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Zoycite does not see Neflyte die. Architect of his death but not the contractor, she’s content to witness the final blow and take her leave. She knows what happens, the stinking indignity of death, the abject reality of what houses a soul. That he died of shock or sepsis, of some cardiac event or a broken heart, does not matter. All that matters to Zoycite is that the aberrance of his authority is no longer an issue. She’s restored some order — god, why must it always fall to her to make things make sense? — and with him out of the way, power is free to flow to the worthy. Just a few more lurches of influence needed from her now, a few more fists twisting in the sheets of the world. Zoycite cannot wait for everything to fall still at last.
On the way back to the Dark Kingdom, a shudder. It’s like feeling someone else’s sigh scratching its way through her lungs, almost like a vain effort at possession by a lesser caster. It’s a hand caressing her cheek and encircling her throat. And then it is gone, and she is home.
She had hoped for a victory lap, a crisp click of boots and even crisper commendations from the queen; however, time is, at best, a suggestion in the Dark Kingdom. Everyone moves as if the time before time-as-it-is-conventionally-known still clings to them. Days and nights are decided by less remote latitudes. There’s no sense that a certain amount of time would need to pass between Neflyte’s demise and Zoycite’s ascension. She had prepared herself to waltz in and eagerly hold out her hands for her hard-won assignment. Instead, she’s afflicted by a headache so severe it makes her laugh.
Zoycite is perhaps an already-dead thing who has no need for sleep or sustenance; nonetheless, there is a bed, a bed she shares with Malachite, a bed in which time becomes even less real, a bed in which she now lies, clutching her head as Malachite runs a gentle hand up and down the length of her back. It feels like something is fissuring between her eyes. Like if she clawed at her forehead she could dig out whatever it was.
“Sleep,” Malachite suggests, implores, orders. She looks at him through blurring vision. She wonders why he’s the only thing that emits any light, here.
Far and away and close at hand, close at head these lives, this malleable material
Stop it up with a spell but she was the strongest of them all, unbroken filly, even now we get the sense she’s bending our will, it shames us, but we let her do it
Far and away and there used to be so much light, remember the colonnades? Remember the gardens, remember the land he razed and repopulated for you, all those identical perfect flowers?
Remember before the flowers? Remember something called adolescence?
Once upon a time before time you sat across from a boy a little older than you and his name was [not found, but it thrummed with life and heat, it was not cold crystal] and you had just beaten him at a game of strategy.
“No — wait — wait, no!” He lunged across the little carved table, scrabbling for the piece you had already plucked from the board. “I was still thinking. Let me take it back.”
“No take-backs!” you crowed. Around you there were books, and linen curtains gathering a warm breeze from open windows, and outside the windows so many trees. “I won!”
The older boy with the thick auburn hair knew you would not give him an inch, so he threw up his hands and conceded, “fine. At least show me how you did it.”
Happily you moved to his side of the table, leaned over him to gesture at the board here and here , and perhaps high on your victory and keen on the radiant warmth of his face so near yours you moved closer and licked at his lips.
He sputtered out whatever name used to be yours, you tilted your head inquisitively, and then something very beautiful was happening. You remember his sonorous voice taking on new tones for you, how he trailed his soft, warm lips down your soft, warm throat, how you smiled, suddenly shy. You remember sinking down onto him with a surprised little, “oh,” and how after a bit of that you moved to the floor, where you wrapped your arms and legs around him and he kissed you until you both sighed into each other’s lungs. The late-afternoon light dyed your tangled hair even more brilliant shades of red.
You remember the moon high in the sky, then. You recall his embarrassed admission that the stars had indeed foretold this, this or something like it. A rare conjunction amidst so much opposition. No you never believed in his hokum but only because you couldn’t control it, while it seemed he almost could.
And oh [not found, bright radiant real name, goddess name], my dear, you resented him so for switching his allegiance to darkness. Just because it was easier to see the stars in the dark.
She awakens from the sleep that is not sleep in the arctic night that is always night. The afterimage of her dream blazes white-hot behind her eyelids; her efforts to contain it fail and it escapes instead down her cheeks.
Malachite, solid presence beside her. He cups her face in his hands, studies with his artful quiet her distress. He waits for her to tell him what is wrong, to explain herself so he always gets her just right.
“Just hold me,” she hisses, and he does. Kisses her lips but she turns her head away; takes her hand and kisses her fingertips; touches gently her small breasts, his mouth on them almost warm.
His hand moves between her legs. She reaches between them, grabs him, impatiently lifts her hips.
“Slow down,” he whispers. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I want it to hurt,” she growls. She can see him still a moment, then he closes his eyes and pushes into her. The ache, the sting, in this cold bloodless thing they know how to do, this sense that it must have been different once, must have been once warm and delightful and heady with the perfume of ten thousand roses.
Zoycite killed Neflyte. So many potentialities now closed off. Zoycite will shear off branch after branch until the path to success is a straight one, and once she has succeeded she will — ?
Malachite forces himself to regard with stoic remove Zoycite’s tear-streaked face. The only pain he feels is her pain, his only disappointments her disappointments. He thinks of the queen and wonders if she, too, seeks success as the path to rest. If these women believe they can buy their peace with blood.
Zoycite has shed her own blood, at least. It’s on them both now and it relieves her and discomfits him. He hopes she will at least allow him to get his mouth on her, which she does, and in apology for what she herself asked for he retrieves her from herself. After she comes she seems confused, searching for a point of reference in this timeless space.
“I’m here, now,” Malachite says. “And so are you.”
“And before that?”
“I was with you, and you with me.”
“How do you know?”
“How have you forgotten?”
She rolls onto her side. The wall facing her is carved in stippled, dripping arches, some melted ruin. She wants a window from which to gaze.
“I feel terrible,” she says.
There is nothing else to do, and time is a wasted waste. She redresses and strides into the throne room to receive her new assignment.