by Rachel Caine
“It depends on the day of the week,” he said. “And the direction of the wind.”
“Clever little madman.” She turned to finish her walk with absolute precision at the doors at the end of the hallway, which she thrust open with the confidence only a queen could possibly have. “My lady Amelie, I bring your errant wizard.”
“Not a wizard,” Myrnin whispered as he edged past her.
“How disappointing,” she whispered back, then bowed to Amelie and closed the doors, leaving him facing his old friend.
She was swathed in a dazzling white robe trimmed with ermine, intertwined most tellingly with strands of silver wire. . . . She wanted her subjects to know that she was old enough and tough enough to defeat the burning metal, and therefore them. She looked the same as always: young, beautiful, imperious. She was reading a volume, and she placed a feather in it as a marker and set it aside as he bowed to her. He assayed a full curtsy, and almost fell in rising.
She was up and at his side instantly to assist him to a nearby chair. “Sit,” Amelie said. “No ceremony between us.”
“As you wish, my lady.”
“I am not your lady,” she said. “At the least, I do not raise the color in your face the way our good Lady Grey seems to do. I’m pleased you enjoy her company. I hoped she might give you some . . . diversion.”
“Amelie!”
She gave him a quelling look. “I meant that only in the most innocent sense. I am no panderer. You will find Lady Grey to be an intelligent and well-read woman. The English have no sense of value, to have condemned her so easily to the chop.”
“Ah,” he said, as she took her seat again. “How did she escape it?”
“I found a girl of similar age and coloring willing to take her place, in exchange for rich compensation to her family.” Amelie was cold, but never unfeeling. Myrnin knew she could have simply forced a hapless double for Lady Grey to go to her death, but she was kind enough to bargain for it. Not kind enough, of course, to spare a life, but then, they were all killers, every one of them.
Even him. The trail of bodies stretched behind him through the years was something he tried hard not to consider.
“Why rescue me now, Amelie?” he asked, and fiddled with the ties on his shirtsleeves. The cloth felt soft on his skin, but he was unaccustomed to it, after so many years of wearing threadbare rags. “I’ve spent an eternity in that place, unremarked by you, and don’t tell me you didn’t know. You must need me for something.”
“Am I so cruel as that?”
“Not cruel,” he said. “Practical, I would say. And as a practical ruler, you would leave me where you knew you could find me. I have a terrible habit of getting lost, as you well know. Since you chose to fetch me from that storehouse, you must have a job for me.” It was hard to hold Amelie’s stare; she had ice-blue eyes that could freeze a man’s soul at the best of times, and when she exerted her power, even by a light whisper, it could cow anyone. Somehow, he kept the eye contact. “Do me the courtesy next time of storing me somewhere with a bed and a library, Your Majesty.”
“Do you really think I was the one who imprisoned you? I was not. Yes, I knew you were there, but I had no one I could trust to go to you . . . and I could not go myself. It was not until the arrival of Lady Grey I felt I had an ally who would be up to the task should you prove . . . reluctant.”
“You thought I’d gone completely mad.” She said nothing, but she looked away. Amelie looked away. He swallowed and stared hard at his clasped hands. “Perhaps you weren’t so wrong. I was . . . not myself.”
“I doubt that, since you are so much better already,” Amelie said. Her tone was warm, and very gentle. “Tomorrow we will leave this place behind. I have a castle far in the mountains where you can work in peace to recapture all that you have lost. I am in need of a fine alchemist, and there is none better in this world. We have much to do, you and I. Much to plan.”
There was a certain synchronicity to it, he found; he had been in Amelie’s company for many years, and when he left it, disaster always struck. She was, in some ways, his lucky star. Best to follow her now, he supposed. “All right,” he said. “I will go.”
“Then you’d best say farewell to Lady Grey and find yourself some rest,” she told him. “She will not come with us.”
“No? Why not?”
“Two queens cannot ever stay comfortably together. Lady Grey has her own path; we have ours. Say your good-byes. At nightfall, we depart.”
She dismissed him simply by picking up her book. He bowed—an unnecessary courtesy—and saw himself out of the room. It was only as he shut the doors that he saw her guards standing motionless in the darker corners of her apartments; she was never unwatched, never unprotected. He’d forgotten that.
Lady Grey was waiting for him, hands calmly folded in a maidenly sort of posture that did not match her mischievous smile. “Dinner,” she said. “Follow me to the larder.”
The larder was stocked with fresh-drawn blood; he did not ask where it came from, and she did not volunteer. She sipped her own cup as he emptied his, drinking until all the screaming hunger inside was fully drowned. “Do you ever imagine you can hear them?” he asked her, looking at the last red drops clinging to the metal goblet’s sides.
“You mean, hear their screams in the blood?” Lady Grey seemed calm enough, but she nodded. “I think I might, sometimes, when I drink it so warm. Odd, how I never hear it when they’re dying before me in real life. Only when I drink apart from the hunt. Is that normal, do you think?”
“Whatever is normal in this world, we have no part in it,” he said. “How long was I in the dark, my lady?”
“Ten months.”
“It seemed longer.”
“No doubt because it was so congenial.”
“You should have stayed for the formal procession of the rats. Very entertaining; there were court dances. Although perhaps I imagined it in one of my hallucinations. I did have several vivid ones.”
She reached across the table and wrapped her long, slender fingers around his hand. “You are safe now,” she told him. “And I will keep my eye on you, Lord Myrnin. The world cannot lose such a lovely head of hair.”
“I will try to keep my hair, and my head, intact for you.” She’d kept her hand on his, and he turned his fingers to lightly grip hers. “I am surprised to find that you accept Amelie’s orders.”
Lady Grey laughed. It was a peal of genuine amusement, too free for a well-bred young woman, but as she’d said, she’d buried that girl behind her. “Amelie asks favors of me. She doesn’t order me. I stay with you because I like you, Lord Myrnin. If you wish, I’ll stay with you today, as you rest. It might be a day of nightmares for you. I could comfort you.”
The thought made him dizzy, and he struggled to contain it, control it. His brain was chattering again, running too fast and in too many wild directions. Perhaps he’d overindulged in the blood. He felt hot with it. “I think,” he said finally, “that you are too kind, and I am too mad, for that to end well, my lady. As much as I . . . desire comfort, I am not ready for it. Let me learn myself again before I am asked to learn someone else.”
He expected her to be insulted; what woman would not have been, to have such a thing thrown in her face? But she only sat back, still holding his hand, and regarded him for a long moment before she said, “I think you are a very wise man, Myrnin of Conwy. I think one day we will find ourselves together again, and perhaps things will be different. But for now, you are right. You should be yourself, wholly, before you can begin to think beyond your skin again. I remember my first days of waking after death. I know how fragile and frightening it was, to be so strong and yet so weak.”
She understood. Truly understood. He felt a surge of affection for her, and tender connection, and raised her hand to his lips to kiss the soft skin of her knuckles. He said nothing els
e, and neither did she. Then he bowed, rose, and walked to his own chambers.
He bolted the door from within, and crawled still clothed between the soft linen sheets, drowning in feathers and fears, and slept as if the devil himself chased the world away.
As he rode away that night in Amelie’s train of followers, he looked back to see Lady Grey standing like a beacon on the roof of the stone keep. He raised a hand to her as the trees closed around their party.
He never saw her return the salute . . . but he felt it.
Someday, he heard her say. Someday.
• • •
He didn’t see her for another three hundred years. Wars had raged; he’d seen kingdoms rise and fall, and tens of thousands bleed to death in needless pain over politics and faith. He’d followed Amelie from one haven to the next, until they’d quarreled over something foolish, and he’d run away from her at last to strike out on his own. It was a mistake.
He was never as good when left to his own devices.
In Canterbury, in England, at a time when the young Victoria was only just learning the weight of her crown, he made mistakes. Terrible ones. The worst of these was trusting an alchemist named Cyprien Tiffereau. Cyprien was a brilliant man, a learned man, and Myrnin had forgotten that the learned and brilliant could be just as treacherous as the ignorant and stupid. The trap had caught him entirely by surprise. Cyprien had learned too much of vampires, and had developed an interest in what use might be made of them—medical for a start, and as weapons for the future.
Confessing his own vampire nature to Cyprien, and all his weaknesses, had been a serious error.
I should have known, he thought as he sat in the dark hole of his cell, fettered at ankles, wrists, and neck with thick, reinforced silver. The burning had started as torture, but he had adjusted over time, and now it was a pain that was as natural to him as the growing fog in his mind. Starvation made his confusion worse, and over the days, then weeks, the little blood that Cyprien had allowed him hadn’t sustained him well at all.
And now the door to his cell was creaking open, and Cyprien’s lean, ascetic body eased in. Myrnin could smell the blood in the cup in Cyprien’s hand, and his whole body shook and cramped with the craving. The scent was almost as strong as that of the hot-metal blood in the man’s veins.
“Hello, spider,” Cyprien said. “You should be hungry by now.”
“Unchain me and find out, friend,” Myrnin said. His voice was a low growl, like an animal’s, and it made him uneasy to hear it. He did not want to be . . . this. It frightened him.
“Your value is too great, I’m afraid. I can’t allow such a prize to escape now. You must think of all there is to learn, Myrnin. You are a man with a curious mind. You should be grateful for this chance to be of service.”
“If it’s knowledge you seek, I’ll help you learn your own anatomy. Come closer. Let me teach you.”
Cyprien was no fool. He placed the cup on the floor and took a long-handled pole to push it within reach of Myrnin’s chained hands.
The red, rich smell of the blood overwhelmed him, and he grabbed for the wooden mug, raised it, and gulped it down in three searing, desperate mouthfuls.
The pain hit only seconds later. It ripped through him like pure lightning, crushed him to the ground, and began to pull his mind to pieces. Pain flayed him. It scraped his bones to the marrow. It ripped him apart, from skin to soul.
When he survived it, weeping and broken, he became slowly aware of Cyprien’s presence. The man sat at a portable desk, scratching in a small book with a feather pen.
“I am keeping a record,” Cyprien told him. “Can you hear me, Myrnin? I am not a monster. This is research that will advance our knowledge of the natural world, a cause we both hold dear. Your suffering brings enlightenment.”
Myrnin whispered his response, too softly. It hardly mattered. He’d forgotten how to speak English now. The only words that came to his tongue were Welsh, the language of his childhood, of his mother.
“I didn’t hear,” Cyprien said. “Can you possibly speak louder?”
If he could, he didn’t have the strength, he found. Or anything left to say. Words ran away from him like deer over a hillside, and the fog pressed in, silver fog, confused and confusing. All that was left in him was rage and fear. The taste of poisoned blood made him feel sick and afraid in ways that he’d never imagined he could bear.
And then it grew worse. Myrnin felt his arms and legs begin to convulse, and a low cry burst out of his throat, the wordless plea of a sick creature with no hope.
“Ah,” his friend said. “That would be the next phase. How gratifying that occurs with such precise timing. It should last an hour or so, and then you may rest a bit. There’s no hurry. We have weeks together. Years, perhaps. And you are going to be so very useful, my spider. My prized subject. The wonders we will create together . . . just think of it.”
But by then, Myrnin could not think of anything. Anything at all.
The hour passed in torment, and then there were a few precious hours of rest before Cyprien came, again.
The day blurred into night, day, night, weeks, months. There was no way to tell one eternity from the next. No time in hell, Myrnin’s mind gibbered, in one of his rare moments of clarity. No clocks. No calendars. No past. No future. No hope, no hope, no hope.
He dreaded Cyprien’s appearances, no matter how hungry he became. The blood was sometimes tainted, and sometimes not, which made it all the worse, of course. Sometimes he did not drink, but that only made the next tainted drink more powerful.
Cyprien was patient as death himself, and as utterly unmoved by tears, or screams, or pleas for mercy.
Time must have passed outside his hell, if not inside, because Cyprien grew older. Gray crept into his short-cropped hair. Lines mapped his face. Myrnin had forgotten speech, but if he could have spoken, he would have laughed. You’ll die before me, old friend, he thought. Grow old and feeble and die. The problem was that on the day that Cyprien stopped coming and lay cold in his grave, Myrnin knew he would go on and on, starving slowly into an insanely slow end, lost in this black hole of pain.
And finally, one day, Myrnin became aware that Cyprien had not come. That time had passed, and passed, and the darkness had never altered. Blood had never arrived. His hunger had rotted whatever sanity he had left, and he crouched in the dark, mindless, ready for whatever death he could pray to have . . . until the angel came.
Ah, the angel.
She smelled of such pale things—winter, flowers, snow. But she glowed and shimmered with color, and he knew her face, a little. Such a beautiful face. So hard to look upon, in his pain and misery.
She had keys to his bonds, and when he attacked her—because he could not help it, he was so hungry—she deftly fended him off and gave him a bottle full of blood. Fresh, clean, healthy blood. He gorged until he collapsed on the floor at her feet, cradling the empty glass in his arms like a favorite child. He was still starving, but for a precious moment, the screaming was silent.
Her cool fingers touched his face and slid the lank mess of his hair back.
“I find you in a much worse state this time, dear one,” said the angel. “We must stop meeting like this.”
He thought he made a sound, but it might have been only his wish, not expressed by flesh at all. He wanted to respond. Wanted to weep. But instead he only stayed there, limp on the ground, until she pulled him up and dragged him out with her.
Light. Light and color and confusion. Cyprien dead on the stairs, the cup of poisoned blood spilled into a mess on the steps next to his body. The bloodless bite on his neck was neat, and final.
There was a book in his pocket. That book. The book in which he’d recorded all of the torture, the suffering. Myrnin pointed to it mutely, and the angel silently slipped the book from Cyprien’s body and passed it to him. He
clutched it to his breast. And then, with the angel’s help, stamped his foot down on the wooden mug to smash it into pieces.
“I killed him for you,” the angel said. There was tense anger in her voice, and it occurred to him then that her hair was red, red as flame, and it tingled against his fingers when he hesitantly stroked it. “He deserved worse.” She stopped, and looked at him full in the face. He saw her distress and shock. “Can you not speak, sir? At all? For me?”
He mutely stared back. There was a gesture he should have made, but he could not remember what it would be.
She sounded sad then. “Come, let’s get you to safety.”
But there was no safety, out in the streets. Only a blur of faces and shrieking and pain. A building burned, sending flames jetting like blood into the sky, and there was a riot going on, and he and his angel were caught in the middle of it. A man rushed them, face twisted, and Myrnin leaped for him, threw him down on the rough cobbles, and plunged his fangs deep into the man’s throat.
As good as the fresh blood his angel had delivered had been, this, this was life . . . and death. Myrnin drained his victim dry, every drop, and was so intent on the murder of it that he failed to see the club that hit him in the back of the head, hard enough to send him collapsed to the paving. More men closed in, a blur of fists and feet and clubs, and he thought, I escaped one hell to suffer in another, and all he could do was hug the book, the precious book of his own insanity and suffering, to his chest and wait to die.
But then his angel was there, his fiery angel. She needed no sword, only her own fury, and she cleared them from him. She was hurt for it, and he hated himself that he was the cause of her pain, but she drove them back.
The head wound must have sparked visions, because he saw himself, a different self, sober and sane and dressed in brilliant colors, and he saw himself in an embrace with his angel—no, his Lady Grey, his savior; he remembered her name now. He remembered that much, at least.