by Kat Howard
She packed away the shadow boxes, the skeletons, the figurines, reshelved the fairy tales.
The return of the sketchbook had reminded her of one thing. If there was any magic she could claim, it was hers, pencil on a page, pigment on canvas. It came from her, not from anywhere else.
The only birds Maeve left in sight were a white feather, a photo she had downloaded from her phone of a naked man perched in a tree, and the sketches she had made of Sweeney. Finally, she hung the recent sketches from the cathedral. She would have to go back there, she thought, before this was finished, but not yet. Not until the end.
• • •
At first, Sweeney thought it was the madness come upon him again. His skin itched as if there were feathers beneath it, but they were feathers he could neither see nor coax out of his crawling skin.
His bones ground against one another, too light, the wrong shape, shivering, untrustworthy. Not quite a man, not wholly a bird, and uncertain what he was supposed to be.
The soar of flight tipped over the edge into vertigo, and he landed with an abrading slap of his hands against sidewalk.
And then he knew.
Maeve was painting. Painting his own, and perhaps ultimate, transformation.
Dizzy, he ran to where he had first seen her, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
• • •
Maeve hated painting in public. Hated it. People stood too close, asked grating questions, offered opinions that were neither solicited nor useful, and offered them in voices that were altogether too loud.
The quiet space in her head that painting normally gave her became the pressure of voices, the pinprick texture of other people’s eyes on her skin.
She hated it, but this was the place she had to paint, to finish Sweeney’s commission here at the cathedral. The end was the beginning.
On the canvas: the shadow of Sweeney rising to meet him, a man-shape greyed and subtle behind a bird. Sweeney, feathers raining around him as he burst from bird to man. A white bird, spiraling in flight, haunting the broken tower of the cathedral, a quiet and stormy ruin.
The skies behind Maeve filled with all manner of impossible birds. On the cathedral lawn, women played chess, and when one put the other in check, a man in a faraway place stood up from a nearly negotiated peace.
Behind Maeve, Sweeney gasped, stumbled, fell. And still she painted.
This time, it felt like magic.
• • •
The pain was immense. Sweeney could not speak, could not think, could barely breathe as he was unmade. Maeve was not breaking his curse, she was painting a reality apart from it.
Feathers exploded from beneath his skin, roiling over his body in waves and disappearing again.
He looked up at the canvas, watched Maeve paint, watched the trails of magic in her brushstrokes. In the trees were three birds with the faces and torsos of women, sirens to sing a man to his fate.
The church bells rang out, a sacred clarion, a calling of time, and Sweeney knew how this would end.
It was not what he had anticipated, but magic so rarely was.
• • •
Maeve set her brush down and shook the circulation back into her hands. A white bird streaked low across her vision and perched in front of one of the clerestory windows.
“Maeve.”
She turned, and Sweeney the man lay on the ground behind her. “Oh, no. This isn’t what I wanted.”
She sat next to him, took his hand. “What can I do?”
“Just sit with me, please.”
“Did you know this would happen, when you commissioned the painting?”
“I considered the possibility. I had to. Without the magic binding me into one spell or the next, the truth is I have lived a very long time, and I knew that death might well be my next migration.”
Sweeney’s following words were quieter, as if he was remembering them. “No one chooses his quest. It is chosen for him.”
Sweeney closed his eyes. “This is just another kind of flight.”
• • •
Maeve hung the finished painting on her wall. Outside, just beyond the open window, perched a white bird.
Returned
The shadows press on your skin, prickled velvet that shouldn’t have weight, shouldn’t have texture, shouldn’t feel like you are wearing sandpaper and poison, but they do.
You are almost used to it, this new way that things that shouldn’t happen do, but you do not like it.
Here is one of the things that shouldn’t have happened: you are awake, and you do not want to be.
No.
No, that’s not quite it, and you are going to be honest. You are going to put aside the polite fucking fictions that are in place to make everyone else feel better around you because you are done, done, done caring what they feel. Since you have returned, no one has given any indication that they care about what you feel.
So. To say the thing true: you are alive, and you do not want to be.
Well, you are not exactly sure about that one word.
Alive.
You died. Not the sort of dead on the operating table, light at the end of the tunnel, go back to those who love you, near-death kinds of dead. But dead dead. All the way gone.
A death certificate was signed. Your body was cremated. You were made into a thing of ash and air and some fragments of bone. All that was left to go wherever you were was a soul, and that had gone on long before the burning of your body.
Not that it had been your idea to die. You weren’t a suicide. It had been
(a snake bite)
(a poisoned apple)
(a hand around your throat)
Anyway, you don’t exactly remember, or rather you do. The problem is you exactly remember all those things, all those possible deaths, and you cannot say which one was yours.
Maybe that is why everyone looks at you, well, like that.
Maybe not. You’ve heard them talk.
You remember being dead. You remember passing over the white bone of the corpse road, feeling vertebrae, ribs, phalanges, crunch beneath your feet. You remember the air shivering as you passed beneath the lych-gate. The scale that weighed your heart. You didn’t need coins to pay your passage, because . . . No. That part you don’t remember.
(maybe)
(no)
The queen whose eyes were as cold as marble, who welcomed you with frostbite’s kiss. You remember her very well. She smelled of winter and tasted like pomegranates.
You were neither particularly happy nor particularly sad about being dead. There were things you hadn’t done—you had never learned French or how to make a soufflé. You never started the novel you had always meant to write, and you still couldn’t run for more than a mile without stopping.
You regretted not doing those things, but in a dull, quiet sort of way. It seemed to you just as likely you would never have done them, only kept them on a list for someday, even if you hadn’t been
(stung by a bee)
(hit by a car)
(drowned in your bath)
You got used to being dead. The way the sky was shades of red, purple, grey—always striated with black, and never any stars. The way voices carried in the land of the dead, sounding more hollow, less real than other sounds, as if they were coming from farther away than the mouths that spoke. The way drinking from the wrong river could make you forget what it had been like to be alive.
(You had known that, about the river, before you arrived on its shore. But it was only a little that you drank, and you had been thirsty, or at least you had thought you should be after your travel there, and besides, you didn’t want to remember how you’d died.)
(You wish there were a river like that here.)
Then he showed up.
The hollow voices of the dead sounded almost solid in their excitement over his presence as they told you he was here, he was speaking. If he spoke well, he would take you back. Back to life.
Excitement was not what
you felt about him being there.
You didn’t listen to him speak. You stayed away, until you couldn’t.
He was, you guessed, the person you would call your boyfriend. Or lover. Which you mostly thought was a stupid word, but what else do you call the guy who walks into the afterlife and drags you back into your beforelife with him?
Bringing you back was, all things considered, easy for him. He had rules and he had tasks and he had warnings, and if he did all the things exactly as he was supposed to, you would have to go with him. He did, and you did.
No one ever asked you what you wanted.
The cold-eyed queen’s goodbye kiss burned like ice on your lips from the moment they touched hers until the moment you stepped again into the sun. You think you remember seeing a tear on her cheek as she embraced you and bid you safe journey, but perhaps you only want to remember that.
Now that he has brought you back, he is bright-eyed and golden and so very pleased with his success, so very proud of himself. He is handsome on television, and in the photographs for websites and weekly magazines that write stories about what he’s done, stories that say bringing you back was a miracle of love. He writes a “Top Ten List of Romantic Gestures Sure to Win Her Heart,” and no one comments on the fact that, for number one to work, she has to be dead first. No one says that things are more romantic when the girl is alive.
You are a shadow in photographs, cold-eyed and frostbitten, and everyone says they cannot tell what he sees in you. This makes them like him all the more. He must be a really great guy, to love someone like you. To stay by your side, even now, now that you are like this.
You cringe from the sun, too bright in a sky that is shades of blue, day and night, and full of the stark white light of stars. You step back when he tries to touch you.
He had sex with you once. The first night you were back. He had brought you back because he loved you, and now he was going to show you how much. He pushed himself inside you and withered almost immediately. You were too cold, he said. Like a dead thing.
He hasn’t tried again.
Small mercies.
You’d walk away, leave, if you could, but whatever tether pulled you with him out of death, whatever magic reconstituted the pieces of your immolated body around your peregrine soul, still hasn’t snapped. If you get too far away from him, well, you can’t. You are dissolved, reconstituted, turned inside out. Returned to him, to his side, to this curse he has brought you to.
You wish he had looked back.
But he didn’t, and you are here. Returned. And at the center of an attention that is just one more thing that you don’t want. You hate how they look at you, with pity and puzzlement. You hate how they look at him, lust and belief.
No one cares about the truth of you. At first, they expected you to be happy. Not being dead was clearly superior to being dead. And how romantic, what he had done. He must love you very much.
No one asked you the opposite question—whether you loved him, whether you had wanted to return with him. The old magics are not without their flaws.
The people around him watch you as you turn from him, as you flinch from his hand, as you stay behind him, as far as you can without being snapped back to his side, as if you are ungrateful, as if you are some half-wild, feral thing, and you suppose you are.
The reason why is another thing they do not know, that you would tell them if they asked. Your body was not the only thing that came back when you were yanked between death and life.
Your memories did too, the ones you drank away with the river. Bits and pieces, here and there, more like a dream than like events you lived through (died in), but maybe that’s how things are now. Even your dreams feel more real than this thing that happens when you’re awake, this thing you used to call life.
But you are awake, and you do remember.
You remember that you weren’t in love with him, not anymore. You were going to leave, you had told him.
You remember he reached past you, and closed the door, and said:
“No.”
You remember the look in his eyes as he told you he would never let you leave his side.
You remember the weight of his hand as it crushed your throat.
You remember that, even though you were dead, you ran from him, under the red-black sky of the land of the dead, on the white, white bones of the corpse road. Ran much farther than a mile without stopping. Ran into eternity, fleeing into death, away from the pursuing voice that called out how much he had loved you, loved you so much, why couldn’t you see it, he would make you see.
You crossed the river’s shore and you washed your hands in it, washed your hands of him, and drank its waters to forget.
But now you remember.
And the shadows fall painful on your skin, and the sky is too bright, and you cannot turn your back and walk away from him.
So you try to die. It’s the only way you can think of to get away from him, and it wasn’t bad, being dead. (The cold kiss of the colder queen.) You were just starting to get used to it. You miss the soothing darkness of the starless sky.
You open your wrists because the knife is close and you have never been afraid of blood, but the liquid that runs in the wake of the blade is darker than blood and your skin heals almost before the cut is finished.
You take pills, so many pills, and you do not even fall asleep.
You sink yourself beneath the waves and discover that you can breathe underwater.
He cries when you come back, dripping salt water behind you, and asks why you want to leave him again, when he loves you so much. He says that it is the power of his love that keeps you here. You should be grateful that he rescued you, that he has made it so you can always be together.
You think about that word: “always.” It is stuffed to the letter with time; it is an alternate shape for an infinity symbol.
It is unbearable.
“I’ll tell them,” you say. “I’ll tell them that you killed me.”
He doesn’t even bother to laugh. It’s too ridiculous. You’re clearly not dead. He has fixed things, taken it back.
Fixed. Things.
Rage is acid in your veins. Even the air on your skin is needles. Your lips peel back from your teeth and you hiss like a snake, like a Medusa, like a basilisk.
And perhaps your gaze is poison, because it fixes him like a stone.
You don’t think of what happens next as murder. His death is only a side effect. But if you are going to be tethered to him for always, for that infinity-shaped word, you are going to choose where.
Your fingers are claws and you tear his fragile heart from behind the opened cage of his ribs, and when it ceases to beat in your hand, you feel the rubber-band snap of a loosed tether. This is not what you expected. This is better.
Free. You are free.
You drop the ruined thing from your stained hand. It is full of blood, and not love, after all, no matter what he said. You begin to walk away. You can feel the bones of the corpse road again, and you know that if you just keep walking, you will find it under your feet, that it will return you to where you belong.
Then you turn. You look back. There is one thing you need to bring with you. A talisman against future events.
This time when you leave, you don’t look back. You carry his head by the hair, and when the white bone of his spine, unstrung like a broken lyre, clatters against the white bone of the road, you stop and you fix it there. You place it very carefully. You make sure that his sightless eyes are always looking into the land of the dead, always looking in the wrong direction to walk out himself, or to drag you back with him.
This time, you do not drink from the river of forgetfulness. You do not even wash your hands in it. You return, covered in the price of your passage, to the cold queen on her colder throne, and she presses her cold lips to yours. Your hands smear her red, like the crushed seeds of a pomegranate, and she tells you how glad she is that you have returned.
14 February—Feast of Saint Valentine
Saint Valentine is often depicted surrounded by roses and birds. Popular poses include his officiating at a marriage or extending his hands in benediction over a couple. He is claimed as patron by affianced couples, those crossed in love, and beekeepers.
The first time I used a blade to defend a point of honor, both the blade and the honor were mine. I was perhaps eight, and Rosamaria Sandro had accused me of copying her mathematics exam. The next time we were in the salle, I told her I would prove her a liar with my blade. She stopped laughing at the idea when I hit her for the third time with the blunted end of my sword and made her tell our mathematics instructor the truth. The pomp and ceremony of today’s events have nothing in common with that juvenile scuffle but the blade.
The blade, of course, is what matters. It is as sharp, as edged, as fatal as truth.
The subject of this Arbitration stands to the left of the dueling grounds, tiny white teeth sunk so deep into her lip that it, too, whitens. Her fiancé hovers close by, as if to shield her from the events or perhaps from their consequences. I wonder if he will put her aside if I am defeated. I want to think that he will stay with her, that his protective posture is a sign of genuine attachment rather than a signal of possession. Laurelle is beautiful and wealthy. The things that have been whispered about her would never have been said so viciously if it were otherwise. So it is possible he stands at her back because of reasons other than love, but I do not wish to believe in them.
Lost in my thoughts, I stumble in my warm-up, bruising the arch of my left foot against a stone I should have cleared from the ground. This is why I hate knowing the stakes when I take up my blade—they are a distraction. What I think should happen, what I would wish for the outcome to be, means nothing. If wishes mattered, there would be no need of swords.
My distracted thoughts focus as the Arbiter takes his place at the precise midpoint of the square, and I remind myself that Laurelle du Lyon’s honor—or possible lack thereof—has not been placed in my keeping but has been entrusted to my blade, and my blade has long been dedicated to the will of God. Not that I wish to believe in God any more than I wish to believe Laurelle’s fiancé cares only for the social and financial benefits of his upcoming marriage. The only thing I have faith in is my blade. Still, the formalities must be observed, and there is something to be said for a system of order in the face of chaos. The Church is gifted at the maintenance of order.