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The knife—no matter how applied—can take more than flesh and features. It can take sight, mind, and love, because skin holds sanity within it as well as blood. That is not a lesson that one person will teach another, if they love them, but it is no less true.
Estrela (girl not creature) carried love like a posy at her belt: thoughtlessly and near.
Belle did not lose her mind. Yet now, for all these things, for all these withered dreams, she must hunt down scraps.
“Still a woman,” Gothmog said, his hand dragging down her throat. “Much good it does you.”
Russandol returned prayers, heartache, and shyness to her. Belle pondered this before she fell asleep. In her afterlife (Estrela’s), the quickest resolution to any hope was to feel how it heightened her fear.
(This was after she saw him beaten.)
Belle, is anything amiss? he asked, his voice a gift, his eyes a vision. She fled.
“Who’s his sweetheart? He must have found one. I know his kind. Someone soft, giving him contraband and sneaking messages…”
“No one, sir. No one I know.”
Gothmog sighed. “So you won’t acknowledge the corn, eh?” He slipped the shining band from around brim of his hat, a long switch of silver in his hands. “We’ll see about that.”
“No, no,” Sticks whispered, her own fingers twisting together. “They got you, Belle.”
“I’m still here,” Belle said, forcing her forced smile. She hadn’t been as brave as Russandol. She had cried. “It’s nothing. But will you fetch Frog his supper, tonight?”
“I know it can’t be you,” Gothmog said. “You’re too goddamn ugly.”
His blows were as quick and unruffled as if he were swatting flies. Belle’s knees were trembling, where she crouched, her palms upturned on his tabletop. He might as well have been a mountain looming beside her. Might as well have been God, answering her foolish pleas.
Another slash of the switch. Another cry.
Was this God, letting her save Russandol?
“He might call for me again,” she told Gwindor. The rags on her hands were already stiff, seeping, though she had changed them an hour ago. She thought of her eye and her mouth and those first dreadful weeks and months. Frog’s mother had tended to her, when she was nothing more than a cast-off body.
Frog’s mother had not yet been with child. That was still years away.
Too early for her to be dying, yet.
(Amlach, was the name Frog’s mother gave him, and told only to Belle. When Frog was an orphan, Belle had not called him that. Belle, holder of her own name and her own past, had known better than to give that name to the slave-drivers.
Someday, when we are free…)
(Freedom. That was the hope that Russandol gave her.)
“If you’re bluffing me, you’ll be sorrier for it.” Gothmog cleaned the blood from his switch and fastened it around the crown of his hat again. “Not another whine out of you. Go on.”
Her skin, whether it scars or not, is broken. Blood falls; she must hold to sanity as tightly as she can.