The Fairy Letters: A FROST Series(TM) Novel (11 page)

My
frustration grows. What good is flying – that activity that was once a salve
for my pain, that once calmed my burning nerves – when there is so much I
cannot do? I cannot see you – cannot take you in my arms – cannot make peace,
make a world safe for you and for all those that you love. What good are wings
when I cannot use them to fly to your side?

One
day, I tell myself – my darling Breena. One day I will use these wings of mine
for the only thing they are truly good for, flying to you. And then I shall
hold you so tightly – tighter than I've ever held you before – and we shall fly
together to all of these places that I have named. The stars. The planets. The
lands beyond the mountains that mark the edge of our known world. Your love
will give my wings the strength to bear us both – as a poet in your land once
said - “beyond the sunset.” This hope keeps me alive – it is this hope, and not
the snowflake pendant that dangles so uselessly from my neck – that sustains
me.

Goodnight,
my love.

Letter 15

My Dearest
Breena,

I
can bear it no longer! Enough – I feel my body cry aloud in despair – enough! I
thought I could deal with my sorrow by writing you these letters, telling you
stories – regaling you with tales from our shared past and from the fairy
history we share. I thought that if I could only share with you my inmost self
– the myths I grew up on, the memories I have of my mother and my father, the
moment we first kissed – I could somehow join you, be by your side in some way.
But it is not to be! I have given you all of myself in my words, and yet I hear
no answer from you. At first I thought you were merely being prudent – I
imagined you in my mind's eye (for I thought it was telepathy – perhaps it is
only a trick of my fevered brain) reading each of my long-pored-over letters,
pressing them to your lips, scenting them with your sweet perfume, and locking
them away in a hidden drawer all your own. I imagined that you read each letter
each night before going to sleep, pressing them to your breast, even (did my
mind deceive me?) placing them under your pillow. I imagined that these letters
were like food to you – that receiving them sustained you even as writing them
kept me alive, kept me sane. I imagined that you wrote me letters, not fearing
to send them lest some treacherous courtier in your palace intercept them and
let the public know of your affection for me. That was the only response that
my mind could come up with to explain your silence – a silence that borders on
cruelty.

It
has been three months and I have heard nothing from you. Not a word – not a
stroke or an iota – and your silence is more agonizing than the mythical Fires
of Landau. Indeed, I would gladly bathe in the scalding flames, anoint my angry
heart with lava, if it would mean a moment's distraction from the pain your
absence has caused me. What has happened, Breena? I know – rationally – that
this cannot be any trick or intention on your part. You would never willingly hurt
me– I know that well. And yet this pain has become so great that my letters
alone cannot bear it, cannot ferry it away from me. I have become so thin,
Breena, that you would not recognize me! My cheeks are pale and hollow – the
bones like the blades of swords. My eyes are ferocious with lack of sleep; my
heart groans and I cannot take food or merriment, because you own too much of
the world around me. You own the sounds of music (for they remind me of the
fairy waltz!) and the taste of fruit (for they remind me of the nectar we sucked
together in the orchards of the Summer Court in our youth). You own laughter
(for when I hear it I think of the tinkling sound of your voice) and believe me
– Breena – you own my tears. There is nothing in this palace – this palace so
great that it would take two days to pass through all its rooms and corridors –
that does not make me think of you, and so my thoughts are bound and shackled,
tortured on the rack, by the very absence of the torturer.

What
agony is this – when she who causes me agony is the only thing that can bring
about its relief? I thought I knew pain when my father died, when I buried him
in the warrior's way, and read the ancient verses of Rosenbush over his body.
But it was nothing compared to this. With the death of my father, his absence
signified something greater – his tragedy had in it the beauty of sacrifice.
And so it meant something, and so it had
meaning
– I could think back
upon his life and see in it a single unity, a snake eating its own tail – he
was a brave man, a great warrior, and in his death he was all of those things,
and he could have met his death no other way than by saving the country that he
loved. It is not nonsense – and so I could bear it.

But
this, Breena,
this
! It is the very nonsense that pains me so. You and I
are in love – we are each other's intended – the universe wills us to be bound
in each other's arms, our limbs intertwined like vines on the bower. To think
back upon all the struggles we have gone through together, to remember each
trial we passed through together, running the gauntlet of our love, and to
think that it means nothing – that it ends in silence. Now that is unbearable!
I could stand it if we died together, I think. I could stand it if I died for
you, and if our love ended with us at one – in this tragedy from which it seems
there is no real end. But not this. Not this silence – this I
cannot
bear!
For in your silence I can hear only chaos. The ancient magic that once sang its
haunting melodies all around us is absent – there is no magic in this silence.
There is no meaning in it.

There
is only chaos. There is only silence.

I
thought I knew madness before, when I raged with desire for you. But that was
no madness. For madness is not what occurs when one's desire is out of one's
reach. Madness is what occurs when the very underpinnings of existence – my
love for you, my understanding of you as my-beloved and myself as
he-who-loves-her – begin to fall apart, when the world ceases to have any
meaning at all.

They
say in your religion the world before its creation was a formless void. That
formless void has surrounded me, is overtaking me. Language means nothing.
Words are gibberish. Nothing is anything – for the only thing that was ever
real
for me, my darling Breena, was
you.

Letter 16

My Dearest
Breena,

Tell
me I am mistaken! I beg of you – tell me that I am wrong. Tell me it is all a
lie, a trick, a joke! I will forgive you – I swear it. I will cast aside my
anger and my pain and take you in my arms, and bear you no rancor for this trickery.
I will love you no less (Breena, don't you understand – every day that passes I
love you
more
!) nor will I bear you any grudge. Tell me it is a
political ploy, designed to cast off suspicion from your love for me – that you
have no intention of going through with it! Tell me that it is a vicious gossip
concocted by your enemies – tell me anything, Breena, but what is true! (Even a
lie, Breena, would cool the fires of my heart, and allow me to overcome this
agony! I want you to lie to me!)

Tell
me you will not marry him.

It
was last night that I heard the news (not news! No – last night I heard “that
vicious lie.” That is the only thing I can bear to write). I was sitting at
dinner with my mother and my sister – Shasta pale and wan with the absence of her
own love, and still refusing to speak to my mother in anything besides those
curt words of “Yes” and “No” at her thwarted love for Rodney (how much happier
she is, still, than I). And a messenger entered from the Summer Court, his eyes
full of fear. His terror was so great that I thought at first that he was
preparing to deliver the worst missive of all – that you had died and left me
to mourn you.

“What
is it, lad?” I bade him come closer.

He
bowed heavily, trembling so quickly that the letter he held fell from his
fingers.

Dead!
I thought. You must be dead – why else would his fear be so great? What else
could he possibly convey to me that would make him think my response would be
one of such great anger – such great rage? And yet you could not be dead! I was
sure that if something had happened to you, I would have felt it, for your
bones are my bones. Your blood is my blood. Your life is my life, and I felt
sure in my heart that at the moment your life gave out, my knees would have
collapsed beneath me and I would have died too. (How naïve I was, Breena, to
think that we had that connection! How foolish! There I was, wrapped around
your finger, fearing for your life, when you had long since severed it!)

“What
is it?” I could feel myself choke on my own voice. “What has happened in the
Summer Court?”

The
messenger picked up his letter and fumbled with it. “I am bound to announce,”
he mumbled, staring very hard at the letter as if to make clear that – as much
as it pained him – none of it was his own invention. “that there is to be a
marriage in the Summer Court!”

“Rodney!”
Shasta cried, but I felt with a horrible pang in my heart that it was not
Rodney who was to be wed.

“Between
the Queen Breena and the Wolf Prince Logan” the messenger finished in a single,
hurried breath, and scrambled from the room before my rage could ricochet off
the drafty beams of the ceilings and come to bear upon his head.

For
a moment I was numb. For a moment it was not true – it never had been true! It
was a lie – a political ploy – something,
anything
but what it was. And
then it hit me. All the telepathy that I had tried so hard to wield in months
gone by, the times I had tried to reach you and found your mind closed to me,
came rushing to me in an instance. I saw you
with him
,  Breena – saw you
kissing him, saw you cuddling together in the orchards that were once the
flower-gardens of
our
love, saw him slipping your clothes from your
body...I saw and felt and experienced in the depths of my being your passion
for this savage Wolf, to take advantage of the loyalty you felt to him...your
gratitude – not (no! It cannot be!) your love.

And
the visions I saw as my mind connected at last with yours turned to
fever-dreams, the hot hallucinations of blood boiled and burned, and I collapsed
immediately, screaming your name – restrained at last by the efforts of my
mother and sister. I remember Shasta weeping, her heart moved to pity by my
predicament, but she nevertheless used all her magic, and all my mother's too,
to keep me from rushing to the Wolf and tearing out his throat that very night.

And
now it is morning, and the madness has passed, but the pain, Breena, has not. I
beg you to tell me it is not true, but what I see in my mind's eye – your love
for the Wolf, your passion for him, the days and nights you have spent in each
other's arms – make me believe that it is no lie. You will marry him, he whom
you love – you who are
my
intended, whom the ancient magic had destined
for
my arms
– and I swear to you, Breena, the moment you are his, that
moment I shall smash my silver snowflake upon the hearth and welcome death
gladly. It will come like a woman in a healer's garb, like a comforter, with
jars and ointments of oblivion, to heal my ragings at last, and smooth my way
into those happy lands of nothingness.

But
I beg you – at least – write to me. Explain what has happened. I will restrain
my grief. I will restrain my pain. Only speak to me – tell me something –
answer all my unanswered questions – and then I shall let you and your new love
be.

What
is it they say in your land? “Best wishes?” The words turn to ash in my mouth.