Knight of Misrule
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"With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement."
― Erich Maria Remarque
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It has been one hundred and eight years to the day since Charle awoke with this particular weight of dread in her chest, but she is not surprised by this.
She fancies herself too old for surprises. But dread, no. One can never be too old to dread.
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She is in her garden when her attendant finds her, tending her roses.
Pruning has always appealed to Charle, even if she could never quite put her finger on why. She supposed it was simply more Wingly sensibilities- encouraging growth in whatever direction she saw fit, and calmly discouraging whatever pathways were ill-suited to her ambitions. She was not always comfortable with ambition, but then, she is not her brother. It is a comfortable way of phrasing which qualities she lacks, as if the ones she does possess were all that was left over once her brother had had his share.
In any case, she does not care to cultivate the rarest cuttings. Some weights are best left by the wayside if one could help it, and obligation to succeed has ever been one of them.
She prunes her roses, which she is beginning to suspect she cannot help from doing, and she thinks of her brother, which is something she has never seemed to be able to keep herself from entirely.
Melbu was an unquiet ghost at best, but then, very little about him was prone to sitting quietly and waiting for the end. It did her no harm to remember in any case. Turning over memories always wears them down, and this is one she wishes especially to have worn down to safe, comfortable curves. Here, in the clean air and perpetual, sandpaper sunshine of Ulara, she would grant him this.
If there used to be a stab of shame at the thought that Melbu, personally, would not think much of pruning roses at her age, there is no longer. Melbu died young, after all. Not everyone had that luxury.
She has distracted herself. This distresses her.
She had willfully allowed herself to remember, and now she can't even go through with it.
She pauses in her work, which she has only just barely started and suspects that she won't make much of a dent in anyways, casting back through the warped and straining hallways of her memory.
He wrote wholly adequate poetry, she thinks at last, holding the thought pointed carefully away, and while it may be a knife, at least she has it by the handle. It pleases her. This sense of control.
On some impulse, she looks up. It is a habit of hers, impossible to cure. Like a wary hen scanning the skies for the silhouette of a hawk.
The instinct is useless. The threat hangs where it has ever hung.
Charle never stole her brother's toys when she was young, and she resents her being responsible for them now. But it is an old resentment, and familiar enough that it is almost like greeting an old friend. She is comforted by it.
This one small, shameful indulgence is all she is allowed before the world intrudes.
Her attendant approaches, her hair veiled from the sun, and her features guarded. Charle does not understand this more recent affectation by the younger women, especially when her attendant's hair is still blue-white and shining. She, on the other hand, had woken up to find her hair gone dull and colorless ages ago, without having ever really noticed its transformation.
Charle picks up her shears, more out of contrariness more than anything else. The heat reflecting off of the white stone makes her temples throb.
She does not care to skirt the issue.
"Is it time, then?" she asks without turning her head, reaching down through the tangle of one rose bush where she can see a dead shoot rising from the main stem. There is something infinitely satisfying about simply snipping it off. The pressure in her temples eases.
"No," says the attendant.
The word is bald and inelegant, and Charle notices the fear slipping underfoot. She frowns. Fear is a luxury like any other, and one she can barely afford at that. What right does she have to it?
She glances skyward again, sweat cooling on her forehead.
One glance is enough to reassure her. Enough to curb an admittedly unkind impulse to rebuke. She does not want to think of herself as too old for kindness, no matter what reality might have to say otherwise.
"We have time," she says simply, and kinder than she might have. Kindness is less familiar than resentment. She trusts it less.
Her attendant says nothing.
Charle raises her head. Annoyance is tiresome, but ever quick to appear when called. "Then does Caron something in particular of me?"
Her tone is snappish. She knows this is not the case. But something in her that is perverse enough to remember her brother, today of all days, wants to hear it from the woman's own lips.
"No," says her attendant again, and there is true nervousness there.
This in and of itself is interesting enough that Charle relents.
"Then?" she says, gentler than before.
Her attendant stares back at her without speaking, her eyes large and bottomless and somehow blameless in their stupidity. Charle feels the slip of the woman's control, a crack in the wall that every civilized Wingly must uphold in order to maintain a sort of silence in their own heads. She feels it, and she knows already what they are actually discussing.
She turns the shears over in her hands.
"Has it failed already then?" she asks mildly.
It wouldn't surprise her. Spells these days are notoriously unreliable. They require constant concentration, constant upkeep, and it is easy, so easy, not to concentrate on what lies sleeping deep in the center of Ulara, turning restlessly in its bed like a blood clot in the city's heart. While there are spells to keep a subject dormant and dreaming for years- decades, even- there is only so much one can do when one is being actively fought, inch by inch, by something determined to wake, no matter the cost.
Her attendant shakes her head mutely, and something in the middle of Charle's back unclenches like a fist. It was one thing to say that more time was to be had, and another to have it confirmed.
But then-
"We," begins the attendant, and at the sound, the fingers of that fist curl gently closed once more. "We keep hearing-"
She swallows. "…Noises."
Noises was such a decorous word. It encompassed so much, and yet said nothing at all, to the point where she is nearly soothed by it. She supposes this was her servant's intention, the word's sheer inadequacy aside. Charle does not fault the woman for wrapping her hands around the first tool to come to hand, when any other would hardly do the job justice.
"That's to be expected," says Charle dismissively, even though the act of sweeping this particular discomfort under the carpet nearly makes even her recoil in disgust.
The woman surprises her by reaching again, fumbling for words that no proper Wingly could express and settling for whatever comes closest. "And," she says, even more awkwardly than before, and at this breach of propriety, Charle cannot help but be transfixed. She recognizes how obscene this impulse is within her, this voyeur's urge. She welcomes this distraction.
The attendant drops her eyes. Fixes them on the white flagstones beneath their feet.
"Screaming," she says finally.
Ah.
Charle closes her shears decidedly, and for lack of ideas, picks fretfully at the hem of her sleeve.
They had even less time than she thought.
The city is quiet around them. But for the rustle of water and greenery, they might be the only two living things there. A city of the dead, if even a true city at all. And even though Charle has seen the real city of the dead, and knows that her Ulara, her greatest and perhaps only treasure, is different, she would be hard pressed to say why exactly.
She feels her attendant's discomfort and unhappiness like sand scouring against raw and shrinking flesh.
It upset them all, the creature sleeping in the city's heart. It offends their sensibilities- the same sensibilities that drives them to such thrilling pursuits as pruning roses. Winglies adore order above all else. Decorum. A wound must be lanced and drained, and cauterized if need be, not left to fester and rot.
Children were to be born in their due time.
Death was to be politely delayed, but not forever.
What pretty frauds we make, she thinks abruptly.
It is not very kind, but perhaps she has outgrown kindness after all.
She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, then stops and examines it critically. She takes in the skin, thin as paper. The pearly white of slowly-swelling joints shining through flesh.
The thought that comes next is neither particularly kind nor particularly heartfelt. Merely dull.
When I die there will be no one left with the power to control him.
The idea of her death does not galvanize her. She fixes her eyes on her roses once more, and what was once a harmless, absorbing task now wearies her beyond measure.
She was, right, of course. Her efforts haven't left so much as a dent.
She changes her mind. She will return to her rooms.
A slight darkening of the sky.
"Mistress," says her attendant, a bubble of fear in her throat, and she sounds so young when she says it, so hopelessly young, as nothing in Ulara has been allowed to be young since her people first fled here. Despite herself, Charle is fascinated by it, this sudden bloom of youth, and so she looks.
Her attendant's eyes are fixed heavenwards, and Charle knows what she will see before she turns- it is pointless, her turning to look, but while she may in fact be too old for surprises, she is never too old for futile gestures.
She turns. Looks.
Before their eyes, the Moon flushes slowly, gorgeously red, from pole to pole.
It is a throbbing, violent red that almost seems to pulse in time with some inner heartbeat. She half expects it to drip down on the earth below, drop by expectant drop.
She feels it, they both do, when the spell breaks. They feel the effect of that awakening roll out across the city, somehow damaging everything it touches.
She feels herself growing older.
When their eyes connect once more, the attendant's face is brittle and unguarded. Charle is not above feeling some form of satisfaction at that. She wondered what that said about her own Wingly sensibilities.
She rose to her feet, slower than she might have once. Slower than she even would have as early as this morning.
"I will be in my chambers. Have tea brought." She pauses. "Wine, rather."
"Yes, Mistress," says her attendant, grasping gratefully at the familiar role being offered to her.
Charle considers leaving her gardening garb on throughout, and then just as quickly decides not to.
A little decorum is in order after all.
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The windows of her solar look out onto the city, and through them the Moon can be seen, a carmine smear in a low haze of cloud. The red light washes across the white stone of Ulara like a bloody tide. Like the beaches surrounding Aglis the day her mother's city fell.
She sips her wine. Her fingers do not shake.
The room is deserted. Her other attendants are absent, and only the one sconce on the wall is lit. Shadows flood the corners. She sits in her chair in a sober gown, with no jewels in her ears or in her hair. The Winglies of old used to flaunt her wealth, and she figures the more disparity between her and her former peers the better.
She had been considered very wealthy once. This shouldn't comfort her, but it does.
The clink of steel reaches her ears. With strength of will, she refrains from flinching.
She wonders, briefly, who among her people was tasked with armoring him. It was so difficult these days, as he could not bear the touch of so much as a hand. A human hand, perhaps, but she no longer has human servants. She wonders briefly where one might go about acquiring one these days, before she remembers that those markets are now closed to her.
In a way, she misses the novelty of human servants.
She notes her own rising fright, and wonders if she should bother hiding it.
The sound of his approach pauses at the door. Her heart beats evenly in her chest. Her tongue fits smoothly in the roof of her mouth. She caresses her awareness of these details, like a small cat in her lap.
Charle forgets, often, that humans lack the walls that Winglies must erect in order to survive. They need not constantly distract themselves, zero in on the tiniest minutiae so as to drown out the rest. She knows that without her own walls, in this moment, that she would be crushed against her chair with every cell in her body screaming.
She retreats, even so. She thinks, Melbu had the softest, finest hair, you know, soft as Mother's. Soft as a girl's.
The handle turns, and the last dragoon, Emperor Diaz's finest knight, walks into her chambers.
He crosses the room. His armor notched and red, and fitted to him like a second skin.
She swallows. The scent of blood is not physical, but overpowering nonetheless, and rolls off him in waves.
His face, no, she cannot bear to look at his face. In any case she does not quite know what he will do upon meeting her eyes. He is, in many ways, an unknown. Distantly, she remembers him as a man who would most likely not stoop to killing an old woman in her solar, but then she remembers that that man is well and truly dead, and that the creature standing before her has smothered children with his hands. Clumsily at first, no doubt, but better with practice.
With enough practice one can become skilled at nearly anything.
She forgets not to look.
He turns his eyes up to hers, and they are the color of cities burning, of empires laid waste, of infants laid tenderly down to die of exposure in the snow.
Her heart wavers unsteadily. A fawn on newborn legs, liable to snap. The smell of blood continues to fill her nostrils. Winglies do not, as a rule, vomit, but the worst laws she has ever broken are standing before her now. She feels liberated, somehow.
"Zieg Feld," she states, grounding him with his full name. Binding him to her service.
"I require another hunt of you."
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