Magic realism and surrealism lie ahead. This story will be 2-3 parts in total. I have little to say in defense of such a departure, except that none of the timeline makes sense with real world logic, does it? And trickster psychopomp Red is my weakness, but self-actualizing ruling queen despoina persephone-parable Liz is my great love./Title from "the Mountain is Burning" by Johnny Flynn, which I strenuously recommend.
She learned a lot from Red. A strange collection of skills not at all what she had expected when she first impulsively threw her lot in with his.
She learned to see the monsters they hunted, not as a collection of pathologies and clinical likelihoods, but as rank beasts driven by instinct and greed. She became able to predict that instinct with some long-slumbering but acute muscle in her gut, and to be able to lift her face and scent these beasts on the wind. She was his hunting dog, his captain of the guard. Sometimes she pointed him on his way and sometimes she leapt first, brought him back something still and bloodied.
She always thought she would be his tempering force but she isn't. If anything he is hers.
She became known, a beautiful, pale, slim woman with soft hair so dark and glossy, always in her trim black tailored coat with a red scarf around her pale, feminine neck. The red, red scarf, the color of fresh dark blood, crisp with silk and soft with cashmere, was his present to her their very first winter, when they haunted Prague through Christmas and Kiev through New Years, shivering and surrounded with opulence. She wore the scarf and painted her lips the same colour, and her hair had grown long again by that time and her eyes had gone hard and sharp and lovely as sapphires - and that was how she appeared in the pictures taken by Interpol that then appeared in many newspapers around the world. Red's consort, they called her, at long last, and she rejoiced. She'd planned and staged the sighting, after all. Finally, they stopped calling her hostage and admitted what she was.
From him she has learned to hordes small pleasures, to experience them completely and store them up for the lean days when the hunt was hard and their fleeing even harder. They spent a scant week in a borrowed villa on a Caribbean island in the cloying humid heat and brilliant sun, sailing on a boat he hired or dozing on their shaded veranda overlooking the sea, passing the threshold back and forth between basking in the warmth and growing limp and irritated under it - and he helped her learn this too, to embrace the heat, the dozing, the hard work in the brisk sea wind, not to feel embarrassed or squeamish about the feeling of her own clean sweat gathering on her skin.
That bright week of sweet fruit and warmth and azure seas, he helped her pack away within herself and bring forth small parcels of, later, to keep them warm and contented as they had to flee from a particular, vicious enemy that was snarling and snapping too closely at their heels.
They were forced to travel great distances and cram themselves into cold, cheerless little boltholes for a good month of sleeplessness and discomfort until they managed a plan to turn their pursuit around on their pursuer. And when they sprung their plan, and found themselves victorious but bleeding, deep in woods spangled with ice, their breath misting as she held him in place and pushed her hand against the wound in his side, feeling against her palm his slick, warm blood, his breathing flank, his fine, crisp shirt going all stiff and crumpled, and found she could not look away from their dead enemies on the ground not far from them, he demanded she recite those days in the tropics. He helped her unwrap the little gems of them as he lay still and kept breathing and bleeding, helped her forget her shivering fear and her throbbing knee and remember the feeling of sun on her skin like sweet fever, the pleasant burn of use in her hands, her shoulders after a day on their little boat, the taste of the cold, creamy, sweet-tart melon soup with tender little shrimps they'd had one night, how she'd been too hot to eat all day but it had tasted so good and refreshing.
By the time help had come she could feel the ghost of that clean sweat on her skin, she didn't shiver, and Red lay smiling up at her from where he lay on the frosted, rotted leaves, and she understood the promise that strung between them. When they were cold and in fear and in pain, those better days were not banished, she could always unwrap them again and again, slip them onto her tongue and taste them as sweet repast.
And also, she understood that she was never to know which were the better days, she would need the savour of endless heat for when she looked out at a field of ice, she would need the smoke and sugar-sting of winter frost and honest fear for when she stifled in hot climes, or worse, in terrible boredoms and endless tepid travel, which would always threaten her with doubt, with blinding aimlessness.
She was miserable at first, the constant motion made her feel like she was being pulled and pulled and stretched and taut so that she would certainly soon snap and fizzle away to nothing. She thought she would love it, traveling with him, like a great adventure. When she didn't, she thought she would grow used to it in time, the lost sensation, feeling like she was loosing, loosing, leaving things behind, always wrong footed, always tired, always staggering and disheveled and feeling unprepared, but no matter how hard she tried she could never quite catch up to her Red.
He fretted over her and petted her and slowed their progress more and more, though the Bureau and Interpol had been particularly avid in their hunt at the time, thinking he'd dragged her along unwilling. He bought her trinkets and fine things such as she'd never dreamed of having as a girl, he kissed her and kissed her, and that alone had raised her spirits for a time, she reached for him whenever they could manage, perhaps more than was decent.
Their bodies together was pleasure and comfort and hope and food and drink and love and respite all at once to her, so she became shameless. Slow, slow, easy, he would often murmur in her ear, are you sure? look what a state you're in. And she would tell him I'm sad and scared and tired and I want to feel good. You make me feel good, your voice, your smell, the feel of you inside me, around me. Please, please, make me feel good.
And he would yield to her, sometimes he would be tender and sometimes rushed and sometimes he would punish her with pleasure and wanting and and firmness and pleasure again until she was a quiet, warm nothing with all her desolation emptied out and chased away, just a breathing shape he would bathe with warm clothes and tuck into bed and she would finally sleep and sleep.
But these were palliatives and not a cure, still she was stretched and pulled, still more and more of the woman she'd thought she was was shaved off in small flakes and fine curls like hard wood under a plane, whittled away and away, until she was so afraid of what little she'd be left with. The more Red told her she was precious and wondrous, the more she feared that she was ugly and empty and weak. The more she waited to feel less like a thing battered around in the wind like a spit of dandelion down, the more she felt rootless and unmoored, homeless and weary.
She had tried to hide it from him, her emptiness, her sorrow, her fear felt like shame though she knew he would never her scold her or begrudge her for them. She wanted to be strong, his wild one, his Winter Queen, she wanted to know that she was the girl who proves herself in every fairy story.
But one night he came to their room after a meeting, and a nice dinner with Dembe that she'd declined, pleading the need to nurse an aching head. He found her curled atop the covers with tears on her cheeks like crystals of ice, though his early return startled away any more that wanted to fall.
Oh, my dear one, he said, sitting down at her side and smoothing her hair from her forehead like a doting papa, like a loving husband, and the ice-tears pricked and frosted over her eyes again. He smelled of good cooking and rich wine and sweet cologne and clean male skin as he leaned over her and she wanted to wrap herself in him, fill herself on his fury, his love. You are miserable.
Yes, she said, the word spilling from her mouth like a petulant sob, I don't mean to be. I don't want to be. I can't help it.
I'm so sorry, I should never have taken you away with me. If we are very careful, it may not be too late for you to turn back.
Don't you dare send me away. Don't you dare, she commanded, prone though she was, Anyway, its far too late, you know it as well as I. I've as good as eaten the pomegranate seeds, going with you. Can't we just settle someplace? Can't we just live in a little house by the sea and be just two people, just live a little life?
We will have that, my love, he said, took her slender, cold hand and kissed each of her blunt fingertips and they heated under his warm lips as though he breathed the life back in them - so strange to think he was life and death both, but neither at all, outside the whole game, so ancient and implacable, out pacing her in every direction. But there is so much work still to do.
I know. I understand, she said, and dashed the tears from her lashes, though she didn't really understand, not yet, still thought in terms of soon and later rather than always and never. I'm just as afraid of stopping, you know, that it won't be any better. I don't know what I am now, I can't seem to catch up to myself and see. Sometimes I think I'm nothing at all, like maybe you didn't save me after all and somehow I just forgot to fade away.
No, he said, and there was that hugeness of him, the implacable immensity of his will drawing him up, forcing the air from the room like a wave of heat or cold, That's not true. I saved you, you're as whole as me. Don't I lay with my ear to your breast every night to listen to your heart beat? Don't I live and die by your will? Don't we have our simple pleasures?
Yes. Yes of course. It only feels that way. Nothinging feels very real anymore, she said, and began to laugh, what an absurdity, like calling the ocean a puddle, like calling a dire wolf a dog. Of course it's not real, of course it's so much more than that.
I think what you need, said the man called Raymond, the Thrice Wise within him subsiding once more, Is a way to be useful, something for you to accomplish. I wanted to offer you every comfort, every ease, but I think idleness is not a kindness to you after all. You need something to do.
She felt her heart wake and spark to life at that, like something bounding in eagerness and straining at it's lead. Yes, yes, something to do, something to exercise her own Will, which was tireless and steely if not so eternally vast. Something to seek, to bend her body towards, something on which to spend her half-drowsing frustrations and hungers and sharpnesses. Oh yes, she begged, Oh, Raymond, yes please. Something to do.
So they began with her lessons, more formal ones, stranger ones. She learned the Order and the Way, and the Disciples in long ranks and files, slowly diminishing each in size, and all hers to call upon if she spoke his true name in their ears - a name like a key, not really a sound at all but a Will, like a puff of thought, the sensation of a clap within the space between one's ears.
She had a Will too, to stretch and test to see if it would grow supple enough and strong enough to wield. Her only true inheritance, revealed to her at last. Raymond had told her he'd wished he could shield her from the dark reality of who they were, that she'd never need to know these things - but that he'd also hoped, deep down, that she was truly blessed with a Will that was as great as her legacy demanded and that he might see her come to command it, knowing she would be glory and wonder itself if she did.
Didn't you always know, somewhere in that sharp, sharp instinct of yours? He'd pleaded into her ear, as she denied and marveled and protested at the shape of what she was, And didn't those around you, little keen-sniffing children of earth that they are, always sense it? Look at you just a little bit askance? It might have been easier if you had known, but then you'd be as twisted round and driven from goodness and sanity as all of us who are of Elsewhere. We thought maybe you could be happier here, live the little clean life, in a straight line under the sun, just like you mother wanted for you. She was human, too, and so angry with your father for keeping you both Underground. And anyway, if I'd kept you after and raised you like mine in that Sideways place, where would we be now, you and I?
Always like this, Raymond. I know we always would have been. Only strung up in a hundred, hundred more ways to belong to each other, she'd said, and took up his hand in both of hers, keeping it on her lap, but her stomach shifted unpleasantly with shivers at the thought of being so subsumed by him, so without boundaries, so wrapped up in the power he could have held over her that way. And she was greedy, she wanted him as her lover only, not to be always battling in ways of unwinding other taints and obligations from between them. And to grow up in his world, that winding place she'd now glimpsed? No. She was sure she would have withered all up under the weight of it. But I'm glad you arranged it the way you did, just the same. I'm glad of Sam, I'm glad of growing up in the straight line, in the sunlight. Of having time to be human, to become ready to know you. Of being old enough to know this is better.
I grew up in the sunlight, too, you know, he said, We still are more alike than you know.
I broke many rules to save you the way I did, he said later, I drew attention to myself in ways that are not safe. I'm going to have to leave here very soon, Lizzie, and for a very long time.
You won't go without me, she told him, I won't let you. And you wouldn't, I know better than that. You'd take me away tonight if you could.
Yes, damn it, if you were well enough I would, he said, and pressed his face to her hair to hide his guilt.
Good.
Red could talk anybody into anything because he kept a lick of magic tucked into his cheek beside his back-most tooth, like a sliver hard candy and just as burning-sweet. When he needed to play a trick or tell a lie or ask a favour he would touch the tip of his tongue to that tiny lick of magic and say what he meant to say and those around him would scurry to do his bidding. Only, when he met his Lizzie, becalmed as her Elsewhere heart was in her breast, as rigid and orderly and trained up as she was in the ways of the Sunlight world, he spoke with magic on his tongue and she did no more than frown with polite skepticism and fold her pretty pale hands in her lap. On her, the magic, which moved every man or woman in both their worlds, did not a thing.
Her imperviousness did not anger him. Oh, no, it was like dangling a shiny thing before a bored housecat, suddenly his ears were pricked, suddenly his eyes alight, suddenly she was all he could see. What a marvel she is, he thought, My surrogate Brother's surrogate daughter. I wonder what she'd made of. I wonder if she will let me near enough to tell.
When she first met him, as she aproached him she paused, the way the ancient memory in us begs us to pause at the edge of the dark wood, the little whisper that says wait, there might be danger, there might be silent things with teeth. And then she remembered, she was one of the things with teeth and her spine straightened. She met his eyes.
He was kind to her. He was slippery and careful and fast talking and kept her spinning in circles with his trickster-raven dances, but he was kind. She didn't trust it. She wanted to find those teeth she'd sensed. She wanted to see what he would do all provoked and unfurled, she wanted to make him turn and snap - because that's what men do when you push them hard enough, they turn and snap. Even her Daddy had done, once or twice, and made them both cry. But even when she went to rail at him every night, Red didn't. He watched, he talked, he smiled his strange half-smile and in his disjointed way he was kind.
She didn't know what to make of it. It was new.
When she near to healed up enough to be released from her narrow white bed with the stiff white sheets and the little plastic device clamped to her finger measuring how well she breathed, her colleagues and superiors came to circle round her and make her tell her tale. She could tell in their faces, which had grown stiff like masks, that they didn't believe what she'd told them of the night that she faced her husband and Berlin and nearly died and still won.
She didn't blame them. She was lying after all. But she told it again, the best she was able, walking so close to the line of truth that the sides of her feet touched it, crossed over it and back, but using only words and concepts that they would understand. And then, to be sure, she let her mouth go soft and pouting like a tired girl's and let her eyes go heavy and pained like a widow's, and pled her confusion, her weakness and infirmity. They looked down at her in her hospital bed and looked suddenly awkward, squeamish. She told them she was alright to go on, just as soon as the nurse brought her medicine, and the nervous children of men packed up their files and fled as though from fire, or as shy, awkward boys from a woman about to undress.
After they'd gone she wanted Red, wanted to call for him and be gathered up in his arms again like she was a child, like she was his gentle, little wife, the way he had the night he found her and brought her back from death. She was shaking with nerves now that the interrogation was over, like a little woodland creature caught in a sprung trap. But she wasn't sure how to reach him, now.
She hadn't seen him or Dembe since the day before when he'd confessed his nature and hers. Maybe he was still raw with confessing. Maybe he didn't want her circling, snuffling colleagues to see her and him together, next to each other. They wouldn't touch, probably, if he'd been there standing by but even little confirming glances would be enough to condemn her, now that they were looking to condemn. Perhaps even just the crackle between them would have been enough.
Now though, even if his absence saved her from meeting the teeth of the trap rather than being merely cornered, she was left stranded. High and dry with only conventional means to make contact, and only conventional means to travel, unless her inheritance proved itself instantly, ability springing up savant-like.
She dressed in the clothes from the bag he'd brought her, not hers but clothes that were neat and new and warm - for it was bitter autumn and the wind was brisk off the Potomac. Her legs were weak and barely willing but they held, all her insides ached gently with the change in altitude from lying to walking and her skin still felt as tender as a sunburn but she made it out of the hospital without faltering or being stopped. When she walked into the day a man in a dark overcoat detached himself from the side of the building where he'd leaned, and she knew they hadn't trusted her after all, only pretended.
She had an address on a slip of paper, found folded in the pocket of the jacket she'd been given, written in Red's slanted, elongated hand. She took four different cabs and cut through alleyways but the man in the dark overcoat stuck to her, not too far, not too close, unshakable. She wanted to do what she'd seen Red do, open a door and step through into a different place than it usually led to, and close it up tight behind her, gone in a wink. She didn't know how.
The address was a little shop with a dirty window that said 'Antiques' that was piled high inside with all manner of things, terribly dim and terribly dusty. A sweet faced old man with white, white hair that billowed about his head in silky curls sat behind the counter, reading a book he hunched over with interest. A bell rang when she stepped in the door, not the traditional little chime, clang, slap of shop bells hitting the door, but some deeper, wider ring that she felt in her teeth and breastbone. The man with the white hair put down his book and looked at her with recognition, beaming, came up to greet her as an old friend with both hands outstretched.
A similarly white haired and beaming and tall and narrow woman came out of the gloom at the back of the shop and together they greeted her and spoke to her and ushered her through their dim, maze-like shop, past piled furniture and boxes of rolled up rugs and high glass-fronted cabinets and indigo and white ginger jars taller than a man. They talked and talked and talked to her and she would never afterward remember a single word they said, but as they hurried her along her heart felt lighter and lighter with joy, listening to them. They took both her hands, one each, with cool, smooth hands that were steady and sure, and led her - one ahead of her and one behind - through a narrow door down long, winding stairs.
The round stairwell was so dark she couldn't see a thing and she felt as though something in the back of her mind was being stretched and stretched like a rubber band about to snap and she had a moment of utter panic, thinking she'd made a horrible mistake, fallen into a nightmare somehow - though that had happened long ago - but the old man and the old woman's hands gripped hers hard and kept her from falling or stopping. Her shoulder brushed the outer wall, the material of her new coat hissing against it, and it felt like unfinished, unjoined wood, as though they walked down the center of an enormous hollow tree. Her heart beat wildly in her chest, and for just a second she wanted to old apartment and her dog and her pretend marriage, her phone and her alarm-clock and her job and all the life she'd expected for herself in her sneakers-and-backpack childhood. Gone, gone, gone, now floating up away, above her, left behind for good. Tears wicked down her cheeks, she couldn't help it, and the woman and the man spoke to her soothingly, cooed at her like the sympathetic granny and grandpa she'd never had and she remembered that on the other side of this giving up was Red and she had nothing left at all behind her, nothing, nothing.
Like her husband had been nothing, had deflated like a balloon when she reached into his chest, and his blood had run up her arms and then there had been Nothing - but she didn't like to think about that.
Then she and her two escorts burst out into the light, so bright and blue-grey white that more tears fell from her eyes, and finally the old man and the old woman let her hands go so she could wipe her lashes dry, the woman leaned over and pressed a firm, grandmotherly kiss on her cheek as she pulled away. The washed out light became a place, and when she looked around the old man and the old woman were gone.
They had been in the city but now they weren't, they were in a gentle, still wood, by a narrow, tame ribbon of river. It had been brisk autumn, blustery but still warm underneath, and now it was cold, and a sparse, fluttering snow fell. There were no buildings anywhere in sight, nor any sign of the staircase she'd come down.
On the river there was a little boat painted red and blue and gold, just a rowboat really with a carved, arching prow that seemed a little overwrought for its humble scale. Beside the river stood Red, with his small smile that meant his mouth was closed around a thousand secrets and his eyes looked into all her secrets and liked what they saw. It was the smile that said I contain more than I am, that she had seen on his face that first day and known exactly meant even though she hadn't understood why or how, and the first, tiniest bell in her had called her to begin waking - the last, biggest brother of which she had heard ring as she'd walked through a door.
Only the first part of the journey must be made with such strange means, he said, taking her hand and leading her to the little boat, Very soon we can return to comfort and modernity. I wouldn't have spent a fortune on my plane if I were always restricted to the Old customs, after all. But first we much prove our willingness. First you must see my home country.
She stepped into the boat.