Beard accepts the lit cigarette back, but he chuckles as he does so, my smile the key required. I watch him suck in the smoke, unfazed by the fact that his lips are now touching that which a Daughter of the Moon enjoyed mere moments ago. The world has truly changed.
The rain has paused at last, but the swallows still seek shelter from behind the planks covering the windows, the insistent knocking of their beaks providing an accelerating rhythm for the tune of the day. From the corner of my eye, I glimpse Celestia indiscreetly waving at me. The tilt of her head signals growing impatience. Our younger sisters seem happily enough preoccupied with the roses under the watchful eye of Captain Janlav and that of Boy that might miss a thing or two.
“I must join my sisters,” I say to Beard. I descend the porch’s steps, leaving him and Tabard behind. But only for a moment, for their duty is to keep us safe, if not from the gagargi, then at least from Captain Ansalov and his soldiers. The two captains have reached an agreement. The soldiers are not to enter the house. The guards are to keep us inside, the only exception being our daily outings. But as the rough jeers of the soldiers carry over from the stable yard, I wonder how long that exception will last.
The grand maples and lindens of the garden hum, scattering drops that land on my shoulders. My younger sisters, including Sibilia, are barefooted, their hems knotted up just below their knees. With white roses bundled on their arms, with smiles and giggles exchanged, they look carefree and free. But I can’t bear the thought of joining them, for that we are not and shall never again be.
I head toward the path that follows the shadow of the wall. Celestia notices my intention. She speaks softly with Sibilia, whose whole posture changes, gaze sharpens. Celestia must have tasked her with looking after our younger sisters. It’s a curious development, to see them again on speaking terms. For Sibilia swore to me on multiple occasions that she’d never forgive Celestia for intending to abandon her.
It was this revelation that propelled me toward the crucial realization. As we drift down the same paths day after day, we might as well be ghosts already. There’s nothing we can do anymore to change our fates. But we may be able to affect that of the very empire.
As Celestia and I slowly stroll past the thickets of fireweeds and thistles, I indiscreetly study my sister, her straight posture and steady steps. But before I can make up my mind about whether she has reached the same grim conclusion or not, a breeze of the colder sort carries with it a hint of smoke, revealing Tabard and Beard trailing after us. Celestia shakes her head.
“What?” I ask. Did she somehow sense what I was thinking earlier? Is she the braver one of us, the one to bring up the topic?
“Must you really?” Celestia glances pointedly at Sibilia, Merile, and Alina, barely visible through the leaves and branches of the blooming rosebushes. But I can hear their giggling still, the playful growls of Merile’s dogs. What bliss ignorance is! “That is such a vile habit.”
My sister is worried about me sharing a cigarette with the guards, of me negatively influencing our younger sisters! I laugh despite myself and to despise myself. It doesn’t matter what I do and with whom anymore, if I socialize with those we were taught to ignore if we needed nothing from them. “Yes. I do think I absolutely must.”
Celestia sighs, but doesn’t say a word. She knows that none of us apart from her will have time to regret any possible ill choices.
On the even ground, plants reach out toward us from both sides of the path, but it’s not because they wish us to honor them with our touch. The rigid stalks of widow’s lace stick out in steep angles. The hundreds of violet fireweed flowers gape open like maws to display their thin, white tongues. Stems of lupines, blue flowers sodden with rain, arch down as if they can’t take, can’t bear their glory for much longer. I pause to tilt water out of one of the stems. There’s so much water. It’s almost as if the whole world were drowning.
“Then I shall respect your choice,” Celestia says after too long of a time has passed for her reply to be genuine. She approves of the guards listening to Sibilia reading, for she thinks it’s our father’s voice that draws them toward us, nothing more. But me smoking with them… it is too much for her, even though the scriptures clearly state that before our father rose to the skies, he intended everyone to be equal under his light.
At nights when I can’t sleep, I often wonder what my sister would be like as a ruler. She says she would be fair and just, but how could she be that when she hasn’t really comprehended the scriptures, our father’s sacred will? She says she would put an end to all wars and launch social reforms to ensure that her subjects would no longer starve and die of disease and exposure. But she hasn’t mentioned how she plans to accomplish this. I don’t think she has given much thought to what she would do after reclaiming her throne. Yet she vehemently opposes the equal redistribution of resources, the one solution that might just bring a better life to everyone!
A thunder of shots fired. A chorus of shattering glass. Vicious jeers. Then, a moment later, the bitter tang of gunpowder.
My sister’s steps remain equally spaced and graceful, though mine falter. A quick glance over my shoulder confirms I should have nothing to fear, for both Beard and Tabard are at ease. It’s just Captain Ansalov’s soldiers practicing shooting once more. Knowing that man, it isn’t a coincidence that they always do so during our daily outing. He’s preparing his men for the inevitable.
It’s cold, suddenly colder in the wall’s shadow, but this is the way the path winds. Here plants must grow in the dark, here they never bloom as vivid, with as much ardor, as their kin that get to grow in the sun. But that is the way of the world. There will always, eventually, be darkness.
I know for certain that one day soon Captain Ansalov will lead us down to the cellar. He will order everyone but Celestia to stand before the wall of granite. The soldiers will take aim. They will fold their fingers around the triggers, perhaps closing their eyes as they do so. How sounds must echo in the cellar when there’s no way out!
“Elise?” Celestia reaches out toward me, to touch my shoulder.
I evade her, brush a stem of thorny thistles aside, change my mind, and snap it off. It’s a law of nature that all beauty must eventually die. Our ruin is unavoidable. “Do you know when the gagargi will come for you?”
Where gunshots couldn’t break through my sister’s composure, my question wounds her, just as I knew it would. My sister pulls her chin high, higher still until the tendons of her neck are taut. Her pale hair glistens in the afternoon sun, a reminder of the crown she still yearns to wear one day. Though she’s the empress-to-be, she lacks the courage to acknowledge the truth. “That I don’t know. But he will come for me as certainly as the sun rises each morning, as certainly as our father will travel the skies during the nights.”
It’s almost a month since Merile’s folly, and with the summer solstice but five days away, anything might come to pass here without our father being able to help us, for he’s just a dim, white disc in the sky. That’s why this house was built here in the first place, to keep the Daughters of the Moon that have fallen from favor out of sight, out of mind. Guarded by the winters too fierce to defy. Isolated by the nightless summers.
“Will you go with him?” For I can but speculate what happens to her and us if she does. But a more frightening thought is what may come to pass if she doesn’t.
If she goes, my younger sisters and I will be shot, and of this I’m more than certain. The gagargi can’t risk keeping us around for fear we might one day plot to claim the throne.
But if she doesn’t… Celestia seems to think herself almighty, though I haven’t seen any evidence that would suggest she possessed any power to alter our fates. Is she just perversely cantankerous? Or is she playing a game, one she thinks she might yet win? As much as I wish that she would emerge victorious, we must be realistic. If she doesn’t go voluntarily, the gagargi will claim her by force and us younger sisters will meet an end much crueler in the maws of his machine.