The Past

There was something real humbling about the skies that night. She looked up at the grand heavens, seeing each space between the stars as drops of black ink and the stars themselves were twinkling gems. She reclined against the wooden walls of her home, her legs tucked beneath her and her hands gently placed upon her knees.

Her hands were gnarled and old, bitten with pain. Her face was wrinkled and parched of life but her eyes held still to an undeniable pool of intelligence and cunning. They flicked up at the dirt street when she heard the sound of hooves kicking the stones and dirt. She didn't rise or move. Her lips tightened, like a scar across her face.

A horse, obviously from the west, trundled along the path. Its legs pushed the green grasses and flowers down, so they kneeled to obey. It dragged with it a rickety wooden platform with a small border, just enough to keep the contents from slipping out. The horse began to pick up speed. The horse was frightened of something behind it and reared, throwing whatever was in the wooden platform back before launched forwards, trying to escape from the leather bounds.

She watched this unfold, slowly standing up. Her hip and back throbbed with pain. She slowly shuffled to the dirt road, now silent save for the wind's whisper moving through the boughs. As she approached the road, she stopped and looked for someone who may be searching for the horse. She saw shadows dance in the far distance and could tell, by pure instinct, that they were not in grave need for the horse.

In the road, cast off by the horse, was a person. She approached the person and discovered that it was a woman cradling an infant. She stopped and bent before the woman, raising her shoulders to see if she was dead. The woman started and gasped. Blood trickled down her fine features and the infant began to moan in her grasp, cradled in fabric.

"What is your name?" She asked the mother.

"Wang Liu…" Liu said, staring down at the floor. Patches of her blood stained the earth, like blooming flowers.

"Wang Liu, I am Li Fan."

Liu nodded slowly. Fan graciously collected Liu in her arms and bade her to rise. Slowly, Liu did, still clutching the infant that had begun to cry.

"What is the child's name?"

"Wang Yao."

"I see."

Fan took Liu into her home, trundling through the darkness and listening to every sound. They reached the home easily.

After Fan had supplied them with a meal, she asked Liu to bathe. Liu did so in the pale moonlight, draping her body in the cold water and shivering. She took perfumes to her body and scraped off the remaining blood and dirt from her skin.

On the other side of a lacquered window, Fan watched as Yao slept, Yao being no older than two. Fan watched the child's chest rise and fall with each measured breath, his lips parted, and his face already showing the marks of a remarkable beauty, like a flower. Yet, something troubled Fan and would continue to as she raised Yao like a prince and eventually sold him off. Something about him was… something special, but altogether earthly. She didn't think he had been possessed by some spirit. He was human. Fan raised her eyes to the window to see the mother.

Liu ran the smooth water over her skin, staring up at the humbling skies. Her skin was white as snow. Running ones fingers over it would feel like touching silk. Her breasts were large with milk, but without it they were not unnoticeable. They must have caused her trouble as a girl when they began to grow, with plum colored centers… However, this is not what Fan noticed. What Fan noticed was the gnarled scar running from her shoulder to her hip diagonally. It was as if a piece of rope pushed through her skin. It had healed as much as it could. She had been cut on the mouth from her fall, hence the blood, and was otherwise free of injury.

….

Some years later…

Liu was in the wet darkness of her room, draped in a single red cloth. She leaned against the corner with her eyes pinned on the entrance. The sounds of night poured in through the window. Yao was asleep in an adjacent room, nearing his eleventh year.

The man in the doorway, who had once cast a blade to her back, began to smile. He approached her, his even face and eyelash-less eyes focusing on her. She pulled the cloth from her body, her full breasts exposed to her. The cloth remained across her lap, like a comforting hand. He took it off and placed it across her back, like a shawl.

"You must not make a sound." Liu whispered.

"You have told me this before." He whispered back.

"I know. I was afraid you had forgotten."

He gave her a long grin that terrified and excited her. He drew his fingers along her neck, as he did that morning when he thought Yao hadn't seen. She shivered.

"If Li hears of this…" she said slowly, but her eyes were impassive. He didn't care. His eyes were focused elsewhere. Her eyes were dangerous, glinting.

"She won't. If Yao hears I'll scare him into silence."

She pretended that the shiver that coursed through her veins was of enjoyment and not of hatred. He passed his hand now down along the scar he gave her when she threatened to run away the night Yao was born. She did, but only over a year later. He had come crawling back for her, thinking and convincing himself that she had come begging for him. She grinned at the thought.

"You like it, don't you?" He asked, indicating the scar.

"I adore it."

"I'll give you another one." He said in a cultured voice that was only a paper mask against the snarling, fanged, thirsty face just beneath the surface. The teeth jutted forth, dripping venom made of gluttony and lust and a need for something he was always told was wrong, horribly wrong.

She could see it. She leaned back and he drew the cloth up her head, so it cradled the base of her skull. She placed her fingernails against his cheek. Her vision went black just as his went blurry. He tugged at her neck, destroying her wind pipe, and she had delivered a fatal dose of poison into his bloodstream.

The following morning, just before the sun had fully risen, Li Fan found them dead. Both their eyes were open. He was halfway across the room, sprawled against the door in his last attempt to escape. She was on the floor, the cloth loose around her neck, barely hiding a necklace of bruises. Her face was ashen and her eyes wide open, both horrified and satisfied and undeniably dead.

…

"It's rare you see a boy so pretty." The stranger leered, pinching Yao's cheeks and turning him this way and that. He raised the jaw to see the swan's neck beneath. Then he lowered it to see into the sorrowful and rebellious eyes, the color of river stones.

He let go, careful not to leave any marks of his fingers on Yao's cheeks. He turned then to Fan.

"I'm sure several clients would be especially happy and would pay a good amount of money for this child, especially with such a deliciously complicated past."

Fan didn't smile or show any hint of emotion on her withered face. She only nodded once.

…

"Is this really what you want?" A young, handsome Lithuanian man named Toris asked. He had a long face, the kind artists adored, and soft brown hair that was in need of cutting.

The woman he spoke to nodded.

"Well, he won't be able to come for some time." Toris explained patiently. "But I did get word that they would move him elsewhere. He's been in a strange state lately, they say, but that could have changed in the time it took to receive this message. Anyway, we can intercept it and then give Braginsky word of it. He loves these things, so I'm sure he'll leap at the opportunity. It really works out pretty well, doesn't it?" he chuckled shyly.

They sat in a dimly lit room as evening waned. His hands were on his lap, clutching the brown, coarse fabric of his trousers. His white shirt was wrinkled and spotted with soil. A single flower stuck from his breast pocket. If it had a mouth, it would have smiled.

"Thank you, Toris." The woman said, in French. She smiled her hare-lip and her crossed eyes focused on Toris. "Ivan's a powerful man, but he doesn't always see what he wants or needs in time. Also, I do believe we have saved the life of a young man just as he was on the brink of collapse."

Thank you for the reviews! I'm glad to see this story really take off.