Unaware of the agonizing watch he had maintained, she slid from the sheets and went to find the place they had buried Ns.
She found Gadriel first in the grand hall dusting trophies amid shafts of light. He mentioned the start she had given the entire castle. After a semi-tense conversation she followed his directions to the place the gardener had set her cat on fire. A carefully raked pile and a ceramic jar in the north garden bespoke the ceremony that had gone into the immolation.
Obviously the animal’s relationship to her had occasioned this strange effort at decorum. She understood it had to be done, of course. Fire was the best way to guarantee destruction of the glimbender larvae.
Sena looked on the jar with faint stirrings of emotion that ranged all the way from parallels to her mother’s fiery end to whether the cat had ever truly liked her.
She wasn’t heartbroken. Her hysteria the night before hadn’t been about endearment. She was saddened, but not as saddened as she had been frightened of the inscrutable repercussions the cat’s death might have on her mind.
As her familiar, the animal had allowed her additional noetic space to calculate holomorphic formulae. Although she hadn’t often used the extra processing power of the creature’s brain, the pain that gashed the soft tissues inside her skull was deep and real the instant Ns had died.
Ever since getting up this morning she had been unable to suppress the repetitive urge to touch her forehead and examine her fingertips for blood. Of course there was none. Her wound was internal.
Maybe I’ll be fine, she thought. Maybe with the exception of last night, everything will be fine.
Sena left the city.
The moment she did, a strange sense of relief enveloped her. She took her sickle knife, her pocket watch, a bottle of water and her empty pack. Beyond Isca’s soot-fouled walls the reach of machines fell abruptly short, amputated by the Duchy’s green mélange.
She was free of the grinding gears, beyond the black vomit of urban architecture. And the war front was still over fifty miles away. People were trickling away, burping cars loaded with personal belongings, headed for the Fort Line and safety.
Beyond West Fen the road turned to clay, hedged with thickets and sloughs. Marshy ditches, resonant with biting insects and glutted with sludge as thick as cow sprue, instigated clutches of weeds that spread their hot-sweet smell along the road.
She passed cottages where people shot up like ancient gnarled stumps from benches in the shade. Their fists clutched newspapers from the city in grips familiar with loss. There were children. Babies crying and raucous games in the grass. Everyone capable of hard labor had melted with the morning into acres of corn or barely or rye.
Sena relaxed as she walked. She thought about Nathaniel Howl. Ever since Cameron’s arrival she had been collecting stories. The old man fascinated her for reasons beyond his connection with the book.
She had jotted down a few of the anecdotes Cameron and Caliph had discussed, the ones that truly unnerved her, like the time Nathaniel had taken it upon himself to explain sex to his six-year-old nephew.
“His fingers were so thin,” Caliph had said. “They did this slow together-apart, together-apart motion that interlaced with a whispery sound as the knuckles brushed against each other. He eased back in his rocking chair and said, ‘Caliph, men and women are like honey and muffins. Put the honey on . . . it melts right inside the muffin. Love is like that. Sweet and warm and sticky. It’s hard to get off because it gets inside.’
“Then he gave me a hand-illustrated book, inked in red and blue and skin-pink . . . mostly skin-pink. He patted my head and said, ‘Love is a good thing, Caliph. It’s what even old men like me want.’ ”
Sena envisioned Caliph poring over love positions by age six. She couldn’t tell if her affection for him was growing. She tried to convince herself that it was. Mostly she just felt sorry for his childhood.
Nathaniel’s character conjured vivid crazy images in her head, roaming the halls of the House on Isca Hill as Cameron described, marking up the frosted windowpanes with designs he drew with his fingertip. “Ha, that’s a little blossom, yes it is. Little frost rose on the window. Cold, cold.” He rubbed his hands. “Lovely little flowers everywhere.” She could hear him in her head, babbling.