No. 8

No. 8 8 MINUTE READ

Jana contracts the Knocking Death in late spring.

The Knocking Death is very straight-forward. The first day you have it, it presents as fever— on a warm spring day, it doesn’t present as anything more than overexertion. The second day is when the irregular heartbeat starts. The knocking. That’s the day you shut the house and get your affairs in order. Though, of course, unless the fever was caught and the sufferer kept away from fond embraces, the whole family will hear knocking tomorrow. The third day you feel very well except for a minor issue of balance. The Knocking Death makes its final home in the inner ear. The moment your body falls horizontal after that, you die.

This final day of the Knocking Death is somewhat variable. If you don’t wake before it settles in your ear, you don’t wake at all. Kind. If you do wake and get creative, perhaps lashing yourself to a tree or suspending yourself against a door via a hook in the collar, you have until people get tired of feeding you, or the hook gives. Most people find by day six of not sleeping well and pissing down their legs they could go for a lie-down. So the Knocking Death, like every other half-magic, half-organic malady carried out of the Reach, has a flawless mortality rate.

This Jana explains slowly to Maggie. The halfwoman was making dinner, Calum seated nearby, so she’s a bit foggy. The boy, bless him, has the presence of mind to move to the hall when Jana has to indicate for the third time where her ear is through the thick layers of veiling she’s donned to protect the household. After that Maggie looks a little sharper, but says, stupidly, “Book a caller tonight. Your least favorite.”

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” Jana says. “This carries, Mags! No one can touch me. Feel the pulse or hear the heartbeat, that’s it. And I don’t have long now to waste on my back with bad company!”

“I know,” Maggie says, echoing Jana’s earlier slow delivery, making sure she’s understood. “So pick someone who spends quick and you can do without.”

“Oh,” says Jana.

Having sex with a magical heart arrhythmia is fairly miserable. Really, the whole half hour is fairly miserable, but Jana tries very hard to position guilt about what’s going to happen over her personal discomfort. Living with a necromancer has the effect over time of making necromancy seem very normal, even mundane. This doesn’t feel like a dark magic ritual exchanging another life for hers in a pinnacle of selfish action. Mostly it feels like being stressed, a bit dizzy from the irregular heartbeat, having to deliver a slap when the unlucky fellow tries for the wrong hole, and then a solid five minutes of being squished under his post-coital bliss. Then it’s the brief sight of Maggie’s broad hand snaking up from under the bed to his ankle, and her… foot…? The sole of her bare foot pressing against the curve of Jana’s calf.

Then it’s blessed calm. Jana’s heartbeat settles. The body crushing hers rolls off the side of the bed with a forceful tug and a crash, Maggie’s disproportionate strength at work. Maggie crawls out and hands her a damp dishrag, which she blots her face with before blotting other areas.

“Well?” she asks. “Will he know he got it off me?”

“Probably,” Maggie says, “but it’ll require another bonetalker to ask.”

Now that Jana takes another look, he does look stiff. “That was quick.”

“I moved it to him at your stage, then took what you needed from what remained of him,” Maggie says. She’s always vague about how the magic works, which Jana used to think was condescending, but discovered some time ago was because Maggie’s understanding is actually that vague. “The ear bit started on the way to the floor, I think. From the timing. I kept my hand on bone.”

“And put your big, callused sole on me,” Jana said. “No pulse either way? Cheeky. Didn’t think I’d ever be glad about your leather-feet in bed.”

Maggie yawns hugely. “Change the sheets? I’ll bury him.”

“Better have Calum do the linens. He’s heavy, even for you.”

The sun has just set when they half-carry, half-roll the dead man into their back garden. They have the lushest on their street. This makes sense to everyone— as local healer, Maggie should tend an exemplary garden of healing herbs and hearty vegetables. In reality, Maggie has a black thumb. It all comes down to fertilizer. That, and Jana teaching Calum to spot dying leaves and suckers, though she wished he wouldn’t just… stand and eat the garden trash.

Maggie digs, densely muscled shoulders rolling as her grip on the shovel shifts, her overdress folded and kept out of the muck by Jana, who isn’t much for physical labor. She just stands among the broom and tansy, looking picturesque. She waves to a neighbor. He waves back, as jovial as anyone in Galhana. The wind is blowing against the Reach. It’s a night for enjoying your back garden.

They eat a late supper after Jana’s unfortunate caller is planted and go to bed early. Calum remade the bed with neat corners. Jana delights in this. Maggie, as ever, looks a little frustrated. Halfmen bulls are supposed to be very different from the gangly and sweetly focused young man they’ve raised, but that suits Jana up and down—she’s dealt with enough bulls of all species in her time.

“Will you stay up to read?” Jana asks as she lights a bedside candle.

“Nay,” Maggie says, yawning again. “Mm. Bridging wears me out. You take the candle.”

That settled, Jana spends an hour as Maggie drops off enjoying her new health with a tawdry little two-copper novel, setting it atop Maggie’s necromantic tome when she finishes. It looks funny and very charming lying with a sloppy saddle stitch on top of the forbidding book bound in skin. Many things have struck Jana as funny and charming this evening. The euphoria of sending the Knocking Death away at the door, she thinks, and muffles a giggle into her pillow before leaning back up to blow out the candle. She tries to remind herself to feel guilty and fails. Maggie curls around her back despite Jana being two whole heads taller. Her breaths are slow, deep, sighing in the way livestock snuggled in clean straw and the safety of a barn sigh.

“It’s happening again,” Rodrig says, grinning across the table from her. They’re playing War with diviner cards. Jana has no idea which of her hand might trump what’s already face-up on the table.

“It’s happening again,” agrees Alsif, with a flip of her hair, as she sets down a Mage-King. Two hands shoot out to slam the tabletop. So it’s Slap? Jana regards her hand again with no better idea of what to play, or when.

“It’s happening,” Goren whispers, conspiratorially, as he leans in towards her ear, “again.”

“What is, Ren?” Jana asks. Under the table, she idly knocks her heels together. She’s wearing mother’s over-sized silk slippers. She’s nine? Younger?

Yves, resplendent in olive-dyed jerkin, leans in to align the cards laid down and take back those claimed. The icons of the diviners make a merry train right up to the table’s edge. The Outsider, The Midwife, The Collapse of All Things, The Huntsman, The Celestial Dance, Forbearance, The Elf Who Eats Itself, then, a knuckle’s-width hanging off in space, the familiar grinning visage of Death Undeniable, picked out in gilt and black ink.

Rhyslaine taps it with a single chewed-down fingernail. Death Undeniable flips and tumbles towards the floor. Against all odds and good sense, it falls on its edge and slides neatly between the floorboards, lost forever.

“It’s happening again,” all Jana’s lost siblings say, smiling until their features run like sunlight hitting the coast air at dawn.

She sits up in bed clammy. She and Maggie have done their customary switch of positions, Maggie now curled towards the wall and Jana pressed to her small back. Part of her wants to fall prone again and plaster herself in place, as if by getting close enough they might become inseparable. A larger part flares hot with rage. The larger part wins out. She flips the quilt back and goes to the kitchen.

“You well?” Maggie asks barely ten minutes later, swamped in one of Jana’s old nightshirts. It’s impossible to leave her sleeping alone long. Some baser instinct wakes her, something to protect against being left behind by a herd. Calum slept terribly for the whole year after Jana insisted he was too big to stay bedded down between them. He still sleeps terribly. Jana pours herself more cooking sherry.

“You found a party to join,” Jana says.

“Who told?” Maggie replies, eyes narrowing. “Pritchett?”

“No one at Dolly’s,” Jana says. She grins, manic, trying to make a show of the canines she has and Maggie lacks. “My siblings.”

Maggie turns this information over for a moment. It’s not herd-slowness, just confusion and sleep still weighing her mind down. Eventually, she states the obvious. “They’re dead, Jana.”

“Maybe!” Jana agrees, more shrilly than she means to. She’s had enough of the sherry by then to feel a little feverish, like she had the day before, when she missed herself falling deathly ill. “That’s the rub, yeah? Cheeky. No bodies to bury in the garden, Mags, just seven backs disappearing past the wall. It was a regular reunion! Rodrig, Alsif, Goren, Yves, Rhyslaine— even Masha and Froilla, though the twins were, as ever, only talkative with each other.”

Maggie slides herself into a chair. Falsely convivial and more than happy to share the awful taste of the pantry wine, Jana pours her some off in a teacup.

“One, two, three, four, five, and six and seven, hand in hand,” she says, “but eight won’t follow, and even mater and pater no longer bother to write for updates on the search. So! Here comes Maggie.” Suddenly vindictive, she spits, “Will that make Calum nine?”

Maggie swallows the sherry with a grimace. Fondness flutters unbidden between Jana’s ribs like a trapped bird. She tightens her proverbial grip on it, quelling the wingbeats.

“If I don’t go now,” the halfwoman says, “I’ll be dead before you’re gray. And Calum two years after.”

“We’d have those years,” Jana says.

“Yea,” Maggie agrees, “and that’s all.”

“Not enough?”

She and Maggie have never said they love each other. Jana stopped saying the words on doomed sibling number five. Maggie perhaps doesn’t know them. But she says them when she says, “No.”

That’s not even why she’s going, and knowing that starts the tears. Jana cries very prettily. When her family had numbers and a future that didn’t terminate at the wall to the Reach, she was intended for life at a cold northern court. She has ice-white skin and white-gold hair, and she sits with the bearing of a queen or a martyr on their secondhand kitchen chairs, and on her perch at Dolly’s, where she waits most days with bodice unlaced to wink at road-grimed new arrivals in Galhana. She cries into her shitty wine and Maggie ineptly takes her hand.

“Mama?” Calum calls from the doorway.

“Yes?” they say at the same time.

“I had the wolf dream again,” he says, looking sheepish and more his actual two-years-old than he ever has. “Could… have you turned in? Could I sit with you a while?”

“No,” Maggie answers the first question, and Jana answers the second, “Of course, darling.”

Jana fights sleep sandwiched between her new, slow-breathing family a little while after the sherry is re-corked.

“I would go, for you,” she whispers, horrified and crazed and so quiet, not wanting to disturb them. Her fine hair is loose and her embroidered slip glows by the guttering candle on the nightstand. She looks like bone china between earthenware mugs. “And you could forget human time. They’re all waiting for me, after all. Only I’ve been so scared. But I would go if you would stay and forget how to read your books.”

The dream picks up right where it left off when she loses her battle. Death Undeniable is lost forever. Masha and Froilla hold two diviner cards, backs to her, and turn them simultaneously. Handfasting and The Blight. The cards tilt between their pale fingertips and cross like an honor guard’s swords.

“It’s happening again,” the twins say, and smile beatifically at once-Lady Jana Kobliska.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/29/2021 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024