Chapter 48 – Beira Braemar / A Choice Not Made Lightly

Chapter 48

Beira Braemar / A Choice Not Made Lightly

            For one long, impossible moment, no one in the ballroom moves.  No one screams.  No one speaks.  No one so much as dares to breathe too loudly.

            I am still on the floor where Brigid left me, cheek pressed to cold marble, breath catching in my lungs in shallow, painful pulls.  My limbs still feel distant, half-numb and badly attached, my chest aching with the deep and terrible wrongness of something that had very nearly been torn out of it.

            Above me, the light does not fade, it gathers.  What had burst from my chest in violence now hangs suspended above the shattered staircase, white and blue, curling inward on itself like breath caught in winter.

            I hear the unmistakable sound of someone dropping hard to their knees.

            Then the light begins to take the shape of a girl.

            She forms slowly, as though she is learning to hold herself together.  Pale blue and white gathers first into outline, then into shoulders, hands, the fall of hair.  The shape grows clearer by degrees until the figure suspended above the marble is unmistakably human and unmistakably familiar.

            She looks like me… no, not me.

            The distinction hits all at once and with startling force.

            She is slight in all the ways this body once was before pain and recovery carved harder truths into it.  Her hair falls in pale waves of moonlight and frost.  Her face is mine, but softer, almost younger in appearance, though she is undoubtedly the same age as me.  She is what Beira Braemar was always meant to be and for the first time since waking in this body, I am looking at the girl whose life I inherited.

            The ballroom has gone so still I can hear people breathing.

            The blue-gold tether of light still binding her to my chest pulses once, softly, like the beat of a second heart.

            Her eyes open.  They are my eyes, only sadder.

            They find Angus first where he stands frozen as if he were a statue.  Somewhere between striking Brigid down and now, his sword has fallen from his slackened hand, the fire that had lined it gutters and dies along its edge unnoticed.  He is staring at the girl suspended above the marble with the kind of stunned, naked disbelief I do not think I have ever seen on his face.

            Her expression changes the moment she sees him.  It’s not dramatic enough for anyone who does not know her to notice, but I do.  Something in her gaze softens with a kind of aching familiarity so intimate it feels almost cruel to witness.

            “Angus,” she says, her voice quiet and soft.

            The sound that leaves Angus in response is not quite a breath and not quite her name, just the shape of both, broken apart in his throat.

            I hear movement somewhere to my left; there is the scrape of leather against marble, the unmistakable sound of someone dropping hard to one knee and then Angus is there.  He is not at her side; he is at mine.  One hand thuds against the floor beside me hard enough that I hear the impact.  The other reaches out and grabs my shoulder with a care that borders on panic, as if worried he’ll hurt me.  He lifts my upper body and moves me so that my head can rest in his lap, his eyes worried as he examines my immobile form.  Then he looks up, his gaze jerking between us.  First to the girl suspended in light above the staircase, then to me. 

            His face has gone pale.

            “Beira,” he says again, and this time I do not know which one of us he means.

            Above us, the girl of light lowers slowly, bare feet never quite touching the marble as she drifts nearer, blue-white and half translucent.  She looks at him like she remembers every version of him he has ever been, and then she looks at me.

            For one long, impossible moment, I am forced to endure the deeply surreal experience of being regarded by my own face.

            No, not mine. Hers.

            Her gaze lingers on my face first, then my shoulders and hands.  The way I am holding myself despite the numbness I am experiencing.  I can see the realization settling in behind her eyes by slow and terrible degrees.  It’s not just that I am here, nor that I am real, but that whatever happened in her absence, did not leave this body, her body, empty.  It had brought me and with that, a change into something neither of us was ever meant to be.  This body had been and was still hers, that truth still existed, but it had not remained only hers.  Not wholly, not in any way that could be unwound without cruelty.

            Her expression shifts, softening around some private sorrow too old and too immediate to name and in that moment, I know she understands the only part of this that truly matters… whatever was done to us, it cannot be undone kindly.

            When she speaks, her voice is quiet enough that the room has to strain to hear it.

            “I see.”

            Pins and needles begin to crawl hot and sharp through my hands and down one leg, sensation returning in miserable fragments that stop well short of control.

            “I’m s-sorry.”

            The words leave me before I can stop them, not because I think apology can fix this, but because there is a girl wearing my face and looking at me with all the quiet grief of a life interrupted, and I do not know what else to offer her first.

            Her eyes shift back to mine.

            “I d-d-didn’t know,” I say, and the words scrape their way out of me unevenly. “I didn’t know you were s-still there.”

            “I didn’t ask for this,” I say, quieter now. “B-but I took it anyway.”

            Her expression shifts, small and nearly imperceptible.  Not to anger, but instead, something gentler and sadder at the same time.

            “You didn’t take it,” her voice is soft but certain.  It is simply quiet in the way snow is quiet, gentle enough to be mistaken for fragile until it buries something whole.

            Her gaze drops briefly to the blue-gold tether still binding her to my chest, then rises again.

            “I don’t know what was done,” she says. “But I know what I am looking at.”

            Her eyes move over me again.

            “My body lived,” she says.  There is no accusation or bitterness in her voice, only a statement of fact.  “It hurt… it changed… it could not have done so empty.”

            Beside me, Angus lets out a breath like it hurts.  His hand is resting on my shoulder with that same careful, almost desperate steadiness, as though some part of him is afraid one wrong movement will make one of us vanish.

            His gaze lifts to the girl of light, then drops back to me before rising again.  For once, he looks entirely without footing.

            “I thought I lost you.” His words are barely louder than breath.

            The girl tethered to me goes very still then, slowly, heartbreakingly, she smiles.  It is not a happy thing.  It is a look of fondness and sadness and something in it makes my chest ache in answer.

            “You did,” she says without cruelty.  There is no accusation, only truth, spoken with unbearable gentleness.

            Angus flinches like she struck him.

            She drifts closer and for one suspended moment, she only looks at him.  Not at the prince, nor the man that half the room sees… she looks at Angus.

            “But you continued to love me even though I was gone,” she says with kindness, but somehow that makes it crueler.

            Angus goes still in the wake of it.

            “Beira…” he says with a choke.

            She shakes her head.  It is a small motion, gentle and final.

            “I know,” she says softly… then, with all the gentleness in the world, she says the cruelest thing of all.  “You have to let me go.”

            His composure cracks… not dramatically.  Not enough for others in the room to see, but I am close enough to see it.

            “I don’t know how.”  His eyes pleading as he says it.

            Beira looks at him with such devastating tenderness I almost have to look away.

            “You don’t have to do it all at once,” she says… then her gaze shifts to me.  When she speaks again, it is still meant for Angus, but it is no longer only about her.  “Just take care of the girl who stayed in my place.”

            No one in the ballroom breathes.  Angus does not move.  He only stares at her as though the shape of what she has given him is too large to hold all at once, then he looks at me and for the first time since she spoke his name, I know, truly know, that he is seeing me.

            “I c-can give it back.”  The words leave me before I have fully decided to say them.

            The silence they fall into is immediate and absolute.

            Even Angus stills.

            Above us, the girl turns her full attention to me again, and for the first time since she appeared I force myself to hold her gaze without looking away.

            “I-if you want it back… you can have it,” I say.  “It was yours first, it s-s-should have been yours still.”

            My throat tightens hard enough to hurt.

            “I never meant to take your life… if you want your b-body back,” I say, “I’ll g-g-give it to you.”

            She stares at me for a moment.

            “You would,” she says in a simple, devastating acknowledgment of the fact that I mean it.  “And that is why I won’t ask it of you.”

            No one sees Damian arrive.  One moment the ballroom is holding its breath, the next, he is simply there… not with thunder or light.  Not with any spectacle.  He is simply present.

            On the landing of the shattered staircase amid the broken marble and ruin he stands, in an immaculate black tuxedo, blond hair neat, sky-blue eyes clear, and not a single drop of blood on polished shoes.   No divine fanfare announces him.  He is just... there.  And with his appearance there is a pressure, a stillness… the sharp, instinctive wrongness of something in the world abruptly shifting just enough for every living thing in the ballroom to know that something far larger than them has entered the room.

            Damian’s gaze passes once over the ballroom.

            The bodies, the broken stone, the blood, the survivors still recovering… and then to Brigid crumpled on the stairs.  His eyes catch on the exposed skin of her back and stop.  His gaze fixes on the mark carved down her spine, and for the first time since I have known him, Damian looks genuinely and unmistakably concerned.  Then his attention shifts next to the girl hovering above me, and something in his expression stills in a way I have not seen from him before.  There is no surprise, only recognition and confirmation.

           “Well,” he says at last, voice smooth and dry enough to make me want to strangle him even half paralyzed, “that is significantly less ideal than I’d hoped.”

           I make a sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke.

           “Now?” I rasp.  “You p-pick now?”

           Damian’s mouth tightens just enough to suggest he is aware this is, in fact, a fair criticism.

           “Yes,” he says, then points toward Brigid, or maybe the rune on her back.  “In my defense, I had other matters to attend to regarding that...”

           His gaze flicks meaningfully toward the room around us… to Angus, then the King, the Queen and finally to the nobles staring in rapt, horrified silence.

           “As compelling as public soul adjudication may be,” he says smoothly, “I would strongly prefer we did not continue this in front of several hundred witnesses.”

           King Malcolm straightens first.

           “And who,” the King asks, with admirable restraint, “are you?”

           “I am Damian,” he says, as if that should be sufficient.

           The name lands like a stone dropped into deep water.  Enough people in the room understand it for the silence to sharpen.  At the far edge of the ballroom, someone drops to both knees hard enough that the impact echoes.

           Damian ignores them.

           “This conversation,” he says, calm and precise, “has already become more public than I would have preferred.”

           His gaze shifts briefly toward the ring of stunned nobility.

           “And I suspect all three of you deserve the dignity of not having the rest of it become court gossip by sunrise.”  He says lifting one hand.

           A blackness appears at his back… it is a doorway.

           “You may continue this here,” he says, “in front of a kingdom.”

           His eyes flick once to the dark opening behind him.

           “Or somewhere private,” he finishes.

           “Private,” the girl above me says, not hesitating.  She looks to Angus.  “Wait for me.”

           Then the blackness behind Damian opens wider.

           The shift is immediate.

           In one breath the ballroom exists full of blood and marble and the stunned silence of too many witnesses, and the next it is gone.  The ballroom, the blood, the broken staircase, the watching eyes... all of it peels away in an instant so complete it leaves me reeling harder than the violence of Brigid’s attack had.  Then the black steadies.  The silence here is different and absolute.  Only black stretching endlessly in every direction and the four of us suspended in its center.

           And without my body, goes the pain as well.  The numb ache vanishes.  The weight of half-returned sensation falls away so abruptly it leaves me breathless for an entirely different reason.  I can move.

           The realization hits hard enough to stagger me, I am not healed, only absent from the body that had been hurt.

           Damian exhales and with the ballroom gone, something in him seems to go with it.  He drags one hand down his face, slow and tired.

           For the first time since I met him, he looks exceedingly young.  Too young for godhood and too young for this, despite the fact that he appeared to be a literal child at our first meeting.

           “Well,” he says into the silence, “this is catastrophically awkward.”

           For one suspended moment, nothing changes, then the shape I have worn since waking in this world begins to come apart.  It is neither violently nor painful… to put it simply… it feels wrong.  My center of balance changes and my shoulders draw narrower.  My frame grows lighter and the long weight of hair against my back shortens abruptly.

            I stare at my hands.

           They are not hers.  They are smaller, narrower… different.

           Somewhere in the silence, I hear Beira inhale and I look at her.  Beira is staring at me.  Then, to my surprise, her expression warms.

           “You’re pretty,” she says.

           “Eh?” I grunt.

           Damian makes a sound somewhere to my left that might have been a laugh.  Mercifully, he does not make me ask.  With a flick of his fingers, something bright and silver-edged unfolds in the dark beside me.  It is a reflective surface that hangs at eye level.

            I stare at it.

           The girl staring back at me is not one I recognize at first.  She has dark hair, warm brown eyes and soft features.

            I do not know her.

           Then I realize I do.

           Not because I have seen this face before, but because I have seen pieces of it.  In photographs, in memories, and in the mirror above my mother’s shoulder when I was too young to understand why looking at her felt like looking at something I had misplaced.  This is not the face that I had, it is the face I should have had.

           Somewhere behind me, Damian says, “There.  That should clear up at least one identity crisis.”

           Angus is staring at me.

           For one long moment, he says nothing, then, with the exhausted dignity of a man who has accepted that his evening has become derailed, he closes his eyes.

           “I would like, just once tonight, for something to explain itself before it happens,” he says, sighing.

           Damian snorts and I laugh despite myself.  Beira covers her mouth with both hands and makes a startled sound that might have been the first genuinely unburdened laugh she has had in months.  After a moment, she lowers her hands slowly.

           “What happens now?” she asks.

           Damian, to his credit, does not answer immediately.

           “That,” he says, “depends on what the two of you want.  The body can be returned.”

           The words fall into the dark between us and settle there.

           “If that is what you want,” he says to Beira, “I can return what was taken. You may have your life back. Your body. Your place.”

           There is a brief pause.

           “Though I would advise against it,” he adds because he is incapable of making anything simple.

           He lifts one hand before any of us can interrupt.

           “Not because it cannot be done.  Because it can, but the damage has already been done.”  His gaze shifts to the tether.

           “What remains of you in that body is no longer only yours,” he says looking at Beira. “And what she has become is no longer separate enough to be cleanly removed without doing violence to both of you.”

           He pauses for a moment before continuing.

           “If you reclaim it entirely, she will not survive it unchanged.”  For a second there is... compassion in his eyes, “and neither will you.”

           A heavy silence follows.

           “There is another option…” he says as if he would prefer anything but.  “Your souls have already begun a process.”

           “What happened in that body was not replacement,” he says. “It was collision… simply put, when I put her there, I believed your body empty… it was not.”

           His eyes shift back and forth, as if examining us for something before settling on her.

           “What remained of you was nothing more than a fragment, just enough soul left in the body to keep it living.  Not enough to wake.  When her soul entered your body, it did not replace what remained of yours.  It fused with it,” he explains.  “That is why her magic changed.  That is why she is not wholly foreign and why neither of you is wholly separate now.”

           The tether between us pulses.

           “If one of you takes the body alone, they will survive.” He pauses.  “The other will not.”

           Beira is the first to speak.

           “When I first woke, I thought something had been taken from me alone,” she looks at the tether then to me.  “But I think we were both taken from what we should have been.”

           Something in my throat closes.

           “I don’t want t-to t-t-take anything else from you,” I say.  The words come out quieter than I mean them to.  “I had a life.  It wasn't a good one, b-but it was mine… when I woke up in y-your body, your life, with your name, I was ecstatic.  But, if there had been someone left t-to give it back to, I would have.”

            I look at her.

           “I didn’t necessarily want your life, but I don’t want t-to die for surviving in it either,” I conclude.

           “You shouldn’t,” she says without hesitation. “You should not have to die just for living a life you were forced into.”

           She glances once at Angus, then back to me.

           “I love him,” she says. “I would have married him.”

           Angus makes a sound somewhere behind me that I very deliberately do not turn around to acknowledge.

           “But I never got to become the girl who would have that chance… you did,” she says with a slight shrug.  It isn’t a shrug of indifference, more a shrug of accepting the inevitable.

            I go still.

           Damian waits until the silence settles between us.

           “If neither of you wishes to destroy the other,” he says, “then there is only one sane option left… the two of you may finish what has already begun.”

           We both look at him.

            “Michelle has already fused partially with your soul, Beira, even if it was just a fragment, it was still a part of you,” he says, it takes a full moment for me to realize he used my chosen name instead of my given one.  “You two could complete the process, but know you both will be irrevocably changed.”

            He gestures to me.

            “It has already happened with her and honestly, this will likely stabilize the problems that have arisen from that,” he looks her in the eye.  “But you, you haven’t been touched by it.  You could live missing that fragment.  Your soul would eventually heal the part that is missing, so you have the most to lose.”

            The words fall cleanly into the dark.

            Beira looks at me and I look back, neither of us speaking, just two girls standing in the wreckage of a life interrupted.

            Beira moves first, lifting one hand before hesitating for just a moment.  She offers a small, sad smile to Angus, then looks back to me. She extends her hand to me.

            My hand shakes as I reach out to hers, not from fear, instead it is the simple, unbearable weight of what is being asked.

            I place my hand in hers and her fingers close around mine.

            For a moment I feel warmth in her touch.  A sense of recognition follows.

            The blue-gold tether between us stops pulsing and brightens into a steady glow, almost as if relieved, then dissolves.

            Memory moves first, not just hers, or mine… ours.

            A little girl laughing in snow.  A boy staring too long into his mother’s mirror.  Angus grinning with a flower crown crooked in his hands.  A hospital room washed in sterile white.  The scent of frost.  The ache of loneliness.  The weight of court silk.  The sharp joy of finally being seen.  The quiet grief of being loved too late.

            There is a blinding flare and when I open my eyes, I am alone, though not truly.  I can feel both of my selves all at once.  The tether is gone.  The original Beira is gone.  Michelle is gone.  Briefly there is a place where we both exist, split cleanly down the middle, then there is only one pulse, one breath, one self.  I am still me.  I am still her.

            Somehow, impossibly, neither of those truths feels like erasure.

            Angus is staring at me.

            Slowly, carefully, he takes one step forward, then another.  He stops in front of me and searches my face with a quiet intensity.

            “Beira?” he asks, in a small voice, as if unsure.

            “Yes,” I say with a nod, the answer coming easily because for the first time, it is true without qualification.

            Something in Angus’s face eases.

            Behind him, Damian exhales.

            “Wonderful,” he says, with exhausted relief.  “Now that we have successfully resolved the metaphysical and psychological crisis, perhaps we can return before the political one finishes metastasizing.”

            The blackened space around us folds in on itself.

            Sound returns first, then light, causing me to shut my eyes.  The ballroom rushes back in fragments... the smell of smoke and blood, the shattered staircase, the gasping breath of those returned to their bodies after Brigid’s violation, and the stunned silence of too many witnesses still waiting to see what returns to them.

            Then pain comes.  A deep ache settles back into limbs that are mine again, soul and body catching against one another with the unpleasant jolt of things remembering they have weight.

            I draw in one sharp breath and open my eyes to a kingdom waiting to see what came back.