Redglass

A foreigner nears the stone boundary of Bourest, the townspeople barely able to conceal their predatory grins. No doubt the guard will drag him over to me, kicking and screaming as new visitors always do once they pass the stones and see the Curse for the first time.

I uncross my arms and straighten the rows of redglass spectacles and goggles that lay across my table, selecting a pair of simple leather goggles to polish. Fingerprints and dust disappear beneath my worn cloth rag, the rosy-hued glass flashing in the midday sun.

He is almost upon the stones now, close enough to see his sandy hair and young face peeking from beneath the hood of his cloak. His skin is paler than most travellers I have seen, his eyes lighter also. He’s either brave or stupid travelling alone anywhere, let alone Bourest.

“Ho traveller, stop before the stones there,” the gate guard calls to the young man.

“Good day, sir!” the foreigner replies, stopping and giving us all a bright smile. It falters as a few poorly concealed giggles ring out.

“State your name and business in Bourest,” the guard commands.

“My name is Aykre. I am a traveller from the north, visiting towns on my journey to the South Sea,” he replies, scanning the crowd. His pale blue eyes lock with mine and I raise an eyebrow. Will he stand still in shock when he sees my Curse-form? Or will he scream and writhe, those pretty eyes filled with terror?

“You’ve never been here before, I take it?” the guard says, smirking.

“No, sir,” Aykre the traveller confirms, cocking his head at me.

With a cruel smile, the guard gestures to him. “Well come right in, Mr Aykre.”

Aykre steps over the stones and the townspeople laugh in anticipation of his screams. He scans the crowd, a slight frown on his face, but crosses the distance to the guard with no complaints.

I gasp and whip off my redglass spectacles, many in the crowd following suit. Did something happen to the Curse?

Sharp teeth click in deformed mouths as the townspeople mutter in confusion and concern. The kaleidoscope of mottled skin, protruding bones and pus-filled boils assault my eyes in a terrifying display. I recognise the Curse-form of the guard speaking to the newcomer before I slip my glasses back on with a shiver. Lourn’s hundreds of needle-sharp teeth and wide puke-green eyes are unmistakable.

“Can you direct me to a reputable inn, sir?” he asks Lourn, his hands behind his back, his posture relaxed.

Lourn’s mouth is open, but he does not reply, his eyes wide and staring at Aykre as if he were the monstrous one.

“I’ll just have a walk around first, then,” Aykre says, the crowd parting in silence to let him pass.

“Follow him,” Father’s voice startles me. His forehead is crinkled above his own spectacles, his muscular arms bulging as he carries crates full of damaged glasses. “Take a pair of goggles. I don’t know if he is mad or stupid, but he’ll need them soon.”

I nod, taking the goggles and walking quickly down the dirt road after the strange young man.

Trade Road is bustling as usual. The gambling tables are out, the patrons tossing cards and swearing at each other, a fight already breaking out. Next door, the herbalist’s window is surrounded, a line of agitated pipeweed smokers winding into the street. The delicious scent of baking makes my stomach rumble as it wafts through the still air, marred by the damp stench of pipeweed from the smokers under the herbalist’s awning. I search the people milling about as I walk, but I can’t spot him amidst the throng. I grit my teeth and slide my redglass spectacles down my nose, peeking above them and scanning the ugly crowd once more.

There, by the bakery. He’s chatting with one of the baker’s assistants, Imdren, her spiny skin giving her the look of a sea creature. How he is able to keep a straight face as her fishy-eyes bulge from her head is beyond my understanding. I slide my glasses back into place with a grunt and thrust the goggles into my skirt pocket, resolving to buy a meat pie and see how things here unfold.

“Will you be staying the night?” Imdren asks him, stepping into his space.

“Yes, and then some. I hope to stay at least a week,” he replies, gifting her with a wide innocent smile.

“Don’t you know that the Curse will get you if you stay that long?” she says, running her fingers along his arm.

He laughs and takes a half-step backwards. “We’ll see, I guess.”

He orders a pie and she flounces away to retrieve it for him, the smile slipping from his face. I try to hide behind the pole I am sitting next to, but he notices.

“Hey! I saw you at the gate,” he says, moving to sit on the barrel across from me.

“How observant,” I say, taking a bite of my pie, grimacing at an unexpected crunch in its filling.

“You were selling those pink glasses,” he continues, pointing at my spectacles.

“They are for obscuring the Curse,” I explain, eyes narrowed at him. “Yet, you seem unbothered by it. Can’t you see our Curse-forms?”

“I can see your scales, if that’s what you mean,” he replies, shrugging.

My stomach lurches, and it isn’t from the dubious pie. I know what I look like—blackened scaly skin and sharp talons for fingernails, a ridge of protruding spines along my back. Why doesn’t he care?

“How is it you all look like this, anyway?” he asks, accepting his pie from Imdren who pouts and stomps away when she sees his attention is elsewhere.

“A few years ago, a witch from the north visited our town,” I say, launching into the story I’ve told so many times. “She walked our streets and was disgusted with what she saw. She stormed down Trade Road, screeching in her northern spell-tongue, ‘eirdohn mok srith klahd lomen mik’. Something like ‘We are all demons and are cursed to look like them’.”

Ayken chuckles as he unwraps his pie. “That’s not what it means.”

I snort. “You understand it? Then what does it mean, Northerner?”

He tilts his head in thought, his sandy hair falling into his eyes. “She said ‘reflect upon their bodies the ugliness within’.”

I scoff, shaking my head at her hypocrisy. How is turning an entire town into monsters not monstrous in itself?

“So tell me, Miss. What ugliness are you carrying inside?” Ayken asks, his blue eyes fixing on mine, cold trickling down my back like the waters of the icy river where my mother…

“You will be driven mad by this town, stranger,” I say, thrusting the goggles at him and burying the memories down deep.

He shakes his head, his cool hand closing over my scaled one as he gently pushes the goggles away. “You people don’t scare me.”

Father and I sit together for our evening meal in the back of the workshop, chewing in silence. Most of the space is given over to the manufacture of redglass eyewear — cutting and polishing tools lie on felt workstations around the room, scrap metal and leather at others. Only one workstation is unused, close to the front door, a thick layer of dust stuck to the felt and dusting the tools.

It is this workstation that I cannot tear my eyes away from now as I struggle with the tough vegetables Father roasted.

“Have you ever done something that makes you feel like you might not be a good person?” I ask quietly, poking at a carrot. “That you might deserve to look like you do?”

He stares at me for a long moment through his spectacles before taking them off and rubbing his silver-bearded face with a calloused hand. “Cursed gods, Ossia. Where is this coming from?”

After a moment of silence, he puts his spectacles back on and breathes out long and slow. “Your mother… I told you how she died.”

I nod slowly, a sour taste in my mouth.

“I didn’t tell you that I let her,” he says through thin lips, his jaw tight. “I stood on the bank of the river and just watched as it carried her away. After what she did to you, and her threats…”

My mind is blank. I try to search for words, but none feel like enough. He did it to protect me, of that much I was certain. Did that make him evil?

Reflect upon their bodies the ugliness within…

Father studies me, his dark brown eyes shiny in the candlelight. He reaches a calloused hand across the table, taking my hand in his and hanging his head.

“I’m sorry, Ossi. We can talk about it, if you want,” he offers.

I shake my head and squeeze his hand, the words stuck in my throat.

I choke down another mystery meat pastry for my midday meal, frowning as my prediction about Ayrke is proven wrong. 

“He’s not wearing redglass. Why isn’t he going mad?”

“He hasn’t been touched by the Curse, and it’s been almost a full day now!”

“Have you heard he’s from the north? He must be a witch then!”

Aykre wanders the town, making polite conversation with any that will engage him, showing no signs of the terror of those strangers that came before him. I shrug off the townspeople’s paranoid mutterings as just that.

Until a scream pierces the air.

The baker, hat askew, runs out from the bakery, her hands bloody. “Help! It’s Imdren. Please, someone help!”

The herbalist from across the way hurries over, following the baker and a few others into the kitchens. A moment later a shout rings out to the immobilised crowd outside.

“Imdren’s dead! She’s been murdered!”

The crowd erupts, theories and accusations thrown around as easily as punches at the gambling tables. Aykre, wary of the conspiratorial crowd, wanders over to my seat near the baker’s front window.

“She was an interesting soul,” he says, his expression unreadable.

“Did she add you to her list?” I ask. “She kept a list of all the men she had slept with. Especially the married ones. She liked to track which ones she could threaten for money.”

“Sounds like she had many enemies,” Aykre muses.

Guards attend the scene now, shooing away onlookers yet noticeably avoiding Aykre and I. Aykre clears his throat and leans in, the caramel scent of his hair stirring something deep within me.

“Did you give any thought to what I asked you yesterday?”

The feeling fades, the cold seeping out from my chest, my limbs heavy. The ugliness within was really none of his business, yet…

“Humour me,” he continues, his voice deep and hypnotic. His hair catches the sun’s rays, outlining his head in a halo of golden light.

“My mother wasn’t a good person,” I say softly, the words coming unstuck under his penetrating stare. “She would say cruel things, and hit me and Father. She’d threaten our lives, and her own. One night, after she had beaten me, I desperately wished she would die and leave Father and I in peace…” I stop, my throat aching.

“You got your wish, didn’t you?” Aykre whispers, pinning me with the intensity of his stare.

I nod, unable to look away from him yet squirming in my seat.

“The ugliness you carry inside does not belong to you,” he says, the tone of his voice suddenly very serious, no hint of the smile that he always seems to have at the ready. “It was hers, and hers alone. Let it go.”

His eyes seem lit from within for a moment, like sunlight glinting on morning frost. I feel a cold, sharp pain in my chest, spreading outwards and I gasp.

“What did you do to me?”

“I showed you the truth,” he leans against the post behind him with his eyes closed, his head resting on his crossed arms. “It’s up to you now whether to accept it.”

Over the days that follow Imdren’s murder, I contemplate what Aykre did to me. His voice repeats in my mind, pushing me to reconsider how I have always viewed the events of that terrible day. More and more I start to wonder if he really is a witch, as I feel a lightness in me that I hadn’t felt before. It isn’t until three days pass and three more murders occur that Father notices the changes in me himself.

“Ossia, your back,” he gasps, startling me into dropping the redglass lens I was cutting.

“What’s wrong?” I say, bending my arm around to touch it.

“Your spines are gone,” he whispers, bringing the candlestick closer to me and staring in awe.

I run my fingers down the lower half of my back, feeling along the bones of my spine. Smooth skin, still scaled but no longer marred by the protruding ridges. I look at Father, my mouth agape.

“How?” he asks, sinking into a nearby chair, candle wax dribbling to the floor unnoticed.

I shake my head, as shocked as he.

“You look different,” Ayken says, grinning and falling into step with me as I carry a tray of spectacles in need of repairs back to the workshop.

“And yet you don’t, and it has been four days now,” I counter, staring at him over the top of my spectacles. “The town thinks you’re a witch.”

Behind us, the townspeople glare, their angry and fearful mutterings just quiet enough that I cannot catch their words.

“Why? Because I’m from the north?” he says, scoffing.

“Because you haven’t changed, nor have you gone mad without the redglass.” Not to mention the four murders that have occurred since he arrived. 

“And yet, you have changed,” he says quietly, nodding to the gate, “and so have others.”

Over the top of my spectacles, I see Lourn is on duty… but his teeth have reduced in size, his eyes a normal bright green.

“It is you, isn’t it?” I hiss. “You are a witch.”

Ayken smiles and shrugs once more. “I just show people the truth about themselves. Some accept it, others do not.”

Something in the way that he says this makes my scales itch. “And what happens to those people that don’t?”

He shoots me a sidelong look but says nothing.

I toss and turn in bed, Ayken’s words tumbling about my mind like stones down a hill. The truths, the deaths. Is he a witch? If so, is he here to help us, or…

I hear the front door of the workshop downstairs open, the creaking of the hinge unmistakeable. Soft voices filter up through the floorboards, Father’s and one other, too quiet to identify.

I slip from bed and press my ear to the floor, straining to hear what they are saying. I hear Father’s voice waver — it sounds like he is crying. 

I rush down the stairs, standing transfixed at the bottom by the scene before me. Father lies on the floor, his throat cut ear to ear. Standing over him is Aykre, a wicked dagger drawn and bloodied.

I open my mouth, wanting to scream, wanting to know why. But the words won’t come, as if my own throat is slit.

“I forced him to see his truth, and he couldn’t forgive himself,” Aykre says quietly, wiping and sheathing his blade. “Why did he spurn the gift my mother gave him? The chance to see the ugliness and face it?”

With these final words, he reaches out a hand and makes a tight fist, his eyes glowing blue. Redglass shards fly in a shower of pink crystal as Father’s final works explode one after another. As the red shards rain down upon me, a thousand stinging drops burrowing between my scales, something within me shatters.

Aykre’s blood runs warm over my hands. I drop the bloodied hammer I’m holding and fall to the floor, cradling Aykre’s ruined head, his halo of golden hair dyed red. 

He blinks his pale blue eyes, trying to focus on my face as my eyes swim with tears. My hands tremble beneath his head, my throat closing over as I see the life leaving him.

With a last gasp, he grasps my arm tightly. He utters no words, but his blue eyes flash, showing me a truth I cannot accept.

The tools and felt tables of the workshop are packed away, as is the redglass and metal. There has been no need for them anymore, not since that night months ago. Aykre’s bones hang from the main gate, which is always open to travellers now. Except those from the north. To them, the bones are a warning.

“I need to use the glasses, Ossia,” Auley begs me, tears sliding down her boil-covered face.

“You were doing so well,” I say, my heart heavy as I lead her to the large comfortable chairs in the centre of the room. 

“It isn’t enough,” she whimpers.

I nod, seeing the desperation within her.

Auley takes a seat across from me, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror hanging from the wall, affixed there for my clients to note changes in their Curse-form’s appearance. My spines are longer and sharper than ever, my scales like slices of obsidian. They no longer repulse me as they once did.

I open the small wooden case and gently bring out the spectacles within, Aykre’s icy blue irises perfectly preserved in the glass. I place them gently on my face. the cold seeping into my bones, my teeth aching as cold blue light flickers across Auley’s healing face.

Yet I remain the most cursed woman in Bourest.

In possession of a cure that I will never use.