What if that was him in his youth?
An immortal man, whom I visited in the past in my dreams? Ridiculous, but my mind swarmed with questions. There had always been something eerie about our village lord. He was a man most of the village could hardly believe existed, but for the small but steady supply of food and other essentials the boys and men delivered to his castle—which, conveniently, had been stopped now that I had moved in. Until I performed the Returning, the lord’s servants would go out into the village and bring home the necessary wares directly. No one—no woman, no man, no child—could set foot in the castle.
The villagers wouldn’t object to dealing with the mute servants more often, especially since I heard nothing of the lord demanding his coppers back from what he paid for the Returning preparations. I’d seen the specters all my life. A hint of a white back turning around the corner here. A glimpse of the black carriage in front of the tavern there. There were actual monsters roaming about the village, and I was off fighting lambs.
Who were these servants? Why didn’t they speak? Why were they unmasked? They couldn’t be married. Or perhaps they had been or at least had been Returned to, but their goddesses lived elsewhere.
The women who lay beyond the cavern pool. A pool that was a path to the past.
Did it matter? I wasn’t leaving the castle, that much I knew.
My mind grew tired with all of the thinking. For there was the question, too, of how much my friends and family knew about my mother. How much the entire village knew. Was I alone left in the dark, or did only a few of them know the truth of the matter? Did those closest to me know, and was that why they all seemed so anxious I perform my Returning? Had I broken my father’s heart all over again by delaying his meeting with his one true sunlight? Did he truly believe I would experience the Returning with the lord without knowing what it was I put at risk—or that I could even do so once I had known all that was at stake?
That was the worst of it. Now that I knew, at least a part of me thought that it would be wise to give up the fight. But my heart would simply never be up to Returning to the lord. Even if all the will had gone out of me. I was cursed by the gift of choice.
What I would give to be Elfriede, whose heart shifted so freely from distaste to love after the initial shock of the confession. What I would give to be Elfriede, just to be with the one I loved.
But that was fine. I could live without love. I’d accepted that by now. I wasn’t sure I could live without freedom.
***
Yet another day passed. I’d lost count.
At first, I filled my days with thoughts of my dilemma and ways to escape my trap. It made the time pass quickly, but it produced no results. Each idea ended with the lord’s gruesome death, followed immediately by the equally horrific deaths of those I loved.
I began to resent the idea that my mother was alive after all, that she had not died from illness, and that the specters had stopped their blades a mere hair’s breadth from touching her. And I hated myself for that. Especially since if it wasn’t her, it would surely have been another loved one.
My mind went numb after a while.
I didn’t see much of the lord. We dined together in the dining hall for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—at his orders. He tried to ask me about myself, about my thoughts on the castle, but he’d get frustrated at my silence and storm out. Eventually, he resigned himself to the same silence in which I had found refuge. We ate together, neither one of us saying a word.
I was given free reign of the castle, except I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the third floor. The top of the second staircase was guarded by five specters anytime I thought myself alone and able to sneak up the stairs. Morning or night, they just stood there, staring above my head, their legs slightly parted and their hands clutched behind their backs. They moved only when I attempted to climb under their legs or fit between them—then all of a sudden they were fast as hares, blocking my path. At last, I gave up. The obstructed entryway meant I couldn’t visit my mother, whose prison was the only place I could possibly wish to go in the dank and dreary castle. This made me even angrier and more eager not to please. I shut myself away in my room between meals.
When the snows came and blocked even the view of the village from my room’s window, it felt fitting. I was trapped in a place from which I could reach no one I loved.