Page 81 of The Deer and the Dragon
He held up a silencing finger as he looked from her to me.
Despite the grandeur of the room, everything felt too small, then too large. At first it pressed in on me, making it difficult to get the air or space I needed. In the next breath, everyone was too far away. I was so alone, so distant from Fauna. If I fell through the couch and tumbled into the awaiting galaxy, I wouldn’t be able to grab anyone for help. I chafed my arms for warmth, hugging myself for comfort in more ways than one, wishing Fauna were beside me. I longed to have her arm around me while I tumbled into the impossible, unable to connect with reality.
He exhaled slowly as he said, “I’d always expected that when you were ready to leave your mortal cycle, you’d join us here. Now you’re here with a Norde and, if she’s to be believed, which”—he patted her comfortingly on the hand—“I do entirely…” He frowned. “This could be your last cycle, Maribelle. And not for the better.”
The spinning intensified.
Against my will, a hand went to my chest, as if to feel for the thread of yarn that my mother had always been able to pull, unraveling me into my childhood. I’d grown up hearing the petition, the dream, the plea that our souls would only continue amid the heavenly hosts after we passed. Now at twenty-six, I was hearing that such a life-long prayer might be answered, but as a punishment.
Fauna had said it before, but hearing it from the King took the air from my lungs. I’d fallen in love over and over again with the same soul—connected to him through time, through body, through country, through language, since the sands of time had flipped from BCE to AD. I wasn’t sure if I was honored or horrified. The room swam, filigree bleeding into the black around it, furniture wiggling, floor rising up to meet me as if it were little more than the celestial whirlpool in the lobbies. I grappled within myself for stability. Nothing about it made sense. Nothing about it—
“Oh.” Fauna leapt to her feet in the same moment theKing grabbed a vase that had to be worth more than Azrames’s Bugatti and shoved it in front of me just as I emptied the coffee, bile, and crumbles of cookie into the beautiful piece of priceless art. It took a second attempt for her to catch the rest of my hair, removing what still dangled near my face as I retched a second time. “Mortals,” she said apologetically to the King as she patted me on the back.
“I’ll take responsibility for that one,” he replied. “I should know better by now. It’s just not every day I get to see…” He stopped himself from reigniting the same fire that had set my belly to curdling. I apologized weakly through humiliation and twisted guts before my third and final emission, relinquishing whatever tiny bits of liquid remained in my stomach. The muscles in my neck, back, and abs all strained against the effort as my body lost the battle against the supernatural. “And with the Prince absent…”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my head, burning with humiliation. The King had already snapped his fingers and the sullied vase vanished. He procured a handkerchief and glass of water, both of which I was almost certain hadn’t existed a moment before. I made the snap decision to do what I’d spent twenty-six years doing and ignore literally every piece of information that had been offered to me so that I could plow forward as a functioning human. Unable to engage with a single topic the man had spoken, I straightened my back, rallied my courage, and did what I’d done best for years as a sex worker: I acted.
“So,” I said, feigning as though I hadn’t just vomited in front of them both, “you’re Caliban’s father?”
His expression softened. “You don’t have to pretend you’re okay with this. We value sincerity.”
Well, there went my plan.
I scrunched my face, closing my eyes. Sensing my struggle for normalcy, the King did me a favor.
“Yes, yes. I’m the king of the freedom fighters. My son—your Caliban—is their prince. As I’ve said, I am surprised tosee you here at long last without him. He’s been in the mortal realm for some time now… Time”—he stopped, waving a hand to indicate his aside—“moves a little differently here than it does there. That said, he generally checks in when he isn’t with you. Princely duties and what have you.”
“Maribelle,” Fauna said carefully, “I think it would be wise for you to share what you said to Caliban with the King.”
I shook my head slowly before I even realized what I was doing. No? Was I saying no, I was refusing information to a monarch? To Caliban’s father? In direct disregard of Fauna’s request, when she’d never led me astray?
They both frowned at me before it struck me.
Shame dropped my words to a barely audible register as I said, “I’m embarrassed about what I said.”
Fauna blew out a breath and interpreted. “Maribelle here wasn’t quite familiar with how literal promises are to citizens of the nonmortal realms.”
The King shared a sad sigh. “That’s the blessing and curse of mortality, isn’t it. Your life is short, so you’re allowed to live it with little rhyme or reason. You can pay penance in your next life, or the one after that. When you live forever…” He looked out the window, gaze unfocusing as he regarded the blacks and grays, stone and steel, glass and iron of his city. Clouds continued to roll until they’d become bottom-heavy thunderheads. “You can’t say things you don’t mean. Words have consequences.”
“Tell him,” Fauna prompted once more.
I closed my eyes as if it would make the memory any less painful. I returned to the last night I’d seen him, to the smell of the forest, the cool rush of his skin, the chill of his kiss as he brushed his lips against my neck. I felt him hold me in those final moments as my shock melted into anger. My refusal to understand our earlier agreement—one wherein he’d bound himself to my verbal consent before any action in my life—had tied his hands from intervening.
“It was three-fold,” I said, eyes still closed. “I’d spent mylife convinced he wasn’t real. I needed to believe I was crazy. I didn’t want to see him anymore, and so I didn’t. He continued to visit for years, but he was no longer visible.”
The king chuckled quietly at the loophole, but the laughter was not unkind.
“Then we made a deal that he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t intervene, he couldn’t so much as lift a finger without my expressed permission. To be fair, it was his counteroffer. I’d told him I couldn’t do any of it anymore, and rather than lose us altogether, he’d allowed me to sequester him into a permitted box. And then, someone tried to murder me.”
Neither of them so much as breathed as they listened to my story.
“An angel—Silas—showed up at the last second and killed the human. I barely made it. He’d…been unable to intervene. He couldn’t help me beyond marking the would-be murderer. I don’t fully understand those implications, but when I’d learned he was there, that he saw everything, that he stood right there and didn’t help…”
The king patted me on the leg until I opened my eyes.
“He loves you deeply, Maribelle. To put out the sort of mark that even an angel could take is a harbinger of urgency and desperation that no one could pass up. The risk he put himself in…” He removed his hand, looking into the middle distance. “You haven’t seen him since then? Since he put out the mark?”
I frowned. “What does it mean? The mark, that is?”
