Nobody's Lady

by Amy McNulty

If you think I am about to give my blessing to your happiness …

  This is what the specter had written while we’d been trying to distract him. He hadn’t been distracted at all.

  If you think I am about to give my blessing to your happiness, you are mistaken. I cannot stop you from spending your nights beside the former husband of your own sister, but I am lord of this village, and under my new law, only my Ailills give permission to wed. There is no will of the first goddess in this village now. She foolishly gave me permission to crush her power into dust.

  But it does not matter. I cannot hear you when not around my retainers, but I can see you, as I assume you and your cohorts might have learned. I allowed you this knowledge. I do not understand why they seem to think they can enter my castle unseen when they know what I can do. But I must forgive them for being foolish; they are quite new to the freedom of will that you and the other women have so long enjoyed.

  This proposed marriage is a falsehood, a distraction meant to send me running to you. I have seen you. You push away this boy for whom you once risked everything because now he has free will. You do not like men with free will. You never have. You may stumble over your feelings for him now, but you will never commit to marrying him, or any other. Men are no longer docile enough for you.

  Nothing you could do would make me come running. If your cohorts want answers, they should have asked you. You played a larger role in all of this than I ever could. As it is, they trespass without permission in my castle, and here they will stay.

  Perhaps you will bring my pages back to me when you stop by for a visit, as I no doubt expect you to soon.

  I flipped the paper over, dreading what I might see on the other side. A drawing burst to life of Master Tailor in a cell, his legs crossed on the stone floor. Beside him sat Sindri, his shoulder against the iron bars, and Darwyn and Tayton, who held hands even as Darwyn seemed to be shouting something and gripping his hair in anger. A pair of legs paced on and off the page, boots I guessed belonged to Jaron.

  “He got them all,” I said. Since it hadn’t been that long since the men had left the tavern, I could only imagine Ailill had sent out his specters and a carriage to bring the rest of them to his cells that much quicker.

  Jurij growled and began pacing back and forth across the room in echo of Jaron. “Now what?”

  I folded the second moving drawing and tucked it in my sash. “Now we walk in through the front gates.”

  We didn’t speak until we’d reached the outskirts of the village, past the Tailor Shop. Seeing the empty, darkened windows emphasized where we were going like a punch to the stomach. I spared a moment’s regret for not racing to tell Siofra and Alvilda. But then we’d be headed to the castle trailing behind a raging, screaming woman who probably wouldn’t make it past the first set of specters.

  “What did he mean, you played a larger role? And that we should have asked you?”

  I was so distracted by my thoughts I flinched at hearing Jurij speak beside me. The timid smile that had formed at the thought of Alvilda in a rage faded, replaced by the cold hardness of the reality I’d created by going through the cavern pool.

  The moon was bright, but I kept my eyes fixed on the path. I shivered as we neared my childhood home. Not just because of the cold nip in the air, or even due to the sister who slept behind closed doors. But because of the memories of another night I ventured down this path, cold and damp, determined to free the man who now walked beside me, the one I now pushed away.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Of course you wouldn’t answer.” He gave the home in which his former wife lived the briefest of glances and led the way into the woods. “How about this then: What did he mean, the Ailills?”

  “That’s his name. The lord’s, I mean. Ailill.”

  A twig snapped loudly beneath Jurij’s foot. “Huh. I guess no one ever bothered to ask his name before.”

  I tucked the pesky too-long piece of hair behind my ear, feeling guilty for so long not caring to know his name. “No one cared about anything outside of their men and goddesses before.” Or, in my case at least, other people’s men.

  Jurij pushed aside a branch hanging across the path. “So the Ailills? Plural?”

  “It’s what he calls the specters.”

  “The what?”

  “His servants.”

  “Why?”

  “Long story.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “I’m not sure we have time.” The beaten shrubbery ahead marked the path to the cavern.

  We were quiet then, but soon Jurij interrupted the silence. “You know, you never asked.”

  “Asked what?”

  Jurij nodded toward the path ahead. “What it felt like the last time I was here. What it felt like to have my wedding day turned upside down.”

  I stopped. We didn’t talk much about my time there. I didn’t even think to ask about his. “You remember?”

  “Not much. My whole life until things changed seems like a haze.” He paused beside me. “But I remember … the shaking. Then waking in a strange place. The blur of white figures, the dark void at my bedside.”

  “The servants. And Ailill,” I said. “Wearing his veil.”

  “I asked for Elfriede.” Jurij traced the line of the scar on his cheek. “I remember the pain on my face, I remember how much it hurt, but it was nothing compared to how I felt being apart from Elfriede.”

  And he was parted from her because of me.

  “But that was stupid of me,” he said, his fist tightening around the paper in his hand. “I know that now.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment, a moment we shouldn’t have wasted just then.

  “I was so consumed with thoughts of Elfriede,” said Jurij, breaking the silence, “I didn’t stop to think about it at first, but the lord, he was … a mess. He was wet. His veil and hat were uneven.”

  That was after he saved me from the pond. I shuddered thinking about what happened then, and how we’d fought in the cavern—how I’d almost killed him then and would go on to “kill” him for a time shortly thereafter. In the time between then, we’d parted as soon as the carriage door opened. Before he’d joined me in the dining room, he’d stormed upstairs—probably to treat Jurij. Although not to the “best of his ability,” as I remembered asking.

  “He took his gloves off, and I remember thinking how pale he was. How ghastly pale. Like one of his servants dressed in black.”

  “He’s not quite so pale as that,” I said, realizing Jurij had never seen Ailill without his mask. “But yes, he’s fair.”

  Jurij didn’t comment on it. I was glad. I didn’t want to explain how I came to know Ailill’s face so well.

  “There was warmth on my face, then,” continued Jurij, “and for a moment … I saw things with a clarity I’d never felt before then. The pain on my face lifted. The pain in my heart eased. I wasn’t thinking of Elfriede. I wasn’t thinking about anything.”

  He did try to heal him with his magic.

  “Then it all stopped. The lord pulled his hand away and tugged on his glove roughly, like he’d burnt his hand. He said, ‘I suppose you felt nothing then. When my goddess’s lips touched yours.’”

  My goddess? I’d forgotten he would call me that from time to time. I knew I was his goddess once, but I’d bristled every time he said it. Now …

  “I was so confused. I remembered you kissed me.” He chanced a glance my way. “But it meant nothing to me when it happened. It wasn’t the first thing on my mind even until he asked, but as that warmth faded away, I saw it clearly. Just for a moment. I felt something for you. Something greater than I’d ever felt for you, something like what I’d thought I could only feel for Elfriede.”

  Did his healing powers “heal” the curse right off a man? Could he have freed him when I asked and he chose not to, or did Ailill himself remain unaware of that fact? I never even thought about it
!

  “But it was just a moment. I remember … the lord said something more, something quieter then. ‘If only you knew what you took from me. It was not even your fault. But I confess I cannot help myself even still.’ As the pain rolled back over me, so did my longing for Elfriede. I was growing delirious, blind to everything about me. I asked for help, for some explanation, but they ignored me. I don’t really remember what happened after that. I don’t remember what happened for a long time after that.”

  “It wasn’t just you, Jurij. Ailill didn’t make you forget the next month. That was the month that no one seems to remember.”

  “But you do, don’t you?”

  I picked up my skirts. “We should go.”

  Jurij crumpled the paper in his hand, then seemed to notice what he was doing and smoothed it out. “The two of you keep so many secrets from the rest of us. And you wonder why I was so reluctant to ask you to play your role in this plan.” Jurij held the paper showing Luuk up above him, trying to get the filtering effects of the moonlight to show him his brother. “What would he lock them up for?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Breaking into his castle against his edict might have had something to do with it.” I clutched Master Tailor’s page in my hand, the paper with the message written so coldly for me on its reverse side. Some of the men in the image stood, and others sat. There wasn’t much change. “We’ll get it straightened out. He won’t hurt them.”

  Jurij laughed, but there wasn’t any joy in the sound. “You mean like how he didn’t hurt me?” He pointed to his scarred eye.

  “I don’t think he meant to do that.”

  Jurij stuffed Luuk’s paper into his pocket. “Well, I’m glad you don’t think he meant to slice a gash down my face. Or take me captive thereafter.”

  “It was the earthquake!” I grabbed Jurij’s hand, and he stopped, stiffening. “Before the curse broke, Ailill was doomed to cause the ground to shake if he left the castle. And he was trying to treat you when you woke up.”

  Jurij’s features softened. I could just make out a glint in his irises in the silver light that trickled through the leaves above us. “So he didn’t cause the earthquake on purpose?”

  “No. Yes.” I shook my head. “Whenever he left the castle back then, he’d cause an earthquake. He knew that, but he didn’t control the tool that cut you.”

  “Why just him? The rest of us may have been cursed, but I don’t recall any other man making the ground shake just because a woman looked at his home. Or because he stepped out of it.”

  “To protect him.”

  Jurij’s gaze drifted over my head. The cavern lay behind me. I wondered if for some reason it was calling him too. “I have a feeling you know more, but you won’t tell me if I ask.”

  I dropped Jurij’s hand and moved forward, pushing the call of the cavern away with each step. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Tell me anyway.” Jurij’s hand gripped my shoulder, pulling me back to face him.

  I faltered a moment. The castle gates were there, just in sight at the edge of the path. The cavern still called me in some way I couldn’t explain. I could run away to either of them to avoid answering him, to avoid thinking about my past—but both were the places I was most likely to remember. “I’m the first goddess.”

  Jurij’s hand slackened. “What?” He was almost laughing.

  I drew a deep breath. “The one from the legend. The one who balanced inequality and cursed the men.”

  “Huh.” Jurij dropped his hand from my shoulder. He looked about to say something more, and then he shut his mouth again. “Are you sure he wasn’t deceiving you?”

  I sighed and kept marching forward, crumpling my message tighter in my fist. “Never mind.”

  “I’m serious!” Jurij said. “What if he gave you visions while you were with him? Why else did I feel those things I felt while in his castle?”

  “Visions?” I repeated. We’d reached the castle gates, and I didn’t even blink when they drew open. I’d yet to approach the castle walls and find them slammed shut. To me, anyway.

  Jurij stepped between me and the open gate, suddenly forgetting his haste to rescue his friends and family. “If you go in there, will you see visions again?”

  I clenched my fists at my sides. “Jurij! I’m not seeing, nor have I ever seen, visions!” I thought about my experiences in the pool and shook my head. No need to explain the things the pool showed me. I pointed back down the path. “You know the cavern?”

  “The cavern?”

  “Our cavern! The one with the glowing pool.”

  “The one you almost drowned in.”

  “Yes.” The one where you rejected me, then tried to force me into your arms. “I traveled to … well, I guess I traveled to the past there.”

  “In the cavern.” Jurij looked at me as if worried I was unwell. I remembered too vividly his looks in that alternate time he didn’t remember, the time when the lord never was, and my parents were gone.

  “Through the pool,” I corrected. He stared at me blankly, and I threw up my hands. “Ugh! Never mind! I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  Jurij glanced over his shoulder and held his hands out as if to stop me. “All right, all right. Let’s say I believe you.”

  “Sure. Let’s say.”

  “How did you have the power to curse all of the men?”

  “I just used the power I was born with.”

  “Which was?”

  “Being able to control any man who found the goddess in me.”

  I could tell Jurij desperately wanted to check over his shoulder again, but he also didn’t want to let me out of his sight. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead. “So in the past, and we’re talking a long time ago, the lord was there?”

  This was hardly the time or place to get into this. “Yes. But I didn’t mean he was the one who found the goddess in me. Not just him anyway.” Jurij let me lower his arm without resistance, and I walked past him.

  “There’s only one man for every woman,” Jurij said as he stepped beside me. “At least before … ” His gaze fell over the darkened room, and his jaw opened. “What happened here?”

  I’d spent so long thinking of the castle as some sort of prison for just me, the lord, and the specters, I’d forgotten that Jurij had been here a few times himself to deliver clothing.

  The place was a mess. The door to the inner garden was open and swinging in time with a gentle breeze, slamming against the wall every other moment. Moonlight illuminated the rest of the room, even if the torches went unlit. There were barrels lying on their sides throughout the foyer, small puddles of liquid seeping out through a number of them. A pile of rumpled black clothing lay scattered between the entranceway and the stairway, boot prints clearly visible on the fabric, like someone had kicked and stomped on them rather than picking them up and moving them out of the way. I could see why the specters had asked for less bread to be delivered. There was a stack of green, rotting bread near the foot of the stairs, knocked over like a mountain after a landslide.

  What has that man been up to?

  “So where is he?” asked Jurij. “Hello?”

  “Shh!” I put a finger to my lips, not even sure why. He was here, obviously. Our friends were here. But the place was too quiet, and I was reluctant to make a sound. I reached for the slip of paper in my sash. “Let’s just get the guys and go,” I whispered, not at all convinced it was going to be that easy. “If they’re where my Mother was being kept—”

  “What is that?”

  I turned around. “Jurij?” He was walking toward the dining hall. “Jurij, it’s not that way.” But he went into the room without a moment’s pause. Satisfied the men remained holed up in their pen, I stuffed Master Tailor’s page back into my sash and followed. “Jurij?” There wasn’t much light in the room. It was almost like he’d vanished.

  “What are these?”

  I
walked toward the noise and knocked into Jurij as he stood up, his hand gripping something he’d picked off the floor.

  I blinked. “A bangle. It used to keep a veil up over the table.”

  “A veil?”

  I bent down to grab another bangle that glistened in the dark. My fingers brushed the fallen veil. Had it laid there since that day he’d vanished?

  “Did you used to dine together? Before he could remove his mask?” Jurij cleared his throat. “I mean, his veil?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.” I reached into my sash and pulled out my gold coin. It also glistened in the slivers of moonlight.

  “The gold in the castle, like you told us about.”

  The gold on Elric’s arm. The bangle he wore that glistened in the firelight.

  “Where’d he get it?” Jurij asked.

  “I don’t know.” I swallowed and tucked the gold coin and bangle into my sash. I grabbed Jurij’s arm. “The prison cells are upstairs. On the third floor.”

  Jurij wrenched his arm away, like he thought I would grab for his bangle. For the first time in this conversation, his voice didn’t sound incredulous. “If you’re the first goddess, why did you curse the men?”

  I clutched at my chest, unable to contain the pain I felt there. “I was trying to save the women. I meant to punish some men. The men who deserved it.”

  “How would men deserve it? For loving the wrong women? For not obeying their goddesses quickly enough?”

  “You think I’d punish helpless men over something so trivial as that?”

  “I don’t know what I think. You—”

  “They hurt women.” That caused Jurij to shut his jaw quickly. “Really hurt them. I don’t know if you’ve ever even thought about it, but men are physically stronger than women for the most part, and these men … Their actions … ”

  The door to the foyer slammed shut, and the air hissed with the scrape of steel on firestone.

  “And you made the innocent men suffer for it.”

  The wood in the dining hall’s fireplace roared to life.

  Ailill stood gazing at the flames, his forearm pressed against the mantel.