by Jean Lee
“Never mind him, Keller. Dearest sister Darra has taken on with yet another marquis.” Vincent laughs and beckons them to follow him over the hill. Charlotte follows on the periphery and sees them look down upon a farm at the hill’s bottom. Small house, small barn, small fenced-in area with one small horse and a few sheep.
“This man,” Vincent points to someone bent over the horse’s hooves, “is something of a pet of my father’s. For years he came here as a god, granting some petty wish about crops in return for his woman.”
“Years?” Keller balks. “I never touch old ones.”
Vincent grins. “He’s got a daughter.”
“Not too young? I never touch the young ones either, they cry too much.”
Vincent merely winks and starts down.
Charlotte hugs herself so tight blood stops flowing through her arms. So many, like Devyn, Ember, even Arlen, had warned her of Liam’s evil past.
Now she stands inside it.
“Well, brother?” Keller asks, waiting. “You know any girl of old man Aleron’s will be worth noting to Father.”
Liam stares into the bloom in his hand. The petals’ edges begin to glow, hiss. The petals shrivel into paper-thin black ashes. He tosses the burnt flower into the meadow. More begin to burn. “Yes. Let’s make him proud, shall we?”
Keller whoops and takes off down the hill.
“Liam!” Charlotte covers her mouth too late.
Liam stops. She cannot see Liam’s eyes through the curls blowing across his face, the flecks of grey like ash from a wind-blown fire. But he looks, for a moment, where she stands. And moves on.
Charlotte sprints silently around them as they cross a narrow dirt road and set foot on the farm.
“Greetings, noble tiller of earth!” Vincent hails pompously. “Once again you are graced by the fortunes of the gods.”
Charlotte can’t bear to listen to their gimmick, their laughter at the aging farmer with shaking hands. She runs straight into the house, a single large room where a girl barely older than Anna mends a small boy’s ripped shirt. A few other children play on the floor with newborn kittens. The sun from the open doorway brightens her work…until three shadows step into the doorway.
Charlotte stops breathing.
Liam stands in the center, arms crossed, sly grin on his face. “Greetings, my lady. You and your family have found favor with the gods. Three of us, in fact.” Keller whistles. Vincent winks. “In return for our favor, we will require your assistance in settling a wager, a wager that will require the absence of these little ones…”
The shadows creep forward with smiles of glowing white teeth.
Charlotte screams.
A fourth shadow shatters the world, its hands too quick for Charlotte to evade.
Glass tinkles. Gold fire ebbs back, and she’s back in Rose House surrounded by broken color. Her mind’s too heavy with Liam’s memory to lift it. She sees his wrecked trousers, the trembling muscles of his thighs beneath them.
“What did you see?” Liam rasps.
Charlotte remains numbed, unfocused. “I saw you start the meadow on fire. Saw the girl. Saw shadows in a doorway.” Her insides and outsides lay mangled among the shards about her.
Yet a gentle kiss of wind blows upon her heart. Remember your own darkness, the Voice whispers. Remember what helped you escape. It blows upon her fragile pieces, and enough fall back into place that she finds the will to blink and look up to Liam’s face.
The eyes so like the Dakota skies heralding rain flash before her now with fierce, scared lightning. A vine has grown on Liam’s face—not of dark ink like their cursed marks for the Wall, but of his own scarred skin, a thick red line with smaller ones branching out as leaves. They feather around his eye, down his jaw to his neck and peek out of his open shirt to continue down the arm that held the blood sword.
Burned for fighting back, just as Uncle Mattie burned her when she at last stood up to his abuse and pain.
Through Charlotte’s broken door and across the hall, Arlen stands in Liam’s quarters, mouth agape. “How did you fly through….” He inches towards them, eyes roaming the glass, his nephew, Charlotte. His head cocks towards the stairwell, then back. “You must face your bloody days, Liam,” he says pointedly. “There will not be another chance. I’ll stall them.” He leans the door into place. Rose House unrolls the wallpaper across the space, removing the door completely once more.
Liam’s hands still grip Charlotte like his talons when he first rescued her from the Pits. “Guess that Bloody Prince thing had to start somewhere,” she says. A sob bursts out, taking any energy to stand with it.
Liam crumples to the floor with her. “I was…” His hands slowly slide down Charlotte’s arms to her wrists. A tear escapes his eye only to be caught by his lightning vine. It remains cradled in the scar-crook like a captured star. “I was so…” He pulls out his blood dagger, holds it between them. Grinds his teeth. “…angry.”
Veins flicker fire beneath his skin as he drags the blood dagger across his open palm. Charlotte does not stop him. The girl had looked like Anna, their shadows so like Uncle Mattie…
Liam balls his fist. Blood and veli become a bright, pretty ribbon between his skin and the floor.
The shards shiver. Lift.
Glass and blood shred the present as they spin around Liam and Charlotte. Jagged pieces find their fit, build together, move as one, and the past comes to life around them…
Another Liam, hardly older than when he’d been left with Arlen—a child by either human or Velidevour standards. Naked as the other youths with him. The hinges of the door groaning, his mother slipping away—“Remember, you’re for the Cardinal and no one else this night.” Turning around, seeing a cluster of half-robed men, one in red, lounging on fur couches. Two of the men stand up, revealing their eager lower selves. Liam sees the dead eyes of the youths around him, their scratched backs, infected backsides, and frantically pounds on the door. “Listen, to your mother, and go to the Cardinal, now.” The memory breaks.
Reforms.
Another dark room. It is filled with women of all shapes and sizes. His father, stripping himself and Liam down. “Our family has a reputation to uphold, our power felt in our every touch. Bedding leads to valuable information and bargains, boy, never forget.” A guard keeps Liam facing the bed to watch the hog of a father drive into the woman so hard she bleeds. “Now show me what you’ve learned.” But Liam doesn’t want to, the woman’s blood threading down her thighs as it had his after the Cardinal. “STOP CRYING!” The father’s hand cracks the air, Liam’s face. “Do it, or heart’s fire, I will beat you until you do.” The memory breaks.
Reforms.
Another dark room. It is filled with gasps and moans and smoke. Liam’s mother pulls the brand out of the fire and walks, the hem of her dress catching on the blood and grit coating the floor. Liam kicks at the hay as he follows, wishing he could go to the field for more, but his mother taps the brand’s staff against the rings of her fingers to call his attention. “You cannot let your stock wander, Liam. Commoners are little better than humans, and like humans, require a strong hand to rule them.” They approach a table, where a Velidevour lays sprawled and chained. Starved and weak, he’s become Incomplete, neither human nor beast. His single horse leg kicks weakly; the tail flares, and a fleshy, hairless head of a stallion shakes as though to cast them aside. “How many clans of commoners have hidden in the Black Forest?” The stallion’s mouth can hardly move to curse. His mother sighs and moves to another table, where a human man whimpers. He does not move. He cannot, with four broken limbs. “Where did you see the magic horses?” But the man barely talks, so his mother holds the brand out to Liam. “Both of them. They will be our message to others.” Liam protests: he doesn’t want to—swift deaths would be a mercy. The iron staff cracks the air. Pain flies through Liam’s temples and down. “Their lives mean NOTHING compared to yours, my son. Never, ever think yourself their peer. Now
do as your mother wishes.” The brand shakes in Liam’s hands. The man’s skin reddens before Liam even brings the brand down upon his belly. The Incomplete, his mother says, must be branded on the face. The stench of burned flesh, the scream, oh Aether’s Fire the scream… The memory breaks.
Reforms.
Another dark room. It is filled with velvet and rasping breaths. Liam, clothed only in trousers and sweat, crawling in candlelight towards a door while a hag looms on a darkened bed, hissing at him to come back, “I’ll tell your mother, you little whore, you belong to ME”—the crack of a whip across his back. Young Liam screams again, again, again—his blood flares. His eyes storm. Feathers of fire grow and wisp away beneath the last crack of the whip upon his back. The next crack, and Liam grabs the whip’s tail. He’s wild, growling. He rips the whip away and runs at the hag to beat that gnarled hand, that painted face, again, again. The collar bone snaps. She bites her own tongue. Still he beats her again, again, again, until her blood washes his face and chest and half the wall behind him. And the hissing stops. No more grunts. No more hands upon him. He staggers back, choking on the silence, the freedom, his screams and sobs muting each other as he crawls away from the mangled body on the bed. No blood flows down his legs today. No one will pierce him inside today, now or ever, for his bestial form is awake at last, and he will never, ever be that weak again. The memory breaks.
Reforms.
Another dark room. It is cramped and loud with human filth from the harbor. A violin scratches somewhere in the corner, a few females writhe upon the laps of their males. Animals in heat, the lot of them. But one, she has hair the color of daffodils. And Liam’s not thought about daffodils in so long that he finds himself approaching her table and speaking without thought. “You’re much too pretty for a place like this.” She thanks him. “Come with me and I’ll show you where you truly belong.” She smiles, but says no. “Just for this night.” She scoffs, insists she’s no prostitute. Her male makes a move to shove Liam aside, telling him to fuck himself. Liam snaps the male’s arm in a heartbeat, unsheathes his blood dagger the next, then points it at the girl’s face. Pretty as a daffodil. Fragile, fruitless, fickle daffodils. His blood dagger sings once, twice, thrice in the air—her cheeks and lips are ruby red now. “There. Now you fit right in.” He stabs his blood dagger into their table. Flames burst, and he wills them higher, higher as the filth screams and flees like rats from a burning barn. The memory breaks.
And stays broken.
Rose House, Charlotte’s bedroom. The lights are dim above them, reflected a thousand times in the shards scattered about them. The fire crackles. Murmurings below them, in the dining room.
Charlotte exhales. This room smells just like her room back in Bismarck, all its anger and shame sticking to every surface like old, spilled booze. Only the scent doesn’t emanate from her this time.
Liam does not meet her gaze. “Those years with Arlen…He was the one person I had ever known that never cared about power or control over people, land, anything. He cared about life. He took pleasure in nature, in creation of the quiet things, and he showed me how, and everything felt so beautiful, and I could…could breathe, and feel, and smile, without nightmares.”
Charlotte’s hands still lay before her, raw as her mind. Heart.
Liam’s tear breaks free of the lightning crook at last and falls with the lightest splatter upon Charlotte’s palm. She can’t curl her fingers around it to keep it safe.
Her own fingers. Her fists. She had used those on Liam, too. Called him a whore. Orna may have controlled her mind then, but it was still her beating the shit out of him. And he never fought back. He begged her to stop like the boy locked in a dark room, his own shadows waiting for him with brands and whips and nightmares know what else. “Why choose to play god when you knew Arlen’s quiet ways?”
Liam lets the blood dagger fall onto the carpet. Glass shards splinter into dust beneath it. “Mother had this…way, of giving me truths. What I thought were truths. My superiority. The princeborn right to take as we saw fit. That humanity, even other Velidevour, meant nothing for the greater good of the Artair family. I learned to stomach her teaching and survive.”
Survival. Blood between her own legs and elsewhere. Pierced soul. Half-dead eyes. Driven by nightmares to beat up people at school just to show she had power, any power, somewhere.
Now what does she have? Princeborns downstairs who want to kill her. Hands incapable of playing a single chord. A boy just as sick of survival as she is.
No sister or aunt.
But no more maimed classmates, either.
“How did you know where—when, I was?”
Liam’s brow furrows, and the lightning in him gives way to what could almost, almost be perceived as a hidden smile, given without thought. “You called my name. Even from across the centuries, I…I could hear you.”
Charlotte runs her knuckles along the blood dagger’s blade. The metal sings a hushed song beneath her touch. “There was this dumb assembly once for the new counselor at school. She was talking about how behind every sob story is another sob story, and, you know, now I see she’s kinda right. We get so, so fucking buried in pain our lungs get stuck breathing it. We function on it, and we spread it around, because we don’t see how others live without it. But then there’s one thing, one thing we don’t want in that pain. Just, to have one thing not ruined. And when we realize we can keep that one thing good, we might just try to keep another thing good, and another thing.” Charlotte brings her claw-hand up to Liam’s neck and rests it there atop his collarbone, where her knuckles can feel the tightness in his jawline. “You showed me I don’t have to keep sharing the sob story, Liam.”
Liam’s lips part and quiver, his face cracking open with disbelief.
“You told me to be more than my scars. You defended Arlen even when you were still mad at him. You never once smelled like your god-self. Not. Fucking. Once. You really think I’d have hung around you if you did?” Her voice hardens to a point, the truth cutting between Liam’s ribs to find his heart’s fire, barely aglow—
—until Charlotte’s hand slides over his chest, towards his new scars. No magic of Earth can heal a strike from the heavens. “But these. I’m proud of these.” The backs of her fingers stroke the red lines, so painful before, but now…now he feels warmth trickle in from Charlotte’s fingers, fill the little channels left behind by fury’s light. Her touch stokes the embers in his heart’s fire, even as she says, “Not your pecks, for the record.”
Liam takes a lock of her hair, all matted down with dust and sweat, and tucks it away behind her ear. He needs to see those lights in her eyes, how they outshine any stained glass he’s ever created. “I’m not allowed to be proud of them?” He risks a small smile.
Charlotte snorts. She manages to clean most of the mucus off her upper lip herself, but Liam finishes with his own shirt, cursing the button on his cuff that lightly scrapes her skin. “Dammit, Liam, you’re beautiful all over. Inside and out. That’s how you could take such a horrible memory out of that meadow, and still find that one moment of beauty to share with me.” She twists the backs of both hands to frame his face. She draws close, closer, with but a hair’s breadth between their noses. “You got these scars protecting people you care about. These can mark the start of a whole new story, with pie fights and bear hugs and swimming lessons.” Her forehead rests against his own as she wraps her arms about his neck. “With this.”
Liam’s arms shake like an eaglet’s wings on the nest’s edge as his own hands press upon her back, the nape of her neck. The rhythm of her heartbeat urges his inner wings to beat, to beat, to beat.
To soar. He’s not tasted proper clouds in centuries, and yet her face glows with a sun’s heat and cloud’s rain. The floor is meaningless, walls are meaningless.
Charlotte presses her lips to Liam’s ear. “You go with them, you go back to being that god, and the sob story never, ever, ends. Please, don’t go.”
<
br /> Liam’s fingers dig into her scalp. He must study her, every inch of her, before they come. He can hear his mother now, badgering Arlen outside the door. “I surrender, you and Arlen remain safe. His family needs him to live.”
“I need you to live,” Charlotte can barely whisper. “We can fight back together.”
The wall begins to crack. Lady Artair’s voice cuts into the spaces. “Do not shield him, Arlen, or so help—”
Charlotte breathes him in, at last knowing the scent, its passion, its feeling. Her lips graze his: “Fight back.”
The wall bulges, rammed with some force on the other side. A groan of pain.
Arlen.
Without hesitation Charlotte and Liam break, the latter whipping up the plants lying on Charlotte’s bed while the former finds the door beneath the peeling wallpaper and pushes it open. The wall next to the door has been cracked by Arlen’s body, who still levitates in Lady Artair’s ring-song. “You coulda just knocked, jeez.”
Lady Artair’s presence fills the second-floor landing with her flowing red silk and gold jewelry. “Where. Is. My. Son?” Her black lipstick faintly glitters orange as her eyes—two volcanoes, smoldering, ready to turn active with Arlen as the first casualty at her feet. He remains on the ground on bended knee, with flakes of the wall still clinging to his threadbare coat.
Charlotte nods at her room. “Well shut your ring up and come in. Apparently, my hands can still get fixed due to some bargain Liam made? Like, I gotta be left alone and okay and, darnit, someone else is supposed to be okay, too…”
“Arlen,” Liam adds while shredding the lavender on the little table near the bay window. “I’m nearly done, Mother.”
Lady Artair silences her ring’s vicious note and slides past Charlotte into the room. Her eyes trail through the broken stained glass to her son, moving with ease. Even the feathered scar upon him looks less inflamed.
Her eyes narrow. “Come, listen to your mother, and leave that to Arlen. I’m sure he has enough skill to right the human’s hands.”
