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From Chapter 18 The straw in the corner of the horses' enclosure poked and scratched against my skin, as I stared at the play of light on box on the floor near my head. I was alone; the men had left the ship hours ago to set up camp and seek out fresh water. The vessel was mine alone, and it was my chance to open the box and let out my mother's long-kept secrets. I felt as though I were trespassing somehow even though I knew that my mother wanted me to know the things she wrote. It was almost as if I could feel her ghost looking over my shoulder and, if I opened the box and let loose the knowledge within, she would be gone from my life forever. Stop pitying yourself, the voice said. You have lived without her for what? Fifteen years? She's gone already. Open the box. "Mind your tongue," I whispered, still staring at the box, unblinking. The carved symbols seemed to move and dance in a fog, undulating like snakes. Open the box! I sat up, my fists pressed hard to the sides of my head. "You do not own me!" I shouted. "You don't even belong here." She pulled away into the recesses of my head, the pain unlike any she had wrought in me before, forcing me to the deck. The symbols on the box had begun to glow softly and I reached for it. "I am going completely mad," I whispered as I pulled the chest closer. "I hear voices that aren't there, see things that aren't there, have memories that are not my own... I am mad." At least I had come to some conclusion, I thought, pulling the key loose from the laces of my kirtle and sliding it into the lock. If I was insane and imagining all of this, then I had no reason to be afraid of anything. None of it was real. The lock clicked beneath my hand as I turned the key. The book sat there, dark and benign amid the wool lining. I reached for it, my fingertips hovering over the leather cover as if the words inside could somehow be transferred to my head through my hand. I swallowed hard and lifted the book from the box, setting the fragile sheaf of papers on my lap. The leather crinkled softly when I opened the cover. A handprint stared back at me from the first page. It was the same shade of pale brown as the writings my father had shown me, but I knew that this was not the juice of rowan berries. The lines of the hand were perfectly depicted in the blood - my mother's blood. In the center of the palm were webbed lines that she had not been born with. I glanced at my own hand, at the softly flashing blue lines there, and I knew what they were: she had used the magic of a stone once, too. She, too, had let the magic take control of her body. But even those lines did not unnerve me as much as the picture in the flat of the palm. A three-sided shape with a crescent moon suspended in the middle had been painted in the blood. The lines of these were dark, as if the image had been cut into her flesh and she had used the blood from the wound to make this mark. Had she made the cuts herself, or had someone else done it for her? Why would she do it? I placed my hand on the print. The size and shape of the fingers was a perfect match to mine, as if I had done this but had no memory of it. It was then that I saw the words, tiny and smeared at the bottom of the page. Blood of my blood, take this gift and live. |
