It was a good thing Roman had turned her down for a sandwich.
Iris stopped by a corner grocer, feeling how light her handbag was. She didn’t realize she had stepped into one of Oath’s enchanted buildings until the food on the shelves began to shift. Only items she could afford worked their way to the edge, vying for her attention.
Iris stood in the aisle, face burning. She gritted her teeth as she noticed how much she couldn’t afford and then hastily grabbed a loaf of bread and a half carton of boiled eggs, hoping the shop would now leave her alone and cease weighing the coins in her purse.
This was why she was wary of enchanted buildings in the city. They could have pleasant perks, but they could also be nosy and unpredictable. She made a habit of avoiding unfamiliar ones, even if they were few and far between.
Iris hurried to the counter to pay, suddenly noticing the rows of empty shelves. Only a few cans remained behind—corn and beans and pickled onions.
“I take it your shop has been overly keen to sell tinned vegetables lately?” she asked dryly as she paid the grocer.
“Not quite. Things are being shipped west, to the front,” he said. “My daughter is fighting for Enva and I want to make sure her company has enough food. It’s hard work, feeding an army.”
Iris blinked, surprised by his reply. “Did the chancellor order you to send aid?”
He snorted. “No. Chancellor Verlice won’t declare war on Dacre until the god is knocking on our door, although he tries to make it appear like we’re supportive of our brothers and sisters fighting in the west.” The grocer set the loaf and eggs into a brown bag, sliding it across the counter.
Iris thought he was brave to make those statements. First, that their chancellor in the east was either a coward or a Dacre sympathizer. Second, to tell her which god his daughter was fighting for. She had learned this herself when it came to Forest. There were plenty of people in Oath who supported Enva and her recruitment and thought the soldiers courageous, but there were others who didn’t. Those individuals, however, tended to be the ones who regarded the war as something that would never affect them. Or they were people who worshipped and supported Dacre.
“I hope your daughter remains safe and well at the front,” Iris said to the grocer. She was glad to leave the nosy shop behind, only to slip on a wet newspaper in the street.
“Haven’t you had enough of me for one day?” she growled as she bent to retrieve it, assuming the paper was the Gazette.
It wasn’t.
Iris’s eyes widened when she recognized the inkwell and quill emblem of the Inkridden Tribune—the Gazette’s rival. There were five different newspapers scattered throughout Oath, but the Gazette and the Tribune were the oldest and most widely read. And if Zeb happened to catch sight of her with the competition in her hands, he would surely give the promotion to Roman.
She studied the front page, curious.
MONSTERS SIGHTED THIRTY KILOMETERS FROM THE WAR
FRONT, the headline announced in smudged type. Beneath it was an illustration of a creature with large, membranous wings, two spindly legs hooked with talons, and a horde of sharp, needlelike teeth. Iris shivered, straining to read the words, but they were indecipherable, melting into streaks of ink.
She stared at the paper for a moment longer, frozen on the street corner. Rain dripped from her chin, falling like tears onto the monstrous illustration.
Creatures like this didn’t exist anymore. Not since the gods had been defeated centuries ago. But, of course, if Dacre and Enva had returned, so could the creatures of old. Creatures that had long only lived in myths.
Iris moved to drop the disintegrating paper in the rubbish bin but then was pierced by a cold thought.
Is this why so many soldiers are going missing at the front? Because Dacre is fighting with monsters?
She needed to know. And she carefully folded the Inkridden Tribune and slipped it into her inner coat pocket.
It took longer than she would’ve liked in the rain, especially without proper shoes, but Oath was not a simple place to travel by foot. The city was ancient, built centuries ago on the grave of a conquered god. Its streets meandered like a serpent’s path—some were hard-packed dirt and narrow, others wide and paved, and a few were haunted by trickles of magic. New construction had bloomed during the past few decades, though, and it was sometimes jarring to Iris to see the brick buildings and shining windows adjacent to the thatched roofs, crumbling parapets, and castle towers of a forgotten era. To watch trams navigate the ancient, twisting streets. As if the present was trying to cobble over the past.
An hour later, Iris finally reached her flat, sore for breath and drenched from the rain.
She lived with her mother on the second floor, and Iris paused at the door, uncertain what would greet her.
It was just as she expected.
Aster was reclining on the sofa wrapped in her favorite purple coat, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. Empty bottles were strewn across the living room. The electricity was out, as it had been for weeks now. A few candles were lit on the sideboard and had been burning so long the wax had carved a way free, puddling on the wood.
Iris merely stood on the threshold and stared at her mother until the world around them both seemed to blur.
“Little Flower,” Aster said in a drunken lilt, finally noticing her. “You’ve come home at last to see me.”
Iris inhaled sharply. She wanted to unleash a torrent of words. Words that tasted bitter, but then she noticed the silence. The roaring, terrible silence, and how the smoke curled within it, and she couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the sideboard, where the candles flickered, and noticed what was missing.
“Where’s the radio, Mum?”
Her mother arched her brow. “The radio? Oh, I sold it, honey.”
Iris felt her heart plummet, down to her sore feet. “Why? That was
Nan’s radio.”
“It could hardly pick up a channel, sweetheart. It was time for it to go.”
No, Iris thought, blinking back tears. You only needed money to buy more alcohol.
She slammed the front door and walked through the living room, around the bottles, into the small, dingy kitchen. There was no candle lit here, but Iris had the place memorized. She set the dented loaf of bread and the half carton of eggs down on the counter before reaching for a paper sack and returning to the living room. She gathered up the bottles—so many bottles
—and it made her think of that morning, and why she had run late. Because her mother had been lying on the floor next to a pool of vomit, in a kaleidoscope of glass, and it had terrified her.
“Leave it,” Aster said with a wave of her hand. Ash fell from her cigarette. “I’ll clean it up later.”
“No, Mum. I have to make it to work on time tomorrow.” “I said to leave it.”
Iris dropped the bag. The glass chimed within it, but she was too weary to fight. She did as her mother wanted.
She retreated to her dark room and fumbled for her matches, lighting the candles on her bedside table. But she was hungry, and eventually had to return to the kitchen to make a marmalade sandwich, and all the while her mother had lain on the sofa and drunk from a bottle and smoked and hummed her favorite songs that she could no longer listen to, because the radio was gone.
Back in the quiet of her chamber, Iris opened the window and listened to the rain. The air was cold, brisk. A trace of winter lingered within it, but Iris welcomed its bite and how it made her skin pebble. It reminded her that she was alive.
She ate her sandwich and eggs, eventually changing out of her wet clothes for a nightgown. Carefully, she laid the sopping Inkridden Tribune on the floor to dry, the monster illustration more smudged now after being carried in her pocket. She stared at it until she felt a sharp tug within her chest, and she reached beneath her bed, where she hid her grandmother’s typewriter.
Iris pulled it out into the firelight, relieved to find it after the radio’s unexpected departure.
She sat on the floor and opened her tapestry bag, where the beginnings of her essay now sat crinkled and damp from the rain. Find something good to write about, and I might consider publishing it in the column next week, Zeb had said. Sighing, Iris fed a new page to Nan’s typewriter, fingers poised over the keys. But then she glanced at the ink-streaked monster again, and she found herself writing something entirely different from her essay.
She hadn’t written to Forest in days. And yet she wrote to her brother now. The words spilled out of her. She didn’t bother with the date or a Dear Forest, as she had with all the other letters she had typed to him. She didn’t want to write his name, to see it on the page. Her heart felt bruised as she cut to the chase that night:
Every morning, when I wade through Mum’s sea of green bottles, I think of you. Every morning, when I slip into the trench coat you left behind for me, I wonder if you thought of me for even a moment. If you imagined what your departure would do to me. To Mum.
I wonder if fighting for Enva is everything you thought it would be. I wonder if a bullet or
a bayonet has torn through you. If a monster has wounded you. I wonder if you’re lying in an unmarked grave, covered in blood-soaked earth that I will never be able to kneel at, no matter how desperate my soul is to find you.
I hate you for leaving me like this.
I hate you, and yet I love you even more, because you are brave and full of a light that I don’t think I will ever find or understand. The call to fight for something so fervently that death holds no sting over you.
Sometimes I can’t draw a full breath. Between my worry and my fear … my lungs are
small because I don’t know where you are. It’s been five months since I hugged you goodbye
at the depot. Five months, and I can only assume you are missing at the front or are too busy to write me. Because I don’t think I could rise in the morning—I don’t think I could get out of bed—if news came to me that you were dead.
I wish you would be a coward for me, for Mum. I wish you would set down your gun and
rend your allegiance to the goddess who has claimed you. I wish you would stop time and return to us.
Iris yanked the paper from the typewriter, folded it twice, and rose to approach her wardrobe.
Long ago, Nan had hidden notes for Iris to find in her room, sometimes slipping them under the bedroom door or beneath her pillow, or tucking them into a skirt pocket for her to find later at school. Small words of encouragement or a line from a poem that Iris always delighted to discover. It was a tradition of theirs, and Iris had grown up learning how to read and write by sending her grandmother notes.
It felt natural to her, then, to slide her letters to Forest under the wardrobe door. Her brother didn’t have a room in their flat; he slept on the couch so Aster and Iris could have the two private bedrooms. But he and Iris had been sharing this closet for years.
The wardrobe was a small recess in the stone wall, with an arched door that had left a permanent scratch on the floor. Forest’s garments hung to the right, Iris’s to the left. He didn’t have many clothes—a few button-down shirts, trousers, leather braces, and a pair of scuffed shoes. But Iris didn’t have many outfits either. They made the most of what they had, patching holes and mending frayed edges and wearing their raiment until it was threadbare.
Iris had left his clothes in the closet, despite his teasing her that she could have the whole wardrobe space while he was gone. She had been patient the first two months he had been away at war, waiting for him to write to her as he had promised. But then her mother had started drinking, so profusely that she had been fired from the Revel Diner. The bills could no longer be paid; there was no food in the cupboard. Iris had no choice but to drop out of school and find work, all the while waiting for Forest to write to her.
He never had.
And Iris could no longer bear the silence. She had no address; she had no information as to where her brother was stationed. She had nothing but a beloved tradition and she did as her nan would have done—Iris gave the folded paper to the closet.
To her amazement, the letter had been gone the next day, as if the shadows had eaten it.
Unsettled, Iris had typed another message to Forest and slid it under her closet door. It too had vanished, and she had studied the small wardrobe closely, disbelieving. She had noticed the old stones in the wall, as if someone centuries ago had decided to close off an ancient passageway. She wondered if perhaps magic in the conquered god’s bones, laid to rest deep beneath this city, had risen to answer her distress. If magic had somehow taken her letter and carried it on the western wind, delivering it to wherever her brother was fighting in the war.
How she had hated enchanted buildings until that moment. She knelt now and slid her letter beneath the wardrobe door.
It was a relief to let the words go. The pressure in her chest eased.
Iris returned to her typewriter. As she lifted it, her fingers touched a ridge of cold metal, bolted on the inside of the frame. The plate was the length of her smallest finger and easy to overlook, but she vividly remembered the day she had discovered it. The first time she had read the engraving in the silver. THE THIRD ALOUETTE / MADE ESPECIALLY FOR D.E.W.
Daisy Elizabeth Winnow. Her nan’s name.
Iris had often studied those words, wondering what they meant. Who had made this typewriter for her nan? She wished she had noticed the engraving before her grandmother had passed away. Now Iris had no other choice but to be content in the mystery.
She shifted the typewriter back to its hiding place and crawled into bed. She drew the blankets to her chin but left the candle burning, even though she knew better. I should blow it out, save it for tomorrow night, she thought, because there was no telling when she would be able to pay the electricity bill. But for now, she wanted to rest in the light, not in the darkness.
Her eyes closed, heavy from a long day. She could still smell the rain and cigarette smoke in her hair. She still had ink on her fingertips, marmalade in the grooves of her teeth.
She was almost asleep when she heard it. The sound of paper rustling. Iris frowned, sitting forward.
She looked at her wardrobe. There, on the floor, was a piece of paper.
She gaped, thinking it had to be the letter she had just sent. A draft must have pushed it back into her room. But when she rose from the bed, she could tell it wasn’t her letter. This piece of paper was folded differently.
She hesitated, then rose and reached down to take it into her hand.
The paper trembled, and as the firelight seeped into it, Iris could discern typed words on the inside. Very few words, but distinctly dark.
She unfolded and read the letter. She felt her breath catch.
This isn’t Forest.
