Rosewood Box

         
         


At first I didn't think it would be worse than any other job--which wasn't saying much, since most of our other jobs were horrible enough. If you can memorize poetry, you can think about it while you're enchanting a cash register or something. I always thought being able to distract yourself like that might make lockwork easier.


Why do you do it, then? my old auntie would say--if she was still able to complain about my work. Why not take up a nicer profession? There's lovework. Lovework is nice.

I can't memorize poetry and I won't work charms to force people to fall in love, leaving imaginary arguments with my auntie as my best option.

I squatted to look at the keyhole, or what I assumed to be the keyhole. The thing that our employers said was a door looked like nothing more than a dent in the ridged white and black aspen bark. The trunks curved away on either side of me, fused together as though a single tree had managed to grow like a wall. The trunks soared twelve feet overhead, stopping in a sudden fluff of leaves. Mages can do that kind of thing, but they usually don't; a gun is faster than fancy curses.

"Nan, come on," Tobit whispered. If I had a life that allowed for that sort of thing, Tobit would be exactly the kind of man I'd like, all sinew and bone and impatience, with eyes like green glass. He was scowling over my shoulder. "Can't you hurry?"

"No." I poked at the gap the employers insisted was a lock. It was just a twist in the bark, a beetle-chewed hole, but it pushed back at my lockpick. This was magic, old-timey shit. "When you hurry magic locks--"

"I know." Tobit shifted his weight. Like most people who do catwork, he can't sit still. Catwork involves courting fear, living in it, leavening a spell with your own adrenaline. "Still don't see why we don't just go over."

He said this, even though he could see the employers as well as I could. They were glaring at us from fifty feet away, careful not to step past the line of salt and mistletoe they'd laid down around their campsite. We never would have been in this situation if I hadn't been so desperate for money when they messaged us. But after a while you get good at assessing people who hire magic in the back rooms of the internet, and these guys were obviously rich. They'd even given us some money up-front, though we'd used most of that up traveling here to the ass-end of the mountains.

"Settle down," I muttered.

Tobit gave up pacing and sat on his heels by my elbow, which was careless. Break a magic lock the wrong way and you can get swarmed with burning wasps or watch your skin turn to powdered glass. I squinted at him, but he just squinted back at me. I've known him since he was six years old and learning to tumble, and he knew I wasn't going to make him go stand with the employers.

The tip of my pick found the lock then. Half the time magic locks aren't even connected to keys. They turn for words, or substances, or moonlight. But this lock had tumblers and pins, they just didn't feel mechanical. I scratched my tools deeper into the keyhole, pressing my cheek against the bark and listening for the normal metal clicks. Instead the bark hummed faintly. It sounded...green.

Tobit leaned toward me, black hair fluttering around his face like vulture feathers. "Nan, maybe I'll marry you."

He's been saying this since he was ten and I was twelve, because he knows it annoys me. I closed my eyes to listen better to the green hum, letting the spell inside my fingertips uncurl, cautious. "I think the lock's alive."

"When we get away from these bastards," Tobit continued, under his breath, "I'll steal a car, which ought to pay for the honeymoon--"

I had to pick a memory to trade for the spell, ideally a boring or a bad one. Like when I was thirteen, sweeping up sawdust at the circus and getting a blister on my heel because my shoes were too small. I held that memory in my head as the spell flowed into my stiff hands, warming and limbering them. Lockwork--or talking magic, whatever you wanted to call it--was the most honest form of sorcery. Lockwork didn't involve blighting your own future to give others romance, it didn't mean you had to call up fears. It was a simple trade. This was going to hurt nobody but me.

"--and then you'll have to listen to me when I say that we should go over the weird magic tree wall--"

I worked the picks carefully, tickling them in between what I was almost certain now was a set of hair-fine roots, not pins and tumblers. What would the real key look like? How would you get roots to uncurl if you didn't sweet-talk them with a spell and steel and wire?

Open, I said to the lock, with the magic, offering my memory that smelled like sawdust and camels and sweat. Open open open--

Click.

"Got it," I said, and the dented place in the bark swung toward us. It was a door, narrow and odd-shaped--mage-made, damn it. Behind it was a dim passageway with walls that looked like soft brown wool and smelled like forest dirt. I exhaled, shaky in spite of myself. I had managed to do it without losing any of the memories that counted.

"Finally. Hate it when you have to do that." Tobit jumped to his feet, his mouth twitching the way it does when he's happy or relieved. He's missing two teeth, knocked out by his dad's boot. They're toward the back, but he's sensitive about it and doesn't usually smile. His eyes slid, for the first time, toward the employers. "They're not moving."

My gut twisted. Ten men in expensive hiking gear and mirror shades were still standing at the edge of the clearing, behind their wards. I had expected then to want to go inside themselves. That kind normally watch you while you work, worried you'll steal an extra ketchup packet or something.

But Tobit was right. They weren't coming toward us. They were huddling around the only one who had a chair. He was a tall man with long hair in fancy wool coat, watching us steadily. I was mostly sure he was the mage. One of them had to be, and he was the one that the others were afraid of. He looked tired, too; all kinds of magic exact a toll. This one looked like he was getting to the end of his willingness to pay.

"They killed her," Tobit said, softly, like he didn't quite know he was speaking.

I was trying not to think about the engineer. She had already been at the camp when we arrived. She was arguing with the mage as we unpacked our gear.

You can't just cut through the wall, she had said. It's not a construct, it's alive. The whole place is alive.

Trees, the mage had said, scornfully. Firewood.

I'm telling you they talk. I won't do it.

The next day she was dead, crumpled next to the unending wall of bark with her head smashed in. It could have been a fall, an accident, but the way they walked Tobit and me past the corpse didn't make me think so. Still, neither of us had said it aloud until now. I had toyed with the idea of trading that memory, getting it out of my head and off my conscience.

"It's a gem," I said, turning my back on them deliberately. "A ghost town, an old house, and a gem, that's all. A blue gem."

Tobit stared at me, something pleading under the sharp irritation in his eyes.

Why can't you do something nice, my auntie would say.

Because nice jobs don't come with money, I'd answer.

"Fine." He slid into the passageway, fitting his shoulders and narrow hips into the space like an eel. Sitting still Tobit looks like a marionette, all knobby joints and tight-stretched skin. Moving, he's so fluid it's uncanny. I found a rock to prop the door open and fumbled my way into the dark after him.

Tobit moved ahead of me, careful not to touch the walls. "Maybe I'll steal two cars. I think that's the going rate for marrying heartless asses. A gem, Nan? You're still thinking about that, after everything?"

"They're paying more than we've made all year," I said. "And they'll let us go if we get it."

He halted, blinking, as we emerged from the tunnel.

It had, once, been a tiny town. Logging, maybe, had been what brought people there a hundred years ago. The buildings were still easy to recognize. A half-collapsed shack showed where the gas station had been. In front of it stood a skinny, once-red pump with a ceramic crown on top, smothered in the roots of the tree that grew beside it. Beyond that was a line of five square little houses with trees punching out through their roofs and a taller building with PETERSON'S STORE still faintly visible on one wall. There should have been birdsong, but there wasn't. Only a slow, drowsy bee-hum embraced everything.

We both saw the tower at the same time, standing apart from the rest of the town, exactly as the mage had described. For spotting forest fires, I guessed, except it wasn't like other fire towers I'd seen. This was stone, five stories tall, and covered in vines that could have been blackberries, except I'd never seen blackberries with thorns like that. The gem was supposed to be in a room at the top--which was Tobit's job--and maybe behind another lock--which was mine. I'd been worried our employers didn't want the gem just to sell it. Now, looking at that tower, I knew.

"Shit," Tobit said, drearily. "Wonder what it does. Turns your blood to molten lead, maybe. Curses someone to dance until they drop dead. Fantastic."

"If we're careful," I began, but Tobit broke off my speech by hitching the coil of rope higher on his shoulder and leaping into the vines.

He climbed the tower with grace so effortless that it was hard to remember how dangerous this was. I didn't like when things were hard to remember, didn't like the way that shone a light on the cracks webbed into the foundation of my mind.

Why can't you do something safer, my auntie would say, on her good days.

Who are you? my auntie would say, on her bad days, fretting at her arthritic fingers, feeling in a panic for a spell that wouldn't spark anymore. Where's my Nan?

And sometimes all that would calm her was to say working, Nan is working, it's all right, I'm here to take care of you. It's a vicious thing, lack of memory. It meant I couldn't hang onto poetry. It meant needing money to pay for doctors and someone to stay with her while I was away, prying gems out of towers. It meant trading my memories for hers.

"Maybe three cars," Tobit called, hanging from the stones by two fingers and one toe, examining the window that yawned just above him, narrow and dark within. He didn't always need magic to do his job, ignored most of the craft his father had taught him in favor of the almost-magic talent that flowed through his muscles and calluses. "You think three cars would be enough for a decent wedding? If they've got good sound systems and it's a small ceremony--"

"Be careful," I said, unable to help myself.

He grinned down at me from under his own arm, showing me that gap in his teeth, and swung himself up and into the window. A moment later the rope came snaking down to me and I could breathe again.

I went up the tower less gracefully, using no magic. My catwork has always been bad, because I'm not willing to access the fear and bad luck necessary to call up the spells. To do catwork, you have to accept you've already fallen.

Back at the circus Tobit danced on the wire high above the heads of the crowd and made buckets of money for his father, but all I could stand to do was learn the spells from Auntie that you need to pick pockets, open locks, and otherwise separate people from their extra property. I'm not talented. It's why I was so startled when Tobit, seventeen and lanky and nursing his latest black eye, looked at me and Auntie one day and said, with that slow, gapped smile, why don't we just steal ourselves?

"Mages," Tobit said, with disgust, as I hauled myself over the windowsill. He took my hand and pulled me the rest of the way into the room. "Pig-filthy."

The room probably had been a mess even before the blackberry vines took over. The floor was covered in old socks, rotted magazines, and blackberry canes. There was a lump against the wall under the vines that probably used to be a bookshelf, and a half-smothered table that still shone with dusty glassware like a vanity, or maybe a worktable, a place for the town's mage to catch spirits and bind them down into bargains. Across the room was an old brass-frame bed, torn bits of a red quilt snarled among leaves and thorns. There was something else there, too, where the mattress would have been once, something white.

"Bones." Tobit hadn't budged, standing beside me like a statue. He hadn't let my hand go. He doesn't usually forget.

The mage waiting outside the wall had said it'll be in a box, a rosewood box with a platinum lock. I'd pictured the box in a cupboard, but looking at the skeleton with roses growing between its ribs, I knew where I would find it.

"You're going to do it," Tobit said. "You're going to walk over and dig whatever horrible piece of rock that mage wants out of the bones of whoever died using it, and you'll trade part of yourself for it. There's nothing I can say, is there?"

I cleared my throat. "I need my hand."

He dropped my fingers as though they'd burned him, twisting his shoulders away from me. "Right."

I made my way over to the ruined bed, fitting my feet carefully into the spaces between the vines. I pulled out my pocket knife, crouched, and began cutting at the vines. They were green and flexible, and bled a lot of sap. Eventually I cleared enough away to reveal a leathery, mummified hand still draped with the rotted shreds of a lacy lady's robe. It was clutching a dusty cube of polished wood.

It wasn't locked. The little rosewood casket opened with a brush of my fingers, and there, gleaming in the dimness, was the gem.

It was larger than any sapphire I had ever heard of, a chunk of faceted stone the size of my fist, wound with twine woven from several shades of human hair. The twine was knotted into a complicated protection spell, sealed with purple wax and silver pins. It glowed, throbbing with a squirming blue-white light that made the whole room shimmer like being underwater in a swimming pool.

"So." Tobit still hadn't moved. "What do we think it does?"

My memory might have been less than whole, but even I had heard stories about people messing with the wrong spell and getting trapped in magical sleep for years or decades. The lady in the bed must have starved to death, locked in dreams she couldn't wake up from. Her hair, a rusty auburn, still flared out across the pillow like hanks of rotting silk.

"I think it doesn't matter," I said, "because that mage isn't letting us leave alive unless we hand it to him."

"He wants this badly enough to hire us, to murder the engineer, to get backing from those dirt-for-brains businessmen. I'm asking you, do you think this thing did..." he gestured vaguely. "We're not still pretending the trees grew that way, are we?"

Shit. I hadn't thought of the trees.

"How should I know?" I wiped my damp palms on my jeans. I was no mage, commanding the spirits. I wasn't even good for the circus. I knew one spell. All I could do is talk to locks, hinges--engines on a good day. Maybe the twine around this stone, if Tobit would stop making me afraid. "This--this is--"

Dangerous, my auntie would say. Don't let me ever catch you working with Tobit on that high rope. I don't want you breaking your neck for a few lousy bucks.

But I've got to break something. I've got to choose something.

"Nan, please."

Anger bubbled inside me, scalding. "Just go then, if you won't shut up."

"You've forgotten a lot about the circus."

"The circus?" This seemed so disconnected from anything we were doing that I could only blink at him. Of course I had forgotten the circus. I had shoved those memories forward to wheedle my way into dozens of cash drawers and wallets. I had kept us alive, and fed. "Let me just do my job, Tobit."

He sighed, but shut up.

I stood there trying to decide which piece of myself to sacrifice. I had to talk the gem out of its bindings, into the hands of the mage outside. Auntie got more fretful and confused every day, and the money from this job would mean I could pay for a home health aide. A safer apartment. I couldn't clear her mind, but I could try to keep her from being afraid. Tobit was wrong. He had to be.

"You talked the tightrope into burning with purple fire while I was walking it." His voice had gone very soft. "Because you were angry with my father. You don't remember that one."

My hands dropped to my sides, the suggestion of magic in my fingertips dropping to embers.

"It went during a job four years ago. The thing with the diner, and the mice. You probably don't remember the mice, either."

I twisted around, but he hadn't moved, staring down at the vines that nuzzled against the scuffed toe of his canvas sneaker, a knock-off that didn't even really look like the expensive shoes it was imitating. Why don't we just steal ourselves. I felt around in my head for the rest of the memory, but couldn't find anything to tie it to. Why was he hanging around me that night? Why had he wanted to take Auntie with us? Seventeen years old--and what, eight or ten years ago now. Why had he stayed?

My Nan is a sensible girl, my auntie would say, because she's always been a little soft-hearted. Settled. Never at a loss.

"You act like I don't know why you're doing any of it," he said. "You always make me take my half of the money. Like we're... like I'm--" He stopped, then turned back to the window, as though his calm could make me forget what he'd almost said. "You're getting just like Auntie."

"She doesn't have anybody else," I said, between my teeth. "I have to do this. You know I have to do this."

"Right," he said.

I could still feel the spell in my fingers, rote in my muscles. I could feel the memory I was going to trade for it, tumbling like a river stone at the front of my mind. "I only trade the unimportant memories."

"Yeah." He didn't look at me. "I know."

But I didn't know. I chose the memories I wanted to use in the spell, but sometimes magic didn't work that way. It spread, digging itself into the foundations of you like vines crumbling a wall. He was skinny and gap-toothed and everything I liked in a man, if I had time for that kind of thing, and I didn't know. "Have I--" I said, before I really knew I was going to. "Have we--"

He pulled a dead leaf off the vines that crawled over the windowsill.

"You should have told me."

He shrugged. "It should have been important."

All at once I was so angry I could hardly see. "They'll kill us if we go out there empty-handed. We have to get the gem. If we give it to them, they'll let us go."

"Fine." If he'd at least said they won't, I could have argued. But he didn't. He straightened, then moved so quickly that I didn't know what he was going to do until it was too late. He slid past me, his long fingers grasping for the sapphire. "Then I'll get it."

"No!"

But Tobit was always faster than me. He had the gem and its bindings out of the box before I could even move, the light inside it blazing bright. I stepped toward him, but Tobit was gone.

Where he'd been there stood a tall climbing rose bush, with leaves like vulture feathers and blossoms so darkly crimson they were almost black. The sapphire clattered to the floor.

Behind me, a voice rasped.

"I knew you would come." She shouldn't have been able to talk. The skeleton in the nightdress didn't have lungs. For that matter, there were no eyes, but she was staring at me just the same.

"That sapphire," I said. Maybe this was a bad dream, and I was still in the shitty hotel room I'd shared with Tobit a couple nights ago, about to wake up and eat cold fries for breakfast and smell the scent of his skin. "What does it do, apart from turning people into trees?"

"It doesn't turn people into trees." Her voice rippled with satisfaction. "My protection spell did that. The sapphire is a sorcery well, a way to do magic without having to trade anything. It allows the user to cast a spell and then export the cost to a willing volunteer. That's why the people in the village tried to steal it from me." Her voice changed. "Who was the rose bush? Was it Karl? Did that bastard think he could do magic for free?"

A "willing volunteer" my ass. I backed a step, even though she couldn't move. I could talk to locks, but I had never been good at talking to people. "What woke you?"

"Someone taking the well away from me, of course." Her voice rasped over her teeth like a file. "I was living very happily in my memories, the ones no one can take away from me. Give it back."

"I can't," I said. "I don't want to turn into a tree. Get it yourself."

"Can't you see I can't walk?" She could talk without lungs, but not move without muscles, apparently. "Give it to me."

"I get paid for my work," I said. "I'm not going to turn into a tree for you, and I'm not going to fetch this thing for free."

A silence, while she thought about that.

"I could tell you how to take the protection spell off," she said, eventually. "The knotwork binding. Then you wouldn't turn into a tree. It's my hair, tied into a pattern. You can't cut it. It needs to be burned off with a fire kindled from my hair." She grinned at me. "I still have some."

Shuddering, I approached and picked up one of the hanks of faded hair that lay spread on the pillow. I stepped back the moment I had it in my hand.

I frowned. There were several shades of hair in the knotwork lock but none was color of the piece I had taken from her pillow.

"Hurry it up," she said. "I hate being awake, and whoever that rose bush used to be is suffering every moment you delay."

I fumbled through my pockets for my cigarette lighter, the one I always told Auntie was Tobit's. A nasty habit, smoking. One I had taken up to try to stay awake working night shift jobs, any job but this one that I kept coming back to. Tobit did used to share his smokes with me. I crouched by the roots that used to be his feet and felt tears blur my eyes.

The lock of hair in my hand lit quickly and blazed, unnaturally bright. The protection spell went up in a puff of purple steam, leaving the blue stone gleaming amid the ash. It was heavier than it looked, and as cold as holding a chunk of ice.

Memories that weren't mine flooded into my fingertips, whipping through my mind like a dust devil: people twining locks of their hair together, a small town sacrificing itself to contain a mage bent on using the stone to consume the memories of others. Memories of the spell placed on the stone, so that anyone who took it by force from the hand of its possessor would transform into a tree...but not anyone who found it. Or was given it. Like, say, me.

"Give it to me!" Her head turned, slowly, sockets staring malevolently at me.

"I want a reward." I edged back toward the window, knowing even as I spoke that she wasn't going to keep her end of the bargain. "I want you to take the spell off my friend. You said you'd pay me."

"You fool." No muscles, but still she managed to sit up, grinning. "The knotwork spell bound me, not the gem. The fools in this village combined their memories, sacrificed themselves to contain me. I can't steal it from you, even from your corpse, but I can hurt you until you surrender it." She swung her pearly ankles over the edge of the bed and stood. "Now give it to me."

To do catwork, you have to accept you've already fallen.

I leaned, holding the gem out the window, the backs of my thighs pressed against the stone sill.

"No," I said, and fell.

An unholy shriek tore through the air as I dangled, hanging on by one toe and two fingers. Something like a bundle of sticks in a nightgown hurtled past me, streaking toward the ground. She landed with a surprisingly delicate series of cracks and did not move.

I put the gem back in my pocket, catwork magic thrumming through me, fear tearing at me like blackberry thorns. It was worse than anything I had experienced before, every dread I'd wrestled with in the middle of the night whipping through me, every disaster I could imagine seeming like a certainty. I hauled myself upward, heart thumping, certain I was too late, sure there would be nothing for me when I reached the top.
Tobit was going to be dead or a tree forever, it was going to be my fault, and dwelling in the fear would make it happen.

But that's the thing about catwork. Sometimes, you don't fall.

Tobit was picking a petal out of his hair and looking dazed. "Nan?"

He tasted familiar, like a memory that could have been a dream.


#


The other trees were slower to transform, perhaps because they'd been trees for a century or so. Tobit posited, as we walked past one that seemed to be growing a pair of booted feet, that possibly the trees wouldn't be anxious to become human again. He said the magic had asked him, deep in the sleepy green agony of being a rose bush, if he wanted to transform back. After all, a hundred-year old tree is still hale and hearty, but a hundred-year-old human is another matter. It made me feel a little better about the idea that wouldn't stop scratching at the back of my mind.

We made our way to the wall of birches and found the gate. I paused at the opening.

I thought about the men outside in their mirror shades. Men like that carried cash. Men like that were greedy, and not used to thinking they might be wrong. I thought about the knotwork spell around the gem, so simple, and all the skeleton mage's memories that I still carried, like a bag of stolen jewelry in my head. I felt the weight of the gem in my hand.

"They won't let us go," I said. "Even if we give them the gem. All that gear they have is worth enough to set us up for life. All that money, and what they want is this thing that will let them drain people dry so they can keep doing their magic. They were never going to let us go."

Tobit watched me, still for once, more like a bird than ever. "I know. Bad luck."

"I don't want to do this anymore," I said. "I don't want to forget you, have to keep leaving Auntie." I dug through my pockets. "I'm not going to keep doing it. We're not giving this to them."

"What else can we do?" For once, the man who did catwork without a second glance sounded afraid. "I shouldn't have said all that, back in the tower, making myself important. It's your life. I shouldn't have--"

"You are important." I found my folding knife and sawed at one of the braids that swung against my neck. "It's our life. I'm making my choice."

He frowned at the knife. "What the hell is that for?"

For the first time, when I felt the magic gather in the tips of my fingers, throbbing like a burn, I smiled.

"I just need a piece of your hair," I said.

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