Truth and Fear by Peter Higgins

Author:Peter Higgins [Higgins, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Dystopia, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780316219730
Google: fXYmAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Orbit Books
Published: 2014-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

46

Maroussia was awake in the night. She lay still, breathing slowly. Listening. The attic window framed a flickering sky: gunfire on the distant horizon, flashing against low-hanging cloud. A new kind of weather.

Lom lay next to her, warm and heavy under the quilt, eyes clenched fiercely in sleep.

There were trees in the room. The room was full of trees.

Count Palffy’s house was full of trees.

The streets of the raion were full of trees.

Watchful trees, waiting for her.

Maroussia turned back the quilt and crawled out of the bed. Her dress was draped over a chair. From the pocket she brought out the bag, stained with her mother’s blood, that held the thing of twigs and tiny bones. She opened the bag and took it out. It stirred in the cup of her palm restlessly, as if a small animal was in there, moving. There were tiny berries inside it, fresh and purple-bright. She leaned forward and brought it up to her face. Listening. Quiet voices whispered. Calling her.

Come out. Come out under the trees.

She pulled her coat on over her night shirt and, holding the knot of twigs and forest breath cupped gingerly in her palm, went down into the house and made her way through tree-crowded landings and passage ways out into the street. Bare feet in the snow. The moons spilled white luminance through gaps in the cloud. The vapour ghosts of her breath glittered. It was so cold. Bitter cold.

There wasn’t much left of the streets; it was mostly trees. She walked among them, her feet freezing, pushing onwards, deeper and deeper into the trees. Eventually she remembered the bag in her hand and stopped. Undid the string at the bag’s tight mouth and pulled it open.

Between step and step she passed through into difference. Forest. Change.

Maroussia was in a beautiful, simple place under the trees. Everything rang with a true, clear note, and everything shone out from within itself with its own radiance, fresh and cool. Nothing was anything except what it was. The distances between things were airier and more obvious. The night air–luminous velvet and purple-blue–streamed with perfume. Corn-gold swollen stars spilled flakes of light that brushed her face and settled on her shoulders.

Walking, she left a trail of dark impressions across dew-webbed grass. She came to a wide clump of thorn. Tiny droplets of mist-water, star-glittering, hung from every tip and nestled in the crooks and elbows of every twig. The water made her thirsty. She crouched in the long wet grass and licked at the branches, making slow careful movements with her tongue. She took hawthorn twigs into her mouth carefully. The water was cold and good. The wood tasted… complex. Thorns pricked the inside of her mouth, mingling the iron taste of her blood with the wood and the water.

She looked at her own hands. They were made of leaves.

The world cracked open as if gods were walking through it. It was a breaking of tension, like a shattering downpour of rain. Everything was alive with wildness.

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