Page 5 of Seduction of a Psychopomp
It wasn’t until the servants began to trickle out, squeezing past us through the door of the antechamber in an effort to flee the awkwardness of our first meeting, that I became aware of others in the room. I was at once overwhelmed by the bustling movement and—as I lifted my gaze to take in the fierce woman with fire in her violet eyes who must have been her mother, leaning over the woman with a damp cloth to wipe her brow, looking every bit the part of a lioness protecting her cub from intruders—I was filled with regret at interrupting what felt like a private moment. My grandmother sensed my hesitation and took my hand, making it so I couldn’t retreat. Though I towered over her, I was immediately five years old again, holding my grandmother’s hand and trusting that she knew how best to confront every difficult situation. Perhaps I’d never truly grown out of that.
She towed me gently along with her as she stepped into the room to greet my future mother-in-law. Arresting though the crown princess was, it was her daughter that drew my attention, my gaze drifting back to her small form as though magnetized. It was a strange feeling, being this close to someone who—for all intents and purposes—really should be dead, andnotseeing their core memories and inner psyche playing out on a loop in my mind. I couldn’t see any of her past at all, and I was surprised at how much that disappointed me. Not that I wanted her to be dying, but I wanted toknowher.
I focused my magic, poking tenderly at her spirit with little tendrils of my power. No hint of her past or her inner thoughts, and I only caught the vaguest glimpses of our future—hints of things that might be, indistinct impressions, maybes that seemed more like an unformed dream than anything coherent.
This wasn’t entirely surprising. I could often see threads of people’s futures, though the closer I am to someone the easier it is to follow those threads. Because of my friendship with Levi, I’d known the moment I saw Elara that she was meant for him, and the image of their child, Lysander, had flickered into existence almost instantly at his conception, the shy boy clearly detailed in my mind, but the man he would someday become was fuzzy at the edges. I’d found myself already strangely possessive of the child, even before his mother had known she was pregnant. People passing on the street were much more difficult to see, the little choices that they made spider-webbing out into dozens of possible futures that may or may not happen.
Torn between the need to know her and the embarrassment of feeling like I was invading her privacy, I retracted my magic and let it dissipate.
“Don’t worry, she’s much prettier when she’s not sick,” the little fae girl said, standing at the foot of the bed and turning to me with the most innocent expression on her tiny face.
I blinked at her in horror, the heaviness of her words feeling as though they would crush my chest. As if this woman’s prettiness or lack thereof dictated her value. As if I were a horse trader come to check the teeth of some broodmare to see if she was worth purchasing.
My grandmother squeezed my hand where she held it, and I flinched as her words came back to me.“She has a pretty face, and she’ll make pretty babies for my favorite grandson.”
“That’s quite enough, Roxana,” the older woman’s voice was an icy wind in the dead of winter.
“I’m just trying to help!” the child protested indignantly.
“Go join the luncheon, please.” The woman’s tone made it clear that it wasn’t a suggestion, and Roxana flounced out of the room with an angry huff.
The woman—Crown Princess Aurora, my memory finally supplied—cast us a long-suffering look before muttering, “Please pardon my niece. I’m not sure why they sent a foolish child to escort you here.”
Because the rest of them are all bound up in debating what they think the ground rules of my marriage should be, I thought to myself, my eyes drifting back to Celeste where she lay on the bed. She looked so very small.
“Children often say foolish things, Princess. Your daughter is still strikingly beautiful, dear one,” my grandmother assured her quietly, releasing my hand and approaching the bed. “Even death could not strip her of that.”
I grimaced at that. Did it matter if the face you left behind held to some standard of beauty when you died? It brought to mind the image of a trampled flower, its petals crushed and stem ruined. It still had a form of beauty in that you could tell that it had once been a beautiful thing, but what stands out after its destruction is the loss. The tragedy of something so delicate and ephemeral destroyed beyond repair, pulled ever further from beauty by the mechanism of decay.
Her mother frowned, and I assumed her thoughts ran parallel to mine, until she said, “Beauty or no, I’ve long feared that death would steal her away from me.” She took a deep breath and released it, passing the damp cloth over her daughter’s forehead and smoothing down her hair with it. “Now it seems that you will anyway.” Bitterness and exhaustion leaked through her words.
A knock at the door required her attention and every ounce of tiredness and pain instantly disappeared from her expression, her features a perfect mask of strength and patience. “Yes, tell them I’m coming,” she told the servant. She sighed again as the young man left, the mask falling away and weariness creeping back in. “Forgive me, dearVeardur, and welcome to our home. I’m afraid I must attend to another problem. I trust that my Celeste is safe with you as a chaperone,” she said to my grandmother, casting me a glance that was so fast I might have imagined it before departing the room at my grandmother’s nod.
“Chaperone, pah,” Grandmother said once she was gone, as she made her way around the bed to take a chair where Princess Aurora had been standing. “If I didn’t trust you alone with the girl, I wouldn’t have arranged for you to marry her.” She lifted a hand to Celeste’s forehead, frowned, and then dipped her fingers into the water on the bedside table to test its temperature.
I drifted closer to watch her work, carefully observing everything she did. Would I need to do this for Celeste after we were married?
She dipped the cloth into the bowl of water again and carefully wrung it out before dabbing with breathtaking familiarity at the girl’s face. I supposed when you’ve been around dying people for a millennium, one sickbed is much like any other. Though one would think that I might feel the same, having witnessed more sickbeds, mortal injuries, and private moments in my relatively short lifetime than most people did in their entire lives, that was somehow different. Iknewthose people because they showed themselves to me. They showed those of us who could see it every corner of their souls in their last moments, and in knowing them, I loved them. But this woman, Celeste, was a complete stranger to me. I didn’t know her favorite recollections, or the people who formed her earliest memories, or the shape of her smile when she was pleased. I felt bereft.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Victor,” my grandmother uttered quietly.
I shoved aside my most pressing thoughts, since“I don’t know her”was a silly thing to admit to feeling uncomfortable about in this situation, and stated another simmering concern instead. “It seems a great cruelty.”
“What does?” she asked, pausing with the cloth halfway back to the bowl as she turned to study me with a startled expression.
I let my gaze fall to the frail woman’s form, considering the magical stasis her doctors had placed her in to keep her from dying, though she was clearly right at the cusp. It took me a moment to find the right words. “To drag her back into the land of the living when she’s already so far gone.” Wouldn’t it be simpler—kinder—to allow the natural progression of things?
“Hm,” was my grandmother’s only response as she turned back to whatever it was that she was doing. Neither of us spoke as she smoothed Celeste’s hair behind her small antlers and then wrapped her hands briefly around another bowl next to the first, I assumed to feel the temperature again, this one full of brown colored liquid, and sniffed at it. She found a spoon on the side table, dipped it into the liquid—apparently a broth—and raised the tiniest amount to press gently against Celeste’s lips. I watched with rapt attention, noting the way she held the spoon, the way she only allowed a drop at a time to enter the unconscious woman’s mouth, waiting until she swallowed to add any more. “I know you’re aware that sometimes babies, in the natural process of birth, get stuck in the birth canal.”
My gaze snapped back to her face, though she was still focused on what she was doing.
Her voice was soft as she continued. “And these days, when they are stuck so tight they cannot pass through—when coaxing, position changes, forceps, and even magic have failed—the mother is subjected to a cesarean section and the baby—sometimes rather forcefully—is backed out of the canal by the surgeon’s hands.” Grandmother replaced the spoon in the bowl and used a dry cloth to dab at Celeste’s mouth. “If she was ready to give up, I might agree with you,” she told me. “But this girl wants to live.” She frowned thoughtfully at Celeste for a moment and then tried again with the spoon. “In her anxiety and weariness, Her Highness claims that we are Death, stealing her daughter away from her after all. But of course, we are not. That is her emotions talking. We are the surgeon’s hands this time, cheating death. I think we can cheat death once every few hundred years.”
“As a treat,” I murmured.
She flicked the briefest glance at me with a wry little grin, there and gone. “As a treat,” she agreed. But then she sighed, and her tone took on a more somber note as she continued. “But just like the surgeon prying an infant out of a birth canal backward, this will be a very difficult thing. Painful.” She looked at me again to see if I was paying attention, but she needn’t have. I was hanging on her every word. She abandoned the spoon to the bowl of broth and turned to face me fully, gently reaching down to take Celeste’s hand in her own. “The Handfasting, of course, is a painful thing for both of you.” She turned the small woman’s hand over and studied her palm and the veins of her arm for a beat, before simply sliding her hand against her palm and holding it in a comforting way. “Just like birth, again, the pain is a necessary part of the process, I’m afraid. But the girl…” She paused to look at her face. “She will need time to heal from this, and it will be very difficult for her.”
“How will she even be able to make it through the ceremony?” I asked doubtfully. She looked as though she might breathe her last right here if it weren’t for the magical stasis they had placed her in.
