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by Sarah L. Edwards
Fantasy, 28 pages.
Originally Published in Aeon Speculative Fiction, 2007
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One of the butterflies brought the message that a stranger had come. The messenger was still resting on my hair, whispering, when the master and the strange man drew near the garden where I was tending the flowers of my kin. The master said nothing to me but only gestured toward me while talking to the other man in low, muffled tones. Twice the man’s gaze drifted to me while he nodded in agreement. Soon they went away again, and I sent a few kin discretely after.
Deep in the night, after every tempting lamp and lantern had been doused, a moth settled at the edge of my window, folding his dusky wings, and told me what the master and mistress had said.
“She’s too young. She’s just barely begun to bleed.” The mistress, masking her plea with firmness.
“She’s sixteen, and that’s more than old enough. You were hardly older when I took you.” The master, not yet angry at the mistress’s disagreement because he knew she would yield, eventually.
“But you were from the village. All we know of him is that they call him the Butterfly Man.”
A shrug. “I know he carries a heavy purse. He will pay a good price.”
“Renna has a fragile mind. So far, without friends — she’ll die, or go wild.”
“No word of that!” A slap. I felt the tingling in my skin as though it had been my own cheek. “And if she dies...” Another shrug. “It will not be our concern.”
“Keth!” I imagined her losing control, clutching his arm.
He shook away her grasp, turning his eyes upon her, stern and cold. “She is no use to us. Better to give her to this man who wants her than have her here, where she does not even earn her keep.”
“She eats but little.” A feeble protest. She already knew her cause was lost. So did he.
“We perform the rituals tomorrow, so they may depart.”
And so I would marry the stranger, a man I had seen only from a distance, clothed that afternoon in road-dust but lively in his eye.
I thanked the moth, offering it my warm breath in gratitude, for it need not have come. It was not of my kin, only a distant relation of the dusk granting me a boon for some reason of its own. Later I looked back and wondered if its purpose was malice.
* * *
Afternoon sun slanted through old willows to scatter across the few surrounding faces as we stood under the ritual arch, I and the Butterfly Man across from me, and the master recited the ancient words of bonding. I listened little, though I had seldom heard them. I had long watched the mistress and the master and knew what they meant.
The man stood straight, stiff, in what I guessed were his only clothes: loose trousers and a blousy shirt cut of black cloth faded to rust. A shapeless, wide-brimmed hat shadowed his face, which might have looked younger were it not for the sun-dried wrinkles bunched about his eyes and the red-toned beard bristling across his jaw.
I nearly missed the moment to recite my words of the old language that I forced, dry, from my throat. “I bind myself.”
The man repeated after me, clumsily, in a tone rough but warm. They were the first I had heard him say.
Afterward was feasting, and I supped on richer fare than any I had had in all my time in that house. Soon the mistress and I were sent out. I fell to my bed before even the butterflies, my kin, had found perches for the night.
* * *
Early in the morning the mistress woke and dressed me, as though I were a little girl again. Her gaze soft, she laid a hand on my neck. I stepped away so that she would not crush the cocoon I had tied beneath my hair. She was looking toward the window and did not seem to notice.
“Serve your new the master well. Obey him always, even if it pains you, and you will earn fair treatment.” She sighed. “I would wish you had been given closer to home, that I might see you now and then.”
I laid a hand on her shoulder. She started at my touch and then smiled thinly. “It’s all right. Perhaps when you birth your first child, I’ll come and help.” Looking in my face, she nodded, pulled me down beside her on the bed, and explained the way of a man with his bride. The picture she spoke was messy and frightening, but I thought of pairs of butterflies I’d seen dancing on the breeze, flashing delicate colors to the skies as they courted, and I shrugged away my worry. If it were only pain, then I would bear it like a beating. And if it were like the butterflies in their frenzy, then... I did not know, except that I would not fear it.
“Wait here,” she said, getting up and leaving the room. She returned with a bundle wrapped in paper. “Clothes for you, until you have materials to make your own. Every bride should have a dowry.” She sat and handed it to me. “Ah, Renna, I wish there were more for you.”
I caught a single tear from her cheek, and she smiled and stood, pulling at me -- [End of Preview.]