Heartless by Anne Elisabeth Stengl Page A

speak her true name.
    The rush of wings on the threshold of her world disturbs the silence, drowning the sighs of the weepers. The Lady does not raise her gaze but hears the heavy tread approaching and feels the heat of fire. A smile twists her mouth, the first movement she had made in an age.
    “Sister,” a burning voice speaks, “I am here to play the game.”
    “Brother,” she replies, “I am glad.”
    She raises her eyes to meet his, which are as dark as hers are white. He is a dragon, vast and black, but as he approaches her throne he dwindles into the figure of a man. A flame smolders deep within the pupil of each eye.
    “It is a woman this time,” her brother says.
    “Man or woman, I care not which,” she replies.
    “I want her for my child.”
    “Did you bring the dice?”
    He raises a hand. The skin is leprous pale, stretched thin over black bones, and each finger is tipped with a talon. In his palm he holds two dice, their faces marked with strange devices.
    “I want her for my child,” he repeats, and smoke licks from his forked tongue. “She is beloved of my Enemy.”
    “Roll the dice,” says the Lady, her eyes not breaking gaze with his.
    “I want her, sister.”
    “Roll the dice.”
    He clatters them together in his hand, then sets them rolling across the mist-churned floor. Her gaze does not move from his face as he follows the progress of the dice. When at last they are still, she sees the flash of triumph pass over him.
    “The game is done,” her brother says. “I have won.”
    “She is yours, then,” the Lady replies. “Take her. But ’ware, brother! You’ve not won yet.”
    Her brother snarls, revealing sharp teeth blackened by fire. “When I have through, it will not matter whether I win or lose! My Enemy will hurt with a pain that cannot be comforted. The heart of his Beloved will never be his.”
    The Lady makes no reply to this, but her empty eyes flash one last time, meeting the burning coals of her brother’s gaze. “Take her, then, my brother. But touch not those who belong to me.”
    “I shall honor our game, my sister.”
    With those words, the Dragon withdraws and becomes once more his true self as he flees the borders of his sister’s land.
    Una awoke to pain.
    Something rough grated the skin of her hands, and she opened her eyes with a start to find Monster grooming her fingers as determinedly as he ever groomed his own paws. She sat up, pulling her hands away.
    “Dragons eat you, Monster!” she hissed. But she spoke with relief.
    The dream was already almost gone from her memory, but the heat remained.
    She sat with her hands close to her chest for a long moment, staring down at her cat, who sat with his tongue out, his sightless face upturned to her. Then she looked at her hands.
    They were red. A searing burn mark ran across the fingers of both, as though she had grabbed a hot fire iron. Her fingers throbbed. What could she have touched that had burned her so badly?
    Though the room was still stuffy, Una found herself able to move. She slid out from under her coverlet and staggered across the room to her washbasin. Grimacing when her seared fingers brushed the cold porcelain, she poured water from the pitcher into the bowl, then plunged both hands in. The cool water helped, but the pain did not go away.
    Muttering, she reached up to pull the curtains aside and open the window. A breeze wafted through the chamber, and the moon, now unhindered, poured light onto the floor. Una, bleary-eyed, gazed up at the night sky. On impulse she lifted her hands, dripping water from the basin. The red marks glowed as bright as the brands in her fireplace.
    But even as she looked, they faded. As though the moonlight itself were a soothing ointment, the burning cooled, the redness dissipated and then was gone. The pain was a memory, and even that evaporated so that she wondered if she’d dreamed it.
    The air on her face pleased her. The world was wet from an earlier spring