Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian Page B

arm of the Empress with her fingertips.
    Her touch was cold as the winter outside.
    The Empress could not suppress a shudder and then was immediately horrified at her own reaction. She exclaimed hoarsely, “Leave us, all of you! Begone from this chamber and give us privacy.”
    The servants and attendants did not need to be told twice. The Ladies-in-Attendance fled in gratitude. Even the priests shuffled out in a measure of relief, and the two attendant doctors bowed their way out, casting pointed glances at their patient before the doors were shut behind them all.
    Mother and daughter alone remained in the room.
    The Empress still felt the aftereffects of that shudder of continued terror and revulsion, mixed with tenderness and anguish. But now at least she could allow herself normal human emotion without a facade of decorum. Justinia Liguon forced herself at first, forced her body to make that initial motion, and then her loving instinct broke through and she took the steps and closed the distance between her child, taking the frail Infanta in her arms, holding her with a force that she may never have allowed herself before, but now—none of it mattered, did it? Nothing could hurt her daughter again—now she squeezed and rocked and held on tight to the cold wooden thing in her arms.  . . . And there was no more doubt.
    She embraced a corpse.
    And as the full realization came to her in that instant, the Empress broke down completely, became a thing of liquid pain without bone and muscle, and sobbed and sobbed, her face red and contorted, her tears and imperial snot running down and staining her cheeks and the cheeks and hair of the dead thing in her arms. At the same time, the drying red stain on the front of the Infanta’s gown, crushed against her chest, was now smeared all over the Empress’s cream dress, and it did not matter. . . .
    None of it mattered.
    “Mother. . . .”
    The corpse was speaking to her. No, no, her daughter was speaking to her! In the same instant her fury at herself broke through the tumble of horror that was the dislocated contents of her mind. The Empress felt a strange expansion of the wooden chest against her own, and an intake of air, and then, the words came again, rattling softly against her own chest, like a sympathetic drum, flesh to flesh, living to dead.
    “Please don’t cry on my behalf, mother.”
    “Oh God in Heaven and Blessed Mother of God! You’re all right, child, yes you are, you are!” the Empress said, her own breath coming in gasps, lips against her daughter’s cold forehead and soft hair—her hair at least was still the same, soft, delicate, sweet cobwebs. . . .
    “What has happened to me, mother? I don’t know.” Claere said. “I don’t think I am the same. No. I know I am not. I should be . . . dead.”
    “Oh God, no, hush!”
    But the Infanta was indeed no longer the same submissive creature, for she put her cold stiff hands against her mother’s shuddering warm chest and she pushed her away, gently but firmly.
    “No, mother. I am sorry, but I am—not alive. There is no pain, no  . . . anything. I no longer feel the world . My fingers—numb—all of me. Not sure how else to describe—but I am . . . As though I am locked in a room with thick walls and thick glass windows, and I am looking out at you and everything through those impenetrable windows. Nothing touches me from . . . your side.”
    “Oh God! Claere, my little dearest, dearest one, but how could that be? How, oh how? You are here, you are here with me and you are alive, and—”
    “When the knife entered me, it hurt. But only for a moment. Terrible pain, then it dissolved into nothing. Something—I felt something recede and it was like a blink of the eye. I was not , and I was pulled inside out and then. . . . And then, I was back. Like this. Locked inside that thick room, feeling nothing.”
    “What he did to you.  . . . He will pay, oh how he will pay!”