Year of Miracles, page 16
part #1 of Collected Stories of the Old Races Series
Daisani, without changing expression, made a scant turn toward Janx and kicked him in the shin, as one boy might do to another. Offense as childish as the action flew into Janx's face, but Sarah laughed, fear released in the burst of sound. "He really doesn't know when to stop," Daisani said with genuine apology in his voice. "You haven't been brought here and made lovely and offered food so it all might be stripped away from you, Sarah. There's no price to this, despite what Janx's ill-advised words might suggest or threaten."
The redhead looked abashed. "Forgive me, Sarah. Eliseo's right. I'm sorry if I've made you afraid. I only meant to tease. There is no cost for this," he said more softly. "No cost at all, such as you might fear. There would be no pleasure in that, and truly, my dear, I wish to please you."
The hammering of her heart slowed and her hands came warm again. It was unwise to trust them, but she did. Maybe because they had so much power, and she so little, that refusing to extend trust was laughable, but more, she thought, because they somehow made her feel as though she had power. As though they meant everything they said, unlikely as it seemed. She didn't lack confidence—no woman running a butcher's table in the slaughterfields could—but they strengthened it in her, somehow. There was no use asking why. Why Janx wished to please her, or why any of this was happening. She would only get the answer she'd been offered so far: because she was lovely, and these two men liked pretty things. And so, trusting the clothes, the grand hall, the eager men, she drew herself up and found enough humor in herself to attempt an accent as high as theirs: "Then it would please me, my lords, to dine with you."
Janx, who had no dignity, cheered and offered his arm. Eliseo took her other, and together they went to feast.
That first meal was not a lesson in manners. Far from it: instead the men out-did one another offering her savories, all of them laughing as she pursed her mouth and winced and coughed on the more exotic flavors and reached eagerly for the best of new delicacies. The servants clearly thought they were all mad, but served up plate after plate, never minding that no more than a few bites were taken from each. Sarah was sparing with the wine despite Janx's encouragement, and still by the end of the meal she had drunk enough to call him by his name, and to do the same with Eliseo. Eli, she called him, and he looked secretly pleased.
She did not, in truth, know when the lessons began, only that her manner improved: that it became easier to manage a wealthy woman's skirts, and that she began to dare the tall boxy shoes that put her eyes level with Eli's. That she became accustomed, even comfortable, with the maids dressing her and styling her hair, and that her speech, by slow measures, became more gracious. None of it was learned in the way of studying, as she did with letters and numbers, but it seeped into her until one afternoon she spoke with a stranger's voice.
It stopped her, that cultured tone, and she glanced across the hall to another mirror—Janx's home was littered with them, his own vanity or the landlords' reigning supreme—and found she knew the woman there.
No one else would. No one, certainly, from the slaughterfields. Not even Jacob, who might have married her. He would bow to the woman in the reflection, as Sarah herself would have once caught her skirts and scrabbled a rough curtsey. The mirror showed someone high-born, someone wealthy, and yet there was no surprise, no discomfort, in knowing that image as herself.
Oh so softly, Sarah murmured, "Excuse me," and left the hall for the outside world. She abandoned her shoes at the drive's edge and, not caring that her feet might be stained, ran across the grass until there were hills between her and the house, and until London's mark could be seen on the horizon. A breeze picked at her hair, patiently taking it from its pinnings. She tucked the stray pieces behind her ears as they came loose. Perhaps a noblewoman would do no such thing, but that was something she couldn't know. She'd met no other highborn women: she and Janx and Eli had delved into an existence of their own making, undisturbed by outsiders. They could stay that way, a world out of time, forever. There were moments when Sarah thought she wouldn't mind that, which, like the glimpse in the mirror, made her wonder what had become of the woman she'd been.
"May I join you?" She hadn't heard him approach, but it was Eli: Janx would have assumed she was bereft without his company and made himself comfortable without asking. She had wanted to be alone, but that difference between the two men amused her, so she was smiling as she looked back at Eli and nodded. Janx had found her, and made her laugh easily, but a disloyal part of her preferred Eliseo Daisani. He was neither so handsome nor so outrageous, and those things made him more...suitable...for the slaughterfields girl.
Eli sat, which she, mindful of her expensive dress, hadn't done, and looped his arms around his knees. "Have we made it too hard for you? Alone out here, away from any society?"
"Too easy, I should say. I almost wish it could stay this way forever."
"It could," Eli said idly.
Sarah breathed disagreement. "Nothing lasts forever."
"You'd be surprised."
They had plucked her from blood and grime and muck and brought her here, gentled her manners and improved her dress, fed her fine foods and finer wines, and smoothed the butchery from her voice. All those things were at least as impossible as their idylls lasting forever, so Sarah smiled again and sat. "I'm not sure I would be."
He glanced at her, seriousness in his dark gaze. Always more serious than Janx, of course, but Janx was a silly creature. She wondered, not for the first time, how they'd come to be friends, and this time asked, cutting Eliseo off to do so: "How do you know each other? You're nothing alike, you and he."
Eliseo slid his jaw around, looking as if he bit back his first answer. "What would you say if I said we'd known each other since before time began?"
"That you've aged well," Sarah said dryly, and Eli laughed.
"It's true. We have. We liked the same woman once, a long time ago. That's how we know each other."
"And she liked neither of you?"
His eyebrows rose. "How did you know?"
"You're both here with me."
"Ah." Eli turned his attention to the distant smudge that was London. "As it happens, you're right. She fancied someone else entirely. But that was a long time ago, and she's dead now."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I'm not even sure I remember her name. No." The denial came swiftly, almost angrily. "I remember. Pandora. Pandora and her box of mischief. Do you know the story? Open it and let the demons into the world."
"Close it so hope remains."
"Remember," Eliseo said, "that the box was said to hold all the evils to plague mankind. Hope was in there along with all the other devils. I've often wondered if it was meant to countermand or exacerbate them."
Sarah gave him a hard look. "No wonder she didn't like you."
Eli blinked, then laughed. "I am scolded. Forgive me, Sarah. I didn't mean to be gloomy. But you're out here on your own, so perhaps you want to be gloomy. Is everything all right?"
"I didn't know myself in the mirror earlier. Or, no. I did. That was..."
"Even worse? What would you do with hope if you found it, Sarah?"
"Cling to it," she said softly. "As I have done. She may not have liked you, but she did me a favor by bringing you together so you could find me. It's a cruel name to give someone, though. Janx read me the story. What kind of mother would name her daughter after a woman who let evil into the world?"
Eli's silence lingered a moment before he shook himself. "She had no mother save all of humanity, and perhaps demons aren't necessarily evil. Perhaps they're just not human."
Sarah peered at him. "And perhaps they fit in a box, too. That would be tidy. We could rush around scooping them back into their prison."
"They would fight tooth and nail not to go."
Cold crawled into Sarah's throat, making her voice small and cautious: "Are demons real, Eliseo?"
"Demons? No, I think not." He spoke with serene confidence, but there was an oddness in the words. A lightness that suggested he knew more than he dared say, and that the knowing caused him a hurt that ran so deeply it had to be touched on delicately if at all. "Shall I tell you how I think Pandora's story really went?"
"Please." Cold stayed upon her, despite the summer heat. They kept to their banter, Eliseo and Janx, and never let anything rise from below. Something lay close to the surface now, though, and Sarah dared say nothing else for fear Eli would change his mind.
They sat together under the sun for a long while before he spoke. "There was Prometheus, who brought fire to man, and his brother Epimetheus, who lacked foresight. And there was Pandora, who, the stories say, was the first human woman. She wasn't, but that's not this story. She was, though, beautiful and curious and clever, and both Prometheus and Epimetheus cared for her very much. In the stories, the brothers are called Titans, the children of gods, but they weren't so much children of the gods as simply extraordinary beings themselves. Prometheus could make fire, and Epimetheus...well, he wasn't wise. He acted too often before he thought, and one of those actions was to tell Pandora the truth about himself and his brother, and about many others besides. Stories of dragons and of gargoyles, of siryns and sea serpents, of selkies and djinn. Of vampires," he said, soft emphasis on a new word. "Creatures that lived on the blood of others. And of many more, until she knew all the tales of all the ancient races that had once peopled the earth. He did it to win her heart, but instead he frightened her away.
"Pandora told the stories. Told them far and wide, until the things that the brothers were became a part of the human consciousness. Until they were the demons which frightened people; the dark things in the night. That was the evil Pandora released: the knowledge of the other beings. And the hope that was left behind, that was the hope that the Old Races might find a way to live with the new. It has stayed in the box ever since, and taunts the brothers from time to time."
"And which of them," Sarah asked slowly, "which of them are you?"
"Epimetheus, of course," Eliseo said to the horizon. "Could Janx be anything other than the fire-bearer? But I learned, Sarah. Oh, how I learned. I had always acted without thought, acted on impulse, done what felt and seemed right in the moment with no eye to the consequences. No longer. Not since Pandora, and she was so very long ago."
Her heartbeat came in slow thick pulses, doing nothing to ward off the chill still settled in her hands and cheeks. "I don't understand, Eliseo."
"Are you ready to?"
She looked at him there in the meadow, at his hair so black the sun could find no red or blue highlights to it; at his skin sallow but unburned. At the weary patience in the slump of his shoulders and the cautious hope in brown eyes.
Hope, which taunts the brothers from time to time.
"No," Sarah said carefully, slowly, and got to her feet with as much deliberation. The world smelled of sun-heated grass, and enthusiastic robins trilled songs in the near distance. There was a breeze, warm against her nerves-cool face, and the sky was relentlessly, intensively blue. So many moments burned into her memory, crisp and clear, and all of them to do with Eliseo and Janx. Her heart hurt for them and she barely understood why. They had given her too much already; she did not need this new ache, this pain that reached deep inside her and made a living space. It was difficult to breathe around that place already, and in a moment of clarity she knew it would only grow worse. "No. I'm not ready. Not yet."
Eli nodded.
Sarah, cold, afraid, excited, walked away.
A storm came up suddenly, driving her inside the manor house, and washed away again as quickly. Sarah escaped the house again before the last drops had fallen, and, searching for a place where she might be alone to think, followed a groundskeeper up a narrow stairway as he went to the rooftop to sweep away water and leaves after a storm. Sarah delighted by the the expansive roof and the endless view of the countryside, kept herself out of the way until the man's work was done, then found a protected space where she could sit quietly and watch the changing afternoon air. She liked the roof's remoteness. It made thinking easier, though she wasn't certain thought was what she did. Mostly she sat, gazing at darkening horizon and feeling: feeling wonder, fear, hope, awe, bewilderment, and other things she was unprepared to name. There had been subtext to Eliseo's story, impossible subtext, but in her core she believed it.
"Have I lost you to Eliseo, then?"
Sarah startled, Janx's cautious voice unexpected. She turned to watch him approach, his hair purpled by the moonlight and his gaze cast downward. Diffidence did not sit well on his shoulders, but he was trying. Sarah had to give him that: he was trying. For a moment she didn't understand why, and then clarity swept her: her absence at through the day, at dinner, all of it hearkened to a change, and the obvious guess was passion. Hence Janx's diffidence, his caution in approaching her: he would not want to be rejected, and perhaps thought restraint would win her back more quickly than anger or jealousy.
"He told me a story," she said instead of answering directly. "The same one you read to me, about Pandora. But he told it differently."
Janx breathed, "Ah," and came to stand beside her. The storm might have passed from the skies above, but not so much from within her. Sarah thought that was a tempest that might never settle. There were stars above now, glittering more clearly than they ever did in the city. Brighter even than usual in the country, now that rain had pounded mist and dust from the sky. Thin moonlight-silver clouds tried to mask them, but they were fierce enough to gleam through.
Like hope, always shining. "Why did you not tell me that version?"
A faint smile danced over Janx's lips. "Because I'm not the intemperate brother, of course."
"You aren't really brothers at all."
"No. Only in arms, though that encompasses too little."
Brothers in arms, in love, in fate, in anger, in fear, and at the moment, she was the source of their concern. It was a heady thought, one she could become intoxicated with. Surely there was a kind of power in attracting men such as these, even if she wasn't yet sure what sort they were. There were too many things to say, and none of them seemed right. She finally said, "Pandora is a story from thousands of years ago," to the stars, and waited.
"Yes." Janx was rarely gentle, but he was gentle now, all the patience and calmness in the world resting in his voice. Sarah was cold again. She seemed to always be in a state of flushed or freezing with these two, as if a steady temperature was an affront to their pull. They would probably like that.
She put her hands together, trying to warm her fingers, and Janx put his hand over hers. They were cool. Not icy like hers, but Eliseo radiated heat and Janx merely warmed her hands a little more than they were. Looking at them, she said, "I thought you were the one who brought fire."
Oddly enough, he understood, and there was a smile in his voice as he answered. "I know. I should be scalding to the touch, should I not? But Eliseo is the one who runs hot. It has something to do with his quickness, like a raging fire that burns white with heat."
"Is he very quick?" Sarah asked distantly. Her body hurt, an ache that ran through her most private places and pulsed in her chest. They both did this to her, these men and their secrets. Jacob, sweet kind Jacob, had never stirred her this way, and surely there was a wrongness in being drawn so strongly to two men at once.
"Yes," Janx said again, just as gently. "Yes. Eliseo is very quick indeed."
All the cold flushed to heat within her, until her hands burned under Janx's cool ones. Her question came from a parched throat, a broken whisper of two words: "And you?"
Her hands spasmed as she asked. Janx looked at them, smiled, then lifted his gaze to hers and her knuckles to her lips. "I," he said, "I fly."
She didn't know, later, why she had the wit to release his hands and back away, only that he smiled in rueful approval, and did the same himself. Sarah stopped at the roof's high edge, but Janx moved to its center, then a little farther still. "Don't be afraid, Sarah."
"I'm not." It was no more the truth than it was a lie, but the words were buffeted away by the winds of change.
Literal, physical, astonishing winds of change, accompanied by explosive sound, as if even unseen air could be shoved out of place and was affronted by so being. Janx was swallowed whole by that burst, and the impossible was left in his place. Red even in the night's dark, and long and twisting, with four powerful short legs—short compared to the length of him, at least—and wings that spread once to announce their size, then tucked back down against his sides.
Sarah, blankly, said, "Baner Cymru," and Janx gave a sound very like a dragonly laugh.
Eliseo, who had not been there a moment before, said, "Don't give him airs," and spread his hands apologetically when Sarah yelped. "I heard him change. Half of London probably heard it. It's a good thing you pay the servants so well that they are selectively deafened to your behaviors, Janx. I thought I was supposed to be the intemperate one," he said to Janx, and then back to Sarah, "He can talk in that form, but it's difficult."
Sarah said, "Baner Cymru," again. "I've seen it at the cathedral. He's—he's—are you—?" The last she said to Janx, who did not, in fact, look like the red dragon on the Tudor flag, the Welsh flag: that beast stood more upright, its neck and head lifted high where Janx's stretched out. More, though, Janx had an astonishing ruff, with whiskers that splayed around his face in long dancing threads.
"No," Eliseo said sourly. "He's not. That's someone else."
"There are more?" Sarah's voice broke and she laughed, high and excited. Her heart caught up to what she was seeing, leaping to a too-fast rhythm, and finally her hands began to shake. She'd known after Eliseo's story that there was something extraordinary about the men, but her imagination had failed her. There was no shame in that: even staring slack-jawed at the man-turned-dragon on the rooftop, her imagination was still inclined to fail. She didn't disbelieve, but neither did she quite believe. She felt the same way about God in his Heaven, though surely if a man could become a dragon, God had a hand in that. "How many more? You said—you said gargoyles and sea serpents," she said, grasping for the monsters of some familiarity. "And—and...vampires. How many more, Eli? How many more?"
