Sister Ignatia pretended to wave the comment away, but she pressed her lips together, suppressing a grin.
Antain glanced back at the window. The madwoman stood at the narrow window. Her body was little more than a shadow. He saw her hand reach through the bars, and a bird flutter near, nestling in her palm. The bird was made of paper. He could hear the dry rustle of its wings from where he stood.
Antain shivered.
“What are you looking at?” Sister Ignatia said.
“Nothing,” Antain lied. “I see nothing.”
“My dear boy. Is there something the matter?”
He looked at the ground. “Good luck with the garden.”
“Before you go, Antain. Why don’t you do us a favor, since we cannot entice you to apply your clever hands to the making of beautiful things, no matter how many times we ask?”
“Madam, I—”
“You there!” Sister Ignatia called. Her voice instantly took on a much harsher tone. “Have you finished packing, girl?”
“Yes, Sister,” came a voice inside the garden shed—a clear, bright voice, like a bell. Antain felt his heart ring. That voice, he thought. I remember that voice. He hadn’t heard it since they were in school, all those years ago.
“Excellent.” She turned to Antain, her words honeyed once again. “We have a novice who has opted not to apply herself to an elevated life of study and contemplation, and has decided to reenter the larger world. Foolish thing.”
Antain was shocked. “But,” he faltered. “That never happens!”
“Indeed. It never does. And it will not ever again. I must have been deluded when she first came to us, wanting to enter our Order. I shall be more discerning next time.”
A young woman emerged from the garden shed. She wore a plain shift dress that likely fit her when she first entered the Tower, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, but she had grown taller, and it barely covered her knees. She wore a pair of men’s boots, patched and worn and lopsided, that she must have borrowed from one of the groundskeepers. She smiled, and even her freckles seemed to shine.
“Hello, Antain,” Ethyne said gently. “It has been a long time.”
Antain felt the world tilt under his feet.
Ethyne turned to Sister Ignatia. “We knew one another at school.”
“She never talked to me,” Antain said in a hoarse whisper, tilting his face to the ground. His scars burned. “No girls did.”
Her eyes glittered and her mouth unfurled into a smile. “Is that so? I remember differently.” She looked at him. At his scars. She looked right at him. And she didn’t look away. And she didn’t flinch. Even his mother flinched. His own mother.
“Well,” he said. “To be fair. I didn’t talk to any girls. I still don’t, really. You should hear my mother go on about it.”
Ethyne laughed. Antain thought he might faint.
“Will you please help our little disappointment carry her things? Her brothers have gotten themselves ill and her parents are dead. I would like all evidence of this fiasco removed as quickly as possible.”
If any of this bothered Ethyne, she did not show it. “Thank you, Sister, for everything,” she said, her voice as smooth and sweet as cream. “I am ever so much more than I was when I walked in through that door.”
“And ever so much less than you could have been,” Sister Ignatia snapped. “The youth!” She threw up her hands. “If we cannot bear them, how can they possibly bear themselves?” She turned to Antain. “You will help, won’t you? The girl doesn’t have the decency to show even the tiniest modicum of sorrow for her actions.” The Head Sister’s eyes went black for a moment, as though she was terribly hungry. She squinted and frowned, and the blackness vanished. Perhaps Antain had imagined it. “I cannot tolerate another second in her company.”
“Of course, Sister,” he whispered. Antain swallowed. There seemed to be sand in his mouth. He did his best to recover himself. “I am ever at your service. Always.”
Sister Ignatia turned and stalked away, muttering as she went.
“I would rethink that stance, if I were you,” Ethyne muttered to Antain. He turned, and she gave him another broad smile. “Thank you for helping me. You always were the kindest boy I ever knew. Come. Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible. After all these years, the Sisters still give me the shivers.”
She laid her hand on Antain’s arm and led him to her bundles in the garden shed. Her fingers were calloused and her hands were strong. And Antain felt something flutter in his chest—a shiver at first, and then a powerful lift and beat, like the wings of a bird, flying high over the forest, and skimming the top of the sky.
16.
In Which There Is Ever So Much Paper
The madwoman in the Tower could not remember her own name.
She could remember no one’s name.
What was a name, anyway? You can’t hold it. You can’t smell it. You can’t rock it to sleep. You can’t whisper your love to it over and over and over again. There once was a name that she treasured above all others. But it had flown away, like a bird. And she could not coax it back.
There were so many things that flew away. Names. Memories. Her own knowledge of herself. There was a time, she knew, that she was smart. Capable. Kind. Loving and loved. There was a time when her feet fit neatly on the curve of the earth and her thoughts stacked evenly—one on top of the other—in the cupboards of her mind. But her feet had not felt the earth in ever so long, and her thoughts had been replaced by whirlwinds and storms that swept all her cupboards bare. Possibly forever.
She could remember only the touch of paper. She was hungry for paper. At night she dreamed of the dry smoothness of the sheaf, the painful bite of the edge. She dreamed of the slip of ink into the deepening white. She dreamed of paper birds and paper stars and paper skies. She dreamed of a paper moon hovering over paper cities and paper forests and paper people. A world of paper. A universe of paper. She dreamed of oceans of ink and forests of quills and an endless bog of words. She dreamed of all of it in abundance.
She didn’t only dream of paper; she had it, too. No one knew how. Every day the Sisters of the Star entered her room and cleared away the maps that she had drawn and the words that she had written without ever bothering to read them. They tutted and scolded and swept it all away. But every day, she found herself once again awash in paper and quills and ink. She had all that she needed.
A map. She drew a map. She could see it as plain as day. She is here, she wrote. She is here, she is here, she is here.
“Who is here?” the young man asked, over and over again. First, his face was young, and fine, and clear. Then, it was red, and angry, and bleeding. Eventually, the cuts from the paper birds healed, and became scars—first purple, then pink, then white. They made a map. The madwoman wondered if he could see it. Or if he understood what it meant. She wondered if anyone could—or if such things were intelligible to her alone. Was she alone mad, or had the world gone mad with her? She was in no position to say. She wanted to pin him down and write “She is here” right where his cheekbone met his earlobe. She wanted to make him understand.
Who is here? she could feel him wondering as he stared at the Tower from the ground.
Don’t you see? she wanted to shout back. But she didn’t. Her words were jumbled. She didn’t know if anything that came out of her mouth made any sense.
Each day, she released paper birds out the window. Sometimes one. Sometimes ten. Each one had a map in its heart.
She is here, in the heart of a robin.
She is here, in the heart of a crane.
She is here, she is here, she is here, in the hearts of a falcon and a kingfisher and a swan.