Текст книги "Cruel Beauty"

Автор книги: Rosamund Hodge

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I smiled. “I’ll get her ready,” I said, and dragged Astraia back around a corner into the shadows. “I think she suspects,” I added under my breath, once we were out of sight.

Astraia shrugged. “Probably, but I’ve been bringing her fresh herbs every day for two weeks.”

“You’ve been bribing her?”

“If it works, why not?” She snatched the veil out of my hands and draped it over my head. “You’d better blush, or everyone will know it isn’t me.”

“Astraia, I don’t believe there’s a thing in the world that could make you blush. And I’m wearing a veil anyway.” I grasped her hands. “You just stay hidden.”

Between the dim light and the gauzy veil, I could just barely make out her smile. “Good luck.”

Nan Hubbard gave me a sideways glance, but she said nothing as she led me to the bonfire at the center of the square. A great cheer went up when I was led in and seated at the main table, for now the festivities could begin. A group of girls linked hands around the bonfire and sang: not any of the traditional wedding hymns, but the counting song that we always sang on this night.

I’ll sing you nine, oh!

What is your nine, oh?

Nine is for the nine bright shiners,

We shall see the sky, oh.

I knew the lyrics well, for the song was also a lullaby; Mother often sang it to us, before the sickness took her away, and it had always been one of my favorites.

Four for the symbols at your door,

We shall see the sky, oh.

But now the words made me shiver with nameless dread and half-remembered sorrow. As the girls worked through the verses, it only got worse. I could barely breathe, and then they came to the end of the song:

One is one and all alone

And ever more shall be so.

I knew I was being an idiot, that I had no reason to cry, but I couldn’t stop myself. I sat under my veil and sobbed like a girl who had lost her first love. The words echoed through my head, and though I had heard them a thousand times before, now they sounded like sudden and complete despair.

“Bring the bride forward!” Nan Hubbard proclaimed. There was another cheer. After a dazed moment, I got up and walked unsteadily to where she stood just in front of the bonfire, the straw Tom-a-Lone sitting up beside her.

She flashed me a smile. The light flickered over her wrinkled face, and I felt a sudden dread.

“Hold out your hand, girl.” I stretched out my right hand, and the cold, solid weight of the ring dropped into my palm. “Do you know what you’re taking up along with this ring?”

I knew what I should say: I take up the hand of our lord beneath the fields. But the words stuck in my throat. The ring was an old heirloom, a gift to the village from some long-forgotten lord. I had seen it put on the bride’s finger every year I could remember. But now I finally saw it: a heavy golden ring, carved like a signet into the shape of a rose.

I smelled crisp, smoky autumn air and I couldn’t look away. Somewhere a bird was singing—and as if from very far away, I also heard the sweet, breathy voice of a girl raised in song:

Though mountains melt and oceans burn,

The gifts of love shall still return.

I stared at the ring, golden and gleaming and utterly real, and I remembered.

I remembered being married to a statue while my sister sobbed her heart out back at home. I remembered being raised as a tribute and a weapon, and I remembered receiving this ring. With love.

I remembered my husband, whom I had loved and hated and betrayed.

There was a roaring in my ears and I thought I might faint. They love to mock, Ignifex had said, and they had. To leave answers at the edges, where anyone could see them but nobody does.

And they had. Everybody knew the story of the Last Prince, and everybody knew the story of Tom-a-Lone, and nobody knew what it meant.

Old Nan said, “Don’t you have a vow to make, girl?”

People said the Last Prince still haunted the ruins of his castle. That he would come if you called out his name. People said that Brigit let Tom-a-Lone out for just one night every year. To meet his bride.

And they are always fair.

I seized the ring and slid it on my finger, then pulled off my veil as I spoke the words I had said before, in a time that now had never been.

“Where you go, I shall go; where you die, I shall die, and there will I be buried.”

Then I bolted away into the woods.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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26

Behind me I heard shouts and people running after, but I lost them soon enough. I kept running, though: I had to get to the castle by midnight. That part of the legend might be a lie, but I couldn’t risk it. I had lived all my life surrounded by the Kindly Ones’ mocking clues and ignoring them. I wouldn’t ignore them anymore.

Eventually I slowed to a walk, but I struggled grimly onward in the darkness, my legs aching as I climbed the slope, sweat trickling down my back. I was now following the road—it seemed safe enough, because who would expect me to run this way?—but there wasn’t much moonlight and I was terrified of losing my way.

Finally I reached the top. I paused for a moment, gasping for breath, then staggered through the ruined archway into the remains of the castle and collapsed to the ground. I was burning with heat from the climb and my legs felt like they were made of limp wool; I wanted to lie down in the grass and sleep, but I made myself sit up and watch.

All around me, there was nothing but darkness and the sound of crickets.

“Kindly Ones!” I yelled into the night. “Where are you? Don’t you always want to bargain?”

There was no answer. I clenched my teeth and waited. And waited. Drying sweat itched against my skin and I shivered in the cold. I began to wonder if I had gone insane and all my memories of that other life were only a delusion.

Or maybe it had all happened and I was deluded to think that they let him out of the box even once a year. I remembered my futile childhood vigil. That had been in the spring, but maybe it didn’t matter what night I waited for him. Maybe my only chance to save the Last Prince had been back in that house, and now that I had lost it I would never get another.

The darkness yawned around me. I imagined living out my whole life knowing what I had done and what I had lost, knowing that Ignifex—Shade—my husband was suffering in the dark and would never, ever be rescued.

Then I did cry again, but only a little; I wiped my tears and settled in to wait. Against all hope, I had remembered. I couldn’t give up now. If I had to, I would come back to this place every night for the rest of my life. I knew whom I loved and what I had to do, and for once what I wanted was right: so nothing in the world could break me.

But I could fall asleep.

I held it off for a long time. I would sit bolt upright, forcing my eyes wide as I glared into the darkness, or sometimes I would stand and jump up and down, pumping my hands through the cold air to wake and warm myself at once.

But eventually I was so tired I couldn’t think. Eventually I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I leaned my back against the stones for just a minute; and then I thought I could surely rest my eyes for just a moment; and then I was asleep.

Birdsong woke me, high and pure. I bolted up, my heart pounding, as I remembered speaking to the sparrow.

Then I heard horse hooves in the darkness and saw a flicker of light through the trees.

In an instant I was on my feet and skulking in a corner of the ruins. I saw them ride out of the woods and into the ruins: a gleaming troop of people made from light and air, mounted on horses made of shadow—yet they looked sharper, more solid, more real than the stone and trees around them. They carried no torches, but light and wind swirled around them; the tree leaves laughed as they passed, and they laughed and sang in return.

Except for one. He rode on a gleaming horse, perhaps because he had no light of his own: shadows fell across his face, and he was bowed and silent.

The horses halted. The lady at the front dismounted, and so too did the shadowed man. She turned to him.

“Well, my lord,” she said in a voice like sunlight gleaming through ice. “Are you satisfied?”

He nodded wordlessly.

“Then return to your darkness.” She held out the box, and he reached for it with one hand.

Then I slammed into him.

We tumbled to the ground together. I tried to drag him away but didn’t get far, because he struggled against me as if I were the Children of Typhon myself. He made no sound but short, desperate gasps as he kicked me and clawed at my face.

“You idiot,” I snarled, “I’m your wife.”

He went still.

“Do you think I’ll let you escape?” I demanded, and pulled him closer. He curled against me and went limp in my arms.

The lady looked down at me. She was the same one I had seen making a bargain with him, all those years ago.

“What is the meaning of this impudence?” she asked, and her voice was the same one that had spoken to me in the darkness, that had told me to destroy him.

“You,” I choked out. “You tricked him.”

“We have kept our bargain,” she said. “In the time that was, and the time that is. And we have shown him such great kindness besides. One night every year, we let him out to see the stars and know his people are safe.”

“I know his name!” I yelled. “You didn’t bother to burn it out of history because you thought no one in this time would remember him, but I do. I remember him and his name is Lux. Marcus Valerius Lux. Now you have to let him go!”

My words fell into dead silence. Nothing happened.

“Oh, child.” The lady shook her head with gentle amusement. “That bargain was with the Gentle Lord. It has now been undone, for it was never made, and the Gentle Lord does not exist.”

“If it wasn’t made, then why is he paying its penalty?”

“He is paying what he promised on that last night: every moment after was undone, and he was locked in the shadows as if he had never called on us. Do you think his heart was ever pure enough to look upon the Children of Typhon and escape them?”

The wind rustled in the trees. In my arms, Lux drew a shaky breath. From all around, the Kindly Ones looked down on us, merciless and serene as the stars, and any moment they would drag him away from me.

I had to think. I had never heard of anybody outwitting the Kindly Ones, but it had to be possible.

“You cheated,” I said. “You’re supposed to be the Lords of Bargains, but you cheated. It’s not a game or a bet or a bargain if there’s no way to win, and there was never any way to guess his name.” My fingers dug into his skin. “He said you were always fair. And you always left hints.”

“But we gave him so much more than hints. Every night in the darkness, we whispered his true name. With your own lips, we told him where to find it.”

I remembered his desperate, wandering voice, the moment before I betrayed him: The name of the light is in the darkness.

“It is not our fault that he was too afraid to heed us. Or that when he did find the courage to listen in the darkness, you betrayed him before he could hear it speak. Or that, once reunited with himself, he was too desperate and too guilty to seek his name any longer. We gave every one of him a thousand chances, child, and he squandered all of them.”

My throat clogged with bitter protests, but I knew they were useless. The Kindly Ones would only further explain their fairness. Shade had always known that they were two halves of a whole. Ignifex had always had the power to join them. I had always had the chance to listen to both of them and put their stories together.

That they had made Shade powerless to start anything, that they had convinced Ignifex there was no point in asking questions, that I had been raised to hate and destroy and never imagine I could save the man I loved—

The Kindly Ones would say it didn’t matter. And maybe they were right. We still could have snatched happiness from our tragedy if we had made the right choices, the right wishes. If we had been kinder, braver, purer. If only we had been anything but what we were.

But I was what I was, and my husband had suffered the fate I had chosen for him.

And now I had the chance to redeem what I’d done.

“Then let me make a bargain,” I said. “Release him, and I’ll pay anything you like.” Fear thrummed across my skin, but I couldn’t stop now. “If it’s mine and it doesn’t hurt anyone, I’ll pay it. Just let him go.”

“Oh?” said the lady. “What do you suppose you have to offer?”

I stared at her, trying to think of something she would consider a sacrifice. “My eyes.”

“Not enough.” She said the words like she was flicking an ant off her dress.

“My life,” I said wildly.

“Not enough.”

“Then I will serve you.” The Kindly Ones always bargained. They had to. Didn’t they?

In my arms, Lux stirred and hoarsely whispered, “No.”

I pressed a hand over his mouth. If he was frightened for me, then it had to be a bargain they would accept.

“I’ll serve you every day until the end of time,” I said. “Just like he did.”

“Do you imagine that we lack servants?” The lady knelt before me with a terrible smile. “Know this, child. There is no price you can ever pay that will suffice to release him from the darkness. He made his choice, and lief or loath he shall have it until the end of time.”

I remembered opening the door, remembered shadows burrowing into my face and hands.

“Then,” I said, and my voice was a little wobbling thing.

One is one and all alone. For nine hundred years, he suffered that for you.

“Then let me make a different bargain,” I said, more strongly. My whole body pulsed with terror, but my love was in my arms and I couldn’t let go. “For my price, I’ll stay with him in the darkness. Forever and ever.”

The lady rose. “And your wish?”

“Nothing. I love him, and I want to be with him.”

“Don’t,” said Lux, his voice stronger.

“I’m not going to start obeying you now,” I told him, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. Then I looked up. “Just give me the price and nothing else. Just let me be with him and share in his punishment.”

The lady’s eyes widened. “That is a fool’s bargain,” she said. “To pay everything and ask for only helplessness in return. Do you think you will comfort him at all? There is no love in the shadows. It would destroy the purest heart and neither of you is pure. You will hate and hurt each other and become your own monsters.”

Her words hammered into me. Every one of them was absolutely true. Neither one of us had ever been pure, and therefore neither of us was strong enough to defeat the darkness. Even in this new world—so much gentler than the one I now remembered—the traitor threads of anger and selfishness still wove through my heart. I would hate and hurt him eventually, and there was nothing I could do to stop myself.

That had been Lux’s mistake, nine hundred years ago, thinking that he could bargain the Kindly Ones into making him actually kind. It was the folly of all the people who had ever bargained with them, believing that if they just found the correct price for the perfect power, they would be able to make their wishes come out right.

I knew better: there was no power I could buy or steal that would save me from my own heart.

But I could still be with him. I didn’t need any power at all, to suffer the same as him.

One of Lux’s hands had found mine, and even though he was mouthing No, his grip gave me the strength to meet the lady’s eyes and whisper, “Even so, I will keep my vow. Where he dies, I will die. And there will I be buried.”

And with a burst of song, the sparrow landed on my wrist.

A handful of kindness, it said to the Kindly Ones. The answer to your riddle.

The ground tilted beneath us, and suddenly we were in the laughing, light-drenched garden where I had met the sparrow. The Kindly Ones blazed with painful light, but I couldn’t look away.

Are you not the Lords of Bargains? said the sparrow. Keep this one, then.

It is no bargain, said the lady. It is a revolt against bargaining. It will destroy itself in the granting. It will destroy us in the granting.

Yes, said the sparrow. Keep it.

They deserve it, the lady snarled. Her face was still human, but only in the same way as a face-shaped knot on a tree trunk, a faint and meaningless resemblance. The darkness and the shadows, they both have it in their hearts and they deserve to have nothing else.

Lux raised his head from my shoulder and looked at the Kindly Ones. “We both . . . accepted that,” he said hoarsely.

Go, said the sparrow. Go. You cannot bear this much kindness.

Something rang out, both like a shriek and like infinite silence; then the Kindly Ones were gone like a ripple in water. The leaves all rustled and turned into living flames.

Do not forget, said the sparrow. The grass caught fire.

“Forget what?” I asked.

It leapt into the air and hovered, its wings whirring into a blur.

Your bargain is death to their power. If you hold on, you may find your way back again.

The air turned into liquid light. The ground rippled beneath us, then melted away, and we fell down into infinite depths, the fire falling with us in great coruscating streams that swirled and screamed through darkness.

In that darkness waited the Children of Typhon, who laughed and sang as they swirled around us. Just as before, their song left me shuddering in helpless horror. And they devoured us: they crawled under our skin and wept out our eyes, they bubbled into our lungs until we choked on the infinite, icy shadow. They hollowed me out until I was only a senseless parchment husk. But no matter how they shredded away all meaning from me, I was still circled in Lux’s arms and I was his.

The fire roared down upon us. It curled through our hair, then wrapped around our wrists and faces, trying to drag us apart. It seared across my skin, hotter than the Heart of Fire, and yet more painful was how it seared through my mind. The fire burned away my memories, taking back his name and mine, both of my pasts and all of my hopes, the sky and the sparrow and the world itself. I clung to somebody I did not know, could not imagine knowing, but I still knew beyond all doubt that he was mine.

We fell until we had been falling forever and always, and always would continue falling, because nothing existed outside this chaos of fire and shadow.

But I held on to him.

And he held on to me.

I woke with the dazzle of morning sunlight in my eyes, birdsong chattering in my ears. I lay on the hard ground, stiff and cold and sore, but there was somebody beside me.

Lux.

I bolted up and then didn’t dare move. It didn’t seem possible that he was here: the prince I had dreamt about, actually real. The husband I had betrayed, actually rescued. The ghostly prisoner, actually whole. Yet here he lay, half curled on his side, his chest moving softly with each breath. I felt like he would vanish if I moved.

So I sat still and stared at him. He had the same slender, lovely face that I remembered seeing on both men. His skin was shockingly pale, but it was a human pallor, not the ghostly milk-white of Shade. His hair was black, but lanky and tangled as I had never seen Ignifex’s.

The line of his jaw was exactly the same as I remembered kissing. But I had never kissed him, not in this life. And he was not exactly the same man.

Since I had remembered him last night, I hadn’t had time to think of anything except what I had done and the terrible need to set it right. I hadn’t even wondered what he would be like, reunited. Now I could think of nothing else. I had loved Ignifex, and after a fashion, I had loved Shade. They had both more or less loved me in return. But Marcus Valerius Lux? What were we to each other?

His eyes flickered open and focused on me. They were bright blue eyes, the pupils round and completely human, but they were not exactly Shade’s eyes; the way he squinted against the light, his whole face wrinkling into the expression, was exactly like Ignifex.

Then his lips curved in a faint smile and he reached up to touch my face. I caught his hand against my cheek and held it; his fingers were warm and gloriously real, but they felt rougher than I remembered. I held his hand to examine it and saw that his palms and fingertips were covered in a network of thin, pale scars.

“This is real,” he whispered, sitting up.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re real. I thought—I started to think—” He was shaking now. Shame burned through my body, but I pulled him into my arms, and still holding on we rolled back down to lie on the grass.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

For an answer, he only buried his face in the crook of my neck, and we lay still together for a long time, until at last he whispered in my ear, “At least you’re not as shy as when we met.”

I was about to say, Do I need to remind you how much I am used to you?—and then I bolted upright, skin burning. Because I remembered everything we had done together, remembered being this woman at ease in his embrace, yet I knew bone-deep that I had never even held hands with a man, let alone kissed one. Memories tangled in my throat and I couldn’t breathe.

Then I realized I had thrown him to the ground. “I’m sorry,” I blurted, hoping I had not hurt him.

But he was sitting up now too, leaned back with his hands behind him, his head tilted to one side. It was exactly the sort of posture that Ignifex might have sat in.

“You saved me,” he said quietly. The cadences of his voice were uncanny: entirely familiar, but not exactly like either Ignifex or Shade. “You saved me, and I think that covers almost half your sins.”

I snorted. “I was more than a little late.”

“Better than never,” he said. “Besides, I did deserve it. I wronged you. Both of me.” His mouth tightened, and then he said, whisper-soft, “I’m sorry too. Please forgive me.”

Neither one of them would ever have apologized so desperately. It was a new person staring back at me with blue eyes—but I was a new person too. And if he, so long divided, could gather himself together and remember how to love me, then I could do the same for him.

“Well, you were at least both handsome, too.” I took his hand again; our thumbs rubbed together, and then suddenly we were kissing.

When we finally stopped, Lux said, “What happens now?” He looked around at the ruins as if seeing them for the first time.

I pushed hair out of my face and tried to think past the warmth of his arm around my waist. “Well, we should tell somebody I’m alive, since I ran out into the night. And we’d better prepare to get shouted at, since I jilted Tom-a-Lone.” I remembered that the world he’d known hadn’t had that tradition. “At the festival, they—”

“I’ve seen the festivals.” His soft voice stopped the breath in my throat. But then he went on, “So, you were running after another man? I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Never leave me again.”

I had just created the kind of scandal I’d spent all week scheming to avoid. But with the sky an impossible blue overhead and my impossible, blue-eyed husband sitting beside me, I couldn’t much care.

“Come on.” I took his hand and stood, pulling him up with me. “Let’s go home. Aren’t you tired of being in this house?”

I meant the words lightly, but he looked around the sunlit ruins with solemn eyes. “It’s strange,” he said softly. “I think I’ll miss it.”

And I realized that in every life he had lived, this was his only home and he had never left.

“I miss hating my sister,” I said, pulling him toward the gateway. “She’s a little bit more wicked now, so I can’t even hate her for being too kind.”

But when we were almost at the threshold, he paused again, and this time there was naked fear on his face.

“You do realize,” he said. “I don’t remember how to be anything but a demon lord and his shadow.”

“I’m still not very good at being anything but a wicked sister.” I took his other hand.

A handful of kindness, the sparrow had said, and now we each had two.

“We’ll both be foolish,” I said, “and vicious and cruel. We will never be safe with each other.”

“Don’t try too hard to be cheerful.” His fingers threaded through mine.

“But we’ll pretend we know how to love.” I smiled at him. “And someday we’ll learn.”

And we walked out through the gateway together.