4.
I saw too much. I saw more than I wanted to. Like a glimmering gold thread, there was a strand of moral energy between them. Promises of some sort had been exchanged between them. They had obligations running to each other.
I am glad my paradigm did not operate on pure emotion, like Colin's, or Grendel's, or else the Lilac girl would have been reduced to ashes on the spot, her silly, vacant look of pride, her thickly made-up face, her grasping hands and haughty, paint-smeared eyes, all blasted to nothing in an instant.
I told myself I was older than this; too mature for jealousy. I did not believe myself, however. Myself knows a bald-faced lie when she hears it.
Vanity saw the look on my face. "What's wrong?" She looked sidelong at Victor and Lilac. From the blank look on her face, I could tell she was not seeing what I was.
I saw a young demigod, pure and handsome, and an oozy, giggling little presumptuous harlot touching him with her monkey-paws. I saw something sacred being blasphemed. I saw degradation. Grendel had spoken of his feeling that he dare not touch me for fear of leaving a dirty fingerprint. I did not know what he meant, then. I knew now.
5.
And I saw, as if my life flashed before my eyes, pictures of Victor as he was now, as he had been last year, five years ago, ten. Victor was brave the way a fish is wet; it was so much a part of him that he was unaware of it. He was unable to imagine living any other way. As far back as I could remember, he had been the leader, the strong one, and the one who never doubted, never gave up hope, never knew fear.
He never cried, even as a child.
He was the one, back when we were small children, when we were Primus and Secunda, who held my hand and told me the secret, the secret too enormous and wonderful to be true.
He told me that this world was not our home; that these people were not our people; that our real parents were still alive; that somewhere, someday in the shining future, we all would escape, and find the place where we were meant to be. Someday, we would find our home. Someday, we would be happy.
We had been sitting on the brink of the Kissing Well when he had told me that, looking out over the sea.
It was raining, rain coming down in silver sheets, beating the grass into mud, and the little peaked roof of the well, like a witch's hat, was drumming with rain, and the noise echoed from the well.
I had been crying about something. I do not recall what. Quentin being given the strap because he would not eat meat, perhaps, or Tertia (as Vanity was called then) being forced to spend the night in another room, because we whispered too much at night.
Primus took my hand and told me the secret. And I put my head on his shoulder, because it was so strong. I stopped crying, because Primus was there.
And I thought he meant we would be happy together. I thought he meant we would make a home together.
I suppose I had the vague idea that him and me, the older ones, would be taking care of the three little kids. Together, a family. Us.
Husband and wife.
6.
When he picked his name, I thought he was picking it for me: Victor Invictus, Victor the Unconquerable, Mr. Triumph. It was a promise that we would prevail, a promise that we, together, would overcome our enemies. When I picked my name, I thought about how good "Amelia Triumph" sounded, and I thought he had selected his name with an ear to how mine would sound alongside.
And, as he spent every day with me, every afternoon, every hour, I knew that we were the ones meant for each other. We were the special people, the Uranians, the children of Chaos. Everyone else was the enemy. Even Vanity might not be fertile with him. I was the one, the only one.
And it took only one lipstick-smudged smile from Lily Lilac, daughter of a fish cannery man, to show me I was not the one. I was not anything.
7.
Vanity steered me by the elbow over to the punch bowl and got me a ladleful of eggnog. I think she sneaked me a cup from the adults' bowl; it tasted bitter and filled my head with a warm lightness. I coughed, and she patted my back.
Boggin must have noticed something, for his eyes traveled between where I gagged on a stolen drink and where Victor was arm in arm with a girl propriety would forbid him to be alone with, for he cleared his throat and said with gentle firmness to our host, "Why, Mr. Lilac, I fear my charges may be growing somewhat beyond control, perhaps a bit too, ah, jolly, there is the right word, too jolly, even in a season as holy as this one. I must wish you a most Merry Christmas, sir, and the happiest of New Years, and we must be on our way. Long walk back through the snow!"
Boggin smiled and Mr. Lilac shivered.
8.
It was a two-mile hike back; neither the longest walk, nor the coldest, but I thought it the dreariest of my life. Mrs. Wren had been given a ride back in the new car Mr. Lilac was so proud of. The rest of us walked, following the bobbing light of Miss Daw's electric torch.
I will not bore you by reciting my circling thoughts. If you have ever had your heart broken and your dearest hopes betrayed, you know. If not, you no doubt imagine you would handle the matter with a stiffer upper lip than poor Amelia Windrose. For all I know, you might very well handle it better than me.
I doubt you could handle it worse. At least I did not cry out loud, and the cold helped me keep all expression from my face.
The line of us spread out a bit as we marched.
I suppose, as the fearless leader of a bold band of escape artists, I should have been examining the situation for possible escape routes. I did notice Colin glancing at the deserted woods left and right and looking at me impatiently, as if I were any moment about to give the signal to club Boggin over the head with a rock and skip away laughing over the snowy hillocks. Colin may have somehow sensed what he did not consciously remember: that Mrs. Wren was the one who countered his power, and she was absent. But I had had bad experiences braining Bog-gin, and I was in no mood to skip.
Once only, Vanity tried to cheer me up. She put her hand on my arm and leaned close to whisper. Her breath made a white plume in the cold night air. "You can't have ever been serious about Victor! Not in that way. He thinks of us as his sisters. His little sisters. Can't you tell?"
This was not exactly what I wanted to hear. I shrugged her off my arm without answering, and trudged onward, watching my boots make one mushy step after another in the gloomy snow.
I saw the lights of the main house in the distance, rising above the stony walls that paralleled the road, when Victor fell into step behind me. He said only, "Done."
I turned my head to glance at him, but he had already slowed his gait, and so was a pace or two behind me.
Opening one of my higher senses, I saw something in his coat pocket; a slim plastic case with earphones and control buttons, one door for the battery, the other for the discs. It was a compact disc player.
1.
I lay awake that night, watching the stars moving through the northern window. Charles' Wain circled the polestar like a cycle, moving against the little etched lines and dots of the star-dial Victor had made for us. The Septen-trion, they called those stars in ancient days, and they said the wheel they made, which neither rose nor set, was the Table Round which Arthur kept in heaven, till the time, in England's hour of need, when he and the sleeping champions shall wake from where they slumber in Avalon.
I recited their names to myself as they turned, the seven who never set: Dubhe, Merak, Phecda, Megrez, Mizar, Alkaid, and Alioth.
No names in Greek or Latin. They come from a time when the Arab astronomers, sitting by starlight atop minarets tall above the hushed desert, counted and watched the stars, noting them with an advanced mathematics, of which the West knew nothing, perhaps with the De Caelo of Aristotle or the Almagest of Ptolemy open on their laps. Eternal names, written in the sky, to remind the proud Western peoples, and perhaps those in the East as well, that no victory, no supremacy, endures.