by Rose, Aubrey
He shuddered over me in what I knew was his release. I moaned, but no sound came out. The fire had died to embers and Eliot lay by my side, stroking my hair.
He looked at me as though he was uncertain of something. I sat up on the side of the bed.
"What are you doing?" Eliot asked.
"We have to leave," I said. "Follow me."
All of the rooms in the castle were the same as I walked through them, and it was only my newfound confidence that reminded me that I was still dreaming.
We went down the stairs, down to the baths that were built up around the hot springs underneath Eliot's castle. The lights of the torches were shining all around us, the gilded edges of the tub glittering. The pools of the baths were filled with white rose petals floating on the top of the water. It was a sea of white, almost like snow on top of the water.
I walked toward the pool, unconscious of my nakedness. The water glinted in the torchlight where the petals separated. Welcoming me.
I took one step in. I could feel Eliot's breath on my neck, urging me forward. He did not touch me, but his presence was calming. My feet were warmed by the hot water of the springs. I took another step forward, and when I looked down I gasped.
The white rose petals were turning red, the color spreading outward from my feet.
"Forward," Eliot whispered, his voice faint. I stepped in farther, the water now up to my waist. My hand trailed through the rose petals and everywhere I touched the white petals turned a dark, dark red. Ripples of color spread outward from my body.
I could hear the soft murmurs of water behind me as Eliot followed me down into the baths.
"Don't look back," he said. "Whatever you do, don't look back."
One more step, and my chest was submerged. This was as deep as the baths went, but as I looked forward and saw the white petals transforming, turning red, panic seized me. My chest seemed compressed, unable to draw enough air. My feet slid across the bottom of the pool, the tile slippery, and for a moment I was so dizzy that I fell forward, losing my balance. I thought that I would drown.
"Eliot!" I caught my balance, my arms spread out in the rose petals which were now almost all red.
"It's alright," I heard him say, but his voice was farther away than before.
"Eliot!" His name echoed off of the walls of the baths, ringing again in my ears, calling out. I couldn't stay in the water without him. I needed him, I needed him there—
"ELIOT!"
My hands splashed the rose petals as I spun around to hold onto him. My prince. My protector.
He was gone. The light of the torches grew dim, and I could hear a whisper of his voice trailing away through the cavernous baths.
"Farewell," he said.
I raised my hands up to reach out, and saw that they were covered in blood. I looked down. The bathwater around me had turned to blood, the rose petals awash in dark scarlet. I screamed. Hands thrashing, I tried to move backwards, to get out of the baths, but the steps seemed no nearer as I splashed through the red petals.
"Don't look back," I heard the whisper say, and then the bottom of the baths fell away from under my feet. I was drowning, drowning—
I woke up panting, my fingers clutching the sheets damply. Beside me, Eliot slept on. I rolled to his side and held on to him, and he put his arm around me sleepily, drawing me close.
"Don't leave me," I whispered, so softly that he couldn't hear it even in his dreams.
It's easy to slay dragons. It's harder when they're in your mind. If I was living in a fairy tale, why were my nights filled with terror?
Eliot held me every night as though he wanted to make love to me. I reached out to him but pulled back always before temptation could overcome me, although I was not sure what I was afraid of. We had slept together already, many times. The first time after the attack was my first time, and Eliot made it gentle. The time after, I thought things would be different, but still he held me delicately, as though I were a rare orchid he had transported from its warm environment. Opening my petals softly.
When I retreated away from him, though, he made no attempt to keep me in his bed. His tenderness both comforted and alarmed me. Could the passion between us have been taken away so easily? I grew frightened to tempt him, for fear that he would not even notice me. I still had secrets and so did he, and those secrets, ugly and worming, slipped into the space between us.
Now every night in this Hungarian castle was filled with nightmares of my mother's death, of Clare's death, of my own. Filled with blood and pain. Even Eliot's arms could not keep away the bad dreams. I was living like a princess. An enchanted castle. A handsome prince. How could I not be grateful? And yet, I knew in my heart that I was no princess, that if Eliot tried to fit a glass slipper onto my foot it would be the wrong size, that I was only pretending. I was holding a mask up to my face that was beginning to slip, and soon everyone would know the truth, if they didn't know already. Eliot would know the truth, and he would cast me aside like any other young stupid girl who wanted more than she deserved.
So I held my secrets close to my heart, and when the dragons breathed fire down my neck I clenched my teeth and tried to forget that I wasn't happy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eliot
“Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.”
Alfred North Whitehead
Eliot was in his study, struggling. The proof was impossible.
No. Not impossible. That would be better. If it were impossible, if he could prove that it was impossible, then he would be done. But every avenue he tried, every method he used, led only to uncertainty. He'd tried manipulating the equations in every way he could think of, and nothing worked.
"Meow!"
Lucky jumped up onto his desk.
"Shoo, cat," Eliot said absentmindedly, running his finger over the one line of the proof that had broken down under scrutiny and scratching absentmindedly at the scar running down his face.
"Meow." Lucky walked across the papers and sat squarely on top of Eliot's notebook. He licked his chops, his whiskers twitching, and waited to be petted.
Eliot sighed and leaned back in his chair. He stroked Lucky on the head and the little gray cat rubbed against his fingers eagerly.
"Good morning." Brynn stood in the doorway. Her eyes looked red around the rims. He knew she hadn't been sleeping well. While she slept, she whimpered and moaned. Eliot sometimes rubbed her back until she stopped making noises, but still she would toss and turn until he wrapped his arm around her tightly. Then she would wake with a frown on her face.
This morning her hair was mussed up on one side, strands of wavy red hair falling forward onto her cheeks. Her green flannel pajama shirt was hanging off of one of her shoulders, exposing her collarbone slightly under the mass of hair. She yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her fist.
"You look stunning," Eliot said, beaming.
"Right. I don't know if I would use the word stunning. Maybe shocking. Terror-inducing. Is that what you were going for?"
"Come here, beautiful." Eliot tugged her arm and pulled her onto his lap. "Distract me from this horrible proof."
"Is Lucky helping you with your work?" Brynn scratched Lucky under the chin until he started purring, then leaned back into Eliot.
"He's helping me forget how badly this is coming along," he said. "Cats don't seem to care too much about mathematical theorems."
"That's why they're so happy," Brynn said. She pulled the paper out from under Lucky's paw. Lucky licked at the pads of his paw, irritated at having been displaced. Brynn studied the page. "Linear algebra?"
"I'm working with matrices as my transformation function," he said. "It's a pretty straightforward translation from the equations to the matrix. I was hoping that it would help."
"Let me guess, it didn't?" Brynn let the paper fall back to the desk. Near the bottom were a number of substitutions, all of them scribbled out with increasing
ly frustrated pen marks.
Eliot laughed bitterly.
"If I was a younger man, I'd turn away from this career and take up gardening."
"Don't beat yourself up over it," Brynn said.
"The Academy board has asked to speak with me," Eliot said. It was hard to meet Brynn's inquisitive eyes. "To see if they'll let me stay on."
"Why wouldn't they?"
"The problem isn't solved, and my reputation here is causing more of a stir than they had expected."
"But you didn't do anything!" Brynn flushed in anger.
"They don't know that," Eliot said, defending the board despite himself. "They're risking a lot, and if I don't produce any results, they'll drop me."
"Do you really care? You don't need the money, right?" Her voice had a strange tone to it.
"No, it's not that. It's just..." How could he explain? "Brynn, when I was younger, I was brilliant. Every problem I touched...the solution came easily to me. Like I was wading through water. Now I'm stuck in mud."
"You'll get it," she said.
"Maybe."
She had so much faith in him. He found it hard to find the same faith in himself.
Brynn stood, leaning forward to pet Lucky. The tiny ball of light gray fur rolled onto his back and closed his eyes contentedly. She yawned again, this time against her shoulder, and sighed deeply, still scratching the kitten's belly.
She was so tired. Poor Brynn. He had been so mired in his own issues that he hadn't reached out to her. Guilt washed over him.
"What's wrong? More nightmares?"
"No. I mean yes, but no. That's not the problem." Brynn's brows pinched together above her nose. "I tried to tell you earlier."
"What is it?"
Brynn swallowed, looking unsure about whether or not to speak.
"My grandmother. She just lost her insurance for the medication she needs, and she doesn't have the money to pay for it."
"How much does she need?"
Brynn looked up at him, her eyes glazed with tears.
"It's a lot. Thousands of dollars. I didn't want to ask you—"
Eliot stood and swept Brynn into his arms, kissing her on the top of the head.
"Brynn, don't ever hesitate to ask for that."
"But it's so much!" She fidgeted in his arms and he buried his face in her beautiful hair.
"Money's no good sitting in the bank doing nothing. If I had known that was what was worrying you..."
"I don't want to be a burden. I don't want you to think that I'm just here for that."
"For what?"
"Because you're rich. I don't want to owe you."
Eliot laughed. He kissed her nose, her cheek, her ear.
"I owe you more than I can say," he said.
"You know what I mean," Brynn said quietly.
"And you know that I love you," he said. "Anything you want, anything I can give, I give it gladly."
Brynn didn't say anything, but when Eliot looked down at her face, he saw that she was choked up. Embarrassed at making her embarrassed, he pulled her in closely for another hug.
"Now I have to get back to being stuck on this problem. Can you get Lucky off of my papers?"
"Lucky, come here." Brynn picked up the tiny cat, who promptly nestled into her arms and began a loud purr.
"I'll teach him some math," Brynn said. She crossed the study in a few steps and stopped in front of the window. The early morning chill had left a fog on the glass, and she used one finger to draw shapes on the windowpane.
"This is a circle. This is a square. This is a triangle." Eliot pulled his chair back up to his work, but the sight of Brynn's silhouette against the pale light coming in through the window gave him pause. He let his eyes travel over the line of her body, over the sensual curves of her hips that could be seen only faintly through the robe.
"Let's add some smaller triangles to the sides," she said, using her pinky finger to draw the lines in. Her voice grew fainter, more absentminded, as she drew. "Then some more smaller triangles, and more, infinitely many."
"Do you know what shape that is?" she whispered, kissing the top of Lucky's head. Lucky's ear twitched, but there was no other sign that he knew the answer to her question, and she answered it for him. "That's a Koch snowflake!"
Eliot's mouth twitched upward into a grin. He tapped his pen on the edge of the table. Lucky's ear twitched again at the noise.
"Pretty advanced stuff for a first lesson," he said.
"You're supposed to be working." Brynn didn't even turn around from the window; she kept drawing her triangles.
"I'm working," he said. "It's the proof that isn't working. Snowflakes in June?"
"It's my favorite shape," Brynn said. She continued to add in triangles, smaller and smaller, until she was drawing them with just her fingernail.
"Why? Because it looks like a snowflake?"
"No". Lucky licked her chin and she tossed her hair behind her head, defiantly, it seems. "Because it's bounded. I remember the first time I learned about them—the teacher drew a circle around the first triangle and said that the snowflake would always fit inside. The area is finite. But the perimeter—"
"The perimeter is infinite."
"It's infinity inside of something that isn't infinite. Like the Gabriel's Horn paradox. It goes on forever and ever inside of a little tiny nothing."
"It's a pretty nice paradox," Eliot said. "Your finger will run out of space on that window soon."
"I know it's just because we're thinking about it wrong," Brynn said, still drawing. She concentrated on the triangles, her tongue poking slightly between her lips. Eliot wanted to kiss her. "A line doesn't have any kind of dimension, not even a molecule wide. We can't think about things in the right way to understand them. That's why math is so nice. It gives us a different way of thinking about things. More abstract."
"That's why people hate math," Eliot said. Even his students who were math majors objected sometimes. Too abstract. Too non-intuitive. Too paradoxical.
"They're wrong," Brynn said, laughing. "It's beautiful. And there is no paradox, is there?" She reached up and added a tiny triangle onto the top of the snowflake. "We're just thinking in the wrong dimension."
"Would you like me to make you pancakes for breakfast?" Eliot asked. "They'll have finite area, I promise."
"I'd rather have infinite pancakes," Brynn said, "but I have to go. I'm supposed to meet Csilla's mom at the police station."
"Oh, of course," Eliot said. He did not know what else to say, so he hugged her close. He wanted to do more, to say more, but he couldn't find the words.
"Thank you," Brynn said. "I'll be back sometime later today." She gave a small smile. "I expect you to have the proof completely solved by then!"
"I'll do my best," Eliot said. "I love you."
"I love you too."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Brynn
Brynn went into the office. Csilla's mom was there. She didn't seem drunk, although there were bags under her eyes, covered with heavy makeup.
"Mrs. Deveny?"
She saw me looking at her and turned away too quickly.
She motioned for me to follow her back, and I did, down the hallway where people turned to look at me. I kept my face turned straight ahead. I didn't know if they recognized me as the girl from the tabloids, or if they had been talking about me behind my back.
Mrs. Deveny led the way back to the end of the hall and down the stairs. The stairway was green with fluorescent light, and we came down into a room lit only by emergency lights. Mrs. Deveny flipped the switch and the lamps flickered on overhead, their cold light alien and sterile as a hospital's. The room was larger than I had expected - the shelves were taller than my head, and stretched back far enough that I thought the room might take up the entire space below the police station. All of the shelves were packed full with cardboard boxes behind a metal grating.
"We run the filing offices for everyone in Budapest," she said, seeing
my surprise. "There's a backlog of information from solved and unsolved cases."
"You don't put anything online?"
"We try," she said. "Nowadays. When was your mother killed?"
"Thirteen years ago," I said. My voice sounded shaky. I coughed into my hand and pretended that the burning in my eyes was from the dust that hung in the cold air.
"We didn't start digitizing records until just a few years ago," she said. She ignored the tremble in my voice, for which I was thankful. "The government offices are, as always, behind the times."
She brought me back through the shelves, winding her way along the corridors. My eyes wandered over the names which labeled the boxes, all in Hungarian. Again and again I saw the Hungarian word I'd learned from searching for my mother online: gyilkosság. Murder.
It was as though I'd stumbled upon a gruesome treasure trove, one filled with horrors rather than coins. Mrs. Deveny strode quickly to the center of one aisle and shook her keys from her pocket. Unlocking the fastener on the shelf, she pulled the metal grate open and pushed the front box aside. A cloud of dust rose from the top of the cardboard boxes and hovered in the thin light.
"Two boxes," she said, pulling out the first crate. I swallowed as I read the name on the side of the box. Katalin Tomlin. It made me shudder. Even seeing her name on the gravestone had not affected me so much. I hoped that Mrs. Deveny would leave me alone. I couldn't imagine digging through the boxes of evidence for my mother's murder with her standing over me.
"You take one, I'll take the other," she said. "There's a table in the back. You can look at the evidence there."
I walked, carrying the box in front of me. It carried all my mother's secrets—the secret to how she was killed. I thought to myself that perhaps I would find some kind of clue that would lead me to the killer. Then I thought that I was being silly.