Cruel Beauty

  “I had it specially made,” Astraia went on earnestly. “It’s never cut a living thing. Just to be safe, it’s never been used at all, not even tested. Olmer swore it wasn’t, and you know he never lies.”

  Unlike the rest of us, who had been telling her for the last four years that there was a chance I could kill the Gentle Lord and walk away.

  “You do realize,” Aunt Telomache said gently, “that it’s possible Nyx won’t get a chance to use the knife? And”—she paused delicately—”we can’t be sure it will work.”

  Astraia raised her chin. “The Rhyme is true, I know it. And even if it isn’t, why shouldn’t Nyx try? I don’t see how stabbing the Gentle Lord could possibly hurt.”

  It would show him that I was not broken and cowed, that I had come as a saboteur to destroy him. It would likely make him kill or imprison me, and then I would never have a chance to carry out Father’s actual plan. Even if the Rhyme were true—even if—trying to fulfill it was still a bad bet, when the Resurgandi might never have another chance like me again.

  “I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to trust Nyx,” Astraia added in an undertone. “Isn’t she your dearest sister’s daughter?”

  Of course she didn’t understand. She’d never had to think through this plan, weighing every risk because she had only one life to lose. She’d never woken up in the night, choking on a dream of a shadow-husband who tore her to pieces, and thought, It doesn’t matter how he hurts me. I’m the only chance to save us from the demons.

  Aunt Telomache met my eyes, and the flat set of her mouth spoke as clearly as words: Indulge her for now, but you know what to do.

  Then she pulled Astraia close and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Oh, child, you’re an example to us all.”

  Astraia wriggled happily—she was almost a cat, she liked so much to be petted—then pulled free and gave me the knife, smiling as if the Gentle Lord were already defeated. As if nothing were wrong. And for her nothing ever would be wrong. Just for me.

  “Thank you,” I murmured. I could feel the rage pushing at me like a swell of cold water, and I didn’t dare meet her eyes as I took the knife and harness. I tried to remember the panic that burned through me last night, when I thought her heart was broken.

  She was comforted in minutes. Do you think she’ll mourn you any longer after your wedding?

  “Here, I’ll help!” She dropped to her knees and strapped the knife to my thigh. “I’m sure you can do it. I know you can. Maybe you’ll be back by teatime!” She beamed up at me.

  I had to smile back. It felt like I was baring my teeth, but she didn’t seem to notice. Of course not. For eight years I’d borne this fate, and in all that time she’d never noticed how terrified I was.

  For eight years you lied to her with every breath, and now you hate her because she’s deceived?

  “I’ll give you a moment to yourselves,” said Aunt Telomache. “The procession is ready. Don’t dawdle.”

  The door clicked shut behind her, and in the silence that followed, from outside I heard the faint patter of drums and wail of flutes: the wedding procession.

  Astraia’s mouth trembled, but she pushed it up into a smile. “It seems so recently we were children dreaming of our weddings.”

  “Yes,” I said. I had never dreamt of weddings. Father told me my destiny when I was nine.

  “And we read that book, the one with all the fairy tales, and argued about which prince was best.”

  “Yes,” I whispered. That much was true, anyway. I wondered if my face still looked kind.

  “And then not too long after Father told us about you”—well, he told her, when she turned thirteen and wouldn’t stop trying to matchmake me—“and I cried for days but then Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme.”

  Every half-educated child knew about the Sibyl’s Rhyme. In the ancient days, Apollo would sometimes touch a woman with his power, granting her wisdom and driving her mad at once, and she would live in his sacred grotto and prophesy on his behalf. They said that on the day of the Sundering, the sibyl stood up and proclaimed a single verse, then threw herself into the holy fire and died; she was the last sibyl, and that day was the last time the gods ever spoke to us.

  Every well-educated child knew that it was just a legend. There was no good evidence that there had been a sibyl in Arcadia at the time of the Sundering, let alone that she had said such a thing, and no ancient lore about demons, nor any newly discovered Hermetic principle, so much as hinted that what the Rhyme prescribed could work.

  The day that Aunt Telomache told Astraia the Rhyme, she forbade me ever to tell her that it wasn’t true. “The poor child’s had enough of tears,” she’d said. “As you love her, let her believe it.”

  I had promised and I had kept my promise, and so now I got to watch Astraia clasp her hands and recite it in a low, reverent voice:

  “A virgin knife in a virgin’s hand

  Can kill the beast that rules the land.”

  A hopeful half smile twisted at her lips, and she darted hopeful half glances at my face. It was my cue to smile and pretend to be comforted, as if the Rhyme were true. As if Astraia weren’t asking for comfort as much as trying to give it. As if I had ever lived in her world, where daughters were loved and protected, and the gods offered an escape from every terrible fate.

  You wanted her to think that, I told myself, but all I wanted right now was to seize a book off the table and throw it at her face. Instead I clenched my hands and said sourly, “We both know the Rhyme. What’s your point?”

  Astraia wilted a moment, then rallied. “I just wanted to say . . . I believe you can do it. I believe you will cut off his head and come home to us.”

  Then she flung her arms around me. My shoulders tightened and I almost jerked away, but instead I made myself embrace her back. She was my only sister. I should love her and be willing to die for her, since the only other choice was that she die for me. And I did love her; I just couldn’t stop resenting her either.

  “I know Mother would be proud of you,” she muttered. Her shoulders quivered under my arms and I realized she was crying.

  She dared to cry? On this day of all days? I was the one who would be married by sunset, and I hadn’t let myself cry in five years.

  There was ice in my lungs and I couldn’t breathe. I was floating, I was swept away, and out of the cold I spoke to her in a voice as soft as snow, the gentle and obedient voice that I had used to consent to every order that Father and Aunt Telomache ever gave me, every order that they would never give Astraia because they actually loved her.

  “You know, that Rhyme is a lie that Aunt Telomache only told you because you weren’t strong enough to bear the truth.”

  I had thought the words so often, they felt like nothing in my mouth, like no more than a breath of air, and as easily as breathing I went on:

  “The truth is, Mother died because of you, and now I have to die for your sake too. And neither one of us will ever forgive you.”

  Then I shoved her aside and strode out of the room.

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  3

  Astraia didn’t follow me, which was lucky. If I’d seen her face again, I would have shattered. Instead I floated numbly down the stairs. I knew that soon I would realize what I had done, that the acid of my self-loathing would eat through my walls and burn me down to the bone. But for now, I was wrapped in cotton wool, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I stepped out onto the floor and curtsied without even trembling.

  “Good morning, Father.” Beside me, I heard Aunt Telomache’s intake of breath, and I realized that I had strayed from the ceremony. I curtsied again. “Father, I thank you for your kindness and beg that you will let me leave your house.”

  As if the Gentle Lord cared about propriety.

  Father held out an arm. “I
will grant that with a glad heart and open hand, my daughter.”

  Certainly the glad part was true enough. He was avenging his dead wife, saving his favorite daughter, and keeping his sister-in-law as his concubine—and the only price was the daughter he had never wanted.

  “Where’s your sister?” Aunt Telomache hissed as she draped the veil over me. The red gauze covered me down to my knees.

  “She was crying,” I said calmly. It was easier to face the world from behind the red haze of the fabric. “But you can drag her down to ruin the ceremony if you like.”

  “It’s not proper for her to miss your wedding,” Aunt Telomache muttered, adjusting the veil.

  “Let her alone, Telomache,” Father said quietly. “She has enough grief.”

  The icy hatred swirled back around me, but I swallowed it down and laid my fingertips on Father’s arm. We walked out of the house together at a slow, stately pace, Aunt Telomache behind us.

  Sunlight glowed through my veil; I saw the golden blur of the sun well over the horizon, and by now the whole sky was bright and warm. Music washed over me, along with a clatter of voices. The people of the town were enjoying themselves; I heard cheers and laughter, glimpsed red streamers and dancing children. They knew that I was marrying the Gentle Lord as payment for my father’s bargain, and while they did not know Father’s plan, they knew that marriage to such a monster must mean death or something worse. But I was still the manor lord’s daughter and he still planned to give the traditional feast.

  For them, it was a holiday.

  We walked the length of the village. It was well before noon, but between the sunlight and the closeness of the veil, there was sweat trickling down my neck by the time we got to the tithe-rock. Every village has one: a wide, flat rock straddling the village bounds, for people to leave their offerings to the Gentle Lord.

  Now there was a statue set atop it: a rough, half-formed thing of pale stone. The oval head had two dents for eyes and a soft line for a mouth; ridges along the sides of the body suggested arms. Usually it stood in place of a dead man, for a funeral or rites concerning the ancestors. Today it would stand for the Gentle Lord. My bridegroom.

  Before witnesses, my father proclaimed that he gave me freely. The village maidens sang a hymn to Artemis and then to Hera. In a normal wedding, the bride and groom would each give the other a gift—a belt, necklace, or ring—then drink from the same cup of wine. Instead I hung a gold necklace around the sloping neck of the statue. Aunt Telomache helped me lift the corner of the veil so I could gulp cloying wine from a golden goblet, and then I held the goblet to the statue’s face and let a little wine dribble down the front. I felt like a child playing with crude toys. But this game was binding me to a monster.

  Then it was time for the vows. Instead of holding hands with the groom, I gripped the sides of the statue and said loudly, “Behold, I come to you bereft of my father’s name and exiled from my mother’s hearth; therefore your name shall be mine, and I shall be a daughter of your house; your Lares shall be mine and them I will honor; where you go, I shall go; where you die, I shall die, and there will I be buried.”

  For my answer, there was only the rustle of wind in the trees. But the people cheered anyway. Then began another hymn, this time with dancing and flower scattering. I knelt on the stone before the statue, not watching, my head bowed under my veil. Sweat beaded on my face, and my knees ached from the hard stone.

  One girl’s voice lifted above the others:

  “Though mountains melt and oceans burn,

  The gifts of love shall still return.”

  I supposed that was true: Father had loved Mother too much, and seventeen years later the gifts of that folly were still returning to us. I knew that wasn’t the sort of gift that the hymn was talking about, but I didn’t know anything else. In my family, nobody’s love had given anything but cruelty and sorrow, and nobody’s love had ever stopped giving.

  Back at the house, Astraia was crying. My only sister, the only person who’d ever loved me, ever tried to save me, was crying because I had broken her heart. All my life I had bitten back cruel words and swallowed down hatred. I had repeated the comforting lie about the Rhyme and tried not to resent her for believing it. Because despite all the poison in my heart, I knew it was not Astraia’s fault that Father had picked her over me. So I had always forced myself to pretend I was the sister she deserved. Until today.

  Five more minutes, I thought. You only had to hold on for five more minutes, and all the hatred in your heart would never have been able to hurt her again.

  Hidden by the veil and the clamor of the wedding, I finally cried too.

  When the sacrifices to the gods were finished, Aunt Telomache dragged me off the stone and packed me into the carriage with Father. Normally the bride and groom would stay for the feast—as would the father of the bride, who hosted it—but getting me to the Gentle Lord took precedence.

  The door closed behind us. As the carriage rattled into motion, I stripped the veil off my head, glad to be rid of the suffocating heat. My face was still sticky with tears; I rubbed at my eyes, hoping they weren’t too red.

  Father looked at me, his gaze even and impassive, his face an elegantly sculpted mask. As always.

  “Do you remember the sigils?” His low voice was calm, even; we might have been discussing the weather. I noticed his hands clasped over his knee; he wore the great gold signet ring shaped like a serpent eating its own tail: the symbol of the Resurgandi.

  I knew what was inscribed on the inside of his ring: Eadem Mutata Resurgo, “Though changed I rise again the same.” It was an ancient Hermetic saying, long ago adopted as the motto of the Resurgandi because they sought to return us to the true sky.

  I was not riding to my doom with my father. I was riding to my doom with the Magister Magnum of the Resurgandi.

  “Yes.” I clasped my hands over my knees. “You’ve seen me write them with my eyes shut.”

  “Remember the hearts may be disguised. You will have to listen—”

  “I know.” I clenched my teeth to keep back all the poison I wanted to snarl at him. I might not be able to hurt Father, but I still owed him my duty and respect.

  Some people distrusted the Resurgandi’s secrecy, the way that dukes and Parliament consulted them; they whispered that the Resurgandi practiced demonic arts. In a way, that was true. By dint of long study and careful calculations, the Resurgandi had come to believe that while the bargains of the Gentle Lord were accomplished by his unfathomable demonic powers, the Sundering was different. It was a vast Hermetic working, whose diagram was the Gentle Lord’s house itself.

  This meant that somewhere in the Gentle Lord’s house must be a Heart of Water, a Heart of Earth, a Heart of Fire, and a Heart of Air. If someone were to inscribe nullifying sigils in each heart—so the theory went—it would disengage the working from Arcadia. The house of the Gentle Lord would collapse in on itself, while Arcadia returned to the real world.

  The Resurgandi had known this for nearly a hundred years, and the knowledge had availed them nothing. Until me.

  “I know you will not fail her,” said Father.

  “Yes, Father.” I looked out the window, unable to bear that calm face a moment longer. I had spent my whole life pretending to be a daughter glad to die for the sake of her family. Couldn’t he pretend, just once, to be a father sad to lose his daughter?

  We were driving through the woods now as we began the slow ascent up the hills atop which sat the Gentle Lord’s castle. Between the tree branches, I could glimpse scraps and pieces of the sky, like shredded paper tossed among the leaves. Then we suddenly drove through a clearing and there was a great foolscap folio of clear sky.

  I looked up. Father had installed, on account of Aunt Telomache’s claustrophobia, a little glass window in the roof of the carriage. So I could see the sky overhead and the black, diamond-shaped knotwork that squatted at the apex of the sky like a spider. People called it the Demon’s Eye
and said the Gentle Lord could see anything that passed beneath it. The Resurgandi officially scoffed at this superstition—if the Gentle Lord had such perfect knowledge, he would have destroyed them long ago—but I wondered how many secretly feared that he might know their plans and be drawing them into one of his ironic dooms.

  Was he watching me now from the sky? Did he know that fear was swirling through my body like water running out of a tub, and was he laughing?

  “I wish there had been time to train you more,” Father said abruptly.

  I looked at him, startled. He had been training me since I was nine years old. Could he possibly mean that he didn’t want me to go?

  “But the bargain said your seventeenth birthday,” he went on, so placidly that my hope wilted. “We’ll just have to hope for the best.”

  I crossed my arms. “If I try to collapse his house and fail, I’m sure he’ll kill me, so maybe you can marry Astraia to him next and give her a chance.”

  Father’s mouth thinned. He would never do such a thing to Astraia, and we both knew it.

  “Telomache told me that Astraia gave you a knife,” he said.

  “She has only herself to blame for that,” I said. “Or was it your idea to tell Astraia that story?”

  I still remembered the day that Aunt Telomache told us about the Sibyl’s Rhyme—Astraia’s muffled sniffling, the hard ache in my throat, the sudden stab of wild hope when Aunt Telomache said that I might not have to destroy my husband by trapping myself forever with him in his collapsing house. That I might kill him and come home safe to my sister.

  It can’t be true, I had thought. I know it can’t be true—and yet that night I had still nearly wept when Aunt Telomache told me it was a lie.