Dancing by witchlight

Celestine rubbed mindlessly at her unfocused, exhausted eyes; the honey scented candles propped around her burnt down almost to their wicks. She had to get this done; she had to finish the poem, otherwise she would miss her chance to say what she so needed for her heart to let up its oppressive aching. Love. That was what she was in, and out, and throughout. Love was all consuming, all being and omniscient in its pursuit of her. She was a plaything in its game, a pawn to move to it’s liking. Love had plucked her up in its flexing ever changeable fingers, given her a good shake to scramble her mind and then dropped her unceremoniously head over heels into the arms of a woman more noble and more astute than anybody had a right to be.

Madrigal, oh Madrigal, oh how nothing rhymed with Madrigal! Celestine let a frustrated half sigh roll from her lips, enjoying the whistle of sound in the otherwise silent bed chamber. She stood, shaking her skirts out from their crumpled assortment, and went to replenish the candles. She made the candles herself, honey and wax and lavender, and they smelled divine once the lick of a heated flame met their carefully placed wick. The flames lit anew, Celestine stood before the largest of the candles, a slim taper as strong backed and lengthy as her skinny forearm, and let the orange red of the flame burn into her irises. The ghost of black splotchy shadow travelled across her vision every time she blinked and she followed its journey across her eyeline, the easily amused smile of the bone-tired lifting the corners of her chapped blossom pink lips.

Coming away from the flames only when her eyes stung with the effort of hydrating themselves, Celestine gathered her dog-eared books and caterpillar soft furls of parchment and settled herself down upon her lumpy wooden cot, shifting until she could no longer feel the press of brittle hay poking obtrusively into her legs and rear. Her pillow, a flat deflated square of nothingness, did little to cushion her back, but Celestine paid it no matter as she wedged herself between the castle wall and her creative curiosity. She was a writer, a poet, a musician and most recently, a woman in love. The love part still astonished her; having no experience of such an emotion before Madrigal entered the city’s turreted walls.

Pursing her lips together, Celestine rubbed with the side of her fisted palm until her pencil markings disappeared into a smudge of grey matter over her most recent parchment offering. To write such a poetic speech, to put voice to her feelings, it was an offering, not an expectation. The musicians of the court, the poets and the jesters, they had a duty to entertain, and love was a scandalous part of that. The court, especially the King, loved to hear of blossoming affection. Let it be shared! He would bellow, red grape juice trickling down his white grey beard and staining the ever-damp front of his doublet. He didn’t want love however, he wanted embarrassment, mortification and rejection. It was hilarious to him to see those of lesser status flounder and be waved away by affronted royals and courtiers.

Celestine was determined not to become one of the King’s laughing stock. If she had wanted to garner the salacious sniggers of the court, she would have become a jester, not a respected court performer. As a woman she had more to prove than most, as did her sisters in creativity, and she wasn’t going to sully her chances with half formed thoughts and empty minded blabber about roses, forbidden touches and gazing hopelessly into another’s eyes. She laboured away for hours that night, sprawling words and scratching sigils of her own shorthand onto parchment until her hand froze up in cramping jolts. She fell asleep like that; one stained and furled hand leant up against the sandstone of the castle, her body curled into itself in a tense crescent moon of goose pimpled flesh and charcoal smudged eyes.

Celestine alighted from her bed clothes at dawn, exhausted and aching through her mind and her body. As a performer for the court she had no official duties until the luncheon feast. Breakfast was a time for quiet contemplative socialising in the castle rather than a time to be suitably entertained and it was these spare hours that gave Celestine the time to ready herself for what she was about to do that day. She drew her own bath, collecting the water herself from the well beyond the servant’s quarters, and heated it with flat skipping stones given their warmth by a naked flame she stoked in her make shift fireplace.

Ice cold water sluiced over Celestine as she bathed, flattening her eyelashes, numbing her lips and clinging to her pores with the tenacity of Harpagonella; it was awful and cleansing all at once and Celestine gasped her way through her washing, muscles shaking with the futility of the act as she cleansed her body of the sweat and writer’s graphite she had been using to recite her thoughts the night before. Finally dry and smelling of the honeyed perfume of the castle’s soaps, a subtle yet attractive scent that leant itself to her sweet nature, Celestine dragged on her performer’s robes; a heavy green corset and an unyielding ankle length gown secured at the waist with a pleated gold and brown belt; she had taken the boning out of her corset with a hair pin and her teeth after too many unbearable performances where she had been black and blue by the end and wheezing her sorrows into her palm between stanzas.

Her hair, a red brown fox’s fur of not dissimilar texture, she braided long down her back; the weight of it stabilising where it rested between her angel wing shoulders. She crushed pomegranate seeds in her hands and patted her fingers to a near dryness on a handkerchief before tapping the fruits stain to the apples of her cheeks; the pink hue giving colour to her otherwise pallid complexion. Her eyes, gently brown and unassumingly molten in sunlight, remained bare. She did not carry other such tools to heighten her desirability, nor did she hope she would need them. She had never been interested in capturing the attention of men; only that of one woman.

Celestine entered the court at midday, the sun dial the city people used to gauge the time of day shading the half mark of morning and lighting the golden promise of the rest of the afternoon. Insides a churning fumble, Celestine took her place alongside her sisters, head bowed and eyelashes flattened until they were summoned forward to present their humour, poetry or music. Cynthia went first, her gift of the garb warming up the court nicely, rolling chuckles from the noble’s throats and belly rumbling laughs from the King. She dropped into a deep curtsy when she finished, her corset fastened so tightly she choked on a breath as she rose back up. Celestine made to reach out and steady her but Cynthia waved her off with a flutter of her fingers. Best not, her dismissal said. Celestine drew back, but reluctantly.

Gwyneth, then Dahlia, and then Rosemarie went before her: poetry spilling from their rouged lips and gaining the adoration of the male court. Flowers were thrown forward, deep blooded roses, sweet pea and baby’s breath. The women collected them and adorned each other’s hair with them in relieved yet faux flirtatious offerings of acceptance. Celestine had received flowers many a time, had nudged them aside with the toes of her pinched performers slippers and stood stock still as Cynthia wove them liberally through her plaits and whispered hurried warnings of which men were approaching her to try and seduce her practicalities. It was a tentative existence, and Celestine was ready to stake it and begin anew.

Finally, she stepped forward into the lightened hollow of the performing circle, the grey flagstones beneath her soft soled shoes worn away from many a person treading there before her. Celestine swallowed thickly, her eyelashes bunching together as she squeezed her eyes tightly closed. She let out a breath and then flared her eyes wide, spirals of shadow and pinpricks of leering candle light grabbing her irises before her perforated gaze landed upon the only one in the room she had wanted to behold. Madrigal.

Madrigal, seated in a high backed elegantly carved chair of red wood and draped in deepest maroon robes, quirked an eyebrow at her from behind the high table where she sat next to the King and his adversaries. Madrigal, a witch and a mystery, a flash of heat and a strum of awakened love against Celestine’s heart strings, held her gaze as though she daren’t pull away for even a second. Celestine was beside herself and her legs buckled at the knees as she saw Madrigal’s full lips part and show her teeth in a gentile smile. The King leaned forward in his grandiose throne, beard sullied with wine already, and stamped his filigree gilded staff upon the floor with a menacing crack.

“Begin!” his sodden voiced boomed

Pulled from her attraction and distraction, Celestine immediately dropped herself forward, throwing her upper body down into a deep bow. Her hands shook as she straightened, her cheeks bleached pink as she tried to smooth her green skirt and reassemble her mind and wits. She was a writer, a performer, she knew the lines by heart, she could do this. Open your mouth you foolish girl! Celestine’s jaw eased open, her lips widening, and yet no sound escaped. The king slapped his hand angrily on his inner thigh and scoffed to his men, the revelry of someone messing up lighting his piggish eyes up like the sun breaching the horizon in mid-winter.

Madrigal’s face was displeasured and she hushed the King, her eyes soft as she watched Celestine. The witch, her soft almond face surrounded by tumults of rich black ringlets, beckoned Celestine with a gentle flourish of her fingers, not dissimilar to Cynthia’s dismissal, and Celestine felt her heart give a horrific lurch within her chest just before it dropped into her stomach and burned up into a dried husk within the acidity of her anxious stomach.

“I- I apologise, I…I just- I cannot- I’m sorry, so sorry, please forgive me-“ Celestine stammered, her voice returning in a ravaged whip of a whisper

Celestine ran. She grabbed handfuls of her emerald skirts and sprinted, blind as a mole, through the sandstone maze of the castle until she exploded out the servant’s quarters and into the shade of the castle garden. This is where they grew the bountiful fruits and vegetables that the court gorged on, where the red grapes turned themselves into wine for the king to pour gluttonously down his spoiled gullet. Celestine, hair devoid of the flowers of success, threw herself down onto a dew damp swath of moss, her hands gripping the sides of her wet cheeks as she raged at her stupidity.

“You idiot, you idiot, you IDIOT!” Celestine sobbed, her neatly braided hair escaping in wisps of reddish brown that stuck to her wet skin and irritated her to abandon.

She ripped her plaits out with agitated fury and then in another childish bout of rage kicked her performers slippers across the garden to land in a bed of bright and mocking petunias.

“I hardly feel it was the flowers fault now was it?” A voice spoke, it’s timbre rich as summer fruit and soft as down

Celestine looked up, her damp fingers retracting from her blotched and reddened cheeks. Madrigal stood amongst the flora and fauna looking as ever as though she herself was grown from the earth, her skin smooth as writers graft and her dark eyes as bright as the stars at twilight.

“My lady” Celestine mumbled, embarrassed and frustrated as a blaze of heat took over her cheeks and travelled down her chest like a rash.

“Madrigal. But you know that, don’t you?” Madrigal said kindly, stepping forward and then after a second’s contemplation, sitting herself down on the moss and bracken next to a stricken Celestine.

Celestine’s mouth opened in a gape and she willed it to close again with a snap as Madrigal, so enchanting up close, turned her dark head toward her and regarded Celestine with warm and cordial humour.

“You’re the talk of the court. The King is livid with scorn and gossip. He will talk about this for weeks, perhaps longer. You’re famous” Madrigal pressed her tongue gently between her lower teeth and smiled, cheek and flirtation dancing there

Celestine, mortified, looked quickly away.

“What is it you couldn’t say? If you don’t mind me asking” Madrigal rested her high cheekbone in her palm as she kept her steady gaze on the girl beside her, taking in her loose waves of fox fluff hair and her pallid tear streaked cheeks.

“I wrote prose to…to ask someone to dance with me” Celestine said quietly, her admission wetly hiccoughed into the curve of her collarbone as she again felt the weight of shame and humiliation hit her.

Madrigal observed this sadly and then, reluctantly, looked away; her dark eyes instead taking in the scope of the King’s royal garden. She hated the King, despised the way he treated his servants and staff, and overall hated the way he had made this young beautiful girl doubt herself and her creative beauty. Rising steadily, Madrigal left Celestine’s side and Celestine huddled into herself further, wrapping her arms shakily around her bony knees until she and her lower body became one and the same entity.

Madrigal chose a rose, the brightest and the sweetest pink she could find, and returned to lean down in front of Celestine, her eyes dancing with hope and the rightness of her act. Celestine glanced up from inside her cocoon of her own limbs and stared at the pink spectral before her. Tentatively her writer’s fingers came up to stroke the feather soft furls of the rose’s gorgeous petals and then, ever more cautiously, to touch and cup the hand that held it out to her. Supported at the elbow and then more securely at her nip of a waist, Celestine let Madrigal draw her up out of the shrubbery and into the middle of the garden just as the afternoon glow of golden light shone down upon it.

“Will you dance with me instead?” Madrigal asked simply, softly, her gentle botanists hands moving aside the cling of Celestine’s stray hairs to gently attach the blush rose above her left ear.

Celestine, her heart beats akimbo in her heaving chest, nodded her head so many times that Madrigal huffed a laugh sweet as elderflower and cupped her cheek within her palm, drawing Celestine’s rouged face to rest against the strength of her sternum. Madrigal swayed them gently at first, rocking Celestine as you would a distressed infant, before she began to move her feet in a sailor’s knot of steps. Celestine straightened her spine as this began to unfurl and, aware of her bare feet against Madrigal’s court shoes, made do to keep up the pace and skip and parry over her steps. Madrigal slid her hold along Celestine’s arms, leaving goose bumps and electric where she trailed her slim fingers, to hold Celestine in a man’s usual role; one hand at Celestine’s hip just beneath where her corset and skirt failed to properly meet, and the other gently mirroring Celestine’s hold to the side of their twisting bodies.

Their eyes never left each other, the deep blue of the ocean in a thunderstorm caught helpless against the warmth of brown sugar. Celestine began to laugh the faster they spiralled around each other, her smile brightening up her face and freeing her passion to be seen by a perplexed and fascinated Madrigal whom smiled just as fiercely back at her, their twin flames igniting as they lost their bodies to the joy of shared movement and their minds to the tantalising thrall of attraction.

Love, Celestine realised, as Madrigal dipped her deep enough that her hair brushed the flourishing flora below and then righted her a gasping exhilarated laugh, was pulsing through her in unbound and joyous waves. She loved this woman before her, the curve of her jaw and the whorls of her fingertips, the indent of a scar above her straight black eyebrow and the way she battled men in the court with a startling wit and an even more captivating flirtatious grin. Celestine loved Madrigal as she had never loved another before. As they courted, feet delicately moving around each other, Madrigal summoned flowers to Celestine’s bright hair, buds of cherry blossom and sprigs of wild mint, stems of fox glove and groupings of yellow daisies.

They danced until the fuzz of nights insects swarmed around them and Celestine, with a laugh made of pure witch light in the face of her new love, the witch of her world, touched a hand to her decorated hair and gasped her surprise into the night to find so many blooms hiding there. Madrigal, an enchantress enchanted, moved forward and captured that gasp with a kiss tender as new life just as the courtiers appeared to pull them apart.

They did not fret, nor fight, because love had found them, and in that they were untouchable. Madrigal was a witch after all, and it was with this knowledge in her heart that Celestine waited for her love at dawn in the garden, a poet and her muse ready to impart upon the world. At first light Madrigal gently enveloped Celestine’s hand in her own and Celestine, full of the sureness of new love, let herself fall heart first into her new adventure, Madrigal’s answering smile all the reassurance she needed.