The Calyx Charm

by May Peterson

  In a flame-colored gown and the scent of apocalypse in my hair, I went out to face my father.

  The street tilted down like the palm of a hand, so that even with the sun overhead shadows dripped to fill the slope. He appeared around the corner, accompanied by blood-thick shadows. He was a white stab in the color of the city, a knot of men around him like armor, and his gaze landed on me with the force of a slap.

  A bitter, burning impulse stirred in my guts. If any of my power had been left, my calyx charm would be blooming around me by reflex.

  How exquisitely I hated him. It was almost a kind of pleasure, like the way the stink of old stone carried a nostalgic sweetness with it.

  I waved from the balcony. “What are you waiting for? Over here!”

  I couldn’t see him well from this distance, but he radiated grim delight that flushed my senses like oil.

  One man accompanied him up the stairs. A flash of intuition told me Father himself was not armed. It made no difference—there wasn’t an officer in the city that would help a mollyqueen over the lord prince.

  My heart screamed as he drew new, my hate violent and boiling. But I stood firm, arms at my sides, and let my contempt rise from me like incense.

  “Well.” Father tilted his hat, tall and inhuman-looking in flawless white. His man stayed a step behind. Father’s expression remained ice-like. “Violetta. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  I didn’t move. “We will step into my flat. We will talk quietly. And you will lift no finger, give no order, to harm or frighten any of my neighbors.”

  He fiddled with his hat idly, smile turning up with sickening fondness. “How dear. Still making demands of me.” He turned to his man with a smirk. “Children never quite grow up, do they? Always imagining the world revolves around them.”

  I produced the absence of a reaction, watched his humor fade before I spoke again. “You came here to talk. If your reason were anything else, you could have simply contrived it. You want me to know that you’re able to find me, and you want me to listen to you. I’ll listen. But my condition is you stay your hand in using bystanders as hostages. Refuse that, and you can fuck off the way you came, or have your soldiers kidnap me. No one will stop you in doing what you want to some random mollygirl.” I grinned, luridly, with teeth. Father’s soldier blanched like he was about to vomit. “But I won’t talk. So you have one chance.”

  A blank moment passed in which Father’s face gave nothing away. Then, a sigh passed through his lips. “Such melodrama. Of course I will not threaten your neighbors. Shall we?” He gestured at the door.

  I waited three full moments before letting them in. My heart continued clawing at the back of my rib cage, shrieking get him out get him out get him out, but my hands did an admirable job of not shaking as I drew the curtain, pulled out some chairs, and poured myself a shot of rum. Over my shoulder, I winked. “I’d offer you something to drink, except that would give the impression you were actually welcome, and I wouldn’t want to mislead you.”

  Father frowned at the chair, did not take it, and set his hat on a windowsill. His man maintained a stiff two steps behind him. Just as well.

  Father’s eyes roamed my flat, narrowing as he took in whatever details his harsh, mechanistic consciousness found. It felt nauseatingly like the way he had raided my naked body with that same vision, every swing of his gaze a sword blow.

  History itself would not deny that in some ways, Father would be lost without me. My prescience had guided his revolution. Locks of my hair had armored his soldiers. My power shielded him from death. He seemed to wholly rely on me.

  Yet I always felt helpless in his presence. Especially when alone with him. Any love I’d once felt for him was stained with violation, so that I couldn’t tell when that feeling had truly begun.

  A quality almost like pain moved across his face. “Is this worth it? Do you really find it so preferable to endure conditions like this rather than live with me?”

  The tone of loss in his voice confused me enough to pause. But the answer was easy. “Yes.” He didn’t need to know that conditions like this were perfectly lovely. He could have asked that question about a sewer duct and the answer wouldn’t have changed.

  His expression was flat. “I suppose it comes down to the freedom to live as a mollyqueen. But you never deigned to reveal any of this to me. Is it your seer’s sight that made you so certain I would not have allowed this at home?”

  I stared. This had to be a fucking joke. Dishonesty was the water Father swam in. He was changing the narrative again, rewriting my past the way he had in my memory. Instead of answering, I turned to his soldier. “Does it make it easier?” I tossed my hair. “It’d probably be awkward to have to muscle the boss’s son. I imagine it’s much simpler dealing with a mollygirl instead. You get to be disgusted. So many things are easier when you’re disgusted.”

  The man’s eyes widened marginally, and his forced placidity was a little too transparent. He seemed so shocked at my irreverence. As if it never occurred to him anyone would so much as speak strongly to Lord Benedetti.

  Father ploughed on. “You were right that I wanted to talk. I don’t like how things ended last time. I want you to come back home. This battle of wills between us has lasted long enough. I understand that I owe you an apology.”

  Apology. I blinked, took a measured step forward. A seed of anger was sprouting in me. “An apology for what?”

  Father’s frown was eloquent. Studied. Rehearsed. “For making you feel that you had to run away. For making you feel unloved.”

  I drew a series of deep breaths. Unloved. Crossing my arms over my chest, I stepped nearer still, incrementally taking back my space.

  “It is strange.” I breathed into the gold-tinged afternoon, dust motes swirling like omens in the window’s beam. “You despise Serafina with such passion, yet you and she are so very alike in this regard. You both come to me when you need something, in spite of it all. At least she has the courtesy to be direct about what she wants.”

  My belly twisted with nausea. Ugh. I couldn’t think. Too much was running through me at once. I felt the future in my body, and short of the thunderstrike that was outright prophecy, I needed time to sift through everything my sensations were telling me. Even the apocalypse prophecy remained unclear.

  One thing was clear. He had not only come here to talk.

  I threw back half my rum and set the glass down. “At first I thought maybe you had come for the same reason as her: you wanted a prophecy. And there’s a prophecy I have no trouble telling you, point-blank. But you aren’t going to like it.” I picked the glass back up, turned it in my hand to send streaks of amber light shivering across my wall. “I also don’t think it’s why you came. You learned something and you wanted to trick me into confirming it.”

  I held eye contact with Father for several seconds, his gaze plumbing mine, and I dared him to see my fear, my outrage, my numbing frenzy of intuitive noise. I dared him to see that I was facing him anyway. Then he looked down at his feet. “Violetta. I came because I want you to come back home. What will it take to convince you of that?”

  That was just it. It wouldn’t take anything to convince me. Of course he wanted me back. That was why I’d escaped the way I had. Father would do anything to hold on to the Honored Child.

  When I didn’t answer, he smiled with rancid sincerity. “You used to love me once too. You used to wait for me to come home and throw your arms around my leg. You used to lie between me and your mother whenever you’d had a bad dream.”

  Nausea became inner fire. The way he casually invoked not only Mother’s memory, but mine of a gentler time that had never actually been gentle—My arms dropped, and I stared him right in the face. “Yes. And then you raped me for it.”

  It tore out of me like a current of lightning, striking the atmosphere dead. Silence thudded into
its place. I hadn’t known I was even capable of saying this aloud to him. Never before had words passed between us about what he’d done to me. Rosalina had been the first to hear the violence named, the pain that yet throbbed like coals in my belly. The burn of violation had never gone out, and now it flamed up in me, the omen of a dragon’s breath heating my tongue.

  Father did nothing. We were in a battle of absences, the void of a reaction volleyed back and forth, and his lack of response to my finally naming his violence was like a swat across the back. The soldier was entirely different. His pupils shrank, the loss of his composure visible. His gaze shifted between me and Father.

  A poison laugh scraped my throat. “Wait, did you bring someone with you that didn’t know?” I pressed in on the man’s space. He recoiled as if violation were something infectious inside me rather than a thing done to me. I leaned closer, feeling the rush of apocalypse. “You mean he doesn’t brag about this to his men? That he dominated the Honored Child? His perfect little son-daughter hybrid, fit for whatever purpose—”

  The man slapped his back against the wall, terror or disgust on his bland features. Father raised a hand. “Enough.” He turned, massaging his brow. His tone attained weight, lost all quality of care it’d held moments ago. “You’ve made your point. It matters very little what my men know. With that sorcerer bitch in the city, I want soldiers that know little and speak less. Show her.”

  He cocked his head, and the man roughly swallowed. Rigidly, he opened his mouth. Father’s meaning became swiftly clear. Where the man’s tongue once was, a stub remained.

  I drew back, coiling my salamander gown around myself, wreathed in a ruinous feeling of vicarious pain. Was there really nothing Father would respect? He remade the people around him, entitling himself to their bodies like lumps of clay.

  Father lowered his hand, and the man closed his mouth. Father gave me a few moments of his long, soul-biting stare.

  “We will play this the way you want, then.” No emotion left. “Why don’t you tell me about the Gianbellicci boy? The one you told me was dead.”

  To my credit, I didn’t blink. “He is dead.”

  Father’s smile spread like black ice. “Yes. But he came back. It wasn’t difficult to ascertain. An assassin with superhuman strength who can walk out of the night air and shrug off bullets? Even witches don’t perform those stunts. That was far from the most intriguing detail, however.” He calmly opened his coat and produced a round object from it. Tibario’s mask. Father tossed it at my feet. “I saw your face when he appeared. You knew exactly who you were looking at, mask or no. And you pushed him out of a window to get him away from me. It doesn’t take a military genius to imagine who you might have done that for.”

  I picked the mask up, holding it feebly against my chest, almost unable to keep facing Father as my tenuous confidence faded.

  Father began circling me slowly, finger trailing a line in the dust on the wall. “Two possibilities began to look very interesting. No one was better equipped to predict his resurrection, and his attack, than you. Either you know what he and his bitch mother’s plan is, or you are the one who wrote that plan. Oh, Serafina is clever enough in her way, but even she wouldn’t have known how to conjure a trick like this. You could. You could foresee whether Tibario would come back from death and guarantee the roll of the dice. You could coordinate an attack, and get him to safety when he failed to pierce your charm. The one that shields me now.”

  He strode closer, encroaching like a drawn blade. “Why on earth would you orchestrate this bizarre attack on me if your own magic was going to keep on shielding me?” His fingertip landed on my chin, stroked down to my neck, and I flinched away with visceral force. “Do you suppose that it would be difficult to take him apart like a lab animal, send him right back to the death that gave him these gifts? We call moon-souls immortal, but this in no way means they cannot die. I run this city. I don’t need to threaten your neighbors, or your friends at your little brothels and taverns, Violetta.” His eyes were pits of cold. “All I have to do is remind you that it will swiftly become pointless to fight me. I can let the city do its job, and all the violence I could desire will be done for me. It would be child’s play to gather up your bestial beau and mount him on a silver pike.”

  I clutched Tibario’s mask like a security blanket. Even the smell of Father’s proximity curdled my guts. How easily he did this. He wanted me to feel like a child again, and I did.

  Swallowing, I looked into the glaciers of his eyes. “You want me to call him off. Not because you think he’ll kill you, but because it will look bad for you to constantly have assassins coming after you.”

  He shrugged, paced around me again, just to the left, so the world seemed to tilt on its axis. “I want you to come home. Be the Honored Child again. Even now, you are still trying so hard to shield all of your friends. Your dear mother. If you come with me, I will not only leave them be, but set men to safeguard them better than they could ever safeguard themselves. Isn’t that what you want?”

  So it was still a chess board set with hostages as pieces. He hadn’t come here merely to show me he could find me, or that he could get at vulnerable targets. He was showing me that everything was a vulnerable target. Even Serafina with her ruthless power, Tibario in his immortality, Weifan with her skill and magic, would eventually fail as Father choked Vermagna to death.

  Anger fell on my mind like midnight.

  I let the mask drop with a thud, arms relaxing. I leaned into Father and said, slowly, “I want you to know that you are going to die.”

  He smirked. “Don’t bother with threats. If you could willingly revoke the calyx charm on me, you would. There’s something preventing you.”

  “You don’t understand.” My own voice sounded alien, like a separate creature stepping out of my body. “I’m not threatening you. I’m prophesying.”

  His face went still.

  I let the memory of the doom prophecy roll over my tongue, ominous and sour and sweet. “I foresaw this in no uncertain terms. You are going to die. Someone is going to kill you, and the calyx charm isn’t going to save you. Because the person you have to worry about isn’t Tibario, or Weifan, or even Serafina. The person you need to fear, Father mine, is me.”

  The soldier twitched, stepped forward slightly and lifted his pistol. Father stayed him with a hand, stolidly absorbing my words.

  “I am the one who is going to kill you.” If he was a glacier, I was a mountain. Glaciers could melt. “Understand me—I don’t have a plan to. I’m not even precisely sure how it’s going to happen. But in a few weeks, this entire city is becoming dust. And you are going to join it.”

  I wasn’t proud. Destruction of all I held dear would never be tolerable to me. My loved ones’ lives would always be worth more than whatever victory cataclysm could bring me. But there was a lurid, suicidal calm in being able to tell him this while knowing it wasn’t even my choice.

  Father’s stillness was eerie, insect-like. “You have no magic capable of that.”

  He was on his back foot. I could feel it. He didn’t know what was coming, but he believed me. His life had trained him to believe me when I spoke about the future. The future was the trove in which all his power lay.

  “But I will.” I folded arms over my abdomen. “I’m carrying a dragon-soul.”

  His pupils shrank. His soldier surged to stand in front of him, weapon drawn, and this time Father didn’t call him back. It didn’t matter. It was all on the table now.

  In my gravid seer’s lilt, I described my prophecy to my father. I described how a pale light would swallow Vermagna. How Tibario would die under the blast, pierced with his own mother’s vermillion eye. How even the calyx charm would not spare Father from the dragon-soul’s might.

  When I finished, he was visibly trembling. In this he and Serafina were also alike. They could terrify me, violate m
y mind and my body. But they shook with fear when the future showed itself through me, because they were powerless against it.

  A sick delight growled in my belly.

  He had no dualistic daughter that would bear him a proper heir. Instead, he had a mollygirl daughter who would birth a charm of apocalypse.

  I splayed my palms. “You can threaten Tibario. You can even have your men lock me away. It will be a waste of the meager time you have left. The future became fixed the moment I foretold it. You only have one defense left.” My hands absurdly steady, I took hold of the wrist of Father’s soldier. He balked, but I turned the pistol in his grip toward me. Slowly, I pulled until the barrel was centimeters away from my forehead. “Kill me right now.”

  “You’re bluffing.” Father sounded like he was speaking from within a tomb. His man’s terror was plain as a bloodstain. Sweat beaded on his brow, and though he didn’t pull his hand away, the gun was shaking in his grasp. Father didn’t look at him. “Don’t let her intimidate you. The Honored Child seems very tired this afternoon. She has very little power left to her.”

  An epiphany rapidly gathered in me, with a clarity that felt disturbingly like prophecy. “I do have power. The power is just all in the future. I think that’s why my prophecies are becoming inevitable. My dragon-soul already exists. When a dragon-soul grows, it expands the magic of the witch that birthed it. Mine isn’t merely reaching forward in time, but backward. It’s fixing fate as I foretell it. You could kill me, and my dragon-soul is still working its influence from the future. Want to roll the dice and see if this can stop me?” I clasped both hands around the man’s wrist, tapped the trigger.

  The man glanced between Father and me, his breath coming fast. Father was motionless.