by Cait Spivey
Goosebumps rose on his arms and he looked down. Though he neither heard nor smelled a thing, he felt it approach him from behind. His breath came shallow and rapid, and his heart raced in his chest despite his attempts to stay calm. Slowly, cautiously, he turned around.
The creature’s head was mostly visible skull, with dry-looking musculature around the jaw and ears just barely hanging on. The body seemed oddly mismatched, thick about the torso and hips but stunted in the legs, with a long tail that looked more like a dog’s than a cat’s. The fur was patchy and dingy, and the uncovered flesh was the same sickly green color his parents’ skin had been in their final hours.
But all the oddity of the hell-cat’s form did nothing to detract from the evil in its glowing yellow eyes, nor the sharpness of its dripping fangs.
Alcander’s hands went to his hips, but his sword was on his saddle.
“L-Lisyne, Mother Wolf and protector of us all,” he whispered, eyes wide as he stared at the devil-cat. “Take my form and shield me from evil—”
The devil-cat took a step forward and Alcander shrieked. He jumped backward and fell over a rock. The cat circled him. He was paralyzed; training urged him to find a weapon, but fear wouldn’t let him take his eyes off the predator. He felt along the ground with his trembling hands. The cat crept on top of him. Its stench was overwhelming; he couldn’t breathe. His vision darkened, and when it returned, the hell-beast was nose-to-nose with him.
“Back! Stay back!” he wailed. He beat it about the face with his hands and elbows. Blood streamed down his arms from the scratches made by the rough old skull. He ceased his attack when he saw the blood, and screamed anew, looking back and forth between his arms and the cat’s now bloodstained head.
The cat, for its part, seemed intrigued. It sniffed at Alcander’s bloody arm and tentatively licked it with a swollen purple tongue. Alcander watched it, lips trembling and tears streaming down his face. The cat looked down at him, its eyes bright.
“Lisyne! Seryne! Oh please, let me be saved,” Alcander whispered.
“Saved?” said a voice.
A face appeared above the devil-cat—a pale blonde girl with blood-red lips. She grinned.
“Alcander. You have been chosen.”
Her black eyes sparkled. Alcander screamed. The cat closed its jaws on his throat, and the clearing fell silent.
Guerline woke to shouts in the hall outside her chambers. After her encounter with Alcander, she’d rushed back to her rooms and shut herself in. It had taken ten minutes to scrub the poultice and gore from her shaking hands, and when she was finished, she’d collapsed into a chair in her parlor and sobbed herself into a fitful sleep.
Someone pounded on her door, and she lifted her heavy head to squint at its black expanse. She swung her gaze toward the large window opposite her. Evening had fallen. She’d been asleep nearly all day.
The pounding on her door resumed.
“Princess Guerline! Your Highness! Please, please open the door!”
Still groggy, she tumbled out of her chair, nearly falling as her legs came clumsily back to life.
“Let me help you,” said a soft voice to her left.
Tender hands slipped around her waist and under her left forearm, taking her weight. Guerline halted and looked down at her left wrist. A slim white hand held her there, translucent-looking against her dark brown skin. She followed the white skin to a black-clad wrist, up the arm, and looked into the face of a young woman with dark eyes, dawn-gold hair, and blood-red lips. The woman smiled at her.
“Good evening, Guerline,” she said.
Guerline scrutinized the woman, furrowing her brow and staring into eyes that were nearly black in the twilight. There was something familiar in her steady expression, and even in the pressure of her hands. Guerline drew a shallow breath, tried to look away, and found she couldn’t. She wet her lips.
“Am I dreaming, or have I died, and you are my Thiymen witch?” Guerline asked.
The woman—more a girl, really—laughed. Guerline gasped; it was as if a window had just been opened in a stuffy room.
“I wondered myself, before I arrived. But I think I won’t be taking you to any underworld yet.”
Guerline nodded, absently gazing about her twilit room. “A dream, then.”
Pounding on the door.
The girl laughed again. “If it helps you to think of it that way, then by all means.”
Guerline shook the last of the sleep-fog from her head and turned back to the girl, but she was gone. Guerline wavered slightly where she stood and held her breath, waiting for some sign that she was truly awake.
“Break it open. We must find her!”
She cursed and ran for the door, stumbling on her long skirts. Dream or no, she couldn’t risk losing a locking door. She flung the bolt back and pulled the door wide, stepping out of the way in case the shouts of “Hold, hold!” didn’t stop whatever battering ram they’d been preparing to use.
In rushed Lord Engineer Theodor Warren; Josen, the Captain of the Palace Guard; and Hartt Lana, her father’s—Alcander’s—Chief Adviser. All three men were flushed of face and breathing heavily, staring at her with wide eyes. She could guess that Hartt and Josen were here on the occasion of her parents’ deaths, though why they looked so panicked she couldn’t tell. Surely they hadn’t just found out; it had been hours. Lord Warren’s presence she couldn’t account for at all, but the tender way he looked at her provided some hint.
“What on earth is going on?” she asked.
“Your Highness. You must have heard that your parents died early this afternoon,” Hartt said softly. His voice was raspy, and Guerline wondered if he’d been crying. Her father had been a hard man who allowed very few into his close confidence. But Hartt, who had a decidedly softer touch than Emperor Johan Hevya, had occupied that position her entire life and then some. If anyone loved her father, it was him.
She nodded. “Yes.”
None of the men offered anything further. Guerline raised her eyebrows. At last, Lord Warren stepped around Josen and reached out a hand.
“Permit me, Your Highness?” he asked.
She placed her hand slowly into his, her breath coming short with apprehension. Such serious countenances couldn’t simply be for her parents, could they? Toward her, her father was always dismissive at best, her mother spiteful; but as rulers, they were all aloof benevolence—not too distant, just removed enough and fair enough to give the illusion of compassion. She had to admit that the rest of the empire loved her parents much better than she did.
Lord Warren led her to a settee and they both sat. He didn’t let go of her hand for a moment, staring at it in his. Then he jerked it back and sat up straight. He looked her full in the face, but still he was silent. Whatever he meant to tell her must have been very dreadful indeed. He’d never been so formal or awkward with her before.
“Theodor.” She reached for his hand again.
“Your brother is dead,” he blurted.
Her heart stopped. She swallowed, with difficulty, and narrowed her eyes at Lord Warren. Her throat suddenly seemed like sandpaper. “What?”
“He went riding this afternoon. When his horse came back without him, I sent men out to look for him,” Josen said.
“They . . . recovered his arm from the Orchid Vale,” Lord Warren continued.
Guerline inhaled sharply. “His arm. His arm?”
Lord Warren squeezed her hand. His blue eyes shone like sapphires. Guerline focused on them and tried to tamp down the inappropriate, giddy relief threatening to burst out of her.
“It appears to have been an animal attack. Some panther or wildcat,” he said.
She coached herself to breathe. Alcander dead. She hadn’t wished for it. She’d only ever hoped to get far, far away from him. But her fear of him uncurled itself from around her heart and fluttered in her chest like a swarm of butterflies. She was not, truly, happy to hear that Alcander was dead. Yet neither was she sad.
“Are you all right?” Lord Warren asked.
Guerline took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to fill to the bottom of her lungs. “Yes. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll arrange everything, Your Highness,” Hartt said. “You needn’t fret.”
“Everything?”
“The washing, and the watch,” Hartt said.
“And your coronation, of course,” Lord Warren said.
Of course. Her coronation. Because, with Alcander dead as well, she was the next in line to rule. The hysterical laughter she’d been fighting broke through, high-pitched and breathy, quickly turning into sobs.
“Josen, fetch Lady Evadine here at once!” Lord Warren said.
She could barely see Hartt and Josen as they bowed and left the room, and she gratefully sank into Theodor’s embrace.
Chapter Two
Aridan funeral practices, as outlined in the Book of Skins and by the priests of the shifter gods, were fairly straightforward. Yet there was an uncertain silence in the air as Guerline, Evadine, and the imperial council stood gathered in the washing chamber. Johan and Maribel had been gingerly transported from their deathbed down to the palace’s Temple, shielded by a thick line of guards who kept out the mourners attempting to gather—a recommendation from Eva, who announced it had been Alcander’s wish that Johan and Maribel’s corpses not be exposed to the general public, in honor of their memory. Guerline had been more than happy to abide by that desire. The fewer people who were forced to take in the abominable sight, the better.
The first step of an Aridan funeral was the washing. The body was cleansed with pure water and doused with perfumed oils, then dressed in their finest clothing and laid out for the watch. The honor of preparing the departed went to their closest relatives, and so Guerline’s attendants stood slightly behind her, waiting. But how could she wash her parents’ flesh when it was sure to disintegrate under the first pour from the jug? Their bodies lay on a single litter, braced on a pair of rectangular stone washing pools, each big enough for a large man to be laid in fully. The corpses, too, waited for her to begin.
The silence became awkward, and still Guerline did not know what to do. She shivered in the plain linen shift she wore and tried to still the panic fluttering in her mind.
“The princess is overwhelmed with grief. My lords, I beg you, go into the Temple and support her from there,” Evadine said. Her clear, sharp voice almost seemed to shatter the empty air, and a rush of relieved sighs filled the vacuum. The councilors shuffled out into the main Temple, some of them patting Guerline’s shoulder as they passed. Once she was alone with Eva and the corpses, Guerline hung her head, expelling a stale breath.
“There,” Eva said warmly. She swept in front of Guerline and put a hand on her cheek, forcing Guerline to look into her smiling grey eyes. “Now, let’s solve this puzzle.”
Gratitude lightened Guerline’s heart, which pounded in her chest as she gazed up at Evadine. “Thank you, my friend. I could barely breathe with all those people in here, let alone think.”
“There was no point to them being here, biting their tongues for fear of looking stupid. They just needed an excuse to leave,” Eva said. She shifted to Guerline’s side, her arm around the princess’s shoulders. Guerline focused on the comforting pressure as they stared down at the rotting corpses.
“It’s no less than they deserved,” Eva said.
Guerline couldn’t bring herself to frown. Instead she said, “We can’t lower them into the pools. They’ll taint the whole supply, and then Priest Piron will be in a state.”
Eva laughed, which broke the spell the corpses seemed to have over them. The two women broke apart and approached Johan and Maribel. Eva bent at the waist to peer down at them, while Guerline bent at her knees and lowered herself slowly into a squat, bracing on the edge of the wash pool. The smell was as bad as it had been yesterday, but somehow it wasn’t as offensive to Guerline now. Now, at least, her parents were dead and ought to smell like rot.
“Must we wash them at all? Must we even bother?” she said after a minute of silent pondering that led her in circles.
“The procedure is clear. . . .” Eva frowned. “We should at least make an attempt. What if we don’t, and the witch refuses their souls?”
“If I were a Thiymen witch, I wouldn’t care how clean a body was on the outside,” Guerline said. “They can see how clean one is on the inside.”
Evadine was quiet. After a moment, she said, “The way they are now, we’ll be washing them on the inside too.”
Guerline laughed, then clapped a hand over her mouth and looked up at Eva. Eva stared back at her with wide eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching. The two of them were bent over rotting corpses only a day dead, debating how to wash disintegrating flesh in order to make it pure and clean for death-witches who, at the handful of watches Guerline had been to, had never spared a second glance for the condition of the corpse. And this did not even begin to cover the strangest of the funerary decisions she was now required to make—that honor went to the single arm recovered from her brother, wrapped and laid at the foot of her parents’ bodies. Was she to wash that too? Was Alcander’s soul in his arm?
Her gaze fell on the abandoned arm, its cloth wrapping speckled with fluids. The guards had searched the Vale for the rest of him, but there was naught but blood to be found, and it could only be assumed that he had been eaten whole by some beast. Why it left his arm behind was a mystery—perhaps it was frightened off, or perhaps it was too gorged on the rest of him. Theodor Warren had offered to simply have it disposed of . . . but it gave Guerline a terrible kind of satisfaction to gaze before her and see proof that her family was all dead.
A shadow caught her eye; she looked up and saw, standing across from her, the pale blonde girl from yesterday. She too stared at the arrayed remains of the Hevya family, her brow furrowed in an expression Guerline couldn’t place. Guerline rose, her mind scrambling to read the girl’s face, as though she could see there a sign of how to proceed—but before she landed on a coherent thought, the girl lifted her eyes to Guerline’s. Guerline blinked, and she was gone.
“Lina?” Eva said.
“Call for a scrub-basin or two, and a scraper of some kind,” Guerline said, an idea coming to her. The litter fabric was thin, soft, and sopping with decomposition; the floor underneath the corpses already puddled with juices. “We’ll rinse them on the litter. Hopefully the loosest flesh will strain away, and what remains will hold until the witch comes.”
Eva nodded and went to the door of the washing chamber, whispered the order to someone else, then came back to Guerline and took her hand. They waited in a silence that was somehow comfortable despite the presence of the bodies. Guerline’s gaze kept drifting to where the girl had appeared. When she woke this morning, Guerline had written off the vague memory of a figure as part of her stressful dreaming. Yet, she had recognized the girl instantly—
Evadine shifted her hand and intertwined their fingers. All thoughts of strange, pale girls were flushed away by the sudden pounding of Guerline’s heart. It’s innocent, Guerline tried to tell herself, while Eva’s thumb lightly stroked her hand. Eva had been her friend and companion for years, almost as long as either of them could remember, and there were few enough boundaries between them.
There would be fewer still, if I had my way.
She held perfectly still lest some movement inspire Eva to draw away. As it had countless times in the past year, Guerline’s mind spun with a heady rush of questions, fantasies, and insecurities, all triggered by Eva’s closeness. The past few months, especially, Guerline had lived in a frantic stasis, her body shrinking from everyone but opening to Eva, only to shrink again before the other woman might notice. Moderating her caresses was a battle of wills, her desire begging her to draw Eva close, while her fear stymied any such attempt.
Relationships between those of the same gender were common in Arido. Guerline’s fear arose not from th
e threat of social censure, but from her father’s insistence that she be considered eligible marriage material by various foreign courts. Certain of the empire’s sovereign neighbors believed such a relationship . . . unclean. Others believed that any relationship outside a sanctified marriage was tainted. So when Guerline sensed the change in her feelings for Eva, she panicked. Johan had warned her what would happen to any lover she might take, regardless of gender.
But now, he was gone, and she could decide for herself. Nothing stood in her way but her own fear that Eva would not return her love. Guerline squeezed Eva’s hand, and Eva smiled at her. Her grey eyes shone bright against her golden skin.
“Eva . . .” Guerline said.
There was a knock on the door, and Guerline cursed under her breath—she could have sworn Eva did too. Guerline extricated her hand and went to the door.
“Good,” she said, when she saw the servants with the basins she had asked for. Her cheeks felt warm. She hoped the blush wasn’t noticeable.
She bade the servants enter and directed them to set the basins under the litter where her dead parents rested. The basins—large metal ones for laundry—filled the space under the corpses nicely. When the servants had gone again, Guerline sighed and took up the laundry bat they’d brought her to serve as a scraping tool. Evadine took up one of the carved clay jugs from a shelf on the wall and filled it with water from the pool. Her movements were so elegant, she almost looked like the water dancers that performed on the lake on High Summer’s Night. Eva straightened and lifted her gaze to Guerline’s; Guerline quickly looked down at her parents instead.