Sorrow
I’ll tell this first part of the tale as you told me, dear brother, since you can’t bear to tell it anymore. Not even to yourself. I want you to understand how things came to this pass.
Brian Coin, that black-haired boy like a rail-thin raven, saw him too, you know, walking through the golden wheat like a thunderhead across a sunset sky. I always thought you liked him because he was so much like me, and a boy too. You always liked boys better. I think you still do now, no matter how your late-come birthright made you wed—no, don’t complain. I know how much you always loved me, and how you never did. It’s not a slander when I say it.
I watched Brian Coin going, and you watched him come to you, his black hair and his bright eyes like old amber and his pale skin that never knew a day’s work in the fields his father owned. You were there in your retreat, the shady grove that grew between the squire’s field and the old stones. The oldsters and the priest said we should shun that place, the five that stood twice a man tall and the fallen two that halfway broke the circle. They said it was a place of devils and accursed temptation. But Mother taught you more than that; The danger came in crossing or in speaking a wish the stones might hear and answer. If you could keep from that, you would be safe beside them. She knew the stones, our mother. Didn’t father catch her there in the courtship they never could speak of?
Remember how you watched and waited Brian in that secret place you shared with him to show how much you loved? The smile on your face bright as a summer sun under your blue eyes and hair as golden as the wheat. His smile was never a match for yours, dear brother, but still you met him with a kiss. You say he met you, but I know the truth. He let you kiss him, not the other way.
And how your hands took time to learn each other, to trace and press and take the measure. His ribs that you could almost count, the ridge of his straight spine. Your broad back and shoulders made for holding up the sky. Your hands that were so clever at every craft, even at blind unlacing were his jerkin met his hose. And how your tongues tangled together, tasting what had only teased before. And how you loved the smooth curve of his hip and how it fit your hand, and the taste of salt when your lips found the downy hollow of his throat, the way he tensed and shivered when your teeth came after. And how he said he loved your big strong arms around him, your chest that pulled your jerkin taut. You were so strong already then, and still a boy.
And then he let you lay him down the squire’s proud son so dark and pale and proud. Down in the grass beneath the oaks. And you recall the whimper he made when you took him in your mouth, and how it grew loud, loud as pinch-tailed hound, when you made him finish before you let him go.
You lay back, proud and pleased with giving pleasure, but he gave you no sweetness back. He took you in his hand and closed his fist to hurt you, and while you rocked and curled round the pain, he spat on you. He called you every cruel and filthy name I won’t repeat. He kicked you more than once while you were wracked. Too weak to fight you fair; he got his licks in while he could.
That was the last time you had a choice, dear brother. He’d made his before he came, and once you gave yourself to his false love, there was no other way this ended, for him or for the two of us. Whatever you can forgive, I couldn’t forgive that.
He told the whole town after: how you had begged to taste his prick. How you were worse than just a twisted invert. You loved men, yes, but not as much as your own sister, that dark witch girl born from the same womb. They all believed him, or showed out that they did. The squire’s son telling tales on a boy whose father was a useless drunk, whose mother hid from her neighbors so much they hadn’t even known she was confined with his sister, who was a little witch herself.
Father knew well enough you were grown too strong for him to beat anything but the poor cottage wall, but he still spouted every awful rumor back to you when you came home to hide, ranting about how it would ruin his reputation in the town. As if he had one. And Mother tried to make you safe, but she had to be a good wife before she was a mother. Those were her terms with Father from the start.
That was your first real pain, what Brian did, wasn’t it? Your first great sorrow? The first time that you were made to see someone could hate you. You thought of leaving then, for the first time, like I’d been thinking since I knew away existed.
Joy
The happiest time of my life was with you in city, dear sister, before you found my fortune and fit me into it. Best of all was when we danced at the White Hart. Remember the smooth warm wood under our bare feet, the way the torchlight made the hunting scenes on the wall dance? The way you clung close as my shadow when we moved.
Mother told me to go, you know? To take you away; said the squire would kill us, and Father too, if we stayed. We couldn’t live there after Brian disappeared, not while the squire fingered those white bones he thought belonged to his lost son.
I always loved you, but more than ever when we danced and you pressed close and drowned me in the scent of your dark hair. That was home to me, when we left for the city. Your hair, and your skin that was always cool against mine, even when we were both sweating from a dance that wore out the musicians. Everyone stopped to watch us that night, how we never stuttered, even when the music changed, even when I let you lead without a word and took you back to spin you like a top and toss you up and catch you. You were light as a bird in my arms. We always knew what the other wanted, at least that way. Your heart was never an open book to me the way your body was, but you knew all of me.
And then, when we were worn out with dancing, Morgan was at the table next to ours, dark and soft and just what both of us desired. That popinjay put his hands on her and called her a jade when she slapped him away. You knew I’d stand to her defense, I suppose. I was touchy after what Brian Coin had called me, and the dandy was the kind of noble drunk to take a slap as a chance to show his steel. I remember how you put a sword into my hand when he swaggered out his own.
Using it felt just like dancing with you, like I was born for nothing else. Of course I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t that kind of fool. But I made him kneel and kiss the hem of Morgan’s dress to apologize, and she was mine after that, and yours. And how we loved her. Me first, of course. She threw herself at me after the duel, and how could I refuse? But you had a long time alone with her after, in our lodgings, and it was quiet talk before it was loud pleasure. She was always a little more removed from me after that night, as if she’d halfway changed her mind about the first seduction.
I never understood how much of what came after was Morgan’s plan, and how much yours. We made a striking pair; her hair and skin like dark polished wood, and mine like the gold fittings. People watched us when we came into a room, and never noticed you. And what rooms she brought me into; bohemian parties full of slumming nobles and libertine merchants, mock tournaments where dandies played at knighthood and I was welcome with her favor on me. And always that grey-haired man in black livery at the edges of things. Watching me. You swanned in from the shadows to kiss me like a lover where everyone could see and give imperious orders for what I had already planned to do. You refused to explain what the game was, but I knew my part, just like I knew the steps to lead you in our dance.
You set me on the course you’d charted, and pushed me out from shore just as the past caught up to drag you back. The watcher came to ask me questions, said he was the steward of the duke’s high hall above the town. You knew just what to say, you and Morgan between you. I knew she was some distaff cousin of the old duke’s wife, his dead daughter’s companion, but I didn’t understand why that should matter. I just stammered and nodded because I didn’t want to ruin whatever scheme had you lying about my age, my birth, the tales our parents told, and how they were both honest, simple, godly folk who found me at the forest edge. I didn’t understand why he was asking until he went down on one knee and hailed me as the duke’s lost son.
It was that same night the squire found us out. A flock of constables broke in the door into the private room where the steward had just offered me a signet and invited me to come and live with my new father. The squire’s man swept in behind, with lawyers at his side like a pair of choughs in their black gowns and red caps. They had charges to lay on us, sealed by the magistrate of course. Charges for the death of Brian Coin, for murder and witchcraft and unnatural loves. It would have ruined everything, just when the lies the steward had invited us to tell were about to make me something more than I had been.
I remember how you almost laughed through your confession. You admitted to all of it, to Brian’s seduction and his death, and every perversion that wouldn’t have me in the dock as well. The smile you gave me, bright and hard as diamond as they carried you away in iron chains. That was your perfect moment, then, I think. That was the hour of your greatest joy, when you set everything in motion and I couldn’t see to turn it back and keep you.
Girl
All black and pale you always were, my magpie sister, my moonlight girl. Even as a baby you were white instead of pink. You were always hiding, behind your hair, under the trees, in locked, forbidden places. You never showed yourself like me; you never got the chance. The other children threw sticks and stones and cruel words when you came to play. Only I knew you were faster than I was, smarter, keener in every way that word could mean.
I saw our mother get you, you know. We’re twins, or close enough, but I was a forward child, grown like a hero from old tales, so that at two years I could slip out and follow Mother on that half-moon night. Father was drunk asleep. He’d ranted earlier about having only one son, and no sign of another no matter how he did his duty.
She went out in the dead of night, when the moon was a lidded eye. She filled a willow basket full of gifts: a bottle of good brandy, soft bread she’d kept back from the table, white salt, a silver bracelet that she’d never bought or bartered for. She went in that cloak of black feathers that she only wore when father wouldn’t see.
She went to the old stones, and I followed like a fox kit, quiet in the dark. She spoke to the stones like she said we never should, asked three times for a child she had promised, had been promised? I never quite understood. I still don’t. I expect you understood it long ago.
The clouds came up out in the world and shut the moon’s eye, but it was still bright silver in the circle. There were three fairy women there, all in black with pale, sharp white faces under their black hoods, like three fat rooks.
Mother reached across the circle of the stones and handed them the basket, and how they crowed and chattered sharing out the things inside, pressing their faces close and cackling and fighting until it was all shared out.
And when they passed the basket back, there you were inside, a babe still, but not newborn, with your black hair and your white skin already stark under the moonlight. You never cried, not even in the cold. Always a secret one, my sister, always kept your ideas to yourself. I’ve thought about that night, and Mother’s feather cloak, since you left me. I’m sure you know what it all meant, what you and I are and aren’t. I still don’t, though, sister. Where did you go when you were gone?
That’s why Father was strange to you, if you didn’t know. Even he would have remembered a confinement and a squalling babe, for all Mother swore you were his as much as I. She told him she’d promised children, and now he had two, so she had kept her promise.
Boy
You always were everyone’s golden boy, brother. The tallest and the strongest and the cleverest. Your hair like spun gold and your eyes like summer sky and your white teeth that never stained or rotted. Always the first in every game you were allowed to play and win. And no one ever seemed to resent any of it. You were too sweet, more honey than your hair, so beautiful everyone just wanted squeeze so tight they wrung your neck. You grew so fast. I thought you were much older when we were young, you know? It took until sixteen to catch you up and be sure we were as close as Mother said.
You never doubted, though. You stuck to me when I was just a scrap of scared little girl hiding behind my tangled hair. You trusted Mother too, like no one else did, tried to stand between her and Father’s fists once you were big enough. He was a drunken fool, a wifebeater never fit to wash your boots, and Mother and I so dark—it was easy for everyone to believe you were a foundling child meant for better things.
You weren’t, though, you know. You were born natural as those two could manage. Just a piece of Father’s one stroke of good luck, of Mother’s one long promise to him. I made you leave that for a better lie. I admit I did, and I wont ask forgiveness. You’re just where you belong, brother, just where I paid for you to be.
He loved you best, you know, Father. Better than Mother or me for certain. Even though he knew you were better than he’d ever be. Even after you half broke his arm when he was drunk on harvest cider and you caught a punch meant for Mother. Even after Brian Coin shamed you and he half believed it, Father loved you more than anything, besides the drink.
You never knew he fought for you, for your good name when Brian dragged it through the dust. He was in his cups at Widow Poly’s house, and there were four of the squire’s men drinking beside him, laughing at the slanders they repeated. The firelight on their blue and black cap-badges like the flash of a jay’s wing in the sun.
He threw the table over and tried to fight them all. Puffed his belly out and pumped his fists like a gamecock preening. Said he’d shove those words back down their lying throats. His boy was none of that, and a better boy than the squire’s pervert son any day. They had to fight him then, and it wasn’t long before they had him down and kicked ‘til they were tired.
That was when Mother begged you to leave, to keep him from another beating. She had to love him first, you know? It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t. She was his before we could be hers.
Silver
I was so frightened the first time you spoke to me in Morgan’s mouth, sister, your high voice instead of her husky one, like a porcelain bell painted in bronze. Part of me, the part that knew you close enough to copy, thought of cutting her open while you spoke, as if you’d be there to dig out of her flesh, a pearled sister hiding in my lover’s throat.
She was with me in the duke’s household, position changed from maid to a dead daughter into mistress of a newly-minted son, guiding me through the second part of the audition you two had arranged. The household and my place in it were still unsettled, still full of questions about my virtue and your guilt, and whether all the distant cousins circling like buzzards and the counts waiting on a free hand when my ‘father’ died were going to accept me on nothing but a flimsy story of a fairy-stolen child that the world had thought was one more stillbirth. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea yet, that everyone was going to agree I was the duke’s long-lost heir. I hadn’t gotten past the wonder of living there, of being dressed like a nobleman, of being told I had always been meant to have all this and more.
I was a perfect fit for a duke’s son. You’d made sure to show them I was a natural with the blade and lance and courteous to ladies as befit their station. The hunting was good too. I know how fine I look astride a horse. I’m not a fool. No matter how much of one you made me.
The counts and burghers and distant cousins all would have been better off if the duke died without an heir and they could divide the spoils. But you know how people like me once I speak with them. I don’t recall anyone who really wanted to hurt me after we spent time together, except for Brian Coin, and you, of course, my cruel, sweet, unmerciful sister. You hurt me worst of all.
You came time and again in Morgan’s mouth to tutor me. I’d already made sure my new father kept you and your trial in the city, so Squire Coin couldn’t just drag you back home to hang you out of hand. I still thought I could save you. I wanted to, but you said I had to lie, deny you to your face, defame you as a fairy hag who meant to use my blood for her advantage. You’d arranged for all of it to be believable, the way you ordered me and Morgan round in public. You cast yourself as villainess to keep me lily-white.
You told me you would never be harmed in the hangman’s noose, and maybe I believe you still, but what aside from deadly harm could keep you from my side so long?
I loved you still, and thought you loved me just as much. I love you now, close as the dark half of my heart. But you whispered demands out of my lover’s mouth each night until I swore by the old stones and our first secrets that I’d do it.
The court was spilling out into the street for your trial; the judges in their black and scarlet, the nobles all around me plumed and silken, the mob packing the space so tight the bailiffs couldn’t push them out. You in the tatters of the same green dress you wore the night they took you from me. It smelled of sweat and clove pomanders, and the sound of the crowd was a river of hounds growling low at the first scent of blood.
Squire Coin came himself to accuse you. He ranted and cried in the witness box, and shook the white bones he said were Brian’s that you killed. He was a broken man already, and if his hate had taken anyone but you, I might have forgiven him from pity. And when I followed him up to the box, I damned you with the words you gave me, denied your love for me and mine for you, accused you of spell-weaving, of compelling me from childhood, of stealing all my memory of my true birth and father for the sake of fairy plots.
Of course they judged you guilty, and the penalty for half as many crimes would have been death.
How you did reassure me before the execution, whispering with Morgan’s tongue against the hollow of my shoulder that you’d be free and well upon the fateful day.
I came to watch, of course. How could I not after my accusations, and with my father, the duke, too ill to see his justice done?
The square before the treble tree was packed worse than the court had been, save for the lane held clear at halberd-point between the gibbet and the gaol. The gallows bars a trio of crooked fingers beckoning the sky down to see the bloody show. All bare but for your rope that day. They’d killed the petty criminals the day before.
It took five executioners to carry you, five black-clad men as big beside you as crows mobbing a sparrow. You went along meek until the end, eyes on the ground, but I know you knew just where I stood. You saw me at the last and locked my eyes in yours and smiled that same joyful smile you had shown when you were taken.
And then you fell, and how the noose bounced empty when that cascade spilled out on the cobbles, silent black feathers and the careless ring of silver coins. I knew it was the double-handful I had sent in secret, enough to fee the hangman for an easy death. I never really trusted you’d be well.
I still have not forgiven you for keeping silent since that day, and staying gone from me, wherever you are that wasn’t at the short end of the rope.
Gold
What a duke you made, brother. You were so young. They all said it; your father barely had a year after he found you. Just long enough to find a bride and see you well wed to a waif with kings to count among her forebearers, wide lands in the south to marry with your northern claim. And who could argue with a man like you to rule them? So strong, so sweetly-tempered, and so keen in conversation, a gentleman to peers and servants both, and well-beloved by all your household near soon as they first met you.
What a sight you made when you rode into that northern village you still think of as home. Hair brighter than your gold-washed mail, your banner bright and blowing in the sun at the head of the procession; lawyers and stewards and cooks and washerwomen coming behind the vassal knights and the men of your own household. You brought the law down like an axe on Squire Coin.
It was well you kept Morgan close until your new bride demanded that she go. You did it hoping I would speak out of her sweet lips once again, I know, but still you took her good advice. She knew which of your court were truly charmed and which only pretended. You were never any good at telling who really cared for you, bother—too used to the answer being everyone. You never learned to mistrust praise and promises, not even after Brian, and I made sure you never paid for it like that again. Morgan really did love you, you know. She planned to marry you at first, or someone who did what you did that night we met her. She needed a husband who didn’t know her as a harlot to keep her out of rustication, but you were too fine a catch for her plans once I explained what the duke would do with you.
I was so proud of how unmerciful you were with the old squire. How you tried him in front of his fine house, an open court for everyone to see him shamed and broken. You his liege and judge, and never a word was he permitted, or a lawyer. You stood him up before you and laid out his treacheries in your honey voice that made everyone know you told the truth. Such charges you found for him: back taxes and forged ledgers, wagons sent across the border that never saw a customs stamp, and worse, the letters sent among the goods, his own and others, arranging where it might be safe and profit all for reivers to slip across and do their bloody work without it cutting into profits for anyone who mattered. More than enough to hang him in all justice.
But you would have killed him just the same if he were pure and blameless as a lamb. You did it all to pay him back for me, and only you and he knew that was why. You never would have done it for yourself; you were too good a man, too kind, too sure in your perfection to be proud and vengeful on your own behalf. And fair enough. You always were the better one of us, and Brian was dead already, not still taunting you from his father’s shadow—yes, dead, brother, not only gone away. Did you really believe he’d wandered off without a word? That the old man didn’t know his own son’s bones?
Mother might have guessed your why. She knew you well enough, but she couldn’t understand the way we bound together. She was too caught in how our father caught her. That binding only ran one way. Most of the rest didn’t really believe you were the same boy; how could that be, a drunkard’s invert son the duke? And even the ones who believed the changeling tale and knew how you had risen never thought of me, the shadow to your golden youth.
How they cheered when you hanged the squire in front of his fine house. Of course they cheered; you said the taxes would be half what they had been, and paid straight to your factor who would spend them in the town, to keep the work up on the squire’s land. All yours now, since he had no heir. You might have worked his little treasons into such a forfeit, but Brian’s absence made it easy.
It was sweet to give the squire’s house to your old father, and money to live there like a lord, to give him comfort for his final years. He wouldn’t have too many, not the way the drink had ruined him. Did you know giving it to him was the only way to let our mother keep it? Or was it your new wife and courtly flatterers advising on propriety? Reward, they had you say, for a kind man who raised a stolen child as his own until he shared the golden secret of your birth and sent you to the city where your real father found you. It was the first time you ever saw him really grateful, baffled out of his pompous entitlement by the scale of what you gave him.
He would have had something to say, they all would, if they’d seen you at the old stones. But you knew how to move through those fields and copses without being seen. I taught you long before. They would have seen you look for a long time at those seven monoliths, two fallen and five standing. They would have tried to guess what you were thinking. More of them would have thought of me if they had seen you there, but they would all have been wrong about what went on inside your head. Only I knew you thought of pulling down the stones, of burying them deep or beating them to gravel with a chain-gang’s-worth of iron hammers. Only I knew that you thought even longer of crying out aloud that you would give your self and soul and anything to see my safe return.
It’s good you didn’t do anything but look in the end. Neither of your plans would have gotten what you really wanted.
How sad our mother was when you went back to your high house above the city. You couldn’t stay even for her. Don’t think she left the night that Father died because she wasn’t grateful, or because she was angry at your absence. She had to go for the same reasons she had to stay as long as he was living.
You were right to leave when you did. It never would have gotten better. You were too good for that village, brother, too good for all you did for my revenge. Each night you slept there, you heard the sound of the sexton nailing up the squire’s coffin. Six hard taps for every nail, like a nutcracker opening a filbert.
A Secret, Never Told
Let me begin the end of this, dear brother, by saying I am sorry, for leaving you the way I did, and staying gone and silent for so long. I am sorry in the way of sympathy, but also that of pain. It has not hurt me less to be apart than you. Be comforted that I am well, save for that ache of separation. I have been far on the other side of circles and of shadows, staying with our mother’s family and learning how to wear my wings.
I swore I’d never speak a word of this to you, and those who listened hold me to my oath, but they cannot begrudge my borrowing your slip of a wife to get around the letter of our deal. They themselves are steeped in such evasions. I hope you will not mind my voice from her unprepossessing mouth. She’s such a washed-out little thing beside you, brother. Straw to your gold, stick thin beside your strength. I suppose she has a pedigree, but it doesn’t show the way a prize hound’s does. She’s only bred for having breeding.
Well, your minding it won’t matter, unless you’ve learned the trick of hearing while you’re fast asleep. I hope you have. You deserve the warning, and this is as close as I can come to giving it, dear brother. I won’t ask for forgiveness. I know you’ll say yes in an instant, and hate that you can’t make yourself forgive after you’ve promised.
I’m talking round the point. I’ll stop. I will confess.
The squire was right about me, every word. I spellbound Brian Coin and called him from his room in that fine house to meet me when the moon was dark. I watched him walk to me across the blind-dark field, just like he walked to you under the sun. I had our mother’s best knife in my hand, and I made him taste it the way he never tasted you. I traced the line of his every lying caress on you with steel and then with salt that would have made him scream if I had not sealed his voice inside his throat. He cried in silence, though. I did not permit him an easy death. I bled him slow beside the stones, and offered the seven deepest cuts to each and to the seven blood-fed magpies that crossed the circle at my inviation. I paid his pain to the oaks and to the dark across the stones to buy all your good fortune.
Did you think you rose from gutter all the way to duke for nothing? I am not sorry that I took the vengeance you never would have asked, or sorry that I kept the crime from you. But now you need a warning that I cannot give without this oathbreaking confession. These fairy bargains are paid twice, as Mother paid for me; once with the basket that you saw, and once and worse with losing both of us.
Brian’s death paid the first price of your nobility, but the second cost is coming, and it will be the worse. I cannot pay it for you, brother, though I tried, with absence when I could not bear the noose.
But here along with my confession I will make a promise: the cost and I will both come home to you. When seven magpies bring this secret never spoken to your supper table and demand their pay, then I will be beside you, close as your own shadow, and never will we be apart again.
