I met up with the king - he confessed his body was burning.
I met up with the king - his body had begun to rot.
And he said, don't think less of me. I'm still the man I used to be.
But no one believed him. No one believed him.
Hma had only seven fingers and she blamed the wolf for that.
She had hunted it down, of course. As though she could let it go free, having down what it had done, seen what it had seen. It had made her bleed, Artem. It had made her bleed, so she took her machete which had belonged to her mother and to her mother's mother, whose edge was keen as midwinter frost. She sharpened it on ceramic before she left, and tested its blade against her skin, pressing lightly until she drew blood with the slightest touch of iron.
So armed, she put her machete on her back and she went out until she was so far from home she could no longer see the smoke in the sky or the glow of fire behind her. She went and she found the wolf, curled in its den with a maw stained with gore and coagulate and flesh under its talons. But, my son, Hma did not find her fingers. Those were gone by then, swallowed whole and gone, and she had nowhere to wear her rings.
She took its teeth instead, and wore them in the hollow of her throat. Doesn't that seem fair? That's the girl that you see in all of the photos - the girl with seven fingers and wolf teeth, the girl with jackal eyes and spidery limbs, as though she were caught in transfiguration between this human form and another more feral.
That was not her curse. I see the question in your eyes, the incline to your brow, but it was not. It was merely who Hma was.
Was it the slaughter of the wolf that sealed her fate? She would have been a fool if she never asked herself that question, I think. She took that blade in her hand knowing what would happen, and I don't think she would have done differently if she had known what was to come.
My father told me, as I am telling you, that the first time he spoke to Hma was the first night of the Selection, with the sounds of sweet bells still ringing in his ears like the ghost of a half-remembered memory. You can sympathise, I'm sure, for I have never known the pressure of thirty-five destinies in my hands, to wreak havoc upon at my very own discretion and pleasure. I have ruled a nation, Artem, a nation split at times by disaster and bloodshed, but there is something intimate about the Selection I do not believe I will or can ever understand. It was this intimate fear that chased your grandfather out to the garden where he would find Hma.
The night was glossy with gloom; the moon was a slender crescent hung aloft tenuously in an iron-studded sky, and the air was still and soft. In the moonlight, all the plants were the same, their shining leaves merely silvery and their flowers shut tight as gates.
The rich soil of the palace was soft, and it had parted easily beneath Hma's seven fingers. That was how my father found her, that very first Selection night; still dressed in the sleek red dress that has been chosen for her, her silken hair falling in tangled threads about a heart-shaped face with eyes like carbuncles, she was clawing at the ground and the dirt and rocks within like it had stolen something from her, and her eyes were very far away.
She saw him standing there and her eyes did not change. Her fingers were black with earth and she looked almost feral in the dim light of the palace windows. He didn't think she knew it, but he was afraid. He didn't think she knew it, but she did.
"Your highness," she said hoarsely, and with clay blackening her hands and blood dripping from a freshly-opened wound on her head, she bent herself into a bow in front of your grandfather, her hair falling across the ground like she had spilled it, carelessly. "Your highness," she said again, and there was no smile in her voice.
She had tried her best, Artem, not to go out that night, but it was as inevitable as the tides or the seasons that she would. The night before, the last night she had spent at home in the small house she shared with a family that was not hers, she had fought against the curse, and she had won, a short-lived victory that meant nothing because it had only delayed the inevitable.
They had eaten fox that evening, in a celebration of her Selection, and afterwards Hma walked into her friend's bedroom and asked him to stay with her.
"Vran," she said. "Stay with me."
What was she asking for, Artem? Stay and make her forget her nightmares. Stay and sleep next to her. Stay and chase the bad dreams away, the memories of blood, of dead parents, of dead girls with eyes like black coals. Stay with her and keep her from doing what she must.
It was a selfish request from a selfish girl.
Hma was not your grandmother.
"Where else am I going to go?" Vran replied. Unlike Chernila or Kesali, I never met him; he was dead in my time, dead and buried and wept for. But my father used his name as a shorthand for loyalty, my son; to be referred to as a crow in my father's court was a commendation of the highest sort, and I think that says all I could say, in the most beautiful kind of way.
And Vran was loyal, for as long as anyone knew him. He loved Hma, and she loved him, in that manner that was more than love; not in the way you believe. I see the tilt of your head; I know how you think. You are wrong, Artem, and I must say it is rare that I utter those words. No - the tempestuous element of romance would have borne the same enmity with their relationship as mercury to the blood of man. In what manner do you love your shadow, your reflection, the movement of your limbs and extremities?
But Hma slept soundly that night, as soundly as the dead, and the next morning when she awoke she could hear the air escaping his lungs, the pulse of blood through his veins, the creak of his ribs with every breath, and that reassured her, wholly, utterly, that she was alive.
Here is the photo I mentioned. Do you see her? Here, between Chernila and Tsiuri - she is a little taller than the others, and shaped rather like a dagger, all sharp straight lines. She was not a friend of the girl with the harp, Fermata, not truly, but one of the two did not like to talk and the other of the two could not talk, and so their silences suited one another, and it was often they were seen together. Fermata was soft. She reminded people of a caged songbird, with her tongue split into a fork to coax from her a song. She was delicate, Artem.
That's why, at first, they accused Hma of killing her.
Can you see her eyes? The colour is faded, but they are gold. They do not belong to her. I do not think it is possible at all that they belonged to her.
No. Hma must have stolen those eyes from the wolf.
