Thy Secrets Should Be Sung

Chapter Fifteen: Penthesilea

 The sound of leaves echoed in his ear. With every step and stride they crunched beneath his heel, with every gust of wind they rustled, shaken from their trees.

Today the forest was equal to the beauty and color of the garden itself. The very air was thick with the scent of pine, the whispering wind, and the colors of fall. It was a fullness he could not describe.

The Knight felt a twinge of guilt. Leaves of gold, and red, and fire—the Princess would never know this autumn. "Would she speak words of poetry, or merely sigh, contented by the October air?" he wondered. His heart yearned to see her loose, to walk these woods if but for a single afternoon.

He would have coveted it, this autumn, had he not known, in his heart of hearts, that fall was also the season of death.

The Knight came to a stand of trees. Here there was a sickly tree that had turned before the rest, and shed its colors early. Its naked boughs looked all the more thin and lonely next to its fuller brothers. Leaves had piled at its base, where exposed roots had made a protective hollow.

Huddled together, they'd been gathered by the wind.

He crouched down and chose five perfect leaves from the pile, cradling them in his hands like delicate, fragile shells. "But I am stubborn and she is stubborn, and I cannot, will not, yield now."

He ventured on to the Princess's cage.

When the Knight wrenched open the garden gate a warm wind blew against him, a deep exhale. A spring mist hung in the air, dew clung to the tops of petals, the tips of buds. The air was heavy and moist, it soothed his parched throat.

He turned and locked the autumn dryness out.

The meadow was littered with green and lilac, yellow and vanilla, a thousand colors, a thousand scents in bloom. Softly, silently, he stepped through the petals of an endless spring. They stuck to his heel and were ground, muddy, into the earth.

He found his Princess by the summer house. She had pulled a heavy table from the grotto, and set it outside in the shade of the fig, leaving a long, dirty rut in the grass where she had dragged the table through the field.

And here she sat, book in hand.

The Knight approached. He stood at attention, still as a statue, waiting for her to acknowledge his presence.

The Princess gave him the slightest of nods, then read on, her fingers dancing, with the upmost of care, over the thin, tissue-like paper of her book.

He glanced down; the feet of the antique table were caked with mud. He grimaced.

The Princess read for a few minutes. She read slowly, and deliberately. More than once she flipped back a page, or two, reading and rereading particular passages, until, apparently, she had gleaned some hidden meaning from them.

Satisfied, she laid her book down. "Thank you for waiting." She beckoned for the Knight to sit. He sat.

"Speak, and tell me your ills," she said. "For once again I sense your heart is troubled. What do you think is the cause of your suffering today?"

The Knight spread his leaves out on the table for her to admire. "Look Princess," he said, "I have brought you a present of the outside world. The signs of fall, the prophets of winter. Consider their colors a fire, of decay: whilst green is the color of life, these hues herald only death."

The Princess looked them over. "The leaf dies so the tree may live," she said. "Is this not natural?"

"And in spring the tree is born anew," the Knight agreed. He snatched up a leaf in his metal claws. "I have no quarrel with this, Princess, it is the way of things."