Tales of Arilland (9 page)

I did not turn back at his words, but I did straighten. The ash bin suddenly felt lighter. “I accept those terms” was all I said before leaving the study.

The next time the baron “sent for a messenger,” I accompanied him into the study...and stayed.

Those next few years were the happiest times of my life. Instead of letting our failed attempts at summoning get the best of us, we made a game of it. We gathered young boys from far and wide, for a variety of reasons, and never raised so much as an eyebrow of suspicion. We sometimes drew it out for days, seducing the boys with lavish feasts and mulled wine and games. The baron was pleased to discover that I had a steady hand at runes, despite the hard calluses I earned from scrubbing and soap making. I drew many a circle and lit many a candle. Sometimes we let the boy draw and light them himself. We would stoke the fire high and keep it hot. We always burned the clothes first.

Over time, I even came to tolerate Prelati. It was never anything so bold as “friendship,” but we knew each other for what we were, and we each respected the other’s loyalty to the baron. Prelati saw that I was a quick study and taught me to read so that I might continue their conversation with new ideas and a fresh perspective. After months of watching me soak ashes in rainwater and strain liquid and boil lye, he invited me to experiment with his incense. I, in turn, taught them both the rudiments of soap making. The baron had a deft hand at floating eggs. I imagined those strong, careful hands on my body many, many more times than I’d like to confess. And the marble was so much easier to clean when we could pour the hot lye right down onto the fresh stain.

I did not let the baron touch me intimately, though I knew at times he wanted to. It was a rush to have such power in one’s hands, to literally feel lifeblood slipping from between one’s fingers. I drew my best work in that blood. We cleaned the middle of the floor so well and often that I was eventually forced to scrub the rest of the study to match.

Our efforts were not entirely unsuccessful; otherwise, we wouldn’t have wasted so much time. There were days when the candles’ flame changed color, or the air filled with tiny starbursts of light. Some chants brought a wind that left the room in complete darkness. One even made it rain indoors—I ran so much that day saving the ash pots and collecting fresh water that I fell asleep in wet clothes on the wet settee and did not wake until the next afternoon. Certain chants made the incense smell strongly of roses, or rot. The flavor of everything we ate on those days was wrong. Not always
bad
, mind you, but roast duck that tastes of chocolate pudding is a shock to any palate.

We celebrated our little triumphs. We danced barefoot in the blood, painted ourselves with red and black and white, finished off the mulled wine and sang every silly song we knew until we’d exhausted our repertoire. Then we pulled on our bootstraps, divined what we could from the entrails, added to Prelati’s endless stack of notes, and cleared the stage for the next attempt.

I began to dread the day we actually summoned a demon, when I would lose my place in this exclusive club, and lose the baron altogether.
My
baron. We were close to success; I knew it. I could hear it on the wind. I could taste it in the spiced air. I could feel it in my bones. I feared it so much that I finally let him kiss me.

“Let me in,” the words were soft, growled into my neck in frustration. My toes slipped in the blood beneath our feet, but I held my ground.

“Make me your wife,” I whispered back.

“I have a wife,” he said, and not kindly.

I placed my palm flat on his wide chest, leaving a small red print on the white silk. “Your title is married to her. Not your heart.”

The next day, he stole us a cleric.

I took an inordinate amount of time preparing for the ceremony. I believe that Prelati deduced my plans—he was smarter than I’d previously given him credit for, especially with regard to subterfuge and mental manipulation—but he said nothing. He mixed the incense concoction we’d agreed upon and painted my face and arms with the necessary symbols after I’d baptized myself in rainwater.

We exchanged gifts, the baron and I, as per tradition more than as a requirement of the summoning ceremony. I gave him a waxen dolly in his own image, as Maman had taught me to do in life, and then taught me never to do again with her death. From my baron bridegroom I received a solid white egg...that I almost dropped when he placed it in my hands. Upon further examination, I realized it was fashioned out of pure white marble—the perfect symbol of the birth of our love for each other. I slipped it into the pocket of my dress so that no blood would mar its pristine surface.

We built up the fire and lit the candles, and when all was ready, Prelati untied the cleric.

The wise man must have realized his fate, for he did not rush the ceremony. My girlish sensibilities thanked him for every extra moment I was allowed to stand upon the symbols with my beloved’s hand in mine.

“Lady Polecat,” the baron’s breath said into mine.

“Lord Fitcher,” I replied.

The second time the baron kissed me, I was his wife. Not his first wife on paper, warden to his prison cell, but the first wife in the way that really mattered: the wife of his heart and soul. This love—our love—was true.

But for all the romance I was a practical young girl. I knew that this union did not exist outside this study, or this castle, or even before the cleric’s god. We could lie together as man and wife, but that’s exactly what it was: a lie. I could lie beside him for the rest of his days and watch him attempt to summon demon after demon until he killed everyone in the castle, and then Prelati, and then himself. Or I could give him what he wanted—what he needed—and set him free.

In my mind, there was never a choice.

Prelati handed the ebony-handled athame to the baron, but this time those beady black eyes never left mine. My love, my
husband
, drew the blade across his palm with a hiss. I took the dagger myself and did the same without so much as exhaling—I could risk losing neither his belief nor his pride in me for the next few moments. We clasped hands with the strength of two lovers facing the universe.

The candles’ flames at the points of the star we’d sketched on the marble turned blue and, as before, the air filled with tiny points of light. The fireplace roared, and the thurible’s smoke changed from sandalwood to rosemary. The cleric crossed himself. Thrice.

“It’s working,” the baron said without breathing, as if he might break the spell with a word. “Henriette, my love, it’s working!” I would never tire of hearing my name spoken from those lips.

“I know.” I tried to reply without gasping, but my body betrayed me. The baron tore his attention away from the magical room to see the dagger in my hand so covered in blood that it totally obscured the double blade. My virgin bride’s blood dripped from my core onto the rune-riddled marble between us.

My true love held me in strong arms; had my silly girlish legs not already given way, they would have then. “What have you done?” He might have screamed this, but I only heard him whisper.

“Freed you,” I said, or perhaps I said. Perhaps the only fragment to escape my lips had been “free,” but that syllable conveyed the message just as well.

There was no blackness for me to succumb to, nor was there a legendary white light for me to follow. The room stayed exactly as it was, in stark detail, and I tried to commit as much to memory as I could before one entity or another whisked me away to some great beyond. The baron knelt over my limp body, repeating “No” over and over again as if the chant might act as a tether to pull my soul back into my body. Prelati stood to one side of the circle in his solemn violet robes and bowed his head, praying to...something. So neither one of them saw the portal open and the man in black step through.

The man was followed by two angels, both terrible, one with wings of feathers and one with wings of fire. My sacrifice had not summoned a demon, then, it had summoned a
god
. This could only be Lord Death himself.

“We seem to have ourselves a dilemma.”

Awestruck, Prelati fell to his knees beside the baron. The cleric passed out cold.

“Bring back my wife.” The baron did not implore Lord Death so much as order him to do so.

“See, that’s just the thing.” Lord Death crossed his legs and sat on the stone casually before them, before my dead body. The angels remained standing, one to either side of him, as did my ethereal soul. Exactly how much of the room’s population could the baron and Prelati see?

“What your loving ‘wife’ has done here is sacrifice herself for you,” Lord Death continued. “To bring her back would undo all that precious magic you’ve managed to accomplish.”

The baron did not reply, but Prelati nodded.

“This girl has made you capable of
love
, of all things. She’s also, in one fell swoop, stopped you from ever killing another child again. Am I right?”

The baron gave the idea some thought before nodding his own assent. Of course my love would no longer bother himself with children. The key to his prison had been there all along in the very thing he eschewed: divinity still had a soft spot for unspoiled females. The marriage ceremony had caught their attention, and the blood had kept it.

“I must honor this sacrifice, as much as it pains me to do so.” Lord Death scanned the room, from the well-scrubbed floor to the cinder-strewn hearth. The angel of fire’s wings burned ever brighter, and I choked on her ash.

The baron—my baron—took up the bloody athame and looked to a sky that was not there. “Then let me follow her.”

Lord Death stayed his hand. “Yeah, let me stop you right there. See, if you do that now, it’s not a sacrifice. It’s suicide. That particular end will deliver you to a very different place. Am I right?” This was directed at the cleric who, having come to, nodded vigorously. “You will never join her, my dear baron, until you die by a hand other than your own. A death that serves to free the soul of someone else.”

The baron looked to Prelati, who raised his own hands in defeat. Prelati’s soul was well beyond saving.

“Please,” said the baron, and it was a tone I had only ever heard him use to me. “Let her stay with me. There must be some way. Let her haunt me until the end of my days, if you must, but let her stay with me.”

“I’m inclined to agree, actually,” said Lord Death. “It would be a fitting end for both of you.” He gestured to the angel of feathers and that bright light I’d heard so much about finally washed over me. There was a rush of wind and a choir of springtime. I felt blood in my veins and breath in my lungs and strength in my sinew. When my vision cleared, I was viewing the scene from a very new perspective, right in front of Lord Death’s face. I screamed, and the dim study echoed with birdsong.

I had wings, indeed, but I was no angel.

“She will stay with you, as requested, until you are relieved of your earthly, fleshy prison.” Lord Death stood. “You deserve each other.” That mystic portal appeared again, and the angels of feathers and fire sped through the opening before him. Lord Death was halfway through before he turned back for one last remark.

“Oh. And Prelati—cut it out, already.”

“Yes, my lord.” They were the last words the magician said before they both disappeared.

Overwhelmed, the cleric fainted. Again.

My beloved took my earthly body down, down, down to my rooms in the bowels of his castle, where no one ever saw me but the fire and the ashes and Cook. I fluttered after him on awkward wings. He laid my body on the table: black hair, white dress, red blood and all. He spent a very long time arranging my limbs and clothes. I used the time to find currents of air around the room, getting used to my new body. When he was satisfied he banked the fire, closed the door to the room, and locked it tight.

He slid the key onto the chain around his neck that once bore a cross—now it held our wedding bands. He pressed his forehead against the door and whispered something, but I didn’t catch it. In his hands—larger to me now than they ever had been—was a small white object. My bride gift. He must have rescued it from my pocket when he’d been arranging my dress! My rapidly beating little heart swelled with pride and I burst into song.

The baron raised the perfect white egg to his lips and kissed it, as he had once kissed me. “We have lots of work ahead of us, little bird. There’s a floor in my study that needs scrubbing.” I perched on his outstretched hand and he stroked my feathers with fingers that would be forced to draw new runes and symbols all on their clumsy own. “And then...let’s find a new wife!”

O
nce upon a time
, there lived a selfish young prince who was very bored. Moping about his castle one day, he overheard two men talking about a unicorn in the Wood. Unicorns were the most beautiful creatures in all the land, with hide like clouds and hair like rain and eyes like love, but they were swift and nigh impossible to catch. The only way anyone might capture one was with a harness of gold, fashioned by the hunter’s own hand.

Suddenly, the prince wanted a unicorn more than anything in the world.

Knowing that he could not ask his father to fund his quest, he brought a small chest of what gold coins he had down to the smithy. The prince promised a third of the finished product for teaching him how to make the harness.

“It is not enough gold, highness,” said the smith. “Then I shall borrow some,” said the prince. And so he did. But his friends were all as selfish as he, and they did not spare much.

“It is not enough gold, highness,” said the smith. “Then I shall beg for some,” said the prince. And so he did, dressing in vagrant’s robes and shaking a cup in the streets. But his subjects were all as selfish as he, and they did not spare much.

“It is still not enough gold, highness,” said the smith. “Then I shall steal some,” said the prince. And so he did, creeping into the jeweler’s shop late at night and selecting the finest golden wares. But this jeweler was no ordinary shopkeep; he was a fairy who magicked his wares. The night after a theft, every bit of stolen gold, and any other gold kept beside it, would find its way back to its rightful owner.

Ignorant of the curse, the prince brought his bounty to the smith, who finally proclaimed it enough. By midday he was done his hammering, by late afternoon he wandered the Wood, and by dusk he was tired enough to rest his weary bones against the trunk of a sturdy old tree. By nightfall, he was asleep. And as the stars winked into the black heavens, so did the golden harness disappear bit by bit: a third back to the jeweler, a third back to those who had given their charity, and a third to the coffers of the patient smith for payment.

When the unicorn woke him, the prince stared up at her gleaming horn, her skin like clouds, her hair like wind, and her eyes like love. She smelled like mist and whispers. She felt like peace and home. She stood right there before him, and he had nothing to hold her.

“Silly, selfish prince,” said the unicorn. “There was never a harness made of metal that could capture me. It is only gold from the heart which binds me.” She laid her gleaming horn upon his breast. “Had you fashioned a harness from what lay in here, you might have had me.” She lifted her head. “A false heart never won true love.”

And then she was gone.