I'm not sure what to call this.
800 odd-words. Post-resurrection. Leon and my MC, Joan.
“The blood flood is the flood of love, / The absolute sacrifice. / It means: no more idols but me, / Me and you.”
Sylvia Plath, “The Munich Mannequins”
You come at last to the cold, dark curve of the cliff, hefting yourself up and over familiar edge, the outline of his head and shoulders, black against the night sky materializing in front of you.
He’d held out his hand to you, once — “Joanie, you’ll fall,” — but that had been long ago.
And hadn’t you fallen anyway? You think of his face amongst all those faces, beautiful and devout above you, his back straight, his shoulders square, all his armoury on view, every bit the people’s Sun King you’d helped him become. And when his name was sung in their poetry, and blessed in their prayers, you’d been the first to thrill in ecstasy.
Here it all goes quickly dark. You lose all but the shape of him. Leaves on half-emptied trees. There’s the sky, the same blue it had always been. Behind the line of soldiers, the rabid crowd, calling for your death. Smoke pluming. Pyre flaming.
You did not hate the fire. You hated the people who hadn’t believed you. And the lover that let you burn.
You pick slowly through the grass, eyes never leaving his back. There’s no indication that he’s sensed your pursuit, but the line of his shoulders trembles and you know he hears you.
“Nothing yet. I’ve been waiting.”
He makes no response. You know he’s been waiting for you.
“I didn’t mean to catch you unawares, your highness. I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.” You say, dipping low into a bow. You don’t have to look at him to see the way his breath catches in his throat, the way his eyes squeeze desperately shut.
There is a pounding quality to the starlight, something that keeps time with the pulse in your chest.
You can feel that other day on the cliff running underneath this one — his mouth on yours, your hands on him. You’d existed only where he’d touched you. Both of you convinced you could leave the war awhile. As though holding hands could keep the world at bay.
How stupid you’d been, and it’d killed you. Just like Sister had promised it would. Just like he’d convinced you it wouldn’t.
He’d made a believer out of you, like he’d made believers of them all.
His voice, rising over the din of the battlefield, carrying over and above the moans of the men as they lay dying — “Come, my friends, be not afraid.”
And they were not afraid.
And into death’s maw did they go, by the hundreds, by the thousands and you their unwitting shepherds, herding them into the ground.
Bedded in their graves — Ilya dropping to her knees, pressing her brow to the dirt, praying — “We are Nature, long have we been absent, and now we return.”
Had she said a prayer for you? Which one? All of them. Her knees on the altar, her eyes closed, please, please, please, simple, inexplicable, desperate, till the Mothers had come to pry her away.
Her hands around Leon’s, her brow pressed to their fingers — “I beg you.”
And it had not been enough. And it had not been enough.
“I’m beyond forgiveness, Joan, I know —” He begins, but in an instant you’re upon him, your hands on his shoulders, the whispered bonds tightening as Thalia taught you.
To his enduring credit, he doesn’t resist, going entirely slack beneath you. You drop, cross-legged onto the grass, forcing him down with you.
“The mistake was mine,” you hiss. “I believed you. I let you convince me things could be different. That I didn’t have to be alone. That the one thing, the only thing was to find the cause for which you were willing to die. And I was willing to die. But never for Param. For you.”
He weeps with tears as fat and crystalline as a child’s, running down his cheeks into the dirt.
You pull Ante’s bloodied cloak from underneath your skirts, dropping it at his feet.
“You’re down one spy-master, your highness. And in the morning, you’ll find my dagger nestled in the visiting ambassador’s quarters. Negotiations will fall apart. Relations will all but implode. There will be no treaty.”
Horror dawns on his face. He looks at you as though trying to remember who you are. Remember who you were.
“I will tear your kingdom down around your feet like so much straw. Your people will burn at the altar of your cowardice, just as I did.”
“Please. The people saw what I showed them, Joan. Burn me. Put me to the pyre. Forgive them. Forgive them.”
