Gentlest of Wild Things, page 5
“Phoebe,” said Eirene, but Phoebe’s eyes slid past her to fix upon Stavros.
“Stavros,” she breathed. Her voice quavered on his name. “I cannot marry him. Alexandra is dead. Did you know that? Please, don’t—”
“Don’t?” echoed Stavros. “Don’t?” His voice grew louder. “You do not command me, little cousin. You forget your place; I am head of this household and you will go to him if I demand it.”
Phoebe shook her head and backed away. Her eyes were bright; she blinked rapidly, dislodging a single tear from her lashes. It trickled over her hollow cheek. “He does not want me,” she said. “He doesn’t know me.”
“Know you?” Stavros laughed. “Why should that matter?”
Another tear slipped down Phoebe’s face, then another. Eirene’s chest seemed to be caving in on itself to see her sister like this, to have no way to stop it. Leandros’s words rang through her mind over and over in his cool, cruel voice. Let her know how sincerely I . . . desire this match.
Stavros spoke now. “Cousin,” he pleaded in a low, desperate tone. “He is a descendant of Eros, a demigod. He has a magic of his own. Think what such a marriage would mean for us.”
“For us,” repeated Phoebe. “Are you marrying him, too, Stavros?”
“So you will do it?” He could be gentle when he wanted to be. Kind, even. But there was always that glint in his eyes, and he could return to spitting rage between one breath and the next.
“She will not,” exploded Eirene.
“I can speak for myself, Eirene!” snapped Phoebe.
“Phoebe.”
Phoebe sighed and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her chiton. She was deliberately not looking at Eirene. She straightened again, pulling her shoulders back with clear intent. “I don’t have a choice. I think we all know that. I would rather go to Leandros with my own mind.”
No, no, no, no, no. Eirene’s grip on the pomegranate had grown fierce and white knuckled without her noticing. It gave way beneath her hands, the thick skin tearing open with the wet noise of a knife through the throat of a goat at slaughter. It felt like a huge mutilated heart in her hands—sun-warmed and wet against her skin, as if it had been yanked fresh from her body. Thick ruby-red juice dripped down her arms, coating her from wrist to elbow in the time it took for her to inhale sharply and drop the foul thing to the floor. It rolled against the hem of her chiton, leaving a bloody print behind.
Stavros smiled that awful smile of his again. “Good. Then it’s settled.”
“You can’t,” said Eirene. She and Phoebe stood at opposite ends of their room, glowering at each other. “You cannot go.”
“You act as if I chose this,” snapped Phoebe. “You know what Leandros is, Eirene, what he’s capable of. If he wants me, I have no choice but to be his.”
“We could run away,” said Eirene desperately. “Tonight.”
“Run?” Phoebe’s laugh was cruel. They could be vicious with each other when they needed to. “Of course you’d think about running. You’re the one who can still run, whose body can still do anything you demand of it. We have no horse, no donkey, no cart, and no money to buy them. It will be weeks before I could have anything new to sell. Besides, every man for miles will recognize us and return us to Stavros the moment we are spotted.”
“Perhaps not,” said Eirene, but Phoebe would not be interrupted. She was flushed with emotion.
“And what if we did get away? I would lose my loom, you would lose your garden, and we would have nothing. And you cannot imagine that Leandros will waste any time pining for me if I were to be gone. We don’t have any friends left to condemn in my place, but someone must go, Eirene. Leandros will have a wife, some poor girl locked up in that house of his. Better that it be me.” Finishing her tirade, she sucked in a pained, gasping breath and sat down abruptly on the edge of the bed. She was shaking all over.
Eirene stared at her sister, at the person she cared most for in the world. She would die for Phoebe, had always whispered it in her prayers to the gods on the nights where Phoebe seemed to cling to life with only her fingertips. Take me instead, Eirene would tell the sky. Let me die, so that she might live. She had meant it then. She meant it still.
“I will go,” said Eirene.
Phoebe lifted her head slowly. “What?”
“I will go,” repeated Eirene. “If someone must go, let it be me. Disguised as you, of course,” she added. “Stavros will never agree.” And Leandros would not want her as a bride, she knew that. She was too short and too strong and she scowled too much. And she needed to stop cutting all her hair off. That’s what Damon had told her, anyway, after she’d told him she was scared of being married off and he’d laughed in her face.
But Eirene was certain she could convince Leandros to keep her. He was an ambitious man. She could use that.
“You cannot go,” said Phoebe.
“Did I not just say the very same thing? What makes this so different?”
“It is different because you do not have to, and I—”
“Listen.” Eirene hurried to her sister’s side, grabbing Phoebe’s hands in her own. “I will not be Leandros’s wife.”
Phoebe shook her head, exasperated. “Eirene, a wife is what he wants.”
“Not forever, I mean,” said Eirene. “Just long enough for you to finish my tapestry. You said it yourself, we have no money and no way to make it, but if you finish it then we will.”
Phoebe shook her head again. “Eirene, no. That tapestry is yours. It’s for—”
“I was never going to need it anyway,” said Eirene gently. “And if I do, then perhaps you will be so good as to make me another one. But for now I will go to Leandros in your place and, when the weaving is done, I will slip away and we will sell it and then we will take the money and leave.”
“Leaving Leandros to prey on some other poor creature.”
Phoebe’s voice was doubtful, but Eirene could see that she could be convinced. She pushed ahead.
“I will be in his house,” said Eirene. “There must be a secret to Desire. I do not believe that so distant a descendant of the gods could have such innate power. I know about herbs and medicine—this cannot be so different. So I will find what makes Desire. I will destroy it. Then we will be safe—and every other girl on Zakynthos, too.”
“What if you can’t? What happens then?”
“I can. But I need you to finish your weaving, Phoebe. Stavros will be so angry. We will not be able to stay here.”
“And why can’t you be the one who stays? Who earns the coins?”
“What can I do in a matter of weeks? Plant some seeds? Grow a really big rosemary? No, it has to be you that stays.”
Finally, Phoebe nodded. Slowly, uncertainly, but a nod nonetheless. “You will need a veil,” she said carefully.
“Yes,” agreed Eirene immediately, even if she wasn’t certain what the veil was for. She would have agreed to anything, so long as it kept Phoebe from throwing herself into Leandros’s clutches.
Phoebe raised an eyebrow, her composure returning. “To hide your face. So that you are believably me.”
“Ah,” said Eirene. “Right. We can use an old cloak, perhaps?”
“Yes,” said Phoebe. She stood up and dashed to the chest that held their clothes and blankets, ready to be piled back onto the bed when the cold weather returned. She threw it open. “Here!” she said triumphantly, digging out a faded blue shawl. “No time to redye it, so we will have to make do. It’ll hide your hair, though I wonder . . .” Her eyes darted around the room, landing on the loom and the knife that lay beside it, the little blade she used to cut the loose threads when they were tied off.
“No,” said Eirene, understanding immediately.
“I’ll cut my hair. I can braid the pieces in with yours, somehow,” said Phoebe. “I will have to pretend to be sulking in bed, of course, but if Stavros looks in, shorter hair will make it much more believable that I am you . . .”
“No,” said Eirene again. Phoebe loved her hair. She rubbed oil into the ends every evening and pulled the curls into loose plaits to protect them. Eirene valued her own hair very little, but she could not take Phoebe’s from her. “The veil will hide my hair well enough,” she said firmly.
Phoebe bit her lip. “But what if—”
“No,” said Eirene again. “Promise me you won’t.”
Phoebe signed. “Fine. We will just need to pin the veil very carefully.”
“And I will need my herbs,” said Eirene. “Perhaps I will need to sedate Leandros. Or”— she smirked—“incapacitate him. Some Alexandrian senna will do nicely, I think.”
“You are a monster,” said Phoebe, but she was grinning.
Eirene grinned back. “When I need to be.”
That evening found Eirene’s satchel lying by the door of their room, stuffed full of herbs. The veil was folded neatly beside it. Eirene herself sat up in bed and squinted at them through the half dark. Phoebe lay beside her, breathing quietly, utterly exhausted by their afternoon of frantic preparation. Stavros had disappeared into the village. Even his cousin’s impending marriage could not keep him from the brothel.
Eirene crept from the bed silently, repinning her chiton and tying her sash tight. The realization had come to her slowly, but now she was certain of it: it had to be tonight. There was too much that could go wrong if she waited until the morning for Stavros to march her to Leandros’s house himself. There were too many opportunities for him to discover the ruse and force Phoebe to go in her place.
So Eirene would go tonight, alone, and she would make sure that Stavros could not bring her back.
She wound the veil around her face and hair as Phoebe had shown her, then shoved half a dozen pins into it haphazardly, doubtlessly ruining the whole effect. She picked up the satchel and moved as quietly as she could toward the door.
A hand caught her by the wrist and yanked her back.
Eirene smothered a frightened yelp. She’d been so occupied with the veil that she had not heard her sister waking. “Phoebe,” she hissed.
She could not make out Phoebe’s features through the dark, but she heard the pain and anger in her voice. “You were going to leave without saying goodbye.”
“I have to,” said Eirene desperately. “I have to go now, before Stavros can stop me. You know I have to. What if he makes me take the veil off? What if he tries to make Eirene accompany us to the house and discovers that Eirene is a dirty rotten liar? There’s too much at risk, Phoebe.”
She had expected her sister to argue. But Phoebe, who had been woven from the same threads as Eirene, who was as she was and who thought as she thought, knew the truth of her words. “You’re right,” she said simply. “You have to go tonight.” Without warning, she yanked Eirene into a tight embrace. “But you’ll come back alive, or I swear on the Styx I’ll bring you back from Hades just to kill you myself,” she hissed into Eirene’s ear.
“I will come back,” said Eirene. She could not quite bring herself to swear it.
“I know.”
“Then let me go.”
Phoebe loosened the tight circle of her arms a fraction. She sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Eirene gently detached herself from her sister’s grip. “So do I.”
VI
Serpent Dire and Fierce
Lamia
From the pitifully small window in her tower room, Lamia could see all the way into the village, so she was the first to catch sight of the girl struggling up the path.
The girl? Lamia blinked. She had been half asleep, leaning out into the cool rain and dreaming up patterns in the shifting shadows, but now she was wide awake. A girl. Surely not. The figure must have been a phantom, an apparition, some figment of what her father would affectionately call her overactive mind and weak eyes. After all, what girl would come here, alone, at night, and in such a torrent?
Lamia turned deliberately from the window and fidgeted with the linen bandages encasing her left hand as she cast her eyes over the room. It was dark, lit only by the single lamp her father allowed and the silvery moonlight, but there was her bed, her small chest of clothes, the rickety wooden table in the corner with its heap of ancient knucklebones, and the shelves piled with curling papyrus and sticks of charcoal worn down to stubs. All things she was certain of, that she could see and touch and know to be true. Unlike the girl.
But she had looked so real. Lamia turned back. The wind had the night itself trembling; one of her shutters had been stolen away by a storm much like this, but she braced a hand against the one that remained and peered out again into the dark.
Not a phantom. That much was clear, as the clouds shifted in the sky and a beam of moonlight shone on the trees and the path and the girl upon it. She was short and sturdy looking; her hands were clenched fists at her side, her face was turned from the wind. She had hidden her hair beneath a clumsy veil, but each fresh gust pulled free a tangle of dark curling strands.
Lamia’s stomach gave a little leap of excitement, followed almost instantaneously by a rush of trepidation. What business could this girl have here, alone as she was? The last person to walk up that path—alone, at night—had been the physician, and he had come to take Alexandra’s body away.
Still the girl came closer and closer, each step bringing some new detail into view. She wore a neat white chiton. The raiment was clean, and Lamia could see no holes in the fabric—though perhaps she was merely too far away to see—but it was too short; it hung only to the middle of the girl’s calves. Her veil was dark blue, and she had a leather bag slung over her shoulders.
The girl walked with a quick, determined gait. It would not be long until she reached the door. There was no servant waiting there—as there never was this time of night, the pale-faced serving girls and rowdy kitchen boys were all sent back to their homes in the village—so she would have to knock and wait for Peiros to come. Lamia’s pulse quickened. The door was usually barred at night, but Peiros had become forgetful in the aftermath of Alexandra’s death. She had not heard him come tonight. And there was a hiding spot in her rose garden that would give her a perfect view of the girl’s arrival, so long as she got there in time.
It was too marvelous an opportunity to pass up. She left the shutter open and crossed the room as quickly as she could. The sheepskins thrown across the floor muffled the thump of her boots, that distinctive sound that betrayed her uneven gait, and stopped her from slipping on the stone beneath them.
The tower stairs were another matter.
Lamia thrust open the door to her room—a sad wooden affair many years past its prime—and stepped cautiously onto the small circular landing. Sometimes she liked to wait here for a few moments, to prepare herself for the task ahead. But she didn’t have time now. She walked to the top of the stairs, took a sharp, quick breath, and began.
She descended the steps slowly, both hands—one wrapped in yellowed linen bandages—clutching the rope that ran along the outer wall of the tower. It was a laborious task on a good day, and today was a bad one. Because of the storm. Her leg didn’t like the rain.
She stood facing the rough stone, lowering her injured leg—her left, stiff and inflexible at the knee—onto each step, pushing down on her toes to make sure she had a sure footing before following it with the other. She moved cautiously, more slowly than she needed to. She had learned not to rush the hard way—slipping on a slick patch of stone and tumbling to the foot of the tower, breaking one wrist and spraining the other. The worst of the damage had been done to her leg.
Her father had been beside himself when he’d reached her—bounding down the stairs in a panic, hauling her up by the broken wrist and crushing her against his body. She remembered the way he’d held her, petting her hair as if she were a kitten, and how he’d trembled with rage and terror. “What if you’d died?” he’d whispered as she’d screamed into his shoulder, her left leg dangling uselessly beneath her. “Lamia, you are too precious to lose. What would I do without you?”
Lamia remembered staring blankly at her ankle, wrenched sideways and already purpling, and at her knee, which didn’t seem to be where it had been before. Five years later, it had never healed; she could hold the cap between her fingers and move it about, push it back into its old place for a moment before it slipped off again. She bound it every morning to keep it stable, but it still hurt. It never stopped hurting.
There was another landing halfway down the tower, another small space in front of another battered wooden door that Lamia kept a careful distance from, and she paused there as she always did, an arm’s length from the warped panels. Her leg—as it always did when she hadn’t left her room all day—was seizing up, cramping painfully.
She braced her foot against the wall and grunted as pain shot up through her calf. If she didn’t press the cramps out here, she knew her leg would crumple beneath her the instant she tried to take another step. But the girl. Lamia could not miss her. It was worth the risk. She pushed off the wall and put her weight back onto her injured leg.
This pain was a crack of lightning. Too hasty, as she always was. The leg gave way.
Lamia fell backward, throwing an arm back instinctively to break her fall. Her hand connected with the door. Lamia gasped, but it was too late to redirect her fall and she tumbled bodily into the wood.
She fell from the door to the floor in a crumpled heap, scrambling back as swiftly as she could. The door hadn’t moved, as she’d known it wouldn’t. In all the time she’d lived here—and that was as long as she could recall—it had been locked. But in her nightmares, in dreams that were hazy and slippery and suffused with terror, Lamia stood upon this landing. The door was always ajar, just a little, and her heart knew that something monstrous lay behind it.
Lamia yanked herself to her feet, fingers curling into the grooves in the stone wall. The cramps had subsided somewhat, but in her hurry to return to the stairs she was still close, too close, to falling again. It was impossible to see it from the ground, but the tower tapered as it rose, and the lower steps were slightly less steep. Her leg spasmed, shooting pains traveling up from her ankle to her hip, so she went the rest of the way on her rear. Her father hated it when she did that, but he was not here to see.
