Work Text:
The physical characteristics of the plant that appear repeatedly show us its signature: the green color, the veins, and the alternating pattern of the leaves, stem, and flowers. The overall gesture of the plant is that it is large and steady on the ground, with voluptuous, round, heavy foliage and a small head of hundreds of flowers that grow out of the leaves, leaving them behind and pointing to the sky: Earth and heaven seem to be present in the plant.
-Corn Lily:
Queen of the Mountain Meadows
A Plant Study by Elizabeth Heyns
-
There’s a new hunter in the manor.
Mary has seen her once, and nothing more. She had been chasing after a cat, clicking her tongue after an oily, skinny looking thing; where she almost missed it the first time if not for the brilliant yellow of its eyes. (When she thinks about it later on, she blames her impulses on sentimentality— missing her darling Angoras and comforts of home.)
Instead what she found was a domestic chapel she didn’t know existed, the skeleton key frame of the nun occupying it, and god, her eyes. A piercing yellow, a sick cloying color to the humor of her irises that ran Mary through the second she stepped into the nave and they were hot. Sucked the breath that was not there from Mary’s lungs like a solar flare and made her skin feel like ash.
She ran almost immediately after, naturally. Slinking through the manor’s mirrors if only to douse the heat that burned just under her ribs.
If she knew any better, she would swear it felt like her heart was beating again.
-
There’s a nun in the hallway.
It’s a ghosting whisper of an interaction, surely, not anything that can mean much. Except Mary can’t bring herself to meet her gaze.
Oh, but she can feel it. God can she feel it. The coil of heat rests thick like a brand against the space of her shoulders, and they ache like they haven’t since the guillotine weighed heavy on her body. The disciple is prettier than she remembers, yet maybe that’s because Mary won’t keep her in direct sight, and she smells of something rotten- or maybe water left to stand too long, stale and flat. It ferments into the chill to her voice, a silken, quiet sound Mary has never heard before, and she finds herself shivering all of a sudden as it twists down her spine. The sun is still there on the back of her neck, but the heat of it is gone.
“Your majesty,” the disciple rasps, bowing her head and bending her neck, as if this was a royal banquet- or perhaps even more bizarrely, a communion.
Those words, as flattering as they are to hear, should not be found in the mouth of someone like her. There’s something there Mary isn’t quite sure she likes. It’s not unsettling, but it’s human. It’s hungry. Mary feels like she should be on her knees, orison folded between her hands like she’s practiced all throughout her life. Instead she pulls up her skirt into a curtsy, politely, begging for her knees not to collapse.
Her mouth is so dry she’s afraid to open it, like salt or sand might come pouring out if she tries.
“Sister,” she croaks, in acknowledgment. Her throat hurts, not in the way it usually does, with pin strike stitches keeping her loose flesh and sinew together, but in needle thin tightness that claws up her esophagus like some kind of wretched beast. She continues to stare straight ahead, until the center lines of the hallway carpet blurr into a pale white wave.
“We have…” Mary can hear the way she chews on the words, as though she’s licking them from her teeth, savoring. Bread and wine and body and blood, “a match together.”
A choice string of words, very much not fit for a queen, curdles hard in her stomach, the air stale, burning and frozen all at once as it sits idle in her lungs. She nods once, curt.
The silence stretches on for a beat too long, and Mary can almost imagine the way the disciple is looking at her: the particular careful arch of her eyebrows, her thin mouth. Those yellow eyes, slitted and sharp, but perhaps they’re shadowed by the dim light of the hallway to the same gold Mary used to covert. How does someone even come about irises shaded to riches? God knows.
(God does, probably)
Finally, the disciple murmurs, “I’ll see you there,” and her voice is awful now, full of augmented fourths and tenderness, not unlike the chirp of a cat.
She goes without another word.
Mary doesn’t realize she has a white-knuckled grip on her skirts until the disciple turns away, and the heat of her gaze is no longer fixated to her shoulders. The ache in her arm makes itself known viciously, and Mary hisses, immediately trying to massage feeling back into the muscle.
In the mirror that night, she has five finger-shaped bruises, pressed into her palm, from where her delicate veins refuse to bleed.
-
There’s a nun in the foyer.
Mary is cursing lightly, which in hindsight she probably shouldn’t do in the presence of a nun. But she was hoping to arrive early enough to avoid the burn of the disciple, and it seems like that wasn’t going to happen.
To save face, she curtsies towards her, with at least a tad bit more regality then last time before sitting in her chair. The ruckus of the survivors behind the curtains act as a backdrop to the scene of the subsequent carnage, and the disciple regards her with a curious look.
“Do you like flowers, your majesty?”
The question catches her off guard, but almost instantaneously Mary thinks of her old gardens back home; rolling mazes of bushes and paths and statues and fountains, thick with blooms of all sorts of hues. An explosion of grandeur, of wealth. Of secrecy. Oh, how she loved those flowers. How odd it is that the disciple makes her so nostalgic.
“I’m partial to them.” She swallows harshly, “Why?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Mary watches the nun fold her abnormal-pale hands together, like those long rotting fingers needed something, a fixation perhaps, to occupy themselves with.
“Good. That’s good,” she says, and the cat bumps it’s forehead under the overlap of her prayered fingers. Her eyes, sharp and hot, flicker towards her, “bring some to me after the game?”
It’s tilted like a question, but feels more like a demand. Mary wouldn’t know how to decline.
-
Mary finds herself out back behind the chapel.
She didn’t have to be here, she thinks. She could’ve stayed in her room, cornered herself away as a reflection in her mirrors. But she’s here instead, and it makes as much sense as anything else does in the manor. The disciple, still covered in gore, blinks owlishly at her a couple times, like she wasn’t expecting the royal highness to follow through on her request, even though she’d asked for her in the first place— and somehow Mary couldn’t keep away, running hot on adrenaline still, with a bouquet of whatever flowers she had on hand, tacky with sap and blood her grip.
“What, ah-” Mary makes a vague gesture, “is all this? A garden?”
It would be quite the macabre garden if that was the case, but it’s all that Mary can truly come up with: the courtyard she’s standing in all strange shadows and sliding-scale sense of physics that roll behind her eyes, pale stones and rotting greens jutting out from the wet ground and the smell of something sweetly thick wreaths them both like smoke.
“No,” the disciple says. The sound doesn’t match with her mouth or person saying it, and Mary, vaguely, realizes she’s been wearing a mask this entire time. “It’s a cemetery. It’s mine.”
Mary’s brow pinches, and hesitates closer to the disciple, skirts swaying around her legs with the movement.
They’re close to each other now: Mary can feel the disciple shedding heat from where she’s on her knees, one of the stones resting in her lap. Mary can see it now, as the disciple tightly brushes away a few chips from the inscription she’s been carving. Mary recognizes it as the name of one of the survivors, or at least the title of one— the coordinator— and remembers, with a bit of a sick thrill, how she was one of the survivors to fall in their match today. Quickly, she scans the rest of the headstones, and finds they all have the names of the survivors.
“Why?” Mary asks. Her voice is real and not like the disciple’s at all; the sound falls like a lead weight. “You don’t even have any bodies to bury.”
For a second— not even a second, less than that— the disciple doesn’t look like herself. She’s a strange pale thing, a stringy cat or a whip or shadow and also nothing like that at all. Too many teeth bundled in with ragged fur. And then she settles back into the shape of a woman again, and Mary can’t even be sure what she saw was real, and certainly wasn’t holy. Not anymore.
“Do you know what corn lilies are, your majesty?” She asks. Mary is close enough to see the way those slitted eyes: pale yellow in the reedy light, almost like old glass, jerk to her as she shakes her head.
“I was a shepherd,” the disciple breathes, a thin, wispy concept, “And I was young, and foolish, and let a ewe graze in a field of corn lilies. Tall, beautiful flowers, like they reach into heaven. They’re sickening to sheep.”
Her pale hands are curled into fists against the headstone, knuckles made even whiter by how tightly the disciple’s holding them. “She was pregnant. She lambed. And the baby… well, the baby was wrong. He was born with one eye— right in the middle of his head— and barely lived past the overmorrow.”
There’s a horrified silence. “I don’t like this story.” Mary says, softly. She lets her eyes fall shut, breathing in the greening-sweet and rotten smell, rather than look at the disciple any longer.
“Most people don’t like these kinds of stories.” She says, her voice full of an awful kind of gentleness, and she hears her drive the stone back into the dirt. “That’s why I bury them.”
Mary has to tamp down the urge to reach out and put her hands around the disciple’s wrists, the disciple’s throat, to get her to stop. (There’s something attractive there that makes Mary squirm, her hands around the disciple’s throat, like the disciple had hers around the coordinator’s just a bit ago.)
“I do not have a soul,” the disciple starts, skin rippling like water when something’s underneath, “haven’t in a long time. But my lamb did. These survivors do. And I buried my lamb, right in that field of lilies, right under what killed him. It gives me peace of mind to do the same now.”
The disciple is a predator, and Mary’s every instinct knows it— but she’s still here anyway, standing so close and rooted in place (she could stand here forever, looking down upon the disciple and breathing in, and in, and in, and never out.) and wondering if she can grasp the disciple before she turns to shadow.
Instead she sets her bouquet down on the wet ground of the coordinator’s grave, and asks, “What do you think her soul looks like?”
The disciple rocks back onto the balls of her feet, and hums in thought, the reverb of it buzzing high and sharp enough that it makes Mary’s teeth ache. “Like driftwood. And I can snap it in my hands, and make it hurt.”
Mary has never agreed with something more.
-
The nun is in the library.
Mary doesn’t want to say she’s seething, because that’s unladylike, but she has been staring heavily for the past couple of minutes. In bewilderment, maybe. No one else was supposed to be in the library while she browsed— and yet.
Maybe it was the inclusion of it being the nun in the first place. It was different with her, like she was a set animal meant to be perpetually pacing around her habitat of the church, the bloodbath of the matches. An untouchable figure bound by faith and violence. Mary realizes it’s a silly thought now that she’s put it to words, but the disciple looks strikingly human at the moment, and she isn’t sure what else to think.
In the swallowing dusk of the evening, the disciple is curled up languidly in a threadbare armchair; long, long legs spilling off the edge in a way that can’t be comfortable as she peels through a cracked tome sitting in her lap, other hand lazily stroking along the thin back of her cat. She’s very pale— white as ash, purpleish shadows in the curve of her cheek, her nose. All her shadows are purple, and Mary wonders whether that’s somehow on purpose. She’s only ever known people whose shadows were dark, black and brown.
It’s all somehow even more unsettling after the godforsaken heat and smell of stale water. But it raises questions that she never gets answers to. She’s not sure where she gets it from; maybe that stupid naivety, the one that caused a downfall of a queen, but she sets her brow and walks right up to the disciple.
“What makes you any different from the violinist?” She demands, because she has to know. “From all his- his wiles, his demonics.”
The disciple doesn’t startle, but she freezes, hand splayed still on her page, eyes flicking up to Mary in a way that drains any confidence she had.
“The devil plays the fiddle,” the disciple says, flatly, as if she was expecting the question, and her voice is strange. Not inhuman strange, but some other kind of strangeness Mary can’t quite place. “I play the organ. Accompanying, but very different.”
Mary feels sick to the back of her teeth, but her eyes narrow, trying to meet the disciple’s gaze headstrong. There’s a beat, and then two, before the disciple breaks contact, and Mary can breathe again. She tucks her slitted pupils to the window she sits at, expression shuddered, always hidden, and then the setting sun is on her porcelain face; there’s nothing to see but blankness and light.
Mary follows, and finds she’s looking down to the courtyard. There’s a few of the survivors, lining up in a string for a game of some sorts. She sees the cowboy break from the line, running. He’s something from a breakdown, beautiful and barely touching the earth; everyone who tries to stop him only finds his shadow, which trails behind him golden brown in the eventide. When he makes it to the end he doesn’t slow, just loops around the makeshift posts in a wide lazy circle, like a bird in flight.
Mary wonders what it looks like, the soul of a man like that. Something bright probably; with feathers.
“I play the harp.” She murmurs suddenly, offering, and she’s not sure what she’s offering.
The disciple makes a soft noise, almost bordering on amusement. “Well, your majesty, that makes you David.”
“Call me Mary. Please.”
It goes quiet again, but after a bit, the disciple says, “My name is Ann.”
When Mary looks back, the disciple has gone, a pool of shadows left in her place.
-
There’s a nun in her dreams.
It’s a haze in the shape of a field, tall flowers with white plumes up to her shoulders and moving like a ripple of heaven. The disciple is there, and has her hand flat against Mary’s stomach, just where her ribs give away to softness. No soul, she says, beautiful body, beautiful corpse.
Wouldn’t you know, Mary says, and the disciple grins. Her eyeteeth are bone-white and porcelain, and sharper than they have any right to be.
We’re more than that though, aren’t we? Divine gifts, one of a kind- I want to see you in entirety. Bared teeth, throat open.
Her eyes are yellow, and Mary murmurs, Cat in the grass, without meaning to say it aloud. But the disciple just laughs, low and amused. Mary decides she likes it, and with all things she likes, she wants to own it tight; selfishly, obsessively.
This is a dream, Mary says. She’s not sure she meant to say that aloud either, but it’s true.
The disciple- Ann, her name is Ann- cocks her head. How do you know?
Mary brings her hands up around Ann’s, hovering just over her wrists, her fingers; not quite touching. You’re cold, she says. That’s how I know.
The storm of flowers swallows them up whole.
-
Mary finds herself back in the chapel.
She has a fistful of corn lilies held delicately in her hands and a nervous sweat crawling up her neck.
Ann looks at her expectantly, the lowlights of her eyes addicting, and Mary burns.
“A… gift,” Mary says, holding out the bushel, though it’s more of an offering. “For your garden.”
“Cemetery.” Ann corrects, but her long arms unfurl to gently take the flowers into them, cradling the delicate blooms against her masked cheek like she’s holding a one eyed newborn lamb of God. They’re beautiful and soft against her, in a way Mary can’t bear to describe, and in a way, she’s certain that’s what Ann’s soul must’ve looked like. She wants to see her face. Wants to see the look of reverence she must be wearing. Lion and the lamb.
Ann turns to her, cocks her head.
She’s forced to clear her throat, the hot slither of thread stitched in her esophagus constricting. “We- have another match together.”
And if the flicker of light in Ann’s eyes seems to gleen brighter, hungrier, then Mary wouldn’t swear to it.
-
Ann sinks her cross in the soft, squirming parts of the survivors' bellies, a god thing bent low with her veil thick to the ground, her habit heavy with cold rain.
“Look at what you do to me,” she says, and she is beautiful, “look at what I can do to you.” She cracks her spine like a flower stem with a heavy sound, folds herself in two over the body, her mask emotionless, slick with ichor and bile, and it stares into Mary's face. It’s not a mirror, but she can feel her face form onto hers. “God means to be eaten. God means to drown.” rasps Ann, praying hail marys over the gurgle of blood.
Mary, Mary, Mary. That’s all she does- look and be vain and be enthralled. She could be David. She feels a hand on the back of her head, long fingers tangling into the roots of her choppy hair, pulling taut, pulling her down to the earth she was buried in for so long. Was the disciple buried? Or did the skies decay her body as it was left to rot?
So many questions and never enough answers. Rainwater drips into her mouth for the slightest moment, before it’s replaced with the slick porcelain, lips sliding against something molded and shaped to be serene. Beautiful. Mary knows her disciple is more than that. She grips the fabric of her habit and follows Ann to the earth, trying to bury a god in her grave, the gesture of heaven and earth in their stalks. Her burning fingers slide and pluck at the chipped lip of Ann’s mask, around her cheeks, her chin.
“Let me see you,” she asks, and her mouth tastes like copper and salt and something sick in the cracks of her lips. “Worship you in entirety.”
Ann makes a noise Mary’s never heard before. Partly like she’s trying to swallow her own tongue and hiss between gritted teeth all at once, and maybe something else, lower and harsh like the scrap of metal on metal. “You should know what you’re doing. What you’re close to.” She says, and she sounds unsteady.
It makes Mary shiver and break out in a hot-sweat, every bit of her skin alive and trembling. “Please. Please let me.” She begs, and she’s never begged before: not before the courts, her people, the executioner, God. But Ann is different. She’ll always be different.
Her fingers curl up again, and the mask pulls away without any give, and Mary’s given in, succumbed to Ann’s wiles, snares, wickedness, eyes, mouth, smile, tongue, clutches, and they kiss, god do they kiss.
Hot. Teeth bared. Like two hands folded in prayer.