“Tell me a story?” she asked, her doe eyes intent on his. They were drooping already with sleep.
He touched his finger to her scar. “What would you like to hear?”
“Surprise me,” she said, shaking her hair until it fell in scarlet apple waves over her face, hiding the scar.
“Anything for you,” he said, interlocking his fingers with hers and pulling on her hand until she fell softly against him. He wound an arm around her shoulders and stroked her hair in languid touches. She settled, smelling of cinnamon and thousands of other sweet things, her bony form fitting its puzzle pieces against him. He didn’t need to see her face to know that she’d closed her eyes.
“Have I told you about the Father of Starlight?” he asked, looking up into the clear night sky.
“A hundred times,” she said.
“Then I will think of something else-”
“No!” Her pulse fluttered like a moth under his palm. “Please,” she said. “I like that one.”
He pressed his lips against her hair, breathing in the scent of her like a drug.
“In a time before Christianity, before philosophy, before writing,” he whispered, closing his eyes too. “He was born. At first, he was only a speck in the cosmic dust of the universe, but, slowly, that mote began to know.”
“Know what?” she asked, as she always did.
“What all thinking creatures know.” He frowned. “Loneliness.”
“Are thinking things lonely?”
“Are you not lonely?”
She didn’t reply, but she would; all he had to do was wait. It was a dance they’d stepped before and always would. Moving together and apart, one flicking into a dip, the other waiting in the dark. They’d danced so many times, always the same, the same hesitations, the same yield.
“I’m not lonely,” she said as he’d known she would. “I have you.”
“Then I am not lonely either.”
“So we’re not like him?”
“You are not like him,” he said looking into the golden brown of her compassionate eyes. He pressed the tip of his finger to the frown between them.
“Neither are you,” she countered and bestowed the same look she always reserved just for him. Like she knew things; the deepest secrets that his heart kept.
His arms snaked to envelop her and press the thin figure to his chest. He buried his face at the crook of her neck and felt her pulse beat weakly against his lips. She was frail and cold. He shook out of his coat and wrapped it around her, pushing her red hair from her pale face. Motionless. His tear drop fell onto her freckled cheek, rolled past the scar. He held one of her dainty hands up to his lips and it was crusted with the dirt of her grave. Even the sweet smell of her was gone. Instead the air reeked of decay.
“There’s an end to everything.” Her dead lips moved in a whisper.
He wiped the tear from her cheek and said, “Open your eyes.” But he knew more than he’d ever known anything, her doe gaze would never look on him again.
He shut his eyes and when he opened them, he saw again what he always saw, the motionless figures that watched him, that drifted in and out of consciousness with him. The dust on their hair and clothes that had settled into snow. Memory and its pain wracked his thoughts as he slid back into his endless sleep. His unseeing eyes gazed out at the emaciated, withered shapes of his subjects. Supine, kneeling, some brandishing weapons, or standing like discarded figurines in a macabre opera. A prostrate figure at the Prince’s feet had one long arm outstretched, as if reaching to touch him.
Aside from the constant ticking of a pocket watch, all was quiet in their grave.
