SIR DEIMOS IS, undeniably, a bastard. A stern, surly-faced killer of a man, far too striking for his own good. Though, as much as I hate to admit it, he does have some more admirable qualities; namely, that he likes his space. Or maybe, it is only that he is able to acknowledge his own insufferableness. Or perhaps it is me that he finds insufferable. Whatever the reason, I am grateful that he has yet to try and worm his way into bed beside me like so many other greedy-fisted others would.
  More importantly, his distinct lack of presence makes it an awful lot easier to sneak out. So after a while of waiting, when the sun is just a mere memory in the sky and there is still no sign of the soldier showing up, I creek open the door. The hall is long empty, though the burnt-down sconces flick shadows up the walls, making me hesitate. You're imagining things, I tell myself when I think I see the disembodied figure of a man, but it is far too large and gone all too soon to be a person.

During the day this Northern heat is almost unbearable, but at night it is like an entirely new world, a different domain with a new set of rules. As the outer majority of the palace is open-aired, I stifle a shiver as I walk along one of the many halls with only a long line of balconies separating me from the endless night. Below, at the foot of the mountain, the city sleeps. A fire here and there, but mostly eery stillness.
It is that same freakish stillness that steals my gaze and almost causes me to trip. I grapple for the stone balcony just in time to save myself from falling, but when I look back to see what could possibly have thrown me in this endless plane of smooth marble floors, my stomach drops.

A serpent. Not overly large, not particularly small, but terrifyingly, a severe slash of oil-slick black in this world of half-lit shadows. Back at home, our snakes are almost all harmless, funny little green things that rarely bite and live in the grass and woodlands. Ascella even managed to catch one once — she kept it for a week before father found it under her bed and snapped it like a twig. But this, with its smooth, black body and blood-red underbelly, is something so foreign I am not sure how to react. If I run will it chase me?

I don't realise how long we've been frozen, this curious creature and I — eyes locked in some kind of unspoken struggle — until the chill creeps in again. I wrap my mother's wool shawl I brought with me tighter around my shoulders, it does little to ward off the cold, though my thin nightgown offers even less. Then, almost as suddenly as it had appeared, I blink, and it is gone.

I rub my eyes, staring at the place where that thing was moments prior. Nothing remains beyond the night. Perhaps I had only imagined it, sleepless and half-dead as I feel. The rest of the way to Ascella's room is rushed and not nearly as fleet-footed as I should be. It's the involuntary weariness of every shadow and turn — feeling like at any moment the serpent will return to wrap itself around my legs like an anchor — that has me rushing breathlessly through her door.

"Whatever is the matter with you?" Andromeda rushes over. Except she does not come to help me, she comes straight past me to check the hall behind me is clear before locking the door behind us, "You're flushed like you were chased."

"No," I say, wishing the blood pooling in my cheeks to dissipate, "I just — the shadows worried me is all."

"Are you sure you were not followed?"

"No, at least, I don't think so." The snake slithers through my mind again, a stygian ink spill that seeps its way into my dreams, tainting them black, blossoming into nightmares like blood from a clothed wound.

"It is too risky for us to keep coming together like this." Says Andromeda, drawing a white cloth over the windows, as if the stars themselves may seek to betray our secret meetings.

We all know it, we have known it since that first night. I have known it worst of all tonight. Sir Deimos may not try to pry his way inside my bed at this night in particular, but it is only a matter of time. For all we know it could very well be tonight that is the night that he decides to wander down those cold stone halls and force his way through my door where he will only find an empty bed. Curiosity bites at my mind, wondering just what it is that he would do at the reckoning of such a sight.

"She's right," The look of surprise on my sister's faces is scarcely hidden. They expected these words from one another, the logical, level-headed ones, and well thought that I would be the one in need of persuasion. "After tonight we should abandon these meetings altogether, at least, for a while."

Ascella's soft brows knit together in thought, "But we cannot stop — at least, not just yet, we still need to figure out a way to help him."

"As I said before, I say we pay one of the footmen to deliver him a message — or perhaps better yet a stable boy. I've seen the stables, they are closest of all to the mouth of the mountain, by that crag in which we first entered this god-forsaken place, where all the carriages come in." There's that deep look of concentration on Andromeda's face, resuming some previous conversation that they have had without me. I tell myself it is only that I was late, no other reason. They trust me, think me worthy of their knowledge and truths. "— There must be some footman or stable boy there that can be bribed."

As in all things, I am an outsider looking in. A creep, voyeuristic and desperate to be heard, felt, needed by someone, anyone. "Who are you talking about?"

Cold shock strikes the thought straight from my eldest sister's face, she is a river run raw, fraught with empty felt, "How have you so easily forgotten how at this very moment your own father rots beneath your feet... Gods have mercy, I always knew you were cold Ophelia, but I wish you would at least try to feign some compassion every now and again, for our sake if not for your own!"

"I forgot him with only as much ease as he would have forgotten me. He was your father five times over before he was once mine or Ascella's." Why must it always come down to this? Though we may forever be bound in blood our hearts have always run parallel, never touching, damned to be forever unable to understand the other's ache as keenly as our own.

"That's not... He loved you, Ophelia, only you pained him most keenly. You look too much like your mother."

Yes of course, I think bitterly, blame the dead so that they cannot bite back.
Ascella, ever the intermedium, clears her throat as if that can brush away all that thick air between us, "So Meda, how did you come to know the stables?"

"Daedalus took me." She softens at once, supple as new wax.

"He has a filly there, a beautiful bay thing that he said the sea nymphs gifted him — and that they bore her from the tainted seafoam from the shore where his son's body washed up. Oh, you should see her Ascella, how she runs and bounds about, and she'll take wheat grains straight from your palm. Daedalus says that he will let me name her when she comes of driving age."

It makes me sick, the way she can talk of such cruelties in the same selfish breath that she celebrates life, how she brushes over the wasted lifetime of a boy and the grief of a father in favour of something tasteless.

•  •  •

THE HALLS ARE colder than before, the chill holds a cruel hand of cold, brushing my thighs and peaking my breasts through my thin nightgown. This land offers few mercies, however, when I am almost over halfway back to my room and there are still no serpents to be seen I take it as a sign of clemency from these Northern Gods.
  And then their grace abruptly ends as a slither of thick black rope darts across the floor less than five steps ahead of me.

  "Damn these Gods! Why on earth are there so many of those horrid things!" The suddenness of my warm breath in the frigid air pants a small cloud from my lips. And then all at once, it is not nearly so cold anymore, freakish warmth radiating from somewhere behind me as if I am stood before an open flame.

  "Blasphemy is punishable by death, little lamb."