NINE

Blueleg woke Leander with a gruff, “It’s time.”

Leander yawned, smelled under his arm, scratched his neck, and arched his back as he stood up.

“Still smell like roses?” Blueleg laughed.

“Yup. It’s been unusually extravagant.” Leander cracked his neck with several horrifying pops.

“Wanna stay?” Blueleg offered with a note of good humor and another of hospitality.

Leander wobbled his hand like he was considering the negatives versus the positives of that plan. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this place has nothing but dudes. One of the advantages of warfare is that there are a lot of women wherever you go.”

“Yeah. Don’t tell the King about this place. I don’t want him coming here to fill his garrison.”

Leander snorted. “You sound like you’ve never met our King. You send these boys out into the world with their trades, right?”

Blueleg nodded.

“The King needs blacksmiths. It’s no good to have unarmed soldiers. He needs carpenters too. Whatever you’re making, he needs them. Scatter them all over the place! It’s a great idea. Wherever his army goes there will be someone he can use.” Leander halted his tirade. “Now, give me a coat. I don’t want to fly with the eagles in only this shirt.”

Blueleg grimaced and got him the coat he needed. It was an old thing, but Leander knew it was at least something they could spare.

Down to the barracks, Leander walked, half thinking that a few men would still be up, planning their tiered fighting matches. However, the place was completely dead when he got there. All the men were asleep. A few of them were so tired, they hadn’t made it to their beds. Stocking was one of them.

Leander heaved him up on his mattress with a motion that involved his knee to Stocking’s back. It was fairly gentle, but the man weighed as much as a corpse. It brought back unwelcome memories. It wasn’t so much that Leander minded slinging corpses. He didn’t. However, he minded it a great deal when it was someone he knew.

“Leave them,” Blueleg said, coming after Leander. “I’ll put the stragglers to bed.”

Leander patted Stocking’s sleeping head. “I’ll remember you, friend. If our paths ever cross again.” He touched his face. It was a gesture he’d picked up from handling corpses. It was the move he did to close a dead man’s eyes. He always waited to close their eyes until he was ready to set fire to the pyre, cover them with dirt, or toss them over the edge of the boat. It was the first time he’d ever unintentionally done it to a living person.

Raising his head, Leander turned to the Maiden, Faydra. She couldn’t be ‘The Maiden’ in his mind anymore. She had a name and he had to use it.

The moonlight was brighter than it had been the night before and a corner of light from an upper window illuminated the place where Faydra’s head rested on her pillow.

For some reason, Leander didn’t want to do what was asked of him. There was something fateful about the whole thing that stilled his blood in his veins. If he took his place in the dance, if he moved like he was expected to, perhaps nothing would be the same again.

He took a deep breath and decided to handle Faydra the way he had handled Stocking. He was going to pretend she was a corpse.

He opened the door to the cage and stepped inside. The first step was in darkness and the second step brought him into silvery moonlight.

She lay on her back. Her arm fell over the side of the bed and hung limply. The other was clasped to her chest in a fist. Her chest rose and fell in strong heaves, like she couldn’t get enough breath, like her body was fighting an invisible enemy.

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It was very seductive.

He didn’t know if he’d be able to forget for one second that she was a very live creature or that she was the type of creature that fit together perfectly with the beast that he had become.

He opened her clasped hand, hoping the key would be there and he wouldn’t have to search her body further. He knew what would be under her dress and removing the red dress didn’t bother him at all. Under that dress, she’d have at least two more layers of clothing, but searching for the key next to her skin was something else. He immediately decided it was better if he searched for the key before he removed the dress. That way, the key would stay in her secret place and he wouldn’t have to rifle through all her nightgown’s nooks and crannies to find it in the dark.

He tugged her hand away from her cleavage, undid the first button of her dress the way he had seen her do it when she hid the key, and reached in.

Leander’s eyes went wide.

What he felt was not what he should have felt. He knew he should feel softness, warmth, maybe even the salt smear of sweat. Instead, he felt nothing. There was the dress and then there was nothing. There was a hollow space where a breastbone should have been–where ribs should have been! He felt a cavern, not breasts, not bone, not even skin. Her body ended and nothing began.

Being a man and not a baby, he didn’t withdraw his hand. Instead, he pushed his hand deeper inside her, eventually feeling her clothes that were nearest to the mattress. No matter how far down he touched, he felt nothing. Curling his hand awkwardly, and painfully, he reached under the ribs he could see. Then he started to feel things, the rapid breathing hadn’t stopped and Leander could feel the multitude of soft balloons that made up her lungs. Then he felt the hot beating of her heart in his hand like a small animal that wanted to run away but couldn’t.

A tear splashed on Faydra’s face.

It wasn’t her tear. It was Leander’s.

He had never felt life like this, beating with wild little thumps. No matter how many lives he saved when he butchered the enemy, life had never been this close to him. It had never been warm or intimate. His breath was caught and his whole body was arrested.

Another tear fell on her cheek and skidded down to her ear.

He got a grip and opened his hand, letting his fingers feel her insides. He felt the sharp edge of the key. With two fingers, he tugged it free from the place inside her. Gently, he removed his hand from the red folds of her dress.

He expected his hand to be red with blood, but it was not. It was clean. Dropping the key into his free hand, he saw the key closer than he had seen it before. It was familiar to him.

The shape and designs etched into it were the same as an amulet the Wizard passed around from man to man in the army. One man wore it for a month and then it was moved onto another man. It was given to the best fighter to wear as an honor. He had worn it himself more than once, but not for two months in a row as Faydra had worn this key. He had worn it for a month two years ago and then another month a few moons ago. What did it do?

Leander looked around the cage for clues. There was nothing there except the bed. The blankets were so large, they fell to the floor. Leander picked up one side and threw it over Faydra to see what was under the bed.

There was a box that ran the whole length of the bed frame. Leander grasped the handles and pulled the box forward. There was a lock on it, but it looked like it had been broken many years before as the hinges were rusted and bent.

Opening the lid, he saw a skeleton dressed in a white dress. He had opened a coffin. The smell was only that of dead flowers. From the looks of the flowers, they had been replaced often and, more importantly, recently. The white dress was the exact fashion as the red dress Faydra was wearing.

A bit of the red dress hung loose over the foot of the bed. Leander turned it between his fingers. For the first time, he thought that the dress Faydra was wearing was red because it had been stained with blood over and over again. How many girls had contributed to the blood that had dyed it?

“What are you doing?” Blueleg asked, standing just outside the cage.

“So, you use the life force of these girls to keep your Ghost Mistress in this world?” Leander said conversationally.

“It would have been fine if Faydra had chosen someone in the month she was told to,” Blueleg said sternly.

“Yes, it would have,” Leander agreed. He closed the coffin and gently slid it back under the bed. He replaced the blankets that covered its hiding place. Then he dropped the key onto a corner of the bed. “I think I wore something similar once. I always wondered how our Wizard stayed alive. Not only is he at least a hundred years old, but he sometimes seems to take mortal blows on the battlefield only to resurface a few days later.”

“So, you’re not angry?” the balloonist asked slowly.

“You and your ghost did not do this to her,” he explained. “She was supposed to fall in love like young women are prone to do. You gave her plenty of reasonable options, but she couldn’t. I wonder if she can live somewhere else now.”

“I hope so,” Blueleg said, his shoulders relaxing.

“Could you look away while I strip her?” Leander asked in a brittle tone. “I’m not sure how much of her body is left. I’m a knight, I can handle corpses.”

“Goodbye then… and thank you. Everything you need is in the north watch tower. Good luck.” Those were the last things Blueleg said to Leander before he disappeared into the night of the castle halls.