by Brindi Quinn
“Celestial-born, like the goddesses, but said to be serpentine in appearance.”
“Snake women?”
“Mm. Some had wings. The ancients carved depictions of them into caves around the far southern shores. I’ve never seen them, but my pop did once, and he painted pictures of them. Those were lost when I moved to the boarding school, though.”
So Windley was an orphan, not only in family but in race.
“By the way, are you getting cold back there?” he said.
Yes. But I didn’t want to stop for camp. With every stride toward the coast, we were one stride closer to defeating Windley’s abuser. The idea of revenge had never been more delicious.
“My cloak is warm,” I said.
“Tsk. Tsk. I can feel the chill of you through my cloak, Merrin. If you don’t want to stop for camp, then at least dismount with me and walk awhile. You’ll warm up if your legs are in motion.”
Though he didn’t give me much of a choice. He slid off and pulled me with him before the prancelope could reject me. Then he turned to the creature, patted his knee and whistled:
“Come on, Dandelion.”
“You named this one Dandelion too?!”
“I got lazy,” he said with a shrug.
“Remind me not to let you name our children.”
Windley stopped cold. “You would… have children with me?”
Oh. I supposed it was quite a forward thing for an unwed queen to say to a non-royal she’d only started courting weeks ago.
“Only if you can prove yourself worthy. Now tell me, have you ever wiped an ass?"
But my attempts at making light of it didn’t stick.
Windley was dipped low, searching my eyes, which I quickly averted into Dandelion II.
“Well, obviously it’s a bit early to be talking about something like that, but… I shouldn’t mind it… someday,” I said.
“Oh.” His gaze met the stars. “That’s so… nice.”
“Windley?”
“I guess you really love me then.”
He was in a strange mood. I couldn’t tell whether or not he was jesting.
“I suppose I do… a little.”
“Merrin.” Windley gathered my hands in his. “Your kind and mine… we cannot create life together.”
I didn’t know what else to do but to repeat it.
“Spirites and humans can’t conceive children?”
He shook his head. I could tell he was regretful over it, but mostly he was searching to see how I might feel about it.
It wasn’t a good feeling, and it wasn’t a discussion I had even thought to prepare for. And now, the conversation I had overheard between Windley and Flora made a lot more sense.
“But if you wanted to bear children with another, I would not get in your way,” he said quietly.
How would that work? To think of your partner having a child with another woman…
It was enough to make your wrists leak.
“Why can’t we?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t work. Not for lack of trying. The trying is the same no matter your race. It’s the outcome that differs.”
Meaning if I was to commit to Windley forever it would mean never bearing an heir, at least not through him.
“It isn’t anything we need to think about now, but it’s best you know,” he said.
I understood the reality of it now. Windley’s plan was to take a back seat in my life. To become a queen’s paramour while I married and bore another royal’s children. Our monster loathed the thought—threatened to turn my eyes moist.
“Ah, Merrin! You’re upset! Look, I’ll try. I’ll go through the effort of making a child with you all day long, but—”
“It isn’t that. It’s the thought of hiding you away like a dirty secret once we return to the queenlands. Having the kin of the Cacti on my arm while you wait in my bed. How can I—”
“Lots of queens have done that, haven’t they?” he said.
I wouldn’t know. My mother had never told me of such things, for I was young when she died. I held her necklace and wondered whether she had kept lovers behind closed doors, or if she had loved my father. No one in the court talked about him much. I knew only that he was the kin of the Cloudfall, the northwesternmost queendom, and that he had died at sea.
My face was betraying me.
“Oh, Merr.” Windley wrapped me in his embrace to cut us off from the chill of night along with the chill of our circumstances. “I told you, lion queen, I would give up everything to have you, but when I told you that, I knew you could never fully be mine. If it means getting you in some capacity, I’m prepared.” He attempted distraction with a sultry tone: “I’ll be your dirty little secret.”
But even if he was prepared for something like that, I wasn’t. And the person who could most relate to these feelings was miles away, carrying the illegitimate child of a magician.
Beau and I had both started the pavings of difficult paths, indeed.
“Well, if anyone’s fit to be a dirty little secret, it’s the Clearing’s naughtiest guard,” I said.
No, that wasn’t the end of it, but I couldn’t deal with it now, and I thought it would be easiest on his heart if I played along.
He followed up with some flirty comment or another, but I wasn’t paying attention, and after, we walked in silence beneath the stars.
Windley had said his heart was not the sort that could love twice. Did that mean that if I broke his heart, he would never love again? It wasn’t fair. That was too much responsibility to bear. And I had given my heart to him before I knew anything.
Yet, when I looked up at him, remembering all the times he had found excuses to touch me, watched me from the corner of his eye… all the times I had done the same to him.
There was no helping it. I couldn’t have kept from falling for him even if I wanted to.
Maybe I had loved him at first scent too. Maybe I was willing to give up everything for him too.
These were dangerous reveries for a queen to have, and there was something inside that didn’t like it.
“When we smite the world, the beastlings will be the first to go.”
Chapter 17
Beastlings
It was a bright afternoon when we made it to the coast. Like when visiting the Queendom of the Cove, I could taste the salt in the air and hear the distant crash of waves before I ever saw the wide patches of sand interrupted by gnarls of driftwood and jagged bits of rock.
These were way markers to the sea beyond.
It felt like home, smelled like home, tasted like home, so I spent some time carrying my shoes so that I could dig my toes into the cool sand at the water’s edge while Windley released persnickety Dandelion II back into the wild, where Dandelion I was also roaming free.
“Now what?” I said. “Did you and Rafe determine a meeting place?”
“Not quite,” said Windley. “The Edge of Nowhere isn’t a place that can be marked on a map, being you can only stumble into it by walking, so the plan is to meet Rafe there.”
“Assuming we’re both able to stumble into it,” I said.
“…Yes, assuming that.”
“And if you failed to retrieve me and bring me to the coast?”
“Chap was to use his newformed bond with the goddess to come find us.”
“Assuming she could locate us,” I said.
“Yes, assuming that. Now listen here—” He wrung his elbow around my neck as though about to give me a noogie. “It almost sounds like you’re questioning the well-thought plan of two royal guards who have devised many a royal military strategy together.”
“Not at all.” I feigned innocence. “I’m merely wondering how long we’re to bimble along until we reach a beautiful sunset or sunrise, given it’s the middle of the day.”
“Fine, cheeky. I might have been a mite frantic when I realized you were missing. If you’ve a better idea, I’m all ears.”
Actually,
I did. “One moment.”
“Oh, here she goes again, turning all witchy.” Yet he was giving the same interested expression he did each time I accessed the other side.
“MerrIn.”
“MeeeerrIn.”
The darkness welcomed me with open, albeit intrusive, arms. I willed them to spread wide and make way for the one more self-aware than the whole:
“Where is Exitium?”
“I am here,” it hissed. “I take it you need my aid again.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to hear anything about Windley being a beastling or whatever, okay?”
There was no response.
“Exitium?”
“That is what he is.”
“I don’t care. I still have no intention of destroying him or anyone else but Ascian.”
“We shall see.”
Frustrating. But I wasn’t in the mood to gripe with a phantom.
“Look, when we face off with Ascian, I’ll unleash all of the bloodlust within me and reduce him to ash. That would please you, wouldn’t it?”
If not Exitium, the rest of the echoes riled hungrily at the thought.
“We will tear, and feast, and burn, and bury!”
“Yes! We will do all those things and more. To Ascian and Ascian alone… and maybe Charmagne if she isn’t careful.”
“And the spider queen!” welled the echoes.
Sestilia? They were still stuck on her?
Little did I know, there was good reason for that. But you shouldn’t worry yourselves over it now, captive ones.
“No, not the spider queen. Forget her. I will bring someone better to kill, a person lacking in any merit, but first I need to know how to reach the Edge of Nowhere.”
Like always, the echoes flurried about, asking each other the question I had just posed.
“Exitium?” I pressed.
One hand, Exitium’s presumably, answered the call by shooting out of the darkness and taking hold of my throat. “She will have noticed the conjurer, but she will not notice you so easily. Keep your shoes off so that she may feel your royal blood through the sand.”
“G-Goddess Soleil, you mean?”
“That is she.” Exitium’s hand began to loosen.
“Wait!” There was another question I wanted to ask. One I had meant to ask for some time, and while I still feared the answer just as much as ever, there was something I was starting to fear more—the mounting realization that it was getting harder and harder to contain the darkness held in my soul.
Leaky wrists weren’t a good look.
“How do you always know what to do when the rest of them welter about? You’re separate from them, aren’t you, Exitium? What… are you?”
Unfortunately, just because I asked didn’t mean I would get an answer. There was no response, just a shadowy hand dissipating into the greater tenebrosity.
Lovely.
“Well, your plan is as good as any,” I told Windley when I returned to the world of light. “The echoes said Soleil might notice us if I keep my shoes off while we walk.”
“Are you okay, lion queen? Your expression is morose.”
“Yeah,” I lied. “It’s just a bit jarring moving between realms, is all.”
He didn’t press it, though I could tell he wasn’t convinced.
“In that case—” He bowed low but kept his eyes to mine. “Accompany me for a long stroll on the beach?”
But when I took his hand, he propelled me toward the sea so that I was submerged to the ankle. It was an attempt to distract me from the worry shown on my face.
I would reward his efforts.
“Schemer!” I splashed at him, and he kicked water back at me.
“Are you sure you want to start this, lion queen?”
“I was hardly the one to start it!”
But if I didn’t end it, we would both quickly be drenched.
“Move along, schemer.” I pushed at his back to usher him along the wet sand.
He halted. “What did you just call me?”
“Schemer?”
“After that.”
“Schemer again?”
He shook his head. “No, you called me ‘beastling.’”
I replayed the scene in my head:
‘Move along, beastling.’
So I had, though I hadn’t meant to.
“What’s a beastling? Like a tiny beast? Moreover, you’re leaking again.” Windley took my hand before I could hide it and ran his nose over the creases of my wrist. “What is this, Merrin? Is your power so great that your body can’t contain it?”
More troublingly, had that been my voice coming out? Or Exitium’s?
“Just excitement. Since we’re getting close to your retribution.”
Lies, lies, lies.
Though he didn’t buy them, he didn’t force me to tell the truth; instead, he slipped his hand around my waist and escorted me along the chilly sand.
I found solace in the dark azure of the water, shiny from the overhead light, diverting myself with the task at hand. When we reached the Edge of Nowhere, would a giantess body step out of those waves and grab the sun for a head the way Luna had? I shielded my eyes from the goddess’s celestial form. If there was a face within, I couldn’t stare long enough to see it.
We walked on with only the smash of waves to break the silence. Small crabs dotted the beach, poking in and out of hidey-holes. The sand was the sort that took in perfect imprints of our footsteps as we made on along the never-ending line of coast. It would have been a fine setting, if not for my wrestling thoughts.
“Let me know when you’re hungry,” said Windley, staring ahead.
“Mm.”
“And let me know when you’d like to talk about whatever you’re hiding from me.”
This time I elected not to insult him with another lie.
Until now, I hadn’t told anyone about Exitium’s voice within the void. Nor had I told anyone about its promises of bloodlust and destruction. Perhaps it was because, since the beginning, I had known there was something sinister lurking behind the echoes. Something I shouldn’t have invoked.
‘The echoes can’t bring calamity on their own, and the true job of the oracle is not to subdue them. It is to bear them so that another does not need to. The echoes can’t just exist out in the world; they need a host. They will attach to someone, and my family has always ensured that they attach to the next born of our lineage. We train to learn how to calm ourselves under their influence. When I whisper my intention into the forest, I’m not doing so to quell the echoes; I’m doing so to quell myself. You need to be very careful with them, Merrin. They are dangerous.’
Beau’s warning had come too late, and long had I wondered whether I had done something heinous in calling Exitium’s name that first time.
But I needed Exitium’s power then, to rescue Beau from Luna. And I needed it now, to put an end to Ascian. I just needed to do so without losing myself in the process.
But what if I could no longer do that on my own? What if the next time something foreign came out of my mouth, it was something hurtful? Windley had trusted me with his innermost secrets, yet I was still harboring my deepest, darkest one.
“I do need to tell you something, Windley. It’s about the echoes.”
…
…
“Wow.” Windley whistled. “I knew something deliberative was going on in there, but I didn’t know it was all that.”
This was the moment I realized: anxiety can be like a parasite, growing the longer it festers inside.
To stop a parasite’s growth, you need only expel it.
Windley scratched his forehead. “So is Exitium part of the Nemophile’s Crown? Or is it a hitchhiker of sorts?”
“I don’t know. I get the impression it may be a warden to the other echoes in some way.”
“Well, it sure as shit doesn’t like me. But then, so few do. Can’t imagine why…”
“It’s only recently started cal
ling you a beastling, but that wasn’t the first time it’s talked through my mouth without my consent.”
“Does it live inside of you, then?”
“I’m starting to think so. Pip seemed to feel it inside me when he was beguiling me. He said there was ‘another being’ in there.”
“So when you close your eyes and go to that other place… is it your soul?”
I hoped not. Though I strongly suspected so.
“I’m scared, Wind. Exitium keeps saying I’ll end up giving in to my true self and destroying the world. It says that bloodlust writhes in me and that I can’t stray from the path I forged when I first used it to save Beau. I’ve committed to something I don’t understand, and if Exitium can make me say things I don’t want to say, who’s to say it can’t make me do things I don’t want to do?”
“Try not to stress over it until we know more, Merr. If you begin to get out of hand, I can subdue you. Once Rafe tethers the sun, we’ll have no need to hide our location anymore. I’ll beguile you anytime, anyplace, and anywhere.” He drew a finger along my shoulder. “You said Luna knew you had the Nemophile’s Crown. She didn’t say anything about Exitium, did she?”
“No, but she did wonder whether I would be the one to use the Crown for its ‘true purpose.’ Your lore doesn’t mention anything about that, does it?”
He shook his head. “But maybe you can ask Soleil. Luna made time for you; I expect the sun goddess will do the same.”
It was an idea, and Windley was busy in his head trying to come up with more. You could see it in the way he wrinkled his brow and chewed his cheek.
It was nice having someone to share my burden. Just pushing the words into existence was enough to make me feel safer.
Sometimes, getting lost in your own head is more precarious than any external danger you may face.
I was just mulling over that thought when I noticed that the sun was behaving erratically, sinking lower than it should for this time of day.
“Windley!”
“I see it.”
We followed it as it came crashing into the horizon on the far side of the water, spewing the sky and sea in an assortment of pastels, some of which I had never seen before. A blue that was sort of orange? And a color that looked the way spring felt. These and others intermingled with sprays of lightest blue, palest pink, and softest yellow. Tufts of clouds, colored in fairest shades appeared over the furthest reaches of sky, daring not to touch the blazing white sun that seemed to be half over the water and halfway within in. The thin remains of ebbed water over the sand reflected the sky like a mirror, and behind us, the mortal world faded away until we were lost within a watercolor world.