“No answer, Sacrifice?” Yorda’s delicate lips spat out the cold words. “Then I’ll tell you: I am everywhere. I can do anything. The Castle in the Mist is me, and I am the castle.”
Even while Yorda’s body spoke with the voice of the queen, he could still see the true Yorda deep within the pools of her eyes. But her back was turned to him, and she was drawing away, sinking deeper inside.
“You’re the castle?” Ico asked, struggling for breath. The queen tightened her grip on him, squeezing out the air. He felt his ribs about to crack.
That meant that all of the madness, all of the killing that had come when the enchantment fell had been happening inside the queen. She had enveloped the slaughter within herself, absorbing the screams and the bloodshed—all of it.
She loosened one arm from around Ico’s shoulders, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and raised his head up till they were eye to eye. The true Yorda was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing but void, dark emptiness swirling with madness and the sparks of wild laughter.
“Tell me, Sacrifice,” the queen said in a voice like honey, “did you really think that the child of the Dark God could be defeated by a mere inconvenience to her mortal body?”
“But you couldn’t face the power of the Book of Light!” Ico said through clenched teeth. “Yorda drove you back with the book! She broke your enchantment!”
“Indeed she did,” the queen said, a smile spreading across her face. “But I was not defeated. The only thing I lost when my enchantment was broken was my human form. Just a mask. By destroying my enchantment, Yorda freed me to become what I was destined to be! And the Book of Light? Why should I fear that? No paltry scrap of ancient spell can hope to defy me!”
The book didn’t rob her of her strength. Her strength grew!
If the queen was the castle, then no matter how great an army marched through her gates, they would be nothing more than ants in the palm of her hand.
“But wait,” Ico said, “if you weren’t here anymore…then who was beheaded on the throne?”
The queen laughed low, until Yorda’s body shook with her deep, rolling mirth. “Men are weak and easily deceived. They see only what they want to see. And if the phantasm before them takes the shape of their hearts’ desire, they believe it all the more. Not even a priest-king is immune.”
Ico’s mouth opened. “The chief handmaiden...”
The queen raised an eyebrow—Yorda’s eyebrow—and drew Ico’s face closer, so that their noses were practically touching. Her breath frosted on his skin. “Very clever, Sacrifice. But what difference?”
But the difference was everything. It meant that there was one person who would have realized the truth. When she stood there, looking down at the woman draped in black on the throne, one person would have known: That is not my mother. That is not the queen. That is my pitiful handmaiden, now just a corpse who still trembles in fear of my mother’s power.
Yorda.
Ico knew from the vision he had seen by the throne that Yorda had been there when they found the body. She had seen everything.
She lied to them.
Ozuma and the priest-king had believed her, of course. Everyone else in the castle was dead. The queen’s fell presence had dissipated. There was no reason to doubt Yorda’s words. Had she not previously betrayed her mother, helping Ozuma steal the Book of Light in order to drive her away?
No one could have imagined that, even as the sword bit into a woman’s neck, Yorda was protecting her mother.
The queen laughed merrily, and it seemed to Ico that Yorda’s body was no longer hers at all, but the queen’s possession entirely. Ico trembled in the queen’s arms.
She laughed one last time, a high, derisive laugh, and then flung Ico away like a child throws away a toy. Ico flew through the air, landing on his back on the stones near the throne. His head smacked against the floor, sending sparks dancing behind his eyelids. He couldn’t move.
Yorda stood slowly and walked over to Ico’s side. Ico looked up at her, his eyes watering with tears. They were not for the pain, they were for Yorda.
Ico moaned. He could taste blood in his mouth. “You’re horrible. How could you make Yorda do that? She’s your daughter!”
“You poor thing. It is precisely because she is my daughter and I her mother that the bonds of affection between us are so strong. We protect each other, she and I.”
“Liar!”
The queen leaned down and grabbed Ico by the collar. She tossed him across the room again. This time he landed below the throne. Despite the pain, Ico looked up. “What lies did you tell Yorda?” he shouted. “How did you deceive her?”
“I’ve already told you,” the queen said. “There was no deception. Do you not recognize the love between mother and daughter when you see it? Why should it be strange for a daughter to want to save her mother’s life? Why would she need another reason?”
Yorda slid down the side of the throne platform and walked again toward Ico. She moved differently now. This was not the Yorda he had led through the castle by the hand, the Yorda who would wander aimlessly if he did not call out to her. This was the queen’s double, her puppet.
The realization led to another. What if Yorda hadn’t deceived Ozuma and the priest-king of her own will? The queen could have been controlling her the very moment she stood by the throne, looking down at the body of the handmaiden. Her own self could have been locked away inside her body, held in thrall to her mother’s wishes, just as it was now.
Fresh tears ran down Ico’s face. His back ached, his arms were numb. He couldn’t even reach up to wipe his eyes. Ico lay facedown, crying.
Yorda had been weak, an easy target for her mother’s spell—because she was the queen’s daughter, and she loved her mother.
At last Ico realized why Yorda had struck her own chest and insisted that everything had been her fault. Even though she could have had no way of knowing what suffering her actions would cause over the years in the dark castle, where shadows walked alone, she blamed herself for it all. The shades blamed her too.
“Why the tears?” the queen asked. “For whom do you cry?”
Ico shook his head for an answer. Getting his arms beneath him, he managed to lift himself off the floor. Sitting up now, he turned his tear-streaked face to look at the queen. “I don’t know my real mother,” he said. “My parents were taken from me after I was born. It’s part of the custom when you’re the Sacrifice.”
The queen stared at him. The glow given Yorda’s body by the Book of Light still shone, dim and low like a sickly firefly, as waves of darkness flowed from the queen’s heart into her veins.
“But I was never lonely. My foster parents took care of me. They were always there for me. They looked after me.”
An image of his mother rose in his mind. With a gentle hand, she reached out to rub his cheek, comb his hair, and put him to bed at night. She may not have given birth to him, but she nurtured his life. And she loved him.
“Did you ever love Yorda?” he asked the queen. “You tell me she had feelings for you, but did you love her like my foster parents loved me?”
The queen’s lips twitched, then the right side of her mouth curled upward, as though caught by a fisherman’s hook.
“I am Yorda’s mother. I gave birth to her, I gave life to her. That is the greatest thing a mother can do for her child, the only thing! Love is meaningless!”
The rage that had been boiling in Ico’s heart burst forth, and he shouted, “But Yorda loved you! That’s why she was deceived! That’s why she saved you! Can’t you see that? Is she only a tool to you—is that all she’s ever been to you?”
The queen turned her back—Yorda’s back, as supple as a spring leaf—to Ico and ascended to the throne. Ico watched her go.
She sat on the throne, the queen inhabiting Yorda’s body. She was lost against its tall back, the broad armrests. The light of the book was lost as well. There, on that throne, she was nothing but darkn
ess in human form.
“They saw what they desired, my death, and believing that they had defeated me they left this place,” the queen said quietly, her voice barely more than a whisper. “They left that nasty sword in a cave by the sea—a symbol of the castle’s pacification, I suppose. There they held an empty, meaningless ceremony, bowing their heads to that ungainly hunk of metal.
“All while I became one with the castle. At the same time, Yorda became mine. She was my eyes and my hands. The bonds of blood are great. She was my most faithful servant. I was there, you know, at the ceremony. I watched it through her eyes. The cheeks of the men were flushed with their so-called victory over me—men who are little more than lumps of dirt, pretenders to their weak god’s glory. I watched them board their boats and leave—and Yorda with them,” the queen said, her voice like a song.
“Through Yorda I knew this, and I decided to wait until they had returned home to their capital. I am unshaken now, as I was then. I feel this castle, every inch of her stone is mine. The loss of my inhabitants, my sustenance, was a setback—but only a minor one. I had time on my side. And my task remained the same: to lie in wait until the next eclipse.”
So long as the queen remained the world was still endangered, and the people of the Holy Zagrenda-Sol Empire were too busy celebrating the defeat of the “herald of evil” to notice.
“They took Yorda to their walled capital beyond the mountain. There they rested their armies and gave Yorda time to rest as well. She was happy. They even let her stand atop the city walls and wave down at all the fools, together with that greatest of fools, the man they call their priest-king. Yorda acted the part they wanted her to play to perfection.”
The queen shook her head slowly, like Ico’s mother used to do when scolding him.
“Yorda thought that by deposing me she had saved me. She thought that she had driven back the Dark God, released me from his spell, and saved my human soul by taking me within her body.”
“You tricked her into thinking that!” Ico shouted back.
He didn’t want to imagine how Yorda must’ve felt, the happiness at being together with her mother at last. And yet he could hear the lies the queen’s soul had whispered to Yorda’s heart as though she were reciting them aloud to him now.
I am free at last. Free of the Dark God’s control. Though I have lost my human form, I am finally myself again. It is as if all that happened until now was but a long, dark nightmare. Beloved daughter, I will be inside you always. Your joy is my joy. Your life is my life. We will share these together. Bless your heart and your gentle nature for forgiving me!
It had all ended in betrayal. The anguish weighed on Ico’s heart so heavily he felt he might sink into the stone floor. It seemed like no matter how many tears he cried for Yorda, his eyes would never dry.
The queen sat in her borrowed body, watching him. White mist drifted through the room, wrapping around Ico as he lay trembling on the stones. When at last he looked up and wiped his eyes, the queen was staring down at him.
“They still had the Book of Light,” she said through her teeth, the alluring smile on her face contrasting with the venom in her voice. “That is why I moved, thinking to destroy the walled city, the priest-king’s army, and that cursed book with one blow.”
“The city of stone…” Ico groaned.
The queen turned her eyes upward toward the dark ceiling high above. “Yes, beautiful stone. Its lifeless forms are a joy to behold. Art as a sign of ultimate power.”
When the queen lashed out at the city, the empire realized for the first time that its struggle with the darkness was not yet over, and their ignorance of the ongoing conflict meant that they had utterly lost the initiative.
“Part of their army simply fled, including the priest-king and that knight with bestial horns like yours. However, the Book of Light was lost, and the stone city became part of my domain, its statuesque citizenry my new subjects.”
The queen leaned forward, arms draped elegantly across the armrests of her throne. “Imagine my surprise,” she said, her tone growing more familiar, “when I discovered the power of that same book woven into the cloth you wear on your chest. It can only mean that the people who sent you to me as a Sacrifice somehow retrieved the Book of Light from my city.”
Ico felt his heart sink. The elder believed in the power of his Mark. They believed in the absolute power of the Book of Light—that he was their light of hope. And yet it seemed now that the book was not as powerful as they had thought. The Book of Light could not defeat the queen. It had failed once already. It was less a poison and more a nuisance to the queen.
Was the elder wrong?
“As it happens, I do remember a particularly mischievous insect slipping into the city quite recently. A little boy, just about your age. He must have found the book and carried it to the place where you lived.”
Ico tensed. She’s talking about Toto!
“What’s wrong, Sacrifice? You look pale.” The queen smiled at Ico. “Don’t worry. That little insect feels no pain anymore.”
For a moment, Ico felt like he couldn’t breathe. “W-what do you mean he can’t feel pain?”
The queen’s smile widened.
“Toto’s dead? You killed him!” Ico felt the strength leave his body. The elder had told him Toto was fine. Why would he lie?
“Poor little Sacrifice,” said the queen on her throne. “In truth, I pity you.”
“Why should you pity me?”
“Because you are mistaken, so terribly mistaken. You have all these misconceptions in your head, and you’ve never been given a chance to set them straight. That is why I pity you.” Though she still spoke with the authority of the queen, a gentleness crept into her voice that reminded Ico of Yorda, and that made him tremble all over.
“You’re trying to trick me, but it’s not going to work!” he shouted, but half of him wanted to believe. Don’t listen to her lies! he told himself, but the other Ico within him wanted to hear more. This could be important, he heard himself thinking. This could be the key to discovering the truth of what happened.
Truth? What’s “truth”?
“What did they tell you back in your village?” the queen asked. “What did you learn of your role, of the custom? What great purpose did they claim you were fulfilling?”
“Quiet!” Ico shouted. “Quiet! I don’t want to hear any more!”
“Did they tell you to resign yourself to your fate?” she asked, ignoring him. “Did they say you were a hero for giving yourself up to this noble cause? Did you picture yourself as a great person for what you did, drunk on the draught of their lies? Yes,” she said, nodding, “there’s nothing sweeter than false glory.”
“Quiet, quiet, quiet!” Ico shouted, covering his ears with both hands. He could hear his pulse pounding in his head, and his breath was ragged—and all this time, his Mark did not glow, nor did he feel its strength flow into him. It was just a thin piece of cloth pressed against the floor beneath his body.
“I don’t believe anything you say!”
“Whether you believe or not is entirely up to you.”
Ico looked at the queen’s face as she brushed aside Ico’s protests and could find there neither the queen’s pale visage, nor even Yorda’s, whose face it truly was. She looked like his foster mother, the gentle woman who had raised him and taught him all he knew.
Beware, a voice said inside him. You’re being tricked. He wanted to look away, but the effort was like trying to grab water in his fists.
“You know, Sacrifice, I think I’m growing to like you. You have a simple, uncomplicated soul. It glitters like gold among the meaner examples of your kind. Truly you must be loved by all the gods,” the queen said. “So I will tell you the truth you seek.”
The queen slid from the throne and walked to the edge of the platform as she brought her hands together in front of her chest and looked down at him. “Know that I never once asked them to sacrifice to this castle. N
ot a single one of you was offered up at my request. It was the rulers of the empire who came up with the custom, chose the sacrifices, placed fetters on their arms and legs and pressed them into the enchanted stone sarcophagi. Your people did this.”
The words reached his ears, but Ico couldn’t grasp them.
“It is not I who devours the Sacrifices,” the queen continued, “nor is it the castle. I am here as the castle is here. We require no sustenance.”
“Liar!” Ico yelled at her, though his voice did not seem like his own. He wasn’t even sure he had shouted.
Silence fell on the room. Even the mist stopped its drifting.
“You lie…” Ico said again, much more quietly this time. “Why would they do that to one of their own?”
“They don’t think of you as one of their own. You are a horned child, a Sacrifice. Nothing more.”
The mist brushed Ico’s cheek like a gently consoling hand.
“When I destroyed their city, the priest-king and his men realized that I was not yet defeated, and they were afraid. Yorda’s treachery also stood revealed. They blamed her, and struck her.”
Ico shook his head, feeling like one of the little wooden dolls with springs for necks that Toto’s father used to make for them.
“They realized that even with the power of the Book of Light they were too weak to ever stand against me. More so now that I had lost my human form! I was indestructible. Even if they managed to cross the waters again and march through my gates, I would merely turn them to stone and wait for the wind to reduce them to dust.”
The queen fell silent. Ico looked up. “So?”
“So…”
“What did the priest-king do?”
The queen leaned very slightly toward him. “He stopped time.”
“They cast an enchantment over the entire castle so that time would stop and I would be trapped within these walls,” the queen explained. “That is why the torches still burn, and the grass still grows green, and the gravestones stand in a neat little line. But in order to do this they needed the power of the Book of Light that was within Yorda. It was through her body that they worked their spell.”
ICO: Castle in the Mist Page 32
