She Sleeps to Wake

Once, when Lesser had been four (back when she’d been small enough to fit comfortably into the curve of her father’s body when he curled up to sleep), she’d woken up in the middle of the night with the purr of the void in her ears. Everything had been blank and blanched to the color of her father’s hair. Even when she’d blinked and blinked and tried tearing up a bit, her eyes still didn’t seem to work.

In that absolute white-darkness, all she could sense was her father, and all there was of him was an enormous, invisible, all-encompassing rumble, like a warm trembling of air in a bottomless hole. He—it—had encased her completely. It held her suspended inside itself, a great big jaw with no teeth cradling her in an infinite, swallowing restfulness. Moments passed before she mastered her terror enough to realize that it was whispering something to her: hesh-a hesh-a, like the chant of the wind’s passage through the trees.

Then it sensed that she’d awakened and it stopped.

At first she’d been too numb to talk, terrified of this overwhelming and monstrous thing that had been hiding inside her father all this time. But she was young, and it was warm and soft and it didn’t hurt her, so she quickly found enough courage to speak to it. “Papa,” she’d said (she was still young and unsophisticated enough to call him “papa” instead of “father,” back then). “Papa, what were you saying?”

“Why are you awake, my darling?” was all its answer.

“What were you saying?” she pressed, in her low and stubbornly patient voice. “What were you saying, what were you saying—”

Finally, it answered her, but not without a note of hesitation. “Why… it was only your name.”

“I have a name?”

“Of course, my most beautiful.”

“Tell me, papa! Is it a good name? Does it mean something awesome like ‘star’ or ‘dragon?’ Tell me, tell me.”

“I cannot.” With a rustling, organic movement it forestalled all the other questions that were buzzing about in her throat. And suddenly, her father’s face was right next to hers, and the whiteness had dissolved into blue moonlight, carried along by the smell of minty, musky flowers. Suddenly, he was her silly, playful father again, and he was smiling with blue powdered lips. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, so she pressed her lips against his so her mouth would carry the imprint of that smile forever.

“Hmm,” he said after a while, and moved his head back lazily. Then he captured her gaze with that frank, guileless look of his—so surprising whenever it shone through his artifice—as if he were a child as much as she was. With a little boy’s solemnity, he continued, “I can tell you only when you’re much, much older. It’s a very heavy name. It’s too big for you right now, my sweetling, so it won’t fit.”

She wiggled, certain that age couldn’t be a serious reason for anything. “Please, please?” And because she was his daughter and fascinated with the imitation of all of his manners, she tried to use his own weapons of persuasion against him. “If you love me,” she said with a pouting slyness that didn’t suit her years, “If you love me, you’ll tell.”

For a moment, her shared with her a look of perfect understanding. Then he slipped away, and hid into a coy, hard beauty that covered him as tightly as the implacable fingers of a child around a beloved button or a string or a bit of lint. “Well,” he said. “If you love me, you won’t insist until I say you’re ready.” He paused, his exquisite eyes widening as if he were slowly realizing some gentle tragedy. “Don’t you love me?”

When she couldn’t answer at once, he shook himself away from her. “Why, I think you don’t. You don’t. You cruel, you heartless, little thing! And I loved you so—I carried you next to my heart for so long, my sweet baby—bled for you, and tore myself open for you—suffered over every mosquito bite that spotted your skin. And you think you know what’s best for you better than I do? I’ve suffered—I’ve been misunderstood—all for you—” between snarling and sobbing “—but how was I to know you’d turn out to be such a selfish, horrible, ungrateful, bloodsucking leech?”

Papa! she tried to say, as she shrank away from him, quivering herself into pieces. Papa that’s enough! Papa, you know I love you. Papa, you shouldn’t do this, not to me.

But she knew if she’d said that, he would have scowled down at her and demanded to know what “this” was. And she loved him too much, feared him too much, to find the courage to explain any of it: how he’d snatched back the dagger she had stolen from him and shown her how to use it by thrusting it into her stomach, twisting it petulantly, conceited in his greater knowledge like a little boy, cruel like a spoilt little girl, as if he had the right to be a child as much as she was, when he was supposed to be older, wiser, more forgiving, her father.

All these emotions and images, and she had no words. So she heated herself with indignation, burned in self-righteous frustration, because if she hadn’t, she would have been afraid. Afraid that he’d meant what he’d said. Afraid that this was the last time he slipped away, because he wouldn’t be coming back for a next, and she didn’t have the words to even just try and call him. Overcome and dizzy, she began to cry in outrage.

And then he was laughing, apologetically and guiltily, saying how silly she was to believe him, while worry and love and self-recrimination crawled and devoured each other across the landscape of his face. He’d taken her into his arms, soothing her when she became sure enough of him to yell and throw a tantrum, offering his throat and shoulders when she bit and clawed. She’d subsided after a while, kissing his chest and neck where she’d wounded him, and they both cried sorry with genuine feeling, even though they both knew they’d hurt each other again tomorrow.

Then they lay back down on their bed, their smiling lips like reflections of each other with no one to tell who was the real and who was the mirror. Suffused with voiceless tenderness, Lesser buried her hands in the perfumed curtain of her father’s hair, caressing his nape until he began to purr. Gradually, he transmuted into an enormous rumbling, like the steady, gentle growls of waves nestling in from the sea, and he drowned them both in his languid arms. For a long time afterward, Lesser lay very still, counting heartbeats until she was sure her father was deep in dreams. Then she cupped his sleeping face in her palms and started speaking to him without words.

I love you, she said with her fingers. I love you like blood, love you like clot. I love you like a scab. A scab. I want to keep picking, and picking, and picking, because even though it hurts, it feels so good to peel that scab away and feel the crusty, dirty thing unstick itself from the good flesh to uncover the soft, weeping skin underneath. Because I don’t know you underneath. I lived and died inside you, and still, I don’t know. I’m so hungry for the truth of you.

And this she said out loud, whispering against his cheeks as she curled her little hands around hanks of his hair, “Oh papa, I think I hate you.”

His eyes came open then, round and alien and as infinitely dead-white as darkness. She jerked back, but his arms had turned into ice around her: skin colder than the absolute purity of white, and it numbed her until she was unable to shiver. He didn’t breathe. His heart and throat were silent. But his eyes, his eyes were open, and the strands of hair she’d been clutching uncoiled themselves from her hands as if they had a life of their own.

The movement around her trembling fingers startled her into frantic consciousness, and she started to beg him, papa, papa, I love you, I’m sorry, don’t be dead, don’t be evil, as she brushed his face all over with butterfly touches. She traced his frosted eyelashes and brows, felt the cold bone of his cheek, kissed fingertip to lip over and over, until the terrible idea came to her: she should close his eyes. And this she did without hesitation, smoothing his eyelids over the cold, sightless spheres of his eyeballs.

Then telling herself he was her old papa, silly papa just asleep, she nuzzled her head into the curve of his chin and insinuated her fingers into his fists, trying to warm him with her body.

When he woke up in the morning, she cried inconsolably and wouldn’t let go of him for days. And she’d never asked him her name again.

Lesser came awake, completely drained of all emotion like a lake of tears in a drought. She came awake in white darkness and understood that she was in a brothel in Singing, sleeping in the arms of a girl whose name she could not remember, and that her father had left her again and that he’d probably never loved her at all, not really.

She felt empty. Restless, the way a hungry animal is restless. She untangled herself carefully from the girl’s arms and knelt down a little distance away, dazedly trying to untwist knots of fog from her black hair.

Night, or something like it, rustled softly. “Mmm. Hey,” the girl said, her breath curling in the mist. “You’re awake. What are you doing?”

“Dear, dear ,” Lesser wanted to say. When the word didn’t come, her fingers roiled in impatience. She pulled at her hair, trying to put a name to the other girl—to the supple, brown limbs and sad, dark eyes and the smiling mouth that never seemed to be without its red paint—and succeeded at finding nothing but remembered impressions. The girl was Prettiness and Quiescence, Gentleness and Softness, Milk and Cloud, Stare-out-the-window and Smile-at-the-world. But Lesser couldn’t find her name. “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said, abandoning all attempts at softening her words with endearments. “Thank you for everything, but I have to go.”

The girl came wide awake. “To where?”

“Anywhere,” Lesser said. “Family. Friends.”

“You have no family, you said. No friends either.” She crawled to Lesser and embraced her, whispering into her ear, “Stay with us girls here. Taking’ll come on Mournday, and I’m sure he’ll give you a room of your own. You’re not ugly and Taking always needs fresh girls. Especially ones who could do head-pictures for the misters.”

For the second time that night, Lesser slipped away from the girl’s arms, stung by those words: not ugly. Not ugly, yes, but never pretty, never beautiful, not even ever close. “I don’t think Taking will want me working here,” she said sharply. The memory of the girl’s soft skin and silken hair remained on her flesh, and she couldn’t help but resent how her own hair and skin (and eyes, nose, lips, neck, hands, waist, feet!) suffered in comparison. The restlessness came over her again, like a black tide against the white darkness of the fog, and a fierce longing to run and fight and be wildly unbeautiful and unloveable began to pound behind her eyes. “I was not made for this sort of thing,” she added, with brittle dignity.

“Is anyone?” the girl pointed out, glossing over the fact of her own startling beauty. “I’ll be teaching you, don’t worry. I can show you how to suck a willy nice and how to kiss with tongues. And you can make your skin softer with oils and scrubs, I swear. I’ll teach you how. That is, if you go on telling me that story in my head. Don’t leave it hanging in the middle. Besides,” she continued, taking Lesser’s hand into her own and nipping gently at the knuckles, “remember who paid the bone-setter to look at your arm?”

“I will pay you,” Lesser said. “But not as one of Taking’s whores.” Before the girl could protest, Lesser slid her hand away and undid the top button of her plain, gray dress. She regarded her companion gravely. “I could give you three hours. It would be more than enough to repay my debt, even if I charged less than half the minimum delusionary rate.”

“But you aren’t a real delusionary,” the girl shot back, taunting her in a spirit that was equal parts exasperated affection and shrewd honesty. “Now, if it was Silkengreen the Bold or Redblood of the Fifth Laughing Angel, I’d take one hour at twenty shakes willingly enough. But you?” She sniffed with mock disdain, and was unable to keep herself from bursting into giggles afterward.

Lesser felt a twinge of nausea, remembering that this playful, faintly insolent manner was exactly how her father was when bargaining with his clients. Sweetie, he would say, as he tickled the nape of the man he was draped all over. You couldn’t even get it up until I came along. Don’t you think I deserve a little something more? He would caress and lick and squeeze; he would simper and flatter and tease; then he would turn to look at her, hiding in her corner beside the bed, and let her see how his eyes had turned into glass.

In the moments she spent struggling with her memories, she lost track of what the girl was saying. She came back to herself only at the tail end of the other’s speech.

“—if that teary tale you told me was true, that is. You’re just a little, lost wanderrat who’s learned some tricks from some hedger. Half delusionary rate’s too high. I say you might be better priced at a fourth. That means eight hours for the twelve shakes you owe me.”

Lesser bit her lip. She tried to collect herself, bring into play what little she knew of bargaining. “Six,” she said. “And we could finish the story tonight.” Awkwardly, she pulled the collar of the dress down to reveal the cleft between her small breasts. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I don’t want it to end.” The girl was frowning, but without realizing it, she’d leaned forward and fixed her gaze on Lesser’s bare throat.

Lesser pointedly unbuttoned the dress down to her navel and guided the material down her arms with a single, languid shrug of her shoulders. The movement came naturally to her body; she’d watched her father do it so many times. “We were with your new master,” she said, with a slight hitch in her voice. She had to clench her hands into fists to keep them from fluttering to cover her chest. With tremulous control, she forced herself to relax, but was unable to keep the slight buzz of inanity from her fingers. “He has just stolen you from his old rival, your former master, and the two of you are now in his carriage. His gaze is hot on you. You are trembling, for you remember him as your childhood tormentor, but he doesn’t recall you yet—he is thinking only of his victory over his rival, and the pleasure he would be taking tonight from his lovely, new slave. We stopped there, didn’t we?”

“And, and then?” Almost frantically, the girl wriggled out of her shift. She settled beside Lesser like a very young child listening to her mother, as unselfconscious in her full nudity as Lesser was ashamed of her bare shoulders and breasts.

“Our skin,” Lesser said, so softly it was barely more than a movement of the lips, and submitted to the girl’s over-familiar embrace without another word. Then they slept together, and dreamed one dream: of a beautiful man, strong, powerful, terrible, cruel to his enemies, but gentle for one woman. A cunning man, sought-after, lusted-over, but whose love was trapped in a jeweled box with only one key.

And Lesser remembered the girl’s name now, that it was Dreaming, and she realized, without words, that every girl dreamed this same way, for a monster to take her entire life into his hand, give her the world, and ask nothing from her but worship. She felt savage and contemptuous, weak and humiliated and hungry. Because she knew she had her monster as well; she knew she would never be free of him. He kept her name; he was all she had of beauty. And she was restless, she felt restless, longing to be snuggled up within a great white jaw with no teeth once again, just one more time.

In her sleep, Lesser wept. In her sleep, Dreaming moaned, laughed with tears in her eyes, and trembled with ecstasy at the whip, at the chain, at the love. They slept and sweated together in the night, one limb-tangled creature both infinitely tormented and infinitely glad.

When Lesser woke the next morning with the taste of flashing eyes and a whirling cape in her mouth, Dreaming had already gone. What few things Lesser had brought with her into the brothel—her little, black knife and the iron ring which identified her as a citizen-of-no-place—were already laid out on the seat of the room’s only chair.

She rolled to her feet, stood dazed, walked in a cloud of dream, and laid an affectionate hand on the chair. It rocked beneath her touch. Steadying it, she closed her eyes, remembering how—in her days of pain and healing—she used to watch Dreaming sit on this very chair in the afternoons and survey the world outside with an inexplicably kind smile on her lips. How once in a while, the lovely girl would turn around, with that smile still shining from her lips like a ray of sunlight trapped from the sky outside, and bathe Lesser with the light of it, the way the sun would bathe a dry, little lizard and bring it to life. It was a sun-smile, an unambiguous smile. It never had any white monsters in it; it was never, ever cold like glass.

It would never be enough.

Opening her eyes, Lesser brushed aside the tattered curtain over the window to look at the world Dreaming smiled over every afternoon.

Darkness blew in like a breath of smoke and suffocated her. It was a black dead-end that the window faced, an alley. As Lesser watched, a door directly beneath her window opened and a man tossed out the contents of a chamber pot. The smug explosion of feces against the wall was as final as the slamming of the door.

Lesser shivered and drew back, confused, unable to accept what it all meant. She tried to think back on Dreaming’s smile but it slid away from her. Unbidden, a droplet tickled her cheek and she raised a hand to her face to pinch it away.

Dreaming would do well enough without her, Lesser assured herself. The girl had a way: she was an alchemist of the heart, a magic-girl, and she was stronger than Lesser would ever be. Soon, a nice, young man, or a gentle, old lord from the upper city would fall deeply in love with her smile and her innocence, and he would steal her away from Taking’s brothel, carrying her to a sunny place where her mouth might be rid of its whore’s paint and allowed to soak up as much brightness as it gave off.

And Lesser smiled tiredly, knowing in her heart that it was a lie. That soon, Dreaming would become just another bitter prostitute, with deflated breasts, heart shriveled in sarcasm, and a love for nothing but shake and death. And Lesser was abandoning her to it alone.

She shook her head, like an animal shying away from a halter. “You’re exaggerating,” she told herself. “You are being morbid! Think of it rationally. Will you really be able to do anything for her, whore’s daughter? You who have lived on nothing but lies and false love for all your life?” But it was with remorse that she kissed the hem of the curtain, that she knelt to kiss the chair’s seat. And when she took her knife and her ring and fairly ran through the doorway, down the stairs, into the common room, her only thought was that she had to run, before every bit of noble feeling left in her could force her to change her mind and decide to become a mad, trapped, little whore just like her father.

Dreaming was in the common room, sitting on the knee of a man whose wrists were thicker than her thighs. Between her peals of sad laughter, she called out to Lesser, “You’ll come back, lover!”

“Goodbye,” Lesser replied, crossing the room without disturbing the momentum of her feet. She ignored the leers of Dreaming’s man: let him think what he would! Then with one hand hovering above the doorknob, she stopped. She turned and caught Dreaming’s eye for the last time. “Stay beautiful forever,” she said, as fervently as if her guilt had the power to make it so.

Then she released herself into the bright darkness of the world outside.

The fluffy-cuddly part of this chapter is dedicated to Out of the Orange. Only it didn’t turn out to be as fluffy as I thought it would be, seeing how Silver turns a little creepy at the end. I’m still working on something about Linove. Tsk. That boy needs more sweet, uncomplicated loving in his life.

And oh yes. I’ll be doing something a little different now. I’ll be posting teaser sentences! Isn’t that exciting? Be excited, minions! So. The opening sentence from the next chapter:

In Sihulsamor, a fashion show is not a fashion show without the spectacular deaths of at least two beautiful, young people…