Gilded Ashes
Page 11

I can’t love him. I don’t. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I’ve seen tear apart my family, writhing through their hearts like worms through rotten apples.
What sense does that make? Lord Anax demanded when telling me about the girl he didn’t love but would die for. The girl who he was wise and kind enough to leave. Perhaps, I finally admit to myself, perhaps for him there’s a way to love that’s sane and happy, that isn’t cruel. The gods know he deserves it.
For me, there has always only been this desperate, heart’s-blood determination not to destroy.
“I think he’ll marry Koré, Mother,” I whisper into the steam rising from the stewpot. Her touch shivers against my neck. “He’ll be so happy.”
He’ll take Koré away to his gilded palace, let her hold Alcibiades, and smile at her words. She’ll run her fingers through his hair and speak the truth to him until he’s comforted, until he forgets both Lydia and the strange little serving girl who delivered letters, until he’s happy. I’ll stay in the dusty, dim house of demons and broken shutters, and I’ll know that he is safe. I can’t ask more than that, want more than that. I won’t.
The next two days, I bring him letters. We don’t talk of Koré, or Lydia, or who I am. He tells me about his studies, his plans for when he is duke, and I tell him exactly what I think. I stare at the lace on his cuffs, the tendons in his hands, and try to memorize him for the day when I’m alone.
I don’t love him. But I take a treacherous delight in him.
On the tenth day, Koré doesn’t give me a letter. She doesn’t come down for breakfast; when I slip into her room, she’s asleep beneath a tangle of blankets. I lay my hand against her forehead, but I don’t feel any fever. Clearly her all-night letter writing has finally caught up with her; I only hope that she’s started sleeping again in time, and I won’t have to spend a week nursing her.
I still go to the palace.
Even without a letter, I can talk to him, I tell myself as I walk briskly through the marketplace. Perhaps today he will promise to marry her.
I should worry about going to see him with no letter, no excuse, nothing to persuade him but my own wits. But all I feel is a curious, floating happiness. It rained during the night; the sun sparkles on the damp cobblestones. The air is cool and sweet, and I suck in greedy breaths as I wind between the vendors’ booths. For no other reasons than the mud between the puddles, the screaming children, and the strings of garlic hanging between the skinned rabbits in the nearest booth, I think that the marketplace is the most beautiful spot in the whole world.
For one delirious, sun-drenched moment, I do not even slightly remember Mother.
A hand closes on my arm. I wrench free and turn back to tell the merchant that I don’t want to buy anything—
An old woman stands behind me. No, not old—her hair is still jet-black, and the lines on her face are scars, not wrinkles.
“Little dove,” she says, her voice hoarse and breathy. “Little, my little dove.”
The rest of the world is suddenly far away, behind a haze. I can’t look at anything but this woman: her stained and wrinkled dress, the bandages tied over her fingers to keep her from gouging her skin open, her wide and staring eyes, pupils swelled impossibly huge.
“My little dove,” says my old nurse.
I was only eight when Mother took ill. Father tried to shield me; he told me again and again that she was just a little tired, and he wouldn’t let me see her until it was clear that she was dying. By then I barely recognized the skeletal creature with sunken eyes. But she clasped my hands and whispered, “Darling, my dearest, I will always be with you. I have found a way. Even after I die, I will always be with you.”
She told me how. She wasn’t ashamed, not when her only daughter’s happiness was at stake. She had called upon the Gentle Lord, the prince of demons, and she had made a bargain with him.
Everybody knows that the Gentle Lord’s bargains inevitably twist and turn to ill. The price is always higher than it seems. But Mother had made sure that she would pay all the price herself. Her wish was that her daughter would always be protected; her price was that she would be the one to accomplish it. Her ghost would be bound to the apple tree behind our house, and she would have the power and the duty to answer all my tears.
“Nothing will take me from you,” she promised. “There is nothing that I could want more.”
The morning after her funeral, when I sobbed beneath the apple tree, I felt her touch upon my shoulder and heard her humming a lullaby in my ear. The wind stroked my face and dried my tears.
“Stay with me, Mother,” I whispered, and she did. She would do anything I asked, I quickly found: she would bring me caramel apples or new frocks, toys or ribbons or sweets.
I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.
Until the day my nurse made me cry.
It was the first morning of sunshine after a week of rain. I wanted to play in the garden; my nurse wanted me to pick up my toys. I said no, I whined no, and finally I stamped my foot and shouted no, but she would not budge: if I didn’t pick up my things, I couldn’t go out.
“No,” I said one final time, tears starting in my eyes, because I felt sure that before I finished picking up my things, the rain would come back and I’d lose my chance to sit beneath the apple tree and feel Mother’s fingers in my hair.
My nurse shook her head. “Then you’re not going out at all today,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in you, and I’ll have to tell your father.”
“You’re horrible!” I cried at her as she walked away from me. “I hate you!” The door shut behind her, and I sobbed hot, noisy tears.
Until she started screaming.
It was like nothing I’d ever heard: a desperate animal wail that went on and on. The sound wrapped itself around my spine and clogged my throat. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.
When it stopped, for a moment I tottered on my feet. Then I bolted for the door.
Everyone knows about demons, and everyone knows of a cousin’s sister’s friend who was driven mad by them. But nobody actually expects to see it happen.
My nurse huddled against the wainscoting, her left hand stuffed into her mouth. Blood and saliva dripped out between her teeth.
“Nurse?” I quavered.
She looked at me then. Her pupils were huge, and her left eye was stained red with burst veins.