Beneath Ceaseless Skies #22 Read online

  I said out loud: “I am not afraid,” and brought the pins to my eyes.

  The heat seared the moisture from the orbs. I hoped it was already done and the pain would arrive in a moment, when of their own volition my eyelids closed, clenching like the jaws of a dog, the tip of one pin grazing the left lid while the other became entangled in my eyelashes.

  I threw away the pins and raged like a willful child, beating the hard stone floor with my fists, cursing my weakness.

  That was how Lys found me. I looked up at the sound of the door opening, his familiar presence stretching and contracting madly before my eyes, now looming like a giant, now running from me though he never moved. I did not look away, the pity and wonder on his face helping me focus.

  “Daria?” he said in his little-boy voice, as though he already knew what I’d attempted. In truth, I barely finished my request before his eyes widened and he started to shake his head.

  “Listen,” I said, my words tumbling like water from a miller’s wheel. “You know what the Book says, how Eve gave the fruit to Adam, but it doesn’t say why. I think it was because she was like me, maybe she had no sense of taste or smell, and she thought if she gave the fruit to him she would know what it was to taste. She would know it through him, for she was a part of him. I am a part of you, Lys, but I’m no use to you like this. Help me.”

  Left and right his head swung, faster now, pendulum-like, his eyes clenched shut as though he could blot out my voice if he did not see me.

  Beyond dignity now, I lunged forward ungainly, trying to hug his knees. My eyes deceived me—I did not reach him but fell, skinning my palms on the stone floor and bruising my cheek. In a trice, Lys’s hands were upon me, helping me up, but I shook him off.

  “I won’t live like this, Lys,” I stormed. “I won’t!”

  Where my arguments and pleas had failed, my selfishness prevailed. Or perhaps it was his selfishness, for he knew I never made idle threats.

  Lys retrieved my hairpins and knelt by the candle. He gave one pin to me and kept the other. Together we reheated their tips till they shone, then brought them to my eyes. Fleetingly I thought that one day soon he would marry, yet the agony his virgin-bride would suffer on their wedding night would be nothing compared to what we were about to do.

  The world was still: no birds chirped, no wind sighed. We did not breathe, we did not think or feel. Our hands moved as though they belonged to one body, one person.

  I was determined to show no weakness in the end, but then the heat blossomed into pain like a night-blooming flower, threatening to blow my skull apart from within. Blood and something thicker flowed down my cheeks. My jaw hinged open like the door of an oubliette, like the maws of those fabulous snakes that can swallow a man whole, and the pain escaped in a shrill scream, like a boiling kettle. As the sound waned, I heard footsteps rushing in the hall while Lys shouted for a physician.

  True darkness welled up around me, but it was compassed within the circle of Lys’s arms, still boy-thin yet with a hint of the muscle that would wield sword and scepter. His arm supported my wet cheek as I slipped away. Tears fell on me, warm as summer rain.

  I lay in a swoon longer than after Alys’s spell, or so Lys told me later. He was with me when I awoke into blessed shadows, my ears keen with the sounds of everyday bustle in the courtyard below my window, the smells from the kitchens reminding me I’d fasted before the sacrifice. That is how I like to think of it: as my sacrifice. It is kinder than what the emperor, the physician, and almost everyone else called it.

  Lys chose to call it nothing, still too shocked to talk. It would take time, but we had that in abundance.

  He brought me a present: a velvet strip embroidered with metal thread. Gold, or I did not know my prince. It took me a moment to guess its purpose as I fingered it thoughtfully, but when I did it made me laugh: a blindfold! I did not take offense: my face must have looked truly terrible with the eyelids falling inwards over empty sockets, like an avenging fate or a nightmare.

  He tied it on me, caressed my hair. “Just so you know,” he said in a low, gruff, earnest tone. “Your eyes… They were…” He stopped, swallowed, soldiered on. “They would have been blue.”

  I ran my fingertips slowly, unerringly down his broad brow, his tremulous eyelids, his long nose, across his mouth and chin to his neck, the bite of Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Here is all the color I shall ever know or need,” I said softly.

  To have said more would have meant exposing my vows to a temptation worthy of Eve. I got a grip on a handful of Lys’s cloak instead; we went down the stairs, into the kitchen garden, the prince with his Shadow restored to him.

  The late afternoon sun beat down bountifully on rows of cabbages and carrots. Herbs and freshly churned earth sent up a divine bouquet. Servants greeted Lys with real affection, even hallooing me with more good will than I knew I inspired. “Could do with some rain, sire,” the head gardener said to Lys.

  “Yes,” I replied thoughtfully, sniffing the warm, dry air, listening for the breeze absent from the apple trees in the orchard. “But not tomorrow.”

  The gardener left us then, muttering. I needed no vision to predict clear skies on the basis of what my senses told me, but even so: it was a start. We stood in the garden till the sun went down, its strong light warm as breath, close as hair. Lys’s hand in mine was thin-skinned on top, callused on the bottom, blood-warm, familiar, and real. More real than anything you have ever seen.

  Copyright © 2009 Emily M.Z. Carlyle

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  Emily M.Z. Carlyle currently lives in Germany. She is a professional historian, an avid reader, and an undercover writer. Her fiction has appeared in Doorknobs & BodyPaint, Fantastic Flash Fiction: An Anthology, Coyote Wild, Storyglossia, Mytholog, Ghoti Magazine, Reflection’s Edge, Thirteen, and the anthology Dead Men (and Women) Walking.

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  COVER ART

  “Endless Skies,” by Rick Sardinha

  Rick Sardinha is a professional illustrator/fine artist living and working on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. His passion is to create in traditional oil media; however, he is just as comfortable in front of a computer and often uses multiple disciplines in the image creation process. More of his work can be seen at http://www.battleduck.com.

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.

  Table of Contents

  “Blighted Heart,” by Aliette de Bodard

  “The Prince’s Shadow,” by Emily M.Z. Carlyle