Circe has been here for a week, but I only summoned her that one time to the Tower of Time. Since then, she has remained sparse. Her contradictions madden me, how she can so easily slip into the shadows but be loud and illuminating if she wants. The cavalier way she speaks of our sordid history, of what happened to her sister, is so unthinkable. I could never be so outwardly wry or coarse, even in jest.
The sigil she's placed on my arm, the small moon, has dulled and no longer aches at all. But I'm always aware of it. Waiting, dormant. I wonder if it really was meant to be a moon at all, since I stopped before she finished. I've asked Kora to check to see what Circe does in the stretch of time we're apart, but she seems to only go to the library to read scrolls.
When I awoke this morning, I was shocked that though my pain wasn't gone, I was refreshed. Ready to go to court, even with Cadmus missing; after all, it isn't as if I haven't carried court alone before. Even when he was there, even when he did most of the talking, I felt alone. The sun tumbling through the window didn't hit my eyes with the same promise of an acute headache.
The day has fared well so far. I managed to eat some slices of honeyed lamb with legumes. As I listen to petitions, I kick my sandals off and let my bare feet dangle, swaying from side to side. No one says a thing. I feared retribution if I were to act girlish, no longer the regal mockery of a statue.
If I sit straight enough and don't move, it subsides a little. A life without this ache seems like a distant dream.
No matter how I feel, I mustn't forget my duties to the people. The Olympians won't care if I act silly, so long as I don't trespass on their supremacy. I have the faint notion that I should go outside the palace for once, but I hesitate. Even if I have little to fear. Too many unknowns.
In the evening, with little to do, I look in the mirror and see the glimmer of my crown.
I don't feel entirely different, as if I've gone from relatively plain to shifting the fabric of the world around me, as if it were water. The difference, I think, is internal. Though I am not changed, I feel the capacity, the energy to start changing.
Candles burn around me. I spend many hours pacing from the washroom to my bedroom. When I think of reading from a scroll or using the loom, fatigue weighs down my bones, and my collarbone stings. Yet, the exhaustion isn't enough for me to sleep. Must remember to ask for poppy tea.
When I settle on the veranda outside my room, a breeze teases the thin linen of my robin egg-blue chiton, with two silver lines crossed in the front. I sigh, and allow it to caress me. Yet, I don't have enough peace to relax as the stars come out, and Ursa Major watches me.
I enter my bedroom, and loyal Kora is there to attend to my last needs, to help me remove the pearls and braids from my hair. When my cornsilk hair falls on my shoulders, a burden eases. Doesn't go away, but becomes less heavy.
As she goes to leave, I call her, "Kora?"
Her round face, red hair, hazel eyes, green around the irises while Circe's are gold. A passing urge in my stomach, a clench. It tells me something is wrong with Kora, but as I look at her, I can't tell what. The way her skin tightens around her mouth, the crux of her neck meeting her shoulders. It feels wrong.
She faces me. "Yes, my queen?"
"Before you retire, please bring Circe to my chambers."
The skin around her eyes scrunches. "Of course." She goes to leave.
I raise a hand. "Wait."
Jutting her chin over her shoulder, she asks, "Yes, my queen?"
As she watches me, her pupils dilate. Often, I've noticed, the black of her eyes pulsates, is larger than normal. "Are you feeling well?"
She cranes her head forward. "Yes. I am perfectly well."
I laugh and press my fingers to my head. "Ah. My apologies. I had a passing notion that there was something wrong."
As she ducks out, I cannot help but feel she's hiding something from me. I want to chastise myself. Paranoia is a common symptom of madness or resentment. It is what guides petty men or pettier gods, especially when it festers. A good queen needs supporters and confidantes, and I cannot afford to let my fragmented mind distance my only handmaiden.
When Kora leaves me, her moon-blue stola fluttering behind the golden door, I wait alone, hands gripping the velvet sheets.
Chimes in the distance. Midnight. It is late to bring someone into my chambers. The part of my mind that would tell me not to has softened, however. Circe fulfills the role of my nurse, and like a nurse tends to her queen when she must sit on the birthing chair, Circe is here to relieve me of the curse around my neck. I mustn't overthink these things. Mother used to chide me for how I ruminated for too long. How, when I was a babe, I would cry from a scratch hours after the pain dulled.
The golden door opens its flowery mouth, and Circe slips in with ease. Her eyes fall on me, drink me in. With my hair down, I look different than I do in court or at the feasts. One might say I look more relaxed. If they don't know how meticulously I've kept my hair from falling along my clavicle, so it doesn't get stuck in the crust and clots.
"Interesting," Circe says, standing by the door. Her distance means I don't need to crane my head quite so high to meet her gaze. "Even in your chambers, you look like you're always watching for something. Like a gryphon on alert."
I palm the hair by my face. "Watching for something? What is the 'something', do you think?"'
A ghost of a smile as she teases her finger against one of the vased lilies on the display table by the entrance. Perhaps when she feels the petals, she gets a sense of the area's aura. What stories these flowers must tell.
"Danger," says Circe, voice low. Heat rolls down my spine. The cool spring air outside has hardened my nipples into peaks she must surely notice. I wonder how often the island nymphs wore clothes. How often she let her stare linger.
Here, she keeps her distance. Waiting. And my posture feels the same as when we spoke in the Tower of Time, so angular and stiff it aches.
She wants to be familiar. Not as a lover, but as my nurse. Her witch-healing requires touch, closeness, and I find I'm tired of the porcelain mask.
More surprising to me, I find her skin on mine doesn't repel me. After the humiliations I've been through, what my body has been through, I feared having someone touch me. Cadmus I allow because I have no choice; a wife's duty, even if she is a queen, is to warm her husband's bed at his command.
"I'd like to continue our healing sessions. At a more fervent pace, if possible."
"Fervent?" Her eyes glitter when she grins. Her touches are soft, and yet her smiles are always sharp. "Of course. I've been waiting to see if you were ready for more."
"I think these are working, so I want to do more."
"We must pace it out, so you don't become overwhelmed."
I look at the mark on my left wrist. At first, it was scary to think I was letting her mark me. But no, like my scars from childbirth, this is mine. If I claim it, and I do. "What will I be able to do?"
"Many things. Detect glamors, perhaps spice your wine with a single move of your hand."
"Turn men into animals?" Men into animals, women into monsters.
Her eyelids flutter. "Why, I would never teach a noble queen such a thing. You must have me confused with another sea-witch."
"Hm. Indeed," I say, jesting along. I cannot remember the last time I was playful with anyone. In my family, I was always the most somber one. Not as charismatic or cheerful as Hedone, and not as furiously dedicated to sowing the seeds of love and sex like Eros. "'Noble queen'. Please, my name is Onia to my companions."
"Who are your companions?" She looks to the side, as if surveying the empty room and saying, Yes, look at your wealth of companions.
"You, for now. We'll see if I can find more."
"All this time, all these years presiding over the human court, and you never found a companion?" At first, I think she means a lover. It's true, I've never taken any lovers besides my own husband. And she must think it strange, a daughter of Aphrodite remaining celibate outside of when Cadmus initiates.
Then, I realize she must mean a friend. I suppose I've been friend-celibate, too.
"I'm afraid I spent my years confined to the tower on the west side of the palace. Few were willing to visit me."
"Not even your husband?"
"Oh, he did, for the first five, six years."
In a gesture that reminds me of Kora, her skin grows taut around her mouth. "How long were you there?"
I never counted. Numbers and such feel relative when one lives forever. "Two-thousand and six years? Perhaps two-thousand and seven." A flush of shame crawls along my skin. "It doesn't feel long at all."
Her eyes narrow. Contemplation. Maybe irritation. "And you were alone the rest of the time?"
"Not exactly. Attendants would come to give me food and drink." Silent men and maids would watch as I worked the loom.
Circe's mouth twitches, her composure slipping. "Why were you put there? Did your king think you were a danger to others?" I tense when light roils through her entire body. I don't know how quite to explain it. It isn't one grand flash, but rather like adjusting a mirror and watching the light slash across it. From her neck to her arms, the energy floods until her hands lightly glow.
I bite down the urge to apologize for offending her so with the topic of my previous deterioration. Somehow, I was inconsiderate of how she'd react.
She must notice how I respond because her shoulders loosen, as if shucking off her fury. As she takes a tentative step, I nod. She crosses most of the distance between us, standing about three podes away from me.
When I must raise my head high to look at her, I sweep a hand to the empty spot next to me. Her eyes flicker between the bed and me. My eyes fall to the gilded floor rugs, there to lessen the hardness of the marble, only to see her feet are bare, except for a silver chain around her ankle, with three pendants hanging on the outside of her foot. Animal heads. A pig, goat, and lion.
In our history, animals are often little better than monsters; they are outside of society, and though Zeus and the Olympians themselves might enjoy taking the form of beasts, no proper man would ever dare to compare themselves to an animal, since the only humans who are ever called animals are slaves, barbarians, and women.
This is why someone such as Pasiphaë was so easily plunged from a formidable witch-queen to a debased harlot, a ribald joke, once Poseidon coerced her into wearing a cowhide. Her trauma would be the undoing of not only her dignity, but her eternal reputation.
For Circe to wear her simple island animals so boldly bemuses me. As she slips beside me and shifts, so I see the inside of her foot, two more animal heads dangle from her ankle: a dog and a dolphin. The symbols of Hecate and Greece. Another, too, one that hardens the cold lump in my stomach, another animal of Hecate: a twisting serpent, right at the elegant curve of her heel.
I shake my head and answer her finally, about whether I was a danger to others, "No. I was a danger to myself. And Cadmus' reputation."
"Of course. Because a king who keeps his wife locked away must truly have a pristine record of managing a kingdom."
"We have had harmony," I say. We say we have had peace, but that isn't the same as harmony. Harmony is a pleasing agreement, a contentment with how things are. We accept that things are how they will always be with tranquil grace.
"All while keeping the goddess of harmony locked in a tower. Hm." The idea that I am harmony personified is endlessly amusing to me. A cruel joke. Me, a peacekeeper, when Father laughs as men die in his wars of iron and blood, and Mother, who laughed and supped as Troy burned.
That isn't even approaching how my melancholy grew so terrible I'd scratch my own thighs until they bled. Or how all my children died brutally and even tore apart my grandchildren when the curse of madness from Hephaestus' necklace set upon them. They didn't even wear the evil thing, and yet, as it infected my blood, my womb, it infected them, too. If I knew, I might've never had children, but I also have the horribly selfish thought that their love and grief must be a part of me; I am not myself without those.
Raising my tattooed wrist, I ask her, "As these grow more extensive, will they hurt more?"
"It is likely at the start, but everyone is different. But they will counteract the curse, and the soreness is temporary."
"Is there anything to alleviate the pain?" At the tower, when she briefly brushed against me before leaving, her brief touch soothed my wrist.
Circe's light touch on my elbow is cool, a balm. "I have unctures in my quarters that may help." Her breath, so close, tasting of olives and sweet cream. "If I knew we'd be doing this, I would've brought them with me. But no matter. It shouldn't take long to retrieve them."
I swallow thickly, but my throat doesn't convulse like it normally would. I'm both drowsy and tingling with endless energy. I want to go and fly among the stars. Oh, to be a bird. "I should hope not."
"Before, I tried not to do too much. I was practicing to see how your body would respond. I know it all sounds very clinical."
"Go on. Be plain."
"I think it'd be most practical to work on concentrating the magic around where the wound is."
Wryly, I reply, "Yes. I expected as much." I stiffen, afraid whenever I go too far with my humor. But if it bothers her, she says nothing, lost in the meticulous business of her work.
"Your lungs and your heart, your spine, and around your collarbone, along your ribs."
I contemplate her words. "I need to undress for you to complete your work."
"That would perhaps be best, but if that isn't something you need, something you're comfortable with, we can certainly work around it. I can continue with your hands, your arms."
The only people of the palace who have seen me naked are Cadmus and Kora. Whereas most gods and goddesses are flawless, I never took great pains to think my scars away, as much as I feared others seeing them. Because of the curse, I was never quite able to heal as readily as the other gods. And I have more than the necklace weighing me down; the self-imposed curse of remembrance.
"First," I say, reaching out with my left hand, "before I undress for you, perhaps you should complete the work you already started."
Her mouth curls in a grin. "Of course. I do hate unfinished work."
"How long will this take?" I ask her.
She hums. "Quite a few hours. Perhaps until sunrise."
When she gets to work, taking my wrist, a mild sting fills my eyes, and it's strange seeing the light under my skin. Though it's not as shocking as the first time. The pain, the reddening of the skin after, will likely be worse, but after this eternity, it feels like a drop in the sea.
I chew the inside of my cheek, and Circe says, "It might do well not to bite down on anything."
Refraining from a short huff, I ask, "What should I do?"
"We could always have a nice conversation."
"Nice. Nice for you."
"What was your island like?"
"There were others there, of course. A small village. Shepherds. Nymphs." She says more, but my focus narrows on the moon-glow caressing her arms, caressing mine. Truly, it is as if she's feeding me her magic like nourishment.
The time that passes doesn't feel like several hours, though I'm shocked when, teetering between soreness and numbness, I see light begin to creep into the room from the windows. And then, Circe lets go of my hand, and I'm careful not to rub my wrist or arm against the sheets. We are so close now.
I lean my head to the side, delirious from ecstatic pain, admiring the poetic curve of her collarbone, her slender neck. What will mine look like, I wonder, once I'm rid of my curse. My curse gone, now it's a possibility. Real. "I can feel it changing, do you?"
"Yes," Circe breathes. When her voice lowers to a silken husk, my body vibrates with need. I must be mad.
The necklace moves, and I gasp as a sharp chill rakes through me. My body fighting, either protesting against the infection or Circe's magic unfurling in my blood. Like a baby's eyeteeth that have just come in. Once steady, but destined to fall. If it weren't for the skin that crawled over the silver-gold like mold, I might be able to yank it off.
A soreness pools in my arm and shoulder. But as they ache, the pangs around my neck lessen. If I were to glance in a mirror, I'm sure the bruises would shrink before my eyes.
The world grows small and big at once, as if my pupils have swelled, as if I'm drunk on wine and nectar. The deep blue sky outside lightens. I could leap with joy.
And Circe. I could kiss her. She is flesh, flesh and blood, but the candlelight seems to play on her skin, so it radiates.
"Will you . . ." I pause. No matter my state, I mustn't forget I'm a queen. Too often, I bow my head and ask for permission. There are some things I consider asking to be important in, such as close contact. "Retrieve them, your unctures, please."
I expected her to leave; I wish she'd done it before we started. But then, between us, when I follow her gaze down, is a clear glass bowl of a white paste sits on the sheets. When I inhale, the uncture smells faintly of mint.
Circe smirks. "A few thousand years of experience have their benefits."
***