She brought me to our place in the garden,
before the fruit trees ready to bare witness.
Hekate drew white across my hair,
a veil fine enough for sunlight to pass through,
long enough to stir against my back
when the garden breathed.
Then gold.
I cannot tell you its shape.
Crown became circlet became something older,
worked heavily with ornament,
rising at the edges like antler-tines
glimpsed between winter trees.
I only remember the weight of it
settling upon my head
and knowing it was given.
Around me, the garden changed.
Thirteen easels stood in a circle.
Thirteen waiting canvases,
paint still sleeping somewhere beneath their white.
Some held the beginnings of faces.
Others would not show themselves.
One woman stepped from among them
as though she had been waiting
for me to notice her.
Arianrhod was no taller than I was.
Her hair fell long and pale in waves,
her dress the blue of the sky
after the last bird has gone home.
She looked toward the empty canvas.
I would like to be next.
Like Hekate before her so long ago,
as though gods may wait their turn
at the hand of a woman with a paintbrush.
Her face appeared on canvas,
Southern moons changing above her.
And then…
before I saw her,
I knew.
Inanna.
Her hand closed around my throat.
My neck raised and she held my gaze
as she found the clasp hidden at my neck.
Gold came away from me.
A collar, thick and gleaming,
far heavier than anything beautiful
had the right to be.
I thought something had been there,
I was blind to it, hiding from my vision
as words and memories hide within my mind.
Then my wrists.
Her fingers closed around one, then the other,
and the great gold cuffs followed,
leaving bare skin beneath them
strangely light in the garden air.
I looked at what she had taken from me
resting in the fading light.
Inanna knew what held me there.
That’s enough, she said.
Something in me heard her before I understood.
No more sacrifices to my sister.
I looked at the power before me—
Hekate.
Arianrhod.
Inanna.
Thirteen easels.
An unfinished circle.
White cloth moving softly through the evening.
Antlers of gold above my brow.
And my hands—
my own hands—
bare at the wrists.
My throat open to the air.
I came back without the weight of them.
Somewhere inside my skull,
the storm that had lived there for months
had loosened its grip.
I will not name what happened
and make the mystery smaller.
I know only that I entered the garden bound,
and when I returned,
the chains did not come with me.
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