IGMS Issue 9 (23 page)

Or was it nothing?

She had to hurry. She had to leave this place and never come back. She had to find her lover, find some way to tell him the truth. She gently laid Molly's body out on the bed and curled her arm around her dolly. She smoothed back the dark curls and kissed her forehead. She covered herself in the black cloak and fled into the night.

She was glad again to be in the air and running over the earth, despite what little support the strange elements gave her. She followed her heart and the dim memories of the snitch all the way to the castle gates.

She strode up to the guards there and threw her hood back. Those that knew of her let her pass. Those that didn't know of her learned. They died quickly.

The myriad halls and stairs and rooms made the castle a giant labyrinth, but she knew where she was going. Up and up and up . . . to the balcony suites of the Prince's bedchamber. She did not stop until she was at the foot of his bed, staring down at his sleeping body. She wanted to shake him awake, wanted to explain everything to him, wanted to scream her love for him to the rafters.

But she couldn't.

If he awoke now, he would know what she had become. He would see the evil inside of her, the stain of it in her hair and on her skin. She had saved his life, true, but how many others had she taken on her path back to him? With love came regret. She knew what she had to do. She knew that the only thing she had to offer him now was her absence.

If she could just touch him one more time . . . she reached out a hand to him. He would wake and see her. He would know that there was sky blue beneath the black of her eyes. He would know that there was gold beneath the red of her hair. He would know because he loved her. All she had to do was touch him.

No.

It would not stop at a touch. She could never be with him, truly be with him, because eventually she would devour him just as she had devoured Molly. His soul was not bright enough for her to survive alone outside it, nor was it strong enough to sustain him once she had consumed it. If she stayed beside him, it would mean his death.

She was a monster.

She forced her hand back to herself and placed it over her heart. She hoped that it spoke enough in the silence for him to hear it, to feel how much she loved him. If it had been water and not air between them, she knew he would have felt it.

A tear fell from her cheek to his.

He stirred and opened his eyes.

She gave herself one moment, one tiny, blessed moment of looking into his soul before she turned and ran.

She tripped down the stairs and cut her feet on the stones. The cloak caught on something and she unfastened it. She was sure that soon they would come for her. They would hunt her like the beast she was. She tasted the tears that streamed down her face and knew there was only one refuge. She ran to it.

The cold beach sand kissed her feet like a prayer. The salty spray mixed with her tears, chasing them away. The first tiny wave reached up and licked her toes. Waves rumbled in a cadence she had almost forgotten how to translate.

Come
, they pulled.

Home
, they crashed.

She took small steps forward. The sand slipped out from beneath her if she stayed too long. The force of the waves pushed her backwards in opposition to the call she felt.

Come
, they pulled.

She stumbled, and the tide ripped her sideways along the beach. Gasping, she managed to regain her footing and continue walking out to sea. The current grabbed at her clothes, and she tore them off. The tips of her hair mingled with the foam. Flotsam swirled around her waist.

Home
, they crashed.

She walked until a riptide took her and dragged her out to sea.

My link to her was severed at that point. But I didn't have to live inside her anymore to know where she was headed.

She would grab the first sharp object she found - maybe a crab's claw or a clam's shell - and tear into herself so that the water could flow through her again. The first gash might have been straight, but the rest would be ragged and flawed. She would make her way to the Deep, her body drawn to the never-ending call of the soul of the world. She would make a home there among the bloodworms and the warm vents and the other predators.

She would take her love and regret with her. She would heal in the balm of the ocean, away from the complexities of mortal life. She would tell herself that if the day came, if the words were spoken and the magic came to her, she would turn them away. She would be brave and righteous. She would not let evil back into the world. The suffering would end with her. She would stew in the self-affliction until it became a dim memory, tucked away in the recesses of her mind like sight and sound, air and fire. Time would fade her lover's face, his name into nothing, and then time itself would melt into darkness. She would ebb and flow and never die.

But when that day did come, as it would, ages and ages from now, she would choose the light. She would choose the escape. She would let the evil out one last time just to feel it all again, to live, even if it meant stealing someone else's destiny.

As I had.

Strong arms wrapped around me, brushing my satin bedclothes against the small jagged scars on either side of my torso. I leaned back against him, feeling his heartbeat through his chest.

"I just had the strangest dream," he said. I felt his deep voice rumble through the skin of my back. "You came to me while I lay in bed, only your hair was red and your skin was different. You stared at me like you wanted to say something, and then you ran. You looked so . . . sad."

He turned me around to face him. "The day you saved me was the happiest day of my life. And this day should be the happiest day of yours. Don't be sad."

I smiled and shook my head.

"Good." He kissed me then, long and slow and deep. He hugged me tightly before pulling away. "Come back to bed?"

"Yeth," I whispered, the words still foreign to my tongue. He kissed me again and left me. I looked out over the moonlit water once more and said my goodbyes before following him, my prince, my soulmate, my stolen love.

Love.

It was the reason I lived.

Mother Holton grieved when the god-voices returned because she remembered what it had cost Settler's Rest the last time, when she was a little girl. It made her weep.

But they were tears of sorrow, not fear. No, she was not afraid. She knew that the voices came around like Gussuf's Wheel and that after the god-voices quieted, they would have peace for a season. But this was the second visitation in a century. They would visit sooner and sooner until eventually they ushered in the next Age of Unknowing.

The Seventeenth age, if the Book spake true.
"So many," she heard a dry reed-rattle voice whisper into the darkened bedroom. Her own voice, she realized.

The room bell chimed and she sat up from the blankets. With each year, they'd piled more of them onto her. "These winters are growing colder," she would say. "What do you think of that?" And they would heat the blankets near the fire that night and her bones wouldn't ache from the cold nearly as much.

The door opened and a wedge of light pushed into the room. A girl stepped into it.

"Mother, they have started," the girl said. Mother Holton couldn't tell who it was. Perhaps one of the younger, newer converts. Was that a hint of the Northern Coasts in her voice?

"I know they have," the old woman said. "Help me to prayer, girl."

The girl shook her head. "I am not permitted, Mother."

Mother Holton laughed. "Them that's told you not to answer the voices are already on their knees, I'll wager." She coughed and tasted copper in her mouth. "Whether or not we answer is irrelevant, regardless of what you've been taught."

The girl stepped forward, uncertainty in her voice. "Why do we want it so badly?"

For a moment, Mother Holton allowed herself to hear the whispering god-voices.
Comehomecomehomecomehome,
they whispered,
toaplacewhereyouwillbeloved.
Only the whispers, when they blended, were a choir that balanced perfectly between chant and song. Mother Holton forced the voices back down. "Because we cannot bear to be alone in the Universe," she finally said. "Now help me to my knees, girl."

The girl came to her side and helped her up. There was a time when Mother Holton would have pretended to accept the assistance without resting any weight on her helper. But now, she knew she needed all the help she could get. The girl gently lowered her to the floor. Mother Holton folded her hands and bowed her head.

"Now pray with me," she said.

The girl shook her head more vigorously. "I can not, Mother."

Mother Holton smiled. "This is your first time, child. You do not know it yet, but before they pass, you will bend your knee to them that's bidding. It's better to do it now. It makes what comes later more easy to swallow."

Trembling, the girl knelt beside her.

Then Mother Holton, Settler Priestess of the First Home Temple, answered the voices from her childhood so long ago.

"Oh," she said, feeling the lump grow in her throat, "I've missed you."

When she was thirteen, Abigail Holton loved Enoch Bentley and knew with a teenaged certainty that she would marry that farm boy and give herself to corn and babies. Her grandmother had raised her on the Book and she knew her part in the Settler's Promise. Grandmother was a seamstress with gnarled hands, doing the best she could by the baby that came into her care in the sunset of her life. Abigail's mother had died following a visitation. And though her grandmother did not speak of it, the other girls in town did.

But Abigail listened to the Book. She would not hate them for repeating the words their mothers whispered among themselves when they thought their children weren't listening. Her mother had taken her own life because the voices never stopped for her.

Abigail was walking in Farmer Bentley's fields, wondering what Enoch looked like with his shirt off, when she heard the voice that changed her life.
Come home
, it whispered and a choir joined in around it. All her life she'd felt empty and alone, until that afternoon as the day stars set hours ahead of the sun. But when the god-voices started up on the edge of her womanhood, Abigail Holton knew that regardless what she'd been taught, she was not alone in the universe.