Maria Isabel Pita

by As Above, So Below

  The lords took their places around the bed, which had been moved to the center of the room. The Brown Lord and the Green Lord stood at her feet, the Red and the Blue Lords stood across from each other at the level of her womb and the White Lord stood behind her head, looking down the softly curving length of her body. The prince’s place was by her heart and he strode into the room now, his body entirely hidden by a heavy black cloak. His long hair disappeared into its folds and his face was the gray-white of the clouds outside the diamond-paned windows.

  The nobles, incredulous at how much their prince had aged in one night, nevertheless respected the intensity of his grief. It would have been different if Mirabel had died a natural death but it was not the Lords who had called her to them so soon. It was another man who had thrust her into the next world, who had held her naked body in his arms as he penetrated her once and forever. Not one of them dared breathe a word about it to the prince but they all strongly suspected—it was shamefully obvious—that Mirabel had had a lover. Why he would have killed her they could not begin to fathom but no one doubted she was at least partly responsible for what had happened to her.

  It was also highly likely in their minds that she had killed herself, although why a beautiful young woman with everything she could possibly desire should end her own life was impossible to imagine. Nevertheless, she had always been a strange one and, apparently, the prince had not been able to tame her. He had failed in something for the first time. The Red and the Brown Lords had daughters of marriageable age and the idea was already in their heads that one of them might be able to comfort the Master of Visioncrest.

  Loric took his place at Mirabel’s heart, his face so expressionless that when he spoke abruptly, in his normal voice, everyone started. “The princess is not to be buried.”

  There was an awkward silence, as every man present thought he had surely misunderstood him.

  “I am glad no one disagrees,” he added with a grim smile.

  “I disagree, my prince.” There was cold iron in the sheath of the White Lord’s respectful tone.

  Everyone tensed, preparing for a profoundly hostile albeit politely controlled battle of wills between the keep’s highest authorities.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Loric kept his gaze fixed on Mirabel’s lovely face, yet he might as well have been staring out at the mountain landscape, his expression was so oddly impersonal. “She is not to be buried or burned.”

  The Green Lord cleared his throat. “May we ask…?” There was no comfortable way to phrase the question. “What do you wish to do with her instead?” He was a kind man, and he had never forgotten that his youngest son owed his life to the dead girl.

  “She is to remain here in my chambers.”

  The White Lord said evenly, “The prince is obviously mad with grief.”

  The Red Lord said, “I must agree.”

  Loric spoke matter-of-factly. “No, I simply know more than you do. For example, I know that my lovely wife here is not really dead. She has not gone to the Lords, as they say.” He added in an undertone, “They have come to her.”

  “My prince!” the Blue Lord exclaimed, unable to control himself.

  “Grief has devoured your reason,” the White Lord stated decisively. “Therefore it is my opinion that, for the moment, you are unfit to rule. If you consider the dead living, the truly living are not safe in your hands, not until the sorrow clouding your mind has dispersed, as it naturally will with time.” He could not have been more polite about usurping Loric’s power.

  “Nothing would please me more than for you to take over my duties for a while.” The prince smiled, his eyes still fixed on Mirabel’s face. “You have my permission to christen newborns and to bury those who are truly dead. And I sincerely hope you enjoy playing prince, for you will never truly be one.”

  There was a general intake of breath occasioned by this open insult and by the fact that Loric was relinquishing his position, if only temporarily.

  “Very well.” The White Lord drew his shoulders back but he was still a head shorter. “And as acting prince, my first command is that the princess be burned tomorrow morning. You may keep her ashes in your chambers until the spring, when the river thaws, then her soul will be freed to the wind and the water as is proper.”

  This sounded like an acceptable course of action to the other nobles present and for a moment they dared hope their prince’s sanity might return sooner than expected, for he smiled again and nodded as if in agreement. But then he spoke. “Do you hear that, my love? You are to be licked all over by hot, hungry flames. Does that excite you?”

  “By the Lords!” Ebonlee’s father exclaimed beneath his breath. He sensed the prince was as lucid as ever but he would be unable to prove this to his peers and he was thoroughly confused himself as to why the prince was behaving in this fashion. It made him look more closely at the dead girl, as if the veil over her face might at any moment lift ever so slightly from the caress of her breath.

  “It is done then.” The White Lord dismissed the matter.

  “I fear not.” Loric turned his strange smile on him. “You will have to kill me first.”

  “My prince!” The Blue Lord went so far as to grasp Loric’s arm through the black cloak but he released it quickly enough.

  “You heard me!” Loric raised his voice for the first time. “Your authority does not extend over Mirabel. She is still and always will be my wife, and I say she stays up here with me until she awakens. The wound did not kill her—her pulse has merely slowed down so much she appears dead. You must believe me.”

  The Blue and Green Lords glanced at each other, for they both thought the prince sounded quite convincing, but the others looked disgusted by this show of weakness. It was Ebonlee’s father who noticed the White Lord’s gesture to the sentries posted at the bedroom door. The two young men had witnessed the transfer of authority, yet they still hesitated an instant before responding. Loric was staring at his wife so intently he was unaware of their movement until, reluctantly, with distressed expressions, they each took hold of one of his arms, awkwardly trying to get a firm grip on him through his black mourning cloak.

  “The princess,” the White Lord stated clearly, “is to be burned at dawn. Until then her bereaved widower will be held in another tower so he does not attempt to prevent the rite or otherwise defile his lady’s remains in a morbid effort to revive her.”

  “I will house him,” the Green Lord said quickly.

  “Very well.”

  Loric frowned gently down at Mirabel’s passive face. “Are you going to help me?”

  At another gesture from the White Lord the sentinels pulled the prince away from the bed.

  “Mirabel!” Loric said her name loudly. “Mirabel?” he repeated, but naturally there was no response from the beautiful body on the bed which, come morning, would be burned to ashes.

  *

  Mirabel had known from the moment Dur tore through her mortal skin’s resistance that he had not been lying to her. Fear had stiffened her body around his first agonizing thrust but then, with an ecstatic breath, she had let him penetrate her again and then again and again as she felt the blade getting closer to the infinitely hot and flowing part of her that was to her soul what blood was to her body. As he stabbed her, his intense stare promised her the indescribable pleasure that lay beyond the more obvious pain. She grasped it through him as she ascended into his eyes while he brutally fucked her with his knife, her desire to live and her desire for him becoming one and the same.

  Afterward, he casually cleaned the dagger on the sleeve of his jacket and returned it to its sheath as if nothing momentous had happened. Smiling, Rhode and Tain then joined him to form an intimate circle around her again. They laid out a simple plan. At least she had thought it was simple while her feelings, swollen with elation, were caught on the branch of a single thought—I’m still alive! She had not only survived Dur’s murderous intimacy, she had enjoyed it like nothing else.
She couldn’t collect herself sufficiently in those moments to consider the problems they might run into and she was the only one who could have foreseen the complication that had arisen.

  The three young Dragons holding her in an enchanted egg of warmth in the freezing tower had only just been born to seemingly solid dimensions through the mysterious organs of her desires and the womb of her imagination. She should have realized their plan was much too uncomplicated. That was the way of the Lords—a magically smooth path of moonlight—but the kingdom was a road littered with stumbling blocks where the smallest stone could break a careless neck. The inconceivable situation she found herself in, lying in state in her bedroom, was her own fault.

  The ground outside was frozen solid, it was impossible to dig a grave at this time of year but she hadn’t remembered that in the tower when she was so hot with triumph and so obsessed with one very important point—Loric was not to be shamed before the entire keep. If his wife, the princess, openly ran away with her lover, his reputation and authority would never survive. If everyone believed her dead she could “fly” off with her Dragons without completely ruining his life. She would break his heart but as long as he remained Prince of Visioncrest she knew he would survive. He would somehow have to bring himself to understand that she had gone away with Dur because she had no choice.

  She still could not face the fact that she was leaving her beloved husband. It hurt more than being stabbed. She had blindly agreed to Dur’s plan and listened with only half of herself as Rhode explained how she could make herself appear dead. All she had to do was remember Dur’s eyes acting like fingers on her wrists, slowing down her pulse with the force of his will. It was remembering the way he had looked at her as he penetrated her with his dagger that mysteriously stopped her heart at every moment with desire so intense she appeared dead to everyone else.

  The three Dragons were to have come for her after she was buried but she was to be burned instead and there was nothing she could do about it. Her limbs were pinned down by Dur’s determination and by the lust of his companions. They wanted her all for themselves but, come morning, ashes would darken their vision and destroy their budding senses. She could only hope that if the flickering of fear and elation inside her had made them dizzy, her sustained emotional scream now would succeed in communicating to them that something was terribly wrong.

  It was the hardest thing she had endured in her life, or beyond it, where she seemed to be, lying motionless in Loric’s arms in the stairwell as he spoke to her with such feeling. She could hear all that was said around her and she felt every touch and caress as the women dressed her for the Lords. It was an unbelievably strange thing, being trapped inside an utterly passive body. She would have given anything to sit up, fling her arms around Loric’s neck and beg him to forgive her. The way he had teased her about hot flames licking her all over had wrung her heart so painfully it almost slipped out of Dur’s paralyzing grasp. She had detected the muffled sound of a struggle but until he yelled her name she had not realized her husband was the one being restrained. It wasn’t until that moment that she discovered just how much his strength and wisdom had permeated her personality. When he was pulled away from her, she experienced a despair such as she had never known. Her thoughts became uselessly frayed threads of anxiety, terror and regret as their beings—woven together so intimately—were forced apart. What had she done?

  Loric! She screamed in her mind. Loric! But only Dur heard her and he held on to her heart more forcefully than ever.

  *

  An indeterminate amount of time had passed since they took Loric away. The air in the room was freezing because, naturally, no braziers had been lit to make her dead body comfortable. She could not cry for Loric, she could not cry at all, but she was a little more at peace now. This had all been her choice. The moonlit blade she had followed into Dur’s eyes was, more than ever, a desirably exciting path in her mind. She absolutely had to believe he was aware of what was happening and that he would come for her before the White Lord could have his way with her body a second and final time by watching it burn. Dur had told her the truth about herself. She knew she could trust him. There was no point in regretting what she had done. The only point left was the one his dagger had made inside her when it stabbed her and she didn’t die.

  Mirabel waited. It was all she could do. When the door to the small room opened, she heard it clearly. It had to be Loric. It didn’t surprise her that he had found a way past the guards in the Green Tower, she had recognized the voice of the man who offered to accommodate him as that of Ebonlee’s father. She waited for him to say something. Would he be furiously sarcastic with her or desperately earnest? She braced herself for the former because there wasn’t any reason he should love her anymore.

  “You take after your mother in every way, don’t you, Mirabel, only it’s flesh you’re able to sew back together.” It was the White Lord who was bending over her. “You’re the seamstress of seamstresses. You use veins instead of thread and fine daggers rather than crude scissors. Impressive, very impressive.

  “But I’m afraid not even your talented mother could have made much of ashes. So unless you’ve managed to stitch yourself back together by morning it’s over for you, Mirabel. Yet I imagine the process of sewing yourself back together takes time and once I’m through with you, well, there will be too many holes to patch. It won’t be worth keeping this particular body anymore. You’ll be relieved to throw it away. I promise I won’t tear your pretty dress, though. I have it from your dear old servant that there was no blood anywhere on the stairwell. I find that interesting and convenient. I can stab you a hundred times and still not make a mess everyone will notice in the morning.

  His voice was growing breathless with excitement. “Loric was right about you, of course, but no one else knows that. They’ll continue to think he’s mad with grief and now that I hold the reins, I have no intention of relinquishing them!”

  Mirabel wanted to kill herself, ironically enough, for it was by pretending to be dead that she had gotten her patient and devoted spouse into this predicament.

  “But never fear. I intend to have some fun with you first. I suspect you can hear me and, more importantly, I know you can feel me…”

  He lifted her veil. She could tell he had removed it because she felt the chilly air more sharply on her face. He moved slowly, carefully. It was necessary for him to leave her looking just as he had found her. If Dur did not release his control over her body there was no hope for her. Loric was imprisoned in another tower.

  The intense cold licked up her legs as the White Lord lifted her skirt. She wore nothing beneath it, as befitted a bride of the Lords, who had no patience with such delicate matters but took what they wanted as brutally as it suited them. He got on the bed with her and knelt between her thighs. Her powerful husband was locked up in another tower but her three beautiful Dragons were not. The strange calm she suddenly experienced was the path they were traveling down now. She sensed their presence even more distinctly than she did the White Lord’s hands on her body as his aroused breathing filled the silent room.

  “Shall I cut his dick off?” She heard Dur’s whisper in the depth of her mind as he released his paralyzing grip on her pulse.

  She sat up and slapped the White Lord’s face with all her strength. He was so completely unprepared for the blow it knocked him over, giving her the chance to crawl quickly off what should have been her eternal bed. But he recovered almost instantly and lunged after her. He caught her, pinning her back against a wall, and when in the darkness she caught the gleam of a naked blade that did not belong to Dur, she screamed for everything she was worth.

  “Cry out all you like, Mirabel—no one can hear you up here! I’m going to have you, whether it’s after I stab you a hundred times or before. It’s your choice!”

  “Let me go! You don’t understand the danger you’re in!”

  “Hold still!”

  “No! Please!”<
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  In that instant she saw what she had been waiting for. She shoved him away with all her strength. He would have caught her again but something yanked on his hair from behind and snapped his head back. He was stunned silent as Dur stepped calmly around to face him, keeping a firm grip on his hair. “That’s no way to treat a lady, sir.”

  She saw the flash of the knife as the White Lord thrust it into Dur’s white shirt but he might only have plunged it into a dense fog for all the effect it had. The man who had stepped out of nowhere didn’t release him—he didn’t even wince. Mirabel’s eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. She saw the White Lord’s expression change when he realized what he was foolishly attempting to fight. His features disintegrated from a contorted rage to a slack wonder and then finally pinched up with fear.

  “Are you all right?” Dur asked her.

  “She’s splendid for a woman who’s supposed to be dead!” his prisoner snapped defiantly. “I suppose you’re the one who killed her? You must be her lover. The Prince and Princess of Visioncrest, the perfect couple because they’re each fucking their own demon! Loric has his special Lady friend from the stars too, you know!”

  “Everything’s gone wrong, Dur,” she informed him needlessly, for his presence proved he was aware of this. She deliberately ignored what the White Lord had just insinuated about her husband but it was odd how she had never considered the fact that the Lords couldn’t all be men. “What are you going to do to him?”

  “What would you like me to do with him?”

  “Let him go. No one will believe him anyway.”

  “No, I think not.” She had never heard Dur use that tone. “He can’t get away with this completely unscathed or he won’t learn a lesson. I think I will cut his dick off—”