Of Sorrow and Such Read online

  One of the bushes shivers and shifts: Sandor steps through. We are frozen with unreasoning fear, waiting. Are there others? But no, there is only Sandor.

  There is only Sandor, pack on his back, wide-brimmed hat on his head, cloak around his shoulders. And a smile, uncertain, but determined, playing across his mouth. There is only Sandor who’s given up all he possessed to follow. He has eyes for no one but Gilly. She stands, poised, uncertain and flighty as a doe. Her head swings from his face to mine and back and back again.

  There are things I want to tell her. Things I should share. Things I’ve kept too long and now there is no time.

  I smile at her.

  “Go, my Gilly-girl. Go.”

  And she does, all hesitation fled. One last quick hug between us, a brisk hand on Fenric’s head, and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a child of my own is gone. She crosses the clearing, her hand reaches for Sandor’s, touches, makes a connection, a bond, and then they disappear into the green depths, and away and away and away from me.

  I watch for a little while, part of me wondering if she’ll return, though my heart knows she won’t.

  “Time to leave,” says Selke quietly.

  “Why did they come for you? God’s hounds?” I ask Selke when darkness has fallen and we’ve finally stopped for the night. Fenric is curled at my feet, gnawing happily on a rabbit he hunted up. At first I think she won’t answer, but there’s no room for secrets anymore. She sighs.

  “I told you the wolves in Lodellan cathedral are mine, my work. And so they are: they’re not normal, not alive in any way anyone else might understand. They were dead once, but I brought them back.” She licks her lips. “When I arrived in the city, you need to understand how callow I was, yet how ambitious. Things had happened in my life and I swore I’d learn from them, but . . . I left them behind, and the lessons I should have held onto I forgot willingly enough. In Lodellan there was . . . all I’d ever dreamt of: riches, fine gowns, jewellery, a workshop equipped with everything I might ever need or want . . . and no limits. No limits on what I did or said, what I could try, the experiments I might make. And a man. The archbishop, Narcissus Marsh, so fine-looking, so clever and charming. A real man, not a boy . . . or so I thought. A man who gave me these things and all I had to do was bend my power in his service.”

  She rubs her eyes. “For a long time our desires were either the same or so close that the difference did not matter. We became lovers. When I became pregnant, he was ecstatic.”

  “An archbishop.” I laugh.

  “You know only the lower orders of priests and pastors are allowed to marry, but in general churchmen live their lives as they wish, especially those as high up as he. They think they’ve got no limits either, think they’re so close to God they can touch the sky with their fingertips and it will sigh in pleasure.” She snorted. “I had the child, a little lad, too soon and so small he came. He didn’t last more than a few days. I was bereft, but Narcissus . . . Narcissus was mad with grief.”

  She stands, kicks at the space where we might have made a fire if we’d felt confident, and paces. Fenric watches her. Tomorrow night will be different, when we’re far enough from Edda’s Meadow that it’s naught but a sharp, bitter recollection.

  “We might have been happy still, might have gone on had he but . . . He came to me one night after the child had been dead a week and kept in the cool of the catacombs beneath the cathedral, for Narcissus couldn’t bear for his boy to be in the ground. He said that the solution had been staring him in the face all along. That I could fix it. What I did with the wolves I could do with our son; I could put a new piece of soul inside him and bring him back to us. That I could make our child into something that . . .”

  “You refused,” I say quietly.

  She stares into the blackness of the forest around us. “And I refused. I’d found my limit at long last. I would not do that to my child, bring him back to nothing more than a half-life. The wolves live with one foot in deepest shadow, the other in twilight. And their minds are not whole things, for there is not enough soul left to balance it. I would not do that to my baby.”

  “You fled,” I guess.

  “And he has pursued me in the ten years since,” she soughs and sits again. “He never did like hearing no.” She wipes at her cheeks where moonlight picks out the damp diamonds of tears. “I wonder . . . wonder sometimes if the child is still there, in the catacombs, waiting.”

  I can offer neither comfort nor condemnation. She has done what she has done and I have done what I have done. I am no judge of Selke and her life.

  After a while she says, “Sleep, time to sleep. We’ll need to be off early tomorrow if we’re to put distance between us and the mess we left behind.”

  I appreciate that she does not say your mess.

  When I wake she is gone. She’s taken no more than her own things and half the food. She’s left nothing more than a sketch in the dirt by my head, a smiling face, and a gift: a small package of living clay that I recognise not by unwrapping it but by the way it moves under my hand. There is a rustling in the undergrowth and Fenric’s large head pushes through, a dead squirrel in his jaws.

  I think of Gilly and wonder how far she is from me now, whether she will be content and accepting of her lot. I think of Charity Alhgren and her mother-in-law, safe at last from husband and son. I think of Ina Brautigan and wonder how long before she deals with her brother and how she will do it. I think of Balthazar Cotton’s nameless daughter and wonder who she will become.

  I eat a small breakfast of bread and hard cheese, then stretch until my body feels less resistant to moving, and finally hoist the satchel Gilly brought for me from the alder grove over my back. The absence of Wynne’s book pulls at me as though it still has weight. In many ways, I suppose it does and it will be a burden, a phantom limb that haunts for a long time to come. I wonder if I’ll ever be free of it.

  I bite back tears, push away the loss, and take my bearings.

  To the north lies the great cathedral city of Lodellan. In his fine home, Narcissus Marsh sits and waits. Waits for one of his hounds to drag Selke back.

  In one of the many pockets inside my cloak is the grey pouch filled with the last of the powdered waterweed. There is a final service I can do for my friend, though she may never know it, in return for the saving of my life.

  I take my first steps into the new day, Fenric dancing beside me.

  We head north.

  Author’s Note

  Of Sorrow and Such is set in the universe I created for my collections Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. It’s the story, dear reader, of Patience, whose early life was introduced in the Sourdough tale of “Gallowberries,” and whose later years were hinted at in “Sister, Sister.” I’d always wanted to go back and explore what happened in between.

  Patience (Sykes that was, Gideon in this recounting) remains one of my favourite characters: she’s determined and cynical and clear-eyed, unafraid to do the things that must be done, unafraid to get her hands dirty, yet she has a conscience and tries to atone for her sins. Her survival instinct is strong and I think that may be what I love the most about her. In Of Sorrow and Such I was able to match her up with Selke, another Sourdough character whose life I wanted to see continue after the events of “A Porcelain Soul.” I think they work well together.

  Needing a central idea to marry them to, I went to one of the stories that’s always stuck with me from childhood. Many years ago, our father gave my sister and me a copy of Mildred Kirk’s The Everlasting Cat, which contains the folktale of the man hired to look after an ostensibly haunted mill, which he finds is actually the lair of some very large cats who can talk, and try to poison his milk. Needless to say, after being carried around in my very messy brain for a long time, some of those images are mirrored here.

  About the Author

  Photograph © 2015 David Pollitt

  Specializing in dark fantasy
and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, and Black-Winged Angels, as well as Midnight and Moonshine and The Female Factory (both coauthored with Lisa L. Hannett). Vigil, the first book of her Verity Fassbinder urban fantasy trilogy, will be published by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016. She has five Aurealis Awards, has been a World Fantasy Award finalist, and is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. Angela holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in creative writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow. She blogs at www.angelaslatter.com about shiny things that catch her eye, and lurks on Twitter @AngelaSlatter.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Newsletter Sign-up

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  of sorrow and such

  Copyright © 2015 by Angela Slatter

  Cover art copyright © 2015 by Anna and Elena Balbusso

  Edited by Lee Harris

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-4668-9192-0 (e-book)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8526-0 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: October 2015

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