OPHELIA

  I STARE DOWN at my hands, studying the fine lines that are stained scarlet. They crawl across my palms like a map of bloodied veins, torn and misguided in their path. Vaguely reminding me of the finely threaded webs that the spiders living in the rafters of the barn spun between the wooden beams.

  Some mornings I'd awaken to find those same webs hanging from the limbs of my mother's pomegranate tree. Only unlike the ones in the barn which were left alone to collect dust until disturbed by some farm hand hauling bales, these were ravaged by the elements. They glistened, weighed heavy with dew and cast gold by the sunrise.

  Beautiful, I had always thought them. At least, that was until the wind blew down from the north, tearing the webs limb from limb, and leaving them waving from their branches like tattered flags in the breeze. Even nature herself submit to the will of the north. We all did in some way or another.

  The blood of the fruit begins to crawl down my wrist, yet still, I make no move to stop it. Instead, I simply watch, utterly transfixed by the thick red colour. Wept directly from the wound, and winding through the planes of my palms, pooling and spilling like tears of crimson, until it stops, halted by the hems of my sleeves which is stains. 

  Later, when I return to the house green-kneed and with dirt beneath my fingernails I'll be in trouble for staining my dress. Pala will frown in that way she so often does but remain silent, those thick wrinkles between her brows deepening in knowing that I have created more work for her.
  My sisters will scorn me also, the eldest Andromeda especially. If she and her mother had their way the women of the family would be locked away, entirely out of sight until the day they were shipped across the seas to be wed.

  Punishment will come later, but right now I do not care.

  With that thought, I crush the rest of the fruit between my palms. What's done is done. It bleeds, thick, and red, and beautiful — in some sick way.

  That's when I hear her. She's tentative in her steps, treading lightly as she knows this place is sacred, well, to me at least.

  She sits quietly beside me for a long while, so long that I fear we may never speak. An ear-splitting silence is the only sound to echo in the empty spaces between us, creating words that pierce me like a dagger and chill my bones like ice. I hear them now, all the angry grit-filled words she wants to yell at me, and in all honesty, I do not blame her in the slightest. She's angry, and rightly so, I am too. 

  — But she does not yell, instead, when she finally speaks her voice is soft; quiet as the star after which she is named. "Father is looking for you."

  My first thought is unjust and accusatory; if he knew me at all then he would know where to look. But he didn't, so he didn't. "Then let him look." I say spitefully.

  "You cannot hide forever, Ophelia." She purses her lips into a thin line, "Sooner or later you must face him."

  As soon as the words leave her lips I know she's right, but that doesn't make the thought any less bitter. "I know." The words taste acrid and wrong, and I stare back down at my hands.

  On second thought, maybe the lines were more akin to the branches of a tree, for webs were not so linear. Each of the distinct crimson cuts carving their path in the same way the dark limbs of the pomegranate tree silhouetted against the morning sky, hands outstretched and pleading. Begging for a mercy that would never come. 

  I had never known a red web. Spiders did not tend to gut their prey in the same way men did. They killed in silence, and when they were done, no one could be truly sure the prey had ever existed in the first place. I had seen many a tree cursed scarlet by the cruelties of man, those stains remained, year after year, storm after storm. 

  My back presses up against the gnarled trunk of my mother's favourite tree. Pala once told me it was older than time himself, planted by the gods. Though as I grew I came to disbelieve her, and I stare upwards, noticing the way Ascella's eyes follow my gaze sky-bound.

  The leaves of my mother's pomegranate tree are crisp and fresh, violently emerald and not yet fleeting from autumn's heavy hand. Looking up I remembered a time when the branches lay bare, and the leaves fell to carpet the land in one thousand shades of amber — a time when I had dreamed of sitting beside my mother beneath the tree.

  "We still have time, you know." Ascella says, tearing me from my thoughts.

  "Three days." I retort bitterly, "That is not time."

  "It's time enough to say goodbye. Be grateful for that small mercy at least, Andromeda and I had to fight father to allow you that much."

  When I turn to her, her eyes are glassy and unkempt, tears fighting to drown the dark brown pools. It hurts to see my sister upset, but it doesn't dull the bitterness I feel towards her now. "Why did you lie to me... Both of you." My chest clenches painfully as if my heart cannot bear the thought of Ascella's betrayal.

  "You know we could never have gone against father's orders." She frowns. "We gave him our word."

  "You gave me your word first and foremost. I expected as much from Andromeda — but from you..." A strange laugh escapes my lips, it's foreign and hollow and I find myself unable to continue or else I may snap at her again.

  "I am not sorry." My sister says, and I hear the deep exhale leave her chest, with it fleeing all hope for a fight-less resolve. "I did what I thought was best to protect you. I will never apologise for that."

  " — To protect me?" I cannot stop myself. Her words have set alight the spark inside me that now threatens to burn us both. It rages, hot and unforgiving as I let loose and all my words come tumbling out, like water through a broken dam. "I have three days Ascella — three days to say goodbye to everybody and everything I've ever known! — And then what? — Am I to be sold or bartered off to some nobleman and used as little more than a broodmare until I grow too old and too sterile to be of any further use? — Because I will not." I scowl at her in the vicious way Pala so often scolds me for. "I refuse. I will die before I let father sell me off to become yet another hag wife in some old man's harem."

  Ascella opens her mouth to speak but I am not yet done. " — How long have you known?"

  "... Ophelia, please. You know it's not that simple —,"

  " — How long, Ascella?" I demand. She bites her lip, knowing her guilt just as well as I do. "...Since the night of the harvest festival..."

  The realisation knocks the breath from my lungs. Two weeks. Two whole weeks she has known this and did not tell me, but I keep my voice steady; deadly calm. " — And Andromeda?"

  "She has always known."

  Of course, I think and cannot help but feel betrayed, mostly by Ascella as I'd come to expect no less from Andromeda, she had always been just as selfish and self-centred as the rest. Besides, this was a fate she had wanted, pined for even. From the moment of her inception, Andromeda had dreamed of nothing more than the power an advantageous marriage could bear her. She was just as selfish as her mother.

"Three days..." I whisper, as if hoping that saying it aloud once more will make the realisation settle faster, but it does not. In three days time, I'll be gone, set sail on a ship to a foreign land, handed off to strange men. The thought makes me feel sick.

  — And that's when I feel them, that unfamiliar heat in my cheeks, that awful lump in my throat. I will not cry, I tell myself.

  Three days.

  The world is closing in around me, the lump growing to a dull ache, and the trees before me at the borders of the grassland beginning to sway with salt. I will not cry.

  Ascella senses the change in me, the slow crumbling of resolve, and she says nothing, instead extending her arm around me as she holds me silently beneath the pomegranate tree.

  — And then, I cry.

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QOTD- What do you think is happening? -TFOA