“My most noble King,” I began quickly, “I can answer your riddle for you in a moment, without consulting a book or an oracle, if you will but grant me the price I ask.”
I could see his rage flare at such impudence as mine, but his fear won some great battle within his breast and he nodded his assent, which could not be withdrawn.
“The solution is simple. You have killed and eaten a Star, which the simple-minded call gods. Her presence within you and your men is trying to assert itself, to re-form into the shape of the Great Serpent.”
“And what is it you ask in return for this simple solution?”
“My freedom, King, what else?”
Indrajit’s brow furrowed like a field after a storm, and when he answered his voice was thick and angry.
“We have given our word, and it is unbreakable. But for such a reward you must also give us the cure for this cancer, to end the malevolence of our former wife within.”
And at this I trembled, for I could not admit that such a thing was perhaps beyond my power. The stupid King had committed a crime from which he could not escape. Had he but consulted me before cannibalizing his concubine, I could have devised much more delicious tortures for her, for which none could be held culpable. Punishments have always been a specialty of mine.
I calculated quickly. The paramount thing at that moment seemed to be to give him something, anything, a path to follow. My lord Indrajit was at a loss without a clear plan, orders laid out on parchment and signed in ink made from the oil of crushed sapphires. He was never very original in his thoughts, and the only plans which made sense to him involved great amounts of blood, and never his own. Given these variables, a course presented itself, which did have some slim chance for success, but more important, would appeal to his innermost heart, engorged as it had always been on the blackest of vintages, stamped from rotted grapes.
“My most honored lord, Zmeya-within is driven in a blind passion to punish the men, the pieces of her former body separated only by a scrim of flesh. But if you were to put your sworn band to death, the sliver of her within you should sleep, become dormant, and your just and mighty reign may continue.”
For a long time the Raja said nothing at all, but seemed to slump in his great enameled throne, which was encrusted with teeth of many creatures and jewels as dark as the most secret blood of the conquered. His wide face moved unfathomably, a tectonic drift of features, as he considered the murder of so many men. I felt reasonably certain that it was not the number which troubled him, but whether or not they would submit to summary execution. These were no peasants, and only he knew by what underworld alchemy they had come to life.
Finally, he spoke, and his voice was like the closing of a marble tomb. “Send messengers, Omir Doulios, to gather the men in the Hall of Voices. I will address them at sundown.”
And, easily as that, my audience was over, and my freedom nearer to hand. I have not waited so eagerly for nightfall since I was a child in my mother’s arms, barely able to restrain my joy at the winter festivals, and the trees all strung with golden lanterns.
As nights will, the night came. One hundred and forty-four soldiers filed dutifully into the cavernous Hall of Voices, where whispers were amplified into bone-curdling screams. They came in all of their battle finery, perhaps sensing that it was a momentous evening, boars’ teeth swinging freely from muscled necks and leather breastplates, some even pierced through noses and ears. Each wore a cloak of pig’s hide, boiled and tanned until it was an ugly shade of scalded pink. They had painted their faces with grease and pitch, and combed blood into their hair. They gathered in formation before Indrajit, who stood on a dais above them, with me seated just behind, looking on their coarse faces with serenity and grace.
“Our most loyal servants, who among all our slaves have always been best beloved,” he began, holding out his arms to them in a fatherly gesture, “much has fear followed our footsteps, like a graceful hound. But a cure has been found for the madness which has stricken you, and we have come here tonight to administer it.”
I am not sure what he intended to do then, and I shall never discover it. For the men suddenly froze as though some black lightning had passed through them, their muscles locked in place, faces contorted in a hidden terror that might have been ecstasy. As one, one hundred and forty-four mouths gaped open horribly, wider than any human mouth. A terrible symphony arose as their jawbones shattered and their heads snapped back. I watched as one hundred and forty-four men spoke with one voice, one awful voice dredged from the depths of the earth, dragging mountains in its wake, echoing in the Hall like an arrow loosed.
“ONLY THE LIVING MAY BE CURED. I AM DEAD. LOOK ON ME NOW, O HUSBAND. AM I NOT BEAUTIFUL? AM I NOT STRONG?”
Indrajit could not understand, at first, but he blanched like a woman and staggered from the throne in horror. “What witchery is this, Wizard? What have you done?”
“It was not I, Your Grace,” I stammered, helping him to his feet. But the fell voice erupted again from those broken mouths:
“FOOLISH BOY ON YOUR TIN THRONE. I AM ALL POSSIBLE THINGS. HOW CAN YOU HAVE THOUGHT FIRE WOULD DESTROY ME, OR THE BELLIES OF MEN? BUT THESE THINGS WILL DESTROY YOU, AND EASILY.”
Suddenly, the bodies of the soldiers shook terribly, and their bones rattled like drums in the Hall. Out of their shattered jaws came an unspeakable light, black and pale and green as if the air had been burned. The lights twined together, braiding their smoky brilliance into a monstrous pillar—and as each sliver of light left the body of a Varaahasind, his flesh shuddered and died, vanishing back into the single tooth from which he came. The clatter of teeth falling onto the mosaic floor echoed solemnly, and the pillar grew.
Indrajit trembled. By now even he grasped the situation, and clutched at his belly helplessly, knowing that he carried the last of his wife, and that he could not escape her. The light-serpent towered over him, eyeless, aware. He prostrated himself, the witless fool, and prayed for her mercy. She spoke again, but this time her voice, no longer contained within so many bodies, was a soft hiss of wind and guttering flame.
“I would have given you the world, if only you had been a greater man.”
With this, the light enveloped him, and passed through his flesh, and the passing ground his bones into his blood, and when it left him, there was only his crown, rolling mutely on the throne, and all its yellow tusk was burned black.
The light itself seemed to pause and stare at me, all its empty menace focused on my heart, and I feared, for a moment, that I would not be spared, though I had not taken part in the dread feast. I was frozen before the half-woman, and her stare seemed to last a thousand nights.
But a second light entered the Hall of Voices, and I was forgotten. White tendrils shone through the painted windows like pillars of gold, and the new light was so great I could not bear to look at it. It filled the Hall with its carpet of broken teeth as though it had weight, like water poured slowly into a glass. But as suddenly as it had come, it was gone, and a man all in white stood before the white smoke-serpent, carrying a pale spear, with his colorless hair streaming behind him. With a tender expression, he opened his alabaster mouth, and a small, secret shaft of light passed between them, soft as the stars in the spring.
When he closed his bloodless lips, the serpent had gone. Zmeya stood in its place, though not whole, not whole at all. She was hard and clear, as though cut from glass. Great onyx bracelets encircled her arms from shoulder to wrist, in the shapes of restive serpents. She wore nothing but these massive jewels, and her hair was circled in a single, slender snake, whose skin was too many colors to count—yet they were all pale and muted, like a painting which has been splashed with water.
Without a word to me, the pale man lifted her stiff form and carried her from the Hall.
“SO YOU SEE? IF YOU ARE QUIET, AND PATIENT, you may be able to get your petty revenge after all. It is none of my business. The King is as stupid as he is coarse, and when I ha
ve what I want from you, I would consider it a favor if you would kill him, and release me from my service here as Indrajit’s death released me then. Hatch your plots in the darkness, for the darkness is all you have.”
He turned from his table with a cup of the thick drink, now green and black as moldy flesh. He smiled, a smile which might be taken as tender, or proud, had it been on any face but his. The Wizard hauled me up by my hair and yanked the gag from my mouth. He forced the brew down my throat. It tasted of bile and rotted flowers—roses, perhaps—and there was a dark, musty undertaste that might have been sweat from some unnamable body.
As soon as it was in me, roiling in my belly, he flung me aside and watched with the curiosity of a cat watching a mouse it knows it is about to devour. I screamed and clutched at my skin—a terrible golden cloud had swallowed my vision, and my skin was ripping apart like the pages of his foul books. I knelt on the floor and vomited twice, still shrieking into the stones. He never reached a hand to help me, only watched as my skin was stolen away.
I must eventually have fainted. When I came to he held up a great mirror with a cruel smile of victory on his thin lips.
In the carved mirror stood a tall woman with hair the color of young wheat cascading past her waist in glowing curls, wide gray eyes like pools of clean rain, and milk-skin without the slightest mark. I was tall, my breasts rode high and full, and there was not a knot or rope of muscle anywhere on me—I was as weak and soft as a lamb at suck.
“And now,” the Wizard crooned silkily, “we will call you Queen.” Seeing my expression, he laughed. “You cannot think I meant for my King to lie with a barbarian! Metamorphosis is my art! Now you are beautiful. Now he can show you to the crowds. Now you cannot return to your people, for they would never know you. You belong to us. We will call you Helia after the great sun which rides the sky and blesses the reign of our King.”
“You cannot take my name from me, slave,” I said softly, touching that hair the likes of which I had never seen, save on the golden horses of my youth.
“My Queen, I have taken it.”
I spent the nights by turns with the King and his soundless cruelties—for he hardly spoke a word to me after our hurried marriage in a temple I could not name, when he clasped a belt of gold and jasper around my waist in place of a ring: he seemed to marvel that it fit perfectly. The other nights I was bound in Omir’s chamber, while he bled me in order to leech power Grandmother had given me from my veins. He opened me with silver needles and gold, even grotesque thorns the size of a well-muscled arm. But it was not deep enough, because the blood never ran silver. It was not deep enough—or perhaps I had nothing after all. Perhaps I was as empty as a hole in the air.
He would not listen when I told him I was nothing, only an apprentice who would never be otherwise. He had taken the moon from me, and given me only a sun that burned and burned.
But I spent every day in my tower prison. Even when I was pregnant, I had no respite, but lay on the stone flags as though dead, listening to the dripping of my blood into the crack of the floor.
Yet all the Kingdoms rejoiced when I gave birth to my son, named for the lions of the wild steppes. And only then, when I had produced an heir, was I allowed an hour a day when I could hold him in free arms and let my tears fall on his smooth forehead.
LEANDER STARED, HIS HANDS SHAKING, HIS MOUTH dry. The birds watched him like an exceptionally slow child who has just learned to throw a ball into the air and catch it without dropping it.
“Helia?” he whispered.
“I would have thought you would figure it out sooner. Nevertheless, all revelations are, in the end, disappointing. Did you think it was by accident that your adventure took you to me? You had hardly to turn the corner and I was there. Surely you expected to get a little further on your way before meeting a Witch? I have waited, just beyond your father’s reach, all these years. I knew no son of mine could be bound up in a Castle all his life and never try to run free. I have bent all my heart on the thought, as though I were crafting a bow to let arrows fly to you. I did not quite think, though, that your first act once you arrived would be to murder your sister.”
Perhaps it was only then that Leander realized the full impact of the Witch’s tale, and his eyes broke like webs in the wind. He cried in earnest then, for his sister, and his mother, and his father, whose crimes he had never guessed.
“But I can bring her back, with the skin, I can bring her back—”
“Yes, yes, my son, but not yet. It is not time, and there is more yet to tell.” She reached awkwardly out to draw him into her—Knife’s embrace was as strange and unpracticed as a tiger embracing a seal. And into his ear she whispered, voice rattling like cattails:
“Your father organized a great festival for the first anniversary of your birth. As part of the celebration, the dungeons were to be cleared out—the remaining prisoners, starved like deer at the bottom of winter, to be executed—all the poor wretched folk who were left of my tribe.
“I, of course, was not invited to the festival or the execution…”
THE COURT GLEAMED LIKE A GREAT ICED CAKE, AND you were bounced on a hundred shoulders, kissed by a thousand lips while I lay bound in golden cords in the tower. But when the night was full as a sail, and everyone had drunk as much wine as goats will gobble their bearded nanny’s milk, I cut my ropes on a sharp stone and, tucking the rough blade into my dress, crept out of the tower, down those old familiar stairs, one last time into the dark of the prisons where Aerie was born.
They looked out at me, terrified, from their cells. I was a stranger to them, hideous as a ghoul in all my various shades of gold. I had to speak softly, to tell them I was not the Queen at all, but their own Knife, and as their knife I would cut them free. They didn’t believe it. That ragged child who chewed raw meat and scampered after crows to catch their feathers could not be draped in silk and smell of violets growing in soft moss. They asked me how to tell a doe’s prints from a stag’s, and how many wildcats I had killed before my marriage, and what my grandmother’s name had been, and both my sisters’.
I answered them all. And one by one, I broke their locks until they sat quivering around me like a flock of wild birds. Only some forty of them were left, of all our hundreds of warriors.
“I can’t let you go under the King’s axe like cattle tomorrow. I can buy your lives at a better price than that. Only… oh, I’m not sure I can. The Wizard cut me and cut me and there was nothing. I don’t know, but I will try. I will try. Come closer, I think I must be able to touch you—”
They pressed me heavily; the smell of their sweat and dying penetrated me like a slow poison. All those faces, cheekbones sharp and high, all those eyes, all those bony fingers grabbing at me! They did not know what they reached for, only that they reached for me, their Knife, and for salvation.
I closed my eyes and spoke in my heart to the Black Mare, who foaled the stars in the beginning of the world. I begged her for the power to which I had no right, for light which was not mine.
Slowly, I took the sharp stone and dug at my breast, cutting through the skin and into the meat of myself, as deep as I could stand it. And the blood flowed, red, and darker, but not silver, never silver.
I cut deeper, driving the rock into myself until I could hear it scrape the bone. I cried out, and my voice echoed in the dark, an echo of an echo, of all my cries when my daughter was born, of all my cries when I let her go.
Something pale dribbled from me, small drops like pearls. Nothing like my grandmother’s wealth of light, but it was there, at the bottom of my body.
With my tribe huddled around me as though my body alone could keep them warm, I bent low and showed them that they had to taste it, they had to suckle at me as a dying woman in the desert will suckle at the blood of her horse to survive.
One by one, they took their few drops, and as they did I became weaker and weaker, for forty men and women can drink a great deal when they are frightened. I was
faint and wobbling on my heels, crouched among them, and one by one I took their frail bodies into my hands and shaped them as I had seen Grandmother do, shaped them like clay on a stone table.
They changed, more slowly than Aerie had, since I was so weak, since I did not have the light of the cave and the stars. But the great silver wings came, the beaks lengthened from their lips, their legs disappeared under pale down. One by one, they staggered upright and squeezed between the window bars, into the night scented with festival fireworks, the moon under their wings, honking under the stars.
And I sat in the damp trickle of the dungeon, sobbing and laughing, skin flaming with light, my arms flung out to them as they spiraled up and up and up.
LEANDER FELT THE HEAT AND WEIGHT OF DOZENS OF black eyes on him. The wild geese that had formed his mother’s bed linens stared at him with a disconcerting light, full of veiled secrets. Knife stroked their long necks.
“You know the rest. I was punished; you were taken from me and given over to my maid. But she ran from my pyre and saw nothing. When I was left to burn, my flock came and braved the licking flames to cut me loose and bear me away to the Forest. The poor things—they could hold no part of their own selves in these feathered bodies. They didn’t know why they did it, why they were compelled to dive into the fire—some died—but they did. They knew only that they loved me, and could not be apart from me. And so we are a tribe again, after all.”