A Basket Woman Becomes Queen
Rojer Vizier grooms a wife for Chalif King. She is a woman of no rank without family who shimmers with magic and mystery.
Book One: Sight Out of Time | Episode 1.3
[This series is rated “Mature” for thematic elements, sensuality, and violence.]
_+ in the days of Chalif King, of the day when I laid eyes upon her for the first time
Lunix was not always wicked and strict. She had seen too many summers without the sweet pleasures of life. Every season had offered its harshest dealing to Lunix and it showed in her eyes and in her body, hard from strain, exhausted with decisions that no woman would wish to face more than once. This was the second thing Rojer noticed when he found her transporting a large basket on her head across the main plaza. A woman with no roots of family, a woman with no memory of her origin before her adolescence. Both ideal qualities. But foremost, a woman vibrating with deep magic and completely unaware of it.
An average beauty in the physical sense, and not so very sophisticated in speech, her allure was predicated entirely upon her proximity to the observer. She held a subtle energy apart from the other women hauling baskets in the square. Lunix, though embodied as one, could not really be classified as a woman hauling a basket. Lunix was a vessel. Of what, it could not be spoken because it was ineffable. All the better that she was generally quiet and brooding; if anyone had the prescience to ask for her wisdom, she could never put it into words anyway.
Lunix had every ability to lie well, but seldom did, because she considered such behavior to be cowardly and useless in the end. This fierce virtue had a light to it, casting a peculiar countenance of beauty over her person that was magnetic and potentially intimidating. Lunix’s only true weakness was that all her days, her blind innocence could never quite subjugate the unforgiving cycles of life. She had no memory of parental love, no mentorship to walk her through the streets of the cities. Armed only with a keen intuition she did not fully comprehend, Lunix survived by the way she made for herself.
Lunix knew Rojer was an evil man. It was a fact he did not hide. It was always a question of whether or not she could leverage Rojer to bring her out of poverty and provide her with purpose. Rojer respected that. Rojer respected Lunix, and she could tell. When she agreed to be presented to Chalif King as his wife, there was no verbal understanding that Rojer would look after her welfare. But she could tell Rojer valued her greatly, giving Lunix a sort of upper-hand that functioned more or less as a tare.
She was groomed in body and manners for a month before meeting the King. Feeling compelled by Fate, I started to venture out from the wood and into the capital city then, visiting the markets, offering my sight secretly to suffering souls, and healing sick children. Rojer knew of me, but left me alone. He’d bewitched a crow once to come and scratch me as a warning, but I took the spell from the bird’s mind and sent it back to him with a wooden rune around its neck. Either Rojer did not understand its meaning or he did not care, either way, he left me alone. I came to understand that as necromancy advances, it enhances some portions of the mind and poisons the rest—it is the only way to invoke absolute power—to wither compassion in service of cleverness. But what benefit is that cleverness when one has forgotten about dead regions of understanding? They no longer know what they do not know. And so it was that Rojer sealed his fate by walking Lunix through the market every day where the eyes of my body could finally see my heart.
To see her face became the only reason I entered the city that month. Every day, I wondered if today would be the day that our eyes would meet, or if I would be able to touch her hand. I watched her; every day she grew more agitated by the task of choosing fabric for her raiment, ornaments for her body, and perfumes for her skin. I realized, as her eyes searched the market, she was searching for me. I waited patiently for her to find me, for the moment of Fate to converge. But Fate never unfolds when one suspects it around the corner. It was weeks before Lunix accidentally stepped into my presence, only for a moment, while Rojer was caught up in some skirmish between midlanders over a camel. The shoving crowd tipped her over, and I steadied her at the elbows. Her fingers grazed the skin of my neck at the collar as she withdrew from me.
“You,” she said.
“I live in the Wood,” I told her, leading her back toward the skirmish with the camel. “Five hundred steps from the river, beyond the old trees, to the east.”
She laughed. “But your name?”
I smiled into her eyes, filled with a warmth that had only been a memory until then. She never laughed again, though my soul sought for the sound in vain the rest of her days. “It matters more you know where to find me.”
With that, she was momentarily distracted and I obscured myself in the crowd. Leaving word of my location and services with a few midwives in town, I retreated permanently to the Wood to prepare. I endured the celebration of her marriage to Chalif King by reminding myself that she had only ever laughed for me.
Eyes of the Oracle: Sight Out of Time © 2023 kmCarter (Krista M. Carter) all rights reserved. Properly-attributed quotes of less than 200 words (print, digital, etc.) may be used for criticism, reporting, or sharing to social media. Direct Message for media, publication, or collaboration inquiries.
