The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Rose,” she said quietly.

  The young woman stirred, slow and drugged, and it was another long moment before she opened her eyes.

  “Briar,” whispered the girl, and even her voice was different: her accent, the way she curled the final note of that name.

  Her mistress was asleep and Rose was awake.

  “I’m here,” the Duelist said. “It’s safe. Take your time.”

  Rose’s eyes stayed open, staring at the ceiling. “You shouldn’t say that to me, Briar. There’s no time at all.”

  “Not if you waste it,” replied the Duelist, rising from the floor. “Sunday is long. And I have your favorite stinking cheese, and that nectar from the ridiculous fruit you so like. Some formerly fresh bread, too. I thought to tempt you.”

  A weak cough broke from between those round lips, those perfect lips. “Oh, Briar. You never change.”

  The Duelist frowned. “Forgive me if I offend.”

  Rose tilted her head to look at her, mouth tugging into a weak smile. “No. I celebrate you. I am blessed with you. As long as you’re here, I am not alone.”

  The Duelist sat very carefully on the edge of the mattress. Rose visibly swallowed. “Anyway, I am starving. The last meal I remember was here, a week ago, with you. That’s the only good in my life. You and this room, just the two of us. I’d lose my mind, otherwise. All that emptiness. All that lost time when I’m asleep and she—she has my body—”

  Her voice stopped. After a moment, she held out her hand.

  The Duelist almost took it but caught herself. No contact, not even the slightest. It might wake Carmela early, which had happened once before, long ago, the same day the Duelist realized there was another woman living in that perfect skin. Just one touch, a brush of her fingers against Rose’s hand, and that was enough to make those eyes change, that mouth tighten into a hard line—a shadow rising to press against the insides of that face like a demon wearing a mask made of human flesh.

  “How dare you touch me,” whispered Carmela.

  “You were crying for help,” stammered the Duelist, unable to think of a better lie in that moment. “You reached for me yourself.”

  “Get out,” said Carmela, swaying and falling to her knees on the mattress. “I sleepwalk, you idiot. Ignore everything you hear inside this room and never disturb me again.”

  The Duelist had not survived that long by always taking orders—or curbing her curiosity. The next Sunday, she returned to the room. Found Rose.

  They never touched again.

  But the Duelist could not help making at least the gesture of a touch: she extended her hand, and their palms hovered close, heat gathering in the air between them. They stayed like that, almost touching. Until it was more than the Duelist could stand.

  She placed the book into the young woman’s open palm. “She has your body, but you are still Rose. You still live.”

  “Stop it,” replied Rose, clutching the book to her chest; and then: “I hate this sleeping draft she uses. I can barely move.”

  “Here.” The Duelist held out the bottle of juice, but the young woman shook her head, eyes going dark in that way she knew too well and dreaded.

  “How many men this week?” asked Rose, in a quiet voice.

  “This accounting does not serve you—”

  “How many?”

  The Duelist did not want to tell her, but long ago Rose had refused to speak to her until she revealed the truth. That silence had lasted weeks, and left the Duelist forlorn, confused. Since then, she had come to understand how there could be more pain in the not knowing. In that first year of knowing Rose, understanding what had been done to Rose, she did not think often of what it would mean to be possessed—did not reflect on how it would feel to have some other person inside her own body, controlling, distorting, plundering. The violation, the horror.

  These days the Duelist thought of it often and the knowing, while hard, took less work than the not knowing.

  That was wisdom, a storyteller had once told her.

  It hurts, she had responded, almost casually.

  The storyteller had nodded. Wisdom always does.

  The Duelist said, “Three different men, but she was with the Lord Marshal every night, as well.”

  Rose managed to find her feet and was once again trying to jam her fingers through the murder holes. Just to feel the sun.

  “Rose,” whispered the Duelist.

  “I’m fine,” said the young woman in a soft voice. “I don’t remember a thing.”

  There was a time, in the beginning, when the Duelist considered killing Rose.

  It was not her idea, of course. That first year the young woman made the request often—quietly, desperately, angrily—even silently—and those appeals chased the Duelist from the tower at sunset and followed her during those long days escorting Carmela from one appointment to another, watching as lard-heavy men, pale and sweating, drooled over her mistress’s figure. Sometimes they glanced at the Duelist, but only because she was a brown woman with a sword.

  The Duelist was not beautiful. She had been blessed with a man’s square jaw and strong nose, and though she was elegant, there was nothing fine, nothing compelling to stare at but the long scar that traveled from her temple to her throat, a duel gone wrong in her youth, a duel with a man who had fast feet. The Duelist was not sorry for that scar. Beauty had a price that she was content to never pay.

  “If you wish to be more than a common street fighter, if you want to be a hero, then you must kill me,” said Rose, early on, in a perfectly reasonable voice. “To stop her from doing this to another innocent girl—that would be your prize. I’m dead anyway; you know that. When she’s done with my body, she won’t keep me alive.”

  The Duelist didn’t mind those conversations, much. Others were harder.

  Sometimes Rose would cry, “What is wrong with you? How can you stand it? How can you watch those men, that witch—all of them using me? Raping me?”

  And the Duelist would say nothing.

  But sometimes when she stood guard behind her mistress, stood still and silent as Carmela sat naked in her dressing room smoothing oil over those breasts the Duelist knew so well, she thought of what it would feel like to push her sword through the delicate muscles of her back, what it would sound like to hear that gasp, smell her blood. She thought of it often, in the beginning.

  She thought of killing them both, some Sunday: the young woman and herself, by sword and rope, or poison. Quick. Holding each other. Touching at last, as she desired, more than anything.

  Giving in, giving up. Almost.

  Then, one afternoon, Carmela remarked, “Did you see the Lord Marshal’s wife in the garden when we left? The old dodder? Would you believe she was lovely once?” Quiet laughter, slow and mocking. “Beauty is always the first to die, my Duelist. It is the most fleeting of all our mortal gifts, and there is no power in this world that can save it. All we can do is steal time, when we can. Steal moments.” Her mistress gave the Duelist a coquettish look that did not belong on that face, those eyes, that mouth, and gently tapped her nearly exposed bosom, which glimmered with gold dust. “This is a moment.”

  “You wear it well,” said the Duelist in a quiet voice.

  She decided, right then, that she and Rose would live.

  She had not crossed those thorny mountains and lifeless seas to die so stupidly. She had not humbled herself, hidden herself, forgotten herself—nor left the desert and her home—to surrender. Not once had she ever surrendered. Not in the war, not when the Torn Men had surrounded her in the Balelands and broken her sword and made her wear chains for a year until she escaped. Not then. She had not wavered. Not once.

  She was the Duelist, after all.

  “How do you fare?” she asked the young woman, the next Sunday they were together.

  “Terribly,” she said. “I want to die.”

  “You must have hope,” said the Duelist.

  “Hope.” The girl
barked a laugh. “What is that?”

  “To never surrender.”

  There were different tellings of the tale, and all were a little true. In each there was a witch, an ancient crone. In every version a comely girl, cursed to sleep. The Duelist had heard them all as a child and scoffed at such nonsense.

  Now she was older, wiser. Now she scoured books for such tales, and on those afternoons when her mistress set her free to deliver messages or buy her perfumes or lurk menacingly upon the stoops of admirers who were a little too demanding, the Duelist always made extra time for herself: to search the city for storytellers, the ones who were blind and toothless, confined to their stools in the shade; the ones who were not fools, who knew there was truth in what they told.

  In the desert, storytellers were the keepers of ancient things and could be trusted with secrets. Here, too, in this city across the sea.

  There was a girl, the Duelist told them after months of tea, months of listening at their knees. The only child of a desert king. Most beloved, and graced with many blessings. Perhaps too many. Beauty has a price, after all.

  Beauty draws many eyes, agreed the storytellers. Some of them unkind.

  Yes, said the Duelist, and told them of a witch, a witch in the body of an aging beautiful woman, who had come to the king to seduce him—but only for the purpose of becoming close to his daughter.

  A witch who craved power, yes—but who craved beauty even more. Power could be lost and regained—power was fleeting, power was part of a game she loved to play—but beauty was far more precious, far more rare. Beauty could feed a hunger inside the witch that no crown or treasure on earth could ever satiate; a hunger to be seen and adored, and desired.

  Except the king was no fool, and neither was his child. Both saw the witch for what she was. Both denied her, drove her away. But not before she promised to take the girl. A curse upon her, a prophetic oath.

  Time passed.

  The girl became a young woman, still most beloved. But the witch had not forgotten—no predator would give up so perfect a prey. And so she hunted, and she connived, and she made her way back to the young woman, found a way into the desert fortress.

  The king was away, gone into the mountains to harry his enemies. And the witch had taken a new body: a sun-wrinkled arthritic old crone who spun fine cloth, and who begged an audience with the young woman. A brief encounter, involving thorns hidden in a bolt of linen, thorns that pricked that perfect skin and drew beads of blood, blood that invoked magic, blood that sent the young woman into a slumber from which she could not wake; a slumber no one noticed because the witch had stepped so neatly into her body.

  The witch fled, in that body. Fled across the desert and the sea. And in this new city, she built a home.

  And in this home, she hired a guard.

  The guard was another foreigner, from another desert. A woman who had lost her family in a hideous war—a war she fought for endless dire years.

  Deadened her heart, said the Duelist to the storytellers. Stripped away joy, all ability to feel the simplest of pleasures. Even love was nothing but a rumor she’d once heard, so long ago she’d forgotten what it was, and who had started it.

  The guard believed the witch was nothing but a frivolous courtesan, and felt little for her, barely even loyalty. Until one day she entered the tower where the witch slept, there to perform a duty—and the princess opened her eyes instead.

  Their gazes met. And in that moment—

  —she remembered love, said the storytellers.

  Love, echoed the Duelist. Love did not make the guard clever. She could not find a way to free the princess.

  Love is powerful, replied the storytellers. Love is divine. That is the answer to every tale we tell. What sleeps can always be awakened with love.

  I love her, said the Duelist, abandoning the story. But nothing has changed. I cannot see the way.

  You will, they replied.

  But the Duelist was not so certain.

  There was a small girl amongst the storytellers, a bright young thing with brown hair and freckles dashed across her nose. Her grandmother, who was the eldest of the storytellers, said to her, How would you break a witch’s spell, little one?

  Find her true name, said the girl.

  And how, asked her grandmother, do you glean a true name from one who speaks only lies?

  Patience, replied the child. You listen.

  The grandmother smiled. Even the greatest liar must eventually tell the truth.

  One must only be wise enough to catch it.

  “I had a dream,” said Rose, one Sunday. “Several dreams, actually. My head is full of them, Briar.”

  The Duelist paused in mid-stretch, palms pressed flat against the floor in front of her toes. A demonstration for Rose, who wanted to learn how she had stayed in good health after more than a decade of hard fighting. No one ever assumed that anything but her size had kept her alive all these years; for Rose to realize there was actual skill and training involved was rather unexpected. And gratifying.

  “I didn’t know you dream,” said the Duelist.

  “I don’t. This is the first time.” The young woman grimaced, and scooted off the mattress to her feet. She fell backward and had to struggle again to stand.

  The Duelist would have only needed to extend her elbow to help her, and she almost did so without thinking.

  “What did you dream?” she asked.

  Rose walked with small, unsteady steps to the narrow window in the tower wall, placing her fingers in the slit. “It was all . . . unfamiliar. I was in a chamber made of smooth blocks engraved with leopards. I had many servants. My skin was golden in color, not brown, and I wore white silk.”

  “Was there more?”

  “A different dream. Somewhere else. Carried in a litter, holding a dog in my lap, smelling the rain outside while thinking that I had better hurry or—or, nothing. I can’t remember much else. The last dream is even more unclear. Standing naked before an immense bearded man wearing armor and a red sash. My body was round. My thighs rubbed.”

  The Duelist thought about that for a moment. “I have a surprise for you.”

  Rose glanced at her. “You have decided to kill me?”

  The Duelist stepped over the mattress to the door. With a hard tug, she pulled it open. And stood there, waiting.

  Rose stared. “What trick is this?”

  The Duelist started to answer, but something hard lodged in her throat, something so magnificent and wild she felt like a child again, small and vulnerable, and consumed.

  “Are you strong enough for the stairs?” she asked.

  The young woman still seemed stunned, but gave a short sharp laugh. “I’ll manage, even if I have to slide down each one.”

  But both women hesitated at the tower door. The Duelist said, “Sometimes I wonder how asleep she really is.”

  “That’s part of her trap. Using fear to bind people in their place. I wonder if I’d been stronger . . .” Rose went silent, leaning against the door frame. “How much of that witch’s power did I hand her outright?”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Ah,” she replied sadly, and sat on the stairs to scoot herself down to the step below. A long journey, just like that—scooting, lowering, bit by bit—mostly silent—until halfway down Rose’s face crumpled and the Duelist thought she’d begin to cry. Instead she let out a sharp, almost hysterical laugh that rebounded off the curved stone walls and made the Duelist blink in surprise. Rose clapped her hands over her mouth but was still shaking with laughter.

  “I feel free,” she managed to say. “Oh, gods, I’m a fool. But this is the first time in years I’ve felt free.”

  “Rose,” said the Duelist, and then smiled—a real smile, a crooked grin that seemed to emerge straight from her heart to her face with terrifying, beautiful power. She felt flush with the thrill of exhilaration and fury. The Duelist wanted to lean in and kiss her.

  Rose said, “You’r
e beautiful.”

  “Let us hurry,” said the Duelist. “I want to show you something.”

  The house was quiet except for them. Odd, seeing Rose walking outside the tower. The Duelist felt dizzy looking at her, for a moment afraid she was wrong, that it was instead her mistress. But then she looked into those eyes and relaxed.

  There was a library, but it held no books. Carmela was not much of a reader. She possessed only artifacts, sculptures, low couches covered in soft pillows; and along the walls, massive paintings of women framed by long velvet curtains that hid the empty bookshelves. Twenty portraits, twenty different faces, twenty bodies hanging. All of them, gazing out with the same sly expression, that cruel smile.

  “It’s her,” said the Duelist. “Every one of them.”

  Rose shuddered. “She hasn’t done mine yet.”

  In fact, Carmela had taken to bed the artist she’d commissioned to paint her portrait; he was scheduled to begin next month. But the Duelist kept that to herself. Instead she said, “Look around this room. This is where she keeps her treasures. See if anything is familiar.”

  “That,” said Rose, pointing to an engraved vase perched on a small marble pedestal. “I saw the design in a dream, embroidered into a tapestry that hung beside a fireplace.” Hesitation, while she looked again at the paintings. “My dreams are of these women, when the witch was in their bodies. I’m seeing her memories.”

  The Duelist felt pleased. “We already know there’s a limit to how long she can hold you. She must rest one day a week in order to regain her strength. And now that you are glimpsing her memories—”

  “—perhaps the lines between us are weakening in other ways. But that could put you in danger, Briar. What if she’s dreaming of this moment, right now?”

  “Rose,” began the Duelist, then stopped and turned, listening.

  The young woman also went very still, balanced on the balls of her feet. She’d bragged once that she was a fast runner—or had been. But there was no outrunning what was inside her. Or what had opened a door in the other room and was coming toward them with heavy footsteps.

  The Duelist strode from the library. Her sword was in the tower, but her hands were strong and that unspent fury burned deep in her belly—rich and hot, and powerful.