Nine months passed and he watched his father raise a bloodied towel to his chest. Within the folds, like some red-stained cocoon, he could see the fingers and thumbs of her fair skin reach out to greet his father. Of his wife Eris Dagon, he nestled the child in her arms and so they named her Clio. Never before had he witnessed his father’s smile.
He caught her gaze in the limelight of the chandelier when the colour of his vision began to dull and whir. Mumblings of some far-off priest stirred in a forested place that, by the makings of kings, had no name. There sat a sole candlelight–a dim illumination amidst winter’s dawn. Orpheus saw a glimpse of his mother’s hair in the burning flame and the muted tinge of orange fire from the silver ceilings; dimples formed from fingers upon the pale womb. Bristling charred corpses stood petrified, buried amongst branch and vine, reaching from the shadows. Then, in an instant, the colours returned. A silent stream of fright ran down Orpheus’ cheek as he saw the infant’s lips twisting in Eris’ cradled arms.
He held his head and reeled his gaze from the child, wiping his eyes with his sleeve cuffs. Orpheus left for the long hall along the black and vermillion papered walls where the servants of both houses stood in wait with jewels, rubies and pearls in their hands and in the angles of their elbows.
When he rounded the corridors he saw the painting of the new duchess in the canvas of the worn picture frame. When he lowered his face he could see the name of his mother stripped from the plaque, no longer laid to greet him.
The shadows of the long hall clamoured with ceremony. Faces he had not met walked the halls in their gowns of full colour and he could hear the wailings of his sister as an echo in the distant rooms. A hand raised to his chest to grasp his mother’s ring.
What he’d seen in those infant’s eyes followed him into the night and the nights following, keeping him from rest.
—
He was nineteen in the June of thirteen years following. For months he had avoided the dull face of his father, reserving himself to the outermost wings of the estate.
Caught in the small gap of his parted window were the ochre pillars of the Summer sunlight - from the sill to the black floorcloth before his bedstand bouquets; rose petals flayed from their pistils. As if to break him from his slumber, a knock appeared at his door.
Orpheus turned in his sheets to hide his face from the light and pulled the covers above his eyes to sleep. When the knock returned at his door again all was silent, save for the chirping of the thrushes in the thickets and the crowing of the roosters in their faraway pens.
“Promptly and absolutely piss right off,” he ordered from the muffle of his pillow.
The door flew suddenly from the hinges and onto the bedroom floor with the passing of heavy wind. Orpheus threw the sheets and the covers from his head to look and he saw the large woman before him - her hand to the mighty sword hilt and her other around his ankle.
“Kezaiah.” He turned his eyes to her. “What in heaven’s white fucking tits could be so possibly impor–”
She tore him from the mattress clinging to the frame and the bedsheets and set him face down. In his palms, he massaged the dark bags beneath his eyes and rolled onto his back groaning.
“Your door was locked,” She said as she tossed a bronze-hilted rapier to his chest and, with the top end of her seasoned leather boot, pressed down into his shin. Stepping over him, she then went back to the door.
“You fucking Dagon!” He called out. After a while, he parsed the rapier in his fingers and slid his thumb twice along the needled edge and again through the knuckle bow. “I cannot presume a shitty barbarian would kindly go away,” he spoke between breaths, “and this is what? Rubbish? Do I look like a fencer to you?”
“No. You don’t look like much at all, bit of a cunt maybe, but it’s either that or a stick with those dainty arms,” she’d remark without looking back from the door, gazing out into the now open hallway with arms crossed. “But break it and you’ll be sleeping with a sword between your eyes.”
“Piss off. The piece of cod’ll break before I’m through with it.”
“It’ll be up your ass if it does,” she’d say, though pause for a moment after. A glance moved back over her shoulder. “You look like shit, you still having those nightmares?”
“Do you plan to watch me change, then.” He said as he turned his face to the busted hinges along the doorframe.
Kezaiah did not respond and instead returned her gaze to the hallway and left.
He got his towel from the closet shelves as she did and went to bathe for an hour at the spring. Once his tunic hung from his shoulders and trousers from his waist, he found in the low drawers of the armoury a sheathe for the new sword. From the Northwing to the barracks and under the stoned overpass out into the court that sprawled, with dead grass on and on even past the high stone walls that surrounded the field, he found Kezaiah doubling the handle of her sword in a grip of bandage and leather.
“What, were you playing with your cock?” she chuffed, her weapons sitting idly on a bench to the side.
He threw his hand to the air by the knuckle and unsheathed the rapier with his other. “Sit on a pike,” he replied, “Hog.”
They stood on either side of the court.
He approached first, the blade edge-forward. As she met his thrust and turned his jab with the gauntlet of her open hand, the breeze and the sun let out upon them. The glint of the sword danced in the morning light like the turn and the rebound of some sparkling jewel.
When he came at a sidestroke for the flank, he could feel the cool metal of the gauntlet as she caught up his wrist from the blow and pushed forward. The rapier tumbled across the field as he lost his footing.
Fetching the sword on his hands and knees, he rose and turned to see the sudden advance of the metaled gauntlet again. He spun on his heels and slashed at what could be seen of her face, but he could only follow the blurred trail of her - spinning and darting in the wind.
A sudden shunt from behind sent Orpheus’ knees to kiss earth. He turned back to swing his clenched fists, but struggled as she grabbed hold of his arm.
“Lazy,” she mocked.
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Orpheus jerked back once Kezaiah loosened her hold.
“Bloody fucking hell!” he yelled, straightening his attire. He returned to where he began with the rapier flailing around in mild frustration.
They continued until the first light of the afternoon, pushing and turning and advancing until his chest heaved and his arms sored. The grass and the dirt stuck on his skin from sweat-like sticks paper thin or dark and pallid feathers.
As he lay on his back to earth she bent and crouched beside him. From his bare arms he swiped ants with the flat of his palm. Out as far as he could see, reclining on the margins of the world, he watched with her the orange blotches beginning along the blinds of clouds into the flat and receding blue spaces, the shadows of the high walls stretching across the open field like claws or fingers or a lone talons.
“Congratulations, you've graduated,” Kezaiah said as she turned and observed the shape of the rapier, “you’ve gone from a rat with a rock, to rat with a rod.”
“I’ll have the hens shit in your drinks for months,” he paused, “crazy fuck.”
As Orpheus turned for a response he watched her stand and followed her gaze to the girl in all black, from hair to shirt and trousers and, when he squinted to see her, he saw at last that the girl was Clio, his younger sister. She touched the broadsword in the scabbard around her waist and, from end to end of her ivory face, she was smiling. She approached them with a second glance. He looked as though he saw a wraith in the evening light.
“Brother,” she began, “Dame Kezaiah. I’ve watched you from the dining hall. Have you both finished?”
He took up his rapier and sheathed it. Orpheus turned to leave. “You fucking harlot. Go elsewhere to lurk about.”
She took him by the wrist and, in all his might, he jerked the hand free. “By all means, dear Orpheus, I lurk when the time might allow, and this evening my duties have left me free.”
He staggered and his vision trailed to a blur. A voice whispered in his memory of something unknown and he saw, in the ruins of headstones, sanctuary pillars standing beneath overgrown shades. Disfigured silhouettes crawled about the shadows, seething in erratic bloodlust. Colour washed in and out of the world around him.
With flared nostrils, closely breathing, he began to sweat from his palms and bared his teeth like the white fangs of wild dogs. Unsheathing the blade he drew it forward, dismissing the uncanny vision. He glowered in the sunlight, half in shadow.
But Clio only smiled at the edge of his sword.
“You see Orpheus I’m rather undone in the evenings. When my schedules are all but cleared, what else am I to do? So, I thought, why should we not share each other's company?”
“Come to mock me, then? It’s all one large leisure stroll to you? You know I’ll carve out your fucking heart. And deliver it to father.”
“To father?” she walked out across the field with a light chuckle, holding a sword unsheathed before her - the pommel refitted with a black-rose embellishment. “How adorable, I wasn’t entirely sure you still called him by that. I wonder, does he still think you his son?”
Orpheus snared, his knuckles tightening around the hilt of the rapier. She noticed the fury that began to tighten within him and could only smirk.
Dust kicked up from his toes as he propelled himself, the rapier guiding him towards Clio. Her sword lowered in response, hovering over the ground before slashing skyward with the intent of severing his leg.
“I meant nothing by it, Orpheus,” she mocked as her blade rebounded to swing horizontally, forcing Orpheus onto the backfoot immediately.
Step by step he was forced back by her flurry of strikes, forced into parries and sidesteps to avoid the bloodthirst. However, the series of attacks became sluggish and predictable, her lungs drawing less air with each swing.
“You swipe like Leonidas,” Orpheus replied, thrusting the rapier forward, “fucking slow.”
Without the time to recover, his rapier pulled and pushed her blade at will - puppeteering every movement until the rapid succession culminated into one decisive blow. As if his arm were made of leather and his knuckles held beads of iron, Orpheus backhanded her across the cheek - sending a palette of red from her mouth onto the stone floors and her beside it.
“How rude,” she replied, licking the blood from her lips and extending her hand outward. Her index and middle fingers rose, calling forth a beige glow of light around her hand. “And here I thought I could care for you as though you actually were.”
A brief hum reverberated from her hand to accompany the glowing light. Orpheus’ eyes widened.
“Actually were my brother that is.”
The air and loose dust and dirt before Clio erupted in chaotic panic. Power emanated, tearing through the stone and rolling through Orpheus. He was sent flailing back across the court and slumped over a stone bench.
His legs were lost to their own weight, keeping on his back beneath his sunken lungs. A ringing seared the inside of his ear - quaking the filling to his skull; though, not enough to entirely muffle the venom that spat from Clio’s lips.
“But, I’ll still be there for you, dear Orpheus,” her words pierced through the ringing, growing louder as she drew near.
He grunted and wheezed, struggling to push himself back up to his feet.
“I’ll be there. Watching.” she continued, “Listening.”
Wrath seemed to boil over inside him. It was an anger, a fury, a frustration, running rampant in the hazy confusion of his mind. And then he heard her, his mother, mocking him. Her fallacy had only fed fuel.
“Always. Always. Always. Always. Always,” the voice echoed and repeated. They were needles in his brain; insects beneath his skin; water in his lungs.
Orpheus’ eyes, blank in rage, glared toward the careless Clio. He bared his teeth amidst a rabid salivation, sunken deep in the intent to kill. He began to mutter with a stream of azure crackling beneath his eyes.
“Blinding Deat-”
A hand swiftly clasped over his mouth, keeping his lips from finishing their utterance. Kezaiah held his lips with the palm of her hand and she did not move as he struggled in her hold. He tried to reach for his sister between breaths. She watched him.
“You must have a death wish,” said Kezaiah.
Clio sheathed her sword and ran her fingers along the strands of her hair. “He does, surely,” she responded.
Kezaiah moved the hand from his mouth when he stopped struggling and he fell to the earth on his forearms and his knees. He trembled in place.
“No,”Kezaiah replied bluntly, “I was talking to you.”
His sister’s eyes had widened in their ivory cups and as she went to speak the lines between her brow bent and curved. “You–”
Before Clio finished there was a voice in the stone underpass to the field that called out for her and, as she wheeled, she saw her father coming along the grass. He took her hand and felt the skin of her forehead and the thin arms in the torn tunic.
“You have been gone very long,” he said, “the Whitlock Princess will wait no longer. Come, my darling, you must not leisure where women do not belong.”
“Orpheus seemed lonely, I’d only thought we might bond a little,” she replied, snuggling her face into her father's overcoat. “I suppose he doesn’t like me very much after all.”
Urien turned to face Kezaiah and his son. A brief glance.
“Orpheus? Ah, yes… Orpheus,” he held his daughter to his chest. “Come, now.” Then he took her by the hand and they walked and faded within the darkness of the underpass.
Kezaiah raised Orpheus by the hand and he leaned upon her, mute and dazed, as if he had been dumb or ill. As his mind wandered he heard her speak in the dimming light.
“Try casting that far in the grave and you’ll be pissing a puddle,” she said.
Kezaiah then paused for a moment as they walked off into the last lights of the evening.
“Right. Your birthday today, isn’t it?”