Nobody's Lady

by Amy McNulty

  I thought of Elgar, guiltily, and wondered how he’d found the blade at all, when I’d left it in a tree for Jaron to find for me. The sword seemed to exist outside of reason, like there were two in the village at once, one over Ailill’s throne and the other in the tree.

  Before I could ask, Ailill spoke again. “Eventually, I stopped caring.” He turned the page. This one showed the crowded tavern, Vena running across the book, men’s heads thrown back in laughter. The page followed a man with his arm around a woman’s waist, his other hand holding hers as they swung around the crowded room dancing, tripping, and nearly tumbling over with laughter. “I would open the book on occasion, but I tended to find it hurt too much to look. To pretend I meant anything to the people in these pages.”

  It was my father. My father dancing with some other woman. Who was she? I couldn’t put a name to her face, but I really didn’t care. To see the look of delight on my father’s features when he held a woman besides my mother made me gasp and turn away.

  By turning, I found myself perfectly positioned in Ailill’s arms. The torchlight danced and flickered across his brown hair. His dark eyes bore into mine, and I felt his arm shift behind me, move ever closer to the center of my back.

  “Do you blame me for so seldom looking?”

  “No.” I swallowed and tore my eyes away. My hands gripped the sides of my skirt. I was unsure what to do with them. How to move away—or if I even wanted to. Ailill dropped his arm and took a step back, taking with him a raging blaze of something powerful between us I hadn’t even realized he’d brought with him.

  A glint of light caught my attention on the floor just beside the stand. I bent down and picked it up—it was the coin I’d lost. I held it out between Ailill and me, letting the firelight dance off its luster. “When you took that bangle away,” I said, nodding at the bangle around his arm, “you said it would have saved me from a lifetime in prison. So what does this coin, or any golden copper, mean?”

  Ailill ran a hand over his bangle. “It means you have the right to know. To see. To rule over this village.”

  I twisted the coin this way and that, not believing that even something so bright and beautiful could give me the right to that. “Like your bangle?” I asked, thinking of the one Elric wore.

  The corner of Ailill’s lips twitched. “And the dozens of others like it.” He removed the bangle and held it out in front of him in echo of my stance with the coin. “I got so bored with receiving them, I started to use them for practical purposes.” He smiled, and I thought of how the golden rings held the veil over the table aloft, how they clattered as they fell to the ground when I ordered him to rip it. “And then I began to leave the remainder behind. I thought it dangerous to populate one village with over a hundred such tokens, solely because I was sent back time after time after time.”

  I gripped the coin tightly in my palm and lowered my hand. “You keep talking about our village as if there are others.”

  Ailill smiled again, and it didn’t feel like he was mocking me. More like he was impressed his pet could perform new tricks. He slid the bangle back over his arm and gestured around with both hands. “We are surrounded by mountains, Olivière. Everywhere you look, there are mountains.” He stepped back, walking toward his throne. “And people are born, and live, and die in this village, and they never seem to think about what is on the other side of them.”

  “But … ” I frowned. “How can there be? The mountains end? And other people live there?”

  Ailill sat back on his throne, crossing his legs so one ankle rested on the other knee. “Not quite, but close enough.”

  “So why haven’t any of these people noticed us?”

  “Who says they have not?” Ailill gestured at the book behind me. “Where do you think I came by such a tome, a book that shows the people of this village at play?”

  “At play? Is that what our lives are to someone like you? Just a game?”

  Ailill rested his fingertips together, always looking somehow both bored and in charge whenever he sat there. “There are greater forces than a simple lord in a single village, Olivière. Even one who frustratingly will not die.” His eyes seemed to search the ceiling, as if looking for a person who might be listening. “And whether my vexing immortality is still in place remains to be seen.”

  “What do you mean? Because you found your goddess, you … ” I stopped. It was only my not being born yet that had kept him alive.

  Ailill shook his head and waved a hand. “Do not worry yourself. I might be freed from the curse at last. It is exactly what I wanted for many, many years.”

  I gripped the coin harder and felt its smooth edges push into my skin. “But you can’t die!”

  Ailill raised his eyebrows. “I am touched you care.” His voice betrayed his meaning, his sarcasm back in full force, dripping over the sentiment.

  “I do care!” I stomped a foot, feeling like the little elf queen not getting her way. “Must you continue to be so frustrating?”

  Ailill stood and stepped down the platform. “My sentiments exactly.”

  “I caused this. I caused all of this, I know.” I looked up as Ailill stopped moving, the surprise clearly written on his face. “I want you to have a chance to live this time.”

  Ailill froze but said nothing.

  “I want all of the men to have a chance to choose what makes them happy. And the women understand that the happiness they had before was never really happiness. Not when there wasn’t a choice. Although I don’t want things to go back to the way they were, either. Everyone in the village deserves to be treated well.”

  “Olivière—”

  “No, let me speak! For once, just let me talk without misunderstanding and berating me. Give me some answers!” I threw my hands up. “The hole behind the throne. That leads to this place beyond the mountains?”

  Ailill took a step closer, his hand outstretched. “Yes, but—”

  “And knowing about that is the danger?” I held out my coin again. “Unless you hold a golden copper, knowing that there’s a world beyond the mountains somehow justifies imprisonment? For life?”

  “Olivière, yes, but not now.” Ailill brushed past, laying his hand on my shoulder for the gentlest of shoves.

  My eyebrows furrowed at his look of concern. “What is … ” The last word died on my tongue.

  The moving ink drawing of the tavern had erupted into chaos. Man after man came to blows with each other, some with bare fists, others with broken glasses or even chairs raised over their heads. Things moved so quickly, tables turning, plates crashing, the silent fury screaming across the page, and I couldn’t find my father. The page was supposed to be centered on him.

  Ailill furrowed his brow, one hand marking his place while his other raced through the pages. “I was afraid something like this might happen.”

  “Like what?” I asked stupidly. “A fight in the tavern?” It looked worrying, but it was nothing like the battle I’d caused in the village of the past.

  Ailill continued to scan the pages. “Too much freedom. Sometimes men cannot be trusted with it.” He grunted. “As you have seen.” He stopped flipping the pages, and his eyes widened.

  “What is it?” I asked, leaning in beside him for a better look.

  A man I didn’t recognize plunged a shard of glass into another man’s back. The second man crumbled, his head lolling forward and then his body vanishing, only his clothing cluttering the floor.

  I gasped. “Someone might have died! We have to stop them! Find whose page that was! Find out if he was killed or hurt or … ”

  Ailill let the pages fall back, leaving the page he’d held open, the page belonging to my father. Bright red burst onto the paper, the first shade of color I’d seen on any of the pages. It dripped down, like spilled ink. Like blood. And then the page went blank before vanishing in a surge of bright violet.

  “Father!” I screamed, clawing at the book. I
t was he who was stabbed on that other man’s page. He who crumpled. Ailill’s arms slipped around me, his hands clutched together at my abdomen. Tears streamed down my face. Endless, white-hot tears.

  Ailill’s cheek pressed against my temple. It was warm, not at all like the cold marble I remembered. “They watch us now,” he whispered, barely audible over the sobs choking out past my throat. His lips brushed close against my skin, like the flutter of petals in a breeze against my cheek as I lay in the lily fields. Lily fields. I’d associated those, that feeling of serenity, with Jurij for so long.

  “They are always watching.” He took a deep breath. “But we cannot let them win.”

  I strode out of the throne room before I could even think.

  “Olivière, where are you going?” Ailill grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. He cradled the book in which I’d watched my father. I’d watched his page burn.

  Father’s not dead. He’s not! But I couldn’t just stand there. I had to know.

  Ailill frowned. “Do you intend to run all the way to the tavern?”

  My stomach hurt, and my throat felt dry. I didn’t know what I intended. I was going to head down the stairs and just run until I got there. Until I could prove to myself it wasn’t true. My eyes wandered over Ailill’s shoulder to the door leading to the cells.

  I spun out of Ailill’s grip toward my friends. “I have to go!”

  “Now what are you planning?” asked Ailill as he walked quickly along beside me. “The door is that way.”

  “Aren’t we going to free them?” I gestured at the door to the cells. “They could help. They know the crowd at the tavern.”

  Ailill didn’t respond to my question. “We will take the carriage. It will prove faster.”

  I started. “You’ll come with me?”

  There was a slight bob to Ailill’s throat. “Of course.”

  “But you never leave the castle.” I frowned. “Hardly ever, that is.”

  “This is too important.” He muttered something to himself about how “the Ailills would restrain them” and disappeared down the staircase to the second floor.

  Several specters appeared from the dungeon and walked past me at a brisk pace, following after him. I may as well have been invisible. One bumped into me with an echoing clatter as he passed and didn’t even slow down.

  I stood there a moment longer, staring at the dungeon door they hadn’t even closed behind them.

  My father needed me. Because he couldn’t be dead. It had to be some mistake. But he wasn’t the only one who needed me.

  Something glistened from the floor beside my feet, and I bent to pick it up. The specter who’d brushed past me had dropped the cell key. It was almost like he was asking me to free them while Ailill was distracted.

  ***

  The book on my lap jostled with the bump of the carriage, and I was afraid my tight grip on its edges would make the thing crumble beneath my fingers. Up close, it wasn’t really in the best of shape—although when I considered how old it was, I was surprised it hadn’t faded to dust years before. My fingers traced over the scene of the tavern men fighting, from Vena’s point of view, as she and Elweard cowered behind the counter, their arms wrapped tightly around one another.

  I wanted to throw up. My mind was racing. I hadn’t felt this anxious, this awake, since the day I’d led Avery and the other women to Elric in the castle. And thinking about that, I realized no one in this village—in this present-day village—had seen physical fighting before.

  Ailill tapped his knee with his fingers, displaying worry for the first time in all the time I’d known him as an adult. “The Ailills can restrain them,” he said, for the tenth time at least. “They will have to.”

  I flipped the pages until I found one with a better view of the brawl. It followed a man I didn’t know as he threw a punch and then received one.

  Ailill had been talking to himself since we’d left the throne room. He touched the fingers on one hand as if he were counting. “There are a 104 of them. Some more frail and older than others.” The specters, I assumed. Even though some certainly looked older than others, I hadn’t suspected any were “frail.” “There are 564 men in the village, minus the seven currently in the cells.”

  I stopped flipping through the book to glare at him. His knowledge of exactly how many men were in his village would have impressed me—assuming it was right—if it wasn’t compounded by the fact that he still intended to keep my friends in his prison.

  “I will not have them bring swords,” continued Ailill. “The longer the people go without thinking about those, the better.” He ran a gloved hand over his face. “But just because I secured all the swords in the fifth life does not mean they cannot turn their tools into instruments of death.” He laughed sourly. “I seem to remember women made great use of pitchforks and axes at one point.”

  I swallowed, too distraught to think of the mob of violent women, instead thinking of the glass shard in Father’s back. I turned the book back to where Father’s page had been. I felt the page that had been behind it, the tanner’s wife, asleep in her bed. Completely free of the pain and worries that filled my chest.

  Because I couldn’t quite believe Father was dead. Page or no page, I had to be mistaken. Or if not, then I’d just have to undo it. Somehow. Someway. I’d been into the past before.

  “Olivière?”

  His voice brought me back to the moment. “Does this mean my father is dead?” I tapped the woman’s page.

  “Olivière,” said Ailill, softer than was his usual custom. “The book shows the truth of the village. When a page burns, that means the villager has vanished into … Well, he moves on from this life.”

  “No!” I slammed a palm against the book. “You burnt Master Tailor’s page, and he didn’t die.”

  “Burning the page is not the same as the page burning itself. My act only returned the page to its bindings.”

  “I know! I saw it. I … ” I didn’t know what I was going to say. The next word caught in my throat, suffocating me. Breathing hurt. Thinking hurt. I’d lost my mother once, and that pain had numbed me for months. Father and I had never been as close, but that brought its own kind of pain. We’d never properly talked since men became free. What kind of man was he really? All I’d have to remember him—the real him not bound by devotion to Mother—was that night I brought Arrow back and our chance meeting in the tavern, when he’d reminded me of the father who’d blamed me for Mother’s illness.

  “Olivière.” Ailill’s soothing voice melted the cold panic and confusion ringing in my ears. He got up from where he sat across from me, his back hunched, his arms out to steady himself as the carriage flew down the path. He slid in beside me, our thighs pressed close together on the too-small seat. His arm flew around me, and before I knew it, I was cradling the book to my chest and pressing my head against his shoulder. It took me a moment to realize the great heaving sobs I heard were coming from my own throat, that my tears were dyeing his black jerkin even darker with dampness.

  “He can’t be dead.” My voice cracked. “I just saw him. And I thought my mother dead once, and she wasn’t.”

  “She was in my care.” Ailill’s gloved fingers ran through the back of my hair. “And I have no such power left. He has already vanished.”

  I leaned away and took his hand in mine, dropping the book to my lap. He swallowed, perhaps hurt that I’d pulled back from him yet again. But I took the glove off and gripped his hand tighter, running my finger—the injured finger now almost entirely without poultice—over his smooth, pale skin. I wanted to feel that healing touch. He’d used it once on me, on a splintered finger. He could use it again. He could fix my hand and save my father. But even if he couldn’t …

  “I could save him,” I said, determined. “The pond will have to accept me and take me back in time. I’ll make it.” My eyes burned as tears continued falling.

  Ailill threa
ded his fingers through mine. “Olivière, you cannot let your thoughts take you to such dark places. You cannot turn to that power. Please. You do not understand what you were dealing with when you fell through that pond before. They toyed with you.”

  I wanted to scream. “Who are they?”

  “I … cannot tell you.”

  “Fine.” This whole exchange reminded me of how frustrated Jurij must have been when he was the one asking questions and I was the one not giving answers. “Then what do you mean, they toyed with me? By sending me into the past?”

  He didn’t answer. I clutched the book again to my chest with one hand. It was a wonder Jurij hadn’t taken me by the shoulders and shaken the answer out of me, because that’s what I was considering doing now.

  Is this what those women who assaulted their men after the edict dissolving marriages felt? The desire to hurt even those you love just because they don’t act exactly how you want them to? Violence is a scary thing. The little elf queen knew nothing of it. “Ailill,” I said, willing my heartbeat to slow, “what happened to you during that month you were gone? Why does no one seem to remember it but me?”

  “Does a dreamer remember his dream after he has finally wakened from it?” An echo of a smile glinted across Ailill’s face briefly, but it was hollow. “They toy with me, too. With all of us.”