by Rena Rossner
“Why did you stop?” he said, his eyes open now.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s a lot. And probably too soon for me to have said anything. But I won’t have my heart broken again.”
“Again? Who has hurt you so? I had my eyes closed because I was trying to picture it; it sounds like heaven. Like everything I’ve ever wanted.”
“What?” I said.
“Truly,” he said. “Hand on heart—you can ask my men. It’s been a long time since they’ve seen me show interest in anyone.”
“Why?” I backed away from him.
“Don’t walk away—please,” he said, like he was afraid of startling a fawn. “What is the shape of the future you dream of? Tell me.”
“I’ll only answer that if you will,” I said.
“Children,” he said. “Children surrounding my table, like you said. And a beautiful wife always round with my fruit.”
My cheeks flushed. My body was betraying me—I felt warm in places where I once thought all was ash. “You’re only saying that because I did,” I said to him. “How do I know you speak true?”
“There is nothing more beautiful—” His voice cracks. “—than a pregnant woman. The only thing I can imagine being more lovely is if I knew that it was my babe she was carrying.” He turned away from me and I thought I saw tears in his eyes.
“Constantin, I’m sorry. What did I say?”
He didn’t answer.
I walked over to him and put my hand on his back. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I was in love once,” he started, but his voice cracked and he stopped. “I loved her with all of my heart. With everything I had.”
I heard the raw edge in his voice and it scared me. I didn’t like where this was going. It was a voice that sounded too much like my own, a pain that felt too close to my pain. No, I wanted to say, please no, don’t tell me more.
But I didn’t say anything. I waited and listened and kept my hand on his back.
“We were supposed to marry. She was—” He took a deep breath. “Sofia was carrying our child. But I came home one day from having been out fighting for Voivode Basarab only to find everyone in my village slaughtered. My parents, my brothers—” His voice caught. “—and Sofia. A Tatar horde. A senseless raid. And I wasn’t there to protect her.”
“Constantin, I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Not many do. It’s not something I speak about. After it happened, I devoted myself to Theodor and his father Basarab. To the protection of our way of life. To ensure that nothing like that would ever happen to anyone I cared for again. But I’m a coward. Because I never allow myself to care for anyone.”
“I… I lost someone too,” I said, speaking about what had happened for the first time since everything burned.
He turned to face me. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
“I saved these seeds from what we ate as we fled through the forest, strawberry seeds,” I said softly.
“Why did you flee?” he said, still whispering, still hesitant.
“We fled after…” I paused. My throat was tight.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Let it be.”
“No,” I said to him. “You deserve to know, and I owe it to his memory to tell the tale. I was married to a man named Jakob. He was heir to the throne, the son of the Duchess of Trnava. We had one night together. And then they ripped him from my arms and burned him at the stake for treason. He was beautiful and brave and I loved him. We waited two years to be together and in one night—” My hands tied themselves into knots. “I’m broken. I’m not whole inside. And I’m not a maiden anymore.” I looked up into his eyes and saw that he was crying.
“That someone who’s felt the same despair could have managed to light up the forest with strawberries tells me everything I need to know about you. You’re stronger than me.”
“I don’t think anyone is stronger than you,” I said.
He placed his large, warm hand on my cheek, and I could feel how rough and calloused it was. “You are.”
He bent down slowly, his hands light as angel wings upon me, both of us afraid. His lips touched mine lightly; he was being so sweet, so soft… I thought of Jakob and the angel—the story Mama told me. I wondered then and I wonder now if all along she’d meant something else entirely. There are two sides to every coin. Where there is darkness, there must be light, or we wouldn’t recognize the darkness for what it is. Maybe in my lifetime I was meant to love both a man and an angel.
The body has its hungers and desires, its like and dislikes. My eyes liked what I saw before me, and my body agreed.
I pined for one man for two years and then he was taken from me. Perhaps it’s possible to open up one’s heart to more than one. The one I lost, and this one, who has lost so much himself. He will never replace what Jakob was to me, but pain is something that we share. It may not be the strongest basis for a relationship, but maybe together we can find a way to grow a family of our own from the ashes of our pasts.
Laptitza
Nikolas stands in awkward silence. There is no food to eat—no natural place for conversation to begin. I feel the ache of the stars in my chest like an ailment. Like I’m only idling my time until they come out again.
Nikolas glances at me, then stares off into the distance. Then stares at some dirt on the toe of his boot.
“Would you like to take a walk down by the river?” he blurts out quickly.
“I’d love that,” I say. It will give me something to do. Something to distract me.
We walk a short way into the forest and soon we hear the sound of a stream.
“It is beautiful here,” I say. “So pristine.”
“What do you like to do?” he asks. “I mean, when you’re not helping at home. Do you have time for any? Interests, I mean…” he stutters, and I can see a spray of pink across his cheeks. “That’s probably a silly question.” He quickly corrects himself. “You likely don’t have time for much of anything else on a farm.”
I can’t help but smile a little bit. He has a sweet and hesitant way about him. I think, This is someone I could see wanting to get to know… if my soul wasn’t pledged to the stars.
“I like looking at the stars,” I quickly say. “I love everything about them and I like to try to read my future in the patterns every night. I like how vast the sky is, and how uncountable the stars feel, how permanent they are—like something you can rely on. Something that will never let you down.”
And as I speak it, I realize that I love so much more about the stars than just the fact that he’s up there.
“I love looking at the stars too,” he says, “but I disagree—stars can fall, and you never know when one will. I think the stars are faithless. But I still love watching them. You should come visit the voivode’s palace. We have an astrolabe there that we use to look at the stars from the highest tower of the palace. You can almost touch the sky.”
“I would love that,” I say. “When can I come?” I could get even closer to him—to my star.
“Well, hmmm…” I see him hesitate. “I would say that we could go now, except there are no stars in the sky yet. But I suppose tonight could work. What time are you free?”
I fidget, my fingers not quite finding a place to rest.
“It will have to be late,” I say. “I need to sneak out, or else my parents would never permit it. Is there a way you could meet me? Here? Or halfway? Or send someone to escort me?”
“Of—of course I can! I should have offered! And late tonight is fine—I don’t want you to get into trouble. Would—would another night suit better? Another time?”
“Tonight is perfect,” I say.
“I will come get you myself,” he says. “Where should we meet?”
“I will wait for you at midnight right here, by this river. It’s not far from where I live, and I won’t run the risk of being seen.”
We make our
way back to where we started. I’m excited. This man can take me closer to the stars than I’ve ever been before. And maybe, just maybe, I will see something there that will give us all hope. Some great secret the sky is waiting to reveal only to me.
I wait for the house to settle, for the stars to fix themselves firmly in the sky, and then I sneak out. When I get to the river, Nikolas is already waiting for me, under the dark cover of tree and sky.
I ride with him all the way to the palace. He ties up his horse himself, and takes me up a back staircase. The stairs go on endlessly. By the time we reach the top, I’m having trouble catching my breath. He opens the door to a moonlit room. There are windows on all sides, and a large metal structure pointing up at the sky.
“Come,” Nikolas says, and he leads me over to the device. “Close one eye and look out the other one,” he says, as he adjusts what look like gears. “Can you see the stars? They feel as close to you as I am.” He sounds as excited to share this with me as I am to be here. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Someone who understands how important the stars are.
I close one eye and squint through the device, and it is as though the door to a new world has been opened. The spaces between the stars and the darkness they contain are visible to me—vivid in a way they’ve never been before. I hear my father’s voice in my head for the first time in a while: “The world is made up of black fire and white fire. The white fire is the holy letters of the Torah but no less important are the dark spaces between them.”
I can see all the dark spaces between the stars. I could stay here all night. “For every darkness in the world there is light. But light cannot exist without darkness,” I repeat my father’s words under my breath.
“That’s very true,” Nikolas answers, and I remember that he’s beside me and that I spoke the words out loud.
“I never want to stop looking,” I say.
“I remember feeling that way when my tutor first took me up here. The first time my tutor turned the contraption up to the stars, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
My eyes scan the sky through the device and it’s only because I’m paying attention that I see it—my star.
It’s white and blinding in its fury.
I see it take a dive from the sky
and plummet towards earth.
I know where it’s heading—
to the clearing.
To meet me—
but I’m not there.
“I have to go,” I say to Nikolas.
“But you just got here,” he protests. “Is everything okay? What did you see?”
“I have to go. I have to go. I have to go.”
I turn and cross the room. My hands fumble at the bolt on the door.
“I’ll come with you,” he says. “You can’t go out there alone. Please—was it something I said? Something I did?” His eyes are wide with panic.
“It was something I saw. I’m so sorry. I need to get home.”
“Okay, I’ll come with you,” he says. “Maybe I can help.”
He can’t help. My being with him is what caused the problem to begin with.
How could I have been so stupid?
I accept his help though—anything to get me back to the clearing where my star-man waits for me.
Nothing will ever compare to the way he lit me up that night.
He opened doors for me to an internal sky of sensation—if I never experience what I felt with him again, I don’t think I’ll survive.
But when we finally get to the clearing, he isn’t there. He didn’t wait for me.
But Nikolas waits. He followed me even when my choices were capricious.
“Can you at least tell me why we raced back here?” he asks.
I must tell him something. I owe him an explanation for my strange behavior.
“Can I tell you a story?” I ask.
He cocks his head at me. “A story. That’s not what I expected. Okay, you can tell me a story. I like stories,” he says. He leans against the gnarled root of a tree and crosses his legs.
I close my eyes. I look to the inner eye inside me—the one Papa taught me to draw from when interpreting the skies. I hear my mother’s voice when she told stories—a tune like reading from a scroll. I search for a story that holds a kernel of the way I feel.
I begin.
There was once a fox that fell in love with a vineyard.
Every day he would pass the fence that kept the grapevines secure from trespassers, and every night he would return and sit and watch the leaves unfurling in the dew and the grapes starting to burst forth from tiny white blooms.
He longed to wander amid the gnarled roots of the vines and to sip from the sweet nectar of the blossoming grape clusters, but he knew that the fence was there for a reason—to keep strangers like him out.
One day, as he made his way around the fence that surrounded the vineyard, he found a small break in the slats.
He stuck his snout through the hole—he could almost touch the vines. He could smell the sweet juice and felt as though he could taste what it would be like for a grape to burst in his mouth—sour and sweet at the same time.
He decided that nothing would ever taste as good to him as the promise of those juicy bunches, so he refused to eat or drink for three days, and each day that he fasted, he found that he could fit more and more of himself through the hole.
“I only long to taste the bounty,” he said to himself, “not to feast or gorge myself upon such beauty—for then I would destroy it, and there would be none left to lust after anymore. I do not seek destruction. I only wish one tiny little taste and I’ll be satisfied.”
On the third day, the fox was able to squeeze his entire body through the hole.
His eyes nearly filled with tears—he felt as if he had entered a foreign land. The grass was greener, the soil softer—and everything was fragrant and lush. It felt so different here, on the other side of the fence. He wished he could stay in the vineyard forever—far away from his daily cares and the dangers of the woods.
He walked around the vineyard searching for the perfect grape—the one that would satiate his curiosity and quench his thirst with its perfection. When he found it—red and ripe and glowing in the moonlight—the grape found itself into his mouth and his teeth clamped down.
He was hungry. So hungry. For he hadn’t eaten in three days. The grape was pure and sweet and tasty—everything he’d dreamed it would be. And before he could stop to think—before he could stop himself—he devoured the whole cluster.
It was so good, so perfect, that it was hard for him to believe he’d actually found the perfect one. Certainly he’d picked the greatest of all the grapes in the vineyard—but to be sure, he tasted another, and another, and another, and before he knew it he had grown so fat with juice that he couldn’t fit back through the hole again.
“Woe is me!” he cried. “What have I done? Not only have I tasted from that which is forbidden, but I have brought misfortune upon myself. Certainly the owner of the orchard will come upon me in the morning and I will become fox stew.”
So the fox began to fast again. He hid amid the thickest of the vines and evaded capture, starving himself and berating himself for his folly, until he was finally able to slip back through the hole.
He ran back into the woods, nearly prancing with joy at the sights and sounds of his beloved forest, and he vowed to never taste from another orchard again.
I’m silent for a while. Then Nikolas says, “It’s a nice story. But I don’t think I seek the same things you seek.”
“That’s okay,” I answer.
“I have an idea,” he says. “Meet me here again tomorrow night, and I will tell you a story.”
My heart seizes in my chest. If he meets me here, my star-man will not come…
“I don’t think I can,” I say, “but thank you for offering.”
“Can I walk you home?” he asks.
“I know the way. Perhaps we will meet
again some time.”
“My star tower is yours—say the word and I will bring you there again.”
“Thank you.” I turn around and walk away.
And all the time I walk, I question if I’ve made a big mistake.
I can’t sort out where I went wrong.
The Holy One, Blessed Be He sails the eighteen worlds in the night, and in the last three hours of morning he sails in our world. Therefore, the early morning is a particularly auspicious time for prayer. It is a time when the wind fills God’s sails. We may have power over the wind, but no man can possess her, for in the wind is the spirit of God.
—The Book of the Solomonars, page 52, verse 6
Sometimes tragedies follow tragedies. Lives and loves play themselves out across the sky. Day in day out. Year in year out. And there’s nothing that any of us can do to change a future that’s already been set in motion. Sometimes stories tell themselves and we become but readers—spectators to the dramas that unfold across the sky.
Stanna
The things I learned from Guvriel are coming back to me—like a fire that’s suddenly been given air. The serpent slithers within me, twining itself with my fingers, wrapping itself around my arm, like a fiery little ghost that haunts only me. It’s waiting for me to tell it what to do.
But I’m not ready. The only thing that fire brings is death and destruction—my mind wars with the little spark that’s refusing to go out now that it’s been relit. Burn bright; I am so proud of you, I hear a voice say. I don’t know if it’s Guvriel or the voice of my father, or the serpent itself, whispering in my ear, waiting for me to make the first move.