Maria Isabel Pita

by As Above, So Below

  The conflicting currents of respect and hatred made it impossible for her to think straight and calmly rise above the situation. All she could do was sit on the edge of her bed petting the large black cat her lover had given her, or rather holding him so tightly that despite the pleasure he derived from her passionate attention he was forced to meow in protest. When there was finally a long silence outside her door she opened it a crack and peered out at the young men casually leaning against the walls around it.

  “Are you sure the prince knows that I’ve asked to see him?” she inquired. Their faces were expressionless because they couldn’t be sure whether the prince was protecting her or imprisoning her. She also suspected the thought had crossed all their minds that if they ever fell ill and Landru couldn’t help them that it wouldn’t hurt to let her try.

  “He knows,” one of them reassured her almost kindly.

  There was nothing more she could do, so she closed the door again and returned to stroking the purring creature on her bed. She had healed a little boy yet every night she tortured a grown man. It made no sense at all.

  Megran came to see her whenever she could get away from the kitchen but she didn’t have much to say. She was unusually pale lately and covered in perspiration. Her skin resembled wet dough and Mirabel knew it was her heart struggling with the mountain of fat in which the years had buried it.

  She had not seen Landru since that fateful morning but he was normally so quiet and reserved, keeping to himself as much as possible when he wasn’t with patients, that she had no idea how he felt about what had happened. She sensed, however, that he was not pleased and that what she had done had somehow threatened the roots of his beliefs.

  Yet at least one thing was clear as never before and it offered her a vague comfort in the midst of all her troubled uncertainty. She was, without a doubt, her father’s daughter. Some of his luminous power flowed in her veins along with her mother’s sensual sap. She had also discovered that, like Janlay, she was a seamstress, only it was living flesh she had the ability to sew back together.

  *

  Mirabel received two other guests besides Megran during her confinement—a servant of the Green who came by several times bearing yet more gifts from Ebonlee’s grateful parents, and the White Lord. She had not dined alone the last three nights. The White Lord glided into her room in the evening on the crescent moon of his smile and a modest retinue of servants drifted in behind him. Swiftly and efficiently they set up a wooden trestle table, covered it with a snowy cloth and spread upon it exquisite culinary creations, some still simmering in their own juices, others jeweled by moisture, the curving column of a wine jug always rising in their center. Then they departed as silently as they had entered.

  Mirabel was certain the prince knew about these visits, the guards he had posted were certain to tell him. That he didn’t seem to care deeply troubled her, so much so that she let the White Lord kiss the back of her hand and then her palm and then, as if this was the natural progression, her lips. He performed this ritual as a greeting, as a farewell and between every course on the table’s gradually ravaged landscape.

  They sat on small stools across from each other and, on the third night of his visit, after her third glass of wine, bemoaning her melancholy was so enjoyable it was almost mysteriously justified. “Why has he locked me up in here?” she mused out loud.

  “I don’t know but it hardly seems fair, does it? You did nothing wrong.”

  “Perhaps I did…”

  “Would it have been better if little Ebonlee died?” He reached for her hand and drew her toward him across the table and his hold on her felt like an inevitable, steadying force she had no choice but to succumb to. His lips tasted as cool as her anger for the prince was painfully hot.

  “Of course not,” she responded after a breathless moment, reclaiming her hand and shifting guiltily on her stool.

  “Then why is he punishing you?”

  “He is not punishing me.” She scowled into the miniature forest of potted plants surrounding them. “He is protecting me from everyone until—”

  “Are you sure he isn’t jealous of your power?”

  Mirabel gasped as if he had suddenly stabbed her. The suggestion sank like a blade into the most vulnerable part of her—the part of her that for some time now had feared this might be true and had no desire to live if it was.

  “I see you have considered the possibility. And it will not end here.” He twisted the metaphorical knife. “The tale has already spread to other keeps. Soon the entire kingdom will know about you.”

  “Oh, Lords, no!” She leapt to her feet in terror but there was nowhere to run. Her one refuge—above the world in the arms of her dark prince—was denied her.

  “Alone you do not stand a chance,” he continued remorselessly. “You will be buffeted from side to side until the king himself is forced to decide that the only way to restore peace in the land is to do away with the problem.”

  “What do you mean? What would he do?”

  “Kill you, Mirabel. Sooner or later, for the good of the kingdom,” he sneered, “you and your unique gift will have to be buried.”

  “The prince would never let that happen!”

  “Why?” He used her own favorite word against her.

  “Because he loves me!” she confessed like a warm gush of blood pouring straight from her heart beneath his stabbing statements.

  “Then why are you dining with me?” His impenetrably dark eyes seemed to swallow the way she had perceived everything.

  She couldn’t look away. “I don’t know… I had no choice…”

  “You could have sent me away.” His voice was very soft and yet his stare was so hard she felt like a dying plant supported by a rod thrust into the ground beside it. Suddenly she longed to twine herself around his strength and support. Only her heart leapt uncomfortably in her chest like a speared fish gasping for the vital element missing from her life—Loric’s love.

  “Do you wish me to leave, Mirabel?”

  “No…”

  “I could easily find another lady to share my meals.”

  It was the fact that he always called her a lady, combined with Loric’s indifference for the last three nights, that undid her. When he rose abruptly and lifted her up in his arms she had no defense prepared against him.

  “The prince is not protecting you, Mirabel. He is judging you!” he whispered intently. “But I will protect you.” He laid her across the bed.

  *

  On the sixth night Loric finally sent for her. She could scarcely believe it when one of the sentinels outside her room knocked politely. When she flung the door open he informed her, smiling, that the prince wished to see her now.

  As she washed her face and combed her hair her cat, Sun-Eyes, watched her sullenly from the bed. He knew she was leaving him and he had probably let himself hope that would never happen again. Mirabel made soft consoling noises as she nervously laced her bodice. The flow of time was the one unraveling string that didn’t interest her pet—his sharp golden vision wasn’t even aware of it. When frustration had made her feel like clawing up the curtains the way Sun-Eyes did when he was upset with her, she had longed for his mindless ability to live completely in the moment. And yet that was also positively the last thing she wanted—to give up thinking and dreaming. Thoughts had been her best friends most of her life and she had recently concluded the true nature of the world in which she lived was mysteriously buried in the dark brown seeds of her eyes. Her vision planted endless impressions inside her that branched out into concepts and flowered as her emotions.

  At last the prince wanted to see her again! It was actually a very brief time she had spent away from him, yet already everything they had done together felt like a vivid dream. There were no bruises on her body to prove to her that their fierce passion for each other was real and not merely her imagination. Her excitement as she prepared to see him was more intense than it had been the night he took her
for the first time, for she knew now what he could do and the indescribable things he could make her feel. Until the senses had experienced it, there was no way for the mind to conceive of such blinding intensity. Even now it was difficult for her mind to hold on to the violent memories.

  Slipping on her leather sandals, Mirabel realized she was trembling with nervous fury. He had even denied her the sanctuary of her gardens these last few days! She had lived just like her cat, locked up alone in a room without his tender flesh to sink her nails into. She had been preparing to bathe yet again in her small tub when the guard knocked on her door. Thank the Lords for Megran, who had made sure she had hot water as often as she wanted it, and she herself had stored plenty of sweet-scented herbs in her wooden chest. Sun-Eyes had looked down at her skeptically from the tub’s rim as she enjoyed basking in the fragrant water, every few moments licking a different part of his anatomy to imitate her activity as best he could.

  Now that she was about to see the prince, she could face her terrible fear that his feelings for her had changed. And the worse part of it was that he had the right to be angry with her. She should never have let the White Lord into her room. She went over what had happened that night over and over in her mind, desperately wishing she had not been so trusting. But the deep, dark waves of the wine he had poured for her had made it feel perfectly natural when he lifted her up into his arms, like a pleasant current helping her over to the bed’s soft shore. And when she had seen him floating over her, she had giggled as she noticed that another, more urgent current had tugged his linen skirt away. But when she’d realized that he was attempting to erect his personal tower inside her, she’d rolled away from him, gasping and laughing incredulously at the way her head was swimming. Only one lucid thought had flashed in her mind like a fish fleeing muddied water—he had drugged her wine!

  With the same inner vision Mirabel had used to cure Ebonlee she distinctly perceived a small amount of another substance hiding behind the wine’s generous warmth like a calculatingly mischievous child hiding behind a lady’s full, red skirts. Her heart caught chilling glimpses of it and after a moment she managed to recognize the substance even though it had never traveled down the paths of her veins before—the Herb of Grace. It was a rude shock to discover its presence in her blood and it was echoed by the one she got when she rolled off the bed onto the hard wooden floor.

  “Stop running from me,” the White Lord demanded, kneeling beside her.

  “I can’t even walk, much less run, my lord…you put rue in my wine,” she accused him mildly, much too pleasantly relaxed to manage being angry.

  “You don’t have to walk or run.” He slipped his hands beneath her skirt and spread her legs. “Together we can fly.”

  “I fly only with the prince!” she replied hotly.

  “You are mine now, Mirabel.” He thrust his knee between her thighs so she couldn’t seal them closed. “Don’t fool yourself. He will never claim you. Only I can give you a life. Whatever promises he has made to you he will not keep. Visioncrest will always come first for him. He will never let anything get in its way, not even his own desires. He knows it would divide the keep in half if he took you as his own. He knows it would threaten all the growth and stability he has brought to his part of the realm and he will never let that happen.”

  He unlaced her bodice even as he undid all her dreams so that she lay as if dead, unable to stop him. If what he said was true, then this was the only comfort left her, so why should she resist? But her lips did not respond to his when he kissed her and the breasts he had freed from her bodice might as well have been cold mounds of snow for all she felt when he squeezed and caressed them. Nothing inside her melted at his touch and yet she allowed him inside her anyway. She felt nothing, really, yet he had stripped her of any reason to resist him.

  She fell asleep right on the floor where he left her a short time later. She didn’t awaken until the soft morning light kissed her eyelids, then she saw with relief that the pressure on her chest was not an aftereffect of the drug but only Sun-Eyes sitting on top of her. He stared down at her in concern as he pawed her with a gentle rhythm, his claws considerately sheathed.

  It took her a few moments to sit up and to note the fact that the table and stools and everything else the White Lord had brought with him were gone, which meant his servants had seen her lying half naked on the floor. All the lords and ladies of the White Tower probably knew about it by now, yet she suspected that his honor would suffer as well if the story actually circulated like fresh blood through the keep’s gossip-pumping heart. Perhaps, she fervently hoped, his people would keep what they had seen a secret. It would be extremely annoying for everyone to find out about an experience she scarcely remembered herself.

  The rue he had slipped into her wine had relaxed her muscles and sedated her to the point where his presence inside her felt like nothing more than a vivid dream she was having as she tossed and turned restlessly. That much she recalled—he had not simply lain on top of her the whole time. He had used her in a variety of positions yet he had been so silent the whole time and she had been so strangely numb, he might as well have been her own restless and dissatisfied imagination.

  The experience meant nothing to Mirabel. Her one concern was the same as when she had first arrived at Visioncrest. What would the prince think? Everything else was irrelevant. His reaction was more important to her even than the weather and it certainly looked as if a storm was brewing, and all because she had saved a little boy’s life. However, she could blame no one but herself for what had happened with the White Lord.

  As she left her room—flanked by the prince’s guards—Mirabel braced herself inside as she attempted to get at the root of her behavior. It was very simple, really—doubt. The White Lord had slipped into her on doubt’s dark path. Doubt had struck at the very foundation of her being—her love for Loric—and from there it had spread swiftly, drying up all her positive feelings—all her sensitive, budding hopes for the future—until her limbs were nothing but cut flowers’ dead stems in another man’s hands. She had not been strong enough to sustain her faith in Loric’s love.

  Darmond had told her she didn’t need to worry yet, that she was special enough to hold on to the prince for a few more years, and she realized now that this idle comment had been seriously worrying her ever since. Obviously people’s remarks affected her more than she cared to believe. Their words were seeds that fell into her awareness and if she wasn’t careful they could sprout somewhere inside her, unseen, and strangle her most beautiful feelings when she least expected it. It occurred to her then for the first time that, from now on, it was going to be necessary to watch out for negative reactions inside herself as closely as she did for choking weeds in the garden.

  Chapter Seven

  The fireplace was black and cold. The silver crescent tables were empty. The floor gleamed like a frozen lake at midnight in which a mighty stag had drowned—the prince’s favorite chair of curved antlers sat in the middle of the room bare of its green cushions. Mirabel’s first thought was that his serving women had taken them to be cleaned. Her second thought was that there was something very wrong. Her third impression was that the man stepped out of nowhere.

  He crossed his arms in front of him as if to defend himself from her incredulous stare. “Hello, Mirabel,” he said in the deep, quiet voice she had never forgotten.

  She was stunned. It was the man she had seen all those years ago when she was still just a little girl and had wandered out to play in the snow without her mother knowing. “Is it you?” she demanded in a breathless whisper.

  “I’m pleased you haven’t forgotten me, little one.”

  The lines framing his nose and mouth were narrow chasms that deepened when he smiled in a way she now knew could be very dangerous for her. She had not been able to fully appreciate when she was an innocent little girl how intensely handsome he was.

  “You’re a regular little butterfly these days, Mirab
el, fluttering from stamen to stamen. You had best watch out for frogs.”

  “Why have you always cared what happens to me?” Approaching him, she nearly slipped on the polished floor just as she had on the frozen snow all those years ago. “Are you a friend of my father’s?”

  “Let’s just say I appreciate his weaknesses.”

  “Where is Loric?” She resisted the urge to caress his black shirt, which merged with his pants in such a way she couldn’t distinguish where one ended and the other began. She knew that to touch him would throw her even more off balance.

  “I’m here.” The prince abruptly stepped through a narrow doorway she had never noticed before, concealed as it was by a tall potted plant.

  Mirabel’s eyes drank him up like parched soil.

  The other man uncrossed his arms and her attention flew back to him.

  His blue eyes blazed into hers over his dim smile. His hair was cut short like her father’s but it wasn’t black—it was a dark, softly layered gold.

  She looked back at Loric. He was staring at his visitor with clenched fists.

  “I seem to find myself in the same position as your lustful merchant,” the prince informed her and then addressed the Lord, “You won’t force her, just as I didn’t, but seducing her certainly isn’t beyond you, even though you know she’s not ready.”

  “Ready for what?” she demanded.

  Loric met her eyes and held them with all the longing she felt for him. “To die.”

  “Your lover has a cruel way of putting things,” the man she had first seen out in the snow on a winter twilight long ago remarked. “But then it’s clear that his way of…putting things excites you.”

  “You mean I wouldn’t really die?” More than ever she believed in getting straight to the point.