​BLACK MARKET LIT

          Outside it’s raining. The streets of hell are coated and slick. Every peasant below is clad in gray, as if the sky had woken and dressed them. The fortunate few are clinging to their umbrellas like kite strings. The others hunch their shoulders and carry on. I clutch the cherry blanket I’ve wrapped around my shoulders to hide my own gray duds, and lean closer to the window sill, to the people milling about the streets, slipping and bumping into each other. I don’t look forward to joining them.
          “Peasants,” Luce says, perching beside me and gazing out at the ants on the street. I hadn’t heard him come in, hadn’t heard him sit down. His smile quirks up. We may as well be at the theatre. He hands me his mug of coffee and I feel it climb down my throat, burning everything in its path.
          “Hey.” I lower the mug and meet his gray eyes. “I’m a peasant.”
          He grimaces, “You?” He leans in so that we’re nose to nose. “You could send off this storm in a matter of minutes. You could turn each droplet of water to a crystal of ice. Let’s see any one of them do that.”
          I turn away, my eyes still on the crowds below. “I don’t know how to do that,” I dismiss.
          “But you could.”
          I can’t argue with that, but I can’t explain why it doesn’t matter. That the poor slobs down there are made of the same stuff as I am. Flesh and bones and a single common thread: commonness.
          “You don’t think you could?” he concludes after I’ve been silent for too long.
          I watch two people greeting each other amiably. That’s like a crime here. We’d all give up on courtesy long ago. “Oh, I know… I’m sure that I could.” If my experiences at the manor had taught me one thing, it was that I could. I could anything. That’s what magic’s for. But there are limits. I know that. “It’s just a matter of…”
          He’s not really paying attention to what I’m saying and I don’t know how to finish describing my self-doubt.

          “I have a meeting at thirteen hundred,” he says.
          That’s my cue to leave. My cue to come up with a clever way to sneak out, or at least get across the manor, close enough to Andres that no one would question my presence.
          “You want to take the staff exit?” he suggests because I usually do. He follows my gaze out and to the rain. “You can borrow my new coat. The hood will protect your hair.”
          My hair? Is it possible that just yesterday I was complaining to him about curls and frizz?

          I look out at the people and suddenly I’m tired. Physically exhausted. I can’t go on in this loop. Days of learning and nights of hiding. It isn’t healthy, and even in Luce’s world, the world of eternities and drawn out lives, loops are never permanent. They’re simply drawn out, until they become so unbearable that something snaps.
          “Luce, I don’t want to sneak out.”
          I can feel him moving to stand behind me and see what I’m seeing. “I know the weather’s nasty, peach, but I need to get ready and someone’s bound to pop in sooner or later. A bit suspicious if the door’s locked.” He says the words without any sort of sympathy, though his hands are on my shoulders, kneading them. “You know how that turned out last time.”
          “Let them come in,” I suggest, not daring to turn around and face his eyes. I wouldn’t stand a chance.
          He chuckles and releases my shoulders, tugging the curtains closed over my view. “Smashing idea. And then my father would kill you. Andres would murder me. Carter would have a hardy laugh and everything would come up roses.”
          I turn to give him a mild glare. “Andres wouldn’t do anything.”
          “He’d grind my bones to make his bread and sprinkle them with chardonnay.”
          “Luce…”
          “From the day that I met you, he’s been asking me when I’m going to make my move.”
          I can’t help but let out a snort, as a shirtless Luce paces towards his closet and scrutinizes his wardrobe.
          “If he were to find out that I had, and that I’d never told him…”
          I roll my eyes. Andres, my tutor, has a heart as soft as butter, even if it is bound in metal. “He would manage. As for your father, you have no idea how he would react.”
          Luce shakes his head. “I know perfectly well.”
          Fire kindles in my mind, “You just told me I wasn’t a peasant, Luce.”
          “No,” he breaks off, angry that I’m trying to corner him with words, “You’re not.”
          “Which is it, Luce?”
          He spins around and his eyes catch me completely off guard. I feel my muscles tense. “My father thinks about as highly of witches as he does about the dirt encrusted on his riding boots, darling. He’s read the scrolls. He knows my fate, and he’s dead set on it. Now please, quit teasing me with the idea.”
          I don’t understand how his face can lose its warmth so quickly, but it must be a family trait, as Carter does it too.
          “No.”
          He shakes his head. He’s running out of patience, running out of words. “This is the best I can offer you, Morgana.” He spreads his arms out to the expanse of his room, and though it’s plush and gorgeous all I see are closed curtains and a dead-bolted door. “I’m sorry if it’s not good enough for you. This life isn’t something I ever would have chosen, but there’s no place on earth I could hide from it, and if there were, I would be there, and you would be there too. Don’t you understand that?”
          “Luce, what if I am your fate? Maybe I’m in those scrolls. Did you ever stop to think of that?”
          His sour look says that he hasn’t, but I suspected as much.
          “And why not? I’m gifted Luce, I have this incredible magic.”
          “There’s more than magic at work here, darling there’s….” Evidently he has no words for it. “Just more.”
          But I do. “Maybe we have more.” I meet his eyes, though they’re still stony. “I think love is more.”
          It’s funny to watch the muscles in someone’s face freeze and grind and stop working altogether.
          “Well?” I say because despite my fury, I’m still just incredibly tired.
          He closes his eyes, “Morgana, please, stop it.”
          “But I…”
          His tone becomes authoritative. The voice he uses with the butler and the handmaid. “Morgana, it’s not your place.”
          I tense. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” My arms cross and I fall back onto the sill and sit like a huffy child.
          He steps towards me. He looks like he wants to take my hands but he doesn’t. He searches my face. “This isn’t what you want; is that right?”
          “Yes!” I shout and I feel the words trapping me as they vibrate in my throat and ears.
          He takes a deliberate step back. “Then leave.”
          “Luce.”
          “You’re free to go. I won’t hold you to anything.”
          “Luce, you can’t just...”

          “No you can’t. You can’t demand that I sacrifice my home life for you. You knew what this was going to be like when you got involved with me. It was inevitable. So if you’re unhappy, walk out the door, because nothing is ever going to change between us. It is inevitable. It is fate. Morgana, if it’s what you want, please go, live a different life. Just know that if you do, you have no right to come back.”
          “I…”
          His gray eyes are colder than I’ve ever seen them. His heart is somewhere distant, locked in a box and carefully guarded by a hundred paper soldiers.
          “Go, Morgana.” He waves his hand and his disinterested look seizes my mind. That’s how he looks at peasants. And now that’s how he looks at me. I snatch this idea and press it tightly against my chest. I run with it.
          I get up, my fists clenched, and make for the door. Wordlessly, I begin to unlatch the bolt.
          “You’re leaving then?” he says, as if he’s not quite sure he can believe it, or else not quite sure that he cares.
          “Yes.”
          He nods, looking back to where I was sitting, and then to me as the lock clicks. “There are two things you ought to know before you do.”
          In my slippery state of mind I pause and turn around. My hands never leave the lock. “Yes?” I repeat.
          “I’ll have to ensure that you won’t tell anyone about us.”
          I scoff. “Consider it ensured.”
          He shakes his head, as if this isn’t the type of insurance that he means, and I shiver. I’m relieved to going. The manor is messing with my mind.
          “Two?” I urge, impatient to be gone before I rush at him and never let go.
          “You can’t be with anyone else. Never.”
          “Sorry?” I assume that I’m misinterpreting his words.
          “It’s me or nothing.  Choose wisely.”
          I shake my head, and outside the lightning tears the sky to pieces.
          “That’s really not your call,” I say, and I finish unbolting the door.
 

***********
 

          It took me eleven hours to discover that I was invisible. Three weeks to convince myself that it was true.
          In the final day of the third week I was meandering around the market place as invisible people will do. Making faces, tripping things up, stealing fruit, and switching signs. I was following a lumbering baker, imitating his gait, his swinging arms, when a voice called “Morgana!” and I stopped dead in my tracks. The boy jogging along behind me tripped, got up, and searched the air questioningly. “Morgana,” the voice repeated impatiently and I swung around to see a man.
          He was dressed in a fine suit and a top hat, neither of which showed the telltale signs of frequent use and old age. His hair was black, his eyes were blue and I swore that I knew him, though I’d never seen him before. Not once in my life. I was sure of it.
          “So this is the way that the world ends,” he quoted as I strode up, astonished as his eyes met mine as no one else’s had for twenty-one days, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
          “Do I know you?” I asked when I reached him, and he smiled awkwardly, as if trying to figure out if I were making a joke.
          His smile vanished abruptly. “No, I expect not. Carter Slate, at your service,” he swept into a short bow, but did not kiss my hand, as stuffy nobles sometimes will do. “Looking a bit, pale today, dear. A bit thin, why you might disappear.”
          “What do you know about this?” I asked him intently. “Am I dead, do you think?”
          He chuckled outright, and a passerby gave him an odd look, but a glare from Carter Slate and the passerby clutched at his chest as if his heart has just caught on fire. “No, not at all. You’re the witch. Shouldn’t you know? You’ve been cursed.”
          I paused to raise my brows at him. “By you?”
          He shook his head, “Not I.”
          I believe him. “How do I get rid of it?” I wave my arms to explain away the word ‘it’ by proxy.
          “I don’t have a clue,” and he literally shrugs, because it is that much not his problem.
          Again I take his word for it, and though my mind screams to ask him a thousand questions, his steady eyes tell me to keep my mouth shut.
          “Though I do wish you well. Really.”
          He gives me that awful, pleasant smile and sweeps into another bow. I curtsy, and this results in another chuckle, which he is quick to smother with a glove, “Good day, Madame,” he says and begins to walk away.
          And I let him. Because how was I to know that he would be the only person who could see me? The only person in over three hundred years.
          I’d have looked for him again, I think. If I had remembered that I met him in the first place.
          But I have no recollection of him, no more than of the sixth months of my life I lost after I entered the manor. Every now and then a snip of memory is there. A maid, or a butler, or a guest, shivering in his coat and looking quite uneasy. I think that did something to me. An experiment, something awful. I long to go back and search for answers, but I cannot.
          Absolutely not.