Page 33 of The Library at Hellebore
Mountains,I thought but did not say.Clean air. Nights jeweled by frost. First snow. The last light of summer. Being free.I could think of a hundred things holier than being sacrificed to something that doesn’t even love you back. Judging from the guarded looks on the faces of the students around me, I wasn’t the only one.
I raised my hand. “Professor Fleur?”
“What.”
“Are we the fig or the wasps?”
“Eat,” said Professor Fleur, tone unctuous. She threaded through the clots of seated students to where I hid under the roots of one of the school’s rare strangler figs. My mother called them banyans, though no else I knew did. I’d only seen them once myself in person on a trip to Cambodia and I’d loved them on sight. Banyans were the opportunistic carnivores of the plant world. Their life cycle wasn’t dependent on parasitism: some banyans could go from epiphyte to deadwood without ever hurting another tree. Every now and then, however, their roots would grow in such a way that they’d choke their hosts to death and when those unfortunates hadrotted to fertilizer, the local fauna would come to inhabit the bones, thereafter proving that sometimes, things had to die for the greater good.
“There are dead wasps in this fig,” I stalled.
“Everything you eat was alive once,” said Professor Fleur. She was so exultantly ugly, there was something mesmeric about her: you couldn’t be this odious without putting real effort into it. “Anyway, it’s not like you will find an actual wasp in your fig. The plant releases an enzyme that breaks down the little insects. Nothing is wasted and sadly, nothing can be tasted. I’ve always been of the opinion figs could use a more interesting mouthfeel. Don’t you agree, class?”
No one said a word.
“Eat,” said Professor Fleur again. I could smell her. An oiliness that every old person seemed to possess. Talcum powder. Good dirt, which surprised me. Healthy loam like the sort in which nothing cruel could grow, like what farmers might dream of. Wholesome; a word I’d never think to associate with the school.
“I’m allergic,” I lied.
She leaned closer. Her teeth were too numerous and too small for her doll-like jaw, the only delicate feature in a face better suited for a snapping turtle. Skin tags laddered down her jowls; there was a frothing of them at her throat. Fleur was practically cancerous with these gleaming waxlike growths. “Eat.”
Trammeled, I did as told. The jamminess of that first bite surprised me as did my pleasure at crunching down on the seeds, the honeyed flavor saturating my tongue, so heady and sweet I was reeling from the taste. I was intoxicated. I wanted to gorge myself. I wanted to eat until I was full and aching with figs, until I could do nothing but wait for thewasps and the other small creatures of the garden to make me something new.
When I was done with that first fig, someone placed a second into the cup of my palms, and I ate that one with as much gusto as the last, lapping at the pith like an animal. I’d have done the same to a third except none came into my possession. Lovelorn, I gazed miserably up for more, every pretense of dignity forsworn for my gluttony. I saw Professor Fleur gazing fondly down at me, with the expression of a doting shepherd looking upon her flock.Eat,her expression seemed to urge.Eat and grow sleek, grow soft.
In my amber-tinged stupor, I barely noticed Rowan raising a hand.
“Professor Fleur?” he said. When she did not answer the first time, Rowan followed it with a train of “Professor Fleur? Oh, Professor Fleur. Professor Fleur!” in different intonations and with varying degrees of nasality until at last the beleaguered woman turned and snapped, exactly like a reptile, “What do you want?”
“You didn’t answer Alessa,” he said with complete innocence. “Are we the wasps or the figs?”
Before the woman could answer, Rowan added with a daggered smile, a softening in his voice that did nothing to corrode the cold lapis of his eyes, one corner of his mouth crooked into something dangerous, something like an invitation, a gauntlet thrown at her feet.
“Or am I thinking too small? Should I be asking if we’re the non-union farmhands who have no choice but to work for minimum pay, or the fat-cat consumers gleefully piling prosciutto and figs in their mouths as they get ready for that day’s orgy?”
“Mr. Rowan Gravesend, I could look forever and I would not find a subtle bone in your body, would I?”
“You’re making this too easy, Professor Fleur. You can’t tell me you weren’t asking me to make the joke.”
The fig-induced delirium was beginning to ebb and the void it created soon became tenanted by a migrainous sensation. It wasn’t quite the same as the real thing. My vision fractured into zigzag lines, half of it becoming nauseatingly kaleidoscopic, the other like an inverted film negative. But where pain should have followed, there was instead a pressure in my belly, like I’d swallowed gallons of concrete and it was beginning to set. When I licked my teeth, I tasted salt, rust, rot.
Rowan, digging through his pockets, made a smallahof pleasure as he found what he was looking for: a beat-up, jaundiced carton of cigarettes. Without so much as a polite check-in to see if everyone else was all right with his habits, he lit up a cigarette, eliciting a tiny yowl of dismay from Fleur, the moment blessedly ruined.
An imperative, shrilled out without interest in decorum: “You will put that out.”
“You know, it’s hard to have sex when you have to avoid any skin contact. Like, unbelievably hard. No pun intended.” He jogged the elbow of the freckled, knob-jointed, red-headed boy to his immediate left. Poor Eoan. He probably didn’t expect to be forced to continue associating with Rowan. “But there are ways. Johanna—”
Oh. That was how the two knew each other.Biblically,as they say.
At that point, I was coherent enough to muscle past the discomfort of those ocular distortions. The edges of things still bled a liquid white flame and I continued to have to squint in order to focus, but that seemed meager enough a price to pay for the opportunity that presented. With Professor Fleur distracted and the rest of the class mesmerized byRowan’s antics, no one was watching me. I staggered onto my feet. Sure enough, she ignored me, taking a few steps instead in Rowan’s direction.
“—is quite acrobatic, so that helps. You need someone who can come kissing-close to your short and curlies, and preferably, doesn’t mind actually kissing the short and curlies—”
“You can stop now,” said Eoan tremblingly. His watercolor eyes flicked in my direction. I shook my head, index finger raised to my lips. He dropped his gaze. “We don’t need to hear all of it.”
“Look, Professor Fleur asked.”
“She most certainly did not.”
