Thrones of Desire

by Mitzi Szereto

  He tugged me forward and I stumbled after him. What was I doing? Did I want my life bound up with this man? I stared at him. Flickering lamplight touched his face, the hint of the monster that explained the darkness in him just there. Almost caught out of the corner of my eye.

  “You can never tame the beast.” Kiritan’s cracked voice followed me and touched my fear. A hacking cough escaped her and she pushed herself up out of the mass of red silk. “My overconfidence broke me. I should’ve known that even with all my power, a shadowbeast cannot be wrought to anyone’s will.” A smile twisted across her withered lips. “Even yours.”

  Varun flexed his fingers around his sword hilt. He held my gaze. His voice was low and sure. “Miar doesn’t need to control me. I made a promise to myself. To her. What I offer, I offer freely.”

  I swallowed. “Freely?”

  “Commander.” One of Varun’s guards pulled back the tent flap. He squinted against the flare of the lamp, his gaze flicking over the wizened woman on the floor. He straightened and saluted. “The siege is over. Her magic is broken. The reawakened are so much dust. However, the mercenaries and soldiers—the live ones—are in chaos. We should get back to the safety of the fortress.”

  Varun gave a short nod. “Agreed.” A smile cut his mouth. “Add to their chaos, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir.” And he was gone.

  Without a backward glance, Varun pulled me from the tent. Smoke billowed from dry canvas, the lick of flames chasing across the flaps of the surrounding tents. Shouts and screams filled the air. Through the darkness, shapes moved and I caught the gleam and flash of swords. Varun wanted total chaos? He had it.

  He unsheathed his own sword. “Ready?”

  He grinned at me, the shine of gold in his eyes tightening my heart. I wanted him, all of him, the man and the monster that wrapped around his flesh. Tasting me, fucking me. Bared skin and teeth and tongue, caught in a wild riot of need. My flesh ached. I would have him the moment we burst back into the safety of the fortress. I didn’t question it anymore.

  His gaze narrowed, but I caught his desire. “Keep those thoughts hot for me.”

  And with that, Varun pulled me into the night.

  SILVER

  Anna Meadows

  My mother married me off as soon as I was more woman than girl. She said it would keep me safe.

  I did not ask what it would keep me safe from. I already knew.

  Some women in our family called our blood a blessing, a sign that a star had loved one of our ancestors. My mother did not agree. She saw our streak of star blood as a sign that, generations earlier, a woman in our family had sinned. She hated our hair, black to the point of blueness. She cursed our skin tinged with gold, not pink like men wanted. She feared what might become of us if our cloaks fell away one evening and the town saw how our bodies glowed, mimicking the silver of winter constellations. Faint, but enough that it could not go unnoticed.

  The Lucero family would demand that I marry their son by torchlight at midnight, their family custom. It was their place to make demands. When he was hardly more than a boy, their son Caspian had fought so bravely defending the town that the Prince had given him an estate.

  The night of the wedding, my mother did not dress me in white. “You will wear green,” my mother said, because green was the color of Caspian’s family.

  Then she produced a necklace I had never seen before, a thin cord of gold strung with a drop of opal. Pale and milky as a moonstone, it caught the light in flecks of coral and blue. My mother turned it, and it wore a shine of lightest green.

  She fastened it around my neck and I stumbled, catching my breath. The moment it touched my collarbone, it felt as heavy as an opal thousands of times the size of the little gem on the necklace.

  I reached to unfasten it, and my mother stopped me.

  “Bear it,” she said, and turned me to the mirror.

  I startled to see the girl in the glass. Her skin was touched with pink, not gold. Her wrists did not glow silver. Her hair was no longer the color of the night sky, but as yellow as straw.

  I looked like a girl that the Luceros would gladly see their son marry.

  It would keep my star blood a secret. “The Luceros have never seen you uncloaked,” my mother said. “They know nothing of how you truly look.”

  The moment I met the Luceros’ son on the hillside, I whispered a prayer of thanks for my mother’s gift. Fair-haired and ruddy, Caspian still had the blush and health of boyhood. But his height and the look of his back through his shirt reminded me he was not a boy. He was a man who would not care for a wife whose lineage bore the streak of a falling star.

  As the priest spoke, Caspian took my hands, his fingers warm. When he shifted his weight, I shivered at the way that I could make out the shape of his thighs through his trousers. Even the scars on his forearms were like cold water at the small of my back. The flinch in his eyes, which were green as his family’s crest, gave me hope that he was becoming hard as I grew wet beneath my petticoat.

  I kept the opal around my neck when he lowered my cloak from my hair, now pale as lemon pith. I kept it on when we undressed, backs turned, on either side of our marriage bed.

  That night, my skin did not shimmer like moonlight on water. My hair did not darken.

  But my new husband did not want me.

  He blew out the bedside candles. “Good night,” he said, and the cut in his voice told me he would not have me, even as I cringed under the weight of the opal. Even with fair hair and pink cheeks, my face and body did not stir in him what his had in me.

  My shoulders and back grew sore from the impossible weight of that small opal. My fingers stung with the memory of my hands in his. The space between my legs brightened and faded like clouds crossing the moon.

  Then I wished, as children wish on stars, as women in my family have many times.

  The next night, my new husband began to suffer.

  He raved as though the house was full of specters. One minute he was delirious; the next, alert as a startled animal. When asked why, he wouldn’t speak.

  No one else noticed the hardening between his thighs.

  The next morning, he recalled the night before like a fever dream, and he was sheepish at the memory. But that night he again grew skittish enough that any noise might make him throw a vase off a ledge.

  At the worst of his desire, he overturned tables and clawed at tapestries with the fierceness of a young wolf. He hurled candlesticks and saltcellars into paintings and cut glass into the hearth. The pieces sparkled like ice that would not give to the fire.

  Each morning he was as much a gentleman as any prince. Each night he was wild as an unbroken colt.

  His family asked if he might be ill. I told them I didn’t know.

  My mother would have warned me against cursing my new husband. His family’s name, along with the opal, would keep me from being outcast as a witch. But she knew how women in our family held grudges. My grandmother had once gone a year without speaking to my grandfather because he had forgotten to bring her wildflowers on her birthday. Caspian had held my hands, and then left me a maiden. For him, I dressed in his family’s green and not the cream of my girlhood. For him, the weight of the opal made me sorer each night. I would not forgive easily.

  At night I grew drowsy from the scent of wood and river stones that came off his skin, even as my shoulders and back cried out against the pull of my mother’s opal. My body rebelled as the star’s light built within my body. I fought to keep it inside, like biting my tongue against screaming.

  Once Caspian had marred the inlaid wood of seven writing desks and armoires, once he had shattered half the crystal in his family’s collection, once a dozen priests could not reason with him, the Luceros decided something must be done.

  He could have his freedom from dawn to sundown, they decided, when he was reserved, cold as the winter sunlight that matched his hair. But at night he again became that untamed colt, thrashing and wri
thing against the desire I had wished on him. They feared he might steal horses from bordering lands, sparking feuds between families, or throw andirons through every stained-glass window in the nearby church, banning the Luceros from the parish.

  They consulted those town priests, who decided a chair gilt with pure silver should be forged, blessed and placed in the darkest room of the estate. Engraved with ornate crosses and celestial orbs, it would draw those strange stirrings out of him. When his ravings began, he was to be bound to the chair until morning.

  At the first of his madness, several strong men brought him to that dark room and fastened him to that great chair. The first night, I heard his fury and the breaking of glass and saltcellars as they worked to restrain him.

  It would cure him, the priests insisted. Each night bound to that blessed chair would ease his affliction. But he fought his bonds. I knew by the thin cords of red encircling his wrists in the morning. If he ever touched himself, I did not know. If he even knew that it was desire that tormented him, he never let on.

  We did not speak. We bristled at each other, him in his defiance, me at the growing weight of the opal, which I never removed, even to bathe.

  A week after the chair was brought to the estate, a letter from my mother arrived. Estralita, it said. What have you done?

  I put it away. Her words still left me fevered with guilt.

  Over the next few nights, the moon thinned to darkness in the sky. The stars were bright as pearls, and they grasped at the part of me that was theirs. I was water pulled into tides.

  I woke to the sound of Caspian’s cries, rooms away. The opal’s weight was breaking my body apart. It rested in my collarbone, heavy as an orb of iron. If I let it, it would crush my bones and turn my body to dust.

  I screamed into the sound of Caspian’s ravings. I fought the burden of the opal. It would not let me sleep. It left me so sore and bitter I barely stopped to notice the sunlight on garden roses. If I lay on my back, I felt as though my ribs would snap beneath the opal’s heft. If I turned onto my stomach, I thought of nothing but it dragging me through the bed and floor and into the earth with the heat of a falling star.

  It had made me pink and beautiful, but for what?

  I sat up in bed, still screaming, still hearing the cries of a man whose body would not let him rest.

  I saw myself in a mirror near the bed. The features of my face were as they had always been, but the coloring was wrong, as if a painter had worked in poor light.

  The mirrored woman looked less like a reflection and more like a strange twin. Her eyes were pale instead of dark, her hair flaxen instead of the color of river water at midnight. Pink and peach tinged her face, no gold or silver.

  She was not me.

  I tore the opal from my neck.

  My wrists again glowed. My hair turned blue-black. My eyes darkened.

  I ripped the green brocade of my nightgown and cast it off, leaving the white of my slip. It didn’t hide the glow my star blood left me with. I did not care.

  I threw the looking glass from the table. A few pieces skittered toward the fire. They settled into the flame like the crystal Caspian had broken in the hearth.

  I carried the opal down the hall, clutching the cord like I had the thing by the neck. If my husband wanted to shun his wife, he could do it to the woman I was, not what this enchanted jewel had made me.

  He was quiet now. No one guarded him. Each night they bound him fast and left him. I slipped into the dark room, once a wine cellar. That great chair’s crosses and scrolled flourishes shone in the single candle’s glow. At first all I saw of my husband was the dark shape of him. Strapped to the chair of silver, he looked as small as a boy.

  His winced against the light from the cracked door. He moaned a little, his head lolling to his shoulder. I shut the door, and there was only the glow of that single candle.

  He still cringed, more as I came closer. What was hurting him? I reached for that single candle to blow it out and caught a glimpse of my wrist. It glowed like snow under starlight. I was paining him. Even with my hair dark, the light of my body pierced him.

  I came close enough to rest a hand over his eyes, surprised that I still had mercy left in me.

  “They think I’m mad,” he said.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “I must be.”

  He spoke softly, even as his hands fought the ropes, his thighs restless as his erection strained against his trousers. I flinched between my legs, giving up the same wetness as on our wedding night.

  I kept one hand shielding his eyes and slid the other along his inner thigh.

  “Please,” he said, his breath catching at the back of his throat.

  I paused, my fingers inches from his hardness.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  I drew my hand back.

  “I have a wife,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, my fingers wringing the opal’s cord.

  “The only good I’ve been to her is faithful,” he said.

  Had he been married already before we married? Was it loyalty that kept his hands from me?

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  He hung his head and answered with my name. “I’ve never been with her,” he said.

  He hadn’t recognized me. Now that my body was free of the green dress, my hair again dark, my skin again luminous with my family’s curse, he didn’t know me.

  “Why haven’t you been with her?” I asked.

  His shoulders tensed, the candle’s light tracing the line of the muscle. “I knew I couldn’t please her.”

  The guilt from my mother’s letter stung. He had never been with a woman. So few boys grew into men without having a girl in some dew-wet field; it had never occurred to me that my husband might not know of such things.

  “I miss the wind at night,” he said. “I miss the sky. The stars.”

  The stars. If he missed them, he might not hate me.

  I opened my fingers just enough to let him grow used to my light. When he did not wince, I let my hand fall from his eyes. He looked at me, no glint of recognition.

  I loosened the ropes from his wrists and ankles.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I must be kept this way.”

  I unknotted the rope around his chest. It fell away.

  He would not rise from the chair of silver. He would not even take his wrists in his hands to ease the ruts left by his bonds.

  “Caspian?” I said.

  He bowed his head. “I am not cured of my sickness.”

  I had never felt guiltier for any wish.

  “They told me that with patience I would be cured,” he said.

  I’d heard his family speaking in hushed tones outside the brick room. They were sure that the blessed chair would be his salvation, that enough nights bound would give him back the manner and grace he possessed in daylight.

  They had told him the chair of silver would deliver him from his wildness, just as my mother had promised that the opal’s enchantment would make me a wife free from the taint of feral stars. I had been told I possessed darkness and light in the wrong places, the wrong proportions; now my body ached from carrying the charmed necklace. Caspian had been punished for desire as natural as the warmth of his hands. We had both been promised that these things would save us: the corded opal and the chair of silver. The jewel had only confined me as the chair had imprisoned him.

  The rage sparked from my heart to my fingers. I threw my mother’s opal at the chair’s back. For a moment the great chair glittered, as though inlaid with a hundred thousand opals. Then the ornate silver gave like a bough cracking loose from a tree.

  Caspian lunged from it and grabbed me, shielding me from the spray of silver. He pulled me down so I knelt, guarding me as the silver broke like ice and spider silk. It made the sound of thousands of icicles shattering against winter trees.

  Then there was quiet, nothing left of the silver chair but bent and buckled metal.

  Cas
pian lifted his chin from my hair. He squinted and blinked, his eyes adjusting to the light.

  He studied the shape of my eyes, the curves of my nose and lips, all the things the charm had not altered. He took a lock of my hair and considered the color. He turned over my hands and examined the glow on my inner wrists.

  He gently held his hand under my chin when I tried to look away. “Estralita?” he said, and I knew that he understood. I wasn’t fair-haired, but dark. I wasn’t the richness of green, but instead white, gold, silver. The only pink I had to offer him was the tint of my lips, and my blush when I couldn’t hide how I wanted him.

  He understood that his bondage in the chair of silver had been my doing as much as the town’s priests.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, an apology for the wish that had punished him, for my blood, for my name.

  “You’re different,” he said.

  So often we had been called demons or enchantresses. We had been driven from the towns of those who yelled “witch” at us as though it was our shared name. They were suspicious of us, sure we would kill their crops and lure their husbands to our beds or their deaths. They never believed us when we told them we had no such power.

  We had only wishes and stars.

  Caspian cleared a tear from my cheek with his thumb. “You’re beautiful.”

  I lifted my gaze to his. “Your family,” I said. If they knew, I feared they would imprison me in darkness worse than the old wine cellar. They would feel tricked and cheated that they had given their young son to a star-blooded girl.

  Caspian looked where the chair had been. Nothing remained but a few twisted branches of silver.

  “I’ll tell them you were my cure,” he said.

  Maybe they’d believe it. He had calmed now that we were touching.

  I could still feel his erection, and the flinch in his shoulder muscles that gave away his wanting. I kissed him quickly. His lips would not let mine go. I did not shy away as his hardness pressed into me. He freed one of my breasts from my chemise and saw that the tip was more gold and brown than pink. He kissed it, his mouth lingering on the underside where the softness met my rib cage.