Nobody's Goddess (The Never Veil)

by Amy McNulty

  I faced the black curtain. There had to be a trick, a plan for the specters to strike when out of sight, or to wait perhaps, until they could capture Father and Elfriede, Alvilda, Nissa, and the Tailors, and everyone else within the village before they made their deathly blow.

  “Command me to tell you if this is a trick,” spoke the lord, as if reading my thoughts.

  I wasn’t willing to play the game just as he wished it. “Don’t ever harm the people I love.”

  Something odd stirred in the lord. A black-gloved hand clutched the edges of the lace tablecloth, an unnatural dam causing ripples along its otherwise unblemished surface. “I will not harm the people you love.”

  “Don’t ever let your servants harm the people I love.”

  “I will not let my retainers harm the people you love.”

  I clenched my fists together. “Tell me if you have already ordered harm to come to them.”

  “I have not.”

  He released his grip on the tablecloth. The ripples he’d made diverted seamlessly back into smooth waters of lace.

  There had to be something I was missing, something he had planned to stay two paces ahead of me. Because now there was nothing holding me back.

  “Tell me why you aren’t fighting my orders.”

  “I never stood a chance against you, in the end.” His voice was barely a whisper. His hands tugged carelessly at the bottom of the curtain.

  My heart emboldened. Laughably, I felt that surge of pride that I had once known as a girl, when I was the little elf queen defeating monsters in the shadows of the secret cavern.

  And here sat a monster, hidden in the shadows of that black curtain.

  I stepped forward. “You will not harm me.”

  “I would never harm you.”

  “You will not seize me or grip me by the hands or arms.”

  The lord tugged at the curtain, and I heard a small rip among the clattering of the curtain’s rings. “I will not hold you.”

  I started, my tongue stumbling for a brief moment. It was off, but it would do. “You will keep no servants in this castle, and no one under your control will ever harm me.”

  “They are gone. They will not harm you.”

  I nodded. “You will do nothing to stop me from leaving.”

  “I will not stop you.”

  I paused mere paces from his side, only a thin layer of billowing curtain between us.

  “Remove the curtain and show me your face.”

  The black gloves didn’t hesitate. They took the bottom of the curtain in their grip and pulled. Rings the color of Elfriede’s and Mother’s hair, only brighter and shinier, fell like shattered glass all around us, to the floor and to the table. I’ve seen a ring like that before—a bangle around Lord Elric’s arm in my dream—in the past. I didn’t flinch as the curtain fell, letting the elf queen inside of me revel in her moment of glory. Nothing touched me. The curtain floated briefly before me as it made its leisurely descent.

  My chest was an inferno, and I could feel the flame spark on the skin of my breast. My cheeks blazed, and the very blood that ran throughout my veins seemed ready to light my body aflame.

  For he was beautiful. And he stabbed me through the heart with his beauty.

  His dark hair came down to his shoulders. Like his hat had often done, the hair caught the flicker of the flame in the fireplace and showed me that it wasn’t black like the men in the village’s, but a dark, succulent brown that only masqueraded as black.

  Just as I suspected, he did so look like Lord Elric. But he was paler, much paler. Almost like he was halfway to becoming a specter himself. His skin had an odd, creamy, rosy quality overlaying the soft white. His lips were dark red, as if they had been stained by blood. His nose was thin and straight—and familiar somehow. His brows came together in an almost perfectly straight line, and the bones in his cheeks practically burst through the strange, alluring skin.

  His ears were as I expected. They poked through the dark tundra of his tresses and rose upward into jagged points. I stepped closer, my hand extended forward against my will to finger the sharp edges. I stopped and pulled my hand back before I touched him.

  A timid smile slowly splintered his faultless face. His lips parted, and I could feel the warmth of his breath cross the few paces between us.

  “And so you have made your choice at last, Olivière.”

  The fire in his eyes burst into red flames. And then he was gone.

  Elgar must have proven essential to getting back to that place. Or it was all a dream after all, despite what I knew in my heart to be true. I tried jumping in again to no avail. Every time I came to the surface, I came back here.

  Home and not home. But not at all that place I’d once been, that place with Avery and Ailill, with the darker lord and Goncalo.

  So I’d given up. I lived among those who were lost among the living. I carved and I whittled, I sat and I stood, I walked and I lay. The few men who populated the commune did not disturb me, so lost were they in their own torment. We watched together daily as the farmers—men, women, girls, and boys alike—marched past from the village and into the fields beyond our heap of dilapidated shacks. They marched past again what felt like years later as the sun set, the women and the girls with their heads held high despite the fact they faced the east. They didn’t look our way, and we didn’t stir. And that was the most we could hope for of peace.

  After the lord vanished, the earth trembled. My memory turned black, and then I woke up in a large field of dirt.

  A field where the castle should have been.

  I dragged my feet forward numbly, cradling my arms to my chest in the chill of the moonlight down the dirt path back to the village. I paused at the edge of the trees where I usually broke off the path to visit the secret cavern. I’d try jumping into the violet sphere beneath the waters during the days that followed. But that day, I just wanted to be sure everyone was well.

  I arrived at my home, recognizing the windows on the house on the horizon lit brightly by the flame of the fireplace.

  When I opened the door, I was greeted first with surprise and then with warmth by Arrow, Elfriede, and Jurij. His face was untouched, not a scar or injury to be seen.

  “Where’s Father?” I croaked. “Was Mother brought home to him?”

  The light fell from Elfriede’s jovial face. “Mother and Father are dead, Noll.”

  She brushed her palm across my forehead. Jurij peered over her shoulder, his face full of concern.

  “Were you out in that cavern again?” he asked. He touched my shoulder, and I shivered perceptibly. Still, Jurij didn’t notice. “Did you swim? You don’t appear to be wet from the pool.”

  Elfriede tugged gently on my elbow. The force was not one I couldn’t fight against should I have wished to, but I had no such desires then.

  She led me to the bed we shared and tucked me in.

  “Rest now,” she said.

  She’s forgiven me. I closed my eyes but didn’t fall asleep.

  Hushed voices held counsel over my questions.

  “Why did she come back here?”

  I should have known she was still angry.

  “I don’t know. She’s acting delirious.”

  “Why did she ask for Mother and Father? How could she forget Mother died from her illness almost a year ago now?”

  Impossible.

  “Or that Gideon followed her shortly thereafter? I don’t know. She doesn’t seem … right.” The way he spoke the last word made me wonder what the “right” me would be.

  I flitted in and out of consciousness. A long time later, I heard the soft moans and rustles from behind me in my parents’ bed, and I shuddered, pulling my quilt tightly over my head. In the morning, I glanced at the coupling intertwined in one another’s arms, Arrow resting at their feet, breathing easily in their slumber. My gaze fell upon the delicate valley of lilies carved into the unfamiliar headboard. I left without a word, dragging my feet back d
own the dirt path and through the village.

  I stopped in front of the Tailors’, wondering if I might find shelter there. But I thought of Luuk and Nissa—the little Jurij and Elfriede in training. What room would there be for me? What place was there for me, among the sewing and the clothes? I walked westward.

  I paused at Alvilda’s door. No. No, that wasn’t home, either.

  The commune was just a few paces away. When the pool brought me nowhere, I had nowhere else to go.

  And there it was that I sat now, carving life into a block of wood. At first, I left the commune only to speak with Alvilda, to borrow tools and to get supplies. She was as concerned for me as Elfriede and Jurij had been—perhaps more so because she wasn’t lost in the bliss of Returned love as were those two. But she didn’t pry.

  I had but one question for her. “What became of the castle and the lord of the village?”

  She ran her sawdust-covered palm over my forehead. I let the dust settle in my eyebrows. “What are you running your mouth on about now? What castle? What lord?”

  There was no castle, no lord of the village. And there never had been.

  I was nobody’s goddess—odd, but not worth much notice in the village where all were concerned with their own exchanges of love and Returning. Maybe my man would be born a few decades later, they thought—it’d happened on occasion before. Old Ingrith didn’t even have a man yet when she died, they said. Of course, I knew better.

  She hadn’t lied. She’d seen her man’s face before she loved him, and with that, she killed him.

  Pity she was gone now, too. She might have been the only one who could understand me.

  For I knew now what she meant when she talked of killing a man no one else remembered. The fate worse than death that lurked around every corner for a masked man was that the eyes of a girl or woman upon his face would make him vanish not from life, but vanish completely from existence. It would be as if he never lived, forgotten to all but the woman who granted him that fate.

  I had two visitors once, early on. And only once. Luuk and Nissa stopped by, the cart they dragged full of hides.

  Nissa gasped when she saw me. “It’s true! You’re living here!”

  Luuk’s bear face tilted slightly. “Why?”

  I looked up from my carving and opened my mouth only to find the airwaves cracked and coated with dust, my lips too dry to form words. The kids watched me expectantly. “I have no home,” I said at last.

  “That’s not true!” said Nissa, her hands on her hips. “You were supposed to move in with Alvilda, the night of Jurij and Elfriede’s wedding.”

  Alvilda told me that herself the first day I’d spoken to her. A new cot still took up a corner of her home, its quilt coated with sawdust.

  Luuk pointed to the figure in my hand. “I thought you were going to become Auntie’s apprentice. That you would take up a trade while you waited for your man to finally find you.”

  “My man did find me. I killed him. I killed him, and no one remembers.”

  One of the men from the commune tumbled out of a shack, his back slouched, his arms practically dragging against the ground. He moaned as he stumbled forward toward the bucket of water the farmers dropped off every few days for drinking, but his aim was off, and he bumped against the kids’ cart, his outstretched arm brushing against Nissa’s waist.

  Nissa screamed, and Luuk jumped between her and the cause of her terror. “Let’s go,” he said, dragging her by the elbow toward the cart. The sight made me queasy—the thought of being pushed and pulled as I had been in another life—but Nissa let her man guide her without hesitation. As they pulled the cart away, she alone looked back at me.

  Her expression reminded me of the look I’d given Ingrith when I thought she was just an old, crazy lady, before I realized the truth of what she said.

  “Learned from Alvilda?” The voice was filtered and hoarse.

  I turned my head slowly. The man scooping water up beneath his mask was Jaron, the only other commune resident whose name I had ever had cause to know. I recognized his worn-down animal mask from the quake at Alvilda’s house, although I was certain he wouldn’t remember the incident if I asked him, either in this life or my last. He stumbled forward and perched on a rock next to me, peering at my woodworking from behind his facial coverings. I couldn’t make out what animal it was supposed to be.

  I suddenly took notice of the shape of the wood in my palm. A rose. I ran the gouge brusquely over the petals, tearing them asunder.

  “Yes,” I said at last, not feeling that Jaron warranted my silence.

  If he noticed that I now wrecked my creation, he didn’t speak of it. Instead, he put a hand on my shoulder, his touch as light as a feather. “She will not come here.”

  She? Oh, Alvilda.

  It was not Alvilda who was my torment. However, I knew instinctively that to this broken man, all torment was Alvilda. My heart tightened, and I wondered if Jaron and the other men in the commune had always felt this way. Even a tenth of my feelings for even a tenth of a second would be torture.

  It was a wonder they did not die.

  “That’s good,” I said. And it was true. I was in no mood for visitors.

  Nevertheless, Jaron sat still beside me, his mask pointed toward the jagged wooden rose in my hand. I put the broken blossom on his lap and walked back to my shack in the middle of the commune.

  ***

  After a couple of weeks, they didn’t feed us anymore.

  There were supposed to be pity scraps, weren’t there? The rotted produce that didn’t sell in the market. And the buckets were supposed to be refilled because someone remembered the men didn’t have the strength to pull their own from the nearest village well. Because someone cared enough that we didn’t die of thirst. But the buckets ran out of water a few weeks after I joined the men in the commune.

  I saw a man vanish one morning, his rotted dog mask clattering to the broken stone tiles in the middle of the commune. I felt compelled to trace the fading pattern on the mask, the nose, the mouth, the long, floppy ears, one half broken. I hoped it wasn’t hunger or thirst that had killed him. How long were these men going without food or water? How could I have been so lost in myself that I hadn’t noticed? I’d hardly eaten myself.

  The men were lying in front of their shacks, moaning. One man was half in a shack, half out, rolling around and pawing for an empty bucket. He scooped imaginary water with the scoop beside it, lifted the empty ladle up under his mask, and grunted when the ladle fell from his grip, clattering to the ground. “Water … ” It was the first word I’d heard him speak that wasn’t the name of his goddess.

  “Water,” another man nearby joined in.

  “Water,” they all repeated.

  I wanted to roll on the ground beside them. I wanted to not want water, to let myself vanish with the life I knew.

  But thirst won out. As did the constant chorus of “water” punctuated by the names of women from around the village.

  Those women couldn’t care less if you starved. I knew it. What I once wouldn’t have given for the problem of the lord to resolve itself without me. For him to suddenly vanish, for me to not know it was my fault.

  I stood, fighting the weakness in my legs, and grabbed the nearest empty bucket. Without responding to any of the anguished cries, I headed toward the well at the center of the village, not caring if I drew everyone’s notice as I dragged my feet through the crowd I knew I’d find there.

  I drew no one’s attention. And there was no crowd in the market.

  Merchants’ stalls were threadbare or empty. There was only a quarter of the amount of produce I expected to find and almost none of the cheese or fabric. The little things that no one needed, even if they were lovely, the gifts that men often bought their goddesses, were gone entirely. The rotting produce that would normally have gone to the commune was for sale at discounted prices, and it was only those cheaper items that the few villagers with baskets were buying
.

  “Come now,” said one merchant. “Don’t you have a young boy and girl at home? Don’t you want to feed them the best? Look at the color on this tomato!”

  A woman who seemed vaguely familiar grimaced and rifled through her basket for a single copper. “No. These.” There was a pile of wilted vegetables in front of her, and she shoved them eagerly into her basket after the man accepted her coin, sighing as he tucked it into a pouch at his waist.

  “I suppose no one can afford to pay for your husband’s music no more.” The man put his perfect tomato down gently with both hands in front of a sign that read, “High Quality Produce. Among the Last. 3 Coppers Each.” He scratched his chin. “Why is that, you think? What went wrong? Seems just a few weeks ago, the farmers had more food for us than we knew what to do with.”

  The woman tucked a wilted head of lettuce on top of her basket. “I don’t know.” Her lips pinched into a thin line. “Maybe you merchants pay them too little for their crops because you charge too much and no one’s buying. Now they don’t have enough copper to feed themselves anything but what they manage to hoard from the rest of us.”

  The merchant yawned and stretched a hand over his head. “But the prices aren’t so different, are they? I know we charged more than this for quality goods just a short time ago. And we had no need to sell this wilted trash.”

  I didn’t think the woman cared. “Good day,” she said, curtly. She met my eyes as she passed and looked at me from top to bottom, but she said nothing. I realized my bedraggled appearance wasn’t as out of place as I expected. The woman’s dress was coated in white dust, and I wondered what a musician’s wife was doing to get that way, and who was watching those children the merchant mentioned if she worked.

  “No one has enough copper.” The merchant stared overhead, not paying me any mind. “How could so much copper just vanish into thin air? Goddess help us.” He kept muttering to himself and I pushed forward down the path, my eyes widening as I took in the line in front of the well.

  They were all tired. No one was quite as tired or hopeless as the men in the commune, but there was something different in the air. Men still had their arms around women, and women still laid their heads against their men’s broad shoulders. But there were fewer smiles and less laughter.