by Amy McNulty
“Enough!” Jaron spat. “Okay, everyone? Enough.” The dungeons fell silent, but for the crackling of the torches. “We haven’t even spent a full night here. No need to panic. People will notice we’re missing.”
“And know to look for us in the lord’s castle?” Tayton ran a hand through the short, thick hair atop his forehead. “It’s hopeless. Why did we even come here?”
“We wanted answers!” Something clanged in Jaron’s cell, and I just made out the sole of a boot kicking against the bars. “And goddess help me, we at least deserve that!”
My eyes flicked guiltily to the ground, even though only Tayton was there to witness it.
Jaron continued unabated. “A lifetime in this prison? After the commune? He hopes to threaten me with a lifetime in this prison?” He scoffed, and I could practically hear him spit. “With my friends here? With someone to talk to? With endless things to want and wish for, with something else to think of other than the bitch who sent me to my torment?”
“Jaron,” Master Tailor’s voice wavered.
Jaron seemed to catch himself. “Coll, I’m sorry. I don’t blame Alvilda. Now I know how she feels. I’m not in love with her. Not in the slightest. If someone asked me to be with her now, I’d be just as repulsed at the idea as she was.” He paused. “No. You know what? She gets just a tiny bit of blame. Maybe a whole lot of blame. She could have just ordered me to sit in the corner, and I’d have been fine. She could have carved me a little hovel outside of her door and told me to lay in it like a dog, and I’d have felt better than I did in that commune.”
Darwyn must have seen something on Jaron’s face that the rest of us weren’t privy to. He sounded alarmed. “Jaron, please. This isn’t helping.”
“This isn’t helping? It’s helping me just fine!” I heard Jaron’s boots pound over the cell floor. “So she loved someone else. I get that. Oh, boy, do I understand what it’s like to love someone you can’t have.” He paused again for a few paces. “But it wasn’t the same for her, was it? The one she loved also loved her back. And she could go more than a breath without thinking about her.”
“Jaron. Stop.” Master Tailor’s voice was firm. Louder than I’d ever heard him speak before. “You think it would have been better being at her side with that feeling she’d never love you back? It wasn’t.”
A lump at Tayton’s throat bobbed noticeably. He seemed to be straining to contain himself.
“Ha!” Jaron’s laugh was anything but genuine. “You had a roof over your head without holes in it. You had warm food in your belly. Sons to call your own.” Jaron’s voice wavered so, I could almost see the tears forming in his eyes. “You had someone to love you.”
“But that someone wasn’t her.” Master Tailor sighed. “Now I know just how important my sons’ love was. But it didn’t matter then. Everything was so messed up for us. The important things didn’t matter.”
“Jaron.” It was my voice that called his name. “You weren’t unloved. I know someone who didn’t forget you.”
I had no idea if Jaron could even guess at my mother’s affections, if his childhood memories were wiped out after years of suffering for Alvilda.
Jaron’s voice came closer, and I saw his hands wrap around the bars of his cell. “Noll! Goddess, Noll. How could I have forgotten? You spent a time in the commune with me.”
Tayton’s head shot up, his eyes wide with wonder.
Jaron’s voice drifted, like he was searching his memory. “I remembered thinking you were nice. You talked, unlike the other men … ” He stopped. “Why? Why would I think you were there with me?”
I stared at Tayton. “I was. For a month before the curse broke. I just didn’t think you’d be able to remember.”
“That month that no one can clearly remember.” It was Master Taylor who spoke. “What happened then?”
“You wanted answers?” It’d been so long since he’d participated in the conversation, I’d almost forgotten that Jurij was in the cell behind the wall I leaned on. “Then you should have asked Noll.”
It was time I shared what they needed to know. It was time I shared everything.
“I’m the first goddess.”
Everything was silent in the cells on either side of me. Tayton stared. Even Luuk had stopped sniffling.
Jaron was the first to respond. “The first goddess?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I placed the curse on men.”
“How?” asked Tayton. “Why?”
I felt my heart thumping hard against my ribs. “I think it had to do with my powers as a woman. I don’t know why or how exactly, but I was there. In the past.”
“You’re making this up!” Darwyn sounded angry, angrier than I’d heard him in years. “Noll, this isn’t helping.”
“She’s not making it up.” Jurij seemed strangely confident for someone who’d just been arguing the opposite a few hours before. “Why else would our curse suddenly be broken? Why is everyone unclear on what exactly happened the month before?”
Darwyn wasn’t deterred. “Because Noll is the first goddess? The woman from the tales at the Returnings? The one who cursed men long before we were born?” He snorted. “Yeah.”
“He has a point,” added Sindri. “How is that even possible?”
Luuk piped up. “Noll said she was the elf queen!”
Darwyn laughed, and it wasn’t very nice. “Don’t tell me you actually believed that.”
“Hey!” I jumped to my feet. “Quiet! Do you want me to explain things or not?”
Even though Tayton was the only one I could see, I could feel the furious energy vanish from the air.
Jaron spoke loudly over the others. “Go on, Noll. And no one interrupt her.”
My gaze flicked quickly to the specter standing across from my cell. Ailill can’t hear what I say on those strange book pages. But the specters can hear, right? Does he somehow hear through their ears? I opened my mouth. “Some of you already know about this, but there’s a cavern—”
The door to my cell opened, the specter producing a key from his inner coat pocket and pushing his way in before I could finish my sentence. Tayton stood, eyeing the specter warily. “Now wait a minute.”
The specter grabbed my forearm and dragged me out of the cell.
“Where are you taking her?” asked Tayton.
I could finally see into the cells on either side of me, the line of worried faces pressed up against the bars. I had only an instant to meet each of their eyes as the specter locked the door to my cell behind us and placed the key back in his coat pocket.
“What are you doing?” demanded Darwyn. “Don’t tell me she’s forbidden to talk about this!”
“Well, if that isn’t proof that Noll speaks the truth,” added Master Tailor, “I don’t know what is.”
“No!” Jaron gripped the bars and shook them wildly in vain. “Not when we’re so close. Not when—”
But I had just enough time to send Jurij a warning glance amidst all the shouting and cursing letting loose from the cells. Don’t talk about what I told you. At least not yet. I was dragged out the door and back into the chillingly cold third-floor hall.
I tugged against the specter’s grip on my arm, but I had no hope of resisting. “Ailill!” I dug my heels into the floor. “I mean you, not him! Let me go!”
The specter hesitated, and I saw something strange flicker across the redness of his eyes. He was old, this one. Older than many of them, now that I looked closely. Washed pale with time. A shade of a long-forgotten man.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
His fingers loosened, and I recognized something of the lord in his quieter moments. Regret. Longing.
His mouth opened.
“Leave us.”
It wasn’t the specter Ailill who’d spoken. The specter dropped his hand from my arm and turned, retreating into the darkness at the other end of the hallway, not even sparing me
one last glance. He passed the current lord in black, pale but still breathing. Ailill stood, his arms crossed, in front of the throne room. He looked me over from head to toe and nodded. “Come in here.” He vanished inside the throne room, leaving me alone in the hallway.
He gives an order, and I’m to obey? He once had to do the same when I spoke, but he did everything he could to resist me. He should have known I could do the same. He’d left me completely on my own in the castle. I could just walk right by, go after that specter about to speak, or walk out the front door, come back with an army.
But no. I’d tried that once before and wasn’t pleased with the results. Besides, I had no doubt the specters would appear from the shadows to stop me if I tried.
I tossed my shoulders back and followed Ailill into the throne room. He had let all but one torch extinguish, so I could barely make him out atop the throne. If not for the glisten of the golden bangle he let dance over his fingers, I might not have known he was there at all.
“I tried sparing your friends the harshest of punishments. I truly did.”
I hadn’t spent all of this time with Ailill—parrying with Ailill—not to be able to divine the meaning hidden beneath those words. “Of course. That’s why we were unceremoniously dumped into your cells for life.” I marched toward the throne, closing the distance between us. “And now? What harsher punishments await us?”
The golden bangle stopped twirling on Ailill’s fingers. “Us? No, you are exempt from any further punishment, I gather.”
“You gather?”
Ailill let the golden bangle slide over his hand to his arm. I was reminded revoltingly of his brother Elric. “This is not a game, Noll. I spared your friends from death, and then you try to condemn them to it.”
“I didn’t think it was a game. It never is that simple between us.” I jutted my chin out and climbed the step to the raised platform so I could look down on him as I spoke. Elgar glistened faintly as I did. I pointed at it. “Where did you find that?”
Ailill looked up at it briefly, then turned away. “I cannot tell you.”
Convenient. “All right. Keep your secrets. But may I ask what would have condemned them to death?”
He rolled his eyes and looked away. “You told them you were the first goddess.”
I dug my nails into the palm of my injured hand, ignoring the pain. “But … wasn’t I?”
He rested his elbows on the throne’s armrests and placed his fingertips together. “I suppose you were. In this village, at least.”
“In this village?” I thought about the village in the past, how I felt like it both was and was not my own.
“And then you were going to give them a map to the heart of the village, let them find their way there if I ever felt gracious enough to let them out of here.”
I didn’t really think he was planning to let them out, but I let that comment slide. “The cavern?” I decided not to point out that Jurij and Luuk already knew about it, although he must have known as much.
“The pool there.” He tilted his head slightly. “Surely you remember the beat of the heart beneath its waters? You rode its heartbeats to the past. I was as sure of that as I was that you were the first goddess returned, that day you first trespassed in my castle.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what? That you had doomed the entire village to its wretched existence? You clearly had not yet traveled to the past. Would you have believed me?”
“No. Maybe not,” I admitted. “But it would have been better to hear that than be pushed and pulled around, thinking you were nothing more than a heartless monster.”
Ailill threw his hands in the air. “Again, back to that. Certainly. You would have just considered me a ranting madman. One who kept entirely to himself and then droned on about a past long ago where you cursed mankind. Would you have fallen in love with that?”
In love? “Were you ever concerned about me falling in love with you?”
Ailill slapped the armrest with one hand. “You doubt that? After all you now know about me?” My heart felt almost like it’d stopped beating. Then the hope that lingered there in that breath between beats floated away as Ailill shook his head and turned away. “After a hundred or more lifetimes, I was ready to be done with this curse. And I would not get there by vanishing the moment you saw my face.”
Of course. He wanted me to love him to free his own soul. Not because he loved me. “But that’s what happened anyway in the end, isn’t it?”
Ailill shrugged. “I had given up by then. It was not the first time I had. But I had hoped it would be the last.”
I felt a sharp pain in my chest, even if I couldn’t stop the anger that invaded my body every time I stood near him. “You lived this long only to give up? It shouldn’t have mattered what I thought of you! That’s no reason to give up on living.”
Ailill laughed harshly, but I knew it wasn’t because I’d said anything amusing. “I am surprised to hear you talk so! You, who became a shell of herself at the idea of her beloved marrying her sister. A beloved you were not even compelled to love, a beloved you had hope of one day no longer desiring.”
I squeezed my arms tight across my chest, swallowing back tears. “How would you know how I was before Jurij and Elfriede’s Returning? I thought you weren’t ‘always watching’ after all. You seemed surprised when I first arrived in the castle.”
Ailill pointed to the book on the stand and nodded. Without waiting for his instructions, I walked over and flipped it open. A man sat beside the fire in his home, a woman at his side, a child at his feet. Whether one of the few remaining families from the curse or a new one formed in the days after, I couldn’t say. I flipped again to a random page, seeing Darwyn’s mother sweeping out her bakery, a smile on her face, her lips moving. She must have been talking to someone off page. Roslyn. The two had found happiness in their new arrangement, as friends and bakerwomen. It seemed like weeks ago, but it was really just earlier that evening.
“I did look,” said Ailill from behind me. “I watched this village evolve for countless years on those pages. A mere echo of what was going on out there, but all I would be able to see.”
I didn’t say anything. I turned a page again and saw a man sleeping in a bed. Another page had a man and woman clinking their mugs together and drinking a toast. After a few moments, Vena appeared on the page, dropping off more mugs on the table between them.
“I saw my sister on those pages,” continued Ailill. “Silently, she worked. Organizing the village after the curse. Guiding the women to gain more confidence. Blessing newfound families.” I heard him sigh. “She never created one of her own. Not that it surprised me. She did not seem the type to forget, and there would be no man worthy of her forgiveness, even if he was altered.”
I turned the page again, trying not to think about Avery’s bloodlust and trying to imagine her settling down as a leader. I couldn’t picture her with her own children, either.
“She never came for me.” Something in Ailill’s voice seemed about to crack. “I wondered if she even knew I was alive. Or if she even cared.”
I stopped. “But they must have known they were left with a lord?”
Ailill waved a hand. “They knew the castle shook when they looked at it. They were scared. Or maybe they did not think they had left behind anything worth going back for.”
“But your servants—”
“Did not yet exist.” He drummed his fingers on the throne’s armrest and smiled, haltingly. “I had not died yet. They could have sent their men after me, but no one thought to. They could have come even if the ground shook, but Avery did not try.”
“I added the earthquakes to protect you. I was worried after Avery stabbed your—stabbed him. I thought she might hurt you.”
“Who knows? To me, that would have been preferable to isolation. Even if she had killed me, I would have sprung to life once more.”
“I … I’m sorry.” I turned back to the book, more out of shame than a real need to flip through its pages.
“Sorry for the earthquakes that kept my sister from me, or sorry for the whole appalling mess you made of things?”
I flipped to another page. My mother. Alone in bed. Her brows furrowed even in slumber. Alive because of him. “Both,” I said at last.
“Of course—” Ailill stopped himself. It was as if he had expected me to say “neither” and had readied himself for the argument we almost always had. “Well. I do not expect Avery would have sought me out regardless.”
Mother tossed and turned in bed. I felt bad that even her dreams couldn’t offer her peace. I saw the foot of Elfriede’s bed in the image. Her sheets were all crumpled.
Ailill continued his story. “I grew older, clinging to that book, living for a time off food stores my brother and father had prepared for some unknown purpose. And when it ran out, I had the food they gave—well … I had food at least. I saw my sister die. I watched as everyone I ever knew faded into thin air. And when the day at last came for me to join them … ” He stopped, and his leather attire squeaked uncomfortably in the silence behind me. “Well. I came back. This time with a pale old man for company.”
I traced my finger across the dancing ink on the page, wondering what it’d be like to only see those you love on its pages, to watch them fading away until you were left with nothing but strangers. I wanted to ask so many questions, but I wasn’t sure if dredging up memories of what I’d done would set my friends free. I wasn’t even sure what was so important about keeping the cavern’s “heart” a secret that he would summon me to stand beside him even after all our fighting.
Ailill’s voice was closer when he spoke again. “In any case. The story repeated itself, only with strangers filling that book’s pages. And repeated itself. And repeated itself, only, the women fell into a comfortable routine of being objects of worship after a few ages. There was no need for anyone to organize the village. ‘The lord’ was the leader. The leader they hardly needed or cared about. But their lack of caring emboldened me. I stopped relying on food from the same sources and sent the servants out shopping. I had no lack of copper with which to pay for it. My father had stockpiled quite a bit, and his father and grandfather before him.” An arm clothed in black reached over my shoulder, and a dark-gloved hand rested a mere hair’s breadth from mine. He turned the page. “I had the servants collect all the weapons, tossed aside in trunks and sheds, forgotten generations earlier. Nobody alive recognized their purpose or cared that we took them. I made sure the idea of swords faded into the realm of myth, so person would never harm person again. An ideal world for all, in a way. Just take the free will of all men away and imprison me. Life was very peaceful.”
