My Name Is Eave

Naiia Greenway had been a plain child. Caught somewhere between blonde and redhead, with a symmetrical, heart-shaped face and unremarkable blue eyes. She hadn’t been anything special. She was the daughter of a Priest, and grew as pious as they come.

She joined the Cloister at womanhood. Her mother recognised the cycles, and her father closeted her away from the cruelties of men and the harshness of the world. Unfortunately for the masses of eligible bachelors in her town, she flourished into a strawberry blonde, voluptuous creature whose beauty could have brought her directly to the King’s bed for a swift deflowering.

As it stood, she remained draped in black and white, and kept her virtue. She undertook her duties with a pleasant, demure smile; attended sermons with a harmonious, soaring singing voice; ate little, drank water, remained perfectly and gloriously pure.

She moved to the Cloister of Silence to be nearer to the city, nearer to greater need.

It was there she encountered her. Another nun, so often to be found praying, burning out candles in long reams of silent murmurings to God.

The first time that Naiia came across her was a week into her settling period. She opened the door to the small chapel, and saw her sat with a candle in her hands. The wax melted all over her dark gloves. The flame burned precariously close to the cloth.

Was she so intent on communing with the Almighty?

Naiia hated to interrupt, but she was positive that those gloves were going to go up in flames if she didn’t.

She wasn’t quite prepared. The face she looked into was angular, still caught in the middle of youth. Dark eyed and pale skinned, square jawed and with hair that made Naiia feel her own was an inadequate representation of ‘redhead’. But it was the eyes she lingered on. They remained open, but didn’t appear to see her. Glassed over with both tears and distance, all at once removed and anguished. The Greenways’ girl was sheltered; she only saw the mild sadnesses of the world, still believed in goodness.

This face did not. This face had lived; its experience was written all over it. She took in the multiple ear piercings. She felt wedding bands as she carefully unstuck the candle from the deeper redhead’s hands. The slight downturn of lips and the untapped pain in her expression spoke greater volumes than Naiia had read before in her life.

There was no reaction to the removal of the candle. Naiia carefully set to plucking the wax off the gloves and collecting the blue stuff into a ‘basket’ made of her lap-skirt. Once she was done, she went to tip it all into one of the genuine baskets in one corner, and then went back to the seated nun. She removed the black gloves carefully, and furrowed her flawless, youthful face (she could only have been twenty-two, surely) on recognising the anger of burned, pinkened skin.

“We must take you to the infirmary,” Naiia exclaimed, her sprite-like voice startled and her brows instantly lifting. Why was this woman not shrieking? Burns hurt.

Dark eyes shifted. Slowly, with force, they registered the face, and a wry, mirthless smile highlighted all of her features in their habitual lines that hadn’t changed since her own early twenties. “Is there a cure for what I have?” she enquired quietly. God, had she not heard of hand-cream?

“Your burns,” Naiia insisted. “They need to be treated.”

“I have burns?”

“Yes! Can’t you feel them? You must be able to feel them.”

Her expression said she felt nothing her body had to offer her. Naiia took her by the wrists and drew her to stand.

Mereavus Varana never did recall that particular encounter. Her first clear memory of the Greenway girl was later that morning. She remembered being roused from her habitually miserable morning ‘prayer’ by registering her face. She could easily recollect, all those years later, the precise expression of concern on the gently frowning brows before her. She could likely tell you, with direct accuracy, the exact colour of golden amber in the girl’s hair on that particular day, how it seemed different every day for the next five years, how on that morning it was something akin to burnished treasure in a quartz holding. She could distinguish the difference between the unnerving pair of vivid blues that haunted her past, and the pale pastel that so worriedly watched. Watched what? She looked down. Her hands! Goodness, not her hands, what on earth had she been thinking? Or feeling, perhaps that was the problem.

“You’re the one who was married,” Naiia murmured, her own delicate, clipped hands working against the injured counterparts with some sort of soothing, wet substance.

“Yes.”

Her voice sounded hoarse from lack of use, and it almost startled her to hear; shell-like. Conversation, she had to make conversation.

Unfortunately it was at that moment that she registered just how beautiful Naiia Greenway actually was. She’d seen women of substantial appeal before. She’d manoeuvred their handsome ways with her youthful cockiness, some sort of roguish charm that remained ineffable and unsnuffable in the smug confidence of her youth.

This was the first time in her life where she felt all of her suave arrogance extinguish. This was the first time she’d laid her eyes on a genuinely unflawed woman. She found she couldn’t quite speak. She knew Naiia was talking to her, she could hear the sound of her. But it didn’t register, she could do nothing but sit and tremble. This had not happened once in the entire history of Lady Varana’s Sapphism.

What had she said? There had to be an appropriate answer, but what was it?
Fortunately, Naiia appeared to have registered something. Her eyes widened, and she instantly took her hands away from Mereavus’ – shit, had she said something? Blurted out some blatantly enraptured comment?

“You’re the Queen’s Advisor,” the Greenway girl stammered, rubbing her hands against a cloth as though it had been criminal to touch the other woman in the first place.

“I am a Sister,” she corrected, regaining some sort of conscious composure and straightening, her hands brushing over one another. “My external station is irrelevant.”

“But you do advise the Queen? You’re her confidante?”

“It’s all rather hot air,” she answered, reaching for the nearby cloth bandages and setting them in her lap. “A formal title for being her friend rather than any earth-shaking political stance.” Little did she know. Her husband’s death would be the beginning of the recognition that his political success was not his own, but his wife’s.

Naiia laughed, a little nervously, and gingerly picked up the bandages. “You don’t know how much more intimidating that is?” she enquired, behaving much as a shy kitten around some feral lioness.

“Naturally not,” she replied, setting her hand out in the proper position for its caretaker to go about bandaging her with twice the care she’d applied before. These hands touched the Queen. “One can’t be afraid to listen to one’s friends and give them a little kick in the right direction every now and again.”

“Oh, stop it!” Naiia gasped, looking both amused and horrified. “You’re just making it worse! One doesn’t kick the Queen!”

There was a brief pause, in which Mereavus looked at the girl with a quizzical sort of amusement, and then she began to laugh. “Only a little one,” she assured her, lips still twitching with her amusement as she watched the face of this peculiar example of virginal womanhood. “Do you have a name?” What a ridiculous turn of phrase, of course she had a name.

“Yes!” Naiia laughed, glancing up timidly but soon jolting her eyes back to the task between her hands. “It’s Naiia Greenway. You mustn’t tell me yours! Lady Varana, everyone knows it. That’s what I’ll call you.”

The bandaged hand enfolded around one of the smaller ones presently tying a knot. “No,” she murmured. “My name is Eave.”

No one could quite understand the sudden recovery of the Queen’s Advisor. For the better part of a year she’d been absorbed in her grief, harbouring some sense of loss so deep that even her Majesty feared she’d not come out of it.
To all the world, it looked as though religion had saved her. It looked as though she had found happiness with God.

It was Naiia. Her bright innocence enlightened her days. They did their obligatory rounds together; delivering babies, helping the sick, maintaining the leper colonies (that is, Naiia would cook, and Mereavus would watch her with continual fascination), delivering freshly baked bread to the homeless. They were regular do-gooders. Nuns as they ought to be – smiling, warm and working in a tandem of Naiia’s unshakable faith and light, and Mereavus’ wisdom and insight.

There wasn’t a friendship healthier than Greenway and Varana.

She never once touched her. Or rather, she never once inflicted the carnal touch she so easily flaunted in her time before the Cloister. They would otherwise touch regularly, brushing past one another in the kitchens, holding hands whilst praying, the occasional settling around one another in the night when it was either too cold to be alone, or Naiia became frightened of thunder.

Unusually, Mereavus found she didn’t want to sensually claim this woman who’d walked into her life, took her by the wound and slowly begun to heal her. She couldn’t deny the development of an abiding, profound adoration of her, it’d be ridiculous to even consider refusing to admit to her utter enslavement to Greenway’s inextinguishable charm. But this wasn’t the violent, tumultuous love that struck her with Violet. This wasn’t the dependable, sexual friendship of her late husband. It wasn’t Verne’s easy physical possession.

No doubt, she fluttered when they brushed past one another. She thought incessantly on the touching of skin when she ought to be praying. She couldn’t shake the scent of rose soap that came in those dark hours of flickering storms when she had innocence itself wrapped firmly in her embrace. It wasn’t the hot rush of desire that claimed her when Naiia came to her bed to cling to her for protection. It was a slow, claiming satisfaction that left her feeling able to defend her from all the world. When Naiia slept against her bodice, she enveloped her into their own little world that no man or woman could possibly come in to disrupt.
There would be nights where the Advisor wasn’t there. She never told Naiia of why – she hadn’t really the heart to. She believed her to be with the Queen on these evenings, and never once begrudged Mereavus her duty with her Majesty. Her sense of place was ever perfect. She was always sleeping peacefully when the Advisor returned from the darker parts of her occupation, washing blood from her hands in the simple stone basin. Naiia never asked why her habit sometimes smelled of smoke when she worked to wash them. The events of the Dungeon and the Justiciar went entirely unmentioned, and it was likely that the girl never suspected that her companion was anything more than maternal and loving and good.

And so they went on.

“Are you going to take full vows when your six years are over, Eave?” Naiia asked on one particularly warm summer morning. The grass seeds were in the air and fluttering through the barred spaces of windows as the Greenway girl went about cooking luncheon for the lepers at the nearest colony.

The Advisor looked up from drying a pan, her burns having healed some years ago. “Are you going to be here in six years?” she answered, jaw slightly tilted.

“Of course I am,” Naiia chirped, wiping her brow with the sleeve of her cooking smock. “What a question!”

“Well, you never know,” Mereavus answered, reaching up to put the pan back where it ought to be. “You might tire of nunneries. Or worse, me – then what would I do?”

“Oh, don’t say that!” the more genuine of the two nuns cried, easily made plaintive by such comments. “Say you’ll stay with me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you go back to regular life!”

And a moment later, she’d smile brightly, and delight in her answer of, “You goose, of course I’ll be here.”

Naiia remained pleasantly oblivious to life outside the Cloister. She knew Mereavus came and went at the whim of her friend and mistress, and, uncomplaining, simply remained in her lifestyle and fixed the wear of Lady Varana’s clothing. And on her return, she’d be brought a little something from town, and a country flower. Always on those days, Naiia would creep into Mereavus’ bed at sundown, simply because she could, and mumble a sleepy, ‘I missed you’.

There came one day where the reality of the outside world was more stark. Mereavus had not had time to change back into her habit, and so swept down the Cloister corridors towards her shared chambers with the imperious grace that carried her through the marble of the castle.

Naiia turned the corner and quite instantly fell flat into kneeling, her hands flat against the cool, smooth stone tiles and her eyes down. She’d caught the flash of burgundy and gold, and the glint of rubies.

“Forgive me, my Lady, I did not see you,” she practically whimpered, praying rather devoutly that whoever this regal woman was, she didn’t have her flogged for almost walking directly into her. Eave would be so disappointed in her.
She flinched at the touch of felt gloves to her shoulders, beginning to tremble violently. Mereavus drew her up to stand, and tilted her chin with the side of her ring-adorned fingers. “No,” she answered, her voice thick with amusement. “You didn’t. It’s me, darling. I didn’t have time to change.”

It was at that moment that she registered just how beautiful Mereavus Varana actually was. She had known she was physically pretty, as all girls did. But in habits she was downplayed, made the same as everyone else. In brocade, she could’ve been the Queen herself; she had that bearing that made people believe she was a force of nature. She had that effortless poise that Greenway had seen her do everything with, but never dared to dream she’d see her bedecked in jewels with her hair done so elaborately. Her fear of status had formed into fondness so quickly that she found it easy to forget who Eave was. She was just Eave to her.

This was Lady Mereavus Varana, and the power in that single appearance made her blush. She trembled even more.

There was a very subtle change in Naiia Greenway after her reminder of status. She touched more often. She looked more often. She could hear her heart pounding every time she rested against the Advisor at night, and those times became more and more frequent.

Mereavus didn’t dare hope. She was already blissfully in love with a heterosexual woman who had no inkling that Sapphism was anything more than an old wives’ tale made to frighten children. She barely noticed the change. She attributed it to growing closer, reaching the highest plain of friendship possible. She valued her even as much as Danele herself. Her misery seemed a distant memory. She couldn’t possibly ruin this with her flushes of burning desire, because it simply wasn’t that sort of love.

And naturally, just as Naiia’s platonic adoration of her protector and closest companion began to simmer into something else, Isis appeared.

Isis Rae was white hot. Her father had found her gobbling the blacksmith whilst his hunting dog had its excited way with her. He completely neglected to be repulsed by his own earlier enjoyment of her mouth, and rather, became jealous and sent her away to where she couldn’t let anything with a cock bugger her senseless.

The Cloister of Silence was the best possible option to reform his wet-cunted daughter. At least, so he thought. He hadn’t bargained for introducing her to one of Nharati’s predatory Sapphists – whose own loins were sorely neglected and dry.

It didn’t take much. Naiia and Mereavus were the most virtuous women in the Cloister, their care would surely be beneficial for her and teach her the beauties of simple, domestic life.

Instead, it reminded the Advisor of those pleasures she’d shunned in favour of an unspoken and unrequited love. Isis saw it in her instantly; the way she watched Naiia, the over-careful way in which she touched her, the ubiquitous use of the word, ‘dearest’ that was purely reserved for the strawberry blonde stunner who remained exclusively God’s.

It was on a spring morning that Isis did it. Naiia had conveniently left to begin tending to one of those vile lepers’ lunches, and Mereavus was left to tend to the local slut’s most recent flagellation wounds.

Isis made for convincing conversation. She knew. The way she watched her so carefully and smiled a fond, contented little smile whenever she saw what she wanted. All Isis saw was a temporarily tamed beast.

It was a beast she knew how to unleash. The careful slip of cloth. The unnecessary moans when cold strips of linen met with her welts. The lingering look when she turned over to thank her, the smug smirk when she realised that the Advisor couldn’t help but look.

It didn’t take much.

Naiia returned with lunch for them both shortly past noon. The door opened, and she caught the end of it. Her eyes widened. She watched as those old wives’ tales turned to life before her. Sapphists. Irreligious, fornicating Sapphists.

And one of them was Eave. Straddled over Isis’ lap, both hand their hand between the other’s thighs. The habit didn’t obscure much, pulled up to the hips as it was. Later, she’d try to convince herself that she’d not trailed a long look from Mereavus’ ankle to her thigh, persuade herself that she wasn’t disappointed to not get a glimpse of what Isis’ hand was doing. As the door opened, they’d
both simultaneously uttered a long, quivering moan onto one another’s mouths.

Eave was one of them. Worse, she’d been suppressing her own emotions to not be one of them! She’d wanted Eave to want her, she’d wanted her to kiss her in the darkness and she’d wanted her to love her. And all of this time; no, she’s a Lady, you must remember, they don’t do that sort of thing. They marry respectable men and have respectable children. She had believed in Mereavus’ heterosexuality as much as the converse was true.

She dropped the tray. Two sets of startled, glazed eyes set themselves on her.

“How could you!” Naiia wailed, hands lifting to press to either side of her wimple. She stared for a long moment at the shocked and suddenly crushed expression of her companion, and turned and fled.

Mereavus didn’t follow her until she’d bathed and cleaned herself. She didn’t want to foul Naiia any further with her sins; she’d been trying so hard not to. She opened the door to their chambers.

Greenway was crying. Heartbroken little sobs onto her pillow, clinging to the fabric the way she used to cling to Mereavus’ nightdress.

“Oh, God,” the Advisor practically cried, shutting the door, locking it and hastening over to the side of the bed. She crouched, reaching for Naiia’s hand. “Darling, please, don’t cry. Please, dearest, you’ll kill me.”

She was so sure she knew what this was about. She was so sure Naiia – pious, virginal, incomprehensibly innocent Naiia – hated her for what she was. It was the one thing she’d been careful not to expose.

“You’re one of them,” Naiia sniffled, moving her hand away from Mereavus’ grip and tucking it underneath herself protectively.

There was that look of anguish again, from years previous. This time, edged with desperation. “I won’t be!” the Advisor answered, her own hands clawed at the corner of the sheets. “Tell me not to be, Naiia, and I won’t be. Tell me to change, tell me you’ll still need me if I change!”

She hadn’t a clue what she was saying. She’d never even considered these words before. She’d never been so thoroughly desperate to keep someone before this.

“No!” Naiia cried, sitting up sharply. “You’re irreligious, you’re an abomination, you’re one of Her creations! And you’ve deceived me! All this time I thought you were respectable, I thought you were good, I thought you’d never consider doing something so vile!”

She only looked more desperate. “Naiia-“

“Don’t say my name!” the usually quiet girl wailed, grasping the pillow in both temper and grief. “Don’t you say it! I know now what else your mouth is capable of! I hate it! I hate you, I hate your lies!”

“I’ve never once lied to you!” Mereavus objected. “Never! I couldn’t lie to you, I couldn’t do anything to hurt you. I couldn’t!”

“But you have!” Naiia told her. “You have! You’ve damaged me irreparably! You and your filth! Your deceit! I-“ She stopped. She twisted in her seat. She released a small sound of distress. “I belonged to God before you! I did everything right, I prayed right, I thought right, I felt right! And now it’s all wrong!”

Mereavus stared at her helplessly. This damnable weakness of hers had done it again. It destroyed everything. And now the one thing she’d withheld herself from knowingly hurting, was hurt anyway. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting back and pushing her hand through her hair. “I’m sorry, N-“ She stopped herself. Don’t soil her name. “I’m so sorry.”

Naiia glared at her for a long, tortuous moment, and then blurted it out. “Why her?” she demanded. “Why did it have to be her? What has she got that I haven’t?”

The Advisor’s eyes snapped upwards. This wasn’t about Sapphism at all. Or rather, it was, but not her own. “Nothing!” she answered instantly. “She is nothing, darling, she’s just a piece of filth from the country. She’s nothing, she means nothing to me. God, you can’t compare yourself to her! You’re so painfully perfect and she’s just... Just painful! I need you, Naiia. I love you. You’re everything to me. Please, don’t ever compare yourself to her.”

“Then why have you never touched me like that?” Greenway asked, becoming as desperate for the truth as Mereavus was to keep her. “All this time I’ve wanted you to, since I saw you in that dress, and the moment I do you turn away from me!”

The Advisor rose swiftly and went to the bed, sitting and taking hold of Naiia by her shoulders whether she squirmed or not. “God! Don’t! I couldn’t touch you! I couldn’t defile you like that, I couldn’t. I’ve loved you from the start. Your goodness, Naiia! You can’t understand what rarity it is to have your sweetness, your compassion, your love of life! You can’t possibly know how drab the rest of the world is, how it’s all so tainted and shabby by comparison to you. You’re untapped, you’re a pure source; what right have I got to touch you with my lusts and smear it? I couldn’t do that to you, I could do that damage. I couldn’t stand it if it changed you. I couldn’t bear it if you weren’t you. I destroy things with lust, darling, that’s what I do. That’s what lust does. It kills things. I couldn’t subject you to some fleeting desire like that. If I have you, I want you forever. I want you like this, I want you as you are, not some victim of my flushes of want. You’re better than that. You mean more than that.”

Naiia stared at her, lips apart, eyes wide. And then, embarrassed, she looked away, and around herself as though she had something to do. “I have to go see to the Landries,” she murmured. “And you have politics this afternoon.”

“Naiia,” the Advisor caught her by the arm as she rose, pleading tone in her voice. The desperation hadn’t gone. “Please.”

She looked down, pulled her arm away, and fled the room as she had the other.

Lady Mereavus Varana was going back to the Cloister that evening when she encountered a road block. She reined Luthien in carefully, and glanced past at the village behind them.

“Is something amiss, gentlemen?” she enquired, reasoning she’d have to take the scenic route back before she faced the inevitable quiet of her evening with Naiia, who’d have been here to tend to the Landries only hours before.

“Sickness, Marm,” one of the soldiers answered. “It’s been blocked off for hours, you’ll have to go around. Looks like it’s killin’ ‘em off.”

That was all well and good, these things happened. But. And at that but, a chill descended over her chest. “The healers from the Cloister, did they leave?”

“No, Marm,” the same guard answered. “They’re still in there.”

Barricade be damned. She turned to go, and a moment later had swung around to clear the wooden picket. The guards shouted to her that it was forbidden, but she rode on down the road towards the village regardless. The liver chestnut brute skidded to a halt and sent spring dirt into clouds. She dismounted swiftly, and hurried into the low beamed building that the Landries inhabited.

“Naiia?” she called, stepping over the prone form of the Landries’ youngest, who appeared to already have succumbed to his sickness.

His mother slumped off the kitchen bench and landed with a thunk. She groaned, and struggled to breathe. Some sort of fever.

“Naiia!”

Quiet. Quiet and indistinguishable groaning. She hurried upstairs and looked in each room, too preoccupied with finding Naiia to care much about the other bodies that were either dead or dying. It moved fast, whatever it was.

Naiia was slumped in a corner of the Landries’ master bedroom. The man of the house was already glassy eyed and twitching into his final spasms. She could hear someone in the house. Impossible, since everyone was dead or dying.

Was that Eave’s voice?

“Naiia!”

“I’m here...” she whimpered, pushing herself up properly. “I’m in here...”

Mereavus didn’t hear her, but she did enter the room to look for her. Another utterance of her name came with a relieved, low tone, and she rushed to kneel next to her.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Naiia reprimanded her quietly. “Now it’ll get you, too.”

“I don’t care,” she answered, leaning against the wall and drawing Naiia in to cradle her properly to herself. “Come on. The other end of town doesn’t appear to be gone just yet.”

She left the house with Naiia wilting in her arms. There were others alive in the village hall, their eyes looking up towards the Advisor as she entered. She sat down with her in a corner.

“I’m sorry, Eave,” Naiia murmured. “I’m sorry I said the things I did. I don’t hate you.”

“Stop it,” Mereavus told her firmly. “You’re talking like you’re dying.”

“I am dying.”

“Then so am I, and we’ll see each other on the other side – so, stop saying goodbye to me.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Never tell anyone, Eave – they’ll hate us. My family-“

“I promise. I won’t say a word, not ever.”

“Kiss me?”

“It’ll damn you.”

“I don’t care. I’ll be damned and happy. It’s worth damnation.”

So, the survivor kissed the victim, and did so for quite some time. Until Naiia stopped responding, until she became rigid and twitching. Conscious, but unable to do anything.

The Advisor sat with her in her arms, in her corner, waiting for the sickness to take her. She watched the others succumb, groaning around her, crawling for fresh air. She kept Naiia close, and softly began to hum the girl’s favoured hymn. She’d heard it whilst she was cooking, listened to her play it on her harp. So, she hummed it now, and watched the flawless little lips push their last efforts into a tiny smile.

Two days later the barricade was lifted, and the Advisor and a small boy were the only miracle survivors. Either they arrived back too late to catch it, or God simply didn’t want them yet.

Naiia was cremated shortly afterwards. Mereavus kept the ashes, and presently they inhabit a priceless vase on her central mantelpiece at Vorserkeine.

The years that seemed white and unknown to the rest of the world are still remembered with fondness. The liberating quality of fleshless love kept the Advisor from grieving too drastically; she loved Naiia too much to fret over never being able to have her. The conclusion of their emotions left her alone until her return to Nharati, where she didn’t utter a word, as promised.

It was all books, and dust, and nothing life-changing. All silence with no meaning.

Save one little hymn.

My name is Eave.