Once upon a time the Lady Elana knelt by the sickbed of her eldest son and thought of death. There was pain in her spine from her three-day vigil, and though she had long abandoned the prayer-fans her hands were festooned with the grays and reds of sacred ink. Her legs were numb at the knees, but despite her body’s pleas for sympathy sleep was the last thing on her mind. There were shadows roosting on the walls, fat spiders waiting to strike.

You can’t have him, she thought, grasping for the comfort of her son’s wrapped and skinless hand, the only one that remained. He didn’t stir – she had stopped hoping for that much – but she thought that he exhaled the slightest of breaths at her touch. Elana could have wept, but her eyes were hard as peach pits and her throat too clogged to swallow tears.

No, they wouldn’t have him. Though they waited in their corners and grew more brazen with every turn of the clock, they wouldn’t take him. Not now; not when he was faring better.

“He improves with each day,” the medicine man had told her that morning, and though Elana had seen the bulge of his pockets she gulped hope like sweet-syrup. It was probably the Fool who bribed the herbalist for his answers, the squat little songster who had always been Zander’s favorite.

“Sing us a ditty,” the young Lord had commanded of him on the night of his last feast, eyes alight with mead and good humor. He had smelled of health and laughter and the flowered soaps the maids had taken to his summer-jerkin, the one that would come back to her tussled and scorched with blood. Obedient as a hand-puppet, the Fool had opened his mouth…

(I knew a maiden with a mane of gold

Her skin was gray and her eyes were cold –)

There were footsteps outside the chamber, the gentlest of whispers against the rhythmic groans of a distant sufferer, and the Lady stiffened from her reverie. Her son’s hand was still in her own, his fingers inexistent beneath the stifling swath of cloth, and suddenly she yearned for home. She wanted to see her son in his own bed, not in a comfortless stranger’s cot used by so many before him. She wanted colors instead of the strange walls spotted with hostile symbols; forbidden flowers to banish the morbid scent of herbs and day-old wrappings. Though home was only a carriage-ride up the hill, she knew that the temple-keepers enacted all their life-yielding prayers within their own sacred halls. There had been no question about bringing Zander here when his escort delivered him, limp and unresponsive, to her threshold.

Five days past he had talked of the hunt, bronze-skinned and blooming. Could time really be so cruel?

“He asks for you.”

There was no knock – nothing but the hiss of paper-robes – and though she knew well that the temple-keepers did not believe in doors Elana lifted her head with a start. She could not put a name to the acrid-faced man before her, but somewhere amid the hazy hours everything around her had lost meaning. Steady as melting wax, realization had dripped away until she was left with bones and staring shadows.

(She planted nettle-thorns in her gown

And plaited hemlock-cloves through her crown -)

Perhaps he read the incomprehension behind her dead look, for the temple-keeper gestured away from the chamber. “The child. Your son; he has asked for you.”

She couldn’t fathom what he meant at first; Zander couldn’t possibly inquire after her. He was here; she held him, her own beloved child… but it wasn’t long until another vision shouldered his image aside, a shade that smothered his golden rays. It was the quiet one who clouded her head, plump-mouthed and needy, scratching circles in the courtyard-dust while Zander galloped to the fields in his white-cloaked glory.

The Lady’s stomach gave a sudden twist of contempt.

“…your House has given him escort – he is not permitted to wander here – but this is not the first time – ”

“Never mind.” She could feel her son’s heat through the bandages. It pulsed in her palm, keeping rhyme to the ragged sounds that wafted from that other place. The steps were increasing, frantic despite the pillow-soles of the temple-keepers.

“Never mind.” Her voice was stronger now, less hoarse. “He was to open his eyes today – She promised. I have done my duties and still he burns.” Elana sought his face. “Bring the medicine man.”

He didn’t flinch away. His robes were a muddled gray – the skin of the shadows – but she locked the apprehension from her face. She would be strong for her son, her Zander, the child who had opened his mouth in laughter at the Fool’s song.

(Well a lord loved her and a lord loved she

And they dug their houses by the moonlit sea – )

“The medicine man is attending to other duties.” Elana couldn’t discern the look he cast out the chamber; the chill that ran through her was involuntary. “There is a birth taking place.”

“The Cleanser, then.” Couldn’t he feel their hunger flooding the room?

“It is a Poison birth, Lady. The toxin must be Cleansed from the body…”

“This is your Lord.” Her eyes were lights that sputtered like dying candles. The sounds were louder now, somehow closer, as if they stemmed not from the white-lipped agony of some laboring house-maid but from the living fever-heat on her son’s brow. The blood drained from Elana’s cheeks. “This is your Lord, and She promised!”

“She always keeps her promises.” The temple-keeper’s eyes were as rigid and immaculate as wall-carvings, and had her head not pounded she might have recoiled. (The shadows were in the room, breathing by her neck and watching, waiting, shrieking until her temples throbbed full to erupting.)

“Your son will open his eyes if she so promised. If you will step aside…”

Elana was not aware of rising, though her legs croaked in protest and threatened to buckle. She was apart from herself, dissolved into echoes that ricocheted off the walls and filled the room with smoldering cries. Zander’s hand was the only thing that stabled her – the sole force that kept her from taking to the air and mingling with the red sounds. She felt the temple-keeper moving somewhere to her right, hovering over her son’s flaming brow like an unearthly messenger.

(And his bride loved him and he loved his bride

But the sea took him on its screaming tide –)

Her hand was at his breast before she was aware of it, and though every crease of her son’s ashen face was permanently ingrained into her mind she searched it as hungrily as it were a prayer that had long eluded her. The temple-keeper mumbled words she could not hear for the brawl that resonated through her head, where the Fool’s painted face enacted a godless waltz with the eyes that swarmed, reeking, from the walls, while Zander rode away from her with a cloak that billowed like a wretched banner.

(SO SHE RIPPED HER DRESS AND SHE BELLOWED HIGH

AND SHE DROVE A PIN-NEEDLE THROUGH HER EYE –)

Zander’s eyes shot open, glass-green and unseeing, just as the bellow thundered through her ears and sent her heart, whirling, over the rim of a bottomless chasm.

Once upon a time there was a death-day, and the screams of birth echoed through its halls.