Daddy said the dolls were a gift, but he wouldn’t tell me from where, or from whom.

Before he died, I remembered those days I went out to the beach with my sister. The three dolls always went with us, cherry-fingered and goddess-legged, being so quiet as they walked through the sand. My sister and I played in the water while the dolls stood in the surf hands slightly outstretched, as if waiting for something with eyes unblinking, lips and teeth marble granite the ocean could not submerge.

They didn’t speak, but I think they enjoyed the sunshine.

“Why do they stand out in the water?” I asked Daddy once. “Why don’t they play with me?”

And Daddy said, “I was in a war a very long time ago, in a very faraway place across that sea. I hurt a lot of people, and I’m not proud of it, but one day my enemies might bear down on this cove and try to take revenge. The dolls keep watch in case that should happen. The dolls are here to protect us. To protect you and your sister.”

I’d heard before about these enemies; men with black bows and bent wrists, men with shuttered hearts and organs full of dark houses that knew nothing of sunshine or surf or the way ocean foam feels in your hair. They lived in crystal caves, murdered their magic, murdered their wives with the weaker spines.

And I thought they were so far away.

When the sun went down the dolls got sleepy. They had their own room in our home, in an antechamber next to my sister and I. I went into their room sometimes when I felt restless, and lay next to the baby-faced doll I called Lily, the one tall as an Amazon and with bones pretty and sharp and thin as angel wings. I’d press my nose and lips against her throat and wait for a breath that never came.    

Once the sun went down the dolls couldn’t be awoken. Only when light came over the cusp of the sea and the cliffs and broke the darkness by puffing out its cheeks and stretching its belly to a pop would the dolls move again, breathe again.

I had names for all them. Lily was my favorite, because once when my sister and I were playing on the cliffs she caught a black velvet butterfly and placed it in my hands. I kept that butterfly cupped between my palms until I got to the highest cliff, and released her to the sea, where she spread her wings and opened her tiny velvet mouth to swallow the sun.

Then there was Violetta, who had dark gothic curls and a swan neck, her body the casing of a grotesque violin, ribs like strings. Daddy said she could kill you with her eyes if she had a mind to, so I never looked too closely for fear of being sucked under, one eye for Charybdis, one for Scylla.

I think Brena might have once been one of the muses, before she was hollowed out and all her organs replaced with doll parts. She glowed, with sun-colored hair and sun-bouncing skin, still as a crane in the waking hours, folding herself in sleep like a starfish. Maybe she didn’t remember any of the words she used to give to the prettiest of artists, but I think those words followed her nevertheless, like invisible ghosts, like the pressure at the back of your head. She drew hearts out on the sand and became sad when the sea and the rain washed them away.

They didn’t eat or drink, and their skin couldn’t be scratched or worn or cut by any human weapons, but they breathed, and even if they couldn’t love I loved them and I loved their fanged butterfly that rested so soft in my palm.  

Daddy never thought his enemies would dare try to come in the night because there were so many crags and cliffs jutting out of the waters. Too dangerous, he said, too risky.

But they did.

And so when men with black bows and bent wrists came in the night, rearing out of the sea wearing sculpted Minotaur helmets and dressed in the glittering darkness, the dolls slept.

They killed Daddy and Mommy first, pinning them to the bed like insects with their swords through every chamber of their heart. Sister next, all alone in our bed while I slept with Lily in the next room. My sweet sister, old enough to look pretty underneath a dress, made to strip naked, spun like a ghost.

I shook Lily but she wouldn’t wake. Before they came into the doll’s room I crawled underneath her bed and shoved my fists into my mouth and prayed to the gods that they would turn me into a bird that could fly away from this place, from its hard edges and steel-tipped edges and this isn’t real. Instead my fists dripped and the men tried to kill the dolls that could not be killed while in every house in the cove bent wrists murdered and pulled hair and beat and ran red this home we thought safe.

I whimpered and choked on my nails.

They dragged me out from underneath the bed by the hair and shoved my head up against the wall. I thought whatever was human of them had been shelled out or buried so deep underneath layers of thick black and spiking spines that it could no longer touch the surface, feel sunlight, love. I closed my eyes when one of them lifted their bows, ready to put an arrow right through my throat.

But then a monster strode into the room and took off his helmet.

“Put her down,” he said, “She’s coming with us.”

Later, back in his palace of black ice, after he adopted me as his daughter, I asked him why I was still alive.

He didn’t speak, just smiled and touched my chin.

He renamed me. Ruby.

I wish I could remember my real name, but to survive I had to shrink into Ruby, live in her skin, breathe the pace, stretch the bones taut, drink my fill of her.

Those men burned our cove, dragged the dolls into coffins so the light could not touch them, and took me and them so far out across the sea that the earth disappeared and the water turned to glass. That girl I used to be sank to the bottom of a reef and is probably still there, like a starfish, a nettle of hair and bone burying her eyes in the sand.

These people lived underground in crystal caves illuminated only by lamps that glowed like stars, attached shadows to our hips and hearts like Siamese twin ghosts.

They locked my dolls away.

They made it clear to me I could never go back to that life. When they first brought me to their world I’d kicked and bucked and screamed until I had no more kicking or screaming in me, cried in the hopes that if I cried enough Daddy would hear me from across that vast space and walk across the bottom of the sea, blood in his hair, salt on his lips, and find me and bring me back home. Even if my home was now a home for wraiths. Even if that home no longer really existed.

I learned to speak in their black tongue, to dress in their funeral shroud clothes. I learned to eat their strange, blood-pale vegetables by closing my eyes and pretending they were the strawberries in my Mother’s garden, the ones she fed to me soft and ripe and bursting with seeds. I learned their secret girl language, the one that speaks in menarche and ritual and marriage, and to keep from forgetting my own sometimes I’d trace my finger against the wall before going to sleep and spell out words I didn’t dare to speak.

The years passed. Without the light to make me rise I sank, spun my head, thought of delivering murder like a sweet gift.

I hadn’t seen the dolls in fourteen years, not since they had been locked away in coffins, but I found out where they were kept when I attended a funeral. Back in the cove the dead were buried, or if they were heroes of war, sent out to the sea in longboats with their armor and sword. Here they were kept in vaults, in a room in the cave they called the valley of the dead. Sometimes I dreamed about that room, dreamed of walking in the underground for miles and miles while corpses bloomed out of the dark.

Each vault contained a single coffin, with the deceased’s name engraved on the door.

Yet that night, while we held candles and spoke to the shadows and put another one of the dead into the vault, I noticed three vaults that had no names engraved on the doors, but the doors were closed.

“Who’s in those vaults?” I asked my then adoptive father.  

“Those we’ve never identified,” he said, “Those who have no names.”

Maybe they had no names, but I had once given them my own.

I became engaged to my adoptive father’s son, Mikal, who had kisses that always tasted of wine and pale blue eyes that had never seen color outside of the caves.

“Ruby,” my adoptive father said, “I have watched you grow into a beautiful young lady, and I love you like my own daughter. Ask me for anything and I will give it to you.”

“I want to be married in the sunshine,” I said.

Everyone was going to be at the wedding, because my adoptive father was a war hero and a figure on the counsel, and the marriage of his son and his daughter from across the sea was going to be the social event of the year. We unlocked the gates and went out of the caves in the darkness and we set out seats and built the altar overlooking the sea. I missed the sea. I wanted to strip down out of my clothes like I used to and jump off the rocks, let it soothe and swim over my ballpoint limbs, numb me back to sleep, set butterflies in my hair. I’d stand guard in the surf for a thousand years, just like the dolls used to, if I could just have one moment underwater.

But I stayed on shore. I prepared for the wedding with the rest of the girls, baked the food and tried on dresses and set the decorations. None of them had seen sunshine before. They asked me what it was like.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, “It’s really beautiful. It’s warm and bright, sets up all the colors and gets all tangled in your hair. You’ll love it, you really will.”

“The elders say we have to wear veils,” one of the girls said, “because we’ve never been out in the sun. Not like you.”

“Do you miss the sun, Ruby?” another asked me.

“Sometimes,” I lied.

All the time.

The night before the wedding, while everyone slept, I crept out of bed and crossed the long expanse of hallways to the vault. I opened one of those unlabeled doors and pulled the coffin out, surprisingly light in my hands, and pushed off the lid.

She was just as I remembered her.

“Lily,” I whispered, kneeling by the coffin. Her supine form was unchanged, soft, indestructible, beautiful. My Lily with the black butterfly. The Lily I used to sleep beside in the night, waiting for a single breath. My Lily.

She was taller than me, but light, nearly weightless. I kissed her cool forehead and took her outside the gates, for the first time since I’d been living in the caves unlocked for my wedding day. I carried Lily into a glade and laid her down in the tall grasses, like she was some princess fallen asleep from a poison kiss.

Fourteen years in darkness, just like me, enough darkness to fill the holes that paralyzed our skin, suture our heads with all those crazy thoughts, sew our thumbs to our lips.

Next I carried out Violetta. Then Brena. Both unchanged. Both still. I kissed each one on the forehead and left them in the open night.

When I got back inside the caves Mikal was waiting for me.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Out,” I said, “Making some last-minute preparations.”

“Father must really love you,” he said, “To do this for you. A wedding in the sunlight.”

“Yeah,” I said, “He must.”

Before dawn I prepared with the girls. They dressed in lacy black and ribbed pearl and powdered their faces before pulling the veils over their heads.

They fixed my hair, so blond and foreign to their iron-straight black, manipulating the ends into curls and pinning it off my neck. They powdered my face, colored my lips ruby dark.

I wore butterfly red.

I thought about the dolls sleeping in their glade, waiting for the sun to hit their eyes.

Daddy used to tell me that revenge was like a pendulum, swinging back and forth and back and forth and never quite coming to rest. He said if you let it, it would chop your head in half.

But I thought obsessively of murdering those who took my sunshine away.

Dawn waited at the fringe when we proceeded out of the unlocked gates. The sea panted itself into a froth while we climbed the cliffs to the top toward the seats and the altar. Before the ceremony started my adoptive father pulled me aside and kissed me on the forehead.

“I’m so proud of you, darling,” he said.

Sunlight spread out over the sea and the fourteen years of darkness made me so pale and shy I thought I was on fire. The men and women in their veils held their hands out to warm them on the rays.

I walked down the aisle toward Mikal in butterfly red that glowed in the sunset, butterfly red that floated in a flash.  

I reached the end of the altar. Mikal took my hand and pressed his forehead against my own. He whispered. “You ready for this?”

I didn’t see the dolls.

“I think so,” I said. “I mean. Yes. I’m ready.”

I was so sure they would be here before the priestess read the vows, but the vows were said, and the sun was up, and the people stood up with glittering sunlight bouncing off their shrouded mouths and shrouded eyes, waiting for the kiss.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, in such a low voice nobody else could hear.

I turned to look at the crowd.

And then the dolls took off their veils.

There was my Lily with flowers in her hair, Violetta with the sunlight bursting in her full lips and Scylla and Charybdis in her eyes, and Brena, sweet musette, tearing apart clouds in her fingers.

Several men drew their weapons, those men too young to have been at my cove with their black bows and bent wrists, too young have stepped into that room where I hid under the doll’s bed with my fists stuffed in my mouth and witnessed their blades and arrows bouncing off these creature’s skins.

But my adoptive father knew, and he held up a hand for them to stand down.

I walked back down the aisle.

“Kill them,” I whispered, “Lily, kill them. They killed my family. They took everything away from me.”

“Ruby?” Mikal said. He ran down the aisle and grabbed my wrist. “What’s gotten into you? Who are these women?”

I pulled my wrist out of his hand. Ignored him and turned to the dolls, still standing still in the aisles. Nobody moved.

“You’re supposed to protect me,” I said, “Kill them.”

Lily stepped out of the aisle toward me and took my hand. She placed a butterfly in my hand. It spread its blue-black wings out into eye shapes, and its fuzzy antennae licked at my fingers. The butterfly flew away and bloomed in the light and disappeared.  

“You’re not going to kill them, are you?” I whispered.

Lily smiled. Shook her head. Took my hand.

“Ruby?” Mikal repeated. He moved to grab me.

“Mikal, don’t,” my adoptive father said. Mikal stopped. “Let her go.”

I turned away.

The dolls and I left the wedding behind.

We walked across planes of sunlight, traveled through fields and glades and forests and touched the sun and held butterflies and let the darkness leave our heads. The sunlight set my red dress on fire and waved its fingers through my hair. It burned all the hate out of my heart. The dolls never spoke, but we didn’t need to speak. I didn’t know where we were heading, but the sun would follow and chase away the black, and when the night came I’d lie beside Lily and wait for a breath. Morning always came. We were still there waiting for it, still alive.

Just like Daddy said, the dolls were a gift.

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