Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(65)

We are different in other ways, as well.

We are not just the two of us now.

Of course, we have not had a physical metamorphism—one of us becoming female, as we once joked about in our tent whilst trying to overcome the grief of Faelan’s passing. As I knew he would, upon our return, Aleksey went straight to the colony to enquire of the puppy the demon child had tortured.

It was well. I did not say I told you so to Aleksey, as he tended to hit me when I said things like this.

The dog had been heard crying. It had been discovered; the child had attempted to hide it out of earshot of the colony but had not had time to do the job very efficiently. The creature had been taken in by the officers of the colony, and thus it was a very easy job for Aleksey to extract it and bring it home. I think it was about eight weeks old when it came to us—far too young to be away from its mother, and a shaky, pathetic thing it was, if you ask me.

It improved when I told Aleksey that it must sleep at the foot of our bed, for I was not going to get up in the night to check on it tied outside.

By the time it had wormed its way up to lie upside down between us, squeezed between our warmth, I think it resembled a proper dog quite nicely.

Aleksey said she was a wolfhound. I did get hit for my response to that absurd claim. I will grant that it was more leg than dog and had eyes so big and beautifully colored that it appeared to be looking out of orbs of purest amber.

Not that I gave it much consideration, you understand.

Aleksey wanted to know what I thought about names—what I pictured when I looked at her. He did not like my suggestions: Vomit, Flea, and Shitpile.

He said he was going to call her Grace after my mother. After all, he pointed out, had not she given me to him and was thus greatly in his favor? So, Grace it was. Did I overcome some more wiggling little worms of pain when I heard this name now so frequently and in such a pleasant way? Of course I did. I no longer heard my father screaming her name as he died in agony, watching her so degraded. Now I heard Grace and looked to find the ridiculous thing on legs that Aleksey doted upon, for, as he said, did not wolfhounds seek out and find wolves, and would not, therefore, Grace lead us one day to Faelan in the great forest where he was waiting for us?

I said we had both been changed by our experiences.

I agreed with him. Grace would.

I must end now.

I am being called.

Have I set it all down now so it makes sense in my own mind? I am not sure. I said it was inconceivable that the laws of nature could be overcome by the world of the spirit and that by setting down this account I would prove that to myself once more.

But I cannot explain how Faelan’s body departed us or why the blueberries were left in its place.

I think I can explain the appearance of the devil in front of the poor colonists and his subsequent power over them. All men who come to this land seem overly… preoccupied… with God and how they are to live their lives obedient to him. I think they would do better to listen to their hearts, to enjoy their bodies and this land we have care for while we are here on earth. But they snivel and worry and punish themselves and thus leave their hearts vulnerable to the likes of the priest who fornicated and sinned and caught a disfiguring disease. And from that weakness, all horror descended upon us. All his madness manifested itself in that journey we took into his darkness.

Where Mary came from I do not know. How she came to be as she was will also remain a mystery to me. But… ah, this is hard to admit. What would my sister have been had she survived and grown to womanhood with the Powponi? If she had been traded away to another tribe as many captives were? Would she, degraded, defiled, brutalized, have become as Mary did? I will believe that she would not. She was hope and celebration, and I choose to believe that she would have remained so.

And the child. Evil men do not give birth to evil children—I had said this to Aleksey. But from whence, then, does evil come? Again, I do not know, but sometimes when I am lying entangled with Aleksey in the quiet hours of the night, I wonder about a man’s soul and whether if it were made tangible, someone like Aleksey would have it as a gem inside his body: shining so bright that even trapped inside, its rays spread out and illuminate. The child’s would be a small, dark kernel of black. Not even coal—for can coal not be lit?—but something truly dead within him.

And then the worst of all the thoughts comes to me. Was that child at five years old as I was at that age? Did the savagery he must have been witness to create the monster he was? And was I, then, a monster, from seeing the same and living the same life? Is that what they had all seen in me? Expecting a civilized doctor as Aleksey had described me (perhaps as he genuinely sees me), but then confronted so abruptly and without warning with me, had they seen the true face I wear beneath this favorable countenance? Is that why I had been singled out for death, but, unable to kill me, they had possessed me with the poppet to bring me down?

Perhaps.

If any of that is true, then I am glad, for whatever I am, I defeated them and their magic.

And here sits a man who once thought himself a man of science.

Perhaps, in the end, it was the falls themselves that determined how events played out. Whether natural or beyond nature, whether science or faith, what could survive in contact with that great, inexplicable power?

Aleksey and I have already experienced the terrifying fog that comes down upon all things in war, when all is confusion and pain.