Page 101 of Honey Cut
“Have you ever known the Scales to be wrong?” Mortimer asks softly. “In three years of being my saint?”
“No, but?—”
“Mark is a threat to the Church. We don’t know if he’s planning on attacking our people physically or through blackmail or reputational destruction or all three. He could be planning to kill the pope right now, for all we know.”
“But why?” I ask. I turn away and look at the reflecting pool. It’s speckled with yellow leaves, moving a little in the wind. “He wouldn’t—he’d have a reason. Everything he does has a reason.”
“We don’t know,” my uncle says. “The Scales is trying to find out. We just know that he’s making overtures to known adversaries and collecting early membership fees from the clergy who are part of Lyonesse.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have clergy members who are part of a kink club,” I murmur, but I’m not really interested in that part. No, my thoughts are wheeling over this conversation like startled birds looking for a place to land.
“A problem for another day,” says Mortimer. “And once Mark is out of the picture, Lyonesse will crumble anyway. We’ll make sure to scrub our secrets from the fallout, and then everything will be nicely dead and buried.”
“How could this have always been the plan?” My hands are flexing relentlessly in my pockets, like they’re seeking something to hold on to. “How could you not tell me?”
He sounds pitying again. “I didn’t imagine this would come about so quickly. I thought we were years away from the inevitable end of this project. And you are a consummate actress, but even you would struggle to play both wife and future assassin if the first role was to last for years.”
I’m numb. I’m not even cold anymore, I’m not even empty-feeling, because I feel nothing, like I am nothing, no different than the wet leaves in the pool or the damp air around me.
“I can’t kill him.” The words are thin. Small. I sound like a girl, and I feel like one right now too. Like that lost twelve-year-old staring at her mother’s casket and unable to stop the humiliating suck and groan of her sobs.
“But you must,” my uncle says. “It is God’s will, and who are we to subvert that? If Abraham was asked to kill Isaac, if God was asked to let his own son die, then who are we to resist our own time to take up the knife?”
thirty-nine
ISOLDE
I’m in my garden,alone in the dark.
There are lights strung along sections of the enclosure, lovely golden glows suspended in the dark, but the light barely touches me back here, near the fountain and under my tree. A fog has crept up from the river, and it veils the air, creating curtains and cloisters and making a hazy sanctuary of my little corner.
I’ve long since stopped trying to pray, and now I’m just sitting, my thoughts as aimless as the fog.
I can’t kill Mark. I can’t kill him because I love him, because I’m fascinated by him, because he said,I have you now. You belong to me. And he meant it.
At least once, at least however briefly, he meant it.
But here is the unyielding truth: I can’tnotkill Mark. My entire life has been about serving the Church, and I have given God everything I have. My dreams of becoming a nun, my body, my innocence, my eventual guilt.
Mortimer left me with both a warm smile and a chilly warning. He loved me as if I were his own daughter, he said….and also if I failed, he would need to rethink my role as a saint.
And who am I if I am not this? Who am I without my honeysuckle knife and my footsteps in the dark? Without my certainty that I am God’s hand here on earth?
What if God is withholding my certainty now as a test? What if it’s myown doubtthat’s punishing me with even more doubt?
What if I obey and I feel right again?
It doesn’t matter how many times I wipe the tears off my face, my cheeks are still wet. My face is cold when I touch it, but so are my hands, and so is all of me. I have no idea how long I’ve been out here. Several hours at least. I’m supposed to be in the hall tonight—there are guests ahead of the celebration tomorrow. It’ll look strange that I’m not there, and however Mark feels about me after learning about my infidelity, he won’t like that.
But I can’t make myself move or stand. I feel as insubstantial as the fog and also as rooted as the cherry tree behind me. I don’t know if I can be around Mark right now, if I can even look at him and hear his voice. How can I hold this bitter choice inside my body while I’m also surrendering that body to him?
And if we were alone…if for some reason he’d decided to put what happened in Belgrade behind us and we returned to our little idyll of sex and chess, what then? Do I think I can hide it from him? Do I really think I can endure being curled against my husband’s hard chest and silently weighing suffocation against stabbing? Poison versus a quick fall from Lyonesse’s roof?
“Isolde?”
I look up and see Tristan coming toward me. With the barely-there glow of the lights behind him and the silvery cling of the fog, he doesn’t look real at first. He’s an idea, a story. A memory of a dream.
And if I let myself, it’s easy to see him like he’d be in a dream, with his hair long and a fur-lined cloak slung over his shoulders. It’s easy to imagine torches instead of strung light bulbs, the roar of the Atlantic rather than the purl and chatter of my fountain.
