O! but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony:
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain,
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
He that no more must say is listen’d more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose;
More are men’s ends mark’d than their lives before:
The setting sun, and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past
Shakespeare, Act II, Scene I, Richard II
I. Requiem for a Child
At first there were only the voices. There was nothing more; the silence otherwise was sweet and absolute. A sense of flight came through the dark, illuminating the garden–wild and twisted, ancient and stunted, the strange fruits and impossible secrets buried like so many corpses in this fertile soil. But it was a dark and perfect Eden; her needs tended by the strange undines that whispered where the fruits were found.
The child was strange. When she was found wandering that grim and ancient place, from graybeard elder to toddling child, they agreed on her peculiarity. She was not like them, an alien thing in human skin. Her eyes wide and alight with an umbral glow, she had no words and screamed at the sun.
With stout ironwood staves, they silenced her screams. Her nakedness was covered with the same rough, uncured wool that the others wore, her feet shod with rags. The autumn glory of her hair bound into the tight propriety of eye-slanting braids, they made her normal with their ironwood staves, save the deep hating of her ember eyes and the words she could not speak. The village healer gave her a pile of rags to call her bed, she who had once known the dark delights of the garden, and a swift kick did she not leap fast enough to the crone’s call.
Once a feast of sweet and mysterious fruits did nourish her, but now her mean meal tasted of mold, despair, and other people’s leavings. She learned the taste of bitterness, and with their ironwood staves, they taught her hate, but they could not make her speak.
Despite the staves or perhaps because of them, she grew tall and strong. In time, she gave them the words they wanted, for she learned the value of choosing her battles wisely. In return, they gave her a name, for all her incomprehension of the necessity for such a thing, and it was as wildly unsuited to her as the uncured wool, the rags and the binding braids. They named her Alice.
One by one, the staves were shut away, mayhap in wait of the next strange child. She wore her wool and rags and braids, dimmed the umbral light in her ember eyes and learned to tolerate the sun. Day by day, she learned the way of these strange creatures that she might walk among them unnoticed, though in her heart of hearts she knew herself a fruit of that dark garden.
The seeming of submission she put on, lowering her eyes and nodding mutely until even the kicks from the crone began to cease. And on that day, she began to learn her own power. Such secrets did she learn from that hoary hag, those that marked the potency women were allowed: the elixir for expulsion of a babe from a woman’s belly, the healing potions and, of course, the poisons…
Her long lashes cast fan-shadows over her sharp and hungry cheekbones, covering the greedy light kindling at such secrets. The foolish, trusting creatures shared their mysteries with her. She would open every vein before revealing even one such. But even then, she knew these secrets would serve her well, as always trusting the darkly whispering undine voices, which guided her through the strange maze of a world.
And so she worked and waited.
The first riders came when she had barely begun her moon cycles. Long ago, her skin had lost that special pallor bestowed by moon-glow and was now well kissed by the enemy sun, taking on a golden hue, which falsely proclaimed her of the day and light.
With all the other half-favored girls, she lined up on the village green, though she was the only one who did not fidget in her uncured wool and rag-shoes beneath the cold blue gaze of the King’s Lieutenant. Such words as king and concubine floated around her, and serene incomprehension kept her hungry, sculptured face placid where the rest flinched and shifted. Her gaze was steady as she regarded the curious creatures, though it is uncertain which she found stranger, the man in the metal suit or the quadruped upon which he sat.
The arctic gaze paused on her, continued the length of the motley assortment of girls, and then returned, resting with a cool calculation. With calm unconcern, she watched the muttered conference between the crone and the metal man, hearing the word Alice drop softly from their lips like mossy stones into a still pond, and then a speculation on her age, perhaps twelve. Before he rode away, the King’s Lieutenant set a future point for his return–two years. Wide, unblinking eyes watched him as he dwindled into the distance, a dim sense kindling that he meant to take her from this place. The undines whispered it was good, and she nodded once to herself, allowing the crone to lead her back to the kettle for stirring. Two years. But she had no notion of time, for it was outside the garden, so she worked more and waited still.
By the time the riders returned, the wool shift was too short and starting to tighten across her chest and shoulders. Learning to hate that wool was her easiest lesson. In summer, it burned and itched; in winter the wind cut through it like the sharpest of knives. As befitted her new status, for she had passed some rite of womanhood she did not truly understand, her hair came down out of the two tight plaits, one at each side of her face, and into a single, loosely woven braid down her back. This ritual meant little to her, save that it took less time to bind the autumn curls against their will.
On that day, no others joined her on the green, and before she presented herself, she enjoyed a thorough scrubbing in the tub reserved for the soaking of the elder’s aching bones. She went to meet the King’s Lieutenant at her ragged best, sheen of unnatural dignity about her. He called her Alice and asked her if she knew where she went.
The undines whispered the words to her, sweet and simple. “I go with you,” she answered, a smile flashing in her lean and sculpted face.
A soft, appreciative chuckle shattered his stern seeming. “That you do, Alice, but you will end your ride with me at the King’s palace. What think you of that?”
“Nothing,” she murmured, for the undines offered no reply. “I will think on it when I get there. But I am not Alice…” She paused, listening to the voices that named her at last, since such things were needed. “I am Synara.”
A brusque nod, as he kicked the horse into motion. “The king will like that better than Alice, no doubt. It was wise of you to think of it. His pleasure is now your only concern.”
So be it, the undines whispered. So be it.
II. Le Roi le veut
On the ride, her education continued. The Lieutenant spoke of courtly things to her until gradually the words took on meaning. Her mind wrestled with the notion of a palace, and having nothing upon which to draw, conjured images of a very large hut, much like the one she’d shared with the crone. The other men watched her warily, some of them villagers themselves, and her strangeness struck an ancient, superstitious knell within them.
She noted the surreptitious gestures they made, those of warding, but they meant nothing to her. Speaking little and only to the King’s Lieutenant, she passed the journey as she had all the rest of her sentence in this strange world, with quiet resignation punctuated by flashes of bright memory.
Some days before their journey’s end, they paused to garb her in fine linen and purchase real shoes for her feet. At that same time, she abandoned the provincial plait and allowed a stranger to trim the ragged ends of her hair. This town sparked her imagination with its stone cottages and wooden buildings, and a very small part of her stopped yearning for the impossible loss of the garden. For her, it was the ending of purity, a flashpoint in which material things began to intrigue her, and on that day, she learned the concept of ownership.
With the first stirring of instinct, she flashed a smile at the Lieutenant, ember eyes quietly pleading a particular hair ribbon in garden green. The slightest thaw in the arctic blue of his eyes, he bought it for her.
The first inklings of her nature stirring within her, she watched him after that from beneath the thick fan of her lashes. She learned his name, Argental, and made a point to remember it. When she spoke it softly, she noted the slightest ripple along his skin. Again and again over the course of the journey, she gave him that smile, that look, and by the time they rode into the mind-numbing opulence of the royal city, he no longer hauled her absently up behind him, but rather cradled her across his lap in the saddle.
As a lush and perfect rose, the glittering opulence blossomed as she rode into the royal city, cradled carefully in Argental’s arms. Beneath the rays of afternoon sun, the stones of the road gleamed with a promise of gold, each rhythmic clatter of hooves carrying her ever closer to the king’s palace and the true beginning.
Twice five miles of fertile ground spread before her, each inch plotted with an eye toward the king’s pleasure. A glossy stone wall with obsidian sheen encircled the city, topped with spikes in some dark metal. Within the wall, delicate, pastel washed towers, faintly glimmering in the sunlight, lifted upward toward the azure, cloudless sky to seemingly impossible curves and angles. The golden domes and spires of the king’s palace awed her into silence, the embers of her eyes darting here and there, absorbing the delicious onrush of beauty.
In each direction she turned, new delights awaited, bright gardens overflowing worn stone walls filled with brilliant blooms and incense-bearing trees. That afternoon, the air was thick and sweet with myriad scents, the incense and the flowers drugging the senses to a luscious languor. The city was cut in half by the softly singing rush of the sacred river, from which the undines whispered their sublime satisfaction, and as they crossed it, a guard absently sliced the hand from an importuning beggar.
Umbral eyes noted the casual cruelty, the crimson line of her mouth softening to a slight smile. The half-twist remaining, she settled more comfortably into Argental’s arms, awaiting this beginning with the first stirring of anticipation.
Once heard, never forgotten, the metallic ring of iron-shod horses’ hooves against the royal stone, that afternoon, the sound sank into her memory as a hot brand into a traitor’s flesh. The dance of the mounts being reined in after a long ride sent a cacophony of clattering up into the relative quiet of the royal stable yard. A boy clad in a silver and blue livery dashed out from the cool and shadowy depths of the stone building, and she watched in curious silence, not knowing yet enough about the marks and measures of wealth to realize that the king commanded great resources to have wasted so much glittering rock to house his horses.
Taking her cue from Argental, she treated the boy as unworthy of her notice, waiting in patient silence as Argental swung down first, and then holding her arms toward him in a calculated gesture of helpless dependence. As he gathered her up and lifted her down, his hands felt warm and tentative at her waist, his face twisting in some slight emotion as his arctic blue eyes flickered toward the palace and her future.
Before they turned together toward the receiving room and the king, his hand threaded almost helplessly through the heavy gold and autumn shot silk of her hair, clenching his fingers around a mass of curl. Before he slammed the shutter down and let her go, his cold-featured face was open with a darkly envious burn, the pale glitter of his eyes turned toward the golden domes of the concubine’s quarters.
Ember eyes narrowing, she stored the expression for future reference, should it prove useful to her. Lowering her gaze in a perfect facsimile of demure shyness, she set one slim, lightly tanned and callused hand along the muscles of his forearm, feeling it ripple at her touch.
“Argental,” she whispered softly, “the king…will I like him? Is he kind?”
Beneath her fingers, his arm clenched as he replied, “I doubt it…and not particularly.” Then his expression clamped closed, as if he wondered what prompted him to such a frank response.
A small, satisfied smile curved her crimson mouth and she allowed herself to be led like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter toward the not-particularly likable, not-particularly kind monarch who thought to rule her.
Despite the languorous heat of the afternoon, the stones of the palace kept the receiving room cool. The interior of the hall was dim and shadowed, complete with marble pillars and ornate tapestries woven of sumptuous silken thread. A huge throne dominated even in a chamber of this magnitude, the stone richly carved with scrolling art and set with glittering bits of gemstone. The sole piece of furniture in the room, for no one was allowed to sit in the king’s presence, the throne’s arms were shaped with monstrous claws and a strange, vaguely eagle-shaped head formed the top of it.
Draped in heavy velvet robes in purple and crimson, the old man sitting on the throne took up only about a quarter of the space, dwarfed and feeble in comparison with the surrounding grandeur. His skin bore the facade of wrinkled parchment, thin and yellow with age, his eyes rheumy with the first sign of blindness. But his hawkish nose, prominent chin, and long, thin fingers testified to his ancient, royal lineage, and his silky white hair lent him a peculiarly regal air at odds with his wizened appearance. And those icy eyes still gleamed with a trace of the lascivious malice that had characterized his youth. A gentle pressure on her shoulder, Argental’s now familiar touch, cued to her the necessity toward obeisance. With a sinuous grace, she knelt before this aged monarch, the undines whispering the wisdom of a completely supine pose, and so she folded downward yet, her torso parallel to the floor. Chestnut and autumn curls spilling around her prone form, the marble looked cool in comparison to the hungry fire of her hair.
She sensed more than heard the softly pleased chuckle the old king offered, as he addressed his words to Argental. “Your eye is impeccable. You have pleased me well with this one, lad. Have her prepared and brought to my chambers tonight.” Through the light pressure of his hand on her shoulder, she felt the tremor running through the Lieutenant at the unconscious condescension. After a moment, Argental clapped his palms together once, summoning a servant who waited behind the throne in eternally patient silence. His voice was expressionless as he murmured, “The king wills it. See it done.”
As she followed her silent cue to rise and allowed herself to be led away, she stored the tremor with her other observations of the King’s Lieutenant. A glittering, subtle glance over one shoulder showed him to be silently raging, though his demeanor was such that it should be cloaked. The king never once spoke to her directly, as if she were some creature unworthy of his words. Shrugging imperceptibly, she knew that would change soon enough.
As the purples of night faded toward the pink of dawn, she crept through the twisting corridors, away from the bed of many veils and the aged monarch insensible on his silken sheets. What passed during those dark hours betwixt midnight and dawn opened her eyes, empowered her, and made her wise.
From the moment she’d been led from the hall, she had met no one, though the whisper of feminine voices outside her chambers lingered for some hours, through all the preparations. Through the steam bath, the application of scented oils, the painting of her face with kohl and rouge, and the final phase, the donning of the filmy boudoir robes, she heard the voices. She paid as little heed to them as any other intrusion, turning instead to stare into the rare and expensive glass mirror, which showed her the first reflection of herself she had ever seen. The silent servants hovering indistinctly behind her, she regarded the exotic stranger before her. The beauty struck her like a rain of hailstones, falling hard into her eyes, and she allowed the awareness to sink into her skin. At that moment, she felt the sense of a weapon settling into her hands.
The sun had fallen long beneath the horizon before another silent servant returned to lead her toward the king’s quarters. The whispering voices scattered, the sound of scurrying feet and doors closing accompanied her first step into the hall and toward her future.
There was no particular fear in her, though the undines murmured nothing in the way of explanation. Her slippered feet made little noise against the marble floors, her filmy robes drifting out behind her as she walked. Escorting her to the door, the servant offered her a steaming mug of something, which she accepted. The undines whispered for her to leave it be, so she tipped it into an urn when the servant had departed.
The king’s quarters were large and grandiose, more opulence than she had hitherto imagined. Rare and strange creatures carved into the ceiling leered down at her as she lay on the massive bed, awaiting the arrival of that aged monarch. The heavy velvet draperies on the bed gleamed with a faint and malevolent light, the tapers tracing shadows in the purple fabric. She held herself very still, her breath the only stirring in the tomb of that bedchamber.
And when that old king finally came down to her, for some inexplicable reason, she saw Argental’s face.
In the weeks that followed, she came to learn the feel of ennui, though she would not know the word until much later. Accustomed to long hours working at the crone’s demand, the languid days spent eating candied almonds and gazing out the tiny, diamond shaped window passed like a flat barge on a slow-moving river, whose poler has fallen asleep in the noon sun. The diamond-shaped window was fitted with bars, and in those beginning days, she oft wrapped her fingers around them in mute protest, eyes fixed on the birds soaring in the azure sky beyond.
As time passed, she met the other concubines, twenty in all, ranging in age from nearly as withered at the king to younger than her. She was the latest arrival, but from the start it became clear she would not be accepted, for her exotic appearance sparked the king’s favor from the first, and he often sent for her on nights that were slotted to someone else. Even then she knew the importance of cementing the old monarch’s need for her, so she went willingly to that bed of many veils, and she learned much in those dark hours between dusk and dawn.
When she had passed three and thirty days beneath the golden domes of the concubine’s quarters, she begged her fist boon from the king while he lay panting and replete. From whispered women’s gossip, she knew the things the others customarily requested, and so she was careful to distinguish herself even in this.
Within the week, the guards began arriving precisely at noon to lead her into a private, terraced garden so that she might bathe in the sun for several hours each afternoon. Such measures would only continue to ensure she remained apart from the others, whose skin had all taken on the unnatural pallor of the eternally confined. And as she lay basking like a serpent in the sun, her smoky amber eyes watched and watched the whirling falcons in the azure sky above.
When she had passed three score and six days beneath the golden domes, she begged her second boon, one of two parts, while the king lay panting and replete. And though she had asked neither bejeweled baubles nor golden combs for her hair from him at any point, that request left him quiet and thoughtful for some moments before he agreed, a slight tinge of pleasure washing his yellowed parchment cheeks.
Before the week was out, silent servants no longer dogged her steps to and from the king’s quarters, nor did they offer her that soporific any longer, designed to dull the horror of the old man’s touch. The undine voices no longer whispered to her so often; her own instincts had developed until she understood precisely what she did and what her intentions were.
In the fourth week beyond the granting of the second boon, she came upon Argental for the first time in one of the twisting corridors that led toward that bed of many veils. His face flickered slightly at seeing her in the boudoir robes, the heavy layers of rouge and kohl, and the arctic blue of his eyes thawed toward a warmer shade.
When it came, his whisper seemed helpless. “Are you well?”
As natural to her as breathing now, she gave him the reply. “I can bear anything,” she said softly. “So long as I know you are near.”
Smoky amber eyes melted into his for one long moment, more warm and intimate than a touch. And infinitely safer. Slippers making no sound as she went away from him and toward the aged king, she felt the pressure of his eyes on her back and knew that the seeds had been sown for her private garden.
By the time she had passed five score and twelve days beneath the golden domes, the hard layered muscles from the long years of brutal work fleshed over with a seeming of softness, the product of a languid lifestyle. The calluses on her hands smoothed away to the perfect of silken palms, and her girlish lines vanished forever. Finally, she began to grow into her coltish height, towering above the other concubines and the king as well with a strange, unearthly grace. She heard the whispers…that she had somehow ensorcelled him…rendering him unable to perform with any other. A twist of her crimson mouth comprised her sole reply to such speculations, for they did not harm her cause in the least. And whatever the truth of it, he no longer sent for anyone but her.
He had begun to talk to her at last once they were through and his wheezing breaths settled into their regular pattern. He spoke almost absently of courtiers and parasites, of lying women and honest men. With the poised stillness of a serpent before the strike, she lay quietly beside him and listened. And at that point, she begged her final boon while the aged monarch lay panting and replete in the bed of many veils.
His crinkled parchment face lit with an unholy gleam as he propped himself on one elbow, the skin of shoulder seeming to want to slide away from his bones. With a malevolent laugh, he agreed, never imagining that she would ever think of serving her own purposes with such a request.
Within the week, a set of suitable silken robes arrived, complete with requisite face veils along with the writ granting her access to all areas of the palace…that she might serve as his eyes and ears, reporting treachery to him at once. A soft, malicious chuckle escaped her as she fingered the heavy silks, and she felt the strong sense of a growing garden somewhere near.
Outside in the courtyard beyond, the undines whispered their approval from the fountain. Soon, they murmured. Soon.
Her silent, silken passage through the twisting palace halls became something of a fixture in time, and eventually she drew no more notice from the guards than one of the scurrying servants. The anonymity served her well, and she reinforced the king’s belief in her purpose by reporting bits of gossip here and there, her expression revealing no remorse when she learned of the executions.
Whispers of witch and sorceress followed her from the golden domes of the concubines’ quarters, but those brightly plumed birds with their clipped wings had long ago earned her contempt, so the scorn of her silence burned them in reply. There was no need for magic where cunning sufficed.
When she had passed ten score and twenty-four days within the palace, she sought Argental out for the first time. In the beginning, she only watched him drill the guards as a quiet, veiled presence within the shadow of the walls. For weeks, she watched until she felt the sense of herself sinking into him like a brand, and he could not forget, or push her from his mind with the cold discipline for which the King’s Lieutenant was renowned.
In the heavy languor of afternoon sunlight, she felt the golden skeins she had fashioned pulling him toward the shadows of the wall. As the guards filed from the practice yard, he took several, halting steps toward her, and she shifted in the shadows, sensing the subtle resistance he exerted without knowing why. Beneath the veils, her mouth twisted into a crimson smile. A worthy opponent, Argental. A shame he must be shattered on the stone of her purpose.
When he spoke, his voice was thick, tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth. “Why must you always watch me?”
She replied first with the ember depths of her eyes, the implied heat melting into the arctic chill, bringing him another step closer to her without his volition. “Because I must,” she whispered, the implied helplessness of the attraction tugging at the golden skeins.
His large, rough-knuckled hands clenched at his sides. “You will be executed,” he said softly, his tone containing the sound of the death knell, which preceded the fall of the ax.
“So be it, then.” Again with smoky amber eyes, she smoothed her gaze over him with the warmth of a touch, promising much, promising all.
The chill of his ice blue eyes flared in white-hot response, as he combed one hand through his ash brown hair. His answer was no more than a thread of sound. “No…we will find a way.”
Beneath the veils, the twist of crimson parted to show a gleam of teeth as he spoke the treason. Her slippers made no sound as she slipped further into the shadows of the wall, only half-hearing the undines whisper their satisfaction.
Nearly time, they murmured, nearly time now.
While the aged monarch lay wheezing in his sheets, she went to Argental, and he drew her down into the crisp, clean bed of new mown hay in a tangle of silken veils and lacing limbs. What passed betwixt them in the sacred solitude of the stable during the bright hours between dawn and break of fast opened her eyes, empowered her and made her wise.
Afterward, she lay satiated and soft beside him, watching the whirling motes of dust haloed by the stream of sunshine through the loft window and absently separating the two acts in her mind. One for purpose and one for pleasure, though sometimes the twain did meet.
Almost tentatively, she twined her fingers through his hair and found a near urge to blush at his frank regard, paired with the quiet question. “It was the first time for you?”
A mute nod did much to seal his tenderness, for few men can resist the awareness that they have been the first to rouse beauty to pleasure; it is oft more pleasing than the first of firsts. With a reluctant sigh, she pushed away from him and slipped out into the courtyard, knowing he would wait some minutes before his own departure.
As she passed through the palace halls, she felt almost a twist of regret that the stones must fall as she knew they would. Argental…she would not have minded keeping him near. But with the singleness of purpose of a general setting troops in order, she fixed her wavering sight on the future and her goal.
The dark of what some would know as time passed for her with liquid speed–plots laid in motion and tended toward the hope of fruition. And by the time she had passed perhaps five years beneath the golden domes of the concubines’ quarters, the trace of her touch could be found in many spheres from the courtly to the political.
The year before, with brazen intent she’d gifted the king with Argental’s child, braving death with one and disfavor from the other. Near blind now, the king praised her, granting her son a princely status, and she released the infant gladly to his custody. Seeing how his aged mind bloated with the pride of his own virility, she merely smiled and whispered more advice, quietly bringing his kingdom to the edge of ruin so that her own goals might be more easily attained.
Now her lover of some long years, she silently resisted the golden skeins Argental had begun to fashion about her heart, for she was fierce in her determination to care for nothing but her purpose. All her weavings were now in place, the product of infinite patience unmarred by the concept of timely limits. But at last, he forced her to speak the words to bring the last wildcard into play.
As he leaned over her in the crisp, clean bed of new mown hay, she looked up into his face and railed at the necessity of submission. “I love you,” she whispered, shards of purpose lingering in the embers of her eyes. “And if you feel aught for me at all, you must do as I ask, lest I bear another king’s bastard.”
Bending to taste the crimson flower of her lying mouth, he bent to her will as well, and she closed her eyes against the unexpected pain of it.
Within the week, the evidence of his obedience arrived, the power of secrets hidden within the simplicity of a small, blue velvet pouch. For a moment, she faltered, unable to even finish the fruition of her thought. Then the low and painful yearning clenched the muscles of her belly, the absolute isolation of rootless feet on alien soil, and she turned her thoughts toward the final hour.
That night, she went with sighing anticipation toward that bed of many veils, and once the aged monarch lay wheezing and groaning beside her in the twist of silken sheets, she whispered her concern to him. A touch or two, a rush of breath into his old ears, then she slipped away to his writing desk, wherein his quills and writs were stored. Still whispering and touching, coaxing his half-groggy hand into motion, she watched with pounding delight as he scripted the scroll.
Until just before dawn, she lay wakeful beside him, awaiting the arrival of his morning tea. The man entered in the eternal silence of servitude, and she feigned sleep until the last trace of his presence was gone. As she slid from that bed of many veils, she emptied the contents of the velvet pouch into the silver kettle, stirring with a golden spoon. Without a backward glance, she left his quarters, her freedom clutched tightly in her hands.
Her fingers were curled around the bars of her gilded prison late that morn when the bells began to toll all over the city. A subtle curl of tension uncoiled within her at the sound, for there had been a lingering fear that the king might eschew his morning tea, or worse yet, not drink enough of it, leaving him ill, but not dead, and suspecting poison. Purposely, she remained in her quarters after returning from that bed of many veils because she did not wish the servants to note her presence and remark that she had been the concubine to pass the night with him.
Slim, lightly tanned fingers gripped the bars until her knuckles whitened. It wouldn’t be long now until the sacrifices she had laid in place would be snared in her stead, but it was her bitter and eternal despair that she could not help the grief building within her. Damn him, he held her heart after all, but there was no saving him. She’d laid her plans too well.
For some long hours, she watched the falcons circling in the azure sky, carefully blanking her mind to all thought. The silent servant who delivered her evening meal was startled by her question, but answered it nonetheless, his eyes downcast. “The king is dead. They are preparing his body for the funeral pyre on the morrow.”
With that, he turned and went from the room as quietly as he had come. Her expression lightly puzzled, she toyed with the spiced chicken and saffron rice, trying to unravel this unexpected complication. She had never imagined they might take his death as natural, but as old as he had been, she felt like screaming at the oversight. But how was she to use the writ, if there was no spectacle drawing attention away from her?
Resting her forehead lightly against the bars, she began to listen, for the first time in years, to the whispering undine voices, softly murmuring from the courtyard fountain. A ripple of near revulsion shuddered through her, for what they suggested was impossibly, impossibly cruel.
Freedom, the undines finished, Freedom. And she bent her neck against the weight of her bonds.
The rains came the following day. After a long, dry season, she stood at the small, diamond-shaped window and watched the servants’ children cavort in the courtyard, their sun-browned faces turned up toward the cooling beneficence. Strange how even long after the memories had faded to a dull ache, she remembered the rain, and the warm feel of it misting like tears against her face through the gilded bars.
Since scripting the scroll, she had been unable to keep anything in her stomach, and the urge toward weeping felt almost irresistible, but with unalterable strength of purpose, she pressed the feeling into a lump of coal within her chest. Perhaps in time, it would become a diamond.
In the late afternoon, word came whispering through the palace via the scurrying servants of the apothecary’s visit to the king’s ministers. Murmurs of murder and poison rippled through those twisting stone halls with the speed of the morbid fascination. She kept herself quiet within her quarters, still a little disbelieving at her own determination, yet there was nothing she wanted so fiercely as freedom, not even love.
For a time, she thought she would be strong enough to remain sequestered until the activity reached its crescendo, then present her writ of emancipation as the coup d’etat. But as time crawled along toward night, it became clear to her that she would not be able to withstand it without seeing him once more. Instead of slipping from her quarters, however, which after nearly six years still bore no trace of her personal presence or tastes whatsoever, for the opulent cage would never be her home, she slid between the sheets and tried to sleep. Mayhap she would feel differently on the morrow. Though she wanted to see him, she did not feel it would be wise.
With her breakfast tray came the news that the King’s Lieutenant had been arrested and stripped of his weapons. The apothecary remembered selling the contents of the small, blue velvet pouch to him quite clearly, and as Argental was oft in the king’s company, there was no doubting he had ample opportunity to slip the powder into food or drink.
Lightly, so lightly, she rested her forehead against the bars of her gilded prison, allowing the rain to mist against her cheeks for what might have been hours. In her mind’s eye, she saw him shackled in the cell, his arctic blue eyes hot and fierce with hating, his long, warrior’s hands flexing against the urge to crush her throat.
After an interminable amount of time, she straightened and donned the heavy silks and veils. She owed him the opportunity to hurl whatever curses he might. Writs of passage and of emancipation safely secured on her person, she swept from her quarters, traversing the twisting halls with a hard, hurting clench deep in her belly. It was fear, though she did not recognize the feeling.
Two drunken guards lolled outside his cell, barely flicking bleary eyes at her writ. One of them grunted something incomprehensible and unbarred the door, slamming it shut behind her. After her eyes adjusted to the dank and gloomy interior, she saw that her mental image had been very accurate.
Argental sat on the stone ledge of a bed, his face turned toward the wall and arms splayed against the wall in metal and leather manacles. Only what he revealed when he turned his gaze on her was many times more agonizing than the hating she’d expected. The King’s Lieutenant was broken, an air about of him of one for whom the death blow has already fallen. His icy eyes were empty and dead; for a moment, he did not know her.
“How you must despise me,” he said so softly, “to have used me so. Were you so happy in your hovel that you plotted such a revenge on me for taking you from it?”
The longest of moments passed, and she could not find her voice…could not find words…almost like the long ago days in the garden when words were something she could not fathom. Her ember eyes burned with quiet hell-fire, a soft and burning torment that she had not foreseen. This man had taught her something very bitter indeed.
Shifting slightly on the stone bench, his gaze searched hers through the silence and slowly filled with wondering disbelief. “You love me,” he whispered finally. “No doubt I will never understand the why of this, but you do love me.” He sighed quietly. “At least I was not deceived in that, as you deceived me in all else.”
At long last locating her voice, she wet her lips beneath the veils. “I did not lie to you in that.”
From the distance across the dank cell, he heaved another quiet, almost mournful sigh. “You cannot doubt what I feel for you, my Atiya Muna. I am dying for you, after all.”
Curses she could have withstood, but this tortured gentleness pierced like demon-fangs all the way to the soul, and yet it was still not enough to deter her from her purpose, for in her mind’s eye, she still saw the falcons circling in that azure sky. “I do not doubt you,” she said softly.
She turned for the door, unable to bear another moment, but his voice stopped her. “One kiss for a dying man,” he whispered. “One kiss from your sweet, lying mouth.”
Unable to demur, his words drawing irresistibly on those golden skeins that bound them, she closed the distance, removing the veils. Bending to him, she offered fully of herself in the seal of her mouth over his. Argental explored her thoroughly, and from his mouth that morn, she learned the taste of the bitterness of her betrayal and his loss. Drawing back at last, he rubbed his cheek against the autumn and gold shot silk of her hair, dulled by the shadows of the cell.
His final words haunted her as she went from him, and echoed in her heart ever after. “My Atiya Muna, you will ever seek me, having sent me from you thus. You will ever seek, and only the gods know if you will find…”
The following morn, the crowds gathered in the courtyard, the block assembled. The rains misted over the executioner’s hood, slicking the black silk to his face so that the outline of his features was revealed. Drops of moisture ran down along the gleaming ax blade; funny she should remember these details with crystalline clarity so much later.
To her eternal shame, in the end, she was not able to watch the final honor of his love for her. As a coward, she turned her face against the gilded bars and saw only the glorious spray of his beautiful crimson blood, slowly diluted to pink, then washed away over the golden stones by the gently falling rain.
A diamond-hard pain in her chest, she heard his words echoing and echoing as she adjusted her veils and went to find the king’s ministers. Somewhere near, she felt the promise of a blooming garden, and the lure of flight and freedom. Fixing her thoughts on the falcons in that azure sky, she turned her mind from the rain, and went from her gilded prison forever.
