The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (24 page)

“I thought it sounded delightful before ‘King’s Conjuror’ or ‘Cunning Man and Charmer.’”

I laughed.

August paused as my laughter rang out, and his eyes focused on something invisible just before my mouth. I licked my lips as I watched, thinking of his salt taste. Did he wear such a charm now? “What is it, August?” I asked.

He did not answer until he had taken three breaths and blinked three times. “Ah, it irks me that he knows me well enough to have created you.”

“I am sorry,” I said, for it was true.

“You shouldn’t be sorry for being so appealing, Melea. You are what you are: ideal.”

“Ideal in what I am for, not in who I am.”

“In who you are?” August’s lips twitched with surprise. I suppose it is because I am not anyone outside of my command.

. . .

I remained in his house. Though I ventured into the city, I never could be long away. The fluttering command drew me back to him before many hours passed. I pretended at my freedom by taking books from his library into the garden, where I might curl up between eldertrees and read.

Many times he vanished into the lower reaches of his house, where his workrooms were tightly guarded. He came out with his arms filled with potions for the king and parchments covered in his looping notes, which he would pass to his fellow conjurors.

We ate supper together every night: soups and greens and never, ever, meat. I caught him often watching me, spoon halfway between bowl and lips, and I watched him back until a shadow-man broke our line of sight with his decanter of blood-red wine.

Some afternoons he accepted visitors, and at the beginning of the summer a grand Lady-Witch arrived for dinner
. I was banished to my rooms by the shadow-men and from my balcony heard the lovely and grand tones of her voice. I tried not to hate her. When she finally departed, I stayed on the balcony, talking softly to the blue finches who nested in the eaves. The knock on my door was soft, and when I called enter, August walked in, still dressed in his finery. Gold and green swirled on his suit, pulling out all the living colors in his face and hair, and his fingers were clothed in heavy-looking rings.

I did not rise from the stone of the balcony, and so he came to me and crouched. In the moonlight his eyes washed into blackness, but his smile was the same. “Melea, you are angry with me.”

“No,” I lied.

“She would have killed you if she’d seen you.”

Something clawed at my throat from the inside, as though the butterfly grew talons. I choked on my words. “You were protecting me.”

His hands found my shoulders, and he pulled me against him. His jacket was rough and stiff from the gilded embroidery, but I did not care. He smelled of sunlight and wood. A forest grove that my butterfly longed for with all its desperate fluttering. “You should have let her kill me,” I said.

“No, no.” His lips pressed to my hair, my ash-bark hair.

“Why not? You know what I am, you know who sent me, and so you must know I will bring you no good.” I whispered into his shoulder, and the corner of my mouth burned with the rough touch of his jacket. “You must destroy me.”

“I cannot.” His arms tightened around me, and I knew what he was going to say. “I cannot because I—”

I kissed him before he could say the words the command vibrating inside me needed to hear. I kissed him and did not let him go.

. . .

August brought me into his workroom in the morning, a wide grin teasing his lips as his fingers grasped at mine. “Come, Melea, and don’t be afraid.”

The room spread over the entire subterranean floor, blocked out of the earth with giant white stones. Half was empty but for diagrams and pictures drawn onto the floor. A quarter of what remained held books glowing like miniature moons and shelves of jars and ceramics that every wizard must have. The final quarter was furnished with round and square tables, each of which held additional books, strange metal and glass contraptions, and piles of parchment. The entire place smelled like fire. I paused at the threshold, but August drew me in and tapped the ceiling with a cane he picked up from the closest table. At the third tap, my ears popped and I felt the workroom close behind me.

“Sit down, sweet,” he said, rummaging already through the chaos of the largest round table. He found a pair of spectacles, which he shoved over his nose. I did not sit, but stared as August drew out from inside a long stone box a thin piece of wood. A wand. He brought it to me, muttering under his breath and cupping the pointed tip with his right hand. I didn’t breathe as he set the point lightly against my ear. His eyes focused, and he said a word of power that sent my butterfly shuddering and my bones atingle.

As he pulled the wand away from my ear, I heard Master’s voice snake throughout the workroom: Welcome, Melea. Here is your order: find my rival August Curran, make him love you, and rip out his heart.

I wrapped my arms around my stomach, but August only laughed. “What an old fool,” he said and he turned to me. “He thought you would betray me easily, but you love me, too.”

It was too close. I began to back away. “No, August. Don’t. You mustn’t.”

“Don’t you see, Melea, we can break his command. It is impossible for you to hurt me the way he wants you to. What will you do? Go to the king and offer your body to him? Marry another man? Ha!” He rushed to me, grabbing up my hands. “I love you, and—”

I opened my mouth and coughed, the butterfly trapped in my neck, trapped and terrified on my tongue. But it would not fly free. I tore away from August, shaking my head. I would not do it. I would not.

August stared, dumbfounded, as I gripped my own hands together and pressed them against my chest. Tears spilled over my cheeks. No, no. The command shoved me forward a step. I stumbled and fell to my knees. The jolt against the hard stone shook my bones, and they did not stop shaking. Get up, get up, the butterfly’s wings beat out the command. Get up.

“No,” I whispered. And then August was there, lifting me up by my shoulders. My fingers brushed against his chest, pushing the loose material of his shirt aside.

“Melea, what is happening? What is he doing? He cannot get to you here, not in my workroom.”

I snatched my hands away from him before my nails clawed into his skin.

“Melea, your hair,” said August in a hushed and horrified tone. “Your eyes.”

I could only see my hands: the skin darkened and was thickening back into wax, sticky with honey. The ash-tree bones were brittle; they would break. No doubt my hair was returning to bark and my eyes to chokeberries. I was fighting my command, and so I was dying.

August touched his chest where I’d bared his skin. “Oh. Oh.” he breathed. “I am the fool.” And he sank back onto his heels. “Three times the fool.”

My vision was dull when I looked anywhere but at his chest and I could not open my mouth.
The rose petals that were my lips fell off my wax face and trembled in the air as they sank to the stone floor.

“I do not have the—the ability to remake you, Melea,” he said. “You would not be who you are.”

I managed to nod as I clutched my dangerous hands together. I would fall to pieces on his workroom floor, and he would use the wax in a spell for the king perhaps, the ash-bark for the princesses. I would like that.

“Take it,” he said, and his voice was flat. He put a dagger—pulled from the air!—against his chest. With his other hand he lifted up the rose petal and pressed it to my mouth. “Take it, and live long with your butterfly, and remember me.” I threw out my hands, but the dagger found its sheath between his ribs. August’s eyes widened, and his lips parted enough that I saw his tongue.

“August,” I said as he died. The blood poured over my hands, and my lips were my lips again.

. . .

His heart was hot and heavier than I expected. But it smelled like the heart of a tree. I could not think, could not speak past the command quivering through me. Cupping the thing in my palms, I walked up the stairs. His blood ran down my forearms and pooled at my elbows before dripping onto my skirts.

Master waited at the front door, surrounded by sparking, furious shadow-men. But they did not—could not—approach Master. He laughed, sharp as cracking ice. “Follow me, Melea,” he said, hands triumphantly on his hips.

But I was not made with a spider or iridescent beetle. I was made with a butterfly. “No,” I whispered, and walked into the sunlight.

Sometimes my own stories surprise me and make me uncomfortable, and I’m sure it says something about me that several of the stories that I picked for this anthology fit that description. I don’t always know why they make me uncomfortable, just that I feel a little squirrelly about posting them on the blog right after I finish them. This story is one of them. I almost threw it away and began again. Looking back on it, I’m still not entirely sure why it made me so uncomfortable.
I can see right off that I was amusing myself as I wrote it,
because I gave the narrator the name that I gave all of my snarky, favorite characters in my novels as a teen: Dominic du Bois. When “Dominic du Bois” first appeared in a novel, he was the villainous but witty son of a fifteenth-century French knight. (Hey, I was fourteen, go easy on me.) I also see that I’m unashamedly playing with one of my favorite tropes: geniuses behaving badly. And also that I’m doing my very level best to harpoon one of my least favorite elements of society: voyeurism. But I think what probably made me feel uneasy about posting it was that I didn’t try to hold back in unsettling the reader. From breaking the world to making cute dogs the enemy, I warped reality as much as I could to make it unpleasant. —Maggie