BREATHS LONG AS YEARS



by M. C. A. Hogarth


Smashwords Edition 
Copyright 2010 M.C.A. Hogarth

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“The King will die without your aid,” the man said. “They say you are the only one who can help him.”
Sacred Rose tucked a strand of honey-dark hair behind her ear. She turned from the visitors to the basket of new apples and resumed setting them on the kitchen table. “I am not human,” she said. “I owe your race nothing.”
“But living here you accepted the rule of the King as your own. You wanted to live among us. You owe him your allegiance.”
She looked over her arm at them: the King’s aide, two guards and a younger man in dark purple and silver, circles beneath his dark eyes. “You do not know what you ask.”
“I do,” the younger man said. “Please, Lady.” In his gaze and across his body his fear for his father was largely writ. In the name of that overt vulnerability, Sacred Rose bowed her head.
“For the King who has sheltered me, then.”
They waited with human impatience as she entered her bedroom and closed the door to begin the V’e-bena, the ritual that would wrest the healing fluid from herself. Dragging the copper wash bin before the fireplace, Sacred Rose stripped her rough clothing from the shell of flesh she wore, a human mask over her immortal Le’enle soul. Useful only as a symbol, the knife was unnecessary; the cup was not.
The true-body of a Le’enle of her age had no flesh at all, only two parts: the magic that fueled its own existence and supported its consciousness, and the halo of magic that allowed it to manipulate the unseen powers. The latter bled out with very little fanfare, dark blue, rich and hot.
Donning a crimson slip of wool over her faded shell, Sacred Rose brought the cup to the men.
“The e’tanne o’vas,” she said quietly. “May it heal the King.”
The aid received the fluid and stepped back. Through her doors erupted ten guards, swords drawn. They pushed aside the younger man in purple and silver, whose countenance wore confusion badly over its burden of weariness.
Disoriented from the ritual, Sacred Rose leaned against the table. “What is this?” she asked. 
“You will return with us,” the aide said. He handed the cup to one of the two guards at his back.
“I do not want this,” Sacred Rose said, backing from the men.
“But you can do nothing about it, can you?” the aide said. He smiled and gestured toward the cup. “We have all your power.”
Sacred Rose stumbled. “It will grow back. It is but a seed. An egg.”
“But it won’t grow back for many of our lifetimes,” the aide said.
Said the younger man, shocked, “Is this necessary? Surely she has done enough!”
“My Lord, it is for the best,” the aide replied. He opened the door and waved a hand at the guards. “We shall be returning now. All of us.”
Sacred Rose glanced at the men with their stink of flesh and mortal blood, the sheer weight of their bodies. Her own soul felt hollow, too ephemeral for her to resist them. Lashes lowered over eyes an uncanny rosy bronze, she allowed them to take her from her tiny home.

#

The castle of the King did not impress Sacred Rose. It was a human place, meant to intimidate human beings, and had no effect on one who had seen the icy domes of Argent Star’s Seat at Teza or A'Satar-lai'ana, the Great Le’enle-se Library that was only partially in this plane. This crude edifice of rambling stone and earth had none of the grandeur of her people’s palaces and none of the beauty of the material that had been wrenched from the earth to build it.
Sacred Rose folded cold arms around her ribs and allowed the guards to push her out of the carriage and up the muddy streets. The miasma of humans living in extreme proximity choked her throat. To the door of the palace they directed her, the aid at her back. The young man was nowhere to be seen... and with her magic stolen by the V’e-bena, nowhere to be sensed.
They led her to a stuffy, dark hall. At its end a rough-hewn stone chair crouched upon a raised dais, and there stood the young man--no, a man very similar to him, but older, upon his brow a thick band of silver.
“Good, you brought her,” he said. His voice felt to her like rusted nails, sharp and thin.
“She is yours,” the aide said with a bow.
“I am no one’s,” Sacred Rose said quietly, meeting his eyes. “Why am I here?”
“My father is dead,” the man said. “I am now King. You will be my wife and upon you I will get children who cannot be slain by magic.”
“You are dreaming, human man,” Sacred Rose said. “Wishes do not become reality at your command.”
His thin lips stretched into a sly smile. “But you cannot stop me. I know. I paid much to learn of your kind, and without your egg you have no magic to punish me with, and shall not before I am dead.”
Sacred Rose said, “That is true.”
The King leaned back. To the aide, he said with smug satisfaction, “Take her to a room and begin preparations for the wedding.”
She was escorted up a narrow staircase to a huge chamber, thick rugs in rust-red and brown and olive green over the gray stone floor muffling their footfalls. There the aide left her, two guards at her door. Two was enough. Listlessly, she explored the confines of her cage; a dais in the back of the room supported a bed the size of her old home’s antechamber. Swaddled in fine white cotton sheets, it overlooked a window segmented by iron bars into ten quadrants. Sacred Rose sat on the bed, staring out the bottom right square.
The door creaked on badly oiled hinges. From behind her came the young man’s voice, rougher than she’d remembered. “Lady, I am sorry.”
Sacred Rose twisted to look at him. His eyes were swollen with weeping. “For what?” she said at last.
“For my father’s death. For your gift, wasted. For your rude treatment.”
“Such is the way of mortals,” Sacred Rose said, turning from him.
“Do you not have deceit among your people?” he asked. The hope in his voice shone like a glimmer of light on a black creek. She thought wearily of the forest behind her modest home.
“It is not the same,” Sacred Rose said, “When each individual can light a sun or spin a world from the yarn of the Vague, it is more difficult to lie. There is too much power. There is the J’hena.”
He came closer, bringing with him the scent of flesh and blood. “The J’hena?”
“You would say the Sacred Paths,” she said, glancing at him. Even without her seed she was still a creature made of magic, could never fill the shell around her the way he did. It disturbed her. “The Paths are a code of behavior we cannot transgress against.”
“There is a punishment,” he said.
“Yes,” Sacred Rose said. “One none of us can escape, for it is self-inflicted.”
“How can that be?”
She smiled sadly. “Our souls wound themselves. Power wants responsibility as balance.”
The young man shook his head. “If only it were so among us.” He looked down. “My brother... wishes to wed you.”
“He shall,” Sacred Rose said. “I cannot stop him. But he will get no sons on me. I wear your shape, but I am not one of you.”
He touched the bars over her window. “So much wasted,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. “But he will die and I will be free. For me his lifetime will be but a heart-beat.”
A shiver rolled over his body and he stepped back toward the door. “I will have food brought, and clothing.”
“I do not need food,” Sacred Rose said. “But the clothing will be welcome.” Her bronze eyes slid to the bars. “I am cold....”
The young man bowed. “It will be done.”

#

The following week, Sacred Rose was stripped of her clothes. Ivory skin, finer than any mortal’s, was washed with silken cloths. Handmaidens piled her dark-honey hair on her head and bound it with nets of lace, then threaded a silver band over her brow. They dressed her in cold purple and silver. In the dark chapel of the castle, she was handfasted to the King. Radiantly beautiful, nevertheless it was said of her that she looked rather pale, without the blush of maidenly joy common to a bride.
The people did not know she was not human. She did not tell them, nor did the King.

#

The seasons drifted by. The young prince built a solar for the Queen, his sister-by-law, before retreating to the wars that plagued the borders of his brother’s kingdom. In the sunlight and by the light of the stars, Sacred Rose wove, silent, the rays of the sun gilding her cheeks. It warmed her.
“Lady.”
She smiled over her loom and turned. It was the young man, young no longer but in the prime of his adulthood. “I see your brother did not kill you.”
“It would take more than a war to kill me, my Lady,” he said, going to a knee before her.
“I am glad,” she replied, making no move to help him up. It was good... to look. “I pray he will find some other way to occupy you that does not involve mortal peril.”
With his broad wrists crossed on his knee, the man smiled. And then the smile faded. “It seems,” he said after a moment, “That my brother does violence upon all the things he should love. You look unwell, Lady.”
She let one hand slide over the batten. “The King is disappointed that he has no heir.”
“He does not beat you, does he, Lady?”
She did not reply.
He stood, one hand lighting on her arm. “I will make him cease.”
“Do no such thing,” Sacred Rose replied without taking her eyes from the pattern on the loom. She began to thread the shuttle with a new color, scarlet bright, like mortal blood. “Do you wish to give him further reason to destroy you?”
“He will not harm me while he has no heir,” the man said. “But you...”
“He cannot hurt me,” Sacred Rose said. A faint smile touched her lips. “Each year for me is but a breath. It has so little meaning. It is not worth your sacrifice.”
He retreated at the reminder. “You would have me stand aside while a man mistreated a woman."
The thread tangled as her fingers curled into a fist. "I am no woman."
"I am sorry," he said, looking away. "You look like one, and so I forget."
"It is the way of your kind," she said, forcing herself to resume her weaving."You cannot feel beneath the surface."
"Would that I were different," he murmured.
She could not speak to answer. And then he was gone.

#

Years dark as shadows collected in the King’s soul until there was room left for no more. That day Sacred Rose was stripped of her clothes so that she could be washed. Handmaidens undid her honey-dark hair and sheathed it in a veil of ivory lace. In a gown the white of death she stood before the burial mound, a golden band across her brow. Her subjects thought she looked pale, but she had been so quiet in life they could only speculate over the depths of her grief, over the years that seemed to have left her untouched while the King withered.

#

“And now you are King,” she said to the man.
His smile was weary, but the mantle of cold purple and silver rested well on his frame, his broad shoulders. “Indeed, Lady. And now you are free.”
“I am not yet in my power,” Sacred Rose said. “You could keep me here.”
He shook his head. “I will find myself a wife of my kind. These years may have been as breaths and beats of your heart, but they were the breath and beat of a person in stasis. You have not been living. No, Lady. Go you to your life, and I to mine.”
Sacred Rose gathered her skirts then and curtseyed low so that her knee touched the cold stone floor. "You have wisdom, my lord."
He drew her up. "Do not."
She did not meet his eyes as she had his brother's. He did not let go of her hands. The perfume of mortal blood and flesh rose from his skin, and she could not speak to answer.
The servants led her away, for the last time to her room. She dressed in a crimson slip and drew an anonymous cloak over her slender body. With her hair unbound and her brow unmarred, Sacred Rose passed through the human town, leaving the castle far behind. She walked without tiring and without pause.
Her humble house had fallen into disrepair in her absence. Thieves had stolen her few pieces of furniture, and tracks marked the animals that had used it for shelter. In the center of the ante-chamber Sacred Rose curled beneath her cloak. Her cool fingers traced over the wooden floor, reacquainting her with its patterns as tears pale as milk dripped slowly, slowly from her closed eyes.

***

About the author:

M.C.A. Hogarth has been many things--a web database architect, product manager, technical writer and massage therapist--but is currently a parent, artist, writer and anthropologist to aliens.

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