It is the custom on the Isle of Feathers for young men to leave small gifts for their sweethearts on each of the twenty-four days of Advent.
Having no sweetheart and desiring none, Neve Ellaquin woke on the first of December without expectations. Well, that’s not strictly true. She expected rain, because rain was as sure a feature of a December day as hungry foxes. And she expected quiet, because that’s what she’d had in abundance since the twins died together in late summer, leaving her alone in this benighted place. She expected, roundly, a heaping spoonful of the same dolorous drear that November had served up, only colder. That was the way of things as Neve knew them: there were no good surprises, only bad. In the evening, when she took her single, cherished book out of the chest to read by the fire, it would hold the same stories it always had, and so would her days, until they ended.
Her feet fell off the bed’s edge like lead weights, and the morning’s first sitting-up breath was a sigh.
“It’s too early in the day for sighs,” she said aloud. She talked to herself all the time now; she used her voice to slice the heavy air into strips so it wouldn’t smother her. “If I spend all my disappointment before breakfast, what will I go on for the rest of the day?” And she smiled at herself for being such a sour thing. She thought of Dame Somnolence at the factory, whose advice to the girls was to “live bitter, so the crows will have no taste for you when you’re dead.”
“And why should I deprive them of nourishment?” Neve had countered, because before this summer she’d still had it in her to be saucy. “Don’t they deserve a treat, too?”
“And you want to be that treat?”
“Why not?” Neve had asked. “What do I care for my carcass once I’m done with it?” And ever since, Dame Somnolence had called her Crow Food instead of her name. Never mind that it no longer suited her. Neve thought she had to be the bitterest snack of flesh on the island these days—especially now, with Christmas coming and the twins gone and gone.
The twins. Ivan and Jathry. With Neve, they’d been part of the batch of kids brought here twelve years back: plague orphans from the Failed Colony, bought cheap and worked hard, the boys in the field, the girls in the factory, their food thin and their beds thinner, out in the wind-taunted sheds behind Graveyard Farm. The light at the end of the tunnel for the lot of them: they were free once they reached Age. “Age,” they all called it, that simple, like it was the only one that mattered. Age was eighteen, and as for “free,” what does free mean to work orphans turned loose with their pockets full of air, on an island in the middle of the blasted great Gliding? Ship’s passage cost more than their lives were worth, and some boys chose to pay that price, just to get away. Signing themselves over to a crew on a contract they’d be lucky to pay off before they saw fifty—and what sailor on the Gliding ever saw fifty?
So most of the boys stayed on the Isle of Feathers, and all the girls did, because though a ship would have been happy to take them, it was on a different kind of contract, and no girl—none—could ever hate the island enough to make that choice. So “freedom” for a girl meant one thing only: freedom to marry, and so that’s what they did. The lucky ones caught the eye of a boy from a First Settlement family—or perhaps not a boy but a man (there being no shortage of widowers on the Isle of Feathers)—and the less lucky, one of the latecome tradesmen who’d hung up shingles in the harbor town. The least lucky of all? One of Neve’s own caste, a “plague boy” with nothing to his name but a pair of work-rough hands.
The First Settlement families owned all the good land, so those girls got real houses whose walls didn’t moan and sway, and gardens that grabbed the best sun, and maybe even a ribbon of clear water slipping across their plot, as aglint with green-gold fish as the mosaics of the church floor. And some of the tradesmen did well enough and some didn’t, so those girls might end up in one of the skinny, gabled row houses on the pitched streets of the harbor town, or else in a flat above a shop, or the cellar beneath a pub, or some place like that. And the orphans’ brides? Well, there were parcels of land to be had for free in Fog Cup—the valley in the middle of the isle so named because it was little more than a cup for fog—and no one would call it good land, but most years it was enough to make a life on. Most years. If you didn’t have too many mouths to feed, and you didn’t mind the damp.
I ask you, who doesn’t mind the damp?
Still, that had been Neve’s plan: Fog Cup, with the twins. They’d thought, once upon a time, that they’d be married all three together. Why not? Back then, to them, marriage just looked like grownups living in their own house and making up their own rules, and what else had they wanted since setting foot off the stinking ship that brought them here? Later on, though, Bill Childbreaker told them—in more detail than was necessary or decent—what went on betwixt husbands and wives, and they’d stared at each other, red-faced, their innocence dissolving like scoops of beached sea foam.
Not marriage, then.
If Ivan and Jathry had been one boy instead of two, then Neve guessed she would have married him, but choosing between them was never an option. When they walked down a road, Neve walked in the middle. That’s just how it was. And when they grew up enough that the carnal secrets of marriage no longer shocked them, well. If either Ivan or Jathry felt husbandly toward her, Neve never knew it, and she had no wifely stirrings herself. They were strong boys with good faces, and they’d been part of her heart since home—true home, long lost—but it wasn’t like that between them. There were no glimmering moments where their looks hooked on to each other and grew hot, and no catching sight of one of the boys in a ray of sun and thinking, I wonder what his skin tastes like. There was never a hint of a blush, nary a tingle, never any of the things the other girls talked of at the factory, breathless and blushing and purring with longing.
Oh, and today would be rife with blushing and purring, Neve knew, and with crowing and gloating from girls who got the best gifts, and weeping and sulking from those who got none, or worse: a gift from the wrong fellow, some drunk or lecher, or maybe that shameless nose-picker “Three-Knuckle” Mickle-Jon Herring, perish the thought.
And then there was Reverend Spear, a category of threat all his own.
A cold weight settled in Neve at the thought of the island’s tall, handsome preacher. He was fire and brimstone, a man possessed, and his sermons were like travelogues of Hell. This lake of fire, this pit of the damned, these gnawing serpents, and all the ingenious implements in the hands of demons who would spend an eternity peeling you like fruit and slowly devouring you, only then to begin afresh, and savor you for another thousand years. If children didn’t wake screaming on Sabbath nights, he considered the sermon a failure and the next week’s was worse. Once, when a farm boy was caught with a potato in his pocket, the reverend convinced Bill Childbreaker to lash him as an example, and when a clatch of girls were found swimming by moonlight at Song Beach—in their petticoats, not even their birthday suits!—he had them shut in their houses for the whole rest of the summer, with signs on all their doors that said INDECENCY IS AN AFFRONT TO GOD.
He’d lost his third wife this year—to the same fever that took Ivan and Jathry—and he made it no secret that he’d be choosing another for Advent. Why pay a charwoman for work a wife would do for free? And besides, wives were more than just unpaid charwomen, weren’t they? Neve saw him looking the girls over in church like they were his own box of chocolates—eeny meeny, who am I in the mood for next?—and she’d felt his gimlet eye settle on herself a few too many times for comfort.
His pupils always looked tiny to her, like painted-on dots.
She told herself she didn’t have to worry. Spear liked to claim that pretty girls made troublesome wives, he’d learned it from experience, and had even said once, for all to hear, “Beauty is free to the eye to enjoy, and the bedroom is dark, after all. But just try pretending your dinner unburned, or your house clean and your children tended.”
In essence, wasn’t their good man of God saying to close your eyes and picture some other man’s wife while you grunt atop the poor homely slave who’s your own?
Neve hated him, and she was honestly sorry for whoever got his gift this morning, but she didn’t think it would be herself. She knew she was pretty, and if she’d never had cause to be grateful for it before, here was proof that there’s a first time for everything. Maybe she’d be the one he pictured in the dark, and that was a notion vile enough to choke on, but she wouldn’t be the one he courted.
She just wouldn’t.
She dressed herself. The shed was frigid; dressing quick was an art learned early. Washing quick was harder; you had to really care to even bother. Neve cared, Lord knows why. At least her basin wasn’t skimmed with ice yet. That would come by January and last through April. Still, this water was kissing cousins to ice, and she was shaking with chill when she yanked on her stockings and slip, her dress and kirtle, her many-pocketed apron, her old, dull boots. Even numb-fingered, it was the work of a minute to bind up her hair, honeysuckle bright, and cover it with a kerchief the color of mud.
And then what? She glanced at the door. On a normal morning, she’d tromp out to the henhouse first thing—not that her sad hen Potpie had been laying of late, but she still checked as a matter of course—but she found herself hesitating and knew well enough why. She was wondering at the state of her porch.
Was it as empty as she’d left it the night before?
“Please God,” she whispered, and right away it struck her as the wrong plea. If there was a god, then Neve’s whole life was a crime He had committed against her, and she dared attract no more of his attention.
She looked to the milking stool that served her for a bed stand and drew some strength from what lay upon it.
A dead flower.
How many girls on the Isle of Feathers had a dead flower ready this morning? And then, how many knew there was no courtship so bad that she could afford to reject it?
That was how it worked: You woke on the first of December to find—or not find—a token of affection on the porch. A paper cone of sweets or a whittled bird or a posey, maybe. To reject the suit, you left a dead flower in the spot for the fellow to find the next night. Acceptance was tacit. You did nothing, just rose each morning to see what your future husband had left for you, twenty-four days in a row until the Christmas Eve gather in Scarman’s Hall. That’s where the couples came together under a lacework of paper snowflakes and frosted lamps and sealed their fates with a dance. You set your hand in his and that was it: contract sealed with the clamminess of a girl’s despairing sweat.
How romantic.