Lightning flashes as she steps out onto the flat roof of the tower sending stark shadows dancing across the wet stone. Rain soaks Mathilde’s hair and runs down the back of her neck, seeping through every crack and crevice in her armor. She imagines rust blooming across the metalwork, but it won’t have time to get far.
Three figures stand across from her, a fourth crouched behind them, and she allows a feral grin to spread across her face. She has no need to worry about enemies at her back. Her people have the castle and will stop anyone from interrupting. This moment is just for her.
“What do you want, witch?” The tallest figure steps forward. Streaks of grey thread through his beard and the hair at his temples; the Duke is smaller than she remembered.
Mathilde spreads her empty hands wide as she steps forward, the clink of her mail barely audible over the pounding of the rain against stone. “I’m just here to tell you a story,” she replies. “I’ve waited a long, long time to share it with you.”
The Duchess steps up next to her husband, and the young man behind them shifts to place himself in front of the girl huddled against the battlements. “We do not consort with evildoers,” the Duchess says, her lip curling into a sneer. “Begone, and we will let you live.”
Mathilde doesn’t try to hold back the laughter that rips its way from her throat. The Duke and Duchess cringe away from her and she knows she must look like a mad-woman, and that only makes her laugh harder.
“Evildoer,” she manages to choke out at last as she gasps for breath. Then the laughter cuts off as suddenly as it began. “I suppose it would take one to know one.”
The Duke and Duchess glance at each other and then the Duke lunges for Mathilde, swinging the sword that has been hidden in his robes. Mathilde raises her arm to block the blow and the sword shatters against the metal of her iron wrist.
The Duke has a moment to stare at the jagged stump that used to be his blade and then her other hand—this one still flesh and blood and bone, but encased in its own steel gauntlet—meets his jaw and he collapses to sprawl across the tower floor. Mathilde nudges his face with her boot, moving his mouth and nose out of the path of the water that runs in a torrent across the polished stone. It’s not his time, yet.
The Duchess’ gasp pulls Mathilde’s attention back to her.
“Like I said, I have a story to tell you,” Mathilde says, stepping toward the Duchess, crowding the older woman’s personal space. “A story about a girl who was ripped from her family. A girl who thought she had lost everything, only to discover that there is always more to lose.”
The Duchess gulps and the silver pendant at her throat jumps with the movement, flashing as it reflects the lightning that dances in the sky above.
Mathilde reaches out and caresses the Duchess’ neck, her hand coming to rest over the pendant. “Your husband stole me from my family to be his daughter’s whipping girl, to be punished for her transgressions, but you…” She bends her head, forcing the Duchess to meet her gaze. “You stole my magic. Tore it right out of me the moment it manifested and then you wasted it. Of all the things that magic can do, you chose vanity and pride.”
Her fingers tighten over the pendant and pull, the silver links of the chain snapping as it comes free from the Duchess’ neck.
The Duchess reaches for it, then her gaze falls on her own hand and she screams.
Mathilde just watches silently as the time that was denied catches up with the Duchess. Wrinkles form in seconds, her long red hair thins and falls out in clumps, and she collapses, weeping, at Mathilde’s feet.
“What did you do to my mother-in-law?” The young man strides forward, seeming to forget the huddled girl he had been so keen to protect.
Mathilde ignores him. Instead, she holds the Duchess’ pendant firm in her gauntleted hand and uses her metal fist to crack it in half. A wisp of smoke rises out of the shattered, twisted silver despite the rain that fills the air, and then a wave of warmth rushes through her. The feeling of emptiness, of something missing, that has been part of her for as long as she can remember ebbs slightly.
“I said, what did you do?” the young man shouts and, at last, she looks up at him.
“Ah, Prince Henrik,” Mathilde says, smiling softly. “You only have a small part to play in this sorry tale, but you made it count, didn’t you?” She lifts her metal arm and tilts it, watching the water cascade down the intricate pattern of runes and brambles engraved into the iron.
“I had so little left,” she continues, “but you still found something you could take. For the ‘crime’ of touching something that belonged to you. As if a person could ever be a possession.” Eyes still on her own arm, she reaches out and backhands him with her other hand, and he stumbles back, blood streaming from a split lip.
Henrik snarls and leaps for her, but she is already moving. She trips him and he falls next to the Duke, and Mathilde is on him before he can recover, dagger flashing as she cuts his hamstrings. He’s not important enough to waste time on and she has other matters to attend to.
She stands, the blood on her hands already washing away under the relentless downpour, and walks toward the final person she came to see.
Alyss is hunched by the tower wall, her long blonde hair plastered to her skin and her pretty pink gown mud splattered and stained. She shakes, crying, as she stares up into Mathilde’s smiling face.
“Now, love, there’s nothing to fear,” Mathilde croons as she reaches for Alyss with her real hand, pulling the girl to her feet. “Come here. Everything will be fine, I promise.”
Alyss stares at the offered hand, then throws herself into Mathilde’s arms, burying her face in Mathilde’s neck as she sobs.
“There, there, sweetheart,” Mathilde murmurs as she rubs Alyss’ back. “It was you I really came to see. Those three all took something from me, but it was nothing I couldn’t live without. You, on the other hand…”
She feels Alyss stiffen and her arm tightens to hold the girl in place. She bends her head to whisper in Alyss’ ear, a parody of past embraces.
“You took my heart, freely given, and crushed it beneath your feet. I thought you loved me, Alyss. But you only loved power.” Mathilde pauses to gaze down at the face of her childhood friend, her lover, her savior, her tormentor, her destroyer. “You called me a monster before you walked away and left me, still bleeding where your new lover had taken my arm.”
Alyss shakes her head, pushing herself closer to Matilde’s body. “No,” she murmurs, barely audible above the sound of the rain. “No,” she repeats, louder, “I didn’t mean to… I didn’t want to. My mother, she made me send you away. I missed you every day. Where have you been?”
Mathilde’s mouth quirks in a grim half-smile. “Where have I not been?” she replies. “I have traveled the world, across the Dark Sea and back again, to learn what I needed to survive. What I needed to return and claim what was mine, and what was taken from me. Until I became the monster you named me, in truth.”
She ducks her head aside as the dagger clutched in Alyss’ hand skitters across the neck-plate of her armor.
“But you would know all about monsters, wouldn’t you, my love?” Matilde laughs as she pulls the dagger from Alyss’ fist and flings it out over the edge of the tower.
“Damn you,” Alyss screams. “We should never have let you live.”
“Don’t worry,” Matilde says, holding the writhing girl close and tenderly brushing her sodden hair back behind her ear. “You won’t have much longer to regret it.”
Alyss screams again, and Mathilde laughs as she raises her iron fist to the sky and calls the lightning home.
| Rebecca Burton is a queer, neurodivergent writer from the UK, who has had short fiction published by Fireside Fiction and Translunar Travelers Lounge. When not writing, she can be usually be found riding her horse, Peanut, or watching Korean & Chinese dramas. You can find links to her published work at rburtonwriter.wixsite.com/home. |  |