Page 18 of As Many Souls as Stars
Miriam was frustrated, and the shadows echoed that frustration. Diminished as they were by the daylight, they fluttered down Miriam’s throat, twisted themselves in her feathers, hungry and insistent; they desired Cybil as much as she did.Patience, she told them, as she followed Cybil and Peter Oswyn toward the market square.
But she did not feel patient. After Miriam’s first meeting with Cybil, she had taken an oak tree by its trunk and torn it out of the earth, flinging it with a great groan to the forest floor. She had never offered a deal that wasn’t then immediately taken, so in tune was she with the desperation of her victims. Now to encounter this—thiscapriciousness, thisarrogance? Miriam considered her interest a privilege, and yet Cybil seemed entirely unimpressed.
But then, Cybil was special—a rare delicacy, the sort of prize worth a chase. In centuries, Miriam had never seen such a soul. To consume it would likely be the greatest pleasure of her existence. It was her conviction in that which now led her to such frustration. No one could burn with such light unless they had some fire within them, some stubbornness. It was to be expected that Cybil would put up some resistance. It would be disappointing if she did not.
But this?Thiswas an insult. To reject Miriam and take up with this man instead—it was akin to declining a banquet for a hunk of bread. As they walked, Oswyn said something to her, gesticulating wildly with his dead rabbits, and Cybil actually afforded him a glimmer of a smile. Truly, what was the appeal? In his colouration, Miriam thought Oswyn had something of unbaked dough in him, and it was hardly as if a woman as beautiful as Cybil needed to stoop so low. But that was the thing about beauty,realbeauty, which was sharp and distant and isolating. Humans were so frightened of it. Mayhap this man was even commendable for his obvious infatuation.
Miriam had spent the morning in Ipswich, in fact—it was a stroke of luck that Cybil had come here also. A mere moment before Cybil had arrived at the gates, Miriam had taken her last meal: a man who had traded his soul for vengeance against a merchant guild that had wronged him. He had forgotten, of course, that he was still a member of the guild also, and so she had slaughtered him alongside his enemies. The guildhall had displayed a large portrait of some ginger-haired woman with a white face and too many pearls; Miriam had amused herself by washing the painting red with their blood. Then she had left, licking the gore from her fingers. There was still a crimson streak on the inside of her wrist. The guildhall was only a few streets away from here, where Cybil and Peter Oswyn were now avoiding puddles as they navigated the cobbles. The scene would be found, sometime soon, and the mortals would make their excuses—one of the merchants went mad, perchance, or a wild animal had attacked, or a local witch had laid a hex. They always found a method of dismissal, a method to tell themselves it could be prevented from happening again.
As Cybil and Peter neared the market, the air became heavy with the stink of horse dung and humanity. The space was thronging with people. Miriam landed upon the roof of a stall to watch Cybil as she wove through the crowd while staring nervously at Peter Oswyn’s back. She was unaccustomed to this, clearly, the bustle and the noise; a blacksmith struck a horseshoe nearby, and Cybil cowered as if the sound had run her through. In the distance, a fruit seller was singing to entice customers, warbling about apples red and pears so green—Cybil clearly found this grating, as she kept glancing in the seller’s direction, forehead creasing. The echoing silence of Harding Hall must have felt as distant now to Cybil as Miriam’s birthplace did to her—across the sea, across centuries.
Cybil stopped, curious, at a stall selling fresh fish. An eel had been hooked and hung from the stall’s front, glass-eyed in death. Below it, the fishmonger was busy gutting a pike. He gave Cybil a wary look, but he did not shoo her away. She watched as he pulled a ribbon of entrails from the animal, pale and thin, like the strings of a fiddle.
The eel on the hook suddenly spasmed and twitched. Cybil startled, jumping halfway in the air; the fishmonger laughed. ‘They do that, sometimes,’ he said. ‘Last spark of life in ’em. They think they can get off the hook and splash right back into the sea.’
‘Does it feel pain?’ Cybil asked.
‘I would not know, mistress. What is an eel’s pain to a man?’
She smiled wryly, glancing back in the direction of the gate. The movement made a lock of red hair fall from her cap, catching the light like a strand of fire. ‘Men are strung up sometimes, also.’
‘We are all God’s creatures,’ he said. ‘But there is a manner of things—a Chain of Being. The queen above men, and men above eels.’
‘And God above us all,’ Cybil said. ‘Observing us squirming on our hooks.’
Peter Oswyn then appeared at Cybil’s elbow. His expression was hopeful, and in his hand he held a fruit of some sort: round and orange, its skin glazed with honey, top cored and oozing with jam.
‘’Tis a stuffed medlar,’ he said proudly, presenting it to her. ‘With rose hip jam.’
Cybil plucked it from his hand uncertainly, and pinched it between two fingers as if it were a dirty rag. ‘… My thanks.’
They stared at each other for a long moment.
‘Will you not try it?’ Oswyn asked her, face crumpling.
‘It is only that—I am not fond of sweetmeats,’ she said, and she handed it back to him.
He was aghast. ‘But youmustlike them.’
‘Why?’
‘Well—everyone does. ’Sides, my da says sweet things are good for women. Keeps them biddable.’
Cybil appeared vaguely disgusted. ‘You ought to be cautious, Master Oswyn. Too much sugar and your teeth shall rot.’ She turned her head away from him, towards the buildings at the other side of the market. ‘Which way was the apothecary?’
Oswyn sighed. ‘This way, my lady.’
‘Then lead on,’ Cybil said—still clearly irritated, to Miriam’s delight—and she followed Oswyn into the crowd.
Their progress was not quick. Every second stall, Cybil would stop to inspect the sunlight glinting off knives, to peer at glass baubles and weigh pewter plates in her hands. The sellers could sense her wealth; they tried to lull her into conversation, making claims about the quality of their wares that were patently absurd. ‘’Tis an Indian bowl, from Roanoke,’ one man claimed of a misshapen lump of half-fired clay. Cybil snorted, said, ‘Oh,indeed,’ and turned away. Then she looked up, her eyes meeting Miriam’s where she sat on the canvas roof of a fur trader’s stall.
Cybil looked at her for far longer than any human would stare at an ordinary crow. Miriam knew Cybil could sense the darkness in her, even if she did not know exactly its origin—and it brought Miriam pleasure to beseenin a manner she so rarely was. She spread her wings, letting the sunlight slip into the folds of her coal-black feathers and disappear. In the back of her throat, she mimicked a crack of thunder.
Cybil’s eyes widened at the mimicry, and then she laughed, delighted. ‘What an extraordinary creature,’ she said, stepping forward towards her—and then Peter Oswyn returned again, looking beleaguered.
‘Mistress, the apothecary shall soon close.’
‘That crow made the sound of a storm!’
