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1.
Only a few days before I whispered the Words that killed my father, I saw something remarkable.
My father thought of himself as French, though the French blood in our veins was diluted and mixed and stepped on until we were really just American. Father, though, he learned to speak French through a correspondence course and would often go days just speaking French, in an effort, I think, to change his past.
But Father was a bore. He learned a language and he used it to say the same things he'd been saying in English, in almost the same flat, midwestern accent. He sounded ridiculous, and the only people who thought he was actually French were people who had never met a French person in their lives.
The thing I saw was a mystic, begging for change on Willow Street. He was a thin, tiny brown man, smaller than any other full-grown man I'd ever seen. I was walking with Aunt Polly, who was crushing my hand in hers as usual, and the little man was in the middle of the sidewalk, suspended over a tiny garden of flowers he'd placed on the ground. He had one hand on a gnarled walking stick that seemed, impossibly, to support his weight.
"Stop," I insisted to my aunt Polly, stamping my feet in their shiny leather shoes when she pretended not to hear me. Aunt Polly did not like me. I put a spider in her bed once, hoping it would bite her and kill her, but as I learned later not all spiders are lethal, or even bite at all.
"Stop!" I shouted, and bit her hand to make her let go. Polly turned and jerked her arm, but when she realized we were in public she chose not to slap me. Aunt Polly was a coward.
I stared at the little man. He appeared to be sleeping. It was impossible that anyone could hold themselves so perfectly with just a stick for support. I was amazed.
Aunt Polly sucked her teeth. This was some time before I chased her down and found her cowering in a tenement in New York City. Even more time still before I made her choke on hundreds of spiders I summoned into her throat.
"It is a trick," she said, happy to spoil the moment. "He sits on a platform and the arm snakes around his back, and his robes hide the contraption."
I remember being enraged at them both: the little man for tricking me, and Aunt Polly for ruining the trick.
The little man's eyes opened. He looked at Polly, then at me. His eyes were red and dark, unhealthy. He had the most curious, ugly little face, smashed like a puppet's. He lifted his free hand and he had a little blade in it, a tiny, sharp piece of metal. He pulled up his sleeve and jabbed himself with it, a sudden, violent motion that excited me.
I sensed something then. I will always remember the first time I tasted a sacrifice.
He whispered something. A few Words, though I did not know them then. He whispered them, and he rose into the air. Just a few more inches. The walking stick he had been holding fell over with a loud clatter. Aunt Polly gasped and stumbled backward and fell on her ass, and that was the best part about the whole experience.
I couldn't stop thinking about the little man and his feat--how it had been done. I knew these things were tricks, but I couldn't see how the trick was done.
The next day, very early, I escaped through my bedroom window and made my way back. I was always escaping; Father had ordered the servants to be on guard, but I was smarter than all of them. And I suspected some of them would not have shed tears if I went missing. I did not shed tears when I buried them, despite their pleas, their pledges of loyalty to the family.
It was twilight when I arrived at the spot. The little man was there, once again seemingly suspended by the stick. He was sleeping, so I crept up to examine him more closely. I had seen him float--really float--and I intended to find out how, for I wanted to float, to rise above and hover over them all. Astound people. Terrify them. It was the first time I had ever felt that, the desire to terrify. My heart beat and my cheeks burned. I knew that I was particularly pretty when I was flushed, rosy cheeked and the picture of a doll, a moppet.
As I tried to lift his robes to see under, his hand suddenly flashed out, letting the stick once again clatter to the ground. His grip was incredibly strong for such a tiny hand. He pulled me close, and I could smell him. Smell him. I'd never been so close to another human being, I didn't think. It was horrible. Human beings are disgusting chattel, awful meat and stench.
"You want?" he hissed in my ear as I screamed. "You want?" he hissed. "You bleed."
He whispered three Words in my ear. I didn't know them. They sounded strange.
The Words were a simple, savage spell, the first I would ever learn, the first I would ever cast. Three Words to stop a heart. You want, you bleed. Simple instructions, and four days later I chewed on my own tongue until blood flooded my mouth, and then I spoke the three Words I'd been taught, and watched as Father bugged his eyes out, made a strange choking noise, and died face-first in his turtle soup.
And I was happy.
2.
My apprentice will kill me someday.
I knew this the moment I interviewed him, this beautiful brown-skinned boy not even ten years old yet, the most beautiful person I'd ever seen. I was younger then, though still old--too old--a wrinkled bag of bones. He showed promise, a boy from Newark who lisped and sweated, but beautiful. Despite his young age, I could see he would be gorgeous. The first time I slapped him for mispronouncing a Word, he looked at me with such hatred, such permanent hate, that I knew it: it might take decades, but he would kill me. That was how I would end. My apprentice would kill me.
I started training him to do so. That much was duty.
I leaned forward, the tea steaming around us. I had not yet perfected my other face, and I was there, near him. "Do you know how old I am?"
He studied me. A child, he worried over having the correct answer. He chewed his lip. "Forty," he said, defiant. The oldest he could imagine.
I smiled. "I am sixty-nine," I said. "How much longer do you think I will live?"
His thinking face again. Then he smiled. Triumphant. "Not long."
