6. Harlow
HARLOW
I stumble into the sunroom, panic clenching in my chest and pain throbbing in my head.
Gaven takes one look at me and reaches for the blade at his waist. “What did he do?—”
“Nothing,” I rasp, a hand finally coming to my head. “It’s?—”
“An attack,” he finishes, crossing the room to loop an arm around my waist. He hauls me down the hallway with surprising speed for someone his age.
I squint. Everything is lit with a bright halo that warps and bends as I move.
It’s always the first sign of trouble, and the nausea and dizziness follow close behind.
I only have a few minutes to find somewhere private to ride out the pain once the glowing starts.
Because after fifteen minutes or so, the pain will grow from a hum to a roar.
I don’t know what causes the episodes, but stress certainly makes them worse, and the past day has been trying.
Servants scatter as we breeze down the corridor toward my rooms. The world starts to tilt and I stumble. Gaven drags me along faster, ignoring my grunted protest.
“How long ago did it start?” he asks as he climbs the stairs.
“Ten, fifteen minutes. I couldn’t just run off when I was expected to walk with Henry.” We pass the landing windows and pain lances my brain as I try to hide from the sunlight. “Hurry—I’m going to be sick.”
I want time to pick apart my first interaction with Henry, but my mind will not allow anything but the impending pain. It builds like a storm on the horizon, lightning strikes firing behind my eyes every time we pass the windows. A cold sweat rises on my neck and my stomach turns over.
Finally, we round the corner into the hallway that leads to my room. Gaven drags me the last few feet and then shoves me through the ornate bedroom door.
“Bed or washroom?” he asks.
“Washroom,” I groan.
He quickly crosses the bedroom and deposits me gently on the washroom floor. I press my cheek to the cool tile and moan.
“I’ll order ice.”
“Don’t forget—” My stomach heaves, and I sit up so quickly I almost fall over, making it to the toilet in time to hurl up my breakfast. I wipe my mouth and look up at Gaven. “Don’t forget to order something to drink with it. If we order ice without a drink?—”
He sighs. “The staff will sense weakness. I know. Last time?—”
“Last time you were lazy.” I don’t mean for it to sound so harsh, but I can’t stand for him to see me looking so weak. “You’re dismissed. Return with the ice and then keep everyone out of my rooms.”
He grunts his assent and leaves me alone with my agony.
I hear the echo of Aidia’s old whispers in my head. “You are bigger than this pain.”
But I’m not. I never have been. I have always been lost in the current of it, drowning in a violent, blinding hurt that comes and goes at random.
The pain is sharp and loud, and I am soft. It claws at everything, hollows out thought with a bright ache that demands stillness, razes all sense of self. And all I can do is try to survive it.
One moment, one breath, one aching blink at a time.
Moments drag by until Gaven’s footsteps approach. He fills a towel with ice, and I lay it over my eyes and clammy forehead. I listen blindly to his retreat. He hesitates at the door .
“Leave,” I snap. The word pulses in my brain, but Gaven listens. A moment later, the bedroom door clicks closed behind him.
When I was younger, he sat with me when these spells came on whenever Aidia couldn’t be there, but he hasn’t done it in years.
Until three months ago, when I woke from a spell thinking it was Aidia’s finger stroking my hair, only to blink up at Gaven, and that made me feel so much worse.
I hate the reminder of her absence. Imagining what’s happening to her on the other side of the city is almost worse than seeing the evidence of it.
I groan and press the ice against my eyes. It’s a waste of resources. It probably won’t even help me. Most of the time, I think it’s more of a distraction than a help, but when it hurts this much, I can’t care.
The pain is a liar. It whispers that I’m weak—that I will not make it through this next swell.
It whispers that I will—that the pain will endlessly endure—and that’s almost worse.
There is no beginning or end and time becomes a smudge of harsh golden sunlight and silver slanted moonlight until eventually the red riot in my head abates to brown and green, like the sky brightening as a storm subsides.
I set the mostly melted ice aside and turn to appraise myself in the full-length mirror across the washroom. My hair is a mess, half-unpinned and plastered to the side of my face. My eyes are glassy, and my skin is pale.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve looked in the mirror at my body, burning with fury.
Be strong. Be stable. Be normal . But it refuses to bend to anything but these peculiar fits and starts of pain—head-splitting aches that feel like someone is cracking my skull open so violently there is nothing to do but curl up and vomit.
How can my face be so beautiful when my insides are so ugly? How can I look so normal when I’m nearly blinded with pain?
For all my attempts to block it out, my parents’ disapproval has bled into me. All of my older sisters mastered themselves. They didn’t commit the trespass of being weak—as if this was something I chose.
Just after the pain started when I was eleven, my parents brought me to an Elvodeen-blessed mender to assess the peculiar spells of agony that plagued me. “Women bear pain better. That’s why they bear the children. Women are made to endure it. You must simply try harder,” the man had said .
I saw it in my father’s eyes then that he agreed. The worst thing I could be was a woman ungovernable of both mind and body.
Other women seem at home in their skin, but mine is a prison—a dungeon full of torture that I can never escape.
Still, the pain I can remember has always been preferable to the pain I forget. It’s the strangest thing, the blank spots in my memory. My body can conjure the terror, feel it in the pounding of my heart and tension in my limbs, and yet I can only ever remember the aftermath.
I remember the tension in my jaw, the fatigue in my muscles from bracing for blows that seemed never-ending, and Aidia’s frenzied whispers hot in my ear.
“Low, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t do it. You know what he will do if I give him what he wants. You know what it will mean.”
Of course I did. That was why I took the punishment. Because I could take pain even better than she could. Because very early on, when my father understood he could not break Aidia with violence, he realized he could by hurting me.
“My heart,” she’d say, her voice still tight with panic.
I’d squeeze her hand, but that wouldn’t be enough to convince her until I answered, “My bones.”
“Our blood,” she’d say as she laid her cool palm against my clammy skin.
The memory jumps to my mother’s grim face, but I cut off that scene before it can start. I don’t need more agony right now.
I count backwards from one hundred, just to give me something to focus on other than pain. I keep losing track of what number I’m on, but after several more tries, I fall into a dull, restless sleep.
I wake to loud birdsong swelling from the balcony. I slept too long and lost another night of helping the women of Lunameade. All because my body is too weak.
My neck and back are stiff from the hard floor and my dress is damp from sweat and the fact that I’m lying in a puddle of melted ice.
I carefully press up to a sitting position, blood rushing in my ears as I gain equilibrium.
The pain has receded, leaving behind a sensation like a hangover—like someone has slid fogged glass over the world.
My thoughts are muddled and I am so unbearably tired.
“You’re up.”
My heart lodges in my throat as I turn and find Aidia sitting at my vanity.
“Bleeding woods! You scared me, Aidy.”
She grins. “You look terrible.”
“Good. Maybe it will scare off my new fiancé.” I stand, cross the room, and flop onto my bed.
Aidia follows and lies down facing me. I could conjure the gardenia scent of her perfume even if she weren’t in front of me.
The scent of my sister is burned into my memory, like my soul has always known the smell of its other half.
She only comes home when she’s close to breaking, and her calm now makes me wild with fear. Now she seems a faint approximation of herself that leaves me feeling like I’m looking at her through distorted glass.
“What are you doing here?”
She shrugs. “I knew you’d need me.”
“What if Rafe?—”
“Fuck Rafe.”
My sigh turns into a laugh. “Aidy, your last bruise isn’t fully healed yet.”
“I told him Mother sent for me to get you ready for your big night and he couldn’t argue, especially since—” She hesitates. “Especially since I can’t be there tonight.”
I sit up so fast I get a head rush. “He can’t keep you locked up in that grim little mansion whenever it suits him.”
“He can and he will,” she says. “For now, I choose my moments. Besides, you know I hate parties. I’d rather have you to myself. Now, lay down and tell me how you’re feeling.”
I slump back onto the bed. I want to fight with her, push her to fight for herself, but her replies are too calm, too stiff—practiced theater meant to convince other people she’s fine. I know she’s not.
The sharp edges of her are wearing away. I can see it in her smile that fades too quickly and the tired rasp of her usually smooth voice .
There’s a terrible clarity in seeing her like this. I loved her so much I ruined her, and then I ruined myself. Now I don’t know how to mend anything.
She traces the stitching in my bedspread. I wish she’d run her fingers through my hair like she used to when I had an episode, but she keeps her hands to herself.