It can’t be true, I had thought. I know it can’t be true—and yet that night I had still nearly wept when Aunt Telomache told me it was a lie.
“She was a child and she needed comfort,” said Father. “But you are now a woman and know your duty, so I trust you have already disposed of it.”
I sat up a straighter. “I’m wearing it.”
He sat up too. “Nyx Triskelion. You will take it off right now.”
Instantly the words Yes, Father formed in my mouth, but I swallowed them down. My heart hammered and my fingertips swirled with cold because I was defying my father and that was ungrateful, impious, wrong—
“No,” I said.
I was going to die carrying out his plan. Against that obedience, this little defiance could hardly matter.
“Are you actually deluding yourself—”
“No,” I repeated flatly. That had been another part of my education: the history of all the fools who tried to assassinate the Gentle Lord. None succeeded, and all died, for even if they stabbed the Gentle Lord in the heart, he could heal in a moment and destroy them the next. I had long ago given up hoping that any mortal weapon could kill a demon.
“I don’t believe in the Rhyme, and even if I did, I wouldn’t bet our freedom on my skill with a knife. You trained me too well for that, Father. But this is the last gift my only sister ever gave me, and I will wear it to my doom if I please.”
“Hm.” He settled back in his seat. “And have you thought how you’ll explain it to your husband, when the time comes?”
His voice was once again as calm as when he read me the story of Lucretia. The euphemism was dry and bloodless as dust on the old book. When the time comes. Meaning, When he strips you naked and uses you as he pleases.
In that moment I hated my father as I never had before in my life. I stared at the loose skin of his neck and thought, If I were really like Lucretia, I would kill you and then myself.
But just thinking the impiety made me feel sick. He had only been trying to save my mother. No doubt, in his desperation, he’d deluded himself into thinking the Gentle Lord would be easier to cheat; and once he knew how wrong he’d been, what could he do but try to save as much as he could?
Iphigenia had gladly let her father, Agamemnon, sacrifice her to the gods so that the Greek fleet would have good winds as they sailed to Troy. My father was asking me to die for something much better: the chance to save Arcadia.
All my life, I’d seen people driven mad by demons; I’d seen how everyone, weak or strong, rich or poor, lived in fear of them. If I carried out Father’s plan—if I trapped the Gentle Lord and freed Arcadia—nobody would ever be killed or driven mad by a demon again. No fools would make disastrous bargains with the Gentle Lord, and no innocents would pay the price for them. Our people would live free beneath the true sky.
Any one of the Resurgandi would gladly die for that chance. If I loved my people, or even just my family, I should be glad to die for it too.
“I’ll tell him the truth,” I said. “I couldn’t bear to part with my sister’s gift.”
“You should make him think you didn’t even want to have it. Tell him that you made a promise to your father.”
I couldn’t resist saying, “He bargained with you himself. Do you think he’s fool enough to believe you’d try to save me?”
His eyes widened and his jaw hardened. With a little flicker of pleasure, I realized I had finally hurt him.
This is the first way that I heard the story: Father drew me aside and said, “When I was young, I promised the Resurgandi that one of my daughters would fight the Gentle Lord and free us all. You are that daughter.”
I suppose it was a kindness that he told me that way—the first and last kindness he ever showed me. I heard the rest of the story soon enough from Aunt Telomache, and I heard it over and over again, from her, from him, from visiting members of the Resurgandi.
The story was all around me—in Aunt Telomache’s grim silences, Father’s carefully blank stares, the way their hands touched when they thought no one was looking; it was in Astraia’s overflowing toy chest, the portraits of my mother in every room, the stack of books Father gave me about every hero who had ever died for duty. I breathed that story, swam in it, felt like I would drown in it.
This is how it goes:
Once upon a time, Leonidas Triskelion was a young man, handsome and clever and brave. He was the darling of his family and the hope of the Resurgandi. And he was also the beloved of a young woman named Thisbe, and in time her husband. But as the years wore on, their joyful marriage filled with sorrow, for Thisbe could not conceive a child. No matter how Leonidas swore he loved her, she despised herself as a worthless and unlucky wife, who would cause her husband’s name to die with him because she could not give him a son. At last she fell into such despair that she tried to kill herself. For if even Leonidas’s Hermetic arts could not help her, what hope was left?
Just one.
So at last Leonidas, who had spent years studying how to defeat the Gentle Lord, went to bargain with him. And this is the bargain that the Gentle Lord struck: a son was out of the question. But Thisbe would conceive two healthy daughters by the year’s end, and the only price would be that when one of them was seventeen, she must marry the Gentle Lord himself.
“And do not think that you can cheat me,” said the Gentle Lord. “If you hide your daughters, I will find them, and after marrying one I will kill the other; but deliver one daughter to me and the other one will live free and happy all her life.”