Cruel Beauty

And then I forgot I had lost it.

Time unwound. Prices were unpaid.

The world changed.

24

I woke up crying.

Not sobbing, as if my heart were newly broken. I lay on my back and gasped the quiet, hopeless tears of absolute certainty. I felt like I was afloat on an ocean of endless grief. A memory of my dream flickered through my head: I had been underwater, struggling to swim—no, I had been lost among shadows—there had been a pale face, or maybe a bird—

“Nyx. What’s wrong?” Astraia’s voice shattered the memories. She stood by my bed, eyebrows drawn together with concern. The pale blue light of early morning glinted on her hair and glimmered through the gauzy ruffles of her white nightgown.

“Nothing.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes, ashamed that she had caught me crying. I did not deserve compassion, from her of all people—

No. That thought was from the dream, and as soon as I recognized it, then it was gone. I tried to remember, but the images were lost. The feelings, too, were sliding away between my fingers; I knew I had been utterly desolate, but now I only remembered the concept of the feeling: like looking at snow through the window, instead of shivering in the icy wind.

“Nyx?”

I shook my head. “Just a dream.”

Her mouth puckered sympathetically. “I don’t like today either.”

With a huff, I got out of bed. “It’s not today,” I said. A bird chirped outside the window, and I twitched. Usually I loved bird-song, but today the noise scraped across my skin. “You’re the one who cries at the graveyard. I just had a dream.”

Astraia wavered back from me. “You’re not upset about tonight.”

I threw open the curtains, squinting at the morning sunlight that cut across my face. “No,” I said.

She caught me from behind in a wild embrace. “Good,” she said in my ear. “Because I wouldn’t let you get out of it. You’re getting married tonight, come fire or water.”

—fire from the death of water—

The words echoed through my mind, and for once they did not remind me of my Hermetic lessons, but left a vague impression of doors and hallways, a secret place with swirling lights and firelight dancing in someone’s eyes—

Another dream, surely, and the memory was gone as soon as I reached for it. I pushed the window open and sucked in a breath of cold morning air. The birdsong was much louder now: a hundred sparrows perched and fluttered in the birch trees that had turned autumn-gold, and the sky above was bright, infinite blue without a single cloud.

“I’m getting married,” I whispered, and could not stop staring at that blue sky until Astraia pulled me away to get dressed.

I could remember Mother, just a little, from before the sickness took her. But I could not remember celebrating the Day of the Dead with her. The first graveyard visit I remembered was the first one after her death. The memory was in fragments like needles: the stiff black mourning dress scratching at my neck; Astraia’s endless, hopeless sniffling; the bright, unseasonable sunlight that cast knife-sharp shadows across the gravestone and its crisp new inscription.

“THISBE TRISKELION,” my father had carved, and underneath, “OMNES UNA MANET NOX ERGO AMATA MANE ME.”

One night awaits us all; therefore, beloved, wait for me.

It was a line from an old poem about sundered lovers, one awaiting the other on the far side of the river Styx. I had seen the words a hundred times before, yet as I stared at them today—edges now soft from the passage of years—they felt new . . . and ominous. I couldn’t shake the image of writhing shadows closing over a helpless pale face.

“Nyx!”

I blinked. Astraia held out the bottle of wine, her eyebrows drawn together. I took it quickly and gulped dark red wine, rich and spicy. It reminded me of wood smoke on cold autumn air, though today—like that first Day of the Dead—was strangely warm.

Astraia shot me a look but said nothing. She never said more than she had to at the graveyard; none of us did, but because she was the family chatterbox, her silence was especially grim. At least she was no longer glowering at Father and Aunt Telomache, as she had last year when they were just engaged. That had been a strange time: I was not used to being the more cheerful and compliant daughter.

“Nyx, darling,” said Aunt Telomache. Her hand rested on the swell of her stomach—she was always fondling her belly, any moment she had a hand free, as if she couldn’t possibly believe she was so lucky as to be bearing Father’s child. “Won’t you recite the next hymn?”

Like a slap to the face, I remembered that I was supposed to chant the hymn and then take a drink—not gulp wine and stare witlessly into the distance without singing before or after. My face heated as I plunged into the next hymn for the dead. I stumbled on the first lines, but soon the rhythm took over and I lost myself in the low, mournful chanting.

Until I realized they were all still staring at me. Astraia had pressed a hand to her mouth as if to hold back laughter, Aunt Telomache’s lips were pressed into a thin line, and Father’s face had acquired the icy blankness I hadn’t seen since the day he announced Aunt Telomache would be our new mother and Astraia spat at her.

For a moment it felt like I wasn’t there at all, but staring through a window into another world, one where I was a terrible daughter who deserved to be hated.

But you were.

The thought entered my head as easily as breathing—and was gone in a heartbeat, as my mind finally caught up and I realized that I had not been singing one of the funeral hymns at all, but a peasant song: Nanny-Anna’s lament for Tom-a-Lone. Most of the verses dwelt on the lost delights of his kisses, which would make it inappropriate for any graveside, but the song ended with Nanny-Anna swearing she would mourn him forever, “and let worms eat my eyes before I love again.” At my mother’s grave, before my father and his second wife, it was a deadly insult.

I surged to my feet. My heart pounded in my ears while my stomach twisted with ice. I opened my mouth, but the only words I could think of were I hate you, and those were wrong and made no sense. Instead I whirled and ran, dead leaves crackling under my feet and tears prickling at my eyes.

I skidded to a halt outside the gate of the cemetery, panting for breath. I thought I was about to burst into sobs, but beyond the prickling, no more tears came.

Something was wrong. I was always moody in the autumn, especially on the Day of the Dead—and who wouldn’t be?—but this year it was worse than ever. This year, the whole world suddenly felt so wrong that I wanted to scream.