Magic and Miracles, page 39
I groaned and turned away from him. “Be serious! I can’t be the reason everything you are working for doesn’t happen! People don’t like me, and you need a wife people love!”
“I need a wife that I love,” he said firmly, no longer joking at all. “That is all I have ever needed, and that is all I will have. Nobody else is marrying you, Dahlia. I am.” He huffed and shifted his weight. “Will you come over here, caro mio? I need to hold you or touch you or something, I’m about to go mad and open my eyes or something.”
I got up and came over to him, adjusting my skirts. “I’m right here,” I told him, taking his hand.
He brought it to his lips at once, kissing each knuckle and then reaching out to stroke my cheek, his eyes still closed. “Marry me, Dahlia. I don’t know how to have my dreams without you, and whatever I accomplish or don’t accomplish in my life, all that matters is that you are by my side. We make our own magic, but we only do it together. Please.”
I swallowed hard and arched up to kiss him, making sure to keep it gentle, though he took my chin and added more emphasis than I would have done.
“I love you,” I whispered.
He smiled, kissing my brow. “Ti amo, fatina. I’ll see you at the altar.”
I nodded, though he wouldn’t see it. “Yes, you will.”
He squeezed my hand tightly. “Promise?”
“Promessa,” I replied.
He groaned and gave me another hard kiss. “I love it when you speak Italian.”
I laughed and pushed him away. “You’ll hear plenty of it later so long as you go!”
He kissed my hand quickly and felt his way to the door, then turned back once it was open. “I’ll be waiting, tesorino. Don’t be long.”
He blew me a kiss, then was gone.
I turned back to the mirror with a heavy breath, my heart racing.
The wedding was on. I couldn’t refuse Marco anything, and today seemed a poor time to start.
I touched up my makeup, as my lipstick had gotten smudged, and tried for a smile. It felt forced and looked pained.
Well, it would have to do.
Eloise and Bianca popped back in, looking beautiful and radiant in their one-shoulder gowns. “Ready, bella sposa?” Bianca asked. “Your sister is anxious.”
I snorted softly. “Iris is getting married next year, she can be anxious on her own time. But yes, I am ready.”
I turned from the mirror and followed them out.
The music started, and I took my father’s arm, letting him lead me down the aisle.
As soon as I saw Marco, my smile—my real smile—made an appearance, and my heart and every other part of me sang a brilliant chorus. His eyes lit up at the sight of me, and his smile made me want to run at him full speed, despite our setting and audience.
He knew, I could see it, and he winked, which only sped my heart up more.
I loved him with all my heart and then some. His was the song my heart sang, and I couldn’t imagine my future with anyone else.
There wouldn’t be magic with anyone else.
He knew that, too, and his eyes shimmered with a tender light as I approached.
This was forever, I decided then and there. No matter what happened, no matter what we faced or what anybody said, this was it. I would never let him go, and he would love me with the same passion twenty years from now that he did today. We were going to do this, and we were going to last.
Forever. With him.
That was now my dream.
I could barely breathe as my father placed my hand in Marco’s, as we turned to face the priest, and as the ceremony started.
But when the time came, my voice was clear and precise: “I will.”
And I did.
A CRACK IN THE STONE
By Charlie N. Holmberg
* * *
https://charlienholmberg.com/
A FOLLOWED BY FROST STORY
Souls painted the entirety of the Underswept a deep shade of blue.
Many thought of hell, the afterlife—whatever they might call it—as gray, black, or even white. But it was blue. Why, Sadriel had never been able to determine, even after centuries upon centuries. The steep walls, blue. Spiraling stalactites, blue. The River Without Water, blue. All the same shade of deep slate blue, so much so that no mortal eye would ever be able to separate the River from the mountains.
Perhaps that was why Sadriel preferred to wear red. He wanted to be seen, even when he never was.
This was his kingdom, his inheritance, and his destiny, and he alone walked it, his footsteps echoing so many times they made no sound at all. The unstirring air was so cold and humid it would kill a mortal body, which meant Sadriel had no visitors. None that made good companions, anyway.
The dead did not speak. Not in the mortal world, and not in the Underswept.
He walked to where his newest harvest descended, souls collected from a plague in Hermade. The country lay about two hundred miles from Zareed, across the southern ocean, behind a wall of uninhabited islands. Sadriel smirked and ran a long finger up and down the gold chain of his ruby amulet. He still had a nasty habit of measuring mortal geography from that backward desert nation. How quaint.
He did not allow himself to dwell on it.
He had visited the souls themselves right as their bodies expired. He’d pulled them out so they could drift down here. The Underswept shadowed every physical place in the mortal realm, and that shadow filtered the souls. They were a slightly darker shade of blue against the other blueness, roughly human-shaped, quiet and liquid-like—though there was no physical state to aptly describe a soul. Not to a person who hadn’t seen one, touched one.
He touched them now, a glide of his fingers on each as he strode by. Flickers of pale light erupted at the contact, then rippled outward, casting a subtle shimmer across each soul. A blessing of sorts. A welcome, a key to the afterlife. The spirits would linger here for however long they needed before the Lords of Beneath deemed it time to recycle them. Who the Lords chose and why, even Sadriel didn’t know. He had his place. An endless, large, and lonely place.
He chuckled. Not that Death was lonely. By all accounts, he rarely got a moment to himself.
Grabbing the edge of his scarlet cape, Sadriel lifted it up to the edge of his wide-brimmed hat, blacking-out the blue for a moment. When the cape dropped, he stood in a different part of the Underswept, this one with fewer mountains and more endless plains, devoid of grass and life. The River Without Water laced through it, carrying the shimmer of souls. Here was the shadow of the Meering, a little nation on the tip of Sosador, so far from Zareed that he could measure it with nothing less than the turn of the planet itself
The Meering was half a planet from Zareed, and it was at war. There was always war somewhere, and in the quiet between battles, new battles emerged, fueled by hatred and greed and all those other pesky human traits that kept him busy. Sadriel didn’t know why the Meering warred. It wasn’t his business to know, only to glide by on his many rounds and dissect souls from flesh with a touch so they could gradually find this cheery place.
They filtered in now, eleven of them, wriggling like newborn snakes. He strode by with a gentle touch for each, guiding them to the River, where they would swim for—
Sadriel drew back his pale hand as he reached the soul of a child. A girl—his well-trained eye could tell. He had not yet touched her, and yet she carried the shimmer of the River. The approval of death. The key to the Underswept.
He had not given it to her.
“Curious,” he said aloud. The word was lost to the empty plains. “Wherever did you come from?”
Had he harvested a little girl? Probably. He rarely remembered their faces. It was too much to remember them. Too much work, and too much . . . everything. It was not his purpose to remember. He had not been created to remember, only to shepherd.
Still, he touched the girl’s spirit, to see how she would react. There was no spot of light, no additional shimmer to her constitution. She seemed to look at him, briefly, before following the others to the River. He watched her go, eyebrow furrowed, lips downturned. He touched two more souls, both of which behaved appropriately, accepting his welcome before merging with the Underswept.
One out of eleven. How peculiar. He wondered why, how. It was not his purpose to wonder, but wonder he did.
The living realm so seldom caught his attention.
But for the moment, the mortals held it.
Sadriel knew the path of the dead the way an old woman knew the pains in her joints. He followed the one the Meering souls had taken into the Underswept, and the cold, wet blueness washed off him like mud in rain. He blinked, and he stood in the mortal world once more. Even after eons, the colors of mortality shocked him after a stint in the Underswept. Hurt his eyes, he might have said to his few past companions. But in truth, the colors were beautiful.
The Meering. It was Al’qusha one hundred and fifty years ago, before the uprising. The mortal world seldom changed, but mortals constantly did. What they ate, how they dressed, how they spoke. They’d once uttered the first tongue, Angrean—it was Sadriel’s first, too. But those words had died with all but the scholars, and her.
Shaking himself, he took in his surroundings. He was inside an atrium of sorts, with sandstone walls and tall rectangular windows without glass or screen. Hot, summery air swept through them, carrying the scents of smoke, grain, and livestock. There was an empty dais in the center of the space, with pyramiding steps leading up to a stone oval. A few mats, some draperies, and people. Half a dozen of them, dark-skinned and humbly dressed, though flashes of color highlighted each’s clothing. An old woman with a swath of indigo draping her torso swept the floor with a straw broom. A man with a vividly orange belt rolled up mats. Two adolescents wearing matching teal hats bickered with one another in the corner.
A woman with skin black as obsidian, her head shaved nearly to the scalp, watered lilies at the base of the altar on the dais. She wore more color than most; orange, red, and indigo braided across her collar and flooded down her shoulders, and a similarly braided belt of indigo and green hung slanted on her hips. Behind her, another woman, this one middle-aged, passed and touched the water bearer on the back before crossing to the adolescents and barking at them to be quiet.
They spoke Al’qusha, or a variant of it. Sadriel didn’t need to study the words to understand them. He knew all languages, dead, alive, and yet to be born. His ears picked up on the dialect without effort.
“—better things to do!” the woman snapped at the adolescents. “Go help your father. Gods know he needs it!”
Sadriel walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, examining it. He didn’t have an immediate recollection of being here; he shepherded so many. But the path of the girl’s spirit led to this place. There were no signs or symbols to denote what the building was, though it looked like a temple. A simple temple, but a temple nonetheless.
The colorful woman set her clay watering jug aside and turned toward the sweeping elder. “I can finish that, Abbe,” she offered, though she didn’t step away from the dais.
The old woman slowed. “It is mostly finished.” She set the broom inside the lip of the doorway. It, too, was a large rectangle, broader than the windows, covered by a sheet of salmon cloth.
“As is this,” said the man, who stood with his last rolled mat and presented it to the colorful woman with a tip of his head. “Where would you like it?”
The colorful woman took a step back. “With luck, we will not need it soon. In the corner, with the rest.”
The middle-aged woman, turning from the now-fleeing adolescents, clucked her tongue and strode over to the man. “You forget yourself, Haja. Keep your distance.”
Chagrined, the man took two full steps back before turning for a shadowed corner, where mats, blankets, and other riffraff lay. Sadriel frowned and followed him. He detected the lightest scent of death here, but that did not give him the answers he sought.
“Go. I must pray,” the colorful woman said.
“Already?” replied the other. “You are diligent, as always.”
“I feel it now,” she explained. “Please, take the others and go. I will be about the village shortly.”
The man dropped his mat and turned, passing through Sadriel’s left arm and shoulder as he did. He shivered, but otherwise went on his way—a little quicker, once the feisty woman returned her ire to him, ushering him out like a hunter with dogs. Within moments, the temple was empty save for the ebony woman at the dais.
Perhaps there was a second floor, and the girl had passed there.
“It is a rare honor,” the colorful woman spoke, “to have Andendi himself grace our village. Far rarer for him to linger.”
Sadriel turned and glimpsed the woman from beneath the broad rim of his hat. Her black eyes, even with his chin, looked right at him.
He hesitated and tilted his head, waiting for her to look away, to address someone else, to continue this method of prayer. But she didn’t. She held his gaze, save for when she clasped her hands before her and bowed.
She saw him. Only the dying saw him. The dying, and the few mortals with magic carrying the tune of the Underswept. Very few mortals. And this mortal was obviously quite alive.
He walked around her then, keeping a wide berth, watching her eyes follow him. A smirk pulled up his lip. “How interesting. What are you?”
She considered him a moment. “That you ask such a question shifts what I’ve been told. Unless you are not Andendi, but a spirit from Beneath?” Her eyes lowered. “But no, you wear the ruby.”
Sadriel’s steps halted abruptly, one hand brushing the heavy amulet of his necklace. “You are familiar with death.”
She nodded. Light from the windows highlighted her high cheekbones when she did, making her look severe. She appeared to be in her thirties, though early or late, he couldn’t tell.
“I am a gala unde Andendi, a priestess of death. I have known you all my life.” She spoke softly, her dialect of Al’qusha lyrical on her tongue.
Sadriel snorted. “Have I stumbled upon one of the few mortal hovels that deems to worship me, rather than fear me?”
“Worship and fear are connected, are they not?” She strode away from the dais. Not toward him, but toward a window, where she glanced out into the village beyond. He understood then. She’d dismissed the others to keep them away, and now checked to ensure they stayed away. Worship and fear indeed.
“Solve a riddle for me, if you would.” Sadriel clasped his hands behind his back and grinned darkly, masking the discomfort her mortal eyes seeded in him. “A young girl passed from these parts into my realm, but she seemed to know her way, as though she’d been there before.” He strolled toward her, but kept about three paces away. “Was she a gala like yourself?”
She considered only a second. “Mattala. She passed last night. Is that of whom you speak?”
“Perhaps, but the dead do not speak, even to me. I would not know her name if I wanted to.”
The colorful woman accepted this with a nod. Strange. All of it, strange. This was not the usual reception he got from mortals. Even Smitha had feared him. For years, she’d feared him. If he instilled any semblance of terror in this priestess, she masked it remarkably well.
“She was not a gala unde Andendi, but a daughter of the village. She passed from fever. From many things, but the fever is what killed her. I am the one who marked her soul for your domain. Did you not know it?”
Perhaps deeming their conversation truly private, the woman turned from the window and looked at him now, truly looked at him, and clasped her hands behind her back just as he did. She approached him, her long skirts swishing about her legs, until she stood but a pace from him. He noted gooseflesh rising on her bare arms, but was that from his chill, or evidence of fear?
She studied his face unabashed, stoking that discomfort in him. Sadriel wasn’t used to feeling uncomfortable. He wasn’t accustomed to . . . any of this.
“I have seen you before. Only briefly. Often a mere flash of red. That is, in part, how I knew you.” Pursing full lips, she walked around, studying him, then bowed again. “Once, as a young girl, I thought I glimpsed your face, but the years eroded the image.” Her eyes shifted back and forth, as though reading his every feature. “Forgive my impertinence. Have you come merely to ask after Mattala? Or is there something . . .”
She paused, eyes drawn to his chest. No, to his necklace. Sadriel snorted. Of course a mortal would be distracted by that amulet, a ruby the size of her fist. It would buy a great many material things. Human minds were all so very—
“You carry the shadow of death,” she murmured.
Sadriel narrowed his eyes. “I am the shadow of death, foolish girl.”
The woman shook her head, unfazed. “No, it is not your shadow, but another. Two separate shades joined together.” She lifted her hands, forming fists with her index fingers raised, and brought them together. “It follows you. It sings from the crack in your gem.”
If Sadriel had a soul, it would have sunk to the floor. He stepped back, startled, and grabbed the amulet to hide it from her prying eyes. The crack—it was only the faintest sliver. Practically imaginary. How could this creature see it so readily?
She lifted her eyes, and he noted, somewhere in the back of his thoughts, that they were not black, but an unending blue, almost the same shade as the Underswept.
“Andendi,” she said his Al’qusha name softly, almost maternally, “as I answered your riddle, will you answer mine? What would happen to Death were he to perish? Who, or what, would replace him?”
The questions seized him as serpents. As the hands of those refusing to die. The shadows of the temple deepened and stretched, reaching out to him. Sadriel did not breathe as living things did, but he had a semblance of it, and his chest moved too quickly. Still clutching the amulet, he took a step back.
