* * *
The next ten or twelve days were tense with waiting. Doctor Corto had been less than useless for an age, but we had no doctor at all now, and although we all knew the tree would choose a replacement, each day that went by without the Electors spawning just tightened the fear that something had miscarried. And speaking of which, pity the mother due to give birth right then, pity anyone sick or injured, staring up at the swollen boll of the hive and hoping for a sign that normal life would resume. The other ghost-bearers were besieged because most people thought they could get news from the tree by questioning their ghosts. Everyone had heard some story, some tale by an outcast found near Aro, or from some traveller from another community. Everyone had heard from someone who had heard from someone who was told by their Grandma about a village Where Things Went Wrong, where the tree died, where the wasps flew away. Lawgiver Elhern and Architect Brosa—herself as old as ever Corto had got, and going the same way—spent every day turning away petitioners who were sure that, if they just asked some new way, the secret would come out.
And they couldn’t ask. Their ghosts came to them with knowledge, but they didn’t carry off prayers to the tree or the hive or wherever they waited when they weren’t incarnate in flesh. I know more than just about anyone now, about how it works, and it doesn’t work like that. Perhaps it was supposed to once. Perhaps, if it did, we wouldn’t be in this fix and I wouldn’t be trying to work out what to do about it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Over the next few days the hive swelled noticeably, its outsides crawling with the humble wasps we saw every day, that were the tree’s means of sampling and testing its dependents, meaning us. Almost nobody got stung in that time, which sounds grand except when you realise it means the tree isn’t listening to us anymore. Its attention is elsewhere, and if everyone had dropped dead, perhaps it wouldn’t even have known.
So everyone was holding their breath, and nobody more than me. I thought it would make everything right again, actually having a proper doctor. I was sick, after all. I was half Severed, and that was something the doctor ghost had jurisdiction over. Once we had someone other than mumbling old Corto as doctor, I could be cured. I was in a fever pitch of excitement. Three long years I’d lived in the unthinking disdain of my kin in Aro. It had been hard, almost too hard to bear, but now there was an end in sight.
In that, I was entirely correct, of course. I think they were my last moments of childhood, those few days of hope. That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.
At last, late enough that everyone was going a bit mad with worry, the Electors came out and started buzzing lazily about between the houses. They were far bigger than the normal wasps, longer than your second finger and with fat, bristling bodies. Once they hatched out, there was no mistaking they were around. The air vibrated with their labouring wings day and night. And when they stung, well, it hurt enough to make grown-ups cry. Or so they said, because of course they didn’t sting me.
They were busy, though. I reckon about one in five from Aro got stung in the next few days, and each time everyone else watched anxiously to see if the recipient would show signs of the doctor ghost coming to stay. Children started following the Electors around, shrieking and pointing at anyone who received their attentions. Those who had been stung but not chosen were left hurting and rueful, and perhaps a little relieved. Being the doctor was a great honour and a great responsibility, but it meant your life would never quite be your own, either. Everyone was a servant of the village, it was true, but those ridden by the ghosts had to share their very heads.
And life went on, despite all this. The fields wouldn’t just hold their ripening, nor would the pests stay away by prior arrangement until a doctor was found. Everyone worked. I worked, most of all. I worked harder than anyone because I had to show them I was still there, still part of the community, for all their eyes told them otherwise. I volunteered for the worst jobs, did extra shifts, ran errands, anything people would trust me with. I was so desperate to belong. And the work was harder for me, too. When I pulled weeds, the plant juices raised a rash on my hands that nobody else had, and I was always working on a half-empty belly because there was so little I could keep down. Pollen puffed my eyes up and picking fruit gave me blisters. It wasn’t just the village. The world was trying to reject me.
And of course I was out working when word came from the tree that the long wait was over. The Electors had chosen. Who was it? Everyone wanted to know. Such a babble of voices that nobody could hear, like clumsy hunters treading over the tracks of their quarry. I pried and craned about the edge of the crowd of field workers, forgotten about, excluded from the excited rush and whisper of news.
But then they were looking at me. For the first time in years, they had turned to me, and for a moment I thought I was in again, the Severance worn off, my curse lifted.
But you’ve guessed, of course. You’ve known for a while, because I tell this tale with foreknowledge of what came after, and so the very choice of my words has guided you towards an unavoidable conclusion. It was her. Melory had been stung, and straight off she had started to show the signs. My sister would be Aro’s new doctor.
III.
THEY’D TAKEN HER TO her bed, of course, and by the time I got there she was already lost to the fever. The sting itself was on her shoulder, an angry welt like a cluster of knuckles. She wouldn’t open one eye for two whole days while her body shifted and changed to make her into a house fit for a ghost. The other eye would never open again.
I sat by her bedside all that time, save where I had to go to the baker to beg some food. One benefit of everyone’s mind just skating over the fact of you is, nobody comes banging on the door to find out why you’re not pulling your weight. So I looked after her; I held Melory’s clammy hand and mopped her swollen forehead and talked to her, over and over, mostly utter nonsense but just so she could know I was there. We’d been together from Ma’s womb and for sixteen years after that, and now she was on a lonely journey through strange places. I wanted her to know I was still there. I didn’t want her to forget about me.
The left side of her face puffed out like a fungus, over those days. The skin broke, wept, healed over again so fast I could almost watch it happen. It was worst about her eye and temple, where the ghost was remodeling the substance of her skull so it could go in and out when it pleased, or that’s what I think now, having seen a ghost-bearer’s bones. She lost her eye when the flesh bloated up like a clenched fist around it. What was left when the tight, angry swelling died down was just a hole, a socket that seemed to go too deep into her head. It wasn’t the only one, either. Pits and pockmarks opened up around it, as though she’d need more eyes or senses than the rest of us, to do her new job. She twitched and turned, and the blankets were drenched with sweat no matter how fast I changed them. She would mutter numbers or meaningless fragments of words, and I think everyone was terrified that she’d be another Corto, that it had been the ghost that was senile, and not just the man. As she lay there, sometimes her right eye would open wide and she’d stare up at me as though begging for help. We had always been alike: So people said and our reflections in still water confirmed it. We shared our mother’s straight dark hair, sharp chin and narrow eyes—like and unlike each other, just as we two were like and unlike the rest of Aro. Now the mirror was breaking. I would never look into Melory’s face and imagine my own. That was the first way the ghost took her from me, even before it came to live in the house it was building.