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She has heard the voices all her life.
“Vera, Vera,” her suitors call. “Come dance with me,” each chattering voice says.
She has her pick of the men who throw themselves at her feet, waves of simpering affection breaking upon the shore of her body. She dances delicately amongst the hearts of the women, sowing scandal in her wake. They are not enough.
Such things they say about her. The lies that fall from their lips are such interesting things, and if the Outsider’s voice is in the echoes of falsehoods, let him sing.
Vera loves it, deserves every moment in the pale light of their gazes. She leaves her mark on those she touches, burns her brilliance into the fabric of their lives. They only see what she wants them to see, hear what she wants them to hear.
They cannot hope to understand her. She doesn’t expect anybody to.
Lord Moray comes close, a knife’s edge away from the truth that cuts deep and quick. He doesn’t understand the darkest depths of her mind but that is not for him to know. He knows of the masks she wears and is content to let her keep them. He does not seek to put her on a pedestal or shut her away behind glass doors to admire.
She listens as his words fall sticky-sweet from his lips, and she savours them like pearls glistening on her tongue. His promises break across the planes of her neck, his kisses tracing the curves of her body.
“Vera, Vera,” he whispers into her hair and presses marks into her skin like ink to a map. “I will take you to the ends of the Isles and far beyond.”
He is young and desperate for what she can give him. She is young but beauty is fleeting, a moment captured in a cameo and gone the next.
“Yes,” she says simply.
The rumours fly thick and fast, keeping time with the tolling bells. A celebration for some, heartbreak for others but it matters not to Vera. They are the ones who have been found wanting, not she.
Scandalous.
Harlot.
Shameless.
Witch, they whisper underneath it all. There are things worse than being a woman.
Let them sing, she thinks. Their rumours are such horrible things, vicious in their beauty and such beautiful music for her to dance to.
*
She is clothed in blue as the ship touches the red coasts of Pandyssia, blue as the ocean that lies between her and the gilded cages of the Isles. The red dust of the cliffs rubs onto her shoulders, grinds into her knees as she crawls through long-forgotten tunnels and picks her way across precarious cliffs.
The wind feels different against her skin, the rain tastes different on her face and the whispers…
The whispers have followed her here.
Vera can hear the mourning keen of whales when she sleeps, even when the shore is far from her sight. She leads her husband through subterranean passages, following the quiet exhalations of whispered breath. Her husband hears nothing. He does not see the beautiful boy, the one with the empty eyes, who takes her by the hand and leads her down the winding steps.
Lord Moray calls it luck, when they stumble into a ruined cavern covered with strange markings. She knows better. They pack as many of the carved tablets and dusty relics into their bags as they can, fingers brushing over centuries of dust and grime.
The sailors refuse to go near their finds. Cursed, they say, crossing their fingers as they spit over their shoulders to ward off evil. The other men, scholars and aristocrats, explorers and philosophers, have no such qualms.
That night, as the sound of sea shanties drifts across the camp, the dreams begin. Vera dreams of the black eyed boy, a young man by most other standards. He lifts the blankets from her, beckons her to follow him into the night.
Vera has no choice but to follow. There was never any doubt.
He leads her to the shores, where the dark water laps at the pebbled beach. They dance under strange Pandyssian skies to the roaring of the sea, to the clattering of stones and teeth from the shadows under their feet.
He does not call her name. He simply knows it, the sound echoing through her body and filling the emptiness. She arches into his mouth as he brushes cool lips against her folds, grasps for something more and finds nothing wanting.
When Vera untangles herself from her sheets, there is seaweed in her hair. There is sand on her feet, red grains under her nails like dried bloodstains on bleached bones.
*
The bones sing to her, begging sweetly for release. She never could resist a beautiful song and this is the finest she's ever heard.
“Vera,” her husband calls. “Vera, come to bed.”
He is lonely and the bed is cold. The bones are warm, so very warm.
“Yes, my love.” She replies and burns the lamp down low, falling asleep at her desk to the whisper of the runes waiting to be set free.
*
“Vera, I am worried for you.” Lord Moray takes her aside one day, pulls the fragments of bone from her hands. “You must stop this.”
Her dearie, the boy with the black eyes, stares back at her from her husband’s eyes. She hasn't seen him in so very long but the music brings him back little by little.
Eyes as empty as a sea of stars shining above and below. She can't refuse and wouldn't even dream of it (she dreams of the sea so close and so far).
“But of course. Anything for you, my love,” she says as she smiles back.
Such music in those bones.