“Not by accident.”
“No. The choice was ever mine.”
His passivity unnerved her. “Do you regret it at all?”
“What purpose would that serve?”
Familiar frustration sparked, but didn’t catch. Lan studied him, feeling with uncertainty the weight of her own past choices stained with sorrow and anger and even the phantom sting of too-brief happiness, but largely unburdened by remorse. That was just a word and once she realized that, her future choices suddenly seemed much simpler.
“I do not like to speak of these things,” he said, not harshly. His hand stroked her thigh just the same as before, but he had gone back to staring at the bedcurtains and that was a bad sign. “I do not understand why you do.”
“I don’t, believe me.”
“Then why must you? What can it possibly profit you to remind me of the great evils I have done? I can never unmake my mistakes. There is no starting over, as you yourself told me. We can but move on.”
“I’m trying.”
“I wish I could believe that, my Lan, but I see no evidence.”
They lay together, silent.
“There’s this saying I used to hear in Norwood,” she said at last. “It goes, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ Like, loving someone gave you a free ticket to arse around and annoy them, because you could always go back to how it was before, with the free and clear understanding that the fight was over. A smile, a kiss, all’s forgiven.” She gave her eyes a roll. “And that is such horseshit, I can barely say it out loud. Love means constantly saying you’re sorry, whether you mean it or not, whether you’re wrong or not. Love means trying to stop keeping score. And I’m trying. I know you don’t think so, but I am.”
He stared at her a long time, his eyeshine gradually eclipsed by the great shadow of his frown, until at last he said, “What does that mean?”
“It means I can move on. I can even move on with you, but I can’t move on if it means leaving everything the way it is now, because that’s not moving on at all, Azrael, that’s giving up.”
“No, before that,” he said, still with that odd, intent stare. “Did you…Did you say you love me?”
Funny, how that part could sneak up on her when it had sort of been the whole root of what she had just said. Lan laughed, or tried to anyway. “It doesn’t always feel good,” she told him. “I wish I’d known that before I let myself fall.”
His frown did not diminish. “What would you change?”
“Honestly? Not a damned thing. Hell is repetition. Love is hell. And I’m sorry to keep after you like this. I’m not wrong, but I am sorry.” She stretched toward him—one more kiss, one more pass of her hand along the rough blade of his cheek—then rolled away and curled up against her pillow. She could feel his stare itching at her back, but he asked no more questions. She fell asleep soon afterwards and although she did not dream, or at least did not remember any dreams, when she woke up alone the next morning, she knew exactly what she had to do and how to start.
* * *
That day, in the library, she submitted her next written complaint—I don’t understand the point of this pigshit—right as Master Wickham walked through the tea house door. When he asked why she wanted to start her lessons in this way, she told him it was so she had time to do lines afterwards and not be late for dinner again. He complimented her on her practicality and made her write out the correct spelling a hundred times and then a hundred more because penmanship counted these days.
The following day, she wrote You can make me do it, but you will never make me love it. He acknowledged this was true mildly enough and set her to writing lines, during which time he penned a quick essay titled I Love Everything. Then he took her to the garrison and made her read it, out loud, to a captive audience of silent, unblinking, unsmiling Revenants. When she finished struggling through the last page—I love your fine hat. I love your black shoes. I will never love reading, but I will always love you.—Deimos ordered his men to applaud. They did.
On the third day, she wrote I won’t stop until you stop. Master Wickham looked it over much longer than was necessary to check her spelling, then set it aside and simply said, “What is this about, Lan?”
She started to put on her dolly-eyes, but then just sighed and sat down. “I don’t want to tell you.”
“Fair enough.” He considered that, frowning his polite frown, and finally said, “How can I help?”
Lan picked up her note and set it down again between them. “With the spelling.”
After a long stare, he took up his pen and made a few neat scratches. “It’s bloody inconvenient being dead at times,” he remarked, passing the corrected copy back to her. “I’m not the least bit curious and I really rather think I ought to be. You may begin.”
After lines, there were her usual lessons and, for a change, Lan welcomed them. Thinking about words and the ways they fit together kept her from her other thoughts, but it certainly didn’t make her a better student. A single page of arithmetic problems took an hour of figuring, even with Master Wickham’s patient coaching, and she read the same chapter in her biology textbook three times without any better understanding of the content.
But all days, even bad ones, end. At six o’clock, Master Wickham packed himself off and Lan went down to be dressed for a dinner she had no appetite for, but which she was determined to at least pretend to enjoy. She thought she faked her way fairly successfully through that endless evening, laughing when laughter seemed appropriate and keeping up her end of the conversation without any obvious pauses, but as good as she thought she was, he was so much better. He talked with her, ate with her, walked her to his chambers and lay beside her in his bed, and she never had the slightest clue she’d been made until the next morning at breakfast, when his usual greeting was replaced by, “I missed you last night.”
There might have been a moment when she could have pretended confusion and maybe gotten away with it, but she hesitated just a hair too long. “What do you mean?” she asked, knowing the game was already lost, but sitting down beside him anyway. “I was here.”
“In the flesh, perhaps. Your heart and mind were elsewhere. And still are, I see.”
Lan pulled a platter of ham steaks over and cut herself a piece, doggedly feigning unconcern. “You’re imagining things.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said mildly, watching her eat. “I lack that level of imagination. Did you sleep well?”
“I don’t think I slept at all,” she admitted. “I was still awake when you left, at any rate.”
“Dare I ask what troubles you?”
“Not unless you want me to tell you,” Lan said distractedly, studying the edge of her knife as she cut herself a second piece of ham. The blade was ridiculously sharp for a breakfast utensil. “I might, you know. I’m tired enough. I hardly know what the fuck I’m saying.”
“So I see.” He pushed his throne back and rose. “You’re exhausted. Come. I’ll take you back to bed.”
“No.”
He frowned, his eyes narrowing. “No?”
“I mean, not yet. I have lessons.”
“One day more or less hardly matters.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. This could be the most important day of my life. The one that changes everything.” She put the knife down beside her plate and did not look at it. “Besides, if I let you take me to bed—I really want to let you take me to bed,” she interrupted herself with a sigh. “But if I do, sure as I’m sitting here, I’ll be writing, ‘I will not bunk off on Master Wickham,’ ten thousand times tomorrow. Which means I’ll get ink all over my hands and probably my face as well, which means Serafina will be in a mood when she has to dolly me up. It’s like that old saying about the shitball that has to roll downhill and just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
“I think you may be confusing two separate sayings,” he said after a moment’s thought.
“Maybe, whatever, the shitball’
s not the point. The point is, I have to do this.”
Did he pause before nodding his consent? Did his eyes spark brighter before he turned away? He was suspicious. Hell, it didn’t have to be today. And really, was it smart to go forcing opportunity like this? Shouldn’t she wait until the time was right and she was sure—really sure—she’d tried everything? Maybe there was another way…if nothing else, maybe there was a painless way. Could she really do this with a table knife?
Did she really still want to?
“Azrael,” she blurted, standing.
He stopped with one foot on the last step of the dais and looked back at her.
She wanted to ask him to end the Eaters and maybe this time he’d say yes. But even as the thought cringed through her heart, her head knew he wouldn’t. Not if she asked him here in the dining hall, not if she asked him later in bed, not ever. She looked at him and saw his life as a relentless chain of running, capture, pain and imprisonment. He could not escape, only hide as centuries slipped by, emerging each time to find the enemy closer, stronger, more numerous. Humans were his Eaters and he wanted them ended as much as she.
“Lan?”
She shook her head, sinking back into her seat. “It’s nothing. Never mind. I’m just tired.”
He didn’t move.
“I missed you last night, too,” she said. “But I promise tonight, I’ll really be there. All right?”
He held her gaze a suspiciously long time before nodding. At the doorway, he paused again and he might have said a word to the guards posted there, but she couldn’t tell. He left without looking back.
Lan finished her breakfast, wiped her mouth, and while the napkin was concealing her hands, tucked the knife into her sleeve. Then she got up and headed for the door, her heart pounding as she waited for the servants clearing the imperial table to notice the missing knife, but they never did. It was hers. It didn’t seem fair that it had been so easy.
It was raining too hard for a walk to the garden (‘It should rain on bad days,’ Lan thought and the knife was heavy against her arm), so Master Wickham greeted her in the library with a pot of tea for himself and coffee for her, with all her favorite trimmings. He had always been thoughtful that way. She drank the first cup as she wrote out her last complaint and turned it in to him.
“Again?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Last one.”
“‘Someone has to lose,’” he read and looked at her. “It is perhaps worth nothing that in order for that to be true, all parties would have to define winning in the same way and we don’t. For example, you surely count this note as your win in whatever contest of wills you imagine yourself to be, because the words express your continued defiance. Whereas I note only that they are spelled correctly. Ironically, I also count that as your win.” He handed the paper back. “You think I win each day that you are forced to attend lessons. I think you win each time you learn something from them. This is what is known as perspective. Perhaps you can give me another example of how differing viewpoints affect the same facts?”
She almost told him about Azrael and humans, humans and Eaters. She almost told him how funny, almost magical, it seemed to her to learn that this concept even had its own word, like finding out that a room for just holding books had its own name. She almost asked him if there was a word for trying to achieve a goal by killing herself. Almost. Instead, she said, “Like how you think that’s really interesting and I think it’s boring?”
He beamed. “Precisely. Very good, Lan. Now please sit down and open your textbook to chapter six. Diagramming sentence structure.”
She tried to lose herself in the writing, but the knife in her sleeve made it impossible to concentrate on her work. The words she wrote had no more meaning for her now than they had before she’d ever learned to read them. Her distraction only became more evident as the day wore on. When the clock on the wall chimed noon, Wickham reached across the desk to gently close her primer and said, “That’ll do.”
“Lunch?” asked Lan, although the thought of having to dump food on her restless nerves was not a happy one. Even if there were lemon cake, she doubted she’d be able to eat anything. Well, maybe if there were lemon cake. But she doubted she’d be able to eat more than one slice.
But Wickham was packing up his briefcase, not just clearing space on the desk. “Why don’t we take a half-day, Lan?”
“Oh. All right. Where are we going?”
“I,” Wickham said cheerily, “am going to the tea house in the garden. You’re welcome to come with me, of course, but I won’t insist. My intermedi-mate needs a rest and she shall have it.”
Lan watched him tap papers and stack books, feeling she ought to protest, if only because she knew he didn’t really want a half-day. He was only offering because she was being so bloody useless. “Are you in a beastly mood?” she asked finally.
“Not at all.”
“Are you sure?”
He stopped mucking with his teachery things at once and smiled at her. “Bunk off, Lan,” he told her gently. “Have a sleep or a walk or whatever you need to put yourself right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Her heart sank. “Goodbye, Master Wickham.”
He closed his briefcase and left, pausing once at the shelves to select a book to read while he was drinking his tea down in the garden.
When he was gone, Lan took a sheet of paper from the desk and uncapped her fountain pen. She was not connected to the hand that wrote. It was like she was at the cinema again, watching some woman she didn’t know blow on the ink to dry it and fold the paper into her sleeve with the knife. She sat there for some time longer, fighting the urge to write a second note, this one to Master Wickham, but she was afraid he’d find it before Azrael found his. In the end, she couldn’t leave it alone and so she found another sheet of paper and wrote I’m sorry I upset your routine. If he found it today, he’d think it was today she was apologizing for. If he found it tomorrow…hopefully, he’d still believe it.
Serafina was waiting for her in Azrael’s chamber, sitting on the edge of his bath and dipping her toes in the water with a bored expression that became alarm when Lan opened the door on her. She leapt up with a splash, her bare feet slipping on the tiles and her tongue slipping over apologies, but she quickly recovered herself when she saw who it was that had walked in on her. She tossed her braids, not quite with her usual haughtiness. “You’re early.”
“So are you.” Lan shut the door, careful to keep the sleeve with her knife and the note in it behind her back, hidden from her handmaiden’s sharp eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting on you, of course. Our lord wished to be informed as soon as you were made available.”
“Well, here I am. Trot yourself off and tell him.”
“I should make you presentable first.” Serafina ran a despairing eye over Lan’s attire and shook her head. “You don’t appreciate how much work that involves.”
“I’m not the only one. Azrael seems to think I’m at my most presentable when I’m bare-ass naked and honestly, he likes ‘preparing me’ himself. Look,” said Lan, edging toward the bed with her arm behind her back, “I’m not going to tell you not to bother, but I will say whatever you put on me is about to come off in shreds. How about we compromise? I’ll take a bath. Then you won’t need to dress me.”
“And your hair would be dry by dinnertime…” Serafina scowled thoughtfully. “All right. I’m trusting you to do a proper job of it and not just get wet and get out again.”
Lan waggled her fingers goodbye and watched her go, trying not to think of what condition she’d be in then, but imagining it all the same. Briefly, she wondered if the sight of her—crusted with blood, dull-eyed and slack-jawed, dead—would shock her otherwise taciturn handmaiden. Probably not. If she recoiled for any reason, it would be because she was afraid someone would hold her responsible.
And someone might. Someone who might flay her, impale her, and never let her die.
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The urge came over her to call Serafina back, but what would she say? Any warning, no matter how oblique, would go straight to Azrael’s ear. No warning at all and she might as well be slitting Serafina’s throat along with her own.
Her own.
Lan waited for the tears in her heart to come spilling out her eyes, but they never did. And she didn’t have time to cry anyway.
She undressed, draping her old clothes over the bath screen where they would get wet but not bloody. Hopefully. She’d seen goats and pigs slaughtered; they tended to spray when the slaughterer didn’t know what he was doing. After some thought and without a lot of options, she slipped the knife and the note under the mattress. Then she stepped down into the bath, waded over to the other side, and turned on the fountain.
Water crashed down, just on this side of uncomfortably hot, uncomfortably loud. She closed her eyes and bent her head, telling herself it felt good drumming on her bare back even though it sort of hurt. She’d thought a bath might relax her. Nothing was going the way she’d planned. Hard not to see an omen in that.
She only meant to wash off yesterday’s sweat and wake up a little. Instead, she fell asleep, right there in the water with her head pillowed on her arms and ten thousand too-hot needles stinging unrestfully on her skin. She knew she was asleep, oddly. Even with her eyes closed, she could see, and even odder, she could see herself.
If it was a dream, it wasn’t very interesting…just a naked lady in a bath. But as she watched, things began to change. The fire dimmed so that the darkness slowly folded in around her, swallowing the bed, the screen, the wardrobe, everything but Lan herself and the last of Azrael’s masks—the gold demon with horns. The sockets were aimed at her, as if it was watching as the black enveloped her, and when the shadows closed all the way around her bath, the water turned to blood.
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