Chapter Text
i.
You have been here before.
Here, you are enslaved; you have been pulling sickly carrots from the clay-like earth, and the lines of the regimented garden planting reach on and on forever. You have not forgotten the feeling of the shackle at your ankle. You have not forgotten the smell of the overseer’s bitter pipesmoke.
There is a woman knelt beside you in the dirt, though you did not see her approach. You know this woman’s face; you know her single eye and how beautiful it is, and how beautiful her mutilated face, which is shaped like one of your mother’s statues, half sculpted and touched all over by the prints of her fingers.
You are a help, whispers Belle—Belle, as you knew her then, her lovely riot of curling hair chopped short, her ravaged lips unsmiling. The kindness in her warms you like a sun. Like a flower, what is living in you reaches towards the light.
Help, is a word you are certain you heard, yes.
Help.
You.
The work stretches before you unending, and it is difficult to do the work, isn’t it, with
one hand.
ii.
Always, you are watched.
There is a man who smells like a burning building.
There is a man like a forest full of bones.
There is a man
like a mountain
like a cell inside a mountain
like everything dark
beneath the earth.
Seers, Gwindor calls them, spitting the word into the dust. You remember how you feared this Soldier, as he kisses you once, upon the star of your brow.
Don’t look ‘em in the eye, see? Don’t give ‘em a reason to look back.
iii.
You are in a clamoring parlor and the world is whirling about you.
You are in a quiet upper room and the clock is striking ten.
You are at the edge of a golden lake.
You do not look, and you do not look, and—
iv.
Russandol, she says, in the way that is hers.
v.
The lake is filled with light the way the sky is filled, and the grass is soft the way it was not in your memory, and you are not shivering-wet from your swim in the water but dry and dressed in good, clean clothes. Essie, however, is precisely as she was when you were awake, from the shape of her brave smile, to the tactile folds of her full skirts, to the way a single tear glitters as it slips down her cheek, like a bead of fire, as if the burning in your own breast and what is bright and glorious in her is somehow, impossibly, the same thing.
What good is it to wish for anything?
vi.
Estrela has only one eye. You have never known the other. The one you know is deep, dark, warm as a mouse in its nest, curled up safe in the softness of her lashes. This close, you can see the way the slanting amber sunlight filters through that darkness, from umber ink-brown to darkest charcoal black.
There was an attic, in the house you loved so much, on the other side of the world. You hid there sometimes, as a boy, to read adventure stories.
Umber-ink and filtered sunlight, all around you.
vii.
You knew this for a dream when you knew it for a memory. This is why you make the same mistake.
vii.
The thrill of kissing Estrela is the same now as it was then, before, in the forever-place outside your dreaming. No—it is sharper now, sweeter, a gladness for once uncomplicated by fear. Some part of you remembers, even as she pulls you closer, that you have already made an ending of this—the tipped up cup of your thumb against her jawline, the deep-drawn breath she takes as she draws you down into her arms—
You remember this is finished. It is over, you ended it, and so you can hurt nothing and no one by dreaming the moment again, and so you do, you do, you do—
(Your mother, tracing and retracing a beautiful face with a charcoal pencil. Laying down shadows she perfects with the deftly loving touch of her hand: the smooth curve of a cheekbone, the softly luminous shadow of an eye.)
(Not truly art, she told you quellingly, though your admiration made her smile all the same.)
(It is only a study.)
viii.
So, then. You make a study of this, of her, of Estrela as she was in the muddy grass at the lakeshore, the sun in her hair and in her eyes, the warmth of her body burning hot against the lakechill of your shivering skin. She shivers too, as her lips part against yours; the breeze which was soft with the promise of twilight grows deeper, stronger, pulling at your hair and stirring the mirror-glass surface of the lake to wakeful motion. Above you the sky draws down the nightfall, and yet darkness does not come.
Darkness cannot come here, when Essie catches her breath in a bright laugh that you never heard waking; when she puts her warm, strong arms about your neck without a care for the scarring she must feel there. As you did waking, you cradle her close with your left hand, tangling your fingers in her hair; but because you are dreaming, you reach for her with your right arm also, wrapping about her slender waist, feeling the way her body curves close to yours, every point you touch a brilliant heat blazing against your skin.
For the light is not merely in her, after all; she is sunlight, fire caught in woman-shape in every beautiful way sunlight can be caught: in the delicate threads of a spider’s web, or the smooth curve of a glass jar on a summer windowsill, or the rippling fall of clean water. You are not surprised by the revelation; rather, you are surprised that you never saw this light so clearly before. It is so bright here, in the gathering dark. Everything your Essie is is a beacon, singing its song of light out across the roiling, rising water of the endless lake.
The taste of her mouth burns like a coal, the touch of her hand against your skin like the ravaging memory of Mairon’s branding irons made holy. She moves against your body as the heat from your father’s forge fire moved, once, stirring like a rising wind, whipping through your hair. Your fingers strike sparks from her flaming hair, scattering ember-bright into the bleeding dark. What you desire now you want more fully,
more helplessly,
more simply,
than you have ever wanted anything in all
your life.
All the torturous turmoil of your cares and guilt and long fear are burned to nothing in the purging brilliance of her light. Your eyes are too dazzled, this close, but you do not pull away; you shut them and pull her closer and in the way of dreams the closing only makes her image burn brighter against your eyelids, the searing white afterimage of staring into the sun.
Russandol, she whispers, in the way that is hers. Her lips move tenderly against your skin, burning.
Maitimo, she says, and the lake sloshes water up against the shore like it was heaved up by an absent hand.
Maitimo, she asks you, solemn yet unafraid,
What is that there, in the water?
ix.
Always, you are watched.
x.
Don’t look it in the eye, you whisper back, hoarsely. Don’t give it a reason, don’t—
Affection offers concealment only a little while, Estrela says, grieving, as she turns a little away from you. She has retreated from you enough that you yearn to follow her, desperate that she not leave you in the growing night alone.
not alone, never alone, don’t look it in the eye don’t look don’t
The water is moving, black-rippled, breathing
Cold-damp-cold
against your back. Something splashes, heavy; something gurgles behind you like the bleeding of a cut throat.
What is that coming closer, in the water?
You will not look, and you will not look, and so all you see is—
There is your Essie, shining like the sun, like a candle in your hand.
There is the sunset behind the fortress where your brothers sleep, blood-red, gold-bright, dripping down the wall of the sky.
And there is the watchful red-lit shape of a man standing upon the earth where your father was buried, and where the head should be there is nothing
nothing
at all.