The bean sidhe drift back through the gardens to join the morgens at the edge of the lake. From the woods, dull shadows tramp from the trees, their shapes indistinct under the enormous basin they bear between them. They drop it to the damp earth with a heavy thud that echoes in the stillness like a muffled shot.
The morgens step up onto the shore as far as they can, just their toes still in the lake, and wring their hair out into the basin. Water splashes against the metal and slowly fills as they return to the depths and soak up more. Inch by inch, the basin fills. The morgens laugh as they go about their task, and softly—too softly to be called accompaniment—the bean sidhe begin to sing.
The grey shapes prove to be women dressed in tattered robes worn thin by time and repeated washings, their long legs flashing through rents and ragged edges. They look older than the bean sidhe, still peculiarly ageless in the way of all fae, but they wear the experience in their faces as so few faeries do. Their long grey hair is bound into sectioned braids that trail on the grass behind them. They brace corrugated boards within the basin and position themselves around it.
And wait.
The bean nighe have come to Elsinore Academy.
Dane may never tell us what the ghost made him promise.
He doesn’t have to.
The washerwomen wait to cleanse the blood of those soon to be slain.
Revenge, after all, is a very messy business.
PART III
CHAPTER 19
Dawn comes early in the summer. It’s not even five before pale, pearly grey streaks across the sky from the east. It isn’t dawn, not yet, but the sky slowly lightens to stretch a canvas for sunrise. We slip back through the trapdoor and the attics and the empty school, back to the house that trembles under the weight of something it doesn’t even know to fear yet. All day long, the students will be arriving for the year ahead. The grounds that have been quiet all summer long will suddenly explode with noise, with laughter and shouts and, from the youngest ones, perhaps some tears as they cope with truly leaving home for the first time.
I catch Dane’s hand as he starts to follow Horatio back into the house. “I need to talk to you,” I whisper.
He looks surprised, and I wonder if I’ve ever said that to him before, if I’ve said it to anyone. Little Ophelia, the living ghost in the corner of the room, never needs to talk, she just listens and remembers and never tells anyone what she hears.
Still, he follows me to the lakeside, where no amount of shouting will reach the house, to the stand of willows that sprawls across a stretch of shore between the dock and the midpoint. Here, he set me on fire and crafted the sun that burns inside my chest to bear his fury. Here he collared me with silver and sapphire and aquamarine, and bruised me with his pain. Now it’s my turn to do, to undo. I’ll still bear the bruises, but this time I won’t be the only one.
I open my mouth but don’t know where to begin, and then he’s kissing me, hard and consuming, and thought shatters beneath his touch. My back presses against one of the trees, a small knot digging painfully into my skin. He soothes the tiny scabs left behind by the bite of the crucifix, even as his hands trail over my body and light fire in their wake.
He laughs against my skin, his face buried in a mass of hair over my shoulder. “I like your way of talking, Ophelia.”
A flush scalds my cheeks. For the first time, I wonder if there’s a part of Father, a part of Laertes, that’s right. The comfort he claims to need of me, if it takes only this form, he could get from nearly any girl in school, but they’re not here yet and I’ve been here all along. Even the thought wounds; given voice, it might cripple.
“My father has forbidden me to see you.”
The words fall flat, and for a terrifying, tremulous moment, they have no meaning.
Then the pain pulls across his face, and I know he’s made them mean too much.
“You told him to jump in the lake, I hope.”
I wince. Even in my most rebellious thoughts, I’ve never sought to remind him of how Mama died.
It’s answer enough, though, because Dane spins away from me with a violent grace. His eyes flash with a fury that doesn’t quite hide the hurt. “You said yes! How can you—how could you—you said yes!”
“He’s my father.”
“But you’re your mother’s daughter. How can he mean anything?”
Because he’s the one who didn’t walk away. But Dane thinks that long ago day in the lake was an accident, a tragedy, so there’s nothing I can say to that. “Dane, he needs me to be a good daughter.”
“You are a good daughter! Just as you are, you’re a daughter any man could wish for!”
“No, I’m not,” I whisper. “I try to be, but I never am. Not in the ways that matter. I have to try. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be here.” Swift as a blink, he yanks my hand to his heart, flicks apart the top buttons of my blouse to press his other hand against my breast. “Be here, right here. Where you promised to be.”
I swallow hard, at his words, at his touch, at his eyes on the ring still on its chain around my throat. Hours before Dane saw a ghost—before he swore to be a good son to a sundered soul—I promised my living, breathing father I’d be a good daughter. It’s the same vow, the same cost; only the details differ. “I’m sorry.”
“Ophelia, you promised me.” He lets go of my hand, my palm still pressed against his chest, and traces his fingers down my sternum to the silver band. Goose bumps trail in his wake. “You promised me.”
“I know,” I whisper, “and I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry!” he snarls. His fingers curl around the ring. With his other hand still braced against my chest he yanks at the chain. It pulls me with it, choking me even as pain blooms from the clasp at the back of my neck. He lets go of me but pulls again, and I drop to my knees as the links on either side of the clasp finally give way. The ends dangle from his fist like strands of a whip. “Stop saying you’re sorry.”
Tears grip my chest in an iron band. The ring was such a little weight, but I can’t breathe with it gone. His other hand shakes as he strokes the top of my head, and I lean against his knee, sobbing. Salt stings the tiny cuts on my lips, and I can taste the sour, copper tang of blood.
He moves away so suddenly that I pitch forward against the roots that tangle their way to the edge of the lake. “I need you,” he whispers, the words like shards of glass. He says nothing else, just turns and walks away.
Always walking away.
The tears flood me, quake my body with waves of pain. The sun where my heart should be scalds my bones, my muscles, curls through my skin until I’m just a heap of blistered flesh, unrecognizable within the agony.
A cool hand passes over my hair in a damp streak, lightly lifts my face to trace the path of tears down my ravaged face. Mama sits on the tangle of roots, her feet still in the water, her night-purple hair plastered to her pale skin. “And Dahut and the strange lover in the red armor stole from the sleeping king the key to the city, and opened the gates,” she murmurs. “The tide, swelled by the terrifying storm, rushed in through the gap in the bronze walls and swamped the city. The great bells of the soaring churches sang in the wind and the strength of the water. The ocean roared in triumph as it finally dragged the great city to the base of the bay and drowned its beautiful buildings, its elegant churches, the cathedrals that spoke more to the arrogance of man than the grace of God. Even had he the key in hand, the King himself could not have turned back the flood.”
She gently pushes me to make me stretch out on the roots, cheek pillowed on one arm, and she strokes my hair into a great fan around me until I’m drowning in a spill of night. “You let Dane steal the key from you, Ophelia.”
“I gave it to him,” I whisper.
“That never mattered.”
I gulp in shaky breaths, but the sobs don’t stop. They tear at my lungs, make my muscles burn because my body is too weak to take this agony.<
br />
“There are less painful ways to drown than in tears.”
But the tears aren’t water; they’re fire, the flares of a star that orbits the shattered pieces of my heart. You can’t drown in fire.
You can only be consumed by it.
Then Father is kneeling beside me, his face ashy and fatigued, and I wonder if he’s spent all night staring at the papers on his desk. “Ophelia?”
“I told him.”
His hand hovers, awkward and uncertain, over my face, then lightly touches my tear-slick cheek. “I know it hurts,” he says softly. “I’m sorry you have to feel this way, Ophelia, because I know you think you love him. But this is for the best.”
Mama laughs derisively, a cruel sound that Father cannot hear, has never heard since her death. “As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters in the sun, and the moist star upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.” Her voice is almost a song. “Even in the end of all things, when all omens shriek to what comes, men will be the fools their petty lives have scripted them to be. Pain is only for the best when it ends.”
I close my eyes against her words, against the genuine concern that wars with relief in my father’s face. I can feel her hand against my hair, my skin, my back, even as I hear him urge me to return to the house, to clean up and perhaps go to bed for a few hours. The roots dig into my skin, sure to leave bruises, and my elbow stings as particles cling to the bloody wound.
I deserve this.
This pain, this terror, this despair, this is mine to bear.
I promised Dane I would help him bear his grief.
And I walked away.
CHAPTER 20
It’s a relief when classes start again. Surrounded by people, always with places to be or things to do, it’s harder to drown in the endless weeping of the drowning sun in my chest. I’m a sophomore this year; I have no classes in common with Dane and Horatio, who are both seniors.
Dinner during the week is a haphazard affair at best. Those of us who live here year-round can choose to dine in the mansion with the other students or eat in the private dining room of Headmaster’s House. Or if one is cowardly and weak, in Father’s study with a tray and a pile of papers that need to be typed. Where other students have laptops and privacy, I have a father whose idea of parental controls involve his being in the room. Consumed with a million details, Father doesn’t notice my self-imposed isolation. Or at least, I think he doesn’t; he might choose to let me keep myself separate for a time, but I don’t believe he could make that decision without comment. Whatever he does, whatever he decides, Father will always have a speech to make on the subject.
It would be easier if I could say that Dane hated me for walking away.
Sometimes I can say that. Sometimes I can feel his eyes on me in the halls, feel the glares that smoke and blaze between my shoulder blades as though with a single glance he could flay all the flesh from my body and leave it to rot. On those occasions, he passes by in sullen silence or even knocks the books from my hands for the simple pleasure of causing me pain.
Sometimes the only way to make a pain bearable is to make others feel it too.
But then there are the days where he acts as if nothing has changed, where he sits beside me at lunch and laces his fingers through mine, where he traps me in corners and kisses me until breath is just a faint memory with no meaning. The days where he drags me into hidden alcoves in the gardens we know so well and traces fire across my skin with hands and lips.
Then there are the days that set everyone to talking.
The third day of classes, Dane swept through the halls in tights; a long, sleeveless leather coat; a blouse with billowing sleeves; a long cape, all black edged in silver; and a gaudy gold crown perched lopsided on his sable hair. He answered all questions put to him quite solemnly, with no indication of a prank or a game or anything at all out of the ordinary.
The next day he spoke entirely in German—not just in the halls but in classes as well, speaking over the professors with rambling, disjointed monologues. Rumors filtered through the lower grades, but Horatio met me in the gardens that night and told me the truth of them. Some of it was poetry, he said, or bits of plays or even operas; and during their Latin test, he stood and delivered an impassioned recitation of large chunks of The Communist Manifesto.
He’s had days where he can’t seem to stop talking and days where he hasn’t said a word. One night he walked into a bathroom of the girls’ dormitory and set about his evening ritual like he didn’t notice the thirteen-year-olds shrieking from the shower stalls. Another day he pretended to faint every time someone said his name; another day he assigned everyone the wrong names and genders; yet another day he threw such a violent fit in his literature class that the first-year professor broke down in tears.
Father and Claudius spent hours convincing the poor woman not to quit, finally offering her a raise and promising to cover part of her tuition should she decide to pursue a doctorate in education. They even offered her two weeks of paid vacation to recover her nerves, and it was still a near thing to make her stay.
Three weeks in, as I sit in Old Testament Studies with nineteen other girls, the door slams open. Our steely-haired professor—a born spinster if there is such a thing anymore—drops both chalk and eraser in a pale puff of dust and turns to stare.
It’s Dane, of course, and my heart sinks at the sight of him.
His bare chest gleams with oil, a black bandana knotted around his neck like a bandit at rest. A black Stetson sits at an angle atop his dark hair, and his black jeans couldn’t be tighter if they tried. A coil of rope rests in one hand, a lasso drooping from the other. He catches my eye and winks, tipping the Stetson in my direction. “Little filly,” he drawls.
My face flames, and I look back at my notes amidst a chorus of whispers and growls.
“Mr. Danemark!”
He smiles at my scandalized professor and swings himself over the first row of desks. “Howdy, ma’am. Just checking the herds.” He reaches my row and hops onto the desk behind me, knees to either side of me, and strokes my hair. “Easy there, filly.”
“Mr. Danemark, I insist you leave my class this instant!”
He eyes her sourly, the lasso twirling slowly at his side. “Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin,” he says softly.
You have been weighed in the balance and are found wanting.
My professor is unimpressed. Purple blotches spread rapidly across her narrow face as she stalks toward the call button for the intercom. “Mr. Danemark, leave my class at once, or I will be forced to take you before the Headmaster for your actions.”
Probably not the best thing to say.
Dane leaps to his feet on the desk, and the lasso spins in a blur over our heads. “Time to cull the herd, beauties!” The rope flies forward, the loop dropping over the sputtering woman. When he pulls the slipknot tight, she falls to her knees and scrabbles against the floor as he yanks her inexorably closer. I could almost feel sorry for her. Dane jumps down and hauls her to her feet by the neck of her blouse. “Say good-bye now, ma’am.”
“Mister—”
He seals his mouth to hers, and we all watch in horrified fascination as the colors spread down her neck. She swats at him ineffectually, but then his hands are flying, the rope whipping around, and suddenly she’s back on the floor with her wrists and ankles tied together behind her back. When she opens her mouth to scream, he stuffs his bandana between her teeth.
And none of us move; none of us try to help.
I’m not sure which one we’d help if we weren’t frozen.
Then it’s out of my hands entirely because Dane grabs me, then Kelly Hunter beside me, and drags us out of our desks and out of the room, yelling so enthusiastically that every door in the hall pops open so heads can watch our skidding, drunken progress. He doesn’t let go until we reach the auditorium and the stage, where he interrupts an Advanced Drama class to hurl
us into the startled arms of Kelly’s older brother Keith.
Thank God for Keith, who just holds us steady as Dane steals a fresh coil of rope from the lighting closet and races across the velvet-padded chairs and out the door again. Kelly giggles and breathlessly relates it all to her brother. I close my eyes against the tears that make the room swim before me.
How many people understand the writing on the wall?
There’s no way to predict these unfathomable episodes, no apparent trigger or pattern to them. He might appear completely normal at breakfast but explode later in the day, or in the evening, after hours of bizarre behavior, he looks at any who might question him on it like they’ve gone insane. The incidents might be scattered with a few days between or strung so closely together that only the particulars prove that they’re separate occurrences.
The performances are in no way limited to the mansion where classes are held. His frenzied antics continue in the Headmaster’s House so long as there is even a single maid to serve witness to it. One morning I awake to the sound of Father locking my bedroom door; Horatio tells me later that Dane spent several hours wandering nude around the house. He half laughs through the entire story, but his hazel eyes are dark with concern. That same night, Dane bursts into his mother’s room and waltzes her through the hall in her dressing gown, bellowing Wagner at the top of his lungs. Just as Gertrude’s astonishment finally turns to laughter, he drops her hands and walks away with a scowl.
As long as he has an audience, he’s performing, even if the act is to appear normal. There’s a logic to his frenetic activity, a twisted course of thought that eludes me even as I know it should be obvious. That it is an act I’m certain. He warned us; he swore it would all be acting. I have to remind Horatio of this after Dane spends their calculus class fencing invisible foes with two pencils taped together. We know the behavior is forced. What we don’t know is why.
Only around Horatio and me does the act drop away, but he doesn’t discuss it with either of us. Somehow this play at madness is part of his arrangement with his father’s ghost, a cog or a tool or a process. I’m grateful beyond words for Horatio’s love for Dane, for the steady regard that seeks to support him no matter the chaos all around us. It’s not a simple thing by any stretch of the imagination, but it yields a simple result: around Horatio, Dane can be real. He can put away the plots and the plans and allow himself to be exhausted by his grief and fury.
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