Wystwood

29. Rose bloomed in ivory

Red ribbons forked from the iron band around the man's neck and thorned across his chest in scarlet strikes of lightning. They spread from his collar like a firebrand had been pressed into his skin and the flesh around had peeled away, bloody and raw.

The body's blisters seemed to stain Ada's vision, casting the world crimson and callous. It was only the man's ginger hair, which had once appeared bright beneath its greasy sheen, that remained ashen.

A gasping mouth and vacant eyes contorted his expression, but Ada could still recognise the face. It was a man she had only seen once before, when he had turned up at Florentin's caravan desperate for a flower. Healing, Florentin had beseeched of his daughter. A cruel irony, perhaps.

He had left the market that day with a single calendula sprig, bonfire bright. His fingers had trembled as he thrust coins of gold to Florentin, paying a high price for the magic he had received. But now, hanging from his iron necklace, the man's fingers were limp and slackened; trembling no more.

Ada wobbled, her legs turning numb and the red giving way to a seeping darkness. It was only the delicate hand wrapped around her elbow that kept her upright, Solen's hushed voice fading in and out like the lapping of the canal against its embankment.

"We've got to go, Ada. Right now." The street was growing thick with people, laughter occasionally breaking up their loud chatter. Nobody looked up. Not a single eye was bared towards the tower.

"I've seen that man before," Ada said, her words thin and scattered.

"Well, we'll have plenty of time to get acquainted with him up there if we hang around any longer." Solen's fingers were tightening around her arm, hard enough for the skin to blossom out in frills of pink.

After a sharp tug, Ada let the woman drag her down the pavement, stumbling against the tide of the crowd. It was a daze of steps, and even as Ada's hood began to slip back past her ears, she didn't reach to right it. 

She had never learnt the man's name, couldn't whisper up a passing farewell in hopes that his body might one day return to the fertile earth below.

They slipped into a street and tall buildings rose up on either side, blocking the sight of the corpse in a labyrinth of brickwork and cobblestones. The roads were near empty, though the pair still kept to the peripherals, Solen keen to catch whatever shade was available as the sun soared into its apex.

Signs that marked family homes and shop fronts were painted onto panels that adorned wooden doorways. There were no protruding posts or pavement peddlers, although sconces marked street corners with bases plated silver, as if even in daylight sterling flames still flickered within.

Strings of chimes were not laced above, but sometimes a solitary bell, grand in size and shape, hung from the crescents chiselled above the doorways. They did not chirp like songbirds as the small fastened bells had done before, but instead caught the breeze in muted clanks, low and coarse and weary.

Solen kept close to the canal, only ever a street or two over from where voices rose and fell, like gulls above ocean waves, or crows circling rotted prey. Ada's cloak was becoming hot and the velvet stuck to her moistening skin. But she didn't dare to remove it, not as city folk dressed in silks and finery meandered across the roads, occasionally eyeing the leather vest that was tight across Solen's chest before the two women could hasten around another corner and out of sight.

They stilled their steps when they emerged into a small clearing, the cobbles beneath their feet more closely worn than the others that mapped the streets of the inner city. The buildings that circled around the empty space stooped together, stout arches of stone sprouting from the ground and doming together to create an enclosed pavilion. Within an upper recess hung a copper bell, protected from the wind with a hollow and eerily quiet.

Sunlight slanted in from cracks between the arches and illuminated a block of masonry. It glimmered faintly, its brittle white reflecting the light as though the slab was carved from bone. It was a twin to the archway upon the Wystwood's hillside, pale as chalk but engraved with meticulous care.

Solen didn't stop Ada as she approached it and hovered her palm above its cold ivory. The top had been levelled off, a clean cut marked only by a chiselled cross and a familiar serpentine script. Just as there had been on the bone arch, four words were carved into the stone. They curled along each of the four edges, separate yet subtly connected with the outermost twists of their starting and ending letters. Together, they formed a tangled ring around a simple cross, twined and infinite in every braided character.

But Ada didn't bring her fingers down to trace them, as if a touch would be too intimate for the brutal rock. Solen was at her side, staring down at the stone though also seemingly unwilling to place her hands upon it. 

"It's a compass," she said.

As Solen spoke, the faint lines darting out from the centre of the cross shimmered in the sunlight, marking out the compass rose that bloomed across the stone. The words were harder to make out, but Solen pointed to each in turn. "Sourn, Vesp, Nord, and"—she pointed in the direction of the canal—"Este."

Ada frowned. "What language is it in?"

"Old Fae. But it's pretty much dead. Nobody speaks it anymore, and only ghosts of it remain within the city." Solen sighed, turning her head away from the compass. "A last remnant of an older world."

It was a spectre of stone, faded and forgotten in a city bustling with life. Ada gazed down at the compass while Solen continued, her voice distant and dreamy. "It used to be the heart of Wysthaven. Not geographically, of course." Ada suppressed a shudder as she pictured the grey tower. "But the heart in so much as a heart truly is. The compass was a place where people could gather with friends and family and lovers. City festivals would be set up around it, sprawling through the streets until you could get lost in music and fruits and silks." Her words pittered out, lost amongst the empty cobblestones.

"Then, why are we here now?" Ada asked.

Solen's eyes were lost when she looked up, a faraway gaze set towards a fantasy. "Because we need to go este. We're walking a path to the sun that rises in the east and marks the beginning of a new day. A new future."

Then Solen rolled her shoulders back, her hands resting on the bandolier around her waist as she walked past the compass and east into the city. Ada followed, the tapping of her boots echoing around the stone dome as they entered a narrow alleyway.

A tapered pavement cut straight towards the centre of the city, the buildings on either side looming in until the cobbles turned dusky and balconies carved up the sky overhead. They were walking into a tunnel, the air stale and the ground spotted with stagnant puddles. There were no sconces here to light the way, but as the path began to rise once again, sunlight dribbled over the cobblestones ahead and rippled between moving shadows.

Ada and Solen emerged onto a muddy bank, the canal shivering just in front of their feet before it was cut off by the walled embankment. The wall stones were slick with algae and muck, dandelions creeping up from the water's edge and dancing between sunspots.

A low pier was built above the bank, and in the mud beneath it stood four women, murmuring and waiting. One stepped forwards as they approached, dressed in a green gown that gathered dirt along its hem as she walked. Her hair was silken and almost white in the sunlight, flaxen waves ruffling down her back to graze her hips.

She dropped a hand, her slim fingers slipping between two folds within her gown. From amongst a nest of tulle and threading emerged a blade, polished so fiercely it looked to be fashioned from a flake of glass. Her painted lips curled up to reveal milky pointed teeth as she leant forwards, knife in hand, and said to Solen, "About time you showed up."