The Duke In His Castle by Vera Nazarian Page A

you call yourself? ” He speaks unexpectedly in a hard voice, stronger than she imagines him to be capable of, and she is startled.
    And then he turns, and she sees the truth—receptive wounded eyes, gleaming dark with moisture.
    “Do you really think I am—like that ?” he asks, and his voice fluctuates; is cracking. “That I would think of her with such filth? Her, whom I perceive only as a dear thing I have somehow wrought? To desire such sacrilege?”
    Desiring sacrilege. Being profane. Do you really think that I— Mad inconclusive thought fragments begin to race in him, driven by fever. . . .
    “I am sorry,” she says again. “Forgive me, for I am indeed quite offensive, often intentionally, but sometimes not. Only—there is something about you, Lord, that touches me peculiarly—” She cuts off abruptly. Then, just as abruptly, she changes the subject. As she speaks, her voice rings bright, sending echoes against stone.
    “Well, now that you presumably know your secret, would you care to test the castle boundary once more?”
    Could it be that everything stills then, is suspended. The night air pauses in its flow. The stars stop their infinitesimal journey across the tiny patch of boundlessness overhead.
    The Duchess holds her breath, watching him with unflinching eyes.
    But the hurt-transfigured gaze of the Duke remains grim, and there is no new hopeful resolve in his voice, only weariness. “No,” he says. “Not now—tomorrow. As I am now, I have no more strength for acts of power. . . .” And he throws back his head and glances with a shudder at the open sky overhead.
    The Duchess of White averts her eyes, allowing him the privacy of weakness. He has earned it in full, tonight.
     

IV: A Dream of Falling
     
    I t is three past midnight. The Mad Queens Tower stands on the northernmost end of the castle grounds, as thick and squat a cylinder as any, one of the many rounded turrets that protrude in ancient tumescence from the baseline of the castle foundation.
    The top of the tower does not narrow into a point. Rather, it has a flat roof which serves as an observation point, with thick crenellated parapets rising in a brim of protection. Wind hums through the crenels between the merlons and disappears into the gaping absolute darkness of the descending stairwell, in a twister, a whirlpool of aerial force. There it races down, down, down, falling without end, like a nightmare-dream.
    Until it hits bottom, full force.
    If wind were a man, it might be expected to die, as such things be told in the proverbial way of things.
     
    They say, always wake up before you hit bottom.
     
    Only, the bottom is no end, and the end is not the bottom. The base of the stairwell opens like a curling snake into a courtyard area, and here the wind and the clamoring air currents have the chance to continue their mad rush, onward and out into the world. The sky of the world is wrought of only a few degrees lesser darkness than the interior of the stairwell and other places hidden by stone walls, on account of a sprinkling of stars that lend a diffused glow to the heavens—throw a spoon of milk into a cauldron of pitch, stir to smoothness, and the dark remains, yet its nature has been altered just a degree beyond overt perception.
    On such a night as this, with no moon, it is said that in the ancient days the noblewomen who reside in the tower would receive lovers. If the lover does not come, the high-born woman walks out onto the roof and waits for him, sometimes with a single flickering candle to signify her presence; its light can be seen for miles, a cry in the void. She waits, standing in the chill air of many nights, and eventually she becomes unbalanced. So many blue blood females wither with longing, with neglect or betrayal, with unrequited or simply forgotten love, that the tower, burdened with history, bears their woeful name.
    Queens, Princesses, Duchesses, Countesses and lesser Ladies of various