They sat among the hedges of the grove to the Southwest, beneath the Murmur Yews and its budding leaves. The sea rose and settled before them as they watched onward from the clearing.

He could hear the sounds of the quivering trees and the whispering waves against the tension of the strings as she flicked and pulled them. When he turned his pale face to her in the daylight, he pressed his fingers to the flat of the lyre. The music swelled and stopped.

“It is quite impolite to interrupt someone playing, dear Orpheus.” His mother smiled.

In the sun, the redness of her hair looked as though to blossom or plume. His hands turned to run his fingers along the wood and lyre strings until they shivered and made sound. He imitated the resonance of music with his voice.

His mother set down the lyre along the muted stone of the fountain, folded her arms beneath him, and carried him from the clearing to the shore, telling him of the names that were given to the trees and the birds and the ways to call and name the changings of the sea. When he was allowed to run the hills and plains from the green northern reach, she spoke out to him and kneeled in her dark dress to hold him by the hand.

“Won’t you sing to me, dear Orpheus?”

His arms rose until they were overhead and stepped back as if, in this way, he could know if she was watching.

“You can hear me clearly, mother? Are you listening?” He asked.

“Always.”

—

As the seasons escaped them, Orpheus’ song rarely reached the grove, or the waves and its dancing tide. His song had become a lullaby and tether, keeping spirit to flesh at his mother’s bedside.

Mahogany desks and high shelves spread outward, inching along the red and golden silk carpets. Their shadows were still and immutable like robed figures in the darkness - witnessing but not speaking. Each one reeled from the lamplight. The curtains were drawn back, but from the window, the overcast seemed to colour everything with grey.

He could see the covers rise and fall from her laboured breathing under the ghostly light of the lampshade. He touched her pale fingers, witnessing the shade of almost bone and half darkness. Like dried blood, her hair pooled across the pillow while she trembled on her deathbed. He’d watched his mother, wasting, shrivelling.

She moved her head slowly, smiled at him achingly, and pressed into his palm a black and rubied ring. Her hand then fell amongst the draping sheets, lost to her fatigue.

“Orpheus. It is to guide you,” she said, “You would sing for me again, would you?”

“I will. You will still be listening?” He asked.

But in her smile, his answer was told. While he sang out to her, he could see that the covers ceased to rise and fall, nor did she tremble beneath them. For a long time, he watched the corpse unmoving as if, perhaps, the flesh would tremble again; but it did not stir.

Orpheus had not moved when his father came into the room. In his ebony garments, kissed with gold, and hair of black silk that lay over ivory skin, each line and groove cast its own shadow. He only observed his son in the doorway, without motion like a ceramic doll with dead eyes.

Chambermaids and servants soon heaved the corpse into sheets of cloth and rolls of linen. Each shadow-robed figure cast from the lamplight fell apart in mourning. His father spoke to him with eyes only for the grey sea beyond the window. He seemed to enjoy the slow commute of the heavy clouds.

“Continue your lessons once you have returned to your quarters, Orpheus,” he ordered.

Orpheus was still.

Heavy steps led him to his son until he stood over him like the lingering shadows of the shelves. He spoke, but only the edges of his lips could be clearly seen.

“Orpheus,” he began. “When a life is taken, you understand that it must never return. She will not spur.”

“But she will.” Orpheus turned his pale eyes to his father. The red hair on his shoulders smouldered in the gloom. “Isn’t she just in the Southern Grove, father? She plays with birds. All day,” he replied, “even in nights sometimes?”

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His father folded his hands behind his swathing coat.

“There is not a Southern Grove for the dead. That, Orpheus, is a luxury to those who still draw breath. Go. And see to it that fire of yours is cut and trimmed. It is becoming too long.”

Orpheus held the ring tightly in his palm and he emerged into the long and thinly vermillion hallway among the hardstone carvings of dukes and duchesses born and gone. He crossed the corridor of royal paintings where the last stone base was empty. He read his mother’s name to a porcelain plaque with no portrait above. There hung an empty canvas painting without a face, dark and worn around the edges.

He turned and watched the chambermaids exchange their dusters or sweepers. Each one moved around the blood-red carpets of the halls like wisps, floating between the spaces of the orange candlelights as though they were opposed to them. Dust billowed into the air and speckled their robes scattering where they stepped. The whispers of the bristles felt to him like the waves his mother had favoured, but now they were muted and not quite as distant. He rounded the corner from his father’s chambers and into his own. None spoke to him as he passed.

Alone he stood in his room that night, motionless and without sleep. Many nights fell by, all too without sleep; when the lessons from his mentor would lull him to slumber in the afternoons, his father had him whipped and lashed and sent to fester in thought. He found he could not put speech to his loss.

It was on the fourth month of her passing that he returned to the Southern Grove. Where the colour had drained from the grass and the Murmur Yews were lost to a deathly black, he looked across to a blurred shore. When he had not found her frolicking there under birds and branches, he instead curled beneath them to weep.

—-

In the spring he was six years old.

Having returned to his studies from eating in the warm evening, he circled the dome of the library centred with white stone columns that held the faces of men and women etched in the ceilings; each step taken held their gaze on him, glancing and displaced.

Where his mentor waited in his study were the shelves of tomes that began along wooden walls and folded below steps. Outward they stretched, across the library in whole to form rows that looked more like dark sectors receding into a rippling pattern that went on, to him, in the distance forever. Orpheus entered without much word and placed his lessons flat on the table. Dust sprinkled upward and down onto the books and pages.

“You are late Master Orpheus,” his mentor commented. “You cannot become an exceptional scholar with knowledge alone. Magic waits for no one. You must be punctual.”

He dipped his feather-tipped pen in a blot of ink on his desk and turned the shaft of the instrument through his fingers. Orpheus did not respond. He turned the pages and flicked dust from the margins, muttering in his study.

The mentor continued.

“And every day you become more and more defiant Master Orpheus. Shall I have you reprimanded?”

“You are not my father Leonidas. An esteemed servant at best,” Orpheus retorted. He applied himself quickly to the page and muttered again to his work.

The mentor rose with his palms down upon the desk while the great dull flowers at the end of it seemed to buckle in fright.

“It is insubordination! You return those words at this very moment, Young Master!” He rolled open the drawer of his desk and produced a small wooden paddle. “At my desk side this moment, Master Orpheus. I suppose your mother was your sole shield in your earliest moments. With her expired, however, someone must discipline you personally.”

Orpheus closed the tome over his writings and came slowly forward.

“Very good,” said the mentor. “When dogs are born from dogs it is up to the masters to procure the punishment and the leash, Young Master.”

When Orpheus clutched in his small fingers the flask of ink he turned and swung, watching the bits and shards of glass shatter. The ink splattered and scurried like black insects on the carpet floor, melting into the thread as they left their mark.

The mentor held his bloodied face in his hands. He wailed like a ghastly thing in a far distance and fell on his side. His face turned to Orpheus with eyes lost to the fog of war. The boy’s small chest heaved, his fingers trembled and he held the paddle in his hands with bared teeth over his mentor like a wraith that would be seen perhaps in dreams, or nightmares.

“You speak ill of my mother. Leonidas, I’ll have you hurt. Leonidas,” he said, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you myself!”

When he beat him, the paddle was deep red and the door had burst open from the sobbing and the screaming. Servants with their dark robes moved like they were bound to the darkness before the obelisk that stood at the door. Parting the servants, they watched as his father seized the boy by the waist and the arms, leaving Leonidas to squirm on the carpet floor.

“See to it that Leonidas is cleaned,” his father demanded, before turning his gaze to Orpheus. A piercing glare shot through his hair, void of mercy. “And have the boy flogged at once.”

Orpheus struggled in his hold.

“He spoke ill of mother! I would kill him! You are listening to me, father!?”

“The dead do not hear, Orpheus. You direct the rage of a corpse–it is blinding. Bring him away.”

The boy watched him with wet eyes and his hair shivered as he fought against the servants and their robes. His heart battered against a suffocating chest, so hot with fury that coal burned in his throat and ravaged his lungs. In the husk of his words, the wildfire crackled through tears and dry spit.

“I hate you! I hate you!”

He howled and howled, beholding his father descending the staircase and leaving him behind for the grey and black.