ultima

By the time she got back from the Falls, her shoulders were tight, her nose was running, and a thick blot of clouds had eclipsed the harvest moon. The lake lurched out of the shadows. The rain lurched out of the sky, pitter-pattering across the arch of her wings as she sank towards the shore. And in her chest (which suddenly felt much too large for it, like a well to a pebble) her heart lurched out of the long bowed ribs. She tried to pretend it was well within the math of a long solo flight, ducking beneath the woven canopy for shelter; cold air, dizzying drop, navigating only by strange stars – it was thrilling! And frightening! A year ago, she’d never have imagined making it so many miles on her own! 

On her back, Snapdragon mewled softly.

“It is funny, isn’t it?” Just barely graduated from the flight programme, and already she was going farther and farther away from— Home, she thought tentatively. 

The quickness with which it’d become her roosting place astounded her, as if she’d never properly thought about it before. The Edge had always been a pivot for her grand forays into this broad, broad prison. To the Blue, to the Rotunda, to the Meadow: no matter how many miles she trekked, by sundown she’d skip back through the front door, trilling about the things she’d done and seen, tracking sand and primrose petals as she went. She’d become so attuned to the sound of glass crunching underfoot, and the hundred little winding paths that led to her nest in the woods; closing her eyes, she could visualize every knoll and buttress root perfectly, even the ones she hadn’t at one point stumbled over, and especially the one Snapdragon had been born in.

Her contentment was almost overwhelming. She’d learned to fly here; Snapdragon had been born here; Maude had been born here; this was where Tilney was always waiting for her, ready with a smile to hear of her adventures. Without a shadow of a doubt, Ultima knew that she did like it here, in the West.

But.

What was it that the Mountain had said? A place to exist, versus a place to grow? 

Across the lake the rain soared to a crescendo and then dimmed, intermittently. It was peaceful without any wind; she could smell the earth and the plants reaching ever upwards, and if she focused she could hear the last leaves chiming like bells as they shook overhead. Pine trees rattling gently, branches swaying and shaking – beautiful. Snapdragon mewled again, pressing against the arch of her neck.

Was it greed to choose? Was it greed if the only thing she wanted was what she’d lost? Or was it greed because rather than any matter of place, it was Tilney (and Maude and Gawen and Alysanne and Lyanna and) who was not enough?

But. But, but.

“I don’t know.”

ultima

The vibrance of the canopy wasn’t lost, even in drab weather; it glowed faintly, like a beacon, and she made her way underneath it as the branches rattled and the lake popped and sang with rain. It was beautiful. That was always one of the first words that came to mind when she thought of the Edge. Lush forests, a lake like a mirror. The pale cliffs that dropped sheer to the ocean below, where she’d first learned to fly. There must have been hundreds of different paths through the trees, leading down to the rocky coast, and then the gardens! The frosted greenhouse! The herbs in their little glass pots, many of which she’d planted and grown herself, stretching cheerily in the sun! It left so little to be desired, and yet—

And yet.

It was the same old dance. More fiercely than ever she wished she could simply go, click her golden heels, vanish from the equation altogether – it was so much easier in the world where nothing had changed, and decisions like this never made their way to her plate. (What did she eat before? She could still remember the golden apples of promise, water sweet and untainted by worry.) Life could’ve been so small and far-removed. The world could have simply ended at the boundaries of the Wood, or been an hourglass toppling over and over within the never-ending Dream of her Wild God, and she would’ve been happy. “Alph, my goodness!” Fools, she thought with a bittersweet wistfulness, are always happy.

(What did she eat now?) “—Where have you been?”

His touch surprised her; for a moment her face was so blank it was as if she hadn’t recognized him. Then the lantern light washed over her eyes, and she laughed. “Hallo!” she said, tucked under his neck. He smelled like sage and sunshine, and somewhere underneath that was an old, wave-filled memory. Sadness, too. She could feel it heavy in the air around him, as finely-woven as the cloak slung around his shoulders. When he pulled away, smiling, a bit of that sadness fell over her shoulders, too. She could only smile back. “Hope I didn’t worry you too-too much,” she said softly, as if mindful of the hour. “Flying’s an awful lot of fun, would you believe? I wish you could try it, it’s … How’s our Maude? Oh, that’s Snapdragon – Snapdragon, say hello—” 

Yes to the forests. Yes to the lake, and the eponymous Edge, and the gardens. These were all pictures and associated scents and textures that flew around her head any moment she thought of this place. But the first word had and would probably always be his name. 

“Tilney,” she said finally. Her smile held, though it hung by safety-pins. “I missed you.” 

(What do crocodiles eat?) “Sorry I was away.”

ultima

There it was. Faster than she thought it’d come, too; she would’ve liked to pretend, for just a few moments longer, that nothing had changed. Oh, don’t, she would’ve liked to say – oh, let’s talk about the weather! The night had been so still for the majority of her return flight, nothing but her pensive white form flitting through the low-hanging clouds, the moon like an old halo overhead; in her heart the rain slicking off the canopy was prime conversation, and her expression took on a strange light with the wanting. But he had asked, and because she loved him she was compelled to answer: “Where did you go?”

And by every tree in her Wood, she would’ve liked to tell him about it, jigging up and down like a child, her voice a force of joy and the thrill of discovery, and there was the lake, and there were aspen leaves, and then they went soaring through the air in whirls and whorls and I, I could not contain myself— How there was nothing quite like her footsteps across the water as she climbed higher into the sky, heart pounding because if she fell, no one would know, no one would catch her. The trees like miniatures underfoot, the earth laid bare like slicks of oil painting. “It was beautiful,” she wanted to say, to tell the story, to begin, again: 

“It was a wind,” her eyes wide with wonder and mischief, enthralled by her own fairytale, “Found only in dreams.” (And it took me far from you. And it will take me farther still.)

But he had not asked about the wind. 

“I went to the Falls,” she said, her eyes averted to some place suspended in the darkness past his cheek. Not timid. “It was grand.” Not so much subdued. “They’re rebuilding.” Careful, more careful than she ever was when she spoke, and if she had recognized how very much like Minerva she had been in that moment (spine straight and resolute, face sober and terribly adult), she might have fallen with surprise. As it was, she felt like she was dangling high off the ground, at the end of the bedsheets she’d strung together and lashed to her bedpost.

This was a great escape, she told herself. She was stealing her own heart and disappearing into some blinding white sunset in order to become. (Become what? And if this was an escape, then who was she running from? Why? To what end, and oh, sweet thing.)

She inhaled twice, the first shallow. The second was deep, though, and it filled her lungs with the Edge.

“Have you ever been there?”

ultima

“I’m going,” she said. It was that easy, and that hard. 

Curled in in her withers, Snapdragon was quiet as if asleep, but his grip on their bond was reassuringly firm. He did not care that he was wet. He did not care that the Tilney, as he’d understood the Tilney to be called, had a mouse in its horns. All he cared about was the girl’s heart, wild as a flock of doves, wild as a storm waiting to burst; holding on tightly, his little claws pressed through the feathers and prickling her skin, he attempted to keep her steady. Baby steps, he seemed to say, their bond hung between them like two cups and a length of string. Because you must. Because you have already chosen.

Ultima, on the other end of the line, smiled tightly in reply.

The sky flashed and her eyes drifted upwards to meet the later thunder, expression transparent as a window is transparent. “It’s a very small herd. They have two Czarinas. One is … Ranjiri. The other they call Mountain,” she said, seemingly speaking more to the weather than to Tilney. Her voice was tired, now, light if only because of the effort it took to stay grounded. She wanted to talk about the Mountain with the same awe she felt for the wind, but a switch had been flipped. She had flipped it, and now she had all the qualities of salt. “The Mountain asked me to stay on.” In the wounds. “As a Medic.” In tears she didn’t have, that she was not allowed to shed.

And why should they be shed? She thought suddenly that it shouldn’t be sad, why should it be sad, a desperate idea that she latched onto out of some distant understanding that this – the rain, the thunder, the canopy fluttering above them – was an ending. Snapdragon’s ears twitched at the shift in her thoughts, and tugged gently, encouragingly. Ends are beginnings, too, they agreed, and smiling softly, Ultima at last met Tilney’s eye. 

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” (Please say yes.)

“They’re all very kind, and the Earth God loves them well. I want to start a garden there, like ours, and with a greenhouse, too,” she said, her smile more genuine now. The wind picked up, the tassels on her bridle chiming and glinting as they swayed. “You’ll have to come see it once it’s finished.” (Please.)

“You and Maude, and Arah, too.” (Say yes.)

ultima

Everything – emotions, questions, confusion, and cycling back to the start – hurtled through her brain so quickly that she could not register them except as bright, strobing color. She could not even say she knew him; her eyes found him familiar, but her mind could not connect those shapes to the gentle, thoughtful man who she had for so long thought of as a walking kindness. He spat at her. He looked at her as no one in her life would have ever dared, even in dreams, and as the coup de grace he spoke what not even Minerva – the battle axe, the chessboard’s indomitable black Queen – dared breathe. At first the girl could not comprehend it, her brows drawn together in bewilderment. 

And then it all clicked into place.

“I forbid you.”

Lightning split the sky above them. In the flash, her face was unrecognizable. Anyone else might have cried, blindsided by the impact. Ultima, however, her chin rising slowly, was not anyone. Hardly a minute ago she had wished that she had been born a bobble-eyed goldfish, swimming round and round beneath the boughs of a lemon tree. But for all her heartache in this godforsaken Helovia, all of the small joys, she had never once forgotten who she was, and more importantly, whom she belonged to. It was not Alph who regarded him then. Even Ultima was secondary. It was the Wild God’s Bride, brilliant and terrible, who looked down at him and asked herself: “What do crocodiles eat?”

The stallion advanced and the Bride did not flinch, even when his breath clogged her nostrils. Immovable as she appeared, there were moments when she felt outside of herself, observing from some vantage point beyond the moon. In that place, she still felt the claw-marks where panic had latched onto her – what was happening? Why was he saying these things? After all he claimed they had been through, how had it come to this? (If you loved me, you would not do this. If you loved me, you would let me go, because love does not belong in any cage but the ribs and even then, the bars are wide.)

On the ground, though, hair plastered to her neck, wither-feathers marshaled like a battalion, these questions of love and circumstance were of no interest. “You forbid me? When you tremble even to speak such words?” On the ground, her only concern was his gross disrespect, and the searing slap of his denial.

“You do not even know who I am.” 

Her elocution had the precision of a scalpel, and she was steady in her rage as he could not be. After all, he was not her model for anger. “You know only who you would like me to be, and that imagining is who you think of when you say, ‘Alph.’” For that, the Lady Ultima turned to Minerva, in whose shadow Tilney’s steel could not even call itself pig iron without crumbling for the audacity of the lie. “But I am not your pet swan.” Her gaze was frigid and untouchable as starlight. Her posture was a true-forged blade, rigid with pride. “That is not my name.” 

And above all, her voice was quiet, so sharp that she need not raise it to draw blood. 

“I was not born to need you.”

Gone was the girl, then, just like the wind that sang her north. What remained was the woman called closest to God (and may He Dream forever of the day You are returned to Him, as He has Dreamt for countless turns of the Wheel), crowned silver with lightning. She did not notice the air crackling around her, forming loose shapes that burst before they could stabilize. The Bride saw only the doctor, and for a moment she thought to relent, to remind him, softly, that, “When the herbs crowd their pots, we replant them happily. We do not punish them for growing; it is their right to strive for the sun.”

But he had not relented for her, and Ultima's heart hardened. 

“You cannot keep me.”

ultima

“The Mountain did not presume. The Mountain did not say to me, ‘I command you: stay.’ She asked, and I gave answer. And you?” The air sparkled again, cast in the shapes of birds. “You forbid me.” A burst of blue sparks. “You fear loss above all things on this earth. You hold what you love so closely you risk smothering it.” A feather, sizzling as it fell to the earth.

“So you lie to yourself,” she said finally, and the air went still, her magic receding. She could not help but think that he looked terribly pathetic in his anger – it didn’t merit her scorn, because he was still love to her, but it evoked a bone-deep sadness, so deep she could have drawn from it like a well. This was beyond her expectation. Whether it was the hour or the season, or circumstances outside of her knowing, she had thought, at least, that he would have some support for her. But he had thrown the first stone. “You insult me, again and again.” She was not at fault for defending herself when the first words to his mouth were not of his fear – which she could have understood if he had only admit them to her – but her so-called folly.

And how will we know? How, if we don’t try? If she had never been taken from her home, if she had never met that crocodile’s stare across the blazing miles of the Flats, if she hadn’t wandered aimlessly for a year, searching for nothing – she wouldn’t have met him. Everything that built up to this moment was a dance of trial and error, but he couldn’t bear to believe that she knew the steps. She could feel it strongly, even through her indignation that he would dare reach for her wings with intent of clipping them – 

He did this out of love. And, Love, she thought, unblinking, was such an ugly thing. She wondered if she should have screamed, too.

But she was deathly calm, the glass between them streaked with rain. Snapdragon mashed his face against the side of her neck, staring solemnly at the Tilney. At that moment, the girl’s heart was so far the cat could barely see it through a telescope; he could only feel the jitter in its orbit, struck off-kilter by the threats, the ready poison. “If you think me a snake now, then a snake I shall be. I shed my skin and I grow, as you would will me not to, as you would will Maude not to.” And yes, he agreed, slowly closing his eyes. “You keep her, Tilney, as long as you can.” Love is such an ugly, ugly thing. 

“I’ve never sought to own either of you, or be your foundations.” (I am only a star you might see by. I am only a crocodile, watching, waiting.)

“Goodbye.”

Unfolding her wings and averting her eyes at last, she ducked beneath the canopy and back into the downpour, to the shore. For a time she stood there, her gaze raised to the heavens, as if searching for a sign. Then there was a breath, a lull in the pattern of raindrops—

And she was gone.