12 . 12 . 13

The next day dawned, two days before Amethyst's birthday. Two days before she would die.

She was beginning to come to terms with that, in her head, though outwardly she began to act more and more desperate. She was aware that she was being childish, but the driving force compelling her to act like a lady had been all but silenced by a simple and powerful instinct: Staying Alive. In the more ancient legends this was called hubrith: the return of the natural man. This instinct pushes away all constructed and rehearsed behavior, labeling it Useless and Out Of Context in the life-or-death situation. All that is left of a person is the character that hubrith cannot vanquish — the character they were born with, and the qualities they innately possess. They become the person they always were when no one was watching.

The witch knew that. She had seen many people die, over the years. Usually by her hand, but not always. If the death was swift and unexpected, the person usually died with honor, and with a sense of peace inexplicable to those still living. When death was drawn out, however, and dreaded, that is when hubrith began to take effect, ridding people of all the manners and lessons they had accumulated over the course of their lives. Though many knights appeared the same in normal situations — chivalrous, brave, loyal, and honorable — only a looming death revealed which had become so by choice, and which had simply been born with those qualities.

She never faulted a man who died begging for his life, nor did she fault a man who faced death bravely. They were only being themselves, after all; who was she to pass judgment on a person's character? They couldn't help who they were. In fact, she had often thought that the men who had achieved such character by a lifetime of devotion and work were more worthy of respect than those who were simply honest or kind by nature. They had spent countless hours and years repressing their unfavorable qualities and nurturing better ones — a noble task, if ever she had seen one.

(This then led her to wonder if those men weren't, in fact, nobler by nature than the kind ones, but that thought only led to headaches, so she soon gave up contemplating it.)

Amethyst was acting like a scared child; she was a scared child. The witch knew she could no longer comfort her, that her presence would only increase the hysteria and bitter tears, so she did the kindest thing she could do: she stayed away from the princess' room and let hubrith take its course.

The task of comforting the girl, then, fell to Tyrillius. While they were in separate rooms, they had discovered a small hole between the walls, through which they could talk and occasionally catch a glimpse of one another. It wasn't much, but having a calm, sorrowful presence always at her back comforted Amethyst to a degree that she couldn't even fully comprehend.

On Tyrillius' part, he felt it was the least he could do, given that he couldn't save her. The connection between his mind at the witch's had lessened, but had not been fully erased. As such, she could always tell when he was thinking of ways to escape, and she foiled any idea he had before he could implement it. This left Tyrillius with nothing to do but listen when Amethyst cried and talk to her when she wasn't, telling her Syndocian myths to distract her and pass the time.

All of the second day and much of the third passed in this way. It was only after Amethyst had finally slumped into a fitful sleep, and Tyrillius had rested his head against the wall as well, that the witch entered his room again.

"I need the charm," she said quietly, approaching him. Her face was grave, and she looked older than before.

Tyrillius watched her through the slits of his barely-open eyes, but didn't respond. He knew she would know he was awake, but he still wasn't going to give in that easily. He'd figured out from her stray mutterings and actions that she needed the charm to finish up the spell that would draw Amethyst to the spindle and eventually kill her. He'd tried very hard, then, to think forcefully of other things as he picked up the charm and pocketed it, but either she'd figured out that he had it anyway, or she was bluffing.

Hoping for the latter would indicate that he thought about the charm at all; Tyrillius hoped for nothing. He just let his eyes close the rest of the way and kept his mind blank.

"I know you have it," she said.

She didn't really. If Tyrillius had been hoping it was a bluff, he would have been correct. But since he wasn't hoping for anything, his face echoed what was happening in his mind. (Which was, of course, nothing. That's a very hard thing to do, actually: thinking of nothing.)

She heaved a sigh. She didn't have the patience to deal with this; she never did. She was the idyllic Evil Witch in that way, at least.

"Just give it to me. Or I can give you another taste of the sleeping blade, if you like, and take it from you."

For all the encouragement Tyrillius was giving her, she might as well have been threatening a rock.

"Tyrillius."

No response.

"Honestly, would you just—"

"What's your name?" he asked, cutting her off.

He knew that if she kept bringing up the charm, he would eventually think about where it was hidden, and he didn't know how much she could see of his thoughts. He saw and heard things from her in spurts of calm, mostly at night as she fell asleep. But he was fairly certain she could hear more of his thoughts. After all, he'd thought of all the escape plans in the middle of the day, and she'd stopped every one.

Tyrillius thought that asking a question of his own would distract her, at least for a little while. He might be fighting a losing battle, but he was going to go down fighting. (And, though he might not have admitted it to himself, he wanted to know the answer.)

The woman just stared at him, very clearly distracted.

"None of your business," she said, frowning.

"Names aren't dangerous," Tyrillius countered. His head was still back against the wall, and his eyes were still closed. It was easier to focus that way. "Why are you afraid to share yours?"

"It's not fear," she said, almost angrily.

"Your sister didn't even call you by your name, in that memory," he said. He'd thought about that a lot since that evening. "Is it particularly horrible?"

"No," the woman said slowly. "Not really, I don't suppose."

Tyrillius didn't say anything; he could tell she wanted to say something else.

"I always thought it was a bit extravagant," she finally said. "But it's not bad."

"Were you a lady, then?" Tyrillius said.

Although she hesitated, she began to explain, very generally, her family's position. Tyrillius had expected that question to fall flat, but she was apparently willing to talk about her past. Tyrillius reflected that most people probably didn't ask for her story, since she was usually getting ready to kill them. The halting, awkward fashion of speech belied a story that was desperate to be told, but had been closed up for so long it had almost forgotten itself.

"My mother was," she started. "A lady. My father wasn't. So I wasn't, no."

The words stopped prematurely. Tyrillius let them hang in the silence for a bit before he said anything else.

"So, what were you then?"

"Just a girl," she said, and it sounded like a reflex.

"'Just girls' don't become witches," he said.

She didn't say anything for a while, leaving Tyrillius' mind to wander around thinking about anything but the charm. This was proving more and more difficult as time went on, and he began to think of the most odd and unconnected things in an attempt to distract himself. It was this line of unconnected tangents that led him to recall the fuzzy image of the dream he'd had days ago. He'd forgotten about it until just now, and there was something about it that his mind was trying to connect—

It was the girl. The girl in the stable was the same girl who had walked down the stairs. The girl with the owl figurine, Cherilyn, was the same girl who had gotten shunned by her mother. They were the same girls, the same family.

Tyrillius' eyes snapped open, meeting the woman's with a jolt of shock.

"Charlotta," he said, blinking still at the rapidity and glaring brightness of the revelation.

It was not that he knew the name — he'd never heard it before. It was that she had a name; that's what put the sympathy in his eyes. He'd said before that a name wasn't dangerous, but that wasn't entirely true. A name was dangerous to those trying to hurt you, to those who could find your family and destroy everything you loved. It made sense that the most feared witch in Ladyra would hide her name.

It was fortunate for her that her name had been given to that one person who, inexplicably, didn't necessarily want to see anything bad come of it.

They stared at each other, neither of them having a concept of speech. The woman's mind had gone completely blank. No one had said her name since that day in the stable. Not even Cherilyn, when she occasionally saw her, would admit that much of a connection between them. No one else recognized her — not after she'd discovered how to manipulate her appearance.

"You're not evil," Tyrillius said, and that statement sent her mind spinning and brought his to a halt.

He'd never thought she was evil — well, he hadn't thought about it, actually. But if he had, "evil" wouldn't have been a word he would use to describe her. She felt too much. He knew how much she felt — more than she let on.

He barely realized that he was standing up, but then he was walking toward her. He didn't know what he was going to do, exactly, but he had to do something. The look in her eyes was enough to break a lesser man's heart. He was catching glimpses and flashes of her life as she relived it, racing through memories at the speed of thought.

Tyrillius took her hand, trying to extend as much comfort as one stranger could to another.

Although, they weren't really strangers. He'd learned more about her in the past few days than anyone had known about her since childhood. And she knew more about him — things that really mattered, not just his age and darkest fears (her usual knowledge of princes, just in case she needed the information one day) — than she'd known about anyone she wasn't planning to kill.

She looked down at her hand, realizing that it was warmer than it had been a moment earlier and found Tyrillius holding onto it. (You must forgive her for being slow; emotional turmoil really muddles one's brain.)

"I am," she said, eyes still locked onto his hand. It was smooth, soft. A prince's hand, unused to hard labor. But his grip was strong. "Evil."

"You're not," he said, quietly, and the next words robbed him of whatever moment they had been sharing (as is often the case with such moments.) "You don't have to do this. You don't have to kill her."

"Ah, and here appears the true motive," she said, lifting her eyes to stare firmly past him. The gesture was rigid, but she couldn't quite make her voice match it. "That's what you're here for, though, isn't it?"

She pulled her hand free of his. He had no obligation to her; she didn't know what was making her take such leaps in her mind. To believe that he actually cared about her — where had that thought come from?

"That's not—" he said, realizing what he'd done (too late, of course, to do anything about it). "That is why I'm here, but—"

She was already leaving. The rest of his sentence died on the tip of his tongue. It was a pity, too, because if the woman had actually heard it, she might have turned around.

—but maybe I can save both of you.