The boy stood several kingdoms away. He was seven years old, his skin as sallow as an earthworm bellying through the dirt under starlight, his onyx-lashed eyes as black as loam unearthed from the land’s darkest heart, and his hair as glittery and shiny as diamonds mined from covetous rock. His magic reached across realms into the bedroom of a queen in the violent throes of labor, where a midwife in plain homespun fretted and a king in an ermine-ruffed tunic paced.
“Take her,” his master crooned in the boy’s ear, his breath warming the boy’s neck like root vegetables rotting in the soil.
The queen’s soul strained away from the anguish of childbirth, from the feeble vessel of skin and bone, like the immaculate sails of a bulky ship billowing out while the body mass dragged through heavy, bashing waves.
“It wants freedom from pain.” His master’s voice charmed like a snake in thrall: hypnotic and swaying, soundless but melodic in its mesmerizing motion.
The boy’s magic grasped the soul endeavoring to leap free from that queen’s tortured body.
I’ll take you, he whispered.
And he did.
Just like that.
Eyelashes Entangled in Slumber
The vivacity of the newborn princess surpassed that of every child born before her. A rosy blush tinged her peach skin, her curls shone like ginger silk, and her eyes like lapis lazuli shone and danced, animated and curious, alighting on her father’s grief-stricken face, the midwife’s fidgeting hands, the horror-mute maids, and the queen’s still-breathing body, a limp husk empty of soul.
The queen’s heart yet beat, her lungs swelled with air, but without a soul, her body could not wake. Days passed, and her pale eyelashes remained entangled in slumber. Weeks passed, and servants with ducked heads murmured behind trembling hands. Months passed, and the princess still had no name, for her father the king still mourned his wife.
But he did not mourn as strong men mourned.
He ensconced himself in his wife’s chamber on a wooden chair by her bed and he wept. He wept until his ermine ruff became matted with tears and water soaked his clothes. He wept until his beard grew past his shoulders, then his waist, then his knees, and its strands turned white as snow.
While he wept, he did not rule, and his daughter grew into a wild urchin of a thing, for without a ruler to command them, the servants gave up caring for the castle or for her. They ceased offering their king any solace, service, or provender. They gave up mopping the floor.
Left to run unchecked, the sad king’s tears puddled on the floor and gathered into a stream. The stream flowed from the queen’s bedchamber out into the corridor, onto spiraling stairs that wound down and down, and out the castle, down the grand staircase at its entrance, and across the cobblestones.
It poured into a brook all the way down to the village, where it became a remedy for sorrow, for something amazing happened when the village women and men tasted of the stream.
They tasted the king’s sorrow and it alleviated theirs. His grief proved so great that their own troubles paled in comparison and shrank down to light sea foam compared to his vast ocean of despondency.
But the stream flowed farther than the village.
It flowed all the way to the kingdom of the boy who had stolen the queen’s soul.
Then, twenty years to the day of his theft, the stream of tears turned to blood.
Scarlet Orbs of Blood
Blood tumbled in an unceasing froth over the streambed rocks, as thick as lifeblood drained from a clean-slit artery. Its blackish-red foam flecked the air and sprayed the pebbled shore of the streambank, gathering in a darkening violet froth in the morning sun.
It didn’t slow or stop its flow, and the villagers whispered amongst themselves, What happened to our king? What horrifying magic has taken hold that bleeds him without end?
A few brave souls set their jaws and clenched their rusted sickles in white-knuckled fingers, then tramped up the hill to the castle at midmorning to unveil the mystery.
As they approached, everything appeared the same. Green grass flourished on an emerald slope where wildflowers budded in the shade of castle walls as white as pearl. Conical towers gleamed rainbow hues in the sun. Falcons wheeled around pennants shivering in the sun of a cloudless sky.
But once the bravest soul trod within thirty steps of the castle, the ground bubbled beneath his boots. Crimson liquid boiled up from the ground and ballooned around him, inflating into a bubble of blood that encased him within, silent and instantaneous. It smothered his scream, poured past his shriek, and swallowed it along with his mouth. He flailed and thrashed while the bloated globule of blood twisted in rising swells from his grappling fight.
The men behind him froze, rooted to the ground and riveted by the sight of the bulbous globe drowning their friend right before them.
One of the men leaped forward and swung the handle of his sickle into the bubble. It thumped wetly against a waist—a body!—and knocked the dying man from the glistening orb.
He toppled sideways onto the ground, gasping and vomiting up blood. But more ground bubbled beneath his shoulders.
Another man seized the prone man’s shirt and hauled him backward—and out of another rising bubble of blood.
He let him go and the man landed with a smack on undisturbed ground. The bubble he’d been ripped from shivered, gleaming dark in the bright sun like a threat, then splashed down and saturated the grass once more.
“What was that?” The wheezing man staggered to his feet. “What just happened?”
But what answer could simple peasants offer?
The reckoning had come for a king.
The Girl Who Knew How to Slink
Her lapis lazuli eyes, half-slit, observed the intruder from behind a thicket of thorns.
He strolled the white stone path, unruffled and unperturbed, in a neglected garden rosy with dusk. Waxy green leaves of vines dangled from dying trees to brush the shoulders of his silk cape. The black fabric draped to his ankles, where its folds rippled with his every step and gleamed like jet around immaculately polished boots.
Most fascinating of all, though, was not the fearless breeze that toyed with his hair, but that his hair was made of stars. The shining strands were kinked into curved, sharp-edged star shapes forming strings of them spilling across his shoulders and illuminating eyes as black as a midnight sea.
Those eyes searched the foliage for her. He’d been tracking her all day, but she knew how to slink, how to hide, how to slip between shade and shadow and melt into nothing. She had done it all her life, spying only from a peephole upon her father with his white beard and ceaseless tears. She had leaped over the stream that wept through the castle, her bare feet fleeting as a doe’s as her toes skimmed over timeworn stone. She’d flitted past empty chambers of moldering canopies and unslept-in beds. Her fluttering gowns had turned ragged and threadbare, but who was here to behold the king’s tousled daughter? Who would care that her uncombed ginger curls became snarled and knotted?
Definitely not her mother, who lay upon a richly appointed bed as if she merely slept, her crown askew and her robes unstirred for years. Now a mantle of dust had settled gray and fuzzy upon the wan, royal cheek and furred the queen’s fragile lashes.
Nor did the servants care, for they had long fled and left Cherub behind.
For was ‘Cherub’ not her name? The cook had called her thus, gesturing as his stout hands smacked his flour-dusted apron. Come get your supper, little Cherub!
Someone must have named her so, hadn’t they?
She had no one to ask now, though, for no one had set foot inside the castle since the servants’ defection—until last night.
Last night, a tempest had scoured the heavens in a churning witch’s brew of thunderheads roiling in the cauldron of the sky. Raindrops had spewed from the rainclouds like needles and struck the windowpanes in a pounding rhythm of tap tap STAB, tap tap STAB.
Cherub had been kneeling in the library am
ong the myriad books she’d read, which lay strewn on the carpet. Lightning had lit up vibrant illustrations of princes and goblins, underground lakes and stalagmites and dragons. Her imagination had soared, intoxicated at the thought of sitting in a creaking saddle and brandishing a flashing sword, or witnessing the flourishing bow of a prince and having his butterfly kiss upon her hand.
Then the massive castle doors had banged open and yanked her from her floating flight of fantasy. The rumble of the colossal doors forced open shuddered through the floor beneath her knees, sending vibrations all the way up to her jaw.
A visitor had come.
Uninvited, a day before her nineteenth birthday.
She’d darted through the hallways, light as silk, and peeked into the gallery just as his billowing cape vanished into the door opposite.
Hushed and creeping, sneaking, she tracked his caped figure through lightning-lit passages to her father’s room.
She stood in the doorframe as he approached her weeping father. As he stepped over the trailing white beard. As he raised his arms and lightning lit up both his cloaked form and her father, illuminating the skeleton beneath her father’s skin and the birdlike structure of bones beneath her own.
Sparks crackled from her father’s eyes, spraying like embers accompanying his scream.
The sparks faded to reveal his tears turned to blood, his eyes gushing it. Garish scarlet runnels ran down his cheeks and stained his beard like congealing red wine.
A scream pulled from her lips. Another flare of lightning drained the blood from her face.
The visitor swung toward her.
She fled—nimble, swift, reckless, sleek. With the rapid footfalls of hunted game.
The hunter pursued her.
Lips Moistened with Pulp
The orchard dripped with the previous night’s rainfall. Its un-plucked fruit dangled abundant and heavy with moisture, rich with apple-reds and tangerine-oranges in the morning sun. Branches bowed beneath their wet bounty, everything sparkling fresh and new, including the dew-dropped girl sloping like a fox behind and between their damp trunks.
Over the years, the garden’s herbs had thrived and its flowers had blossomed for her, fruity globes ripened for her to consume.
She had danced with her lips stained by juice: dark cherry, piquant redcurrant and blood orange.
Now her stomach cramped with hunger and she sought to appease it.
Unsure where her pursuer had gone to ground for the night, she crouched in soft grass with a plum in her fingertips. Her lips moistened with pulp and her tongue reddened with plum, her insides ripe for this sweet draught of nectar. The juice trickled down her fingers in syrupy dollops.
Then a shadow cooled the spot of soil she knelt upon and a warm body encased her back. She froze like captured game while his cloak fell around her and pooled beneath her bare feet like oil.
His breath grazed her throat, bringing a husky voice sweet with lies. “Well met, Princess,” he whispered, the teeth of his words grazing her skin. “Or should I say… well caught?”
Is Not Every Child Wicked?
Cherub perched upon a marble bench, its icy bite searing through her lacy gown and burning the underside of her legs. Her toes burrowed in the dirt, crackling frost nipping at their tips. Ugly brown nibs of ice wedged beneath her toenails.
A sphere of ice sparkled around her—and around him, her captor, blocking this tiny portion of dripping garden and dewed grass from the bright day shining beyond.
His dark gaze raked her up and down, from her tatty ginger hair to her threadbare lace gown to her mucky, dirt-caked feet.
She felt like a bashful child—no, like a girl on the cusp of womanhood, more impulsively curious than petrified as an obedient daughter should be. After all, this sorcerer had drawn blood from her father’s eyes… but he had not done anything to her, merely gestured her to this bench and enclosed her with him in a bubble of ice—and now stared at her within their prison.
She ought to be cold, she supposed, but the sunshine slanting through the ice melted across her skin like hot cider. It infused heat into her bones. And excitement.
When had she last spoken to a fellow human?
When might another come?
What if he left and no one else ever came again?
But—
“Why have you come?” She tilted her head to the side. “Why are you doing this? Who are you?”
He bowed slightly, just an inclination of his chin until his starry tresses slid past his neck and illuminated his perfect red lips. “I’ll gift you one answer without requesting anything in return. I am Waif.” This time he bowed deeply and from the waist, with a grand, practiced flourish of his cape.
“Waif?” She worked her mouth around a word usually labeling scrawny children of flesh and bone, with leaky roofs above their heads and fathers who were tatterdemalions and mothers with callused hands. But a glance at her captor’s fingers revealed velvet gloves buttoned with silver. A glance at his shoes showed polished boots. A brooch sparkled at his neck, pinning his magnificent cape closed. She returned her gaze to his face, a face she should perhaps fear if not despise. “What kind of name is that?”
He adjusted a glove already perfectly in order, a cold shrug lifting his cloaked shoulder. “It’s a name given to a child whose parents never cared for him enough to deal with annoyances like naming him. They left that deed to servants.”
“Cook named me, too. Cherub.” Cherub’s lips parted in surprise at her own confession. She licked her lips, still sweet with sugars from the plum.
His attention fell to her sugared mouth. One shining, starry brow hitched upward. “And were you the angelic babe that name implies?”
“Is not every child angelic?” she challenged, a fizz in her veins at the closest she’d ever come to repartee.
“Is not every child wicked?” he rejoined, as his dark eyes shone in the light of his luminous brows. “Tell me you didn’t chase cats to squeeze their fur or play pranks on a lumbering curmudgeon of a tutor.”
“I never had a tutor,” she replied primly, pulling at a thread and unraveling a lace swirl on her knee. “I stole tarts to get attention so I could pretend my mother and father were chasing me instead, but I never went naughtier than that. Did…” Did she dare ask? “Did you?”
“Go naughtier?”
A barely perceptible nod from her, and the fizz in her veins bubbled higher at her daring.
“I went the naughtiest,” Waif murmured.
Her blood felt hot, effervescent, at the thought that she was completely intrigued, enthralled, captivated. “How terrible did you go?”
He averted his night-dark eyes and pivoted. His boots crunched over ground crusted with frost, his cape swirling out. “Some questions should never be asked.”
“What did you do to my father?” Cherub ventured next. “Will he survive?”
He touched his fingertips to the sphere enclosing them, keeping his back to her. “What would you give for me to say ‘Yes, he will survive’?”
“What should I offer?”
“What are you willing to sacrifice?”
“Is it a sacrifice when one has nothing of consequence to trade?”
Still he did not turn. “Do you not value your own life, if I should request it?”
“To value life, does one not have to have an existence worth living? A life they fear to lose?”
This time he did turn. He strode toward her, crushing grass and ice underfoot. “Perhaps you simply fail to perceive the value of what you possess.” His shadow blocked out the sun, his presence right before her. The hem of his cape rippled against her ankles, his knees pressing slightly against hers, pressing them apart. “Your every breath…” His gloved fingers trailed over her throat. “Your voice with freedom to speak…” The softest caress on her lips. “Your innocence.” Something tightened his mouth and he withdrew his touch. “Things you do not value until they are no more.”
She forced
a shrug, her skin and lips tingling where he’d touched them with his velvet. “There is no one here to appreciate them anyway. What worth are they to anyone within these crumbling walls?”
“Shall I give you something you’ll fear losing then?”
“What would you give?” Was she wicked for wanting, when her father bled inside the castle? When his life flowed past the crystal globe in a stream that glistened at her in lurid winks?
Waif looked down upon her, an icy façade shuttering his features. His voice quieted to the pitch of one inviting her to unveil her secrets and urgent wishes. “What do you crave?”
Dreams of Darkness Page 7
