He tried to break the kiss and pull away in order to demand an answer, but Roald’s hold didn’t slacken and in fact felt a bit painful. The kiss, Alarick realized, was also increasing in ferocity, so that it seemed as if Roald were devouring him. Alarick’s jaw ached once panic began to take hold of his mind, as Roald’s mouth and tongue had forced it wide open and held it open, and Alarick could feel saliva trickle down his chin and his throat. He started to push against Roald, struggling in earnest now, his earlier moans of pleasure replaced by muffled protests. His lover didn’t seem to realize what was happening; indeed, Alarick wasn’t sure that it really was Roald holding him now despite the familiar taste, smell, and feel of the other young man.
Around them, a slight breeze had picked up, and with it, a distant, hollow voice that laughed. Alarick couldn’t rightly tell, for he was now struggling to breathe and couldn’t escape. His eyes flew open, and it was all he could do to stare at the sun in growing terror, the mocking laughter now sounding as though it were coming from Roald.
Stop! Let go, you bastard!
The vines tightened around them and then gave a mighty tug. The two youths tumbled backward and fell into the well. No—only Alarick tumbled into the mossy darkness. Where was Roald? Was that him laughing from some great distance? The well was small on the outside, but once he’d fallen in, Alarick realized that the interior was large enough so that a person tumbling down it wouldn’t even touch its walls.
A few times, Alarick caught sight of the well’s opening, which shrank bit by bit, and Roald’s silhouette broke through the light as Roald peered into the well.
“No! This isn’t fair!” Alarick cried as watery darkness engulfed him, and in a final desperate and useless move, he threw a hand out for Roald to take hold. The words that came out of him weren’t the ones he wanted, either. Cries of help burst through his lips but instead turned into a complaint against injustice. Cold, wet darkness shrouded Alarick as he sank to the bottom, the well’s opening now a faint and distant dot of light. Roald’s silhouette had vanished, and the well sighed.
You got your ridiculous locket back. You saved him from a curse. How much luckier did you expect to be?
Alarick awoke with a little gasp of surprise, and he sensed that morning was just about to break. He looked around him, frantic and shivering, the spectral remains of sleep and his dream fading with every blink of his eyes. It was still dark, and after a moment, his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He found himself alone in the cottage’s bedroom, surrounded by nothing but empty beds—six of them. He listened to his heart’s desperate hammering calm down along with his breathing. Once his mind had fully caught up with him, he took a deep, shuddering breath and ran a hand through his hair.
“That was a strange dream,” he said, rubbing his eyes, and the watcher in the wood nodded knowingly. Then Alarick remembered Roald and felt his spirits sink again. “I don’t even know which is preferable,” he added, this time blinking away the gathering tears when the feeling of crippling loneliness overcame him. “Waking up to this or dreaming of punishment.”
The wooden man smiled faintly and then breathed in, savoring the doubt and fear that rippled out of the figure on the bed. This boy appeared to be showing promise as a student, the watcher noted. His lessons would prove to be a real pleasure, his mind a sweet and tempting fruit to pluck, and what a happy coincidence it was for him to end up in the forest, vulnerable and lost. It had been a long time since the path had led another unwary person to the cottage. That last one was rather unsavory in the end, his mind too empty and rotting from drink, his soul blackened with thieving, and the taste of his reason as it was methodically drained away from him was—unappetizing. That this scruffy, filthy man was let out after seven days in a state of complete madness that reduced him to nothing more than a woodland animal revealed everything about the distasteful process. If a cursed cottage could vomit following a horrible meal, it would have.
The watcher had grown quite bored of the solitude and the perpetual cold and darkness that had been his lot in the afterlife, but then again, even he couldn’t remember what it was he’d done that had led to this form of exile. A collection of memories that seemed to come from several men haunted his hours—memories from the distant past, involving black magic, rape, murder, adultery, women…
How many past lives did he lead, anyway? Or was he the result of countless fragments of past lives that had been devoured by the forest and then regurgitated in a cottage taken from nursery tales but was definitely tied to a more sinister purpose? Was he the embodiment of sins committed by long dead men and women?
You’re the combined essence of several dead men and women, absorbed through the years in the light of a hundred candles while alive, and the darkness of countless leaves in death, their minds, their hearts, and their souls shaping your existence now…
Wooden lips pulled back in a grimace, a soft growl escaping wooden teeth. The watcher shook off reminders of his own destiny—or, perhaps, destinies entwined—as he fixed his attention back to the tired prince who’d by now managed to pull himself together by talking himself back to reason.
“Roald’s fine,” Alarick said as he stared at the blankets covering his lower body. “He’ll be all right. He knows how to protect himself. I just hope that he meets with friends, who’ll help him, wherever he is.”
Alarick wasn’t convinced, but hearing himself say those empty words still raised his spirits somewhat even if it was because of nothing more than the comfort of the familiar sound of his voice in a strange cottage.
“Rest, Your Highness.”
It was still much too early for him, and Alarick burrowed back under the sheets for another hour or two of rest. He heard nothing, of course, even if the watcher were to attempt to talk his ear off. The wooden man wasn’t meant to be heard, let alone acknowledged by the living. That was yet another aspect to his curse.
Alarick continued to dream of other tales, those that he’d heard before and had kept close to his heart for whatever reason—sentimentality, perhaps. The fact that they made the sting of childhood loneliness less bitter, at least before he met Roald. Perhaps it was also because Amara told him some of them, sharing them during those moments of distress and isolation, when he felt the most vulnerable. In his dreams, Alarick found that he loved being in them, loved living them if only in his sleeping state, in spite of the minor irritation of odd little accidents happening here and there that somehow tempered the romance. Nothing, it appeared, ever worked out to his satisfaction. In fact, at the end of each nursery tale, he seemed to be worse off than when he began.
“Surely there’s a reason for this,” he told himself as he struggled against stabbing thorns or monstrous teeth, granite coffins or clumsy giants.
And each time, he thought he heard a distant voice shout, “What are you doing in these stories? There’s no room for you here! Get out before you ruin things even more! You’re not the one! You’ll never be the one!”
Then he realized that he was wrong. No, he didn’t hear voices screaming at him to go away. No one told him that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time; he was never told, and circumstances showed him instead. He saw that his dreams unfolded to demonstrate his bad fit. Attempts at rescuing helpless princesses turned ugly, and either the princesses or he himself got killed in the process. Sometimes the entire dream-kingdom went up in flames, all because Alarick simply appeared at the scene.
“What am I doing wrong?” he cried, horror filling him as he watched peasants get slaughtered or flattened by marauding monsters. Gripping his sword, he’d charge headlong into advancing enemy forces, but somehow, the more he fought, the more his enemies’ numbers increased. For every slain monster, three sprang up in its place, wreaking more havoc and crushing more lives.
Get out of here! Get out! Do you want to kill everyone?
That was the answer given to him, and it was all he could do to turn around and fight his way out of one dream—only to tumble
headlong into another. The ancient, web-festooned spinning-wheel creaked back into life, and a new story was spun.
In Alarick’s mind, throughout his misty and horrifying adventures, he also heard another quiet voice urging him on, encouraging him to dream and to enjoy his little escapes despite his increasing reluctance and the obvious disasters he caused by simply being there.
Enjoy them while you can, it said with emphasis.
“How can I enjoy any of these?” he demanded as he stood on a hill in one dream, surveying the burning wreckage of what once was a palace from which he’d tried to rescue a princess. The young lady had perished in the process, of course, because Alarick simply appeared and tried to do good. She’d been shot in the chest with an arrow while attempting to escape with him. The look of shock and bitter recrimination on her face as she sank to the ground, blood blooming rapidly on her chest and trailing down the corner of her mouth, was the last image Alarick had of her.
When the voice remained silent, Alarick looked at the sky and cried, “What am I doing wrong?”
It was a question that wouldn’t be answered, would never be answered, perhaps. Alarick could feel it in his belly, and he looked back in mute helplessness at the palace that slowly vanished in flames.
And when he finally awoke to a brilliant morning—or at least whatever he could gauge given the thick enclosure of trees around the cottage—he was amazed and relieved to find himself healed, all marks of a savage beating gone.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” the man in the wall said.
Alarick, for his part, had jumped out of bed and was now examining himself closely, his mouth hanging open in speechless shock as inch after unmarked inch of skin was bared to his stunned gaze. There were no bruises, no cuts, and he felt no pain anywhere.
The watcher chuckled. “Had your mother been around, she’d scold you for oversleeping. No—had your mother been around as well as sane, she’d scold you for oversleeping. That is, if she even cared enough to bother.” Wood grain shoulders shook as the man in the wall laughed at his own cleverness.
Chapter Twelve
Another day of Roald’s travels came, with him venturing down the southern road, and he came upon an isolated woodland glade—teeming with a variety of rich plant life and a small bubbling brook that cut through it. And there he spotted a marble statue standing near the trees.
He stopped dead and blinked. It was an odd sight, to be sure, for there were no signs of creative efforts anywhere. Roald quickly scanned the immediate area and found no discarded tools, no broken stone—absolutely nothing that might have suggested previous activity taking place in that small patch of land. Seeing as how the statue stood at a height that was true to life, Roald could only imagine the weight of the whole piece and the efforts that surely would have been required to move it from one place to another. That the artist or whoever was responsible for placing the statue there chose such an isolated and lonely spot for the marble figure to spend its hours gave Roald nothing else to go by. It was a puzzle from start to finish, but perhaps there could also be a less pragmatic reason behind this strange presence.
“Another unhappy mortal punished by the gods, I suppose,” he said. “Why aren’t there people here to comfort him, though? Has he been abandoned?”
He walked up to the statue and gazed at it critically. The figure, which was that of a boy near the end of his adolescence, was slight of build, but its musculature was clearly showing signs of development. It stood with its head turned up as though it was caught glancing up at the sky when it was transformed. Its expression was that of calm intelligence with a hint of wistful longing, and Roald thought that were the statue alive, he was sure that the figure would be rather striking in appearance.
Roald froze. “Wait a moment,” he murmured as he turned his face away and shut his eyes. Something had just whispered in his mind, a vague, vague touch along its fringes, stirring shadows from his past. He stood there for a moment, desperate and exasperated as he fought to keep those embers alive, but they seemed to flicker with a dying fire for a second or two before fading again. They left nothing in their wake but an odd and insistent stirring in Roald’s stomach as well as a thought—distant, improbable perhaps, but no less emphatic in its desire to be acknowledged—that remained nebulous but most certainly significant.
Familiarity? Yes, that was it. For the briefest of moments, the feeling of familiarity swept over Roald, and he didn’t know what it meant or where it came from.
“Have I been here before?” he asked, this time opening his eyes and frowning at the clusters of forget-me-nots near his feet. A quick sweep of the area around the statue revealed a scattered collection of those little flowers, all mingling with other wildflowers in a variety of brilliant colors. Against such a backdrop of vivid hues, the forget-me-nots seemed to shrink in the background with their soft blue color, but it was this curious calm in the midst of a riot of exuberant shades that drew Roald’s attention to them all the more.
No, Roald had never been in that woodland glade before. Of that he was now sure; however, the feeling of familiarity remained, and it was all he could do to attempt to trace its path in a slim hope of understanding its source. His attempts led him nowhere, for beyond the recent days, he could find nothing but darkness and void.
He slowly stepped back, unable to take his eyes off the marble figure before him. The statue’s legs were encased in rough stone up to the calves, with one leg bent at the knee as though the figure were in the process of walking when it was captured and frozen forever in this state. A long, narrow sheet wound airily around it as a soft scarf would when billowing in the breeze, but for the most part, the figure was naked.
There was a lack of self-consciousness in the statue’s pose that struck Roald—a general casualness that spoke of confidence and a deep-seated strength that went beyond what was physical. A closer look at the face only served to confirm that in the Roald’s eyes, and he nodded knowingly.
“I’d imagine any of the local folks telling me one troubling story after another regarding your plight. I can hear them tell me that you angered one of the gods,” he said, half-expecting the marble youth to say something in return, but the statue remained silent. “But I’ll play along and stretch their story further. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them desired you, and you were punished for something you can’t help.”
He felt faint warmth spread through his face as he spoke, but he also felt no shame in what he’d said or of the fact that he was communicating with a marble figure standing in the middle of an isolated glade. His eyes still fixed on the figure, Roald decided that the marble boy truly was pleasing to the eyes and added, “You are beautiful.”
Another twinge in his belly—another pang of familiarity. Was it the feeling of admiration that was it? Was it the statue itself? What it represented, perhaps? Roald tried to determine what it was the statue, indeed, stood for, and he could think of nothing. Stunning and ageless, the marble youth stood for only the heavens knew how long, placed there to mark an event or serve as a memorial of a young man long gone.
With a heavy sigh, Roald realized that he was nowhere nearer the answers to any of his questions, but he held on to that feeling and refused to let it go. Perhaps if he were to allow it to grow in his mind and in his heart, it would lead to…
Roald shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. He didn’t know where it would lead to.
“I like the thought of you being punished by the gods for something you can’t help. How cruel of me to say so, but I can’t help but be drawn to it somehow. It’s—it feels—right, though I don’t know why.” He tried to imagine a lad blessed with beauty and maybe even more than that, envied and despised by a being who was far, far greater than he. What irony it was, indeed, that the gods would crave certain perfections that eluded them, for all their powers. Perhaps that was the tragedy of their existence, that their immortality was nothing more than a painful, infinite extension of
petty concerns that surely would have destroyed mortals in a breath. Silence met his words, but Roald pressed on. “It’s a bit harsh being caught out here and being exposed to the weather. But—I suppose you wouldn’t feel a thing.”
The clouds shifted above, partially obscuring the sun before moving again. Soft shadows were thrown on the statue’s face, and Roald thought that he saw it frown. He couldn’t help but smile faintly at the effects.
“It looks like you do,” he said, a little surprised at his own reaction to the minor miracle. He paused and looked around. The trees that surrounded them seemed too thick, with shrubbery covering up every inch of ground between them.
“There’s no place where I can move you right now,” he said, oddly compelled to speak in apologetic tones. If the statue were truly a young man who’d been cursed, Roald must be feeling the effects of the unfair punishment, for he couldn’t help but talk to the marble figure as if it truly were alive and it could hear him. The shadows moved on the statue’s face yet again, and it looked as though a small, sheepish smile curled the corners of its mouth. “I think you’ll have to put up with the weather until someone does find a better place for you.”
The branches of nearby trees swayed lightly in the wind, and the statue seemed to nod as well. Roald studied it for another moment, and his mind settled itself on the doomed willow tree and the unfortunate pond, and he felt strangely moved.
“I’ll return,” he said, bowing, before turning and hurrying off through the trees, bursting out at the other side to find himself standing in a small field choked with wildflowers.
And there he busied himself, falling to his knees as he pulled out brilliant blooms that caught his fancy, gathering what he could fit into two hands. When he couldn’t hold any more, he stumbled to his feet and hurried back to the statue, stopping once to pick up a broken and faded pot that littered the side of a dirt road. It was an odd thing, Roald thought, to find it in the middle of nowhere. He glanced around and found nothing else that seemed out of place, but he decided that this broken pot must have fallen off a traveling wagon sometime ago. It could very well have been discarded by an individual on foot, too, but Roald didn’t care to think any more about particulars.
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