Tristan finished painting the last star on the ballroom’s ceiling just his alarm went off. He had plenty of time, to be honest – he was even tempted to put the next layer of varnish on the upper balcony – but he wouldn’t let himself work longer.
He stepped away from the dollhouse to admire his progress. This morning most of the rooms had been empty shells. Now they were starting to look alive, to fill up with shadows and textures and the faint trappings of non-existent inhabitants. Really, one more coat for the balcony, and he might be able to see a fine lady throwing herself romantically against it…
But his back-up alarm reminded him that he had a real lady to worry about.
It took him four minutes to lock up his studio and only fifteen to make the walk back to the flat. Twenty in the shower, for good measure; twenty-five to blow dry his hair. Putting on his suit posed something more of a challenge with the tie, and then to pin up his hair in something that looked passably neat…
Still, by the time he was finished, she hadn’t even text to say that she was leaving work.
He had expected it. The reservation was much later than he’d told her it was. She was probably rushing around madly already, but a man had to do what a man had to do.
And if she managed to miss it even then, it didn’t matter. The restaurant was only there to feed them. The real treat were the tickets to the 1920s ball he’d bought them for after, complete with ushers to demonstrate how each dance was performed. She’d been crazy about trying to learn ever since they’d watched “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”; she was still talking about it when he’d bought her that vintage dress last month, “just because”.
Now it was laid out waiting for her return, along with her shoes, her make-up, and everything else he could think that she’d want. He could finally sit and read his magazine.
By the time she finally did throw open the door, he had forgotten he was waiting at all. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, Tristan!” He heard her toss her bag down in the hall. “I swear I was on my way out the door, but a patient went into cardiac arrest and there wasn’t another doctor available.”
He looked up just in time to see her stomping into the living room, her platinum blonde hair now a bird’s nest on her head. He couldn’t help but laugh.
“It’s okay, Rhea – we have plenty of time.”
She was already tearing the pins and bobbles out. “No, we don’t! We’re going to be so late! I’ll have to skip my make-up, or something.”
“The reservation is later than I said it was.”
She froze, directing a mock-venomous glare at him. “You bastard.”
He chuckled. “If you want to make it up to me, you can wear the dress I put on the bed,” he tried to say casually, turning his magazine to the next page. He could feel her eyes narrowing on him. “I’d really like to see you in it again.”
“Suspicious…”
Yet she did put it on. Her routine took much longer than his, what with the curling and the eyeliner and the swearing at the eyeliner and removing it all to start again, but it was worth the wait. She always looked a dream in the white she usually favoured, but the beaded black dress gave her a mysterious allure that made his heart skip a beat. Gatsby would have chosen Rhea over Daisy, he felt.
They took the Tube for most of the journey and walked the rest. As they approached the third last street to their destination, he glimpsed the bright lights in the little shop that he’d asked to stay open for him. The owner was a craftsman he’d commissioned to make a 1920s headdress for him, specially made with the colours of the bisexual pride flag that Rhea loved to display.
“Hey, actually… There’s something I want to take a look at.”
She gave a mock roll of her eyes. “We passed an art shop, didn’t we? Alright – but I’m going to go and see if John Conolly’s new book is in yet.”
He followed her gaze to the open shopping centre that she was eying up. He smiled. “Okay. I’ll come find you in five minutes.”
He only let his hand slip from hers when the distance wouldn’t allow them to stay joined any longer. He couldn’t help but look back at her again and again as they walked away, watching her half-jog the length of the street to make it there faster. He laughed to see how she glanced back too, and soft grins passed between them. In the end, he stood and watched her disappear inside.
He had only just pushed the door to the shop open when he was thrown through it.
He heard glass shatter. Rubble fell. When he picked himself numbly up from the floor, he saw that the centre was on fire.
Survivors. His first thought was of survivors – how their chances would be dwindling with every passing second in the smoke and the heat, how fire could rip through rooms in one go in the right conditions, how Rhea had to be the closest to the exit and so much more likely to live than the others… He couldn’t feel his feet under him but he surged forward, stumbling, fighting for those precious few seconds where he could slip in and pull her out, hearing screams distantly through the tinnitus.
“Please, God…”
The second explosion greeted him at the door.
Tristan wished that had been his last memory. If he wasn’t going to turn up at the gates of Heaven and find her smiling there, the least they could have given him was blissful nothing.
Instead, the fire scorching his skin was instantly replaced with an ice-cold bath of air. The agonised screams of a woman mingled with his own as he was roughly grabbed and bundled up.
They called him Muirgen Belleforte, the fourth daughter of Baron Loki Belleforte and Baroness Arete. In this world of dragons and fairies that would have made his brother weep with joy, he was to be a measly human noble trapped in the meagre human lands that they had somehow scuffled their way into claiming from the Others.
For much of his babyhood, he stayed in denial. For his infanthood, in depression. By the time he began having bursts of anger and desperation, they called it his “Terrible Twos” and patted him on the head.
There was nothing to distract him from his memories because there was nothing for him to do. His nursemaid saw to it that he was fed when he didn’t feel like eating, that he was bathed when he didn’t feel like moving, and that he was dressed in bright and lacey dresses when he wanted to wear black.
Once every blue moon, he and his siblings would be gathered up and dragged before a drunken gathering so that their parents could say: “Here are our children!”
And then they would be forgotten in the nursery again, with the exception of the eldest, Alvis, who was the only boy and who was often brought away to see their father.
In fact, it was only four years after his birth that Baron Loki touched him at all. Their mother had died but six months before and his siblings were deep in grief. That day, their father had swept into the nursery and lifted Tristan onto his knee, gesturing for the others to come close to him.
“My children, I know you miss your mother as I do…” He looked only to Alvis. “But the time has come for me to take a new wife.”
Even their brother wept at the idea. Tristan tried his best to look sad. All he knew about his mother was how she looked and, as a fellow widower, it was hard not to judge the lack of grief from his father. Loki held him tighter.
“I know it’s hard to understand…” At last his eyes dropped to Tristan’s. He was surprised to see the beginning of tears. “I loved your mother deeply. But there’s a saying that one day I hope you’ll come to understand: When a widow’s weeds wither, new life will spring.”
He thought he saw real, deep sadness in those eyes, mirroring his own bereavement. Loki and Arete had, like Rhea and Tristan, been married for many years, and there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think of his own wife.
He held his father’s hand while he wept.
Tristan wasn’t so sure that his “weeds” would ever wither, but he tried to put faith in his father’s words. He never wanted to forget Rhea. Never wanted to “move on” from her. But he felt that he might, with Loki at his side, find some fulfilment in this lifetime, even as a girl.
First he tried to return to his old hobby of crafting doll houses. However, he wasn’t able to convince anyone to let him build one from scratch and, once the nursemaid noticed that his hands were becoming rough from shaping wood into furniture, he was banned from manual labour and monitored at all times.
Then he thought that he would embrace his studies. After years spent rotting in a nursery, it was soothing to complete maths sums and exercise some intelligence. Plus, he had years that he could devote to learning languages, musical instruments, the art of horse riding and falconry…
And there was something to that, maybe, but the adults went wild to find that he was a “genius” who could perform advanced formulas after only a few weeks. His father paid out of the nose to hire one of the country’s best tutors for him, and his stepmother boasted of his brilliance to all of high society. It was only after he had the attention of everyone in the country that they realised there were limits to his “talents”.
His previous life gave him no advantages in etiquette training. Curtsying was a struggle for his tiny body, and the many customs that he was required to memorise made his head spin. No amount of teaching could make him an extrovert. He couldn’t keep up with the double meanings and two-faced habits of his fellow nobles, and he frequently disappointed his family by making a fool of himself in public.
To make matters worse, he was a very plain girl. Here, in noble society, they preferred women like Rhea: small and plump. Tristan, on the other hand, grew to be almost as tall as he was as a man, and just as much of a beanpole. His hair and eyes were a fallow brown, unable to compensate for his plain features and face full of freckles. Honestly, Tristan still thought that his body was a pretty thing, with soft skin and silky locks, but… In a crowd full of other soft-skinned and silky-locked noble ladies, he was worth less than a cheap wall hanging.
At least he was allowed to paint. He held onto dreams of making it big as an artist or using his knowledge of engineering to have his name go down in history. But his paintings vanished, mysteriously reappearing with his brother’s signature, and his great revelations were credited to Loki.
That was when he tried to put his foot down. If they were going to exploit him, he would keep his knowledge to himself until he was an adult and could fight for recognition. His father scowled, his brother swore, his sisters threw themselves about the room wailing… And his stepmother grabbed him tightly by the shoulders and hissed, “Stupid bitch! Would the king listen to something like you?” She shook him until his head snapped back and forth. “Let your father do the climbing for you, and you and your sisters can marry well!”
So his father pleased the king with all of Tristan’s trump cards and was made into the Prime Minister. His brother gained a high position in politics.
After that, there was talk of marrying the brilliant and clever Muirgen to the second prince. By the time he was 16, he was so unpopular and disfavoured that his sister took his place.
There was talk of marrying him to the fourth prince, and then that too went to another one of his sisters. Then a duke was presented to him – but seen only once.
There was no more talk of marriage after that. Eventually Tristan ran out of “discoveries” to fuel his father’s career and the focus shifted to his half-brothers.
With one last swirl of pink for the skirt, the bedroom mural was finished. The hazy figure of a beautiful blonde looked down at a man from a flower-covered hilltop, the breeze carrying her hair across her face. He had had to paint it that way. These days, he couldn’t remember what she looked like.
Loki had finally granted him a collection of premade dollhouses to customise after his last engagement fell through. It was to keep him quiet and out of the way, no doubt, but he was happy to comply.
Some he had tried unsuccessfully to remodel as their old flat. The largest he had set aside to reshape into Rhea’s dream home, just the way she had always described it to him. Or as much of it as he could remember. So much of it was wrong. She had been specific about the shade of violet she had wanted the bannisters to be, but the memory of the swatch she had showed him had long since disappeared. Nothing that he mixed together was right.
He had hoped that the mural she had wanted in the bedroom could redeem him, since she had never told him what to paint… And still it turned out like this.
He brushed an irritating strand of hair away from his cheek with a sigh, not caring about the paint he smeared there. It had been more than 19 years. She no longer visited him in his dreams and her name was like a bitter poison in his mouth, but he wished for nothing more than to hold her one last time.
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Loki didn’t wait to be called in before he entered, grinning a charming grin that Tristan recognised as a precursor to trouble.
“My darling daughter – what a sight you are!”
He didn’t miss that his tone was neutral, carefully avoiding any hint of it being a good or bad sight.
“Good afternoon, father. Did you need something from me?” He wiped his hands off on a rag and inspected the state of the library floor.
Loki inspected the whole house from a safe distance. “Must I need something to speak with my clever girl?”
Instead of answering, Tristan began rinsing his brushes. He heard his father sigh. “The queen of Shadowfell Forest has extended an offer of alliance to the king. There will be a large celebration held in her honour. I have an invitation for you.”
The Shadowfell Forest was territory in the Otherlands, guarded fiercely by the all-female Dark Elves. Like most humans, Tristan had only heard wild and brutal tales of the other species, and had never once heard of a human returning from beyond the border in one piece.
“Are you sure that you want to take me? I could cause an international disaster.”
His father tried to scoff like he didn’t believe it. “This is a savage, not an honourable lady like our queen. I’m certain that your… “Striking” personality will be a delightful curiosity to her.”
Loki picked up a modified miniature divan, turning it over in his hand. Tristan watched it carefully.
“It will be a good opportunity to practice socialising. It takes a toll on the sanctity of your mind to isolate yourself with… “Art”.” He put the divan back. “Come: this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to marvel at the uncanny.”
Comments (0)
See all