The Shape

Sayblood's Children: Part Six

Sayblood’s Children is a folk horror/romance novella, serialized in twelve parts. This is Part Six.

Click HERE to start at Part One, or click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.

Previously, Othniel learned what forces he is up against by keeping Sayblood on the island.

In this chapter, Sayblood and Othniel grow closer, while danger draws nearer.

Enjoying this story? Let me know with a like, comment, or restack.

If you would like to follow this story as it unfolds, subscribe for free!

---

Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash

I remember returning from the ballroom to the palace of my sleepless father.

Shrike and I had spent hours talking; I had watched his lips as he spoke under that magical mask, told me tales, uttered his strange Above words like spells over me. I was caught, captivated, snared. Troubled.

The halls of the pewter-spired palace were hushed and shadowed as I passed through them. Soon, I stood in the doorway of my father’s dark library. I did not wait for him to look at me. I knew he knew I was there.

“What is the Shrike?” I asked him.

He looked up from his studies, then. “A rare talent,” he replied, his breath stirring motes of dust from the pages of his book.

“I have taken an interest in him. What shall I do?”

One Prince smiled, and I knew he was pleased with me. “The poet is worthy of your interest. He is good practice. You will learn much from him.”

“What shall I do?” I asked, again.

My sleepless father bent back to his book, cowled in crimson.

“Practice,” he said. “Practice survival. Practice on the poet. You will know. Let interest lead to lessons.”

My father spoke in riddles. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that I wished I had a mother to ask. But her absence was the strength of my hands, and I knew it was an evil to wish for her.

I took my troubled thoughts to bed with me but I could not sleep. Instead I went walking in the garden of One Prince as I did often throughout my youth, stone trails snaking through a vast field of thornbushes, brown and brittle and bristling with long and wicked thorns. I did not know then that such bushes—plants, living things—are meant to be green and alive, their spines softened with leaves and flowers. That there are other plants, some small and some very large, that grow and tower and creep and perfume the air.

But the garden of One Prince was never green. It never bloomed, and never grew.

The lanterns along the path dripped with cold light that heaved and receded with Sumble’s eternal breath and the stained bushes hung with bones and flesh: this is what remained of One Prince’s enemies, criminals, and trespassers. Thieves and the weak we punished on the thorns, and their blood fed the dust.

From childhood I had learned to find it beautiful, but as I walked it then, Shrike’s words about Above had turned the graveyard garden limp and lifeless to me. I longed for the things he told me about, the strange words he used, the places he described.

I was desperate to meet the Moon, to find the Sun, to taste the Sea.

I wanted to touch the softness of Rose, to feel the air stirred by the wing of creatures called Birds whose names delighted me: Robin, Finch, Sparrow, Wren. Wren, most of all.

I turned the corner of a trail in the maze, a path I knew well, and there I saw a fresh execution, not an unusual sight. There was a man hanging naked on the thorns, bound across them so that they bled him. His head lolled dully, not dead yet and not quite alive, lost somewhere in the shadowed hedge between the two.

But I saw that there was someone else, a figure cloaked in gray to disappear against the colorless garden, who was standing beside the dying man. Reaching up with a shining blade, cutting the bonds holding the criminal to his fate.

I watched, fascinated, as the figure cut the ropes and helped the dying man down from the thorns. I waited, bewildered, as the figure pulled the man up onto his shoulders and began to carry him down the path, deeper still down a trail I did not know, that led out and away into the dark.

I pulled the twins from my belt. Thirsty blades, and so quick! I slipped through a gap in the thorns, what once served as childhood hiding places for me, and I met the figure on the path, Kysiel and Vaziel bared to his way. They sang in my hands.

The figure stopped, lowered the dying man to the ground, and removed his gray hood to reveal himself: dark hair and green eyes and warm-blush skin. I did not know his face, but it was his lips that gave him away. I had watched those lips under a magical mask for hours and hours. I had been hypnotized by them.

“Poet,” I said. “May you make a choice meal.”

“Dread Lady,” he replied. He was calm, and this fascinated me even further. But he did not smile. There was no charm in his eyes, nor fear. Only a martyr’s readiness.

I asked, “Would you steal from the garden of One Prince when the penalty is death?”

“I would,” he said.

“Where are you taking the dead?”

“He is not dead. And I am taking him home.”

I understood, then. “So that is what a poet does. He steals from One Prince.”

“It falls to this poet to rescue the lost, who wander into this place and run afoul of your father’s justice,” he replied. The words shirred like embers, whispered on that sweet tongue. “None travel between worlds except poets and thieves, and so a poet must become a thief to snatch souls from Sumble’s teeth.”

I could not reply. I saw, in my mind, a staircase of poets like Shrike—warm flesh and dark hair and green eyes—carrying bodies from our hell into the heaven of his blue-painted sky, his green-gilt grass. I saw them passing to and fro in secret, up and down from dark to light and back again, and I felt a longing I could not name.

“Why?” was all I could manage. Because I could not understand. It was not practice, and it was not survival, and it was not appetite. Offerings we made aplenty, but to give one’s self to it? To flirt with death to save another? Folly, and sacrilege. Survival is the highest good, or so I had always been taught.

The word I sought was sacrifice, but I did not know it, then.

He did not answer my whispered question, only murmured, “If it’s stopping me you’re after, Dread Lady, you’ll have to kill me.”

I could have. It would have been nothing to me. I had practiced before on better trained than the poet, and Sumble had favored me every time.

Practice, came my father’s voice. Practice on the poet.

But I found that I could not. My mind was in too much turmoil, and something like shame had risen in me.

My hands—strong with the blood of my mother—dropped, the twins flashing dull in the cold light, and I stepped back.

“A wager, poet,” I said. “If I allow you to pass with your burden unharmed, will you vow to take me to the sea?”

There was a moment of surprise, and then he smiled. And he was beautiful in that colorless place. And I was merely a blood-fingered child, unaware of what I had done. What curse I had unleashed upon myself.

He bent and lifted the dying man onto his shoulders once more.

“One day, little queen of Sheol, I promise you,” Shrike said, passing me by. “If I have anything to say about it, you will visit the sea.”

*******

The clouds knelt to hear the whispers in the mist-wreathed treetops better, lowering themselves over the island with a sigh, as Sayblood went walking in the small orchard up the hill from Othniel’s cabin. The bare trees rested in the winter chill and all was quiet.

Sayblood was slow these days, the weight of the child within her pulling her earthward and leaving her often breathless, but she still craved these walks. She saw, now, that the wanderings of her childhood through One Prince’s gray, lifeless garden had been only a dull echo of the gardens above. And this was still a garden in death, according to Othniel. He told her about the green of spring leaves, the bright riot of summer flowers, the budding of autumn fruit, and she could not imagine it. It seemed impossible.

She walked, wide-brimmed hat on, boots sweeping through the dewy grass, catching her breath in delight and surprise every time a bird fluttered out of sight and saying its name softly under her breath to imprint it in her memory.

Robin. Thrush. Junco. Wren.

Wren, most of all. Wren was her favorite.

It had been a little over one week since she arrived here. It took Othniel two careful days to make Sayblood a simple bed frame in the little windowless storage room where he kept the root vegetables. He had given her his feather mattress and filled for himself an old canvas with straw. He also put together bedding from bartered furs and blankets, and Sayblood was very pleased with it. It was not the elaborate finery of her father’s palace, but it was very comfortable.

For the first few days and nights the two of them had simply learned how to move around each other, how to live in the same space. Sayblood had slept much, finding the exhaustion of her journey Above too much to fight. She had eaten much, too; whatever Othniel would cook for her: salt pork, game, fish, beans, eggs, biscuits, dried berries, potatoes, porridge. He was a passable cook, and she had a willing appetite. She asked questions of each dish, asked especially for its name. Learned to memorize each new word in its turn to add to the growing lexicon in her mind.

Thus had the first days passed. Despite her annoyance with the occasional strength of the sun, too bright for her strange eyes, Sayblood was deeply interested in the passage of the hours, the changing weather over the little island, and she would plant herself beside the window and watch it evolve: simmering clouds, falling rain, gusts of fitful winter wind. All was new to her.

It was after three days of sleep and hearty food and window-watching that she began to accompany Othniel outside as he went about his chores and daily tasks, checking fences and making mends and repairs to the places that needed it. She followed him into the barn and marveled at the creatures there: Peg the pony, the chickens, the goats, the geese and turkeys, the pigs. She watched Othniel as he fed the animals and groomed them, explaining to her the purpose of each animal to the farm and—eventually—to his table. This she accepted without much surprise. Butchery was not new to her.

Sometimes the wild man called Bill passed through, just a trembling in the trees. But he would only glower at Sayblood, grumble, and avoid her.

Sayblood was a quick study. And though she could not do much physical work because of her pregnancy she was more than capable of it, and felt it wise to help where she could. To her, tasks were play. From watching Othniel she learned to carry water from the well, throw feed for the chickens and geese and turkeys, and sneak apples to Peg when she thought Othniel was not looking.

It was the apples that had taken hold of her. From the moment Othniel had handed her one from the basket in storage—a perfect Putnam Russet, he said—and she took a bite, sharp teeth cutting easily through the peel with a stern snap, she was enthralled. And when he showed her the orchard, told her that these trees were where the apples would grow from, she had been captured by the absurdity of the idea.

How would such sweet things grow from bare, dead branches?

So she walked often in the orchard, listening for the whispering of its secrets, searching for signs of spring and change—though it was still far off yet—and staring out at the snip of gray sea visible from the hilltop.

On this day, the day with the low kneeling clouds and calling gulls and mist-wreathed trees, Sayblood found herself drawn to the wild apple tree at the heart of the orchard. It was a gnarled thing and old, and the fruits still clinging to its topmost branches, too high to be harvested—riddled with rain-rot and worm-holes—were small and sour. When ripe they were good for cooking, Othniel said, but not for slicing and eating with licked fingertips.

Othniel had told her about the trees, here. How when he built his cabin and set his boundary, he had been pleased to find a handful of wild apple trees nearby. He had bartered for saplings from passing traders and added his own, the east-bred Putnam Russets and Fameuse that provided sweet winter fruit, the ones Sayblood liked. But the wild trees were old and strange and seemed to thrive on stubborn spite, and there was something about them that made Sayblood feel watched, witnessed.

She drew near the old tree and, following an impulse, rested her hand on its silvery trunk, lined with the holes of a bird that drinks from the veins within.

Sapsucker, she whispered, another Bird that Othniel had taught her. It was no small marvel to her that everything had a name, and that those names carried some inner power in them that Othniel seemed largely unaware of.

The touch of her skin on the bark filled her with dread. The tree seemed to tense under her touch. There was an awareness in it. The tree knew that she was there, but would not look at her or acknowledge her. It was like sitting beside someone who refuses to speak to you, who ignores you utterly, who rebuffs your advance.

It reminded her of hours in the ballroom below, far below; tincture-breathed dignitaries trying to speak too close, to take her hand, and her turning away from them. Only now she was the folly-riddled dignitary, and this tree—or something within it—was the cool, aloof Dread Lady.

She removed her hand, feeling a little stung.

“What have I done?” she asked. “How have I offended you, to be treated so?”

The swish of grass behind her drew her ear and she turned, hands on her belly in an instinct of protection.

It was Bill, emerging from the treeline. The wild man leaned on a hand-hewn branch for a walking-stick, blue eyes sharp and wary. Sayblood’s sensitive nose could catch the scent of him from a distance, unpleasant: body odor and low tide.

“May you make a choice meal,” Sayblood murmured, attempting as respectful a greeting as she could think of, though she did not feel it.

He did not respond.

They stood like that for a pause, before Sayblood said, “What is it you want?”

“I know what you are,” he said.

She returned his gaze frankly. “I know what you are, also.”

And she did. She had long suspected it, from the first moment she had met Bill. The scent of ill omen lingered around him, stronger still than the stale odor of his clothes and skin. She had lived in the house of One Prince long enough to recognize dark threads, the result of angry vengeance upon a soul. Othniel thought Bill was mad, but Sayblood knew better.

He wasn’t mad at all. He was cursed.

Bill tilted his head. “This land is wary of you.”

“It has nothing to fear from me,” she replied. “I mean it no harm.”

“Even so, you bring doom with you. The trees know. It’s why they reject you.”

Sayblood considered this. “How is it that you know what the trees say?”

“I hear nothing else.” And he laughed, a harsh sound.

Sayblood frowned. She did not have the patience for riddles. She was reminded of her father, the way he would speak around her, give her nothing to hold on to.

“I should go back to Othniel,” she said, moving away from the gnarled wild apple tree and the strange wild man. “May you fall prey to none but Him, Bill.”

“You smell of death,” the wild man said.

“I know. Of course I know that.” She was losing patience, her fingers itching for the twins that no longer waited at her belt. The memory of Shrike pulled her back, pulled her upward and away from that rage, that bloody anger. She sighed. “But I crave life. It is all I want. I want my child to live, no matter what it means for me.”

Carrying souls from Sumble’s mouth, darkness to light, back and forth.

“Your kind doesn’t believe in that,” Bill said.

“No, we do not. But we can learn. I must believe that we can learn.” Sayblood heard the desperation in her own voice and caught herself from saying anything more.

Without Shrike, she would never have learned anything worth knowing.

“I must get back to Othniel,” she said, with finality.

The cursed man’s blue-eyed gaze was terrible, cutting her in half. There was a time when she would have killed for such impudence, but no longer. Now she took her leave, hurrying away down the path, back toward the slim thread of smoke rising from the cabin’s chimney.

*******

While Sayblood was off walking—where exactly, he was not sure—Othniel was in the barn, brushing Peg’s fluffy winter coat while the pony stood patiently, ears twitching and swiveling to meet the soft sounds of a winter afternoon.

The big door was open to let the thin, milky light in and Othniel found himself humming softly as he worked, thick brush sweeping through the bay roan’s fur as her skin twitched with the itch and kindness of it, the removing of seeds and burs and balls of hardened mud from her grazing.

The thoughts that Othniel were lost in were pleasant enough, if surprising. Over the last week or so he had thought often of how to help Sayblood leave this place, find a route to a safer home for herself and her child before the ill mood of winter took the kind of hold it was impossible to escape from. More and more Othniel had been catching the scent of impending cold on the air, and if there was a possibility of snow and ice, it could mean imprisonment until a thaw.

But today, he was not thinking of her leaving. He was thinking, instead, of how pleasant it was to have her near. She was strange, to be sure. But she was also companionable.

He had not expected that. He had not expected to enjoy her company. And he had not expected to feel that she enjoyed his, as well. Their conversations by the fire or side-by-side at daily chores strayed often to more interesting things than Othniel was used to discussing. He told stories of his travels, and she spoke sometimes about her life in the place called the Underside, but only in vague details.

There was a pain there. A hidden thorn. He knew it must have to do with the macabre spirit, the father of her child. Othniel did not press her for the tale. After all, he had his own thorns to contend with, unwilling to explain; it would not be fair.

The brush slid through Peg’s coat and the pony adjusted her weight with a heavy huff of breath, curling out in a mist, and Othniel remembered the voice of the ghost crouching beside his lantern, blood dripping into the floor.

Family. She will need family.

Othniel shook his head. Family was not enough, as he well knew. Families could cheat, falter, stumble. Families could break.

Break, yes. Even shatter. This he knew well.

It was not in him to call a ghost a liar. But perhaps the spirit had simply been mistaken.

I can give her safety, Othniel thought. But family—

Peg nickered, ears open forward through the barn door. Othniel turned to look out across the yard, the fence, the dark treeline. He saw nothing out of place.

But then, Peg’s ears swiveled backward, flat, and she stamped and shuffled sideways against the lead holding her, tied to metal rings on the wall.

“Hew, hew…steady.” Othniel crooned to soothe her, reaching out to pat her neck. But the pony stamped again and jerked her head back, braying, the lead pulling taut.

“Whoa, Peg! Whoa, girl!” Following the gaze of her panicked, rolling eyes, Othniel looked again out at the treeline, and that’s when he saw it.

It was a splash of moving color against the trees. A dark red shape, almost a warm purple, eerily out of place in the island’s eternal green. It moved unnaturally, slim limbs folded as it crawled, the form of a hairless man on all fours. Wide eyes were mere white smudges in the round face, which turned to look at the barn.

Peg shrieked and struggled against her lead, and Othniel watched, too dumbfounded to reach for his rifle, as the dark red thing paused to stare, long-fingered hands curled beside its collarbone and bony knees akimbo.

Then, Peg kicked out with her back legs and caught a steel pail of feed sitting on a nearby bale, sending it crashing backwards into the depths of the barn with an almighty din.

The noise seemed to spook the shape. It skittered across the treeline and vanished into the underbrush.

Othniel trembled, watching and waiting for any other sign of it. When none came he turned to calm the pony, whose nostrils flared as she danced her rear feet away from Othniel, nervous, then back again. With the shape gone she allowed his touch and quieted, nickering quietly to herself.

A thrill of fear leaped up in Othniel’s heart, his very core.

That thing is out there. And so is Sayblood.

He grabbed his rifle from the place where he had set it and left the barn. But before he could get far in pursuit of the shape, Sayblood herself emerged from the opposite end of the yard, the direction of the orchard.

Relief flooded through Othniel as he approached her. She seemed unharmed. In fact, she seemed hale from her walk: cheeks flushed, eyes deep in thought, a soft smile on her thin lips. The good sleep and good food had done her well.

She looked happy.

She looked…lovely.

Sayblood called to him as soon as she saw the rifle in his hand.

“Is all well?” she asked, concern lacing through her words.

The idea of causing her worry, of ruining the sweet lingering scent of her wanderings, suddenly turned his stomach. He could not tell her about the red shape. He swore to himself that he would—that he must—but not yet.

So he lowered the rifle to his side and smiled, crossing the yard to meet her. As he drew near he stopped at a polite distance, touching the brim of his hat.

“All is well,” he said. “And glad I am to see you safely return.”

She smiled up at him, and something in him squeezed. If he had been paying attention he would have noticed the disquiet behind her gaze. He would have seen that he was not the only one keeping a secret.

But he held out his hand, and she took it. Together, they walked back down the muddy path to the warmth of the cabin. Time yet to sit a while with tea and warm up the hands and toes, to talk of pleasant things, to finish the chores before the light faded completely. Plenty of time.

Yet, in the trees, white smudges of eyes watched from a crimson-painted face above a panting, tongueless mouth. Long-fingered hands curled by the red collarbone, twitching.

It watched—unholy and unseen—before slipping away, carrying its dark message with it to one underground, sleepless, waiting for news.

---

Thank you for reading! 🍎

Click HERE for the NEXT ISSUE. ⏭

Click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.