by Gow, Kailin
Yet it pains me to think that you will never be able to fly with me (although such pain is mitigated when I think that I might, rather, hold you close and tight in my arms, and thus take you spinning towards the stars). There is nothing more exhilarating than the feeling of stretching out one's wings into the open air, feeling them beat onwards towards the sky, letting a cool breeze waft over one's body. I crave the feeling of spiraling higher and higher, pushing the air downwards, pushing myself upwards – looking down as the world below me gets smaller and smaller, and as the universe seems bigger and bigger.
Sometimes, I feel that if I beat long and hard enough with my wings – longer and harder than any fairy has done before – I will be able to ascend so high that Feyland itself becomes invisible to me. Perhaps then I will be able to reach the top of the mysterious Mount Malum, where so many stories speak of the gift of immortality being handed down – or perhaps I will reach the top of Mount Eberim, which stretches into the other sun of Feyland. Perhaps I will go further still, so high up that even those mountains are but a memory to me – and then I will reach the stars. Who knows what other worlds exist on the backs of these stars – stars that look like fairy wings, gossamer and shimmering and breathtaking in their beauty? Perhaps there are other fairy kingdoms, other brands of magic, which can only be reached with that special kind of strength that gives my wings the courage to reach them. Perhaps the ancient magic that once infused Cathon with his power comes from those celestial bodies. Who knows – or will ever know? - the secrets of the universe?
Whenever I fly, all these things cross my mind. I become aware of how small Feyland is – even in all its loveliness, even in all my love for it. There is so much more to discover, Breena! The land beyond those two impassable mountains – Malum and Eberim – which perhaps I will never discover. Other planets, other sun and moon and stars! I know that in your land, Breena, men have built ships with no magic at all, and ascended not only to the moon but indeed higher still, sent satellites to planets that are not even visible to your mortal eyes on a clear night! Why can I not fly higher, Breena? Why can I not go there?
My frustration grows. What good is flying – that activity that was once a salve for my pain, that once calmed my burning nerves – when there is so much I cannot do? I cannot see you – cannot take you in my arms – cannot make peace, make a world safe for you and for all those that you love. What good are wings when I cannot use them to fly to your side?
One day, I tell myself – my darling Breena. One day I will use these wings of mine for the only thing they are truly good for, flying to you. And then I shall hold you so tightly – tighter than I've ever held you before – and we shall fly together to all of these places that I have named. The stars. The planets. The lands beyond the mountains that mark the edge of our known world. Your love will give my wings the strength to bear us both – as a poet in your land once said - “beyond the sunset.” This hope keeps me alive – it is this hope, and not the snowflake pendant that dangles so uselessly from my neck – that sustains me.
Goodnight, my love.
Letter 15
My Dearest Breena,
I can bear it no longer! Enough – I feel my body cry aloud in despair – enough! I thought I could deal with my sorrow by writing you these letters, telling you stories – regaling you with tales from our shared past and from the fairy history we share. I thought that if I could only share with you my inmost self – the myths I grew up on, the memories I have of my mother and my father, the moment we first kissed – I could somehow join you, be by your side in some way. But it is not to be! I have given you all of myself in my words, and yet I hear no answer from you. At first I thought you were merely being prudent – I imagined you in my mind's eye (for I thought it was telepathy – perhaps it is only a trick of my fevered brain) reading each of my long-pored-over letters, pressing them to your lips, scenting them with your sweet perfume, and locking them away in a hidden drawer all your own. I imagined that you read each letter each night before going to sleep, pressing them to your breast, even (did my mind deceive me?) placing them under your pillow. I imagined that these letters were like food to you – that receiving them sustained you even as writing them kept me alive, kept me sane. I imagined that you wrote me letters, not fearing to send them lest some treacherous courtier in your palace intercept them and let the public know of your affection for me. That was the only response that my mind could come up with to explain your silence – a silence that borders on cruelty.
It has been three months and I have heard nothing from you. Not a word – not a stroke or an iota – and your silence is more agonizing than the mythical Fires of Landau. Indeed, I would gladly bathe in the scalding flames, anoint my angry heart with lava, if it would mean a moment's distraction from the pain your absence has caused me. What has happened, Breena? I know – rationally – that this cannot be any trick or intention on your part. You would never willingly hurt me– I know that well. And yet this pain has become so great that my letters alone cannot bear it, cannot ferry it away from me. I have become so thin, Breena, that you would not recognize me! My cheeks are pale and hollow – the bones like the blades of swords. My eyes are ferocious with lack of sleep; my heart groans and I cannot take food or merriment, because you own too much of the world around me. You own the sounds of music (for they remind me of the fairy waltz!) and the taste of fruit (for they remind me of the nectar we sucked together in the orchards of the Summer Court in our youth). You own laughter (for when I hear it I think of the tinkling sound of your voice) and believe me – Breena – you own my tears. There is nothing in this palace – this palace so great that it would take two days to pass through all its rooms and corridors – that does not make me think of you, and so my thoughts are bound and shackled, tortured on the rack, by the very absence of the torturer.
What agony is this – when she who causes me agony is the only thing that can bring about its relief? I thought I knew pain when my father died, when I buried him in the warrior's way, and read the ancient verses of Rosenbush over his body. But it was nothing compared to this. With the death of my father, his absence signified something greater – his tragedy had in it the beauty of sacrifice. And so it meant something, and so it had meaning – I could think back upon his life and see in it a single unity, a snake eating its own tail – he was a brave man, a great warrior, and in his death he was all of those things, and he could have met his death no other way than by saving the country that he loved. It is not nonsense – and so I could bear it.
But this, Breena, this! It is the very nonsense that pains me so. You and I are in love – we are each other's intended – the universe wills us to be bound in each other's arms, our limbs intertwined like vines on the bower. To think back upon all the struggles we have gone through together, to remember each trial we passed through together, running the gauntlet of our love, and to think that it means nothing – that it ends in silence. Now that is unbearable! I could stand it if we died together, I think. I could stand it if I died for you, and if our love ended with us at one – in this tragedy from which it seems there is no real end. But not this. Not this silence – this I cannot bear! For in your silence I can hear only chaos. The ancient magic that once sang its haunting melodies all around us is absent – there is no magic in this silence. There is no meaning in it.
There is only chaos. There is only silence.
I thought I knew madness before, when I raged with desire for you. But that was no madness. For madness is not what occurs when one's desire is out of one's reach. Madness is what occurs when the very underpinnings of existence – my love for you, my understanding of you as my-beloved and myself as he-who-loves-her – begin to fall apart, when the world ceases to have any meaning at all.
They say in your religion the world before its creation was a formless void. That formless void has surrounded me, is overtaking me. Language means nothing. Words are gibberish. Nothing is anything – for the only thing that was
ever real for me, my darling Breena, was you.
Letter 16
My Dearest Breena,
Tell me I am mistaken! I beg of you – tell me that I am wrong. Tell me it is all a lie, a trick, a joke! I will forgive you – I swear it. I will cast aside my anger and my pain and take you in my arms, and bear you no rancor for this trickery. I will love you no less (Breena, don't you understand – every day that passes I love you more!) nor will I bear you any grudge. Tell me it is a political ploy, designed to cast off suspicion from your love for me – that you have no intention of going through with it! Tell me that it is a vicious gossip concocted by your enemies – tell me anything, Breena, but what is true! (Even a lie, Breena, would cool the fires of my heart, and allow me to overcome this agony! I want you to lie to me!)
Tell me you will not marry him.
It was last night that I heard the news (not news! No – last night I heard “that vicious lie.” That is the only thing I can bear to write). I was sitting at dinner with my mother and my sister – Shasta pale and wan with the absence of her own love, and still refusing to speak to my mother in anything besides those curt words of “Yes” and “No” at her thwarted love for Rodney (how much happier she is, still, than I). And a messenger entered from the Summer Court, his eyes full of fear. His terror was so great that I thought at first that he was preparing to deliver the worst missive of all – that you had died and left me to mourn you.
“What is it, lad?” I bade him come closer.
He bowed heavily, trembling so quickly that the letter he held fell from his fingers.
Dead! I thought. You must be dead – why else would his fear be so great? What else could he possibly convey to me that would make him think my response would be one of such great anger – such great rage? And yet you could not be dead! I was sure that if something had happened to you, I would have felt it, for your bones are my bones. Your blood is my blood. Your life is my life, and I felt sure in my heart that at the moment your life gave out, my knees would have collapsed beneath me and I would have died too. (How naïve I was, Breena, to think that we had that connection! How foolish! There I was, wrapped around your finger, fearing for your life, when you had long since severed it!)
“What is it?” I could feel myself choke on my own voice. “What has happened in the Summer Court?”
The messenger picked up his letter and fumbled with it. “I am bound to announce,” he mumbled, staring very hard at the letter as if to make clear that – as much as it pained him – none of it was his own invention. “that there is to be a marriage in the Summer Court!”
“Rodney!” Shasta cried, but I felt with a horrible pang in my heart that it was not Rodney who was to be wed.
“Between the Queen Breena and the Wolf Prince Logan” the messenger finished in a single, hurried breath, and scrambled from the room before my rage could ricochet off the drafty beams of the ceilings and come to bear upon his head.
For a moment I was numb. For a moment it was not true – it never had been true! It was a lie – a political ploy – something, anything but what it was. And then it hit me. All the telepathy that I had tried so hard to wield in months gone by, the times I had tried to reach you and found your mind closed to me, came rushing to me in an instance. I saw you with him, Breena – saw you kissing him, saw you cuddling together in the orchards that were once the flower-gardens of our love, saw him slipping your clothes from your body...I saw and felt and experienced in the depths of my being your passion for this savage Wolf, to take advantage of the loyalty you felt to him...your gratitude – not (no! It cannot be!) your love.
And the visions I saw as my mind connected at last with yours turned to fever-dreams, the hot hallucinations of blood boiled and burned, and I collapsed immediately, screaming your name – restrained at last by the efforts of my mother and sister. I remember Shasta weeping, her heart moved to pity by my predicament, but she nevertheless used all her magic, and all my mother's too, to keep me from rushing to the Wolf and tearing out his throat that very night.
And now it is morning, and the madness has passed, but the pain, Breena, has not. I beg you to tell me it is not true, but what I see in my mind's eye – your love for the Wolf, your passion for him, the days and nights you have spent in each other's arms – make me believe that it is no lie. You will marry him, he whom you love – you who are my intended, whom the ancient magic had destined for my arms – and I swear to you, Breena, the moment you are his, that moment I shall smash my silver snowflake upon the hearth and welcome death gladly. It will come like a woman in a healer's garb, like a comforter, with jars and ointments of oblivion, to heal my ragings at last, and smooth my way into those happy lands of nothingness.
But I beg you – at least – write to me. Explain what has happened. I will restrain my grief. I will restrain my pain. Only speak to me – tell me something – answer all my unanswered questions – and then I shall let you and your new love be.
What is it they say in your land? “Best wishes?” The words turn to ash in my mouth.
Letter 17
My Dearest Breena,
No word from you? No word at all? I had at least hoped that, despite your seeming love for this Wolf who has snatched you from my loving arms, you would have the kindness to alleviate the misery you have caused. Even the basest thief in Feyland, when he strikes a man down to steal a few pieces of gold, leaves his body on the main road for his widow to find and bury, rather than leaving it in the heart of the forest for the carrion to feast upon! Even he knows that there is nothing worse for the bereaved than to have no explanation for their loss – to wait and wonder and reflect upon the past and ask the silent voices of magic what has occured?
For that is what I am doing now. One week has gone by and I have spent all the daylight hours scanning the sky, my eyes tracing the path from my sun to yours, hoping that a winged horse or fearsome unicorn would bring me your response. Oh, it would slash my heart open – I deny it not! - but it would be better to have the final blow at once than this waiting, this uncertainty. I know you are lost to me but I do not know why or how. My love for you, my trust in you – wars with the information I have received and the images, now imprinted in my mind, of you and that Wolf writhing together in the bed I hoped would once be mine! I have heard confirmation from another messenger – after beating the first to make sure he lied not – that the story of your marriage is true; my recurring dreams of your pre-nuptial bliss only make it clearer that I have not been deceived – that is to say, I have been deceived, but only by you.
What have I done, Breena? When we parted we swore to wait for each other, to bear our parting with strength and courage. We swore that we would reunite one day, in the happy aftermath of peace. And now do you break that oath – an oath as sacred as the love that binds us? I have read over my letters and again, scanning them for any signs of offense they may have caused you. If the story of my love – of the cruelty of my childhood, of my mother's bitterness towards your father – have angered you then I apologize; I sought only to tell you the truth about a life you no longer remember. And now you seem to have forgotten not just our halcyon days of youth in Feyland, but indeed the newer days of our love as well!
I thought I could bear this pain. I thought I could be strong. Am I not the strongest fairy in Feyland, a true noble prince, trained to bear far worse attacks than those made upon my heart by the simple – yet so penetrating – dagger of love? Did not my mother warn me, when I was a child, of the inflammation such emotions would cause – did she not caution me against it? And I in my foolishness dared to doubt her! I in my foolishness imagined that the strength of our love could overcome all the barriers set up against it, that our love could somehow be stronger than war, stronger than death.
But I know now that it was all a lie. It is all deceit. I can no longer control my magic – sparks fly from my fingers and shatter the windows, throw the servants into walls, make the walls of the castle crumble. My mother and Sh
asta have been forced to place me in the dungeon where I once spent so many tearful childhood nights out of fear that the magic I cannot control will destroy the palace or kill its denizens. I do not begrudge them this decision – they have been kind enough to grant me at least a pen and paper, so that I may continue my writing.
“Poor Kian,” my mother whispered to me. “I never wanted this for you.”
So this is what my mother feared. Blue fire ricocheting off the dungeon walls – turned back onto myself so that my skin is scalded by its heat. My wings beating uncontrollably against the walls of my cage. Glamouring so quickly that I no longer have a face at all – but a formlessness borne out of a succession of faces. And the horrible telepathy that strikes me when I least expect it, making me a privy to your every pleasure, your every ecstasy with this beast that you now love. I try to shut my eyes, shut my ears – this terrible voyeurism that causes me such agony, but I cannot. Our magical bond remains unbroken, even as the bonds of our love have been severed.
Like your father before you, you have courted love, and now you must see the effects of its desolation. You have drawn me to you, intoxicated me with your perfume, your light eyes and dark lips, and now here I am – your victim, your poor unworthy servant, locked in a stone dungeon with only a sliver of the moon for a writing-light, my magic running rampant – a demon I cannot control. I am infected, invaded, overcome. And I know now the truth of my mother's words – and the falsity of my own.
Love is death, Your Highness. Love is pain. With love there will never be peace – not in my heart and not in the land. And so I abjure it forever, throw it aside – I long for the cool hatred of my earlier days, for then – and only then – had I the strength to harness this demon that is my magic, jerk back its reigns and make it do my bidding.
