The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [28]
Approaching, a smell of mould and rotting vegetation, of stagnant water, became denser and denser, but there was another scent, almost indefinable—sweet, not altogether unpleasant. The young servant girl, the kholic named Octavia, nearly choked on this brew. She filled her lungs again and again, eyes watering. She had missed such pungency.
Octavia held her lantern out, staring at this partially opened door, or what was left of it. Strangely, there was another light, dim and green, coming from inside the cell. These plants by her feet, dying or not, defied nature.
She hung the lantern on an iron sconce.
Stagnant water pooled the worn stone floor, staining the rough corridor for some distance. Her flat rattan shoes were quickly black and befouled, but until a fortnight ago, she had never worn any.
From inside the cell erupted suddenly a bray of laughter, followed by low, muttered phrases Octavia could not catch, though she was sure she heard her name.
There was just enough space for her to squeeze between the stone doorframe and the rotten wood of the door, which pressed against her body, soft as flesh and almost as warm; with the stench and heat of the cell filling her lungs, dense against her face and hands, Octavia stepped forward.
And she looked in.
First she saw a portcullis, within arms reach, though not at all as rusted or old as she would have imagined, if she had imagined a portcullis. Beyond these bars she saw no creature, no fecund, though just how this beast might appear she was not entirely clear. There was only a lush habitat of startling green, a riot of growth, as if the source of all life were crammed into here.
Was this a joke? An initiation of sorts? Those stories from her childhood, tales and rumours passed down in the dorms of the ostracon, untrue? Maybe the chatelaine was playing a trick on her?
She stood upon a thin strip of wet rock. On the other side of the bars, vines spilled down the walls and over the floor. More vines hung in verdant cascades from the ceiling, which was almost totally obscured. The more she looked, the more vegetation she discerned.
Tiny lizards hovered over the flora, and black beetles rustled through the humus strewn by her ruined shoes. She frowned. She even smelled traces of the outdoors here: soil, smoke, and a struggling breeze. But from where? That greenish light seemed to emanate beyond the lianas overhead, as if there was a source up there, but none of this was possible because she had travelled down several flights of steps, and down many sloping corridors in the bedrock—tugged along by the chatelaine’s dream, which she held clenched in one sweaty fist—to get to this subterranean room.
In a quiet, quavering voice, Octavia called out, “Hello?”
That breeze, rustling, was her sole answer. Followed by the hum of bumblebees. She could not really tell how big the cell was. When she established a wall, and then tried to see the wall opposite, they seemed to shift.
Was a pond covering most of the floor? The surface had become so thoroughly choked by arrowheads and duckweed and algae that it almost appeared to be comprised of the same greenery that overhung the cell and draped the walls, and when one first—
The pond moved.
Octavia stepped back.
Solidifying, massive and green, rising up before her, what else could this be, emerging from the water? As if the pond was metres and metres deep? What else but the fabled fecund? Octavia steadied herself against the wall. Had the monster been lounging, camouflaged in the shallow water all this while? Or maybe, Octavia thought, there was no floor at all in there, and the fecund had come when she had called, swimming up from a water-filled tunnel below the palace—
The monster filled the cell now, turning her long face slowly toward Octavia, revealing through this movement the undeniable fact that all of this was extremely real. Their eyes met. Octavia could not look away, though she tried. Evidence of the fecund’s gender was certain, locked into those little red eyes. Though difficult to admit, Octavia felt