pilate
/
walking round always mad reputation, leave a pretty girl sad reputation / this that what-we-do don't tell your mom shit, this that red cup all on the lawn shit / got a fresh cut straight out the salon bitch
I know everything there is to know about black holes. In my journal—the secret-secret one, the one you will only ever find if I tell you where to look—I collect notes about them in handwriting less royal than the kind I use in public, a panicked scrawl that speaks of how stealthily I must write in it. There is nothing particularly incriminating in here; but I worry about how it would reflect on me. Have I really become a prince who forsakes his duties to go think, alone, about stars?
Small but deadly. Every black hole has an event horizon, a ring which, by nature and on principle, must refuse each and every speck of light. A black hole burns you to death; it doesn’t crush you, or suck.
Writing has always come easily to me. Physically I have always been enamored by the loops and swirls of a good cursive font, my attention easily caught by the gilded spine of a book; and I really have no trouble thinking of things to write about, though I would prefer to discuss things like these than the fairytales Corradh and my sisters are—were?—so fond of. My desk is forever piled high with bloated journals and water-warped books. I keep a carefully organized collection of quills that the servants now better than to move even an inch. I am using one now—one of my favorites, a wide, white arc of swan-feather—to write this:
Black holes are messy eaters. The majority of matter that passes close to a black hole will be spit back out, one way or another.
Sometimes I have dreams. In most of them, my parents are alive, and everything is back to the way it was. Adonai dutifully completes his lessons, then skips away after dinner to play with Mernatius; I read books in the courtyard, sipping my way through a drink every half-hour; and Corradh is here—sullen and rebellious and irritating as ever, but at least he is doing it at home.
In my dreams, on the rare nights I have them, reality is but a suggestion. I see through walls. I talk to snakes. But here they talk back. I can hear from miles away; I can track footsteps through the floor, all the way to Denocte. In my dreams, I read books in the courtyard; but I can see Adonai, no matter where he is, or who is he with, or what lies between us. I can see him across the property, lazing around with his friends. I can see him when he wanders into the city and talks to the commoners. I can see him when he doesn’t want me to. Especially when he doesn’t want me to: I can see him when he is kissing some street rat, writing illicit letters, spiking the punchbowl, talking back to Mother; when he is brightening his fake smile to speak with the Hajakhas and ignoring my poor sisters, who trail at his heels like he is some god they seek the favor of.
If you were in the event horizon, even if you were moving at the ultimate cosmic speed, any path you dare to take would still lead you toward the center. There is no escape from the—
I toss the quill and the journal under my bed just as a servant knocks to announce dinner. I have grown practiced enough at this that, by the time I turn to face her, I am wearing a droll smile and not a panicked grimace.
She bends into a deep bow, and says: “Prince Adonai says he will be joining you tonight.”
For just one second the world stops and stops and stops. My heart plummets through my chest; my chest-half-heaves; I am frozen like a victim and not Medusa herself.
“Fantastic,” I answer, glittering with fake pleasure, and the servant—whose gods-damned name I can never remember—backs gracefully out of the doorway.
I run my tongue around my teeth until I taste blood. And the world begins anew.
I am downstairs before he is. Of course. Even before all this happened, he was not one to respect people’s time.
The table is set with its usual feast: dusty bottles of well-aged wine, grape leaf dolma, bread already broken; platters of dried apricots and figs, ornate glass jars filled with olives. When Adonai graces me with his presence, I am splayed comfortably in a pool of moonlight flooding in from a high window, eating pomegranate seeds one by one and spitting the hulls into a beaten-gold bowl. I know he will hate me for it. And I smile.
“Adonai,” I respond. And he must hear that some part of me really is happy to see him—the part I hate, which in Corradh’s absence begs for the shoulder of a brother, and in my parents’ absence begs for the next best thing to replace them—but he must also see that I am watching him as carefully as ever. I know he is tired of me and my hot-and-cold antics. Imagine, I think drolly, how tired I am.
I watch him take his seat, unaffected. In the moonlight, he hardly looks like an Ieshan at all. He was the only one of us to come out so pale, like a ghost, as if he had been bleached of all our family’s perfectly dark blood. Corradh, even, inherited my mother’s black skin, and I, of course, her scales. Adonai has none of her. And that is the one thing I can hold over his head.
(The second thing, now.)
He speaks as easily as ever, and with the same obnoxious lack of regard: Brother. That word makes me shudder. I am thirsty.
My eyes fall to his, then to where his glance rests—a bottle of red wine, halfway between him and I on the long, long table. A black hole burns you to death, I think; it doesn’t crush you, or suck.
Unhurriedly, I rise to my feet. The servants, bathed in wet moonlight, watch as much as they can with their eyes still turned to the ground. How quiet can a room get—? I hear nothing but my footsteps, the gentle pant of my breath as I measure it, in and out.I walk toward him, picking up the bottle as I pass it, tossing the cork carelessly onto the floor, and then pausing at his side to pour it into his glass, where it sloshes like so much—
Like the Red Sea, I mean.
We are close now, though no closer than I get to him every day. I push the glass gently toward him, wearing an expression of concern, my eyes widened in sincerity.
“Drink, then,” I say. “Brother.”
His eyes are beautiful now. Far better than the boring, Pallas-Athene silver they used to be. These days they shine a lovely cornflower-blue, a bruise-blue, a bottom-of-the-river-where-I-wish-he-drowned blue, and the pupils are always blown wide.
Like black holes.
I smile.
