Ash & Bramble (4 page)

And if there was something before, there must be something after, for stitched seams have beginnings, and they have tied-off ends, too.

After a time, two horned, goat-footed guards bring in boxes of fresh waxen candles, which are lit and placed at our elbows. The other Seamstresses cast me wondering glances. Marya sits like a stone beside me, and stitches.

“Are you all right?” I whisper.

She stares at her work and does not answer.

For a time I sew my straggling stitches, which aren't anything like grains of sand, and think. My history is a blank. Marya remembers a village, a handsome boy, her name. I
don't know what I would do if I had all that in my Before and nothing ahead.

The candles burn down and are replaced with new ones. A silver needle breaks and I reach for another, threading it with white silk to match the nightgown I am hemming.

An odd stillness interrupts my thoughts. Marya has stopped working. She sits beside me on the bench staring at her unmoving hands. The Overseer's back is turned, but when she looks around she will see.

“Are you all right?” I ask again.

Marya does not answer. Slowly she sets down her needle and pushes a pile of scarlet velvet off her lap. Her movements fluid with remembered grace, she gets to her feet.

The Overseer, distracted by another's stitches, does not see.

Marya turns and walks to the sewing-room door.

Don't!
I want to scream.
Stop!
I grope for the thimble in my pocket.

The Seamstresses pause in their work, following her with their squinting eyes. This cessation of motion the Overseer notices. She snaps around.

At the same moment, Marya throws open the door and flings herself into the passageway. A spate of activity follows: the shouting of guards, a scuffle, the sound of blows, Marya's high-pitched screams. Followed by stillness and silence.

We Seamstresses are on our feet, our faces to the door,
our eyes straining to see. The Overseer re-enters, smoothing her dress; there is no sound but the susurration of her footsteps. She looks up, sees us staring.

“Sssssew.”

We bow our heads, resume our seats, and sew. We are all wondering what will become of Marya. Most of us imagine the flogging post. Some of us might even look forward to witnessing such a punishment, as it breaks up the monotony of our work.

We stitch. A day passes.

Late in the afternoon the guards come again. Between them walks Marya, her eyes blank, moving awkwardly, like a collection of sticks pulled by strings. The guards push her onto her seat beside me on the bench; the Overseer places a threaded needle into her hand and sets her to hemming an apron.

The guards depart. Marya stitches. I watch her out of the corners of my eyes. Her stitches, I notice, are wide and sloppy, far worse than mine. A thread of drool escapes from her mouth and stains the cloth, but she sews on, unnoticing.

I have thought of doing what Marya has done, but no one has ever tried to escape the fortress. I can see why the Godmother has sent Marya back again, even though she has been made useless. Just like the Shoemaker, I suppose, she has learned her lesson, and now she serves as a lesson for the rest of us.

I wonder what I will learn from it.

We stitch on. My fingers cramp around the needle. The Overseer gives me a few more
thwack
s
with her switch. My shoulders hunch, and I stretch to get the ache out of my back, rub my burning eyes, and then stitch some more.

I am unpicking yet another crooked seam when the door opens. Three guards bustle in and whisper to the Overseer. We Seamstresses are made to stand in rows before our table, heads bowed, hands folded neatly before us. The thimble burns in my apron pocket. Just an inspection, the Overseer says, as if trying to reassure us.

For a moment there is silence. Then the Godmother enters. I don't dare look at her, but her presence is obvious in the way the room feels suddenly smaller and colder, and taut with held breaths.

The Godmother stands in the doorway, surveying us.

“Good girls,” she says, even though some of the so-called girls are old enough to be grandmothers. The Godmother sweeps into the room, trailed by the Overseer and the nervous guards. She pauses to inspect a bit of Hump's fine embroidery, then proceeds down the row. She passes Marya without even a glance, and comes to me.

I keep my gaze on the stone floor. The welts that stripe the back of my neck burn.

“Show me your hands,” the Godmother says.

The sound of her voice makes me jerk in surprise; my body tingles as if I've been dropped into an icy river. For a
second I grip the thimble. Then I let it go and pull my shaking hands out of my apron pockets, holding them palms up for inspection.

The Godmother takes one of my hands in hers. It is like being touched by a marble statue; her skin is that cold and smooth, white veined with palest blue. Her fingers stroke the callus on my thumb.

“The Overseer says you speak for the others, Seamstress,” the Godmother says, still holding my hand.

I suppose she's right. I do speak for the others. Even though admitting it is dangerous, I nod.

“Well then,” the Godmother says. She turns my hand, inspecting each finger. Her delicate nose wrinkles slightly, as if she smells something she doesn't like. “Is there anything you want? Or need?”

Ah. They don't want us thinking about escape, as Marya did. They want us to be happy, or at least compliant. Good little workers.

But I will not ask the Godmother for anything. What could she give us that she hasn't already taken away?

I can sense the other Seamstresses' anticipation, their unspoken requests. “Nothing,” I say, and risk an upward glance.

The Godmother regards me with her silver-blue eyes. Her expression says that she is wondering if my refusal to ask her for anything is a veiled rebellion. Her dress is the same frozen color as her eyes; I remember Marya sewing the tiny crystals onto the overskirt. She leans closer.

I hold myself still.

Her breath is cold against my cheek. “I wonder about you, my dear,” she whispers into my ear. “What you remember. And what you forget.”

“I forget everything,” I breathe. “I remember nothing.”

She straightens and drops my hand. Her eyes narrow as she inspects me closely. Too closely.

I bow my head. My flame fades to the faintest ember, hiding. I make myself the very image of a good and obedient Seamstress.

Her attention fixes on my bare feet. “Your feet are sufficiently small,” she says. “The Overseer reports that the Shoemaker has requested a model for his latest task. You are excused from your duties until he has finished with you.”

The Godmother stares at me, waiting. I bob a quick curtsy, and she glides regally from the room. The walls step back and take a deep breath after she's gone.

The other Seamstresses cast me jealous looks as they resume their seats.

Marya stays on her feet, staring blankly at the wall across from her, until I take her arm and pull her to the bench.

“Here,” I whisper, and put a threaded needle in her hand. Her fingers stay loose until I fold them around the needle. Then I pick up the apron she's been stitching and put it back into her lap. I let my touch linger against her hand for a moment, a bit of warmth for her, and for me. “I'll be back soon,” I say.

“Sahhh,” the Overseer interrupts, and I straighten. She ushers me to the door and tells me how to reach the Shoemaker's workshop. I go out the sewing-room door, down the passageway, and out to the courtyard. As always, the sky is gray, and the air is swirling with tiny snowflakes. Shivering, I cross the courtyard without looking at the post or the bramble-covered wall beyond it, and re-enter the fortress. I follow the Overseer's directions, making a left turn here, following that empty corridor to its end, climbing this narrow staircase, until I come to the Shoemaker's door. As instructed, I knock and enter.

S
HOE LOOKS UP FROM THE WORKBENCH WHERE HE'S BEEN
sketching out some plans for the blasted glass slipper ordered by the Godmother.

The stick of charcoal drops from his fingers.

The new girl, the one from the room of the Seamstresses, stands in the doorway. She'd caught his eye before, and her gaze had been piercingly, speakingly direct. And now she is here. She has a hand in the pocket of her apron as if she is holding something but keeping it hidden.

He gets to his feet, wiping smudged fingers on his trousers. He nods a greeting.

“Hello,” she says. Her voice is slightly rough—because she doesn't use it often, he knows. She is tall—his own height—with pale skin and hacked-short hair as dark and shiny as shoe
leather, and red welts across the back of her neck. Her features are strong, not pretty, he thinks, but sharply distinctive. She looks around the room with assessing gray eyes. “You're all alone here?”

He nods, still trying to find his voice. There had been another Shoemaker once, a young man, but a long time ago he'd gotten a requisition for twelve sets of dancing slippers, and then twelve more, and then more and more without end, and was beaten by their Overseer when he couldn't keep up. In the end all he could do was rock back and forth on his bench, muttering to himself while stabbing an awl through a mangled piece of shoe leather over and over again. Guards had taken him away, and he'd never come back.

Yes, he is alone.

“No Overseer?” she asks.

He clears his throat. “Sometimes. They trust me to get on with it.”

“You must have been here for a long time, then,” she observes. “What's your name?”

He shakes his head. “Call me Shoe. We don't have much time, so you'd better sit down.” He points to the three-legged stool beside his bench.

She stays on her feet. “Aren't you going to ask my name?”

“You don't have a name,” he says roughly.

“Still,” she says, and cocks her head as if waiting.

He sighs. “What should I call you?”

She gives a one-shouldered shrug. “I don't know. Stitch?”

No, she is too sharp for a name like that. “You're more of a Needle,” he mutters. “Or a Pin.”

Without warning she smiles, not a cool, sharp smile, but a wicked grin that makes him step back and catch his breath.

“Pin will do very well,” she says.

He notices, then, that her way of talking is sharp, too. Like cut glass, he would say. He is the Shoemaker, and in the Before he must have been an apprentice to a shoemaker, because even though he remembers nothing from then, his hands know what they are doing when it comes to making shoes. But her—in the Before, she wasn't a seamstress. She's too keen; she burns too brightly. In the Before, she'd been something else.

Pin steps closer, and he smells her: clean, caustic soap and something of the wind and snow in the courtyard. She reaches out and takes his hand in hers.

He feels her touch as a shock, the warmth of her fingers scorchingly hot against the skin of his own cold hand. He grits his teeth as she holds his hand in both of hers and turns it over, inspecting it. With slender fingers, she traces lines of fire along the tendons on the back of his hand, then strokes coals against the calluses on his thumb. She has calluses too, on the tips of her fingers.

He pulls his hand away. This is dangerous.
She
is dangerous. If this kind of thing goes any further, he'll end up under the whip again, or she will, and he can't face either one of
those things. “You'd better sit down,” he repeats, and points at the stool.

With a shrug she sits, first sweeping her skirt aside, an almost regal movement, as if she is used to wearing a fuller, richer dress with layers of petticoats. Maybe in the Before she did, and her body remembers it. Now she wears an apron over a loose woolen dress that comes down to her ankles.

He sits, and she pulls her skirt up to her knees and plops one of her bare feet onto the low workbench. “Well, Shoe,” she says. “I suppose you'd better get on with it.”

The glass slipper—or fur one, he hasn't gotten that cleared up yet—has to fit perfectly. He will measure each of Pin's feet and then carve a model of them, and then build the shoes. A girl can dance all night long in a shoe he's made and never feel footsore; her toes will never be pinched; she will never feel the slightest blemish of a blister on her heel.

He'll know about it if they do, the mysterious girls who wear the shoes he makes. He'll be punished for any mistakes, and know better next time. He gets out the calipers and measuring tape and a fresh piece of paper and his charcoal pencil and starts making notes.

I
LIKE THE NAME HE'S GIVEN ME.
P
IN
. I
LIKE HIS NAME,
Shoe
. From the way he moves, and the depth of his concentration, I can see that he's very skilled at his craft, just as the Seamstresses are. That makes sense; the Godmother would take only the best. Except for me. It makes me wonder even more why I'm here when I'm of no use to her.

I like the way Shoe's room smells of cured leather and tallow candle, and I like the way his tools are carefully put away on a rack on the wall. His workbench is neat, with everything to hand. Clearly he takes pride in his work, which strikes me as being odd, somehow. Something about him makes me feel wide awake and alive, not at all the gray, exhausted, dull Seamstress.

He bends over my foot, taking a precise measurement
with some metal device, inspecting it, then making notes on a piece of paper.

“Why are shoemakers called cobblers?” I ask, for something to fill the silence.

He glances up, wary. His green eyes are a strange flash of forest in this dim gray room inside a gray stone fortress within a foggy gray world. “We're not,” he says. “Cobblers fix shoes, they don't make new ones. They're not supposed to use a whole piece of leather, they only repair shoes by cobbling together odds and ends. It's—” He opens his mouth as if he'd like to say more, but then shakes his head and closes it again. Shoe is a talker, I realize; he's just out of practice.

“That must be from the Before,” I note. The Godmother does not deal in scraps and rags. For the Seamstresses it is only the richest fabrics and finest of threads. I can see, stacked on a table in the corner of the room, that Shoe has rolls of the best materials to work with, mottled leather from some reptile, a snake perhaps, shiny black leather, creamy white doeskin, and sables and rabbit fur and thick felt.

He blinks and bends his head to the measurements again. His voice has been rough, but his hands are gentle as he cradles my foot, turning it this way and that.

“Shoe, do you remember anything from the Before?” I ask softly.

“No.” He pauses to write something down on the paper. “Just the Now. I forget everything before this moment.”

I can understand this. His recent past includes the post,
after all. Time is tricky here, but it can't have been too long since then. The lashes on his back must be barely healed. “And will you forget this moment when it has passed?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don't know. Maybe.”

“What about this, Shoe,” I ask. “Do you know why we're making these dresses, and the shoes, and the rest of it? They're not all for the Godmother, are they?”

He gives me a frowning glance. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“Ones that you won't answer,” I say.

“I don't know the answers, Pin,” he says wearily, and suddenly I notice that his face is too pale, too thin, and his green eyes are shadowed with exhaustion. I wonder if I look the same, stretched to skin-over-bones by too much work and too little food. I examine my own hand. It
is
too thin, too pale. We cannot live long, I think, in service to the Godmother.

I put my too-thin hand into my apron pocket. The thimble slips onto my finger, and it warms my hand. My hope flares; a knot of determination forms in my chest. “Shoe, something is out there, beyond the walls around this fortress. I think we should try to get to it.”

He drops the metal measuring device—it clatters against the stone floor—and jerks to his feet, eyes wide. Staring at me, he backs away until he is pressed against the cold stone wall of his room. “No,” he says, and I can see that he's shaking. “If she caught us, she'd kill us. Or worse. Curse it, Pin, she'd kill us if she knew we were even talking about it.” He
glances around as if expecting a listening ear to spring out of the stone walls of his room, or an accusing finger to appear and point him out as a rebel.

“You know it exists, don't you?” I challenge. “We had to come from somewhere, didn't we?”

He shakes his head. “No. I'd better get started on the slipper pattern before it's too late.”

“All right,” I say. But it is already too late. For I am more than a Seamstress, and I have decided what I am going to do.

Shoe finishes his measurements, his movements jerky, his shoulders stiff. Then he stands and pulls on a shapeless coat made of the same gray wool as my dress. “I'll walk you to the sewing room,” he says.

Oh, so gallant. Or maybe he wants to be sure I won't get into trouble on the way back. I give him a pert curtsy that makes him frown, and then follow him from the room and down the narrow stairs. At the bottom we're supposed to go right, toward the courtyard; I go left.

I hear quick footsteps, and he catches up to me. “What are you doing?” he whispers.

“Just curious,” I answer. Curiosity is a new feeling, and I want to indulge it. I want to see what sorts of rags and scraps I might find lying around the Godmother's fortress so I can stitch together a plan. The hallway we're in is wide, lined with closed doors, lit by smoky lanterns, paved with smooth stone that is cold under my bare feet. I pause and try turning a doorknob. It's locked.

“We shouldn't be here,” he breathes.

“You don't have to come with me,” I reply. I try another door. Also locked.

I know nothing about the Before. I don't know my name or where I came from, but I do know that I am a person who asks questions and risks pushing against the boundaries of obedience. Shoe could leave me now; if he is smart, that's what he'll do. My plan will unravel, likely enough, and I'll end up at the post. But he's stubborn—I know that much about him, even not really knowing him at all—and he stays with me, a grim shadow at my back.

I reach another door, and this time I pull the thimble from my apron pocket.

“What is that?” Shoe asks at my shoulder.

With anyone else, I would hide it, but for him I open my hand; the thimble gleams silver on my palm.

“It's from the Before,” I whisper.

His eyes widen as he stares down at it; then he looks soberly at me, and I feel as if I could fall into his green eyes, into the promise of the forest outside. My knees wobble and I clench my hand around the thimble. He takes my arms, steadying me, and for just a moment my faint flame kindles to his; between us, the thimble burns with a sudden flash of light that leaks from between my fingers. Suddenly I can feel how strange the thimble is—its power, its potential.

He closes his hand over mine. “Keep it hidden,” he says, his voice ragged.

I nod, knowing he means the thimble
and
the flame.

“What can it do?” he whispers.

“Let's find out,” I answer, and slip the thimble onto my finger. Turning from him, I try the doorknob again. It turns. I glance at the thimble and it flashes a gleam at me, as sly and secret as a wink. “Thank you very much,” I tell it. Opening the door, I poke my head inside. The big, high-ceilinged room is busy, smelling of sawdust and burned feathers and linseed oil. It is the workroom of the Jacks of all trades. The air is noisy with the sound of hammering and the whoosh and rush of a bellows. I step inside and look around. In the center of the room, four Jacks are using a rope and pulleys strung from a hook in the ceiling to maneuver a feather mattress onto the top of a teetering stack of mattresses piled on a sturdy bed frame. They don't notice me and Shoe standing just inside the doorway.

But another Jack does, and scurries over to us, his face lined and pinched. “We're busy,” he snaps. “And our Overseer is due to check on us in less than an hour. Do you have a requisition?” On a nearby table, I notice blue requisition slips impaled on a metal spike.

“That depends,” I say. “Could you make me a metal hook about this big?” I hold out my hands to show him.

The Jack stares. “A
hook
? You want to know if we can make you a
hook
?” He barks out a scornful laugh. “Missy, we could make you a spinning wheel to spin thread as fine and strong as a cobweb. We could make you wings that will fly
you to the moon to get cream for your tea. We could make a music box out of pure gold that can sing like a nightingale. A hook! Hmph.”

At the center of the room, one of the Jacks reaches the top of the bed piled with mattresses. “Have you got the pea?” he shouts down to the other Jacks. One of them scurries off, presumably to fetch a pea, though what that has to do with such a strange and impractical bed, I have no idea. I ask the Jack. “Why a pea?”

He blinks and glances over at the mattress-stacked bed. “Godmother's orders, of course,” he says.

I seize at once on his words. “But why? What does she want it for?”

The Jack looks blank. “The Godmother's orders. That's all I know, missy.”

“And you don't know why?” I say to our Jack.

He shrugs. “Not my job to know.”

Of course it's not. I go back to the reason I came in here. “I need you to make me a hook, Jack. One with an eye at the end to put a rope through, and prongs that will hold tight to the top of a wall that someone might want to climb.”

From half a step behind me, I hear Shoe take a breath, as if he's about to say something.

“A grappling hook, you mean.” The Jack rubs his nose. “You got a requisition?”

“No,” I answer.

“Then we can't make you any hook.”

“Pin,” Shoe says in a low voice, a warning.

“It's all right,” I say to him. Then to the Jack, “I thought you could make anything.”

“We
can
make anything,” the Jack protests. “But you've got to have a requisition!”

In the center of the room, one of the Jacks wails; another one comes climbing down from the tall bed. One of the mattresses has sprung a leak; feathers swirl around them.

“Oh, curse it,” our Jack mutters. “Just a moment.” He scurries away to confer with the other Jacks.

“I'll be right back,” I say to Shoe, and I join the Jacks. A mattress at about head-height in the pile on the bed has split at its seam, which is still unraveling, and feathers are spilling out of it—bursting out—and floating down to the floor like snow. As I reach them, a seam on another mattress splits, and then another. The Jacks are frantically trying to stuff the feathers back into the mattresses, holding the unraveling seams together with their hands, wailing, arguing, blaming one another for the mistake.

“Come on, lads,” our Jack orders. “The requisition says this must be ready tonight.”

“It'll never be ready in time, Jack,” one of the other Jacks says, and sneezes as a bit of fluff goes up his nose. The tall stack of mattresses wavers as if it's about to topple over.

“Oh, we're in for it,” our Jack moans. “Our Overseer will be here soon. It'll be the post for all of us.”

The other Jacks moan, and a few of the younger ones
start to cry. Bits of feathers and fluff stick to their damp faces.

“Have you got a needle and plenty of stout thread?” I interrupt.

Our Jack glances aside at me and makes a shooing motion with his hands. “Go away,” he says. “You can't help.”

“Seamstress,” I tell him.

He blinks. “Jack,” he orders, with a snap of his fingers. “Needle. Stout thread.”

The fluff-covered Jack brings them, and a ladder. As I thread the needle, I push the other Jacks out of the way and climb the ladder. Here it doesn't matter if my stitches are tiny and straight, and quick as a flash I stitch up the seams of the leaking mattresses. Then I run the thimble along each seam. I don't know what its powers are, but perhaps this will help. “They'll hold,” I say, hopping to the floor.

Our Jack looks up at the teetering stack of mattresses. Then he gives me a brisk nod. “That was well done.” He lowers his voice. “You want that hook, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” I say. I can see it; the Jack has the same rebellious flame in his heart that I do. Just a spark, but it's there. I give him a quick grin.

He gulps. “When she catches you, don't tell her it was us you got it from. Right?”

“She's not going to catch me,” I say.

“Well then,” the Jack says slowly. “We'll make your grappler, right enough.”

“Thank you.” On my finger, the thimble gives a warning
throb, and I know it's telling me that it's time to go. “I'll come fetch it soon,” I say, and I lead Shoe out into the hallway. This time I turn right, toward the sewing room, and Shoe falls into step beside me.

He is furious. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, in the line of his jaw.

“I have to try,” I explain. Hook or no hook, I am going to try. I stop and face him. “I have to escape from here.”

“Where?” he asks roughly. “Even if you could get away, there's nowhere to go.”

“Yes there is,” I assure him. “There's the Before.”

“No.” He shoves his fists into his coat pockets and frowns at me. “There's no Before. It's gone.”

“An After, then,” I tell him, and point down the hall to where a door leads to the courtyard, past the post, over the wall, and beyond. “To whatever's out there.”

“There's nothing out there for you,” he says bleakly, and shakes his head. “It's too much of a risk.”

“Staying here is the biggest risk you could ever take,” I tell him.

“I can't—” he starts, then breaks off and closes his eyes. “There's worse things than the post, Pin.”

“Shoe,” I say. “We get barely enough to eat and hardly any sleep, we're not permitted to speak, we're frightened all the time, and we will work here until the day we die.” Now I step closer to him. We are much the same height, and as I lean in to whisper into his ear, my cheek brushes against his,
and he flinches. I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him. “We don't touch,” I breathe. “We don't kiss. We don't love. How could anything be worse than that?”