No! I caught the door’s elaborate handle in one hand to brace myself and used that leverage to raise my walking stick, hoping Madding would be able to grab it. Madding, his eyes wide and teeth bared, strained toward me. The sound of jangling chimes was barely audible, sucked away by the hole.
He mouthed something I couldn’t hear. He ground his teeth, and I heard him in my head this time, in the manner of gods. GET INSIDE!
Then he flew backward, as if a great invisible hand had grabbed him around the waist and yanked. The hole vanished. He was gone.
I fumbled with the door handle, my breath wild and loud in my ears, my palms so sweaty that the stick slipped loose to clatter on the ground. I could hear no one else on the street; I was alone. Except for the remaining holes, which hovered all around me, darker than the black of my sight.
Then I got the door open and ran into the house, away from the holes, toward the clean, empty darkness where I was blind but where at least I knew what dangers I faced.
I got three steps into the house before the air tore behind me, and I flew backward off my feet, and a sound like trembling metal filled the world as I tumbled away.
7
“Girl in Darkness”
(watercolor)
MY DREAMS HAVE BEEN more vivid lately. They told me that might happen, but still… I remembered something.
In the dream, I paint a picture. But as I lose myself in the colors of the sky and the mountains and the mushrooms that dwarf the mountains—this is a living world, full of strange flora and fungi; I can almost smell the fumes of its alien air—the door to my room opens and my mother comes in.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
And though I am still half lost in mountains and mushrooms, I have no choice but to pull myself back into this world, where I am just a sheltered blind girl whose mother wants what’s best for me, even if she and I do not agree on what that is.
“Painting,” I say, though this is obvious. My belly has clenched in defensive tension; I fear a lecture is coming.
She only sighs and comes closer, putting her hand on mine to let me know where she is. She is silent for a long while. Is she looking at the painting? I nibble my bottom lip, not quite daring to hope that she is, perhaps, trying to understand why I do what I do. She has never told me to stop, but I can taste her disapproval, as sour and heavy on my tongue as old, molding grapes. She has hinted at it verbally as well, in the past. Paint something useful, something pretty. Something that does not entrance viewers for hours on end. Something that would not attract the sharp, gleaming interest of the priests if they saw it. Something safe.
She says nothing this time, only stroking my braided hair, and at last I realize she is not thinking about me or my paintings at all. “What is it, Mama?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, very softly, and I realize that for the first time in my life, she has just lied to me.
My heart fills with dread. I don’t know why. Perhaps it is the whiff of fear that wafts from her, or the sorrow that underlies it, or simply the fact that my garrulous, cheerful mother is suddenly so quiet, so still.
So I lean against her and put my arms around her waist. She is trembling, unable to give me the comfort that I crave. I take what I can, and perhaps give a little of my own in return.
My father died a few weeks later.
I floated in numbing emptiness, screaming, unable to hear myself. When I clasped my hands together, I felt nothing, even when I dug in my nails. Opening my mouth, I sucked in another breath to scream again but felt no sensation of air moving over my tongue or filling my lungs. I knew that I did it. I willed my muscles to move and believed that they responded. But I could feel nothing.
Nothing but the terrible cold. It was bitter enough to be painful, or would have been if I could feel pain. If I had been able to stand, I might have fallen to the ground, too cold to do anything but shiver. If only there had been ground.
The mortal mind is not built for such things. I did not miss sight, but touch? Sound? Smell? I was used to those. I needed those. Was this how other people felt about blindness? No wonder they feared it so.
I contemplated going mad.
“Ree-child,” says my father, taking my hands. “Don’t rely on your magic. I know the temptation will be there. It’s good to see, isn’t it?”
I nod. He smiles.
“But the power comes from inside you,” he goes on. He opens one of my small hands and traces the whorling print of one fingertip. It tickles and I laugh. “If you use a lot of it, you’ll get tired. If you use it all… Ree-child, you could die.”
I frown in puzzlement. “It’s just magic.” Magic is light, color. Magic is a beautiful song—wonderful, but not a necessity of life. Not like food or water, or sleep, or blood.