Jasmyn

by Alex Bell

  ‘What’s the matter with this horse?’ Ben said after checking the bridle, whilst I sat in my saddle helpless with laughter.

  ‘What?’ Ben demanded. ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘It’s your voice,’ I gasped at last. ‘He only does it when you talk.’

  Ben pulled a quizzical face and turned back to Ed. ‘Testing, testing, testing,’ he said - to which Ed instantly began to move his lips in that ridiculous way. ‘Hmm. You seem to be right,’ Ben admitted, swinging up into the saddle and patting Ed’s neck before picking up the reins.

  ‘Play something for me, Jaz,’ Ben pleaded as the scene switched again and we were in our old house together. When I protested that I was in the middle of a gripping chapter, he snatched the book from me and said with a grin, ‘I’m your fiancé. And I’m commanding you to play for me now, not later.’

  Grumbling, I got off the couch and went over to my violin case, lifting the lid as I turned around to grab a piece of sheet music.

  When I looked back, I yelped in alarm at the sight of the beautiful, skeletal, blue and silver Violectra nestled in the velvet interior. It was supposed to have been a Christmas present but, after having it made in the design and colours he’d picked out, Ben was too excited about the violin to wait so long before giving it to me ...

  We were engaged after two years of dating - picked out the horse-drawn carriage and the church and the honeymoon in the Caribbean together. And then ... that was when my memory got hazy. I wasn’t sure how but, at some point in between getting engaged to Ben and getting married, something went horribly, horrendously, hideously wrong - and it was Liam I had married instead - whilst somehow never being aware of any difference between them, as if I had been engaged to Liam all along. But I realised now that it was Ben I had been best friends with all through school, Ben I had fallen in love with and Ben I had agreed to marry.

  The daredevil stuff was all Liam. Ben had never jumped from a plane or driven a high-speed car in his life. But he had sat silently with me in the stables, watching for faeries; he had looked after me at school - been put in detention for pulling Heidi’s plaits; he had gone with me to Munich to drink Glühwein and eat gingerbread outside in the snow; he had bought me a blue and silver Violectra and he was the one who had made me the happiest person in the world one day when he asked me to be his wife.

  All the things I’d thought were different about Liam after we married made sense now. I saw us together in my mind’s eye - eating at the table, watching TV on the couch, sleeping in the same bed ... And I knew that I had never loved him. But - somehow - I had married him anyway.

  ‘Ben,’ I croaked, looking across at him in the shadowy dimness of the catacombs. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘How did what happen?’ he asked, sounding stiff and wary.

  ‘How did I marry Liam when I was in love with you?’

  I had never felt two such entirely conflicting emotions. On the one hand I was so overjoyed and relieved I could have sobbed because the man I’d been mourning for months wasn’t really dead and buried back home in an English graveyard but standing right here in the catacombs with me, and all I wanted was to fling my arms around him, touch his face, kiss his lips and reassure myself that he really was alive.

  But, at the same time, guilt, misery and shame wracked through me because, however it had happened, I’d married his brother and been apart from Ben for over a year. And now everything was different between us and could never go back to being the same. Even the way he was looking at me was different. There was no warmth in his gaze whatsoever. In fact he looked so cold that for a brief moment I even wondered whether he remembered it all wrong too.

  ‘You do remember being engaged to me, don’t you?’ I asked. I couldn’t help glancing down at his left hand and seeing the band of white gold there on his ring finger. There was no sick fiancée called Heidi. It had been me all along.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I remember being engaged to you. I remember everything. You’re the one who forgot.’

  ‘I ... I didn’t forget,’ I said, wincing at his accusatory tone. ‘I just ... remembered it all wrong. Who’s Heidi?’ I asked. I knew that there was a woman called Heidi, for I had spoken to her on the phone myself.

  ‘She’s my cleaner. It was the first name that came into my head.’

  ‘How did this happen?’ I asked, pressing the palms of my hands to my eyes, desperately trying to find some stable ground to shake the surreal feeling of unreality that had settled on me.

  I knew I had done it; I remembered it clearly enough - remembered thinking that I loved Liam and wanted to spend my life with him. But all my memories of him had actually been of Ben. How could my mind have got so messed up like that? A smooth transition of love and friendship from one man to the other without my even noticing that they’d changed.

  ‘He used the swansong to enchant you,’ Ben said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To punish me. It was my fault he got dragged into the lake that night. I warned the swans he was coming. There was something wrong with him - there always was, right from the day he was born. I knew it and my parents knew it. He was ... unbalanced. Not right in the head. Sometimes he did things ... But he was able to disguise it almost all of the time and appear normal.’

  I found I hardly cared in that moment who’d done what and why. All I cared about was that Ben was there and he was alive. I was filled with the overpowering urge to touch him and reassure myself that he was real. But when I reached out towards him, he stepped back as if by instinct. My hand dropped to my side and I was filled with hurt for a moment before anger and frustration and regret started bubbling up inside me. However it had happened, I had married Liam. I had married Ben’s brother. Been his wife for almost a year. There could be no going back to the way things had been with Ben after that. I was Liam’s widow. And now everything between us was ruined. I glared at him. ‘Why did you let me do it?’ I said angrily. ‘Why didn’t you stop me? Or stop him?’

  ‘How should I have done that, Jasmyn?’ Ben retorted, just as angrily. ‘What could I possibly have done? You thought he was me! You would never have believed me if I’d told you otherwise! You would have thought I was a lunatic!’

  ‘So you just stood back and let him marry me?’ I raged, impatiently wiping away the tears that were streaming down my face. ‘You bloody coward! How could you not even try to—’

  ‘I did try, damn it!’ Ben interrupted. ‘I’ve done nothing but try since this whole nightmare began! What was I supposed to do, Jasmyn? Kidnap you?’

  ‘You should have come to me! You should have come and told me the truth!’

  ‘You would never have believed me, Jasmyn, never!’ Ben said harshly, touching me for the first time by gripping my arms and almost shaking me as he went on bitterly. It was all the worse because I knew that he was right. I had loved Liam absolutely because I had thought that he was Ben. ‘Don’t blame me for this!’ Ben hissed. ‘You’re the one who left me! How could it have been so easy for you to forget us? How could you not even see me when you looked at me?’

  He let me go and stood back as I put my head in my hands and wept. The pain had changed but it was just as bad. Before the enchantment lifted I’d believed the man I loved was dead. Now I knew that he was right here beside me and had been since this whole nightmare began. But what was once there was now broken, for I had married his brother and filled the space between us with a hurt and bitterness so intense that it was never going to heal no matter how much time passed.

  Ben was right: I should have been able to resist the black magic. I should never have mistaken Liam for Ben no matter how strong the bewitchment. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. I was disgusted with myself. How could I ever hope to have Ben touch me again now, knowing that Liam had been there before him?

  You must see how hard all this is for Ben ... The phrase I had heard so many times after the funeral came back to me now and - at long last - I understood it. N
o wonder Ben’s mother hated me. No wonder she and half his family had refused to attend the wedding. What must it have looked like to them when, a mere two weeks before the wedding, they learned that I was marrying Liam instead of Ben? A decision so sudden that most of the people turning up to the ceremony were still expecting to see Ben as his was the name on the invitations. He and I had planned it together, picked out our honeymoon hotel together ... And then, at the last second, I had married Liam instead. How unforgivably cruel I must have seemed to them all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said wearily. ‘Don’t cry. None of this is your fault.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone say anything to me?’ I said.

  ‘They did,’ Ben replied. ‘I know my mother spoke to you about it just before the wedding even though I asked her not to. She told me it was like you weren’t even hearing her. I expect the same thing happened if anyone else commented about it.’

  I had a vague memory of talking to Ben’s mother around that time but it was hazy, as if I might have imagined it or dreamt it, and I couldn’t remember a word she’d said.

  ‘I didn’t realise you’d transferred your memories of me onto Liam,’ Ben said. ‘Until you told me in Munich that Liam had given you the Violectra, I thought you remembered being engaged to me as well. But even if I’d known that you didn’t, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I could have shown you photos of the two of us together and the enchantment would have made you block them out, or see Liam in my place. The same thing would have happened whenever anyone made any comment to you about our relationship, although I expect that stopped when he died.’

  I thought back to the odd comments people had made to me about Ben since Liam’s death - my mother, his mother, Laura ...

  In my mind I could pinpoint the exact moment when the two of them had switched. I got home one day three weeks before the wedding to find Liam standing outside waiting for me because he’d supposedly lost his key. A week later we walked into the house to find Ben drunk in our kitchen, saying he’d heard from his mother that we were engaged and that he wanted to talk to Liam about a business proposal. Then they had left the house together and I didn’t see Ben again until Liam’s funeral.

  ‘You just left!’ I shouted, my voice sounding horribly loud down there in the catacombs. ‘Liam waltzed in and you just left me there in our house with him! How could you? How could you? I was bewitched - you weren’t! What possible excuse can you have for not even trying?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Ben said coldly. ‘Blaming each other isn’t going to help.’

  ‘But you are to blame!’ I said loudly. ‘You should have come back for me!’ I saw him flinch as if I’d struck him and I felt guilty for laying all the blame on him but was quite unable to stop myself from going on. If I stopped feeling angry then I’d feel a crippling sense of loss even worse than before and I didn’t think I could bear it. ‘You should have fought for us every day instead of rolling over for Liam and making it so easy for him to do what he did! I wouldn’t have believed you at first. Maybe I never would have.

  But you didn’t even try! You just left Liam to it and moved to Germany. Oh, I could kill you for being such a coward!’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, Jasmyn,’ Ben said in a voice so full of weariness that it squeezed painfully round my heart. ‘Maybe I’ve just done everything all wrong. Perhaps the entire thing is, like you say, totally my fault—’ He broke off with a wet coughing sound and clapped one hand over his mouth, his shoulders heaving with the sudden struggle to breathe as if he had just swallowed something that had gone down the wrong way. Something wasn’t right. It sounded like he was choking on his own tongue. When he dropped down onto his knees, I thought at first that he was being sick. But then I realised that the only thing coming out of his mouth was feathers. They were bedraggled and covered in saliva - and they were long and black ... very much like the kind that might belong to a swan ...

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ I almost whispered as he sat back on his heels, remembering the way his eyes had turned red earlier. There were at least ten large feathers strewn about the bones on the floor, looking ugly and twisted and unnatural ...

  He carefully avoided my gaze as he pushed himself back to his feet, pale as a corpse with dark rings beneath his eyes. ‘I had to do it,’ he muttered. ‘It was the only way.’

  ‘What did you do, Ben?’ I said, fear making my voice sharp and angry.

  He turned his head to meet my eyes and said flatly, ‘I turned myself into a knight.’

  23

  Ice Palace

  ‘A swan knight?’ I said, staring at him in the dim gloom.

  ‘Yes, yes, a swan knight, what else?’ Ben replied impatiently. Then he angled his head, breathed a sigh of relief and said, ‘Kini’s coming.’

  ‘What?’ I said, wondering what on earth he could be talking about.

  But a moment later there was the sudden clattering of hooves on stone. The sound made me jump. Deep underground was the very last place I had ever expected to find a horse. When he rounded the corner and stopped before us, however, tossing his glossy head, he somehow seemed no more out of place down there than the scattered bones crunching beneath his hooves.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Lukas sent him,’ Ben muttered. ‘We need to get out of here.’

  But first he knelt down again amongst the skulls and picked up the petals that had fallen from the rose. I noticed that they no longer had my name on them. When he’d gathered them all up, Ben closed his fist around them for a brief moment and, when he opened his hand, the swansong had become a plain black chain that he hung around his neck and tucked beneath his coat.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, standing up and turning back to me.

  He linked his hands to give me a leg-up onto Kini’s back. With no mounting block and no stirrups it wasn’t easy for him to get onto the horse after me, but eventually he was seated and I held on to him for balance as the horse instantly picked up into a trot. If I hadn’t wrapped my arms around Ben I would have fallen off so I really had no choice, but still I cringed to feel him stiffen at my touch.

  When Kini reached the wall, he didn’t slow down but went right through it, as if it was a projected image rather than a solid thing. I felt nothing as we passed through and out the other side, where we found ourselves in a castle that seemed to be made - entirely - out of ice.

  Kini snorted in the sudden cold and his breath misted before him as his hooves crunched on the snowy floor of a great hallway that glittered blue in the light from the sun outside. Tall pillars made from ice bricks stretched the length of the corridor, supporting the ceiling. Even the chandeliers suspended above us were made of ice. It was something from a fairy tale. It had to be. Nothing this exquisite could possibly exist in the real world. It completely took my breath away. Kini must have brought us straight back to faeryland.

  At first I thought that there was no one else nearby but then Lukas walked around to Kini’s head. The horse pushed its muzzle into Lukas’s palm and I heard the crunch as it took a lump of sugar from him.

  ‘Good boy,’ Lukas said softly, his breath misting in the freezing air. Then he looked up at us. ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben replied.

  I loosened my grip on him so that he could slide off the horse’s back. Then he turned back and helped me to dismount. His hands were off me as soon as my feet touched the floor.

  ‘And the enchantment?’ Lukas asked, glancing at me.

  ‘Broken,’ Ben grunted - not sounding at all happy about it, for all that it was something he had been trying to achieve for more than a year now.

  Riderless once again, Kini turned and trotted away down the hallway, his glossy black coat even more striking against so much white. His hooves rang on the ice for a few moments, then he faded away and was gone - more like the ghost of a horse than a real one.

  ‘Are we in faeryland?’ I blurted out, quite sure that Lukas was going to say yes.

/>   Instead he just flashed me a slightly quizzical smile and said, ‘No, we’re in the Ice Hotel. In Sweden. I know someone who works here.’

  I knew of the Ice Hotel. Of course I did. It had been a glorious fantasy in my head ever since Ben brought photos of it into school one day after a relative had been there.

  ‘I’ve seen your house, Jaz,’ he said. ‘Your real one, I mean.’

  He showed me the photos and I was enchanted by the way the ice turned different colours depending on the sun outside, from blue to green to turquoise to white. Everything was made out of ice, from the walls to the beds to the hollowed-out glasses served in the ice bar. Everyone wore snowsuits and boots and gloves and furry hats to protect against the constant minus-five-degree temperature maintained inside. When the sun went down, hundreds of candles were tucked into ice nooks and crannies around the palace. There was no other place in the world like it. The Ice Hotel was a piece of faeryland and Ben had referred to it as my house because it looked every bit like a snow princess’s castle. After we got engaged we had even said that we would go there one day when we were older and richer for one of our wedding anniversaries. We’d thought we’d probably have to wait a long time because it was so expensive. Now we were here, but not at all in the circumstances I had dreamt about.

  I drew breath to demand that they tell me everything so that I could get it all straightened out in my head. But when I looked at Ben, who was lifting the black chain over his head and handing it to Lukas, I saw that his eyes were that vivid shade of red again. Lukas noticed it too and said calmly as he put the chain around his own neck, ‘I think you’ve got something in your eye.’

  It seemed that Ben hadn’t been aware of it until Lukas spoke. He hurriedly blinked his eyes closed, but when he opened them they only looked normal for a bare few seconds before the red colour seeped back into them, like ink spreading through water.