once. She would be marble and malleable here, and the rebellious unruly body would remain far away.
Madael could only touch the marble lips once, breathe into them, and revive. Once he tried to do so, but he never could. Perhaps he didn’t feel comfortable kissing the marble after a living body. Or maybe he considered it sacrilegious. If you know Rhianon herself, her imitation can no longer be complete.
Madael pulled away from the bust, slowly and reluctantly. If he could he would fly for Rhianon now. Only it was unlikely she would want to see him. He was alone again. Even surrounded by those creatures, he was always alone.
With Rhianon, it was different. When she appeared for a while, she changed everything about him. Feelings that had been forbidden had become familiar. He had enjoyed them for a while, but they were gone with her. Perhaps even fighting with her would be better than not seeing her at all.
He found himself on the battlefield faster than the wind. Her husband’s troops were no longer here. There was nothing but bones and bloody bits and pieces of corpses. His demons had feasted. He would have drunk blood with them, too, if it had given him satisfaction.
A grim, hunched silhouette in the distance was doing just that. He was leaning over the remains and cradling the wounds. He also kidnapped children from the village and drank their blood, here on the battlefield. Asmodeus! Madael grinned at the sight of him here. Like a shadow, he always loomed over the empty space. Once he thought of something bad, he was there.
And now, just as his master leaned on his sword, he left his victim and began pestering him with exhortations. They came like echoes. Madael could have simply flown away from them, but he was unwilling to leave the battlefield. He wanted war, and there was none. So it would have to start somewhere else in the morning. He grinned wryly again. Yes, that’s where he’d like to fight this time.
It was as if the grim creature had caught his thoughts. Asmodeus suddenly expressed concern. Strangely, he was beginning to get nervous. Not only his hoarse voice, but his entire mutilated body spoke volumes.
«Do you think about what you have to lose?»
«I have nothing to lose. I’ve already lost the most precious thing,» Madael jammed his sword into the ground and stared up at the darkening skies. The wind parted his strands, almost burning his face, pulling at his skin like golden wire, so soft to the touch, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if one day they had turned into writhing worms. He didn’t care anymore. As he had said, he had lost the only thing he wanted to have. There was nothing more to lose.
Rhianon caught herself repeating the names of the sentinel gnomes in her sleep. Clo, Melor, Seth, Hugh, Horace, Ivan, Pip, Byrne, Soiro, Fodel… They sounded like the ticking of hands. Saying them, the tongue seemed to merge with the one single mechanism of the devil’s clock. Rhianon awoke in a cold sweat. It seemed to her that even after she awoke, she could clearly hear the clanging of the dwarves’ hammers, the movement of the counterweights and the hands, all in one single hymn of hell. She caught her breath when she thought the clock was moving very close by, right in her room and yet somewhere outside. They were measuring her deadline…
Was it deadline for what? Only the Cathedral of Thunder and the blood sacrifice came to mind. The vision of wings growing out of her back gave way to a very different picture. A golden-haired angel girl was trampling a dragon, golden limbs slithering, coiling around her ankle. The picture looks both triumphant and erotic. It is not clear whether the victorious girl agrees to make love to him or decapitate him. There was a beauty and the serpent. The mural was as clear as if imprinted on the retina of her eyes.
She had remembered the face of Yve, only his features were already blurred, merging with the endless dusk.
«Give me a chance! Just give me a chance!» whispered from the darkness his already powerless and distant voice. «Give me a chance to be born in his place in the body of a supernatural being.»
Maybe his taken life was worth it. Just a frail human, Yves died, and he could no longer be born as a supernatural being. Or could he? Would his giftedness have allowed him to do so? Sometimes Rhianon felt as if her bloody baby fingers were sliding across her still flat belly. Yve was so attracted to the supernatural life inside her. How he wished he could be part of that life. But she knew in advance that she would never let him. And the ghost disappeared back into the darkness with a stifled groan.
When Rhianon awoke, she found the room rattling. She didn’t remember taking any tame animals with her, but that was what was fussing over the bed. Here was her harpy, already stealing a cage of canaries from somewhere. With its sharp claws it had snatched the birds from behind the bars and torn their throats out. Rhianon cringed in disgust. But the tiny gold dragon was pleasing to the eye. It dragged unsteadily on a cord to which a box full of jewels was attached. None of the baubles were hers, and the ebony box was not hers either. But now it belonged to her precious Ingot, as she’d called the creature. The dragon’s paws were occupied, but in its mouth it was carrying a red rose for its mistress, or perhaps for itself. Rhianon never understood. But the thorns on the stem didn’t hurt him at all.
«It was I who took care of getting them here,» Orpheus voiced from the darkness. The invisible Orpheus slowly detached himself from the gloom and hid in it again, like an actor lurking behind a curtain. «Are you at least grateful to me? After all, you’ll have a lot more fun with them in this black hole.»
«Loretta is not a black hole,» she sternly reminded him, though she doubted it herself. Take this castle, gorgeous though it is, and it’s so bleak. Was this pile of stones worth fighting over?
Orpheus grunted disapprovingly. He did not find this kingdom magnificent himself, as he had said many times before. In his opinion there was not enough treasure in the treasury, too many people to be sent immediately to the executioner’s axe, and, in general, Loretta, he said, was squalid, no better than the Duchy of Rothbert. Rhianon was not even angry with him for that. She knew for herself that he had a point. Since she had fled, the treasury had indeed been depleted of money. Manfred had been too exhausted for the wars, the upkeep of soothsayers and wizards, and the entertainment of his own son. In retaliation for that, she let Drusil win a week, but only a week. For seven days he would feel like the richest and luckiest man in the world, and then his luck would change. He will begin to lose with such frightening regularity that he will be left without the last shirt, but even then his excitement will not be able to stop. He will go mad. Rhianon had already sentenced him.
Things were much more difficult with the other courtiers and members of the council, whom Orpheus said should have been sent to the scaffold immediately. Rhianon would have gladly done so. If it were up to her will, Angus and Hermione and Roderick and Darius and Clotter would lay down their heads right now. Even Hildegard, who hypocritically greeted the new queen as if she were her own sister, gave Rhianon a pang of dislike. The snake was up to something. Her affectionate kiss made Rhianon feel disgusted, as if a toad had licked her cheek, and the words «my dear sister» sounded like an insult. Although the maidens and courtiers who had previously surrounded Hildegard were all gone, Rhianon still felt that she was in a hornets’ nest.
It would have been easy to kill them all. She could have turned them to ash without even going near them, burned them and pretended she had nothing to do with it – they had burned themselves. There are a lot of candles in the castle, and anyone who isn’t careful can light their hair on fire. Especially it was Hildegard. Her long, tight black tresses, covered by a smoky veil, will burn so quickly. No one would even have time to help her. Pour a whole bucket of water on her, the fire would be unstoppable. Hildegard’s crisp brocade outfit would be such good food for the flames. Even better than brushwood
