by Megan Derr
It wasn't fair. He'd done nothing, nothing at all. Why was he alone left to suffer this way?
He had asked the monks that very question, but their answers had held no sympathy, nor even pity. Nothing, they had said, was even worse a crime. Willful ignorance and taking no action was worse than actively doing the wrong thing.
Shortly thereafter, he had taken his leave. He was miserable enough without their high and mighty prattling. Love, they had said. If he ever wanted to break the curse inscribed on his throat, then he must get someone to fall in love with him—and return that love. Love and be loved.
Personally, he thought the monks were nitwits. Love? Even pretending love was real and not a tool to use on lesser minds, who would love someone who looked as he? It was a curse with no true way to be broken, which struck him as cheating and a typical faerie thing to do.
Then again, Alcor acknowledged, nothing was harder to take than the impossible. If the bastard faerie had sought to ruin his life and make him suffer forever, well, he obviously had known what he was doing. It was as brilliant as it was stupid.
Alcor made his way slowly through the remains of his home, not certain why he bothered, but what else did he have to do? The monks had given him clothes, a warm cloak, food for a couple of weeks—not that he needed it, he doubted his appetite would ever return—and some coin that did him no good because wherever he went, people screamed or cried or threatened to kill him if he did not leave immediately. All of them made the sign of warding against evil.
It wasn't fair, but after weeks of trying, he was starting to accept there was nothing he could do. He hated it, and he hated the damned faerie responsible for it. He was cursed and cursed forever.
Something caught his eye—a flash and sparkle, completely at odds with the remains of what had once been a beautiful old castle. Alcor walked toward it, kicking away bits of debris. He had not been here in over a year, yet so much of the destruction remained. Perhaps it was cursed as well; he wouldn't put it past the vindictive bastard faerie.
Kneeling in the grime, he pushed away bits of burned wood and stone to reveal a small bottle. It was made of crystal, flawless and beautiful in the light, the delicate stopper made to resemble a rosebud. It was filled with some clear liquid, and he could not say for certain if it was the crystal or the contents which sparkled.
Something flickered through his mind, then was gone, like a candle lit and promptly snuffed—the scent of honeysuckle, warm and soft and sweet. Frowning, confused and annoyed, Alcor stood and examined the bottle more closely. Perfume, of some sort? How had it survived the fire? He grasped the stopper and pulled, but it would not come free. He pulled and pulled and began to swear, but all for nothing. Surely the fire had not done it, not if the bottle had survived.
Irritated, he tucked the bottle away to figure out later and continued to make his way through the ruin that had once been his home. His stomach roiled as he caught a faint whiff of dragonweed, but surely that must be his imagination. Any such scents would be long gone, fifteen months after the damned faerie had destroyed his life.
The dark faerie who was dead now, and that was perhaps the hardest part to take. The bastard had taken his revenge—on Alcor, unfairly—then killed himself to cheat Alcor of his own chance at revenge. He had questioned the monks a thousand times on it, but they had been quite firm about it. T hey had recognized what was left of one corpse to know it for a faerie.
Another glint caught his attention, and Alcor immediately went toward it, curious despite himself that anything—let alone two things—would survive the inferno that had leveled a centuries old faerie castle. Reaching into the broken bits, he pulled free a dagger which seemed to be made of purest silver with a hilt of gold and sapphires. Useless, but beautiful.
This time an image came to mind, fragile as morning mist burned away by the sun—pale gold hair, long and soft looking.
Mysteries and more mysteries, and didn’t he have enough problems without adding that to the mess? When was enough enough? Stifling a sigh, he tucked the dagger into his jacket with the crystal bottle and decided he'd had enough of the entire mess. What was the point in coming back here? Nothing remained, no one remembered, and he would not break his curse by skulking around these pathetic ruins.
But as he was nearly clear of them, he caught sight of yet another oddity. It not the sparkle of crystal or the shine of silver. No, this time it was color. A deep, rich red. It was like nothing he had ever seen, not really. Kneeling, Alcor plunged his hand into the muck and grime—and managed to prick his finger on something. Jerking his hand back, swearing loudly, he glared at the blood which well up from the small puncture at the tip of his finger.
Wiping his hand on his filthy breeches, he reached again into the mix of mud and ash, and this time was braced for when his fingers were again pricked by something. Pulling the object free, he stared in shock. A rose. A perfect scarlet rose. It was the color of fresh blood or a dark ruby or a heady wine, and yet none of those exactly captured the depth and richness of its color.
Loyalty. Protection. Love.
Alcor frowned and held one dirty hand to his head, which had begun to throb. He could hear the words in his head, spoken in a soft, shy voice. He could see the pale gold hair, smell the honeysuckle—
That was all, and the dreamlike image was gone. Until he brought the rose close and caught its scent. It did not smell like a rose, however, but like honeysuckle and green things, herbs and spices, tea and lemon. He heard the soft, shy voice again, but could not quite hear the words it said. Saw the pale hair…
It must be some dream, a hallucination or some such. Anyone so soft spoken was not his sort; they were too easily broken, the nice, gentle, weak ones. But why dream such a thing? Was it a memory from that awful night?
He could not remember. Perhaps it was some faerie trick. That would explain how the three objects had survived the inferno. If that were the case, he was best rid of them, yet he could not bring himself to throw them away.
Shrugging, irritated by his own strange behavior, Alcor nevertheless inhaled the bizarre scents of the rose once more before tucking it away with the bottle and dagger.
Then he strode to clean grass and cleaned his hands as best he could of the filth of the ruins, ignoring the way his skin and muscles pulled and ached as best he could. Finished, he stood at a complete loss. The monks had tended him in a little church closer to the village when first they had been called to save him. When he was strong enough to be moved, they had carried him to their monastery for proper healing. All told, he had spent just over a year recovering his full health—or as much of it as he would ever recover.
When he and the monks had no longer been able to stand one another, he had decided to return here. But whatever he had hoped to find, it was not here. Nothing was here, and this had been a waste of time, but what else did he have to do? No goals, no acquaintances who would talk to him whether they remembered him or not.
Not for the first time, and far from the last, he wished he were dead. Everyone else was, including the damned faerie, so why couldn't he die as well?
He had tried to do it, back when the pain had still been more than he could bear, but it had only added further scars to his body and made the monks give him even more of their condescending looks. As if they had any idea what it was like to live the existence forced upon him. They had no right to judge.
Distant thunder rumbled along the mountains a few miles off. A storm was coming, which meant he should try to find shelter of some sort. If the foul weather stood no chance of killing him, then he saw no point in suffering it.
Getting away from the rain was, at least, a goal. Pathetic, really, when once his only priorities had been which of the dozens of parties to attend, who to invite to his castle, and which ones were worthy of being taken to his bed for a short time.
There was something else he would never again experience. No more fucking, no more pretty boys with eager mouths. Even if anyone cou
ld stand the sight of him, he no longer had any interest. Recollections of the pretty things he'd fucked night after night left him cold. Beyond that, he suspected that even if he had the interest, the ability would not be there.
He was not eager to confirm the fact, either, and so left well enough alone.
Turning away from the remains of the castle, Alcor began to trek back along the road he had once traveled nearly every day of his life. His father had hired men to maintain the road year round so that it was always traversable for the family and whatever guests came to call.
Now, it was overgrown and uneven, rapidly being consumed by the dense forest on either side. In a few more years, no sign of his family would remain at all.
Dark came quickly, hastened by the storm he could feel now in the air. He would not find anywhere to shelter before it struck. That fact might have angered him, but it seemed only one more unfairness in a life suddenly overfull of them, and he could not spare the energy to resent the weather specifically. Much easier to lump it into the general mass of resentment he felt for life.
He walked on, even when it got too dark to really see—and seeing well was hard enough, when he had only one eye remaining. Occasionally he slipped a hand inside the threadbare jacket he wore, absently touching the bottle or the dagger or the rose. He kept hoping for something more to come to mind, something that would explain the strange, ghostly images that flickered for all too brief a time. He did not like mysteries, but the mystery was better to think about than other things.
Perhaps he was hoping for a memory stronger than scorching fire, of screams of agony, the stench of burning flesh and the hot-cold bite of steel at his throat. The months and months spent in a hell composed entirely of pure pain. Even sickly-sweet honeysuckle was preferable to the memory of his father burning to death before his eyes.
Immersed in his thoughts, he did not see them until they were upon him—three of them, he thought, though it felt more like six of them by the fury of their grabbing and punching and kicking, the way they shoved him down and pressed him into the ground, tearing fabric in their greed to empty his pockets, take his little knapsack.
He curled up in a ball of agony as the beatings finally eased, unable to do a damned thing as they reached for the inner pockets of his jacket. He grabbed feebly at a wrist as they latched onto the objects he'd found in the castle remains, but his own wrist was twisted hard and a sharp cuff to the face put a final end to his protestations.
"Bah," the attacker muttered as he examined the three objects. "Nothing but junk and some nasty little bit of dead weed. Pathetic little beggar, he's got nothing but the food and coin we already took. Maybe that cloak. Take it, too." He laughed in an unpleasant way and threw the objects down, then kicked Alcor hard in the gut before backing off entirely. "Come on then, lads, nothing on this sad thing."
The sound of their laughter as they left was slow to fade, and he did not really draw breath until at last no sign of them remained.
He breathed, but carefully, because even that caused a thousand new pains to flare up. On top of the permanent miseries attached to his burn scars from where he'd hurt himself while hysterical and feverish during the healing, this was all his nightmares returned. Once upon a time, no one would have dared touch him in any way without permission. Once, he would have ridden a great stallion or in a fine carriage bearing the family crest. No one would have stopped him or hurt him. He could have traveled this road at any time of day or night with not even a touch of fear.
Now it was half-reclaimed by the forest and polluted with robbers, all but forgotten by the rest of the world. The bastard thieves had taken his few belongings, minus the oddities he had recently collected. Strange, but he just didn't care right now. He didn't care about anything, and no one cared about him. No one even knew he lived. No one to help him with the pain, no one to care that he was alive, no one who would care to hear if he died.
Curled up in the middle of the dirt road that had once led the way to his family home, in too much pain to even think of moving, Alcor sobbed.
The rain forced him to his feet some time later as it began to fall hard, swiftly turning the dirt road into a muddy river. As he had no desire to learn what it was like to drown without actually dying, he picked himself up slowly and started to walk away—when he suddenly remembered the objects the robbers had cast aside.
Turning back sharply, he scrambled almost frantically through the mud to find the discarded objects. Such stupid, trivial things should not matter; he'd once owned a hundred things a hundred times more beautiful, but they did matter, and he was not in the mood to question it
At last he found them and clung fiercely to them. Junk, the robber had called them—junk and a dead weed. Why? That made no sense— Is that what they saw, in place of the jeweled dagger, the crystal vial, the perfect rose? How could they see only trash in such beautiful objects?
He laughed bitterly. Unless he was clinging to junk and a dead weed and only seeing the beautiful objects now clutched tightly in his hands. Perhaps he was deluding himself; after all, it was impossible that the flower especially would survive that gods damned fire.
Well, if he was crazy, so what? Being crazy hardly mattered on top of everything else inflicted upon him. Just one more problem on a very long list, a list that was titled 'things about which nothing can be done.' Tucking the objects away, fixing his torn, wet clothes as best he could, Alcor walked.
How long he walked, he did not know. Every step hurt, every movement ached, but it would hurt the same if he held still. Eventually, the sun came up and the rain stopped, though he could not say for certain in which order those two things occurred. At some point, the forest had thinned out and then finally vanished, leaving nothing but fields all around him. So much open space did not sit well with him—he was too visible, too vulnerable. He wanted to hide away and never endure again the pain of other people. He was done with them.
A few hours later, he saw a family walking toward him. He kept his head down and was sure to stay well away from them, but still the woman screamed, the child cried and all three of them made the sign of warding against evil.
Ignoring them as best he was able, Alcor walked on. He wished the robbers had at least left him his cloak—that would have given him some cover. He wondered when he would become used to the screaming and sobbing and threatening.
Some time later, he saw the telltale signs of a village drawing close and turned off onto a road that seemed to lead well away from it, not eager to find out what an entire group of people might do if suitably horrified by the sight of him.
At least he knew where he was, though why that should be comforting he was not sure. He did know where he was, though. Alcor had always travelled by horse or carriage, but he knew the way to the family's hunting lodge like—
The hunting lodge! Why had he not thought of the bloody thing before? It was perfect. No one but the immediate family and a very few precious guests had ever used it. Mostly, his father had kept it exclusively for the family. The two of them had hunted with relish, with his mother and sister not far behind.
He doubted the dark faerie had known of it or even cared. If the curse held true, it was as forgotten by everyone who might have known of it as everything else. It was a place he could live alone, untroubled and unseen. As he never bothered to eat, he had no need to worry about a cook or cleaning. Well, how much of a mess could one person make, and who would be there to care, anyway? He had well established the answer was no one.
What he was going to do when he got there, he did not know, but it was a destination and that was something. Anything was better than wandering aimlessly and encountering shrieking morons. The journey would take some time; the hunting lodge was a one week journey by horse. Really, it was more of a winter home than the much draftier castle. They had often left in early fall and stayed until spring thawed winter away.
Yes, it would be perfect if he could just get there. Going on foot, it would take mu
ch longer. Then again, it was not as though he had anywhere else he needed or wanted to be.
That brought the realization that he had been walking long and hard for a man with nowhere to be, and in a great deal of pain besides. The moment he thought that the pain hit him as if he had run straight into a wall.
A little ways ahead rested a copse of trees and Alcor made himself walk toward it only because he had no other option unless he wanted to rest in the open, which was a bit like inviting people to inflict more pain. He didn't want more pain. Over the course of the past year, he'd gotten to know pain better than he had once known dragonweed. It was more pain than anyone should have to bear, and it never went completely away. The monks had loved informing him it never would.
When he reached the copse of trees, he collapsed with a ragged sigh, wincing at the sound of his own ruined voice. Finding a spot that looked relatively comfortable for the ground, he pulled off his jacket and draped it over his head.
Immediately half-asleep, he lay there for some time not quite able to drop off completely. After a moment, he reached with sleepy, unthinking fingers into the inner pocket of the jacket. The awkward angle caused him to fumble for a bit, but at last he wrapped his fingers around the rose, uncaring of the thorns.
Then he fell asleep.
He was jerked from his sleep by the sound of whistling, but for a moment, could not think of anything but the lingering scent of honeysuckle that had followed him from a dream that was already slipping away. Muttering a soft curse, Alcor fumbled to sit up and drew the jacket from his head, pulling it back on with stiff movements.
Even before he had removed the jacket, he'd known it was late at night. Pitch black, dead of night, and barely a sliver of moon by which to see, and yet there was light. Silver white light, close and moving closer and, he realized after a moment, in perfect time with the whistling. An insufferably cheerful tune, especially for the late hour. What sort of idiot whistled cheerful songs while travelling in the dead of night?