[P] pale laughter in the empty room.

[Adonai]

M

y mother often visits me in dreams.

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

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