“This is Elroy McGlover and Arlen Esco.”
“Esco,” the governor said, eyeing him. “As in, Matthew Esco’s son?”
“The one and only,” Sterling answered with a smile and a wink.
Arlen watched it happen. He’d seen it a hundred times before. All his life, in fact. The man sized him up, determined how much he was worth and found that knowing him was distinctly more profitable than not knowing him. Perhaps, if the money tree shook, the leaves would fall on those closest to him. And so, Arlen knew Governor James Harris would strive to be his friend.
“You’re starting to turn, Harris!” Sterling said, gesturing at a violet clump near the governor’s temple. “You’ve been out here that long?”
“I suppose so. My wife says she likes it. She’s turning blue. It’s quite exotic, is it not? I’ve almost forgotten what you non-shine people look like!” He opened the door to the carriage. “Come along, men. Welcome to Shine Territory. The night awaits.”
I see her standing on the small deck outside our room. The moon hovers in the sky, holding court in her onyx kingdom. Cassandra is shining, limned by the heavens themselves. Otherworldly.
She is staring at the stars. I want to drink their light from her lips. I want to touch her, so I can know what heaven feels like.
Cassandra is so still she may as well be carved from marble. She is torment given flesh and form, terrible and beautiful. If I watch her closely, I can almost see the slow shatter working its way through her. I want to plant night-blooming flowers in the cracks that spiderweb her soul. She is a garden I long to lose myself in.
I have been awake too long, and I am weak. I need my rest. It is getting harder and harder to just hang on. To see each day through. I am no longer living, but surviving, barely.
We are so close to my end.
Perhaps that is why I cling to these moments so desperately.
She knows I am awake. I see it in the set of her shoulders, and the curve of her spine. She turns to face me, her movements graceful. She is wearing nothing but the night. My heart stills in my breast. I wonder how it is possible for someone so beautiful to be so sad.
“You cannot love me,” I say. “I am nothing but mud and dust.”
Our eyes meet. My cheeks fill with the colors of the sunset. Summer on fire.
There is a curl at the edges of her lips. “Is not the earth made of mud and dust, and more beautiful for it?” Her words drip like honey between her bee-stung lips. Her smile is a thief stealing away my breath.
The world fades away.
And then there is only us, and the soft magic of this night.
We are lost in an ocean of silence, yet we are drowning in each other.
“Ianthe,” she whispers.
My heart shudders, my soul gasps, and I know I’ve heard the most beautiful sonnet ever written.
“I want to hate him,” Annie said, her voice a whisper in the stillness of the afternoon and it cut right through me, “but I can’t.”
Her husband, Jasper, was out in the fields, tending his crops, while her son and daughter were at school. It was just the three of us, and she bade me stay inside while she spoke with her neighbor and best friend, Imogen. The day was cool, but even so, the cabin was small and close and seemed to capture all the heat and hold within its walls, even with the door open. A fire was burning low in the fireplace, and on the stove, a loaf of bread rose in a pan, covered by a moist towel.
It was a perfect slice of life, a picture of something I’d never known existed until that moment. A house, food, and plenty. Sometimes these small moments still catch me unawares. It is shocking, is it not, the ease with which we forget how precious stability is. I wish, to this day, I could have shared some of it with my father.
Her words, however, punched right into me, made the cabin suddenly feel cold.
For a moment, there was no sound. Then, I heard them sit in the two chairs that Annie had placed in the shade near her herb garden. Heard water being poured into cups, while I waited with bated breath in the cabin, to hear whatever came next.
“A daughter,” Annie said slowly, her voice laced with ire. “Can you imagine it? He’s gone for—how many years?—and he comes back with a waif and dumps her at my feet. Tells me to fix her. To make a girl out of her the world can be proud of. No never mind, just do it. I’m his big sister. He knows I could never turn him away, and certainly never turn my back on a child in need.” She let out a breath of air. I was afraid to move. Afraid to breathe. I didn’t want to remind her I was there. Didn’t want to be noticed, and yet all I wanted to do was hide. I winced as her words tore through me.
“Annie,” her friend said, voice low and soothing. “Be calm.”
Annie didn’t seem to hear her. Didn’t seem to register that she was speaking. I’d been in her home a few days, and while she had been nothing but kind to me, anyone with eyes could see the tornado of emotions swirling just beneath her skin. “I didn’t even know if he was alive, Imogen. No word from him in years and years. I had Jasper put up an altar for him in the meadow, just in case. I light the Fate fire once a year, to show his soul the way.” A pause. “I thought he was dead. I mourned him. Then he saunters up here like he just he woke up and realized he had a daughter, dumped her here, and left to go nurse his wounds on the back of some mountain, doubtless.”
“It will be okay,” Imogen said.
“I don’t know what to do with her. She’s a wild thing.”
None of the nice Annie here. Her words were so cruel, each one leaving an indelible mark on my heart. All of this was borne of her frustration. I understand it now. At the time, however, I felt bruised. She couldn’t have hurt me more if she’d have hit me.
“She’s half-animal, Imogen. She came here in buckskins and a tunic, hair in braids, five minutes away from howling with the wolves. I caught her, just yesterday, digging up one of my flower bushes, licking the roots, wondering if she could eat them. Chris was never a man with fine manners, and he’s been gone for… It’s been so long. Whatever civilized ways he had, disappeared. Then his wife died. He loved her, and it broke him. He dragged his poor child through the wilderness and didn’t teach her a thing.”
“Children are pliable, Annie. It’s not the end of the world.”
I do not want to admit the humiliation I felt upon hearing this conversation. It pierced me in a dark place, turning me inside out, but I knew she did not speak a lie. My father, for all that I loved him, had done wrong by me, and now it was her job to fix his mistakes. I felt a great, terrible shame at being one of them. I wanted to hide from the world. If there had been more than one door in and out of the cabin, and if Annie and Imogen hadn’t been sitting right outside of it, I am afraid I would have run away and never shown neither hide nor hair of myself in that place again. As it was, I was trapped. Nowhere to run, and nothing to see but all the marks stacked against me.
I was five, and alone. I had no one to hold me, and so I held myself and blinked back stinging tears as their conversation bit a chunk out of the morning.
“She’s inside. I just… I wanted to warn you before you saw her. I need your help, Imogen. I can’t let her leave the cabin the way she is, and the task is so big…”