“They own every breath that we take.
They pick each piece off our plate.
They eat all flesh that we make.
They run the whole of our fate.
And they say it’s all for our sake.”

-What we’re not supposed to sing outside.

We’d all heard, for quite some time of course, about our master’s first tragic passion. There’d been many more little dears who’d died off before their faces could crease: three in childbirth, two by consumption, the one malbred girl he had delivered to the Gods for the lovers she kept when he was away. They’d all been mourned, yes, but in time had quietly been shaken off to welcome the next girl we would call Lady Nigh.

But then there was always left that stain of the first. Though she never made it to set foot in this palace, in this land of revolving draperies and cast-aside eyes, her presence clings like an odor. The never-heard, never-seen spirit echoes in the empty chambers that should’ve been filled with heirs made by her blood, kept noisy by her songs our master will still mumble. The others that arrived after Her had all came and lived and lived no more, their journeys played out, but this was that Blessed Creature that should’ve been. Time, the many decades, and all that is left up to that supposed life has smoothed her memory into something perfect and worshipped and too wondrous for any pitiful coming wife to uphold.

For the girls like me, the sealed-mouth servants that hustle about to maintain this gilded world, the First Lady offers up a certain hope. When we get handed our paltry wages at the end of every week, we think “The First Lady would have us paid much better.”. When we are slapped by the current wife, usually a pale-lipped girl not much older than ourselves, over some slight offense, we think “The First Lady never would have raised her hand at us.”. When we have our hair yanked and pared off at the end of each season per his orders, we think “The First Lady would have let us keep our locks as long as hers.” And when the master throws the oldest, unmarried of us to his miscreant workmen, to the ones who aren’t good enough to find a wife on their own, we think “Should the First Lady have come and shown him what love really is, we would never have our hands forced to these unions.”

The First Lady, as I said, never came to prove our dreams wrong, and so she stays the secret saint among us laboring maidens. And like every saint and venerated thing, she had been struck down by a tragedy whispered to us in the quiet before sleep by our mothers and repeated back to our very own new-made daughters that’ll once again carry these words after we’ve rejoined the creators that rest in the cool ground. Between me and a few of the other reading girls, we’ve managed to put down the tragics down. Written word robs its sort of breathless, illicit quality that’s drawn us to it, to her, but yet it remains:

The First Lady was a girl born so beautiful and so pure that she was stolen away the very same night of her birth by a crooked old woman that tried to pull from her those illustrious qualities as one would a tapestry by a thread.

But unravel her the old woman could not, and the girl managed to etch out a passably happy existence inside a high tower built right in the very thicket of the woods nearest our own kingdom (for she had been spirited far, far from the home she had been born to). Her upbringing in captivity was spent practicing songs she knew, somehow, from the womb of which she came, and brushing and plaiting her rich hair that rivaled even the shine of Heaven’s Ladder.

By the time the master (then but the boyish heir to the land) happened upon her traces while hunting, she had passed enough years there that her voice could carry clear and lovely across the air for miles, miles that the would-be master had tracked with the hunger of an animal, and her braided hair that he saw when he finally arrived to her prison of heights, was long enough to tease his reach.

It was, as he may’ve confessed to somebody, the truest pang he’d ever felt for a pretty-faced girl. But her beauty was backed by other things- her curved and plump mouth held a clever tongue within, hands that were are as silk smooth as they were crafty and nimble, a pair of diamond eyes that could find all in meeting another.

And when those eyes locked down with the pleading ones that squinted up at her peak, her singing stopped, the sudden silence hanging thick in their atmosphere. He squirmed under her gaze, yet he would not break it. After some time, she finally gave him a smile with the warmth of the sun meeting skin and began to sing once more- a love song. He knew.

There were many nights that he would slip away from his public, nights he’d ride the miles to again catch her songs. Just to catch her songs, sometimes another smile. To inhale the sweet, blossom perfume she emanated from above. She was his heaven, and he was her duly pilgrim. He never asked to come up. He would never wish to disgrace her like that.

But there came that night she threw down her hair so that he may enter her realm and adore her every detail. So that he could press his lips against hers and declare everything past the horizon of trees to be truly at her feet. To at last plot her escape, their wild chance to bear past the concrete walls and bring her forth to all the courts and lords and ladies that’ll just love her, love her too, love her at least half as much as he…

After a slow descent by her own fibers, the girl took unsteadily to her bare feet. She’d never felt the ground before, never been underneath the sky. Moments of a wordless blessing to the stars that’d guide them and the horse that would take them there. But the horse-

That’s when they made the cold discovery that the horse had run off, its bondage to a young tree having been cut. The girl, with a sick horror washing over her, declared it couldn’t be anybody but that horrible old hag, she could kill us, she’ll never let me leave alive and pulled him to run, run the way back.

What they didn’t know, as we all have, was that the old evil had died some nights before. She hadn’t anything to do with the horse- it must’ve broke the rope on its own- and her corpse would be burnt with the tower in a putrid fire he would order within the week. But for that moment she was as big and fearful as the earth itself, and they charged through as desperately as any other fleeing victim.

Without the romance of their moonlit nights, the dark seemed to push on their fears and they staggered on even as their skins were streaked with weeping cuts, their clothes shredded by the catching limbs of the forest. Though they would make it, they would pant that much. As the palace crept up within their sights and the edge of the forest gave way to the river that divides the two worlds, they could almost believe so.

But this is a tragedy.

The poor girl, gasping from their flight and dizzy at the prospect of claiming the glowing paradise before her as home, tripped in the unsteady ground and fell into the dark waters. He threw himself into this second rescue, but her hair at once took up the with the river and may’ve well been stones strapped around her head. She sank to the bottom. They never could find her. And there she stays.

He vowed against loving then. It was frivolous. It wasn’t real. The only thing that could follow opening one’s chest to bare their heart is the sharpness of a blade when it is pushed within. He did not wish to take a wife but he was, after all, a lord. And lords must have ladies. So he tolerated them: could give them a tight smile across the table, a brush on the mouth to pass for a kiss, a few weeks of solace at their early departures. But they knew there was no love to be had, and that was what we all thought these young things were driving themselves dead from, really.

Our lives were not built to have those kinds of fancies. We come in this world to work, to serve, to earn the occasional silver or thrill of a living firstborn. What we get is all by their good graces, and we’re taught from our low genesis not to expect very much.

The First Lady, speaking in the material, is not much more than some bones and a decayed braid settled in the deep of our waters. The First Lady, speaking in the unspeakable, is our mother. Our daughter. Our sister. Is the girl we just pray will be the one to find a life beyond our sights. Of happiness that’s always swung- the irony isn’t lost on us, just as that braid had- above our stretching fingers.

There is a little place by the river, just past where we wash our thin skirts and draw water for what we call our homes. A flowering tree by the shore, a place of shade and rest on our odd hour off before the night snaps again onto the air. What they force from our heads we collect, hairs scooped up into pockets once they’ve left us alone. On this tree’s branches hold the tied bundles of blonde, brunette, auburn, black, the rarity of red. Smooth or curled or coiled or kinked, knotted there by the tired hands of a visiting girl who just wishes, wishes.