Gilded Ashes

by Rosamund Hodge

  “Do not,” I say quietly, “presume to tell me about withholding truth.”

  Then I whirl and run from his study, run from the palace, before the cold ache in my chest can turn into real anger. But though I’m calm again by the time I reach home—though I smile to Mother and whisper, He’s so sweet, though I say to Koré, I think he’s weakening—his words are still lodged like splinters beneath my skin, and I hear them again every time I move. Lydia wrote me. Lydia wrote me.

  What else could I do?

  I go back the next day. I must, because Koré gives me a letter and I cannot let her be angry with me. But as I creep into the palace, I feel raw and helpless and naked, like a chicken trussed up for baking. A few of the maids nod at me as I pass, and one giggles—all the servants know about my visits now—and though yesterday I ignored them, today I flinch, as if they can know about yesterday’s fight just by looking.

  I can’t believe I was foolish enough to goad him. If he’s set on marrying miserably, what of it, so long as he marries Koré? If he can’t forget this Lydia, what should that be to me?

  Nothing. It should be nothing. I’m the girl who never gets angry and never wants anything, and that’s why my family is still alive.

  It used to be so easy. I used to huddle in the corners and think of the wallpaper and forget I even existed. Now, as I march grimly through the hallway of golden rosettes and mirrors, my body and my thoughts and my wretched, tangled emotions cling to me like sticky bread dough.

  When I reach Lord Anax’s study, I pause a moment. I tell myself, You are the only one who can protect your family. Nothing else matters. Then I push open the door.

  Lord Anax is sprawled back in his chair, feet on the desk and Alcibiades in his hands, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his forehead creased as he stares at the marble skull.

  The moment he sees me, he flails upright, papers flying everywhere. In a moment he’s on his feet.

  “Maia,” he says, and doesn’t go on, just stares at me.

  “Lord Anax,” I say, and bob a curtsy, then flush because I’ve never curtsied to him before. I thrust my hand out. “I brought you another letter.”

  “I really don’t care about the letters. At all. Not one bit.” He’s still staring at me with—not fear, I don’t think, but a sort of dazed caution.

  “Then I have no errand here,” I say, and I mean to go—this is a relief, isn’t it, that I don’t have to face him any longer, so why this plummeting sensation in my stomach?—but my feet won’t move.

  “Wait.” His hands are clenching and flexing. “I wanted—that is to say—I am sorry for speaking angrily to you yesterday.” He swallows. “I hope you will not repeat . . . anything I may have said unwisely.”

  My spine stiffens. “I’m not a gossip, my lord.”

  “I didn’t mean that—well, maybe I did. A little.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I’m no good at this. Maia-who-refuses-to-tell-me-her-family-name, will you sit down? I think you deserve to hear a story.”

  His eyes flicker to me once, then focus on his desk.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, my lord.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “But you wanted to know why I am determined to marry—anyone but Lydia—and you deserve to know.”

  “I’ve only brought you letters, my lord.” I don’t want to keep spitting the title at him, but my tongue won’t do anything else.

  His head snaps up and now he does look at me. “You have told me the truth, and Tartarus take me if I do any less for you. Sit down, woman, and do as you’re told.”

  “Yes, my lord.” I sit down.

  He draws a breath. “I’ve known Lydia Cosmatos since I was three years old. We were childhood playmates. We did everything together, until we were old enough that it wasn’t proper, and then we still saw each other as often as we could. Our fathers largely looked the other way, because while they never said anything, it was generally understood that we were destined to marry each other. When we were children, we thought it a very good joke. When we were older . . . Lydia was beautiful. Is beautiful. And sweet, and kind, and good. I was in love with her, or thought I was, and though she grew quieter every year, I was positive that she returned my feelings. So on my sixteenth birthday, I declared myself—told her that I loved her more than light or breath—and begged her to marry me. I thought we could be wed before the year was out.”

  Then he pauses, staring at the skull. Finally he continues. “Lydia smiled and said yes. She said—I can still remember the exact words—‘I had given up hope that you felt about me the way I feel about you.’” I kissed her and kissed her and thought it was the happiest day of my life. Our fathers were delighted, though they said to wait at least a year.

  “And then.” His hands clench. “Lydia and her father were guests in our house that summer. One day, they went walking in the box-hedge maze. I went after them, and I heard them talking. Lydia was—was begging her father to break the engagement. She said that she had thought she could bear to marry me because he wished it and I was a friend, but every day the thought of marrying one she regarded as a brother grew more abhorrent to her. She said that every time I kissed her, she wanted to die.

  “I don’t remember how I got back to the house. I don’t really remember anything until that evening, when I cornered her in the library. I was—vile. I threatened to slander her to the entire city unless she broke the engagement herself. I wouldn’t tell her why. I had enough decency, at least, to pretend I didn’t know her secrets; I just said that I was sick of her, that I couldn’t bear to see her face again. Which was true enough. So Lydia jilted me the next morning, and her father has been plotting to reconcile us ever since.”

  Finally he turns to me. “You see why I have to marry. She won’t ever be free until I do. And as much as I despise the thought of marrying a woman who smiles and lies to me, I think I can bear it if she’s not a friend.”

  “You still love her,” I say quietly.

  “Maybe. What does that mean, anyway?” He crosses his arms and stares over my shoulder, out the window. “I think I’d die for her if she asked it, but I couldn’t attend her birthday party. I’d have rather died than walk into that room and smile at her. What sense does that make? Frankly, I’ve gone off the idea of love.”

  “It would only be sensible if you had,” I say. “But you haven’t.” I can see it in the miserable, hunched lines of his shoulders.

  And yet, for all his love, he let her go. He tried his best to escape her. I had not believed that anyone could love like that.

  He barks a laugh. “And you have?”

  Yes, I mean to say. I have never loved. I have never wanted to be loved. In all the world, I am the only girl who doesn’t.

  But then he looks at me—his mouth twisted halfway between a smile and a grimace, the skin crinkled at the corners of his dark eyes—and I can’t speak.

  I’m the only girl in the world who doesn’t want love. I’m the only girl in the world who can protect people from my mother. And I am always, always alone. But the slant of his shoulders, the set of his mouth, the line of his eyebrows all say, Me too—and for one crazy, impossible moment, I believe him. I believe that someone else could understand me.

  I believe that love could possibly be kind.

  And then I don’t.

  “I haven’t gone off love,” I say. “I never liked it to begin with.” My hands are shaking; my heart is pounding as hard as the time that Stepmother slapped me, and all I could think for an hour was, Mother, Mother, my darling mother, I love my stepmother so very much.

  “Well, you are a lucky girl, then, to swear off love so gladly. Just be sure Aphrodite doesn’t punish you as she did Hippolytus.”

  That startles a real laugh out of me. “I don’t think even the gods could make my stepmother fall in love with me.”

  “So you’ve a stepmother,” he says thoughtfully, “and you’re well educated. Likely wellborn, too. There aren’t even many nobles who know the
story of Hippolytus—let alone servants, who usually only want stories about the hedge-gods.”

  I wouldn’t know about Hippolytus either, except that one winter Thea got the idea that she should educate me, and she trailed after me reading plays aloud until Stepmother locked her in her room.

  “Actually,” I say, “most servants here in Sardis won’t have anything to do with the hedge-gods. Too rustic and uncouth.” My voice falls into the cadences of our old cook’s voice. “That sort of rubbish is only for weak-willed jennies who wish they were back on the farm with dirt beneath their fingernails.”

  “Really? My late mother would have been delighted; she was always trying to organize new programs of improvement for the servants.”

  “So said our old cook. Mind you, she wasn’t above throwing midsummer cakes on the fire, though she tried to hide it.” I smile, remembering the way she scolded me when I asked her what she was doing. None of your business, little Miss Nosy.

  The memory stabs me straight between the ribs. A week after that scolding, something happened that left her hands shaking, that made her hide beneath her apron at every loud noise. For the next month she burned soups and dropped pots; then Stepmother dismissed her.

  I don’t think it was my fault. I laughed at the scolding, and she smiled at me a moment after. If she’d actually met a demon, she’d have died or gone insane. But I can’t be sure. I can never, ever be sure, and that’s when I realized it was better not to make friends with the servants. After her, none of them stayed more than a month, anyway. They always realized the house was haunted and fled.

  “You’re like a chameleon, do you know that?” Lord Anax is staring at me now with his eyebrows drawn together thoughtfully, his mouth crooked up in a faint smile. “One moment you have vowels that could put my mother to shame, the next you’re talking like the scullery maid. You dress in rags and you know thousand-year-old plays.”

  I am the most perfect chameleon he’s ever known, and he can’t know me. He can marry Koré if he wants. He can even marry Lydia. I’ll smile and pour out wine to the gods in thanks. But he can’t get to know me any better or Mother will notice him and he’ll be trapped in my fate and I would rather die.

  I’d rather die, I think, and realize that I mean it.

  “I’m also a messenger,” I say. My body feels cold and stiff. “Here’s your letter for today.” I hold it out.

  “Maia—”

  “Good day, my lord.” I throw the letter at him and flee.

  I try not to think it as I sweep the floors, scrub the pots, cook the meals. I try, but everywhere I turn, the thought drums along with my heartbeat: I’d rather die. I’d rather die. I’d rather die.

  I can’t love him. I don’t. This feeling is not the selfish, grasping need that I’ve seen tear apart my family, writhing through their hearts like worms through rotten apples.

  What sense does that make? Lord Anax demanded when telling me about the girl he didn’t love but would die for. The girl who he was wise and kind enough to leave. Perhaps, I finally admit to myself, perhaps for him there’s a way to love that’s sane and happy, that isn’t cruel. The gods know he deserves it.

  For me, there has always only been this desperate, heart’s-blood determination not to destroy.

  “I think he’ll marry Koré, Mother,” I whisper into the steam rising from the stewpot. Her touch shivers against my neck. “He’ll be so happy.”

  He’ll take Koré away to his gilded palace, let her hold Alcibiades, and smile at her words. She’ll run her fingers through his hair and speak the truth to him until he’s comforted, until he forgets both Lydia and the strange little serving girl who delivered letters, until he’s happy. I’ll stay in the dusty, dim house of demons and broken shutters, and I’ll know that he is safe. I can’t ask more than that, want more than that. I won’t.

  The next two days, I bring him letters. We don’t talk of Koré, or Lydia, or who I am. He tells me about his studies, his plans for when he is duke, and I tell him exactly what I think. I stare at the lace on his cuffs, the tendons in his hands, and try to memorize him for the day when I’m alone.

  I don’t love him. But I take a treacherous delight in him.

  On the tenth day, Koré doesn’t give me a letter. She doesn’t come down for breakfast; when I slip into her room, she’s asleep beneath a tangle of blankets. I lay my hand against her forehead, but I don’t feel any fever. Clearly her all-night letter writing has finally caught up with her; I only hope that she’s started sleeping again in time, and I won’t have to spend a week nursing her.

  I still go to the palace.

  Even without a letter, I can talk to him, I tell myself as I walk briskly through the marketplace. Perhaps today he will promise to marry her.

  I should worry about going to see him with no letter, no excuse, nothing to persuade him but my own wits. But all I feel is a curious, floating happiness. It rained during the night; the sun sparkles on the damp cobblestones. The air is cool and sweet, and I suck in greedy breaths as I wind between the vendors’ booths. For no other reasons than the mud between the puddles, the screaming children, and the strings of garlic hanging between the skinned rabbits in the nearest booth, I think that the marketplace is the most beautiful spot in the whole world.

  For one delirious, sun-drenched moment, I do not even slightly remember Mother.

  A hand closes on my arm. I wrench free and turn back to tell the merchant that I don’t want to buy anything—

  An old woman stands behind me. No, not old—her hair is still jet-black, and the lines on her face are scars, not wrinkles.

  “Little dove,” she says, her voice hoarse and breathy. “Little, my little dove.”

  The rest of the world is suddenly far away, behind a haze. I can’t look at anything but this woman: her stained and wrinkled dress, the bandages tied over her fingers to keep her from gouging her skin open, her wide and staring eyes, pupils swelled impossibly huge.

  “My little dove,” says my old nurse.

  I was only eight when Mother took ill. Father tried to shield me; he told me again and again that she was just a little tired, and he wouldn’t let me see her until it was clear that she was dying. By then I barely recognized the skeletal creature with sunken eyes. But she clasped my hands and whispered, “Darling, my dearest, I will always be with you. I have found a way. Even after I die, I will always be with you.”

  She told me how. She wasn’t ashamed, not when her only daughter’s happiness was at stake. She had called upon the Gentle Lord, the prince of demons, and she had made a bargain with him.

  Everybody knows that the Gentle Lord’s bargains inevitably twist and turn to ill. The price is always higher than it seems. But Mother had made sure that she would pay all the price herself. Her wish was that her daughter would always be protected; her price was that she would be the one to accomplish it. Her ghost would be bound to the apple tree behind our house, and she would have the power and the duty to answer all my tears.

  “Nothing will take me from you,” she promised. “There is nothing that I could want more.”

  The morning after her funeral, when I sobbed beneath the apple tree, I felt her touch upon my shoulder and heard her humming a lullaby in my ear. The wind stroked my face and dried my tears.

  “Stay with me, Mother,” I whispered, and she did. She would do anything I asked, I quickly found: she would bring me caramel apples or new frocks, toys or ribbons or sweets.

  I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.

  Until the day my nurse made me cry.

  It was the first morning of sunshine after a week of rain. I wanted to play in the garden; my nurse wanted me to pick up my toys. I said no, I whined no, and finally I stamped my foot and shouted no, but she would not budge: if I didn’t pick up my things, I couldn’t go out.

  “No,” I said one final time, tears starting in my eyes, because I felt sure that before I finished picking up my things, the rain would come back and I’d
lose my chance to sit beneath the apple tree and feel Mother’s fingers in my hair.

  My nurse shook her head. “Then you’re not going out at all today,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in you, and I’ll have to tell your father.”

  “You’re horrible!” I cried at her as she walked away from me. “I hate you!” The door shut behind her, and I sobbed hot, noisy tears.

  Until she started screaming.

  It was like nothing I’d ever heard: a desperate animal wail that went on and on. The sound wrapped itself around my spine and clogged my throat. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  When it stopped, for a moment I tottered on my feet. Then I bolted for the door.

  Everyone knows about demons, and everyone knows of a cousin’s sister’s friend who was driven mad by them. But nobody actually expects to see it happen.

  My nurse huddled against the wainscoting, her left hand stuffed into her mouth. Blood and saliva dripped out between her teeth.

  “Nurse?” I quavered.

  She looked at me then. Her pupils were huge, and her left eye was stained red with burst veins.

  “Make it stop,” she whispered. “Make it stop, little dove, I’m so sorry, please make it stop.”

  She laid her right hand against her forehead as if she had a sudden headache. Slowly, she scraped her fingers down the side of her face, leaving behind four bloody trails.

  Then she started screaming again.

  My nurse was the first one. She was not the last. It wasn’t until the butler and the chambermaid had also been destroyed that I realized what was happening.

  Mother had wanted the power to protect me, and she had bargained for it with the prince of demons. So her power was to command demons. She could force them to bring me trinkets and sweets. Or she could use them to destroy anyone who made me cry.

  She used to weep over beggars and birds with broken wings. She had thought it would be a small price, to become a ghost so she could protect her little daughter. But she had forgotten that ghosts have no pity.