
He was everywhere at once, and not there at all, and the longer the memory haunted him in his now-awoken state, with the world veiled in snow and ice, the angrier he became at the discrepancy between what he was seeing right in front of him and what he was seeing in his mind.
His sister was dead. His best friend was dead. The place he had called home for most of his life had been eaten away to dust. He had lost everything he had – and the world had turned innocently white, so calm and so bright, while he had been passed out from exhaustion.
He wanted to scream, but his throat was stitched shut. He wanted to cry, but his tears were emptied out. He wanted to let out the unrest boiling him from within, but it had curled up inside him and made itself a home in his hollowed-out body.
Cedric wanted to lie down on the cold ground and wait and wait and wait, until the pain had ebbed and time stilled…
… but his heart kept thundering in his chest, his thoughts kept running erratic in his head.
His fury still warmed his body, still sent red hot blood through his veins.
She hadn’t said a word. He hadn’t told him the truth.
They had been lying and lying to him for weeks and months and years and years.
“I am so glad that we have each other at least,” she had said in that cold manor house.
“Yes, I am still glad that we have each other at least,” she had said underneath that tree in the park.
With her hand always, always, always tucked in his.
Cedric stared down at his fists. He hadn’t opened his hands since he had left the castle behind. He feared that they were frozen forever in this state. With great difficulty, he pried them open again, his fingers stiff from the strain and the cold.
Something prickled at the back of his eyes.
It had been a quick idea, half-formed by his numbed mind. It had hardly even felt as if he was moving out of his own will when Cedric had taken out the knife that he was always carrying with him and leaned down to his sister and to his friend too.
Dying was delicate and harsh, slow and fast. It was never a state; it was always a process. That’s how Cedric had come to learn of it first: There was always someone dying somewhere, wasting away in sickbeds and fading away in deathbeds. And where there were the dying there were the living too – attending to those flickering out of the world and to those who had already closed their eyes forever. When Cedric had been five, and their neighbour had been passing, he had watched her little house come alive in a way he had never seen before: Villagers had gathered to see her; family had travelled to be with her. They had been talking with her or reading to her when talking became difficult. They had been basking in the other’s presence; even when she was gone, people had been sitting at her side still, reminiscing. It had baffled Cedric greatly, for he had not seen most of them at his neighbour’s house when she was fully well. His mother had had to explain that this was how it was meant to be: The dying were not to be left alone, and the dead were only considered that when they were buried in the ground. “No one comes into this world alone,” Cordelia had said, “and no one should leave it alone too.”
The memory, having grown dusty over the years, had returned to Cedric in full force as he had hovered above the bodies of his sister and his friend and realised with great horror and great sorrow alike that he could neither take them with him nor bury them there and then. Not with the fire spreading to consume the castle and its surroundings. Not with his mind and body petrified by shock and grief and anger.
No, this was goodbye. This was how they would have to part forever: In this cold, bleak garden by their burning home, with no ceremony and no preparation – with Cedric having to leave them behind alone. Because there was no time left for anything; because Cesca and Chester had left him behind first, had gone to a place where Cedric could not follow.
But he had wanted to. He had wanted to run after them like he had always done since childhood days – into the woods, through cobbled streets.
To that one last place.
The knife was heavy in his hand.
As was his heart in his chest.
And the ring against his neck.
The Towers family ring – a mourner’s ring with a lock of moonlight hair encaged within, a tether to the past, a line between life and death.
The softest of winds now brushed its fingers against the strands of hair in Cedric’s hands. One set brown, the other silver and bright in the pale winter light.
Hand in hand.
There was her voice again, so loud and clear still, – “I am so glad…” – when the wave came at last, and the ground was flecked with tears and the tranquil air pierced by weeping.
“I am so sorry,” he pressed out between shuddering sobs, “that I couldn’t take you with me too…”
***
Snow was falling softly upon the city. Vendors stood by their booths, bundled in their warmest clothes, shouting about their offerings. Carriages rattled over the snow, making it crunch. Children were running through the streets, jumping, laughing, playing. People were slipping and catching each other on the icy roads. Shovels and brooms were brought out to fight nature, to clear the ground from the frozen rain, all while it kept descending upon them.
Everything around him was cool and alive whereas every fibre of him was both ablaze and so, so numb. All sounds amalgamated into white noise in his ears. Snowflakes landed on him, to no registration.
He had no idea where he was going. He only knew that he had to keep on moving.
And moving and moving and–
Cedric almost hit a building’s façade face-first, having slipped and staggered on the powdered ground; his injured leg was not fully well yet. He managed to brace his hand against it in the last moment to prevent the collision. He took a step back. Snowflakes got tangled in his lashes as Cedric looked up to the belltower and the stained-glass windows.
The sight of the church made him halt, made him remain on that spot and break his perpetual movement for only a little while, and that was all it took: Forcing his body to keep on moving, concentrating on this very action and on nothing else, had kept Cedric warm and his mind occupied. Now, the weather and the guilt were touching him again with their cold fingers, running them along his spine and pressing them on his chest.
Paralysis was crawling up his body, and a storm was making itself at home in his mind – all while the church loomed, tall and dark, against the bright white-grey sky and over his body, and the tendrils of warmth that escaped through the gaps in its wooden door pulled him inside.
Cedric resisted at first. He had arrived at a church of all places, the best and worst place to be. He had been a child the last time he had entered one in good faith; even back then, it had been a rare occurrence as his parents preferred not to mingle, no matter if it made them oddities in every parish they had resided in. Still, this was not a question of faith or of belonging but of icy gusts and warm hearths. Before Cedric knew it, he was standing in the church’s vestibule, the door falling behind him into its lock with a rattle.
Cedric’s stomach turned at the sight of the vast empty space before him: No soul lined the pews or lit a candle or hovered by the altar. He was all alone with his thundering thoughts in this echoing place.
He turned to leave – quick, quick, the cold was nothing; this had been a bad choice, he should have just kept on moving – when he heard steps behind him.
“My child, can I help you?”
It was a tight space, the inside of the confessional booth. Tight, cold, and dark – such a stark contrast to the church at large. All that parted Cedric from it was a mere cloth curtain even, one that did not reach all the way down, and still he felt so cut off from everything as if he had been entombed.
His heartbeat quickened, his chest tightened.
Breathing in was painful; sharp needles were pricking his lungs. A reminder that there was still air to breathe. That he was aboveground. That he was not alone, even if he could not make out the priest beyond the latticed panel in this dimness. Even if the voice that seeped through the small gaps did not reach Cedric’s ears as anything but white noise.
He leaned into it, nevertheless. Rested his head against the dark-panelled wall, let the timbre of the priest’s voice try to extinguish the rattling in his mind.
Noise against noise, cancelling each other out.
But it was only a wish, not a fact.
It was not enough.
The priest’s voice was too soft still, the turmoil inside Cedric too loud after all. All that anger, all that pain, all that guilt within him wanted to boil over and get out. And he didn’t know for how much longer he could stand to keep them at bay, if he could last another day, a month, a century – if he could even manage to make it out of the booth and out of the church without getting buried beneath the weight of it all.
Buried.
His heart fluttered, and then the first word was out. And then the next and the next… all running together, bursting out of him incoherent and unbound.
But it was so, so refreshing. Each word was a weight lifted. There was not enough to say to remove them all; some would have to remain, like stones enduring against time. But it was a start, and he hadn’t felt so light in so long, if he had ever felt truly light at all. What a warm feeling it was, amidst all that residing pain.
Cedric did not quite grasp that his words had stilled. Not until the priest spoke, his words now crisp and intelligible,
“I’m sorry that your sister died such a bad death.”
All at once, they were summoned again. The weight. The fog. The blood rushing into his ears, concealing every sound and confining him to his own thoughts.
Nausea overwhelmed him as they returned, the weight buckling him down with such force and intensity that the brief relief from before felt now like a distant dream.
He got to his feet. The curtain was pulled back. His ribcage seemed ready to burst from the pressure and the pain as he stumbled out of the church and into the arms of the waiting cold.
He clutched his chest, reached with the other hand – the one still balled into a first, the fist that held onto Cesca and Chester, his guilt and his pain – out to search for something to steady himself against. When he touched the church’s stone façade, he drew back his hand as if he had been burned.
Cedric willed himself away – away away away – until there was another building, another stone façade to fall against. He pressed his forehead to the cold wall, pulled his fist against his heart. Snow descended upon him, wrapped him in white. It was not wise to remain as he was, stationary in the freezing cold. But he had no thought to spare for himself. All he could focus on was if they, Cesca and Chester, had been left by the ruin, untouched and uncared for. And if they, now too, were being covered in snow. Then, they would have been buried at least, one way or another – if not beneath earth, then under a blanket of snow. A temporary tomb was better than none.
But how disgusting it was of him, to be horrified that he had been unable to tend to his loved ones in death, that he had not been able to lay them to rest and live knowing that they were at peaceful death now, if for so long now, he had been the cause of bad deaths aplenty:
After all, there was no “dying” in his profession, only cold, static “death.” No gatherings, no last offices, no proper farewells. Just a sudden end – and then it was time to dedicate oneself to something else already.
How horrifically fitting it was, Cedric had thought as he had loomed over Cesca and Chester, that they, too, had found their end so abruptly.
A fitting end for the life they had led.
And still, and still.
Had they not just been children then? When they had been taken out of one existence and pushed into another?
Why would they have to be blamed for that?
Every part of him felt so heavy now.
If they were buried in this same grave, of ice and snow and winter pain, would they find each other then? In that place he wasn’t meant to follow them to yet?
Again, he so wished to just close his eyes and remain as he was until nature had consumed him whole, but his heart was still beating, knocking, hammering against the fist pressed to his chest. A reminder to him, a reminder to them, that he was still alive.
One out of three still on this side of the river.
And had this not been what they had wished?
Cedric took a deep breath, the oxygen he exhaled forming a cloud in the icy air, before he took a step back and away from the wall. It was such a simple action; it was such a hard one too. This step, the next one was the same, as was the next and the next and…
He was on the move again, through the streets, through the town, with no goal, with no end, just the knowledge that he had to keep on going, for himself to tame his thoughts and for them to honour their sacrifice.
Then, in the corner of his eye, a shadow vanished in an alleyway.
He stilled, parting the crowd before and after him.
No, not vanished.
One small shadow pulled into an alley.
His blood was singing, a siren’s song to guide him ahead, and Cedric stepped into the side street and fell back into the past before he registered his strides.
Different town, different street, different weather.
But there was still a child pressed against a wall.
And there was still he. Both the child and the grown man.
Cedric barrelled into them, hair mementoes tucked away, knife raised, catching the bandits unawares. His vision blacked out. When his consciousness balanced itself out again, returned from the then to the now, the thieves were gone; there was only he, the boy, and stains of blood remaining in the alley.
Blood dripped quietly from the tip of his knife and his bottom lip into the rumpled snow. Cedric wiped both and pocketed the knife before he turned to the child, a boy who could not be any older than nine or ten. He was flattening himself against the very wall the thieves had thrown him against. His body was swallowed by his threadbare coat that was too large for his frail frame, and his eyes were wide and blue and terrified.
Cedric tilted his head at the boy. They stood like this for a moment longer, in silent observation, until a memory trickled into his mind. He held out his hands – stained with soot and dirt and blood – in front of him as if he was approaching a scared animal. The words came out rattling and strange, as if they had been distorted by the pull into the present.
“Hey, calm down. I don’t want to do anything to you.”
***
How good it was that he had never lost this habit despite the misery it had caused him, once upon a time. Cedric had only forgotten that it was there, the pouch of money, inside the pocket of his jacket. When had he slipped it there? It had been several days – days; the word sounded hollow in his ears – but the gorge between then and now felt more gaping than that. What had time become even? It was passing in a rush, pushing him along. It was folding inward, staining each and every corner with memories: The snow melted, and he was thirteen years old again, Chester was still a secret kept from his sister, and they were darting through the streets laughing. And then, there was Cesca now too, leaning against a façade in the height of summer, her brown eyes widening at the sight of Chester’s gift of roses. Cedric blinked, and the snow reappeared, though it was one that had fallen in a long past winter. It had been the third one since Lennox and the first one in which Cesca returned Chester’s onslaught of snowballs, and Cedric helped his sister pelter their friend and bury him in a pile of snow.
Cedric closed his eyes. Besides him atop the stone wall sat the boy, and he was chewing his way through a bag of rolls. The boy evidently hadn’t eaten in a long while; Cedric was glad to have reached into his pocket in the right moment to rediscover his money. What a strange sight they had made: He, a hollowed-out spectre of a man who hadn’t bothered to scrub the blood off his hands, and this dirty, spindly thin child who was following him like a sheepish duckling entering a bakery to buy a sack of bread.
The snow had stopped falling. Wind brushed against his cheeks. He concentrated on listening only to the boy eat to drown out all the other sounds, lest they summoned yet another memory he could not bear.
There was a soft tug on his coat. Cedric’s eyes fluttered open. He craned his head towards the boy. He was gazing at him with wide eyes – blue like Chester’s and not like his at all at the same time, because, of course, it was just a colour; just a colour like any other – and opened his mouth hesitatingly to say, “Won’t you eat too, mister?”
Cedric tilted his head ever the slightest, needing a moment to comprehend his words: Yes, of course, he hadn’t eaten in a while too. The taste of the candy he had eaten days before returned to him now, foul and bitter, and those he hadn’t eaten yet turned as heavy as rocks.
“Do you have a moment? I have candy and something to talk about.”
“Mister?” the boy asked.
Cedric rubbed his eyes, scrubbing the memory away, before he reached into the bag and retrieved a bun. They ate in silence then until the bag was emptied and their stomachs filled.
The boy folded and unfolded the paper bag, lining it with creases and tears. “Mister? I am sorry for having been afraid of you earlier. You are a good man. And I’m sorry for not introducing myself earlier; that was rude of me.” He stuffed the bag into his trousers and held a bony hand out to him. “I am Rasmus.”
Cedric eyed the little hand for a moment. Of course, he knew that the boy wanted a name in return, a name for a name like in those faerie stories Cesca had severely disliked, but something within him lurched at this simple request. No one had ever called him by his real name for decades except for Cesca and Chester who were no more.
Wiping the snow away, melting it with the fiery-hot rage that continued to run beneath his skin, he took Rasmus’ hand in his and said, “I’m Cedric.”
Rasmus blinked at him. “What kind of name is ‘Cedric’?”
“What kind of name is ‘Rasmus’?”
“I asked first.”
The ghost of a smile briefly settled upon Cedric’s lips before it vanished again. “My father was not good at spelling words, or names. And you?”
“It’s Swedish,” said Rasmus. “My family is from Sweden.”
“Well, now, I can say that I’ve met a Swede,” Cedric said and jumped from the wall. “It was good to meet you, Rasmus. You should return to your family; they must be worried sick. Take care.”
He had taken a few steps already when he heard Rasmus’ little voice behind him, “I don’t have one.”
Cedric halted and craned his head to the boy. “Pardon?”
“I don’t have a family,” Rasmus repeated and clutched at the hem of his coat. “I used to have one but not anymore. I’m actually on a quest to find another.”
“You are?”
He nodded. “After my parents died and my sister was taken in, I stayed alone in our old house for a while until I realised that it is unusual for potential new parents to come to you, so I thought I should head out and go to them.”
The rage-hot fire was stirred in Cedric’s chest. “What do you mean your sister was ‘taken in’?”
Rasmus cast his eyes downwards. “There was this friendly couple who lived in our street,” he told Cedric, half-mumbling. “They looked after Hilda and me when our parents died. They were very nice to us. One day, they moved away and took Hilda with them. They said they could only take one of us, and Hilda was smaller and more in need of a family, and she did look rather angelic with her blonde locks whereas my hair is straight and boring…”
Cedric wasn’t sure whether Rasmus had trailed off or the blood rushing into his ears had suffocated the rest of the boy’s words. He was seeing red. Who would do such a thing? Take one sibling and leave the other to rot? Who could do such a thing and think of themselves as righteous?
His vision only cleared when Rasmus got off the wall too and hesitantly approached Cedric. “… And I wanted to ask, Mr Cedric, if I could stay with you? Until I have found a family?”
Cedric mustered the boy – he was so very small in this large coat, his straight hair matted, and his eyes clear and wide in his dirty face – and thought for a moment that he shouldn’t take him with him, that Rasmus was still better off alone than with him in his current state. In the next, Cedric recalled the charred Brannan Manor, his parents’ blackened bodies, and Martin and his comrades and Lennox and his people; he then knew that he couldn’t leave Rasmus alone. Rasmus had no Cesca. Had no Chester. No hand to hold while wandering these dark roads.
Cedric held out his hand to the boy.
***
“He stuck with me then, little Rasmus. We would usually sleep outside when it was not snowing at night or when it was not too freezing to preserve our monetary reserves. That first night, however, I searched and paid for a room and made sure that he was washed and fed and held under a blanket and not a bridge.
“Rasmus was so brittle in my arms, like one of the baby birds Cesca used to rescue and return gently to their nests. So small, so fragile, so easy to break.”
***
“Unlike the little birds, Rasmus had no nest to return to; and unlike Cesca, I did not possess the power of reuniting him with his family. Where could I even start? I only had a few names and a young child’s memories, and the world was wide and populous. All I had to offer was my company, and though it was shabby, Rasmus accepted it gratefully nonetheless.”
“We wandered and wandered from place to place; I kept waking to differing days and differing seasons, held ghostly hands while trudging through woods, felt winds that had long blown past nevertheless. I tightened my grip on Rasmus when this happened, turned his little self into an anchor.
“We quickened our pace, moved in zig-zags. We floated through towns; we rushed through villages.
“Time moved forward, was supposed to move forward – as did we; and still and still there was an echo in the woods, an echo in every street and every corner beckoning me to look back.
“Sometimes, it was a simple call. Other times the melody of a violin or the cadence of a fairy tale told from the heart.
“Snow was falling steadily. I wished the cold was all the reason for my aching body.”
“There was no end to my restlessness. No end for Rasmus’ search either. How could one linger, settle into a place and turn it into a home, if they could not find rest first?”
***
“My money was slowly depleting. There used to be a time when I would have gone and found myself some work, no matter how fleeting or wretched it was. But even with little Rasmus in my care, and knowing very well that I was no child anymore and would be punished like any other vagabond if caught, I could not bring myself to do anything at all. I was full of energy, full of rage and hatred still – for Cesca and Chester, for myself, and for Rasmus now too –, and none of that fuel was one that could propel me to work. It would only remind me of times that were no more. It would only push me to go on and on and on.
“Despite that energy, that rage, that pain, I was so, so tired. It was an exhaustion that was bone-deep and unshakeable, and the more it snowed, the deeper it ran.”
“We spent our days wandering, thus. My turmoil hummed in the air, making the silence between us vibrate.
“Rasmus was such a quiet child, near invisible in his mismatched, oversized clothes. Unlike me, he was so full of life still – warm hand clasped in my frozen one, and eyes wide and bright, he followed me into the world.”
“Once, he pulled me down to create angels in the snow. It had caught me off-guard. One moment, we were wandering over a field. The next, I thought earth was taking me back at last. But instead of darkness, I fell into a bed of snow.
“Rasmus prattled on about spring as we drew angels into the ice – how much he looked forward to lying in the warm grass and looking up to the blue sky. His face had been flushed bright from the cold, his eyes glittering with joyful anticipation, as he had told me this. However, as abruptly as this outburst had come, it left in the same manner too: With his words still hanging in the air, Rasmus retreated into himself. The light in his eyes dimmed. He rolled towards me, pressed his face into my coat – ruining his angel in the process.
“He did not have to say a single word. I understood him perfectly well, nonetheless.
“I reached out to him, smudging my angel too, and pulled him close.”
***
They were walking through a forest, its trees barren of leaves and crystallised with snow, when Rasmus’ face suddenly lit up. He dashed through the fragile bushes as quickly as he could with his short legs.
“Ra-Rasmus?!” Cedric called. He was stunned into stagnancy for a moment before he hastened after Rasmus. He swiftly caught up to him, being taller and stronger and having wider strides, and this circumstance opened a door to a decades-old but never-forgotten memory. Cedric slammed it shut and went to his little friend.
Rasmus was standing still and quiet, like a tree, next to a river; his eyes were fixed upon it, a slight glitter shining within them like he had been bespelled.
“Rasmus?” Cedric asked quietly, hesitantly. A shiver ran over his body at the sight before him. He was about to repeat Rasmus’ name once more, to reach out and try to pull him back, when Rasmus lifted his gaze from the frozen river at last and said, “Sorry, Cedric, I just heard the river!” Rasmus presented Cedric with a sheepish smile. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Cedric glanced at it. It was a pretty sight as Rasmus had said, but Cedric failed to understand why exactly he was getting that excited over it. It was a narrow river running through a skeletal forest like any other; it was covered in snow and ice like everything else around them too. “It is,” Cedric replied to placate him and nodded for emphasis.
“Why do you think it is like that?” Rasmus asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The river!” He pointed at it. “It’s all frozen over but it keeps running. And look,” Rasmus moved closer to the edge of the riverbank, “the fishes are moving in it too!” He leaned down a bit more and lost his footing. Cedric’s heart shot into his throat. He reached out to Rasmus blazingly fast and yanked him back.
“You need to be more careful!” Cedric shouted. His voice came out louder than he intended to and carried far too well in this silent forest. “One should never cross a frozen river. The ice is rarely if ever stable enough to hold your weight. You will break through it and die a sure death!”
Rasmus stared at him with wide eyes and distanced himself more from the river and from Cedric too. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I just stumbled.”
Cedric took a deep breath, willing his heart to quiet down. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
The boy looked at him before he went to wrap his arms around Cedric. “I was very scared for a moment,” he mumbled against him.
“It’s all right now. I got you,” Cedric said. He placed a hand on Rasmus’ head and ruffled his hair. When they had met, Rasmus’ hair had been caked in dirt and discoloured brown. Now that Cedric took care to get him washed whenever he could, it was the colour of straw. The dirt had been like a poultice – and whenever this thought crossed Cedric’s mind, he felt unsteady on his feet. His own hair had grown a little too, curling against the top of his ears. The first time Rasmus had seen Cedric’s hair clean when it had begun to grow out, his eyes had widened in wonder. Cedric had had to suppress the urge to find a pair of scissors or simply use his knife to cut it down again then and there. The wish not to spook the boy had been victorious in the end.
“It’s interesting that the fish are alive under all that ice,” Rasmus continued. His words tugged a little at the corners of Cedric’s mouth.
“Is it? Unfortunately, I don’t know why that is so.”
Rasmus peeled himself a bit away from Cedric to look back at the river. “Where do you think they’re going?”
“Wherever the river leads to, I suppose.”
At this, Rasmus grabbed Cedric’s hand. “Come!” he exclaimed, both his face and voice so bright, so cheerful – still, something within Cedric stiffened when Rasmus seized his hand.
“Come!” he repeated, tugging at his hand. The past overlapped with the present again; blink, and someone else was before Cedric, blink, and it was not Rasmus animating him to move.
Cedric’s heart tumbled in his chest, was rocked like a ship at sea. He tore his gaze away from the cheery little face before him – the one that was meant to be Rasmus’, that should have been Rasmus’ – and towards the river. Frozen and alive, stagnant and running. Its sight made Cedric’s stomach lurch, made his lungs contract. It pushed him down, tore him along. He closed his eyes; when he reopened them, he reawakened in the now.
With feeling returning to his body, Cedric rose to his feet and allowed himself to be guided away.
***
Somewhere, Scotland, Kingdom of Great Britain – January 1754
“We occasionally encountered people who took pity on Rasmus and me and invited us into their homes for a meal, a scrub, a bed for the night. It was never for longer than one night – and then, we often slept in a barn, not in the main house – until Rasmus caught a fever.”
“He woke up one day, his eyes fever-bright and his skin scalding hot. I bundled him in my coat and scooped him into my arms before I ran through the cold to find signs of civilisation. We had left the last town the day before and had gone to sleep in the middle of nowhere. Why did Rasmus have to fall ill now? When there was no one around who could help besides me?
“He murmured ramblings into the layers of fabric wound around him and kept a weak grip on my shirt. I was sinking deep into the snow – it had fallen afresh two days before, had fallen strangely too: It had arrived as half-rain, half-ice and landed as soft powder, as smooth as sand and as consuming as the wetlands. Every step I took was a challenge. I was sinking into depths unknown; it took great effort to lift oneself out of it and ahead.”
“Civilisation seemed to be eluding us. Before and behind us were only stretches and endless stretches of pure white; the deep furrows I was leaving the only marks that someone had ever been here.
“But I had to keep pushing on, so I did.
“I could not let Rasmus die. My frozen-stiff grip tightened on his small body.
“I could not be alone again.”
“Then, before the sun sunk fully, drowning us in darkness and taking all the meagre winter warmth with it, I espied a little farm in the distance.”
Cedric’s breath came out in white clouds. His legs were crying out with every step. “We’re almost there; we’re almost there, Rasmus,” he said in-between sharp intakes of oxygen. Rasmus muttered something he could not make out. Cedric was not even sure if his fever-laden words were in English either. Of course, he could be mistaken – his ears must be on the verge of falling off; that’s how cold he was feeling.
The closer he got to the farmhouse, the more another old memory resurfaced: a carriage in the night, a harsh whip, the rough brush of straw against his skin, and moonlit Cesca holding his hand and the pins that led them to freedom. Cold sweat enveloped Cedric’s body. He pushed the memory away. “I’m sure the people there will help us,” he said, more to himself than to Rasmus. “I’m sure they will be nice people who will help you get well again.”
When he, at last, arrived by the door, Cedric shifted Rasmus around, propping him against his shoulder, so that he could free one hand and – hesitate – knock. Once, twice, his hand a frozen ball hammering against the wooden door.
The door creaked open. Cedric could not make out the person who had appeared in front of him. The relief to know that there was somebody here was enough for his body to give up. He could only barely make out the failing of his legs before his mind shut down.
***
Cedric woke up feeling warm and wondered whether he was not dreaming after all. He strained to move his arms and hands enough to pinch himself. A brief, sharp pain sprang through him before ebbing away again.
Not a dream, Cedric thought. Then, coldness rushed back into his body.
He had just moved his arms around and not even brushed Rasmus.
With a start, Cedric sat up and searched the bed frantically for his little friend. It had been over a month since he had last woken up without finding Rasmus next to him. How could he let him out of his sight? Particularly now, when Rasmus was sick and needed him more than usual?
The worst of thoughts somersaulted in his mind as Cedric climbed out of the bed – and slipped right on the little carpet before it and crashed onto the floor.
“What are you doing?”
Cedric flinched at the sound of the unfamiliar, rough voice. A second later, his training returned to him. He jumped to his feet, ready to attack – though he was wearing nothing but a nightdress.
The man raised an eyebrow and sighed. “She should be happy that I love her so much,” he murmured under his breath. “No one else would put up with this.” Then, he straightened up and crossed his arms in front of his chest. The man was tall with blonde hair and green eyes. Although his clothes were obviously old, they were well-kept, and he wore them as gracefully as a general wore his aged uniform. Cedric was rather taken aback by that.
“There’s no reason to panic,” the man said without much warmth in his voice. “You collapsed right before our house, and we took you in and warmed you up. The boy is in another room.” His eyes darkened a little. “My wife has been losing sleep fussing over him all night. She thought it would be best not to keep you in the same place for that reason; she feared you might not get much rest otherwise.” The man glared at Cedric. “Therefore, the polite thing would be not to cause a ruckus, do you understand?”
Cedric stared at the man, dumbfounded.
“I brought up your clothes – washed and dried – earlier. They are on that chair,” the man pointed at it, “so get dressed quietly. Come downstairs if you want to eat something.”
Without another word, the man turned around and left.
***
The smell of food wafted through the house as Cedric, now dressed and coiffed, took the stairs down to the ground floor. The man was cooking something – Cedric could pick out eggs and sausages – and standing with his back to Cedric. His stomach rumbled, and saliva multiplied in his mouth. He kept his mouth shut and himself distanced, lest the man noticed either of Cedric’s embarrassing reflexes – or him overall. The man didn’t seem to be particularly fond of having Cedric around after all.
Nonetheless, the man said without turning around, “Just get here already and sit down.”
Cedric did as he was told and seated himself at the table. A colourful, handwoven tablecloth had been laid over it. It was one of many, many spots of colour in the room: The kitchen tiles were hand-painted with herbs. Drawings depicting nature motifs covered the walls in the dining area. Plant pots, most of them empty now, filled the corners, the ceramic tinted in cheery yellows and warm oranges.
The room where Cedric had slept had been the same. After the initial shock of waking in a foreign place without Rasmus had faded away, and the man had left the attic room, Cedric had taken in his surroundings properly. Every piece of furniture had been painted and re-painted. A few bands of pearls in all colours and shapes had been hung on the ceiling. The blanket under which he had slept had been quilted from a large, colourful conglomeration of fabric pieces. His eyes had hurt upon taking everything in; how strange it was to be bombarded with so much colour, to have found a place as colourful as this one in the middle of a grey, snowy nowhere. Cedric had even had to pinch himself again, to make sure that he had not fallen victim to a Fata Morgana.
And though it was none, this place still felt wrong.
The man handed Cedric a plate with scrambled eggs and sausages. He placed a basket full of bread on the table and gave him a steaming mug of milk too. Cedric stared at the food. He was reminded yet again of the faerie stories his sister had despised so much: Beautiful but wicked creatures leading you to dazzling places, offering you the most fantastic food and drinks. But beware, your life would be forfeit, forever bound to this strange place, if you accepted any and put them in your body.
Of course, faeries only dwelled in myths and legends, not in forests and by rivers, let alone in cosy farmhouses in a desolate area in Scotland.
But hadn’t Cedric entered a stranger’s home once and taken food that hadn’t been his?
Hadn’t he paid dearly for that?
Cedric’s stomach was in knots. Cedric’s stomach rumbled. He had warmed up but he was so tired from yesterday and from the days before. And he was so, so hungry too.
He was not a child anymore. Surely, he was overthinking things, mistaking the echo of a dread from the past with a danger in the present.
Surely, this would be fine and not a damnation.
Cedric ate quickly but as silently as he could – the man was watching and unnerving him. When Cedric was done, the man cleared the table and washed the dishes. Just as he was drying his hands on a towel (white with embroidered daisies), a door flew open, and a woman hurried into the room. She was short with long brown hair that hung loose to her hips. She had been saying something – “Aaron, could you please…” – when she stepped into the room, but she interrupted herself when she spotted Cedric at the dining table.
Her whole face lit up. “Oh, you are awake!” she exclaimed and went to grasp Cedric’s hands. He stiffened at the sudden touch, whereas the woman remained cheerful. “And you’re not so awfully cold anymore! I am glad,” she continued. “I’m sorry that we couldn’t get acquainted earlier: I am Julia, and you have already met my husband, Aaron.” The man – Aaron – made an annoyed sound, by way of greeting.
“I’ve been looking after the boy – your brother? your child? His fever has not broken yet, albeit he seems a little better than upon your arrival. Fear not, someone is already out to get a doctor,” Julia told Cedric.
“Thank you,” Cedric managed to get out at last. The pit in his stomach grew heavier as he took her in. He would have shaken her hands off his if Aaron hadn’t been watching, if he hadn’t known how impolite that would have been. Wrong, wrong, wrong, it echoed in his mind. “I am Cedric,” he continued, “and the boy – he is not related to me at all; he is just a child who has decided to wander with me – is called Rasmus.”
Julia’s eyes glistered. “Rasmus! What a cute name. It is good that I can now call him something.” She let go of his hands and went to her husband. “Would you mind fetching me more water?”
“Not at all,” Aaron said, his voice surprisingly soft. He pressed a kiss atop Julia’s head before he grabbed a coat from a hanger and went outside.
“I need to check on Rasmus again,” said Julia. “Please make yourself at home, Cedric.” She smiled brightly at him. It made Cedric’s skin crawl. “I will make sure that you are informed when the doctor comes; don’t worry.”
***
“Looking back at my memories of Julia and Aaron’s farm, they felt more like a fever-dream than reality.
“I hadn’t noticed it before, but I later learned that there were multiple farms in this area. One that belonged to Aaron’s brother and another that was a family friend’s; that family friend, Ken, had been the one to go and get a physician for Rasmus. They were a close-knit community, and though some of them were a bit prickly or standoffish like Aaron, none of them were unfriendly or outright unpleasant. We had been incredibly lucky to find those people in that time.
“But I could never shake off my unease.”
“Everything at that place had felt wrong. Not because it had been, but because it had been too perfect.
“Everything was too bright, too cheery. I would lie in my bed, stare up at the strings of beads, and tense up. I would run my hands over the painted walls and feel ice fill up my veins. I would look at steaming meals and warm smiles and wish to run.
“It was the place of dreams. The house Hansel and Gretel should have ended up at.
“But it had not been the place for me.
“Not when everything within me clawed to get out, get out, get out, back into the wilderness and away.
“Not when I could not summon the image of Cesca sitting in the living room, flowery blanket across her lap and chatting with Julia. Or Chester tending to the fields with Aaron or Ken. Not when their absence inside this place grieved me, not when their presence before it startled me.
“They would stand there, quiet imaginary ghosts as they were, some metres in the distance, looking at the farmhouse but never coming close.
“Even if they had been alive, this would not have been the place for them.”
“I would stand by the windows, watching the memory of them.
“And it hurt and it hurt.
“I should have wanted to stay.
“If, like them, I had not grown so accustomed to the witch’s cottage already.”
“How sad it was, that this was not a Faerieland after all.”
***
“The doctor came, inspected Rasmus, and instructed Julia how to nurse him best. She didn’t ask for anything in return, but Aaron made me help in the house, carry food and wood and sweep the floors. Apparently, he had made that remark when we had first met because Julia had the habit to take in all kinds of injured animals, restore their health, and set them free. Rasmus – and I, to a lesser extent – was the first person she had invited into her home for that reason. His explanation made my heart clench. Maybe in another time, in another life, Julia and Cesca would have got along after all.”
“Rasmus’ fever broke a few days later, though he remained weakened and had to stay in bed. He was very happy to see me again, and I was happy to see him.
“He was treated like a little prince by Julia and the others. Even Aaron warmed up to him eventually, albeit while keeping a distance still.”
He could not sleep again – after that very first night, he had been unable to find any rest in this cluttered, suffocating house – which meant that he was left wholly undisturbed by Rasmus crawling into his bed in the small hours of the day. It was pitch-black outside, and the temperatures were so low one might freeze solid upon stepping out of the door; there was no warmth and no benevolence beyond the frames of this bed. At this hour, in this darkness and cold, only the dead and the unfortunate were awake.
It was not the time for young boys recovering from sicknesses to wander around. But unwelcome he was not. Having Rasmus’ warm little body nudged against his again was the first normal thing for Cedric in a week. The universe had restored a bit of its balance. Cedric threw an arm around Rasmus, righting the universe even more.
Rasmus stilled then, remained quiet for so long thereafter that Cedric believed him to have fallen asleep until Rasmus muttered something. His words were unintelligible at first, muffled by the night and the fabric of Cedric’s shirt; Cedric had to ask him to speak up for the tones to take form.
“They asked me to stay,” Rasmus whispered.
The scale had fallen over. Cedric’s ears were numb as Rasmus continued: He had told Julia and Aaron about his quest to find a family and about the reason why he was looking for one in the first place. In return, they had offered to take him in, permanently, because their wishes aligned. They had had no luck having any children of their own; they would have adopted a child long ago but there were no orphanages anywhere close-by, and they could not afford to travel to one. How miraculous it had been then, that they – the boy in search of parents, and the spouses in search of a child – had crossed paths in the middle of nowhere. But, of course, Aaron and Julia did not want to keep Rasmus here by force, and, of course, Rasmus had not arrived here alone.
“If I stayed,” Rasmus asked, a quiver in his voice, “would you stay too?”
How easy things would have been if Cedric had had the strength to turn around and leave after handing the ailing Rasmus over. If the dread he had felt upon stepping on the porch and Cesca’s memory at the edge of his vision had pulled him away, instead of the cold and exhaustion pulling him down.
Wrong turn, wrong choice.
The correct answer having come too late.
And now there he was again, before yet another end that was so much worse than the one he could have had.
It was too dark to see her; the walls were too thick, and the wind too loud to hear her. But he saw and heard Cesca nevertheless, her voice in his mind forever crisp and clear.
***
Rasmus had drifted into sleep while Cedric had pondered over his response. There could only be one, one true one, one right one; nonetheless, the search for it had left him sickened and paralysed.
As the first rays of sunshine brushed against the embroidered curtains, Cedric peeled himself away from Rasmus and slipped out of bed. His heart thundered in his chest. Cesca rapped at the window. He had to get out. Get out and run and run and run.
Cedric changed into his clothes – cleaned and fixed, curtesy of Julia; he suppressed the urge to tear off the patches and rip apart the stitching – and grabbed his bag; in all the time he had been here, he had never unpacked. He was almost ready to go, to vanish into the wilderness all alone again, with only ghosts chasing him. All that was left was to sneak downstairs, put on his jacket and shoes, steal into the new day…
… and not look back.
Cedric halted at the doorsill. The stairs were right ahead. He hovered where he stood. Rasmus was still asleep. Little Rasmus, all the joy he had left in this world. Cedric itched to turn, to fidget with the blankets, to pat his head, to kiss his hair – but all of that would ruin everything. He fixed his eyes on the staircase, descended them in quiet hurry. He shrugged on his coat, briefly touched the repaired parts, and stuck his feet into his shoes. Julia and her husband had tended to them too. They were rather old and had been caked with blood more than once. She had polished them to the best of her ability and even replaced the shoelaces while Aaron had rightened the soles.
This was a good place, even if it was not the place for him. It would be for Rasmus. Aaron and Julia would be the best of parents for him and love him dearly until the end of their days, whereas Cedric would fade out of Rasmus’ memory.
Cedric tied his laces faster; it was time to leave.
The early morning sun was too weak to push against the cold. Ice wrapped its fingers around Cedric the instant he stepped out of the farmhouse. Maybe he would have indeed frozen solid if this rage, this panic, this hurt that made him walk and run and go away and away had died inside that house. If it could have been eased, tamed, pacified by the love of strangers, by the frightened, shaky question from the only living soul he held dear. Instead, it had grown wild and restless within him.
He couldn’t await to unwind that coiled turmoil within him, even if his heart was in lament.
He made his way towards Chester and Cesca. They were waiting for him beyond the freshly fallen snow, at the edge of the forest. Cedric had made it to the halfway point when the quiet of the waking world was ruptured by a shout.
“Cedric!”
Cedric hadn’t turned in the house; he wouldn’t turn now. But like in the house, he stopped. The snow behind him crunched. “Cedric!” Rasmus called in-between huffs. “How… how… how could you just leave without a goodbye?”
When Rasmus went on, Cedric could not hear his steps anymore, just his tear-stained voice.
“You could have just said that I should say ‘no’! You could have asked me to come with you. Why didn’t you ask me to come with you…”
Cedric knew he should move, make a run for the woods or pick Rasmus up and deliver him to Aaron again. Only this time, he would do it properly. But he could not go ahead, and he did not dare to turn around, even to bring Rasmus back to the farmhouse.
“I… I don’t want to stay here without you. I want to stay with you,” Rasmus pressed out. “Cedric, please… please don’t leave me alone too.”
“Selfish heart, treacherous body.
“If only I had been stronger in that moment.”
“It has been nearly a hundred years, and I keep wondering what would have happened if I had had the strength to walk away that day.”
Rasmus’ coat was half-buttoned, and his scarf hung from his hand. His eyes, watery and red-rimmed, widened slightly at Cedric’s sight.
“Please don’t leave me behind,” Rasmus cried, and all Cedric could think of was himself.
He stepped forward, his heart and legs made of lead.
Always, always saying those words to Cesca, to Chester, out loud and in his mind.
He closed Rasmus’ coat properly without a word.
Always, always saying those words when they had been alive and now when they weren’t.
He took the scarf out of Rasmus’ hand, winding it properly around his throat. He kept the end of it grasped in his hands.
Always, always wishing for the wrong things.
***
“He clung to me more than ever before in the days that followed. He would hug and embrace me a lot, would hold my hand tighter than before. I must have scared him more than I had fathomed, and this thought made my heart grow heavier with guilt.
“How could I have ever contemplated to do the very thing to him that I had always feared the most?”
“The days were rough and short, the nights worse and longer. It was the greatest comfort to know that I did not have to endure them alone.
“To know that I still had someone to hold onto.”
“Since we had left Julia and Aaron’s farmhouse, we had arrived in a new town. A quaint, quiet place that looked picturesque in the persisting snowfall. We wouldn’t stay – I couldn’t stay – but it was as lovely a place to pass through as any.
“Rasmus was sitting beside me on this crumbling stone wall eating the bread we had acquired from the friendly baker down the road. It was as if time had been spooled back. The cold, hard stone beneath me. The ice crystals glittering around us. The smell of bread perfuming the air. His little body radiating warmth beside me. How similar it was to that first day, how different it was too.
“I reached into the bag of pastries unprompted. There was no blood on my hands and Rasmus was not a stranger anymore. The spectre of a smile appeared on my face as the snowflakes resumed their descent.”
***
“In the wake of our almost-parting, Rasmus grew more playful and lively too. The day we had made angels in the snow, and the day he had been bewitched by the river had been anomalies in his behaviour before; now, it finally fit into the grander whole. He had become so chatty. He would point out every interesting little detail he spotted – painted birds on façades, a headless weathervane, stones in odd shapes, discarded toys waiting for their owners to return – and ask so many more questions whose answers I did not know. The snow continued to be ever-present, but something within him seemed to have melted.
“Now and then, Rasmus would ask me to play some game with him. Hide-and-seek in the ruins of a cathedral. Tag in the serpentine streets of a village. Today, he suggested we play in the snow again.”
Rasmus groaned as he rolled the ball forward and towards Cedric. “Is this big enough, Cedric?” he asked. Cedric had bestowed Rasmus with the task to provide the snowman with a head. That had been meant to be easy enough to do for someone of his height and weight. Both of them were eating better now – their stay at the farmhouse had replenished them, and Cedric had recently taken a small job again, and they had had a little feast afterwards – but all that time in hunger before could not be rectified with such ease and quickness. It appeared as if Cedric had made a slight miscalculation though: Rasmus had managed to roll a decently sized and shaped ball without needing his help. However, while he was not lying on the ground, too spent to stand anymore, and sucking in oxygen like a fish on land, Rasmus’ entire face was red, and his thin arms were shaking within the wide sleeves of his coat.
A pang went through Cedric’s heart. Perhaps he should have approached this differently; this division had been how Cesca and he had built their snowmen in their childhood days, but neither of them had ever been as frail as Rasmus. Cedric let go of his own task, the base sphere, and put his hand on Rasmus’ head, ruffling his hair. “It’s perfect. Come, let’s make the middle one together.”
They ended up making a big snowman and a small one. There was snow in such abundance that they could have created a whole army but two were both Rasmus’ and Cedric’s limit. It had been so long since Cedric had built one, or since he had physically exerted himself that much. Lately, the most he had been doing was walking after all, and at the farmhouse, he had merely been given small tasks.
Exhausted, Cedric let himself fall into the snow. He didn’t want to ponder over the repercussions of this day’s activities – maybe they should have stopped after completing the large snowman –, and Rasmus was so happy about them; whatever revenge his body had in store for him would be worth it.
Cedric closed his eyes, tired and content, and he would have remained in this peaceful state for much longer if he had not been assaulted a second later. The snowball hit him in the cheek. His eyes flew open. Before him stood Rasmus with another snowball in his hand and a radiant smile on his face. “I’ve realised,” he said, “that we haven’t played this so far either!”
A small chuckle escaped Cedric’s lips. Then, he was back on his feet and ready to strike back.
Somehow, they had managed to drag their battered but fulfilled bodies back to town. It hadn’t snowed the entire time they had been on the field; it had only started again when it was time to return. Cedric had opened his coat, held half of it up to shield Rasmus from the heavy snowfall, and Rasmus had hugged him all the way to the next inn – both out of gratitude and necessity. Cold night had fallen upon them so quickly, but they hadn’t minded it for once; their bodies had still run warm with joy.
Now, they were in a small room in an inn, sharing an even smaller bed. It was storming outside. The walls could not keep all the cold out. Rasmus was fast asleep already. Cedric’s heart warmed as he watched his little friend sleep so gently and placidly, all the resemblance to that anxious boy in the alleyway gone. Carefully, Cedric inched closer to him. If their clothes hadn’t been soaked, they could have used their coats as extra blankets; instead, they had to make do with just the singular one provided by the innkeeper.
Cedric shut his eyes. The pain and the anger weren’t gone yet. They had echoed through his mind throughout the entire day: The remnants of Cesca and Chester – of his parents too, albeit even paler – had lurked at the edges of his vision, as he had been caught by old memories – of winter days, both peaceful and filled with fright, and of the fire, always of the fire. He was still restless, still guilt-wrecked, still furious. He would remain that way for a long time; Cedric was very aware of that. But today, for the first time since the fire, he finally allowed himself to think, to wish, to want, that it would not stay like that forever.
***
“My memory crumbles here.
“Maybe it already had, long before.”
The next thing Cedric remembered was standing in front of the inn and carrying Rasmus’ still body. An icy wind was passing by; he hardly noticed it. The view before him was a blur. Passing bodies, waking stores – life all around him.
The innkeeper had kicked them out just now. The night was over. The storm had ceased. There were customers who had paid more for that small room.
The innkeeper didn’t know that Rasmus had died.
Cedric barely knew himself.
“He had not fully recovered from his illness when we had left the farmhouse. I had not realised; I had been too focused on myself to understand. I had frightened him too much for him to confess this to me.”
“‘Like the shadow that departeth; or like a tale that is told; or as a dream when one waketh.’
“Rasmus had lived, had disappeared in that exact manner. I held onto him like I would have held onto that shadow, that tale, that dream, to keep him from dissipating.”
Cedric did not look at Rasmus as he wandered through the town. A silent procession, unnoticed by those around them. The world had only halted, had only quieted for him. He only dropped his gaze at Rasmus when he had returned to the field.
The snow had fallen all night, repairing the damage they had made to this bed of ice. Their footsteps wiped away. The signs of their snowball fight erased.
Merely the large snowman rose intact and proud, albeit powdered and with one arm lost, in this field. It was all the evidence that they had been here yesterday. That yesterday had not been a dream. That that joy had been true and real.
Cedric could not remember if he had cried in the morning upon finding Rasmus unmoving beside him. He could not remember whether he had cried as he had made his way through the town and to this place.
He only knew that he was crying now.
He wanted and did not want to avert his eyes from the corpse. He hadn’t been able to do this, to look upon the dead properly and in quiet peace, before after all, neither to his parents nor to Cesca and Chester. He had solely been able to catch glimpses of them in this state.
They said the dead looked like sleepers. He had thought the same about Cesca.
Quiet, still, but appearing as if they could wake at any moment.
They were liars. How sorely mistaken he had been.
Cedric had seen people sleep. He had watched the soft rise and fall of Rasmus’ chest, his eyes moving slightly beneath his lids, the twitch and turn of his limbs, the voiceless movements of his lips just the night before. Sleepers were not truly still. They were animate, in their dreams and in reality alike.
What was this boy dreaming of that made him equal to his friend?
It had been a kind of mercy that he hadn’t understood back then when Cesca had dragged him away, when the fire had made him flee, to be shielded from gazing upon someone he had loved and only finding an empty shell.
He bedded Rasmus in the snow, right before the snowman. The ground was too hard and too frozen to take him back. Cedric shook with guilt that he could not bury him either, that Rasmus, too, had to make do with only a temporary tomb of ice. Another body to add to the list. Another failure. But it was not quite February yet; snow would fall again. Like it concealed the decay of winter, it would entomb Rasmus’ corpse too. Wrap him in white like a shroud. Reveal him come spring. He had been looking forward to it so much, to welcome its arrival.
It was all Cedric could do. It was the most he had been able to do so far.
Yesterday, they had seen people passing by as they had played. No soul approached this field all day, as if they knew that this place was one of death now. Cedric remained at Rasmus’ side until the grey, cloudy sky was dipped in ink. The pale light retreated. The temperature dropped. All the world was asleep, except for the dead and the unfortunate.
Cedric took out his knife at last. Aaron had cleaned and polished the blade at Julia’s behest but there were no stars visible in the sky to be mirrored in the metal as Cedric cut off a piece of Rasmus’ hair. He had been so insecure about it when they had first met. Cedric reached into his coat and pulled out the flask that hung around his neck on the same thin string that held his family ring. He had found this little thing not long after encountering Rasmus; it had lain discarded and forgotten between some cobblestones, its glass having become cloudy with age. He had picked it up absentmindedly, had only later realised that he could store his mementoes in it. Cesca’s silver and Chester’s brown locks were now joined by Rasmus’ straight, straw-coloured hair. Cedric hoped that, somehow, some part of Rasmus would know that it, that he, had been precious enough to be preserved.
He knelt beside Rasmus for a little while longer, took in his face, fixed his clothes, ruffled his hair, kissed his head for the last times.
The first snowflakes descended, silently and slowly, as Cedric left the field for the forest. His limbs were stiff from the cold, and his steps were heavy from the added weight around his throat.
***
The snowflakes’ dance to earth remained quiet and slow throughout the night. Softly, they tangled in his hair, repainting it white. Gently, they touched the trees, the hills, the ruins, the bustling towns, connecting everything and everyone, all that was alive and all that was dead, with the same threads of ice.
His steps were growing heavier. The night was getting darker.
His friend was watching him with hollow eyes from afar. His sister was wandering many steps ahead of him. The child hovered in his wake.
They were always there. They would always be there.
Reminders of his mistakes and misdeeds. Never letting him to. Never letting him rest.
How could he have ever thought the days would change again?
They had been the same since the fire, since Lennox, since Martin, since that knock on their door. Dark and shadowy, cold and restive.
The wind cut his cheeks. The snow dampened his steps. The ice petrified his limbs. The cold crawled into his lungs.
He was suffocating.
He had been suffocating. The entire day, his entire life.
The darkness around him was thick and inky. He could not see ahead, could not look back. Every path he could choose would lead him somewhere but never away, never forward, never further.
No matter how much he accelerated his steps, he could never overtake his sister, could never escape the scrutiny of his friend nor the weight of the child.
Could never outrun himself.
He had been trying that for almost two months now, to no avail.
A river ran through the forest, silently beneath a sheet of ice. Ghostly fingers brushed his frozen ones, inviting him along.
Memories lurked in the shadows, twirled in his periphery, making his mind spin.
A challenge to see who could climb the highest a lopsided birthday cake riding on horseback blood dripping from a knife the fragrance of a bag of pastries jumping from cobblestone to cobblestone a dead man’s glassy eyes a failed music lesson tumbling into a hole warm hugs having a snowball fight in a lone field a broken vase a scolding a bowl of candy rounds and rounds of card games an alleyway of thugs hiding under beds a stifling church vomiting into a bush finding images in stars making baskets in solitude and wishing for company running after his sister his friend running after everyone and never being fast enough never being quick enough always getting left behind always being alone alone alone alone
The river ran into another.
He halted, enchanted by the view in front of him. Two rivers, feeding into each other, forming a perfect cross between them.
He had never seen anything like that before. What a truly miraculous sight it was; it left him light and hollow, quiet and tranquil for one moment. A long pause for his tumbling thoughts. A place for resolve, for resignation, to bloom.
When that moment was over, his body moved on its own.
He opened his bag and dug within it until he found the battered tin box. They had discovered it days before; it seemed to have stored candy once although the lid showed the weathered image of a bird in flight. Rasmus had taken a liking to it, so they had kept it. Now, he opened it and retrieved the flask and the ring from around his neck once more. The faintest of hesitations; then, he ripped them off the string and placed them in the tin. Their loss did not lighten him; his heart grew heavier when he closed the lid, and even more when he found a hole at the bottom of a tree and put the tin inside.
Twenty-two years of carrying the ring. Two months of carrying Cesca and Chester. One night of carrying Rasmus.
A lifetime of carrying this accursed, miserable heart.
He closed his eyes.
Once more, he would leave them behind, his family and his friends. There was nothing but broken promises between them.
And one wide, wide river.
He reopened his eyes for the last time.
He approached the rivers. There was no fear within him anymore, no fight. What was there to fear, what was there to fight for if there was nothing left?
He stepped onto the ice. A warning he had issued himself long ago rang in his ears as he made his way forward.
The ice had been cushioned by snow. The crack was still loud to hear.
A constellation of spidery lines, growing bigger and wider.
At the crossroads of the rivers, he knelt. The ice groaned beneath his weight.
He saw movements beyond the dark ice. Where would these strange, twinned rivers lead them? Where would they lead him?
He pulled out his knife, weighted it in his hands.
He could not be unlucky today; he could not risk being seen and retrieved.
He did not think that he could do this again if he were to survive.
But he did not think he could bear seeing another sunrise all alone either.
He would leave the remnants of his loves behind to return to them. But, first, he had to leave himself behind too.
He cut lines into his arms and into the faltering icecap. His contribution to this orchestra of cracks.
For one moment, he felt warm – impossibly warm, warmer than he had in a while, his blood running over his skin and seeping into his clothes. An oasis of colour in this landscape of white, in the darkness of the night.
In the next, he plunged into the river.
He felt the biting cold.
He felt nothing at all.
He was weightless. He was infinitely heavy.
He was so, so cold.
Water, water; there was water everywhere. It ran around him and into him.
He did not know where he ended and where the river began.
His eyes were wide open. The water was tinted black.
A red line curled upwards.
He could not reach it. Could not pull himself back.
He fell deeper and deeper, was tipped along the stream.
His limbs burned. His lungs burned.
His heartbeat slowed.
His mind cleared.
It was so quiet, so peaceful.
This waiting dark.
This cold grave.
***
Paris, Seine, France – June 1848
~Cloudia~
How still it was in this city in battle. How quietly fell the dead man’s tears.
There had been a disconnect for Cloudia, between the Cedric of this tale and the one before her. That stern, diligent child, that frightful boy, that hollow man – none of them had ever felt like her Cedric; her smiling and laughing Cedric; her Cedric who had never not gleamed with life. None of their plights had moved her as the story had gone on. They were strangers, unrelated and unknown to her.
But this quiet shudder, these endless tears, this ancient pain she was witnessing just now belonged to her Cedric. The one from the tale and the one before her were one and the same after all.
At some point, Cloudia had lain back down, and their hands had come apart. Now, she sat up again with great difficulty and great strength, pushing away a tower of pillows and peeling after layers of blankets. She took one of his hands in one of hers, reached with her other one for his face. Cedric flinched when their skin collided; he relaxed when she brushed her fingers over his cheeks; he leaned into her touch when she wiped his tears away.
She pulled him onto her bed, did not let go of his hand as she lay down herself nor as she drifted with him into sleep, with one blanket, a few centimetres of space, and two heartbeats between them.
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It should be a non-issue, of course. A mere triviality, nothing more and nothing less. The briefest of touches, the lightest of kisses – even more so than Cloudia’s kiss from last Christmas. But his face was burning red, and his heart was hammering in his chest louder than the bells at St Anne’s.
Cedric shook his head and took a deep breath. He couldn’t possibly appear in front of Newman and Milton, or anyone, in his current flushed state. There was no reason at all to get so worked up about this. Hadn’t he done that and more in his human life before already? It was nothing new; and still and still…
He shook his head again, clapped his hands against his cheeks for good measure. Damn his traitorous body for having moved by itself in Cloudia’s room. Damn his mocking mind for circling around that memory.
Damn his heart for aching for her already, a few minutes after having left her room and being a handful of steps away from it.
Cedric stopped halfway down the stairs to compose himself properly before he continued his descent, with Milton’s tinderbox clutched tightly in his hand. The shimmering metal dug into his palm and kept him focussed on what he had been meant to do.
With wide, quick steps, Cedric went to the kitchen but only found Newman and Lisa there preparing dinner.
“I took him to the wine cellar earlier at his request,” Newman told Cedric without much preamble, for he must have read the question and the slight worry in Cedric’s eyes.
Newman missed the naked anxiety in them, however, when Cedric nodded absentmindedly in return and bolted to the basement.
Shouldn’t Al have been able to guess that Milton should be anywhere in this house besides the wine cellar?
Why, why hadn’t I warned Al about Milton earlier? About the drinking – party trick or not? About the scar?
Cedric opened the door to the wine cellar with such ferocity that he nearly fell into the room. He caught himself on time, staggered for a moment before he pulled himself upright again right in front of the doorsill. And that’s where he remained for now, taken aback by the sight before him.
It was better than he had feared, but worse in a manner too.
For one, Milton wasn’t in the wine cellar at all, strictly speaking; he was in the adjourning room, very much alive, with no empty bottle in view.
The sight of him made Cedric’s heart sink nonetheless, for Milton was scurrying around the sitting room, almost more of a blur than a person, doing this and that and muttering something under his breath that Cedric could barely make out. It was as if whatever thing that usually kept all that nervous energy within him contained had cracked, and it was now flowing out of him uncontrolled and untamed.
Milton halted abruptly in the middle of the mess he had created and looked right at Cedric. It made Cedric’s skin crawl when Milton’s gaze locked with his. His eyes were so blank in that moment, and he was standing so still and quiet in a sea of dissections, pieces strewn haphazardly all over the floor and lying half-assembled atop the table.
Dissections. What a terrible name for something so very mundane and so very harmless. A litter of hardwood scraps, not a mixture of blood and bones and intestines, was covering every centimetre of the ground. Where would have Milton even got the latter from, with every person within the townhouse accounted for, and his own chest intact and not hollowed out?
Cedric very much preferred the word this game would have in the future – puzzles – and could not wait for it to become commonplace in about half a century’s time. It conjured less unfriendly images in one’s mind, though Milton somehow managed to look unsettling right now, nevertheless.
Cedric exhaled slowly when Milton slid his eyes away from him and to something behind him instead. “Kristopher,” he said with a strangely faraway voice. “It is good to see you. Would you mind closing the door?”
Cedric blinked at him before he turned and did as requested.
“Thank you,” Milton said and then straightened up ever so slightly. “Ah – there you are.” He fetched a piece from the other side of the room, clicked it together with the one in his hand, and linked them to a bigger piece that laid on the table. He did that with absurd casualty as if he hadn’t looked like a nightmarish deer in the headlights a mere moment beforehand.
Cedric wanted to point out just that – minus the headlights – when the remark died in his throat. He stiffened when he registered the bottle of wine on the table.
“Ah, that,” said Milton. Cedric hadn’t even noticed that he had turned his attention back to him.
Milton reached for the bottle, resting his hand on its neck. “Do not worry; I do not mean to drink this,” he said. “The Flajolet simply caught my eye earlier. It used to be my cousin’s favourite, and I pulled it out of the shelf because I briefly contemplated asking Mr Newman to share it with me. I swiftly changed my mind though, remembering that it would be unwise and unfair to request such a thing from Mr Newman when he is working. I would wager that Lady Cloudia would not mind much, but Mr Newman certainly would. I also decided to pause my experiment. Going any further with it in someone else’s wine cellar would be tremendously rude. After all, I don’t know how many bottles I would have to drink to get drunk – which is, as you know, the reason why I am conducting this experiment in the first place – and I cannot with any good conscience decimate the Marchioness’ collection in any significant manner, especially not without her explicit consent.”
When he was done with his explanation, Milton tilted his head a bit, hazel eyes bright with curiosity and concern. It confused Cedric for a moment until he realised that he must have blanched while Milton had talked.
“Kristopher, are you all right?” Milton asked.
What a question to be spoken by someone who looked like he could fall apart at any minute; what a question that could only be spoken by Milton in such a state.
“I am fine,” Cedric replied slowly. “What about you?”
“I’m doing well.” Milton turned the puzzle piece he was holding in his hands and raked his eyes over the ones on the ground. “I’ve been busy. I helped Mr Newman clean the kitchen. I helped to check the remaining inventory. I reorganised the pantry six times…”
“Six times?!”
“…and the Marchioness possesses an awe-inspiring number of dissections.”
“Milton.”
“Don’t worry. I will tidy up everything when I’m done. I…” He trailed off when something caught his attention, and he went to set the piece in his hands against another.
Cedric ventured very carefully into the room. “Milton,” he said softly and gestured to the masses of assembled and disassembled hardwood maps. “Would you call this ‘doing well’?”
“Hm,” made Milton and linked together a few puzzle pieces in quick succession. “Yes, it’s as good an activity as any.”
Cedric ran his hands through his hair. “Milton, you are looking especially pale – as if you have seen a ghost or your life pass in front of you. You cannot tell me that excessive pantry organising or dissecting is not frantic behaviour. Earlier, you were even murmuring something while you were buzzing around like a deranged bee.”
“Oh, that? I was reciting a book.”
Cedric stared at him.
“It is a very long poem, really. I memorised it alongside some others for Pa… for my father.” Milton paused briefly before he continued, sorting and connecting pieces with a slightly more increased speed as he did. “It keeps my mind busy, and my thoughts focused. It’s… it’s also soothing despite everything and even if the poem is not the most calming content-wise.”
“I think the only words I caught were ‘sin’ and ‘death’ and ‘sufferance,’ so I believe you on that front, yes,” Cedric replied.
He watched Milton for a while in silence thereafter, a few soft clicks filling the air as pieces were merged back together. Only when Milton completed a puzzle did Cedric realise that these weren’t the shambles of one enormous map at their feet: It were the parts of many. All mixed up together and waiting to be sorted like the peas and lentils in Cinderella.
“Milton,” Cedric tried again. “Would you mind answering me this question plainly and truthfully: Are you losing it?”
Milton stopped mid-movement, let the piece in his hand hover over its neighbour without reconnecting them before he put it down very gently. “No, not exactly,” he began and sacked against a shelf behind him. “It’s… it’s just that the headache hasn’t faded yet,” Milton told him, looking straight back at Cedric again. “It’s… all a bit much, and this is simply what I do every time such a thing happens: I try to find a distraction, and I try to lose myself in it.” He fumbled with his right sleeve. “I know it must look bewildering to others. This is part of the reason why I am here and not upstairs.”
Cedric mustered him intently. Milton didn’t seem to be lying, and he did not know him to be a liar. However, given the fact that he had kept silence about knowing that Cloudia was the Watchdog for two years and told them all that he was in France for a mere “business reason” with barely even alluding to the true extent of it, to Townsend and the weapon smuggling, Cedric was well aware that Milton liked to keep most of the truth to himself. That he preferred telling white lies and half-truths over outright fabrications. He also seemed more off than usual right now too which did not help matters. Cedric was sure that, again, Milton had only described the tip and left out the rest of the iceberg.
“I see,” Cedric said slowly. “I cannot help but feel that it’s our fault – in part at least – that you are doing so poorly right now. Maybe we shouldn’t have taken you with us…”
Milton shook his head. “No. I insisted. You didn’t ‘take’ me. Not exactly. I made you do it. Even if you had continued to refuse, I would have come on my own.”
“We should have tried harder to make you reconsider anyway. Watchdog work is a lot to take in after all. Most would feel unsettled and overwhelmed if they got thrown into a situation like this one as you were, though not even we could have anticipated the scale of this mission beforehand. Who could have foreseen an uprising happening just when we’re in Paris?”
A little smile tugged on Milton’s lips then. He turned his head downwards and ran his fingers over the puzzle pieces next to him. “No,” he said softly. As he went on, his voice grew more robust, his presence more palpable as if he was a ghost and materialising right before Cedric. “I did not mind any of that, actually. You forget that I keep my ears open to underworld business and nothing about it is news to me, and that I put myself very knowingly and very willingly in this particular crossfire. When I found out about Townsend’s pretence and his small success at misusing the resources of the Salisbury Company right under my nose, I didn’t have to go after him personally. It didn’t have to be me who would chase him in France. I could have gone to the police; I could have asked anyone else I knew who might have expertise in such matters. And if you ask Bram, he will agree that I should have stepped back from this matter and let someone else handle it, but…” Milton picked up one of the wood pieces and turned it around in his hand. “This was a mistake I have made. The company and its people were given into my care. This was my responsibility alone, and not something I could have asked anyone else to risk their life for. My life is not more precious than anyone else’s.”
He palmed the puzzle piece and raised his head.
“I meant what I said to Lady Cloudia back in the château before our departure to Paris,” Milton continued. “I have never thought lowly of her because she is the Queen’s Watchdog.
“While the exact circumstances of her work might be inglorious to many, the essence of it I believe to be quite noble. To keep the order of things in balance and punish those who do evil. Of course, everything she does is done at the Queen’s behest – but have the people not benefitted from it all, nevertheless? A change of fate for a potential victim? A little safer world?”
Cedric stared at him, stunned speechless for a moment, before he chuckled briefly, amused. “What a way to look at the Phantomhive family and the Watchdog duty. You would have great difficulties finding someone who shares your sentiments, Milton.”
“I do not mind that too.” Milton opened his hand again and trained his eyes on the puzzle piece on his palm. “What I am and what I do is not noble at all. I am barred from doing what I do; I cannot simply go and hunt down a criminal myself, especially not in this manner, not in this scope. This is not my place, not my right. I am neither a police officer nor anything like the Watchdog. The police would not be pleased if they knew of my actions, and the Queen might not be either – haven’t I, by sheer coincidence, interfered with her Watchdog’s mission in a way? I helped Lady Cloudia, yes, but my ineptitude also extended this case. The police might have difficulties arresting me for this alone because of the status and title I hold, but Queen Victoria might see me punished despite that.”
Cedric stood up a bit straighter. Milton leaned forward to affix the piece in his hand to one on the ground before he, at last, combined the parts next to him, the ones abandoned some minutes back. He ran his fingers over the pieces, smoothed them down, and picked up the next puzzle piece. “If you ask Bram, he will list this as one of my hobbies he dislikes; perhaps, he would even proclaim it his least favourite of them all. Of course, I understand the danger too, and that I am barred from carelessly throwing away my life as well. I’ve only done something like this – looking into a matter of relatively large scale quietly by myself – a few times for that reason. I shouldn’t do it at all, but this is the least I can do with my existence. And…” He bent his head down; his voice was a little fainter, a little quieter, when he continued. “And I like it too. What a terrible thing, is it not? To like something that always starts with someone else’s suffering? Terrible – and selfish too, to put my life on the line when I am not meant to and make Bram and others worry about me just because I like something that I shouldn’t.”
Milton looked up at Cedric again, his eyes soft even though a slight strain brushed the lines of his face. “I have never done Watchdog work, naturally. This is the first time I have run into a revolution too. However, I am not fully unfamiliar or inexperienced in matters like these in general. The matter with Townsend is not the source of my headache, I assure you, Kristopher.” He tilted his head. “Now, what is bothering you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were grasping my tinderbox very tightly when you entered, and your grip has never relaxed since. Not even a fraction.”
Cedric glanced at his right hand at Milton’s words. His hand was balled into a tight fist, knuckles white, around the tinderbox. Earlier, the box’s metal digging into his palm had served him as a sort of anchor. He hadn’t registered the moment the pain had shifted to numbness; he had even been too distracted to notice that he was holding it still. “Ah, right,” Cedric said at last and opened his stiff hand with great difficulty. The tinderbox glistered grey and blue in his palm. “I’ve come here because of it, actually. The Countess mentioned that it used to belong to your mother, and I thought it best to return it to you immediately in that case.”
“You did not have to hurry to me just for that,” said Milton, his eyes fixed on the tinderbox. “I said it was fine for you to safekeep it, but thank you for making the effort nonetheless, Kristopher. You can place it on a shelf or on a table.” He lifted his head. “So, all that has been ailing you is your worry about Lady Cloudia and your worry about me?”
Cedric glanced once more at the tinderbox before he went and returned it to its original position on the table in the sitting room. “Yes, that’s all,” he said without taking his eyes off the little metal box.
“That’s all, truly?”
Cedric met Milton’s gaze. They were now about a metre apart at maximum; Milton looked at Cedric with his eyes oddly alight. “Yes, that’s all that’s weighing on me right now,” Cedric told him. He pointed a finger at Milton. “Between a bullet wound and whatever is ailing you I don’t need any other worries. It’s more than enough.”
Milton mustered him for a moment before that bright look in his eyes faded; only then did Cedric understand that it had been something like curiosity or expectancy.
How weird. Did he want me to be bothered by something else? That was rather unlike him.
Milton hauled himself to his feet. “That’s good,” he said, sounding just the slightest bit absent-minded like before in the kitchen when he had asked Cedric, “When do you think this will end?” Milton reached out for the tinderbox but let his finger hover above it instead of giving it a little tap. Then, he suddenly pulled his hand back and made a step backwards.
Cold surged through Cedric. “Milton…?”
“Hm?” He craned his head to him before he rubbed his eyes and held his face in his hands for a moment. “Sorry, Kristopher. Just a little stab of pain. What were we talking about?”
“How I’ve got enough to worry about between you and the Countess.”
“Ah, yes, right.” Milton’s eyes fluttered closed. Cedric wondered for a moment whether he should ignore Milton’s request from earlier not to touch him. However, before he could close his internal debate, Milton exhaled and muttered something to himself – certainly the continuation of the poem; the bits and pieces Cedric caught of it sounded the same as before, “sinful” and “aethereal” and something about Heaven. Then, he rubbed his eyes again, and his temples too.
“I’m sorry, Kristopher,” Milton said when he reopened his eyes. For a second, Cedric thought they were wet with unspent tears; one blink later, the tears were gone as if they had never existed at all. “It’s a bit…” Milton grabbed a puzzle piece from the table, gyrated it in his hands as he searched the ground for one of its neighbours.
“It would be very helpful if you could just tell me, or anyone else, what is wrong,” Cedric remarked. “So far, you only told me you have a headache and that it’s not because of the situation with Townsend. But what is its source? No one can help you if you don’t confide in anyone.”
Milton halted, froze in his movement – stepping towards a corner, a promising piece of hardwood in his sight. It did seem as if he was considering it for once, telling Cedric what was wrong, and it became Cedric’s turn to look at Milton with great curiosity and expectancy.
In the end, Milton shook his head and pulled on his right sleeve. “I’m sorry; I cannot,” he said quietly. “I can say this though.” He looked directly into Cedric’s eyes. “I am not well now, but I will be again. I cannot say when, only that I will be.”
***
Cedric closed the door behind him, took one step into the corridor – and then another and another and then he was climbing the stairs, out of the basement and to the ground floor. His steps were becoming ever the slightest bit quicker and louder with each one.
He had rounded half the ground floor without aim before he realised that he was brimming with rage. That it was anger that was pushing him forward and forward. One part of him wanted to turn around, return to the wine cellar, and shake Milton. Another wished to run into the cool night, to kick against a façade or wander the unfamiliar dark streets until he couldn’t find his way back anymore.
Not that I ever could.
He did neither, however. Instead, Cedric leaned his forehead against the closest wall and took a deep breath – again and again.
That idiot, that utter fool.
Maybe, it had been my mistake too – to seek him out, knowing a piece of his ailment so well, too well, right after I had recalled the loss of my sister and of my friend. To seek him out, and see him again so battered and so lost, when the memory of that day had been so fresh, that wound rubbed raw anew.
And another about to burst open too.
Cedric buried his face in his hands, inhaled deeply and exhaled lengthily.
Too close, too close. It had been too close together.
He groaned and slammed a hand against the wall; it only made the paintings along it shake but did not allay his heart. He couldn’t calm it, couldn’t prevent it from pumping fury-heated blood through his veins.
Cedric peeled himself away from the wall. His body was shaking and burning so much with seething rage as he headed to the stairs and up to the first floor that it came as a surprise that he wasn’t setting the townhouse on fire while making his way through it. Cloudia’s room came into his view at last. He would have entered it without another thought if his senses had been fully melted away already. They had not been though, and he halted right in front of the door. Lisa or Newman had hovered before it last night; now, it was unguarded. Cloudia was better now; of course, there was no need for this extra precaution.
But Kamden might be feeling differently.
Cedric dug out the necklace, wrapped his fingers around the skull pendant – and recalled suddenly and violently Florentin’s words: of the skull necklaces being a danger, a risk. His grip tightened around the pendant, its edges digging into his flesh. He would never be able to reconcile the pendants’ true identities as instruments of death with all the good they had brought him. Cedric closed his eyes as the anger surged in his chest, set aflame by the memory of when he had first received the skull pendant necklaces.
What is wrong?
He reopened his eyes with a gasp. Cloudia’s voice had just rung loud and clear in his head.
Is Kamden inside? he returned with slight hesitation, having laboured over the right question for a minute.
No, come in.
Somehow, Cloudia had managed to sit herself up enough to light the lamp on her bedside cabinet between her enquiry and Cedric’s entry. She had been covered in a ridiculous number of blankets and pillows before, but Kamden had added a few more since.
“I know,” Cloudia sighed and rearranged the superfluous bedding atop and around her so that it didn’t completely swallow her up. “I just can’t bring myself to protest properly; he’s been so very antsy about this after all.” She met Cedric’s gaze from across the room. He had remained by the door, fearing – faintly, stupidly – that he might hurt her if he approached her now, so full of boiling fury as he was. She had only just recovered; he didn’t want to take a risk, no matter how idiotic it might sound. There was no actual fire in his veins after all. That was an impossibility; he was merely filled with feelings he could not handle. It was too much, this singing heat that wouldn’t be extinguished. He could hardly blame Milton for wanting to numb his senses, to try, even in vain, to lessen the pain, to bury it underneath another that was easier to bear. The thought of Milton only ignited the anger within Cedric further and twisted his stomach.
“Come here now,” Cloudia commanded. Her steady voice made Cedric snap out of his thoughts. She extended her arm out to him and kept her calm gaze on his, beckoning.
He took a few steps forward, clasped her hand in his – he was bracing himself for a burn, for a singe, that, of course, of course, didn’t come to be –, and let himself be pulled into that chair next to her bed.
He expected an interrogation, but Cloudia didn’t say a word. She merely held his hand, her lips pressed into a thin line, and watched him with her dark eyes.
Waiting and waiting until, at last, the fire within Cedric decreased a bit – a little, little bit. The whole of him cracked like firewood. “It’s never been a fairy tale, Countess.”
***
Somewhere, Scotland, Kingdom of Great Britain – December 1753
Heat reached out to his back, but he kept on moving.
He couldn’t remember getting to his feet, couldn’t remember starting to walk.
The night was dark and cold ahead and bright and warm behind him. Smoke was drifting through the air.
He couldn’t remember where he was even heading to. He might have never known at all.
The shouts and cries were muffled in his ears. The fire had been noticed – how could it not have been? It was a fire like a lighthouse, far away but breaking apart the night with its beam and beckoning people towards it – and sending him away.
His movements were sluggish; something within him was forcing him to drag himself forward. He was limping a little; he couldn’t remember when and how he had injured his foot, his leg.
If anyone saw him now, stumbling farther and farther away from the castle with accelerated speed, would they assume that he had set the fire?
Would they think that of the gentleman too as he passed through the night in his carriage?
Though, of course, he wouldn’t be in a hurry. His horses and his carriage would carry him through the dark as leisurely as he had folded his papers and blown out his lantern in the garden.
As if he had all the time in the world.
As if this was yet another ordinary day for him.
His blood was rushing in his ears so loudly that he could barely hear the distant shouts, the crackle of the fire, his feet dragging on the frozen grass – his knees colliding with the ground.
He couldn’t remember tripping, couldn’t remember falling – or getting up again. A moment, numbed, dulled, erased by the fire that ate at him from within. It feasted on his thoughts, his tears, his wants until all that remained was the need to go forward and away.
Away from the castle, away from the bodies, away from his failure.
Even if he longed to head back too. To find that man, to return to their bodies, to embrace that fire as well.
But he was forced ahead and ahead while part of him clung to the castle still, and it tore him up inside, this tugging war.
And now there he was, unable to get up – though he should – and either turn around or move forward, unable to do anything at all.
The world ahead was an inky blur his ears were ringing his bones were creaking his muscles screaming and Cesca was dead and Chester was dead and the castle was burning and he had to leave them behind was now wandering and wandering and he didn’t see where the gentleman went didn’t know where he was going and his sister was dead everyone was dead dead dead dead…
***
He woke up and was blinded by a changed world. Overnight, a blanket of snow had been laid over everything; the white sheen a gentle hand that dampened all sounds, softened all edges, and led all to tranquillity.
He pressed his fists against the frozen ground. It was still greyish brown beneath him, covered in pieces of fallen leaves, not painted white like everything beyond the underside of this bridge.
And everything within him remained ablaze, not soothed into calmness.
Cedric had slept but hadn’t rested. He had moved but was still there. He was in the castle, running around, wondering and wondering and hoping and hoping. He was outside it too. He was in the garden, standing over them, kneeling by them. He was watching the gentleman. He was staring into the fire and watching the castle burn.
He was everywhere at once, and not there at all, and the longer the memory haunted him in his now-awoken state, with the world veiled in snow and ice, the angrier he became at the discrepancy between what he was seeing right in front of him and what he was seeing in his mind.
His sister was dead. His best friend was dead. The place he had called home for most of his life had been eaten away to dust. He had lost everything he had – and the world had turned innocently white, so calm and so bright, while he had been passed out from exhaustion.
He wanted to scream, but his throat was stitched shut. He wanted to cry, but his tears were emptied out. He wanted to let out the unrest boiling him from within, but it had curled up inside him and made itself a home in his hollowed-out body.
Cedric wanted to lie down on the cold ground and wait and wait and wait, until the pain had ebbed and time stilled…
… but his heart kept thundering in his chest, his thoughts kept running erratic in his head.
His fury still warmed his body, still sent red hot blood through his veins.
She hadn’t said a word. He hadn’t told him the truth.
They had been lying and lying to him for weeks and months and years and years.
“I am so glad that we have each other at least,” she had said in that cold manor house.
“Yes, I am still glad that we have each other at least,” she had said underneath that tree in the park.
With her hand always, always, always tucked in his.
Cedric stared down at his fists. He hadn’t opened his hands since he had left the castle behind. He feared that they were frozen forever in this state. With great difficulty, he pried them open again, his fingers stiff from the strain and the cold.
Something prickled at the back of his eyes.
It had been a quick idea, half-formed by his numbed mind. It had hardly even felt as if he was moving out of his own will when Cedric had taken out the knife that he was always carrying with him and leaned down to his sister and to his friend too.
Dying was delicate and harsh, slow and fast. It was never a state; it was always a process. That’s how Cedric had come to learn of it first: There was always someone dying somewhere, wasting away in sickbeds and fading away in deathbeds. And where there were the dying there were the living too – attending to those flickering out of the world and to those who had already closed their eyes forever. When Cedric had been five, and their neighbour had been passing, he had watched her little house come alive in a way he had never seen before: Villagers had gathered to see her; family had travelled to be with her. They had been talking with her or reading to her when talking became difficult. They had been basking in the other’s presence; even when she was gone, people had been sitting at her side still, reminiscing. It had baffled Cedric greatly, for he had not seen most of them at his neighbour’s house when she was fully well. His mother had had to explain that this was how it was meant to be: The dying were not to be left alone, and the dead were only considered that when they were buried in the ground. “No one comes into this world alone,” Cordelia had said, “and no one should leave it alone too.”
The memory, having grown dusty over the years, had returned to Cedric in full force as he had hovered above the bodies of his sister and his friend and realised with great horror and great sorrow alike that he could neither take them with him nor bury them there and then. Not with the fire spreading to consume the castle and its surroundings. Not with his mind and body petrified by shock and grief and anger.
No, this was goodbye. This was how they would have to part forever: In this cold, bleak garden by their burning home, with no ceremony and no preparation – with Cedric having to leave them behind alone. Because there was no time left for anything; because Cesca and Chester had left him behind first, had gone to a place where Cedric could not follow.
But he had wanted to. He had wanted to run after them like he had always done since childhood days – into the woods, through cobbled streets.
To that one last place.
The knife was heavy in his hand.
As was his heart in his chest.
And the ring against his neck.
The Towers family ring – a mourner’s ring with a lock of moonlight hair encaged within, a tether to the past, a line between life and death.
The softest of winds now brushed its fingers against the strands of hair in Cedric’s hands. One set brown, the other silver and bright in the pale winter light.
Hand in hand.
There was her voice again, so loud and clear still, – “I am so glad…” – when the wave came at last, and the ground was flecked with tears and the tranquil air pierced by weeping.
“I am so sorry,” he pressed out between shuddering sobs, “that I couldn’t take you with me too…”
***
Snow was falling softly upon the city. Vendors stood by their booths, bundled in their warmest clothes, shouting about their offerings. Carriages rattled over the snow, making it crunch. Children were running through the streets, jumping, laughing, playing. People were slipping and catching each other on the icy roads. Shovels and brooms were brought out to fight nature, to clear the ground from the frozen rain, all while it kept descending upon them.
Everything around him was cool and alive whereas every fibre of him was both ablaze and so, so numb. All sounds amalgamated into white noise in his ears. Snowflakes landed on him, to no registration.
He had no idea where he was going. He only knew that he had to keep on moving.
And moving and moving and–
Cedric almost hit a building’s façade face-first, having slipped and staggered on the powdered ground; his injured leg was not fully well yet. He managed to brace his hand against it in the last moment to prevent the collision. He took a step back. Snowflakes got tangled in his lashes as Cedric looked up to the belltower and the stained-glass windows.
The sight of the church made him halt, made him remain on that spot and break his perpetual movement for only a little while, and that was all it took: Forcing his body to keep on moving, concentrating on this very action and on nothing else, had kept Cedric warm and his mind occupied. Now, the weather and the guilt were touching him again with their cold fingers, running them along his spine and pressing them on his chest.
Paralysis was crawling up his body, and a storm was making itself at home in his mind – all while the church loomed, tall and dark, against the bright white-grey sky and over his body, and the tendrils of warmth that escaped through the gaps in its wooden door pulled him inside.
Cedric resisted at first. He had arrived at a church of all places, the best and worst place to be. He had been a child the last time he had entered one in good faith; even back then, it had been a rare occurrence as his parents preferred not to mingle, no matter if it made them oddities in every parish they had resided in. Still, this was not a question of faith or of belonging but of icy gusts and warm hearths. Before Cedric knew it, he was standing in the church’s vestibule, the door falling behind him into its lock with a rattle.
Cedric’s stomach turned at the sight of the vast empty space before him: No soul lined the pews or lit a candle or hovered by the altar. He was all alone with his thundering thoughts in this echoing place.
He turned to leave – quick, quick, the cold was nothing; this had been a bad choice, he should have just kept on moving – when he heard steps behind him.
“My child, can I help you?”
It was a tight space, the inside of the confessional booth. Tight, cold, and dark – such a stark contrast to the church at large. All that parted Cedric from it was a mere cloth curtain even, one that did not reach all the way down, and still he felt so cut off from everything as if he had been entombed.
His heartbeat quickened, his chest tightened.
Breathing in was painful; sharp needles were pricking his lungs. A reminder that there was still air to breathe. That he was aboveground. That he was not alone, even if he could not make out the priest beyond the latticed panel in this dimness. Even if the voice that seeped through the small gaps did not reach Cedric’s ears as anything but white noise.
He leaned into it, nevertheless. Rested his head against the dark-panelled wall, let the timbre of the priest’s voice try to extinguish the rattling in his mind.
Noise against noise, cancelling each other out.
But it was only a wish, not a fact.
It was not enough.
The priest’s voice was too soft still, the turmoil inside Cedric too loud after all. All that anger, all that pain, all that guilt within him wanted to boil over and get out. And he didn’t know for how much longer he could stand to keep them at bay, if he could last another day, a month, a century – if he could even manage to make it out of the booth and out of the church without getting buried beneath the weight of it all.
Buried.
His heart fluttered, and then the first word was out. And then the next and the next… all running together, bursting out of him incoherent and unbound.
But it was so, so refreshing. Each word was a weight lifted. There was not enough to say to remove them all; some would have to remain, like stones enduring against time. But it was a start, and he hadn’t felt so light in so long, if he had ever felt truly light at all. What a warm feeling it was, amidst all that residing pain.
Cedric did not quite grasp that his words had stilled. Not until the priest spoke, his words now crisp and intelligible,
“I’m sorry that your sister died such a bad death.”
All at once, they were summoned again. The weight. The fog. The blood rushing into his ears, concealing every sound and confining him to his own thoughts.
Nausea overwhelmed him as they returned, the weight buckling him down with such force and intensity that the brief relief from before felt now like a distant dream.
He got to his feet. The curtain was pulled back. His ribcage seemed ready to burst from the pressure and the pain as he stumbled out of the church and into the arms of the waiting cold.
He clutched his chest, reached with the other hand – the one still balled into a first, the fist that held onto Cesca and Chester, his guilt and his pain – out to search for something to steady himself against. When he touched the church’s stone façade, he drew back his hand as if he had been burned.
Cedric willed himself away – away away away – until there was another building, another stone façade to fall against. He pressed his forehead to the cold wall, pulled his fist against his heart. Snow descended upon him, wrapped him in white. It was not wise to remain as he was, stationary in the freezing cold. But he had no thought to spare for himself. All he could focus on was if they, Cesca and Chester, had been left by the ruin, untouched and uncared for. And if they, now too, were being covered in snow. Then, they would have been buried at least, one way or another – if not beneath earth, then under a blanket of snow. A temporary tomb was better than none.
But how disgusting it was of him, to be horrified that he had been unable to tend to his loved ones in death, that he had not been able to lay them to rest and live knowing that they were at peaceful death now, if for so long now, he had been the cause of bad deaths aplenty:
After all, there was no “dying” in his profession, only cold, static “death.” No gatherings, no last offices, no proper farewells. Just a sudden end – and then it was time to dedicate oneself to something else already.
How horrifically fitting it was, Cedric had thought as he had loomed over Cesca and Chester, that they, too, had found their end so abruptly.
A fitting end for the life they had led.
And still, and still.
Had they not just been children then? When they had been taken out of one existence and pushed into another?
Why would they have to be blamed for that?
Every part of him felt so heavy now.
If they were buried in this same grave, of ice and snow and winter pain, would they find each other then? In that place he wasn’t meant to follow them to yet?
Again, he so wished to just close his eyes and remain as he was until nature had consumed him whole, but his heart was still beating, knocking, hammering against the fist pressed to his chest. A reminder to him, a reminder to them, that he was still alive.
One out of three still on this side of the river.
And had this not been what they had wished?
Cedric took a deep breath, the oxygen he exhaled forming a cloud in the icy air, before he took a step back and away from the wall. It was such a simple action; it was such a hard one too. This step, the next one was the same, as was the next and the next and…
He was on the move again, through the streets, through the town, with no goal, with no end, just the knowledge that he had to keep on going, for himself to tame his thoughts and for them to honour their sacrifice.
Then, in the corner of his eye, a shadow vanished in an alleyway.
He stilled, parting the crowd before and after him.
No, not vanished.
One small shadow pulled into an alley.
His blood was singing, a siren’s song to guide him ahead, and Cedric stepped into the side street and fell back into the past before he registered his strides.
Different town, different street, different weather.
But there was still a child pressed against a wall.
And there was still he. Both the child and the grown man.
Cedric barrelled into them, hair mementoes tucked away, knife raised, catching the bandits unawares. His vision blacked out. When his consciousness balanced itself out again, returned from the then to the now, the thieves were gone; there was only he, the boy, and stains of blood remaining in the alley.
Blood dripped quietly from the tip of his knife and his bottom lip into the rumpled snow. Cedric wiped both and pocketed the knife before he turned to the child, a boy who could not be any older than nine or ten. He was flattening himself against the very wall the thieves had thrown him against. His body was swallowed by his threadbare coat that was too large for his frail frame, and his eyes were wide and blue and terrified.
Cedric tilted his head at the boy. They stood like this for a moment longer, in silent observation, until a memory trickled into his mind. He held out his hands – stained with soot and dirt and blood – in front of him as if he was approaching a scared animal. The words came out rattling and strange, as if they had been distorted by the pull into the present.
“Hey, calm down. I don’t want to do anything to you.”
***
How good it was that he had never lost this habit despite the misery it had caused him, once upon a time. Cedric had only forgotten that it was there, the pouch of money, inside the pocket of his jacket. When had he slipped it there? It had been several days – days; the word sounded hollow in his ears – but the gorge between then and now felt more gaping than that. What had time become even? It was passing in a rush, pushing him along. It was folding inward, staining each and every corner with memories: The snow melted, and he was thirteen years old again, Chester was still a secret kept from his sister, and they were darting through the streets laughing. And then, there was Cesca now too, leaning against a façade in the height of summer, her brown eyes widening at the sight of Chester’s gift of roses. Cedric blinked, and the snow reappeared, though it was one that had fallen in a long past winter. It had been the third one since Lennox and the first one in which Cesca returned Chester’s onslaught of snowballs, and Cedric helped his sister pelter their friend and bury him in a pile of snow.
Cedric closed his eyes. Besides him atop the stone wall sat the boy, and he was chewing his way through a bag of rolls. The boy evidently hadn’t eaten in a long while; Cedric was glad to have reached into his pocket in the right moment to rediscover his money. What a strange sight they had made: He, a hollowed-out spectre of a man who hadn’t bothered to scrub the blood off his hands, and this dirty, spindly thin child who was following him like a sheepish duckling entering a bakery to buy a sack of bread.
The snow had stopped falling. Wind brushed against his cheeks. He concentrated on listening only to the boy eat to drown out all the other sounds, lest they summoned yet another memory he could not bear.
There was a soft tug on his coat. Cedric’s eyes fluttered open. He craned his head towards the boy. He was gazing at him with wide eyes – blue like Chester’s and not like his at all at the same time, because, of course, it was just a colour; just a colour like any other – and opened his mouth hesitatingly to say, “Won’t you eat too, mister?”
Cedric tilted his head ever the slightest, needing a moment to comprehend his words: Yes, of course, he hadn’t eaten in a while too. The taste of the candy he had eaten days before returned to him now, foul and bitter, and those he hadn’t eaten yet turned as heavy as rocks.
“Do you have a moment? I have candy and something to talk about.”
“Mister?” the boy asked.
Cedric rubbed his eyes, scrubbing the memory away, before he reached into the bag and retrieved a bun. They ate in silence then until the bag was emptied and their stomachs filled.
The boy folded and unfolded the paper bag, lining it with creases and tears. “Mister? I am sorry for having been afraid of you earlier. You are a good man. And I’m sorry for not introducing myself earlier; that was rude of me.” He stuffed the bag into his trousers and held a bony hand out to him. “I am Rasmus.”
Cedric eyed the little hand for a moment. Of course, he knew that the boy wanted a name in return, a name for a name like in those faerie stories Cesca had severely disliked, but something within him lurched at this simple request. No one had ever called him by his real name for decades except for Cesca and Chester who were no more.
Wiping the snow away, melting it with the fiery-hot rage that continued to run beneath his skin, he took Rasmus’ hand in his and said, “I’m Cedric.”
Rasmus blinked at him. “What kind of name is ‘Cedric’?”
“What kind of name is ‘Rasmus’?”
“I asked first.”
The ghost of a smile briefly settled upon Cedric’s lips before it vanished again. “My father was not good at spelling words, or names. And you?”
“It’s Swedish,” said Rasmus. “My family is from Sweden.”
“Well, now, I can say that I’ve met a Swede,” Cedric said and jumped from the wall. “It was good to meet you, Rasmus. You should return to your family; they must be worried sick. Take care.”
He had taken a few steps already when he heard Rasmus’ little voice behind him, “I don’t have one.”
Cedric halted and craned his head to the boy. “Pardon?”
“I don’t have a family,” Rasmus repeated and clutched at the hem of his coat. “I used to have one but not anymore. I’m actually on a quest to find another.”
“You are?”
He nodded. “After my parents died and my sister was taken in, I stayed alone in our old house for a while until I realised that it is unusual for potential new parents to come to you, so I thought I should head out and go to them.”
The rage-hot fire was stirred in Cedric’s chest. “What do you mean your sister was ‘taken in’?”
Rasmus cast his eyes downwards. “There was this friendly couple who lived in our street,” he told Cedric, half-mumbling. “They looked after Hilda and me when our parents died. They were very nice to us. One day, they moved away and took Hilda with them. They said they could only take one of us, and Hilda was smaller and more in need of a family, and she did look rather angelic with her blonde locks whereas my hair is straight and boring…”
Cedric wasn’t sure whether Rasmus had trailed off or the blood rushing into his ears had suffocated the rest of the boy’s words. He was seeing red. Who would do such a thing? Take one sibling and leave the other to rot? Who could do such a thing and think of themselves as righteous?
His vision only cleared when Rasmus got off the wall too and hesitantly approached Cedric. “… And I wanted to ask, Mr Cedric, if I could stay with you? Until I have found a family?”
Cedric mustered the boy – he was so very small in this large coat, his straight hair matted, and his eyes clear and wide in his dirty face – and thought for a moment that he shouldn’t take him with him, that Rasmus was still better off alone than with him in his current state. In the next, Cedric recalled the charred Brannan Manor, his parents’ blackened bodies, and Martin and his comrades and Lennox and his people; he then knew that he couldn’t leave Rasmus alone. Rasmus had no Cesca. Had no Chester. No hand to hold while wandering these dark roads.
Cedric held out his hand to the boy.
***
“He stuck with me then, little Rasmus. We would usually sleep outside when it was not snowing at night or when it was not too freezing to preserve our monetary reserves. That first night, however, I searched and paid for a room and made sure that he was washed and fed and held under a blanket and not a bridge.
“Rasmus was so brittle in my arms, like one of the baby birds Cesca used to rescue and return gently to their nests. So small, so fragile, so easy to break.”
***
“Unlike the little birds, Rasmus had no nest to return to; and unlike Cesca, I did not possess the power of reuniting him with his family. Where could I even start? I only had a few names and a young child’s memories, and the world was wide and populous. All I had to offer was my company, and though it was shabby, Rasmus accepted it gratefully nonetheless.”
“We wandered and wandered from place to place; I kept waking to differing days and differing seasons, held ghostly hands while trudging through woods, felt winds that had long blown past nevertheless. I tightened my grip on Rasmus when this happened, turned his little self into an anchor.
“We quickened our pace, moved in zig-zags. We floated through towns; we rushed through villages.
“Time moved forward, was supposed to move forward – as did we; and still and still there was an echo in the woods, an echo in every street and every corner beckoning me to look back.
“Sometimes, it was a simple call. Other times the melody of a violin or the cadence of a fairy tale told from the heart.
“Snow was falling steadily. I wished the cold was all the reason for my aching body.”
“There was no end to my restlessness. No end for Rasmus’ search either. How could one linger, settle into a place and turn it into a home, if they could not find rest first?”
***
“My money was slowly depleting. There used to be a time when I would have gone and found myself some work, no matter how fleeting or wretched it was. But even with little Rasmus in my care, and knowing very well that I was no child anymore and would be punished like any other vagabond if caught, I could not bring myself to do anything at all. I was full of energy, full of rage and hatred still – for Cesca and Chester, for myself, and for Rasmus now too –, and none of that fuel was one that could propel me to work. It would only remind me of times that were no more. It would only push me to go on and on and on.
“Despite that energy, that rage, that pain, I was so, so tired. It was an exhaustion that was bone-deep and unshakeable, and the more it snowed, the deeper it ran.”
“We spent our days wandering, thus. My turmoil hummed in the air, making the silence between us vibrate.
“Rasmus was such a quiet child, near invisible in his mismatched, oversized clothes. Unlike me, he was so full of life still – warm hand clasped in my frozen one, and eyes wide and bright, he followed me into the world.”
“Once, he pulled me down to create angels in the snow. It had caught me off-guard. One moment, we were wandering over a field. The next, I thought earth was taking me back at last. But instead of darkness, I fell into a bed of snow.
“Rasmus prattled on about spring as we drew angels into the ice – how much he looked forward to lying in the warm grass and looking up to the blue sky. His face had been flushed bright from the cold, his eyes glittering with joyful anticipation, as he had told me this. However, as abruptly as this outburst had come, it left in the same manner too: With his words still hanging in the air, Rasmus retreated into himself. The light in his eyes dimmed. He rolled towards me, pressed his face into my coat – ruining his angel in the process.
“He did not have to say a single word. I understood him perfectly well, nonetheless.
“I reached out to him, smudging my angel too, and pulled him close.”
***
They were walking through a forest, its trees barren of leaves and crystallised with snow, when Rasmus’ face suddenly lit up. He dashed through the fragile bushes as quickly as he could with his short legs.
“Ra-Rasmus?!” Cedric called. He was stunned into stagnancy for a moment before he hastened after Rasmus. He swiftly caught up to him, being taller and stronger and having wider strides, and this circumstance opened a door to a decades-old but never-forgotten memory. Cedric slammed it shut and went to his little friend.
Rasmus was standing still and quiet, like a tree, next to a river; his eyes were fixed upon it, a slight glitter shining within them like he had been bespelled.
“Rasmus?” Cedric asked quietly, hesitantly. A shiver ran over his body at the sight before him. He was about to repeat Rasmus’ name once more, to reach out and try to pull him back, when Rasmus lifted his gaze from the frozen river at last and said, “Sorry, Cedric, I just heard the river!” Rasmus presented Cedric with a sheepish smile. “Isn’t it pretty?”
Cedric glanced at it. It was a pretty sight as Rasmus had said, but Cedric failed to understand why exactly he was getting that excited over it. It was a narrow river running through a skeletal forest like any other; it was covered in snow and ice like everything else around them too. “It is,” Cedric replied to placate him and nodded for emphasis.
“Why do you think it is like that?” Rasmus asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The river!” He pointed at it. “It’s all frozen over but it keeps running. And look,” Rasmus moved closer to the edge of the riverbank, “the fishes are moving in it too!” He leaned down a bit more and lost his footing. Cedric’s heart shot into his throat. He reached out to Rasmus blazingly fast and yanked him back.
“You need to be more careful!” Cedric shouted. His voice came out louder than he intended to and carried far too well in this silent forest. “One should never cross a frozen river. The ice is rarely if ever stable enough to hold your weight. You will break through it and die a sure death!”
Rasmus stared at him with wide eyes and distanced himself more from the river and from Cedric too. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I just stumbled.”
Cedric took a deep breath, willing his heart to quiet down. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
The boy looked at him before he went to wrap his arms around Cedric. “I was very scared for a moment,” he mumbled against him.
“It’s all right now. I got you,” Cedric said. He placed a hand on Rasmus’ head and ruffled his hair. When they had met, Rasmus’ hair had been caked in dirt and discoloured brown. Now that Cedric took care to get him washed whenever he could, it was the colour of straw. The dirt had been like a poultice – and whenever this thought crossed Cedric’s mind, he felt unsteady on his feet. His own hair had grown a little too, curling against the top of his ears. The first time Rasmus had seen Cedric’s hair clean when it had begun to grow out, his eyes had widened in wonder. Cedric had had to suppress the urge to find a pair of scissors or simply use his knife to cut it down again then and there. The wish not to spook the boy had been victorious in the end.
“It’s interesting that the fish are alive under all that ice,” Rasmus continued. His words tugged a little at the corners of Cedric’s mouth.
“Is it? Unfortunately, I don’t know why that is so.”
Rasmus peeled himself a bit away from Cedric to look back at the river. “Where do you think they’re going?”
“Wherever the river leads to, I suppose.”
At this, Rasmus grabbed Cedric’s hand. “Come!” he exclaimed, both his face and voice so bright, so cheerful – still, something within Cedric stiffened when Rasmus seized his hand.
“Come!” he repeated, tugging at his hand. The past overlapped with the present again; blink, and someone else was before Cedric, blink, and it was not Rasmus animating him to move.
Cedric’s heart tumbled in his chest, was rocked like a ship at sea. He tore his gaze away from the cheery little face before him – the one that was meant to be Rasmus’, that should have been Rasmus’ – and towards the river. Frozen and alive, stagnant and running. Its sight made Cedric’s stomach lurch, made his lungs contract. It pushed him down, tore him along. He closed his eyes; when he reopened them, he reawakened in the now.
With feeling returning to his body, Cedric rose to his feet and allowed himself to be guided away.
***
Somewhere, Scotland, Kingdom of Great Britain – January 1754
“We occasionally encountered people who took pity on Rasmus and me and invited us into their homes for a meal, a scrub, a bed for the night. It was never for longer than one night – and then, we often slept in a barn, not in the main house – until Rasmus caught a fever.”
“He woke up one day, his eyes fever-bright and his skin scalding hot. I bundled him in my coat and scooped him into my arms before I ran through the cold to find signs of civilisation. We had left the last town the day before and had gone to sleep in the middle of nowhere. Why did Rasmus have to fall ill now? When there was no one around who could help besides me?
“He murmured ramblings into the layers of fabric wound around him and kept a weak grip on my shirt. I was sinking deep into the snow – it had fallen afresh two days before, had fallen strangely too: It had arrived as half-rain, half-ice and landed as soft powder, as smooth as sand and as consuming as the wetlands. Every step I took was a challenge. I was sinking into depths unknown; it took great effort to lift oneself out of it and ahead.”
“Civilisation seemed to be eluding us. Before and behind us were only stretches and endless stretches of pure white; the deep furrows I was leaving the only marks that someone had ever been here.
“But I had to keep pushing on, so I did.
“I could not let Rasmus die. My frozen-stiff grip tightened on his small body.
“I could not be alone again.”
“Then, before the sun sunk fully, drowning us in darkness and taking all the meagre winter warmth with it, I espied a little farm in the distance.”
Cedric’s breath came out in white clouds. His legs were crying out with every step. “We’re almost there; we’re almost there, Rasmus,” he said in-between sharp intakes of oxygen. Rasmus muttered something he could not make out. Cedric was not even sure if his fever-laden words were in English either. Of course, he could be mistaken – his ears must be on the verge of falling off; that’s how cold he was feeling.
The closer he got to the farmhouse, the more another old memory resurfaced: a carriage in the night, a harsh whip, the rough brush of straw against his skin, and moonlit Cesca holding his hand and the pins that led them to freedom. Cold sweat enveloped Cedric’s body. He pushed the memory away. “I’m sure the people there will help us,” he said, more to himself than to Rasmus. “I’m sure they will be nice people who will help you get well again.”
When he, at last, arrived by the door, Cedric shifted Rasmus around, propping him against his shoulder, so that he could free one hand and – hesitate – knock. Once, twice, his hand a frozen ball hammering against the wooden door.
The door creaked open. Cedric could not make out the person who had appeared in front of him. The relief to know that there was somebody here was enough for his body to give up. He could only barely make out the failing of his legs before his mind shut down.
***
Cedric woke up feeling warm and wondered whether he was not dreaming after all. He strained to move his arms and hands enough to pinch himself. A brief, sharp pain sprang through him before ebbing away again.
Not a dream, Cedric thought. Then, coldness rushed back into his body.
He had just moved his arms around and not even brushed Rasmus.
With a start, Cedric sat up and searched the bed frantically for his little friend. It had been over a month since he had last woken up without finding Rasmus next to him. How could he let him out of his sight? Particularly now, when Rasmus was sick and needed him more than usual?
The worst of thoughts somersaulted in his mind as Cedric climbed out of the bed – and slipped right on the little carpet before it and crashed onto the floor.
“What are you doing?”
Cedric flinched at the sound of the unfamiliar, rough voice. A second later, his training returned to him. He jumped to his feet, ready to attack – though he was wearing nothing but a nightdress.
The man raised an eyebrow and sighed. “She should be happy that I love her so much,” he murmured under his breath. “No one else would put up with this.” Then, he straightened up and crossed his arms in front of his chest. The man was tall with blonde hair and green eyes. Although his clothes were obviously old, they were well-kept, and he wore them as gracefully as a general wore his aged uniform. Cedric was rather taken aback by that.
“There’s no reason to panic,” the man said without much warmth in his voice. “You collapsed right before our house, and we took you in and warmed you up. The boy is in another room.” His eyes darkened a little. “My wife has been losing sleep fussing over him all night. She thought it would be best not to keep you in the same place for that reason; she feared you might not get much rest otherwise.” The man glared at Cedric. “Therefore, the polite thing would be not to cause a ruckus, do you understand?”
Cedric stared at the man, dumbfounded.
“I brought up your clothes – washed and dried – earlier. They are on that chair,” the man pointed at it, “so get dressed quietly. Come downstairs if you want to eat something.”
Without another word, the man turned around and left.
***
The smell of food wafted through the house as Cedric, now dressed and coiffed, took the stairs down to the ground floor. The man was cooking something – Cedric could pick out eggs and sausages – and standing with his back to Cedric. His stomach rumbled, and saliva multiplied in his mouth. He kept his mouth shut and himself distanced, lest the man noticed either of Cedric’s embarrassing reflexes – or him overall. The man didn’t seem to be particularly fond of having Cedric around after all.
Nonetheless, the man said without turning around, “Just get here already and sit down.”
Cedric did as he was told and seated himself at the table. A colourful, handwoven tablecloth had been laid over it. It was one of many, many spots of colour in the room: The kitchen tiles were hand-painted with herbs. Drawings depicting nature motifs covered the walls in the dining area. Plant pots, most of them empty now, filled the corners, the ceramic tinted in cheery yellows and warm oranges.
The room where Cedric had slept had been the same. After the initial shock of waking in a foreign place without Rasmus had faded away, and the man had left the attic room, Cedric had taken in his surroundings properly. Every piece of furniture had been painted and re-painted. A few bands of pearls in all colours and shapes had been hung on the ceiling. The blanket under which he had slept had been quilted from a large, colourful conglomeration of fabric pieces. His eyes had hurt upon taking everything in; how strange it was to be bombarded with so much colour, to have found a place as colourful as this one in the middle of a grey, snowy nowhere. Cedric had even had to pinch himself again, to make sure that he had not fallen victim to a Fata Morgana.
And though it was none, this place still felt wrong.
The man handed Cedric a plate with scrambled eggs and sausages. He placed a basket full of bread on the table and gave him a steaming mug of milk too. Cedric stared at the food. He was reminded yet again of the faerie stories his sister had despised so much: Beautiful but wicked creatures leading you to dazzling places, offering you the most fantastic food and drinks. But beware, your life would be forfeit, forever bound to this strange place, if you accepted any and put them in your body.
Of course, faeries only dwelled in myths and legends, not in forests and by rivers, let alone in cosy farmhouses in a desolate area in Scotland.
But hadn’t Cedric entered a stranger’s home once and taken food that hadn’t been his?
Hadn’t he paid dearly for that?
Cedric’s stomach was in knots. Cedric’s stomach rumbled. He had warmed up but he was so tired from yesterday and from the days before. And he was so, so hungry too.
He was not a child anymore. Surely, he was overthinking things, mistaking the echo of a dread from the past with a danger in the present.
Surely, this would be fine and not a damnation.
Cedric ate quickly but as silently as he could – the man was watching and unnerving him. When Cedric was done, the man cleared the table and washed the dishes. Just as he was drying his hands on a towel (white with embroidered daisies), a door flew open, and a woman hurried into the room. She was short with long brown hair that hung loose to her hips. She had been saying something – “Aaron, could you please…” – when she stepped into the room, but she interrupted herself when she spotted Cedric at the dining table.
Her whole face lit up. “Oh, you are awake!” she exclaimed and went to grasp Cedric’s hands. He stiffened at the sudden touch, whereas the woman remained cheerful. “And you’re not so awfully cold anymore! I am glad,” she continued. “I’m sorry that we couldn’t get acquainted earlier: I am Julia, and you have already met my husband, Aaron.” The man – Aaron – made an annoyed sound, by way of greeting.
“I’ve been looking after the boy – your brother? your child? His fever has not broken yet, albeit he seems a little better than upon your arrival. Fear not, someone is already out to get a doctor,” Julia told Cedric.
“Thank you,” Cedric managed to get out at last. The pit in his stomach grew heavier as he took her in. He would have shaken her hands off his if Aaron hadn’t been watching, if he hadn’t known how impolite that would have been. Wrong, wrong, wrong, it echoed in his mind. “I am Cedric,” he continued, “and the boy – he is not related to me at all; he is just a child who has decided to wander with me – is called Rasmus.”
Julia’s eyes glistered. “Rasmus! What a cute name. It is good that I can now call him something.” She let go of his hands and went to her husband. “Would you mind fetching me more water?”
“Not at all,” Aaron said, his voice surprisingly soft. He pressed a kiss atop Julia’s head before he grabbed a coat from a hanger and went outside.
“I need to check on Rasmus again,” said Julia. “Please make yourself at home, Cedric.” She smiled brightly at him. It made Cedric’s skin crawl. “I will make sure that you are informed when the doctor comes; don’t worry.”
***
“Looking back at my memories of Julia and Aaron’s farm, they felt more like a fever-dream than reality.
“I hadn’t noticed it before, but I later learned that there were multiple farms in this area. One that belonged to Aaron’s brother and another that was a family friend’s; that family friend, Ken, had been the one to go and get a physician for Rasmus. They were a close-knit community, and though some of them were a bit prickly or standoffish like Aaron, none of them were unfriendly or outright unpleasant. We had been incredibly lucky to find those people in that time.
“But I could never shake off my unease.”
“Everything at that place had felt wrong. Not because it had been, but because it had been too perfect.
“Everything was too bright, too cheery. I would lie in my bed, stare up at the strings of beads, and tense up. I would run my hands over the painted walls and feel ice fill up my veins. I would look at steaming meals and warm smiles and wish to run.
“It was the place of dreams. The house Hansel and Gretel should have ended up at.
“But it had not been the place for me.
“Not when everything within me clawed to get out, get out, get out, back into the wilderness and away.
“Not when I could not summon the image of Cesca sitting in the living room, flowery blanket across her lap and chatting with Julia. Or Chester tending to the fields with Aaron or Ken. Not when their absence inside this place grieved me, not when their presence before it startled me.
“They would stand there, quiet imaginary ghosts as they were, some metres in the distance, looking at the farmhouse but never coming close.
“Even if they had been alive, this would not have been the place for them.”
“I would stand by the windows, watching the memory of them.
“And it hurt and it hurt.
“I should have wanted to stay.
“If, like them, I had not grown so accustomed to the witch’s cottage already.”
“How sad it was, that this was not a Faerieland after all.”
***
“The doctor came, inspected Rasmus, and instructed Julia how to nurse him best. She didn’t ask for anything in return, but Aaron made me help in the house, carry food and wood and sweep the floors. Apparently, he had made that remark when we had first met because Julia had the habit to take in all kinds of injured animals, restore their health, and set them free. Rasmus – and I, to a lesser extent – was the first person she had invited into her home for that reason. His explanation made my heart clench. Maybe in another time, in another life, Julia and Cesca would have got along after all.”
“Rasmus’ fever broke a few days later, though he remained weakened and had to stay in bed. He was very happy to see me again, and I was happy to see him.
“He was treated like a little prince by Julia and the others. Even Aaron warmed up to him eventually, albeit while keeping a distance still.”
He could not sleep again – after that very first night, he had been unable to find any rest in this cluttered, suffocating house – which meant that he was left wholly undisturbed by Rasmus crawling into his bed in the small hours of the day. It was pitch-black outside, and the temperatures were so low one might freeze solid upon stepping out of the door; there was no warmth and no benevolence beyond the frames of this bed. At this hour, in this darkness and cold, only the dead and the unfortunate were awake.
It was not the time for young boys recovering from sicknesses to wander around. But unwelcome he was not. Having Rasmus’ warm little body nudged against his again was the first normal thing for Cedric in a week. The universe had restored a bit of its balance. Cedric threw an arm around Rasmus, righting the universe even more.
Rasmus stilled then, remained quiet for so long thereafter that Cedric believed him to have fallen asleep until Rasmus muttered something. His words were unintelligible at first, muffled by the night and the fabric of Cedric’s shirt; Cedric had to ask him to speak up for the tones to take form.
“They asked me to stay,” Rasmus whispered.
The scale had fallen over. Cedric’s ears were numb as Rasmus continued: He had told Julia and Aaron about his quest to find a family and about the reason why he was looking for one in the first place. In return, they had offered to take him in, permanently, because their wishes aligned. They had had no luck having any children of their own; they would have adopted a child long ago but there were no orphanages anywhere close-by, and they could not afford to travel to one. How miraculous it had been then, that they – the boy in search of parents, and the spouses in search of a child – had crossed paths in the middle of nowhere. But, of course, Aaron and Julia did not want to keep Rasmus here by force, and, of course, Rasmus had not arrived here alone.
“If I stayed,” Rasmus asked, a quiver in his voice, “would you stay too?”
How easy things would have been if Cedric had had the strength to turn around and leave after handing the ailing Rasmus over. If the dread he had felt upon stepping on the porch and Cesca’s memory at the edge of his vision had pulled him away, instead of the cold and exhaustion pulling him down.
Wrong turn, wrong choice.
The correct answer having come too late.
And now there he was again, before yet another end that was so much worse than the one he could have had.
It was too dark to see her; the walls were too thick, and the wind too loud to hear her. But he saw and heard Cesca nevertheless, her voice in his mind forever crisp and clear.
***
Rasmus had drifted into sleep while Cedric had pondered over his response. There could only be one, one true one, one right one; nonetheless, the search for it had left him sickened and paralysed.
As the first rays of sunshine brushed against the embroidered curtains, Cedric peeled himself away from Rasmus and slipped out of bed. His heart thundered in his chest. Cesca rapped at the window. He had to get out. Get out and run and run and run.
Cedric changed into his clothes – cleaned and fixed, curtesy of Julia; he suppressed the urge to tear off the patches and rip apart the stitching – and grabbed his bag; in all the time he had been here, he had never unpacked. He was almost ready to go, to vanish into the wilderness all alone again, with only ghosts chasing him. All that was left was to sneak downstairs, put on his jacket and shoes, steal into the new day…
… and not look back.
Cedric halted at the doorsill. The stairs were right ahead. He hovered where he stood. Rasmus was still asleep. Little Rasmus, all the joy he had left in this world. Cedric itched to turn, to fidget with the blankets, to pat his head, to kiss his hair – but all of that would ruin everything. He fixed his eyes on the staircase, descended them in quiet hurry. He shrugged on his coat, briefly touched the repaired parts, and stuck his feet into his shoes. Julia and her husband had tended to them too. They were rather old and had been caked with blood more than once. She had polished them to the best of her ability and even replaced the shoelaces while Aaron had rightened the soles.
This was a good place, even if it was not the place for him. It would be for Rasmus. Aaron and Julia would be the best of parents for him and love him dearly until the end of their days, whereas Cedric would fade out of Rasmus’ memory.
Cedric tied his laces faster; it was time to leave.
The early morning sun was too weak to push against the cold. Ice wrapped its fingers around Cedric the instant he stepped out of the farmhouse. Maybe he would have indeed frozen solid if this rage, this panic, this hurt that made him walk and run and go away and away had died inside that house. If it could have been eased, tamed, pacified by the love of strangers, by the frightened, shaky question from the only living soul he held dear. Instead, it had grown wild and restless within him.
He couldn’t await to unwind that coiled turmoil within him, even if his heart was in lament.
He made his way towards Chester and Cesca. They were waiting for him beyond the freshly fallen snow, at the edge of the forest. Cedric had made it to the halfway point when the quiet of the waking world was ruptured by a shout.
“Cedric!”
Cedric hadn’t turned in the house; he wouldn’t turn now. But like in the house, he stopped. The snow behind him crunched. “Cedric!” Rasmus called in-between huffs. “How… how… how could you just leave without a goodbye?”
When Rasmus went on, Cedric could not hear his steps anymore, just his tear-stained voice.
“You could have just said that I should say ‘no’! You could have asked me to come with you. Why didn’t you ask me to come with you…”
Cedric knew he should move, make a run for the woods or pick Rasmus up and deliver him to Aaron again. Only this time, he would do it properly. But he could not go ahead, and he did not dare to turn around, even to bring Rasmus back to the farmhouse.
“I… I don’t want to stay here without you. I want to stay with you,” Rasmus pressed out. “Cedric, please… please don’t leave me alone too.”
“Selfish heart, treacherous body.
“If only I had been stronger in that moment.”
“It has been nearly a hundred years, and I keep wondering what would have happened if I had had the strength to walk away that day.”
Rasmus’ coat was half-buttoned, and his scarf hung from his hand. His eyes, watery and red-rimmed, widened slightly at Cedric’s sight.
“Please don’t leave me behind,” Rasmus cried, and all Cedric could think of was himself.
He stepped forward, his heart and legs made of lead.
Always, always saying those words to Cesca, to Chester, out loud and in his mind.
He closed Rasmus’ coat properly without a word.
Always, always saying those words when they had been alive and now when they weren’t.
He took the scarf out of Rasmus’ hand, winding it properly around his throat. He kept the end of it grasped in his hands.
Always, always wishing for the wrong things.
***
“He clung to me more than ever before in the days that followed. He would hug and embrace me a lot, would hold my hand tighter than before. I must have scared him more than I had fathomed, and this thought made my heart grow heavier with guilt.
“How could I have ever contemplated to do the very thing to him that I had always feared the most?”
“The days were rough and short, the nights worse and longer. It was the greatest comfort to know that I did not have to endure them alone.
“To know that I still had someone to hold onto.”
“Since we had left Julia and Aaron’s farmhouse, we had arrived in a new town. A quaint, quiet place that looked picturesque in the persisting snowfall. We wouldn’t stay – I couldn’t stay – but it was as lovely a place to pass through as any.
“Rasmus was sitting beside me on this crumbling stone wall eating the bread we had acquired from the friendly baker down the road. It was as if time had been spooled back. The cold, hard stone beneath me. The ice crystals glittering around us. The smell of bread perfuming the air. His little body radiating warmth beside me. How similar it was to that first day, how different it was too.
“I reached into the bag of pastries unprompted. There was no blood on my hands and Rasmus was not a stranger anymore. The spectre of a smile appeared on my face as the snowflakes resumed their descent.”
***
“In the wake of our almost-parting, Rasmus grew more playful and lively too. The day we had made angels in the snow, and the day he had been bewitched by the river had been anomalies in his behaviour before; now, it finally fit into the grander whole. He had become so chatty. He would point out every interesting little detail he spotted – painted birds on façades, a headless weathervane, stones in odd shapes, discarded toys waiting for their owners to return – and ask so many more questions whose answers I did not know. The snow continued to be ever-present, but something within him seemed to have melted.
“Now and then, Rasmus would ask me to play some game with him. Hide-and-seek in the ruins of a cathedral. Tag in the serpentine streets of a village. Today, he suggested we play in the snow again.”
Rasmus groaned as he rolled the ball forward and towards Cedric. “Is this big enough, Cedric?” he asked. Cedric had bestowed Rasmus with the task to provide the snowman with a head. That had been meant to be easy enough to do for someone of his height and weight. Both of them were eating better now – their stay at the farmhouse had replenished them, and Cedric had recently taken a small job again, and they had had a little feast afterwards – but all that time in hunger before could not be rectified with such ease and quickness. It appeared as if Cedric had made a slight miscalculation though: Rasmus had managed to roll a decently sized and shaped ball without needing his help. However, while he was not lying on the ground, too spent to stand anymore, and sucking in oxygen like a fish on land, Rasmus’ entire face was red, and his thin arms were shaking within the wide sleeves of his coat.
A pang went through Cedric’s heart. Perhaps he should have approached this differently; this division had been how Cesca and he had built their snowmen in their childhood days, but neither of them had ever been as frail as Rasmus. Cedric let go of his own task, the base sphere, and put his hand on Rasmus’ head, ruffling his hair. “It’s perfect. Come, let’s make the middle one together.”
They ended up making a big snowman and a small one. There was snow in such abundance that they could have created a whole army but two were both Rasmus’ and Cedric’s limit. It had been so long since Cedric had built one, or since he had physically exerted himself that much. Lately, the most he had been doing was walking after all, and at the farmhouse, he had merely been given small tasks.
Exhausted, Cedric let himself fall into the snow. He didn’t want to ponder over the repercussions of this day’s activities – maybe they should have stopped after completing the large snowman –, and Rasmus was so happy about them; whatever revenge his body had in store for him would be worth it.
Cedric closed his eyes, tired and content, and he would have remained in this peaceful state for much longer if he had not been assaulted a second later. The snowball hit him in the cheek. His eyes flew open. Before him stood Rasmus with another snowball in his hand and a radiant smile on his face. “I’ve realised,” he said, “that we haven’t played this so far either!”
A small chuckle escaped Cedric’s lips. Then, he was back on his feet and ready to strike back.
Somehow, they had managed to drag their battered but fulfilled bodies back to town. It hadn’t snowed the entire time they had been on the field; it had only started again when it was time to return. Cedric had opened his coat, held half of it up to shield Rasmus from the heavy snowfall, and Rasmus had hugged him all the way to the next inn – both out of gratitude and necessity. Cold night had fallen upon them so quickly, but they hadn’t minded it for once; their bodies had still run warm with joy.
Now, they were in a small room in an inn, sharing an even smaller bed. It was storming outside. The walls could not keep all the cold out. Rasmus was fast asleep already. Cedric’s heart warmed as he watched his little friend sleep so gently and placidly, all the resemblance to that anxious boy in the alleyway gone. Carefully, Cedric inched closer to him. If their clothes hadn’t been soaked, they could have used their coats as extra blankets; instead, they had to make do with just the singular one provided by the innkeeper.
Cedric shut his eyes. The pain and the anger weren’t gone yet. They had echoed through his mind throughout the entire day: The remnants of Cesca and Chester – of his parents too, albeit even paler – had lurked at the edges of his vision, as he had been caught by old memories – of winter days, both peaceful and filled with fright, and of the fire, always of the fire. He was still restless, still guilt-wrecked, still furious. He would remain that way for a long time; Cedric was very aware of that. But today, for the first time since the fire, he finally allowed himself to think, to wish, to want, that it would not stay like that forever.
***
“My memory crumbles here.
“Maybe it already had, long before.”
The next thing Cedric remembered was standing in front of the inn and carrying Rasmus’ still body. An icy wind was passing by; he hardly noticed it. The view before him was a blur. Passing bodies, waking stores – life all around him.
The innkeeper had kicked them out just now. The night was over. The storm had ceased. There were customers who had paid more for that small room.
The innkeeper didn’t know that Rasmus had died.
Cedric barely knew himself.
“He had not fully recovered from his illness when we had left the farmhouse. I had not realised; I had been too focused on myself to understand. I had frightened him too much for him to confess this to me.”
“‘Like the shadow that departeth; or like a tale that is told; or as a dream when one waketh.’
“Rasmus had lived, had disappeared in that exact manner. I held onto him like I would have held onto that shadow, that tale, that dream, to keep him from dissipating.”
Cedric did not look at Rasmus as he wandered through the town. A silent procession, unnoticed by those around them. The world had only halted, had only quieted for him. He only dropped his gaze at Rasmus when he had returned to the field.
The snow had fallen all night, repairing the damage they had made to this bed of ice. Their footsteps wiped away. The signs of their snowball fight erased.
Merely the large snowman rose intact and proud, albeit powdered and with one arm lost, in this field. It was all the evidence that they had been here yesterday. That yesterday had not been a dream. That that joy had been true and real.
Cedric could not remember if he had cried in the morning upon finding Rasmus unmoving beside him. He could not remember whether he had cried as he had made his way through the town and to this place.
He only knew that he was crying now.
He wanted and did not want to avert his eyes from the corpse. He hadn’t been able to do this, to look upon the dead properly and in quiet peace, before after all, neither to his parents nor to Cesca and Chester. He had solely been able to catch glimpses of them in this state.
They said the dead looked like sleepers. He had thought the same about Cesca.
Quiet, still, but appearing as if they could wake at any moment.
They were liars. How sorely mistaken he had been.
Cedric had seen people sleep. He had watched the soft rise and fall of Rasmus’ chest, his eyes moving slightly beneath his lids, the twitch and turn of his limbs, the voiceless movements of his lips just the night before. Sleepers were not truly still. They were animate, in their dreams and in reality alike.
What was this boy dreaming of that made him equal to his friend?
It had been a kind of mercy that he hadn’t understood back then when Cesca had dragged him away, when the fire had made him flee, to be shielded from gazing upon someone he had loved and only finding an empty shell.
He bedded Rasmus in the snow, right before the snowman. The ground was too hard and too frozen to take him back. Cedric shook with guilt that he could not bury him either, that Rasmus, too, had to make do with only a temporary tomb of ice. Another body to add to the list. Another failure. But it was not quite February yet; snow would fall again. Like it concealed the decay of winter, it would entomb Rasmus’ corpse too. Wrap him in white like a shroud. Reveal him come spring. He had been looking forward to it so much, to welcome its arrival.
It was all Cedric could do. It was the most he had been able to do so far.
Yesterday, they had seen people passing by as they had played. No soul approached this field all day, as if they knew that this place was one of death now. Cedric remained at Rasmus’ side until the grey, cloudy sky was dipped in ink. The pale light retreated. The temperature dropped. All the world was asleep, except for the dead and the unfortunate.
Cedric took out his knife at last. Aaron had cleaned and polished the blade at Julia’s behest but there were no stars visible in the sky to be mirrored in the metal as Cedric cut off a piece of Rasmus’ hair. He had been so insecure about it when they had first met. Cedric reached into his coat and pulled out the flask that hung around his neck on the same thin string that held his family ring. He had found this little thing not long after encountering Rasmus; it had lain discarded and forgotten between some cobblestones, its glass having become cloudy with age. He had picked it up absentmindedly, had only later realised that he could store his mementoes in it. Cesca’s silver and Chester’s brown locks were now joined by Rasmus’ straight, straw-coloured hair. Cedric hoped that, somehow, some part of Rasmus would know that it, that he, had been precious enough to be preserved.
He knelt beside Rasmus for a little while longer, took in his face, fixed his clothes, ruffled his hair, kissed his head for the last times.
The first snowflakes descended, silently and slowly, as Cedric left the field for the forest. His limbs were stiff from the cold, and his steps were heavy from the added weight around his throat.
***
The snowflakes’ dance to earth remained quiet and slow throughout the night. Softly, they tangled in his hair, repainting it white. Gently, they touched the trees, the hills, the ruins, the bustling towns, connecting everything and everyone, all that was alive and all that was dead, with the same threads of ice.
His steps were growing heavier. The night was getting darker.
His friend was watching him with hollow eyes from afar. His sister was wandering many steps ahead of him. The child hovered in his wake.
They were always there. They would always be there.
Reminders of his mistakes and misdeeds. Never letting him to. Never letting him rest.
How could he have ever thought the days would change again?
They had been the same since the fire, since Lennox, since Martin, since that knock on their door. Dark and shadowy, cold and restive.
The wind cut his cheeks. The snow dampened his steps. The ice petrified his limbs. The cold crawled into his lungs.
He was suffocating.
He had been suffocating. The entire day, his entire life.
The darkness around him was thick and inky. He could not see ahead, could not look back. Every path he could choose would lead him somewhere but never away, never forward, never further.
No matter how much he accelerated his steps, he could never overtake his sister, could never escape the scrutiny of his friend nor the weight of the child.
Could never outrun himself.
He had been trying that for almost two months now, to no avail.
A river ran through the forest, silently beneath a sheet of ice. Ghostly fingers brushed his frozen ones, inviting him along.
Memories lurked in the shadows, twirled in his periphery, making his mind spin.
A challenge to see who could climb the highest a lopsided birthday cake riding on horseback blood dripping from a knife the fragrance of a bag of pastries jumping from cobblestone to cobblestone a dead man’s glassy eyes a failed music lesson tumbling into a hole warm hugs having a snowball fight in a lone field a broken vase a scolding a bowl of candy rounds and rounds of card games an alleyway of thugs hiding under beds a stifling church vomiting into a bush finding images in stars making baskets in solitude and wishing for company running after his sister his friend running after everyone and never being fast enough never being quick enough always getting left behind always being alone alone alone alone
The river ran into another.
He halted, enchanted by the view in front of him. Two rivers, feeding into each other, forming a perfect cross between them.
He had never seen anything like that before. What a truly miraculous sight it was; it left him light and hollow, quiet and tranquil for one moment. A long pause for his tumbling thoughts. A place for resolve, for resignation, to bloom.
When that moment was over, his body moved on its own.
He opened his bag and dug within it until he found the battered tin box. They had discovered it days before; it seemed to have stored candy once although the lid showed the weathered image of a bird in flight. Rasmus had taken a liking to it, so they had kept it. Now, he opened it and retrieved the flask and the ring from around his neck once more. The faintest of hesitations; then, he ripped them off the string and placed them in the tin. Their loss did not lighten him; his heart grew heavier when he closed the lid, and even more when he found a hole at the bottom of a tree and put the tin inside.
Twenty-two years of carrying the ring. Two months of carrying Cesca and Chester. One night of carrying Rasmus.
A lifetime of carrying this accursed, miserable heart.
He closed his eyes.
Once more, he would leave them behind, his family and his friends. There was nothing but broken promises between them.
And one wide, wide river.
He reopened his eyes for the last time.
He approached the rivers. There was no fear within him anymore, no fight. What was there to fear, what was there to fight for if there was nothing left?
He stepped onto the ice. A warning he had issued himself long ago rang in his ears as he made his way forward.
The ice had been cushioned by snow. The crack was still loud to hear.
A constellation of spidery lines, growing bigger and wider.
At the crossroads of the rivers, he knelt. The ice groaned beneath his weight.
He saw movements beyond the dark ice. Where would these strange, twinned rivers lead them? Where would they lead him?
He pulled out his knife, weighted it in his hands.
He could not be unlucky today; he could not risk being seen and retrieved.
He did not think that he could do this again if he were to survive.
But he did not think he could bear seeing another sunrise all alone either.
He would leave the remnants of his loves behind to return to them. But, first, he had to leave himself behind too.
He cut lines into his arms and into the faltering icecap. His contribution to this orchestra of cracks.
For one moment, he felt warm – impossibly warm, warmer than he had in a while, his blood running over his skin and seeping into his clothes. An oasis of colour in this landscape of white, in the darkness of the night.
In the next, he plunged into the river.
He felt the biting cold.
He felt nothing at all.
He was weightless. He was infinitely heavy.
He was so, so cold.
Water, water; there was water everywhere. It ran around him and into him.
He did not know where he ended and where the river began.
His eyes were wide open. The water was tinted black.
A red line curled upwards.
He could not reach it. Could not pull himself back.
He fell deeper and deeper, was tipped along the stream.
His limbs burned. His lungs burned.
His heartbeat slowed.
His mind cleared.
It was so quiet, so peaceful.
This waiting dark.
This cold grave.
***
Paris, Seine, France – June 1848
~Cloudia~
How still it was in this city in battle. How quietly fell the dead man’s tears.
There had been a disconnect for Cloudia, between the Cedric of this tale and the one before her. That stern, diligent child, that frightful boy, that hollow man – none of them had ever felt like her Cedric; her smiling and laughing Cedric; her Cedric who had never not gleamed with life. None of their plights had moved her as the story had gone on. They were strangers, unrelated and unknown to her.
But this quiet shudder, these endless tears, this ancient pain she was witnessing just now belonged to her Cedric. The one from the tale and the one before her were one and the same after all.
At some point, Cloudia had lain back down, and their hands had come apart. Now, she sat up again with great difficulty and great strength, pushing away a tower of pillows and peeling after layers of blankets. She took one of his hands in one of hers, reached with her other one for his face. Cedric flinched when their skin collided; he relaxed when she brushed her fingers over his cheeks; he leaned into her touch when she wiped his tears away.
She pulled him onto her bed, did not let go of his hand as she lay down herself nor as she drifted with him into sleep, with one blanket, a few centimetres of space, and two heartbeats between them.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Vincent is far from gifted at fencing. Cloudia fears that is her blood at work, smothering whatever talent for swordplay that Cedric might have passed on. Despite this, Vincent remains enthusiastic at the sport, for at the end of the day he is but a boy; running around with a sword in his hand remains the greatest thrill of his young life.
Francis, forever incensed to be left out of whatever her older brother was doing, had begged to join.
New Undertaker drawings have me losing my mind, here's a snippet of a Claudiataker fic entry I'm working on for my Nightingale's Lament series
"No," Cloudia agrees with a nod. "I suppose Poe considered The Black Death a little too passé for the modern audience." She pauses and angles her head towards him, her eyes sparkling through the ornate mask, outshining any gem on her person. "Present company excluded, of course."
She has no idea how very right she is - unless, of course, she does.
He keeps his face impassive, his tone apathetic, but she is always seeing more of him than he intends. "Lady Phantomhive, if by some small chance the plague does make a return tonight, I can assure you I will have had nothing to do with it."
She hums doubtfully. "Ah, but what other reason might you have for attending tonight's soirée?"
"Other than spreading darkness and decay?" Cedric asks wryly. "The same as most here, I would think. I received an invitation."
"Did you now?" Her frown is hidden beneath her mask as she looks out again to the other guests, the couples who had begun dancing in a swirl of bright skirts and feathers, but he sees it all the same. "My, how curious. I wonder what other tradespeople may be among us tonight, unrecognized?"
"The thrill of a masked ball," Cedric deadpans, and her resulting huff of laughter satisfies him more than he might ever admit.
"I do not know how I could have ever doubted your enthusiasm for such a gathering, Monsieur, do forgive me." Cloudia turns to him, considering. "Although, in the spirit of the evening, I suppose we ought to leave titles at the door?"
And all decorum with it, no doubt. He might have expected this as soon as he saw her. "Ought we?" he prompts, slightly wary.
"Well, who is to say we recognized one another in our costumes?"
Only, they had. She had spotted him with an immediacy that unnerved him, for his methods of achieving obscurity were not limited to the masks and cloaks of their fellow partygoers, and Cedric…
Cedric feared he would know Cloudia Phantomhive anywhere.
New Undertaker drawings have me losing my mind, here's a snippet of a Claudiataker fic entry I'm working on for my Nightingale's Lament series
"No," Cloudia agrees with a nod. "I suppose Poe considered The Black Death a little too passé for the modern audience." She pauses and angles her head towards him, her eyes sparkling through the ornate mask, outshining any gem on her person. "Present company excluded, of course."
She has no idea how very right she is - unless, of course, she does.
He keeps his face impassive, his tone apathetic, but she is always seeing more of him than he intends. "Lady Phantomhive, if by some small chance the plague does make a return tonight, I can assure you I will have had nothing to do with it."
She hums doubtfully. "Ah, but what other reason might you have for attending tonight's soirée?"
"Other than spreading darkness and decay?" Cedric asks wryly. "The same as most here, I would think. I received an invitation."
"Did you now?" Her frown is hidden beneath her mask as she looks out again to the other guests, the couples who had begun dancing in a swirl of bright skirts and feathers, but he sees it all the same. "My, how curious. I wonder what other tradespeople may be among us tonight, unrecognized?"
"The thrill of a masked ball," Cedric deadpans, and her resulting huff of laughter satisfies him more than he might ever admit.
"I do not know how I could have ever doubted your enthusiasm for such a gathering, Monsieur, do forgive me." Cloudia turns to him, considering. "Although, in the spirit of the evening, I suppose we ought to leave titles at the door?"
And all decorum with it, no doubt. He might have expected this as soon as he saw her. "Ought we?" he prompts, slightly wary.
"Well, who is to say we recognized one another in our costumes?"
Only, they had. She had spotted him with an immediacy that unnerved him, for his methods of achieving obscurity were not limited to the masks and cloaks of their fellow partygoers, and Cedric…
Cedric feared he would know Cloudia Phantomhive anywhere.
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