by H. D. Gordon
Larry’s pock-marked face lit up with hope. “Oh, thank you, Princess Surah. Thank you so much. I—”
Surah held up a hand, cutting him off. “Don’t thank me just yet. I said I was going to let you off easy, not let you off. You’re going to get a choice.”
Larry swallowed so loud the people in the city probably heard it. “What kinda choice, my lady?”
Surah smiled and shrugged. “An easy one, I would think. You can keep your tongue… or your manhood, Larry, but only one. Not both. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.”
For two seconds Larry looked as though he was choking on his own spit. Then it all came out in rush. “Oh, please, no. Please, no! Please, don’t do that, Princess! I won’t never come near you again! I swear it! I swear it to the Gods! Please—”
“Time’s up, Larry. Should I decide for you?”
Long story short, she ended up taking his tongue. When it was done, Charlie helped her drag him over to the side of the road and prop him against a rock. Charlie said nothing the entire time, and as per usual, Surah had no idea what to make of that. She supposed it didn’t really matter at this point. Once a person witnessed you taking another person’s body part, there wasn’t too far to go from there. The only people she’d let see her do this in the past were the ones paying in flesh, and she felt oddly exposed to Charlie afterward, like he’d glimpsed behind her mask and seen the demons there. In a way, she supposed he had.
She paid closer attention to Charlie this time while she carried out the task, sneaking glances at him as he held Larry’s shoulders to the ground. Charlie didn’t cringe, not even once, as Larry screamed and screamed and darn near choked on his own blood. He didn’t pull his eyes away, either.
She wondered not for the first time just what those blue-green eyes of Charlie Redmine’s had seen in the past to make him so seemingly immune to such a sight.
CHAPTER 18
CHARLIE
They stuck to the trees on the walk to Candace’s house, keeping quiet as other groups of people made their way down Common Man’s Pass, all heading in the direction of the city. As the day grew darker, the groups of people became more frequent. In the twenty minutes it took to reach Candace’s house Charlie decided that the majority of the kingdom was travelling to the city for the public meeting tomorrow. He had never seen so many folks on this road. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. On one hand, this would help the princess and him blend into the crowd. On the other hand, it meant everyone would be gathered in one spot, making them an easy target for whatever his brother was planning.
His guitar was slung over his back, the crossbow in its place on his shoulder, and the knife tucked back in his boot. He thought of all that had happened in the past two days and again about how life came full circle. He had not carried a weapon since before he did his stint in Contrain, had not taken a life or even broken a law since leaving that place. Today, he had murdered a man and helped remove the tongue of another. It didn’t bother him as much as he wished it would have. He supposed some things were just like riding a bike. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw. Maybe be hadn’t changed as much as he liked to think.
Charlie looked over at Surah now, who seemed to be lost in her own thoughts, her expression turned inward, the moonlight making a sculpture of her fine profile. He watched her for a bit and wished he could reach into her mind and figure out just what was there. She never stopped surprising him. In one moment she could be sweet and poised, proper, and delicate. The next, she was cutting the fingers off Fae and the tongues out of common criminals. She was like a ball of juxtaposition, all soft curves and beauty wrapped over sharp edges and deadly thorns. What made things worse was that it made her somehow even more attractive to him.
He had to tell her the truth about everything. Tonight. He had to tell her the real reason she hadn’t left his mind since that long ago day at the lake. He had to show her the skeletons in his closet and introduce her to the ghosts of his past. He had to reveal the role he’d played in her pain, because now his love for her went beyond an infatuation built up from afar over time. Now his love for her could not be written about and played in a song, or equated using all the stars in the universe. The more time he spent with her, the more it became something that transcended words and stars and song. The more time he spent with her, the more the truth ate at him from the inside out, like a million tiny parasites.
He opened his mouth to say something. What, he didn’t know. Surah beat him to the punch. “Where did that man know you from?” she asked, breaking the silence around them the way a stone smashes through a window. In this case, the question was the stone, and Charlie felt like the window.
He’d said he’d tell her the truth, and now was as good a time as any. He let the words come out before he could stop them. “I spent three terms in Contrain,” he said, and tried to appear at ease as he waited for her reaction.
Her head whipped toward him so fast that her lavender curls flipped over her shoulder. He met her violet gaze steadily, but his heart was racing faster than a mouse runs from a hawk. He made sure his expression remained indifferent, and forced a smile away when he saw that she was doing the same. This girl was a great pretender, almost as good at it as he was.
“Three terms?” she asked.
Charlie nodded, waiting for the question that always followed this revelation. What’d you do to earn that?
She surprised him again when she said nothing. The silence around them seemed incredibly loud now, as if he could hear his heart beating in every chirp of the night bugs and whisper of the wind through the trees. She stayed quiet for so long that soon they found themselves on a small hill overlooking the house Candace had described after inviting them. Smoke rose from a small chimney, smearing a haze over the night sky, blurring the heavens above. A little garden sat around back, wooden stakes holding various vines and plants sticking out of the earth in neat rows.
Charlie was trying to decide whether to let the subject drop or not when she finally broke the quiet. Her voice was at its softest, a sweet pitch and low tone that made one want to lean close and listen. “That’s a long time,” she said.
Charlie nodded slowly, pulling his eyes away from her lips with effort. “Yeah, it was.”
She turned to face him now, studying his face closely. “I don’t know of many people who could survive that long in Contrain. I’ve heard only thirty percent of people live through half a term… Three terms is almost a guaranteed death sentence.”
Again, he nodded. “That sounds ‘bout right.”
His heart flipped in his chest when a small smirk formed on her pink lips. “So people wanting you dead is sort of your thing, huh?” she asked.
Charlie laughed at this, wondering at how she could make him do so even as the world seemed to be crumbling down around them. “Never thought of it that way, but yeah, I guess so,” he said. His hand reached up and smoothed a lock of hair behind her ear. He dropped it before it could do any more, and took a small step back from her. “Seems we got that in common.”
She nodded her agreement and looked back to the house. Part of him was hoping she would ask what he’d gone to prison for, that she would open that can of worms and then he would tell her the whole story, releasing the poison that had been plaguing him for so long. The other part of him knew she wouldn’t, so again he jumped before the fall could scare him off.
“Don’t you wanna know what I was doing there?” he asked. “How I got myself a three term sentence?”
From beneath her cloak he could see her chest rise and fall as she took a deep breath. She was looking down at the old lady’s small house again, giving him a view of her profile. He let his eyes wander from the tip of her chin to the top of her head and back again, trying to commit to memory each soft curve and perfect line of her face. He memorized the way the moonlight reflected from her violet eyes, making the one that was visible to him appear silver. He watched as her long, dark lashes fluttered closed when she took another
deep breath, pressing heavily against the porcelain of her cheeks.
He promised not to forget the way his heart beat fast and his stomach tingled when he was this near to her. No matter what lay ahead, he would hold onto that feeling, so he would always have it. Forever and ever.
When she spoke, he held to her words the way new leaves hold to their branches, the way the clouds hold to the sky. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to know what earned you three terms. Not right now, anyway.”
Surah turned to him again, and seeing her face full on made it a little hard for him to draw in air. It was quite insane that many times in his life he had literally laughed in the face of death and danger, but one look at her could bring him to his knees. Her head tilted back as she stared up at him, and he could see the mask she so often wore melting away slowly, like the last snowfall of a long, long winter.
“Besides,” she continued, “I doubt whatever you did to get it can be any worse than some of the things I’ve done. When you live as long as we do, eventually everybody ends up with a few bodies buried in their backyard. Right now, my own graveyard is plenty full. I don’t need to go peaking over the fence into yours.”
He could see tears forming in her eyes, but knew that she wouldn’t allow them to escape. He suspected she’d stopped crying over her troubles long ago, and this was a thought that made his heart ache and burn. It was a thought that made him hate himself more than he would ever admit.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, a smile on her lips again, lightening the mood instantly. “I won’t ask you what you did to earn a death sentence, and you don’t judge me when I have to cut body parts off of people who mean me harm—which, despite what you’ve seen recently, is not something I do very often… just for the record.”
He opened his mouth, preparing to just come out with it once and for all, to ignore her very intriguing suggestion and tell her the things she didn’t want to hear. It was his worst nightmare come to reality, worse than anything he’d had to do before in all his life. Worse, because he knew it would only hurt her to learn the truth, and he had hurt her enough already, even if she didn’t know it. Worse, because he never thought he’d actually have to tell her, never thought she would ever be close enough for him to tell her, and now she was, and it would be the greater of two evils to allow her to give her love to him without knowing the truth.
But Surah stepped forward right then and put her fingers to his lips, stopping the words there with the magnificent force of her touch. She shook her head once, lavender hair swishing across her forehead, her eyes gentle but serious, as if she somehow knew what he had been about to do, and was telling him again not to. Then she took his hand and began pulling him down the hill toward the small house, the chimney smoke obscuring the stars in the sky just above.
Just before they reached the door, she whispered, “Sometimes secrets are better left as such, Charlie.”
Then she knocked on the front door of the house, and they were ushered inside before Charlie could formulate any response to that.
And before he could tell her he was partly responsible for the deaths of her mother and sister.
CHAPTER 19
SURAH
“Charlie, I’m glad you decided to come,” said CJ, her voice a little deeper than Surah remembered it being before. Her eyes flicked disinterestedly at Surah, who found that her nails were digging into the palms of her hand. “Princess Surah,” CJ added.
Surah felt her princess-smile pull her lips up, the smile she used much more frequently than her real one. “Cindy-Joe,” she said, and nodded.
Candace came over and shooed her granddaughter out of the way, and Surah didn’t miss that CJ used this as an excuse to scoot closer to Charlie. Candace wiped her hands on her apron and gave Surah a low bow. “Hope you’re hungry, my lady,” she said. “I’m ‘fraid I prepared enough for an army. It ain’t often I get royalty at my dinner table.”
Surah glanced around and saw the house was clean but very cozy. The front door led into an eat-in kitchen with a small table arranged with eclectic dishes and settings surrounded by four chairs. This opened up into a dimly lit living room with mismatched furniture, and a short hall led off of it which Surah assumed led to the bedrooms and bathroom. It had been a very long time since she had been in a home so small, and it was a far cry from the high-ceilinged, huge rooms of her father’s castle, but it had a sense of homey comfort about it she knew the castle could never achieve, not if she lived in it another thousand years. At some point she had outgrown the vast chambers and endless halls.
“Sit wherever you like, my lady,” Candace said, taking a large platter of fried bird, mashed potatoes and broccoli and placing it at the center of the table.
They all took their places around the table and Surah was so lost in her thoughts that she nearly jumped out of her skin when Candace placed a hand over hers. “Do you pray before supper, my lady?”
Surah shrugged slightly. “I suppose it never hurts,” she said, noticing that CJ had taken hands with Charlie and her grandmother as well, and was running circles with her thumb over Charlie’s hand. She relaxed a little when he pretended not to notice, and placed her own hand in his free one. He smiled and gave her a small squeeze, and Surah relaxed further still.
Candace closed her eyes and led a prayer that thanked the Gods for everything from the sun that made her garden grow to the air that flowed in her lungs. Surah looked up to see that Charlie was staring at her, his greenish-blue eyes burning her across the small space. His fingers were rough and warm in her hand. The left side of his face was still swollen and sliced and had begun to turn black and blue in several places, but she thought she had never seen a man more beautiful than him, that perhaps he was more so for all his wounds, both those on the outside, and those within.
After the prayer concluded, they all dug into the food. Surah was pleasantly surprised to find Candace was an excellent cook, a skill that she’d obviously honed over a very long life. She was also pleasant to converse with, a quality Surah had found to be extremely rare, and one that had obviously not been passed onto her granddaughter.
CJ hardly said a word to Surah the whole time, and glanced at her even less. The girl’s eyes were only for Charlie, and she was leaning into him as she spoke in that low voice Surah suspected she used when she was trying to be sexy. Charlie was polite, answering her questions and not saying anything more. CJ repeatedly slapped at his arm and giggled at practically every word he uttered. Surah thought she should have thanked the Gods when Candace had been praying earlier that Charlie was extremely short-spoken. If she had to watch CJ touch his arm any more, she might decide to stab her own eyes out.
She wondered what Samson would think of this extreme thought, and decided she didn’t want to know.
Eventually, each of them had eaten all they could stand, including a fresh blackberry pie that Surah found more delectable than anything that had ever come out of the castle bakery. Candace began to clear the table, and when Surah offered to help clean up twice and was refused both times, she stood from the table and retrieved her cloak from the hook near the door where Candace had hanged it upon their arrival. She slung it over her shoulders and fastened it at the neck.
“Well, Ms. Waterford, thank you for having us. You are a wonderful cook, and I’d be honored to return this favor at the castle someday.”
Candace waved a hand, a deeply creased smile on her old face. “Honor was all mine, my lady. And please, call me Candy,” she added, giving Surah another small bow. Then she turned to Charlie and patted him gently on the shoulder. “I know you two have places to be, but you’re welcome to stay the night here if you want. The Pass ain’t so safe after dark, and the city is close enough to reach by mid-day if you start out early tomorrow. You could go with us, since we’re gonna be headin’ to that meetin’ anyhow.”
Surah and Charlie exchanged a glance. Charlie said, “You’ve been kind enough to us already, ma’am. We don’t want to impo
se—”
Candace waved a hand, cutting him off. “You two ain’t an imposition. You saved me and my granddaughter from big trouble earlier. All I did was give you a meal. I’d hardly call us even. Besides, I got two extra rooms down the hall. You look like you could use a good rest.”
CJ gave Charlie a toothy grin that made Surah’s fists clench involuntarily. “You should stay,” she said, and her eyes flicked to Surah. “But I guess our place might not be up to a princess’s standards.”
Candace rolled her eyes and began to apologize, but Surah smiled and spoke before the old lady could get a chance. “That’s very generous of you, ma’am,” she said, and looked over at CJ. “We’d be honored if you would have us for the night.”
Candace smiled and began running around grabbing extra blankets and towels for them. CJ slipped out of sight around the corner of the hall with one last flick of her hair, saying something about how she was going to make herself more comfortable.
When they were semi-alone in the kitchen, Charlie gave her a look that said what the hell?
Surah leaned in close to him and her jaw clenched on its own accord when she picked up a whiff of CJ’s cheap perfume on his shirt. “We have nowhere else to go,” she whispered, not about to admit that CJ’s little jab had caused her to agree to stay just to prove a stupid point. “And we’re better off hiding out here than somewhere in the city.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Besides, these two seem relatively harmless.”
One side of Charlie’s mouth pulled up. “Relatively?”
Her next words came out before she could stop them. “Well, CJ seems as though she could jump on you at any second, so yes, relatively.”
Charlie’s smile grew, causing a little blood to trickle from his split lip, and only as she saw this did Surah realize how childishly jealous her last words had sounded. Now she knew her cheeks were going red, and she was grateful when Candace spoke from behind her in the living room, giving her an excuse to turn away from him.
