Free The Crimson Skew by S. E. Grove Page A

returning. The first thing she noticed was that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and more of the room was revealed. The walls were covered with dark drawings: lines and spirals and faces that seemed to describe a specific shape, only to alter and become something different.
It’s a tattooed room,
she thought,
like Wren’s arms.
    Maxine was holding a silver pitcher and a platter. She worea black veil that covered her entire person, leaving only her hands free. Placing the pitcher on the table, she gestured to the armoire in the corner of the room. She opened its doors, revealing a darkened interior of shelves filled with objects. Sophia approached the armoire and peered into its depths, trying to make out its contents. “Choose as many as you’d like,” Maxine said, her voice slightly muffled by her veil. She held the platter before her, waiting.
    There were four shelves, all of them piled high. Sophia wanted to protest that she could not see, but she realized that perhaps this was partly the point. A pale shape like a moon at the back of the middle shelf drew her eye, and she took it out. It was a circle of wood, smooth and flat, that seemed cut horizontally from a tree. She placed it on the platter Maxine was holding. Something on the lower shelf winked in the candlelight, and Sophia reached for it: a silver chain.
    Her eyes had gotten used to the deeper darkness, and she saw more clearly what the armoire contained. It looked like wreckage: the contents of an abandoned attic; the dregs of a shipwreck; the bits and pieces at the bottom of an old trunk. And yet, here and there some things intrigued her. She picked them up and set them one by one on the platter: a broken piece of glass, a horseshoe, a smooth brown shape that might have been wood or amber, a white shell, a velvet ribbon, an old key, and the porcelain arm of a doll.
    Without meeting Sophia’s eye, Maxine walked back to the table. Slowly, she placed the objects from the platter on thetable, creating a perimeter. Making her way back to where Sophia stood, she put the empty plate aside, then reached beneath the veil and produced a pair of silver scissors. Sophia flinched as the fortune-teller’s veiled figure leaned toward her. Without a word, Maxine cut a strand of hair from Sophia’s head and dropped it into the silver pitcher.
    â€œMorel for honesty, violets for sight. Truth in tresses and payment in blood.” She stabbed her forefinger quickly against the scissors, letting a slow drop of blood fall into the pitcher. She tucked the scissors away, then swirled the pitcher high over her head. Drawing it down toward the table, Maxine had to pull as if tugging it out of the hands of some invisible being. The pitcher jolted slightly as it came free. Sophia heard Maxine let out her breath.
    Then Maxine emptied its contents onto the table.
    Sophia gasped. The liquid was viscous and dark, almost black against the marble. Instead of pooling where Maxine poured it, the substance spread outward, stopping just at the edges of the table. A thick trunk channeled across the surface and then fanned out into branches, which split into even thinner branches. The pitcher poured far more than it seemed to contain, and when the last drop had fallen, a black shape like a tree filled the white stone. The branches reached out toward the objects Maxine had placed at the perimeter, making it seem as if each was a piece of unusual fruit on this most unusual tree.
    â€œAh, here we are,” Maxine whispered, walking around thetable appraisingly, admiring each branch of the black tree. “Yes, yes—I can see,” she continued, following the dark limbs with a pointing fingertip as if reading a text spread across the table. “I would never have thought . . .” she trailed off. “Astonishing. Not impossible, but astonishing.” Again, she circled the table slowly, commenting under her breath until she had reached