By the Light of the Dark

by Stephanie Burgis

Stephanie Burgis is an American author who lives in Yorkshire, England, with her husband, Patrick Samphire, and their crazy-sweet border collie mix, Maya. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines, anthologies, and podcasts, including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and Pseudopod. To find out more, please visit her website.

Also see her story Ivy and Thorn here on QK.

In the darkness, he came to me. I felt his weight press down our wedding bed. I felt his warm breath on my face, before I ever felt his touch.

In the darkness, I wander, seeking to bring my husband home.

I left traitorous candle-light at home, with my fine gowns and my jewels. I left behind my arrogance and my leather-bound books. They melted into the darkness behind me as I stepped into the woods.

Sometimes blindness is the only way to truth.

∞

I was always praised for my cool reason. My tutors bragged of their success. Philosophers imported from France and Germany, still shivering in their massive furs, tested my wits before my father's court, and I bested them all, to my father's infinite satisfaction.

Snow surrounded my father's palace, and the sun reflected off it: white light, light so bright it could blind you, and the foreign philosophers veiled their blinking eyes against it. But I, I with my ice-blue eyes and my hair drained of color, I stood in the tallest and coldest of my father's guard towers, I stared into the brightness and I gloried in it.

So it was that I saw him first, before any other.

I saw his white bulk, picked it out from the snow around it, only when he was thirty, twenty feet from the sheer white palace walls. I saw the glints of iridescence that the sun sparked off his fur.

Not common, for a bear to lumber so purposefully toward a palace full of men, in broad daylight; not logical, for the beasts know to fear capture and bloody death. I could not fathom it; shock stilled my voice from calling warnings to my father's guards, who sat behind me playing cards in the warmth of their shelter, while the cold wind whipped through my hair.

Then the bear lifted his head, and our eyes met across the snow.

I do not know how it happened. All I know is that I was outside the palace only instants later, as if I had flown. I, who prided myself on my grace and dignity, was flushed and panting, my clothing disordered from the run, and others told me later that I'd shoved aside the Tsar of all Russia's own ambassadors in my hurry.

I knew nothing of it. All I knew was my need for something I'd never sought nor known to want before.

Warmth. The warmth that I saw in his eyes, drawing me home.

∞

It's cold, where I am now. So cold.

I want to blame my sisters. I want to scream my innocence to the shadows in the skeletal canopy above me, in this forest that has no end.

But I feel judging eyes on me from all direction, eyes that see through the dark, and I know they can perceive the truth:

It was my own choice.

∞

Hidden in his pelt, he'd brought dazzling gems. They cascaded onto the snow around us as my father's guards flooded out of the palace, shouting warnings and threats, and my sisters screamed in an ecstasy of fear to see me held tightly in an ice-bear's embrace.

He'd brought enough jewelry to dower an empress. Enough, even, to dull the edge of my own father's horror once he grasped the full extent of my determination.

My sisters pitied me, for once. They'd grown up resenting my place in our father's favor; now they saw me, as they thought, sold to be a monster's feast.

"Run away!" they whispered, as they dressed me in our mother's wedding gown. "We'll help you...hide you..." And to each other, when I did not answer: "See how she trembles!"

For I was shivering with terror and I could not stop. Terror, not of my bridegroom, but of myself.

A stranger, even a monster, is only to be feared for their unpredictability. Once met, the mystery resolved, they can be rationally understood and either befriended, appeased, or conquered. I had made this argument myself many times.

But to find a greater mystery revealed inside oneself...

I felt a chasm opening inside my chest, and I was afraid to look too far, for fear of what I'd find there. I couldn't recognize myself in this girl whose whole body breathed one vital purpose. Who followed the driving pulse of Need instead of Reason.

It made no sense. I had no sense for it. A day ago, I would have despised such an irrational creature.

That evening, after the wedding, I rode away from my father's palace on my bridegroom's wide, soft back. I clung to his warm fur. His muscles shifted beneath me as he loped through the snow. When the snow cleared suddenly around us to reveal a landscape of warmth and blooming flowers, I could hardly question it -- this, though I knew no such kingdom could exist, for I had studied my father's maps!

We approached a golden palace, long and low in the setting sun. Servants surrounded us, welcoming me as their new mistress. Referring to my husband as their king.

They drew me away from his warm bulk. They bathed me in hot, scented water. They took me to my bedroom and extinguished all the lights. They silently withdrew, leaving me alone in the big bed. Waiting.

My breath came quickly. I did not doubt -- still, I did not doubt! -- but my abandoned reason quailed and fought against my certainty.

He is an animal! it screamed, trying to force the rest of me to listen. Have you gone mad? Have you---?

The door swung open, revealing only darkness in the next room.

The door closed. I held myself still on the bed. Footsteps approached. The bed sank beneath his weight.

"Husband?" I whispered, barely daring to breathe.

Warm breath brushed against my face.

"Wife," he whispered back, and kissed me.

It was a man who touched me, then. At his touch, I forgot reason entirely. I wrapped myself around him like a wanton, and I gasped with pleasure as I absorbed his warmth.

∞

What sparks true love? Is it the first rush of ecstasy, the burning need, the fire that can only be slaked at the touch of the other's skin? Or is it the moment afterwards, lying entangled, laughing with helpless pleasure and release? Lying with him afterwards in the darkness, I found myself at ease in a way I'd never known. I had nothing to prove, there in the dark -- nothing on which to be judged, no need to impress. Only this feeling of simple pleasure, this miraculous ease of fellow feeling. We lay together -- I and my husband, whose body I had felt but never seen in his true form -- and we talked together with the freedom of children -- but hardly as I had been a child, tested and wary at every public moment.

We talked of simple things -- the beauty of the flowers that grew outside the palace, the taste of the fine food served at his table. I talked of my childhood; he, sometimes, in general terms, of his. He never said what had caused his enchantment. He turned away my questions, and I did not press him. We talked of anything and everything else. I spent each long day waiting eagerly for the night. I ran my hand over his soft bear's fur, looked into his eyes, and dreamed not only of the ecstasy we would give each other later, but more, of the time we would share together afterwards.

He only refused one favor that I ever asked him: he would not let me see his nightly form.

It was enough for me; I felt it was enough. I told myself it was.

But my sisters' questions, phrased so sweetly in their letters, gnawed at me. Even as I lay in my husband's arms and felt his heart beat against my chest, I questioned everything.

Can it be love, when mystery lies at the heart of it? Can it truly be love, when so much remains hidden? Or is it rotten at the core?

I was the girl who had been praised for her reason. I could not dare to trust my heart.

∞

I've walked so long, the nights begin to blur. Was it five days ago or three when I met the old crone? Her eyes like steel; her voice, a hoarse whisper.

I curtseyed before her, though my weak legs staggered. When did I last sleep?

I carried her heavy pack, though we seemed to walk for days. I cooked her dinner at her hut, and took none for myself. At the end, when I'd scrubbed her mountain of dishes until my hands were red and raw, I finally dared to ask my favor.

"Tell me where my husband is."

She cocked her head; her eyes were bright and bird-like. "Why should you care for that? You drove him away."

"I swear I never meant to."

She shrugged and turned away. "I know not. But if you go to my sister, she may know. Tell her that I sent you."

And I walked again. My knees wanted to collapse beneath me. My head swam. I walked.

I remembered the light cast by my single candle. I remembered the moment before the wax dropped onto his chest.

The moment I stopped questioning and finally knew, knew with glorious certainty what I had felt all along.

The moment that I ruined it all.

I weep as I walk. I berate myself. I berate my circumstances.

Birds flutter away from me through the dark trees. Am I talking aloud? I did not mean to. But I cannot seem to stop.

"It was unfair! How many women know their own hearts? I was only human! Who would trust an enchantment? What fools would never ask for proof?"

I almost walk into the wolf who blocks the path. Only the sound of his snarl breaks me off.

I stop still, rocking back on my feet. I nearly fall. I meet his eyes and gasp at the pain I see there.

"Did you never wonder if he doubted, too?"

The wolf's voice rasps through my ears. He fades into the trees and vanishes before I can think of how to respond.

∞

I lit the candle while my husband slept. It took me four tries to strike a light from the tinder, in my fear. For a moment, after I lit it, I kept my eyes closed.

Then, trembling, I opened them.

∞

The second crone is more bent than the first. I wash her clothes for hours, in bitingly cold river water, in the dark. When I've finished, and they all hang outside her hut, she looks at me and shakes her head.

"You aren't ready to find him yet," she says. "Go to our youngest sister when you are."

"I'm ready!" I gasp. "How can you say otherwise? I regret what I did. I know that I was wrong. I would do anything to bring him back!" My voice rises to a shriek of exhaustion, rage, and hurt. "What more can you ask of me?" I cry.

But she's already vanished, and her hut vanished with her. Clouds shift to cover the moon. I step into the blackness of the deeper forest, weaving gently as I walk. For a moment, in the corner of my eye, I sense wolf eyes, watching me.

"Doubts?" I ask the darkness. "How could he have doubts? He came for me, not I for him! He knew his own heart. He had no reason to fear. I had no secrets from him..."

My voice fades and cracks in my dry throat. I squeeze my eyes shut. I summon up the only vision that I have, the moment I regret more than any other, the moment I still cherish, despite everything.

∞

My husband's hair was long and brown, laced with shining specks of gray. I'd felt it tangled softly in my fingers, when he'd moved above me; I'd stroked it as we lay in close embrace. It was all I could do not to reach out and stroke it now, but I didn't dare to wake him up.

Old scars ran across his face; his nose was crooked, where it must have been broken, long ago. An old, reddened welt rose above his left eyebrow. His skin looked pale; I knew that it felt soft.

I couldn't hold myself back. I leaned forward to kiss the scars. My candle tipped in my hand. A drop of wax fell onto his broad chest.

His eyes opened. They met mine. They widened in horror.

He threw his hands in front of his face and disappeared.

∞

I knock on the door of the third crone's hut. Hope tightens my chest until it hurts.

The third crone steps back to let me through. The hut is lit by firelight. I search the shadows and find them empty. Only the sight of a second door brings me a moment of hope. I run forward and grasp the handle -- but it is locked and will not turn. I press my ear against the door, but I hear nothing.

The crone snorts as she sees my shoulders slump in disappointment. Only my pride holds me upright.

"I'll do anything you ask," I say.

She studies me narrowly. "And for what purpose? Why should you think he would want you back?"

I close my eyes. I speak clearly, past the beating of my heart, and listen to the truth I have discovered in myself.

"Because he cannot give in to doubts," I say. "Because it was his fault as well as mine. Because he was wrong to think that I needed the enchantment."

She snorts. "How not? An ice princess, you were. Why would you love a humble soldier? Scarred, battle-weary, ugly---"

"He was never ugly!" I stare at her. "Who could say so?"

"You had the admiration of all your father's court. Why would you love a man with nothing to offer?"

I fist my shaking hands. "You did this to him, then. A palace, jewels, servants -- but in trade---"

"He made the bargain himself," she says. "It cannot be unmade. He kept it all only while the mystery was preserved. If ever you looked upon his face..."

She shrugs. She looks, pointedly, at the locked inner door. "The game is over," she says. "Your fairy king is gone. Your palace disappeared as you walked away from it. But your father would gladly take you back."

Weariness pulls at me. Reason beckons in her voice.

No one would blame me for turning now. My return would be hailed as a fortunate escape; my persistence as pathetic, a desperate fight for a cause already lost. Why fight for a marriage as fragile and doomed as a sculpture carved from ice, based from the beginning on illusions and fear?

But the illusion was never what I loved. And I do not bow down to Reason any longer.

I shake my head. I raise my voice despite my exhaustion. I speak directly to the locked door, and I invest my words with everything I feel.

"Love accepts the mystery," I say, "but it does not rely on it! We both had doubts, but mine are resolved. I need no palaces or servants to make me happy. No finery could console me for losing my most cherished friend."

I swallow over the burning in my throat.

"Please, husband," I say. "Trust your heart. Come home to me and let us forgive one another."

The handle turns. The door swings open.

The light of the fire shines on my husband's weary face.

He opens his arms, and I run into them.

© 2008 Stephanie Burgis