Too Wise to Love
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.
Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.
It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
—C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Would you like me to tell you a story?
Come closer.
Listen well.
—
Once upon a time, in the faraway land of Faerie, lived seven sisters, fairest of the fair. Beautiful, brave, fierce of heart. The Fair Folk love with wild abandon, and these sisters loved stronger than most. One by one, they fell in love—no, leapt, plunged, hurtled recklessly into love.
And love destroyed them.
—
Once upon a time, except time is a funny thing, isn’t it? Sometimes, what was once shall be again, or will always be. And some lands can be far away, and still all too close.
This is no mortal fairy tale, pretty and safe and suitable for children. I can spin no such fiction out of gossamer and spiderwebs, because fairy tales are lies. But Tales of Faerie, those are only ever true.
—
So, then: Once upon a time, in the land under the hill, in the time before and always, six sisters were destroyed by love.
Nerissa gave her heart to a Shadowhunter, and bore him two children, and when he discovered what loving her had cost him, Nerissa loved him enough to harden his heart against her.
She let him believe she was dead, split from neck to belly with his own brother’s blade, and she watched him rejoice over her corpse.
Nerissa loved for seven years, and when love was lost, so was her reason to live, and so she wasted away to nothing, until only nothing was left.
Talidhe gave her heart to a forest nymph, a raven-haired girl, lovely and true, and felled by an arrow meant for another. And Talidhe, in her grief, was rooted to the spot where her lover was lost, for days, for years, until she became one with the wood.
Eiriana gave her heart to a mortal and maimed herself in body and spirit, chasing, ever chasing a mortal life. Turned her back on Faerie, on magic, on the Shadow World. She cannot lie, but she will live one, till death do they part and beyond.
Lirse fastened all her love to a knight of the Unseelie Court—and he gave his heart to his mortal lover, and Lirse could not bear it.
She slaughtered the knight and his lover in their wedding bed—so much blood, spilling from her beloved’s throat, and at the sight of it, she screamed and screamed, and pulled the ragged flesh together over the wound and willed him back to life, but his life was bled dry at her hand, and her screaming has never ended.
Celithe, the gentlest, gave her heart to a mortal who despised her, who treated her only with betrayal and scorn, who dared lift his hand against my gentle sister, and she loved him enough to bear it.
Until she could bear it no longer. My gentle sister discovered rage, and made her rage manifest, and burned her lover alive, and delighted in his pain.
If love was pain, Celithe decided, then pain was love, and so she loved again and again, one mortal after the next, and the more they suffered, the more she loved, and with each torment she burned away another sliver of the gentle Celithe that was, until the rage was all that remained.
Maelera, the youngest, gave her heart to one of the wild fey.
He claimed his gift with an enchanted knife, sliced her open and seized her heart, still beating, from her ragged chest. He buried her empty shell of a body in shallow earth, and bent the bloody heart toward his own dark magic. They say it beats still.
Six sisters, destroyed by love.
But what of the seventh sister, too wise to love?
—
I lost them all.
I made ice of my heart.
I survived.
—
I am known as Nene. This is not, of course, my true name. Only those I trust can know that, which is to say, no one has ever known it, and never will they. Unlike my sisters, I am no fool.
Every life needs a purpose, but I knew love could never be my purpose.
That was how it destroyed you. I made healing my purpose.
I learned to salve wounds, purge poisons, ease suffering.
I learned to recognize when wounds could be healed and when they could not, and how to bear witness to death, when it comes. Even for the fey, it comes.
In the Seelie Court, there are those who assume that because I excel at healing, I must be soft.
That I must be kind, with an open heart.
But I am an excellent healer only because my heart is so easily shut.
I have met mortal healers, and I recognized something in their chill.
Of all mortals, they are the ones who come closest to seeing through the glamour of life, who understand that mortal bodies are nothing but meat and bone.
To heal is not to love, but its opposite.
To heal is to accept the inevitability of loss, and know that loss will not destroy you.
I have lost many, despite my best efforts, and I have endured it all, because what are they to me? Nothing.
My sister Nerissa, she understood. Why else would she invite me to witness her waste away? She refused healing: She wanted the quiet, the dark, the end. Every life needs a purpose and hers had left her for dead.
“I have not summoned you for me, my sister,” she said, “but for my children.”
They were barely old enough to stand, her son and daughter, half fey and half Shadowhunter, pale as angels. Miach and Alessa, delicate, beautiful children. Easy enough to love, perhaps, for those who had it in them.
“I thought I could live for them,” Nerissa said. “I thought I could love them, but I was wrong. They’re too much of him, and also not enough.”
Him, the black thorn who had pierced her heart.
“You want me to raise them for you,” I guessed, and this I would have done for her, though the thought chilled my blood.
My sister Nerissa had a beautiful laugh, and this was the final time I heard it.
“I would not have my children raised by one who cannot love,” Nerissa said.
“To love another is to invite destruction, I know that now. But to never be loved by another? I’ve seen what becomes of a child who grows up without knowing what it is to be loved.
I will not let that fate befall them. No. They must go to their father.”
She knew me well. I would not let myself love her children, as I would not let myself love her.
If I had loved them, surely I would not have been able to carry out her wishes and leave my sister’s children on the doorstep of the Shadowhunter who had destroyed her, a man who might loathe them for what they were and how they came to be.
By the time I returned to her she had entered her last delirium. If I had loved her, surely I could not have sat quietly by her wasted body as she let her last flickers of life slip away.
—
Now you’ve met the humble teller of this tale, we can begin.
Once upon a time, and the time is then and now and may it be forevermore, there was a Seelie royal whose beauty was sharp as a blade, whose blood ran with ice, whose kingdom molded itself to the shape of her soul, whose people lived by her will and her whim.
She was known only as my lady, the Queen.
Ah, did you think this was my story? Mine to tell maybe, but not mine. Stories require foolish choices of the heart. Every story has at its core a want, and remember: I am the sister too wise to want.
The Queen, however. What didn’t she want? Power, pleasure, pain—her wants were manifold and rarely denied.
Then came the Morning Star.
—
To serve at a banquet of the Seelie Queen is an honor.
I had healed one of her handmaidens, and a night’s servitude was my reward.
It was the closest I had ever been to the Queen, and I had eyes only for her.
The banquet was a celebration of alliance, but I cared not for its purpose or its guest of honor, some mortal of the Shadow World puffed up with promises.
I’d seen its like before. The Queen, however, mesmerized the eye.
Hair like blood and fire, woven through with strands of glowing fireflies.
I imagined, whenever a brief moment of silence fell, that I could hear the whisper of their panicked wings.
Her gown was a shimmering scarlet, a match for her favored mortal, whose own scarlet gear was writ with golden runes.
Red to call enchantment down. The old Shadowhunter rhyme.
He was no ordinary Shadowhunter, the Queen’s guest. He was something different, special. I was less than no one to him, and yet as I ferried my tray of blackberry wine across the ballroom, he placed himself in my path. Cold fingers closed around my wrist.
“My lady, well met, I’m sure,” he said, and the words were entirely proper. There was no reason to shiver with fear, or wrench my hand away as if his touch could burn. And yet. “May I have a dance?”
I nodded to the tray, implication clear, I was here to serve, not revel. He swept the glasses away, grinning as they shattered.
“There,” he said. “No one can say that was your fault.”
No point in saying to him that, of course, it would still be considered my fault. To show clumsiness was a great crime in the Queen’s Court. But rudeness to a guest was worse: I held my tongue against my angry urge to lash out.