The Proud Princess (whole story so far)

Warning:

Some fairy tales take themselves seriously.

This one can’t decide. Parts are facetious, tongue-in-cheek, and engage in copious amounts of wordplay. Other parts delve into deep yearnings and emotional connection. Gore prances on the fringes. Cozy moments cuddle up with teacups and scones in sunshiny rooms. The whole story toes the line between gothic and flippant, sometimes sinister while a flying cat in the hat, who is judging from the corner, crosses his arms (paws) and is decidedly unimpressed.

*

If Damarishka had possessed any personality before her twentieth birthday, she had buried it like people bury childhood embarrassments, and by the time he came, whatever character she’d retained had reduced itself to piteous nothings, shooed off by her pride.

By then, she did nothing but eat and drink and sleep and (not) think and (not) live as she walked her castle day by day, and she strove to be oblivious enough not to notice the dissatisfied subjects occasionally burning royal estates on the periphery.

Of course, she smelled the char and ash while taking breakfast in her castle garden, and the scent of roasted flesh intruded while she tried to swallow her scones, so she would sometimes hum or sing to disguise the distant screams.

And then she would throw up in the greenery.

Her proud cat always departed when she did that, though, since cats reserved the right to vomit, and how dare a princess leave steaming chunks in his pawing ground. Especially without the excuse of expunging a decent hairball.

The king would dispatch soldiers (for the rebels, not the hairball), and Damarishka would employ her apathy. She would regiment one empty thought after the other with the dull regularity of a metronome. Tick-tock, tick-tock, knock-knock.

No one’s home. Once, there was someone here, she thought. But not anymore.

*

Eventually, amid her mechanical mannerisms of eating and drinking and (not) thinking and (not) living, and helplessly wandering her father’s castle garden that smelled of charred people, her twentieth birthday celebration arrived.

Twenty was too old for an unmarried princess, perilously close to putting her on the shelf with other dusty, unwed princesses, but she was too proud (or empty) to be content with anything less than a proper prince (not a pauper prince); someone fetching, not feeble; someone courageous, not cowardly; and gallant, not galling.

Or maybe she just wanted someone to wake her up.

She disdained all suitors who came, letting the ostentatious things gabble until her silence browbeat them into stuttering halts and hangdog retreats.

Today, however, another matter tangled underfoot, because when she descended from her lofty bedroom for breakfast, she found her father transformed from proud and righteous and vengeful to… diminished. His chest had shrunk. His chin hid in his neck. His figure cringed. His beard trembled toward the ground.

“Father,” Damarishka intoned emptily while gliding breezily toward the sideboard of food, “what has happened?”

“I had to solve a problem.” Furiously, the king ogled his egg yolks as if offended that they were so errant as to ogle him yellowly back.

The problem of the people? Damarishka thought, then recalled that she did not think, and so she vacantly puppeted her mother’s old adage. “Where is your pride?”

“My pride is perished!” the dramatic king sighed, entrenched in self-pity while eyeballing his egg yolks. “But tonight, that problem will be yours.”

“How?” Damarishka shivered, unable not to shiver as she thought of her late mother, whose loss would not sleep in Damarishka’s soul. “Are you ill, Father?”

“Don’t be stupid. No illness would dare make me so angry. I do not have time for stupidities like flus.” The king straightened a little.

“So tell me what’s going on.” Other than—

Singed forests; steaming rock; the skeletal remains of expansive estates; an incompetent reign—

No, she did not think of such things.

“Don’t question me!” The king rose from the table, his palms smacked flat on the tablecloth. “You will find out this evening.” Then he left in a kingly pique.

The untouched egg yolks glistened reproachfully at Damarishka.

Proudly, emptily, she cut into them.

The Malodorous Ring

Evening fell and the largest ballroom in the palace was primed for Princess Damarishka’s birthday celebration. A quartet of musicians in a nook produced magnificent melodies. People in glittering jewels and gleaming satin danced on polished parquet floors. Diamonds, crystals, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, gold, and silver flashed in the light of hundreds of thousands of candles in freshly lit chandeliers.

Damarishka danced most of all, alternating one partner after another, although each one seemed emptier than the next.

She inwardly sighed. Would she ever find anyone worthy? (Although, honestly, she couldn’t even define worthy. All the attributes she truly wanted had been interred with the childhood dreams she’d entombed long ago.)

At last, the time came for gifts. She opened them one after the other. Velvet dresses, satin gloves, silken scarves, golden bracelets, silver necklaces, gem-set rings, flutes decorated with jewels (not that she knew how to play any instrument at all), even a grand glass piano.

More gifts, and more and more…

But the one thing Damarishka wanted most of all was missing.

Everyone to be allowed to live.

No. That was not a thought she was supposed to have. She wanted a prince. Valiant. Gallant. Dashing. And—

Anything more she could want was stuffed down, back into the box of inappropriate things.

As was right and proper, she puppeted her way through the evening, smiling at everyone and thanking them for each useless luxurious gift while they sensed her insincerity and carped about her ingratitude.

Proud! Vain! Haughty! they whispered behind their hands. Someone ought to have taken a switch to her backside when she was a girl, no matter how tragic the loss of her mother!

Damarishka, attempting to empty her mind further, studied her cat. In the corner, he was lounging serenely on an appointed velvet pillow and licking his flanks, ignoring the gifts with extreme indifference. Watching him, Damarishka imagined he was lamenting the lack of cream for his sophisticated feline palate, morose that not a mouse poked about here or there among the ribbons.

This whole lengthy process is a chore, he thought clearly, startling Damarishka (was her mind so vacant that she was now hearing her cat’s thoughts?). For some mysterious reason, continued the cat in his disdainful vein, while lifting his leg in the air to lick the underside, people do not like rats. And why is the king huddled in the corner and muttering like a madman?

Indeed, Damarishka’s father was balled up in the corner, his eyes rolling until they were white-rimmed and horrified as they watched her.

Oh, Damarishka thought (distantly and detached as always), she had picked up the final gift, a small green box with a peculiar odor. (In truth, she had intentionally left this one until the end, hoping she could secretly remove it from the table during the course of the evening and no one would be the wiser, but she hadn’t managed it.) She didn’t even want to open it, but everyone in the hall was staring at her, and they already thought her ungracious; what would they think if she tossed out a gift unopened?

According to the card attached to it, it was from her father, but Damarishka doubted any gift from him would be very pleasant after his behavior today.

She crinkled her nose, then obediently unwrapped the strange box.

The instant the wrapping paper slipped from it, the entire castle shuddered from its very foundations. Everyone tottered, their wine spilled, cries torn from their mouths.

But the tremors didn’t last long, and no catastrophe followed. (No visible catastrophe, at least.)

There was, however, a golden ring with a strangely brilliant green stone now spinning in the air before Damarishka’s astounded eyes (it must have sprung from the box), then it dove downward and slipped itself onto her left ring finger.

What outlandish magic was this?

A fierce wind rose around her and whipped her hair every direction. Desperate and in vain, she strove to twist off the ring, but it seemed glued to her finger. What did it mean?

The ballroom doors slammed open, swiveling everyone’s attention that direction.

A tall man in a golden mask and flowing violet cloak materialized there, his full shirt sleeves pompously a-billow, his black-clad hips annoyingly trim, his boots immaculately glossy, his body perfectly posed.

Everyone froze as if carved from stone—speechless, amazed—as the unwelcome guest set off and sauntered slowly across the hall, his masked gaze fixed only on Damarishka.

His inexorable approach halted right before her.

The Masked Intruder

The intruder had dark hair and black eyes—‘Villain,’ his appearance whispered, as villains are wont to whisper as they appear in the tales, and—this was an unfortunate event, Damarishka vaguely thought, since her mother had always warned her to fall for a man as fair as the sun and with eyes as blue as a summer sky (‘Be cliché; be normal,’ Mother’s voice reminded her. ‘No magic, no…’ No, Damarishka thought, surely Mother hadn’t mentioned magic).

But, well, Damarishka had always secretly been partial to men with dark hair—men with pasts as murky as moats a-fester with monsters.

And where had that thought popped out from?

It matched the thought that maybe this newcomer was a wicked wizard who had usurped her prince’s story and stridden into her life in the prince’s place.

What an odd notion!

But in his hand he held the most perfect rose she’d ever seen, clutching it in the most languid and romantic way a man could, and he proffered it to Damarishka with a low and indolent bow.

She accepted it with the distinct impression that she was somehow making a very bad deal with him (and somehow, maybe she thought she deserved it?). Her legs were shaking—although fortunately her dress concealed it, for she must not succumb to embarrassing exhibitions of public trembling. Trembling was for lily livers. And her liver was not made of lilies, at least as far as she knew. (This was also a danger of shutting off one’s mind; one became stupid, prone to stupid thoughts. And was she babbling in her own mind?)

“Who are you?” she asked to cut off her inner prattle. Also, he kept staring at her, and she didn’t think she was improving any under his regard.

And lo! At that moment, the king waxed dramatic. He leaped from his corner, his dagger unsheathed, and hurtled himself in a wildly savage manner toward the guest. “He wants to take you, Damarishka! We must kill him!”

The cloaked man casually lifted his hand and clipped out a curt, almost severed word, at which the king was suddenly writhing mid-air.

“I’ll destroy you!” the royal personage bawled, swirling madly and helplessly brandishing the dagger. “I’ll pluck out your eyebrows!”

Damarishka was about to sprint toward her father, to tug him away from his undignified flogging of the air, but the masked man seized her arm and forcibly held her back.

“Let him down!” Damarishka cried. “Now! This instant!”

“That is hardly a course of action in my best interest,” the personage drawled, “as he obviously harbors intentions of rendering damage on my person with that dagger.”

“That,” Damarishka sniffed, “is a lot of words to use to say ‘no’.”

“Some people,” the intruder had the temerity to sniff back, “need a lot of words to understand ‘no’. Not, of course, meaning you.” He bowed, the motion studiously correct.

Damarishka, studiously glacial, shook off his hold and stepped back. “Why does my father want to kill you? Who are you?”

“Your bridegroom.”

“But you’re not blond.”

Well, now that was a stupid answer, she thought, but to be fair, his assertion had been a stupid statement.

Still, she should have said, ‘You’re not a prince’, but unfortunately she had been thinking of her mother’s words about finding someone fair.

“Do you want me to be fair, Princess?” the intruder pressed, and with a sweep of his hand, his luscious black locks flared into a shine like liquid gold. “In the end, though, it matters not how I look, for your father signed you away in marriage to me regardless of appearance.”

“That’s not possible.”

Naturally, other kings gave their daughters away in marriage all the time (well, generally only once), but, well, the king’s face was showing absolute loathing despite his being trounced by the air.

Damarishka ventured, “He doesn’t look like he agrees.”

“A man may have regrets. Nevertheless, he signed the contract.” Another sweep of the villain’s hand veiled the sunlit shine of his hair again with the black of a starless night.

 “Contract?” Dumbly, Damarishka struggled to keep her tattered remnants of reason together while her entire kingdom looked on her royal cluelessness. “Why don’t I know about it?”

“It did not happen under the light of day.” The deep voice of the man in the golden mask echoed throughout the hall. “But at night, the bargain was struck.” He stepped closer. “The bargain for—”

Greedy as I am

At this point, Damarishka’s proud cat hissed and hoisted himself off the pillow where he’d been lording over his purr. His hackles prickled, the hair on his back standing on end.

The stranger didn’t give the cat the light of day—or even the light of his eye. He continued to intone to Damarishka: “Your father’s greed sprawled beyond his capacity to obtain. Discontented with the kingdom and the riches he already owned, he sneaked out every night and rode to me, where he tempted his fate. He rolled the dice and played a dangerous game to gain more lands, more gold. He bet high and lost more. Everything fell to me; he was hopelessly in my debt. But,” the masked stranger’s eyes shone like hungry falcons sweeping the sky, “he wept, so heartrendingly forlorn that I pitied him. And so, kind as I am—”

At this, Damarishka, who had resorted to trying to soothe her ruffled cat with distracted pats, outright snorted. “Kind!”

“—or greedy as I am,” the stranger continued, with his smile crooking into mockery, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I swore to give him everything back if he gave me the one thing I want. He agreed. He traded you for his kingdom and all his riches.” In the light of the chandeliers, his golden mask glittered as if encrusted with jewels and malice.

“I don’t believe you,” Damarishka whispered (what else could one whisper at such an unbelievable allegation? It was what she must whisper).

The man extracted a curled scroll from the folds of his cloak. “Do you believe this?”

Lips pursed, Damarishka deigned to lean forward and squint at the print.

It was, indeed, a contract for the return of her father’s kingdom and riches… in exchange for the one asset he hadn’t yet bartered away: his daughter. And her father’s signature looped undeniably at the end of the document.

Damarishka struck the scroll. “You forged this!”

“Regrettably, that goes against the laws of magic.” The masked stranger, with a single flick, rolled the scroll back up and reinserted it into the folds of his cape. “It is very real. I won you fairly in a reprehensible way.”

Damarishka’s fingers clenched, and the cat, being petted by those fingers, yowled.

The masked suitor’s smile spread like toxin from a spilled vial. “He bargained you away so he could save everything else.”

“So I am to be a sacrifice.”

“A fascinating interpretation. Maybe I’m saving you by taking you away.”

“How?”

“Because you know nothing of the outside world.”

“Ha! I know there are trees.”

No. That had come out wrong. Even her proud cat looked embarrassed. He covered his eyes with his paw.

Damarishka sniffed. (One can often save face with a timely sniff.)

The masked intruder inclined his head, his gaze swooping over her again like a hungry falcon. “There are trees. Who am I to argue with such an immutable fact?”

“Who are you at all?” Damarishka spat, striving to iron out her growing fear.

He stilled. “Is that an insult?” he inquired painfully politely. “Implying I am nobody at all? Or do you really want to know?”

She did want to know; she was too proud to stoop to insulting people when those worth insulting invariably insulted themselves.

But the panic inside her was completely dismantling any reply. She couldn’t marry a man not a prince, no matter who he was. Her mother’s urgent words echoed like doom. Damarishka had to marry a fair man, one without magic, and she had to be content. Be normal. Stay hidden.

This wizard was anything but normal or hidden. He was dark and magical, everything Mother had warned her against.

Maybe he was lying about her father’s contract, though. Maybe he wouldn’t really make Damarishka marry him.

And would Damarishka let him make her if he did? She had always rigorously bowed to royal responsibility, and weddings were one of them.

And already she knew she could never become one of those dark princesses who killed off their monstrous husbands. All the blood that murder required! Mouths foaming from poison!

If only he didn’t look so dangerously impossible to refuse, with hair that curved across his chin like night-dark scythes and a gaze that bored into her as if trying to pull out all every single one of her inappropriate wants.

Her next query tumbled desperately out. “At least show me your face!” Maybe, behind the mask, he would be desperately ugly.

But after he promptly complied, removing his mask in an undeniably elegant motion, Damarishka went weak.

This was worse than she could have imagined.

Ladies and Empathic Men

A deep scar bisected his entire face—a jagged pucker that ran from the corner of his left eye, over his nose, and down to his opposite jaw, as though someone had cleaved his face in half and taken some of his skull with it, for part of his cheek was sunken in at the deepest section.

Damarishka should recoil, her stomach churning, her dinner disgorging, but her stomach went fluttery, her breaths shallow, her heart rampant because this harrowing scar showed that he had been dragged to the threshold of death and had dragged himself back. He had spat at the feet of the person who had so reviled him that they’d striven to cut him in half, and he had shoved himself back into life.

As if his triumph were hers, Damarishka reveled in the proof of survival that the scar practically screamed from him.

While she stood motionless, however, the rest of the fellowship of nobles around her howled. Ladies and empathic men fainted. Brave men turned coward and averted their heads.

A corner of the stranger’s mouth quirked. “I’m glad my face isn’t a cause for fainting,” he stated with a certain seep of irony, for at least ten ladies and empathic men had passed out around them, and he was rightly and smugly taking credit for this phenomenon.

The king’s mid-air thrashing abruptly assumed a startling resurrection. “Out of my kingdom!” he thundered. “Out! Into the oubliette with you! Exiled, wizard, do you hear? You’re ousted! Banished!”

Lazily, the man re-donned his golden mask. “Tedious king. Why so afraid?”

“Pcha! Afraid? Who’s afraid? Not I! I’m not afraid!”

The wizard shook his head, sending his evil-dark hair shivering over his mouth in a way that made Damarishka unaccountably shiver, too.

“Such lies,” the wizard chided. “No matter where I am in the world, King, you will always fear me.”

“Show me respect, you despicable warlock! You filthy worm!”

“I’ll do what I want: insult you; affront you, demean you. In the end, though, I will never esteem you.”

“Out!” The king’s face went mottled, splotched, ruddy with anger. He hurtled his knife (O valiant attempt!), but the weapon scarcely flew a few hand-spans before it struck an unseen barrier, ricocheted off, and plunged to the floor. It skidded across the checkered tile with a clatter as loud as the king’s ensuing tantrum.

The masked man smiled, unpleasantly stretching his scar. “Don’t dare to defy a wizard, King. You’re not a big enough man for that.” And then, amid the king’s bawling, the masked wizard waved his hand.

At once, all of Princess Damarishka’s gifts—the cloaks and gloves and shawls, necklaces and rings and pins, the flutes and violins and piano—all whirled into the air, spun in a dizzying vortex, and soared out the window in a glittering plume of pink powder.

Everyone present (barring those deciding to stay passed out) gaped up, their jaws ignobly slack.

Only Damarishka never let her gaze waver from the wizard. She considered bolting for the door as a last resort.

But what hope had she of outrunning the wizard?

All too soon, only vacancy echoed in the places where her gifts had been heaped.

The wizard turned to her. “Will you come with me your own volition, Princess, or must I carry you in shame over my shoulder? Because will you or nil you, you’re coming with me tonight.”

Rifling through every political nicety she had absorbed in her life, she ventured out with tremulous hope: “What if I ever-so-gently refuse your kind offer?”

“It’s not an offer. It’s not even a proposal. It’s a bargain.” He paused, head cocked, his tone abruptly lacking any inflection at all. “Unless you break your father’s word.”

Odd that he said that. Was that even a choice? A certain curiosity dwelt in his look as he followed her response. Testing whether or not she considered it a choice.

Absurd, of course. She couldn’t break her father’s promise. She took pride in being a proper princess. An obedient daughter. An empty space. She did everything precisely (and vacantly) down to the point of royal precision.

But everything up until now had fallen in line with her mother’s command.

To marry this wizard meant flouting her mother’s warning.

Inspiration struck. Pit wizard against feline! Outwit and out-con him with distraction.

“I’m not going anywhere without my cat!” she cried, and she prayed that the cat had faster feet than she did.

The wizard glanced at the cat.

As if the cat understood that things were not going to go well with him, he really did start to dart off.

Unfortunately, not even cats can outrun magic.

The wizard sailed said cat into the air with a magical flick of his finger, then steered the wildly meowing creature straight to him, at which he securely tucked the tom under his arm.

Then he angled his cockiness at Damarishka. Will you come with me now? his arrogantly raised brow indubitably inquired. I have your cat.

A Gonfalon for the Enemy

Damarishka, desperately delaying, looked at his outstretched hand.

Long, slender fingers. No gloves, no golden rings, no gleaming gems, no glitter to detract from the beautiful hands of an artist—if only an artist of magic.

So help her, why was she waxing poetic about his hands? She shouldn’t like how he looked. (Her mother had warned her. No magic. Stay hidden.) She should run. She wasn’t marrying his hands.

Presumably, though, those hands would touch her, would languidly stroke—

Wiping that thought away like a discarded, dirty rag, she tried to glare hard enough to incinerate the ring that had slipped itself on her finger when she’d opened the wizard’s gift (for surely that had been his gift).

Incinerating it with her eyes, though, didn’t work; she wasn’t the sun; her glare wasn’t that fierce.

There was truly nothing more for it. Her father the king had promised her to this wizard—this villain. And if she broke the promise, the entire kingdom and all its riches would fall to the wizard anyway. Her father had bargained everything, which meant that, even if Damarishka refused this villain’s hand, she and her father would be left with nothing at all. They would—what? Live here on the wizard’s sufferance?

She would rather be banished.

But then she would have to beg for food, money, shelter, bread—and how could she beg on bended knee when her pride refused to let her even bow her head? Would she romantically waste away upon some pastoral hill? A princessly remnant languishing in silken wreckage in some poet’s prose?

As a last resort, she glanced at her proud father, still thrashing like a hooked worm above his gawping noble fish-heads.

She could expect no salvation from him.

Wretched man. Selling his kingdom through greedy stupidity, now hoisted in the air like a gonfalon for his enemy. Anyone who wanted to could look under his waistcoat.

Damarishka had no choice. No matter what her mother had warned her of, her father had sold her to it.

And so, bracing, shuddering, she thrust her fingertips into the wizard’s.

His fingers tightened around her hand—around her agreement to this—and his hold was firm, implacable, the beginning of whatever her mother had warned her against. But his flesh pressed against hers as if bidding her not to tremble.

Then he was urging her with him, corner after corner through the castle, guiding her away from what she knew, away from her guardedly empty life.

Out the castle’s carven door.

Down the grey-veined marble steps.

Through the slanting beams of sunset.

To where, in the center of the courtyard, his black carriage shone as sleekly as a glossy beetle.

He helped her—or hefted her—into his glistening vessel.

She expected to land in the raw belly of an actual insect, but, instead, she plopped in an anticlimactic oomph on plump red upholstery swathed in velvet, where copper lanterns above the door lambently illumined gilded walls.

The wizard followed her in, eyeing her there in his conveyance as if the view gratified him.

His eyes glowed like burning black coals set in his rich gold mask.

Unceremoniously, he evicted her hissing cat from the crook of his arm and into an arbitrary corner.

Damarishka opened her mouth.

The carriage jolted into motion—starting her journey of no return with this husband.

Her question jerked out like a string yanked from her fear. “Why me?” Her tone emerged a little agonized. “Why didn’t you take, instead, the kingdom—our riches?”

“Maybe I value the princess more.”

“So I’m an object to own.”

“Or you’re a dream unexpectedly offered for sale,” he said, his tone rough.

Something in her viscerally reacted to his answer, and she gripped the edge of the seat.

“And,” he went on, “I am not so controlled that I wouldn’t use any means to get what I want.”

Damarishka’s feelings didn’t know how to react to this. Should she feel trapped by his devious, insinuating charm? Titillated the tiniest bit that he’d apparently pined for her from afar?

Or not deceived by what was an obvious lie intended to weaken her defenses?

Cynically, she winched out, “But what godforsaken reason would you have for choosing me?”

He bestowed upon her an infuriating smile. “I like you.”

Damarishka snorted and scowled at the city flashing by outside the window. “You don’t know me.”

“Don’t I?”

She swerved her attention back to him, trying to discern from his too-soft inflection what he meant. But his eyes only reflected enigmatic shadows in the eyeholes of his mask, and mocking secrets played at the corners of his lips.

Abruptly, the blood drained from her cheeks. “Have you been spying on me?”

His rather mysterious smile could easily have been malicious or merely mild. “Do you want me to have done such a dastardly thing? You have already cast me as your villain. Shall I comply and be one? The spurned evil skulking behind screens, obsessed with the unwitting princess?”

Damarishka, for all her vaunted lessons on reading facial expressions, could discern nothing from his. She worked her way around an answer. “It is a villainous thing to do, to peep on a person who’s unaware.”

“Maybe you were aware. As a wizard, I can take many forms.”

She blinked. He had disguised himself as someone else?

For a dozen panicked moments, her mind leaped from kitchen wench to maid to noblewoman to suitors—everyone she had come into contact with on a daily basis and who could have secretly been him.

She catalogued the things she’d demanded, commanded, given, taken, confessed.

She stingily thinned her lips. “Can you impersonate women, too?”

His eyelids idly lowered. “Are you now rethinking the words you speak daily? Would things you have said harden a heart, soften a heart, or win a heart—or perhaps incite someone to marry you just to teach you a lesson?”

Damarishka shot him an aggravated glower. “That would be an idiotish reason to marry someone—to teach them a lesson.”

“Would it? If one were to wreak a certain pleasure from the marriage…” The look he slewed over her made no secret of what kind of pleasure he referred to.

Boor! Churl!

Exasperated, she refused to play his guessing game. It didn’t matter which guise he’d inserted himself into in her life. She was proud and empty, not cruel. She may have exposed her maids to excessive views of her nostrils while sticking her nose into the air, but she had never, not once, slapped a maid or even shrieked at one, and the gifts she had given had been intended to help, not harm.

But the boorish mage could think what he wished.

And he was apparently thinking plenty, because he certainly wasn’t speaking, simply watching her.

How could he be so unnerving at that?

Fidgeting on the impossibly soft upholstery, she at last gave up and broke the silence again with a lovely and defiant (and potentially lame): “I suppose you should tell me your name.”

“Ah. Finally, my bride admits curiosity about me.”

“I admit nothing!”

“I’m afraid your eyes betray more than your lips. Although…” His smile unfurled like a poisonous bloom while he unfurled his penetrating gaze down to her mouth. “I’m willing to wager that your lips will betray you, too, soon enough.”

Enough Potency to Destroy Them All

Damarishka drew herself up, indignant.

Truly? What could she say to this overweening popinjay? Should she huff? Sniff?

Surely her scoff was implied.

She hooked herself, boringly, onto the unanswered question. “Your name? Or,” she arched a rigorously censorious brow, “is your name a violently guarded secret?”

“Not violently guarded against you.” The low way he emphasized ‘you’ brought her existence into an intimate place—too intimate for someone she’d just met—and intimate enough to make her strangely squirm.

All in all, the timbre of his voice did things to her that no voice should dare to do.

Or he did them.

And then, gently—dare she say gallantly?—he cut across the space between them and captured her hand.

His power and heat seemed to encompass her in impossible ways (unwisely not entirely unpleasant ways).

Without removing his gaze from her face, he caressed her palm, then kissed her knuckles. And there, he breathed: “Nothing of mine is guarded against you.”

She ruthlessly tamped down another visceral response. “Then…”

His smile went toothy as a wolf’s. “I am Darian of the Darklands.”

She stiffened. “No.” Then forced a false laugh. “No.”

“Yes.” The rascal grinned. “Yes.”

The known miscreant’s kingdom hid itself behind a veil of storm and lightning, beyond which no one could forge a path—not for years, some claimed for decades. The most potent mage in the world had made this kingdom his home and brutally struck every intruder down.

He was the scourge of… well, something. She wasn’t well-versed in world news.

The world news wasn’t supposed to affect her.

Now the world’s worst news had her in his clutches.

He let her limp hand slip from his, and he retreated to his seat while his face cradled his lupine, satisfied smile.

Damarishka’s breath whooshed back in (the breath she hadn’t known she was holding—and what was it with the breaths one didn’t know one held? They always assailed one at the worst of times, when one wasn’t supposed to be influenced by dastardly men).

Her mood went spiky, and she retreated into silence like a sulky bug behind its carapace.

Desultorily, the villain Darian waved his hand, and the carriage hoisted into the air.

Damarishka, jolted, stifled a squeak. What—

She threw herself at the window, her nose plastered to the pane.

They were flying! How?

She had never even imagined this. Her heart thumped like a hare that had nowhere to flee but into excitement. Like a child, she took in the fields, forests, and bridges dashing past below, the villages that sat like scattered toy cottages in the valleys, and the rivers that wound like ribbons through the dales.

Part of her chest constricted, understanding now that she truly couldn’t escape this scoundrel, but the other part of her chest expanded, unable to absorb the experience of being airborne. She almost—nearly—didn’t mind being abducted.

When she’d been young, she’d longed for more; longed for something, adventure? But her mother had always shushed these wishes. Don’t wish for anything outside, my darling. Stay hidden. Be content.

Damarishka had never been content, but for her mother, she had obediently caged her wants. If it wasn’t proper, then she must stuff them down.

She must copy her father and go overweening with pride… but not violence. Never that.

“Are you hungry?” her tormentor broke into her morose introspection.

She turned to find a repast of crumbly cheese and rich, dark bread on a wooden board. A pitcher of water stood beside it, flavored with squeezed lemon, crushed ginger, and spoonfuls of sugar. As she watched, a woven basket materialized, with apples and oranges proliferating inside it.

She pilfered one of the ruby-red fruits and bit into it. Sweetness crunched on her tongue, a delight unforeseen. “Where did you get these?”

“Stolen from some orchard below us.”

“Thief!” she named him, but without rancor, even with a little smile, for food conciliated her inner shrew. And wasn’t this an adventure her little-girl self would have craved?

“Thief?” Darian’s mouth quirked up the slightest bit. “For you, I’d stoop to anything.”

Again, her heart did unwise somersaults.

Best to change the subject. “Tell me why you’ve cut your kingdom off from the world.”

“Tell me why you’ve cut off yourself.”

“Myself!”

“From your own wishes,” he clarified.

Had he read her mind just moments before? “You’re evading the answer.”

“As you are evading mine.”

“I asked first.”

“But I am more interested.”

“Are you accusing me of feigning curiosity about the kingdom to which you’re spiriting me?”

“Foes,” he murmured. “Envy. Hatred. Viciousness. I inherited home and power when I was a small child, and many who knew me were not kind. I was forced to become formidable, dangerous. And when I gained great enough potency to destroy them all, I found them tiresome and simply cut them off.”

She opened her mouth and closed it. When I gained enough potency to destroy them all.

As he watched her digest his words, he curved his gloved hands delicately around his knees. So much power held so lightly.

Keeping her poise, she reached for a crumble of cheese. Tangy. Her mouth watered from its taste while her scrutiny dissected him, her mind working through… a yawn. Her hand lowered with a hunk of bread to her lap.

She slipped… her eyes shut…

Just for a moment…

She startled awake.

Still in the carriage. Outside the window, snowflakes swirled in a fierce gale she could not hear. Inside, shielded from the blizzard, sat a bowl of steaming, soft porridge infused with cinnamon and apples, beside a carafe of hot apple cider.

Her abductor smiled annoyingly across from her.

“You put me to sleep,” she accused him outright, circling around courtesy and barging straight for plain speaking. “So you could cast some enchantment on me, surely.”

“Or,” he reached without warning and brushed the curved backs of his knuckles beneath her eyes, “perhaps you needed to sleep. You’ve shadows under your eyes.”

She pulled away. “So?”

His hand lowered, slowly. “You do not sleep. What worries haunt—”

“I have no worries.”

“Don’t you?”

No worries that she could do anything about. Her father ruled as he wished and brushed aside her concerns with his feather-duster of dismissal. The people can afford to give us more.

And more. And more…

When would he stop draining them? As good as killing them…

Not wishing to answer Darian’s question, she turned to pleasing her belly with the cinnamon porridge and cider while flattening her face again to the window.

Below them now plunged a seemingly immeasurable abyss.

Her eyes rounded. “Where are we?”

“We’re crossing the protective enchantment around my kingdom,” Darian answered willingly enough, but with an inscrutable expression.

“It looks like the end of the world,” Damarishka murmured.

“Maybe it will be the beginning of yours,” Darian murmured just as softly.

And then the darkness was broken by light, and his kingdom unfolded before her.

“Dare You Enter?”

Below them, craggy mountains stabbed violently upward like rocky titans that had once attempted to tear free of the earth but failed. Frozen forever, half-submerged in great, white-frothed rivers that surged around their waists, the time-eroded peaks hunched proud shoulders under mantles of forests.

Beyond the mountains rolled green hills, clumped together like curled-up, sleeping children. And there, in their centre, reigned a vast castle, one even taller and prouder than Damarishka’s. Its central tower rose like a dark sceptre beneath the sky, surrounded by rows of concentric corner towers.

Ivy overgrew half the castle, as well as the defensive wall of bastions that wound around it.

Most unbelievable, though, was that all the castle stones shone iridescent black, as if the bricks consisted of the crushed carapaces of beetles.

Despite its walls being reminiscent of smashed insects, though, it was the most imposing castle Damarishka had seen in her life. As their carriage jolted downward, she kept staring like a country bumpkin at the equally black outbuildings in the courtyard: stables like ebony, a smithy’s like dark marble, a chicken coop of shimmery black, where surely black hens were laying black eggs bred by a black rooster and—

She sounded as if she were in a fairy tale! ‘Behind seven mountains and seven lakes and seven hills…’ So much repetition!

She must not be lulled to complacency by fairytale innocence, though. Her betrothed (abductor, fiend…) held a reputation as black as his castle, and she must hold onto that knowledge to keep him (and her excitement?) at bay.

At last, the carriage landed in the centre of the courtyard, and wicked Darian vaulted from it. He chivalrously offered Damarishka his hand as sunshine illumined him like a favourite, its rays brilliant on the facets of his golden mask, which glittered in stark contrast the black stone and dark ivy behind him.

In the worst sort of dream, Damarishka lifted her proud cat in her arms and stepped toward the carriage door…

And hesitated. What eerie delegation of horrors would greet her here? What twisted contortions of servants would he rule? What—

Darian, openly impatient with her terror, slipped his gloved hands around her waist and hoisted her out, will she or nil she. She sucked in a breath at his effrontery, but then her slippers were alighting on glossy black stone and—

There. The first monster to greet her! Not even human, but airborne! Its face hidden behind a hat, his legs backward-jointed and covered in black fur and—

It alighted before her and bowed while doffing its hat to reveal—

A flying black cat wearing a hat?

“My lady!” The cat swept off his hat completely and bowed. “Welcome to our humble castle.”

Damarishka gaped. Only a cat?

A second later it dawned on her that the cat had spoken. She angled Darian an uncertain look. “Is that animal talking to me?”

Darian grinned (and how dare he have an array of perfect teeth). “Don’t say he’s below your social stratum.”

“I am insulted!” declared the flying cat. “Master, kindly explain to her that I am no animal! I am a cultured creature with developed abilities! Mistress should realize this and acknowledge that I am truly admirable!”

Darian raised an eyebrow at Damarishka expectantly.

She was supposed to apologize?

Abruptly, the truth struck her into stillness. “You’re cursed.”

“Pardon?” The cat flattened his hat to his throat.

“He cursed you.” Damarishka pointed at Darian, whose grin went stilted.

“Cursed?” The cat smashed the hat back onto his ears and huffed. “I am magically endowed! Above all other cats! I talk. I fly. I somersault!” He demonstrated.

“I mean,” Damarishka said, “you were once human.”

“I hope not.” The flying cat in the hat shuddered. “Humans are so un-fuzzy and have a bad sense of smell.” Abruptly getting over his offense, he curiously measured the cat she was still holding in her arms. “That poor fellow can’t walk, my lady, that you must carry him?”

At this, her proud cat leaped down and landed gracefully. “I am perfectly perambulatory.”

Damarishka had scarcely come to terms with conversing with a flying black cat in a hat, let alone having her own cat suddenly find his voice!

“And how beautifully I perambulate!” he expostulated, parading around with his tail haughtily hoisted like the banner of a flagship.

The cat in the hat crossed his front paws over his chest and propped himself against the carriage wheel. “If my hat walked, I would be impressed. But please understand that your walk does not excite me in any way. That’s really all you can do? And you’re so proud of yourself for such poor art? Pffff! What a world today. Everything out there must really have gone to the pigs! How did you survive out there, my lord?” He faced Darian, who had been listening with his own arms crossed and his lips curved with amusement.

The inveterate wizard tipped a secret smile toward Damarishka. “I had a pleasant task on my plate.”

“Plate! Ach!” The cat in the hat slapped his forehead. “My manners have fled along with the wits of this tragic cat!” He quickly bowed again. “You must be hungry as a wolf, and here I stand marvelling at the creature you’ve brought with you! You must be overjoyed to be restored to a normal environment, Master. Come along then. A dinner worthy of a king awaits!” He glanced at Damarishka and winked dramatically. “And surely for a princess, too.”

Darian offered her his elbow again. “Dare you enter?”

“Did you curse him?” Damarishka asked outright.

“He was never,” Darian studied the creature leading them, “human.”

She opened her mouth but found that she would rather not know.

Then Darian touched his fingertips to his castle door, and the polished black wood swung inward, inviting her deeper into his realm.

“Mine Alone?”

Despite its black stones, the castle interior adhered to conventional castle aesthetics: candlelit chandeliers dangled overhead with their dewdrop crystals sparkling; tapestries vividly warmed the walls, their tassels dragging on the floor; and braces of candles infused every corner with dulcet light.

As the flying cat in the hat escorted them, he cheerfully chattered while gesturing like a garrulous guide. “This is the foyer, my lady, and that is the gallery, and I, by the by, am Whisker.”

“Damarishka,” the princess murmured politely back, honestly a bit overcome and feeling absolutely surreal, with only her hand tucked into the crook of Darian’s elbow anchoring her in this reality. (Or else she might verily float away like a disbelieving balloon, for she was to marry this man.)

“And I am Claw!” her cat dramatically pronounced, trotting along behind them.

“But I named you Snoof!” Damarishka craned her neck to look back at him.

“A reprehensible mishap,” Claw groused.

“A respectable name,” Whisker contributed.

“I am Claw!” The viably angry cat brandished said sharp appendage. “And I will apply it to anyone—”

“Snoof,” Darian interjected smoothly, “can be my dog’s name.”

“You have a dog?” Claw yowled.

“A very imaginary one.”

“He’d better be!” Claw’s hackles settled.

Damarishka almost smiled. Darian briefly set his hand over hers and smiled secretly, impishly back.

“You know,” Whisker cast a critical scrutiny over Claw, “you could learn to fly here, too, if you wanted. Almost anything is possible in this castle.”

Claw puckered his whiskers. “My walking is more than enough for me!”

“Perhaps embellish yourself with a cane?”

“I need no garnish!”

They ended up dining together, with Whisker leaning back in a chair, paws crossed and legs stretched out as though he owned the place, only lacking a pipe as a finishing touch to his arrogance.

Claw claimed a chair, too, perched upon it like a monarch, and commenced licking at a platter of shredded salmon.

The two cats engaged in passionate debates that amused Darian but which Damarishka listened to with only half an ear (not that she had half an ear; she had whole ears, but she was only halfway listening with one).

Thoughts of what would follow haunted her. Darian hadn’t shown her to a room, but neither had he requested the ceremony that would make her his wife. He’d only brought them here, to this high-ceilinged, vaulted dining hall, where heavy cream soup heated her constricting belly, and steaming delicacies tempted her to put them into her mouth despite her nerves tying her tongue and her stomach up in knots.

She kept looking at him to find him looking back, and she couldn’t help imagining him as her husband—leading her into his bedchamber, his hands slipping free her laces, his mouth touching her skin… a veritable stranger becoming…

Her mind shut down. It was beyond imagining that someone she hadn’t known this morning would become, by tomorrow, more familiar with her body than anyone had ever been before.

She had never even kissed anyone, too proud, too distant (too empty), too wary of her mother’s warning not to wish for more.

Inevitably, though, the last dessert crumbled to its allotted porcelain plate, the cats were sleeping curled up on woven rugs near the hearth, and only Damarishka and Darian breathed into the solitary, crackling silence.

That was when he rose, his cloak swishing, honey-gold mask reflecting the fire, and spoke. “Come, I’ll show you to your room.”

“My room?” Damarishka squeaked, involuntarily clenching her butter knife. “Mine alone?”

“Yes.” A frown furrowed his brow. “I would not inflict nuptials on you so soon. We may set a date later.”

“How much later?”                                                       

“When you wish.”

The reply of ‘What if I never wish?’ hovered unspoken on her lips. Instead, she nodded jerkily and stood up, shocked that her shaky limbs obeyed her.

In moments, they traversed the corridors—alone, this time—their footfalls like steps in her soul. Every step she took with him brought them… somewhere. She couldn’t think. Her mind stumbled over nothings after such a day bloated with travail.

“You know,” murmured Darian, “you could fly here, too, if you wanted. I could show you—”

She hastily shook her head, not so much a refusal as wanting to brush away any subject at all. She was overwhelmed with the reprieve he’d given her. Grateful, yes, but also resentful. She’d wanted—

“What is it you want?” He abruptly stopped walking.

“Are you reading my mind?” she asked, her tone shrewish.

“No. Your face. You yearn. It’s obvious. What is it you want?”

She swallowed hard and averted her head. “Am I so transparent?”

“I would say, instead, that your wish is that strong.” He touched his fingertips to her chin, light as moths. “Tell me.” He paused and removed his touch. “Please. I would esteem your confidence.”

“To spend time with you,” she blurted out quickly, before she lost her grip on her thready courage. Still unable to look at him, she rushed on. “If we are to—to become intimate, I want to know you first. I can’t—couldn’t abide a stranger doing to me what—what only someone at least a little loved by me should be doing.”

At last, she forced herself to look at him to find him at a visible loss for words, blinking. Then he composed himself and said, low and penetrating, “I would not deny you anything.”

How could half the things he said make her insides so jumbled?

“If you are not tired now,” he went on, “I can show you to the library. Conjure up tea and biscuits.”

She quirked her mouth in the tiniest, oddest smile. “Stolen again?”

“Stolen from my own kitchen. Is that clandestine enough for you?”

She bit her lip, which was trying to smile. “It will do.”

And so, he led her into another unexpected nook of his world.

Your Loving Heart is Greater Magic

Darian gestured her into a library, where mounted candelabra on the soaring shelves cast blushes of gold across the books, over the polished ladders and cushioned stools in the aisles, and across the patterned carpets of antique gold and rust-red. The lambent candlelight ribboned through Damarishka’s curls.

Opposite the entry glittered a magnificent arched and latticed window, beyond which the moon shimmered like a pearl on a midnight velvet sky.

Like a scene in magical realm (well, Darian’s was a magical realm, Damarishka supposed), a tray of culinary delights already perched on a low glass table.

Her manner fastidious (in truth, she found herself suddenly shy), she trailed her fingers along the spines of the books, murmuring some of the titles out loud and admiring how others had frames of curlicues, blooms, and thorns, until one title snatched her attention up.

Futures Eluded.

Curious, she slid it out, aware like a prickle on the back of her neck that Darian had gone tersely motionless, and she flopped the volume open—and nearly dropped it.

Not words, but scenes swooped across the page—scenes of her, of Darian, of his black castle’s vast dining hall, crazily illumined by a hearthfire as hungrily large as a horse, its mane dancing bright in some unfelt wind.

In the center of the dark hall, mangled shadows flickered in the captivity of torches which were borne aloft in the gloved hands of warriors. The men’s armor was like snakeskin, the scales gleaming like black leeches and tiny mirrors. And she—

Damarishka was with him.

Her breath clotted like blood inside her lungs, any sound smothered as though under a blanket, for in the image, manacles glittered around her bare feet. A golden choker like a slave band encircled her pale throat. And she sat on the stone floor beside Darian’s chair while he lounged like a warlord on the upholstery, his hand resting on her braided hair as if she were a beloved pet.

The intricate weave of a thousand thoughts and reactions pricked and snarled inside her.

“What—?” she started, then swallowed, feeling as though the world around her was gulping her down. “What…” She turned a page to find herself and him again, but lovers this time, quivering and clasped together on a silken bed. One of her hands was strapped to a bedpost, her fingers white-knuckled around the leather strap, her other hand twisting a fistful of his hair, their passion obviously nearly spent.

Her cheeks aflame, she flipped to another page.

In this one, he slept, stomach-down, the vertebrae visible on his nude back, while she loomed above him. Her limbs shifted ethereally in a thready gown, her person untethered now, although the leather strap dangled from her wrist, knifed free, and—

Reprisal glinted in the blade of her upraised dagger.

She slammed the tome shut, her breath whooshing out like a punched bellows. “What is this?”

“Our potential futures,” Darian clipped out, “had we chosen something different in our past. Walked different paths than what we’ve chosen now.” Gingerly, with a pained contortion of his mouth, he eased the book from her limp fingers and clapped it back into its place with unwarranted—no, warranted—fury. His thumb smashed across the embossed title. “Futures Eluded,” he read, emphasis on the ‘eluded’.

Her heart slowed, her breathing stertorous. “You mean none of those will happen?”

“They should not, no. All the scenes shown within these pages are eluded fates.”

“So I won’t kill you?”

“I don’t plan on giving you a reason to, no.”

Still stuttering in the aftermath of what she’d seen, she couldn’t match his wry smile. “And you won’t become… what you were when you had me chained?”

He, too, eschewed any smile. “At one point in my life, I did have the potential to become that man, but no more.”

“Did—did you see these futures before you came for me?”

“I saw… many, yes. More where you slew me. Some where you loved me—as darkly as I loved you. One, the worst, where—”

“Where what?”

“We never came together at all.”

Her breath caught. That was the worst? Not the ones where she obviously despised him—where she planned his murder?

He spun away and unlatched a windowpane, and into the library’s stuffy air swirled the rainy, mossy, wetly musty sent of petrichor, which intermingled with the lemon, carrots, and sugar of the iced cakes.

Somehow, the freshness invigorated her boldness. “Do you know what choice in the past would have led to—to those fates?”

“I can only guess my choice to cut myself off from the world enabled me to grow up untortured. Had the world charged in when I was a boy, I think they might have repainted my barely sketched rage into violence.”

“Why did you erect your walls against the world?”

“You told me to.”

“I did?”

“Do you remember when you sneaked out of the castle to fly a kite?”

“When I was twelve?” Her lips twitched a little at the clandestine incident. “Yes.”

“You met me then.”

Her brow crinkled. “But…”

“I misted over your memory afterward. I can remove the mist-spell so that the past clears, but I must touch you as I touched you when I cast the spell upon you and speak the same words. May I?”

Bewildered, but with her heart in a strangely anticipatory rhythm, she nodded.

He stepped close (her heart syncopating even faster) and he touched his fingertips to her lips.

Her emotions beat like wings against her ribs.

As his eyes held hers, he murmured: “Your loving heart is greater magic than theirs.” And her mind opened up.

Like a Boy Fallen from a Nomad’s Wagon

Like a flower chain, old memories threaded through other ones and…

“Out here all alone, are you?”

Twelve-year-old Damarishka whipped around, her gasp jumping out of her mouth like a butterfly flown from her tongue.

Through her tangled hair and the drizzle misting the world, she stared at a boy around her age. The only person visible in all the hills around her, he resembled a wild thing that had fallen from a nomad’s wagon. All spiky hair and rambunctious grin, torn black trousers and scruffy black boots, his unbuttoned black vest whipping around his ivory linen shirt in the wind.

And here she was facing him with her arms stretched high, too involved in grappling with the spool of her kite, a magnificent scarlet dragon that was navigating the stormy sky with its tail and wings of ribbons buffeted by the air. Its weight kept tugging her upward even though she was too heavy to be dragged off, with her damp skirts heavy and spangled with rain and flapping around her calves in the ferocious wind.

“Who are you?” she blurted out.

Instead of answering, the boy leaned more into the vicious wind—toward her, his entire focus honed like a blade. “Nice weather you have here. Beats you in the face.”

Ah. Damarishka relaxed somewhat, relieved because he was talking about the weather. The weather was a socially acceptable topic, and boring, which meant he was safe, technically—or that’s what it would mean in a parlor; she wasn’t certain what protocol ruled out here, and so she hoped her belligerent chin would disguise her racing heart. “What’s it like where you live?” Because the way he’d said ‘here’ made it clear he wasn’t from here.

“Worse.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers and squinted into the wind. “Sometimes knocks you flat on your ass.”

Her eyes rounded. “What?”

“I got a nasty mouth, sorry not sorry.”

She blinked rapidly, ignoring the tug-tug of the kite pulling her up.

“You gonna tell me why a princess is out here alone?” he went on.

And the look he slid toward her then lifted the hairs on the nape of her neck, because she swore he looked as if he were thinking of snatching her. Something about the reflexively wolfish way he leaned again, and how his gaze flicked rapidly from side to side as if gauging this place for witnesses.

She jerked her chin toward the kite. “I’m here because of this?”

“Why didn’t anyone come with you?”

“Because it’s storming!” (That was patently untrue; she had actually sneaked out, a trifling matter whose significant peril was becoming increasingly evident.)

His dark brows lowered, his grin falling into a scowl. “They don’t beat you, do they?”

“What? Where’d you get that from? No!”

His shoulders relaxed. “Good.” Then he tensed again. “They say mean things to you?”

“No!”

“They do mean things?”

“N—” She stopped on the cusp of ‘no’. Her father didn’t always treat the servants or his subjects well. “Not mean things to me,” she amended. “Were your parents mean to you?” she hastily turned the tables.

“Not my parents.” His head ducked, his hair lashing cheeks turned red as apples from the elements.

“Servants?” she guessed.

“Had no servants. You play piano?”

“No, but I sing. You?”

“Play piano. I sing like a caterwauling cat regrettably.”

She couldn’t stop the laugh that poofed out of her at that.

He grinned, shaking his hair back and dislodging specks of rain. “You embroider?”

“Not willingly.”

“Can’t blame you. You draw?”

“Rarely.”

“Paint?”

“Badly.”

“You gotta be better than my cat.”

“Your cat!”

“He tries. Paws don’t hold brushes well.”

She covered her mouth (with her upper arm, since her hands were wrapped up with the kite spool) on another escaped laugh.

“You like sweet foods or salty more.”

“Sweets!” she answered decisively. “Fruits, cakes—”

“Candies.”

“Yes! And cheeses.”

He laughed. “I got a sweet tooth, too. We used to pick blueberries in the wood near our castle and then cook pies and tarts from ’em.”

“We have strawberries in the castle garden! I used to help Cook pick them.” She smiled impishly. “Till she discovered more ended in my tummy than in her basket.”

His eyes crinkled. “How many would you eat?”

“Enough for a stomachache.”

“Me, same.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’d always have blue teeth and a poochy stomach after picking blueberries. But we’d also pick mushrooms, too, which made the best soup. So delicious I still dream of it.”

“Oh, yum. Don’t make my mouth water,” she teased, an intended wordplay referring to the rain on her lips and salivating about his mushroom soup, but the jest seemed more clever before she said it than when she thought about it after it was out.

Nevertheless, his face lit up with absolute delight. “You joke, too!”

“Not well. I’m working on it.”

That surprised a laugh out of him, which warmed the cockles of her heart, which got her wondering—what even were the cockles of a heart? When she posed this question to him, faux-somberly, of course, he replied with equal faux-somberness, and as she was giggling about that, he asked if she read books, and then they were both lost, talking one over the other about this adventure or that villain or this annoying hero or that mad rescue, and she didn’t even know how he’d done it, but she completely lost track of the fact that she was holding a kite until the sky opened its belly and dashed all its storm on her at once.

Pelting rain was suddenly striking her kite like missiles from the clouds, and her scarlet dragon was falling toward the earth, bucking side to side in the deluge.

Damarishka could barely see beyond the sheets of rain streaming over her.

“Reel it in!” The boy thrust his arms around her, both shocking her and jolting her into action, and they both worked together to turn, turn, turn the string to drag the kite in before it could plummet down to be crumpled on the ground.

Once they got it in close enough, the boy leaped forth and caught it, then grabbed her hand. “Hurry!” He dragged her behind him, her sodden skirts draggling and tripping her over and over until he cursed and shoved the kite into her arms and then he was carrying her, running and slipping on the wet grassland and nearly falling himself, which forced her to shriek and grab him around the shoulders and neck—and was he laughing? She heard the telltale huff of it and felt the warmth of his expelled breath on her cheek, an inarguable contrast to the cold drip of the rain.

Then he was swinging her down, standing her back upright on a spot that barely dripped, beside the trunk of a thick oak.

She should chastise him for daring to mishandle her person, she supposed, but how idiotic was that when he’d actually handled her quite well by hastening her to a dry spot?

Well, drier, anyway. The ancient tree shielded them from the worst of the downpour, though not from raindrops that mazed through the branches overhead, landed in her hair, and slid in runnels down her nose and lips.

Whooping, the boy flopped down, his back to the tree, legs stretched out, and smiled up.

And Damarishka, looking down, was possessed of the oddest thought. As the blustery wind lashed the tree and dislodged the leaves, making them spiral down around him like coins traded for wishes, she thought he was a wish she had somehow traded for, though she hadn’t known she’d wished for anything, and she didn’t know what price she’d paid.

But then something started happening to his face. A glaring, angry welt appeared and puckered across one side, stretching from his chin, across his mouth, and up to his opposite temple.

She dragged in a breath, her gaze riveted on that violently wrought wound. “What…”

His hand flew to his face, probed the wound, and he cursed. “Is the spell fading?”

“Spell?” she squeaked. “What spell? Are you a wizard?”

“Jag it!” He scrambled to his feet, his gaze thrust up to the sky visible between the wind-thrashed branches. “They must’ve—”

A bolt of lightning scorched the grass nearby. Damarishka screamed and whirled away, but even so, clods of displaced dirt scraped her cheeks and lodged between her teeth.

The boy belatedly tried to shield her, deprecations coming in a torrent from his lips.

Another lightning strike deafened her almost completely, her ears ringing so loudly she could hardly even hear the boy’s curses as he knelt above her.

Above her? When had she collapsed?

The next lightning strike exploded around them. Her eyes stung, her nostrils burned, and she smelled scorched hair, singed bark, and—

“I’m sorry, princess!” the boy shouted, seizing her hand.

And then the ground opened up beneath her.

It was simply gone.

Screaming, she toppled with him into a void.

The Glop and Gluck of Miry Earth

Damarishka flailed midair, her body hurtling downward, her screaming gaze flung upward—toward the earth above, which was now reduced to a hole that framed the black branches of the oak tree.

Its limbs were clawing at the sky while its leaves, aswirl, were spiraling down into the hole like stupid birds trying to follow Damarishka’s catapulting fall.

Then the hole sealed up, enclosing Damarishka in this heaving, lightless drop, and the boy in the dark grappled her close.

Abruptly, he slowed their descent to a scant and floating sway, as if they were leaves, adrift and weightless, sweeping side to side and spinning in an aerial dance, and if she’d been able to ignore the suffocating knowledge of the weight of dirt all around them, she might have loved the feel, the gentle, rocking fall…

But panic was veining through her fast, and Damarishka, gasping, groped for the boy’s arms in an attempt to evade the attack she knew was coming. “You have to get me out of here!”

Any answer he might’ve had went either unspoken or unheard, for the rock above them exploded apart, and not two stories above them gaped a new mouth in the earth, widening as if to eat the overcast sky, with dark shapes of living things that lined its edge, forms rippling in and out of sinister shapes.

Huge boulders peeled away from the sides of the crevice with ear-splitting screeches, like monsters torn from the rock face and slung downward.

The boy cursed again and shoved Damarishka’s face into his chest. He smelled of rain and rock and mint and blueberries—which why was she noticing this now, with clods of dirt pelting her ears and crumbling in her hair and a boulder falling at them from above?!

She scarcely drew in another breath when she was thudding to her feet and staggering forward. A blast of displaced air behind her smacked into her with a whoosh. The boy, beside her, hauled her up before she could sprawl face-flat. “Run!”

A glance back over her shoulder showed that he’d somehow found (or made?) a cave branching off the shaft they’d been floating down, and as she watched, the hind end of the plunging boulder vanished out of sight, visible in some dim overcast light slanting down from above.

Shouts echoed off the rock walls, eerily distorted.

The boy looped his arm around her waist. “Faster!”

Her feet acted of their own accord and followed his lead, but then her gaze shifted to the looming void of the tunnel before them and—

Don’t scream! Mother had hissed into Damarishka’s ear. Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream!

Damarishka squeezed her eyes tighter, wheezing for breath.

Knobs of dirt pummeling her shoulders, rolling off her back and onto the hard ground.

Don’t scream! Mother’s hand had mashed Damarishka’s mouth shut. They’ll hear and—

The earth rumbling.

Mercy upon us! Damarishka, you’ll have to run. Run, darling, run!

Pushing Damarishka away, so much dirt falling that it was piling onto Damarishka’s arms, her neck.

Run, Damarishka, now!

The boy’s hand gripped her fingers hard, anchoring her, but shivers reeled up her nerves and—

Mother!

Tears streaked hot and gritty down Damarishka’s cheeks and smudged the grime into muddied smears on her skin.

Stay always unseen!

Any bravery inside her knotted into a mess, and the glop and gluck of the miry earth sucked at her heels and—

“Stop!” Winded, wheezing, she dragged at the boy’s hand. “I can’t be down here. We’re going to suffocate!” I am going to suffocate, she thought.

“We won’t, I promise! Don’t you trust me?”

“No!”

He tripped and stumbled while half-turning, but also still running, and in the faint floating fairy lights racing alongside them—which he must’ve magically conjured up while she’d been swamped by the awful past—his eyebrows practically shot up into his hairline. “What?”

She almost—almost—laughed at the sheer absurdity of his blatant shock that she might not trust him, but then panic submerged her again. Her breathing stuttered, her sobs gulped openly out, and—

—the ceiling was starting to fall.

Don’t scream, darling! Run!

“Get me out of here!” Damarishka shrieked.

“Kacking blell!” the boy cursed. “Hold on to me!” And the whole earth above them rumbled and shifted and ruptured into another split-open rift. Dislodged rocks exploded outward and rolled toward them in a waterfall of pebbles—but then the boy wheeled her into his arms, and she toppled against his chest. Her knees buckled and he caught her with an arm around her waist. He reached up—his motion jolted her as she pressed her face into his vest—and he shouted a word she couldn’t understand.

They jerked into the air and shot upward. As they—flew?—pebbles knocked into her elbows and heels.

Mercy, her heart couldn’t bear this! She grasped the boy tighter, her stomach barreling downward as her body was borne up and up and—

A gust of drizzle smattered her shoulders and dampened her knuckles, windy air pitching her hair in every direction.

Damarishka raised her head. They were speeding out of the hole; something invisible seemed to be holding the boy’s arm and hoisting him up into the air, and Damarishka along with him as he gripped her to him.

But they didn’t stop at the ground. They kept arrowing upward even as the earthen hole below them wove itself shut and smoothed into wet grassland that fell farther away.

There was nothing beneath her feet, and her belly tumbled, her legs kicking, as the boy was somehow flying her into the sky.

Was he unwittingly abducting her?

(Not to mention, somehow, somewhere, she had lost her kite.)

Where the Monsters Collect Our Screams

As the boy swept her through the sky, the whistling wind stormed around them. Its forceful gusts stung Damarishka’s eyes and snatched away her breath, with drizzle dampening her skin and slickening the boy’s wrist, which she gripped even harder.

But her arm was beginning to ache as she swung from him like a pendulum in the center of the turbulent sky—back and forth, her stomach in a swoop and flip.

Also, there would be bruises, meaning her father would make someone pay if he found the marks, and she would have no one to blame, for she could not bring home this boy—but why was she thinking this when—“What are you doing?” she shouted up at the boy over the shriek of the wind.

“Saving us!”

“I mean how are you flying?”

“Recklessly!”

“Kacking blell!” she cursed. “That is not making me feel better about this situation!”

Laughter erupted from him, an exhilarated sound without a niblet of apology. “You’re taking this fantastically, by the by! Nary a scream nor a faint on your horizon.”

“Drop me and you’ll hear me scream for sure!”

“Never! I promise!” He grasped her harder.

More bruises, she despaired.

And then the rain stopped—or else they flew out of the storm, for the fields rolling below them gleamed as though sown with diamonds.

Sunbeams sparkled between slate-hued clouds.

Damarishka’s breath caught in her chest, for the vista was gorgeous, as if the storm had strewn the earth with celestial gems. Despite the discomfort of her drenched hair plastered to her neck, and her sodden gown plastered to her midriff and arms and thighs, and her soggy boots dragging her down, exhilaration darted through her. Abruptly, the wildness of this dangerous misadventure struck her. The thrill! But—“Where are you taking me?” she shouted.

The boy glanced down, his own sopping hair slanting over his forehead and his dark eyes, and the storm had sprinkled his hair with its gems, too. “Do you want to come home with me?”

“What? No! I can’t leave my kingdom!” Not to her father. Not forever.

The boy tilted his head upward. “Down!” he cried. “My arm’s getting tired!”

“Who are you talking to?” she called up.

“The—” The boy suddenly shrieked, and abruptly he and she were both hurtling toward the earth at alarming speed.

Damarishka screamed; he screamed.

“Kacking blell, you—!” He shook his fist to the sky. Then, cursing, he clawed at Damarishka’s wrist as if that could slow their headlong descent.

Instead, they plummeted faster. The fields hurtled upward as they hurtled downward, and the wind screeched past, a banshee whisking along and threatening to swallow Damarishka’s life. Not even her scream could push its way out of her, throttled by utter terror.

Then the boy bellowed, “Pillows!”

Pillows!?

Pillows—there! Down on the meadow below, they were proliferating in a heightening pile of fluffy white, starchy—

The boy let her go.

Damarishka squeezed her eyes shut.

Stomach-up, she smashed down onto a heap of hundreds of goose-down bed-pillows, her hair flung out, the air in her lungs squished flat.

Despite the softened impact of yielding cushions, she sank down deep.

The boy oomphed somewhere to her right.

Gasping in shallow breaths, Damarishka battled upright inside a flurrying scent like freshly washed laundry, and a flapping sound around her like sheets on clotheslines. Her eyes bolted open to feathers swirling dizzyingly around her.

As she wallowed like an overfed cat on the fluffy heap, the boy, still unseen off to her right, was punching pillows—or crawling closer?

There! He was clambering over the mound, clearing the pillowed rise with feathers in his hair and stuck to his rain-damp cheeks. He blew one out of his mouth.

Somehow, though, for a second, he appeared more skeleton than boy, his cheeks hollowed out with deep contours of gauntness, a boy wasting away.

Then Damarishka blinked and nothing remained amiss, only the sun slanting across a rain-flecked, cherry-cheeked boy, bright with excitement.

Damarishka threw up her arms, the feathers stuck in her flounced sleeves pricking her rain-damp skin. “What was that?”

“The theft of a lot of pillows.” He grinned toothily and slapped a pillow under his knee. “A lot of people will go to bed very grumpy tonight. But we’re alive.” He whooped.

“I mean what was carrying us? And why did it drop you?”

He puffed out his cheeks. “Maybe I’d better return these pillows.”

Motion from the side yanked her head around. Pillows were leaping into the sky, shedding feathers like shot birds.

“What was carrying us,” she doggedly repeated, “up in the sky?”

When his inflexible jaw clearly signaled his refusal to answer—and was his face going gaunt again?—she crossed her arms. “Fine, be a mystery.”

“I’m not trying to be an enigma.”

“Then at least tell me who was attacking us back under the oak tree.”

“Those, I can name.” He spat vilely. “They were the monsters who killed my parents.”

“Killed your parents.” Her heart clenched, but she withheld her pity because his blackening demeanor was rejecting any. “Monsters attacked them? As in—”

“Human monsters, but still monsters.” Rage scrawled ugly red latticework across his face, whitening the jagged scar there.

Helplessly ignorant on how to soothe his fury, she sought a response and settled on simply: “Why?”

He flung himself down beside her while pillows kept furiously vanishing off in every direction. “Ambition? Power? I don’t know. I was only four.”

“They spared you?”

“Not them. I’m only still here because of ancient magic. It doesn’t matter. We should get moving.” He wheeled his scrutiny across the sky. “They’re still hunting for me; I know it.”

Back in the present, Damarishka mulled on her younger self—how she’d felt after landing on that heap of pillows, learning of his tragic origins, and then accompanying him over the rain-washed fields.

Her younger self had known she should head home, known that the repercussions of her absence would only augment with every further moment, and that she must not consort with anyone magical, and definitely not out here, but she couldn’t bring herself to go. Despite the fact that the boy was obviously being hunted, she’d secretly, recklessly thrilled with the adventure, wishing the day would stretch on forever.

That day became her magical reprieve away from her staid castle life, for no one knew where she was—except him, and he hurled the very idea of ‘staid’ into oblivion, as did she. While they wended their way across the meadows, she hitched up her skirts and spun like one drunk, and young Darian spun with her.

Whimsy had crowned her spirits with sun-dust and daydreams. She’d flaunted her grin at the sun and even teased Darian, “You know, your thoughts leap clever and quick as a cat’s. There are worse things to land on than pillows.”

He’d grinned at that. “Like smelly socks.”

She crinkled her nose. “I meant normal things like the ground. That’d hurt.”

“Bees, too,” he suggested.

“Nettles,” she outdid him.

“Nibbled on by blood bugs!” he outdid her.

“Ew! But we don’t have blood bugs here.”

He did a boyish skip and hop. “Lucky.”

“Do you have them where you live?”

“Only in our dungeon.”

“You keep people in your dungeon?”

“Nah. Too much hassle to clean. Everyone just has to behave.”

She laughed, and their conversation traipsed on, unstopping even when they arrived at his solitary wagon which stood beside a field of wheat, a little roof attached to make a moving house he could live in.

“I traveled here in this,” he boasted.

And she had gone trustingly inside it with him.

She couldn’t even blame her younger self, because his younger version had been charm embodied. His easy humor had warmed her like a hearth fire, and she hadn’t really been warm since the loss of her mother.

Or maybe her young self trusting young Darian had less to do with his charisma and everything to do with her eroded hope. When he had insinuated his way into her solitude with the fragile bloom of friendship tendered on his palm, he had offered her the most deeply alluring gift of all.

And there, inside his enclosed wagon, sitting face to face on his single bunk, their legs crossed and their souls afire, they hadn’t stopped talking.

She’d wanted to know everything that a boy without parents did, and he wanted to know everything a girl with parents wanted to do.

“I actually only have a father now,” she’d eventually, reluctantly, corrected him.

He’d cast his gaze down, away from her, but she’d sensed his attention sharpen like a crow sighting a bauble. “What happened to your mother?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?”

“It’s true. We were… underground and fleeing and—”

“Fleeing who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how we got there. Everything is a muddle and I would think it was a nightmare, only—” She bit her lips and mashed her hand on the bed.

“Your mother was gone in the morning,” he guessed, “and never came back.”

“And dirt was caked under my nails.” She didn’t mention the tear tracks that had been drawn in the grime on her cheeks. “And ever after…” She couldn’t finish.

“…at night,” the boy brushed his fingertips over her knuckles, “your sleeping mind sells your unheard screams to the monsters that run rampant in your dreams.”

Nightmares. “Yes.”

“If I could catch them,” he cupped her hand in his, “I would toss them to the heart of the sky where the tale would stay always unsung. I would bury all your nightmares in the velvet casing of the night so that their violent fire would blend in with the twinkling stars, and you could never reach them again.”

Enamored of his words, she wished to reciprocate, for surely he, too, had screamed into the powerless night for his slain mother and father. “And I,” she swore, “would steal your screams back from the monsters in your dreams and magically twirl them into hummingbird wings, and instead of encumbering your heart, they would enable your soul to soar.”

“If only,” he whispered, “we held sway in the world of dreams where the monsters collect our screams.”

“Can we hold sway here, at least?”

“Let’s never give up until they let us live.” In a sort of waking dream, he rose then and drifted to the wagon door, which he opened onto a world on the brink of night, where the orange dusk was slowly dispersing into tattered ribbons of indigo.

He invited her to his side, and they sat down hip to hip, their legs stretched out down the wagon stairs, and Damarishka thought: The world lies so vast before us, and we are so small.

The dark blue of night was thickening on one side like a tide of water filling up the sky, as if a glass were sloshing full of night, and inside it, the stars glimmered like twinkling fish on the ocean blue.

Nearer to the earth, fireflies flickered in the gloaming, and the boy took Damarishka’s hands in his and urged her, “Imagine something.”

“Imagine what?”

“Anything, a snail shell, a golden-beaked bird, and I’ll create it in glass for you from magic.”

“Can you create your likeness for me?”

“My likeness?”

“Your face in a mirror perhaps? It’s just—”

“Yes, I can do it. Close your eyes.”

She did, and in a few moments, the flat, cool surface of the back of a mirror spread along her palms.

“Now,” he whispered, and her eyelids parted.

“It’s—” perfect, she wanted to finish, for the mirror he’d made held his image, his cheeky smirk under his impish eyes, but outside the mirror, across from her hands, his hands were…

One was normal, pale and moon-washed.

But the other shone as bare as pearls: only finger bones and wrist bones stripped clean of meat, not becoming flesh until halfway down his forearm.

His smile hung on an edge of oddness, waiting.

Damarishka’s fingertips, still holding the mirror, hovered a hairsbreadth away from the fingertips of his skeleton hand. “What happened?”

“The flesh, the muscle—it’ll regrow after the magic rejuvenates.”

“Your skin is the cost of magic?”

“Do you find the aspect repulsive?”

“Not… repulsive. Not when it’s part of you,” she stipulated.

“You wouldn’t prefer just any skeleton?” he jested, his tone not quite as light as it should be.

She didn’t smile. “I prefer you encased in flesh.”

His smile dropped. “So do I. But—” His fingers clenched, his fleshless knuckles blanched completely white. “I’ll kill them all, I swear.”

Damarishka blinked. “Kill who?” What had provoked his outburst?

“Them, the ones who slew my parents and constantly, consistently, incessantly try to destroy me, too, over and over and over. They destroyed so much that they deserve to be destroyed in turn. Slowly, violently—I swear I will filter their blood from their veins, slash it from their families, steep it from their children—”

“No.” She touched his knuckles—the skinless bones—but stifled a shudder at his fleshless joints, powdery-dry beneath her padded fingers, so she shifted her plea to his mouth instead, and he froze at her touch; he stopped, and she whispered, “No. Do not become what they did.” What my father did. Be stronger.

“But they—they killed my parents. And I—I am only here because of ancient and powerful magic. If I gathered it all up and turned it against them—”

“Have you ever killed before?”

He didn’t answer.

It was answer enough. “You don’t know the feel of blood on your hands,” she murmured. “And I do not think that a soul which began innocent will ever forget the feel of fresh blood on it. So. Before you spill any, do you want it on you forever? Because we spoke of monsters in our dreams, but what happens when you see those monsters when you’re awake? Whenever you look in your mirror?”

“What else can I do?” he ground out. “Hide forever?”

“Hide for now. Because you obviously can’t defeat them yet.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you ran from them today.”

For an unexpected instant, the faintest grin overtook him. “You noticed that, did you?”

The faintest smile visited her, too. “I did notice the earth falling away from me, yes, as some crazy boy I shouldn’t like was bearing me into the sky.”

“The crazy boy was only doing that because some crazy girl asked him to.”

“The crazy boy misunderstood the task.”

He laughed quietly, but it perished the moment after. “I don’t want to run all my life. To live poor and haggard in this wagon only to occasionally return home and hope the monsters don’t notice I’m there. I did not tell you, but my castle stands vacant, the servants long fled. I am not supposed to be alive, so at the merest sign of me, my parents’ murderers will descend.”

“Then dig in your heels. If you cannot fend them off, then fight them out. Return to your castle and build traps, walls, mazes, gorges, anything to keep them from getting in. And build up your strength. Make a plan. Prepare for the time when you will open your walls, when you will be invincible. But do not bow to war. First offer them peace. Then, if they attack, let their blood be on their own hands.”

“That… is a devious way to be peaceful. To make myself a trap.”

“Are you so certain they will strike?”

“When they discover I live, yes. And once I raise a barricade around my kingdom against them, they will know that I live.”

She hesitated. “Will you be safe there?” Alone?

“I have a reason to ensure it now.” The way he smiled, his saddened eyes studying her… “But let’s not dwell on unhappy things.”

She heartily agreed, for her own unpleasant thing burdened her mind: aside from her mother’s abhorrence of magic, Damarishka had been gone from the castle for far too long; some servant would likely be punished for her absence, and the longer she dallied here, the worse the servant’s suffering.

But couldn’t she be selfish just this once? Let herself be smitten with a boy? Young and flush and girlish instead of princessly? Buoyant with elation in his company?

Already, his hand was re-fleshing itself: muscle and veins of blood were winding around his bone, followed by a flowing cover of skin. Who knew when her magic friend would return here, if ever. If she had no chance but now… then now it must be.

And so, together, he and she left their sorrow behind, until it only trailed like footprints in their minds: mere indentations with nothing and nobody stepping there for a time.

Still smiling, still talking, then talking slower, slower, mumbling now… he and she fell asleep.

And in that sleep, Damarishka dreamed that their nightmares twirled into hummingbirds in flight, and their souls rode free on those wings.

*

Someone was shaking her. “Wake up! Quick!”

For an instant, her past reared up, her mother—

No, it was the boy, Darian, frantically scrambling backward into the shadows of his wagon.

Damarishka had fallen asleep. Mussed with sleep and bewilderment, she scrubbed at her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Past midnight. You have to go, now!” the boy cried.

“What’s wrong?” Why was he hunkered in the corner? She clambered up and grabbed for him, but caught only sticks—no, she caught bones.

His fingers were of bone again. “What magic did you do?” she blurted out.

He backed farther away, averting his face. But her eyes were adjusting to the dark, squinting. His longish hair looked too greasy on a scalp—a skull?—that was far too white to be skin, and the shoulders visibly prominent under his vest and shirt were far too knobby to be anything but bones.

“I won’t wreak death on the human monsters,” he swore. “Nor on their families. As you proposed, I will return home and barricade myself in my kingdom until such a time as…”

“Until—when?” Fear made her tone faintly shrill. “Will you ever visit me again?”

“I swear. I will, eventually, and I will hope, always… that—” without warning, he loomed before her and touched his skeleton fingertips to her lips, and in the moonlight from his wagon home’s tiny window, she looked straight into his face—his cheeks were impossibly sunken in; his face was barely fleshed, without any muscle or fat between skin and bone; his eyes were only white glints of sclera deep in his sockets—all of him seemingly un-alive, and yet she felt the exhalation of his life-breath on her cheek as he finished with a whisper “—your loving heart is greater magic than theirs.”

The Chain of Human Agony

Damarishka opened her eyes back in the present, in Darian’s library.

“You see,” he murmured before she could say aught.

Behind her, a hairsbreadth away, he exhaled a living breath, like the one which had exhaled from that seemingly not-alive boy he’d been…

She dragged her shaky fingers along her gown. “What must I see?”

“That I chose to lock out my enemies because of you, instead of slaying them. Because of your words and the wisdom of your secret heart.”

She recalled another part of their conversation, too. As they’d sat cross-legged, facing one another on his wagon bed, their knees touching, their voices mingling—even before his hand had turned to bone and he had sworn to shed his enemies’ blood—he and she had discussed war and violence, and she had advocated for peace.

“Even if another side instigates the pain—” as she’d said it, she knew the boy couldn’t know, but she was referring to her father’s own fate and his past, brief, cruel captivity “—I have seen the one tortured rise up to become more brutal than those who abused him. It becomes a chain of human suffering: one human brutalizes another, who brutalizes the next, who brutalizes the next. Sometimes, one person must turn away from the pain done him and choose peace. And thereby end the ongoing perpetuation of the chain of human agony.”

The boy raised a brow in visibly dubious skepticism. “Will peace truly bring peace to all, though?”

“It will at least bring some less blood—and fewer bruises.”

“Are you bruised?” He lifted his fingertips from his knees as if to reach for her face, but then aborted the touch. Crimson tinged his cheeks as he curved his fingers into fists, and his demeanor assumed the intensity of a vow. “I can carry you away, you know, if they hurt you.”

She laughed tearily (tears she hoped he didn’t notice, as they were still unshed) while looking away. “Would you?”

“Do you want me to?”

In the present, she drifted toward a library window set in an alcove where the broad window ledge provided a nest of tasseled pillows perfect for lounging and reading. “When you… the way you looked at me some of the time, during that day—I thought you were dangerous. A treacherous boy who might take me away without my permission.”

“I considered it,” he admitted softly. “I was dangerous, potentially. I was lonely, bitter, angry, and, obviously, in other iterations of our lives, I did take you, then. But not in this iteration.”

“In other iterations? Ah, you mean in some of the potential lives that the book with our eluded futures shows—the fates that we’ve evaded in this life?”

He dipped his head in affirmation. “You were not always unwilling to be taken back then. But when you were… it did not always end well. ”

“I fought?”

“Not too much. Mostly, you saw the merits in being snatched from home.”

Against her will, his faint smile as he spoke these words intrigued her, sparking her imagination in areas she probably shouldn’t enter.

To avoid thinking of stupidities, she veered tactics. “Your magic… it eats away your flesh and pares you down to bone as its cost, and yet you have looked nothing but healthy the entire time since you abducted me, and surely you’ve done more magic now than then.”

“I’ve not actually used too much. Does it… disturb you that the magic takes my flesh—at least until the power rejuvenates?”

Instead of answering his question, she asked another of her own. “What magic did you do—back then, before you shook me awake in that wagon? The boy you were was half-rotted by the time you woke me.”

“All of those spells were for you: I cast a copious number of them to protect you on your way home—and I cast the one to take your memory of me.”

“Why did you?”

“Take my existence from you, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“To protect you.”

“Was I in danger?”

In lieu of answering, he crossed to the shelf and slid out the Futures Eluded book from earlier. He rifled through the pages, mouth set grimly, then slapped it on the table beside the cakes, causing ripples in the cocoa. “Behold.”

The scene shifting stormily across the pages depicted a sky of roiling clouds above Darian’s castle courtyard. At least twenty cloaked figures braced themselves in a circle on the flagstones, their cloaks riled by the wind, although their hoods firmly obscured their identities.

And in their center: Damarishka. Maybe thirteen years old, barefoot and in a white nightshift, her long, tangled hair mussed and uncombed, as if they had dragged her straight from sleep. Even in the library, in the present, she wavered as faint exhaustion shook her limbs, and the wind sheared across her in a phantom sensation. Strands of her hair skimmed over her mouth while fear clenched in her gut.

Around her in the scene floated at least a hundred knives, all aimed at her throat, heart, ribs, abdomen, every vital, susceptible body part (like an invisible butcher indicating the best places to split open a pig); a few dagger points even hung suspended a finger’s breadth away from her eyes. Two more cornered her parted lips, her panicked gasps fogging the daggers’ steel tips.

“She’s calling for you, you little bastard!” one of the hooded figures bellowed toward the castle.

The castle’s double doors crashed open.

Young Darian stepped out onto the stair landing, wearing buckled black boots, torn trousers, and a billowing white shirt. His wild hair flew, onyx-dark, above his blanched-white scar, his mouth abominably twisted. “Don’t you dare!”

“Yield to us!” boomed the cloaked form. “Give us your power, or she will suffer!”

One of the knives by her mouth pricked her skin, and a rivulet of blood trickled down her chin.

Darian slammed the book shut, startling Damarishka out of the sensations of past storm and terror.

His jaw fixed in a hard line. “No matter what I did—whether I surrendered, fought, or hurled their terribleness at their consciences—that they would hold knives to a young girl!—it did not matter; you never… I could never get you out of that trap. Our lives always ended there.”

Damarishka swallowed.

“So.” He absently traced the book’s embossed title. “That is why I took myself out of your mind this time, so that you would never quest for me and thereby draw my enemies to the only weakness outside my protection.”

She wrapped herself in quietness. “Why did you choose me, though? In every iteration?”

“Did I choose you?” he whispered. “Do we ever choose our favorite soul in the world?”

Things You’ve Done to Me

“How can you say such things?” Damarishka murmured, alarmed by Darian’s admission, not only at its depth (for they had hardly met), but at its effect on her despite her barely knowing him. Not to mention her mother’s warnings… Stay hidden. Shun dark-haired boys. Avoid dark-haired men. Especially any who knows magic. Be content…

“It is this book.” An unvoiced curse roughened Darian’s tone as he traced his fingertips along the spine of Futures Eluded. “Every life we lived together flows through its pages, and I have known of it since I was a boy of twelve. Desolate, wishful, lonely, resentful—how could a boy such as I not open its pages to discover my fate? Some evenings, I read about our lives voraciously, while other nights, I howled and strove to destroy every page, for I was sure it was all lies, atrocious traps lain in ink to foment my helplessness. Imagine—” He dragged his hand viciously through his hair. “Imagine if you had read a chapter of our lives almost every day until you knew my every weakness. My awful strength. As I learned every one of yours.”

“Perhaps, then,” Damarishka ventured, “I should read it—so that I know you.”

“Not…” He flattened his palm to cover the embossed title. “There are things I would rather you not discover there. Things I would hide forever if I could.”

Damarishka hesitated, then pushed out: “Things you’ve done to me in our other lives?” Things you plan to do to me in this one?

“Not… not only those.” He slipped his fingers around hers, startling and intimate, and he breathed devastatingly hotly across her knuckles: “Indulge me in this, I pray.”

Her lips tightened. “Have I a choice?”

He kissed her captive hands, one after the other. “Yes. Any time you demand the book, I will hand it to you. I am asking first, however, for you to resist knowing.”

“Why?” She shouldn’t let him do this, shouldn’t acknowledge how weak his fervent kisses on her knuckles rendered her, and how she longed to indulge him simply because the potency of his desire thrummed into her, his wish as powerful as her own blood. Their shared past as boy and girl had burrowed powerful roots into her after mere hours. His youthful charm had charmed her too well.

His face now, too, seemed to hide nothing, only showing naked and brutal honesty. “Because I hope that this life, here, will be the one we can finally have together. One where you don’t live in fear.”

Fear of what? she wondered. Fear of him? Were my mother’s warnings about you? Or did he fear something? The people who hunted him? The sorcerers who had attacked them both when he’d found her with her kite at twelve summers old?

She only knew that she trusted he meant what she said, and so she summoned up the mildest of smiles. “I concede to your wish then—for now. But do tell,” she teased lightly, “if you know them all, then what are my favorite things?”

He grinned. “Books. Plum pie. Standing in the courtyard in the sun and tossing seeds to the birds until they flock around you as if you were an enchantress of all the winged creatures on earth. You love living in a castle full of cats—especially black ones. In one of my iterations, I had a black tom that loved my lap, and you couldn’t resist his catty golden eyes, and when you finally crawled close and knelt by me to pet him, I—dastardly, wicked—got to triumphantly pet you in return.” His devious half smile invited Damarishka to accept the memory as one playful, not hurtful.

In truth, she was struggling not to imagine how he would have petted her—innocently, or not—and even more tellingly, which would she have preferred—in that iteration? “Crows, too,” she offered. “I’ve always been partial to their glossy black plumage.”

 “Yes.” Darian fractionally grinned. “And ravens. You fed them from our bedroom window every eve, with the sunset around you like a blazing stage as you leaned out in your gauzy night things, your hair unbound, shimmering in the breeze…” His gaze misted over with imagery of her, and Damarishka’s throat went dry.

To distract herself, she swiveled away and seated herself on a velvet-upholstered chair beside the table where the tray of delicacies sat. There, she plucked a cherry tart and sank her teeth into it, its sour sweetness puckering her mouth.

It could not distract her from Darian quietly shifting behind her, though, nor from the knowledge that he had known her intimately in their every single potential life, and it seemed inevitable that they would know each other equally intimately in this one, too.

He paused behind her, his presence palpable, his fingertips a handbreadth away from her shoulders. “Will you listen to me play? You… love that, too.”

She was already rising, tart in hand, her answer blatantly obvious in her unthinking reaction. Always, she had loved music. But—“Do you love it?” she asked, wanting to discover him, too, despite her mother’s warnings.

His smile offered her secrets without telling any. “You will discover all of my loves and weaknesses in time. You always do.” Laughing softly at her huff, he ambled toward the door. At a crook of his finger, the tray of sweetbreads and tea levered into the air behind him.

To Damarishka’s unspoken joy, the tray floated alongside them like a pet on a leash through the candlelit corridors and accompanied them into a dimly lit music room.

Here, a single candle flickered on a grand piano near an open window. Around the piano, sheet music fluttered like roosting doves on metallic music stands. In the dark wings of the room, cellos, harps, and other instruments formed rapt and shadowy spectators.

Every alcove hosted an air of waiting stillness, reminiscent of an audience of a thousand bated onlookers.

Darian slid onto the piano bench, followed by the faintest of angling his head. “Sit where you please.”

A cozy window nook beckoned, but something of Darian’s too-quick glance drew her instead to a veritable nest of cushions beside the piano. She settled there like a dragon on a tasseled pillow hoard.

Poising his fingers above the keys, Darian released an indrawn breath, and his hands descended.

Thus commenced the ascent of a melody that was almost familiar, almost…

Every part of it defied encapsulation, until Damarishka simply shut her eyes lest she go mad attempting to pin down its indomitable spirit—its emotion, its ardency. It swirled in a place in her mind that was misty and nostalgic, a… comfort.

A haven only between them.

No marvel that she loved this, not for its mere music, but as a sanctuary from everything else.

As it gentled to silence, the final notes drifting, she thought it a kind of asylum not for the mad, but for the wounded, for those injured by their nearest and dearest.

Like her father had become estranged to her.

The idea jarred, and she opened her eyes.

Darian’s smile twisted. “Yes. When the music stops, your defenses are lowered. Do you want to speak of the hurt?”

“Of how my father became a tyrant to everyone behind my back while smiling to my face and telling me all was well? Condescending to me until I dulled to complacency? No, I do not.” What she did not actually want to speak of was her inaction, how she had let herself be shut away in the devastation of her own mind and done nothing at all.

It made her wish to hurt herself. “I find myself weary.”

Darian instantly rose, his lean figure as smooth as water. “I’ll show you to the chamber prepared for you then.” The tea tray bobbed along behind them again, and Darian, noticing her noticing it, impishly crinkled his eyes. “Never let it be said that I do not plan for every contingency, including midnight hunger.”

“Truly I would never accuse you of so very egregious an omission as discourtesy.”

His roguish grin turned him boyish. “Maybe not in this life.”

She couldn’t decide whether to bluster or laugh.

His grin slipped into a wistful smile. “Maybe this life will be the one where we both grow plump and…” His mirth snuffed out.

“Plump and what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

A lie, she named the response, or at least a deflection, but the day had strung her too taut for too long, and enough secrets had tested her endurance, and so she didn’t press him for this one.

Upon reaching her chambers, he instructed her on how the baths tapped heated water, and where to find soaps and towels, and he showed her which wardrobes held her stolen clothes.

Then they were facing one another in her bedroom door, and she was fending off a sleepy yawn while he stared down—and leaned down, his hand lifted, his head lowering—

Her breath caught.

But he swiveled away.

No kiss. No touch. Not even a whisper.

An enigma.

Was he the terror her mother warned her of? Or just a hunted boy? A man haunted by his countless luckless lives with Damarishka?

A skeleton encased in magic—magic that ate his skin away…

Too much, Damarishka decided, her exhausted eyelids entwining and easing any rumination from her mind.

She sank welcomingly into the sheets, and instantly fell into dreams… but her dreams were never tranquil, and the screams that were sold there every night—the nightmares, her mother’s shrieks and muttered warnings, the falling rocks—all bubbled up in Damarishka’s mind—

Until the strains of a piano swept them away like coins from her tongue, and the melody bore them aloft, above the dream monsters’ claws, and the music would not let the monsters buy her nightmares.

Not this time.

And thus she slumped into the nectar of a deep and dreamless sleep.

When sunrise breached her bedchamber, the first well-rested awakening in years enlivened her.

Darian, she realized. He had played her to sleep in order to keep her nightmares at bay. But who, her aching heart asked, was staving off his?

Cruel Mimicry of ‘Love’

Damarishka resisted waking, not wishing to end the loftiest, most nebulous sleep she’d had in years, but a dense wall of wakefulness was building up around her.

No, she begged. Just one more second… minute…

Unfortunately, the chirping of birds winging beyond the windowpanes conspired against her, their cheeps chastising her for her slugabed ways, not to mention some garrulous dormice gabbing gregariously in the bedroom corner.

Sighing, Damarishka at last blinked herself from amorphous dreams, stretched, and yawned—and spied a note upon her pillow.

Its red wax seal was illumined by indomitable sunlight beaming undeterred through the windows and reflecting off a silver carafe by her bed.

A note from Darian?

Excitement fluttered across her nerves (a sensation she would rather not question), and she reached…

Within seconds, she broke the seal…

To nothing. Not a word, not a spot, not the dot of an ‘i’!

A blank page.

But then, lo! Bold handwriting looped dauntlessly across it, asking: How did you sleep?

Damarishka’s cheeks unaccountably heated, although she didn’t know why.

Then rationality intruded: How could she transcribe a reply?

A glance at the stand resolved this quandary: a quill awaited, complicit pawn in Darian’s magical plan.

Damarishka took up the quill and wrote: Splendidly. Your music lulled me all night. But did you sleep?

A moment later, his reply (or evasion) appeared: Will you join us for breakfast? Whisker wishes to sharpen his etiquette on someone who appreciates his comely feline manners.

Damarishka pursed her lips. She would fain not argue first thing in the morning, but people circumventing issues made her wrathful, and so, she doggedly repeated: Did you sleep?

A hesitation, then landed his obviously disinclined response: I do not need to as much as you.

As she puckered her brow, he wrote onward: You asked why I chose you, last night, after which I responded by questioning if we ever choose our most beloved soul in the world (the person with whom we most align—in thought, in fascination, in interest, in enjoyment). It was an evasion.

She scribbled: THIS is an evasion.

He: Only partly. I…

Nothing more.

Was he thinking? Gathering words?

Lies?

Elusive enigmas with which to befuddle her attempts to truly know him?

At last, more words inked his thoughts: I am conflicted in my feelings toward you. I should not—that is to say, magic grinds me down to skull and bone. By what cruel mimicry of ‘love’ should I—a man reduced to a skeleton, a pitiable remnant of a body, which cannot touch you with softness, cannot kiss you with—what right have I to a woman like you? You of passion and flesh, of potential and ardent, actual essence. I nearly did not come for you at all; I nearly left you in your father’s pretty prison. Sometimes, I think I should have.

No, she scrawled, sickened by the faint scent of burning men—a residue of her former life, of her emptied mind as she used to eat the smell of scorch in her father’s palace garden, those vestiges now as sticky as blood viscous in her throat. She peeled off the foul sensation with effort. Continue, she wrote. Tell me why you did come.

More inked words poured: Because in the book of our eluded futures, you and I—something beneath the surface always bonded us. Even in the worst of our potential lives—namely, the one where I abducted you with brutality and chained you, when your animosity rightfully grew like a bitter, poisoned seed, even in that vicious life, one scene showed…

He trailed off, and Damarishka, fidgety and fervid with curiosity, jotted: Tell me.

And his inked words flowed unflinchingly onward: In this scene, I was stretched naked and stomach-down on my bed, perusing a map of my lands. My bedsheets glimmered in disarray, implying… the obvious. That you and I…

Damarishka flushed to her toes, imagining that they would eventually do so in this life, as well, and she wasn’t quite against it. (Maybe not at all against it, but she shouldn’t be thinking of that now.)

His unabashed script spun blazingly onward: And you, in patent mutiny, were sitting on the carpet by my bed, nested in a blanket, your chained arm stretched to my headboard. (In this cruel iteration, you were still clearly trying to escape me.) In the candlelight, you marvelously spellbound that version of me. Scarcely clothed as you were in that half-laced nightshift, yet still so thickly cloaked with dignity and grandeur, which drove me to the edge of madness, but which I never wished to strip you of. You overcame me in untold ways.

As he described her so intimately, his depiction so enamored, Damarishka couldn’t name how she felt.

He continued: You were balancing a book on your upraised knee, your lip between your teeth, your eyes avidly scanning the text, your mind roving visibly elsewhere, in stories outside ours. It simultaneously confounded and bewitched me that you could soften so much while reading a book after screaming at me with such fierce hatred and passion. I… in this scene, I abandoned my map, slid across my sheets, and offered you an immoral bargain—and yet one well-worn, as I apparently had innumerable times before: I promised to take you to the library to pick another book if you slept with me.

Damarishka, incongruously, was startled into a laugh. You used books to bribe me for THAT?

She wondered if he were laughing as he replied: You took the bargain every time.

She wrote: You were a scoundrel.

He confirmed it easily: As accused. Worse, actually. Degenerate. Debased. Debaucher. And arrogant to boot. In this scene—as you fumed, infuriated—I trailed a finger along the nightshift barely held up on your shoulder, and I gloated, “You don’t find me entirely awful.” And the most extraordinary thing is that you didn’t. The way you looked at me wanted, desired, wished, craved even as you fended it off with a ruthless hatred. Eventually, you slew me, but in so doing, you destroyed yourself, too. My point in relaying this is that some bond of heart or soul or mind or something binds us in every potential life. And if you, even minutely, could want the inexcusable villain I was in that eluded future, then…

Damarishka concluded where he was leading: Then I might even want you now, with you pared by magic down to skull and bone.

Precisely, he affirmed, and she imagined him heaving a relieved sigh. Yes. And that is why I came for you.

This bond between them—she felt it, too.

But something else niggled at her.

Her quill scratched again: Does this mean that, in other courses of our lives, you were not pared down by magic to a skeleton?

Yes, he wrote. I was not.

She bit her lip. Then why do you waste away when you use magic now?

A reluctance settled into the space between them, which stretched before he replied: It is an ugly story, and one I should tell you face to face. Are you hungry? Your absence torments us at the breakfast table.

His exaggeration unexpectedly both charmed and diverted her, and a blushing laugh brushed her lips even as her stomach growled.

I heard that, he wrote teasingly.

Damarishka laughed outright, and then practically sensed his subsequent smile like a presence crouching beside her. A genial warmth brimmed in her middle.

She shouldn’t feel bright and flittering like a butterfly, she thought, not with so much mystery steeping him, yet she couldn’t stop her smile.

Stealthily, he had slipped into the nooks of her wishes where she’d thought no one would ever squeeze.

When you are ready, he wrote, toss this letter into the air, and it will lead you to the dining hall.

With that, the paper and quill both disintegrated into raining sparkles that vanished before reaching her lap.

These enchantments of his utterly enthralled her; after her heavy, leaden life, the whimsy of his life (despite the darkness at its edges) made her buoyant.

She clambered from the bed at once and made wise use of the garderobe first, then took stock of her appearance in the vanity mirror.

Her hair had frolicked with chaos in the night, and her curls flocked in every mussed direction imaginable.

Leaving it spiral as it wished, she splashed cold water on her cheeks, then meandered to the wardrobe of stolen gowns (stolen from her castle at home and spirited into the cabinets here at Darian’s). She chose her favorite green velvet, which fell in long, dark folds that shimmered like an enchanted forest wherever sunbeams fell. Then she slipped on dark, matching gloves. White stockings.

And golden-silk slippers, each with a tiny bell.

At last, she tossed the letter into the air, and at once, it sailed briskly toward the door.

Damarishka traversed the halls behind it, hardly hearing the bells on her toes or the hush of her footfalls over her lightly dancing soul. She scarcely paid heed to the relentless black corridors of oppressive black stone that closed gleamingly in as if cloistering her in the belly of a beetle.

The letter guided her into the dining hall, where Darian’s highhanded flying cat, Whisker, was currently prattling, “It’s nice to have you fleshed out again, Master. Your skeleton hands scratch well, but femurs are hardly comfortable lap material.”

Damarishka’s footsteps impetuously froze.

“Princess!” Whisker whisked himself her way while doffing his hat. “I was just praising Master for keeping his human flesh and muscle on his bones since your arrival. He has been mostly mopey skull and scrappy skin for years, which—oh, come in, come move; don’t stand there!”

Anxiously, Damarishka sought Darian.

At the head of the table, he had risen and gone motionless halfway through his bow. Without his golden mask, the stark hollows of his face contoured him into a gaunt yet beautiful man, with raven-dark hair that feathered over his void-dark eyes. His black cloak slid like a waterfall around his elegant pose of homage, brushing his boots, which were glossy with polish.

Damarishka’s question toppled like a burning city. “Am I to understand you’ve been a skeleton for years?”

He smoothly rose while just as smoothly smoothing out his expression. “Not now.”

“An evasion.”

“Yes,” he answered simply. “I existed mostly without flesh for years. Although at least being only bone spared me having to consume food.”

“But you love food.” The boy he’d been had glowed when he’d spoken of it—the blueberry pies, the mushroom loaves—

“Yes.” Although his face didn’t crumple, Damarishka imagined his soul did, a little, behind his forcibly vacant eyes.

“Why?” She battled back rage. “What magic were you doing all these years that justified you being depleted to bone?”

“Sustaining the barricades around my kingdom to keep my enemies out. As you suggested I do rather than fighting them. For that, my sacrifice was warranted. Now that you are here, however, I’ll remain flesh and blood and… heart and soul together. At least as long as I can reduce my use of magic.”

Her mind pieced together the bits he left unspoken behind his words. “What of the barricades now? Do they require less magic?”

“No,” he stated simply, setting his gloved fingertips to the table. “They are failing. Without my expending the vast magic vital to maintaining them, it is inevitable. Because of this, I must soon set out soon to check the borders.”

“Are we in danger?”

“Potentially.”

“Definitely,” Whisker inserted.

Darian slid his frown toward the floating cat. “Eventually. Once the other enchanters discover that my barricades are down, they will come.”

“And,” Damarishka theorized while pulling out an upholstered chair at the table but not sitting, “you believe they will come in violence.”

“They always come in violence.” Shadows congregated in his tone. “I do not know why, but they never simply let us, as in you and I, live.”

“Now that you are grown, will you be able to fend them off?”

“That question,” his palpable fury strummed the air around him, “haunts my thoughts every time I look at you: Can I defeat them this time, in this iteration of our lives?”

“Me?”

“They come for you, too, and every time—”

“Fie, Master!” Whisker whisked up and fondly patted Damarishka’s hand with his paw. “No dreary thoughts! We’ll do our best, my lady. Have a scone for courage.”

She almost choked on a laugh, and before she could regroup, in swished her cat.

He poised briefly on his hind legs, his black tail cutting the air, his pomposity cutting the company. “Claw has arrived!”

“The perambulatory wonder!” Whisker heralded, accompanied by a contrary rolling of his eyes.

Claw hissed.

Damarishka seated herself, undertaking to stamp down her gloom, and considered the silver trays and porcelain dishes arrayed at the center of the table before her. “Where were you last night?” she challenged her pet. “You always sleep by my pillow.”

“You did not acknowledge my presence in your sleep.”

“An oversight.”

“Unforgivable.”

“But you’ll forgive me.”

Claw tended to a paw with a delicate tongue. “I upped a hairball in a place you have yet to discover, O Neglectful One, and then I rose early in order to taste of the local rats.”

“Decadent fare, is it not?” Whisker inquired, flitting about like only wingless cats do.

“Voluptuous rats here,” Claw allowed. “Befittingly maintained.”

As the cats proceeded to advance their meticulous debate on the quality of local rat, Damarishka strove not to react to Darian’s appraisal of her, and strove not to think of the gaunt and skeletal boy he’d been, or of the unnervingly beautiful and yet too-thin man he was now, and of the barriers to his kingdom falling, and the fact that those who’d killed his parents would eventually come here again.

She focused only on loading her plate with buttery mushrooms in a sauce of cream and spinach. She plucked an orange, too, which instantly hoisted itself from her hand and spun around, magically peeling itself. The spiraling rind twirled away, and beyond it, Darian (author of the unpeeling) crooked an impish grin.

The corners of Damarishka’s mouth turned involuntarily up.

Smiling graciously, Darian spread out his cloak to resume his seat—but instead, his chair went screeching across the stone, and his gaze shot straight to the window. “They’re here.”

“Who?” Damarishka blurted without thought.

“The murderers—the bastards.” His black gaze terrifying, his manner almost violent, Darian sprinted for the corridor.

Whisker arched into the air, his scarlet cloak aflutter, his valiant bravado a-billow. “I will join you, Master!”

“No,” Darian flung over his shoulder, halfway to the door. “Protect Damarishka. And you—” Abruptly, vehemently, he halted in the doorframe and slewed his look over her.

His intensity staked her in place.

“Live.” Then he bolted out the door.

Grouse at Me Now

Upon the advent of Darian’s dramatic departure, Damarishka desperately debated: should she follow him to help?

Doing so could burden him with danger, if he had to expend magic to protect her instead of fighting the foe, but her doing nothing didn’t even enter the equation.

And then: inspiration.

She imperiously snatched the strawberry scone from Whisker’s paw just as he sank his sharpest kitty teeth into it. “Aren’t strawberries poison for cats? Tell me how to help him.”

Upon having his fruit thus atrociously confiscated, insouciant Whisker declined affront. Instead, he smoothed down his whiskers with fastidious paws. “You have chosen wisely, my lady. The strawberries are excellent.” He availed himself of another scone off the platter, this time blueberry. “I am, alas, not allowed to convey to you certain things.”

“Now is not the time to be cryptic, Cat.”

“Being cryptic is timeless.”

“These people killed his parents! They could kill him, too!”

“Interesting choice of words, my lady. Darian, however, has sworn me to protect you from the truth at all cost.”

“From what truth?”

“From the truth I must protect you from, naturally.” The blueberry scone had vanished into kitty belly area and also turned Whisker’s teeth blue, a fact clearly visible as he cat-smiled at her.

“You are maddening, Cat.”

“And you are mad. I understand. It is a thing all creatures feel.”

“Are you not worried about him?”

“Worry is unhelpful.”

This was getting her nowhere.

She swished grandly toward the door.

“Oh,” Claw theatrically whispered sidewise to Whisker, “you’ve pricked her hackles now!”

“She has hackles?” Darian’s cat squinted at her as she pompously glided out the door.

The only thing she could think of to do was head up to the roof of the castle’s highest tower.

Not that she would be able to see Darian, but surely magic battles involved dramatic components such as eruptions, paroxysms of the earth, plumes, fire? Something visible, at least. Some piddly sparks?

It was her only hope.

She ventured up and up and up, as far as the stairs would let her go, then she climbed a ladder and through a trapdoor onto a tower roof.

The wind rushed around out here like an incensed witch, a veritable fury punishing Damarishka for having hair—or at least castigating her for leaving it unbound, but Damarishka ignored it in favor of scouring the horizon for any hint of magical conflict.

Nothing!

Nothing in any direction!

Where was he? How could she help him if no obliging fireworks were accommodatingly exploding so she could locate him?

“What am I supposed to do now?” she muttered.

“Die,” growled a voice behind her, very clearly, and then someone hefted her up and catapulted her over the parapet.

She couldn’t even scream, only squeak feebly in protest, and then air currents were blasting past her as she somersaulted in tempestuous flips, her skirts flapping against her arms, her hair its own blustery storm, the strands striking her face and arms like undomesticated snaps of lightning.

Her belly had been left behind somewhere far overhead, but what did it matter? She was about to be smashed to bloody flinders of muscle and carnage on the flagstone courtyard twelve floors below; it was hurtling toward her far too fast—

No, she was hurtling toward it.

She must do something!

At the thought, something ruptured from her core (something probably as bad as that phrase sounded), and suddenly she was somersaulting back upward.

Startled, shrieking, she flung out her arms—and was somersaulting downward again—then again her entire body seized up, and there she was cartwheeling back up.

“What is this?” She tried to grab the tower wall—too far—and now she was toppling down again. “Help me!”

“My lady!” A massive beast of iridescent green scales was sweeping out of nowhere, beating its vast and barbed wings against the turbulent wind.

Where had a dragon come from?

No, that was Whisker’s voice!

Damarishka whirled back upward again like a child’s toy. “Whisker! Did the dragon eat you?”

The dragon, in odd synchronization with her own jerking up and down, flew backward as she flipped upward, and then thrust forward again as she fell. “My lady,” cried Whisker from the dragon, “stop using your magic!”

Mercy help her. Her stomach was revolting now at this pell-mell abuse—up and down; soon her breakfast was going to be up and then down, too. The contents of her belly were already about to—“What magic?” she gasped out.

Whisker’s voice grumped again from the going-forward-and-back dragon. “You’re winding back time, Lady! Very badly, I might add!”

“How can you grouse at me now, Cat?”

“There is always time for grousing, my lady!” The dragon wheeled backward again. “Cease and desist!”

“I don’t know magic!”

“Very obviously you do.” Forward the dragon flew as Damarishka fell and Whisker groused onward. “It’s not my magic misbehaving right now.”

Not that she believed him, but: “How do I stop it? Without being eaten by the dragon that got you?”

“If I knew your magic, I’d tell you. Alas—” Whisker-dragon pinwheeled backward again.

Abruptly, a hand of bare, stripped bone encircled her wrist and yanked her to a halt.

Her frantic fall stalled with her swinging crazily a floor above the flagstones, her arm almost pulled from its socket, clutched by—

She twisted her head upward to find a man with a half-fleshed skull—

No Judgment on Your Courage

Darian was holding her, his face half skull, half flesh, and all contorted into anger. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“What?” Unable to believe he would suggest such absurdity, she unleashed some nice and knifelike sarcasm. “Why would I smash my beautiful body on a flagstone courtyard that doesn’t appreciate my stunningness? Somebody…” Her voice trailed off, because the vast wings of the dragon were shrinking and furring up and—cat ears, cat claws, cat paws—it turned into Whisker.

Levitating, the ever-insouciant black cat brushed himself off with his hat as if sojourning as a dragon transpired as a daily dalliance. “So glad your humor stayed intact along with your body, my lady. Dead senses of humor lack life. Or is that stating the obvious?”

Damarishka had words. “You were a dragon!”

While Whisker fussed with dust on his hat, Darian floated Damarishka and himself down toward the flagstone courtyard, near the ebony-wooded chicken coop where a black rooster boasted his strut among the hens. “Yes, well.” Darian’s mouth—the flesh part, not the grinning jawbone part—twisted wryly. “I did tell you he was not human.”

“You…” Damarishka couldn’t even begin to guess anything anymore. “Is he real?”

“Quite.”

Her feet alighted on the ground and Darian’s hands—only bare bones without muscle or flesh—caught her balance.

Damarishka pointedly crossed her arms. “Explain.”

Darian pointedly sighed out the confession. “When I was still a boy, almost two decades ago, before—well, nevermind before. I found a dragon with a split claw, its wing segments arrow-torn, a spear jutting from his hind leg, and bad teeth.”

“Master!”

“It is true.” Darian executed an unapologetic bow toward the affronted Whisker. “He was huddling at the foot of one of our mountains, and despite his heated expulsions of breath, I healed him. I meant to leave it at that and let him fly away, but he followed me home, like a cat.”

Discriminating Whisker licked a persnickety paw. “Master provided my palate with many meaty morsels. Food furnished without any effort on the part of the hungry one is not to be scorned.”

Darian continued in his offhand way, speaking of how he had so cavalierly befriended a dragon: “He deigned to speak to me at some point, and with his approval, I eventually enchanted him an alternate form, so now he can alter at will into a magical cat. Only truly soulless humans would hunt a hatted cat, meaning he can thusly avoid pursuit by dangerous humans.”

Whisker gravely flattened his hat to his chest. “Humans kill dragonkind, you see.”

“Do you eat humans?” Damarishka put timidly forth. “Because if you do, they are kind of justified in protecting themselves.”

“Pffff!” Whisker flapped his hat toward the puffy-clouded sky. “Have I eaten you, my lady? I am a cultured being with developed abilities! We don’t eat creatures that are stimulated enough to hunt us. We feast on the dumb ones that don’t give us lip. Boars. Cows. Moose. You never see a moose incentivized to exert a mastery over pitchforks. Cows prefer wearing cowhide to gauntlets. And boars would be more likely to rootle for roots than swords. You humans, however, kill any creature that you judge physically terrifying. I challenge you: look at my little fellows the spiders. How many of them have you slain in your life just for webbing in one of your corners?”

“I… have killed none,” Damarishka answered as truthfully as she knew.

“Then your maids have slain them on your royal behalf.” Whisker swishingly bowed alongside his hat. “No judgement on your courage, of course.”

“Actually, it was one of my maids who told me not to kill spiders.” Damarishka diligently thought back to her childhood. “When I was a little girl, she informed me that spiders don’t transmit infection or disease even if they bite you, and they catch and kill the flies and other insects that can make you sick.”

Whisker stroked his whiskered chin. “Very peculiar. Advanced thinking for a simple maid.”

“I’ve always thought so, too. I believe she briefly entered my life from part of a larger tale.”

“I wonder where her story went.”

“I’m sorry I cannot know. Now that I think of it, she was likely in disguise as a maid.”

“I am of the same thought. Perhaps—”

“Fascinating as this is,” Darian physically stepped in between them, the skeleton half of his face in a grinning rictus while the half with skin was grimacing, “we’ve gotten off topic. Damarishka, were you hurt in the fall, or when I caught you?”

How silly was it that the way he said ‘when I caught you’ made her heart distort in ways that were rampantly indiscreet for a body organ? She actually wanted to be caught again, clasped against that man’s firmly made chest—well, actually, he might just be bone underneath, a skinless breastbone with no heart under it, only a solar plexus of shriveled desiccation, which should make the idea of being clasped to him less romantic, but it didn’t.

It must be testimony to how enamored of him she was that she enjoyed him even when he was only bone.

Should she be enamored of a man this quickly?

Well, there was no law against it…

Brought belatedly back to her senses when he cocked the brow on the half-fleshed side of his face, she took inventory of her body. “Not an ache on me.”

“Ah, the elasticity of youth,” Whisker sagely intoned.

Darian adhered more appropriately to the matter at hand: “How did you fall?”

Damarishka shuddered. “Someone pushed me.”

“Pushed you.” Darian glared upward, frowning and ferocious. “They were inside my castle?”

“On the roof.”

“Curse it. Whisker, can you secure the premises and then brew us a tisane?”

“Chamomile?” Whisker inquired.

“Rosehip, I think.”

“A choice one must not be ashamed of.” Whisker tossed his hat into the air and then neatly secured it with a prick of his claw. “You place proper faith in my competence, Master!” He whisked himself away.

Damarishka marveled after him. “You use a dragon as your butler?”

Darian’s half-fleshed face halfway grinned. “He uses me as food provider. A fair exchange.” Then he took hold of Damarishka’s arms and sprang upward.

She shrieked and he held her tighter, and bony or not, she did love the proximity of this man.

And as he ferried her up and up and up along the castle wall, and the ground receded farther and farther below, she concluded that she decidedly preferred going up to down.

But then she noticed the bits of skin on his jaw being invisibly pared away, and she fretted: “Are you using too much magic?”

Darian squinted upward as the tower windows sped past them. “The worst damage is already done.”

His tone brooked no continuation of the subject, and so she asked instead, “Did you defeat the wizards?”

They almost overshot the roof, and Darian bobbed them back down and over the parapets. He deposited her gently on the stone surface, as if he were handling something precious. And then, grimly, he said: “No. That’s why I returned so quickly. The attack was a diversion for most of them to infiltrate here.”

Damarishka sucked in a breath. “Were they the ones who pushed me?”

“Almost without a doubt.”

“Why?”

His gaze skewered her with its ferocity. “Because your magic is at least as powerful as mine.”

The Entire Physical Space of Our Lives

“My magic as powerful as…!” Damarishka mutely relived the moments preceding Darian catching her as she’d fallen, how she had gotten stuck in a loop catapulting downward and then upward, and then down again and then up, and Whisker had said…

“You can manipulate time.” Darian thinned his lips, his turbulent gaze cast out over the tempestuous terrain of his realm: the rain-lashed peaks in the distance, the verdant curls of forest in the dales. “As your mother did.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

His black brows furrowed darkly, his black hair cutting across the skeletal half of his face, other strands catching in his half-fleshed mouth. “I hoped, if you never manifested your powers, those bastards would leave you alone. Instead, they triggered your magic’s awakening.”

Damarishka didn’t know what to say. Darian, leaving her to digest this without his input, paced into a thorough scrutiny of the tower roof’s perimeter, his head tilted to one side as though listening, the wind rippling through his cape behind him, making the material seem like liquid onyx.

While he stanchly examined every nook and cranny for any remnant of her attackers, Damarishka mulled on the fact that she could do magic, could supposedly wind back time. What if—

Abruptly, she knotted her fingers together, white-knuckled and almost abusive. “Could I have saved her?”

Darian pivoted mid-step, his expression candid, not quite pitying. Sympathetic maybe. Compassionate. “Damarishka…”

“Tell me the truth.” She dashed away foolish tears. “If my powers had manifested when they—it was them, wasn’t it, who took and likely killed my mother—the same ones who killed your parents and one of whom just tried to kill me—if they—if I—if my magic had manifested then, could I have saved—”

“No. Had your mother thought you stood a chance, she would have taught you by then.”

“But—”

“The only answer you can accept is no. Otherwise—” He demolished the distance between them and clamped her hand between his own of fleshless bones. “Your mother, you, I, my parents—we have lived life after life trying to escape this constant coil. How can you think to shoulder blame? They killed your mother, and mine, and my father, and—and now we are on their roster. Take your blame to their door, their feet. They have done this.”

“Life after… life?”

“Yes, they have done this time and again. I’ve hinted at it before; now I will be clear: the book of Eluded Futures contains the lives we have already lived. Destinies we’ve already attempted and been slain in.”

“Been slain in…”

“Yes. Every single time we have been born, they have come. Every time we have united, they have attacked us, and murdered us—twisted us and tortured us. We want nothing but to live life, together, but they will not let us survive even a single lifetime.”

Damarishka frowned. “What have we done that they do this?”

“We were born too powerful and dared to love each other. You and I together could destroy all the others.”

“But we wouldn’t!”

“We haven’t.” He released her, retreated, and lounged back between the teeth of the parapet, viciously scouring the stormy sky. “Sometimes, though, I think that will be the only way to stop them. Too many times have we hidden, hindered them, blocked them, bullied them back, battered them blue, yet still they keep killing us, and still we keep returning in time to try our love again.”

“How is this even possible?”

“Our parents. Do you want the story?”

She puffed herself up. “Of course!”

He grinned. “There’s my proud princess.”

“Tss! As if you’re lacking pride yourself!”

“Not with you by my side.” He tapped her huffy nose, at which she unexpectedly kissed his fingers, at which he left them motionless upon her lips, and for a moment, only the thundering wind of the sky and the thundering of their emotions stormed between them.

Then he withdrew his fingers and narrowed his eyes at the violent sky. “Many iterations ago, in a simpler time, your mother had an illicit affair with a foreign prince. Both young, drunk, and unattached, they were uninterested in knowing each other’s names. Unexpectedly, though, she swelled with his child, having been too drunk to use caution. Afterward, she found his name and tracked him down, but as she spied from afar, she discovered his penchant for brutality: he clouted his servants, ordered a starving, twelve-year-old thief executed, and spoke of burning all the dissenters to his rule alive. Your mother decided to conceal you from him—and from her own family, too—and my parents took her in.”

“Ha!” Damarishka’s laugh scratched into the air like a crow. “In that life, she avoided my violent father, but in this one, she married him…”

“Which she did in many lives,” Darian clipped out.

“Do you think,” Damarishka paused in strange ponderance, “do you think she hoped his violence would protect me?”

“Protect you!?” Darian whipped upright and was at her side within three blinks, not touching her, only… quietly… exhaling on her hair. “I watched,” he rasped, “time and again as she rewound time after time after he struck you, to remove you before he could hit you, so you could never know that he had, or that he would. And after she was gone, I cast a distant spell that would cripple his arm every time he raised it to strike you.”

Damarishka could barely breathe. “Then why would she stay with him?”

“Who always made you fall in love?” His skeleton hands scraped disturbingly pleasantly across her cheek, and scraped through her hair, and his rough-tongued words scraped near her ear: “In this life—in every life where she took you and went with him rather than staying with my parents—I believe she was trying to keep you alive by keeping you away from love.”

From him, from Darian. Damarishka swallowed, wavering on her feet, with her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, warning her away from dark-haired boys, urgent persuasions impelling Damarishka to find a blond-haired, blue-eyed prince.

Darian’s voice emerged raw: “But I would always find you.”

Like a rabbit in a snare, she was ensnared in his stare. The skeletal points of his thumbs slid their bony tips across her lips, and instead of shuddering or twisting away, she leaned into his skinless caress, and the resulting burning in his eyes nearly brought her to her knees.

“You and I,” he continued in that rough and scraping voice, “grew up together in our first life and fell in love. The other wizards disliked how powerful we were, however, and they forbade our union.”

“Forbade us!” Damarishka huffed.

Abruptly, the corner of his mouth crooked upward, and his jaw had rejuvenated enough by now to ostentatiously display his fully wicked grin as he chuckled. “You can imagine how well we obeyed.”

Damarishka smiled, too, feeling downright roguish now to match him. “Must I imagine, or will you tell?”

“Must I tell, or can you imagine?” His warm mouth smiled into her lips on a titillatingly ill-behaved kiss. “We married in secret, and that’s when the other enchanters came to kill us. Afterward, however, my parents worked along with your mother to—”

“What magic did your parents do?” Damarishka interrupted. “Did they control time, too?”

“Not time. Like I do, they manipulated physicalities—human tissue and bone, objects like furniture and wagons, elements such as wind, fire, water, etcetera.”

“Powerful.”

“Says the woman who could unwind time around any object she wished.”

“Any object?” She hoisted her brow.

Oddly, his cheeks flushed as he laughed. “Any object. Anyway, my parents and your mother, who manipulated the time continuum, tried to save us by cutting the entire physical space of our lives out of time itself, starting at a year before our birth and ending at the point when the enchanters killed us, and now we are currently trapped in repeat, reliving our lives over and over until we either manage to kill those killing us, or we permanently escape the enchanters.”

“How?”

“By living past the age they usually slaughter us.”

“Which is the age we are now,” Damarishka guessed.

Darian, keeping his hands in her hair, breathed a kiss upon her brow. “Which is the age we are now.”

The next blog installment is here.