“An arm’s worth of coin is not enough to tempt anyone in this place. They have hundreds of arms at the end of any reach.”
“It will tempt Vhummim. She likes us. She watches over us. It will be enough.”
I was silent for a long while, and the other children, young and new, snuffled in their gray beds.
“It is a good plan, Oubliette. But not for you. I will put my arm beneath the stamp, I will let it cut into my shoulder, and you will remain whole.”
Her thick eyebrows furrowed and she scowled at me. “Why? You know you are an overgrown, scruffy-limbed infant when it comes to pain.”
I held her face in my hand, cold skin on cold skin, her clipped hair bristling against the tips of my fingers like quills.
“My arm is bigger. We will get more money.”
She said nothing—what could she say to that?
“You will cry out.”
“I will not.”
We held each other all that night, and she kissed—the only kiss she ever gave me—the spot where my shoulder joined my arm.
In the Garden
THE BOY HAD LEFT HER.
He always left her. Each morning, and the morning after that one. She did not mind, really—it was difficult to speak for so long, to remember so much of what was written on her eyelids, to be close to another child when she had been alone for so long. She had not known how that could tire her. And so it was that when he had gone from her, she often went into the placid Garden lake, to let the cool water, rippling like a dress pulled up above the knees, wash him away from her. The hard, round pebbles under her bare feet were comforting—she had always had them, and the lake, and the reeds, and the knocking cattails, and the moon and the stars, to stroke her to sleep. She thought of the boy, how eagerly she waited for him whenever the red sun sank below the pomegranate trees, yet how often she was emptied, when he was gone, like a painted vase whose water has been flung out onto the flagstones. It was so easy to miss someone, she thought, when you have never missed anyone before.
She knew her stories so well, she did not lose them when she spooled them out to him—she told herself this over and over. They were still her own, her own. But when the words of the tales passed her lips and wound into his ears, they seemed to become so solid, to grow limbs and hearts—bodies winding into each other like snails winding into their shells. When she had been alone, and whispered those tales into nothing more than the surface of a little pond or a thatch of blackberries, they had stayed thin and wispy, shreds of a gown which did not quite fit her fluttering in the wind. She was happy to see them grow solid—she told herself this over and over, too.
Waist-deep in the lake, she turned her face up to the starlight, and the falling shadows of dwindling ash leaves. The leaves were all gray in the dark, their reds and golds seeped out like tales. She ducked her head under the water, once, twice—she had long ago stopped praying that the black marks would come off when she did so. She would be looking for him again by the next evening, she knew, but now she felt as though all her self was laid open, like shining tendrils, like snakes let out of their basket to wriggle in the world, and she gathered them in again, in the silver light.
When she came up for breath and cleared the lake from her eyes, a figure was walking nearby, cloaked in white and not her boy at all, some distance from the violet-bordered water.
It was Dinarzad.
Her hair flowed behind her like the shadow of a much taller woman, and her feet were bare on the grass. The girl feared Dinarzad had gone mad—proper amiras did not go about thus. But she seemed calm, did not weep or tear her hair, but touched the trees lightly, as she passed, as though looking for something. Finally, she saw the girl in the water, half submerged like a lamia or a mermaid, and froze near an orange tree which was still glossy and green in the forest of bare branches. The girl said nothing—when one approached a strange animal for the first time, she knew, sudden movements would frighten it or enrage it, and if she did not want a terrified goose on her hands, surely she did not want a terrified princess.
Dinarzad opened her dark mouth and squeaked. She tried again, her voice clearing like a winter sky.
“I wanted to hear… I wanted to listen—”
She bolted, a doe caught before an arrow. The girl watched her go, not knowing what she could do to make the woman stay. She had never tried to make the boy stay, once the tales had begun. He was naturally faithful as a sleek hound.
And so it was not surprising when he found her near the moss-drenched stones the next night—it was only as much as she had come to expect from him, expect and anticipate, though it cost her. He brought her a round cheese and a slice of pastry. They whispered and ate as they had always done until the sky had gone as black as it might, and she could begin again in secret and in safety.
“I want to hear more!” the boy said excitedly, clapping his hands. “Dinarzad didn’t speak to me all day—it was like a holiday! Tell me how they escaped!”
The girl smiled softly and breathed deeply, opening up her tales again, herself, like a reliquary full of sacred bones.
“Seven was certain he would not cry out when the stamp pressed down on his shoulder—he would be brave and stalwart, stoic and true…”
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED