“No.” There wasn’t fire in Gabrielle’s voice, but rather cold conviction. “There is a way. I simply must remember it.”
Hall replied not with irritation but with patience. “Without the vessel, the anchor of the curse, the spell cannot be lifted.”
“Without the vessel, the spell cannot be broken. There’s a difference.”
Mother Hall took a small sip of tea as Gabrielle stood and began to pace. “So?”
Gabrielle could feel the answer beneath the river of her thoughts, but she didn’t grasp for it. She was already dancing around the solution- she simply had to continue her drawing-nearer movements.
“The spell is stuck, anchored to a pumpkin whose physical integrity is preserved by magic. It’ll take years for the magic to wear off, at least.” Gabrielle watched as her words made Dignity’s sallow face- already contorted with grief- even waxier. She had to fix this. “The spell cannot be broken.” That much was true, but- “But it can be altered! It can be lifted if we lay it on another.”
Dignity’s eyes flickered, their pale flames beginning to burn brighter. But it was the red-eyed boy who spoke.
“What are you saying?”
Gabrielle spun around to face the whole table. “We can save Dignity if we condemn Lillian.”
The slightly-malicious but mostly-mischievous grins of the mice-boys paired with Dignity’s grim nod and Mother Hall’s slightly wry look of pride told Gabrielle that her plan had their support.
***
But the summary of a plan glosses over its substance, and after Gabrielle’s proclamation there were still hours of plotting and planning and mapping to do before she set out from Hall’s home, three mice-boys and a Pumpkin Prince in tow. They had two more rivers to recruit, simulacra to obtain for the thrones, and all the ingredients necessary to transfer the binding spell from Dignity to Lillian left to find.
And so began Gabrielle’s mad run around the realm of Harkenhilt.
***
“Right,” Gabrielle said, hand on her hips, looking the very picture of prepared and staring at the entrance of the Candlewood. “So I’m never going in there again. Dignity, time for you to pay your brother a little visit.”
“Denial is not my brother,” Dignity grumbled. “More like a cousin.”
“Huh.” Gabrielle looked intrigued for a moment and then shook her head. “No matter. You go in there with two of the boys and snag a good lump of candle wax for us.”
Dignity sighed and looked at the ornate doors resting before him. They were far more finely wrought than those Gabrielle had used to enter, and she wondered to what great cathedral they belonged, for Dignity had explained to her back in the empty courtyard that church doors were the formal entrances into the Candlewood.
“When our world is in order,” he had said, “spirits flit in and out of the Candlewood to taste again the memories of their families and friends. It is a sedative for grief, one that can ease their souls frightened at the unknown. Few linger over-long except the guards, who tend in any case to already be liminal souls.”
But now, Gabrielle knew, souls were trapped in the Candlewood, their identities melting away like the candle wax they craved. Nobody deserved such a fate- she had to save Harkenhilt, to restore to the throne its missing rightful prince.
Who was looking particularly put out at the prospect of visiting his cousin. Or perhaps, Gabrielle thought, it was Denial’s consort he took displeasure to. Her memories were fuzzy, but she recalled sharp distaste for a waspish woman in a feigned crown.
“Well, one of the boys will stay with me, and you can be on your way. Our mission requires haste.”
“Adverse to being left alone?” murmured Dignity as he stared at the doors. Then he looked back at Gabrielle. “Ah, I suppose it makes sense to leave you back up.”
“Oh.” Gabrielle tilted her head to the side. “That does make sense. I just wanted a running commentary. The boys have a psychic link, you know.”
Dignity groaned. “Of course they do. Great. Well, let me preface this by saying that I have no control over my cousin or his wife.” He paused for a moment, as if planning to say more, then simply shook his head and pushed his way through the doors, two of the boys darting in behind him. Gabrielle caught sight of the Candlewood’s murkiness and shuddered, glad she didn’t have to brave its depths again. Glad she had friends now to bear her burdens with her, though she fervently hoped she wasn’t condemning them to the same loss of self she herself had suffered.
But Dignity and the boys did, in time, come back with a lump of candle wax, but not before the blue-eyed boy had given Gabrielle a hilarious recounting of the wasp-woman’s desperate flirtations with the uncomfortable prince.
“Not a word,” the flushed pumpkin-man had said as he exited the cathedral doors, his arms wrapped around a lump of candle wax and his eyes aflame and narrowed at Gabrielle. “Not a single word.”
***
Before Gabrielle was even allowed to approach the river Atemos, she had to smear dirt on both her arms and under her eyes.
“To remember,” the mice clarified, though Gabrielle wondered if this wasn’t just another one of their pranks.
But Dignity seemed to agree with the precaution.
“Also, do you know any poems? Any songs close to your heart that you know deep in your bones? If so, it is vital you repeat them under your breath as you approach and leave.”
Gabrielle knew a few, remnants from her childhood days, but strangely it was the song from the Candlewood that called out to her. Candlemaiden, Candlemaiden, eyes aflame with gold…
In his compromised state, Dignity didn’t dare risk journeying to the river of erasure, the waters of forgetting, less he lose his already tenuous hold on his rank. Instead the mice-boys, who had kept curled up vines purloined from the castle under their robes, formed a harness for Gabrielle, who would journey alone. The river was also no place for liminal souls.
“We’ll tug you back when it’s time,” they said in harmony once the vines were snug around Gabrielle’s waist.
“Gently?”
“With as much force as is necessary,” the red-eyed boy admonished, and it struck Gabrielle suddenly how distinct the three of them were. All mischievous, all playful, all a bit wicked- and all to a different degree. She hoped she could remember, after the river Atemos, the impressions that were forming in her head.
Gabrielle came back with the songs still whispered under her breath, and the word yes scratched into the dirt of her arms, but of all else of her encounter she remembered nought.
***
With the mice sent to steal a stone from the labyrinth, Dignity and Gabrielle peered down into the basin of the river Akavos, whose air had the rippling unreal quality you see over fires in the summer. It was odd- Gabrielle had felt lazy sepia-summer warmth and the tug of coming-hunger in the Candlewood, but those feelings had been muted and more of the mind than the flesh. Her thirst at the river Alaethos had been urgent but informed, intense without the throat-rasping lip-cracking agony she could feel back in Life. But here, at the edge of Akavōn’s domain, the heat that seared her face was hyper-real, almost as if she had sunk back into earthly form rather than the abstracted phantasm she was in rest of the realm. She had the sense that here she could be injured, that here she could be altered.