of the man who
left in september.
his name was law.
❖
505. spring?
The act of waking—the shock of it. The lungs remembering breath, the limbs remembering blood. Nothing else to call it but a shock. Did you know you can drown in it? Your own blood, I mean. Haemoptysis. Asked Ruth about it: a massive haemoptysis, no water needed, just you, your lungs, your blood, the heaviness of sweet-morphine sleep. A drowning in the sheets—painless, Ruth says.
❖
I shock awake to the white roar of a spring-fed river.
For a startling moment there is nothing in my head but a starburst of pain: a localized stab of it just beneath the ribs, my heart drumming like a captured rabbit’s. I press my head to my knees, cough out the too-sweet smell of grass at the end of summer. My coat slips down my shoulder, letting in damp forest cold. Shuddering, I pull the thin collar back over my neck.
Slivers of grass float off of me when I draw unsteadily to my hooves. The sun is already high in the sky, unobscured by scraps of cloud. Beneath it, the world is polished to a shine: everything is either sparkling bright or starkly in shadow, and my eyes smart when they go to the river’s surface. A snowy egret lifts its head towards me, its yellow eyes accusatory, when I stumble down to the lapping water.
The current is rushing too quickly for me to see myself as more than a hazy outline of gold, a slash of bright red where my mouth should be. There is the familiar dull ache of hunger in my stomach yet I ignore it. I will find him soon enough. And it is nothing, really, nothing at all, to the catatonic shock of awakening.
I feel in my pocket for the smoothness of sanded glass. By now the egret has dipped back into the current, bored by my slow, drowsy movements. When it surfaces, a bass’ silver belly thrashes in its dripping beak.
The vial, long emptied of its contents, is small and insignificant under this penetrating sun. I bring it to my lips—the tang of iron—before tossing it, end over end, to the bottom of the river.
It is high noon, and I am a thousand wing-strokes away from my kingdom of blood-in-the-sand.
❖
I think I’d expected for him to want to find me again, eventually.
How long could he stay away? A month. I could last two. A season, however, is cruel; a week after the solstice I sent the first letter, my calligraphy tight and pinched. Angry black slashes bleeding out on the parchment. The ribbon I had tied to Abbadon’s leg had been red, instead of the Ieshan’s diplomatic white.
And then I had paced. I used to find it comic, the pacing. The seriousness of the pacing. I never used to do it because I’d thought myself too busy for it, yet now I know I’d merely never been that desperate. Princes do not know desperation with much intimacy—we prefer to skirt around it—yet when we do know it, we are consumed. How dare they, we think, to deny us.
For we are the deniers. For we are the ones who hurt. It is birthright, versus achievement.
It is the reason why, when I see him in the gloom of dusk through a phoenix’s eyes, I feel a violence twist beneath my skin that I have never known. I do not change back to that weak, sick mortality. My lungs are on fire but I am a phoenix—what does it matter?
He is keeping close to the river like a water creature, his back the forged gold of a shield. For a moment I only watch from high above: he looks well in a disarming way. Not a hair out of place—everything gold and pyrrhic.
It has been months, and he looks well, and my lungs are on fire because they are dead when I am still alive. I exhale, because a phoenix cannot laugh.
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all
the sins you never had the courage to commit.
❖
M
y culture only has a handful of love stories. The kind that define generations worth of love; the kind that boys will not admit longing for, and girls dream of their entire lives. The kind that teach us how to be, how to care, how to love.
With poignant clarity, I remember this about the stories: they all end in tragedy. Of the five, one tale in particular haunts me. Yes—one, in particular, seems a morbid shadow of my own life. Forbidden, because the love between soldiers, although known and encouraged, could not be made whole. Our island race demanded reproduction; and so all viable men were expected to marry women, no matter how fiercely they loved their comrades. We are an unromantic people; overly pragmatic, unsentimental.
—but once, there were two, idia kardiah. Same hearted. The legends say they were one soul in two bodies, divided unevenly. Gennaios, the word for brave, was filled with all dark aspects of the split soul, felt compelled by duty, darkness, and not a lack of morality, but the opposite—a need to fulfill his life's purpose above all else. (And that purpose was to win the war). He was merciless in his pursuit of these aims. He did not flinch, nor feel compassion on the battle-field. The other half of the soul, Fovos, was named for fear. Not because he was a coward. But he was so intimately connected to all sources of fear—his heart was too large. He cared too much, too deeply. Fear comes from the potential of loss.
Gennaios and Fovos were raised together; they were not brothers of blood, but of arms, and they were deeply in love.
And, together, they completed all weaknesses in the other. In war, they were beautiful—poetic, in the way of epics. When they fought alongside one another, they were symmetry. One pushed, the other pulled. They were balanced as the sun as the moon, the earth and the sea, the day and the night.
Fovos loved too much, and Gennaios not enough.
Do you already know how the story ends? (How this story, told a thousand-thousand times, will never change?)
Gennaios, a general at the time, had a decision to make on the battlefield. They had been unexpectedly flanked, and Fovos’ regiment was their only line of defense. Gennaios knew they could counter the attack successfully—but with heavy losses. He knew the other part of his soul was there; that Fovos would fight bravely, that—
That he died. And Gennaios knew it when he ordered them not to retreat, but to face the threat. They won the battle, but Fovos died in the defense.
These stories can never end so simply, however.
Fovos, killed by a Prince of the Khashran, by a keeper of souls, must be punished for his crimes against the Prince's people. And for this punishment, the Khashran prince ripped Fovos’ soul from his body in death and assigned the soul to Gennaios. Somewhere else, the story might have ended beautifully—they might have been made whole, together, in one body. Not here. Not in this tale. Gennaios, so haunted by Fovos’ feelings of betrayal and love, could not bear to harbor his soul. In order to survive and do right by his people, Gennaios met with a shaman and asked to have Fovos ripped from him—the shaman warned him that to separate them again would cause irreparable damage, that he would never be whole again. But Gennaios agreed.
And when Fovos was killed not just once, but twice, the good parts of Gennaios’ soul were ripped away, never to be salvaged.
But they had won the battle. Fovos' life, ended, had been worthy. After, Gennaios’ descendants were said to be the most competent of soldiers. They did not flinch in making the decisions that would ruin their souls; and many, many years later his descendent's fulfilled Gennaios' destiny. They won the war.
I won the war.
If I trace my family line back to the beginning, to when we first settled on Oresziah—
Gennaios was a part of me. His blood, in my veins. His curse, in my heart. I never paid much mind to it; the story, in my heritage, was told not as a negative, but a positive. If Fovos had been faced with the same decision, he would not have sacrificed Gennaios—and he would have lost the battle. And that, that is what boys are taught.
That is what they are told, when they are blooded for the first time in combat.
(I wonder how much of the tale carries truth; if any of it does. My mother taught it not to me as a history, but as a warning when she began to notice my feelings for Bondike. 'You will never be happy with him,' she had said. 'He will ask too much of you. You will try to give it, but some of us... some of us simply don't have as much heart as others. We run out of what we can give, and start offering the worst parts of ourselves instead.')
I close my eyes and listen to the Rapax; the way if I let it, the noise consumes all other aspects of my life. Just the tumbling of water, the roaring. If I let it—
(I think of the story now because, in legend, the two men would meet at a river in the woods. After each battle. And together, they would wash the blood from one another’s bodies. My mother told me this, too. She told me there had been good in Gennaios. Just not enough).
—if I let it, it all goes away.
I step into the water and for a moment, pretend—
I am Gennaios, and Fovos stands just beyond me; and the water washes all the blood I have ever spilt. But I know when I open my eyes, nothing will have changed.
Yet, when I do, at last... everything has. A Phoenix rests on the riverbank, something out of myth, out of legend.
(Just as Gennaios and Fovos were).
I regard him quietly. At first I do not recognize him. And then, I see something in the eyes.
“I was wondering,” I say at last, above the water’s roar. “When you would try and find me. If you could.”
In that moment, I know—I had let him go. Perhaps it had been Sereia, or the wounds, or Amaroq’s death. Perhaps it had been all or none of these things. Perhaps—
Perhaps I would have let him stayed gone. But now that he is here, I smile a wolf’s smile, all my teeth on display. Because I know he needs me; and because he needs me, I will not let him go. Not out of compassion, or a sense of duty, but because some of us, when we have no good left, give whatever remains.
With false humor, "I must admit, Adonai, you have outdone yourself. I did not expect you to find me with such... shall we say... flare." A crooked smile that meets my eyes; a flash of happiness, and then. I remember.
You will never be enough, Adonai.
No one is. But I smile anyway, glad to see him, and the gladder I become the softer my demeanor grows.
there’s enough light to drown in
but never enough to enter the bones
& stay.
❖
I am careful to keep the river between us.
(Why? Because, if he is Gennaios, then I am Fovos. My phoenix fire is yet uncontrollable; it may spare leaves, and twigs, and drip like water off of coals: yet is that enough? Enough to convince me that no matter what, I could never burn him with flames impossible to extinguish?
I would not have sacrificed Gennaios.
I would not have won the war, because I cannot sacrifice someone I love. In return, I sacrifice those I do not love. It is a hundred thousand lives to one.
Who, really, is the worst of us?)
The current churns with white froth as I sail down to the stone-tossed shore. He does not see me. I make sure of this by keeping behind the gnarled trunk of a cypress, its foliage the deep emerald of summer. When I bring my eyes to the water it is not like how it was at the river's mouth—my eyes no longer smart, and instead of bubbling silver, the river is dull and bloated, grey crashing over grey. In this form, the sun’s light is but a single ray to the brightness of my body. In my presence, everything becomes absence. Were the magic not god-given, it would surely be blasphemous.
(Sometimes, I am still undone by the origins of my magic. I have been cultivated into something altogether too pious to expect a saint’s heart from a divinity. The too-mortal gods of our pantheon never bestow gifts without expecting something greater paid back, so what has mine taken in return? The last half of my life? A curse to fade into obscurity? An inability to know true happiness? Or perhaps he went for the jugular. Perhaps, on the day I have sharpened my magic to a point, it will pierce through the heart of someone I love.
Fovos, killing his Gennaios. Is that how the story should have gone?)
A flurry of motion stirs a thicket of reeds clinging to the riverbank and I tense, glancing towards Vercingtorix, who has waded into the water, before leaning warily towards a twitching cattail. From within its damp hiding place beady eyes watch me with reciprocal suspicion: they belong to a sleek-pelted otter. The otter leans out to sniff at the carbon shedding off of my feathers before I draw back, apologetic. It bids me farewell with a flash of serrated teeth.
I cannot stall for much longer before I glide from the cypress to the shore.
Later, I would ask him how he had known. How quickly the realization works its way across the angles of his face—from the eyes to the mouth—before resting in the crook of his brow. “I was wondering,” he says, his voice a song above the roaring current, “when you would try and find me. If you could.”
My phoenix's beak aches to sneer: one to match that smile. For a moment I believe myself capable of resenting him.
“I must admit, Adonai, you have outdone yourself. I did not expect you to find me with such... shall we say... flare.” And then it is not really so difficult.
My wings snap out in a torrent of fire—
And I dive headfirst into the waiting river.
It begins with a tingling of the skin, the transition, a thousand needle pricks as the magic seeps out of the pores. Then the bones begin to soften—there is no pain, yet the feeling of compression—like folding yourself into a pickling jar—is disorienting enough to cause faintness. To return, however, is an easier matter; instead of compression it is expansion, cells swelling gargantuan, everything a sucking in of breath, a pouring in of life, until the lungs strain to burst. I have done this enough times by now that when I break the water's surface, my face a hairsbreadth from his, I am myself again.
“Avoiding me, were you?” I say, carefully ignorant to the way my pulse taps hummingbird-quick at my throat. I think of the glass vial at the bottom of the river. “—Torix.” I think of him, on the beach, spinning sincerity like spinning wool. And then I think of how he had looked hopelessly mortal back then—not so far away from me.
My eyes scan feverishly over him. He has lost it, that mortality. However damaged it had been—none of it now remains. I lean closer, stifling a cough. “Outdone. Somehow, I doubt that.”
This far inland, he smells like the darkest part of the sea.
