The party was nothing special. I hadn't expected it to be: as always I sat silently in the corner and looked at the beautiful people around me, pretending I could maybe have been one of them, if there had been a little less of my father in me, more of my mother. That line of thought threatened tears, after a while, and I gave up and addressed myself to the punch.

I was aware that it was alcoholic; I was unaware exactly how alcoholic it was until I got up and realized I couldn't walk exactly straight. There was a strange humming in the room, and for a moment I was unsure if I was asleep or awake: the world was swaying around me. I cursed myself for an ignorant little girl, and sat as still as I could and tried not to look drunk. Someone called to me, took my hand, and I was dancing suddenly; and it was fun, it was interesting, it was something I hadn't ever enjoyed before. Arms were around me, someone's hands were on my waist. I saw only a shifting flesh-colored blur, dark eyes, an open mouth, laughing.

I don't know how long it was before the music ended, and I found myself outside. Then it was darker around us, and cool, and the hands that had been on my waist moved to my breasts, and then downward, and downward, and I wriggled and tried to pull away, but the arms around me were too strong. I think some of the alcohol was driven from my brain by the shock of fear and sudden wrongness, but I don't know whether what I remember was real or dreamed. The boy who was involved with removing my mother's dress from my suddenly very innocent body was jerked away from me, harshly, and I heard something rip, and found time to wonder: What am I going to tell her tonight, when she asks me what happened.....and then there was a pale face over my own, and cool pale hands touched my face, my lips, so gently I can't remember if I really felt them; and then there was nothing in the world but blackness, and voices rapidly fading away.

Aidon sat tiredly in the warmth of the kitchen, one hand to his face, the other curled around a small glass of clear liquid on the table. His black coat hung over the back of the chair, his white hair fell limply over his white brow. Ceres stood with her arms folded and an expression of deep mistrust on her face; mistrust, and something older, and more sorrowful.

"I think she saw me," he said at length, tapered fingers rubbing his eye sockets. "I'm almost sure she did."

"I don't understand any of this," Ceres said. "Why did you come back? Why now? and what are you doing here in the first place? I haven't heard of any conclaves or meetings. He's not been in touch."

"I....happened to be in the neighborhood," he said. He coughed, a little, very lightly; just a shaking of the shoulders, a catch in each breath. Ceres regarded him without sympathy.

"You're falling apart," she told him. "You oughtn't to be here anyway. I have to thank you for saving my daughter's honor, but I can't imagine what else you have to do on this particular plane."

"What about you?" Aidon asked, looking up. She saw how deadly tired he was, how the strain of physically existing in the kitchen was dragging at him. "What is it to you, to live here? Why do you remain? Your own kingdom must be suffering too."

"My realm," she said, stressing the word, "is here. Right here, on the mountain. I am everywhere, as I am here, and you are not. That at least he granted me before he let me go."

Her voice dripped with bitterness. Aidon drained his glass, stood shakily. "Ceres, I'm....sorry, about all of this. I can't say how sorry I am."

"I know," she told him. "I do know. But that changes nothing."

He looked at her beseechingly and in his face she saw his brother suddenly; so suddenly it made her feel almost ill. Then he was gone, his shadow fading from the terracotta tiles as he and his black coat disappeared from view.

Ceres looked down at her sleeping daughter. Kore was going to feel ill enough in the morning, she thought, quite apart from the lecture she herself was preparing to give her; but she couldn't help feeling infuriated. Most of the fury was not for Kore herself; it was for Aidon, and the past that he had so neatly brought stirring up like mud into her brilliantly clear and self-organized life. Life, again, was the wrong word.

She sighed, walked back downstairs into the kitchen, looked at the chair where her brother had sat. So long ago she had been just a girl by their standards, he had looked down at her with ineffable snobbery down the length of his long white nose. "You're so good," he had said. "So good. I can't bear you."

Aidon, she thought, why did you have to come back? Why do you have to be here now, now when I can least afford you, now when the world is drawing very near to something critical and all my strength must be focused on that which is for others' good? Damn you.

As if he stood in front of her once more, she heard his dry, sardonic voice. "Already done, dear sister. Already done."

Aidon lay on a great black-upholstered couch, feeling a little better now that he was back where he belonged, but not much. His sister's golden eyes burned into his mind, and her bitterness, her refusal to comprehend what he might be saying to her, cut him to the bone. He could understand, of course. He could understand precisely, exactly, what she was thinking, and why, and he could still not escape from what he felt. That was, he reflected, why it was so particularly awful: because he himself knew how bad it was. He couldn't erase the way Kore's black hair with its glints of red had lain scattered like silk over her body, when he had pulled the lout off her and explained to him the error of his ways. It had been color, in a world which for him was almost entirely monochrome. Her hair and her eyes were notes of color which to him were the more brilliant for their dull surroundings, for the flat white and black greyness of the world in which she moved.

He looked out of his windows. The room was done in black, all black; a morning room, with an obsidian fireplace, black silken couches, ebony floorboards, black carpeting, black candles in the chandeliers. Black appealed to Aidon: there was something clean about it, something peaceful and forgettable. He had had most of the mansion done in black, except for the one red room down below the ground level, the room that he went into very seldom, and referred to hardly ever.

He coughed again, a little less now, as the strength of his realm found his body again and began to flow back into him. His white minions swayed and danced with the force of their own passage, slow and forceful, slow and forceful by turns, on their weary way along the dark roads of his world. Black poplars shed their leaves in the eternal dusk of the underworld.

Outside his mansion, rain began to fall.

I woke, cold. Cold, and sick, and my head pounded, and the room was yellow-grey with dawn light. I couldn't remember anything. There had been a party, some kind of party, and I had worn a pale gown.....

It struck me with blinding force. Oh Gods, there had been a boy, and the cream dress had been ripped, and what had happened after the rip? what had happened to me? I cursed myself, struggling to my feet. Mother was standing in the doorway, arms folded, an expression of barely-concealed annoyance on her face.

"I hope you're satisfied with yourself?" she asked me. I passed a hand over my face.

"I loathe myself," I confessed. "What happened?"

"From what I gathered, you drank enough to disgrace yourself in front of your friends, and managed to get yourself in a situation which could have got you pregnant or dead had not someone come to your rescue. Do you remember anything at all?"

"Only....dancing, and then it wasn't dancing anymore but something worse, and someone ripped the dress I was wearing....and I was so afraid...and then it all went away. Someone came and made it all go away."

"Yes," she said simply. "You were lucky. Kore, do not ever, ever do anything like that again."

"I won't," I assured her. "Who saved me?"

She didn't reply immediately. "I don't know," she said after a minute. "I don't know. Just...go and wash yourself, and then stay in your room for the rest of the day. I don't want to see or hear you until dinnertime."

"Right," I said automatically. One does not argue with Mother when she gets that particular look in her eyes. Only I knew she had been lying. She had known very well who had saved my honor and quite possibly my life.

I know very little about my mother, I realized. I hardly know who she is, really; I don't know what she did before I was around, or what her secrets are, or who she dreams about at night, or who she is thinking of when I hear her crying quietly after dark sometimes, when she is sure she is alone. I don't know.

I sat back down on the bed and thought about my mother. She is old and she is young, and there are times when I am sure she is remembering another place and another time, and another face before her own; not mine. The pale man I have seen twice now is something to do with that other time, I know, but she would never vouchsafe information about her past to me; that is not the way things are.

After a while I felt steady enough to get up. The cream dress had vanished; I wasn't sure I wanted to know what had happened to it. Shame so thick and sickening it was almost palpable overwhelmed me at the thought of what I had done. I had been so pretty, so....

(beautiful)

presentable, that night. I had looked almost as I wanted to look, and I had expected a wholly different outcome to the evening. I wasn't exactly sure what that outcome was, but it was a far cry from narrowly-averted rape. My breasts poked assertively against the thin fabric of the shirt I wore. I decided I didn't want to think about them, nor any other part of my body, and went into the adjoining room to draw a bath.

This small domestic ceremony had always made me feel good. There was something of luxury in lying chin-deep in hot fragrant water, something I didn't have much in my life. Now, sitting on the edge of the ancient clawfooted tub, watching steam rise like smoke from the rushing water, it felt more like a purification. Over and over I felt those half-dreamed hands touch my lips, my eyelids, my hair; a touch so faint and gentle I must have imagined it. I almost thought I remembered to whom those hands belonged, but just as I was about to bring the face into my mind it slipped away into mist.

Mist rising from hot water.

I opened the sink cabinet and selected a bottle of bath crystals, glittering and deep blue as sapphires in the warm peach-colored light, and shook a handful into the water. Watching them dissolve was like watching tears falling into water; they shimmered and swirled and faded into nothingness, and it was as if they had never been.

I realized I was crying all of a sudden. Hot painless tears overflowed and ran softly, slowly, down my cheeks, fell in crystal showers into the steam-obscured water. I turned off the tap, pulled my shirt over my head and stepped, gasping at the sudden heat, into the bath.