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My head was faint and weary. I grabbed on tighter to his arm, more in need of support than anything. The stranger stepped forward, the rings of his eyes stretching against dark pitted pupils.
“I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it. Now go before you become more trouble than you’re worth.”
A demand, it seemed, but the words barely passed as anything more than a whining plea. He, too, was tired of the day’s antics, then.Feeling my eyes well with tears, I started to beg. “Just tell me one thing, please, I...”
“Gwyn,” He warned.
“No, that’s just it!”
Shaking his head, he tried to pry himself from my grip. I doubled down, adding my other arm into the mix to keep him with me. I felt like screaming but I couldn’t rid myself of the fear of being seen bythe others.
“On the Mountain and the landing...” I was running my words together in haste, “You kept calling me something. Gw—, Gwah—,” I tried to force the syllables out into the space between our faces, but I fumbled.
“Gwynore?” he corrected smoothly.
“Yes!Guh-wen-o-ruh.” He grimaced as I butchered the word once more. “What does it mean?”
The stranger’s eyes widened, and his mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Then he swallowed, and timidly, he said, “It’s your name. You’re called Gwynore.”
These words were the softest he’d spoken to me, yet. Almost melancholy, like he was sad for me not to have known.
A name, I thought.My name.
I hadn’t given any thought to whether I had one. I named the East Bright and the Wane and the Sea and the Mountain...the Auriel. But it never occurred to me that I might need a name, or that I was already given one.
Gwynore.
In shock, I released my hold on the stranger who slipped greedily out of my reach. He was already halfway to the top of the stairs when I called out from below. Flattened against one of the boards directly above me, only his bright golden eyes could be seen through the shadowed slats.
“Yes, Gwynore?”
My cheeks heated at the way he gently uttered my name as if it was important for me to be more acquainted with it. “What are you...called? What is your name, I mean?”
The way the skin creased around the ledge between his cheekbones and his eyes made me think he was smiling. That, or pulling a face at my broken speech. He gave nothing of himself away.
“Kalen. That is my name,” he said quickly. “But I am called Kal.” Without any more of an explanation, he whisked himself back up into the light.
While I hadn’t meantto strike the handmaiden, she was rather understanding of why I might have clubbed her on purpose.
That is because I had never seen another person so much like myself. Somewhere in my bones, I knew what she was—a girl, a woman, like me. That didn’t make her swift entrance through my chamber doors any less alarming. It especially did not calm my fear as she stood directly in front of me,tskingat the poor sight of me before moving her hand out towards my matted hair.My fist acted on instinct, and instinct alone.
“I apologize, my lady,” Rebekah said, clutching her cheek with a shocked expression. One similar to my own, though my vicious hand now cupped my mouth. “I should have introduced myself before getting straight to work. You see, it has been a long day. Clarisse, one of the other handmaidens, is on leave with her baby, and all the guest needs have fallen to me…”
“No,” I said. “It was my…fault. I am sorry. You took me…by surprise.”
Rebekah seemed uncomfortable by the choppy arrangement of my words. Who would have expected a dullard to have such a sharp punch?
“Yes,” she replied, her green eyes still wide as she attempted to compose herself. “Well, let’s get you clean and dressed inrealclothes.”
The girl reached out to me again, slowly this time, and I found control of my gangly limbs at last.
Three days had gone by since that first meeting. Or as I counted, six passes of both the Bright and the Wane as they circled the cosmos painted in the glass panes of my window.When Rebekah had finished applying a salve to her cheekbone and made to pour my bath, I asked about their movements. We had enough time to wait for the dirt that was pressed into my skin to dissolve into the scalding tub of water for her to tell me the story of their forbidden love.
She told me that thesun—apparently that is what we called the East Bright—took his last breath as dusk settled over the world. He did this, she said, all so that we could bask in the breathtaking luminance of his lover. Rebekah said we called her themoon.
I couldn’t believe that my entire life I had lived in the moments just before such a tragic end. I had wandered unknowingly beneath the finest hour, the most intimate eternity of bliss the two had ever known. I had stood on the border of day and night, an unwanted and prying eye to the most harrowing affair in the universe. What I wouldn’t give to go back and tell them to savor it. To hold each other’s gaze until their lights bleated out and the Sea swallowed them whole.
But maybe they were better off being so oblivious. What would it do to them, and the way that they held each other, to be aware of how soon one would be ripped from the other’s embrace? I shuddered at the senseless cruelty, and decided it was better that they love without the fear of knowing.
