lxiv. Beauty and Her Beast
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Obi did not understand why he was not dead yet.
He had done his very best – he had found the nastiest snake around and grabbed it by the tail.
Instead of biting him, it had buried him in this hole.
Even in this, then, Obi thought, rotating his shoulders as the cold of the stone sank into his skin. The rope chafed his wrists, but his hands had grown too numb to feel it.
Even in this, he had fallen short.
...
What did it take for a man to find oblivion? What god must he offend, to be struck down?
Or was that it: he was cursed to existence, to the steady and persistent reminder of his crimes, and that in itself was the punishment?
Obi looked up at the ceiling of his cell and wished for something worse to come, something final and fatal.
The door opened.
A brilliant square of light seared his eyes — he had only time to perceive a dark silhouette outlined against it, before he squeezed them watering shut.
A clang and a heavy thud followed next, then the clatter of the key in the lock. Heavy footsteps receded, but someone remained — Obi knew he was no longer alone.
...
Blinking the moisture from his eyes, he forced them open again and peered into the gloom.
The someone was standing — no, sitting up, a tall man and broad.
He groaned softly, rubbing his head, and a thrill of recognition ran through Obi.
...
He fell at once on his usual defense: an armor of jocularity, nonchalance, ill-favored humor.
Injecting his voice with false incredulity, he hailed his new cellmate: “Hm, what’s this, Mister? Did you get lost?”
“Obi,” the other man whispered, disbelief in his voice.
“Doesn’t quite seem like your usual line,” Obi rolled on, inwardly coiled tight as a spring in anticipation of the reckoning to come.
...
He had not met Mitsuhide since the war. He had not wanted to.
Though the knight made himself an easy mark more often than not, he possessed a core of steel that broke through Obi’s posturing and bit into him where he could not deflect it.
Obi feared to rouse him, now of all times when there stood yet between them everything to say and nothing to raise in plea to mitigate it.
...
“What was it this time, sir knight?” Obi spoke wildly, desperate to suppress the sensitivities awakening in him that he had thought deadened by his rampage of excess and neglect.
A longing for annihilation he could bear, for as long as it took to satisfy it, but shame? He didn’t want to face it, not just when he had thought himself beyond it.
He was grasping at straws, flinging dust to cloud the air between them. “A bit of highway robbery, perhaps — moonlighting as a bandit? Counterfeiting? Sold your sword for hire?”
...
Mitsuhide stared at him for a long moment, then he slumped back against the bars of the cell. Even without the light to catch the pallor of his skin, Obi could see in the bowed curve of his shoulders, the hang of his head, that he was not well.
When he spoke, Mitushide’s voice was low and weary. “I am no knight.”
...
“Ahhh, and what is it then that they’re calling you these days, sir — chevalier? baronet?”
“No, Obi.” Mitsuhide spoke sternly now. “Don’t misunderstand me. I am no longer in service to the crown. I have renounced my knighthood.”
A heartbeat of silence, then Obi said, “And the sea snake captured you for farming turnips, did she?”
...
Mitsuhide rubbed a hand over his face; the tension in his shoulders bespoke annoyance. He had every right to it — Obi had no right to demand anything of him, least of all an explanation.
That was the game, though: get a man to speak of himself; leave him no time to ask questions about you.
Then again, perhaps there was more to explain than Obi would ever have guessed, for how could it be that he spoke not with Sir Mitsuhide Lowen, but this stranger — how could the knight once in attendance on the second prince of Clarines be no more?
Who had returned from the war in his stead?
...
“I was riding circuit,” Mitsuhide said, his voice muffled. “Delivering messages. Somehow her men… they were looking for something, and they knew me.”
“And you let those halfwit scoundrels take you?” Obi asked softly, thinking that Zen’s spirit had taken more than the prince himself with it, and perhaps they were all dead and dying alongside him — only more slowly.
Mitsuhide lowered his hand, and even in the gloom his glare burned fierce. “I’m not a knight!” he snapped.
Then, darkly, he spoke into the mystery: “No one should ever rely on my sword again.”
...
“Ahhh…” Obi’s head fell back; he stopped watching his friend of old because he had understood now all that he wanted to know. “Too bad… Then we will both die here.”
Mitsuhide looked across the cell at him, and each man loathed himself too much to feel compassion for the other.
“Even so,” Mitsuhide shook his head, “why you are not with Shirayuki…”
...
He did not bother to mask the accusation in his voice. Obi might judge him wanting for laying aside his sword, but at least he had not set aside his wife.
How he could treat her in such a fashion – like a plaything to be discarded…
...
Obi did not move at first, but only huddled where he was, propped against the prison wall. When he answered at last, his voice seemed to come from somewhere else. “I let her make her own path,” he said quietly.
...
Mitsuhide was aghast. Evasion, he had expected; excuses, explanations, even a denial of guilt — but this!
To simply accept and embrace what he had done, without attempt at justification — Mitsuhide would not have believed it of him. Had he masked his true character so thoroughly that only now its callousness showed?
Had his time serving as royal messenger changed him so little?
Anger flashing hot and futile within him, he spluttered, “How could – don’t you know? You were to stay by her side, continue as her guard — protect her!”
...
Obi gave a hollow laugh, still crumpled as if Mitsuhide’s charges had drained away what life remained to him.
The knight — ex-knight — sounded like a directive from an outdated letter: many moons ago, before the princes had ridden off to war. His words rang hollow now, devoid of any meaning in this present time.
“That’s easy for you to say, mister,” Obi mumbled, lapsing back into their familiar patterns of dialogue. “You—”
“No!” Mitsuhide broke in hotly. At first, Obi thought he objected to the formal address, but the once-knight had something else on his mind.
...
His blood was up; he leaned forwards, hands clenched on his knees. “Not me — Zen!” The name broke between them like shrapnel, wounding them both.
Obi flinched, but Mitsuhide ground on. “That day — he thought of you, both of you.”
The blood had drained from Obi’s face; he could not speak to interrupt.
...
Mitsuhide ground on. “He wanted her to be happy.”
Obi squeezed his eyes shut, but the words kept coming.
“He said, if anything were to happen–” and with a last convulsive breath, Mitsuhide wrenched the arrow from the wound: “he wanted you to be the one to care for Shirayuki… in his place.”
