Foreign Window
A yellow door stood before me.
There wasn’t anything particularly outlandish about that door, despite my expectations. It was solid, paneled wood, it was rather on the small side, it had a smooth wooden oblong knob and no knocker, and it belonged to the Wardens.
I had come straight from the brewery. We’d spent most of the day cleaning and getting organized. Mara had Perdy stay behind to be near Florin, and she arranged shifts of people to watch over both. She tasked her little sister, Clara, and her friends with ferrying messages back and forth, and the kid was so thrilled to be helping it melted my heart. It can’t have been easy, being ten years old in a place like that.
The mayor, surprisingly, didn’t even bother to shout at me. He just shut his mouth, shot up, and turned on his heels. I had no doubt whatever he planned next would be terrible, but I also had no room in my basket of worries for it. Rareș went home to his wife after giving me a pat on the back that almost knocked me to my knees.
The thought of going back to the house alone and waiting around to see what tragedy struck next was unbearable, so I asked for directions to the Wardens’ Warren instead. I knew that Paul’s death would catch up to me sooner or later, and a helpless rage nearly overcame me. The only thing that soothed me was the thought that maybe I could do something. Maybe I could better prepare and prevent any more people from getting hurt. Maybe next time, I could be useful. The Warden Ancuţa had promised me training, and I came there, to the Warren, to collect.
I stood like a cow trying to tell time, on the empty street, in front of the seemingly empty two-story house with dark windows and a dandelion-colored door. I knocked, fully expecting nobody to be home. The door opened a little, and I waited. And waited.
“Hello?” I called.
I waited another minute, torn between how awkward it was to stand there and how awkward it would be if I barged in just as they were reaching the door.
“Hello?”
Nobody answered. I considered turning around and leaving. Eventually, I caved and pushed the door open all the way, gingerly stepping inside.
“Hell—”
The moment my toes touched the doorway, I froze. It wasn’t by choice, and there was no reason to – I simply couldn’t move any farther. A soft bell rang somewhere in the distance, and a voice wafted down from the stairwell.
“Coming! Hold tight.”
A swell of panic at not being able to move rose from my heels, and I did my best to breathe through it. My mind went straight where I wished it didn’t, to being back in Alec’s basement with my head underwater. It rushed in my ears and breathing caused a sharp ache right at the top of my lungs.
I focused on all the details of the lobby around me, hoping to distract myself from that ache. The black-and-gold patterned carpet, the brass lamps, the silvery strings across the white ceiling, the dark gray line of powder under my feet, the sound of footfalls approaching me.
Ancuţa condensed into my wobbly field of view and waved her hand around my face.
“Come in, friend.”
She grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, and just like that, I could move again. I celebrated by almost falling to my knees.
“What the devil was that?”
“A Ward on the door. Any living thing that’s a stranger here and tries to cross is transfixed until I can get a good long look at it. Now you’re not a stranger anymore, come and go as you please. Come on!”
She went back up the stairs in a rush, and I followed, albeit reluctantly. My heart still raced. I didn’t want to seem a coward, so I made myself take heavy, steady steps.
At the top, a large room greeted us. The entire back wall of it, facing the forest, was made of hundreds of square panels of glass all fitted together. I’d never seen so much glass in my life, and the light pouring through it was spectacular, tinted green by the pines and blue by the fog. Around the room, tables were scattered, covered in scrolls and boxes and tins of herbs and strange tools. Everything seemed hastily used and hastily left behind. The two side walls were all a mishmash of randomly sized and randomly colored bookshelves, from a fine hardwood affair that rose all the way up to the ceiling, to a small construction of bricks and planks in a triangular shape, laden with so many books it seemed it might crush the bricks at any moment. I sunk into a rich carpet the moment I stepped off the stairs and couldn’t suppress a gasp.
Ancuţa laughed. “Do you like it? I insisted on the carpet myself. My feet get so cold when I’m working.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I took care of most of the arrangements for this place, and I’m rather proud of them.”
“Ancuţa, is it magic?”
“What, the carpet?”
“No, the way you froze me at the door.”
“Ha! No, it’s not magic. There’s no such thing. It’s nature. Very obscure, almost forgotten laws of nature. Certain things have certain rules. Poppy seeds ground to dust at midnight sprinkled across a threshold won’t let strangers through, and that’s all they’ll do. It’s not magic, it’s Warding.”
I turned to gawp at the rest of the room. The wall facing the road was bare and only had two small, plain windows, but next to them what looked like curious telescopes loomed, peering out ominously. Ancuţa moved from table to table, placing things back in boxes and placing boxes back on shelves, her straw-colored braids swinging with every motion.
“You’ve caught us at a strange time. Everyone else is out, they left in a hurry to tend to all the bodies. Everyone will blame us, so we need to stay sharp.”
“Blame you?”
“For the deaths. For that damned Whisper making it in. For not defending them, as though we could. We Ward, we don’t conjure lightning, this isn’t some fairy tale.”
“How did it get through? Did the Wards fail?”
She tugged on her dress collar and spat in her bosom.
“And what in the stars does that do?”
She gave me a solemn look. “It lightly dampens the tits, Anna.”
It took two heartbeats before she burst into laughter and I joined her, an exhausted but glorious release from the pressure I’d been stockpiling. I wiped tears from the corners of my eyes.
Ancuţa shook her head. “It’s supposed to ward off evil, but who knows? We just do it. As for the break-in, I don’t know how that happened. Maybe the Wards were only ever a suggestion, and the Whispers decided to stop taking it. Maybe, like the mayor has been saying, someone in town found a way to invite the Whispers in.”
I stood silently in the middle of the room for a moment, trying to understand her meaning. She waited for the space of one breath, then went on.
“He’s been pointing at you.”
I must have gaped at her like a yawning lion. She giggled at me for a moment, then rushed over and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Relax. I’m not about to pass judgment or make any big statements. I don’t know whether you did or didn’t. So I assume you didn’t.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“I can’t be.”
“I came here to ask for your help. To learn about Warding. But if you suspect me of being to blame for this attack—”
“It doesn’t matter. Either you did it, in which case you clearly already have all the knowledge I could share with you. Or you didn’t, in which case you’ll need it. Worst-case scenario, I lose a bit of time telling you things you already know.”
“There’s got to be some way to prove who did it.”
“There isn’t. Not right now. Could have been a goat, or a child, or nobody at all. The tale I’m supposed to tell if I want money to keep funding our work and research is that Warding is a science. Nature is a constant. Everything is stable. But in truth? Nothing is that simple. I’ll have time to look into it tomorrow, but not right now. Right now, the dead need tending, and you need to learn one or two things that might keep you alive for long enough to question, should it come to that.”
“And it doesn’t bother you to think that you might be spending time with the person responsible? What if I did it without knowing?”
She leaned her head to the right and frowned a little, but more like she was thinking to herself than frowning at me. “That’d be like accidentally knitting a sweater. And no, it doesn’t bother me. The purpose of knowledge is to be shared. Whatever you did or didn’t do shouldn’t influence that, should it? I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t know you or your reasons.”
“That’s a very rational approach.”
“Only one I’ve got. So, I promised you training.”
She looked around, scanning the shelves, finger on her lip. I guessed it was a posture she adopted often; it suited her driven curiosity so well. Eventually, she settled on the high shelf of an improvised bookcase made out of short planks placed across the steps of two ladders. Her destination was a fair bit higher up than she could reach, and I wondered at what she’d do, but before I could consider it overly much, she was already climbing the wooden boards, precariously shaking the entire construction.
“Ancuţa, be careful!”
I rushed over to push the bookshelf back up against the wall just as it leaned outward. She laughed and started tossing books down, shaking book dust all over my hair.
“Don’t worry! Hah. I do this all the time. It leans a little, then stops. See? You can’t have been the saboteur. You just tried to save me from death by bookshelf.”
I had to dodge the next book, then she jumped down with a heavy thunk that would have befitted a person three times her stature. It seemed like determination was more of a factor in her speed than agility was. Before I knew it, she was repeating the process on another bookshelf, and we had a little pile of about twelve books to account for.
We scooped them up in handfuls and carried them across the room to one of the emptier tables by the glass wall. As soon as they were out of my arms, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the magnificent window. I was so close that, without realizing, I’d fogged up a patch right in front of my face with my breath.
“Can I touch it?”
“The Walker Window? Sure. It’s almost unbreakable.”
The glass was cold and perfectly smooth, and my fingers slipped over it easily. I had planned on drawing something silly in the mist, but it quickly became an eerily accurate sketch of the thing I encountered on my first morning there, round white eyes, long ears, antlers, and all.
“Why is it called a Walker Window?”
Ancuţa thumped and slammed books behind me, sorting them into an order only she understood. “It’s Warded to see the truth, just like Walkers do. Whenever there’s a Tide or any strange occurrence that a normal person wouldn’t really notice or understand, through this glass you can see what a Walker would. All the Whispers and such. It’s a limited view, sure, but it’s an important piece of forest, right by the arch.”
“You didn’t see…?”
“The attack? No. You were way too far in even for the telescopes to pick up. It really only serves to observe and make note of the things that come up to investigate us during Tides. And those are usually harmless.”
Her footsteps shook and lifted the floorboards under my feet as she drew near me.
“Ah, I see you’re familiar with the forest Vâlva.” She added tufts to the tips of the ears of my fog drawing on the glass.
“Is that what it is?”
“Yeah. They’re tricksters and they change shape, but the ones around here like to look like a giant variety of Lepus cornutus. There are a few of them and we suspect they’re part of a family.”
“So there are many of each kind of Whisper?”
“Some. There are many Vâlve. I don’t know if they have a leader, but they seem peaceful, so they may not. Many Zmei, and they definitely have a leader. Zburătorul. Only one of him.” She shuddered. “Many Samca and Iele, one queen over them.”
“It’d take a lifetime to learn all of this.”
“And a library.” She laughed. “Maybe you should spend more time here. That’s a pretty good drawing, actually. You should consider contributing to our archives. We’re always looking for people to help us fill out our Whisper Compendium with images and descriptions, and good luck getting Paul to—”
Her eyes got lost in the distance for a second, then she waved her hand in front of her face as though she were brushing away cobwebs. A moment later, she was in motion again, tidying and tossing garbage into a bucket.
“Never matter. It’s done now, and my chance to convince him is gone. If only I’d been subtler, more careful.” Louder and more firmly, she changed the subject. “Have you seen any others?”
It didn’t feel right to press. “Something the other townsfolk called Dochia.”
She grimaced, showing me all of her teeth. “The Dochia. Nasty creature. Only one of her. Wait.”
With great conviction she dragged one of the larger books toward her across the table and opened it, shuffling old pages to and fro. Beautiful hand-inked illustrations as well as hasty charcoal sketches peered out at me from the paper, each one more astonishing than the next. Before I could take stock, she found the right page, straightened the book out, and slapped it down with the palms of her hands.
“Aha! Here she is.”
The image was almost perfect, pale against a charcoal backdrop, albeit less menacing and somewhat softer than the real thing.
“The nails and beak are a little off, but it’s definitely her.”
“Fascinating. I wonder what she was after. She’s a kidnapper, you know. Our records over the past four hundred years show at least two dozen people put to sleep and carried away into the Unspoken, never to be heard from again.”
“Is that what happened to Perdy and her parents?”
“The Samson family? No. That’s not it at all. They were seen walking out into the woods with the baby, of their own volition. It wasn’t even Tide time.”
“Were they Walkers?”
“No. I was only a novice then, but still, it would have been on the record if they were made Walkers.”
“What do you mean ‘made’?”
Shafts of twilight fell on her curious face, lighting up little freckles I hadn’t noticed at first. She took on a calmer, more serious air.
“I thought you knew about how Walkers come to be. I mean, I don’t know what happened in your case, clearly.”
“I assumed it was something we were born with. I need to learn to stop doing that.”
“Being born?”
“Making assumptions!”
“Right. No, nobody’s born a Walker. You end up being able to see Whispers and Walk into the Unspoken because at some point in your life, your link to this world became less solid than it is for most people.”
“Less solid?” It was so obvious that the normally direct woman was suddenly using euphemisms, I wondered what she was – poorly – hiding.
She hummed, picking her words. “Less reliable. We say that Walkers are one step removed from normal people, because at some point in their past they took that one step away from life and they never came back.”
“Even if I knew how to do that, I’m not sure I would.”
“Well, it’s not a choice. It’s not something you did. It’s something that happened to you.”
Some of the locked drawers inside the corridors of my mind got restless, their keys slowly turning in the locks all by themselves. The rattling made my jaw clench. “You’re talking about horrible events, aren’t you? The sort of thing that leaves you feeling not normal for the rest of your life.”
She nodded, and I could read sympathy and fear in her eyes.
I swallowed, but my throat was dry. “A while back—”
“Anna, you don’t have to tell me anything. I’m not asking.”
“But I want to understand.”
She sat on the edge of the table, frowning at the floor. Her hands folded in her lap and I admired the beauty of her slender, nimble fingers in the orange light of dusk.
“I can respect that. Very well then, I’m listening.”