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Authors: Tanith Lee

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Coira bit her lip to stop herself laughing at the suffering of the world.
By the time they left the mansion, her tears were falling again. But many came out of that place sobbing.
 
 
According to the candles, further days and nights passed. Nothing might have happened. Even the dwarves’ unease about the silver and the thief-prince faded, for there were no more challenges.
Coira had begun to walk sometimes in the Underworld. More or less known now as belonging to the seven tough dwarves, she was not
attacked and seldom accosted. She had no money, had never asked for any. She sold things instead in the market, one of the two uncouth dresses, the first pair of shoes they had bought for her, since replaced. She even considered selling her long hair, which she still covered over on her walks. She did not know why she did any of this. Was she preparing to leave the dwarves and go out alone on to the winter earth?
Where
would she go? Korchlava—why? And
why
would she go?
On the journey back from the valley, she and he had not exchanged a word. Save for the intermittant courtesies—
Here, let me help you, the track’s worse—Thank you for your help.
They had ridden another raft only part of the way. He had stood by the polesman, this time a burly youth with one eye, exchanging local news. Avoiding her.
He had avoided her after, too. He did not always now come back to the shack-house. He let Soporo’s two women bathe him, or found some outlet of the river to wash in, or went dirty. He went off with Greedy, drinking at a still-shop up the cliff.
He. Hephaestion.
I could go to the city and become a whore. I could live by that.
I could live in some village, making up herbs for their illnesses, and hoping not to poison them by mistake, Because I never learned all Ulvit taught me.
I could go back to
Belgra Demitu
and slap
UlVit’s
face, or have her killed, as she tried to ruin me.
None of these things were believable. Such cities and villages and people no longer existed. (Did Ulvit? Did
Arpazia
exist?)
There was only the Underworld ruled by an unseen, howling arch-thief. And Hephaestion.
Alone in the shack, she said aloud to herself, “He is like
her
, like the Woman—my—perhaps my mother. He doesn’t want me near him. That’s why he stays away.”
But the most bizarre thing had happened. Coira, who had been lessoned that she might expect nothing from anyone else, did not at last credit that. She had been an infant, now she was a woman, and Hephaestion a man. It seemed to her—so very curiously—that
she need only reach out, as if to some summer tree laden with glowing fruit—to pluck what she would have and feed herself over and over.
Coira did not know why she thought this, after all her other thoughts. Nor did she ask herself why young and handsome men had sometimes in the past moved before her, and she had barely seen them.
Hephaestion was a few years older than she, but had the looks of a man of thirty. He had the body of a tree. His feet were crippled. The crown of his head reached only just above her elbow.
It did not occur to her, in her feral and innocent desire, to wonder if he would feel used or patronized by her interest. It
was
in her awareness that to the dwarves, all of them, ordinary humans were foreigners, trustless but inferior.
But not she. Not she with him.
Which was her idiocy, for why should she seem any different to him?
He was the height of a tall child, but had five times her strength. Twenty times her knowledge. His limping grace stunned her. His beauty made her heart scorch so she wanted to tear herself apart before him and throw the pieces of herself against his spurning flesh. Oh, she was the child, not he.
 
 
It was night. The time-candle said so.
Above, the upper floor shifted faintly as Proud and Tickle made love on their mattress. Soporo was off with his pair of lemans. Want and Vinka were silent and motionless behind their curtain. greedy was out drinking. Hephaestion too had not come in.
Coira had blown out her personal lamp, washed herself head to toe behind her own screen, put on her shift, in which Cirpoz had stolen her, and wrapped over that the ragged cloak.
She emerged, crossing over to heat a cup of watered wine at the fire-pit. She moved softly, not to disturb or alert the dwarves.
As she knelt there, she found she stared up at the mirror trethered
to the wall. Blackened, occulted, and disregarded, she had nearly forgotten it all this while.
Coira got to her feet. She moved noiselessly to the mirror. Putting one finger on the muck, she scraped a little spot away.
She gazed into her own eyes then, that were like the eyes of the mirror itself.
Was this she? Or some sorcery …
To the eyes, whispering, she spoke.
“Make him come here. Make him come to me. Now. At once. Wherever he is. Make him come here.
Mirror, mirror, make it true. Make him mine by power of you.
”
How long she stood there, whisper-whispering, half-singing, without sound, her rhyme, again and again, she did not know. Miles off, she heard the wine boil over and go out harmlessly on the flames. (The pan would be spoiled.) She heard the surrealistic noises of Elusion, distant echoing shouts, filmy settlings from the mines, a baby that mewed and grew quiet.
Then, she heard—him, coming in at the door, and from her eye’s edge, saw the shadow that strode before him, high as the ceiling. He was a giant.
She was too afraid to turn. Then she turned.
He stood there, glaring sadly at the fire. He smelled of the acid brews of the stills, and of the river he had bathed in. And of skin and life, of himself, and uncannily familiar, as if she had known him always.
Coira drew off the burned-out pan, and filled another with diluted wine. She let it heat, then poured it in a cup. All this while he stood there, waiting. She handed him the cup. He drank, catching his breath at the wine’s temperature. Then he followed her to her alcoved wall of the shack. They moved inside the half-transparent curtain, and all the world was shut out.
“I made you come back,” she said, shaking aside the crow wings of her undone hair, arrogant in humiliation.
“I thought so. I felt it pulling me here, your spell. I knew you
were a witch from the start. At the inn, when you made him leave you alone. Your mother was a witch, they said.”
“Perhaps not my mother. She hated me. Do you?”
“I? Hate you … you’re another race than mine.”
“Will it matter?” She drew in all her breath and said his name, “Hephaestion, will it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Am I repugnant to you?” she asked. But she stared in his face, and for the first time in her life, she felt herself to be (the mirror’s sorcery) beautiful. As beautiful as the queen, Arpazia—no, no, fairer far than Arpazia. Fairest in the world.
“Let’s not talk,” he said. “We can’t talk, you and I. Sit down.” She sat. He sat by her. This way, they were almost of a height. “I’ve had a woman, once or twice. I mean, your breed of woman. No unkindness was in it.”
Then she turned and pressed her face against his, her profile to his, her nose pressed into his, her eyes blinded by his, and her lips spoke on his mouth. “But I love you.”
He kissed her quickly, light, without meaning. He drew back slightly and said, “No, but you don’t, Coira.”
Her name. He had said her name. She put her hands around his head and locked her fingers in his hair and pulled him home again against her mouth. It was like the mirror, too, but he lived.
“I love you. I only ever loved
her.
But I love
you.
”
“All’s vanity,” he said.
“Not vanity. It’s
love.
”
“Very well. Then—yes, you love me. I see you must do, if you cast a spell to bring me here.”
They kissed now more deeply, but still with face pressed awkwardly to face, the way a face must press flat against its own self in a glass.
She felt his tongue, wine-hot in her mouth. She wrapped his tongue with hers. She drank his breath, wanting to suffocate him or to be suffocated, to drop down with him into the chasm of feeling and fear and desire that was expanding now between them.
His hands moved on her waist. It was like a dance. He lifted her up and she was lying back. He found her breasts inside the shift. She tore the thin stuff away so he must put his lips on her bare skin.
“You smell so sweet,” he said. “I stink of the mines and the river—”
“You smell of metal and fire,” she said.
“Your hair,” he said, “as if all the bloody night fell in through the hill—”
When he tried to take her, she felt her virgin’s body sealed too close. It was impossible. She was like some wall. She forced herself against him, struggling. “Lie still,” he said, “be patient.” He stroked her until the impossible wall melted. Then she felt him break her open like the wound of death. But she was born in him.
Connected now, as if one creature, they thrust together in a battle. The sound of their breathing filled the Underworld. Then they entered some other place through the fabric of the dark, brighter than the sun, and died in each other’s grip.
“I’m sorry that I hurt you. Sometimes it has to be, the first time.”
“Is that all?”
“Was it so disappointing? You seemed not to think so.”
“But it ends so soon.”
“It kills you otherwise. It can always be done again.”
“Do it again to me.”
“In a while.”
“Perhaps the night won’t end. Look how strong the candle is, still.”
“Nights end. Days end. What are these little scars on your arm?”
“They let my blood once, when I had a fever. What are
these
scars, here?”
“The lord beat me when he was drunk.”
“I hope he’s dead and in Hell.”
“He is. We are too, supposedly.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “Thank God. We’re safe in Hell.”
S
EVEN DAYS AFTER MIDWINTER-
Mass, snow covered Belgra Demitu.
It had come from the mountains in the east, flying down to the sea like white swans. Perhaps, through the years, a flurry of flakes had speckled the air. But no sooner did they touch the earth than they were gone. This snow settled in a cloud. Such snow had never seen there—
never
; not in a century.
“Black is the wood, white is the snow …”
What did the mirror see looking in? A young girl? No. There was no young girl, and the mirror was gone.
“Snow,” announced the woman, the crone. “And land, and sky. Nothing else.”
But she observed something shifting through the avenues of the whiteness. The wind, wolves, riders. (Fate again was bounding over the snow’s book, toward her.)
Black is the wood
—
“Hush,” she said. She spoke to herself.
She withdrew into the shell of her thoughts.
 
 
Arpazia dreamed, and the wood was red as a ruby. The snow was black, and something pale flowed down—
But then, the snow was black, and the trees were white, peeled by the scorings of the tusks of beasts, and a red stream, rippling—
The white trees rose from the blood-red snow.
Arpazia saw she bled, and her blood was blacker than night.
 
 
Aggrieved, Prince Tusaj turned the letter in his hands. His father had not, of course, penned it; Draco could hardly write his own name, some scholarly scribe had seen to this, and so knew all the words.
Draco had abruptly recalled he had a legitimate daughter here. She was of marriageable age, in fact, seventeen or so, and presentable (said Draco) according to Tusaj’s earlier information. Send her then to Korchlava (said Draco).
Which would be difficult, the girl having just been lost.
Tusaj had already been put out, because he had meant to purchase some of that fellow’s dwarves, not all of them, but the three best ones, the tall blond, and the angry sable, and that minx with green eyes. But Cirpoz had taken them off before Tusaj had the chance.
And now this. Tusaj feared the king, it went without saying.
“Write—write that she’s sick. Very sick, may die. Some female thing …”
Tusaj was also no scholar, and the scribe bent to his paper in the tremblous light of winter candles, unsettled as they and the prince.
“ … Some female malady,” repeated the scribe.
“Yes—what do they suffer from?”
“They are like us, sir, in many ways …”
“No, they’re women.”
At a loss, both men fumbled after secret, grisly-sounding ailments, muttered over by doxies and grannies in their boyhoods.
“Perhaps, Lord Prince, this terrible harsh winter—the cold and snow which never before—”
“That won’t do.”
But Tusaj looked from his window, down across the terraces and gardens, become all a desert of whiteness, to the vanished sea they said was hard as a silver mirror.
Was this some curse? Some sorcery?
Tusaj relaxed his grasp on the black wood of the windowframe. “Wait.”
“Sir, I merely—”
“Shut your noise. Let me think. What do they say of the old woman—his ugly old wife—Arpasha—Arpadzia—whatever her name is? She’s a witch, isn’t she?”
“They say so, my lord.”
“I know she is. She goes to the wood … oh, some of them do that just for a bit of fun, but what fun can she get there now? No, with her it’s sorcery. And she’s lost her mind as well as her looks. Jealous. Green-eyed jealousy. Draco cast her off for her sourness and her devilish glamourings. Then it’s her fault. She’s envious and has done something against the girl. I
smell
it.”
Trimming his quill with unsteady fingers, the scribe had nicked himself. A drop of blood fell on the parchment. But this would not be a problem, a new sheet would anyway need to be used.
Tusaj was almost happy now. He thought, warmly,
Draco dreads the witch. He’ll be glad to blame her with the Church to back him—perhaps be rid of her once and for all.
 
 
No one came near Arpazia. Even her waiting-women, a girl and a matron, neither intelligent, kept away as much as they could. She sent for no one. Arpazia fended for herself in her mean, cold rooms.
Rather than bother with making a fire, if no other had seen to
it, she would wind herself in her mantle and some covers from the bed.
She sat thinking, thinking. Then she would get up. pace about. Thinking.
There had been a water-clock, but nobody replaced its liquid. Now her steps were the drip-drip of the mechanism.
The door was scratched upon. Arpazia believed it was mice. They had got into several of the rooms of the palace, driven there by the extremes of this winter.
When the scratching came again, Arpazia heard a human voice. It was elderly and had an edge.
“Let me in, Queen.”
She took no notice.
Then the old woman undid the door and walked straight in.
A hag, as ever, one of the kindred of the Smoke Crone.
“I said,” said Arpazia, sat there in her bed-covers, “you and your sisters should keep away.”
“Yes, just so. You tired of us. Never mind it. I’m not here for that.”
Arpazia bit at her finger absently. Like a child.
The hag approached.
“Where is your witch-glass, Queen?”
“I gave it away.”
“Where is your daughter?”
Arpazia laughed. “I have no daughter.”
“Yes.”
“Then she’s dead.”
“Then you ordered her death.”
“I?” asked Arpazia, ingenuous.
“Tusaj has written to Draco. Tusaj says you worked a spell on the girl that caused her to die. Either that or you spelled some hapless simpleton to murder her. Soon the priests will seek you out, Arpazia, and put you to the test for sorcery. Do you know what that means?”
“You are all witches,” said Arpazia, “here.” But her face had
altered, grown transparent with alarm—even if her eyes stayed vacant, not yet catching up with it.
“We are good Christian women, Queen. And besides, Tusaj comes to dance with our girls in the wood. He’ll point a finger at none but you. It’s only you they all detest, Arpazia.”
“Yes, they hate me. You all hate me.”
“
We
have warned you.”
“Useless,” said Arpazia. “What can I do?”
“Are you tied up? Are your ankles chained? Are you so old you can’t walk? Get up from your chair and take yourself away.”
Arpazia thought,
I should have gnawed through the cords and escaped
Draco
long ago. But I am a fool. Shall I do it now, at last?
When she looked round, the hag had gone.
The room seemed full of hoarfrost, and the unlit braziers blue with ice. It was much colder than the world outside.
 
 
She never heard the silent voices, telling the antique tale of the goddess over. How Demetra, having lost her daughter, and not knowing it was to the god of the Lands Below, went seeking her, wandering about the earth, in the first winter of all, which was created by her own grief and desolation.
But the pagans of Belgra Demitu (whose very name meant Ground of the Goddess Demetra).
they
heard. Maybe it was the only reason for their warning. To help the old story along.
C
LIMBING UP THE HILLS IN THE snow, Arpazia did not know her way anymore. It was a partial memory that led her. Already it had drawn her down from the palace, on to the road above the sea. In summer, the hills held cedars, rocks and stands of lavender, but all that had changed now. Everything was
changed. And only two colors were in the world. The sky and the hills and the woods in their white snow fur, drawn over and under in black.
This was the route she had traveled with her lover Orion-Klymeno-Dianus.
Yet it took a great deal longer on foot.
Not a single person had challenged her as she left the palace. She decided this was because she had aged so completely they no longer knew her. She was some thirty-three years of age. She had not seen herself in her mirror since the night of Midwinter-Mass.
On the hills, however, she began to feel young.
When she moved in under the snow-trees of the wood, and reached the log-hut where
he
had brought her, she was filled with actual terror, as she saw that half its roof had fallen in under the weight of the snow.
She stood inside the room, staring at the destruction.
But by then she was worn out.
She would have sat down and gone to sleep, there in the freezing wreck, but she heard his voice suddenly, gently saying to her,
We must make up the fire, sweetheart
. He had said this sometimes to her then, all those years ago. The fire had been for cooking on, that summer season, not for comfort; yet there had been cooler days too, as autumn came on.
She found pine-cones and some bundles of wood in the place where he had stored them, and put them on the hearth. She took his flint and tinder out from under the stone and struck sparks. And then she blew on the fire as she had seen him do, always watching him, his beauty in fascinated astonishment, watching everything he did.
When the roof had come down, the snow had gained access. It had piled up high and impenetrable, closing off the hut-house, and making it ironically more insulated.
Arpazia sat by the fire.
She thought, and she knew—if Klymeno had lived, he would not have left the precious flint and tinder behind in the hut.
Ah, so he truly was dead, as that carter had seemed to say, lying to her …
She had forgotten how to cry.
She sat there, looking at the fire, until her eyelids slipped shut.
 
 
“These apples are baked. Eat one, and some of this cheese. The wine’s hot, too. Crumble your bread into it. It will do you good.”
Arpazia ate slowly, having forgotten also how to eat.
She said, “But I believed you wouldn’t see me again. You were finished with me.”
He did not answer. But across the flames, intently beautiful, he looked at her. The firelight gilded his long hair and his eyes were amber, like a young wolf’s. But he wore bear furs, as she did, clad for winter. He was not a day older than when she had seen him last.
“Klymeno,” she said.
“Oh,
that
name,” he said. “Did I never tell you my human name?”
“Tell me,” she said, but somehow he did not.
How could she worry over that, now that he was here with her? And he had baked the apples in the fire for her, and brought the cheese and bread and wine.
She pulled her hood across her cheek. “Don’t look at me. I’ve grown old and foul.”
“You’re lovely. Just as you were.”
She was filled, brimming with fiery gladness. He was alive. He had returned. And she had gone back in time and must be young as he was. All was well.
But she said, diffidently, “Why did you never—why didn’t you send to me, after those letters I sent you? You were so angry—And then when I searched for you—you’d gone away—to the west, he said, that man.”
Klymeno—he had no other name—looked at her between the flames. “I never received your letters, Arpazia, sweetheart. Perhaps
you trusted the wrong messengers. Besides, what made you think I could read? You should have come to me sooner yourself.”
“You were in a fury. You hated me.”
“Did you think I did?”
“Because,” she said. She stopped. She said, “Because I wouldn’t bear a child again. Oh—don’t you know how I suffered with the first child—Draco’s rape-child—the agony and horror and that
thing
fastening itself into me—”
“Don’t
you
know, Arpazia, the wise-women from the wood could have given you herbs to make you strong, so you’d carry without sickness, and at the end to take all the pain away?”
“You hate me still, then,” she said, “because I wouldn’t hear your child. Are you like Draco?” But the words blistered her mouth, and the cup fell from her hand, the wine sputtering out harmless on the fire.
“No woman should bear a child all against her will,” he said. “the people of the wood know that, which is why they know the plants to alleviate such misery. And nothing dies, Arpazia. Even that little seed in you. You killed it, here. Its inner life you couldn’t touch. But I—oh, yes I was angry. Don’t you know why? Don’t you know how you hurt me? I loved you. Arpazia, and you were mine. You came to me and gave yourself. But the child in you was also me, you and I, both. And you crushed it like a spark before ever it Could burn. You never even told me of it, only that you would have it gone. Anger, oh, yes. But that would have passed. It would have left me. Yet you never came to me. How could I come to you, in your palace?”
“I sent you letters—presents—”
“I had nothing.”
“You hated me, you told me you were done with me—”
“Arpazia, are you such a fool? Do you think that no one in this world can
feel,
save
you
?”
Amazed, she stared at him.
Klymeno, her lover, said to her quietly, “I don’t accuse you of a sin, beloved. Not even of selfishness. You’ve never
known
that we
feel, the rest of us, as you do. Can you really believe we are all so strong, and only you are the weakling?”
She held her breath hard within her, afraid to let it go, as if, should she breath out and in, she would lose him again.
“I loved you,” he said, “I loved our child in you. Did you love
me
at all, to let me turn from you so easily?”
“Yes, yes—oh yes—” she cried.
But her breath went out on the cry.
She had none left.
She choked and woke, frantic for air, flailing with her arms. And the fire was dying.
But he—he was not there. He was dead. And gone forever.
 
 
One of her three rings had flown off in the waking spasm. They had grown very loose. She only realized after, and by then she was some distance from the hut. She had risen at first light, and come away, as if she must.
The clawing voice started up in her head at once.
They were all you had, all you thought to bring, dolt, those rings and your necklace. What else can you sell, to live? Not yourself, ugly old hag.
Should she return and try to find the ring?
She could not be bothered, though the voice nagged her.
A moment later two women appeared out of the trees. Both looked up, saw Arpazia, and started.
To her, they seemed identical. Of the same height and build, quite young, done up in ragged gray cloaks.
The one to the left crossed herself.
The other stuck her hand down.
“It isn’t a haunt!”
Arpazia stood there, in her furs black on the snow.
“She thought you’d come from the hunter’s bothy—some spectral thing of the elder woods. Or a beast. They said he could call bears and deer and other animals. Even a boar. He could tame those, they said.”
“But that was wrong,” said the other. “It was a boar did for him.”
Arpazia watched them. They were meaningless yet horrible.
The first one said, “Where are you going, Lady?”
The black fur must appear valuable to them, but despite her solitariness and their vulgarity, they did not think of stealing from her.
Arpazia wondered. Where was she going?
They had been gathering sticks, to judge from the loads on their backs. The second one said, “The town is the other direction, Lady.”
“I don’t want the town.”
They glanced to and fro.
They were not
of
the Wood, although perhaps they lived in the woods.
Arpazia said, “Do you know where he is?”
“Who, Lady?”
“The hunter.”
“Dead, Lady. Gone to the west.”
“He was a Woodsman,” said the other. “
Pagan.
”
“There’s a grave,” said the first one, taking care now. It came to Arpazia they were hoping to be of service, so she would give them something.
“A grave,” she said.
“He left off the pagan rites,” said the first woman. “He was the lover of the queen, in Belgra Town. But she cast him away. Then he lost heart. He didn’t worship the old gods of the wood any more, but nor did he go over to the Christ. So he had nothing to help him. When he hunted the boar it ripped him up and he died.”
“That was years ago,” said the other. “My ma told me. Ten years or more.”
The first one said, “In the end his own people, those Woods People, they put a stone over his mound, to mark it. He’d been a king among them, do you see.”
“But where is it?” Arpazia asked.
She walked down, over the hard-packed, ice-locked snow, and took off another ring—it slid easily—and put it in the first woman’s rag-tied hand.
“I can’t take this!” But she shut the ring in her fist.
“Where—ten me where—”
They told her.
 
 
Somehow, she did find the grave, and the stone like a pillar that stood up on it.
Nothing sounded in the woods. The trees crowded into a great forest now, uphill, downhill, closing in. Evergreens and pines brought a darkness that even the white-shining snow could not erase.
Arpazia wandered round the grave, round the pillar. A dead bird, frozen, flawless, a dove pink on the snow, lay under the pillar. She could imagine he would have picked it up and warmed it in his warm hands, giving it back its life. He only slew for food, or in sacrifice.
But there was nothing for
her
there. He was gone. It began to be twilight again and she was irrationally frightened—having come into the waste of winter without a qualm.
She gazed up, and the trees were columns of a church. The stars painted themselves on the ceiling. She heard wolves, or thought she did. “Shall I die here?”
She would have to return to the camp—Draco’s place. No,
no
she must not. And … it was not that, now, no camp at all. Yes, even Draco had gone. How strange, for a space of seconds she had forgotten that all that was over long ago.
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