“Walk with me.”
I looked up suddenly to the other version of myself; she watched on to the scene before us, her eyes hollow, distant, like she wasn’t aware she was beside me. But when she turned her head and looked directly into my eyes, I felt her presence, her sentience. I shuddered inside.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She turned away, hugging her arms across her waist, her yellow dress falling softly around her knees, not blown by the wind that swept her hair. “Walk with me,” is all she said.
So I did. I followed her through the field, feeling the long grass between my toes, feeling every rock, every rise of soil touch the balls of my feet, while the warm wind did nothing to steal the chill radiating from her ghostly presence, like an icy cloth.
“Tell me where we’re going,” I called out.
“To find understanding.”
“Understanding? For what, who?”
“Jason.”
“Jason? Why?”
“You need to see.” Her voice had a distant, resonating echo to it—like she wasn’t real, or the part of her that once had been, no longer was.
“What do I need to see?”
“How you loved him.”
I stopped walking, the world going dark, quiet all around me. “That love was never real. It was the spirit bind.”
When she stopped also, I felt the eerie weight of her madness creep across my shoulders; the very energy of her impatience made the air thick and heavy. “That is the lie you tell yourself.”
“No. It’s the truth.”
She smiled conceitedly. “Then why do you wish he never died?”
My mouth gaped; I took a few steps back. “I wish no such thing.”
“Liar.”
“No.” I started walking away again. “We’re all better off now he’s dead.”
“If you believe that, then perhaps you’re more like David than I wanted to imagine,” she called out through the darkness.
“Perhaps I am.”
“Then you, like David, are no better than Drake.”
I stopped again. “David is nothing like Drake. How can you say that?”
“You saw his past. You saw the hate in his heart.”
“I saw a boy—one who bullied his brother. He is nothing like Drake.”
“Then you looked, but you did not see.”
I shook my head. “Even if David was evil once, people are capable of change.”
“Then why do you not feel that way for Jason?”
“Because he has done unspeakable things to my life!” I stomped my foot. “He hurt David—killed him. And maybe he isn’t dead, but Jason never knew about immunity. He meant to kill him. He meant to end him. And I can’t forgive that. I just can’t.”
“But you forgive David?”
“David never hurt me. David never did anything—”
“He never hurt me!” The girl appeared in front of me, teeth clenched, eyes suddenly black. “But where was he when I was in the dark—when I was being hurt by Jason? Where was he when I was alone, where was he when Jason was binding me?” Her voice strained. “He never did anything bad to us—but he never did anything right by us, either.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I shook her icy, bony touch off my wrist. “I have no feelings for Jason—not after what he did to his own brother. So stop haunting me with his memories. I don’t want to see them anymore.”
She lashed out and grabbed my arm again as I turned away. “He never wanted anything in this world so bad as he wanted to hurt David, Ara. You saw what he suffered in his human life. Where is your compassion?”
“I don’t have compassion for him. Not real compassion. He forged that when he came to me in my dream and had sex with me.”
“No, Ara. He didn’t. He earned that compassion through his kindness, protection, and love for you.” She stood with her arms by her sides, soaking from the sudden rain that came down in her world, but not mine. “He protected you. He hurt himself, hurt his own soul, then died for what he did to you in that room.”
“He felt nothing for me then. It was all lies.”
“No.” She stepped forward. “He fell to the floor each time he left that chamber; he cried so hard for the way you begged him to stop. But if he had—if he stopped, if he had not killed his brother, if he had not hurt you, they would have taken him away—they would have handed you over to someone else, and he would never have been able to stop them from what they wanted to do to you.”
“What would you know?” I screamed. “You’re just a dream. You’re me—a part of me. You don’t know what Jason felt. You can’t know.”
“If that is true, then this is what you wish he felt. This is what you want to believe.”
“Of course I do. It’s human nature to find a reason—a connection.” I turned away. “It’s called Stockholm syndrome.”
She only laughed loudly as I walked faster and faster, trying to detach myself from the drain her mere existence brought on my soul.
“Don’t you walk away from me, Ara. You can’t escape me. I’ll keep bringing the memories until you see,” she called after me. “One day—you will see.”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“There is always the truth.”
“I know the truth.”
“And the truth is—” her voice became smaller the greater distance I gained. “The real truth is, you’re just afraid to love him because you don’t want to grieve him, too.”
I dared not turn back. She was wrong—everything she said. This was just a nightmare—words Arthur spoke, fear of what was to come and the deep hope I felt to be rescued while I was being tortured by Jason—all rolling into one horrible dream. I had to wake up.
Wake up, Ara. Wake up!
“Time to wake up, Princess Amara.”
My eyelids popped open, the warm scent of toast and garlic filling my nostrils before daylight signed the registry of consciousness.
“I trust you slept well,” said a very unfamiliar voice; a tray appeared on my lap.
I looked down at a coffee cup and a plate of eggs and bacon, then sat up a little more. “I…I was having a nightmare,” I said before I could stop myself.
“May I enquire what it was about?” The man showed his face then; kind eyes, aged, wrinkled skin and grey hair. Human.
“Oh, um. It was about being a queen, I think.” I grabbed the fork and broke the yolk over my toast.
The old man smiled. “Then, I do not feel so bad for waking you.” He bowed. “I am Edgar, your butler.”
“Nice to meet you.” I smiled.
“The pleasure is all mine.” He wandered over and opened my window, letting in the smell of wet grass and the hum of crashing waves, pleasantly accompanied by the resonance of a violin.
“Where’s that coming from—that music?”
Edgar smiled. “That would be Arthur Knight, Majesty.”
I closed my eyes and felt the notes in my heart. “Where is he? Is he in his room?”
“He is. Shall I request he desist?”
“Oh, no. No, please don’t. I like it—” I slipped my legs over the side of the bed, leaving the tray by my pillow. “Ask him to wait for me, please? I’d like to speak to him.”
“As you wish.” Edgar bowed slightly, then walked away, closing the door behind him.
I slipped into my light denim shorts and white tank top with the shoestring straps, then scuffed my toes into my flip-flops as I walked out the door, leaving my hair in the ponytail I’d slept in. It would probably only get messier at training today anyway.
The lure of Arthur’s music led me down the corridor by my ears, touching my soul like a warm hug, and the scent of garlic followed me out of my room, stealing the sweetness of summer rain outside. As I neared his open door, the music wrapped around me, daylight disappearing in the depths of his dark room; I could just make out the edge of his four-poster bed to the right and one column of pale light shining through a window beside a fireplace. Arthur stood on the other side, his body framed by the shadows behind the closed curtains of the second window. I stood in the doorway, wriggling my toes, unsure if I should enter, but so lost in the perfection of his every note that I likely couldn’t walk anyway.
His whole body moved with the flow; his forearm swinging with each stroke of the bow across the strings; his head rolling, taking his body through the soul of the song. I could only just see the side of his face from the small pillar of light, showing the contour of his cheek and the corner of his eye, but it was enough to see the smile he wore there. I smiled too as he lowered the violin, the song ending before I wanted it to.
“Good morning, my lady.”
“Morning, Arthur.” I crossed my arms and leaned on the doorframe, watching him place his violin in its case on the table.
“I hope my playing did not disturb you.” He snapped the case shut then turned around to face me.
“No. But that would be a sound I could wake to happily anyway.”
“Then, I shall play for you at every sunrise.”
We smiled at each other across the room.
“Please, do come in, Princess.”
Unlike the hesitation I always felt to enter Mike’s room these days, I felt none walking into Arthur’s. I wandered over and took his hand, smiling when he kissed it. The smell of rosemary and mint, and the dry parch of ash from a fireplace not lit for a long time filled my nostrils. My head turned instantly to the scatter of plants and herbs all over the box seat, sitting neatly in the cove of the window.
“The song I was playing, you know it, don’t you?” he asked.
I looked back at him. “It’s the same one in my music box—the one David gave me.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Who composed it?”
He leaned on the heavy wooden table and folded his arms. “Vampirie.”
I felt privileged then, felt a kind of intimacy that comes from knowing a secret no one else knows. Just the notes of that song were so wondrous, so ancient—written so long ago, in a time before pianos, in a time before great composers like Mozart, who would have given anything to hear such a masterpiece—to hear notes arranged in a way no mortal had ever thought to try. And here I was, just a girl of the twenty first century, not a historian or a person of any great importance, and yet, I had been privileged enough to know such a tune—a story that came from a place before time.
“May I ask—” Arthur turned to me, “—who taught you the words?”
“The words?”
“Yes. You sung them once, I was told, when…the day David died.”
I swallowed, blinking. “I…I don’t remember doing that. Did I really?”
“Yes.” His gaze dropped to the floor.
“Well, how would I know them?”
“A question, my lady, I had hoped you might answer.”
I wandered over to his window and rested my head where the bricks cornered outward, forming a cosy nook around the box seat. Outside, a rainy sky darkened the greens, making the hedge labyrinth, the garden that looked like a chessboard and the forest border look richly coloured—something toned by enhancing the hues artificially. “Did Jason know the song?”
“He did. Why do you ask?” Arthur said, and light filled the room behind me, coming through the window as Arthur opened the curtains on the other side of the fireplace.
“Maybe he taught me the words.” I smiled at his memory.
“When would he have done that?”
“In a dream. Many dreams.” My arms tightened around myself, my distracted gaze, full of thought, on the day below.
“Dreams, you say.” There was a fondness to Arthur’s voice. “He called them mind-links.”
“Yes. But I like to think of them as dreams.” So they don’t seem so real.
“Then he came to you other times, aside from when he bound you.”
“Yes,” I said. I knew I probably shouldn’t trust Arthur with this, especially since Mike and Morgaine didn’t even know, but something in my heart told me he would keep this secret for me.
“Was he kind to you?”
I nodded, letting my head fall softly against the bricks again after.
“I never believed he did not love you.” He stood beside me, smiling down at the rainy day; I looked up at him, tilting my head slightly since he was that bit taller, like David. “He had the council convinced his affections were a ploy, but I never believed it.”
I swallowed. “I did.”
“I know. He needed you to believe that.”
“No, that was how he felt,” I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I didn’t feel the meaning in them I usually did. Arthur knew that, too. It was in his smile. “Was Jason sick as a child?”
“Sick?”
“Mm.” I nodded, not really feeling like I was in the room—still standing on the cusp of my last dream. “He showed me memories.”
Arthur cleared his throat. “Yes, he was sick.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“He…Jason was four when his father saw fit to punish him for speaking out of turn by leaving him on the doorstep for the night, like an ill-mannered pup.” The anger from hundreds of years passed remained in his undertone. “The boy was near death by morning. He came down with the fever and was not predicted to last the winter. But he did, and when spring came, he showed promising signs, but was never quite the same again. His lungs were weak—his body, even the poor boy’s soul.”
