Paper Confines

xviii. A Burnt Child Loves the Fire

PAPER CONFINES.
18. / A Burnt Child Loves the Fire

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       Amoret died at seven, and had then enjoyed the caress of blankets pooling at her waist, the feeling of wriggling for the right position all day, sleeping and waking and sleeping again, fluffing Bibi's feather pillows just to bury her face in them. It was influenza that had killed her. Amoret had been the last to catch it after the first feverish head turned up at the schoolyard, and then all the children got it, even the homeschooled. Mrs Ford, a squib, was still nursing her youngest daughter, and had whispered to Mum—unknowing that Amoret was pressed with a cupped ear at the door to listen—that it had come from a family in Upper Slaughter who'd just returned from a business venture in London. Ere, Mrs Ford had said in a conspiratorial hush, those manor folk can't mind their own, I tell you. Of course, Amoret didn't know yet that Mrs Ford's newborn wouldn't survive dying like Amoret would, or that she was going to die at all. But before it had gone so terribly wrong, it was a blissful, bleary malady; broth at her bedside, a scintillating light on the window pane, Mum and her stories of the woman called Isoken who had raised her like a father. Amoret had never felt so loved as when she was dying in bed.

The resuscitation had been excruciating.

She hadn't even realised when her heart stopped—Dad had said it so many times with his hand clasped over hers: you're so strong, Etta. You would turn tides. You're so strong, so strong, so—and then there was just nothing. She was swaying in the vast emptiness thinking, this is the sea. If I reached out I could swim.

It lasted only a moment. Then she was out of bed, crying into her father's chest as something blue bolted her heart. Even now, she had no idea what form of magic her father enacted, only that it felt like being seized by all the electricity in the world. She remembered static in her hair, she remembered her name being called, she remembered wanting to die and not knowing she already had.

Nine years later, she learned after carrying an English soldier's corpse to a pyre that whatever her father had done to resurrect her had been left behind like a bullet. She'd learned about muggle weapons by looking through the wound of one—that certain things entered a body like a puncture and left like a bomb. Mum said different bullets made different scars, and the English soldier's exit wound yawned like a daylily in bloom. It sort of trickled from the centre, red petal-tips that thinned into purple skin. Amoret's scar was similar in that it flowered from the point of impact too, jagged dark lines twining like autumn sticks, like daisy chains in mid-July, like lightning splitting through spring rain.

A year after that, she learned that she would die all over again if it meant she could cry into her father's chest again.

And she felt it. A chest. Someone carrying her. A bump at every step they took.

Amoret craved what it promised like a child craved their favourite toy—to be sick and in bed and given tea and stories. That infectious promise was a star in the slow blink of her eyes as she woke, a distant memory of what it had felt like to be so loved that someone had defied death itself to save her.

When she came to, she felt so horrible she might as well have been struck by her father's magic again. Her whole body ached, and Amoret winced as she tried to stretch.

She was in the hospital wing. She was alone. She felt on fire. When she turned to see the window, the world looked so cold it could have snuffed her out. The leaves fell with bludgeoned ferocity and a night sky drove the winds west, raining winter like a great monsoon, starless and unrelenting. It was a violent murder of autumn—the trees had barely changed colour before they were shedding their skins and baring bones. Amoret had never seen a storm like that. It swallowed the castle grounds whole in its fervour, the forbidden forest looked like a wall of figureheads peering down the prows of their ships. Water flooded from the runnels to the empty gamekeeper's hut.