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“It was not I, Your Grace,” I stammered, helping him to his feet. But the fell voice erupted again from those broken mouths:
“FOOLISH BOY ON YOUR TIN THRONE. I AM ALL POSSIBLE THINGS. HOW CAN YOU HAVE THOUGHT FIRE WOULD DESTROY ME, OR THE BELLIES OF MEN? BUT THESE THINGS WILL DESTROY YOU, AND EASILY.”
Suddenly, the bodies of the soldiers shook terribly, and their bones rattled like drums in the Hall. Out of their shattered jaws came an unspeakable light, black and pale and green as if the air had been burned. The lights twined together, braiding their smoky brilliance into a monstrous pillar—and as each sliver of light left the body of a Varaahasind, his flesh shuddered and died, vanishing back into the single tooth from which he came. The clatter of teeth falling onto the mosaic floor echoed solemnly, and the pillar grew.
Indrajit trembled. By now even he grasped the situation, and clutched at his belly helplessly, knowing that he carried the last of his wife, and that he could not escape her. The light-serpent towered over him, eyeless, aware. He prostrated himself, the witless fool, and prayed for her mercy. She spoke again, but this time her voice, no longer contained within so many bodies, was a soft hiss of wind and guttering flame.
“I would have given you the world, if only you had been a greater man.”
With this, the light enveloped him, and passed through his flesh, and the passing ground his bones into his blood, and when it left him, there was only his crown, rolling mutely on the throne, and all its yellow tusk was burned black.
The light itself seemed to pause and stare at me, all its empty menace focused on my heart, and I feared, for a moment, that I would not be spared, though I had not taken part in the dread feast. I was frozen before the half-woman, and her stare seemed to last a thousand nights.
But a second light entered the Hall of Voices, and I was forgotten. White tendrils shone through the painted windows like pillars of gold, and the new light was so great I could not bear to look at it. It filled the Hall with its carpet of broken teeth as though it had weight, like water poured slowly into a glass. But as suddenly as it had come, it was gone, and a man all in white stood before the white smoke-serpent, carrying a pale spear, with his colorless hair streaming behind him. With a tender expression, he opened his alabaster mouth, and a small, secret shaft of light passed between them, soft as the stars in the spring.
When he closed his bloodless lips, the serpent had gone. Zmeya stood in its place, though not whole, not whole at all. She was hard and clear, as though cut from glass. Great onyx bracelets encircled her arms from shoulder to wrist, in the shapes of restive serpents. She wore nothing but these massive jewels, and her hair was circled in a single, slender snake, whose skin was too many colors to count—yet they were all pale and muted, like a painting which has been splashed with water.
Without a word to me, the pale man lifted her stiff form and carried her from the Hall.
“SO YOU SEE? IF YOU ARE QUIET, AND PATIENT, you may be able to get your petty revenge after all. It is none of my business. The King is as stupid as he is coarse, and when I ha
ve what I want from you, I would consider it a favor if you would kill him, and release me from my service here as Indrajit’s death released me then. Hatch your plots in the darkness, for the darkness is all you have.”
He turned from his table with a cup of the thick drink, now green and black as moldy flesh. He smiled, a smile which might be taken as tender, or proud, had it been on any face but his. The Wizard hauled me up by my hair and yanked the gag from my mouth. He forced the brew down my throat. It tasted of bile and rotted flowers—roses, perhaps—and there was a dark, musty undertaste that might have been sweat from some unnamable body.
As soon as it was in me, roiling in my belly, he flung me aside and watched with the curiosity of a cat watching a mouse it knows it is about to devour. I screamed and clutched at my skin—a terrible golden cloud had swallowed my vision, and my skin was ripping apart like the pages of his foul books. I knelt on the floor and vomited twice, still shrieking into the stones. He never reached a hand to help me, only watched as my skin was stolen away.
I must eventually have fainted. When I came to he held up a great mirror with a cruel smile of victory on his thin lips.
In the carved mirror stood a tall woman with hair the color of young wheat cascading past her waist in glowing curls, wide gray eyes like pools of clean rain, and milk-skin without the slightest mark. I was tall, my breasts rode high and full, and there was not a knot or rope of muscle anywhere on me—I was as weak and soft as a lamb at suck.
“And now,” the Wizard crooned silkily, “we will call you Queen.” Seeing my expression, he laughed. “You cannot think I meant for my King to lie with a barbarian! Metamorphosis is my art! Now you are beautiful. Now he can show you to the crowds. Now you cannot return to your people, for they would never know you. You belong to us. We will call you Helia after the great sun which rides the sky and blesses the reign of our King.”
“You cannot take my name from me, slave,” I said softly, touching that hair the likes of which I had never seen, save on the golden horses of my youth.
“My Queen, I have taken it.”
I spent the nights by turns with the King and his soundless cruelties—for he hardly spoke a word to me after our hurried marriage in a temple I could not name, when he clasped a belt of gold and jasper around my waist in place of a ring: he seemed to marvel that it fit perfectly. The other nights I was bound in Omir’s chamber, while he bled me in order to leech power Grandmother had given me from my veins. He opened me with silver needles and gold, even grotesque thorns the size of a well-muscled arm. But it was not deep enough, because the blood never ran silver. It was not deep enough—or perhaps I had nothing after all. Perhaps I was as empty as a hole in the air.
He would not listen when I told him I was nothing, only an apprentice who would never be otherwise. He had taken the moon from me, and given me only a sun that burned and burned.
But I spent every day in my tower prison. Even when I was pregnant, I had no respite, but lay on the stone flags as though dead, listening to the dripping of my blood into the crack of the floor.
Yet all the Kingdoms rejoiced when I gave birth to my son, named for the lions of the wild steppes. And only then, when I had produced an heir, was I allowed an hour a day when I could hold him in free arms and let my tears fall on his smooth forehead.
LEANDER STARED, HIS HANDS SHAKING, HIS MOUTH dry. The birds watched him like an exceptionally slow child who has just learned to throw a ball into the air and catch it without dropping it.
“Helia?” he whispered.
“I would have thought you would figure it out sooner. Nevertheless, all revelations are, in the end, disappointing. Did you think it was by accident that your adventure took you to me? You had hardly to turn the corner and I was there. Surely you expected to get a little further on your way before meeting a Witch? I have waited, just beyond your father’s reach, all these years. I knew no son of mine could be bound up in a Castle all his life and never try to run free. I have bent all my heart on the thought, as though I were crafting a bow to let arrows fly to you. I did not quite think, though, that your first act once you arrived would be to murder your sister.”
Perhaps it was only then that Leander realized the full impact of the Witch’s tale, and his eyes broke like webs in the wind. He cried in earnest then, for his sister, and his mother, and his father, whose crimes he had never guessed.
“But I can bring her back, with the skin, I can bring her back—”
“Yes, yes, my son, but not yet. It is not time, and there is more yet to tell.” She reached awkwardly out to draw him into her—Knife’s embrace was as strange and unpracticed as a tiger embracing a seal. And into his ear she whispered, voice rattling like cattails:
“Your father organized a great festival for the first anniversary of your birth. As part of the celebration, the dungeons were to be cleared out—the remaining prisoners, starved like deer at the bottom of winter, to be executed—all the poor wretched folk who were left of my tribe.
