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.”