we the monsters -- pt. 2

Katalin first looks up because of his voice, and keeps looking because of his eyes: dark with a curious steepness to them, viperous and hard. At once she knows him, because she’s seen those eyes on his sister, his brother. This must be Juhasz Imre, the eldest sibling and the true lord of that high, lonely castle. And as she crouches in the dusky earth, basket forgotten, he speaks to her with a familiarity that she doesn’t know how to return.

“You’re the Szarvas girl,” he says plainly, his voice very clear, almost sweet. To this Katalin says nothing, because there are four Szarvas girls, and she isn’t even the prettiest among them. Besides, what would Juhasz Imre want to do with her? She thinks of his sister Mariska, the brocaded amulet she wears in the hollow of her throat, and something inside of Katalin flutters like the wings of a moth even as she does her very best to pin them.

“One of them, my lord.” She’s never spoken to Mariska or her twin brother Tamar, and wonders if they sound the same: as if they expect the world to part before them, as if they’re swans in water. She can imagine it of Mariska, but not of Tamar.

“Not the youngest or the eldest,” he says. “One of the two in between.”

She says nothing.

“My sister has noticed you,” he continues, and now Katalin looks back up and sees him almost smiling. “How old are you, truly?”

“Almost twenty now, my lord.”

“Unmarried.” It is not a question.

“Yes,” she says. She could say the same for him and his siblings, but they are lofty in a way she never will be. “I care for my mother.”

“Is she ill?”

“Melancholy.”

“So not ill, then,” says Imre. “We are all melancholy.”

My mother wasn’t, Katalin thinks, not before me. 

“Would you like to meet her?” Imre asks, and he sounds as if he truly wishes to know. “My sister Mariska?” 

Katalin is so surprised that she speaks honestly. “I am not certain, my lord.”

“Do you mean the rumors?” He looks uninterested now, with a sort of carelessness only the nobility can afford. “Do you believe that she runs in the forests until her feet bleed, and hunts with her bare hands, and lies in the silver stripes of moonlight? Do you think that she ensnares all the wanton village girls to her and consumes them like a wolf?” He is watching Katalin carefully again, gauging her reaction as a mountain poacher would, and she doesn’t like it. “You should know better. My sister is gentle, and good.”

Katalin says nothing again, and waits for him to leave her. He doesn’t.

“It isn’t your choice, not truly, little macska,” Imre says finally. “It’s Mariska’s.” There is no demand in his voice, no expectation, and that’s what frightens her.

“If she wishes to meet me,” says Katalin, suddenly conscious of her dirty wrists, the sweat shining like a badge on the back of her neck, “Then I will do as she says.”

“Good,” says Imre, and in the speckled forest light it’s as if he sees her properly for the first time. “When you do, wear your hair without the net, down across your shoulders. She likes dark hair very much, my sister.”

Are you her errand boy? Katalin wishes to ask in astonishment, because Imre is older than his sister by six years, and by rights even Tamar should have more authority. But she’s seen the two of them in the village, Tamar looking to his twin in what could be described as a careful deference, and sees it now replicated in Imre. A bizarre respect, she thinks — a devoted sense of consideration. But there’s something in Imre’s gaze that has never been in his brother’s, and she doesn’t like that, either. 

“She just wants to see you up close,” says Imre, and his voice is gauze-soft now, compassionate. “See you for what you truly are.”

“And you, my lord?” She can’t help it, not really; the impulse to resist jerks within her like a hare’s leg caught in a snare. “Do you wish to see me for what I truly am?”

“You mustn’t worry about that,” Imre says, and he’s almost smiling again. “I think I already have.” He pauses, and dips his head, and in the dim light she can see that his hair is almost as dark as her own: not the gorgeous russet of his siblings. “I like your spirit, but Mariska is different. Be careful, little macska. Sweet things can swiftly turn bitter, and my sister has always been one of them.”

we the monsters -- pt. 1

folie à famille — madness shared by a family.

She is born an unfortunate child, in an unfortunate time, in an unfortunate place. When the winter recedes and the slow freeze thaws, it will be too late; she'll be two months old on the very margin of spring, and she'll have outlasted what many children her age never do.  Her mother names her Katalin, not because the girl is so very perfect but because the mountains around them are caught suspended in an atmospheric chill, and her skin is white as snow.

In the little house on the white hill, isolated from the arm's reach of the nearby village, her sisters spin thread and her brothers sleep away the cold. Her mother rarely sleeps at all. She’s gripped by a misery that cradles her even as she refuses to rock her own child; it’s possible to be soothed by grief, the woman learns, to hold legions of it within you. It’s possible to be happier being unhappy.

The sorrow never leaves her, and though as she grows Katalin isn’t foolish enough to carry the blame entirely, she also isn’t foolish enough to think herself an innocent. She is a timid, pretty child that grows into a timid, pretty girl, forgettable in every way save for the black hair caught always under a simple unornamented net — the color so dark it seems glossed with ebony lacquer — and her impossible stark-white skin.

The first time Katalin sees Juhasz Mariska in the village, she’s standing curved and rushlike around a fine-featured boy who Katalin can’t identify. They have the same sweet edges to their faces, that blank animal sharpness, clear and illuminated and bright; she grows to think of them as lovers, but later learns they’re twins. Upon closer inspection it becomes more apparent; they look more alike than she’d first observed, and their affection doesn’t surpass a familial warmth. There is another sibling, too, she learns — an elder brother of some twenty-six years, reclusive and proud who rarely leaves the stifled chambers of their castle. The twins, by the time Katalin turns eighteen, are twenty and still unmarried: strange enough. Stranger yet that their elder brother exerts no influence over them, lets them wander the village in their pale dove-gray clothing and touch the dirty hands of  curious children.

It’s Mariska they’re most fascinated by, because her twin’s straightforward good looks are startling when replicated in her: the chestnut hair, bright and coppery and fine, the small slender hands always in movement. She’s like no girl (or woman, or man) that Katalin has ever seen, and so she fosters a bizarre curiosity about her — about the three siblings alone on the mountain.

Not everyone shares her keen awareness of them: or if they do, they mask it underneath disgust and fear. The siblings are called both zealots and heathens, saints and sinners, Christians and unbelievers. In truth, no one has a word for what they are, and no one wants to.

But rumors still flicker on some tongues: that they were the ones to poison their mother and father, that they speak to the devils that sleep under their floorboards, that they are gripped in the hold of a loneliness that is impossible to comprehend. But, as Katalin comes to grasp, there is a darker, more elusive truth within these fragments of lies that chills her like the very bone of winter: that they wet their lips on the blood of those willing, and let night destroy the rest.

The Butterfly Girl pt. 1

Have you ever pulled the wings from a butterfly? After a point, they do not struggle. The life goes out of them the moment the powdery brightness is torn from their bodies. Your fingers will carry the stain of their days but they won’t breathe their tiny breaths any longer because their fragility is the exact thing that makes you want to harm them. It is because you can. We weren’t all so lucky to be born high and mighty and giant. 

I was a butterfly girl, so I knew all about this. Sometimes the children ran in from the village beyond the trees and tried to capture the minute creatures in their hands. They couldn’t take their eyes off the colors. The eyes were alright; it was their touch I was worried about. They were entranced by the beauty, and I knew why, because I’d walked down to the village many times to trade blankets and baskets for meat and milk. There was little enchantment there. The streets were thick with mud; the houses were packed in tight, tipping and leaning on one another for support like old men. The smell from the butcher house clung to your nostrils like cold did to bones. The women from the village looked thin and drawn, their skin papery—their names were things like Long Winter and Old Mother. The butterfly girls up on the mountain were bright in comparison, fluttering along always on the edge of spring or autumn.

Our homes were built of wood, like the ones in the village, but they were swept clean and kept free of wandering animals. Incense burned on the floor to keep out bad spirits and the windows were always open at least a little, to keep out the stuffiness, even in winter. Our beds were soft mats we rolled out into the upstairs chambers. Into the wood of our houses, our stories were written, carved into the surface. You could run your fingers over the paths of our lives: quilts, perfect little fans, girls and women with straight black hair, bowls and dishes, butterflies. Always the butterflies.

The butterflies were the reason for our existence. We raised flowers—and “raised” was the perfect word for it, because we tended to them like children—and we sewed, but the butterflies were our core. Within their homes of lashed wire nets they quivered from one branch to another, and rested while beating their bright wings sleepily. Despite being anxious creatures they managed to sweep the mountainside with a perfect calm. In the still afternoons I would sit on the rocks with my hands under my knees and watch them. Their faceless bodies would open up to the sun.

Winter was not butterfly-time. Their lives are incredibly brief; just as they emerged from their cocoons, we would sweep them up in wire cages and sell them to the caravans that came every summer. It was the most that we would see of men all year long, other than the brief glimpses we caught of some in the village. They wore the sharp colors of the Inner City, blues and greens, reds and yellows. Their robes were tattered and fell below their knees, and crossed over only one shoulder, leaving the other bare in the summer heat. The oldest of them wore white beards so long and white we could not stop giggling. We were fascinated by them. These were delegates of the vast Lotus Empire, and distant and proud as the stars. Of course I didn’t know they were merely merchants. I didn’t know much of anything.

They were almost (but not quite) as fascinated by us as we were by them, but none of us could recognize that at the time, either. Lily, the mother-figure of us all, gathered us around her after shaking their hands like a man. “Let me introduce you to my daughters. This is White Fox, that is Gentle Sister, that is Snow Deer –“ and so on and so forth, until, “and that last one, with the bright hair, that is Smiling Lynx.” I was always the last to be named.

And it was because I was the one who most often caught their attention, though I was not any prettier than the rest. It was the hair; a brown that was not quite straight, and gleamed gold in strong light. My eyes were also a little too round, and slightly off-colored. Lily didn’t think I looked right; my face was not flat enough, and my nose too big. But I rarely caught sight of myself and didn’t know what the men found so curious about me until the summer I was fourteen. As I handed one of them, green-robed, a cage of butterflies, he leaned over to me and said, “You look so much like Princess Lien. Has anyone told you that before?”

I felt hot down to the very tips of my toes. Princess Lien was the treasured daughter of the Lotus Empire, and tales of her perfumed skin and perfect oval face had filled my ears ever since I had been very young. “You’ve seen the Princess?”

“From afar, yes. You have the same hair—the same bearing.”

If I had known any better I would have excused his comments as empty flatteries. But being compared to the Princess Lien was as much as any girl could hope for. “Is she so beautiful?”

“The most.”

Lily’s voice cut across us like a knife. “Smiling Lynx! Come here!” And that was the end of that.

I had been thrilled to be compared to the Princess, but it soon faded from my thoughts. Autumn followed summer, and after that came winter. We were always holed up in the house. I spent my time playing games and sewing with Snow Deer, who was my favorite. She had long lashes and delicate white skin.

“What now?” I asked. We had finished cleaning the sleeping mats and were shivering from the cold.

Snow Deer sat on the floor with her legs crossed. Some other girls who lived with us were in the far corner, but they weren’t listening in. “Let’s play our favorite game!”

“Not that one—“ I began, but she cut me off.

“Yes, that one!”

It was our habit to take turns guessing who our parents were. Butterfly girls were sometimes orphans, sometimes not, but always dropped at the feet of Lily or her sister Beautiful Sky and then abandoned. Even if Lily or Beautiful Sky knew who my parents were, they could not tell me. We were either unwanted children, or children with dead parents, and I wasn’t sure which one would be worse. Lily said to be thankful we had as good a life as we did. Not all girls were so lucky. “You could be in the streets of Shu Lan or worse, Weiguo. Look upon the blessings you have been given and be thankful for them.”

“I can’t possibly think of anything else,” I said, somewhat pouty. “You’re far more creative than I am.”

“Don’t be nice. It won’t get you out of playing with me.” The older girl smiled and her inky eyes, so lovely and giant that they nearly reached her temples like strokes from a calligraphy brush, creased in humor. “Your mother is a queen from the west and your father a soldier from the Imperial Army—that explains your hair.”

“Your family comes from a long lineage of sky pirates.”

“You’ve already done that one!”

“Oh… well, your mother was a courtesan in Emperor Shing’s Masked Court, and he liked her so much that you have thirteen brothers and sisters!”

Snow Deer laughed, hiding her gapped teeth behind her hand, which was the only flawed thing about her. If Lily or Beautiful Sky was around we’d not dare to say such a thing, much less laugh about it if it was uttered. But we had been raised in the country, in the mountains, and had no idea what court or city life was like. We didn’t know that a wrong look in the Emperor’s direction could earn you death. People were good, to us. They were simple and good.

“What would it be like, to be related to the Emperor? To anyone in his court?” Her voice was quieter now. “Where would you go if you left here?”

“I don’t want to leave, Snow Deer. There is no other place for me. There’s just this mountain.”

“Perhaps there are hundreds of mountains out there. Thousands. Wouldn’t you like to see them?”

“If you have seen one mountain, it is likely the rest look the same.”

She scorned my lack of adventure. “There are more than mountains. There are people out there. Girls, boys, women…men who aren’t old and leaning on sticks and who smell like donkeys.”

But I didn’t need anyone. Just her, maybe, and Lily, and the butterflies when we raised them in the warm months. I imagined that people were just as fleeting. “This life is so short. You see how the women die so young in the village. If  I leave the mountain, I’ll likely die even faster.”

Snow Deer seemed troubled by the sudden depth of my fears. “You won’t. I’ll protect you.”

I looked at her, so delicate and small the top of her head only brushed my nose, and light-boned as the animal she was named for. “But you want to leave.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Do you promise?”

Snow Deer glimpsed quickly around the room, as if someone would look in upon our secret pact and disapprove. “I promise. I’ll be with you forever.”

I clasped her tiny warm hand in mine and felt as if something sharp had been wedged into my chest. It was because I was already afraid that she would break her promise. That is a terrible thing and I shouldn’t admit it, but I didn’t have much faith in anyone. I loved her more than anything. I was afraid of stepping somewhere that I shouldn’t, putting pressure on a place that would burst, doing anything that would drive her from me. Her promise did not soothe me. It antagonized me.

“You are meant for greater things than you think.” The winter light fell over her slight shoulder. 

“How can you tell?”

“Because I can.”

“Yes, but how?”

“You have to trust me,” said Snow Deer, somewhat severely. “You have to trust some people, you know.”

I got up and went to stand by the window. Our game was over. Neither of us would ever find out where we had come from. Snow fell outside; I could see it when I pulled down the screen fully and what had been a slit of sunlight came bursting through. I saw the top of Lily’s head as she carried in wood with Lovely Flower. I prayed that Snow Deer’s words didn’t sink too far into my head. I couldn’t risk feeling angry and resentful when all I should be was grateful.

That winter passed quickly. After the snow melted on the mountain we became animals of the air again. Our time was spent outside, in the small gardens, passing by the cocoons that would one day soon split gently. It was a little diversion of ours, to see who could spot the first butterfly. It passed the time and made us attentive. The girl who did was awarded with a fish the rest of us would spend all day trying to catch (this was the rule; we couldn’t go to the village to buy one) and then Lily would cook it in spices and serve it hot with rice. The lucky girl usually shared it with the rest, unless if it was Gentle Path who won. She didn’t really like sharing.

That year it was Snow Deer who saw the first butterfly. That night as we sat and ate (Snow Deer gave me nearly half of what she kept for herself) Lily said, “I have something to say.” And everyone fell silent at once.

“White Fox and River are going to be leaving us this summer when the caravans come from Shu Lan. They will go as far as the village of Peiu.”

None of us said anything, but there was a sudden taste to the air, as if the sweetness of it had suddenly gone rotten. Butterfly girls left often: that was a constant in my life. One day, when they grew too old, or perhaps were no longer fair enough to tend to the butterflies, they would flutter out of our lives as quietly as they had come. I did not know what was the deciding factor, what pushed them from us, and now I stopped with a bit of fish halfway to my mouth and stared. 

White Fox and River were barely older than me. They were almost sixteen; soon they would be in their yellow years, when a woman fully grew into herself. I was still considered to be in my green years, but not by much, and I wondered why I wasn’t going with them. White Fox had a strange mouth and a heavy jaw, and River was bordering on pretty, but she was not quite there. For a moment I thought myself beautiful and special, that I was allowed to remain while they were not. But just as soon as that thought came, my heart sunk again in my chest with all the bitterness of winter. I didn’t want them to leave. I never wanted any of them to leave.

“Excuse me, Lily,” said Snow Deer, always the first to speak up. “But where is their home? Are they going somewhere else to be butterfly girls?”

Lily and Beautiful Sky gave her a look that would have frightened me into submission. But while Snow Deer hung her head, she did not take back the question.

“Don’t you think that we will make sure they are taken care of, daughter?” The last word hovered in the air brightly like a warning. “Do you have no faith in us?”

“Yes, Beautiful Sky. I was just curious. I am sorry.”

It was the closest I had ever seen Snow Deer to being shamed. I put the rest of my fish back into her bowl, to try and make her feel better. But she did not eat anything else that night, much to Lily’s irritation, and fled to her bed roll as soon as she was allowed. I found her laying on her back with her eyes wide open like half-moons, staring at the beamed ceiling over her.

“What made you say that?” I asked her accusatively, as I came down to sit next to her. “You don’t even like White Fox or River.”

“You’re right,” said Snow Deer, her petal-like lips barely moving. “White Fox is ugly and River is the clumsiest girl here. But they have no say in their fate. That isn’t right. Just because they’re ugly and clumsy doesn’t mean they should be sent away.”

There was an unsaid thought left after she spoke the words, and I knew what it was. Snow Deer was afraid she would be here forever, because she was so beautiful.

It wasn’t pride or arrogance on her part. Instead it was fear, radiating from her so strongly it felt like heat. Her lips quivered even though she didn’t say another word. Snow Deer had no time for her appearance. I had never seen her ducking for another look at her reflection in the stream or stealing a glance into Lily’s looking glass like the rest of us. It seemed unfair to me, that the most delicate of us had the looks we all sought for and didn’t even care. Worse, she hated them, because they kept her here, safe and well, while all she wanted to do was get away.

“Well,” she said, at last, “I suppose you’ll be here with me.”

“I’m not as beautiful as you,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “But you are pretty, and we would all do anything for your hair.” We let a silence grow between us, momentarily. “If you go, I’ll go too, Smiling Lynx. I told you I wouldn’t leave you on your own.”

“You’ll have no choice,” I said. Now something sticky was clogging my throat, and I recognized it dimly as fear. “You wouldn’t be able to just go with me. Besides, who said that I am leaving?”

“No one,” said Snow Deer, looking miserable. “But who knows?”

“You shouldn’t think about the future,” I said. “That always makes you unhappy.”

“I never think about the present,” she countered. “The present is just a trap. At least the future has hope.”

“Why do you need hope when you have me?” I felt like a stalk of bamboo had been driven through my heart. She didn’t answer me for a long time. Why was I not enough? Why didn’t she find comfort in the mountains, and the slanting dawn, and in the adequacy of the moon in the star-pinned sky? 

“Smiling Lynx,” she said, in that blunt way of hers, “Do you have any idea of what it is like to be lonely?”

Of course I knew. Often I sat by myself as the shadows creeped over the flat dark stones of the ridge, my feet curled underneath me. At those times I heard nothing but my own breath. I knew what winter was like; the death of it, the harshness of the season that had taught us to appreciate the clarity of endings. I had been turned away from people before, I had been rebuked and scolded and smacked on the arm. I had often been alone in my life, and when I told this to Snow Deer she just looked at me and gave a little frown, her budding lips tiny creases.

“There’s a difference between being lonely and alone,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like Nuwa. I feel cold. I want to forget every kind thing everyone has ever said to me, so it would be easier for me to disappear.”

“But Nuwa made the world. She never forgot a thing, Snow Deer.”

“But she did disappear.”

I don’t care about Nuwa, I wanted to say. You promised me that you would stay, and now I can’t imagine living a day peacefully without you.

Maybe that was loneliness.

But I just said, “I don’t want you getting hurt. You won’t really run away, will you?” 

Snow Deer looked at me in such a way that I felt as if I were the cause to all her problems, a boulder that blocked her exit. “No. I won’t.” 

That was all I wanted to hear, so I retreated to my own bedroll, thinking she would feel better the next morning. She didn’t. She was moody and lacked her usual even temper, even when Lily snapped at her and sent her running back and forth from the well as punishment (Snow Deer was never made to haul water; she was so small she could barely lug the buckets). Her rebellious nature caused her to stew instead of forgive. She was a true Monkey, I thought; far too reckless and impetuous for her own good, and her cleverness only made it worse. I feel that she resented Lily and Beautiful Sky for not releasing her along with White Fox and River. Though she would never leave without being told to, she found other ways to rebel. One morning I woke up and found that she’d cut all her hair off. Now it was just a little below her ears.

“Oh no, Snow Deer,” I groaned. “Not your beautiful hair.”

“Don’t fuss at me,” she said. “It was never anything like yours, anyway.”

My mild Sheep self sat back and listened, my heart quite battered, as Beautiful Sky reprimanded Snow Deer and sentenced her to two days without food. I tried slipping her some dumplings and rice (rather messily) when we ate that first night, but Lily saw through me easily and slapped me so hard that I stumbled around for minutes after. When I went back to the upper floor of the house, Snow Deer apologized profusely, seeing the red mark on my cheek and saying that I should never do that sort of thing for her again.

It was all I wanted, though. My life had changed somehow, and the only thing I could think about was making Snow Deer happy again. I didn’t know if this was from my own selfish fear of being left behind, or my love for her, and I didn’t want to dwell on it. Instead I filled my days with little jokes and reassuring words. I made her a crown of flowers from the redthorn patch, the same kind that Princess Lien was said to wear during the New Year. I bothered her until she ate her rice. I did her chores for her. Eventually Lily pulled me to the side and said, “You have to stop doing everything for that girl. I know she is your friend, but she is too stubborn for her own good.”

“She is just sad, Lily,” I said.

“We all are sad sometimes. We all suffer. How about you think about yourself for once, Smiling Lynx?”

I couldn’t much see the point in that, so I just mumbled an apology and went off. I didn’t stop trying to cheer up Snow Deer, however. I just made sure to do it when Lily wasn’t around. Snow Deer never pushed me away, exactly, but she seemed distant now. I came out one day when morning was spilling over the green mountain, and every blade of grass had a tip of fire. Our houses, which were scattered like grains of rice, stood bathed in red light and so did she. Her hair fluttered like little wings around her ears.

“You should sleep more,” I said, feeling my habitual worry for her again tighten in my stomach. “You should also eat.”

Snow Deer turned to look at me, her presence as suffocating as a cloud of incense. “You are the best mother I’ve ever had.” Then, she smiled. 

“Why are you out here?” I asked.

“Looking for fox spirits,” said Snow Deer, and she folded her legs beneath her and sat down in the cold dew. “They’re supposed to come out in the morning.”

“Why would you ever want to see a fox spirit?”

“I’d like to make a bet with one. I’d like to see if I could trick her.”

Spirits did not interest me. I had never been very religious, the village beliefs too absract for my taste, and lacking the officiality of a state’s creed. Not that I knew much about any of that, then. I was just relieved that she no longer seemed sad.

“You can’t trick a fox spirit,” I said, rather obviously.

“I know that,” she said, looking at me with disdain. “That’s why I want to try.”

Snow Deer always wanted to be first. The first to the table, the first to her bedroll at night and the first to awake in the morning. The first to see the butterflies. “So that she’d take you to her heaven?”

“Yes,” said Snow Deer. “One day I’m going to catch one, and make a deal with her. Then I’d rule over her heaven.”

The fox spirits of the Lotus Empire were crafty but fair-minded ghosts who roamed the forests in the space between day and night. Sometimes, a traveler who passed by our community would stop in and tell us stories of their encounters; how one misstep would beckon the fox to them, how a villager who chopped down the sacred trees would be met with a spirit’s wrath. They were tall and stood on two legs like men, and wore bangles in their ears. Their fur was the color of leaves in a mountain autumn. Their eyes gleamed like a woman’s.

The foxes were just one kind of spirit who reigned in the Nine Heavens beyond our world, but they were also the strongest. They bent elephant ghosts to their will and bound the souls of earthly scribes to chambers where the stolen humans would then write of their honor for the rest of eternity. Every step of their palaces was inlaid with jewels; they wrapped silks made of cloud around their waists and painted their claws with the blood of tigers. They danced between the realms as if they’d been born of two worlds. They trapped travelers in games of luck and chance, reciting riddles that only astral creatures would be able to answer. They were, as I had said, untrickable.

“When you rule the heavens,” I said, “Remember to send me rain. I like rain.”

Snow Deer scoffed. “You’d be with me, Smiling Lynx! You would have your own palace.”

“With my own servants?”

“Of course, as many as you want. And cat spirits for you to play with. And the most wonderful food.”

“Not congee, then,” I said.

“No more congee, no more plain rice.” Snow Deer tilted her face towards the morning and I wondered what it was that caused her to be so brave. “Fruit from sky trees and the saltiest soups you’ll ever taste.”

Her dreams were further than she could ever reach. I could almost see her thin arms grasping at the air for something solid, waving as if drowning. 

“You think too much,” I said.

“You think too little.”

“My thoughts are filled, Snow Deer, even if you don’t believe me. I’m not stupid, like Lily thinks I am. I’m not at all.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to say you were stupid, Smiling Lynx.” She pressed her head down on my shoulder, and her hair felt cool as water on my skin. “You are much smarter than me. You know how to be happy. Isn’t that funny? I never even learned how to be happy.”

I didn’t think that was very funny at all. “You can be happy. Just look at the trees and watch the butterflies. It isn’t too hard of a thing.”

“That does not bring me joy, just restlessness.” Snow Deer sighed dramatically. “A butterfly wing makes me think of the gowns of court ladies. Trees remind me of soldiers. Everything is an echo of something else that I can’t have.”

There was a tenderness beneath her tone, as if she was trying very hard not to hurt me, but still said what she felt. She could be nothing but honest.

“You shouldn’t think of what you cannot have. Just be glad that you have more than others.”

“You sound like a monk,” said Snow Deer, kindly. “I think we were born into the wrong places. I should have been born into the Inner City, and you should have been born under the eaves of a monestary. Think of all you could learn.”

“We wouldn’t know each other then,” I pointed out.

“That isn’t true. I would come up to your mountain every new moon, and ask you how I should live my life. And you would tell me…”

“Be happy and gracious.”

Snow Deer groaned. “Are you sure you aren’t religious?”

“You don’t have to believe in something in order to be thankful.”

“No, but to be as pious as you…”

“You are a Monkey and I’m a Sheep,” I said practically. “You sit on my back and look out at the world, and decide which way to go.”

“But the Monkey is foolish.”

“The Sheep is weak.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Snow Deer. “You have never been weak.”

“Our astral signs shape us from birth. I am weak. I was born to be.”

“You keep denying religion, yet you are as devout as a monk to some immovable, unseeable force!”

I cowed to her then, as I always did. I reached up a hand to stroke Snow Deer’s inky black hair, felt her cheek as soft as fur underneath my fingers. “You’re right. Maybe I am religious. Not like the villagers, though.”

“No,” Snow Deer agreed. “You are like a swan; they’re just sparrows.”

I giggled. “That isn’t what I meant at all.”

“So? It is true. To me, at least.” She pulled away and pushed back her hair so that her perfect oval face looked as if it dripped with golden light. Snow Deer always seemed as if she was glowing, but instead of having a brightness that came from within, it was as if she was being shone upon by some heavenly radiance. That morning, it was indeed the case. The sun was rising just ahead of us, and if you raised your hand it would swim in spirals of falling light. I had to squint to look at it, so powerful was the sun, though I never looked into the brightness directly. It was too much for my eyes to carry.

“I would never sleep for the rest of my life, if I could see this every day.” She sounded very old as she said this. 

“I think you would grow very tired,” I pointed out. Snow Deer laughed.

“You know what Lily says. ‘Life is too brief to be sleeping all the time, girls!’”

“She says that to White Fox all the time,” I said, smiling. But my friend sobered at the name, remembering.

“Where do you think they go, Smiling Lynx?”

“Who?” 

“The girls who leave us.” 

I paused for a moment, unsure of how to answer. Perhaps Snow Deer did not want the truth. Perhaps she was looking for something else. “Lily says they go and are free.”

“Yes, that’s what Lily says,” said Snow Deer, and I could tell that she did not believe it. Yet my view of the world was so small, so insignificant, I could not believe any harm would fall to them. Why would anyone ever hurt a butterfly girl? We were gentle, and good.

“Isn’t that what you want, Snow Deer? To be free?”

“There are different kinds of freedom,” she said, with a worldliness I could not understand. “So yes, I would like to be free, but only in a certain way. It is like the traveling poets, Smiling Lynx. Everyone loves them, everyone listens when they speak. But no one really believes them. No one looks at them and thinks, ‘Yes, life could really be like this.’”

Here I was quiet, because I had never doubted the words of poets. But Snow Deer turned to me again, burying her warm face in my neck, thin shoulders shaking from either hidden sobs or laughter. “This is a funny life we have, Smiling Lynx. It is a funny thing.” I did not see what was so funny about it, but I held her to me anyway, and watched as the sun bore its full light onto our skin.

The Eadoin pt. 1

It began in Ireland, they say, and so it will end there too. It will end when the waters rise and swallow the Isle beneath their sweeping foam, when the mer come forth and pry the remaining ones from the living rock and draw them into the depths, down beneath the keening mountains and hungry valleys, wan arms wrapping round them like snakes and lulling the creatures into a sleep that is neither peaceful nor sweet. The lips of the mer will part, running like scales over fur and flesh, willing their inhuman selves to taste what they were never meant to touch. 

The sons of Eire will be drawn into the depths beside their white-skinned sisters, lashed to the breasts of creatures with fey eyes and no names, bound with seaweed and cradled in their arms like long lost children. The mouths of men will open, struggle, cry and swallow only the salty sea as they plead for air. But as their own lifeblood was once denied to them, the mer will deny the sons and daughters of Eire this final request; for those of the sea have a long memory, and hearts turned cold by icy tows—if indeed, hearts they have. The mer will remember the hiss of salt on their slick scales, the burn of the sun and the quick slash of a knife on their moonpale skin, the fate that met their ancestors so long ago. And so they will embrace these children, these children of men, because those of Ireland are closer to them than the rest, and they know this from the heated flash of their pale eyes and the quick run of their blood beneath their skin. It will be almost a sort of love with which they bring them down, clasping them to their chests and watching them with slitted eyes. Into the darkest caverns of the ocean, beneath the Eire, they will bring them, where the fish are blind and no men’s inventions have yet reached, but by this time their prey will be dead and the mer have no fear. One cannot fear if one has no heart.

This is how they say it will happen, because this is something like how it had begun, and few question the folklore of the Eadoin. Their House rose from the mists and the rock and the moor, before the English brutes came with their iron and glittering tongues to steal away their land and home. But wars could, and would, rage, and still the Eadoin stood strong as princes on their foggy shores, slender and white with hair as black as coal. It is said that they are not entirely like their Irish kin; that their blood runs hotter yet, and in thinner veins. Witches, some whispered, the men and women alike, but especially the men, with their straight backs and gentle hands, smiles that whispered of things past. And it was true that their House stood taller than most, and withstood storms of men and nature that would weather any mortal family. And yes, it was truer still that their eyes were blue and cold, and stared always out to sea, as if waiting with all the patience of the earth for a savior that would never arrive. True, as well, that their frozen-white beauty was locked into a peculiar unchanging canon over the passing years—hard lines upon the bodies of both male and female, sharp cheekbones angled like the bones of Ireland herself, hips whose unpleasant juts were made lovely by the contrast of soft thin lips and thick lashes. Always the eyes remained, blue and light, too bright to be real, a statement to unchallenged purity. House Eadoin were the land’s risen angels, after all. 

Eons could pass upon Ireland’s weathered face and the Eadoin still would stand, as much a part of the earth as the lakes and forests, the meadows that disappeared slowly into suburbs and cities. She has a sense of ancient youthfulness to her beckoning shores and hills, and she had long ago wrapped the Eadoin family in her arms. They were preserved, in part, due to her grace. Among the first were Aisling, and Rion; sister and brother, with hair of the blackest sea. 

They rose to their castle in the northeastern shores and their family came to join them, where they practiced a solitude so deep not even the new religion could fully penetrate their fortress. Stories still flicker on some tongues; that they talked to mermaids, that they knew more magic than the forest creatures, that they were once as powerful as gods themselves. Never benevolent, no, but fair, in their way, and rarely cruel. They were sea-people—would often stand for hours looking out at the water, as if they could see things trembling beneath it. 

The village folk didn’t understand. Ireland was in their bones; sweet Ireland, with her good firm earth and blissful green. But the Eadoin were evanescent, changing, waif-like as they knelt and dipped thin fingers into the water and waited for things that did not come. Perhaps they are not from this land, the villagers murmured, perhaps they are not of us at all. But they did not know that every ounce of Eadoin blood ran thin and quick; that magic flashed in those temperamental eyes and they were crazed, nearly crazed, with love of the land and the hunger for something that they would never find. Disturbed by lack of understanding, driven by their own arrogance, the Eadoin holed themselves in their fortress and learned to draw magic from the bones of the earth.

They were perhaps an overly-serious folk; this didn’t change until the arrival of Lucia, a fair-haired girl to whom one of the sons of Eadoin, Sean, was betrothed. She was beautiful and kind, and lit the halls with her laugh, and did not resent her husband for never loving her. She did not expect him to. His love was tied deep, somewhere in the foundations of that castle, somewhere cold and hard where magic ran. But there was something about Lucia that sparked the family’s interest. Long had the Eadoin loved the mer. And with every movement of Lucia, every flicker of blonde hair that rippled as if she were suspended underwater, every blink of her great sea green eyes, the family became more convinced that she was the key to finding a great power. The mer hold great magic in them; untapped, raw, wilder than most, and they have the tendency to be bold and careless, but it is a great thing nonetheless, and the witches of Eadoin had never encountered one whose magic glowed from the inside. The family beseeched her to allow them to find it; compliant, she agreed, with the queerly meek attitude of the tamed mer—perhaps a part of her seeked a greater good. Perhaps she believed her sacrifice would do her people well. The mer do not have a sense of self, not in the way men do, and a glimpse into their eyes like cut glass would reveal this clearly. Yet the Eadoin were wired for efficiency, not for love, and their passions were caught in the webs of magic and stars, not in mortal cares. A part of that proud family loved her, yes, the same way they loved their wolfhounds, their caged singing birds. Not in the way they loved their brothers and sisters, in the way they loved their land. She was a dear pet, clear and innocent, and her beauty was not enough to save her. 

When Lucia was nineteen Sean took her down the stone steps to the grey shore, where they stood for a long time, very still. He waded into the water, hair like smoke against his tight pale skin, and told her to come forward. Lucia did not move, her eyes fixed on something beyond his shoulder. The wind had picked up and her hair looked like snakes, living, writhing. A peculiar look was on her face, as if she was quite close to something she had never had, but that she was too afraid to claim. Sean’s hand circled her wrist and pulled her, not ungently, and she nearly tripped into the water. But that is too ungraceful of a word.

The waves seemed to moan towards her, reaching in swirling eddies towards her spindly knees, as if the sea had found again something it had loved. Lucia’s expression was not one of surprise, but Sean pressed his palm to his forehead, bothered by something, the way the water yearned for her cold skin. It meant his family was right, of course, because they were rarely wrong. But he looked pained as she knelt, apparently unbothered by the cold, smiling as she dipped her arms in the water, put her head sideways against the gentle sea as if listening for what it would say. He did not want to do it, not because he loved her, but because she was a good girl, and especially now—she looked like a simpleton, a child, smiling like that against the sea. Her eyes had taken on a glassier shine, her skin was freezing to the touch. And he could hear it. The sea was whispering to her, but he could not understand what it said. Lucia did. She was looking downward, her lips skimming the water with the shadow of a kiss. Her hair moved with the direction of the sea, not the wind, curling around her neck and pulling down her back. “I haven’t been here in so long,” she said, her voice dancing around the rough Irish syllables, and she glanced up to meet the pale gaze of her husband just as he reached down to grab her shoulders.

“Now,” Sean said, and turned her, pushed her underneath the water. Lucia’s face was tilted upward, lips slightly apart, as if she had been about to speak. She did not struggle. At first he felt a stab of guilt, remarking once more on the innocence of her features, the bland quiet facelessness of her beauty. So pure, like an animal’s. Like a mermaid’s.

Lucia’s hair fanned out underneath the water like silk, and her lips shut against the cold sea. It was her eyes. She did not struggle, for moments that stretched into minutes, yet her eyes remained unblinking and wide, staring into his without remorse or pain. She looked like a sleeping ghost, grey underneath the water, and though he held her steadily, he was afraid she would float away, become an intangible creature that fled like death. She was so still he reached for a pulse, and with an an angry cry realized she had none. Thinking his family had lied to him, he let go of her in his anger, and quicker than one would have thought she was gone beneath the waves, pulled not to the shore but out to sea. At once he dove beneath the waves, but she was gone; there was no trace of the golden hair, the white gown. Sean’s lungs fit to burst, he rose again above the water only to be met with the sound of her voice, far-off, and though he was certain Lucia could not swim, that she had been dead moments ago, that she could not possibly have reached a spot so far out to sea, she floated, shoulders above the water, a warmness to her cheeks. 

“You can’t drown me,” she said, almost laughing, and once more her hair moved against the wind. He might have been seeing things, relieved beyond words that she was alive, but he thought her skin shone silver with the shedding of opalescent scales. “If you do, I’ll just slip away.” 

“Lucia!” He exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to let you go.”

She did not come closer, and he was panicked for a moment, that she would slip beneath the water again and be gone to him forever. But she did not move.

“You did,” she called out to him. “You thought I was dead. You won’t need me when I am dead.”

He was tempted to tell her that he loved her, that it wasn’t true, that she should come home where she would be safe. All three promises were stuck in his throat, as all three were false. He couldn’t lie to her, because she would see through his lies. So he said the truth, instead.

“We need you,” he said. “Come back to us.” 

She dipped beneath the waves, and too soon, too quickly, she was beside him, breaking the water without a ripple. The water clung to her skin and glittered like stones. Her nails, for some reason, looked hard and brittle as seashells. Lucia blinked her large and watery eyes, met his solid glance. She put a hand on his shoulder and her touch was like ice, but it was the single sweetest motion out of a thousand loving actions. Sean looked away, back towards the castle of the Eadoin, pained by her meekness. His family at least had always taken pleasure in breaking things. The pity of Lucia was that she offered herself without restraint, without a trace of dignity. There was no plead for human goodness in her eyes, for she knew not to believe in the inherent integrity of people. 

“You are so thin,” he said finally, glancing back to her. “Have you been eating?”

She wavered like a mist off of the sea, but he was no longer afraid that she would run. He did not think his hands were quite as quick as a mer’s, yet there was a steadiness in her gaze, not the dumb trust of an animal but something else entirely. She wouldn’t flee, not now.

“I sit at your elbow every evening,” she said. “If you looked to your left, you would know.”

His hand slipped around Lucia’s forearm, squeezed it so tightly she could feel the bones grinding together underneath her skin. “Forgive me. I’ve had other matters on my mind.” Her arm was so limp in his grasp that he dropped it. It fell like a dead thing to her side.

“Yes,” Lucia responded, expressionless, as if she hadn’t noticed the crushing strength of his grip. “You and your family both.” She’d never counted herself as one of them; she knew better. Even then her husband’s eyes were not on her, but out to sea, on the hem of her gown, on the edge of the rocks—he disliked meeting her glance, as if the flicker of humanity within was a constant reminder of his family’s unjust tendency to steal such precious things away. She studied Sean, the sharp jaw, tired eyes, the hollows beneath his angled cheekbones. In comparison Lucia was very small. Soft. 

“Why do you do this?” He said suddenly, as if something had finally broken inside of his mind. “Why are you so willing to let us use you so?”

Lucia’s lips formed a small ‘o’, as if from surprise; her brow crinkled slightly, and her expression was one of calm and quiet, an echo of the sea wrapped so lovingly around her ankles. “For one so determined to claim us, you don’t know very much about my people,” she said. She had never spoken of her water-blood before, because the Eadoin were a family very much tied to land and wind—they did not concern themselves overly-much with those who lay outside their circle. The village within whose borders they lived, they paid their due respects to; the Eadoin had their magics, their queerly wonderful way of curing desperate ills and droughts with little more than a murmured word. The villagers rarely saw them, but on occasion one or two of them would ride into the village borders on their grey horses, dressed in their black cloaks to shield them against the cold. Their men rode slightly hunched, not proud like princes, but curved, as if they despaired against the wind. As if they were a hundred years old and their spines were grievened by time. But they walked swiftly and their words were fair, and their touch gentle. The Eadoin did not break their promises. In return the village kept them in food and privacy, and the wealthy family, in turn, kept to themselves. It was how it always had been, for as long as any of the living Eadoin could remember. 

“We know what lays within you,” he replied. “Our magic comes from the earth. I can feel yours somewhere—somewhere, in here…” Sean put a finger to the pulse of her heart, felt the thin hot blood with his mortal touch. He closed his eyes for a moment and a shock ran through Lucia’s small frame, starting at the soles of her feet and ending somewhere near the bottom of her neck.

“What did you do?” She said, letting fear for the first time enter her voice. She stepped away, and a deep red flush colored the area where he had touched her. 

 “You see? We’re not so different.” But Lucia couldn’t read him; there was the maddening smile of the Eadoin on Sean’s features now, aging him beyond his youth. She knew the look fair well. He was far away, locked somewhere tight within his irrepressible audacity, but she could not be angered with him. Perhaps that was Lucia’s greatest fault, that she blamed all his flaws on the upbringing of his family. This was not true. He was his father’s son; a descendent of Aisling, the first, sister of Rion, and whatever winds had carried them to those shores still called to him. Even now, faced with the delicate-boned mer, he watched her so dispassionately that they looked more like strangers than husband and wife. An Eadoin would be an Eadoin, whether brought up underneath the shelter of their Irish fortress or not. Lucia could never reconcile with this, the summation of her life wasted on a man whose goal was not to live but to slave underneath his family. It was not the lack of love that incensed her so; she had never expected him to love her. No, it was the fact that he would not cling to life like he should, but instead looked to it as a forceful master. He took no joy in living.

“Why play with your magic when it brings others pain, and you no happiness?” she asked, in a tone so quiet he knew she was afraid he’d strike her. Pity stayed his hand.

“It is not man’s lot to love this world,” Sean said witheringly, turning back to the rocks where the grey steps waited. 

“Is it your lot to be miserable, then?”

He did not deem to answer, finding the question childish, but left her standing in the water as he climbed the steps to the fortress. Lucia stood there for a long time, and then followed him, stepping lightly for one who knew she would soon meet death, and so far away from her sea.