Like A Willow

When she sees him, she thinks, good, how good it is to be in the company of someone her own age — and yet in another light it’s impossible that she ever saw him that way at all. He has the gaunt look of an aged man and the long muscle of a limber young boy, all at the same time. You can know a woman’s age from the backs of her hands — but it isn’t the same with men, and the only observation Gabrielle can reap from the look of Marten Broadcloak’s hands is that he’s no gunslinger. His hands are smooth as stones, and his lip and cheek clean-shaven, like a boy’s face — his voice is hard and whistling like a man her father’s age, and his sayings make no sense. But his teeth are long and white, and his eyes are clear, his hair is dark. He’s a sorcerer and not a man.

Rumor has it he’s lost his balls. He’s one of those overgrown witch-men who come from the desert and lose their parts. One of the women she plays gran-points with says so, a big rangy woman with gray in her hair and tough hands — and Gabrielle laughs the way women only laugh when they’re alone. He certainly carries himself like a man in complete possession of his parts — not a little self-important.

Steven carries himself like an old man these days, crossed and knotted by battle-scars Gabrielle can only imagine — he won’t let her nursemaid him any more, won’t let her wrap the wounds he’s incurred going up against Farson’s men or the beasts that worry the outskirts of the Affiliation’s lands. She should love his marks, she should be moved by pity and desire at the sight of them, she should number them all with kisses. She doesn’t; she hasn’t.

She wasn’t brought up to worship her husband. Her natural mother raised her to remember the old ways, in her fashion, and her fathers were two sworn brothers like men of Eld — she considered at first if Steven and Marten might not be the same to each other, but Marten gave her a queer look when he asked if she’d like that, for her husband to be another man’s cullion. They do things differently in Gilead.

She’s never freer than she is on the Points ground — she grows strong there again, she seeks distraction from the daily work of accounts and tables and she finds it. She’s never happier than when she’s playing her game, until she throws her arm out of true and Marten Broadcloak brings her the cup that will poison her.

*

He comes to her while she is fainting away on her bed — she’s still filthy from the Points ground, the knees of her broad split skirt are scuffed with red mud and the last of the veiled women to leave her had a dusty smudge on her white starched temple as broad as the palm of a hand. She cannot move her arm without extraordinary pain — pain like a rose, blossoming in the joint of her shoulder and sending thorny tendrils down to the wrist, the elbow. She cannot lift her arm at all — the sensation is of strange bonelessness, and all she can remember for a while is waiting for it to be finished.

There’s no blood, only spectacular enervating pain — her sleeve is unbuttoned to the shoulder, and her white sleeve is muddy with sweat. She waits and Marten Broadcloak comes to her, carrying a glass cup like it contains something incredibly precious or incredibly volatile. He is whistling a tune.

The glass like a blue-green jewel, shining like a drop of poison honey as the light spills over her, over him, over the spools of scattered bandages. No men should be here — but he doesn’t walk like a man, he walks like something else, a glint of unfamiliarity in the motion of his hips as he crosses toward her bearing his offering.

“For the pain,” he says, bringing the glass to her lips. His thumb tugs down her jaw, to help her drink.

His doctoring is different — there were no surgeons there when she bore Roland into the world, only a swarm of midwives and ammies, and none of them laid a hand on her above the waist even to squeeze her shoulder when the contractions began. Some things are not done in Gilead. His touch is all over her, or at least as far as decorum permits — they are alone here, after all, and a woman’s mind wanders. He manipulates her arm against her side, asking her to hold certain positions — the pain recedes like water but the weakness remains.

The proximity is a little dizzying. He probes the joint of her her shoulder with a gentle hand — she can feel the bones shifting like chips of flint, but no pain

“Lift your arm as far as you can.” It isn’t very far. Gabrielle is keenly aware of the glaze of sweat still on her skin — her husband’s magician looks cool as a stone. His heavy cloak spills against her leg. “Better for now?”

“I say yes,” Gabrielle answers in the fullness of her dignity as dinh’s wife. “Bring me something to read.”

*

She’s only a spectator after that — she sits in the pavilions and plays at cards, while the other ladies go up to bat. Her team-mates no longer come to visit her. Steven’s upbraiding is worse than the first pain of injury. That’s the wedge between them, the first poison — he can throw his own body down without caring but when he saw Gabrielle come to hurt he saw Roland without a mother, and not a woman in the throes of a silly injury. Her bones knit, her blood runs thick again, and she watches Marten a little more closely than before. She sees him bent over at her husband’s elbow, sliding tokens along the scarred tabletop to stand in for troops and supplies — Steven trusts him, he makes himself indispensable. Lamps burn brighter when he’s in the room — and the shadows deepen around him.

He says strange things, sloppy seconds and take me out to the ball game and mutually assured destruction. But after all, he is a sorcerer. And he’s terribly attractive — not in a brute way but slinky like an animal, quick-footed as a woman. The acrid smell of his presence lingers behind in rooms where he’s been — a chemical smell.

She finds him first. In her mind, she is finding him first, and not following a directive — when she asks him to teach her how they dance in Garlan, or asks his advice on figuring a table, or brushes his sleeve with her hand during a state dinner. He seems so surprised to be wanted — and Gabrielle has never wanted like this in her life.

She calls him to her apartments during a great storm — Steven is abroad and all the boys in training are gathered up into the barracks by their arming-master for safekeeping. Strange things happen in Gilead during these storms, and it pains her to think of Roland holed up in the dark and wet like one rabbit in a litter. She knows what Steven would say — would you keep him in the nursery?, not even unkindly, simply in reproach — but Roland feels very far from her indeed and she must comfort someone, something, simply to quell her own fear.

Marten is waiting for her in the white hallway, waiting with his books. He is waiting for her at the threshold of her apartments where no man is meant to go, not even her own husband and dinh, and she finds him. It’s something from a song. She knew all the songs of Eld back before she was married. They shouldn’t be alone together at all, not without reason, and yet.

Nothing scandalous transpires between them there. It doesn’t need to. After that he comes to her in her dreams. She let him in, after all.

*

The lady is much too sad, he says. Steven is far from both of them, and Roland is away at his studies, and everything she’s ever had has been taken from her. He’ll show her a trick or two.

He lugs his box of smoke and mirrors into her apartment — after taking the precaution of making himself unnoticed, he says when he arrives in her suite, but there are still blind eyes in Gilead.

He shows her every velvet-wrapped article, and sets up the little brazier on its three legs — shows her the polished stone he uses to peep at the future when that catches his fancy. The scrying mirror is little and black, as broad across as a rawhide gran-points ball and as thick as a finger.

She watches attentively with the smoke stinging her eyes. Side by side, they squint the reflection from the stone’s surface — shapes twisting in the air, a twisted hand, a ragged claw, a hooded snake. This one for battles, that one for storms and cataclysms.

Show me Steven, she says. Show me my son. Show me my boy. Show me the ones I left behind me at the Place of the Waters.

And he assents, and she squints at the stone to see.

When they’ve finished, Marten turns it over on the backs of his fingers like a juggler, passing it back and forth idly. Idle and lazy and undeniably magical — but there are men at country fairs in Arten who can do the same with a silver coin, and other things with their fingers if you let them.

“Show me my future.”

“I think we’ve seen enough. Don’t you?” And he kisses her, bending her back against the spine of the chair.

Gabrielle’s breath catches in her throat. His hand is on her wrist, pulling the skin to twist and shear. He will not let her go from here, not now.

He is not from Garlan, he says, or from any other place. He isn’t from anywhere. He came to Gilead because she needed him. They seek no more that day, not for the fate of Steven Deschain and not for anything.

*

It’s not a question to be asked in bed. Her legs still ache from treading the steps of a dozen waltzes, stitched into cotton slippers. Dancing with her husband had made for a pale second course, and Marten had watched them together, she could tell the spark of jealousy was in his eye and shining in his white teeth — she’d gone and done her duties as the lady of the feast and then came to find him here. And it had been gentle, as gentle as a waltz —

“How do I know you aren’t bewitching me as we speak?”

Right there on the mattress, naked as the day she was born and him retying his narrow belt, smoothing the close legs of his trousers against the thigh. It’s fascinating to watch him dress — more fascinating still to watch the figure of a man emerge from beneath his robes.

“I would never do that to you, Gabrielle. Any magician who would force a woman by use of his craft deserves to be thrown in the ocean in a basket.” He’s smiling jauntily, speaking borrowed words. There’s a song: up he rose, and donned his clothes…

“You know I’ve never seen the ocean.” The closest she’s been to an ocean is the shores of Lake Soroni. The waters of Arten are running dry. Time is moving away from them.

“A river, then. I didn’t force you.” The backs of his fingers reach out and dance against the nape of her neck.

Gabrielle crosses her arms and furrows her brow. “How would I ever know if you did? You could wipe me clean like a slatestone.”

“I’ve never forced you to do anything. Not by witchcraft or any other way.”

“That first night. I found you there, but then—”

“Better women than you have tumbled down for men who weren’t their husbands. You were only sixteen when your fathers made the match, remember that. Even a country girl gets a romp in the hay come Reaptide.”

From alongside, she can’t see his face, but his voice is light and genial. Gabrielle ties her hair into a thick unruly braid, tries to stuff it back into its golden net. An absurd gesture, all out of order. The first thing he’d taken off of her had been the net from her hair, sliding loose its pins and hooks in a scandalous gesture.

Her own recollections come to her only slowly and stupidly. Had it been like that? Had it been the way she remembered it — the way she remembers it now? How had it been? Last night, or at the beginning of their time.

“—you caught me there, you wouldn’t let me go, you said—”

“I couldn’t have raped you. You desired me too much. You’re flattering yourself now that you didn’t, but you came to me hungry, and you came to me willing.

“I did.” She had. Solid as a rock, that’s one truth she can get a toehold on. She’d seen and she’d wanted. She’d coveted.

“A willing woman can’t be raped. That’s something they say in Gilead, and in Arten, and in what’s left of Delain too, no doubt. If I’d raped you, you wouldn’t have come back the night after that. The second night was sweeter still. We weren’t strangers then.”

Sweeter still. His mouth under hers, the way he’d found her body beneath her gown and drawn the lacings free. Gabrielle takes a conciliatory turn.

“I didn’t mean it. It was foolishness. I only meant to shift the blame, that’s all.”

“Maybe so.” His voice goes soft now, reflective.

Gabrielle crosses one arm in front of her breasts. “That’s foolish, isn’t it.”

The mattress shifts under her sharply. The sorcerer casts out his arm and she doesn’t think to flinch away fast enough, not when his voice issues out with strange force:

“If I did it to you, Gabrielle, you would have been weeping. It would have made you very ugly. You would have been bleeding, which I recall very well you were not. You would have bitten and kicked and clawed to get away.” His hand makes a claw to demonstrate. Gabrielle tries to scramble away, but she is fat and naked and vulnerable. His grip is on the back of her hand; his weight is against her back, sudden and terrible. “You would have crawled away. I would have done it to you anyway, Gabrielle Verriss, my most estimable lady, I would have dragged you under.” Forcing her forward all at once, in a single levered motion that knocks the air out of her and forces back her arm and crushes her breasts against the mattress. “It would be really fucking easy. But I haven’t done it. Have I?”

His hand has made a fist in the curtain of her hair. It twists. Gabrielle swallows, and sobs.

He doesn’t force his way inside her there — there’s no awkward erection brushing at her back, a thing that would have been unbearable, like a misguided play-tussle between two children old enough for the difference in them to become horribly apparent. He simply holds her there in place until she sobs to be let go, his long thin body a whipcord mass against the backs of her legs, the shallow of her spine.

He withdraws his hand from her hair and straightens up, lifting the weight from her. Marten’s voice is milk and honey again, but horribly cold, clotted. “Get up. Get out. I have no more need for you.”

The golden net fallen from her hair has snapped. She’ll be finding little pearly beads in the creases of her bedsheets and the sweaty folds of her gown for weeks.

*

In Debaria there’s bread and water for her, and endless chores to be done, and everywhere the scent of roses — not thick and sticky like petalbeads or the oil Gabrielle’s mother used to dress her hair with, but fresh and green and growing. The perfume gives her a little sliver of peace, a quietness against the raging storm that’s in her head.

It seems so strange, and yet not strange at all — a city of women like Gilead is a city of men. The prioress is a lofty woman who likens the place to a hive of bees, and Gabrielle’s head is a wasp’s nest. Her fellow penitents can’t understand it — no doubt they think her strange and aloof, the madwoman in the tower who’s never swept out a fireplace or scrubbed a stain in her life. But they can’t know what she’s atoning for. They’re all decent women with stained pasts — when she looks at them she sees the failures of men lurking over every shoulder, a wicked father or a spendthrift brother or a bad husband. Gabrielle is the only wicked woman in the House of Serenity.

It’s quiet here, but the thoughts haven’t gone away — they no longer sound like his voice, slippery and confiding, they sound like her. They sound like the rumble of the inevitable, not far off, the tremor of an oncoming Starkblast. Fate is going to pull her under.

He’s told her about this, about Farson and Maerlyn and the man called Marx who sounds something like the Man Jesus, he’s given her a full tuition in the ways of the world — the world outside Gilead, outside the walls of Arten. What men do to women who inconvenience them, to women they pity. He’ll come back for her. She doesn’t know if this is dangerous or if it sustains her — the strange, shifting awareness that she has come all this way and mended her manner of life and this man will still pursue her.

She thinks of Roland often — passing the bone tablets of her loom over and under, now that they trust her enough not to make a noose out of the sisters’ best homespun. Simple work for the madwoman of Gilead, and bland as bread. She thinks of Roland the boy she bathed and nursed, near-to-killing a man for the sake of her own foolishness, and turns cold all over.

Her gentle boy, who listened closely tucked up under her arm at bedtime. He might forgive her, one day when all this is done, but he’ll never be her boy again.

A never-ending woven cord, Steven and Marten and Roland and Gabrielle, a band that knits the four of them together — Steven loved Marten before he loved her, and Gabrielle loved Roland long after her heart had ceased to burn for the man she married, long before she ever knew Marten. Steven would send her away if she asked him to, and not one moment before. If the only child between them had been a girlchild, she could slink back to Arten with no shame on her head — but Roland’s a man and will live by the gun, not the shuttle and the awl.

*

She lies fitfully and wakes from her sleep often — tearing awake to a thudding and scratching at the window. It’s only the cat trying to get in, Gabrielle thinks murkily, before remembering her cats are all dead and she’s at the top of a tower. There in the dark something is drawing long whetted strokes — a black bird sharpening its beak on stone. She sweats and freezes, she runs hot and cold. She wakes in the night to the sound of voices. But she is alone in her cell, hopelessly alone.

On the night of the full moon — the phases of the moon have meaning, Marten taught her that, they follow a rhythm like a woman — the sisters are saying their prayers all night long and Gabrielle, as an unhappily married woman, must wait in her cell. She tries to keep a vigil in her own rooms but falls away — failing at that, even, sleeping where she lies on the stone floor. She dreams she is standing in front of a mirror with her dark hair gone white.

When she wakes on the night of the full moon vigil, she knows it as sure as if he were next to her in her heap. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here for her and they are going to be — married, married, married, damned, damned, damned. There are pits of fire for women like her. Roland has no doubt consigned her to such pits for what he’s seen her do. She crumbles.

There is no further sound of wings. Marten seems preposterously pleased to see her. He’s dressed like a pilgrim but beneath his rough cloak are close-fitting clothes like he wore in Gilead and she is in her worst nightdress, scratched and bruised and haggard.

“You were waiting for me, my love.” The look on his ageless face is pure sweetness, melting sweetness — honey from the comb, sugar from the bottom of the coffee cup. It is positively hateful.

Gabrielle sweeps her skirts about her legs, dropping into a courtesy like a maid of Arten at a country dance. It’s only halfway in mockery. Waiting here, but not for him. She was waiting for something to become clear to her instead of sick and muddled, for the contamination to run its course and leave her new again — but it never will, like the old fevers it comes back again,

When Gabrielle was young there was a plague in Arten. Victims thought they were well again until the pestilence chased them down again with a vengeance. They died with swollen throats and distorted faces. They rose from their sickbeds and their hospital wards only to die in shops and stables, on their rooftops, in their gardens. It came and found them wherever they were.

Marten her lover stands before her with his own face on, with his cloak pulled back from his shoulders. Everything that ever made her love him is made manifest here, all at once — it’s all crowding and seething in his face, it’s a horrible presumption, some distorted vision of what lovers’ eyes see, Marten the magician trying to make himself lovely and failing. He’s her demon lover, fanged and bristling. He is every dark thing. It is frightening. She loves him still.

He sleeps with her the first night, after striking her. No more questions, he says.

This is not the first time he has slept with her after striking her, but it is the first time in the narrow wooden bed the sisters lend to novices, the first time on a cinched-rope mattress where his tangling kisses will bring the taste of blood to her bruised mouth. His les are too long for the bedframe.

She studies his face in the rush-lights, wondering how this could be the man who hurt her. He isn’t a day older than the first day he had her.

*

The rebels are advancing. They have fearful weapons on their side, old weapons pried up out of the earth and tribes of painted men. Gilead will fall — Gileads always fall, the great cities never stand. This is her chance, he says, to be on the right side of history. He always smiles when he says those words. The history of the world doesn’t have sides, only edges — only horrible scything edges that catch women like Gabrielle and cut them off at the middle. (The magician’s lovely assistant, he says, with his hand on her waist fingering apart the spiral laces of her dress. She doesn’t know what it means. He says things.)

This is her chance to be a queen again.

“Don’t you want to be first choice? Not my side-wife. Not somebody else’s darling. But mine alone.”

“You planned this from the beginning. You knew.”

“They’re your husband’s kinsmen, not yours. It’ll happen quickly. In the blink of an eye. Power changes hands so quickly.”

He gives her a meaningful look. She could scratch his eyes out, if her fingernails weren’t broken down to the ragged edge.

“And my husband?”

“There’s no poison quicker. He won’t know it was yours, not even at the end.” His lies are smooth as butter, even now.

“And Roland?”

At that name, a darkness crosses his face, blossoming like a passing bruise.

“He would kill you for what you’ve done. He will kill you for what you’ve done to your husband, and to your son, and with me. You need not worry about him.”

Flagg kisses her, knotting his fingers in the hair on the nape of her neck. He bows her back when he kisses her, like something from a song of Eld.

Chussit, chissit, chassit. He’s not a man at all, but something slipped into a man’s skin and hollowed out. He could take the whole city of Debaria and crush it bloody, just to get to her. He could have done that today instead of cloaking himself in feathers. Married, married, married, a hateful word. She’ll become his token-bride, or worse. Did he have other concubines before her? Has she ever seen him so much as speak with another woman save to give an order? Gabrielle tries to picture him trying his sleek charm on the abbess of Serenity, who stands at least as tall as he does, and has to stifle a desperate laugh. If nothing else he’s faithful.

Was there another way it could have happened? Was there ever another way? Before she was the treasonous Lady of Gilead, before she was a mother and a wife. There was nothing before, there is nothing left behind for her in Arten. Her life has narrowed to a single point, smaller than her tower cell, smaller than the tablets of her loom. Narrower than the cuff of Marten’s sleeve. The noose is closing around her throat.

“Do you trust me?” Marten asks, touching her face with his bloodless tapering fingers. His grin is cruel.

“I trust you as far as my life,” Gabrielle says. Her life has been cropped short. She will never bear another child, she will never pitch at gran-points again, she will never dance another waltz. She could jump, and let the drop cut her life shorter still — there are rooms in Debaria with balconies, there are high windows and towers. But Roland needs her — she needs Roland if she ever wants to rest, however it will be. In her mind, she begins to draft a letter.