Psyche
My sisters were laughing. They had their skirts hiked up around their knees and they were skipping away from the water’s edge as yet another, much larger wave crashed toward the sandy shore.
The gaggle of men around them were only too happy to play along with my skipping sisters.
The gods had seen fit to bless us all with great and exceptional beauty.
I knew that. And they did too.
But I’d seen a dark side to beauty, long ago, and I’d never forgotten the lesson that my sisters had. Beauty always came with a cost. A price. All my life I’d been waiting for my lien to come due.
While my sisters pranced about, I kept to myself. I dressed in their rags, which were anything but rags to most anyone else. But to my parents, I heaped coals of shame on their heads that I didn’t own a single “new” dress. My parents hated how unwilling I was to flaunt, and I quote, “the body the young gods had seen fit to bless me with.” They hated how little I paraded my beauty, always demanding I wear more provocative clothing, that the more I highlighted my goods the better prospect I would gain so that their coffers might grow even bigger than they already were. That it was high time I found a suitor. Settled down. Made beautiful babies, ensuring wealth for all our future generations.
But even dressing as I did, I’d received more than my fair share of suitors. From wealthy laymen, to princes, and even kings.
I’d said no to all of them. Because it’d been apparent to me, even then, not one of them had cared even the smallest whit for me. If I would try to talk with them about crop rotations, or the riots happening in the southern kingdoms, I’d receive a demoralizing pat on my head and would be told “not to worry my pretty little head about it.” No one, it seemed, wanted to be with me as a peer, they simply wanted me as their prop. And I didn’t give a damn if mother was okay with that lot in life, I simply wasn’t. I wanted more.
Maybe I was cursed to have a brain. Maybe my life would have been far better for me if I’d been more like my sisters, Adelia and Rose.
My sisters were currently trying to ensnare the twin princes of Macedonia. Those poor besotted fools didn’t understand the truth of them though. The princes were blinded by their beauty, but in truth, my sisters had cold hearts. Dead ones. Like succubuses they would suck those men dry and then my capricious sisters would move on to the next fools in line. And there were always more in line.
No, beauty was a curse. I’d seen what it had done to my grandmother. She had been a renowned beauty in her day. Far prettier than I could ever be, or so the stories went, she’d landed the biggest fish for it too. The King of an exotic land full of gold and myrrh. She’d had five daughters. All of them gotten by rape. My mother being one of them. And then one day the King had grown tired of her and had had her beheaded for an imagined crime just so that he could play house with the next poor soul in line.
No, I was quite determined that I would not follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. A woman’s worth should be more to her mate than merely her looks and how many babies she could bear him. I wanted a partner who saw me as an equal. Or none at all.
Unfortunately, my father was quite determined to see me wed. In fact, I was already betrothed and had been since birth to a local merchant of some great mean. He was merely a fall back plan, if father couldn’t find himself something better. My time was rapidly running out, the princes’ visit had been father’s attempt at seeing me wed but I’d trained the eyes of the princes onto my sisters. If I’d wanted them, I was sure I could have had them. But that was a game I simply wasn’t willing to play.
I sighed, feeling empty and disillusioned by life. If I were a man I would never marry.
Suddenly a jaunty, whistling tune caught my ear. I was sitting a couple hundred yards away from my sisters and their toys. So, none of them heard what I did. Frowning, I turned on my seat, a prickly piece of lava rock, and looked behind me. At the dusty trail that led to the city.
There was a man on the trail, walking alone.
He had a sack in his hands. And his feet were sandaled, but coated in red dust, attesting to a long journey made. Judging by the clothes on his back, he was a poor farmer or peddler. There were holes at the hem, and along his collar. But his face was scrubbed and glistened in the waning sunlight. As though he must have bathed in the waters just a few yards away.
His hair was sparse, and his nose crooked. But he was smiling and singing in a robust tenor voice and I found myself smiling.
He looked so happy.
He was a man who had half of what I did, if that, and he seemed to be much more joyful than I’d ever been in my life.
“Psyche,” Adelia—my eldest sister—cried out, “join us!”
I glanced over. The men were looking at me with avarice in their eyes. Making my nerves shoot sky high. I had no desire to be anywhere near them. I shook my head. “No, I am fine right here. Thank you. Go. Play.”
Rose, my middle sister squealed as one of the twins (I did not know which) picked her up and tossed her boldly into the sea. There would be a wedding, possibly two in the not too distant future, I was sure.
Adelia, not to be outdone by Rose, skipped away from the other twin’s grasp. I’d already been forgotten.
I looked back toward where the peddler had been and gasped when I noticed him strewn out on the ground. As though he’d tripped and fallen.
I didn’t think. I merely jumped to my feet and ran toward him.
I reached him what felt like half a second later.
“Sir,” I cried, hastily kneeling so that I might help him up. But he was already on his knees and dusting himself off.
“Gods, how mortifying,” he murmured, still staring down at his dirt stained robes. “I do apologi—” he turned to look at me and suddenly the words died on his tongue. His cheeks blazed scarlet and his breathing inched faster.
I cleared my throat, used to the gawking my sisters and I seemed to elicit in others, but I’d never been fully comfortable with it. Pressing my lips tight, I gave him a strained smile. “Do not be ashamed, sir. I fall all the time.”
And to prove to him that I wasn’t merely spouting off nonsense, I turned my arm over, revealing two very large and ugly yellow-purple bruises. I wasn’t sure why I was so accident prone, but I was. Maybe because I was cursed with an impossible curiosity. My head was always in the clouds.
Without warning, he suddenly reached out and traced my bruise with just the tip of his forefinger. “Gods, I thought at first you were merely saying that to spare my own bruised ego. What did you do, milady?”
Heat suffused my cheeks. This male was so… different. He spoke like someone from the past. Long, long in the past. The iron age, at least. And though he’d momentarily been stunned to silence when he’d looked at me, he was respectful. Not saying or doing anything untoward or inappropriate.
Shoving my sleeve down, I said, “I ran into my head cook’s butcher block.” I cringed, recalling how much that bloody thing had hurt and how I’d been laughed at by the staff for my penchant for daydreaming.
I’d been reading a very fine book, I’d completely lost track of my surroundings. Which, sad to say, I often did while reading. Probably why father had demanded I stop reading immediately, unless I was sitting still in his library. I’d snuck that one out and had paid the price. I couldn’t let my father see the bruise, so I’d been wearing long sleeves until it faded. It was the height of summer and a dip in the ocean would have been wonderful today. But my sisters could not be trusted, they would tell father that I’d ruined his most valuable merchandise and I’d be locked away indoors until it healed. I hated the darkness. Hated the dank confines of the castle dungeon.