My head lolled back against the lip of the tub. The energy it cost me to force myself to scrub my deceitful flesh nearly spent me for the rest of the day, but I wanted dearly to attend Eyre’s class and after that there would be another chocolate with Ivy and the others. This time I would be normal; surely this time nothing would happen. I poured water over my head and soaped my hair, rinsed it and dragged myself out of the tub.
I didn’t make it to my wardrobe.
The pain came first this time, tripping me on the rug. The impact of my shoulder against the floor drove me nearly mad from agony but I didn’t faint. I couldn’t see for the brilliance of it, the eternal fulminating present. When it discarded me I found myself drooling blood from a bite on the inside of my cheek, three fingernails broken past the quick and their blood streaking the floor in narrow lines, like sigils in some language I was desperate never to apprehend.
How many hours had it been since the last episode? Surely I’d used up the entire day’s allotment of misfortune. I had based my entire adult life around the ability to predict my seizures and order my life around them. That this knowledge might be deserting me...
I found myself chafing one knee awkwardly against the carpet because the fibers seemed to be petting me. The sour tang of blood stung my nose and throat, blotting out every other scent... but that didn’t stop the rest of the world from caressing my skin. The softness of the air, made warm and humid by the steam long since escaped from my tepid bath, made me shudder.
I had to move. I had to pretend to normalcy. Except the breeze I created by standing was too intimate and I found myself flushed and breathless. I reached for the bed knob to steady myself and found myself distracted by brass’s smooth finish, so slick, cold. And such a color.
Moving. I was doing something. Dressing. This would pass, but in the mean I needed to dress. I reached for my wardrobe doors, forcing myself to ignore the texture on the knobs, and confronted my folded clothing.
The first thing I touched pried a moan from my lips. Soft. Too soft. My fingers walked. Wool scratching like thousands of tiny iron wires. Linen... such smooth, regular lines. They felt comforting at first, so predictable, but the longer I ran my hand over them the more they dug into me. I expected to find slices in my palm and was disoriented when my skin remained pristine.
“All right, then,” I whispered. “You may wear off at any time now.”
The sensation didn’t oblige, leaving me with the unpalatable duty of selecting something that would be neither embarrassingly soft nor cruelly abrasive. Crazed by the choice I thought of attending school nude; that would cause an entertaining ruckus. But no, surely by the time I arrived I would have worn this sensitivity to rags and emerged normal. I set my jaw, unfolded the first items that came to hand and jerked them on, burning myself with the friction. My skin throbbed from neck to ankle, raw from the rough treatment...
...but better that than the too-tender distraction of softened cotton.
I ate, slowly, too aware of the stiffness of yesterday’s bread and able, God save me, to smell the rancid promise of butter that had seemed perfectly fine the evening past. I hoped food would settle this episode, but no luck. I gathered up my folio and supplies with fingers far too aware of the imperfections in the leather and walked to the door—
—out the door—
—into a cacophony of glory and noise so intense my shoulder struck the doorframe before I realized I was listing.
So many smells. So many sounds. And the suffocating caress of the wind, insinuating itself beneath the length of my damp hair and trying to lick the back of my neck.
School. Eyre. Eyre’s lecture... a chance to talk to him about elves. I had read about them, hadn’t I? Yes. The silver-haired king with the golden eyes. I had to get to campus. Surely I would lose this on the way there.
Except I didn’t. The horse hitched to the carriage I hailed... God, the fragrance of hide and sweat and life rising off him was enough to intoxicate me. The church bells seemed to vibrate every rib in my body. The creak of the seat beneath me, the jostle of the wheels over the road, even the cobblestones brought tears to my eyes. By the time the driver delivered me to the dizzyingly perfumed fields in front of the main lecture hall, I felt abused... and the air’s constant offer to nestle me into its ever-changing embrace didn’t help at all. I couldn’t force my legs to move; couldn’t escape. The world owned me, blood and skin, and shivering I waited in misery and rapture for it to release me.
“Morgan?”
How had I not noticed the delicacy of her voice? So alive. I smelled her approaching, the bouquet of her skin and hair like lilies over something indefinably feminine. She crushed the air between us until I could feel her breathing not an arm’s length away.
“Ivy,” I managed. “Sorry. I was just... “ Just drowning in the smell of you. “Just lost in thought.”
She laughed. “You’re going to miss Eyre’s lecture.”
“God forfend,” I said. “He’ll have my hide.”
“Come on, then. Or are you feeling wicked?”
I opened my eyes then; had I ridden all the way here with them closed? But I’d seen all the landmarks we’d passed. “Wicked how?”
“We could not attend,” she said, grinning. She took my arm, her supple skin dragging against the folds of my sleeve. “Find some nice sunlit square in the gardens and talk of nothing in particular.”
Alone. She wanted to be alone with me. “That is... exceptionally tempting.”
“Eyre would be incensed,” she said. “We would have to be suitably penitent when we returned.”
“Yes,” I said, and how I didn’t gasp to breathe I would never know. The perfume of her nape, so vibrant, her laughter, the pulse of blood beneath the skin that veiled her face with such a luminous brilliance...
I have never felt such ambivalence at the sight of Radburn’s amiable countenance.
“Morgan! Ivy! What, you want to be forced to sit in the front? Hurry!”
Ivy sighed with the wet sweetness of her breath. I dragged it in even as it faded, as the smell of her receded from my nostrils and the weight of her linked arm in mine became human again, something that could be encompassed. “Caught before we could even escape,” she said. “We shall have to plan another time.”
“I’d like that,” I said and found a shaky grin of my own. “Shall we?”
“Let us,” she said, and let me lead her in.
Radburn’s warning was somewhat premature, but we ended up in seats closer to the front than we usually preferred. I knew Radburn chose the seats furthest from the lectern so any inattentiveness might pass unnoticed; Ivy, I suspected, shared my need to go unseen. She for that women were few at the university, and I, of course, so that I might escape if weakness gripped me. But we put aside daring thoughts of flight and set ourselves to note-taking. Eyre’s lecture touched on a topic I hadn’t spent much time investigating, that of the priest as outsider in folklore, and as usual I found myself so engrossed the time fled. Such a fascinating concept! We who had had so many kings, and none of them suited to the role of observer when they could meddle in the affairs of those they commanded? We had fought a war to rid ourselves of their interference. How different history would have been had our kings been true outsiders!
I was not so engrossed in the lecture, however, that I did not remain aware of Ivy sharing my desk and my ink glass.
Afterwards, Eyre strolled toward us, tapped my side of the desk with stiff fingers. “Find your reading interesting?”
Now that he was standing in front of me, I could not for my life recall any of the words from the manuscript. I knew I’d read them but my misadventures afterwards had wiped them all from memory. I said, “So interesting I found it hard to retain.”
He laughed. “Read it a few times through. Maybe on the fourth pass it’ll stick.”
“I hope,” I said. And then, “Should I also be looking for priests?”
“I don’t know,” he said, h
is face closing until the expression became enigma. “Should you?”
Frowning, I watched him wander out of the hall.
“Chocolate,” Ivy said, touching the back of my hand.
I started. “Now?”
“No!” she said, laughing. “This evening, after supper. We’re convening for special cause.”
“And what cause is this?” I asked. Afternoon chocolate was our routine; evenings were best served by study, familial duty, and in Chester and Ivy’s case, religious devotions.
“We’re going to choose Radburn’s dissertation,” she said with a laugh, and then her smile faded. “And try to help Chester find a new topic. We thought tonight would be good as we have rest day tomorrow. Bring some books.”
“Right,” I said.
“And it’s at Chester’s,” she finished.
“I’ll be there,” I said. I would miss the opportunity to peruse my folio of elves, but Ivy was right: this was an unusual circumstance.
She left me then; she and Guy and Radburn had separate lectures, Chester a guided study and I had a free period to do with as I pleased. My custom, as long as I felt healthy enough, was to volunteer my services to the library, re-shelving discarded books. I evaluated my state and found it peculiar: I didn’t feel sick, but I still felt frangible. Nor was I sure whether the morning’s episode would fulfill my requirement for the day. I sighed and pushed myself to my feet. My own skin struck me as bizarre, as a stranger’s.
I presented myself to Professor Kendwyne in the library, who smiled absently and pointed to the latest stack of forgotten material. With a deep breath I sat at the desk to sort them. This room had been originally intended as a vigil chapel and was not particularly suited to its new use; the ceiling was so high and the windows near them so narrow that most of the lighting was provided, perforce, by lamps. To maximize the space, the bookshelves had been built in stories, with ladders leading to slim ledges. It was not a place for the faint-hearted, with the wooden ledges given to creaking and flexing beneath the foot and the ladders precarious. The corridors between shelves were a claustrophobe’s nightmare, so close that two people standing on the opposite ledges could easily clasp arms over the distance.
But it smelled like parchment and the pungent richness of ink, like the acid clinging to foil and the musky warmth of old leather. It smelled like age and wisdom, and the thick shadows at the ground level allowed one to hide if one so pleased; or to climb the ladders to the thin high light of the distant windows, if one desired such obvious symbolism. And the silence had a muffled embracing quality I had never found duplicated elsewhere.
So I sorted books and began re-shelving and found some measure of peace in it. As usual, Kendwyne made an appearance halfway through my labors, a truncated smile smoothing some of the taciturnity from his face. He hated disorder. In all the time I’d been in school we’d exchanged perhaps thirty words, and all those in instruction on sorting and shelving when I’d first volunteered... but his pleasure was easy enough to see.
The last few books belonged to the topmost shelves near the center of the library. I climbed the ladder and made my way along the precipice to the first. The edge of the book rasped against the wooden shelf just as a spasm passed through my wrist. I glanced at my hand, as dumb as an animal. God save me, but even as old as I was I still felt a mute denial before every seizure.
There were no banisters on these ledges. As my body twisted out of my control and my feet jerked me off the boards I wondered how long after this episode that would remain true.
I woke with Kendwyne and Eyre hovering over me, along with a man whose face didn’t recognize, saturnine and sallow with thickly lashed dark eyes, like a doe’s. All three of them seemed out of focus, smudges of skin and sepia shadow.
“Morgan!” Eyre said. “God above! We thought you’d gone and broken your neck.”
Had I? I couldn’t move still.
“Menden says you’re fine,” Eyre continued, twitching a shoulder toward the unfamiliar face. “He’s Anatomy, he should know.”
“Say something, boy,” Menden added.
My tongue felt sluggish. “Did I break... my spectacles?”
Eyre let out a breath—relief? Irritation? Kendwyne huffed a dry and brittle laugh.
“No, no, they’re fine,” Menden said. “Fell some ways from you on the carpet.”
“Oh,” I said, relieved. In a nod to my unfortunate penchant for fainting or falling head-first into convulsions, my parents had ordered them crafted specifically for durability, with hexagonal lenses to make it easier for the frames to grip them. I had only managed to break them once before, and the expense had been considerable. My parents would have been displeased had I had to replace them again.
“Can you rise yet?” Menden asked.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t yet feel my extremities; until I could, there would be no moving. I’d learned that the hard way years past.
“Get a doctor,” Eyre said.
“No,” I said in tandem with Menden. More slowly, I finished, “It will pass. Thank you, Professor Menden.”
He nodded and removed his face from the cluster over me; a few moments later, my glasses were set on my ribs near my folded hands. They had arranged me like a king on a carved bier. I almost laughed.
“So, this is why you vanish whenever you decide to leave my lectures unannounced,” Eyre said.
“I did tell you that I was given to feeling poorly,” I said. My tongue always recovered before the rest of me.
“Given to feeling poorly isn’t the same as given to life-threatening seizures.”
“They’re not life-threatening,” I said. “I’ve had them all my life.”
“They are when they cause you to fall off library ledges,” Kendwyne said.
We both glanced at him.
“How often does this happen?” Eyre said, ignoring Kendwyne as an interloper. I could almost sense the proprietary concern: how dare disease and hardship afflict one of his students? How dare that student conceal it from him?
“It isn’t important,” I said.
“Not important!”
“Sir,” I said. “Truly. I consider it an inconvenience, nothing more.”
Both of them stared at me. Was I not lying convincingly, or did they simply not believe it possible?
It was, of course, a lie. These seizures defined my existence.
“My student—”
“I would be quite grateful if you didn’t mention it to anyone,” I continued. “Pity is tiresome.”
“Of course not,” Eyre said. “But—”
“Let it be,” Kendwyne said abruptly. To me, “Can you get up?”
I fluttered my toes and found I could feel them. My hands were steady enough to perch my glasses back on my nose. The moment their faces snapped into focus I felt some measure of control, of relief. “Yes. With aid.”
They slid their hands beneath my arms and hoisted me up, and by then my legs were wobbly but serviceable. The library books I’d been about to shelf were scattered in an arc around me; with a sigh, I bent to gather them.
“Leave it,” Kendwyne said.
I glanced at him and found his expression inscrutable.
“Eyre, hail him a carriage, eh? He could use one.”
Eyre eyed him, then nodded once and left with ill grace.
“Give him time to see you normal,” Kendwyne said, helping me to the door. “He’ll not coddle you then.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it.
The old man shook his head. “Suffer with aid or suffer in silence. No man can force another onto the course they think best. Even if it is best. Next week, Mister Locke. Be punctual.”
“Of course,” I said, startled.
Eyre had the carriage waiting by the time I limped across the library threshold into a day gone streaked with thin gray clouds. I didn’t let him help me into it, nor did I meet his eyes as the driver slapped the reins over the mare’s rump and set her clopping down th
e drive. I watched the skies and thought of spring rains, and hoped I would get home before the urge to vomit rose.
And I did. Just barely. But bent over the pot I felt the first stitches of fire up my spine, searing the muscles lining it. I thrust the pot away just as the agony flared and this time, oh God, this time I screamed.
When it released me I was sobbing on the floor, past endurance, past dignity. I could no longer count on any pattern to save me. There would be pain, or sensitivity, seizures or vomiting, and I would never know when and I would never know how often or how long. They could reach me in lectures, in class, in the company of friends, alone where no one could save me if I hurt myself. They were beyond the ken of doctors. It didn’t matter that they didn’t kill, probably would never kill me; they would destroy my life all the same.
I dragged myself upright, every muscle trembling, and reached for the bottle I’d left on the table. Uncorked it with shaking hands, measuring out a dose that looked reasonable with the spoon packed with it.
And I drank the bitterness of the poppy, and it was nothing to the bitterness that drove me to it. I slumped against my chair and wept in silence, my forehead pressed to my raised knee. The drug burned all the way down into my chest.
By the time I called a carriage to deliver me to Chester’s, the world had grown sleepy and strange and faded. I stood in the patter of the evening rain and knew that it would drench me, but I couldn’t believe in it; the droplets that darkened coat and streaked hair did so to someone else, whose body I observed with a diffuse curiosity. The man beneath me, I thought, should eat more and indulge in more athletic activity, the better to refine his body and remove from it the sunken weariness more appropriate to a debauched libertine than to a gentleman and a scholar. That this body belonged to me was but a footnote in the more interesting treatise involving how clumsily he boarded his carriage and how sadly inadequate his posture was for someone his age.
Upon arrival at the St. Clary residence, I struggled toward immediacy and failed. My hands mechanically divested myself of my coat, handing it to the butler. I allowed a servant to lead me through winding halls and up curving stairs to the suite Chester used on the third story of his sprawling family manse. Only he, Guy and Radburn were there when I was shown in.
An Heir to Thorns and Steel Page 4