Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  “The prophecies say that you will be true love’s kiss—”

  “Wait.” Callum has never asked, but he does so now. “What prophecies?”

  It was foreseen in the entrails of a white stag, divined by two blind sisters, gibbered by the face tattooed over the heart of a dead king’s corpse. It was—must—have been foretold somewhere, the child is certain. Callum and Annora exchange looks, and he rises to warm what bourguignon remains from dinner, while his love interrogates their guest, whose chin is already slumped onto her chest.

  “Do you know for sure that it was true love’s kiss that your princess needs?”

  The child hesitates. There is blood and brambles on her stockinged feet. “It is what is customary.”

  “What happens after that? Does she marry him?” Annora shucks her weapon, sheathes it in an umbrella stand. Callum’s love then makes their guest a bed of cushions on the meagre couch, the corners tasseled and heavy with hag stones. Over the girl, she drapes the bearskin that a boy-prince had gifted them, black and lustrous as grief, Annora’s voice, a drowsing alto throughout, softly gabled with a highland brogue.

  “Yes.” Her head bobs with every syllable, eyes lidding. “She must. That is the price.”

  “I see.” Like every daughter born to a blacksmith, Annora is strong, muscles like ley lines across the map of her body, arms tattooed with icons of the Burning God, every weapon she’d ever made frescoed on her skin, so you’d know, even if you couldn’t tell from the thickness of her arms and the scarring on her fingers, that she belongs to the forge and the fire. Her fingers brush the girl’s brow, an anointment. “Callum, beloved.”

  He hears the worry leavened into her voice, and although it opens an ache in him, Callum nods, setting down a bowl heaping with comforts: brisket and potatoes and carrots and caramelized onions, a touch of fine red wine and fresh thyme in the stock. “Be safe. Be wise, be careful. Be all the things that I know you are.”

  “I’ll send a raven when I’m on the way home.” They had begged her, every holy order to hear of the blacksmith’s daughter who lived alone with the man who would not be king. They had plied her with redemption, the decadence of immortality. Ten years, twenty, no more than that. That is all that they want. In return, the gods will indulge her everything. Only serve them as templar, as champion, as avatar. Please.

  And Annora said no.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” A smile parts her lips, and the candle-light makes honey and gold of her ash-brown hair. “Now, to bed with you, my little one. But not before you eat. You’re nothing but bird bones.”

  “But the princess—”

  “Can wait until you have slept.”

  One year before Callum was seventeen, he murdered his mother’s potatoes, and somehow, that same unfortunate summer, mistook locusts for ladybirds. That winter, there was no jam, no pots of savory marmalade, no preserved fruits or pickled garlic to infuse in their cakes or stews. They ate leanly: dried meats and hard cheeses, crispbreads with shavings of goat’s butter, which would have been flavored with leeks or thyme, had Callum not made a slaughterhouse of their crops.

  Until Callum learned that, while no garden will love him, the forest would at least tolerate a friendship. He found sugar kelp by a frost-wefted shore, whiting in its waters, yellow-foot chanterelles blooming in the roots of a scrawny black birch: these, Callum gathered to make a broth, letting them steep with five-spice and star anise before he adds venison from his father’s hunt. The stew was thin, but Callum’s family devoured it like a blessing.

  The next day, he unearthed a harvest of sunchokes, which he filleted and fried with duck fat saved from his mother’s birthday. The evening after that, Callum brought home burdock and juniper berries, rose hips red as love’s mouth, and a bottle of dark honey that tasted dizzily of molasses and wood-smoke, wine and winter’s end.

  “There will come a time when this knowledge is more important than any other you learn,” Callum’s mother declared, as she stirred eggs and powdered sugar with that glossy, brilliant honey. “To know how to make a feast of nothing, to stop the world while you stand in your kitchen, a ladle in your hand and a pot on the stove, a cake rising in the oven. To be able to quiet the universe with a promise. There is no better magic.”

  Callum, still young, replied. “But what about pyromancy?”

  His mother laughed, and Callum would always remember that sound, how resonant it was, how rich, the abandon with which she guffawed, and how she’d stroked a thumb across his brow, her skin smelling of cinnamon and golden in the cold light.

  “No. This is a better magic than that. You’ll understand, one day.”

  She comes back in armor blackened by dragon fire, in armor belted with teeth marks and stippled with thorns; in new scars, a half-moon of meat gouged from her left cheek. But she comes back, and she comes home victorious. The princess lies strapped to Annora’s back, hair limp and long, less royalty than bedraggled kelpie, wrung of fight, wrung of anything but that dim instinct to exist.

  When her head lolls upwards, it is all Callum can do to not cry out. The rungs of her throat, the spokes of her shoulders, the fashion in which her eyes rest sunken in a face so gaunt, it is only scaffolding and a spidering of cartilage. Something had eaten her down to the last shivering breath.

  “The roses did this.” Annora’s voice, flat. The world outside is blue with dusk, heavy with fog, gold and wine-bruised where it isn’t grey. “Someone erred in their creation. The roses needed sustenance, some way to maintain their own immortality, so they found the princess.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?” says Callum, freeing his beloved from her sallet. Beneath the iron, dented, scuffed, ill-shaped, Annora’s hair is matted to her skull, salt-clotted and clumped with dried blood. The latter is unmistakably a product of injury, but Callum cannot bring himself to ask her questions yet or roll those answers in the cup of his palm, not when he has had to spend weeks without her, sick to the teeth with the certainty that Annora was dead or bartered to a divinity somewhere.

  “The apothecary’s assistant.” Even now, the princess is a palimpsest of every lesson she was taught, and Callum can see as much in the imperious tilt of a head that can scarcely hold its weight. A darting of a pale, dry tongue that does nothing to moisten cracked lips. “She was my only friend, she said she would help—”

  “A girl,” says Annora, as Callum removes her pauldrons and vambraces, careful to robe each piece in oilskin and put them away by turn. He notates what requires repairs, what has slid. “With hair black as grief? Sugar-brown eyes. Bramble and blood on her feet.”

  Here, her voice fractures, like a spindle of ice splitting beneath a child as she runs and she runs, alone in the woods, alone in the winter, breath curling white through the air, hounded and haunted by the wolves of a role she was too young to suffer. Callum touches a hand to Annora’s cheek, and she shudders like a winded warhorse.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Callum tells her.

  “You don’t know that. She could have sent the girl out—” Annora clenches a mailed fist, while the princess stares on.

  “And she might not have.”

  “Callum—”

  “Her name was Emilia, and mine is Irina, and I will thank you to use them when you address us.” That demand skins her of everything she has left, and finally, the princess deigns to collapse, cheek smushed into Annora’s shoulder blade, still swaddled like an infant. Callum wonders if there will be conversations about this one day, if the princess—Irina, corrects her voice in his head, sharp as the sound of a snapped rose-stem—will sit down and sign a letter to commemorate what Annora had done, allot her a title and a tract of land, but what would they do with that?

  “We’re not going to get anywhere, shouting at each other in the doorway.”

  Annora bares a grimace.

  “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Callum has only seen his mother angry once.
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br />   Which was not to say that she did not become irate, would not color with vexation, cheeks blotching red, or raise her voice when Callum eroded her patience, but there is no other instance in his recollection, no other frame of memory through which he might look through and say, yes, his mother had been angry here, as well. The texture of her rage surprised him then, astonishes even now, when he thinks to examine the memory: it was a righteous thing, bright burning, molten, the rage of someone who had seen a nation bend its knee to her command.

  But the object of her fury, that was what astonished Callum even more.

  It had been an old man. Callum would have said it was another king had there been anything regal about that tired figure, but he was only old, ragged in that way Callum was beginning to understand was unique to people who’d only ever lived for someone else. A diadem nested in a corona of grey hair, long emptied of its shine, its emeralds milky as a dead man’s eye. He dressed simply: a traveller’s leathers, a traveller’s woollen coat, no artistry in anything he wore, save, perhaps, the locket that swung from his throat.

  “Please,” said the man.

  “I told you to leave me be.” His mother stood at their stoop, rolling pin in hand, flour like war paint daubed along her cheekbones. When she spoke, it wasn’t with volume or thundering emotion. Her voice was cold as late frost. “How many times must I repeat myself?”

  “Please,” said the man again.

  “Leave me be.” And his mother would have closed the door on the man forever, had not Callum spoken up, voice wavering, something like recognition in the denouement of his exclamation, something like memory, and years later, Callum would wonder if it was destiny that had coaxed him to whisper:

  “I know you.”

  The man laughed, a wounded noise, as Callum’s mother glared, and although Callum dwarfed her now, six feet to her five, he shrank from the fury smoking in her gaze. “How you have grown, child. I remember when your mother brought you to the palace and you found your way to the barracks. How they loved you! Their little—”

  “Enough.” This time, Callum’s mother roared.

  But the man would not concede the smile, or the look he now wore like the spoils of a war won after a thousand years of bodies burning through the night, his expression one of such profound and enormous love that Callum was halfway to his feet before he realized what had transpired.

  “Grandfather,” he said.

  For the first week, the princess Irina will eat nothing but the leanest of vegetable broths. Anything else, any endeavour to thicken the stock with aromatics or flavour it with salt, to add protein, only results in vomit. For the first week, she does nothing but ask for Emilia, half-delirious from the rigors of recovery but still demanding, nonetheless.

  “What happened to the girl?” Callum asks, one night, weary of Irina’s hysterics. Between lunch and supper, she contracted what he worries to be the prelude of a fever. If he is careful, they will not have to call for the apothecary, who lives atop the shoulder of a hill a day’s ride away.

  Annora shakes her head. They repeat the ritual thrice again before at last, Callum’s beloved, beloved of the gods, the blacksmith’s daughter with eyes the colour and gleam of a blackbird’s wing, moves to speak privately with the princess. Callum absents himself during their talk: he bakes egg tarts instead, uses too much butter in one batch, too little in the next, redeems himself with the third attempt. Halfway through his labour, Annora emerges and holds her arms out to him, expression vacant, a house with no hope.

  He embraces her and tries, with no success, to ignore the sobbing that shudders from behind Irina’s door.

  Callum is told a story:

  His mother had been fated to serve as a fulcrum of mythological narrative. Had she been born male, destiny might have decreed her a Chosen One, a saviour, a shining light in one of the many apocalypses that cycle through the world like the passing of seasons. But she was not, and the world held only limited places for princesses: on a throne beside a king, on a bed of briars, under glass, young perpetually, waiting, waiting forever to be redeemed by the mouth of a man. They are meant to be brides. The question is if they are wedded to men or tragedy, although by her estimate, there was often no difference between the two.

  For her, the soothsayers envisioned a death at sea, swallowed by serpents, servitude at the altar of an ocean god, her throat gorgeted with carnelian and her hands scarred by coral. If she was lucky, the divinity would marry her, make her mother to monsters.

  But she would not have that fate.

  To her parents’ dismay, Callum’s mother chose instead a tradesman from the town. She courted and wedded, of all the men in their rolling green kingdom, the local leather-crafter: an orphan, grossly untalented in the kitchen, his nose shrivelled by years of breathing tannins. But he had a voice like an angel who had broken its heart, and he could make her laugh like no other, and most importantly, he knew how to work hard. For her dowry, the leathercrafter slaved three bitter years to turn the carcass of a dragon—the beast itself was slain by his brother, a mercenary of reasonable repute and uncustomary charity—into armour for an army.

  And grudgingly, the king and queen gave their blessing. So, Callum’s mother and the leather crafter married by the rosy dawn of an autumn day, with only their families in attendance, one set in velvet and the other in sturdy brown hemp. By dusk, when the larders had been plundered for black wines and golden ciders, there was no difference between the two, and the leather-crafter, roses in his red hair, sang for them the shy songs he wrote for his new bride. If there was a guest that day who could say they listened without tears, well, they were lying.

  The festivities lingered to midnight. The final stragglers bade Callum’s parents goodbye, and Callum’s parents, who had always dreamt of a house in the woods, of a kitchen ambered by noon-light, of a life safe and sweet and simple as meltwater, stole quietly away to their new home.

  Gradually, Irina’s diet is broadened. Callum introduces porridge with a dram of whisky, peppermint tea cut with honey, shortbread and saltines and sweet potatoes roasted in their skin. He brings her silken tofu with oyster sauce, garlic in growing increments. Nothing that mandates effort.

  “What happened, exactly?” Callum asks one frost-brittled day, the air outside so sharp that each breath comes as a cut. He sets a bowl of soup down on the low table in front of the princess. This is their first experiment with carrots and butternut squash, chillies and ginger, although Callum makes sure to keep his hand light with the latter. Irina’s palate, he decides, is likely still too meek for wild experiments, although he’ll now compel her to chew.

  “It’s a story as old as time. A kingdom, a father, the spectre of a dead wife in the margins of his memory, and her daughter he loved more than the summer sun itself. When civil war broke loose, the king chose to do all he could to protect what he loved.” She stirs a wooden spoon through the soup. Irina has begun to plump, but not by much, her skin still loose and dull. Nonetheless, a lustre is beginning to take hold in her eyes, and Callum, to his relief, can no longer see the strings of tendon around her wrists.

  “So, he ordered his men to murder their brethren,” Annora intones, glaring at Irina over her tea.

  Irina twitches a bony shoulder, expression impenitent, unburdened by borrowed guilt. “Yes. What else do kings do in this situation? They rally armies, dress them in gilt and shining metal, hoping to god that the posturing will be enough to make the other side back down. My father wasn’t a bad ruler, but a country’s memory stretches across centuries. His predecessors were known for cruelty, for policies that gouged holes into the pockets of the peasantry and mistakes that cost thousands their lives.”

  Annora crosses her leg, ankle over knee, leaning forward. There is something peregrine-like to the swoop of her posture, the raised chin, even the flex of her shoulders, her entire body moulded into an unsubtle challenge. “He could have stepped down.”

  “He could have.” Irina sips her first
mouthful of her soup, blanches. A hand flies to her lips, but after a laboured moment, she swallows. “But that asks for more wisdom than my poor father could have offered. Power is not easily surrendered. Especially not by men.”

  Her answer wins a chuckle from Annora, along with a grudging smile.

  “Your father’s inadequacies asides, how did the whole—” Callum hesitates “—debacle with the roses come to pass?”

  “Desperation. You’d be amazed how willing a man is to bargain with dark forces when he has his back against the wall. At some point during the chaos, he was struck a mortal blow. In his panic, he turned then to one of his soothsayers, who everyone knew to have a relationship with the gods of the earth. I was entrusted to him.” Another of Irina’s tense, thoughtless shrugs, the motion clattering loosely, as though the bones are conjoined by silk, not cartilage. “It was a bad idea.”

  “The soothsayer was a mole, then? An agent for the other side?” Callum refills both Annora’s mug and his with tea, unable to think of anything else, any action more useful than this act of domesticity.

  “No. Worse. He was inept. He thought that he would be able to deter our adversaries by summoning a rose wall around the castle. A romantic idea. But such accelerated growth is never without a price. The roses grew tall, and they grew hungry. They devoured many, many men from the other side. When the other army retreated, the roses naturally turned on us.” A whistling sigh as Irina sets down her spoon, fingers lacing over a knee. “It didn’t take long for my father’s soothsayer to realize what he had done. Hoping it would save me, he put me into an eternal sleep, one to be broken by love’s kiss. That … well, it did not work the way he wanted. The roses, starving, were quick to find the one thing in the castle pulsing with unimaginable amounts of magic.”