Deimos drove through the night (with one hand on the wheel and the other idly scratching at the deerhound’s ears) and the following day, and the night after that, and by morning of the third day, they were back in France and headed for the coast. The deep-ferry that had brought them was still there, with its Revenant crew exactly as they’d been left. The crossing was rough and uneventful, apart from Lan hanging over the rails the whole way, and it seemed that no sooner were the white cliffs of England’s shores in sight than they were back on the road. In another hour or two, she was riding in the back of the van through the fluttering field of all those corpses with the man who’d ordered it done sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulders to comfort her. A few miles later, they were home.
They would have made quite a sight walking through the marble halls of the palace—Azrael, maskless, naked but for a plain loincloth; Lan, unwashed since leaving Mal Henri’s weeks before; Serafina, still in her civilian ‘disguise’; and Deimos, impeccably handsome in his Revenant uniform, with the dog close on his heels—but Deimos took them into the palace the same way Lan’s ferryman had brought her so long ago, so that they entered from underground. Deimos and the deerhound went before them to clear the way, so that no one going about their duties could glimpse their lord stripped of his imperial finery. That was the worst part of the whole journey for Lan: knowing every stair, hall and door that stood between this place and Azrael’s bedchamber below, but having to wait in that dark place, where minutes did not pass, but only piled up.
And when Deimos did appear, Azrael raised a hand to halt Lan’s first eager step and turned instead to Serafina. “Take her to her room—” he began.
“Oh, the hell she will!” Lan exploded. “After all I’ve gone through to have you back and you put me on the shelf? You must be joking!”
“No, I’m demonstrating restraint and consideration. You are exhausted and, given the choice, I would rather have you rested.”
“You mean bathed,” she grumbled.
“I mean…” He slipped a hand around to the small of her back and pulled her hard against him (where it was unavoidably obvious that they could both use a bath), leaning close enough that the heat of his eyes warmed her face as he growled, “…rested. Even I am wearied by travel and you…” His gaze moved over her, dimming with concern wherever it lingered. “You…”
“You look awful,” Serafina supplied.
Azrael sent her a warning glance, but did not correct her. When he turned back to Lan, his smile was still troubled. “You’re tired,” he told her. “A night’s uninterrupted rest will improve us both. I have missed you and I intend to prove…arduous.” He sealed the promise with a kiss while Serafina sighed at the ceiling and Deimos impatiently scanned the empty hall, then released her, asking with pointed unconcern, “After all, there is no hurry, is there?”
“No.”
He smiled at her sullen, slightly breathless tone. “Patience is a virtue, child.”
“I’m your dolly. Me and virtue aren’t even on the same street. Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll rest up. But you better not keep me waiting.”
“Never. I’ve seen the lengths to which you go to hunt me down. I would not want you for an enemy. Lan,” he said, softly now, just as she’d turned away. When she looked back, he was no longer smiling, but neither did he speak. She could see thoughts in the flickering embers of his eyes, but in the end, with a scarcely perceptible shake of his head, he said merely, “Sleep well.” And to Serafina: “Take her to her room and see to her comforts.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Serafina, hiding her scowl with a deep curtsey.
Lan did not bother to disguise hers.
Azrael brushed his thumb across her lips with a chuckle, then gave a nod to Deimos and the two of them left with the dog cringing after them.
Alone with Serafina, the very last person she wanted to be alone with on her first night back in Haven, Lan rubbed her eyes and said the words she bloody well ought to be saying to Azrael right now: “Take me to bed.”
“This isn’t what I wanted to come home to either,” her handmaiden grumbled and pinched prettily at the bridge of her nose. “Right. Refresh my memory. Which room was yours?”
“The Red Room.”
“Nonsense. None of the tower rooms even have a bath.” Serafina considered the matter with the expression of one considering a platter of fresh dung and at last threw up her hands and slapped them down on her thighs again. “I’ll have to take you to my lady’s chamber,” she said disgustedly. “Come along.”
Lan wasn’t any happier about spending the night in Batuuli’s rooms than her handmaiden was, but at least she didn’t have to climb all those bloody stairs. And it was just for one night.
It had better be just for one night.
It had been more than a year since Lan had last seen these rooms, but little had changed. The table where Batuuli had laid out her poisoned pasties was still there, with a tea service set out and only lightly filmed with dust. The drapes could use a beating and the floors a good sweep, but the neglect was only as old as their journey had been long. Deimos had told her that Serafina had been pressed into Azrael’s army since the purge, but clearly, she had not surrendered all her former duties.
Serafina dragged her fingertip along the topmost curve of a low-backed chair and sighed to prove she was unhappy. “Wait here,” she said, moving toward the other room, the one with the bath. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Are they still here?”
“Who?”
Lan shrugged and went over to open the wardrobe. The last time she’d done this, there had been two pikemen inside, put away like all the rest of Batuuli’s possessions. She’d let them out once, but they might have been put back, maybe wrapped in white canvas with a handful of cedar chips to keep the moths out of their open chests. But no, the wardrobe was empty, apart from a small selection of Batuuli’s dresses, which were themselves suspiciously moth-free for having been neglected all this while.
“No,” said Serafina, watching her. “I…That is, they were discovered and removed to the gatehouse so the sight of them could serve as warning that none enter Haven save by our lord’s command.”
“I didn’t know he’d done that.”
“Yes, I imagine that was deliberate.” Serafina switched on the light in the washroom and planted her hands on her hips, looking it over. “What a mess.”
Lan went to see, but apart from a bit of dust, everything seemed to be in its place. “Can I help?”
“Certainly not! Just stand there. Don’t you dare!” she snapped as Lan sat on a padded bench to unlace her boots. “I’m supposed to do that.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Serafina sniffed, but did not insist. Taking a cloth from the linen cupboard, she stepped down into the empty tub to clean it. “In any event, after you left, our lord ordered them released and gave them true death, along with the rest of them.”
“Rest of them? You mean the ones in the meditation garden?”
“And on the battlements and the outer walls and I think there may have been a few hanging in the lesser servants’ dormitory. But yes, all of them.” Serafina finished wiping out the tub and started the water running. As it filled, she bustled back and forth from cupboard to vanity to cupboard, arranging a bathing tray and muttering to herself about how dusty everything was.
“Well, I’m glad,” Lan announced.
Serafina huffed out a laugh, glanced at her, then ducked her head and admitted, “So am I, as far as that goes. But it was a bad time. Winter was the worst. He went just as dark as the weather. He never spoke. He rarely ate. Sometimes, you would see him at the window in the great hall in the morning and he’d still be there when they changed out the guard at night. Other times, he would shut himself away for days on end and no one would see him. And when he did come out, he had such moods.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Lan dipped a toe into the rising water, then
shut it off and climbed in, hissing at the heat of it in the cold room. It was actually hard to settle without writhing and after only a few seconds, she tried getting out. “It’s too hot.”
Serafina impersonally shoved her back in, then swished her arm through the bath and gave her a scornful stare. “It isn’t either, you’re just being difficult.”
And maybe she was. It had been a hell of a long trip, especially if one started counting from France, which Lan did. She hadn’t slept well in the ferry and had spent the last leg mostly being sick; she’d chucked up more in the last three days than she had in the three years preceding. Her stomach still felt a bit abused and expressed itself now and then with ominous gurgling noises. No, she wasn’t in the best of moods and it was just possible she was taking it out on her handmaiden unfairly.
“Fine.” In an effort to distract herself from the sensation of being dipped in liquid fire, Lan said, “Deimos told me all about Azrael’s moods.”
“He killed his entire court, did Deimos tell you that?” Serafina nodded solemnly at Lan’s startled stare and knelt beside the bath to begin sponging soap onto Lan’s back. A year’s respite had not improved her handmaiden’s technique; it was like being rubbed with a rock. “Not long after you left. I was ordered to look after that horrid child, so I was there that night, waiting for dinner to end so I could make up the ungrateful little beast’s tray, and I just knew something was going to happen. I could feel it in the air. He had been shut up for more than a month and then he just came to dinner like he’d never been gone. He took his chair and called for wine and then sat and looked at his court and I tell you, that look gave me shivers.” Serafina attempted a shiver. It was not very successful. “And then he killed them. He waved his hand and they all dropped and he just sat and drank his wine.”
“That’s awful,” said Lan, but she was thinking of Azrael, not the courtiers he’d killed.
“It gets worse. Rinse.” Serafina waited for Lan to dunk herself under and when she came up again, she went to work on her hair. “After, oh, an hour or so, he sent for his flute-player.” Serafina raised an eyebrow. “You know about her.”
“We’ve met.” And because she could see the gleam in Serafina’s eye, Lan added, “She was his dolly once.”
“Most of the servants withdrew, so that he could…enjoy the music…without distraction. And he never called them in again. They were in there alone for hours, with all those poor people dead in their dinners, and him listening to music. Then the music stopped,” Serafina said meaningfully.
Lan caught herself frowning and scrubbed her face. “Yeah, and?”
“And nothing. A few minutes and a few more.” Serafina rolled a careless shoulder and massaged soap into Lan’s scraggly hair. “And then out she comes at a run, holding her clothes on and crying herself all the way to her room.”
Lan closed her eyes, but again, it was Azrael she saw in the darkness, not the flute-player.
“He stayed there the rest of the night,” Serafina went on. “At dawn, he finally came out, only to shut himself up again and no one saw him for weeks. No one who lived, at any rate. You could always tell when he came out and where he went by the bodies he left in the hall. I never saw him like that, not even after you warmbloods murdered his Children. His toys, you called us that night, and for a time, that was just what we were. Toys he’d long outgrown. Rinse.”
Lan went under and stayed for a while, closing herself in the warm muffle of the bath until the ache in her lungs eclipsed the one in her heart. She came up only reluctantly, surrendering herself to Serafina’s comb and looking at her distorted reflection in the water. “I’m sorry.”
“When does that ever matter?” Serafina ran the comb through Lan’s hair once more on each side to check for missed tangles, then leaned back to run a critical eye over the rest of her. “Oh, you just look awful.”
Lan sighed.
Serafina sighed right back at her, picking up her hands and inspecting them with a pained expression. “All the work I’ve put into you, deliberately and maliciously undone.”
“Yeah, every morning, I’d wake up and think, ‘What can I do that will annoy Serafina the most when I see her again?’ And then I’d go soak my whole body in lye.” Lan held out her arms to demonstrate her whole-body soak, then executed a double-take of surprise. “Wow, I’m really pink! No fooling now, the water’s too hot!”
“It has to be hot to get the dirt off. I swear you grind it in with a wheel. What on Earth does he see in you?” Serafina grumbled and went to work paring and shaping Lan’s fingernails.
“He says I’m beautiful.”
“You aren’t,” Serafina said flatly.
“Yeah, well, you’re not the most objective critic, are you?”
Serafina’s gaze unfocused, making her in her stillness look uncomfortably like what she was: a corpse. At length, she shook her head and put her tiny scissors and file away. “No. No, I suppose I’m not. Our lord raised me to love only one…and she is gone. I cannot even love him, only obey him. Shall I tell you something, warmblood? One of the few secrets only the dead know.”
“Sure.”
“They say the opposite of love is hate,” Serafina told her. “But it isn’t. It is merely the absence of love. I see you don’t believe me, but it is true, you know. One cannot grieve without first having loved…and you living can love anyone, for any reason, even in the most miserable conditions. You’re proof enough of that. But I will never know that freedom. I had but one love and it is gone and now there is nothing and I tell you, that is the most awful feeling in the world. You…” She raised her head and searched Lan’s face with a narrow, slightly confused expression. “I look at you and I know that you have done something great, something I sincerely believe only you could have done. You have found and restored our lord to us. I know I should feel grateful, but I don’t. I can’t. I only know that my mistress is gone and you have replaced her. You.”
A thousand criticisms were pressed into that single word. Lan looked down at herself and rubbed a smudge half-heartedly from her arm.
“I resent you,” Serafina said, almost to herself. “I can do that much. Isn’t that funny?” She went back to Lan’s hands. “I should run you a fresh bath. This one has gone to sludge.”
It was disheartening to realize she had just fouled this much clean water without so much as a twinge of conscience, but not even Lan could do it twice in one night. “No,” she said, wading up the short steps and onto the tiles. “I’m too tired. If you want a bath, go right ahead, but I’m done in.”
“Servants do not bathe in their lady’s chambers,” Serafina informed her. “And ladies do not dress themselves! Stop that at once!”
“It’s a towel!” Lan shot back. “I’m allowed to wrap myself in a damn towel! And you’re dismissed! Go…Go make the bed up or something.”
“You’re impossible,” Serafina sniffed, but at least she went.
Lan walked into the sitting room and solicitously dropped the towel over Batuuli’s settee so Serafina could yell at her later, then leaned up against a window to look at the lights of the city. It wasn’t the same, seeing it from inside, as it had been glimpsing it on the road with winter’s wind blowing in through the ferry’s vents, but it was still a pretty sight. As she admired it, two pikemen passed by on the path below. Neither one looked up to see the naked lady on display in the window, but even if they had, Lan supposed it would feel much the same as being ogled by a barn-cat. She could still remember a time when she thought the dead were merely animated, not alive; now, she wasn’t as certain, but it was a very different sort of life they had, if they had it.
And here she was, back among them. This time, she had no plans to leave.
The thought was enormously depressing. Maybe it wouldn’t be, if she were tucked up fast against Azrael’s side as she was thinking it, but here in Batuuli’s old rooms, looking out this dusty glass at the silent, sparkling, lifeless city, it was all she could do to
keep from crying. It felt like home, it really did, but that only proved that home wasn’t always a good place.
Serafina broke her from her morose reverie with a caustic, “Your bed is ready. Need I bother with a nightdress or will you be wearing the window?”
“You can go now,” Lan told her, not moving.
“Not until I’ve finished with you.”
“I’ve been putting myself to bed since I was three.” So saying, Lan looked down at herself and frowned. “I’m still pink.”
Serafina heaved up her hands at the trouble she was making, but came over to have a look. “You are,” she admitted, probing at Lan’s arm. “Does it hurt?”
“Sort of. Hurt more in the bath.”
“Perhaps you’re sunburnt.”
It did rather look like a sunburn, but Lan couldn’t remember seeing very much of the sun. Besides—
“Shouldn’t there be stripes?” she asked dubiously. “Where my clothes were, I mean. I wasn’t running raw in the breeze out there.”
“Well, then, the water was too hot,” Serafina said, flinging out her hands. “There, are you happy? Honestly!” Off she stomped to the bathroom, returning in short order with a small jar of cream, which she daubed onto her fingers and began to rub into Lan’s skin. “Is this better?”
It was. Considerably. Lan scooped some out herself and put it on her legs while her handmaiden did her back and the other parts she couldn’t reach as easy. It was soft and cooling and smelled of roses. Batuuli’s scent.
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