“When you were born,” Goody told her, “I had loved nothing and no one for so long. I had forgotten my name, my language, my history, in the dry eternity of my servitude. No task brought me pleasure. Nothing moved me. I was animate but nearly mindless, unmotivated by anything but the compulsion to obey.”
She spoke slowly, deliberately, the way she did everything, her voice so deep it seemed to come from beneath the grass. She and Lanie lay side by side on their backs: Goody with her hands folded upon her breast, Lanie’s fingers intertwined behind her head, and the sorkhadari tree darkly luminous above them, not yet limned in any but the promise of daylight. The damp earth bent around their bodies like a table burdened by too great a feast, and when Goody turned her head in the grass to look at Lanie, the earth moved.
“And then…” she said.
Lanie closed her eyes, waiting. This was a story she had never heard before. The last story Goody would ever tell her.
“And then, twenty-three years ago, there was born to the Stoneses a sickly babe. A wasted, wretched, shriveled creature who could not sleep in a house that by day stank of death and by night rang with the cries of the dying. She could not bear the touch of her mother’s cold hands or her father’s rare caresses. Because of this, they ordered me to care for her. They were Stoneses; I was under their command. Care for her, they said, knowing I must obey. Well. You know, Mizka, and I know, that there are many ways I might have obeyed. I might have cared for her by throwing her down a well. Or bricking her up in the cellar. Or exposing her in the woods. Set against all the tales of all the necromancers of history—especially those of that house—such actions might be considered care indeed. Call it, even, mercy.”
Lanie shivered. She had borne witness to enough of Goody’s interpretations of Stonesish commands over the years (hundreds, thousands, of them) to understand that Goody might have justified so much—or more—to herself.
“Instead, I cared for the babe by cleaning up her messes. Rocking her at night. Making sure that some of what she ate stayed inside her belly. I did this… almost… mindlessly.” Goody paused. “But sometimes… sometimes, in my bleakest moments, sitting near her crib, covered in her drool and spit-up, listening to her beseeching, mewling, wordless whimpers, I remembered the faintest strains of a lullaby I once knew.”
At this, Lanie opened her eyes. The dark needles and bright berries of the sorkhadari tree were beginning to sparkle with new light, but she was not sure if this was the breaking of dawn or of panthauma. She dared not interrupt Goody to speculate.
But she berated herself for never having conceived of it before: how, even as a helpless infant, Lanie had yet been bound to Goody—as a necromancer must always be to the undead. Her body, tiny and pitiful as it had been, was yet blessed of Doédenna, and would have exerted some influence or effect upon a revenant. Whenever her living fluids had come into contact with Goody’s undead material—and however ungovernable and unappealing those fluids might have been—the result would still have created a pure ectenica. Which would, in turn, have renewed Goody’s own substance, washing her in new strength and memory.
“I had not remembered anything of myself for so long,” Goody continued. “I was like a scorched and salted battlefield pushing up its first wildflower. Even that lowly weed of a lullaby seemed to me a miracle. And so, remembering, I sang. And when I sang, the babe, at last, slept in my arms. That, Mizka, is when I recognized her. My language was slowly returning to me, and with it all the things I once knew. I knew her for what she was. What she could and would be to me. The daughter of my undeath. My hope for an end. This hope, Mizka—it was not… not a peaceful sensation, nor did it lighten my burdens. Indeed, with it came the whetted knowledge of my everlasting wounds, my unending durance, my thralldom, and such restlessness and loneliness and longing as I cannot now speak of. But if one thing made my terrible hope bearable, these twenty-three years, it was the love I felt for you, and from you for me. The surety of my love being returned. The surety that your love was true, and that once you came into your power, you would take my seed of hope and make it bloom, and lay it as a bouquet upon my final resting place.”
Lanie could not answer this. She rolled over onto her stomach and wept into the grass. Her tears were hot; they scorched where they dropped.
No one, in all her life, had ever told her they loved her. Not in words. Not like Goody. And after tonight, would she ever hear such words again?
But if she failed Goody tonight, she might never hear them anyway, for she would have betrayed Goody’s trust forever.
“I’ll miss you!” The uneven ground of the cryptyard seemed to rise into her mouth to muffle her words. “I’ll miss you so much. I’ll miss you like breathing. I’ll miss you like bread. I’ll miss you like, like…”
Lanie couldn’t finish, and Goody laid a hand upon her back, as vast and cold as the first stone to ever press a criminal to death. It silenced her.
“You have seen Doédenna’s face,” Goody whispered. “It is my turn, Mizka.”
Lanie lay a long moment in the dirt before she mumbled in agreement. Gathering her up from the ground, Goody held her in her arms a while.
“Come,” said she, almost a croon. “We will spend our day in joyful preparation. I shall sit beneath this sorkhadari tree and pray, remembering what of my life is still within my grasp, and also those points of my recent undeath wherein I sometimes felt joy. And you, Mizka, wipe your tears away”—she did this for Lanie, who sniffled—“and join your friends at festival. As you and they celebrate the gods in wonder, and as the gods turn their attention twelve-fold back upon you in blessing, so the tides of panthauma will crash ever higher, grow ever more marvelous. You shall return to me tonight at the height of your happiness, in the fullness of life and magic and the marvelous memory of the gods, and then you and I shall bid each other farewell. Truly,” Goody murmured against Lanie’s wet cheek, “truly, Mizka, we are blessed to have my hour come at a moment of our choosing. That is a rare gift in life—or, as I have found, otherwise.”
It was the longest speech Lanie could remember Goody ever making, and the hardest to hear. Each word felt acid-etched in her memory. Certainly she had known enough of death—all of it shocking and ugly and cruel—to understand that tonight would be among the most beautiful of her life, full worthy of Doédenna who wanted to receive all Her people in gentleness.
Only, just… Goody! It was her Goody!
No, a voice at the back of her brain reminded her. It is Her Goody.
Remembering her god’s face, Lanie’s treacherous body was suddenly beset by eagerness, approval, encouragement—as if Saint Death Herself had joined with Goody in urging Lanie to keep her Midsummer promise. As Goody wished it, that internal joy seemed to convey, so too did She.
Lanie reluctantly nodded against Goody’s granite breast, and sat up, wiping her face more thoroughly. “All right, Goody. It shall be as you wish.”
Her voice trembled, but Goody tucked a finger under Lanie’s chin, and smiled down as Lanie had never seen her smile. “I have a present for you.”
Lanie was so startled, she hiccuped. “What?”
“Stay there,” Goody commanded. “Close your eyes.” She stood smoothly, like a monolith suddenly mobile, and disappeared behind the sorkhadari tree.
All was silent for some time. Lanie inhaled deeply: no hint of citrus, no tingle or tickle. No rhyme ringing in the cradle of her skull…
Except—? Oh. Except for the constant, light echo of Datu’s silly tree song, of course. But that was not unusual even on a non-surge day. Under Gyrgardu Duantri’s tutelage at Waystation Thirteen, Datu had set her little rhyme to music, bolstering the tune with a handful of chords she’d learned, accompanying herself by twanging away on the small cavaquinho her didyi had managed to purchase for her second- (or more likely sixth- or seventh-) hand from the rag-and-bottle shop on Market Circle. The child had been singing it nonstop for the last month and a half.
Sorkhadari! Sorkhadari!
Oldest of them all
Sorkhadari! Sorkhadari!
Never may you fall!
Lanie brushed new tears from her eyes, cursing herself for crying at a child’s song. The next moment, she felt a heavy, silent tread come up behind her, and Goody’s voice bidding her, “Open your eyes.”
Lanie obeyed, as a waterfall of peony-pink, dahlia-coral, snapdragon-orange, and marigold-yellow silk fell into her lap, aglow in the breaking dawn. She stared at the piles and piles of silk, shining heaps and mounds of it: embroidered in contrasting jewel-blues and bright greens, bouncing with flounces, foaming with lace, running with ribbons, and festooned all over with enormous silk flowers.
Open-mouthed, she stroked the bright heaps and folds, and then, still gaping, glanced up at Goody, trying to gather wits enough to thank her.
But there came pouring upon her, in a secondary cascade of radiance, an onrush of panthauma like a fizzing citrus thunderstorm.
It was so sudden, so complete an envelopment, that Lanie could focus on nothing but those hundred zany pinwheels of fractured light.
Panthauma bubbled and glittered, capered and gesticulated, giggled and zinged and zanged. Lanie was dizzy with it.
Before she knew what was happening, Goody helped her to stand, and then helped her into the gown. In minutes, Lanie had been buttoned, clasped, and laced in pure panthauma, in silk and summertime and love and the work of Goody’s hands. If lava were kindly, if rainbows were warm, if stars smelled of orange blossoms—these, then, Lanie felt, would be the raiment she stood up in.
“Weeks ago,” Goody explained to her—and somehow it all rhymed and chimed in Lanie’s ears, even though the words themselves were very plain—“when the gyrgardi went to market to find the child an instrument, I bid him bring me materials with which to make your festival dress. The child,” Goody added conscientiously, “picked out the ribbons herself. She wished me to make that very clear to you. Here, too, are gloves.”
Little yellow lace gloves, hardly there, like gauze, like mist. But they were enough to disguise the wizard mark on her left hand.
“The gyrgardi also found you a pair of slippers for me to make over. They are the correct size, but he apologizes that they must perforce also be secondhand.”
To Lanie’s surge-struck eyes, the slippers—another shade of pink, laced with coral and orange ribbons, with great floppy yellow silk flowers that trembled over the toes—appeared like two tiny fireworks that never lost their spark.
“I don’t mind!” she gasped.
“That,” said Goody, “is what I told him you would say.” She produced another ribbon—pink satin this time, just a bit frayed at the ends—to tie around Lanie’s neck. “Now sit you down upon this headstone, Mizka, and I shall unbraid your hair.”
She did so, with great patience and gentleness, until Lanie’s hair burgeoned up and around her head like a black gloriole. She set upon her brow a wreath of fresh peonies, made up of every sunset color, and fluffed a few of the silk flowers to bursting brightness at her shoulder, then stood back to inspect her handiwork.
“How glad thou mak’st mine eyes, thou girl-bouquet,” Goody murmured in Quadic, her voice as deep as wells. “Now join thy friends and celebrate this day, and when the sky doth shroud itself in night, return to me and sing my lullaby.”
“I will, Goody. I won’t fail you. I... I… thank you!” Lanie flew back into Goody’s arms, and held her tightly.
She clung until Goody turned her around and gave her a half-pat, half-push, expelling her from the shadow of the sorkhadari and into the blazing green garden, where Mak and Datu were awaiting her.
“Auntie Lanie!” Datu exclaimed disapprovingly from behind her red beard. “That dress is pink!”