around a circular mouth. They had flown as fast as angry hornets when they attacked her, propelled on an inundation of song. A malignant spell cast from Nualo’s mouth to hers. They ate through Corinn’s flesh for as long as the curse that gave them life rang in the air. Several frantic moments in which they swarmed her lower face. Their chewing and writhing had been such a loud garble, frantic and horrible, that for those moments they were her entire world.
By the time she wrapped her face in her shawl to hide it from others in the Carmelia, the eaters had already completed their work. They died inside her flesh. There they remained. She could feel them. She ran her fingers over the segmented ridges of their bodies. They were part of her, dead husks that she could feel half submerged in her tissue, their corpses hued the same chestnut brown as her skin.
Staring at her reflection in her dressing table mirror, she could see them. She sat there, straight-backed on the stool, looking into the glass as she had a hundred thousand times before. The room was still. True silence. Empty. She had made everyone leave, even the servants who would normally have plastered themselves invisible and forgotten against the walls and behind drapes. She was alone. The long, thin sliver of a knife rested within arm’s reach on the dresser, but she only had eyes for the mirror.
What looked back at her this time was impossible to look at. And yet she did. If she could have screamed she would have. She would have given in to panic and ripped her fear into the world with shrieks. But she couldn’t. One thing she would never again be able to do was scream. The fact of it was more horrible still, enough so that she could only stare, stunned to a place on the other side of terror.
The eaters had not consumed her flesh. They had processed it. They had curdled its substance. They swallowed it in from one end and expelled it out the other, turning her flesh into a thick paste that congealed in such a manner that where her mouth had been there was no mouth. Tough, doughy-looking flesh covered her lips, making her lower face a stretch of mottled skin. All this in a few frantic seconds. And there it was.
She would never be able to eat or drink again. She knew this, but she also knew that it did not matter. She would not die from hunger or thirst. She could feel it. Hunger was something she would not face again. She would waste away, yes, but it would happen very slowly. The Santoth wanted her alive until they got what they wanted. It would be an unbearable wait.
She ran her fingers over her damaged flesh. There. That was it. She could not speak. She could not say a word of explanation to anyone. She could not even hide behind a veil and issue orders. She could not use the song. It was in her head, just as before. It hummed and thrummed and banged against the sides of consciousness, but she could do nothing about it. Without a mouth to speak it, all her knowledge was useless. It raged like a cyclone confined to the dimensions of her skull. Just like that, with one malignant spell, Nualo had trapped all her weapons inside her.
You are hideous, she thought. There was something freeing in acknowledging it. It was a proclamation she could almost wrap around herself and be encased within, her funereal shawl. It was a tempting notion. Silent death. Leaving all this. You are hideous, best to turn inward and cease to be. How could you have been so stupid? You stupid bitch. Stupid, ugly, fool of a-
“Don’t say those things.” Hanish appeared behind her. He stood at her shoulder, studying her reflection. Corinn’s eyes snapped to him. He was so close. Solid. Just there behind her, looking too much like a living man. “They’re not true.”
She felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder. This ghost version of him had never touched her. She had thought he could not, but she felt the weight of his four fingers, his thumb moving in a circle. For a moment she was glad of him, didn’t hate him, didn’t want him gone. The moment did not last. What could he offer her that was more soothing than death?
Leave me, she ordered.
“No, I won’t,” Hanish said.
Leave me.
Hanish shook his head. “I can’t. Banish me if you can, but I don’t think you can do that. You are stuck with me. And I with you.” Leave me.
After a time, Hanish said, “Corinn, have you forgotten that you imagined this before? In your dreams you did. You knew this would happen. You just didn’t understand your own vision. Do you remember?”
She had not until he asked, and then she did. It came back as a set of images leering at her through a haze of forgotten dreams. For a time she had lived through the same nightmare over and over again. It began with Aliver returning to life. Just as she wanted. Just as she later sang him into reality. With joy at all the fine things this meant, she had dashed through the halls of the palace. That was how she came to find him, the figure with his back turned to her. All the joy vanished. The man turned…
“And it was I,” Hanish said.
Yes, it had been he. The same beautiful man, lean and golden haired, with his dreamer’s eyes. He had worn a black thalba, snug around the torso that she had so loved to wrap herself around. He wore the same now. But then, in the dream, his mouth had been sewn shut on her orders. Needle and dark thread through the lips she had kissed, pinching the soft tissue. She had placed a mass of jagged fishhooks in his mouth before sewing it shut, so that he would swallow them and be shredded from the inside.
“You wanted me to suffer. I remember it now. It’s your dream, but I remember it. And the worst part…” He stopped, pulling back from it.
The worst part, Corinn acknowledged, was that I changed my mind. I tried to run to you to undo it, but then you were not you. You were our son.
“I became Aaden.” He smiled. “Dreams are frustrating devils, aren’t they?”
How could she have forgotten that? It was not even so long ago that this dream had tormented her. Just a few months back. Did she forget because she had set in motion the things that would make this version of that dream a reality? She had woken Aliver. And Aaden, he had slept and been awoken as well. And before all that, she had killed her lover’s Tunishnevre ancestors with blood from her palm, and then she had ordered him killed as well.
Corinn placed her hand over the dagger.
“No, not that,” Hanish said, reaching forward and pinning her hand down on top of the weapon. “You don’t get off as easily as that. You killed me, and I’m still here with you. Death is not the balm it seems right now. I swear it.”
What do you want? Are you here to gloat?
“No.”
To relish this?
“No.”
You want to humiliate me. Look at me, then! Stare. Get your eyes full of me and then leave!
“I’m here because I love you,” Hanish said. “No one has ever been more beautiful. This thing that was done to you does not change that. It just makes it even more obvious.”
Corinn yanked her hand from his grip. She spun around on him, blade out before her in threat, hating him, wanting to cut him down again, for real this time.
“You can’t cut me, Corinn,” Hanish said, so sadly it looked like he wished she could.
No, she thought, but I can do this… She lifted the knife and raked the blade across the mutated flesh that had been her mouth, screaming as she did so. Silently, inside her mind, she screamed. And cut.
L ater. Some hour in the deep dark of the night, Corinn lay on the floor with her head in Hanish’s lap, her hand touching her mouth, hiding it. The knife was on the floor a little distance away, under the edge of her bed, where it had fallen when she did. Despite the force with which she cut, the blade had done nothing but slide across her skin. For a moment she thought she felt the dead worms writhe, but that was all. No searing pain. No bloody slit to yell through. No death. Nothing changed.
When she could not carve herself a new mouth, she had tried to turn the knife elsewhere, to cut her wrists or to find the artery in her neck or to sink the blade to the hilt in her abdomen. Hanish prevented each attempt. She fought against him, but he was stronger, faster. He toyed with her, even turning their whirling struggle into a playful Maseret, humming a tune that he kept time to, as if that dance of death had ever been performed to music. “What would a servant think if she saw Corinn at this crazy dance?” he asked. They would see only her, knife in hand, swirling in choreography they could not fathom.
That was before she gave up. She let the knife drop, and herself, and came to rest partially on the smooth,
