Green Eyes

  ‘Please, Donnell,’ she said, groping her way. ‘Let me go.’ The O sound became a shrinking wail, and then a word. ‘Ogoun.’ She shivered, blinked, as if waking from a dream. Her silk robe, which hung open, was speckled with leaves and mold, and a large bruise darkened her hip. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Donnell and the door, but her face was frozen in a terrified expression. Black curls matted her cheeks, making it appear her head was gripped within the scrollwork cage of a torturer’s restraint. ‘Let me go!’ she screamed, demanding it.

  ‘Is that what you really want?’ He kept his voice insistent and even. ‘Do you want to go on hurting yourself, hurting everyone, screwing your sting into people’s lives until they curl up in your web and waste?’ He eased a step nearer. ‘It’s time to end this, Otille.’

  She edged further away, but not too far. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

  ‘Better to die than go on hurting yourself,’ he said, inching forwards, trying to minister her madness, seduce her with the sorry truth. ‘Think about the suffering you’ve caused. You should have seen Valcours die, bleeding from the eyes, his bones crunching like candy. Downey, Clea, Dularde, Simpkins, all your supporters. Gone, dead, vanished. You’re alone now. What’s there to look forward to but madness and brief periods of clarity when you can see the trail of corpses numbering your days, and feel sorrow and revulsion. Better to die, Otille.’

  She raised her hand to her cheek, and the gesture transformed her face into that of a young girl, still frightened but hopeful. ‘Ogoun?’ she asked.

  ‘I am his judgment,’ he said, wondering at the archaic sound of his words, gauging the distance between them.

  Otille blinked, alert again, tipped her head to one side and said, ‘No, Donnell.’ Her left hand, which had been shielded behind her, flashed up and down so quickly that he did not realize she held a knife until he saw the hilt standing out from his chest. A gold hand was carved gripping it. The blade had struck his collarbone dead on, deflected upward, and stuck; she tried to pull it out and stab once more, but her fingers slipped off the hilt as he staggered back.

  Angry at his carelessness, he plucked it out and threw it into a far corner. The wound was shallow, seeping blood. ‘That was your last chance,’ he said. ‘And I don’t even think you wanted to take it.’

  She pressed against the wall, her head drooping onto her shoulder in a half swoon, her eyelids fluttering, helpless; but he could not lift his hand to strike. For the moment she seemed fragile, lovely, a creature deserving a merciful judgment, involved in this tortuous nightmare through no fault of her own. Seeing his hesitation, she hurled herself toward the door; he dove after her, clutching an ankle and dragging her down. He scrambled to his feet, still hesitant. His cold and calculating mood had fled, and he was not sure he could do it. One second she was a monster or a pitiful madwoman, the next a lady frail as alabaster or a little girl, as if she were inhabited by a legion of lost souls not all of whom merited death. And now she stared at him, another soul duly incarnated, this one displaying the sulky pout of adolescence, ignorant and sexual: a black-eyed child with pretty breasts and a dirt-smeared belly. A trickle of sweat crawled into the tuck of skin between her thigh and abdomen. He was bizarrely attracted, then disgusted; he stepped around her and opened the first door of the Replacement Room.

  ‘Go on in,’ he said. “This is the way out.’

  Stupefied, she pushed herself up onto an elbow, gazing into the dimly lit passage, her head wobbling.

  ‘You can’t hush up what’s happened, Otille. Not this time. You’re too far gone to deal with it. And you know what they’ll do? They’ll lock you up somewhere a thousand miles from Maravillosa, in a room with iron bars on the windows and a bed with leather cuffs and leg straps, and a mirror that won’t break no matter how hard you hit it, and a blazing light bulb hung so high you can’t reach it even if you stand on a chair and jump. And all you’ll hear at night will be muffled screams and scurrying footsteps.’

  There was no indication that she heard him. She continued to gaze into the room, her head swaying back and forth, lids drooping, as if the sight were making her very, very sleepy.