Work Text:
Your first mistake is not running away the second you heard them talking.
“The infant is broken,” your sister Lyctor whispers fretfully one evening in the room beyond. You freeze, having been about to enter; but she is, without a doubt, talking about you. “She is nowhere near the Eightfold Word, and yet…and yet!! She is alive, but she is broken! I had to peel her off the floor today because Ortus went after her with that horrible spear—”
“At the very least he’s trying to do something about it,” comes the laconic reply. “What are you doing, Joy, besides talking my ear off?”
There is a second of miffed silence, and then the Saint of Patience lets out a short non-laugh. “Thought so,” he says.
You need to move, lest you be accused of skulking. You are not trying to overhear your elders’ discussion. You have only come to Mercymorn’s rooms to ask her if you might be excused from killing a planet tomorrow, on account of the Saint of Duty having gone after you with—she’s correct—that horrible spear. But you had barely started floundering through the gauzy tangerine-colored curtains of her anteroom before you’d heard voices beyond, and then you were stuck, too far in to make a quiet retreat.
Augustine mutters something you cannot hear, but he is alarmingly close now, and before you can hide, he is striding through the anteroom. You freeze, in full view. But he only glances at you, shakes his head, and continues on his way out. The door slams. You flinch, and tangle yourself further in the curtains, and trip, and flail, and abruptly meet the carpet.
When you look up again, Mercymorn the First is standing over you, cream-colored shawl pulled tight around her shoulders, mouth pulled tight into a frown. She looks distinctly unsurprised to find you in failed trespass on her floor.
“I cannot abide skulking,” she hisses. “You may as well come in.”
By the time you slither out of the curtains and present yourself just inside the doorway, she is pacing up and down before the expansive pillow-crowded bed you suspect she never sleeps in. It is too large a room for a person to ever feel comfortable, and has too many sections: a sitting area with a fireplace, the bed and nightstands, a vanity, a walk-in closet, another sitting area without a fireplace, and some open space with a net and rapier hung on the wall.
“Elder sister, I am—”
“I don’t care,” she snaps. “Sit.”
You sit. The taupe velvet sofa nearest the door is not as comfortable as it looks, and your bone corselet clinks against itself. “I am—”
“Stop talking. I don’t care. When I need information I will ask you for it.” She perches upon a fluffy pouf facing you, and grinds her teeth so loudly your own molars ache in sympathy. She is much too close, and the look she is giving you is too accusatory to be about anything significant, and too clinical to be about anything trivial. It is the look you used to give theorems that were too difficult for their own good.
This is the last moment you have any hope of escaping, though you do not realize it then.
Mercymorn leans even closer and takes your head in both hands, neatly cupping the back of your skull. Her mouth twitches briefly in derision, or disgust, at what she finds. Then she says, abruptly, “Think about your cavalier.”
You have no time to mount a defense. Your cavalier? Ortus Nigenad. He is a blurry stain in your past, no clearer than what you ate for breakfast yesterday, or Sister Sepulchrine who died when you were seven years old. Something behind your nose begins to itch. “What does this have to do with—”
“Shush,” says the Saint of Joy. “You are not allowed to faint,” she adds. “If you try, I will yank you back to consciousness. By force.”
Before it can quite dawn on you that this is a very bad idea, she continues, “Think about the first time your cavalier swore the oath to you.”
She glares at you with those tornado eyes until you obediently shut yours, and try to recall—Ortus Nigenad, at Drearburh. Did you swear in the pool? In the chapel? You cannot recall. Did you swear at all?
“Think,” says your teacher, “about what your cavalier looked like.”
Ortus Nigenad, mournful and hulking, like the human version of the rock at the mouth of the Tomb. The mental picture is not nearly as clear as things you see with your eyes, but you think you’ve understood the assignment—which is a mistake.
You are so acutely aware of Mercymorn holding your head, of her fingers in your too-long hair, that it bothers you. The sensation is nudging up against something else—something—being held—and the smell of salt—the oath, and your cavalier. You had failed to pay enough attention, though, and the image of your cavalier morphs itself in your head, drifting away from Ortus Nigenad and toward something else. There’s salt water and hands on your head and you are looking up at something golden—golden—
Say it—
A shudder ripples through you, and you blink your eyes open. Just in time to catch Mercymorn retching slightly, though she doesn’t even bother hiding it. She still has a grip on your skull.
“This is—something,” she mutters, and her fingers shift slowly over your scalp to different places. “You may have messed with your brain, but you didn’t quite get it all. Your body knows how it felt about your cavalier, and it is responding so strongly I am frankly embarrassed for you. You can’t hide it, as much as I wish you could.”
No, but you’re trying anyway, willing yourself to take deep calming breaths. Your paint hides the flush of your cheeks, but it can’t hide your pupillary response, and you’re not enough of a flesh magician to stop it. Visual signals are moot, anyway, with Mercymorn’s fingers on your skull showing her the unseen, the whole circuitry of your body lit up for her. She is privy to the uptick in your heart rate and blood pressure, and the silent fireworks in your amygdala.
You poor thing, you only put a name to the response an instant before she supplies it.
“Arousal,” she mutters, with a dreary sigh.
You are too horrified by this to respond. Two galaxies on opposite sides of the universe have a greater chance of colliding than arousal and Ortus Nigenad, in your head. Eventually, you manage to croak, “My relationship with my cavalier was entirely within the bounds of—”
“I’m sure,” says Mercymorn, with no little sarcasm. "I said that too, once." She finally ceases her anatomical prying, wipes the tips of her fingers on her cream-colored trousers, and fixes you with a flat stare. “You have clearly not been taking care of yourself.”
Not taking care of yourself? It is true your hair is unbrushed and you have not bathed in several days, but you are upright and wearing clean clothes today. This ought to count for something. But in the prurient sense, which is what she obviously meant…of course you haven’t been. You cannot explain to her that you long only for the Body that appears to you and will never touch you; you cannot explain to her the pain of yearning for something you know you cannot have.
Also, every time you try to touch yourself, you faint. That's a pretty effective deterrent.
“Any arousal has nothing to do with my cavalier,” you insist, and your voice cracks on the last word. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Saint of Joy, either, probably; but your mouth is suddenly dry.
Mercymorn throws her peach-colored head back and laughs, with all the mirth of drywall. Then she reaches out and winds a hand into the hair at the back of your head. You flinch, but only slightly. Eyes narrowed in calculation, she jerks down on your hair, tilting your chin up, exposing your throat. Something familiar flashes through your mind so quick you can’t tell what it is, but both you and she notice the way your heart beats faster.
“Hah,” she murmurs, and releases your hair, but takes you by the chin instead. She turns your head right and left, but nothing happens until she lifts your head up so you are staring into her eyes—golden, and bright, and you think maybe she’ll—
No. No. The Saint of Joy’s eyes are a light-brown sandy color, swirled with angry reddish bits, and not what you were thinking at all. It must have been a trick of the light.
Something warm oozes from your nostril, crawling down your dried paint to your upper lip.
“Eugh,” whispers your teacher, with satisfaction. She does not bother to wipe it away, and neither do you. You are trying so hard to be still that you’re trembling. As she turns your head to one side, she brushes a bit of hair off the side of your face, and you twitch—wet hair, salt, fingers, touch—but when her lips press against your cheek, there is only the stuffy dry warmth of the too-large room.
The Saint of Joy mutters to herself, “So your cavalier did this…” Again, she tidies away a lock of your hair, which makes you shudder. “And this…” She lifts up your chin with one finger, again forcing you to look into her—not golden, not golden (why do you think they should be golden?)—eyes.
What would happen if she kissed you?
You don’t want her to—or do you?
“Did your cavalier ever do this?”
Her breath is warm on your lips. You are being tugged forward, and your eyes close of their own accord, and you catch the scent of salt and sweat and heat, and as you are kissed—
You unravel.
The wanting that tugs at you is buried so deep it is painful. Within you too many things are getting tangled up, in a weird roiling mixture of triumph from getting something you did not know you wanted above all other things, and the disbelief of it actually happening, of someone kissing you, someone who you were sure hated you your whole life for good reason, although you want so desperately to earn her forgiveness. Forgiveness, for—for—for—for the way you—her forgiveness—what? For the way you had treated—
Something warm and wet fills your ears, and the familiar void of unconsciousness sways up toward you—
You jolt awake, eyes flying open, tense all over. Your heart beats fast, everywhere you can feel it—your temples, your chest, and most of all, between your legs.
Mercymorn has one hand on your skull again, the other still under your chin. Her brow is furrowed in thought, and there is a smear of blood on one side of her upper lip. Your blood.
“I told you,” she snaps. “Keep conscious. If I can just push in the right places…coax your idiot limbic system into a response…”
You are not sure you want anything coaxed into a response, but your idiot limbic system disagrees. Somewhere deep inside you, a buried thing scents a path toward the surface. “Elder sister—”
“I am trying to fix you!! Keep quiet, stay conscious, and don’t complain!” Tendrils of intestine-pink hair flutter around her face as she heaves a sigh. “I know I am not your cavalier—and thank God for that—but just pretend, can’t you?”
You don’t quite catch whatever she says next—possibly “As bad as Anastasia’s first sexy party”—because her mouth is on yours again, and you taste salt, and sweat, and your limbs grow cold and heavy. You flounder blindly toward—somebody, and ball your fists in clothing that should be thick and heavy and is disturbingly dry in your hands—
“Good,” someone says, and you are pushed firmly backward. Nothing slows your motion; your back bounces against the surprisingly unyielding sofa back, and Mercymorn’s rooms swim hazily back into focus. Annoyingly, so does Mercymorn, fingers pressed to your temple, lips pursed critically. She is too slight and too short and too old—God, she is ancient—but something about her hair in the dim light makes your head hurt. It is almost the right color. It is the wrong color entirely. “Good,” she says again.
You yank her towards you. Her mouth tastes like blood. You do not know what you are doing, not in the slightest. Nothing is right or familiar—not the feel of her against you, not the way she smells—but the action and movement and motion and touch, somehow, is almost right, like something you’re trying to remember, or something you made up once and forgot.
She kisses like she’s testing you on technique. You have no technique. You are drowning, and your teeth keep getting in the way. Hands rove over your head, your neck, shoulders, arms, back, collarbones, breasts, waist, thighs, all with the clinical efficiency of somebody pressing every button on a machine to figure out which ones work. You would despise being touched like this if you had any room to notice. Everything in your body is overelectrified, sensitive, alive. There are too many clothes touching your skin and they are both dry and soaked. You clutch someone to you in salt water and succumb to the—
Teeth sink into your lower lip. You jerk back in surprise as the scent of saltwater turns to a whiff of dust; and then even that fades to nothing in the unwelcome cavernous room. Mercymorn says, “Interesting,” and then, “Bite me.”
“What?”
“Bite—”
She demonstrates again on you. You hate being bitten, entirely, with your whole being; and after a little fumbling, manage to bite her back. Hard. There’s the dust again. So satisfying. Again, harder. The noise she makes is not her own—who are you trying to bite? Someone’s face against yours—and you free a hand, get a little distance, and rake your nails down a cheek. Gouge, claw, feel the resistance under your fingernails as the skin tears, and the pain that made you do it—
A drop of blood splashes into your eye. The Saint of Joy straddles you, one hand planted on your bare chest where your shirt has come open. A few specks of dried paint cling to her nose. The deep scratches in her face knit themselves together as you watch. She is sneering, you think, with a strong jaw and whiff of snow leek porridge and eyes that did not die when they were supposed to.
You cannot throw her off you, so you drag her to you and bite her again, and again, but she rears back so your teeth only sink into thin air. “No, no, no, keep your adrenal glands out of it,” she snaps, “and I don’t even want to know what that’s about, thank you!!"
Your vision judders; any urge to fight is abruptly sucked away. Your heart beats slower but no less forcefully as you catch your breath, on the too-dry too-strange unexciting velvet of the couch.
Mercymorn says, "How about...this.” She flicks your unbuttoned shirt entirely open, and brushes the pad of her thumb over the peak of your nipple, watching you carefully.
“Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” someone says.
But Mercymorn’s lips haven’t moved. You do not feel well. You do not feel well at all. Blood pours out of your nose, both nostrils, trickling over both your cheeks and into your hair, which might have something to do with it. You arc up as she squeezes the swell of your breast, and some blood runs back into your nose, making you choke and cough and sputter. Frontline Titties—
Nails dig into your flesh, making a front line on your titty. “What was that?”
You realize you’ve said something. You gasp again, “It’s—not a real publication—”
The Saint of Joy makes a monumentally disinterested noise and trails a hand down your stomach, over your bone corselet, to the center seam of your leggings.
This time, your shaky inhale has very little to do with your brain playing inventive tricks on you. This is the most tedious, pedestrian trick of them all: the purely somatic desperation of flesh longing to be touched. The whine that comes out of you is not special; there is no revelation in the way your hips cant up towards her fingers. There is just this room, and just this moment. Something hurts, deep within your bones.
The hand disappears. You make a complaining noise, and Mercymorn says, “You’re off track. Cavalier.”
Ortus Nigenad appears in your head, bringing an icy dose of recoil to your entire body. Before you can complain again, Mercymorn grinds her teeth, and hisses, “Why is that worse, I don’t understand!!”
Whatever your body is doing, it displeases her.
It displeases you, too: you should have been unconscious long ago. Not just from your brain’s hobby of shutting off sometimes, but also from the huge amounts of blood you’ve lost. The sofa squelches under you as you struggle up onto your elbows, sticky with drying blood. Everything around you has the hazy too-bright quality of unreality, and you become desperately, skin-crawlingly aware of a horrible fact: you are dying for her to fuck you.
You wriggle out of your bone corselet, which has long since begun chafing you, since either you or Mercymorn pulled your shirt out from under it. You cast it to the floor with a faint clinking. Your shirt, which you are only still wearing under a generous definition of the word “wearing”, follows it. The Saint of Joy, kneeling lost in thought somewhere over your shins, regards you with suspicion. When you reach for the hem of her shirt and try to drag it up, she slaps your hand away.
“Please,” you whisper. Your mouth is so dry, and you realize, to your horror, you are on the verge of begging.
Luckily, this seems to revolt her as much as it does you. “No!!" she says. "I will not be prey to the clumsy attentions of a—a libidinous pupa. Control yourself for ten seconds, I nearly have it.”
Persons of lesser dignity would have screamed at that, but you massage the sting out of your hand and hold your head high. At least, until the Saint of Joy rubs her forehead wearily, and you become aware of the way you’re squeezing your thighs together. It doesn’t do anything for you, really, but anything is better than sitting still.
“All right,” says Mercymorn, less than joyful, and picks up your hand—
Water laps faintly in your ears. You are looking at—
Mercymorn, now, who is watching you. She squeezes your hand, and there it is again, the salt and cold and—
Your fingers curl into someone else’s. You shiver, because it’s cold, and you are wet, and someone brushes some hair out of your face, which is both damp and dry and two different lengths. Some vague noise of approval is directed at you, you think. Fingers lift your chin up. Your gaze drags; you can tell how this goes by now. Someone will make you look into their eyes and you will want to be kissed so badly it's inane. But you look, and there's the sense of buoyancy that is either in your body or only in your chest, and there are the eyes. They are reddish or they are amber or they are both, under hair that shades from peach to red and back again. You look, and there are the eyes, and the taste of salt upon your lips, and you grow furious with waiting, and you surge up and take that kiss.
You are in a pool and you are on a couch and you are half floating and you are fighting with your sodden garments and you are wearing no shirt. It's happening and it's not happening and it never happened. You are inhaling salt and sweat and water and a faint sandalwood scent you hate automatically, and your knee is parting someone else's legs, and you are pushing them up against a sofa back and a pool wall. You are laughing and alive and hungry and half-dead, and your hands stroke over skin wet and dry. You gasp: fingers that are both too small and just right dip below your waistband, then lower still.
You are certain you are going to faint. Except you don’t. The flashes of memory keep coming, and you arc up into the touch and beg for more. It is granted: fingers slide into you, pressing and stroking. Is it real? It cannot be real. You’re not even sure anymore if it’s memory of something that happened or memory of something you just wished had happened. A memory of a dream, or a memory of a fantasy, and you want it so badly you lose control of yourself.
You reach for her, seize her, try to bury yourself in her, in her black robes—
She is not wearing black robes. She is wearing an off-white shirt and trousers and bats your hand away from herself, almost bored about it. Her face is smeared with blood, and it’s close enough to the Priestess Crushed Beneath the New-Laid Rock to be acceptable, though she should be wearing black and her skull paint should be—she should be—she is kissing your face, at the bone of your frontal sinus, between your eyebrows.
It is this that undoes you completely.
You are not responsible for the sobbing rage that seizes your body, nor for the water you splash everywhere in your flailing, nor for the selfishness with which you rub yourself on her hand, heedless of all but the friction and pressure you need. It is all the fault of that kiss, right there, upon your face.
A word comes to your lips, a word you have never said before. It is a nonsense word. Your brain doesn't know it, but your lips want so badly to form its syllables, and your lungs want to give it air to fly from you in your release. You must not say it. You have to resist.
Your mouth opens wide, and you scream instead, all the way to oblivion.
Consciousness forces itself upon you with a full-body shock. The room is bright, and something close to you is making a noise like gravel in a blender: Mercymorn, grinding her teeth, having just pumped more adrenaline into you than is strictly polite.
In a rare concession to her name, she waits for your teeth to stop chattering before making you do something awful.
“Speak,” she says. “I know you have it.”
She is poised and tense, waiting for an answer from you.
You make a noise like, “Hngh?”
“The Eightfold Word.” Her eyes bore into yours, like abrading reddish dust, and nothing more. “Speak the Eightfold Word.”
There was a word once. You don’t know what it is.
Several seconds tick by without you conjuring up this mystery word from nothing. Mercymorn’s face acquires a hard, closed-off quality. It would be hatred, if she cared about you enough to hate you.
“Who,” she says, “was your cavalier?”
That’s easier. You swallow, wet your dry lips. “Ortus Nigenad.”
Mercymorn observes you critically, nostrils flaring, probably making a list in her head of everything broken and pathetic about you. This is not what she wanted to hear, though it is the truth. You could not possibly have given any other answer; you have never had any other cavalier.
“No,” she says, after a long moment. “No, of course it didn’t work. In this, and in all things, I waste my time.” She exhales. “Get out.”
You go directly to bed, and collapse without even resetting your bone wards. You have a splitting headache for five days after that, and the scattered sensations pulled from your fevered brain sift back into obscurity again like so much dust. You have no conception, in the end, of ever having had them.
But of course you don’t. Mercymorn could poke and prod at you as much as she liked, but she'd got it all wrong. There was no hidden memory there.
It was only ever in your imagination that the mouth on your body, the hands on your skin, and the name on your lips had been mine.