A Prince of Hera

Fantasy - High Concept - Written Winter 2023

Amenot. Onowep. Ininbe. Eratam.

The valley of mesas stretches out below me, a great quilted blanket dyed blue by the moon and stars. I float over it, a mind without a body. 

A thin cloud passes beneath and its rainwater tickles the ends of my toes. An orange speck burns far below me, the last ember within the blackened log of a fireplace, the watchlights of the isolated palace we share. The night air chills billowing clouds into my breath. Shivering and impatient, I leave my post amidst the stars and half-wake into my chamber far below. I thaw in the radiance of the fireplace by the end of my bed, in the warmth of the living world. As soon I have the strength again I lay my head against my downy pillow and return my spirit to the sky.

So many times have I, like the lemon dove, danced the winds for joy. Tonight I fly with purpose.

The northern wind fills the wings of my mind and I sail it, passing the many miles of the Great Horn towards that distant capital of Hera. The place of your birth. I see your banners flutter against the dark stone walls of your kingdom as I pass, the standing black ibex on a field of saffron, its horns held high and proud. The same banner flapped against your chest when first I saw you, before you surrendered your princely silks for the same simple uniforms as the rest of us.

I glide over the slums beyond your castle walls, sinking low enough to kick off from roofs of packed clay, to run the length of clotheslines draped with every dyed color of the natural world. A slow, weightless jump sends me over your highest walls, whereupon I see its guards and hear their shirts of chain clinking against the shafts of the spears they hold at their sides. My bare foot lands atop the cold helmet of one such man and I leap off again, soaring towards the high tower of the palace itself. I hear his voice cry out behind me with the fright of one who has felt the impossible.

I come to a stop against the highest wall of the palace tower and adjust so my legs hang over the lip of the window’s sill. Its stone blocks are ice against the skin of my thighs. Behind me, through a window of stained glass, a lamp’s oil still burns at this midnight hour. I turn and look past my shoulder to see a woman asleep at a great desk of engraved kosso. Her hair is uncovered, beautiful and black. Even the thin nightgown that adorns her is worth more than a labourer’s life. Your mother. 

Letters and maps and carved figurines of soldiers, horses, elephants, and towers populate the desk between us. If I am to believe the rumours that spread in my waking life, she prepares her people for a war that might consume all of the Horn. I care nothing for this war. I am here for you. I turn back to the sky and reach out my arms until they touch the very heavens themselves. Then I pull, and the stars fall. 

Below me, the city unwinds. The outskirts of Hera recede, tents and houses disappear between the flickering blinks of night and day. A grand library within the castle walls is unmade stone by stone. I cannot see the people at work, only the whispers of their shapes, only their shadows flitting about like ants in the mouth of a mound. Occasionally I push the heavens to a stop to check the stars. Workers freeze in the acropolis like marble statues. A sheet of rain is trapped in the still air like a swarm of crystal locusts in amber. When I’m sure, I continue again.

Eighteen times do I count the ram, your sign, in the sky above the tower of Hera. I slow my pace to a crawl and search the heavens for a half-moon. Then for a sunset. Then for the hour of your birth. Your mother’s cries shake the same window behind me. I’ve found it. 

I leave my arms behind outside to hold the stars in their place. I use my feet to work open the window wide enough that I might slip within. Normally I would close it quickly behind me, careful to leave no trace of my passage. This time, I do not. The tall chamber—with its marble floors and saints of painted glass, with its canopy of white draping fabric that seems to pulse in time with the screams of the beautiful woman on the bed—feels as hallowed with heavenly grace as it is poisoned with unease. 

Two men guard either side of the room’s single doorway with crossed spears. I can see in their faces that they have killed before, that they would kill again—anything for the safety of their king and heir. Another man, clad in silks of violet and white, studies the birth with a nervous vexation. He winces each time she shouts out. Only a single midwife attends your mother, and she frets about the bed wiping her sweat with a soaked linen and sneaking what few encouraging words she can between your mother’s echoing cries.

Through the door, I think I hear a different sort of cry. Aged, strained. I can’t see them, but I know where the rest of the nurses have gone. I know the story well. Across the hall, perhaps down a stairwell or two, a small army of attendants, physiks, and sages crowd the chambers of King Sagra I. Your father will be dead before the sun finishes its descent beneath the horizon. 

Through the window of your mother’s chamber I feel the whole of the kingdom holding its breath. Should your mother birth a living boy, an heir, King Sagra’s legacy will be secure. Should the child die or be born a girl, all that Sagra built will fall into the hands of his brother Mahdra, the Bloodprince. 

Even from within this chamber I can feel my arms struggling and straining with the weight of the stars outside—I cannot remain in this time for much longer. I try to hold on. To catch a glimpse of the infant who is just beginning to crown. I can’t.

Sky slips through my fingers like the reins of a startled horse. I grasp again, harder, and the pull on my arms outside wrenches me from my feet. The world spins. I am plummeting to the earth. I squeeze my fingers around the heavens that surround me with all I have until, finally, my vision evens and I float to solid ground. I stand at the base of the tower of your birth, it is day, and I am lost in time.

It is summer, I assume, by the orange heat of the sun which warbles the outstretched green of the palace grounds. I stand beside a row of fruiting lemon trees and move from trunk to trunk as I search for some bearing in this place. Servants flit about in the periphery of my vision, sleeves rolled up and kerchiefs tying back their hair. To my right, the palace tower. To my left, a wall of buildings and palisades and stone that marks the rest of the palace district. 

A bell rings above the distant clamber of a marketplace. It is God’s Hour. 

My ragged breaths begin to steady. I could return to my body, wake, and pass another day in the pain of your absence, biding my time until I may return here tomorrow. I begin to. And then I hear a voice.

“The Prince, you mean?” 

I duck toward the shadows of the nearest tree—as if anyone here could see a mind without a body. The voice is male, affected, likely noble. I follow it and the sounds of its companions until I reach a nook within the palace grounds, a stone pavilion shaded by a ring of surrounding trees. Vines of ivy climb its railing and snake up its columns, and I coil myself among them in silence like the spying trickster serpent.

Four men stand about the shadowed place in a small circle, each facing outward so that none looks upon the other. A fifth man sits atop one of the stone benches, facing the backs of the rest. He is the oldest, bald and pockmarked. Each wears the same purple and white silks and carries the soft, pudding weight of a court attendant. The voices continue:

“The old king, Sagra, as well. You know he was troubled with illness all his life before it finally took him.”

The statement is followed by a spattering of affirmative grunts and nods. I squint to find the speaker.

“A shame,” he continues, and I identify him as the leanest of the group with a cropped head of black curls, “for such an illness to endure in the royal line. They say a king is his country…” 

The oldest man taps his cane against the stone floor in protest. His speech is weak and full of pauses and his voice warbles as it leaves his aged throat, barely loud enough to fill this small space.

“King Sagra, truly, was met with unfortunate health from a young age. But every word from the royal prison paints his majesty, the young prince, as the very picture of health and nobility. He is successful in endeavours of history, poetry, statesmanship, and war. None dispute these facts. I—” The old man is interrupted by a series of violent, rib-shaking coughs. Once he has composed himself, he dabs the corners of his mouth with a serviette and finishes, “Many of us in the court await his lordship’s ascendancy to the throne with baited breath.”

“There are reports,” another of the standing men pipes up, “of a special medicine hand delivered from the Queen-Regent’s retinue to the prince at the royal prison. A daily concoction. ‘Tis curious, though I’ll admit I’ve no idea of the specific poultices in question.” They consider the information the way a horse considers chaff, grunting and murmuring all the while. Finally, the lean man speaks again. 

“No one claims the prince to possess any affliction that would harm him in endeavours of poetry or war. As it was passed to me, it’s possible that none else may ever learn the prince’s secret.” He grins, biting his lip, and then steadies his expression so that his eagerness will not appear within his tone. “Save for his wife… on his wedding night.”

The match is struck. The group explodes into a cacophony of voices. The old man stammers and bangs his cane too quietly to be heard. Each waves their arms and gestures yet none turns to face the other. One voice, that of another young man, finally rises enough to quiet the rest.

“What rot do you speak of?” 

“No rot, my brothers! I am, as ever, this court’s servant. I merely thought you all would like to know—with time to prepare—in case the royal line returns to Prince Mahdra. Should the young prince sire no heirs.”

My ears burn with quiet rage. I would like to kill this man for your honour, though I have so little power so far from my own time. Instead, I ball my fists with the sky. I’ll claw my way back up, back here. When I wake, I’ll find the ceiling of my chamber has taken the place of the years-old sun and clouds. When I wake, I’ll find my fingers knotted within the woollen sheets of my bed. 

Despite the eight years we shared within our royal prison before you left, you may not remember my name. I exist within your shadow—another faceless student in the back rows of your classes, another spectator in the surging crowd that cheers your fencing victories in the court of yard two, your debates on the agora of yard one. 

Only three-times had your eyes met my own before you rode into the black uncertainty of the night aback that stolen horse. So many times have I sent my spirit to those three moments that I needn’t do so now to describe them to you in exact detail. 

The first, upon a spring day ten years past:

We had all watched—all thirty or so of us royal children of all colours and sizes, all in our matching sky-blue tunics—your convoy snake its way up the narrow pass towards our prison. We had been there since the first call of the horns had woken us that morning. Forty carriages for a single new arrival. We had never seen such a display.

The carts, whose wood siding was painted as bright and orange-yellow as the quilted armors and barding that adorned its mounted guards, each carried yourbelongings. Gold-bound scrolls, wax, incense, instruments of every shape, illustrated manuscripts, models, miniatures, dolls. Enough pillows to crush a grown man to dust and twice as many blankets. And, of course, two dozen personal servants to supplement your needs. 

We children had spent the past month clearing the westmost wing, adjusting our lodgings so that some of us from smaller families now had to bunk together. The tutors hadn’t told us why. We all knew now. A wing for a single prince.

Your arrival was a parade we watched through iron bars. Shura and the other boys clambered over one another to sneak a look above the fence while the girls guessed and gossiped about you and fretted the final touches on the gifts we’d been preparing in the weeks before you came. My gift—a two-foot pane of stained glass—lay in the lawn beside me as I silently counted each leaf of grass around it.

Even when the heavy gates creaked open, even when the horns blew and the servants bowed, I didn’t look up from my frivolous little distraction. A guard took my small arm in his gloved hand and pulled me to my feet. I tugged away and kicked and yelled, and another guard crossed in front of me and raised his hand to strike my cheek. My little glass, and the hours of work I’d spent with it, crunched to pieces under the heavy sole of his careless leather boot. I fell limp, a poppet without strings, and the men carried me to the end of our line without resistance.

The thunder of hooves and wheels filled the yard and we were soon surrounded by your endless entourage. The heaviest of the carriages, drawn by six great white warhorses, pulled closest to us and stopped before the centre of our line. The horns blared again and the children all stood at attention, chins raised, arms straight and by their sides—save for I, who stared at the grass by my feet and listened to the shattering of the gift that was trampled into smaller and smaller shards behind me.

Our warden trotted up the palace stairs and turned his steed in a circle between us children and our unending string of guests. The general was as mountainous then as he is now, though the curly beard that overflowed his chin and covered the golden scaled armour atop his chest still shone with the proud shining black of his prime. His northerner’s voice boomed louder than the trumpets as he welcomed you into the palace.

“Prince Indira, son of King Sagra I and the Queen-Regent Ansya, and future King of Hera,” his yellow teeth shone beneath the thick wires of his moustache as he spoke, “I, General Vasudva, the once-called Lion of the North, humbly welcome you to the Monastery of the Mountain Ahmra. There is no safer nor more beautiful place on earth. I pray that you find it to your liking.”

Though my spirit has since flown the lengths of the world and seen wonders both current and distantly forgotten, the general’s words hold true. From the palace’s highest parapets one can see Zion itself, unspoiled by the settlements of man. Primaeval forests fill the lush valley around the mesa with their sea of damp, heavy leaves. Six of the ten sister mountains pour water into the glittering basin lake from their falls, whose distant, rushing whispers can each be heard from anywhere in the palace like the roaring of the ocean’s waves. 

Far to the north, mineral groundsprings bubble with the heat of the earthsun and paint the landscape in all of the rich candy colours of the rainbow. Only a single, red-clay road—easily mistaken for a creek of iron-rich water—crawls from the palace gates to the far mists that bite at the edge of the horizon. Here, the sky itself is alive with the earthy aroma of the world, the natural salt and bark and spice of the rivers and forest.

The palace itself is sturdy and squat, cut into the mountain as a continuous structure free of any seams of stacked, mortared stone. From a distance, the intricate carvings along its walls meld into the natural grooves of the mesa below it and would disappear entirely from sight—if not for the ever-burning fires of its watchlight towers. The monastery’s flat roof overgrows with a garden whose grafted trees are each home to a thousand colours of fruit and twice as many animals that swing, sing, and fly within their branches. In the centre of this garden rests the God Eye, a pane of glass nearly two fathoms in any direction that bathes the great chapel below it in a spiralled mosaic of colour. The royal prison is truly royal. 

“It is said that a God was buried here long ago,” General Vasudva continued. “No wonder, then, that this place is as true a paradise as man can discover in this world.”

Yet, it is also entirely a prison. A vault for things too fragile or caustic to exist in the outside world. No assassin’s poison can reach us within these isolated walls, nor can we plot against our families for we have no couriers to carry our writings. Those heirs too young to rule—like Prince Shura, like Princess Subira, like you—will only be interred until you reach the age appropriate to rule. The rest of us, we second children of nobility, will be cloistered here until our betters pass and our time comes to assume our lands. If our time comes. Shuffled from wing to wing, graduating from uniform to uniform in all the colours of the setting sun. Children whisper of a wing in the shadow of the mountain, of white-haired women working needles, dressed in gowns of the darkest black. Heirs to nothing, in the end.

“Our tutors and facilities are the finest in the Horn. So long as you follow our rules, my rules, your family could ask for no better heir when the time comes for you to ascend.”

The general’s speech progressed and I pretended not to listen, not to watch. I didn’t look up as the general dismounted his horse, as he walked the line of my peers and made each recite their names and families. No, I didn’t look up until I felt the jolt of his heavy hand upon my shoulder. The stiff fabric of his under-armour strained against his muscles as he pulled into a squat, close enough that the bristles of his beard brushed my cheek and arm. 

“Come, Gensha,” he whispered between breaths of hot fennel air, “give our new guest a proper greeting.” Your small boots stepped into my vision: well-oiled, tightly laced, and ombre from deep to reddish brown. I studied their leather engravings as I repeated my practised, rote bit of speech aloud.

“I am Gensha, second daughter of Gesha, grand-daughter of Lord Vati.” I bowed, closing my eyes, and finished: “Welcome to Mount Ahmra, my Prince.” The general, satisfied enough, rose and placed his other hand on your shoulder.

“And you, my lad?” I waited, eyes closed, for your reply. Instead, I felt the warmth of a hand as small as mine take my fingers in its palm. I shot upright, ready to pull myself free. Instead, my gaze met yours.

Your eyes were brown, like mine, yet interlaced with a golden hue the colour of your attire. The hazel of the Yashima line, as I would come to learn, was passed to you by your mother and grandmother. You hadn’t yet lost the plumpness of youth, though I could already see the delicate curve of your nose and strong ridge of your jaw that would define your features as you aged. Your skin was lighter than mine yet possessed an ochre so richly golden-red that it called to mind the terra-cotta kings of Tolas. You were, by any metric, a Prince—a living art. Your appearance, I thought, was proof enough of the divine right of your blood. You looked at me and bowed and placed your lips against the back of my hand.

My face flushed, flooded with blood, and I pulled my hand from your grasp. Even seconds later, I felt the lingering jolt of your kiss against my skin. You bowed, earnestly, and I bowed in turn, clutching my hand against my breast as if it had burned against the handle of an iron cooking pot. When we rose, facing each other again, I could not will my eyes to leave your face.

It was not your beauty alone that stunned me. I appreciated those figures that peopled our palace museum, freed from oil and stone by the careful hands of the old masters. Yet they did not haunt my dreams as you so often have. Nor was it your status, nor the freedom you could have brought me from this prison had I won you as my spouse. 

No. 

I looked up to the general, turned my head to the young girl beside me, and craned to see the girl beside her. Their faces beamed—humbled by the glory of the sun. Yet none of them saw what I saw beneath the patterned fabrics and frankincense oil whose rival was unfound in the vaults of my wealthiest aunts’ and uncles’ estates. The thin glass of your eyes barely contained the floodwaters of fear and sorrow within. A babe ripped from mother’s breast and dressed up as a king. Entirely royal. Entirely prisoner.

“My lady Gensha,” you said, and bowed so low before me that your knee dipped into the soft earth. The general squeezed my shoulder, pulling me back to reality, and I looked up to his face far above.

“Your gift?” he asked, miming speech with his lips. I looked to my hands, worriedly, then turned towards the yard that swarmed with servants both ours and yours. I weakly pointed to the painted shards that glistened here and there among the short grass of the lawn. The general’s large nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath. 

“That’s enough, my Prince” the general said and clapped your shoulder again. “Let’s continue inside. There is much for you to see.” His large hand guided you towards a row of waiting servants. His own boots, however, didn’t move. He squatted again, closer this time. 

“You will not return within the palace walls until you have gathered every crumb of glass from this hallowed garden.” He rose again, donning a proud smile for all to see, and followed you past the second set of iron gates. 

That night I crawled on hands and knees through the cool night-dew of the grass and filled the bottom third of my gown with tiny crystals of coloured glass. It was there, by the light of the watch-fires high above, by the moonlight songs of the crickets and the nightjars, that I found the words of God.

I first saw it beside a shattered wedge of glass that crudely depicted the head of St. Zero, hanged by the Iurti for refusing to renounce his faith: the cap of a rock no larger than my fist barely jutting above the rich dirt of the garden floor. It was smooth, rounded by the elements, grey. The sort of insignificant detail that was overlooked by most yet hypnotic to me. I ran my hand along its cool face and felt a humming resonance beneath. My left hand closed the pouch that I had fashioned while my right hand clawed away at the soft dirt that obscured most of its shape. It stretched down, fathomless, and every swipe of my hand revealed more of the great stone’s size in each dimension.

Despite my manic, ceaseless labour, much remained below the surface. Engraved across the face of what I had unearthed was the unmistakable curvature of a script. Stiff, undecorated, and unimaginably old. I traced my finger across its length, pushing ebony dirt from its grooves, until the shapes of its words were made plain to me. I read them, sounding out the ancient syllables which had been buried for centuries. Then, I read them aloud: Amenot. Onowep. Ininbe. Eratam.

I felt lightning crack my spine. I felt your lips press against the back of my hand. 

It is said that a God was buried here. I imagined that the words on this stone, so familiar and so alien, were His epithet. I imagined that it read: “Gesha. Second daughter of a second daughter. Take my gift and free yourself.”

I took its gift and buried it again, greedily, beneath the black garden dirt. A spell for myself alone to keep.

As the royal prison held my body, I now knew that my body held me. As a key could unlock those iron gates and set me free, I dreamed that these words could unlock my spirit and set free my mind. Only the scribe of Heaven knows how many times I repeated the words: Amenot. Onowep. Ininbe. Eratam. Words with no meaning beyond that which I gave them. Words that were now indebted to me. 

I repeated them until sleep carried me into imagined fantasy each night. I repeated them until my fantasies were no longer imaginary. It was then I learned a crucial truth of this world: A mantra repeated enough becomes a tulpa. A living lie. Words become ideas, ideas become reality.

As you adjusted to our prison, I learned to escape it. As your wings were clipped, I learned to fly. That was the first day that your eyes met mine.

For the next three years you practised the lessons of our tutors in exchange for a ceaseless praise that never lived up to that which they had taken from you. For the next five years I shuffled from lesson to lesson by day, a disappointment to all who knew me, and swam the swirling tides of history by night. And though you had given me this gift, in a way, I had grown to forget you too. Another petal along the bough. For as much as you were lost in your mind I was lost in my own, as I was lost in space, as I was lost in time. What boy could win the interest of one who had hidden all of the heavens and the earth beneath her feather pillow?

And so we continued.

It wasn’t until the winter after we retired our sky-blue uniforms, on a day like any other, that our eyes met for the second time. 

It was early evening and the sun glowed impatiently behind the thick overcast of the sky. My knuckles stung from the dry chill of the air and from the switch-strikes doled out by my remedial tutor. I trudged across the length of the third yard spewing clouds of hot-breath, wishing I was a thousand leagues and a thousand years away. It was Djim, the night of story and feast, and I hadn’t bathed in days.

I climbed the stone stairs of the squat building to my right and passed the chambers of our thermae to the main, candlelit undressing room. I took a bench against the low-curving wall and held out my limbs. Four servant women emerged and crouched around me to begin their task, delicately untangling the layers of my clothing like spiders plucking threads of silk. They spoke among each other, laughing and unweaving endless yam-red fabric from my body. Finally, they pulled the leather-and-hide boots from my feet and undid the tight velvet scarf from the curls of my head.

“Your hair,” said Nyssa, a servant girl who had tried more times than most to lure me from the mists of my mind with friendly conversation. Her eyes surveyed my bare legs, my arms, my lap, the thicket of black curls thereupon. “Wax and razors,” she whispered and waved away the girl to her left, then, with a gentle smile: “We will make you tidy.”

“No,” I muttered back and rubbed my finger and thumb at the dark creases beneath my tired eyes, “I wish to be done here as quickly as possible.” But thank you, I hope she also understood from my the lilt of my tone. 

Our thermae was as carefully guarded from the eyes of men as our bodies, as the hair on our heads—a shawl of wood and stone for the heiresses of Mt. Ahmra. Nonetheless, the other girls carefully groomed and waxed and plucked the bodies which no man might ever see. It confounded me more than the instructional courses that suffocated my waking hours.

The bathing area outside comprised two pools etched down into the same brown stone as the rest of the monastery, each deep enough in the centre that the tallest of us could barely hold her chin above the surface of the water when standing. An engraved cliff face, some thirty feet high, acted as a barrier to two sides of the opening while a tall acacia fence contained the rest of the bathing area against the side of the thermae shelter. The sound of rushing water nearly hushed out the quiet dialogues that wafted from the gathered girls in each of the steaming pits. Each pool, a few fathoms wide, was fed by a series of open-topped wooden spouts that carried water from the natural hot springs one cliff and storey higher. Each of these ramps poured forth thick white steam as their boiling contents cooled in the ambient chill of the air before pouring into our baths.

The air chilled me, as well, and blew goose pimples across the bare skin of my body. I moved towards the farther and less occupied of the pools, clutching a bathing linen close to my chest, and silently prayed that my body was as invisible to the girls around me as my mind would have been had it been night. 

“Gensha!” The voice echoed off the far walls and—I imagined—rolled into the valley far below us, startling birds miles away into flight.

I froze, for I recognized the source long before she rose above the fog of the nearest pool. Where I was gangly and under-developed, her mature shape rolled with the fat of plenty. Where I felt like ash to the touch, her skin shimmered with the smooth sheen of scented shea oil. She smiled and ran her fingers through the long black curls of her hair, showering the pool steps with a cascade of droplets. 

There was a time that Princess Subira and I were sisters—closer, at least, than I was with the sisters of my blood. Countless hours we had spent in our cloud-white robes tumbling and rolling together through the plush hills of yard six. She had taken my hand in her plump, segmented fingers and held it close to her chubby face. Her smile hadn’t yet suffered even the first lost tooth of childhood. She squeaked with joy:

“Let’s do this forever, Gensha!”

I agreed, and we promised on all of the stars of the night sky, and time drove us apart all the same. More precisely, time drove an endless crowd of her imitators and admirers between us. In the third year of our robin’s egg robes, I blew away from her crowded canopy like the first brown leaf of autumn. It was another month before she noticed.

Each passing year after my leave had only caused her to blossom more. If you were a bust chiselled away by the skilled hand of an ancient dreamer, the princess Subira was a painting in the studio of an underfed young genius in New Rioja, whose still-drying oils refined the impossible beauty of a dozen lovers. 

I looked away in shame, though I had no reason to, and she laughed and placed a steaming hand against the bare, cold skin of my shoulder. 

“It’s good to see you about again,” she said loudly enough for only our ears to hear. “I’ve missed you.” I saw her gleaming eyes search my face in the periphery of my sight, waiting for a response. I felt her fingers lift from my skin when it was clear that none was coming. Her smile faded, and she shifted uneasily from foot to foot, and I thanked my God that she didn’t say my name again before she drifted off.

I sank to the base of my nose in the water at the farthest edge of the farthest pool beneath the shade of a great banana tree. I remained there, amidst the smell of warm salt and perfume, until long after my fingers had grown rough. I thought of Subira. I thought of the way that she drew hot blood into my cheeks and ears and kicked sickness into my gut. I hated her, I thought, for that feeling. For the way she made me real when I now only wished to fade away. 

I scrubbed at my body with the linen and imagined the weight of the past week crumbling away with each pass of my hands. After a time, I lifted myself from the hard water, sat atop the damp edge of the pool, and ran the rag across my neck and breasts and legs. It was there, as I idly glanced around the width of the hot springs, that I saw your eyes upon my body. 

Your right arm, wrapped in the thicker fabric of the men’s tunics, supported your weight against the top of the acacia fence. Between the patterned red of your clothes and the burnished copper of your skin, you almost disappeared into the warm hue of the wood—a fence post with wide, hazel eyes. I continued to bathe inquisitively, making sense of this strange sight, until the realisation drained the warmth from my face. 

I stood up at once, covering my breasts with the length of my left forearm and my groyne with the palm of my right hand. A startled shrub squirrel. Your face paled, too, and your eyes looked away from me and back, away and back, a child awaiting punishment. But you were not a child, not anymore, as I could tell from the rigid shape of your features, from the dusting of hair that spread along your jaw and above your lip. It was there, as you nervously looked up to my face, that our eyes met for the second time.

I felt the presence of no sin, as I had always expected when a man looked upon my head of hair or the awkward shape of my naked body. There was no lust in your expression, nor curiosity. I felt your longing not for carnal satisfaction but for some greater truth, a puzzle to which my figure was somehow an important piece. Your eyes, those pools of gold and green and brown, pleaded with me. Desperate and afraid and alone. 

My eyebrows knitted together, my posture straightened. Then, I’m sure that you remember, I parted my arm from my breasts, my hand from the hair of my lap. I swallowed, nervous and confused, and your eyes finally broke away from mine. I bared myself to you as I had never done for anyone before, and my heart beat its wings dangerously against the bars of its cage. You studied me like an astrologer, drawing divine wisdom from the constellations of my body. 

For a moment I didn’t think about the journeys that awaited me in my sleep. For a moment, I thought only of us. I remembered you. Then someone screamed behind me and the thermae erupted into frenzy.

Hot water flooded up onto the brown stone of the pool deck as a dozen naked girls clambered to the surface and ran for shelter. The scream lingered, siren bells warning of your attack. I jumped at the sound, broken of the hypnosis of our bond, and you shifted and clung unsteadily against the pikes of the high wall. The waves of panic swept me along with them, away from the springs, away from you.

“It was Prince Indira,” one girl whispered as we huddled together inside, servant and heiress alike bundled together limb by limb on the dressing room floor. Another burst into tears. I was swallowed by a great swirling confusion, a dizziness that would have stolen me from my feet if not for the support of the interlacing arms around me. 

“Did he see me?” another cried, and clawed at the wet hair that hung in front of her face. “What will my father do?”

“I don’t think so,” said another, “I believe he was only looking at Gensha.” 

All eyes fell upon me. I imagined them asking, silently, why her?

Someone stumbled through the doorway, more tripping than running, and burst into explanation. “Outside—a fight!” Another girl trampled in after, bracing herself against the stone frame of the door.

“Not a fight, a slaughter! Shura of the Iurti found the trespasser. He’s beating him to death!”

We dressed as quickly as we could and fumbled our way outside, a herd of young women packed shoulder to shoulder behind the shepherds who had brought us the news.

Three tutors pulled Prince Shura away from you by his arms. The heels of his thick hide boots dug trenches into the grass of the yard as he fought to reach you again, still swinging strings of your blood from the knuckles of his heavy, thrashing fists. You lay upon the lawn. Your face hid beneath a mask of blood, some of which bubbled from the air at your mouth and drooled into the spattered grass around you. I thought of the oldest of the terra-cotta kings—of perfect, sculpted faces collapsed into dark, hollow pits.

“Unhand me,” shouted the Iurt, and he pulled himself free from the last of the three tutors. He breathed in heaving motions that caused the great fur cloak across his back to raise and sink, a louring bear. Clouds as hot as the spring’s steam poured from between his gritted teeth. A tutor drew a blade from his hilt, a steel song in the cool evening air, and pointed it at the standing prince’s back. Shura spied the blade over his shoulder and spat against the ground. 

“Very well,” he growled, and shouldered past the crowd. “Take your little prince back to his wing.” 

As you laid motionlessly upon the earth, a heavy hand fell upon the red cloth at my shoulder.

“Gensha,” General Vasudva’s voice was soft, softer than it’d ever been before, “you should come with me.”

That night, rockets of fire and brimstone burst sound and colour into the black sky above us. Their vibrant explosions shone, from time to time, through the great God’s Eye that made up the ceiling high above us. The festival’s celebrations were well underway. 

The brownstone eyes of long-dead saints watched us from the cathedral walls. The only light, save for the sporadic bursts of colour through the stained window above, glinted softly from the thick melting candles in the statues’ hands. We filled the front rows of the grand chamber’s long, ebony pews—Shura and I and a small army of viziers. The Prince of the Iurt had bowed before me when he first arrived. The sentence was the only one he had said since his arrival, uttered just before he took his seat across the red-rugged aisle from me.

“Fear not, daughter of Gesha,” he had whispered, and smiled, “I shall make things right for you.”

The general’s deep-set eyes slowly surveyed us from atop the dais. He wore his golden champion’s armour—as he had on every Djim celebration before—and the sash across his cuirass hung with the black braids of the dozen heroes he had slain.

The hulking wooden doors at the end of the room behind us creaked open, and we all turned to see your entrance. You sat, stone-faced, within a black wooden throne whose four handles were each held atop the shoulder of a servant. The entourage carried you to the centre of the aisle and lowered you gently, resting you some ten feet from the general’s boots. 

Long robes of violet silk embroidered with golden flowers flowed from your shoulders to the ends of your feet. Bands of gold and glinting blue gemstones ringed your fingers and neck and pierced the ridges of your ears and the bridge of your nose. Yet these adornments hardly distracted from your cracked, bruised visage. Ugly black stitches marred your pallid cheek and lip and your eyes were swollen, dark, and purple-green. Your body was motionless, save for a slight sway to your head and shoulders that gave the impression that your throne floated on trembling waters. Vasudva drew a deep, whistling breath through his nose at the sight of you, and braced his hands against the carved pulpit before him. 

“We are all assembled, then?” The pop of another rocket high above punctuated the general’s careful speech. Violet light, as if from some queer flash of thunder, shone upon us through the Eye and disappeared. “Ramses. Bemnet. Present your cases.”

Two viziers rose from the frontmost pew and bowed in sync. 

“My general,” the first began, his voice even and refined, “I believe that this council is meeting in err. ‘Tis no crime for a boy to grow curious about a woman. I would argue that it is in fact encouraging.”

“How could it be encouraging,” replied the second vizier, his voice huskier and full of breath, “for a young man to spoil the virtue of a girl under our monastery’s protection?” The first vizier drew a deep breath, preparing a rebuttal behind his sharp, brown eyes.

“The young prince has merely proven his virility. Regardless, Lord Bemnet, who has his majesty bespoiled?” He hesitated, then turned to gesture towards me. “Only the second daughter of a lord of little means.”

Every gaze fell on me but yours. I tightly shut my eyes until the moment passed.

“And the granddaughter of Lord Vati. A dear friend of the general’s who does not take the violation of his kin lightly,” Bemnet rebuked. I felt the general’s eyes upon me even through the blackness of my lids. “What say you, Lord Ramses? No justice should be served? No retribution paid?”

“Look upon the prince’s face — is this not punishment enough? In fact, if any should face judgement,” his voice grew daring, quicker in pace, “...for Shura of the Iurti to lay hands on the crown Prince—”

“Try it.” 

The third voice brought the room to silence. Prince Shura stood beside his pew. His large palm lay against the pommel of the blade at his hip. Where your features were carefully fired clay, Shura’s were hacked into hard, dark wood. All edges and mass, sharp and flat and heavy. The same rippling hide-cape from before concealed most of his rust-red uniform, and hawk’s feathers dangled beneath each of his ears. He grinned, drawing strength from the same attention that had caused me to wilt. 

“What did you say?” Ramses asked in disbelief. Shura tilted his head and stared the bald young wizard in the eyes. 

“I told you to try it. Send your finest swordmaster after me. Hell, send them all.” His smile widened, baring a set of jagged, white teeth. “See how many die in the name of your perverted prince.”

“Careful, boy.” 

General Vasudva’s voice boomed louder than the fireworks above. Shura turned to the general, too, and moved his hand from pommel to hilt. The general’s eyes lowered, smouldering with a growing rage, and he spoke again: “Need I remind you why your people still know me as Lion?”

“Enough.” Your voice was a windchime: clumsy, full of air and music. You lolled and caught yourself against the arm of your throne, all the while gathering the strength to speak again. “Bamnet is right. Prince Shura is right. No one deserves punishment but me.” 

The words had barely escaped your lips before you collapsed, slumping forward into your silk-clad lap. The general watched you silently and ran his thick fingers through the black and white tangle of his beard.

“I agree,” he finally said.

Shura scoffed and shoved his way into the aisle some three paces behind you. He cast his wildcat eyes up to Vasudva and hissed. “The next time he violates a daughter of Mt. Ahrma, a sister of mine, you will not stop me from claiming justice.”

“Nor will I try to,” replied the general, low and grave.

Later, after the court and the tail end of the festivals, when I’d returned to my chambers with a handful of stolen pastries and stuffed my face in secret, I collapsed into my bed. No sooner had I touched the sheets than I repeated my mantra, God’s epithet crossing my lips over and over until…

My spirit drifted up the mesa’s cliff through the windows which overlooked the valley from the farthest end of the lonely western wing. I passed the saffron curtains which fluttered in the midnight breeze, disturbing their shape with the unseen volume of my mind’s form. Despite what the men had said that evening by the light of saint’s candles, I had not felt spoiled by your eyes. No, I thought, you had seen me, had needed to see me. 

Now, I needed to see you. 

You laid beneath a dozen quilts of patchwork, patterned fabric, obscured from view by four great sheets that hung from your long bedposts. You turned back and forth, violently, as if writhing upon a bed of coals. I reached out to you and carefully parted the sheer walls that separated us. Your breaths wavered uneasily, as did mine, and sweat slicked the rim of your caramel brow. Engrossed again, I placed a knee atop your cloudsoft bed. 

“Hello?” you called out, weakly, and searched the empty room with your eyes. My heart pounded but I, confident in my invisibility, completed my climb atop your bed. I looked down upon your restless face and studied you as you had studied me, seeing you as if for the first time. 

The discolour of your injuries seemed to have disappeared beneath the silver light of the moon. Your white blouse was unlaced and open wide, revealing a brown chest made firm by countless hours of exercise. Your eyes had closed again and fretted beneath their lids and you winced, jolting from some phantom sensation. It was then that I noticed your right arm working away beneath the sheets. Timid, curious, I placed my dream-hand against your bare chest. You gasped and arched at my phantom touch, at the touch of your own hand against yourself. You were so vulnerable before me, so frail, and my head swirled with the stars.

Your chest lurched again—more of a skipped, violent breath. Another followed, and another. A tear streaked across your battered cheek, glowing like a crystal in the light of the moon. You broke into a sob, a sob that lasted for hours, and my stomach wrenched with pity. I wished to comfort you with the warmth of my body. For the first time in my life, I wished more than anything that I could be seen.

Though you did not know it, you had made me yours.

My memory of you in the years before that night was an unformed sketch, a few strokes upon an otherwise white canvas. Brushstroke by brushstroke and dream by dream I began to fill in the missing detail, the watercolour of nuance.

You were no longer the soft-spoken, diligent child who had bowed before me in the grass. Nor were you yet the king-in-waiting you would one day become, perfect in body and mind. No, I discovered within you that interstitial night exactly what I had craved for years. My reflection within a mirror of tarnished bronze.

Each morning you hid yourself beneath your covers until your servants tore you from them and dressed you. Each day, you visited your courses and took your meals and whispered your prayers beneath the God’s Eye and wept within your bed at night. Every evening, the vizier Ramses brought you a small wooden bowl filled with mashed herbs, and you spread the black tincture across your limbs, neck, and chest. “Your remedy,” the wizard called it, though I saw no signs of the illness that deserved such regular treatment. You followed this regimen, I imagined, for the same reason you did anything else. Routine. Expectation. Where I possessed the gift of watching, you seemed to draw no joy from anything—an automaton, like the metal constructions of the ancient scholars, animated to false-life by nothing more than the push and pull of the water within your pipes. 

Six seasons you had spent in that state before I found you. I wish that I had saved you—had, at least, offered you the camaraderie that you had given me. I never did. I had forgotten how to act, how to live as a human rather than to haunt as a spirit. I had forgotten how to walk in favour of flight.

Alas, it was the same woman who had condemned you to that void who ultimately pulled you from it. She came to you only once, later in that same bloody summer that Prince Mahdra executed six and twenty payans for failing to deliver his tribute. She came under cover of night in a single, undecorated cart and was gone again before the sun god’s chariot returned with the first lights of morning. My dream-eyes watched as she sat upon the edge of your curtained bed. The general himself stood sentry, massive hand upon the hilt of his sword within the doorway.

Her beauty astonished me. The shape of her face was so similar to your own, with striking hazel eyes, strong brows, high cheeks, and a powerful jaw. Where your nose turned up softly at its end, however, hers was hawkish, pointed, and proud—a true daughter of Yashima. The simple shawl that surrounded her face, the humble tawny fabric that covered her body, failed to hide the obvious nobility of her looks.

“I heard about your troubles,” she began, once the pleasantries of your reunion had ended, “with the Prince of the Iurti.” You looked away, ashamed, and she turned your chin back towards her with a single, manicured finger. “You seem to have healed nicely,” she smiled, and you nodded slightly in return.

“It was so foolish,” you whispered, “I don’t know what came over me.” She sighed and placed her hand atop your knee.

“I know, my little Prince. We all do things that we regret.”

“They say that I’m the first.” Your eyelashes fluttered as you spoke, and thick tears began to well behind them. “That in all of Mount Ahmra’s history, no man has violated the women’s thermae before. No one would have dared—” Her finger moved to your lips and halted your voice within your throat. 

“A King does not cry. Try to control yourself.” You swallowed your emotion, steadied your breath. She began again and her voice was as grave as it was sweet.

“You aren’t like the other boys. You know that.” You nodded, and your face flushed and you hid it away beneath your drooping sleeves. She moved her hand to your shoulder, leaned close. “I carried you. I birthed you. You have no secrets from me.” 

“Why could—,” you started, stopped, and started again, “why couldn’t I have been like other boys?” She studied your face, measuring a reply.

“God has plans for us all, my sweet prince. There is a reason, even if we do not know it.”

Her voice hushed. The honey faded from her words.

“We must focus on what we know. What we can control. The time will come soon for you to assume the throne. Until then, it is time for you to begin behaving like a prince. Your tutors tell me that you have incredible potential that you refuse to tap into. Those days are gone.” She gestured towards the general, whose large body tensed at attention. Ever the soldier.

“You are Lord Vasudva’s shadow now, Indira. You will oversee the grounds with him, patrol with him, eat with him. You will spar with him until your hands bleed and you can no longer hold your sword and you will do so again once your blisters have healed. You are also his servant. You will fetch his cup, change his linens, scrub his chamber pots, complete his reports. You will do so unflinchingly. If you fail him, he may punish you in whatever way he sees fit.” She looked at the man in the doorway and lowered her gaze. “No matter how harsh. My son will become the perfect prince. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my queen,” replied a rumbling voice beneath a dark forest of a beard. She cast her eyes back to you. 

“Do you understand?” Your gaze fluttered but you nodded all the same. “Leave us.” Without delay, the general turned his back to your bedchamber. Your mother listened until the last of his heavy, jangling boot-falls disappeared into the hall before she spoke again.

“You know why I ordered you to bathe and sleep alone. Why you must apply your medicine—lest things worsen for you. Your condition makes you no less of a man… but it makes you vulnerable. Especially with your uncle growing bolder each year.” Her eyes pierced into your own.

“Your claim is stronger than any other. Give no one any reason to doubt that.” You nodded again, weakly, and she took each of your shoulders in her grip. “No, Indira. Promise me. Promise that you will show yourself to no one. Promise that you will take no woman to bed.” 

“I promise,” you blurted out in a voice that dripped with confusion and pain, “I promise, mother.”

Your mother's commandments held you, broke you, reformed you. You were a cracked prince of clay and the General was the careful hand that worked you anew. You kept your promise like a dagger in your heart for the next four years. Only last night, the night of your escape from this prison, did you break it, did you pull the dagger from your heart. The night that you met my eyes for the final time.

The boy whose memories I visited in my dreams was no longer the man that lived beside me in the present. Gone was the child who spoke only to his tutors, who hid beneath his sheets and cried. I did not know if I truly loved the new Indira they had sculpted, but I knew that I could not escape you.

You held your post for hours each day beside the general’s desk, arms folded behind your back and chin held high and proud. Often the General would recline within his wooden throne, run his thick fingers through his beard, and ask for your advice. The name he called out changed as seasons passed: “Boy” became “Indira” became “young Prince” became “lieutenant.” The sword that hung from your hip, gold-bladed and green-hilted, was the same blade that he had carried in the northern border wars. Countless spirits clung to its razor-fine edge. A gift Lord Vasudva had never thought he would give.

The general was only the first to discover your talents. As your uncle amassed his armies far from the sanctuary of our secluded valley, you amassed an army of your own. An army of proud tutors, of hopeless sparring partners, of smitten suitresses. Though you spoke only rarely and with great consideration, your followers grew to hold your opinion on all subjects as gospel—and there was no subject as interesting as your ascension to the throne.

"What do you say to the rumours of war with your uncle?" asked a boy in a yam-red livery one day upon the forum.

"The Bloodprince has benefited from my mother’s respect for the memory of her late husband," you replied without hesitation. "My father was a great man, I’m told. I have no such sympathy. My uncle will kneel to me or die."

Though half a foot shorter than most of the other men, you had grown to carry yourself like a giant. As strong and wise as the General, they said, as beautiful as the Queen. You donned a cloak of your family’s colours atop your plum regalia and wore an iron crown. Two new names were bestowed upon you: 'Prodigy' for your skillful displays in history and debate, 'Tiger of Hera' for your newfound skill with the blade. Only Shura of the Iurti, the now-dubbed 'Demon Prince,' compared to you in talent and reputation.

One evening, in the warm breeze of spring, Prince Shura held a wooden sword above his head and cheered. Six of his peers, six of the next best swordsmen in our class, moaned and clutched the bruises and contusions that ached across their bodies. Their own swords littered the sand of the sparring pit, chipped and cracked and broken. His audience cheered. I cheered. To watch the Demon Prince fight was to watch a master paint injuries onto the canvas of his enemies.

Where you were small and slight, the Demon Prince had grown prodigiously, and the shifting shape of his hard-etched muscles was visible even beneath his thick uniform. Where your hair was shortly cropped and full of volume beneath your crown, Shura’s hung heavily in long warrior’s locks. He bore the scars of a thousand more battles than you had fought—one split his eyebrow, another formed an ‘x’ against his right cheek, another dug into the flesh of his lip and trailed an arc down his thick neck.

He pointed his training sword across the pit towards you, who sat within the highest box of the wooden stands. I looked up, along with the rest of the crowd, wide-eyed with anticipation. 

“‘Tiger Prince,’” he called out, “care to cross swords with me next?” You rose, straightening your cloak with one hand, and began your slow descent towards the Iurti prince. You replied levelly as you drew closer—even the muscles of your face hardly moved in your reply. 

“You know I am only allowed to spar when the general permits it.” Shura traced the pointed tip of his club in a half-circle across the sand between you.

“Hide behind your keeper as usual, then,” he spat. 

“Prince Shura—” you began to explain, though your words were cut short by the growl of the Demon Prince.

“Keep my name from your mouth, defiler.”

“Pipe down, Shura,” came the honeyed voice of the princess Subira. She drifted through the standing crowd and came to a stop between the two princes of our prison. She wore an elegant gown that trailed within the sand behind her—a plum robe like my own, only highly modified by careful hours of her own work. A silver circlet sat atop her peach-coloured headscarf. Her plush lips smiled dimples into her full cheeks. The past years had, somehow, only furthered her beauty. 

“Thank you,” you whispered, and your slender hand brushed against her own. Shura frowned.

“Stay away from the little prince,” he grunted, “lest he try to defile you next.” Subira tilted her head, jestingly, and smiled.

“Better that you defile me, instead?” 

Shura scowled, for a moment, then softened into a devious grin. 

“Perhaps.” 

Subira laughed and pushed her hand against the Demon Prince’s broad chest and he shook his head and turned away. She turned to face you again and straightened the collar of your uniform with a few gentle motions. Around you, the rest of the crowd filtered out of the arena and into the plush greenery of yard one. I remained within the stands, observing you as quietly as ever.

“Prince Shura may grow to respect you more if you did face him, you know? I think half of his disdain for you comes from how isolated you keep yourself from all the other boys.” You nodded, and sighed, and placed your hands against her own.

“If I could, I would. It is not my choice that keeps me locked away.”

She nodded, softly, and rested her chin atop your shoulder, her ear against your neck. Despite your many new admirers, none had grown so fond of you as the princess Subira. She followed you as so many followed herself, as I had followed you both in your times. 

Those years, I watched as her eyes met yours more times than I could count. As you matched wits with her upon the agora, debating such frivolities as the meanings of poem and song. As her feet brushed your ankles beneath the mess hall table. 

You and I both knew that you could not give Subira what she wanted. What you wanted, as I learned from the whispered name that escaped your lips one sleepless night. Nonetheless, you played her games. Your lips smiled, ever so subtly, when you heard her voice. You flushed and looked away when you saw a black curl fall from the end of her scarf. Together you were the king and queen of our prison, our paradise. My peers muttered about the great wedding you would have when you were both released into your high stations, of the parades that would accompany your union. The idea brought me no jealousy. I knew that no one could ever have you the way that I had you. You were golden and you were mine.

Yet, you were mine in the way that a scholar might feel possessive toward a favourite tome. I believed that I knew your words in a way that no one else did, front to back. Even so, your author had not written your story for me, had not known that I would be the one to read you. I could not crawl within your margins and join your adventures on the page. How could I know—how could anyone have ever known—whether I was reading your story the true way, the way it was intended? The thought twisted my guts with joy and despair. I felt as you so often made me feel: like a goblet filled to the brim and empty all at once.

Last night, I sat beside the headstone of God within the garden and counted the blades of grass that I pulled from the earth beside it. The black sky hung close above my head—too close, like the low-carved stone of the cellar beneath the palace vineyard—and the ground around me was cast in the same indigo hue as the robes which I would soon don in my next ascension ceremony. The robes which you would never see—so quickly would your graduation be upon us. The boy prince was nearly ready for his throne. The second daughter was nearly ready to be shuffled, again, from one dormitory to the next.

I ran my fingers against my thumb to spread the green juice and grit that had dyed my skin during my meaningless task, then lay my head against the stone. The cool resonance spread through my skull and neck, almost uncomfortable, like a plucked nerve. I endured it and whispered a prayer for another miracle, for freedom from the prison in which I had interred myself. The stone’s response came immediately—the hum of a familiar voice whispered between the trees. 

“Why do you flee from my touch, my prince?” 

I moved toward the source on hands and knees, crawling through the night dew as I had once done long ago. Leaves prickled my face as I shuffled and squeezed past them, tracking the sounds as a hound tracks a scent. 

“I know you feel for me,” came the same voice, the familiar voice of a long-lost friend. 

I peered between the sharp edge of an aloe plant at the great clearing before me. You sat pensively atop a brownstone bench and your would-be queen paced around you, her fingertip drifting along the hem of your cloak. The smooth, sparkling surface of the God’s Eye spread out between us. Far below, I saw the wavering candle-flame of the cathedral’s many saints. All the animals of the night crept and sang around us, and I craned to tune my ears for your response. You breathed sharply at her and turned your head to the sky. Your voice came hushed and forceful, an attempt at a final word. 

"My duty is to my kingdom. It doesn't matter how I feel. No distraction can steal me from that duty."

"No distraction?” she asked, and a smile crossed her face. I crept closer, carefully, through the underbrush along the Eye’s rim. I was soon less than six yards away, pressed against the rough bark of a tree within the brush.

“You ask me to commit among the gravest of sins. You ask me to defile you.” Your voice wavered, unsteady, like feet on shifting sands.

“Then defile me,” she said. You pulled away, shaking your head dismissively, and she took your cheeks within her hands. “It is not sin. We will be wed someday.”

A wide gesture pointed out across the clearing. I ducked my head beneath the leaves, worried that she had somehow found me. She continued speaking, louder now, emboldened by the sureness of her words. 

“We are together, now, by the God’s Eye. What higher authority could there be?”

“My mother—” you began, though your voice quickly disappeared beneath hers.

“Your mother? When you sit on the throne in two month’s time, will your mother be king?” 

You levelled your eyes on her own and tilted your head, slightly, as if to say ‘Be careful.’ You were not the frail youth who had so helplessly endured the earliest of the general’s corrective beatings. You were a Prince now, for better or worse. The silence lingered.

“I will not force you. I do not wish to, nor could I if I did,” she admitted. She took your rough hand, carefully, in hers, and raised it until your fingers brushed against the knot at the back of the scarf that covered her head. You jolted, all lightning and raw nerves, and your breath shook unevenly. She nodded and your fingers tightened and pulled. The fabric unravelled, drifted slowly to her feet, and a great mass of black curls unfurled around her face. You looked upon it as you once looked upon me. There was more than curiosity behind your eyes this time. She smiled. 

“But do not deny what we both know that you want.”

Your hand fell from the back of her head to the space between her shoulders, and you pulled her into your lap. She yelped from surprise—a sound that was stifled in her mouth by the presence of your lips. Your fingers ran along the gem-studded surface of her leather bodice, up into the bouncing spirals of her hair, and you gripped her tightly. She held the sides of your face within her fingers and pulled your mouth into hers as if drinking from a wide basin of sweet wine. One of your hands moved to her ankle and travelled upwards, bunching the plum fabric of her uniform dress into a rippling fold at your wrist. You gripped the pillow-soft skin of her thigh, her buttocks, and she moved her waist against your own with a steady, rocking motion. 

I felt my ears burn, my heart pound within my chest. I had never seen such a dance before—not, at least, with my waking eyes. I could not believe the way that my sight, red-hot, poured through my face and gut and twisted in my loins. I hated her and I hated you and I wished that I was both of you or some third, impossible figure, the tangle of breath and desire within the space between you. I shut my eyes and said my mantra and nothing happened, and I opened them to see her slender fingers dancing upon the small black hairs around your nipples.

Her hand travelled further down along the muscles of your chest to the trail of hair between your bellybutton and the hem of your trousers. I saw you open your mouth, though much of your face was hidden beneath the dark cloud of her hair, and you gasped.

“No, please…” Your words were lost in the music of the night. Your promise broke beneath her touch.

Subira bolted upright. Her eyebrows furrowed, her eyes studied your frozen face, as her hand investigated the shape beneath your briefs. As her fingers slipped within.

“You’re—” she spoke without thought, without consideration, “a woman?”

The words burned us—you and I—like the red-glow of an iron brand. The words which we had both held within our lips, too afraid to speak aloud for fear of making them real. I saw the shape of the grand puzzle you had sought to solve, the puzzle for which my body was a piece. I saw the crystal tear upon your cheek. 

Subira recoiled, snake-bitten, jolting herself away from your lap. Her heel stepped backward onto the shimmering glass behind her and slipped against its smooth surface and her head cracked against the Eye of God.

You dropped to your knees beside her at once and took her limp arm within your hand. “Please, God,” you begged, and God answered, and her pulse was strong against your thumb. You held the bare back of her head within your palm, panting hot breath into the night air, and searched the forest around you. 

It was then that your eyes met mine for the final time. Though I hadn’t realised it, the shock of her injury had driven me to my feet. I stood there, exposed like an open vein, and shivered in the slight breeze. You were frightened, too, and paler than you had been in your trial years ago. 

“Sister, she’s been hurt. What should I do?” There was no concern within your voice, I thought, for your own fate. You shifted her head against the soft of your shoulder, took her weight onto yourself. 

“You should take her to her chambers,” I finally replied, weakly, remembering that I could speak, “I don’t think there’s much the physiks could do for her head that a night’s rest couldn’t. But,” I added quickly, “someone will have to watch her through the night to be safe.” You nodded, absorbing my words, then:

“Can you do it?”

“What?” My voice trembled and wavered, barely audible.

“Can you stay with her?” 

You were wide-eyed and fierce as you spoke, a lioness defending her wounded packmate. I nodded, swallowing my fear, and you rose to your feet. We raced over crunching leaves and snapping twigs, over an endless decline of brownstone stairs. The courtyard below us was silent, save for the high flickering of the watch-fires that bathed the space in rings of golden light. Our wooden soles clacked frantically against the cobble of the seventh yard’s walking path. It was a straight shot across the short-cut lawn, some three fathoms away, to the women’s dormitories. We had nearly made it.

“Indira.” 

The voice that boomed across the lawn brought you to a stop, grinded your heels against the path. The shape of a man had stepped from the shadows of the male dormitory. He knocked the side of a wooden pipe within his hands, tapping smouldering ashes into the grass of the lot. The wrong place at the wrong time. He was clad in plum regalia, draped in a heavy fur coat. 

“Please, Prince Shura,” you pleaded quietly. “Let me pass and you’ll never see me again. I swear to you.”

The Iurt’s eyes trailed along your body, discovered the body slumped against your shoulders, and winced away at the sight of her uncovered hair. He spoke again, slowly, with a glower fixed firmly upon your face.

“Step aside, daughter of Gesha. You should not see something as wicked as this.” His hand moved to the curved handle of the sword tied horizontally above the back of his belt. He pulled it free of its sideways scabbard, its steel teeth gritting against the inside, and held the massive blade into the warbling orange light of the watch-fires with both of his calloused hands.

“Put away your weapon, Shura. You needn’t throw away your life for nothing.” Your voice was as desperate as it was cool. Shura moved his long, curved blade before himself, its tip pointed toward your throat. You lowered the princess to the ground, gently, and held out a hand to keep me back.

“Four years I have waited for this. It is time to fulfil my promise to your bastard general.” Shura’s toothy smile shone into the light, nearly as bright as the blade of his weapon. You sighed, moved your hand to your own hilt.

“Don’t worry, sister,” you whispered quietly to me, “This will only take a moment.” 

One second was silent, motionless save for the drifting red petal of a nearby hibiscus tree. The next, the two princes before me exploded into motion. His blade slashed the air in massive, flashing arcs. Your shoulders and hips twisted, jerkingly, to avoid each stroke. Your right hand was still firmly on the hilt of your sheathed general’s sabre. It was a violent, beautiful dance, an eskista in which a single mistake would have showered the yard in your blood. My untrained eyes were lost in the frenzy of your movement, hardly able to even see the blade which you were managing to evade.

Shura yelled with exertion as he pulled into a heavy swing, assuming the form of a Gena batter swinging at a wooden ball. You instantly crouched into a low squat, and the blade thundered through the air a half-inch above your hair. Shura’s eyes tracked your motion, though his arms which carried the momentum of his failed attack may as well have been a world away.

“I have you,” your body seemed to say, and your blade sang from your sheathe towards the neck of the man above you. For a moment, there was nothing around you but air. Then, the Iurti warrior’s heavy boots slammed small craters into the lawn—a perfectly timed backwards leap had put him some two feet from the sharp edge of your golden sword.

He grunted out a stilted chuckle and took one hand from his weapon’s handle. He ran his free thumb along the new, shallow gash that spilled white wool across the front of his uniform. He lowered his heavy blade—one handed—to the dirt and began to close the distance between you again, dragging its tip through the grass and soft earth. You adjusted again and again, shifting the orientation of your sword, the stance of your feet, anticipating your enemy’s next attack. I stepped backwards and tripped—so powerful was the killing intent that poured from the Demon Prince. 

His blade ripped upwards, showering your face in a rain of dirt and debris. You stumbled back, shielding your face with your arms, and the Prince attacked again. He swung into a wild hack that barely contained all of the strength of his massive form. There was no time for you to dodge—you imposed your sword between your head and certain death.

An ear-splitting, metallic scream echoed throughout the courtyard. Your arms lurched back and forth in their sockets from the warbling force of the weapons’ collision. You strained to pull your sword away with no effect. Your golden blade was locked within the jagged teeth of Prince Shura’s violent greatsword. He grinned and shifted his feet in place and wrenched the sword from your hands. It spiralled noisily against the cobblestone of the path.

You looked up to the man who towered above you, who readied his blade in both hands. He swung down like a headsman and you dodged to the side, and his blade buried into the dirt and stone of the ground beside your feet. He swung again, again, and you tripped more than evaded his fierce barrage of strikes. You tumbled to your knees beside the general’s sword. The Prince prepared a final swing, an attack from which you could not recover. I felt my feet begin to shift beneath me. A frantic dash to save the man I loved.

I slid between you, arms outstretched at my sides, and screamed.

“Enough!”

The teeth of his sword stopped mere inches from the thin fabric at my shoulder. Wind rushed from his halted motion, ruffling the cloth of my scarf and uniform like a banner ripped around by a storm’s breeze. He breathed, stilted and heavy, and his brow twisted with confusion and anger. His lips began to move, to chastise me for my involvement. Before a sound escaped his throat, the thin blade of your sword pierced the air like an arrow beside my ear. 

You were frozen behind me in a fencer’s lunge, and the tip of your sabre extended past my head and kissed the thick skin of the Demon Prince’s throat. You panted unsteadily, a wounded rabbit’s breath, and fought to gather the strength to speak. 

“Lower your blade, Shura. It’s over.”

Shura gritted his teeth as he studied us. Finally, he nodded, and lifted his serrated edge from the space above my shoulder. He began to lower his heavy sword to the ground, your eyes following the motion, until he lifted his heavy leg and kicked me squarely between the ribs.

All of the air escaped my lungs in a startled, painful rush. My head was thrown back, colliding hard into your own, and I tumbled head-over-heel across your body, sliding to a stop within the wet grass behind you. The Demon Prince carried the momentum into another attack, a final woodcutter’s swing toward you. The muscles of your legs contracted and expanded like coiled springs and you rolled beneath Prince Shura’s wide-legged stance. The razor of your blade dragged across his thigh as you went, scattering an arc of crimson blood across the lawn. Shura yelled out and collapsed to a single knee, and you sprang to your feet and laced your blade across the front of his throat.

“It’s over,” you declared, spitting blood from your nose and busted lip with each word, “Surrender to me or die.” Shura’s chest heaved up and down, wrestling to steady the harried breaths within his chest. His eyes searched for any possibility of escape. Your razor slid along the thinnest breadth below his chin, drawing a single trickle of blood along his tan skin. “It’s over.”

“I think you’ll have to kill me, then, defiler.” Shura breathed in noisily through his nose and spat onto the grass. I pulled myself to my hands and knees, fighting to quiet the pounding throb within my head. I called out to the captive prince, my voice shaking as severely as the rest of my body.

“Shura,” my eyes and body begged him as I spoke, “you don’t understand. Indira hasn’t defiled the princess. He hasn’t defiled anyone. I saw everything.” His brows furrowed deeper. 

“What?” His voice was deep, hoarse. 

“Shura, you know me. You’ve known me since our white robes. Trust me. Indira—,” I hesitated, “Indira is the most beautiful soul I have ever seen. He didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

You lifted your blade from the Iurt’s throat and your fingers released its green hilt from your grasp. The golden sword clattered to the path beside his feet. You moved your hand to the thick fur at his shoulder and tightened your grip.

“Just let me get the princess inside, safe, and dignified. Then,” you sighed, still trailing blood onto the man beneath you, “you can do whatever you want with me.”

Shura turned and shoved your hand away, his eyes wild with confusion. He hobbled to his feet, clutching his bleeding leg beneath his giant hand, and balanced his weight against his sword like a cane. He surveyed you as if for the first time. His face, still twisted, shifted into the subtle motion of a nod. You bowed before him, knee dipping into the grass, then rose and moved toward the motionless princess. He watched silently as you pulled the jacket from your uniform and bound it around her hair, as you hoisted her from the dewey ground. You carried her with the reverence one might carry a delicate wreath of flowers.

“Come, sister,” you said to me without turning, “the princess still needs your care.”

When we had situated her beneath her velvet sheets, you leaned forward to place a gentle kiss atop her forehead. You held her hand within your own, squeezed her fingers gently, then rose.

“What should I tell her about you when she wakes?” I asked pensively. You shrugged, thoughtlessly, without taking your eyes from her body.

“I do not mind. I will be gone before the morning, and none of you may ever see me again. Tell her whatever you wish.”

I nodded, and laid my head against her warm chest. You were gone before I lifted it again. It was another hour before the bells began to toll, before the guards and tutors began to shout about a prisoner escaping into the night aback a stolen horse.

“Indira…?” The princess asked, stirred amidst the calamity, and I gently squeezed her hand. “My prince?”

“No,” I said, and smiled weakly, “it’s just me. Gensha.”

Amenot. Onowep. Ininbe. Eratam.

The valley of mesas stretches out below me, a great quilted blanket dyed blue by the moon and stars. 

Far below, search-fires blaze across paradise, an army of glowing ants searching the night for the missing prince. They are far too late to find you. 

I do not fly for joy, like the lemon dove, as I have done almost every night for the past eight years. I fly with purpose: tonight, I will solve the mystery of your birth.

I set out again, gliding over the Great Horn with the wings of my mind. The checkerboard hills and rivers and towns and cities of your kingdom rush below me. Your capital, all dressed in black, crests the horizon. I reach the tower of your birth more easily this time and settle atop the balcony window as silently as an owl. The cool stone still stings my bare thighs. Your mother sits at the desk behind me, her lantern burning low, and ruffles a deluge of letters and parchment that is now even taller. I see one letter with the general’s stamp near the top of the pile. Vasudva’s seal is unbroken, his news unread.

I am extending my arms to the heavens, ready to unwind the clock of reality, when I hear a voice through the stained glass window behind me. Your voice.

“Mother.”

I spin around to see you. You look haggard, unshaven. The general’s sword hangs from your side and your hand grips its green hilt, white-knuckled. Your mother turns and jumps to her feet—excitement gives way to confusion gives way to unease. “Why are you—?”

“Sit down.” Your voice overpowers her own. She clutches the edge of her nightgown, and you nod towards the great silken bed of your birth. She obeys, wordlessly, and lowers herself against its edge.

My mind races. I need to see this confrontation, your long-awaited explanation, yet I also need to see your birth myself. To witness the truth. The answer comes as a revelation. Tonight, I will split myself in two. 

I open myself in half with a thought, peeling apart at the centre like the soft green rind of a banana. My left half remains atop the balcony, my left arm continues its reach toward the heavens. My right half slips within the night-cast chamber, my right eye watches as you take a heavy step towards her.

“What did you do?” my right ear hears you ask. Your voice is harsh, uneven. I didn’t know such a timbre lived within you. Outside, my left side counts eighteen rams within the sky. Half of me disappears backwards in time.

“How did you get here?” she asks, hoping her smile can mask her fear. Her eyes dance from your face to the hand at your sword.

“Answer me,” you say, and take another step. “My ‘condition.’” 

You say nothing else. You do not need to.

My left ear hears a harsh scream behind me. Another scream joins it, shrill and light. The harmonised cries of mother and child. My head turns, my left eye peers into the same chamber I visited in the thin hours of the night before. A man in purple and white silk paces. Four soldiers guard the door. White fabric pulses in the breeze of the open window across the room from me.

My right ear hears the click of a sword exiting its scabbard. My right eye sees a golden blade glint in the dwindling light of a lantern on a desk. Your mother raises her hands in protest.

“No, no!” my right ear hears her cry. She steadies herself, evens her breath, and speaks again. “I will tell you everything. It is long past time that you knew.”

My left eye watches the midwife pull your legs from your mother, pink and wet and screaming. Your umbilical trails within her, and you drip with the fluids of birth. She hesitates to spread your legs, your legs which kick and writhe with the breeze that has never crossed your skin before. Her face pales. Your mother, still strained and slicked with sweat, cries out again. 

“My baby.”

Her weak arms grasp for her child. She only holds you for a second before her curiosity, the same curiosity which grips the kingdom below, takes hold of her. She looks at you and her eyes widen with fear. My left side drifts into the space beside her bed. My left eye sees the source of this terror.

I see a healthy baby girl within her arms. No different from my youngest sister at her birth. No different from myself—except, I guess, for the lighter shade of skin, for the hazel eyes that blink in the first painful glimpses of light. I imagine this girl at the age you are now. Clad in silken robes instead of rough, thick tunic. Hair sheltered from the elements by a scarf of fabric. The spitting image of the woman who holds you, aside from the shape of your nose. Instead, your mother wraps her bed sheets tightly around your little, screaming body and holds you close to her breast. The man in purple and white parts the long curtain drapes as he draws near.

“Well?” he asks, his voice strangled in uncertainty. Your mother smiles, manic. I see desperation in the whites of her eyes, the enamel of her bared teeth.

“A boy. It’s a boy.” She laughs, hysterical, and the man laughs, and the midwife laughs, and all three laugh together for three different reasons. 

“It’s a boy. It’s a boy. It’s a boy.” The chant carries through the room, through the palace, through the city, through the kingdom. All the people of Hera chant it. “It’s a boy! It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” Your uncle, the Bloodprince, shouts it and shatters his goblet against the wall. “It’s a boy! It’s a boy! It’s a boy!”

A mantra repeated enough becomes a tulpa. Words become reality. Prince Indira, a living lie.

“For the kingdom, for your father’s legacy, we needed a prince,” my right ear hears. “So we made one.” Your hand, shaking, lifts from the pommel of your sabre and travels to your sweat-licked forehead. Your mother continues to explain, her voice frantic and quick.

“If you hadn’t been a boy, the Bloodprince would have hanged us all from the ramparts of this tower. Our people would have suffered beneath his reign the way his people have suffered these eighteen years.”

My right eye sees you stumble back, sees you catch yourself against the back of the chair by her desk. Your eyes search nothing, attempt to grasp anything. 

“My medicine?” you ask breathlessly. 

“A careful mixture,” she replies, “intended to slow your development as a woman. To… encourage the development of masculine traits.” 

“You poisoned me?” you ask, and your voice drips with pain.

“I—” your mother halts herself, then begins again, “You saved the kingdom. You saved your people. You, my only child. My only son.” I hear the fear in her voice. Her teeth are bare and gritted still, though she no longer smiles. Your legs waver and you fall to the floor. Your mother rises.

“You still have such a role to play. Your uncle plans to move before you take the throne. It is good that you are here,” the honey returns to her voice and she droops and places a delicate hand against your face. You are listless, her words flow over you like clear water over the river bed. She continues: “You are the only one who can save this kingdom, my prince. My king. The only one.” 

Your hand falls from your sword.

I cannot see the future, the unwritten time, even if I pull at the sky until my lungs burn and my face purples with exhaustion. But I can see the future in your face. In your fractured will like tea leaves. In your broken heart like the lines of your palm.

I see the sacrifice you will make for the good of the realm.

I see the armies you will rally. The Demon Prince and his screaming legions of the Iurti. The Princess Subira in her litre of gold, wearing your secret like a key around her neck that she would never use. I see your archers blacken the sky above the Bloodprince.

I see your father’s bannermen filling the square around the royal tower. I hear their horns blowing and cheering as your iron crown is replaced with a crown of gold.

Yet beneath your golden crown your face will be the same. Millions of eyes will stare right through you.

Here, now, in your mother’s chamber, I make up my mind. There is time, I hope.

Tonight, as the search parties scour the valley around the Monastery of Mt. Ahrma, I will slip through the gates and ride after you. No one will notice I am gone. No one will look. My arms and hips and thighs will scream from the activity but they will each surrender before my will. There is work to be done, work that my mind cannot do.

And when my body reaches you, I pray that you will listen to the ramblings of this mad girl, this girl who has memorised every word of your book. 

“Indira,” I will tell you, “you are not alone. You are not invisible. I see you.”

“Indira,” I will tell you, “your people do not deserve your sacrifice. They have taken enough from you.”

“Indira,” I will tell you, “they do not deserve you.”

Indira, you will understand, I hope, from my voice, I deserve you.

No matter your choice, no matter your reply.

My prince, my prison, you will always have me.

Amenot. Onowep. Ininbe. Eratam.