Foam sprinkled the sandy shore; a soft sunset-light twinkled along the darkening, rippling sea. A salty breeze brushed along the dunes and danced around the tops of the cliffs, and the brave bits of vegetation that managed to grow there swayed along to music only they could hear.
And he watched. He always watched, up on his cliff above the sea. He watched the sun setting and the breeze blustering and the waves caress the yellow-white beach. Most of all, he watched her. With her hair unbound and her dress fluttering around her like a pretty white wraith. She was lovely and small and delicate as the very flowers in her dark gold hair, and quick and clever as any he’d ever known. She was sweet, she was kind, she was vastly intelligent—
At least, he thought so. He’d never actually spoken to her, all these weeks, all these months, all these long, long years. Yet every day she came down to the sea and danced by the waves as the sun set beneath the waters, and every day he watched her, loved her ever more. Life, he knew, would never be complete without those moments every sunset-time, with her like an angel on the sands below.
In days past, he would dream of going down to those selfsame sands, of speaking to her, or dancing with her along the shore. Imagine, at times, holding that small white hand in his, kissing those soft red lips. He longed for those make-believe moments, wished, as he watched the bloody red sun fall away into the darkness, that he could make every one a reality. And yet he could not reach her, touch her, and this awful knowledge filled him with such bitter regret!
The boy sighed, starting to his feet. She was going away, back down the beach towards the Hochlein Point, and in what seemed half a moment, his dear love had disappeared, now but a lovely memory. He sighed again, much louder this time, and turned his back on the bright-burning stars, the night’s chill already creeping in beneath his jacket.
Dawn, noon, dusk all came and went, and as the sun started its descent into the sea once more, the peasant boy sat again on his cliff, waiting for his golden-haired girl. He was playing with a white wild flower, the kind she wore sometimes in her hair, and as he twisted and twirled it ‘round, it fell from his fingers, tumbling over the edge of the cliff. On his hands and knees, he leaned out from the cliff’s edge, and saw it, pushed this way and that by the fickle wind, at last disappear into the rock-piles below. It was odd, he thought, how such a beautiful thing seemed so unwilling to fight away obscurity in the dank, salty darkness of those rocks. Odd, and sad, that it would so happily disappear from man’s knowledge, one less pretty flower on the edge of a cliff by the sea. Shaking his tousled head, he turned to watch the Hochlein Point—she should have appeared by then, and yet somehow, he knew there was a reason for this uncommon tardiness. Knew in his heart of hearts that something was different, amiss, even.
At last that golden hair flashed in the sun’s fading light, and she was dancing along the sand. The boy’s heart stopped in his chest when he saw, just behind—another figure. One with a blur of black hair like darkest night and dressed as she was, in white. Except it looked not so much white as a sort of miserable grey on this…this man.
The girl was oblivious, of course, to the boy’s jealous fury, and twirled happily down the shore, leaving in her wake a trail of footprints and scattered sea-foam. A dark cloud swept over the sun and for a moment that beautiful hair seemed to cease its glowing, its glittering, as the man dressed in white caught up with her. She’d thrown herself down into the warm sand, and up on the cliff, he watched them talk, heard, so far off, the sound of her tinkling laughter.
They went away early; they left before the sun had set. He watched his girl trail away, hand in hand with her dark-haired companion, and the red-orange light staining her white dress like old blood. He shivered, and then they were gone around the Point. What was it about that dark-smudged shape that worried him so?
All at once a movement caught his eye—sudden, rushed, wild as the last dark rays of sunlight flittered away into darkness. A distant white shape, racing laboriously along the sand. He could see it wasn’t a game, wasn’t anything so innocent as dancing. This was a sprint fueled entirely by fear, by terror. The boy froze, crouched over the cliff, and in his heart all his brightest dreams were realized. He could save her! Only, the steps down to the beach were hard to maneuver even in broad daylight, and with night setting in as it was, he hardly knew if he would survive the steep descent alive.
For long moments he stood, torn between all his dreams of rescuing his darling and wishing desperately to survive to see another day. She needed him! But so did his family, so did those stupid sheep and who knew who would milk the cows if he wasn’t there to do it.
Then, around the Point, came another figure. A vague form with hair so dark it blended in almost entirely with the blackness all around, grey-white clothes glowing oddly in the rising moon’s weak light. The boy’s heart jumped into his throat and in a moment he was stumbling down the stone-cut stairs, without hardly another thought for anything but that girl, his golden-haired darling. That awful man had something in his hand, something small, something glinting in the abruptly icy moonlight. Fumbling in his pockets as he scrambled along through the overhanging brush and squeezed past fallen boulders, he found his little pocket-knife, the one and only protection he had against this madman. What could he possibly mean to do, what heinous crimes had he dreamed up? The boy shuddered to think of it.
Finally he leapt off the stairs into the sand; it was still incongruently warm to the touch. Before he could pause a moment to get his bearings, the shepherd-boy was off down the beach, eyes darting everywhere at once, looking for prey and predator.
Froze, eyes wide, as he caught sight of them on the beach. At first glance, it seemed almost as if they embracing, as if this was but an intimate encounter between two lovers on a deserted beach. But the boy knew better, knew he’d seen her run from this dark-haired demon, and in a moment his worst suspicions were feared. It was, really, hardly evidence, but all at once he heard her sobs, quiet and impossibly haunting, above the continuous deep hum of the man’s voice. She was crying because of him, and our sweet hero was not going to stand for that.
He took a step forward, and then another, heart racing so loudly in his chest he was sure they would hear. Perhaps they were too rapt in their own dealings, for they did not hear nor see him as he edged closer, closer. Now he could see the arm tight around her waist, the knife pressed to her pale white throat, and again he froze, watching. Her beautiful eyes were wide, tears like unwrought silver slipping across cheeks soft and white as snow. She sniffled, but even that oft-pathetic sound was breathtaking, coming from those dark red lips. The shepherd’s boy held his breath, unsure, suddenly, what to do now that he was so close to rescuing his dear love from her captor’s clutches.
A voice, soft as silk but deep and ominous as the beating of a native’s drum, came to his ears. “See this boy, Ryta? He’s been watching you, darling. I saw him but yesterday up on the hill, ogling you like a lovesick puppy. And I rather don’t like the competition. Now, as influential as I am, I cannot seem to get anyone to rid me of him. All the men I know suited for the job merely laugh in my face, and those unsuited cannot seem to get their loutish heads around the matter without spewing it to all their pathetic drunkard friends. So here, dearest, is what I want you to do: send him away. He will not listen to anyone but you, and somehow, with death at your throat, I hope you will be a bit more obliging than usual.”
He could not believe, for a moment, how seemingly unsurprised the man was. Not a second of astonishment, not a single question. Somehow the dark-haired prig must have known he was coming, all along, and led him like a dim-eyed lamb. “I—I—” The shepherd-boy could only stammer, staring in grudging awe at the would-be murderer before him.
Then she spoke—his darling, his dearest, his own. She turned her eyes to him, bright as gems and full of unshed tears, and her voice was, however trembling, however frightened, the sweetest symphony to his ears. “Is it true?” she asked, and he could not decipher the tone of the question. Was she frightened of him? Was she angry? Was she – and here he could only hope – by merest chance, in love with him as he was with her?
“S-sort of,” he started, and his voice shook just as hers did. “See—”
“No one here,” interrupted the man, “cares to hear your sappy, cliché little love story, peasant boy. The deal between us is quite simple: you leave here, and never watch, dream or think of my girl again, and she lives. You refuse, and she dies, and so do you. I do not think that the decision will be hard to make, but”—his grip tightened on her waist, and she whimpered in pain—“I have been wrong before, no doubt.” As if, the boy thought, he didn’t know. As if the no doubt implied he couldn’t think of a time, as if he was some sort of awful infallible demon—
The knife pressed against his angel’s yet-unscarred throat, and his angry thoughts were abruptly interrupted. “How dare you!” the boy shrieked, shaking with impotent rage. “She isn’t anyone’s girl, and here you are threatening to kill us both because of petty jealousy? All this planned for a dull shepherd’s boy like me—you mustn’t be so important as you pretend, with such time on your hands.” It came out in a hurried, stumbling rush, but it seemed to stun the man a moment. Only just, and no more, for he threw back his head and laughed, and gods, a cruel, nasty sound it was.
“What a perfect little orator you are, boy. I assure you if your very appearance was not so distasteful to me, I might hire you as my next castle jester.” A pause, as his eyes darted between our hero and his desperate damsel. “But I have not time for your jokes. Ryta! Send—him—away.” And with every word his grip tightened on the knife, until his knuckles went stark white and harsh line of his jaw seemed ever crueler, ever sharper.
It all happened in a moment—the boy leaping forward, the dagger slipping from her neck and falling into the sand, the pocket-knife in his hand rising up, up, slashing the night-darkened hollow of his enemy’s cheek. Time slowed, and it seemed for a moment that the man would strike back, would reveal some weapon upon his person, and plunge it into the shepherd-boy’s earnest heart.
Impossibly, unreasonably, going against all that reality expected, he turned away, the slight un-avenged. “You have some courage to go against one as dangerous as I, little boy. Do not for a moment think that you will not pay for your insolence.” One last time he glanced over his shoulder, and the paper-thin cut oozed a liquid not so much red as black. A smile, at the horror on the boy’s face, pulled at his enemy’s mouth, and then a veil of darkness flashed over him, and he was gone.
“So…bloody dramatic,” gasped the girl, Ryta, and our hero fell into the sand beside her, gazing concernedly into those bright eyes. There was a cut across her neck, thin and shallow, and a trail of dark-beaded blood trickled down her pale white skin and into the sand below. “Don’t look so scared. Help me up, will you?” Dumbly doing as she asked, he sat beside her in the moonlight, hands shaking, hardly believing what he had done, however small and unimportant it might be.
“Thanks,” she said frankly, when the silence had stretched on for some time. And then the girl, his darling angel, who a moment ago had been in such dreadful danger, leaned over and kissed his cheek. He went rigid, sent away into some sort of heaven he had previously no knowledge of, and for a moment forgot entirely how to breathe.
She drew her hand across her neck, breathing deep, and sighed when her fingers came away stained red. “Oh, he’s done it again,” she moaned. “I swear if I get one more of these ridiculous cuts I will just scream.”
“Don’t you need a—” But for what seemed the hundredth time that night, he was interrupted.
“Shhh,” she said, inching closer and setting her head on his shoulder, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Stop thinking for a moment, will you? Look at the moon instead; isn’t she beautiful?”
Struck nearly dumb by the common sense of her words, he did as he was told, and together, the shepherd-boy and the golden-haired girl watched the moon mount majestically into the velvet-dark sky. And yet, even through her matter-of-factness, he could feel her trembling a little, from shock or fear or cold, he wasn’t sure. It just didn’t make sense for someone to go through that and be as calm as she appeared to be. Desperately, almost despairingly, he tried one last time to catch reality as it escaped into the star-strewn sky.
“I don’t—”
“Shush!” she said again, and giggled a little. “Just watch.”
So they did.
***
One of the first short stories I've finished to my satisfaction...ever. Please don't get all nitpicky, I'd much prefer you spent your time telling me what you thought of the characters and the dialogue and the plot and not complaining about split infinitives. Just tell me if I should read it over again for grammar mistakes. Hope you enjoyed it!
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