Gilt and Midnight

Yesterday and long ago, in a kingdom far from here but right next door, there lived a handsome young man and his equally beautiful young wife. She had hair the color of sunshine, eyes like a summer sky and skin like rich cream. Her name was Ilina, and the young man loved her more than anything else in the world.

Ilina, for her part, loved her handsome young husband. Pitor was strong, with muscled arms and legs that had no trouble chopping wood or building fences. His hair, the color of the forest’s deepest shadows, hung to his shoulders in ripples like silk, and his eyes shone like the night sky littered with stars.

If Ilina had one small wish, it was that Pitor could be as satisfied with their humble cottage and plot of land as she was, but though her husband worked long and hard, he hated the labor that brought them their food and the roof above their heads. No matter how Ilina tried to soften the small rooms with her handwoven tapestries or delicately embroidered pillows, night after night Pitor looked around their home with dissatisfaction on his face.

“I love you,” she told him. “No matter if we eat on gold and silver or on wooden trenchers, Pitor, I love you.”

But Pitor would not be satisfied, no matter what Ilina did. And each day when he came home from chopping wood in the forest, he grew angrier and more sullen. Nothing Ilina did could move him to smile.

A time of drought and misfortune came upon the land. Pitor had to travel farther and farther into the woods to find trees he could chop for profit, until at last one day he’d traveled so far he couldn’t make it home before dark. Though he ached to return to his beloved Ilina and knew she would worry for his safety, he knew how foolish traveling in the dark would be. He made himself a small camp and prepared to spend the night. He dared not even burn one small portion of the wood he’d gathered, for not only would it be taking food from Ilina’s mouth to use the wood he intended to sell, but the risk of deadly fire in the dry forest was too great. Instead, he pulled his cloak around himself and hunkered down, unable even to sleep lest a beast attack him in the night.

Nevertheless, weariness overtook him, and Pitor’s eyes closed. He dreamed of his love, of her touch and of her kiss, and woke with his cock straining the front of his trousers.

“Ah, sweet,” said a voice from the shadows. “What a prize you hold between your legs. How I long for a man to fill me up with what you’ve got.”

Convinced he was dreaming, Pitor sat up with a shake of his head. Laughter curled like smoke from the darkness. A woman stepped from behind a tree. The sight of her sent fear and desire coursing through him in equal amounts, and Pitor sprang to his feet, his hatchet ready to defend against her.

“You know me?” The woman’s dark hair swirled around her face.

Pitor’s breath heaved. The closer she stepped the more aroused he became, until all he could think of was satisfying the carnal urges flooding him.

The woman was upon him, astride him, before he knew how to object.

“Who are you?” he cried, stricken, for he’d never been unfaithful to his wife before.

“You don’t need to know.”

He turned and was on her before she could escape, the blade of his ax to her throat, but she only laughed. To his shame, his cock twitched and rose at the sound of it. She reached between them to grab and stroke him fully erect.

“You should be better satisfied with what you have, woodsman, else you lose it all. Let me show you what you could have.”

Pitor jerked away from her and lowered the ax. “I love my wife.”

The woman stood, her eyes flashing in a face still covered with shadows. “Come with me and be my love, and we will walk the forest as monarchs.”

He shook his head. “No!”

She tilted her head. “No? Then fuck me once with that sweet prick, and I’ll reward you for your efforts.”

Pitor’s hand trembled. “No reward you could offer me would be enough for me to betray my wife.”

“Not even the life of your child?”

Pitor gasped aloud. “I have no children!”

Ilina had lost several pregnancies at great harm to her health. He knew she still longed for a babe, but he hoped for her sake she wouldn’t catch again. The woman in front of him clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

“Fuck me, and your child will never know hunger, nor poverty. How is that for a reward, and for so simple a task? One your body craves already?”

“You can promise me that?”

“That and more,” promised the woman, and Pitor was lost.

As he sank into her warm, slick flesh, Pitor groaned, “Ilina!”

“Ah, yes,” said the woman atop him, the woman who smelled and felt so familiar now.

Pitor groaned again as ecstasy swept him. “Ilina!”

The woman slowed her movements, rocking against him. She bent to whisper in his ear. “I am your Ilina, if you so desire.”

Pitor’s hands gripped her hips as he thrust inside her, over and over, until his seed boiled out of him and he fell back, spent. The woman laughed and withdrew, leaving him cold in the night air. Pitor blinked, stunned at how she’d once again become a stranger.

“Don’t travel so far from home, next time,” she advised, and was gone, leaving Pitor to return to his wife.

She had meant to keep it secret from him until she knew for sure the babe grew inside her without difficulty, but Ilina didn’t regret telling Pitor about the child their love had planted, because the moment she did, the gloom and anger Pitor had allowed to overtake him vanished.

For months, Pitor returned each night to his Ilina with a smile as bright as diamonds. He made sure to bring her the finest fruits they could afford, even forsaking his own hunger to provide his wife with the best delicacies to tempt her failing appetite. Still, as Ilina’s belly swelled, the rest of her withered. She kept a smile on her face, though, while the babe inside her wriggled and squirmed.

The midwife was not pleased with the way the babe had stolen so much of Ilina’s strength. “It’s not right,” she told Pitor when Ilina had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep. “The labor has begun, but it’s not progressing. They’re killing her.”

“They?” Pitor, white-faced and sick, clutched his hands together and tore his gaze from his wife long enough to look at the midwife.

“Your wife is carrying twins.” The midwife said no more when Ilina woke and began to scream.

Ilina’s daughter was born in blood and sweat and screams, and the midwife placed her into Pitor’s arms at once while she sought to stanch the flow of crimson from between Ilina’s legs. Pitor held the squirming, naked infant and watched his wife die in front of him, and then he handed the child to the midwife and left the cottage.

She found him in the garden, the place where his beloved Ilina had spent so many hours tending to her flowers. The midwife had cleaned and wrapped the child, who lay quiet in her arms, but when she offered the babe to her father, Pitor turned his face.

“Take them away.”

The midwife, a good-hearted woman who had seen many births and deaths but none so surprising as this one, offered the child again. “There is only one. I was wrong.”

She had never been wrong before and was uncertain if she was truly wrong now. One child had been born, yes, but the girl was unlike other babies. The midwife pulled the blankets away from the child’s face to show Pitor, who would not look.

“See,” the midwife said. “Her eyes? Her hair?”

Pitor shook his head. “My wife is dead. Take that creature away.”

The midwife looked into the face of the sleeping infant. The hair was silver gilt on one half of her head and black as grief on the other. The child’s eyes were the same; one pale blue and the other a deep, midnight black. Two faces…yet one.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asked the midwife quietly.

“I don’t care,” said Pitor. “You can kill it, for all I care. Now go away, and let me bury my wife.”

So the midwife crept away into the night, the bundle in her arms, and left the man to take care of the woman he’d loved so well.

The midwife, who had already raised more than her share of babies, did not want to raise another. Not even one that cooed so prettily or waved its dainty hands in the air. One that didn’t cry like other babies, but wept only from its dark eye and never from the pale.

The midwife’s husband, who was as good a man as the midwife was a woman, did not want to raise any more children either. “I’m too old to start over,” he complained. “We’ve done even with dandling our grandchildren on our knees and wait now only for them to bring us their children to love. Why do we need to adopt some ragamuffin child?”

The midwife did not disagree. “I’ll take her to the noblewoman on the hill. She has long yearned for a child of her own and has had none. Maybe she will adopt this one.”

So thus it was the unnamed babe with the mismatched eyes went to live in the large stone house on the hill.

The noblewoman, who was not nearly as beautiful as Ilina but whose husband loved her just as dearly, called her new daughter Miracula because of the miraculous way in which she’d been brought to them. Never was a child more cosseted and pampered, or more loved, than little Mira was by her adopted mother and father.

By the time she reached womanhood, Mira had become known as the most beautiful girl in all the land. Her hair flowed down to the backs of her knees in ripples of silver on one side and ink on the other. To any who looked upon her perfect features, the different colors of her eyes only enhanced the thick darkness of her lashes, the crimson of her lips and the sweet pink blush of her cheeks. Her body had grown lush and firm, with rounded breasts and buttocks, and hips just right for a man’s hands to hold.

Her father’s fortune only made her all the more desirable, but though many sought the hand of the nobleman’s adopted daughter, none were allowed to court her.

“She is a child, still,” insisted her father to her mother, who knew better but didn’t wish to disagree. “She’s not ready to be married, to go off and leave us.”

“Someday,” said the noblewoman, patting her husband’s hand, “she will have to.”

For though she loved her daughter very much, the noblewoman knew how it was to be a young woman without a suitor, and how her daughter must long for the time when she could be courted as all the other young women were.

“They only want her money,” grumbled the nobleman. “They seek her fortune as much as they do her heart.”

“That, too, might be true,” said the noblewoman. She looked out the window to where Mira walked in the garden, alone. “But someday, my husband, we won’t be able to keep her to ourselves any longer. Won’t it be better if we’ve chosen a husband for her? One who won’t take our beloved daughter too far from us?”

The nobleman thought of this, but harrumphed and garrumphed and would not give in.

And in the garden, Mira bent to smell the flowers, all alone.

Winter stole across the world like an illicit lover, taking the light and leaving darkness behind. Inside the stone house on the hill, there was food and drink aplenty, and warmth and all manner of entertainments. The nobleman and his wife hosted friends from near and far to help relieve the lethargy of the cold season.

Mira, no longer the child her father wanted her to be, wished the house were silent instead of filled with the shouts of cardplayers and the snuffle of hounds. She preferred the scent of snow to the savory smells of roasting fowl and baking bread. She even liked running through the now-dead garden, though it left her shivering, better than sitting in front of the blazing fireplace wrapped in a goose-down cloak. Only the year before she had longed for these long nights with a house full of company; the twelve months that had passed had turned her into someone new. Now, though her parents gestured for her to join them and their guests, she snuck away down dark and chilly corridors to find a place in the attic to sit alone.

She blew on the frost-covered windows to look down to the barren gardens below. They weren’t empty, as she’d expected them to be. Footprints marred the smooth whiteness of snow-covered plots. And in the corner by the gate, a huddled figure clawed at the ground. Mira watched it scrabble in the vegetable plot. Perhaps seeking the remains of a gourd or something else? Had some poor vagrant stolen into her garden to look for food?

Pity moved her, and Mira left the attic to sneak past the rooms full of merrymakers. She crept to the garden without shoes or even a cloak to keep her warm, so intent was she on finding out who she’d seen from her window above. The snow bit at her toes and the wind gnawed her fingertips, but it was nothing compared to what the traveler must have felt.

“You must come inside,” she insisted to the scarf-covered face. She couldn’t tell even if the visitor was a man or a woman, so bundled and wrapped in layers was the figure. “Get warm. Have something to eat.” When they went inside, however, Mira’s father was not pleased at his daughter’s kindhearted gesture. There was no room at his table for a beggar, be it woman or man. Not even in his kitchen, not even to eat the scraps unfit for dogs, and he made the bundled visitor go back into the snow even before it had time to unwrap one of its many cloaks.

“Father—” Mira protested, but the nobleman wouldn’t hear her plea.

“I will go,” said the beggar, whose face was still hidden. “But you should know who you’ve turned away.”

The guests who’d gathered around the scene gasped when the beggar pushed back its coverings to reveal the face of a beautiful, if cruel-eyed, woman. Everything about her was dark. Her eyes, hair, even the blush of her lips and tongue were dark rather than red. She looked around at them all before settling her eyes upon Mira.

“Your daughter has far better manners than you, old man,” said the dark fairy. “She will be your salvation, as she tried to be mine.”

The nobleman was too smart to try to beg forgiveness from the dark fairy. “Don’t take her!”

The dark fairy laughed; in the garden the flowers shivered beneath their blanket of snow. “I don’t want her, old man. Just as you would like nobody else to want her either.”

“Please,” begged the noblewoman, stepping forward. She was no less wise than her husband, but women know the ways to deal with one another and the dark fairy was still a woman. “Please don’t punish our daughter because of our foolishness.”

The dark fairy laughed. “Worry not, lady. I won’t make your daughter hideous to the eye, nor make it so toads fall from her lips with each word. No, lady, I shall grant your daughter a gift, instead, for the generosity she attempted to show me. And in giving her the gift, I shall punish you.”

The dark fairy clapped her hands and the guests drew back as one, each hoping not to draw her attention. The dark fairy smiled and waved her hand. Her veil of cloaks and scarves fluttered.

“You shall be desired,” she told Mira. “And you shall desire.”

“That’s it?” cried the nobleman, perhaps not so wise as he believed himself to be. “That’s the curse?”

The dark fairy drew her hood back over her face and opened the door. Snow swirled inside and melted on the floor. The gathered company shivered in unison.

“Until your daughter finds completion, old man, you will slowly lose everything you have. Pray hope she finds it before you are beggared and must rely upon the unkindness of strangers.”

With that, the dark fairy was gone.

The nobleman reached out his hand to Mira, who didn’t take it. Nor did she reach for her mother, who wept with fists pressed to her mouth. Mira looked around the room, at the men and women gathered there, and something swelled inside her that she’d never felt before.

Heat flared inside her belly and lower, between her thighs. She pressed a hand to herself there, and the other to the swell of her breasts where more heat rose. She bit back a gasp at the look one of her father’s friends was giving her. His eyes burned dark with an emotion she couldn’t name, but that she felt echoed in her own.

Then she knew what it was, that fierceness, that burning, that flush on her skin and the flare in her gaze.

Desire.

It began at once.

Without regard to her parents or the guests assembled in their hall, Mira went to the man staring at her and let him put his mouth on her. Nobody stopped her. Nobody said a word when he took her by the elbow and led her upstairs and rid her of her virginity. Her mother wailed and her father gnashed his teeth, but neither of them stopped it.

Neither of them could stop it.

Mira’s first lover was not handsome, but he was bold, and he fucked her so thoroughly that first time she couldn’t walk the next day. Yet despite the hours of intercourse, the kisses he rained over her body, the things he did to her, she didn’t feel complete. In fact, when it was finally over and her lover stole away from the sweat-soaked bed, all Mira felt was emptiness.

Clearly, this would not do.

Already her parents’ guests had fled. The staff, no longer loyal to a house accursed, left as well. The hearths lay cold, the fowl uncooked. Her father had locked himself in his counting room, counting outhis money. Her mother had pricked her thumbs with every spindle in the house, but could not sleep.

Mira washed the scent of the man from her body and discovered that a fingertip slid against the pearl hidden inside her soft folds could bring her pleasure so intense it weakened her knees. Was this, then, completion? She stroked again and dipped a finger inside her heat much the way her lover of the night before had used his cock to fill her. She moaned and bit her lip, grasping the edge of the wooden bathtub, as pleasure coursed through her.

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