fic: for jewels become her
prompt: lilith or any other demon: “To know the future / there must be a death. / Hand me the axe.
words: 1197
Her name is Aillin and her house has a green door. She remembers that long after everything else has passed.
Dawn until dusk she’s in the fields while her mother is in the house. Her father is long gone, or perhaps he never was in the first place. It’s how things are in a village too small for a name, a place the raiders pass by because there is nothing there of value.
That winter is cold, the coldest she’s known in her lifetime. The wind bites at the cracks in the shutters and whirls the hearth fire down to embers again and again. Her mother tells stories. Fair maidens, handsome knights, kings and queens and dragons atop hordes of gold that shines like fire. Gold like the summer wheat, gold like the warm sun, gold like the hair of the baby that had died two winters past, too small to have a name. That winter takes her brother, tall as a tree and built like a boulder and all it takes is twisted ankle out in the snow. His foot is black by the time they bring him in. They summon the village barber, and Aillin is made to sit on his chest as he screams and bucks beneath the knife. His blood pools on the dirt floor and freezes there a shiny black. He yells until he doesn’t, until he sleeps and doesn’t wake up. The stain is slippery on the floor all winter.
Once her brother is gone the animals die one by one, shivering sacks of bones already rotting as they stand. Her mother grows thin and gaunt and Aillin wonders if she will start to rot like the sheep. She closes her eyes and thinks of the stories when it’s always summer, where maidens sing and knights ride horses. And dragons sit deep in their mountain caves atop their treasure and breathe hot, hot fire.
Winter breaks into spring as it must, but it stays winter for her mother who remains thin and tired. She eats less. She sleeps more. She does no chores. Aillin takes to going through the garbage heaps for scraps. She doesn’t find nearly enough. She thinks of her neighbors warm in their cottages, food upon their table. She thinks of roast beef, fat pork, crackling bits of pigfat in the fire. She thinks of the way blood spurts from an animal’s neck at butchering time, the way it smells, hot and thick and salty, and her mouth waters.
A lost noble rides through their town that spring, his horse hooves crushing the green shoots of grass rising up along with path. His cape is scarlet silk and his fingers are covered with rings and he has a jewel in one ear. His page and his guard flank him but Aillin is small and worms her way beneath the horses to grab at his boot.
“Please.” She says, staring up at his gold ringers, his feathered hat, his fur-lined cloak. He does not look at her as he raises his whip and strikes her down into the mud.
That summer her body changes- waist becomes smaller, her breasts larger, but she is still too skinny to have curves. She bleeds for the first time- not very much, and not every moon, but she knows what it means. And the world seems to know what it means too. The girls in the village her age have sweethearts, or betrotheds. The milkmaids aren’t maids any longer and the girl Aillin used to pick flowers with grows large with child. Her husband is the thin reedy trader, the richest man in town, and everyone pretends not to see the bruises that patch her skin.
The farmer from down the road, the man with the warm cottage and fat sheep, begins to sup at Aillin’s house. He brings them milk and eggs and watches her like she is a cow at market. He is large and pimply but amicably quiet and Aillin’s mother smiles at him.
She isn’t surprised when he comes to her as she hoes the fields one day, catches her dirty hands in his and tells her they are to be married in a fortnight’s time. She gives him one of his own calculating looks, and his face tightens. She touches his chin. She thinks of the knights and dragons in songs, queens who drip with jewels. Am I your sun? She wants to ask. Will you give me a crown? She already knows the answer.
The wedding is sparse. It was a bad harvest, it almost always was. Their last sheep is Aillin’s dowry. As the bleating animal is herded into its pen in its new home, Aillin wonders what the difference between them is. I’m quieter, she tells herself.
That night he is not rough but he is not careful. He slows when she gasps in pain but does not stop. When it is over he rolls to his side of the bed and is snoring within seconds. Aillin stares up at the thatched roof and counts heartbeats.
The next winter is harsh again. Her sheep dies. Her mother fades away into a fragile husk then one day is gone, blown away by the winter winds. The farmer’s fat pigs die. The grain rots. The roof leaks. Every night she counts heartbeats but every month she bleeds anew. The farmer’s silence is no longer friendly. He takes to ale. She spends too long by the hearth fire staring into the embers that glow like gems.
The first time he hits her she does nothing. She touches her swelling cheek with one hand and then returns to sweeping the floor. He rages himself into a stupor. She sweeps around him.
The second time he hits her she spits at his feet, sticky blood and saliva and a single white tooth. She leaves, walks barefoot out into the midnight snow, so cold it hurts to breathe. She follows the moon, hanging in the sky like a giant pearl, like her tooth, and the moonlight leads her to the shack at the far edge of town where the villagers only venture when the barber can do no good, when the patient is too sick for any earthly cure.
The thing that answers the door might have been a woman, once, but that was a long time ago. Now it is skin and bones and rags and a wide toothless smile. It waves her into the hut that is impossibly hot for such a small fire, hot like summer or dragons and soon Aillin is sweating.
“What do you want?” It asks, reaching up to the rafter to throw a pinch of something in the fire. It explodes purple and Aillin watches the sparks dance up toward the ceiling. She smiles.
“Everything.” Aillin says.
-
Years later, far across the sea, a kohl-eyed man in golden robes touches her hair fervently, his dark gaze feverish and worshipful.
“What is your name?” He begs, and he gazes upon her like she is his sun. She laughs, and glances down to where her jeweled bangles catch the light.
“Ruby.”