Ezekiel is standing on a low hill beside the dry bed of the creek. In a gully there grows a strident stand of snapdragons, wild reds and yellows, like frozen fireworks. Lyla stands up from among them. She has Nocturne tucked beneath her arm. Her face is smudged with dirt, but she shines with triumph.
“Mr. Ezekiel!” she calls, running up the slope. “I’m here, don’t worry!” Nocturne barks. Ezekiel feels slow, nervous vines uncoiling from inside him, receding into his inner dark.
“I am glad, child,” he says. He reaches out his hand, but Lyla only looks at him.
“Mr. Ezekiel, I won the game.”
“You did.”
“That means you have to leave Mother here with me.”
“I know it,” he says. “A most unexpected turn. But my word is binding. It has kept order in these hills since long before your first birthday.”
“Who are you, Mr. Ezekiel?”
“Merely a shadow. But tonight, I am your shadow, and no one can harm you. Come.”
* * *
Lyla’s steps have grown sluggish by the time they reach the house. Nocturne rumbles beside her in encouragement.
“Child,” Ezekiel says, kneeling. He places his hands on her shoulders. “You are brave. May you sleep peacefully tonight, and all nights.”
Lyla regards him with solemn sleepiness. Then she throws her arms around his neck. She is warm, a small engine of life and feeling and care. Ezekiel feels some of that glow, just a little, pass into him before she releases him.
“Good night, Mr. Ezekiel,” she says.
At the stairs she pauses, one small hand on the Newell post. “Mr. Ezekiel. Will you be lonely?”
“I have my shadows for company, child,” he says. “Good night.”
He waits to hear the click of her door. Then he gathers Nocturne to him, rubbing the hound’s hard skull with the heel of his hand.
“Remain here, Nocturne,” he says. “Be her companion. Keep her safe.” Then he whispers other, older words into the hollow of Nocturne’s ear and sets him free to thud up the stairs into Lyla’s bedroom.
It’s only then that Ezekiel finally climbs the stairs himself. He opens the door to the mother’s bedroom, a hothouse gust blowing out at him in the dark, the smell of pent-up sickness and loam and transformation. The cruelty of that smell, he thinks: of the passage, generally, from this world back into the other. Ezekiel sits at the edge of the bed. He reaches a trembling hand to brush a damp lock of hair from the mother’s brow. She stirs, her eyes still shut.
“Ezekiel?” she murmurs. “Is that you?”
“It is.”
Her eyes struggle open then, shutters lifting from a green light that is lovely and fierce. Just as when Ezekiel first saw her, it both transfixes him and blows him apart, all in one shining instant. He sinks to one knee.
“My queen.”
“Ezekiel, please. There’s no need here. Rise.” Her hands fumble away the covers, to grip his own. They’re hot with fever. “You’ve come.”
She pushes herself into a sitting position, her arms frail beneath the nightgown. The fever has hollowed her cheek, drawing the flesh tight over her fine bones. But her gaze is steady on his. Sickness hasn’t robbed her of that way she has of turning everywhere she sits into a throne.
For seven years-—two and a half thousand nights—-Ezekiel has gazed across his narrow chamber beneath the ground. Huddled in his empty, overlarge bed; watching the vacant crib of woven birch, where a girl-child used to lie. Their absences so keen to him that they’ve achieved solidity, like shapes, like shadows.
He cups Catherine’s cheek in one hand, knowing the warmth of her at last. It is all as he imagined, everything inside him as free as running wax.
Only such a fool as he could ruin this so quickly.
“My love,” he says, “I know we agreed. But I cannot take you back with me tonight. Lyla found me in the kitchen. I made a wager with her, and she prevailed.” Catherine is silent, so he presses on, with difficulty: “Who will teach her to keep a vow, when her own father crosses the only promise he has ever given her?”
At this news, it seems she shakes with weeping, a thing most unlike her. But then he sees it’s only laughter.
“Ezekiel. It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t take us anyway.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Lyla,” Catherine says. “It isn’t time.”
Ezekiel grips her hands hard, in spite of himself.
“She’s not ready?”
“Nearly. She sees in the dark better than the both of us. If my time ended tonight, I think she’d rule most wonderfully. She’d wear the birch crown and care for all the shadow-folk, and walk the hills with Nocturne by her side.”
“Good then,” Ezekiel whispers. “She’s ready. I’m ready. God knows I am.”
Catherine’s smile is beautiful and weary, like the smile of the moon, sending its brightness down across a great distance. “I, too, am ready. I miss my crown and scepter. I miss the tromping of the night-things—-even their squabbles and suits. But this is the way, my love. This is the law. A young matriarch must dwell with the living until she knows all she needs to rule the shadow-land.”
Ezekiel, shade-born, has known the way of things since birth: how the first Night King married the first matriarch, a living woman, to keep peace between their realms, in a time lost to mortal memory. How each young matriarch must live in the light until her understanding is complete, until the fever calls her mother home, the old matriarch and the new crossing back into the night to rule once more.
“Putting a flower in the shade too early can damage it, curdle its roots,” Catherine says. “She has grown fond of the mortals she has met. But fondness isn’t enough. She needs belief. When she sees the living at their worst—-when she takes up arms against the Paladins—-she must know mortals’ capacity for good, so she doesn’t turn on them. It must be in her soul.
“She will rule one day, Ezekiel. As I have ruled, and as you do now. She will lead the Midnight Court with vibrance, with the good heart you have given her.”
“And you,” Ezekiel says. He is thinking of the way Lyla carried Nocturne, cradled under one arm like a doll. Of how she barred Ezekiel from the staircase, without a trace of fear: him, the lord of night, the liege of multitudes. “I am very proud of that girl.”
“I’m proud of you both,” Catherine says.
Inside him, there’s a sensation like a tall wave cresting. Memories, hopes, plans, all swirling in its tide. His tears shame him when they come. But he cannot hold them back.
“How can I rule?” he says. He lays his head on the covers, and she strokes it, her fingers warm against his cheek. “The shadows stir, and are unhappy. They need their matriarch. They cannot look past your general to see a king.”
“My best general.”
“Still.”
“Hush,” Catherine says. She coughs, a wretched sound, smoldering with decay. “Don’t think my days have been idle here. I’ve conferenced with the crows. They say the Paladins are driven back almost to the Gray Mountainside. Not since my mother’s mother have we seen such peace here for the dark.”
“So the crows say,” Ezekiel mutters. “The night-trolls, on the other hand—-”
“Show them the wounds you suffered for them during the Strife. The trolls have hard heads, but their memories are long. They will follow you.”
“I could stay with her,” Ezekiel says. “Let me take your place.”
“And see you crumble in the light of the first morning?” she says. “Where will our people be then, Ezekiel? Where will Lyla be, or I? Now I see how my mother must have felt, during my years in the light.”
They sit for a moment, not saying anything more, letting the knowledge and weight of what they share fill the space between them.
“It’s good to see you, Ezekiel.”
The fondness in her face inflicting ecstasy and agony in equal measure.
“A few more years,” Ezekiel say
s, with a firmness that he needs but doesn’t feel. “I will come back for you again. Both of you. And we’ll see what power this childhood of love and life has lent.”
“The sun will be up soon,” Catherine says.
She doesn’t need to say it. Ezekiel senses the gray fingers of dawn probing at the curtains. He dreads them, as he always dreads the coming of the day.
They kiss, and he tastes the fever, hot on her lips. Ezekiel breathes it in as one might a smoke, until he has collected it, crushing it away inside him like a candle flame. When Catherine coughs, it’s a human sound, without pain.
“My queen,” Ezekiel says.
“Goodbye,” Catherine whispers.
Ezekiel melts into the shadows, and becomes them, and is gone.
* * *
Cracking the door to Lyla’s room, Ezekiel sees a small, fluffy dog curled up at the foot of the bed, a white dog with soft ears. The spell isn’t perfect. Nocturne will always have a whiff of the earth about him. But he will have a wet pink tongue, and a real tail to wag, and he will be happy here, and the young queen of the nighttime will be happier, too, for his company.
Leaving the house, Ezekiel strides through the hollows, among the straight stands of pines, and the tears come to him again, salt-cold and black as ebony. He thinks of his lonely home underground. Emptiness gnaws his bones like hunger.
But not forever. What is a year, to one such as he? What is two or three or seven-score? Ezekiel has passed many nights in this place. He will pass many more.
He walks, and the direwolves fall into pace beside him, and make their reports. He consults with the heron, and gives the owls and their tribe some last instruction. And then, as pink dawn rises in the east like smoke, Ezekiel Nightshade flings open the hatch to his castle in the earth, then pulls it firmly shut behind him. And by the time the first light fills the hollow by the road, there is no door in the earth at all; and it looks as though it has always been that way.
Copyright © 2017 J.W. Halicks
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J.W. Halicks lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and several overcrowded bookcases. “Nightshade” is his first published short story. Find him on the web at jwhalicks.wordpress.com.
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COVER ART
“Pillars of the Gods,” by Ward Lindhout
Ward Lindhout is a concept artist currently living and working in Japan. Having studied game design in his home country of Holland, his love for original videogame design drove him to the land of the rising sun. After having worked on titles like The Evil Within and Metal Gear Rising he is now working at Capcom. He is passionate about designing new worlds and their inhabitants, drawing inspiration from traveling to the many beautiful countries the world has to offer. View more of his work on his website at www.artbyward.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1076
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
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