by Amy McNulty
“Let us in!” barked the lord. One of the guards pulled a set of keys out from his front coat pocket and turned the lock. He stood back and both specters pushed open the thick, heavy door; even they strained to do so at their usual rapid pace.
This was it. I was to rot in his prison the rest of my days. Probably “graced” on occasion by a visit from the lord, asking me if I would like some more wine or venison or if I found the cell cold enough or if I was ready to break down and perform the Returning.
Or why I’d “mutilated” my ears.
The nausea that spread over me was met halfway with something deeper. A force of sheer will lent steadiness to my shaky legs. I could let him think he had broken me. I would let him remove the muzzle with his leathery fingers, and with all of my might, even if they proved to be the last words I ever spoke, I could tell the lord to climb up to the roof of the castle or the tallest mountain and to jump to his death. I let the words form on my trapped tongue, ready to pounce the moment he removed the muzzle.
And then the specters dragged me into the room after the lord. He stood in our way for a moment before shifting to the side and pointing to a bed. There, in the middle of the room under a thick quilt, lay my mother.
I tried to scream, but the veil muzzle gripped too hard against my tongue. Its movements were heavy and impeded.
“Do you understand now? Do you understand what I am to you?”
My eyes darted around the room. I did not understand. I didn’t understand at all.
My mother lay in a large wooden bed atop a plush mattress. Across her body, the thick quilt was tucked tightly below her neck and hid everything from view but her face. Aside from a roaring fire in the nearby stone fireplace, the room was empty. I wanted to know how she still remained visible after death and why he would have her.
She moved. I had to squeeze my eyes shut tightly for a moment to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. But there it was. Ever so slightly, the area of the quilt over her abdomen rose and fell.
She was alive.
The mother I thought dead months prior had been alive all this time.
But why? How? Why had we held mourning? And why was she sleeping? Why didn’t she wake after hearing all of the ruckus?
“Will you think twice about abusing your power now?”
My gaze shifted from my mother’s peaceful shape to the harsh, black-covered lord. He stood beside the bed, his elbows akimbo, his legs slightly parted. He awaited an answer.
I had more than a few choice words to give him, but I couldn’t speak. I did what I thought would rectify that situation and nodded.
My eyes still betrayed some of my intentions. The lord nodded, and one of the specters’ hands released its grip on my arm and removed the muzzle. However, he stood holding it beside my head, ready to slap it back on at a moment’s notice. And his other hand wouldn’t release his painful grasp.
I said nothing. Nothing was to be gained yet until I knew what was going on.
The lord had no qualms about filling the silence. “We should have had the Returning today. And the wedding. I would have let your father and sister come to see her.” He paused. “I gave you almost a year to get over that boy you thought you loved. But, as ever, you prove too stubborn.”
It was difficult to bite my tongue and not respond to his comment about Jurij. I forced myself to remain calm. “What’s going on? You said you wouldn’t help me.”
“I said I would do what I could.” The lord stirred slightly, seeming to fight something within himself. Then he relaxed. “Her survival was to be a Returning present.”
“What?” So much for calm.
The lord crossed both his arms tightly across his chest. “I would have told you, but only upon the Returning.”
“But since I refuse the Returning, why did you tell me anyway?”
“Because you have acted so imprudently. You are taken with the power you have over me!”
“The power I have over you?” I gave a pointed look first to one of my trapped arms and then to the other before glaring in the lord’s direction.
He must have nodded, if only slightly. His shiny metal hat tipped forward and caught a small sparkle from the firelight.
The specters released me but remained close. The one holding the muzzle tucked it into his front coat pocket. I had the feeling that even though they had set me free, it would take only a slight wave from the lord and I’d find myself ensnared again.
The lord’s voice was hard and cold. “You know of what I speak.”
I laughed. I was his goddess, but the thought didn’t make me rejoice at my power over the lord. It was a mere illusion, like the power of my choice.
My mother was alive and the lord had her in his grasp.
I crossed over to her and felt her cheek. Ice cold, like the rest of this dreaded castle. I wished against all hope that I could turn back time and listen to her and the other villagers. That I had never so much as looked at this place.
I ran a finger across her golden hairline, noticing the touches of gray that framed her face, and watched the barely noticeable twitch of her nose as it took in and let out the frigid air around us.
I faced the lord, one hand still resting atop my mother’s head. “How is she alive?”
The lord moved closer, the hollow echoes of his hard-tipped boots reverberating across the room. Without even thinking, I jumped up, sliding between the bed and the wall and clutching the headboard tightly with both hands. Although thin, the lord was more broad-shouldered than I. He wouldn’t be able to follow me.
He almost tried it regardless, but he paused and walked slowly in the other direction. He ran a black-gloved hand along the length of the quilt covering my mother and stood opposite me at the foot of the bed.
“I expected to be thanked,” he said.
Forget the lost blade Elgar. I wanted a few of my chisels and gouges. Perhaps I could carve him a new face so I could stop directing my anger at an empty black void.
“Explain,” I uttered slowly, “why my mother is here.”
“I had her brought here,” replied the lord, “after you asked for my help.”
So Father was right. He could have done something. But what had he done?
The specters snapped back into imitating statues.
He was careful with his words, this one, saying not a grain more than bidden. I had never seen a man not yet Returned so reluctant to obey his goddess. But he wasn’t like the other men at all; the power he went great lengths to hold over me was more than enough to prove that.
I couldn’t help but think the men I’d met in my dream were a warning, something my subconscious had picked up on the few times I’d met the lord.
The lord moved casually now toward the fireplace, the fingers on one hand running over the edges of the footboard.
“I would be careful,” he said before pausing. “Just how freely you use that power.”
He faced the fireplace now, folding his hands behind his back. One finger pointed outward briefly and the four specters flew in, two on each side of the bed. From their coat pockets, they each removed a small blade and held it out over my mother, ready to strike.
“No!” I screamed, my arms flinging forward, trying vainly through the holes in the headboard to block the nearest blades from my mother.
The lord stepped to my side at the edge of the headboard. He flicked his hand, and the specters put their blades back into their inner coat pockets. They remained hovering over her.
I fumed. “Don’t hurt her!”
The lord shrugged. “I am not hurting her.”
I pointed at the specters. “Don’t let them hurt her.”
“All right.” He waved his hand.
The specters retreated through the doorway. Six more specters marched in. They were all so similar in appearance and in gait that I had yet to put my finger on whether they were identical or merely brethren.
The six shuffled in on either side of the bed, and each removed a bl
ade from his inner coat pocket.
“Stop!” I yelled.
The lord tensed and didn’t move, but the specters stirred just a little, glancing first at me and then at the lord. After a moment, the lord moved closer, running his hands slowly over the top of the headboard, almost within reach of me.
I clenched my jaw. “I can play this game all night.”
“As can I.”
I backed away from his encroaching fingers, not caring if that put me closer to one of the specters and his extended blade.
“I could think of a way to word it,” I said, not bothering to pretend any longer, “so that I would win.”
“And win you would,” said the lord. He stood upright and made a slight wave of his fingers. The nearest specter grabbed me and pulled me out from behind my small sanctuary behind the headboard, the blade gone from his hand and both hands gripping tightly on each of my arms.
“But you would also lose.”
The rest of the specters lowered their blades toward my mother and I screamed.
Don’t look before love. What if I agreed to the Returning and then he simply vanished at the unmasking? If Ingrith wasn’t crazy, no one would even remember.
No. It was too late for that. The lord knew I wasn’t able to Return to him. And besides, what if he was needed to save my mother? There had to be a way to word it. To win the choice that was owed to me but to save my mother at the same time. Could the specters still respond to those little hand gestures if I commanded the lord to slice off his own fingers? Had they already been ordered to rush to my mother and kill her if I so much as dared? Would it end there? Would they go to the village and slaughter Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, the Tailors, and Nissa? And Jurij? Would it end with my own death or would they drop me in the commune, forcing me to live with the endless trail of blood my choice had wrought? Would the lord’s death be worth it, when with his death, I’d lose all control over the one who held command over the specters?
You sound like a bloodthirsty monster. No different from the men in your dream.
I didn’t have to kill the lord to come out on top. The specters gave me some hope. They seemed different when I gave my orders. They obeyed him, but in that brief moment, they at least appeared confused. That could prove to be my opening, if I could just figure out how to take advantage of it. But before I could risk my mother’s safety, I would have to practice, to push and pull with inconsequential orders and figure out how I could stop the specters from acting, even as I prevented the lord from noticing what I was doing. But he noticed every order. He anticipated it. He must have spent all this time since he met me planning for my refusal, even as I lay ignorant in my bed beyond the woods. If the stories were to be believed, he could have spent a millennia preparing for my refused Returning.
The lord of our village. He who never stepped beyond the woods surrounding his castle. A lord whose birth and parents no one could remember. There were those whispers that he was proof of the tale—that men who couldn’t find their goddesses among the village women would live forever until they did. For if no one remembered when he was born, was it possible that he was older than everyone who lived?
I shuddered to think of an old, wrinkled, spotted man taunting me behind that black veil. To unmask him upon a Returning might be more chilling than seeing him now hidden from view.
My mind swam with faded, unreal memories of the village that was and was not my own.
You said you would help them. And then you left them.
I shook my head. It wasn’t real. My hands reached out for a phantom sheath at my waist. But even if it had been a dream, it lingered with me all these months later.
Because even if I’d seen that lord’s face and not this one’s, they seemed more and more alike the better I came to know him.
What if that was him in his youth?
An immortal man, whom I visited in the past in my dreams? Ridiculous, but my mind swarmed with questions. There had always been something eerie about our village lord. He was a man most of the village could hardly believe existed, but for the small but steady supply of food and other essentials the boys and men delivered to his castle—which, conveniently, had been stopped now that I had moved in. Until I performed the Returning, the lord’s servants would go out into the village and bring home the necessary wares directly. No one—no woman, no man, no child—could set foot in the castle.
The villagers wouldn’t object to dealing with the mute servants more often, especially since I heard nothing of the lord demanding his coppers back from what he paid for the Returning preparations. I’d seen the specters all my life. A hint of a white back turning around the corner here. A glimpse of the black carriage in front of the tavern there. There were actual monsters roaming about the village, and I was off fighting lambs.
Who were these servants? Why didn’t they speak? Why were they unmasked? They couldn’t be married. Or perhaps they had been or at least had been Returned to, but their goddesses lived elsewhere.
The women who lay beyond the cavern pool. A pool that was a path to the past.
Did it matter? I wasn’t leaving the castle, that much I knew.
My mind grew tired with all of the thinking. For there was the question, too, of how much my friends and family knew about my mother. How much the entire village knew. Was I alone left in the dark, or did only a few of them know the truth of the matter? Did those closest to me know, and was that why they all seemed so anxious I perform my Returning? Had I broken my father’s heart all over again by delaying his meeting with his one true sunlight? Did he truly believe I would experience the Returning with the lord without knowing what it was I put at risk—or that I could even do so once I had known all that was at stake?
That was the worst of it. Now that I knew, at least a part of me thought that it would be wise to give up the fight. But my heart would simply never be up to Returning to the lord. Even if all the will had gone out of me. I was cursed by the gift of choice.
What I would give to be Elfriede, whose heart shifted so freely from distaste to love after the initial shock of the confession. What I would give to be Elfriede, just to be with the one I loved.
But that was fine. I could live without love. I’d accepted that by now. I wasn’t sure I could live without freedom.
***
Yet another day passed. I’d lost count.
At first, I filled my days with thoughts of my dilemma and ways to escape my trap. It made the time pass quickly, but it produced no results. Each idea ended with the lord’s gruesome death, followed immediately by the equally horrific deaths of those I loved.
I began to resent the idea that my mother was alive after all, that she had not died from illness, and that the specters had stopped their blades a mere hair’s breadth from touching her. And I hated myself for that. Especially since if it wasn’t her, it would surely have been another loved one.
My mind went numb after a while.
I didn’t see much of the lord. We dined together in the dining hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—at his orders. He tried to ask me about myself, about my thoughts on the castle, but he’d get frustrated at my silence and storm out. Eventually, he resigned himself to the same silence in which I had found refuge. We ate together, neither one of us saying a word.
I was given free reign of the castle, except I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the third floor. The top of the second staircase was guarded by five specters anytime I thought myself alone and able to sneak up the stairs. Morning or night, they just stood there, staring above my head, their legs slightly parted and their hands clutched behind their backs. They moved only when I attempted to climb under their legs or fit between them—then all of a sudden they were fast as hares, blocking my path. At last, I gave up. The obstructed entryway meant I couldn’t visit my mother, whose prison was the only place I could possibly wish to go in the dank and dreary castle. This made me even angrier and more eager not to please. I shut myself away in my room between m
eals.
When the snows came and blocked even the view of the village from my room’s window, it felt fitting. I was trapped in a place from which I could reach no one I loved.
And even that dream world never came back to me. Without the blade, without the pool, I’d never know if I’d seen a vision of the past.
I saw the specters often. They brought me tea between meals and built a fire. At first they also brought things I assumed were meant to amuse me: old books, art supplies, and embroidery. All things to which I had never taken and had no desire to practice still. My mind was numb enough without drudgery. Several weeks into the snows, the servants saw to my fire, but they no longer brought me anything.
There were dresses in the chest at the foot of my bed. At first the specters would choose one—a different one each day—and lay it on my mattress. My hands dared to touch them and found them finer than anything I had seen on any woman, but rough and cold to the touch—and far too heavy. They also immediately brought to mind images of Master and Mistress Tailor, whom I assumed would have made them, as they were the only true tailors in the village. And thoughts of the Tailors brought up thoughts of Jurij. I wouldn’t wear them.
Eventually, the specters delivered a strange package to my room that contained the clothing I’d left behind at home. I sorted through the pile, my heart nearly stopping when I came across the dress with the fine embroidery flowers on the back. I fingered it, familiar with the dress but the needlework new to me. It was the torn dress I’d worn that day I fell into the pool. She’d fixed it at some point, and I hadn’t even noticed. It was clearly Elfriede’s handiwork, done to mask the ripped material. The rips down the dress like the cracks of a whip. My finger stopped at a single crooked thread that Elfriede had failed to cover up.
This dress was first stitched by Avery. And that dream was no dream at all.
I burned with the stupid idea that this was more proof I’d met the lord in the past. In a past so long ago no one else even remembered it.
