The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “Mostly. Bits and pieces, at least. The meeting I went to was an informational one more than anything; everybody else, including me, got some need-to-know stuff in private. My need-to-know was that I had to turn in my own cousin and act like I wanted in with the Hierophant now that I’m a martyr. They won’t tell me why I’m here, or what I’m supposed to do now that I’m here. I think I’m supposed to figure it out when the time comes, but I’m freaking out. It’s pretty serious, Dominia. And they said the more you know, the more danger you’re in.”

  No wonder they didn’t tell René a thing, considering how he’d spewed his guts in a snap. “Everybody around these parts loves withholding.” Feeling all the more aware of her right leg, she added, “I’m already in danger, regardless of how little or how much I know.”

  “Yeah, nobody mentioned anything about you losing a leg. I might have cast a no vote after you saved me in Bi’ir as-Sab. I thought I was signing up to help you!”

  “I’m sure you did sign up to help me, which is why I need to make it look like we’re still pissed off at each other.”

  “Wha—”

  The crack as she kicked his jaw was significant, but not as significant as it would have been were she wearing boots instead of oxfords. Even so, René went down like a big sack of satisfying bricks, which she dragged inside by the collar. Not fully unconscious, the new martyr continued babbling through a dislocated jaw that softened his r’s to h’s and made the word “party” sound rather hilariously like “potty”: “Oh, God, will this heal? There’s supposed to be a party, Dominia! I can’t go to a party like this.”

  “A party?” She paused several meters from doors vacated by the courtiers. “For what?”

  “The Hie—you—”

  This was getting old. With the thick snap of ligaments and bone, Dominia fixed her undeserving progeny’s jaw so he could, after yelping and working it back and forth once or twice, explain, “Your Father’s insisting I stay for a New Year’s party. I’m worried he’s already on to us.”

  “Of course he’s already on to us. That’s why I’m not supposed to know anything, and why he’s starting to tell me everything. When is the party supposed to be?”

  “New Year’s Eve.”

  “Must be my deadline.”

  “He’s going to take your leg at the party?”

  “That, or just before. ‘Party’ is sure to be a euphemism, knowing him. Or it isn’t. Sort of a coin flip with these people…I suppose we’ll find out.” That said, she resumed dragging the yet-dizzied man into the hall. He curled into a wet and bruised ball on the cold tile floor, one hand upon the aching hinge of his jaw.

  “How long have you been waiting to do that to me?”

  With a stifled grin, she stepped past him, in the direction of Lavinia’s apartments. “Don’t make me hurt your feelings, too.”

  Those courtiers, nervous as they were curious, emerged from the nearby lounge to assess the scene, then darted back when the General laid eyes on them. Suddenly, her grin was easy to suppress. All humor dropped from her and she was the General once more, colder than the icy waters from which she’d pulled René.

  “Traitors and I don’t get along well,” was her only explanation. The two glanced at each other before she gave an irritated wave toward René, just the sort Lavinia might have when demanding her “friends” pick up some trash she’d littered in the garden. “Could you take him to his guest room, please?”

  Even if she couldn’t fully manage her tone, she curtailed her language with courtesy. That counted for something, right?

  Jacket lost to René, the General made her damp way to Lavinia’s quarters, a set of living spaces and several bathrooms that felt rather like a sorority despite the classical aesthetic and the high, rich wainscoting of the walls. Maybe it was the television in the artful salon that made it seem that way, or the couches, or the proliferation of women’s magazines and trashy romance novels left behind when Lavinia tossed her brigade out into the castle. Kronborg bore little resemblance to what it was in Hamlet’s day—hell, little resemblance to what it was in Dominia’s night! There was a kitchen in here, now. Come to think of it, that was why it felt like a sorority. The smell of baked goods emanated from the cramped kitchenette and nobody had bothered to wash the dishes, but neither were there any cookies to be found. Speaking of a bunch of girls who could use some titillating corporal punishment!

  Too bad they didn’t have a haven of cute women when Dominia was forced to stay in Kronborg. She might have liked the castle’s drafty halls a bit better with a few extra skirts swishing around. (She turned her head too sharply at Lavinia’s footsteps, and the chain of Cassandra’s diamond twisted to choke her; she laughed to think of her jealous wife.)

  “Ninny!” Lavinia’s voice twinkled with excitement as she emerged from her bedroom at the end of the hall, but her expression soon gave way to a wrinkled nose. “Oh, my, Ninny, you’re all—what happened?”

  “Can I borrow your hair dryer?” asked Dominia, lifting damp arms. “I’m freezing.”

  After a few minutes—ten, to be exact—spent talking Lavinia out of her “wonderful” idea that Dominia borrow some of her clothes, the stubborn princess admitted the hair dryer that had run amid her begging had done a fine job, she supposed, if the General was fine with looking like a boy.

  “This is just how I feel comfortable,” said Dominia, shrugging as she might when talking to any unworldly child. “I don’t look like a boy; I look like Dominia. But just so you know, a lot of ladies like the way I look. One of your girlfriends seemed to, anyway.”

  “They’re not—girlfriends,” sputtered Lavinia, so flush that the General laughed. “They’re girl friends, it’s a different thing. I am above such unwholesome activities.” Her eyes closed in a stuffy way that nonetheless registered to Dominia as very dear, because she saw so much of Cassandra’s sleep in it. The girl turned away before her eyes opened, so she didn’t see how sad the General had grown in those two seconds. “Not that it’s wrong for somebody else to get up to…business, but I’m a saint, Ninny. I can’t do a thing like that!”

  “And I’m technically a saint, too. Or I was.”

  “But you’re a saint of war. Nobody says you can’t fall in love with anybody.”

  “And you can’t?”

  “Well, of course I could fall in love, but it must be pure love. Not trivial, fleshly love. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Frankly, she’d been busy feeling astonished by the variety and size of the makeup collection littering the vanity where she sat. Bigger, even, than Miki Soto’s before her bridal ceremony. “You’re awfully into makeup for somebody who doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Now who doesn’t know anything? I don’t do makeup for boys, I do it for fun. Cicero helps me with it each evening! I can do it myself, of course, but we like to talk. He’s such a good brother!”

  Good, creepy…a fine line with all martyrs, but especially with the Holy Family, and exceptionally with Cicero. There had always been something indefinably weird about him. Some mixture of incestuous idolatry and profound resentment toward the Hierophant that plagued every room El Sacerdote entered. Now Dominia understood that, and all his fawning over Lavinia, too. And she understood her Father much better. Was that the fate of Cicero? To move on to another reality and make his own? If so, was that because he left to spread his proverbial wings—or was that because he was forced out? The salvation of this world didn’t mean the destruction of another, did it?

  “Did you have a bad meeting, Ninny? You’re frowning again.”

  “I don’t know if I should discuss it with you, kiddo.”

  “I’m not a kid, Nin—Dominia.” The General managed to keep a straight face as the girl went on, “I’m absolutely grown up. I know all kinds of things!”

  She wasn’t in the mood to have an argument with somebody who was so wrong they didn’t even have the frame of reference to comprehend their incorrectness. Instead, investigating a b
ottle of perfume, Dominia said, “I was given a very ugly penance. I just wish there was some alternative.”

  Her frowning sister leaned forward. “What penance?”

  “Lavinia,” chided the General, but the girl, literally on the edge of the bed, insisted with her hands upon her chest, “But I’m an adult. Really, I am! I’ve been awake for almost seventy years! When you were seventy, you’d already been high in Daddy’s army for four decades!”

  “That’s because that’s what I trained for. He bred me for that purpose.” And others, she knew now, deeper and more inexplicable. He was a scheming, untrustworthy bastard, the Hierophant, but Lavinia had stars in her eyes for him—loved her Father more intensely than any other child, adult or not. Everything he did was right, so far as the girl was concerned.

  But, Lavinia also carried a deep love for Dominia. There had been instant attachment on the little girl’s part when she awoke in that young woman’s body. So much so that Cassandra had been jealous at times, and Dominia suspected this was because, deep down, her wife always knew the truth. Even before that feast night where the Hierophant’s mocking had not slipped past Cassandra’s drink-lubricated consciousness. December finished out with an eerie quality and Mrs. di Mephitoli did an impeccable job of hiding her suspicions for a while. But Dominia soon discerned that something was afoot: her wife scrounged through the Governess’s old documents one night when the much-demanded politician had been called away on weekend business that ended unexpectedly and allowed her home a few hours earlier than thought.

  The General hadn’t been that bothered by the awkward return, because the letters she “caught” Cassandra in were correspondences with Lavinia. Despite her sometimes weird bouts of jealousy over how adored by Lavinia Dominia was, the Governess’s wife had never taken much interest in the Merciful Miracle of the Holy Father—frankly, the girl was a tremendous amount of trouble when she awoke. At least she awoke with any sense of language at all, for understanding if not for speaking: that was a miracle capping even that miracle of miracles, more than twenty years of clinical death spent in a period of growth that ended in crystalized life. Lavinia awoke in a state of physical perfection, that peak at which most martyrs stopped aging. She had never lived at all, let alone lived outside the Holy Family.

  And she was immensely lonely. Even living across the ocean in the Front, Dominia saw that. The poor Princess of Europa with her paid-for friends didn’t even have those until she was about thirty or forty physical years old, when the Hierophant deemed her socially competent. That meant Lavinia was awake for twenty years before she was “allowed” to have a friend, even one subsidized by her Father. Talking to her before that point had been dangerous, especially if the person doing the talking was a young man. Other than the Lamb and the Ciceros, Teddy was the only man Dominia could name who was allowed within arm’s length of the Eternal Virgin. It was all a bunch of bullshit as far as the then Governess was concerned, and she showed her protest by drifting away from the Family. This was also an effort to keep Cassandra as far away from Lavinia as possible. But to quell her guilt for this, and for leaving Lavinia alone, she began to write her sister letters. The Hierophant had read them to her, at first, then written back childish correspondences the struggling savant had “dictated”—prompted, edited, and surely augmented by him, of course, but it was a start. Then, as her grasp of language and reason improved, and her rampant emotional problems (along with their resulting memetic contagions) began to wind down, letters had come from her own shaky hand. The confidence in these lines grew over the years to true calligraphy, fine as their Father’s—sometimes Dominia still suspected he slipped his own letter into the mix, as talented as he was at everything, forgery included. Even if that was the case, she was glad to know Lavinia got those letters. They were all very boring, and she never talked much about Cassandra in them beyond what her wife’s job was like at the time. Nothing of their fights or troubles.

  So there wasn’t anything wrong with Cassandra reading those letters, per se. The Governess wasn’t thinking about Lavinia’s strange Feast Night party anymore. She hadn’t even connected the events until too late, when she realized in bloody hindsight that her wife had been searching wildly, desperately, for any scrap of information about whether her suspicion about her daughter was true. And—perhaps more importantly—whether Dominia had known.

  What Cassandra never could have understood was that Dominia was just too careful. Even with herself, she was too careful. She had worked hard to avoid thinking of any of this since the baby was passed off over ninety years ago. Now, after seventy years of Lavinia’s conscious life, Dominia had the opportunity to stop being so careful—and the painful irony lay in the caution that was required when relieving herself of these cares. It would be easiest, the General decided, if she not dive right into the subject of Cassandra’s parentage. Better to start with what the Hierophant planned to do to Lavinia’s beloved older sister. Perhaps once she understood the gravity of that, the girl would be more conducive to understanding what had happened to her—why Dominia had done as she’d done, and why, in the end, it wouldn’t have mattered whether she’d gone to him about the baby, or he’d come to her.

  After suffering her nagging thoughts, a reluctant groan, and Lavinia’s pleading expression, the General relented. “I can tell you some of what was said at my meeting with him tonight.” The girl’s eyes, blue as Benedict’s, lit like great lamps in the low light of her room. “But you have to promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

  “I won’t! Oh, I promise, Ninny, I won’t.”

  “Not a soul. Not your friends, and definitely not Father.”

  “Never! Please, what did he say? Are you okay?”

  Still reluctant, the General sat at her sister’s side, voice as low as her head. “I don’t want to tell you this because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to turn you against Father.”

  “Nothing could do that, Ninny! You don’t have to worry.” A delicate hand landed upon Dominia’s shoulder with that birdlike touch. “I know you know how much I love Daddy! But I also know how scary he can be sometimes.”

  “He told me he wants to—” Just say it. Say it out loud. Make it real to someone more important than René. “He’s going to take my leg, Lavinia.”

  The series of emotions through which Lavinia’s face cycled was so unnatural as to be unreadable in the circumstances. The mere sight burned the worst brand of cognitive dissonance across the General’s skull. Her little sister’s features widened, grew overjoyed, then caved into laughter.

  “Why, Ninny, but that’s wonderful! Don’t you see?”

  “No.” She was numb, more alone than she’d been while lying in the ruins of the McLintocks’ china. “I don’t see.”

  “That just means he loves you, silly.” As the Princess went on, the General paled. Not at the unwinnable battle before her but at something much worse edging into consciousness. “He really has forgiven you! If it were otherwise, why, he’d have you killed and wasted.”

  The nauseous General regarded the daughter sacrificed on her wife’s behalf, and said nothing. Lavinia frowned in the face of that silence, struggling for something to say. Given an epiphany, she sprang to lock her bedroom door, and as she did, Dominia’s mind began to scream.

  “You know what, Ninny? I know you’re scared.”

  Please, no.

  “But since you shared a secret with me, I’ll share one with you.”

  Oh, please, please, no.

  “And then you’ll understand why this is something you should be happy about!”

  Oh, God, Lady, Lamb, please, God, Saint Valentinian, no.

  All smiles, Lavinia hiked her many skirts high above her pale leg. After perching upon the edge of her vanity seat, she detached the DIOX limb from the stump of her amputated thigh with the practiced hand of a woman removing a garter.

  “See,” chirped the girl, all sunshine. Dominia’s mouth hung wider than her horror-ringed eyes as t
he oblivious child continued, “It’s nothing bad at all! Daddy loves me more than anything in the world. That’s why he took my arms, and my legs. We’re the luckiest, to be eaten by him while still alive on Earth! It’s an honor, Ninny! Don’t you understand?”

  The General could think of nothing to say. Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Didn’t she understand?

  Didn’t she understand!

  Her mind, a whirlwind, wouldn’t operate. She left her body for a period of indeterminate length and was drawn back by the girl’s nervous voice.

  “Ninny, why—you’re laughing but you look so—”

  All of six seconds later, Dominia was stooped over the edge of the toilet bowl in her sister’s bathroom, once again plagued by that nausea from the Hierophant’s office; nausea which she had not, in the first place, fully escaped. Maybe she would never escape this sickness again. Certainly not as she remembered in a horrible flash of hindsight the very party in which Cassandra came to understand the truth. In her mind’s eye hovered once more its glorious centerpiece, of which all the guests, Dominia included, had partaken.

  That delicate woman’s arm. That—in retrospect—familiar woman’s arm.

  “That was your arm at your feast night two years ago,” she said, lifting her head to slump against the enormous bubble jet bathtub. Lavinia stood, mortified by her sister’s illness, at the edge of the bathroom to which she’d hopped. “The one before Cassandra killed herself…that was you we ate for dinner.”

  “Of course! It was my last limb, so Daddy wanted to share it, and, why—I thought that was just so special and beautiful! Why are you sick, Ninny? Did you eat someone rancid?”