“Lan, he knew which garden this was when he told me you were to have it. And I’m certain he knew what you’d want to do with it as soon as you saw it.”
“He makes mistakes. You and I both know that. He may be certain today, but I don’t want him to regret it a year from now. This place—” She looked helplessly around. “—may be all he has to remember her by.”
“She would not want a memorial from him.”
“He told me something like that once. But…”
“You want to be sure.”
“I want him to be sure,” she insisted. “Because when I dig it up, that’s what he’ll remember. That I replaced the last thing he had that his daughter made with her own hands. And it’s going to look awful, you know that,” she finished desperately. “I’ll grow all the bloody flowers I can, and I’ll try to make it all look nice, but it’ll never look like I meant to do it, not like this does!”
“That may be just what he intended.” But even as he said it, Master Wickham beckoned and began to lead her back up the winding path and out of the awful garden.
“It doesn’t have to be this instant,” she protested, even as she followed him. “It’ll give us something to talk about if he comes to dinner. If he doesn’t, it’ll give me something to fume over while I wait for him.”
“Oh, how I wish I could tolerate that, Lan,” said Wickham. “But his word to me this morning was to show you the garden and make any necessary arrangements for the commencement of your project. I can’t do that until you have a project to commence. Therefore, there is nothing in the world so important in this moment as the matter of which garden you are to have.”
“Sorry.”
“You’ve no reason to apologize,” he told her. “I understand your reluctance. I’m simply incapable of sharing it. The living have the luxury of indecision. The dead do not. It’s bloody inconvenient at times.”
The walk from the palace to the awful grey garden had seemed to take forever, located as it was on the extreme edge of the grounds, but the return flew by, giving Lan no chance at all to decide just how she was going to bring up the touchy subject of Azrael’s lost Children. She had only just stepped off the gravel path of Tehya’s garden and then she was walking on rich carpet and cold marble tiles with her muddy slippers in her hand.
She expected Master Wickham to take her to the library or, failing that, to Azrael’s bedchamber to wait for him. To her surprise, he took her all the way to the front foyer, where she saw a group of perhaps a dozen Revenants standing together—more than Lan had seen in one place anywhere outside of the garrison itself. One of them raised a gloved hand, silencing his mates, and came to meet them.
Master Wickham either was oblivious to what it meant when a Revenant stepped up with a hand on his sword or pretended to be as he said, “Would you be so kind as to inform our lord that Lan would like a word with him, if at all possible?”
The Revenant looked at Lan, then at Wickham, then over his shoulder at the other silently watchful Revenants, and finally back at Lan. “Come this way, please,” he said, stone-faced, and led her up the white stairwell that climbed to the second floor.
“Until tomorrow then,” said Master Wickham and turned to go.
“You’re not coming?”
“To question our lord? Certainly not.”
“You’re in a beastly mood, aren’t you?” she asked with a sinking heart.
“Beastly! But never mind me. If nothing else, I can organize the crew with whom you’ll be working, so that you are not forced to deal with anyone determined to be too obnoxious about taking orders from the living. The interviews should take me through six o’clock and then I’ll be right as rain again. However,” he said, polite even in a temper, “I’ll send for coffee and biscuits, in the unlikely event you finish your audience before then and feel like joining me in the library.”
“I appreciate it.”
He kept walking.
“If you’re ready, miss.” The Revenant on the stair swept one hand impatiently upward and put the other on the hilt of his sword. “Come this way, please.”
“Can you get a pot of tea, too?” Lan called. “You know the kind I like.”
He stopped and looked back, perplexed. “No, I didn’t think you cared for—oh. Oh, quite. Coffee…and tea.” He frowned, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, and finally said, “It’s a pity, circumstances being what they are. I think we could have been friends, if I were alive. Or if you were dead.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that, but he meant it well, which, as unsettling as that was on its own merits, prompted her to a weak smile.
Wickham’s gaze shifted past her to the waiting Revenant and he heaved a dead man’s sigh. “Go on,” he told her. “I’ll see you shortly. We’ll chat then.”
The Revenant took her deep into the unfamiliar territory of the second floor to a relatively plain door that opened on an equally plain room. Although it was still fairly early in the day, the curtains were closed, throwing everything into premature twilight. Lan went to open them, but saw the meditation garden below her and quickly closed them again before she could look too closely at the ‘flowers’ planted there. She turned around to ask the Revenant if there was another room she could wait in, just in time to see him shut the door on her.
And lock it.
“Wait here, please,” he said through the door—was that a joke?—and retreated, his boots thumping away down the carpeted hall.
Alone, Lan had plenty of time to look around and familiarize herself with the small, empty room in which she waited.
Because it was empty, as much as any room in the palace could be. There were lamps fixed to the wall and carpets on the floor, and it was all clean and tasteful, but the only furnishings were a small writing desk set in the center of the room with a single high-backed chair behind it, facing the door. There were no books, no paintings, nothing to do or even to look at. It was just a place to wait, so Lan sat down and waited.
It was a long wait, long enough that she could have walked all the way out to the grey garden for another look at the reason why she was here and all the way back again. For a man who supposedly did nothing all day, he didn’t seem to want to be interrupted.
The dark made both the room seem smaller and the minutes longer. After a while, Lan went to one of the lamps on the wall, but couldn’t reach it. Dragging the chair over to stand on, she investigated, but although all the parts seemed to be in place, she couldn’t see how to get the light out. Just touching the bubble did nothing. With some experimentation, she discovered she could unscrew it, but there still seemed to be no way to strike the light. She put the bubble back and stood there, peering at it in mounting frustration until startled by the suddenly opening door.
She and Azrael stared at each other—he, with his head tilted in confusion behind his snarling mask, and she, with an odd sense of embarrassment, as if he’d caught her scratching her ass, but only until she got a good look at him.
He was dressed…strangely. At first, she couldn’t even quite say how. He was wearing his black, snarling-wolf mask, nicely set off by a broad gold collar set with black stones. The jeweled band he customarily wore on his left bicep was missing; in its place, razor wire wrapped three times, cutting deep but bloodless wounds in his flesh. His belt was black leather over a loinguard made of plated gold, which itself hung low over many layers of black silk, both plain and embroidered with gold thread, the longest of which nearly reached the floor. And there was a fresh wound on his breast, deep and still wet, but the edges clean; he hadn’t moved when the blade had gone in.
Moving slowly, he raised one arm, extended his index finger, and tapped a very small panel tucked away beside the door. All the lights in the room at once came on together.
“Oh,” said Lan. Damn it, she was blushing.
“It isn’t very intuitive, is it?” He closed the door and came to lift her down from her improvised step-ladder. She didn’t need the help
, strictly speaking, but the long skirt did make things tricky. “You are too young to have met many people who lived full lives before my ascension, but there was an amusing time shortly after the fall of Man’s dominion when nearly everyone I saw attempted to light every room they entered by groping at the wall. And you could see it in their eyes, not merely after that futile slap, but even before, how they knew full well that age was ended. But the habits of a lifetime do not change merely because our circumstances do.”
“Is that why you don’t use electric lights in your own room?”
“Out of habit? No. Not consciously, at any rate.” He glanced at the lamp on the wall and, curiously, when that light shone directly on him at so close a distance, his own eyeshine shut itself off, just like it came with its own panel on the wall. The color beneath was briefly distinct, but still unnameable. Then he looked back at her and his eyes glowed out white again. “I just don’t like them. They seem unnatural to me, and yes, I’m aware of the irony.”
“Then why do you leave the rest of the lights on in Haven if you don’t like them?”
He looked at her, then said, “Is this what you wished to speak with me about?”
“No, I…no.” But she still didn’t know how to begin in a tactful way, so after an interminable moment trapped in his gaze, she finally just took a breath and said it: “I went out to the garden you gave me.”
He nodded with an air of impatience. “A daunting task for one pair of hands, but you will have others to manage the more taxing labor. Wickham will see to it and act as intermediary so that you will not have to interact with them personally. I acknowledge the dead can be…intolerant of the living. If you have any difficulties, suffer any slight, you are to tell him at once and, if necessary, he will tell me.”
“It’s not that.”
“Come to it, then,” he said and if it wasn’t entirely a snap, it certainly did have teeth. So did the smile he gave her afterwards, sharpening rather than softening his appearance. “Is there something else you require?”
“No—well, yes. I’m going to need some work kit. Trousers, boots, gloves, that sort of thing.”
“Are you?” He looked at her gown, on the muddy hem of it in particular, and smiled. It was not the smile of man doing his best to deal with a problem he did not find especially relevant. To the contrary, it was the smile of man who has been relieved of a problem, and a pressing one. “Of course you are. I’ll speak to your handmaiden tonight and send you off to be fitted tomorrow. In order that you should begin work on the garden as soon as possible, it would be most efficient if you were to remain on site with the tailors until you have what you need.”
As much as she wanted out of these fussy dresses and the silly things pretending to be shoes that went with them, that prospect did not in the least appeal. However, it didn’t appear to be up to her.
“I’ll send your handmaiden with you for company,” Azrael was saying. “And Wickham, if you like. And you needn’t be closed in with them every minute. You’ll have time for lessons and the odd hour’s respite. My tailors are quite skilled and, as they have no other work at the moment, you shouldn’t be away more than…” His eyes cut away from her, looking at the door and through it, thinking. Not of clothes and tailors, Lan was sure. “Three days,” he said slowly. “Ten at most. I have never known it to take longer than ten days.”
“Fine,” said Lan, although it was not fine and she had no intention of being this accommodating when tomorrow rolled around. “But that’s not really why I wanted to talk to you. It’s the garden. The garden itself.”
“It isn’t very pleasant, I know, which is why I would like you to—”
“It was Tehya’s garden.”
Azrael eyes flared and narrowed. Otherwise, he was very still.
“Who told you that?” he asked, too quietly. Then let out a harsh cut of laughter before she could even think to lie, saying, “Wickham.”
“I asked,” she said, too late.
“I’m sure. No matter.” He turned and went swiftly back across the small room, saying, “If you have so strong an aversion, I’ll not insist upon it. You’ll have a new garden tomorrow. Now, if there’s nothing more—” He opened the door and gestured to the hall. “—I have other matters to attend to.”
“Is someone waiting for you?” she asked, not accusing or arguing, but only asking.
“Yes.” His eyes flickered. “But not who you think.”
“Then can’t we talk?”
“Not now. I’ll see you at dinner.” He seemed to know just how much weight that promise carried with her after this last run of days, because he paused and adopted a more conciliatory tone, saying, “Go to my chambers. We’ll have dinner there, without my court, without servants or music. Just you and I.”
“Five minutes, Azrael. Please.”
“I value your conversation, Lan, you know I do, but this is not a good time.”
She went, not to him, but to lay her hand on the tall back of the chair. “Would it help if I sat on your lap?”
He stared at her in tense silence one long minute and part of another, then slowly shut the door. “It might.”
“Come here. Sit down. I’m not refusing,” she said again as he came toward her. “I said I’d grow your garden and I will. I just want you to be sure that’s the garden you really want to give me, that’s all.”
“Why would I not?” he asked, pulling out the chair and seating himself.
“It was Tehya’s.”
“And?”
“And I just thought…you might want to keep it.”
“As what?” He put a hand on her hip to support her as she swung a leg over to straddle him—trickier than it looked in long skirts—and to guide her in her first rolling movements. “A shrine to her affection for me?”
“She put a lot of work into it,” said Lan, because that was the best thing that could possibly be said about that awful grey garden, but as soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t, because it was true. Tehya had put a lot of work into it. She’d put her bitterness and loss in every leaf.
“She did,” Azrael agreed, working a hand up under her rumpled skirt to stroke her bare thigh. “But I cannot make sacred everything my Children have touched, no more than I can erase all evidence of their time with me. But if it is true I can never sever myself of their memory, so it is also true I need not preserve their hatred. I have kept Tehya’s garden and I suppose I would have continued to keep it indefinitely, were I not so certain…” His voice faltered as she reached for his mask’s fastens. He waited, eyes dim and troubled, until she lifted it away, before finishing, “…of you.”
“You have a lot more confidence in me than I do.” She started to put his mask on the table behind her, but she’d never liked this one—the snarling wolf—and didn’t want it looking at her. She hung it by its strap on the pointy jobbie on the back of his chair instead. A finial, that was, or would be on a building. She had no idea she’d learned that until just this moment. “You know a garden is nothing like a greenhouse. I mean, you know that, right? What do you think I’m going to do out there?”
“Only what you must to please me, I’m sure. But whatever else that comes to, that much will always be true. It will have been to please me. And so it will be a better garden than Tehya ever gave me. Don’t.”
She had bent close to kiss him. She stopped, hovering awkwardly inches away, sharing his breath as he stared past her into the corners of this empty room, then tried to kiss him anyway. He turned away, but when she caught his face between her hands, he let her turn him back.
The first kiss was cautious, just the lightest brush of her lips across his, testing his tolerance. He neither avoided nor encouraged her, which was encouragement enough. She moved her mouth to the very corner of his, teasing for entry with the tip of her tongue. He kept shut against her, but did bring both hands to rest on the small of her back, holding her closer even if he did it only grudgingly.
Lan s
ettled in, twining her arms around his neck and resting on his shoulders as she nibbled, sucked and prodded at his lips, all the while moving gently against him. She could feel his reluctance, but she could also feel his desire, and between the two, she knew which would win out in the end.
At last, with a growling sigh, his lips parted. She immediately took the kiss deeper, feeding him little sips of her and tasting him in return, letting the slow roll of her hips gradually quicken to match the fervency of her explorations until he gave in and kissed her back. His hands, no longer silent partners in the embrace, moved roughly over her, fighting her clothing for the possession of her body, but making no effort to cut the corset loose or even to shift her skirts. This wasn’t sex. This wasn’t even about sex. It was about heat and friction and him and her, but not sex, and her frustration when she finally realized that must have been evident, because he chuckled into her mouth and bit her on the lip.
“I know you want me,” she whispered, grinding at the proof through his skirts and hers.
“Mm.”
“You don’t want to wait.”
“But I will.”
“How long?”
“Tonight, Lan. When I have time to tend to you properly. I have other obligations at the moment.”
She wanted to tell him whoever was waiting could jolly well wait, but she was being nice. Instead, she ducked her head to peep up at him through her lashes in that way Elvie Peters made look so coy and which Lan strongly suspected made her look squinty and sleepy, and said, “I bet I could change your mind.”
“I think not.”
“I’m a really—” Lan let her hand travel down, over his scarred chest and along the ruined trail that led to his belt. “—really—” She plucked once at his buckle, then let it alone and cupped the solid bulge of him through his skirts. “—really good negotiator when I want to be.”
“True.” He caught the back of her neck and forced her to bend backwards where gravity pulled, disorienting and exhilarating at the same time. He leaned over her, filling her vision with his fanged smile, his burning stare. “But I am not without my means, diplomat.”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 46