A Thread of Gold

A THREAD OF GOLD

by Nayani Jensen

Content warnings: Death, loss, suicide, and depression

A storm was brewing, and the sky tasted like a struck match.

I let it wrap around me with its smoky little breezes as I flew low over the town. I drifted in through the university dormitories, out to the attached building where the old bursar lived.

I slipped into the bedroom. 

The old man slept deeply, one hand on his wife’s arm. He was dreaming of dark-robed figures, of children, or perhaps students. His dreams were as smoky and faded as the sky.

But I hadn't come for the dreams. There was no good in dreams—fragments of a tired mind, bleeding into one another, feverish and chaotic. 

I placed misting fingers on either side of the wrinkled face, gently bent and reached—below the dreams, to the things deeper than dreams—

The waking dreams, the sleeping shames. The moments that played over and over in this little mind, never far from the surface. 

Sometimes it was a single phrase that walked itself back and forth across their thoughts. Sometimes a snippet of a scene, playing on a loop:

Breaths rising and falling beneath sheets.

                A thin wail. 

                                 Blood.

Moments the length of a blink.

This was the place where the secrets lived. This was the place where they ate away.

The old man didn’t resist me. I sifted around, and his secrets came away into my fingers in warm tendrils of pale gold. I took only what was needed and drifted easily back out through the door, over the heads of his sleeping family.

The storm was rising now, rain lashing against slate roofs.

I flew.

•••

All done. 

An easy job.

My young master nodded. 

He rubbed a hand over his face and pushed at the pile of papers strewn across the long table. 

His father had filled this room—brisk, loud, sharp about the eyes. But this one was different: soft face, glasses winking in the lamplight. Kinder than his father had been. 

Wrinkles, already, between his dark brows.

The years at the university had softened him. He was slow to make judgments, now. Slower and more careful still, after the death of his fiancée in the spring. Her picture sat on the table, just beyond his fingertips: curling black hair, laughing eyes. A beautiful thing, drowned in a shipwreck after the duke expelled her family. 

My master’s eyes flickered to the portrait, and then away again. 

Hush now, I murmured. Time to rest.

I brushed cool fingers over his wrinkled brow     .

He leaned against me, poured himself a brandy.

Quietly he sat, turning over the pages of requests, pleas for secrets—desperate people who would never be able to pay the fee; corrupt people who he would refuse no matter the fee; judges who were unsure, merchants being cheated, barons who doubted their wives, some from further and higher up still—

He sorted them listlessly.

The fire crackled. He put his face in his hands. 

Shhhh, I whispered.  

He reached an arm up to me, and I wrapped my many wings around him, feathers brushing, rustling his thinning hair. I could see, as always, the layers of his thoughts. All the secrets, every hidden doubt, every desire. Muddled, today, swirling like the sky outside. Hard to catch hold of. 

His soul, filtered through mine. All his secrets knitting us together.

He reached to tug at the pale gold chain that he wore always at his neck. It was a chain with no clasp, a delicate loop composed of hundreds of links that were themselves perfect circles, far beyond the skill of any human goldsmith. At its center hung a small pendant marked with wings. He had worn this chain since his father died, and both his father and grandfather had worn it before him.

He pulled at it as if it hurt, and I felt the responding pressure of that bond beneath my breast, burning a little, unbreakable. 

Hush now, I said. I lowered his fingers gently.  

“What happened with the old man?” he said finally.

The tutor was right. He’s been lifting funds. 

I took his hands in mine and let the soft gold dust take shape in the air between us, playing out the stolen images. He wrote up a short report and folded it into a waiting envelope, sealed it, and placed it to one side for the messenger. A kindness for an old friend, this one; a small, uncomplicated job, not like the pile of waiting contracts.

One particular contract was set aside from the others; it sat, white against the dark tabletop, not far from his fingers. He fiddled with it. 

The corners were already bent, worried at the edges. 

I didn’t need to read it to know what it was; he’d been agonizing over it for days.

He took a long breath.

“Find the musician for me,” he murmured. “The duke thinks she’s in the old fishing cottage past Tribalar. On a headland—” 

I wound my wings around him.

Are you sure?

“Please,” he said. He closed his eyes, opened them again to look at me. “Tell me what you see. I just want to check.” 

Of course.

I blew on his tea to warm it, and then I slipped out through the window.

•••

The night was still howling, the clouds lying low and restless.

I flew out over the dark yard, the wall, over the town.

There was the coastline, the rugged little houses, the schooners and dories swelling on the waves and straining against their ropes. 

I felt the thunder inside my bones, inside my many wings, all the delicate pieces trembling. Wonderful, a wild feeling—

I blew a kiss to the stars, swirled through the clouds—part of them, not part of them—

Little games.

Out along the rocks, now, the houses thinning. And there, as promised—a little cottage, run-     down, the garden overgrown—

A husky-dog, lean and wild-looking, sleeping by the hearth; dirty boots and coat by the door, everything dark. Nicely kept, once, but now left untouched, the taste of dust in the corners. A well-loved place, though not her own. The mandolin hanging on the door was her own, though, and the boots, and the long, deep-red coat.

A traveller’s things.

The mandolin had one gold string shining amongst the others, and I could feel it humming as I came in—

A lonely sort of hum. There was dust on this, too—

Curious. 

She lay on one side of the small bed, her clothes still on.

Hair cropped short to her jaw, face all edged, the handle of a knife emerging from beneath her pillow.

A fighter; a lonely thing.

She ought to have someone to smooth her brow, to kiss those thin cheeks, as I would have done for my master—

I had been curious about this one for years, ever since she first appeared in my master’s hall to play. 

Perhaps it was that loneliness; perhaps it was the scent of those secrets she clutched so tightly, which seeped through every pore of her skin. 

Perhaps it was because she was the one who had given my master the creases in his brow.

I slipped up right beside the bed. 

Her sleep was light. The dog padded to check on her, bristling as he sensed me, and finally settling watchfully in the doorway.

Come, little thing. 

Show me.

Her face was young in my fingers. I kissed her brows. I didn’t need to, but I did.

She dreamt of water, of gasping breaths, light swirling.

And beneath that—

Her thoughts were shuttered. I parted the veils carefully, and she twisted in her sleep. A strong thing, so unlike the arrogant ones who slept with their minds wide open, who sometimes didn’t even recognize the secrets they kept.

I grasped hold of the edges of a thought.

Ahh.

My master’s face. 

A surprise, for a moment, to find it so near the surface. He was an image edged in darkness, tall and looming.

She did not see him as I saw him; but then she had only ever seen him from a distance when she had come to play, sitting cross-legged in his hall with her mandolin. 

But he was not the main thing.

Deeper, deeper—

One secret stood out from all the others; I sensed it long before I found it, blazing with warmth. It had the watercolour edges of something viewed often, revisited obsessively, hated and loved.

I wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes, gently brushed her hair in my fingers. 

There—

There—

It flowed into me, and it tasted of sea-salt and honey and lavender.

In this same room, but a different time:

Autumn, gentle and golden, light in the window and jars of jellies on the shelf. Someone asleep on the other side of the bed—a familiar young woman with curling black hair, face turned away, all the blankets wrapped around her.

My master’s fiancée sleeps, and my young dreamer watches her, rises quietly from her side of the bed. She puts the kettle on.

The kitchen is suffused with light. The sea laps, and the mandolin sits upon the kitchen table. 

My dreamer carries two cups of tea back into the bedroom. She parts the thin curtains to let in more light, looking all the while at the sleeper.

After a moment, she lifts the mandolin from the table—no dust on it now—and plays it quietly, delicately at the end of the bed.

The gold hums even through the dream. 

The room is all gold.

Beneath my fingers the young woman twisted in her sleep, murmured.

The dog barked, and the thread broke.

•••

I should have returned home.

I could have. I could have told my master to forget her, that she was no danger to the duke or to him.

But I wanted to feel that warmth one more time; I wanted to know what else there was. 

I watched the young woman wake and go out with the dog at her heels. She fished in the little dory, returned in the afternoon, and took the catch to the traders.

There was a listless sort of rhythm to her day. I sensed her mind wandering.

I waited until she was once more in the small bed, the dog at her feet this time.

I watched her breath rise and fall. The room smelled of fresh lavender. Chimes rang in the window.

Softly, carefully, I emerged and placed my fingers to her cheeks. 

It was easy, this time, to find my way back to the warmth. I sifted through the fragile, translucent layers, lifted them out one by one—

Two girls, one laughing, the other watching that laugh, their feet dangling in the ocean and their hems soaked with salt. 

Two young women parting on a rural road, one lean and work-hardened, the other off to university.

Two young women meeting again on the docks, one smoothing a rough cloak and the newly-short ends of her hair, the other stepping down the ramp in a town-dress and hat, both nervous and then both grinning, waving.

The remainder of the earlier memory, here in the fishing cottage:

The black-haired woman turns her face. She opens her laughing eyes and sips the tea.

“I should go back today,” she says quietly.

My dreamer watches her. “Be careful, or he’ll propose.” 

It isn’t quite a joke, but the other woman smiles. “He’s a good man. And I’ve asked him to invite you to play again next week.”

My dreamer leans back, runs her fingers uneasily over the mandolin strings.

“Are you sure?”

“He won’t look. My secrets are my own. He promised me.”

She leans in, kisses my dreamer. The kiss turns deeper, closer—

The scene broke off. There was a sharp pain, so unexpected that at first I thought it must be part of the memory—

No. The young woman had me by the wrist, and the hum of gold was in the air, burning.

The mandolin against the door was missing its gold string. She coiled it around my wrists. She was strong; she pulled.

How did I not sense it before?

Of course, of course—

The lavender everywhere, the chimes ringing, drowning out the precious, binding metal.

Clever girl.

I tried to pull away, but her elbows pressed against my wings. I fought, but not really. Not too hard.

I was curious.

She tied the wire.

“Take me to your master,” she said.

I watched her, the gold light in her eyes, the fierce lines of her face.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

“Then I’ll keep you until he comes looking.”

Perhaps it was the devilish bit in me that wanted it.

Fine, I said. As you like.

She slung the mandolin over her shoulder. She took the knife and nothing else, climbed into the dory with the dog beside her.

It will be faster if you let me go.

She considered me, and then loosened the knot and re-tied it to the prow of the boat. I was amused by the thoroughness. I put up with it.

I stretched the gold into a delicate thread. Swirling alongside, I pulled the dory faster than she could ever row it, sent it streaming out under the midnight sky. I wanted to see what she was thinking, but she was focused now, with none of the looseness of sleep. Everything was locked away.

I let her see me properly, my many shifting, beautiful wings, each one its own—silvery, pearl-white, gold-edged, deep grey, iridescent—

My finest features, accumulated lovingly over the years.

She didn’t say anything, but I felt the spark of her response. She watched me slide beneath the surface of the water, emerging in a fountain of droplets to arch over the boat.

“Why?” she said. “Why bind yourself to a selfish little man?”

I sprayed her with salt water. 

The bond is mutual.

She could never understand the way the secrets fed me and gave me life, both his own and those he sent me to collect. The secrets didn’t matter if I got them for my own. They had to be sought-for, longed-for, protected, used. 

The young woman’s secrets were valuable because she clutched them so tightly. My master’s secrets were valuable because he was lonely, because they were for no one else. His father’s secrets had been valuable because of his enormous guilt for the things he had caused, for the games he had played with life and lands.

But even that was not the complete reason. Perhaps the bond was for companionship, for someone to look after, someone to love. 

For something to do.

“Which secrets of hers did you take for him?” she asked. 

Not telling.

I could not have told her even if I had wanted to; it was part of the terms of the bond.

She tied the little fishing boat between two merchant schooners and followed me up the narrow streets—past the town, up to the old house and garden.

The family had never been extravagant. Extravagance draws attention, and they had learned early that attention was dangerous for a service as coveted as this.

I swirled around the guards at the door.

They knew me, were afraid of me—

I felt the pulse of the secrets they immediately thought of in trying not to think of them; their little indiscretions, their slips in duty.

They opened the door, and the young woman went calmly in with the dog just behind her. 

I drifted up the stairs.

I could feel my master pacing, the anger trembling through the floor.

He pulled the door open as I arrived.

“Where have you been?” he said, quivering, and then froze, looking at the visitor.

She looked back.

My master put his hands over his eyes and then dropped them again.

She was expecting me. She had gold wire.

He wasn’t really angry with me, as I knew he wouldn’t be. 

I deserve it, his face said. 

 Just talk to her, I said.

Perhaps he did deserve it.

They both looked very young, there in the large oak space. The room was a cloak that didn’t fit either of them.

He held the door open for the woman and closed it behind her, flinching when the dog brushed against him. The much-worn letter was in his hand, and he rubbed it between his fingers. 

“A contract came in,” he said, without looking at her. “The duke thought you’d been meddling—”  

“Yes, I had to get your attention somehow,” she said. “I know how you love the duke’s contracts.” 

My master stared. 

“I’ve waited for months,” the young woman said. “I spent two weeks outside your gates, did you know? But you’d slipped off…” 

She walked over to his desk, looked down at the laughing portrait. 

“She believed it when you promised to never set your creature on her. But I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”

Creature. I bristled, but she wasn’t watching me.

My master said nothing. He hated her; the hate was silvery-blue, fragile rather than hot. I wound myself soothingly around his arm.

“So you pried out her secrets,” she said. “And then had your revenge by getting the duke to expel them all?”

His mouth pinched, and his fingers twitched at the chain at his neck. She walked closer.

“I’ve listened to every rumour. I’ve traced the ships. I want to know what happened.” 

“She was on the Phoebe,” he said. A whisper.

“And?”

“The ship got mistaken for a government one, it got caught up in the fighting.” 

“Convenient, for you.”

“No,” he said. It was more of an inhale. “I was—you don’t understand—”

“Did they find bodies?”

“No. But I did everything already, I asked everyone—”

“I want the names,” she said. “ The locations. I’ll search again myself.”

In the lamplight, her hair had streaks like flames.

She was dangerous. He had made her dangerous.

I was fascinated by the taste of that danger.

He went over to the table, moving slowly like a wound-down clock. He gathered a stack of papers from the side table and handed them to her. 

She checked them over in the lamplight, tucked them under her arm, and turned to go.

My master didn’t look at her; he faced away, into the fire. 

“I loved her,” he whispered.

He said it into the fire, not to her, and it had the echo of a secret—

I loved her

               loved her

                             loved her.

He tugged at the chain around his neck, and it hurt my chest.

The young woman watched him.

“She didn’t love you,” she said. “She knew her father had been conspiring against the duke, and she was convinced the duke would have you investigate him otherwise.”

“I know,” he said, and took a long breath.

His thoughts grew louder, into a swirl, becoming clearer, monochrome. 

Master, I said. I pulled at his sleeve. 

He pushed me away.

“I never meant to pry,” he said. “I never wanted to.”

He walked back towards her, and both his fingers were wrapped around the little chain; the gold hummed and sang as it strained, each little chain link quivering, and I felt the fragility of it in my bones, pulling, pulling— 

“I hate it,” he whispered.

He didn’t look at me. 

“I don’t want to do it anymore. Please, take it—”

He was an ugly crier.

The young woman stepped back, and for the first time there was a flicker of apprehension.

“I don’t want it,” she said, and she meant it. She was not the sort, not the type to give up her secrets for any reason. 

My master clawed at his neck. He pulled at the thread, and his nails left lines on his throat.

There was no clasp; it would not come off that way.

“Please,” he said to me. “Please.”

But I could not take it off. He knew that. That chain was our bond, and there was only one way to release it; that was the bargain they all made. 

He tried pliers anyhow. He took the tongs from above the fire and heated them, pressed them clumsily to the gold thread. He pulled, twisted.

Flames appeared on his collar, the smell of singed skin.

The young woman flinched. 

I blew the flames out, held cold fingers to the burn. 

Stop. Stop that.

“Is this what you wanted?” he gasped at me. 

But it wasn’t. He knew that, deep down.

I kissed his soft cheeks.

Stay, I said.

And I was so very fond of him, this one with the soft eyes and wrinkled brow. But even then I knew; I could see it in his eyes. He’d made up his mind.

“I was angry,” he said. Quietly, purposefully. He looked directly up at the young woman. “I took the duke’s contract to investigate her father. I’d refused it for years. I never meant—I thought he’d send them all away, I thought it would separate you two. And then I’d go to meet her, I’d finish with the secrets, I’d leave all of this—”

Shhh, I whispered. 

The gold hummed, grew louder.

A single link on the chain trembled, thinned. A wisp of gold dust leaked away into the air, and I resisted the impulse to reach out for it.

My master didn’t look at it, but the young woman did. She glanced at me, then back to my master.

“I hated watching her secrets,” he said. “I hated you.”

The secrets fell heavily into the stifled air of the room. And steadily, without shame, he let them go.

“When I was nine, I stole a half-crown from my father’s purse and the footman got blamed for it—”

“I never liked the duke. I’d never meant to take his contract anyway. I don’t know why I did.”

The young woman’s fingers were tight in the dog’s fur. “What are you doing?” she said quietly. “Stop.”

But he did not stop.

“My family is scared of me. Everyone is scared. They think I’ll look, think I’ll take the secrets—maybe I would—”

They poured out, these little truths that bound him to me, these little things he had told no one else—and one by one, the links in the delicate gold chain loosened, dissolved, filling the room with a soft stream of gold dust. And I felt it deep inside, that bond untangling itself, severing.

The dog whined low in its throat and pushed at my master. 

“I was jealous of my brother. Always. My father, he always preferred…”

He was losing breath, his words fumbling. 

It took enormous will, this kind of release. The others in his family had not done it. His father had been released by an ordinary seizing of his heart, his grandfather by old age.

Shhh, I murmured to him. I wrapped my wings around him, encased him. Don’t. Stay.

But already he was slipping, and as he slipped his murmurs became more truthful, perhaps unknown to him, even, until that moment.

“There was a nest of bowerbirds in the courtyard one summer. My mother showed me. Gold and blue eggs, and they were so beautiful. I put my hand into the nest. I just wanted to hold them. But they were so fragile—the shells crumpled, and suddenly the yolk was on my hands. I ran and hid. I saw the mother-bird come back, flying around and around her broken nest, and I was sorry, I was sorry and so afraid of hurting things—but I did, I always did…”

And as he slipped from consciousness, the gold dust took form in the air—

They filled the room, now, his own moments of shame, deceit, desire.

The first girl he loved.

The last time his father beat him.

Kinder scenes, too—the spots of intense joy, the longed-for. It was not just the shameful secrets that bound him to me. He did himself a disservice; they always did.

They filled the room, these mingled moments.

His first sight of the girl who would be his fiancée, in a courtyard at the university; their first fumbled conversation, years ago, now.

The way she smiled.

A scene of himself, imagined, years from now: three children, and she glanced up and laughed, and he kissed her, brief and familiar—

The young woman looked away from the images and watched my master instead.

Then she looked at me. “Can’t you stop it?” she said.

There was nothing I could do. But I was touched by the way her feeling coiled its way into the room, by the mingled taste of regret. 

The gold dust rearranged itself—

The smell of coffee and old pages on a cold morning.

The soft pad, pad of the paws of a boyhood companion.

I had seen these before, seen them myself and seen them through him, but still I watched.

And I was so proud, so fond.

Here and there were the secrets he’d held on to for others, until they became his own—the terrible ones that ate away, the ones he’d refused to sell or pass on, no matter the threats, no matter the money—

The moment he’d watched his father slip away, here in this room. He was fresh out of the university, and he’d stood looking around at the room, at the piles of letters, at me—

Wanting it, not wanting it, fearing it.

Knowing, perhaps, even then, that it was wrong for him, but hoping—hoping he might do better, might make something purer of it—

I had waited patiently, not wanting to pressure him. 

All this, as he lifted the small gold pendant that had fallen onto his father’s clothing, lifted it to his own throat, as the chain began to grow.

Not as long as his father’s had been at death; never so long.

There were not so many secrets, after all.

Then the moment in the hall of this house, a small gathering, everyone eating, talking, the dark head on his shoulder, a ring shining on her finger, gold—

The musician plays—a sweet song.

His fiancée hums: she has hummed this many times before.

He watches his fiancée, watches the musician. And there is all that love. And the doubt. The love and the doubt—

And in the vision he looks up at me, tries to change his mind, but can’t, quite—

“Will you check?” he says. “Will you look, just quickly?”

And I know, I know how this goes.

Are you sure?

“Please.”

On the floor, my master closed his eyes and twisted his face away.

And there, at last was the stolen memory, the one he had watched again and again, obsessively—

The fishing cottage. Music. Tea on the night-table. The same memory, but the other way around. 

The last time, before it had all gone wrong. 

The musician’s face was wide-open and young. 

I wiped my master’s brows.

He was fading, now. The images crowded together, jumbling, sights and sounds and scents.

He lifted his hand, and I touched it, but his fingers moved through me; it wasn’t me he was looking for.

After a moment, the young woman knelt and took his cool hand.

He whispered something, but she couldn’t hear.

He tried again. 

“Will you play?” he said.

He’d loved hearing her play, loved it more for how much his fiancée loved it.

The young woman’s face was complicated; she drew her hand back. He didn’t ask again, just breathed, watching the scenes shifting over his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Shhh,” she said.

She took the mandolin and played for him, fingers skipping over the missing string. 

She did not play the song from the memory. She played light things, gentle things, and his eyes closed, and his face grew soft and loose. She played while the scenes overhead began to flicker, running together, drifting apart, dispersing, until the last of the secrets that bound us together was released and he was motionless on the dark floor. On his chest was a single pendant, tear-dropped. 

The cloud of dust above him gathered itself—a faint, wispy shape, and at last I reached out to meet it, knowing what a gift it was—

This little soul. Not a strong man, not a bad man. And he drifted to meet me, and gently I took him.

I felt the surge of warmth, the new set of wings growing and settling among the others. His father’s were an old, dusty silver, but these were shimmering white and flushed with veins of colour, like the inside of an oyster.  

I turned to look down at the young woman.

She knelt next to the body, took a handkerchief from his pocket and picked up the gold pendant. She was careful with it, not touching it. 

It wouldn’t matter if she did; she had to want it, really want it.

“Would you like it back?” she said.

I was surprised, for a moment. I was so rarely surprised.

You keep it.

She raised an eyebrow. “I’m not going to use it.” 

I know.

She held it cradled in her palms. She looked at my master, looked at the portrait on the desk, and finally she placed the small parcel warily in the mandolin case. 

It knocked against the strings, a muffled, tinny chord.

I had not been without a bond in a hundred, two hundred years. Everything felt lighter, looser, lonelier.

The dog growled softly, and the young woman put a hand to its head. She replaced the instrument at her back, the folder of information under her arm. 

She left the body in the room for the footman to find.

In the doorway she paused, and glanced back at me. 

“You can come, if you like,” she said, and then she turned, and walked down the stairs with the dog padding after her.  

For a moment I waited, taking a last look at this room, at the form that had been my young master. Gently, I smoothed his collar to cover the place where he’d burned himself. I kissed his cool cheek.

Then, carrying his soul with me, I flew.