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When Konstantin finds her Melisande is at the window-seat of her bower: outside, it is spring. The garden is in bloom, the trees’ boughs so heavy with fruit that they brush the ground and create a hundred small and hidden spaces that might shelter two lovers. Petals drift in through the window, just the same pink blush as his consort’s cheeks—if he caught one in his palm he thinks it would bruise just as easily.
But she is unbruised, now. Pale and perfect, serene, combing her hair so it falls across her breast like a river of ink or silk or black and shining steel. She does not slap his hand away when he moves close enough to touch that terrible fall, only hums a low greeting. Beneath her working hands and the lacquered comb her belly swells, round and lovely. She is lovely.
This should be his warning: Konstantin feels at peace.
There is a part of him that clamors in alarm but it is not loud enough. It is not loud enough to melt the smile from his face, or to stop him lifting Melisande into his arms as if she weighs no more than a magnolia blossom. She sighs and clings to him, her smile hot on his neck, and the alarm stutters and halts. It remains silent when he tumbles them into her bed, a riot of quilted silk and soft linens, and it remains silent when he rolls to his back and pulls her on top of him. The skirt of her nightgown rides up to her hips and the softness of her thighs fill his palms—was there something Konstantin had feared?
What he had he been worrying over?
The nightgown is gone and Melisande is clad only in the cloud of her hair, swirling around them both, and Konstantin’s doublet and shirt and breeches are all gone as well. He fits inside her like she was made for him—and she was, of course. She will remake herself for him, she will always be what he needs and that must be why. That must be the reason for it. This impossible gift. For the milk-swell of her breasts, heavy and just beginning to leak, for the broad expanse of her belly stretched taut over the babe. It makes her sensitive, his son in her womb, makes her tremble under his touch and makes him gentle when he touches her, gentle as he has never before been able to be.
He was not made for her. But can he not also make himself into what she needs?
Her tail wraps around his calf like a vice; her little hands on his chest dig in their nails and her eyes are open impossibly wide, endlessly dark and swallowing and wet with her tears of pleasure. He moves inside of her and it is perfect.
Melisande says his name, arched over him, shaking. She is begging—for more, harder, begging for him to fill her again with his seed, to feed her, to feed his yet-unborn son, to make them strong. The rush of blood in Konstantin’s ears sounds like the cry of an infant, like the whimpering of a woman, like a battle bugle in the distance. It goes on and on, the sound, his building climax, endless and aching.
When he seeks for her pearl through the slickness of their shared pleasure Melisande breaks under the touch. She opens her mouth to cry out—and chokes on blood. It pours from her like tar, thick black bubbles that burst and splatter them both with a sticky ichor. It recoils when Konstantin shouts like something living, something startled, but he cannot press it back. He stuffs it back into Melisande’s throat, three fingers all lined up and thrusting it down but it does not go. It froths up around his hand like caustic sea foam and his consort tears his wrist open, laying bare the bones and tendons there in her panic to drag him from her mouth.
“Stop, stop this, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go—please, ‘Sande, please—”
She sobs around him, fingers and cock and heart, and he rips her open from throat to cunt.
Konstantin once found a chrysalis as a child, having slipped the leash of his governess and retainers and consort all. Some pupae’s spun cocoon, not as they spin them in the midlands or the coast but in the way so much here on the border does. Wrong. The size of his forearm, it had been, and when he had prodded it with a stick it had punched through the surface like a pen through paper when one is expecting vellum. He does not know what it would have hatched if allowed to complete its work but what oozed out, that day, was a clear and viscous fluid suspended throughout with chunks of malformed flesh, teeth and bone and fur and the paper-scales of moth wings all interspersed without care or reason. Such a thing ought not have been able to survive, exposed to the elements all unfinished. Such a thing ought not have been able to lunge and close those scattered teeth around his hand like a hunter’s trap.
What spills from her is the same sort of thing. The detritus of monsters, teeth and fur and meat and black, poisonous ichor, always. No babe, nothing even half-formed, not even a womb where one might live just as there are no intestines and no stomach, no lungs, no heart. There is nothing human inside of her at all. Her hands close over his when he tries to pull shut the seams of that great and gaping wound and if his are covered in that black ichor then hers are drenched in blood, the red of real blood, his own, his son’s. Her face is twisted by agony and betrayal; her bottomless black eyes beg him.
“Why? Kostya, why did you this? It hurts—you’re hurting me—”
It isn’t Melisande anymore, neither the perfect darling of this dream nor the vicious and cruel beast he knows best—the naked girl atop him trying to hold her belly shut and her insides in is Ysolt. Ysolt as she was, before she died, round-faced and solemn and terrified. She was always terrified, after Konstantin had taken her to wife—after he took her to bed. He had not been able to be gentle enough. He had hurt her, every time, and she had wept in silence and let him do as he needed, unresisting.
She weeps now, bloody-handed, organs filling them all pink and yellow and white, drenched in a battlefield stench, that birthing-bed stench. She holds it all apart and out of his way, meek and undemanding while he moves unrelenting inside of her. Small pieces move between her fingers, tiny feet and tiny hands made sluggish and desperate.
“Husband, forgive me. I can’t do it—I can’t do this, take it out—take it out—”
He reaches for her, to apologize, to beg forgiveness, to see the babe she can no longer hold and she seizes him by the wrist. White knuckled and bruising, nails painted plum-purple glossy—how is her hand so much larger than his? He tugs and tugs and cannot free himself, and his mother slaps him across the face.
“You little wretch. I ought to have taken the herbs, I ought to have thrown myself down the tallest tower of the palace—better to squeeze you out in a bloody pulp than birth a monster.” She drags him closer, slaps him again, the blood sticky and sweetly-rotting on his face. Her eyes are his; the lines of her face are worn with misery. She shakes him and shakes him and draws her gown up so he can see—he is buried inside of her still, as he buried himself inside of Melisande, inside of Ysolt, fucking cruelly into the bloody ruin he made when he ripped his way out of her. He mutilated her. She is torn and shedding blood in great clots around him, her belly sliced open too-late and sewn back up in jagged and uneven stitches that weep, and the wasted muscles of her legs shake where they fail to wrap around his hips. “Do you see this? You did this to me. It should have killed me—why didn’t you kill me?”
“Mama—mama, don't leave me, I’m sorry—” A man's voice. A little boy's voice. The hoarse and mocking echo of a caged bird at its mimicry. Konstantin's face is wet with tears, with blood, with rot and birthing fluid and black ichor, and then—
“Baba?”
He wouldn’t. He never has, he never would—he has kept her safe—
“Baba, is it going to hurt?”
His daughter sits astride him. Konstantin thrashes, throws himself from her, is caught in the diaphanous mound of bedding and trapped by it and still Alevtina is there, all in wedding white with her legs bare and splayed beneath her skirts. Her dear little face is drawn with anxiety, serious as any grandfather, searching. He cannot look at her, cannot bear to look at her, and he puts his hands over his eyes as if that will stop it.
“Alya, go—leave me, child, I beg you—”
He feels her hands on his chest, her ankles bracketing his hips as she steps carefully into place, and he aches to his teeth, straining.
“Am I going to die, too?”
Someone takes him in hand. Konstantin flinches and recoils but the grip is firm, sharp edged, studded with the super-heated metal of rings that clack when they stroke him.
“Poor little prince—this truly is all you’re good for, isn’t it?”
The wizard seizes him by the face and forces Konstantin to look at him, that mismatched gaze cruel and derisive. He is stronger than Konstantin thought he would be, his hands calloused and hard. His touch is electric, his hand around Konstantin’s cock as sweet as any slick and wanting cunt. “I solve problems—didn’t I tell you? Here—”
Starosta folds a blade into Konstantin’s shaking hands. He wraps them in his own and guides the knife to his lower belly, between the cradle of his hips, just at the root of that awful organ. Together they press down. It is blinding, the pain, and Konstantin shouts in his little-boy voice until the wizard laughs and the flesh is severed and the blade drops softly into sodden bedding, everything soaked in blood and misery. Life pours out of him, strength and vitality siphoned out through that gaping wound, and Konstantin scrabbles at the edges with blunt and broken nails, gasping.
“See? Better already. Now: ‘tis my turn, your highness.”
Konstantin orders him to stop, begs him, but there is no strength in his voice or his hands and he cannot stop Starosta from leaning over him with his many-robes all unlaced, jewelry dangling like an infant’s mobile. He thrusts into the hole they cut into Konstantin, rough and fast and wrong. Konstantin cries out and it’s wrong—wanton noises of pleasure that urge the wizard on, laughing. Starosta folds himself around him like an indulgent lover a-murmuring adorations. Konstantin reaches for him, tender and desperate, and he is gone.
“You disappoint us, boy. Did not we always say you would? Invert—catamite, weakling—”
A hand around his throat, squeezing like iron: Konstantin looks up at his father. He claws at the hand but his own wrists are still torn open and flapping and the Emperor is strong, broad as a mountain, larger than life, and he splits Konstantin’s bloodied cunt open. Wendelin the Elder, the Emperor Expanse, fucks him with a brusque and businesslike rhythm, and Konstantin’s vision begins to darken, blood trapped and pounding, airless.
“We ought to have drowned you when they brought you to us. You shame me, you shame our fathers, you shame the entire Empire—”
Konstantin’s belly bulges around his father’s cock, protruding grotesquely. Something writhes under his skin like snakes or larvae or a malformed and many-limbed child. When next the Emperor withdraws and slides back into him a blade erupts from the space below Konstantin’s navel; it guts him, slicing upwards until he’s choking on steel and the belch of black and angry blood, drowning in ichor, a vessel shattered and upturned—
Konstantin awakens like a dying man dropped through ice, lungs frozen and muscles straining fit to tear. His arousal is pinned between his hip and the bed and it pulses his climax in agonizing spurts. He is alone, there is no blood, he is whole and hale and he is cursed. As he ever has been.
For a moment, he allows himself a weakness. Konstantin weeps, shoulders shaking and stomach turning, and then he locks it all back inside of his heart. The violence, the pain, the fear and rage. The night is as dark as the gods’ graves, the moon new and hidden, so he dresses blindly in the suit he does not need a manservant to don, counting buttons and rearranging cuffs until everything lies correctly. His gloves he pulls on last; the final barrier.
If he does not touch them he cannot hurt them.
Konstantin seats himself in the cold darkness of his rooms, and he waits for sunrise.