"Diamond Tears"

[butterflydreaming]

Fantasy/Horror
PG-13... borderline R for violence

“Diamond Tears”

 

            I had kissed my pet mortal just that morning, before leaving my home to answer the summons from Court.  And even standing before the Assembly, before the collected heads of the eldest and presumed wisest of the Faerie nobility, my peers, my thoughts still drifted to him, to his imp-black hair and smooth skin, and to what we had done prior to that parting kiss.  Perhaps my thoughts should have been directed more studiously to the panel’s questions and my own answers.  It probably would not have mattered.  I think that my punishment had already been decided when the missive had been sent.

            It was the glee in Lord Balder’s tone that awoke my attention as he spoke decisively.  “Jouet Isobel,” he said.

            Isobel is not my family name; it is the name of my lands, a castle remote and quiet near the Ocean of Ice.  Jouet is my common name, the name I allow my pets and the lower classes of Faerie to call me if they are intimates, and not my True name.  To use the two in conjunction was to strip me to anonymity in the eyes of my peers.  I smiled my prettiest, most endearing smile toward the counsel, and to Balder, who was my mother’s cousin, most particularly.  “Pardon?” I asked, the single word glazed in candy.  Taking in the unanimous distain in the row of eyes fixed on me, I felt my first shadow of misgiving.

            I had been called before the Assembly on occasions before, for the same offenses, so there had been no reason for me to think that I was about to receive anything other than the usual reprimand, which amounted to hardly more than a scolding from someone who I had never taken seriously.  I’d always felt that my fellows’ disgust for my lifestyle was disproportionate.  My penchant for mortal lovers was a constant subject of gossip; I was doing these bored nobles a favor by giving them something to get their tired immortal blood up about.

One would not have been a problem.  Mab herself collected them on occasion, but perhaps my mistake was in thinking that I could behave as freely as the Queen, and in not stopping at one.  Though I was currently keeping monogamous company, I enjoyed entertaining mortals in succession and occasionally in groups; I deepened my sin by allowing them to come and go freely from my bed, my estate, and Faerie.  I think that the last might have been less than wise.

            My thoughts flashed in the minor pause between my question and Lord Balder’s next words.  “You have been warned,” Lord Balder said to me, as I stood before faces as unyeilding as masks, only the eyes showing a range from satisfation to delight, “thrice.  The consequences of your obstinance will be meted to you now.”

            My fey blood, already cold, ran colder.  I had expected only another lecture, on the foulness of my perversions, and how my deviant behavior reflected poorly on my noble family.  The same lecture as before, intoned again.  My eyes searched around the room for any trace of an ally, but I had been cavalier too long, and had never engaged in the standard politics, and had no friendships of depth.  My sister was not in evidence, since she was not a member of the Assembly.  As I realized the sure danger of my situation, I felt strong fingers tighten over the sheer sleeves of my falsely demure dress.  On each side of me were young-faced faerie men, ones I had known all my immortal life.  Eyes cold, and without word or greeting, they took me by my arms and pulleded me kicking from the Hall.

            I pleaded with them; they dragged me on my knees while I begged.  I fought them.  Graeden, though he had been the one to know my virginity, gripped my left arm as unyeildingly as did Kell, a brute that I had spurned for his sister.  Mirror bruises began to cloud the ricepowder-white of my skin.  I could see the darker color rising around their fingers, muted only slightly by the diaphanous layer.

            We of Faerie, despite the tales that mortals tell of our schemes upon them, reserve the worst for our own kind.  Trying to catch the eyes of my captors, I knew why we were called soulless.  I fought harder.  I am small and fine of bones, but stronger than many, and I was about to experience the worst dishonor that could ever befall an immortal noblewoman.  And the pain that would come with it would make the injuries of my struggle vanish in comparison.  So I fought, with fingernails and feet and teeth and screaming, but despite a lucky hit on Grae and the blood on Kell’s lip, I was thrown out onto the ground of an empty amphitheater; before I could recover myself, that blue-eyed brute had my wrists bound to a pillar.  My feet were tied to stakes in the bloodstained ground below me, to keep me from kicking out, but my long skirts had already accomplished that effectively, earlier on, without aid.

            I was vaguely thankful not to have an audience.  I suppose that no one had the stomach to see it done.

            They began with my hair.  It was Graeden who did the cutting, so I suppose that is why he was involved in my disgrace.  It had been my hair that he had liked most about me.  The locks dropped off of me, carrying their weight to meet their tips at the hems of my skirts.  I began to cry.  I saw Kell don gloves, and then realized that Grae also wore gloves; I glimpsed the knife that he was using to cut my hair.  Though the silvery blade gleamed brightly in its handle of wood, it was not silver.  It was steel.  Forged iron.   

            I began to shriek.

            Kell held my neck until the last of my hair was shorn to uneven stubs.  I didn’t notice then, but I realize now that Grae had been careful with the knife, because in his hands, the blade had only touched the gold of my hair and never my skin.  I am thankful for that.  Kell, on the other hand, had no reason to be kind.  I saw the teeth of his smile reflected in the steel blade when it was handed to him, and I know that I heard a low laugh just before the knife touched my wings.

            I cannot explain what it felt like to have my wings removed.  My mind cannot wrap around the memory, and my memory was incapable of understanding that pain.  I know that I screamed until my voice disappeared into a raw scrap.  I know that I fainted, or perhaps remained conscious but unresponsive.  I know that someone delivered me to the exterior of my own castle.  I know that I walked, as a sleepwalker, through my own door and to my bedroom, with my blood-soaked dress brushing a streaked trail in my wake.  I was no longer bleeding, myself.  The iron in the blade was used to cauterized my wounds, after the brutal cuts were made.  When I reached my bedroom, my mind began to wake again.

            He told me afterward that none of the servants dared to approach my room, and that I was wailing with a ferocity that could have torn the veils between worlds.  Magic was something that he understoond; power was something that he knew as his own.  He never pointed out, afterward, that he alone, my mortal pet, dared to come to me, to comfort me and tend my wounds.  He washed me and bandaged me, and dressed me in clean clothes that would not  press against the long wounds on my back that would forever bring me pain even long after they had turned to scars.

            He gave me what comfort he could, holding me and speaking my name, “Jouet,” as quietly as a lullaby.  When he spoke it, it was my name.  When he spoke it, I did not miss the other.

            Eventually, he left my home to use his magic and power to make a place for himself, among but removed from his fellow mortals.  He left my bed for another, and I did not know of his passing until years afterward, sadly through my own fault, because I had never ceased being careless, and it was too easy to forget our differing perceptions of time.  And with him gone, I was alone, though my bed was never empty.

            Foolishly, I went to see the one that he had chosen over me.  It was… not a successful interview, and though both of us wept for our loss, it was not together.  I wished that I could have cried real tears, but I had become something made of ice and crystal, and what poured out of me was hard and without color, evidence of missing things.  I could give no comfort, and no comfort was given to me.  When I left, returning to the glacial cold of Isobel, I left his grieving lover with nothing of value, only a handful of diamonds.

. . .