The first time, I had not known to expect her. My dream had been full of faces and hers had only been one among the many, King Zolin's preening golden presence leaching away all of her luminance, my siblings' sneering mouths taking so cannily after her that I quickly lost the ability to pick her apart. When Mernatius took form from a pile of golden sand and I saw that his shadow was winged, my mother disappeared completely.
Blue butterfly wings sprouted from Mernatius' back. I pushed past the others and when I reached him he laughed when he saw the way I wore my shock. “Why are you surprised, Adonai?” he said to me. “I have always had them. You have just never bothered to look.” His words shattered me. I fell before him, my knees bloodying the ground, and clutched desperately at his beautiful wings, begging him not to leave, telling him that I was sorry, until the sight of his crooked smile sickened me and I looked down in defeat.
When I looked up again his wings were no longer wings but real butterflies, hundreds of them, crawling like maggots over his eyeless corpse.
“Adonai.” I did not look at her though I knew it was my mother, my beautiful mother, with Pilate’s eyes and Pilate’s scales and a robe of gold silk so fine it slipped away like water when I reached out to touch it.
“My beloved prince.” Her eyes were just like Pilate’s. When she had made him, shaped him from desert sand dampened by her own blood, she had plucked out her eyes to give to him and filled her empty sockets with amber. In the dream, I had been sure of this.
“You are dying,” she told me. I shrugged, before wetting my lips and saying slowly, “I wish to join you. Do you miss me?” She said nothing. Mother had intruded in my dream when I had not known to expect her, so she was still just like I remembered her: Enchantress Keturah of House Ieshan, sometimes my mother, sometimes a stranger.
“You are dying.”
—
I am dying. I collapse against my bedpost and the marble tiles are so cold they burn my skin like iron. Quickly enough, however, the nightshade enters my bloodstream and the contortions begin. Yet I have prepared for this; I bite down on the wooden rod in my mouth and when I catch reflections of myself in the tiles my eyes are black holes.
I admire them for as long as I am able.
I am writhing on the ground but I have locked my door and stuffed my bedsheets into the cracks against it and the floor so that no one will hear and no one will come. My eyes are black holes and my room has cracked perfectly into two and I can hear my pulse as it throbs and throbs and throbs in my head. It is not long before I begin gasping for air but this is not new either; it is the hemlock, and though I feel like I cannot breathe, and perhaps I really cannot breathe, I am comforted by the thought (that repeats in my head first in B minor and then in A major) that I have done this to myself.
That I am only dying but not dead. That I have been dying for so long that it has become the only way I know how to live.
I close my eyes and when I open them again my mother is lying on her side besides me. She wears no gold robe but one of lavender chiffon, a fabric that does not escape my touch. She is in lavender instead of gold because I have learned to expect her coming, and to prepare her accordingly for the visit.
“Adonai.” Her voice is softer; she cannot hiss when her tongue is no longer a snake's. I roll over to gaze carefully into her eyes. They are not pieces of amber gazing back but her own, fluid and bright. In my dream, she has not given her eyes to Pilate. After me and Miriam, she made no more. Me and Miriam were enough. I hold half of her heart, and my beloved sister, the other half.
“Why do you poison yourself so?”
“It is only a sliver of nightshade and hemlock. I will not die. Tomorrow will be milkweed, and a week after that some yew mixed into my breakfast.” I laugh. She laughs with me, yet when she strokes my cheek, her eyes are dark with concern.
“Or you could just tell someone. Miriam. Ruth. One of them will listen.” My dream mother knows of my siblings, but she had not made them.
“I—can't. I cannot make them think badly of him. He is still my brother.”
“You do not need to lie to me, Adonai. I will not think less of you.”
“Fine. You know me too well.” I pick myself up from the floor and pace over to my bed. My eyes are wild and knife-blade-silver. “Pilate may not think through his actions, but I do. If I tell the others of my suspicions, Mother, they will start picking sides, and then so will the servants, until even the gardeners begin to draw lots. I give it a day before all of Solterra hears of how ours is a House divided. Of how a brother tried to kill a brother.”
“Forget the alliances we'll lose. The Hajakhas are still weak, and the Azhades too enamoured with their markets to care. They are only collateral. What is important is what the court will think of me. Perhaps in the beginning, they will feel horror. Perhaps for a day after, they will feign sympathy. But after a week? A month? Bards will begin to sing of how foolish I was, to be betrayed by my own brother! I was head of house. I had all the cards in my favor. Ruth befriended her own assassin. So how could I have missed it?” Mother sits up and her dress splays over her like a pale lotus flower.
“It will not be like that. You are thinking too much, my son.”
“I assure you, Mother, that I am not. I may yet gain my place in court again someday, but even if I do I will never be as I was, if they know how I fell so ill.”
“You do not recover from such disgrace. I think—dying is easier.”
When I am finished pacing I look at my mother again and she is crying. I walk to her. I sink back down to the floor, and when she holds me against her I memorise the sight of her tears rolling down her scaled cheeks.
—
I am alerted of the new doctor from Terrastella mere moments before she is allowed into my room. I am still not fully recovered from the poisons I ingested yesterday, but—what difference does it make?
I lay back down in my bed and stare up at the ceiling.
In my mouth, I still taste the sugary sweetness of atropa belladonna.
oh mother i'm scared to die
where, where do my good deeds lie
Yesterday, she had brought Elliana to where she had first arrived, to the first place she had been taken when she had emerged from the waters and into Dusk, like rising from a tub of a baptism. It had been comforting, in small ways, to stand in the garden, adorned in the frost of winter. “Come spring, this entire garden will be filled with flowers.” Elliana had walked around, picturing the small garden in her mother’s house, but even bigger, more colorful. “You can come here and paint,” she said, bumping her daughter’s shoulder. Elliana, for her part, smiled like something bloomed underneath her skin, flowers peek from behind her eyes.
The heat of Day Court provides a quietness that Elena feels like she rarely experiences within Terrastella, especially with a child, no matter how contemplative and thoughtful Elliana is. And then there is Nic, she has stories and keeps Elliana entertained, while her daughter paints their new house guest. Elena knows it is temporary, but she really, she hopes Nic is able to stay through the season at least, she has brought a light into their tiny cottage, and Elena is not quite ready to give her up just yet.
For so much of her life, Elena has wanted stillness, now she wanted anything but. So she had been grateful when one of the doctor’s at the hospital had provided her the opportunity to take over one of his patients in Solterra. He says it is for one of the noble families, and that any discussion of his ailment, or treatment would need to be kept quiet, even from the other healers. Elena agreed to the arrangements, and so she was handed his information, his health history, and given instructions of his care. While it all seemed strange to her, coming from a land where even the princess ate with the ‘commoners’ and the king did not call himself king but a guardian. There was strict decorum to be held by, and it seemed as if he had a number of siblings.
Stomach upsets.
Headaches.
Shortness of breath.
Inappropriate response to light.
Confusion.
The list of symptoms goes on and on, until it reaches the latest note. Patient stable….as stable as can be. Elena looks at the words. Stable as can be? Her stomach clenches at the words, the empath feels something like guilts in her veins. Elena has not been presented with such a complicated case before. She sighs, walking into the palace, thinking what would happen to her if she could not do what needed to be done. Her heart lifts when she remembers she has Orestes, the sovereign would never let any ill fate befall the golden girl.
It is this thought that gives her the confidence to push open the door and enter into his bedroom. “Excuse me, Prince Adonai?” She asks, soft and in a voice like silver, her eyes wandering gently over the delicate angles of that pale face of the man that lays there and she wonders what sort of paths in his life had led him to this. She wonders if, without her family, without Elli, without Nic, she would confine herself to such a fate.
“I am Elena, the healer from Terrastella, I am here to take care of you,” she says gently, going to his bed side. She wonders if he is even aware she is there. “Prince Adonai?”
hen the Terrastellan doctor enters the room, I look first to the top drawer of my writing desk to see if I had locked it last night — as always, I'd been meticulous — before exhaling slowly and pulling myself up to sitting.
My hair is not arranged; it falls around my shoulders in tangled layers, their ends curling up like wet parchment. The gradual straightening of my boyhood curls through adolescence had often saddened me. The texture of my hair was the only physical feature I shared with Miriam, though hers had always been my superior in both volume and sheer amount. I would spend afternoons lazing on the balcony we shared, watching through the window-glass as her nursemaids combed oils through her hair and plaited it to rose-red magnificence.
“Excuse me, Prince Adonai? I am Elena, the healer from Terrastella, I am here to take care of you.” Through my bed curtains drifts a feminine voice, light as a summer faerie's. I observe the silhouette of her for a moment — compact and delicately made — before raking the hair from my eyes and drawing back the brocaded silk.
My surprise shows in the curve of my smile. I am used to wizened old doctors, more tree than nimble wood-nymph. They had been immune to my charms; no matter how I smiled at them, they would prescribe me the same bitter medicines, the same strict regimens, with composures bordering on monkishly ascetic. Yet with her, perhaps —
“Elena,” I say, my voice hoarse until I cough. I wonder how much about me she knows. “Terrastella is far from this kingdom of sand. I hope the journey did not wear you?” I smile mildly as I look over her eyes (summer blue), her skin (sun-kissed), the white marking anointing her forehead (heart-shaped). Her hair is as pale and gently waved as mine.
“I am sorry I cannot rise to greet you. It seems you caught me—” the shadow of a frown as I glance quickly towards the desk, “—in a bad spell.”And with little warning.
But of this I tell myself that I can't fault anyone. My days are so full of dull-eyed emptiness to most that they never believe me engaged enough to be capable of being disturbed. What business has the sick man to mind? Surely any company, unasked for or not, would be welcome.
(And if not company, then flowers. To brighten the room. Refresh the spirit, rejuvenate the body.)
I gesture towards a cushioned chair pushed against the wall. “Please, sit.”
oh sister my voice is weak
oh brother i long for sleep
“Lilli, tell me a secret,” she had asked of her cousin one night. “Like a real secret,” she had pressed. And they sat there together, giggling into the night, passing secrets back and forth. And then they grew, and so too did those secrets they shared. Secrets about love, about lust, about not being good enough, about wondering if they could change the past and would they if they could. In the end they told too many secrets, perhaps, but Elena always knew that her secrets were safer with Lilli than they were inside her own heart. Her chestnut cousin wore Elena’s burdens better than she did herself.
What secrets do you hide, Adonai? And what places do you keep them?
She notes the way he sits up, wondering how slumped over he must have been before she entered into the room. How weak was he truly without placing the brave mask over his pale face. Elena hides the questions and the shock at seeing him. Buries it underneath her own mask, one of the practiced doctor. She watches the curtains blow through a breeze in the cracked window. She wonders if he grows hot with the air of the desert.
Yet, he is smiling at her. He is handsome enough, he is a prince after all. Elena smiles back at him, feminine, enchanting, but by no means as charming as his own. That sort of thing takes practice, practice of things Elena has so little interest in. But he coughs and the illusion is broken. He is still a prince, yes, but he is also her patient. She takes his greeting as an invitation to move closer. “Not at all, it is not my first time traipsing into the the desert,” she says, in fact the first was when she came to meet Orestes, a request to be a medic at the tournament. “You look as if you had made the journey rather than myself,” the empath says, resisting the urge to sit by his bedside, hold his head and stroke his hair. “Please, do not tire yourself, I am sure you were planning something elaborate for my welcoming? Shawls of gold, rare flowers and rubies perhaps?” She jests with him. She has a hard time finding his emotions with her empathy, hidden beneath sickness and twists inside his head.
“Adonai,” she says when she moves to the cushioned seat. “You know why I am here,” she is determined, the previous doctor mentioned he could be a more—difficult patient. “So I believe it is best we get started. You said you are having a bad spell—tell me more.”
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