“Noted.” I smiled.
“Now”—Mike climbed out of bed and took my cup, his autumn eyes crinkling on the edges with his smile—“get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning for training.”
“Great.” I snuggled down into the warmth Mike left behind. “I can’t wait to meet all the knights.”
“They’re just as excited.” He went to walk away then stopped. “Oh, and Arthur wants to come watch you train. He’s eager to see your powers.”
“Really? Should we let him?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You seem to be all buddy-buddy with him.” Mike shrugged. “It’ll be fine. You just need to hurry up and figure out his plan.”
“He has no plan, Mike,” I said, rolling over. “He’s opinionated, but he’s not a mole.”
“We’ll see.” Mike snuffed the flame in the lantern and closed my door.
My eyes stayed open, looking above me to the unspoiled sky through the glass dome. Across my room, the soft white curtains billowed in the summer breeze as it snuck through my open balcony door, blowing a gentle tickle of warm air across my nose and lips like a goodnight kiss from the evening. I could hear the ocean in the distance now with the manor going quiet, room-by-room, all around me. It was peaceful, serene, but empty.
The walls seemed to swirl then, the open space narrowing me in to my own little world, and behind the loving eyes of the unknown man in the glass, sunlight suddenly shone through, making them sparkle. I smiled back at him as the light flooded down my walls, blotting out his face, my pillows, and my dresser until spring owned the space—my only cage being the long grass rising up past my shoulders and cheeks with the wet scent of soil and crushed daisies.
I slid my hand across the ground, knowing the boy next to me would reach out and wrap his fingers through mine.
“Can you show me another?” I asked, suddenly standing above this boy and girl holding hands in the grass. The sun shone down, making the girl’s yellow dress almost transparent, showing the outline of her thighs and hips in a shadow under the fabric.
The boy rolled up on his elbow, bringing his body closely alongside hers. “I’ve shown you so many already, Ara-Rose.”
“Shown you what?” I asked, stepping closer.
She looked at me then, her blues eyes taking my breath as they reached right between my ribs, starting my heart. “Memories,” she said to me.
“Of what?”
She just smiled and looked back at Jason—left behind in the realm of moments gone. “Watch, and you’ll see.”
Dark sky swallowed us whole, taking Jason away again and leaving me alone in a windy clearing with nothing but a stormy sky, the wide arms of our tree and, in the distance, two boys running.
A ring of light shone down onto the clearing over them, presenting their memory in daytime, while I stood on the cusp of dark and light.
“David! Wait. I can’t…” The smaller boy folded over, dropping his hands to his dirt-covered knees. “I can’t breathe.”
“Good,” David called over his shoulder, laughing. “Then I shall win—again.”
The boy tried to run for only a second more before flopping to the ground, tucked into a small ball, his shoulders lifting with each raspy, tight breath.
A shadow covered his face then, and he looked up with bright green eyes at his brother.
“What are you doing, Jason? Get up,” David said.
“I can’t,” he wheezed. “Get… get Aunty.”
But his brother only shook his head, his face lit with humor. He toed Jason’s shoulder, rolling him onto his back. “Stop pretending. Arietta doesn’t love you more because you’re sick. She only pities you.”
“Please?” Jason reached up, his face going white around purple lips. “I can’t… I can’t bre—”
“Father says it is God’s will.” David kicked Jason’s hand away. “He says we should stop healing you.”
“Please?”
But David backed away. “Maybe he’s right.”
“N-no.” Jason curled into a ball again, tucking his knees to his chest.
“If you want to live, brother, perhaps you should pray.”
But Jason didn’t hear those words. His breath became short, shallow, as David walked away, disappearing into the glare of the sun.
I ran over and knelt beside the shuddering child. “Jason,” I whispered, wishing I could be an entity of the past—to reach out and touch him. But when he looked up suddenly, it was to a great fluffy hound licking his face, waking him from the drift of consciousness. Was that Petey?
“Petey,” he said, wrapping his arm across the dog’s neck. “Get Aunty.”
And Petey ran, bouncing over the fields faster than possible, barking for all who might be near.
When Jason opened his eyes again the room was mostly dark, lit only by a fire burning nearby, while the softness of a mattress braced his tiny body. He looked up into the soulful blue eyes of a woman with honey-blonde hair.
“Jason.” She touched his face.
“Aunty.”
“Shh,” she said, stroking his cheek over and over again. “Don’t try to speak, my love. Just rest. You’re safe now.”
He nodded and closed his eyes, but opened them quickly, revealing thoughts that took that sparkle from his soul. “Aunt Ari?”
“Yes, sweet boy?”
“Is it true—that I killed my mother?”
Arietta paled, rising up slightly to lean right over Jason. “Who said that to you?”
The little boy looked away.
“Was it your father?”
His reluctance to say was all Arietta needed.
“My darling child, your mother died because the doctor couldn’t stop the bleeding. Momma just didn’t have enough strength to keep breathing.”
“But if I had not been born, she would have lived. Father says she was smiling; that she was happy after David was born; that she let go when I tried to enter the world.”
“Jason—” Arietta couldn’t find the words to make it all okay. I wondered if a part of her believed this too, or if maybe she was so horrified by this child’s certainty of his existence destroying another’s that she couldn’t speak. “Jason, your father was not even in the room when my sister passed. I was there. I saw her smile when the doctor told her there was another child. I saw her eyes light with joy for the fact that you would be born.” She stroked his hair, her eyes touching every inch of his little face. “Oh, my sweet, sweet boy. She wanted nothing more than to hold you, I know this, because she was my sister, and we have the same heart.” She touched her chest. “If I love you this much, then she would have loved you just the same.”
Jason nodded into the cup of her hand, but I saw it in his eyes that her truth couldn’t change what was in his heart—what he had been told since he was old enough to understand words.
“I am so sorry I can’t stay here and be your mother, Jason. If your father would have me, I would not leave you at the end of the summer, not ever, but”—she looked down, her eyes tearing—“but just know that, even though we can’t be together, I never stop loving you, or your brother.”
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, watched tears fall between his fingertips where they dug into the blades of grass around his knees.
Thunder clouds closed the day in on him and the rain came down over his shoulders, making the cold harsh and the pain go deeper. He swiped a hand across his nose, barely able to see the name on the headstone before him.
“This is the second woman our family has buried because of you.”
Jason stood quickly and spun around to his brother’s angered face. “David, how can you say such things? I cannot be to blame for this.”
The two thirteen-year-old versions of the twins stood face to face: one softened by grief, the other hardened, with hate-filled eyes barring his brother.
“You tell yourself that, demon. Go ahead. If it eases your guilt.”
“Guilt. Guilt for what? I ran.
I told you this. I ran as fast as I could—”
“And yet it was not fast enough.”
Jason reached out to gently clasp the lapel of David’s coat. “I will not be to blame. I could not have saved her if I’d grown wings and flown to get Uncle.”
David’s stiff body seemed to shake, his nostrils flaring with each breath of hatred or grief or whatever he was carrying inside that made me take a step back. “It’s not how fast you ran, brother; it’s not how long it took you to bring Uncle; it’s your mere existence. You were never meant to be, and until your ashes are in this earth, balance can never be restored.”
“I don’t believe that. And Arietta didn’t believe that either.”
David looked at her grave, clenching his teeth so firmly his cheeks hollowed. “She could never see past your lies, and now she’s dead. She is dead because you are an abomination.” His arm shook, his finger aimed at the beastly creature across from him. “But I see you for what you are. I see you for what Father knew you were. As far as I’m concerned, from this day forth, I have no brother,” he said, not a shred of sympathy softening his rain-soaked face.
He backed away then, leaving Jason to grieve the loss alone.
My heart saturated with sadness, but I couldn’t allow it—couldn’t let pity change how I felt about either of them. I wanted to hate David as much as I wanted to fall beside Jason as he sunk to the ground and wrap my arms around him—around his young self—tell him everything would be okay.
But it wouldn’t. Not for him.
From that day on, the one person who loved him, saw him as just a boy, would never lay eyes on him again, never lay a comforting hand to his cheek. He was alone now.
I backed away, my heart pounding in my chest.
He was truly all alone.
“Walk with me.”
I looked up suddenly to the other version of myself: she watched on to the scene before us, her eyes hollow, distant, like she wasn’t aware she was beside me. But when she turned her head and looked directly into my eyes, I felt her presence, her sentience. I shuddered inside.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She turned away, hugging her arms across her waist, her yellow dress falling softly around her knees, not blown by the wind that swept my hair. “Walk with me,” is all she said.
So I did. I followed her through the field, feeling the long grass between my toes, feeling every rock, every rise of soil touch the balls of my feet, while the warm wind did nothing to steal the chill radiating from her ghostly presence like an icy cloth.
“Tell me where we’re going,” I called out.
“To find insight.”
“Insight? Into what?”
“Jason.”
“Why?”
“You need to see.” Her voice had a distant, resonating echo to it, like she wasn’t real, or like the part of her that once had been no longer was.
“What do I need to see?”
“How you loved him.”
I stopped walking, the world going dark and quiet all around me. “That love was never real. It was the spirit bind.”
When she stopped also, I felt the eerie weight of her madness creep across my shoulders; the very energy of her impatience made the air thick and heavy. “That is the lie you tell yourself.”
“No. It’s the truth.”
She smiled conceitedly. “Then why do you wish he never died?”
My mouth gaped. I took a few steps back. “I do not.”
“Liar.”
“I don’t.” I started walking away again. “We’re all better off now he’s dead.”
“If you believe that, then perhaps you’re more like David than I wanted to imagine,” she called out through the darkness.
“Perhaps I am.”
“Then you, like David, are no better than Drake.”
I stopped again. “David is nothing like Drake. How can you say that?”
“You saw his past. You saw the hate in his heart.”
“I saw a boy: one who bullied his brother. He is nothing like Drake.”
“Then you looked, but you did not see.”
I shook my head. “Even if David was evil once, people are capable of change.”
“Then why do you not feel that way for Jason?”
“Because he has done unspeakable things to my life!” I stomped my foot. “He hurt David, killed him. And maybe David isn’t dead, but Jason never knew about immunity. He meant to kill him. He meant to end him. And I can’t forgive that. I just can’t.”
“But you forgive David?”
“David never hurt me. David never did anything—”
“He never hurt me!” The girl appeared in front of me, teeth clenched, eyes suddenly black. “But where was he when I was in the dark, when I was being hurt by Jason? Where was he when I was alone, where was he when Jason was binding me?” Her voice strained. “He never did anything bad to us, but he never did anything right by us either.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I shook her icy touch off my wrist. “I have no feelings for Jason—not after what he did to his own brother. So stop haunting me with his memories. I don’t want to see them anymore.”
She lashed out and grabbed my arm again as I turned away. “He never wanted anything in this world so bad as he wanted to hurt David, Ara. You saw what he suffered in his human life. Where is your compassion?”
“I don’t have compassion for him. Not real compassion. He forged that when he came to me in my dream and had sex with me.”
“No, Ara. He didn’t. He earned that compassion through his kindness, protection, and love for you.” She stood with her arms by her sides, soaking from the sudden rain that came down in her world, but not mine. “He protected you. He hurt himself, hurt his own soul, then died for what he did to you in that room.”
“He felt nothing for me then—he had Drake compel him to hurt me.”
“No.” She stepped forward. “He fell to the floor each time he left that chamber; he cried so hard for the way you begged him to stop. But if he had… if he stopped, if he had not killed his brother, if he had not hurt you, they would have taken him away; they would have handed you over to someone else, and he would never have been able to stop them from what they wanted to do to you.”
“What would you know?” I screamed. “You’re just a dream. You’re me—a part of me. You don’t know what Jason felt. You can’t know.”
“If that is true, then this is what you wish he felt. This is what you want to believe.”
“Of course I do. It’s human nature to find a reason—a connection.” I turned away. “It’s called Stockholm Syndrome.”
She only laughed loudly as I walked faster and faster, trying to detach myself from the drain her mere existence brought on my soul.
“Don’t you walk away from me, Ara. You can’t escape me. I’ll keep bringing the memories until you see,” she called after me. “One day you will see.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“There is always the truth.”
“I know the truth.”
“And the truth is”—her voice became smaller as I gained distance—“the real truth is that you’re just afraid to love him because you don’t want to grieve him too.”
I dared not turn back. She was wrong—everything she said. This was just a nightmare: words Arthur spoke, fear of what was to come and the deep hope I felt to be rescued while I was being tortured by Jason, all rolling into one horrible dream. I had to wake up.
Wake up, Ara. Wake up!
“Time to wake up, Princess Amara.”
My eyelids popped open, the warm scent of toast and garlic filling my nostrils before daylight signed the registry of consciousness.
“I trust you slept well,” said a very unfamiliar voice as a tray appeared on my lap.
I looked down at a coffee cup and a plate of eggs and bacon, then sat up a little more. “I… I was having a nightmare,” I said before I could stop myself.
“May
I enquire what it was about?” The man showed his face then: kind eyes, aged, wrinkled skin and gray hair. Human.
“Oh, um. It was about being a queen, I think.” I grabbed the fork and broke the yolk over my toast.
The old man smiled. “Then I do not feel so bad for waking you.” He bowed. “I am Edgar, your butler.”
“Nice to meet you.” I smiled.
“The pleasure is all mine.” He wandered over and opened my window, letting in the smell of wet grass and the hum of crashing waves, pleasantly accompanied by the resonance of a violin.
“Where’s that coming from—that music?”
Edgar smiled. “That would be Arthur Knight, Majesty.”
I closed my eyes and felt the notes in my heart. “Where is he? Is he in his room?”
“He is. Shall I request he desist?”
“Oh, no. No, please don’t. I like it.” I slipped my legs over the side of the bed, leaving the tray by my pillow. “Ask him to wait for me, please? I’d like to speak to him.”
“As you wish.” Edgar bowed slightly, then walked away, closing the door behind him.
I slipped into my light denim shorts and white tank top with the shoestring straps, then pushed my toes into my flip-flops as I walked out the door, leaving my hair in the ponytail I’d slept in. It would probably only get messier at training today anyway.
The lure of Arthur’s music led me down the corridor by my ears, touching my soul like a warm hug, and the scent of garlic followed me out of my room, stealing the sweetness of summer rain outside.
As I neared his open door, the music wrapped around me, daylight disappearing in the depths of his dark room. I could just make out the edge of his four-poster bed to the left and one column of pale light shining through the curtains beside a fireplace. Arthur stood on the other side, his body framed by the shadows, while I stood in the doorway wriggling my toes, unsure if I should enter but so lost in the perfection of his every note that I likely couldn’t walk anyway.
His whole body moved with the flow; his forearm swinging with each stroke of the bow across the strings; his head rolling, taking his body through the soul of the song. I could only just see the side of his face from the small pillar of light, showing the contour of his cheek and the corner of his eye, but it was enough to see the smile he wore there.
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