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do you remember being born ?
— petscop
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cracked the egg i was born in
there was nothing inside it yet
just a face for a name i forget
— alter eagle, of montreal
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On the razor's edge between night and morning is when the boy comes. He's a pockmarked, pidgeon-toed thing, some grunt from another squadron with a mouth that sneers. Fordola despises him as much as she despises anyone, which isn't the point. The point is the door swinging open, the shuffle of unlaced boots upon the floor, the stink of a stranger in her space. He isn't even halfway across the room before she's on her feet to meet him, knife glinting in the silvery dark.
"One step and you're fish guts." Her voice reverberates like a clap, stinging and sharp. "Tell me what you're here for. Now!"
The soldier stops short of the knife's tip touching the hollow of his throat. There's fear in his eyes—good, clean fear, the only familiar thing in this wretched place. "It's not what you think," he says, the words high and pinched as if squeezed through a balloon. "I was told to fetch you at once. Lord Zenos, he—"
"Zenos?" The knife falters in the dark. "Why?"
The boy clicks his tongue. "I don't know. No one ever knows what he wants."
"Tell me what he said," she barks. "Word for word."
"Hell, he didn't say much at all! I was on patrol about to switch shifts and—I wasn't slacking, I swear it, I was just—"
"Quit your bloody blustering! Out with it!"
"All he said was, 'You. Fetch the Butcher.'" The imitation is a poor one—not hollow enough, no sense of some massive animal moving silently in the dark. "That was it. Didn't even say my name. I don't think he knows it."
"He doesn't," Fordola says distractedly, watching the boy's bitterness well up inside him until it shines through his eyes. He swallows, his throat bobbing like a white back of a duck; but there's an emboldened glint to his gaze now, a shark smelling blood. He saw her falter. Fordola never falters.
"But he's a man, right? Can't be too hard to figure out."
"Shut your mouth."
"Hope you washed," he says, backing away from her with a quickness that belies his smirking mouth. "But that's not a concern for your kind, is it?"
The knife flies from Fordola's hand, and he dashes away before it can strike him. It notches into the wall like a tooth sinking into fruit.
Moments pass in stony silence. The knife stays put. A throw like that would have killed him, and then there would be one less bastard in the world. She'd have the body gone in an hour if she had to. A brief fantasy plays behind her eyes: running away before sunrise, leaping over the cruel steel of this place until the ground gives way to earth, going home, going home.
You fool. You'd sooner turn yourself in.
Her eyes burn into space. Then she lifts a hand and cracks it hard against her face once, twice. The pain is brilliant and fresh, a pure spark, like the wasp that stung the back of her thigh ten summers ago back home, back home. Another hard crack of her palm and then her face is numb, and numb is what she needs.
"Walk," she says through her teeth.
Her body follows the command, a good soldier to the last.
The door to Zenos's quarters is a dark mouth tightly shut. Fordola stands before it, spine straight as an iron rod, fists knotted at her sides. There must be some protocol that exists for this, but it fails her. Does she knock? Announce herself and be ushered in? Hot blood beats in her throat and at her temples. Humiliation always shows in her face, flushes her skin red and makes her sweat. You need to fix that, says the cold command center of her brain. They'll use it against you—they'll take you and make you red—you need to become a stone, need to—
Zenos answers the question of protocol for her. The door swings open, and Fordola is awash in amber light for one blinding moment. When she blinks, the light is gone, and Zenos stands cloaked in shadow and vague candlelight. Trick of the eye, or perhaps insanity; either one is acceptable. Rather than his usual impenetrable wall of armor, he's dressed plainly, which is worse than if he wasn't. Fordola's guts twist.
"My lord," she says, saluting with enough force to mask the twitching of her arms. "You—requested my presence, and I came at once."
Zenos's stare is like two molten ingots; yet despite that intensity, he looks half-awake, almost drugged, his hair hanging lank and his white shirt slipping from one shoulder. It's the first time Fordola has ever seen the unobfuscated lines of his body, and it gives her a strange feeling, like seeing a lion skinned of its pelt.
"Good," he says, and grabs her arm to pull her into the room. The door is kicked shut behind them. Fordola closes her eyes, finds that quiet place inside herself that brings her back to her childhood bedroom—sunlight streaming through the tapestry over the window, lighting up every brightly woven thread until they glowed like magic. If she just thinks hard enough, she can throw her mind back into that sunlight, she can become a glowing thread; her body can remain here and do as it must.
"I apologize for the wait, my lord, I—"
"Are you familiar with the expressionist movement, Pilus?"
Fordola opens her eyes, blinks. Zenos stands in a pool of candlelight, watching her with the eyes of something not from this world. She swallows. "Afraid I don't know the word."
"That surprises me," says Zenos, not sounding surprised in the slightest; Fordola isn't sure his voice allows for it. "I would have surmised that you would be very familiar with it. Your homeland is where it began."
Your homeland. Sunburn pain. "We—they must have used a different word for it."
Zenos gives a noncommittal hum. He stares at her for a few silent beats, unblinking, his face like some tranquil god. When Fordola was small, she had dug up palmfuls of clay from the silt by the river and shaped it into an idol, a deity she had invented all on her own, with round eyes and a knowing, cursive mouth. It had scared her mother: I don't like how it looks at me, she'd said. Zenos looks like that idol now. Fordola turns her gaze to the floor.
"A fine word," Zenos says, turning gracefully on his heel to step over a pile of discarded clothes, miscellaneous papers marred with boot prints, naked knives. "A word given one part and one alone to play."
Fordola watches him move through the mess, his long sleeves carrying the scent of sleep and faded perfume: roses and something else, something hostile, like iron or blood. A slow boil of confusion bubbles behind her sternum. He isn't even looking at her; she has as much presence as a potted plant someone forgot to water.
"The empire despises art like this," says Zenos airily, drifting around a tall bookcase so that his voice is a sighing afterthought from the other side. "My father especially. He has a unique disgust for 'expressing' much of anything, you see."
Fordola keeps her mouth shut. If that's a test, she won't be the fool to find out too late. At her silence, Zenos peers around the bookcase with owlish, discerning eyes, and the effect is that of a doll head floating high above the floor. Then the look morphs into something amused, which Fordola likes even less, before he vanishes behind the books again.
"But I rather like it," he says, a little dreamy. "I think you will see why. Come."
Like speaking to a dog. Fordola obeys. Zenos has pulled out a large canvas and propped it against the wall, his head tilted as he studies it with wide eyes. The look on his face is almost childlike, giddy with something Fordola doesn't recognize. She pulls her gaze from him and regards the painting, which is as bright and strange as a sunrise on a distant planet: oranges and reds slashed upon an expanse of burnished gold. At its center, a blot of yolk-yellow, like an egg cracked.
"It was taken from the home of an Ala Mhigan family," Zenos drones. "A soldier brought it to me after his recent operation. He thought I would 'appreciate' it."
There's a pause. It must be Fordola's turn to speak now. She clears her throat, which feels full of sawdust. "And do you, my lord?"
"Appreciate it? Hm." Zenos puffs a breath through his nose as means of a laugh, but his face is unmoved. "No, I think not. The fool took it upon himself to enter civilian homes. He was never given such an order. But such are the wills of men who seek only hapless prey backed into a corner . . . though I am sure a man of his prowess could only hope to land a blow on an unmoving target."
Fordola is still staring at the shout of red slashed across the middle of the canvas. "Where is he now?"
At this, Zenos's gaze flicks upon her, almost playful, like a child who has stolen a cake from the kitchen. "Would you like to see?"
Fordola swallows, shakes her head. Disappointment ripples behind Zenos's glass eyes, which is dangerous, but then it passes like all else that touches him, empties out into nothing again. He yawns now, and a thin, high sigh leaves his throat. "The offer remains open," he says airily, "until he is put in the ground with the others. A bloody little excursion it ended up being. Men of his own squadron died on the field, yet he was able to spirit away this artifact without so much as a scratch. Now how could that be?"
In spite of herself, Fordola's nose crinkles in disdain, her mouth twisting with it when she says, "He was a coward. A greedy coward looking for recognition. There's no other explanation."
She hears the anger in her voice, a cold and curdling thing. Zenos's gaze burns into the crown of her head. "No other explanation indeed," he muses. "Unlike this painting . . . which can have a myriad explanations. What do you see, Fordola?"
The sound of her name reverberates in her ears like a whipcrack. It's the mundane presentation of it, the almost-familiarity, that gets her; it should sit restlessly in Zenos's mouth, should choke him before he can even find the breath to speak it, but it doesn't. It just sounds like a name—her name, that threadbare garment she left behind in her old bedroom millions of years ago.
She centers herself; she has to. "I see—I see movement, and color, and—"
"No. Go deeper."
"I see—anger. Anger and fear."
"Mm. Whose anger? Whose fear?"
Fordola grits her teeth. "My lord—"
"I used your name, did I not?"
"Yes. You did." A bead of sweat rolls down the back of Fordola's neck. "Zenos—the anger, the fear, it's—it's Ala Mhigo's."
Zenos tilts his head, his gaze probing but distant all at once. "A safe answer. Now for an honest one."
"I am being honest," Fordola says, breathless now as Zenos drifts from her side to—bafflingly—sit cross-legged before the painting. Like this, Fordola still only clears the top of his head by a few inches, and seeing the golden whorl of his scalp where the hair parts is more intimate than if he were nude.
"Do you want to know what I see?" he asks quietly.
It's then that Fordola realizes yes, she does want to know, she wants to know so ravenously that she could double over from it. The feeling comes from somewhere outside of her, a puppet string wrapped around her spine and pulling her upright. But Zenos isn't even looking at her; he doesn't hold the string, perhaps nobody does, but still it pulls.
"I see a birth," he murmurs, studying the painting with sleepless eyes. "The coming of some red and yawning beast, born at dawn. Half-human, half-bull. But it is the bull that crowns first . . . its horns as sharp as any weapon made for war. They carve through the world, out and out. The beast's first moment of perfect violence . . . before it can even speak, or walk, or think."
Outside the iron-latticed window, the first rosy finger of sun curls against a pale sky, like a newborn reaching. When Fordola turns back to Zenos, she finds him already turned to peer at her over the curve of his shoulder. His curtain of hair, even while unwashed and unbrushed, gleams like spun gold, and the blue eye staring out from beneath swallows all the light in the room. Fordola feels herself falling inexorably forward, forward, being dragged into that quicksand gaze, marching one-two one-two into its maw—
"Surely you have heard the tales of the Empress's demise," Zenos drones. "Well . . . perhaps not. Even Garlemald does not speak of her. My father and his indulgent grief saw to that."
Fordola shakes her head. The little bones of her neck creak like rusty machinery. She used to wonder in her early days here what the Empress would have looked like, and all that came to mind was an empty picture frame, or a black curtain barely parted to reveal a hand reaching for nothing. Sometimes it was a child's hand, gloved in lace; sometimes it was Zenos's hand, strapped in steel and pointed claws. But nothing sprung to mind for her face; she could have been of any age, with any color of eyes and hair, with a mouth that either scowled or smiled or—like Zenos now, staring over his shoulder—held itself in the straight, mute line of a doll in a curio cabinet.
Then, without expression, Zenos holds up a finger at each side of his head to mimic horns. "Cleaved in twain," he says, then drops his hands to his lap. "The bull crowned first, you see. My great-grandfather witnessed the whole act, spoke of it at length anytime I asked . . . the one memory of the Empress he and my father allowed me." He lolls back to the painting, moving as heavily as a figure in a dream. "And thus the new life is marked by another's departure . . . painted all in red, just like this."
Fordola stares down at the crown of his head—stares down. It almost unmoors her. Zenos has never been beneath her before, always looming like a red star pinned high above the mortal world; yet here he is, not only kneeling but turned away from her, away, as if she weren't armed with her blades and standing right behind him. He must know I wouldn't do something so mad, she thinks, and then comes a second, worse thought: But why? Why wouldn't you think that of me? What cause have I given to make you think I wouldn't do whatever it takes?
The blades at her sides sit warm and humming. Zenos, as if picking up on the thought, tilts his head just so to the side, and a slip of golden hair falls away to reveal his throat. All it would take is one clean slash.
Instead, Fordola goes to that quiet place again, where sunlight stretches long over her bedroom floor, over the quilt her mother made, over her hands. "Butterfly babies," she says. "That's what we'd call children whose mothers died in birth."
Zenos half-turns. He says nothing, but there's a keen edge to him that tells Fordola he's listening.
"When the chrysalis opens," she goes on, "a butterfly emerges, like the babe emerges from the mother. The mother is transformed into the new life. And so the mother and child become one being."
Zenos idly touches the ends of his hair, looping a strand around his finger again and again. "Hm. And how does one reconcile such a story when the child is a boy?"
"Nothing to reconcile, my lord. It would be the same story." (Or sometimes the story would evolve, and the boy that emerged from the chrysalis would take on the wings of a girl. Fordola had a friend like that—she had emerged from inside herself, had let her mother's name step forward. But Fordola doesn't mention that, not now, not even when Zenos goes as still as a watchtower.)
Silence gathers between them. Outside the arched window, the sun is properly rising now, throwing its golden body upon the floor and crawling, subserviant, around Zenos's folded ankles.
"A strange story," Zenos says at last. "How unlike the minotaur your butterfly is. It transcends itself, and somehow nothing dies. Your tale . . . believes the child could know anything but violence, the very thing that brought it into the world. The first shape it ever took."
"Ala Mhigo didn't see it like that."
Zenos presses his palms into the floor, arms straightening as he stretches upwards like a big cat. "Like what, exactly?" he asks, the words filtered through a groan of relief when something in his back pops. "Like an arbiter of destruction given but one task? That is unwise to overlook."
"Like there's someone to blame," Fordola says, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. "Like it's—someone's fault."
Zenos laughs, and the sound is as a gunshot. "My father could tell you many a tale about fault. His favorite word, I would posit." Then his face goes empty again, a death mask of some ancient saint, eyes turned to the heavens in waxy nothingness. "A foolish word. Whoever's 'fault' it is matters not." He gestures to the painting, and its wild red appears as Zenos's reflection, then as Fordola's when she gazes into it with him. "What we are left with," he murmurs, "what is . . . expressed . . . remains the same."
It could be right now. She could bring her blade down on the crown of his head. She could crack him open, an overripe fruit bursting in her hands; she could eat him raw, jaws rubied with royal blood, fill her belly with revenge and never be hungry again. She could do it right now, right now—now, do it now! It has to be now! The flesh of his neck unpeeling beneath her blade—now! Do it! The fruit of him spilled upon the floor at her feet. Would he grasp at her ankles, as the sunlight does? She hopes so. She hopes he claws at her, gasping and vulnerable, eyes rolling into his skull in the ecstasies of death. She hopes he pulls her down with him, where she belongs.
"Fordola," says Zenos, "tell me what you see. And do not lie."
The words come whispering. "It's . . . it's me. I'm looking at myself." Cracking. "In a mirror."
Zenos smiles—a clay icon in the sun. "Yes . . . very good." He takes in a sharp breath through his nose, and his eyes flash with something giddy, lion-hungry. An impossible heat fills the room, slips it hands under Fordola's clothes, makes her skin ache. Then it cools, and she is only offered the back of his neck again. "You are dismissed."
Fordola's head snaps up. The after-image of the painting leaves a red stain at the perimeter of her vision, tracking with each tiny movement of her eyes. Zenos is unmoving, a giant's body at rest. Fordola thinks of saluting, the way she's supposed to, thinks of saying my lord or even his name. But nothing comes. Her tongue is a river stone, her words buried in rubble.
Then Zenos's head turns just so, and his voice comes low and cold, unimpressed. "Or did you think I asked you here for something else?"
Fordola's stomach drops. Her stunned silence is its own answer. She turns without a word. (The lack of formality is never brought up, never punished. She will think about this later during the dark hours in her cell, when Ala Mhigo is free but she is not.)
She takes the long way back, rushing through the steel corridors like a tumbleweed. The ceiling hangs one thousand miles above her head. More nameless grunts' eyes follow her; she shoves past them, showing her teeth. Head down, she bursts out onto the courtyard, and only when she's sure she's beyond anyone's line of sight does she breathe, sucking in the huge, wheezing gasps of someone nearly drowned. The air is crisp on her sweat-damp skin, and it smells familiar, some bright flower cresting on a wave of Garlean steel. Mama used to put them in little jars of water on the windowsill. Fordola gags, spits onto the dirt.
The call of a kestrel beckons overhead. Fordola, wiping her mouth, looks up for the first time.
A red sky, red as muscle, bearing down on the world—the sun spilling its bright yolk over the clouds, like an egg cracked.