“I’m tired,” she said.
“Shall I take you home?” His face betrayed no more emotion than the mask lying beside them with his clothes, but his voice was harsh with hidden strain. “Tell me what to do, Lan. Tell me, if you’re ready.”
“I’m not.”
She had not been aware he was holding his breath until that moment, when he let it go. His body relaxed beneath hers, but not fully, and his embrace did not ease.
“This isn’t something that only happens when you’re ready, Azrael. I wasn’t ready for my mother to die, but she did. I wasn’t ready to lose my life in Norwood, but I left. I wasn’t ready to be in your bed—”
His tendons creaked through the healing gash in his throat.
“—and now I’m not ready to leave it,” she finished. “Hell, if I waited to be ready for everything, I’d still be picking peaches with Eaters howling at the wall. I could be wiping Elvie’s snotty little brat’s ass right now and mooning after Eithon bloody Fairchild like a git. I could think that was a good life, all because I wasn’t ready to see what else there was.” She rubbed her aching belly with the hand that did not hold the bottle. “Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready.”
He covered her hand with his, quieting her restless kneading.
“It’s such a beautiful night,” she told him as the rain poured down. “Look at those stars, yeah?”
He tipped his head back. Water hissed as it dripped into his eyes and wisps of steam rose up. “I see them.”
“I’d like to watch them with you. I don’t think I’ve ever just looked at the stars before. They’re kind of pretty, when you look at them right. Don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s getting late. The stars are very beautiful, but I don’t want to wait too long, you know, before I go home. You won’t keep me too late, will you?”
He did not answer.
“I don’t want to leave right now. I don’t want to leave at all. But I’m tired. And it’s such a beautiful night.” She put the bottle back with her dress and wiped rain from her cheeks like they were tears. “Would you mind if I fell asleep here? I don’t mean…I just mean sleep. I miss falling asleep in your arms. And if this is the last time—”
“Hush.”
She tried.
“I want the last time to be with you,” she said.
“Please, Lan.”
“All my good nights are over. This has been…” She wiped at the rain again. “…the best night in so long. I just don’t think it’s going to get any better. So if this is the last time I fall asleep, please, let it be in your arms, under the stars, on a beautiful night.”
The slushy rhythm of his strange heart broke, but it kept beating.
“Azrael?”
“All right.”
“Okay?”
“All right.” He pulled her closer. She wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but he did. “Go to sleep. When it’s time to go…I’ll wake you. Rest now.”
* * *
She really didn’t think she’d sleep—all dovey sentiments aside, it was raining—so she was surprised when she awakened to his gentle touch and found the dark closed in all around them. The rain had stopped and the clouds cleared to let slip enough moonlight to show her a storm-swollen river, all white caps and black water. The rush and roar of it helped to clear her head of dreams she couldn’t even remember, but her body was slow to come around. The damp had soaked in all the way to her bones, so much that she couldn’t even feel Azrael’s chill separate from her own. She supposed that was how she’d been able to sleep, the awfulness of his flesh eclipsing lesser hurt and discomforts. Now, although achy and cold, she was at least temporarily free of the exhaustion she had been waking up with so many days.
And really, when she stopped to think about it, the aches and the cold were temporary too. As for lying in the wet grass all night, what was she going to do, catch her death?
“Good morning,” she said uncertainly, searching the sky for clues. “Is it morning?”
“As clocks may calculate it. We have hours yet until dawn.” He was quiet a moment, his fingertips lightly tracing the planes of her bare back. “I lived most of my life without any better notion of time than yesterday or tomorrow, now or later. But once I had understood hours, I have never been able to stop feeling them.”
“I’m sorry.”
He stirred to look at her. “Don’t be. For as much as it has been a burden, still I understand why Men have done this. Time in its fullness has no weight, no significance. Only broken can its value be measured.” He shifted her closer, resuming his steady caresses. “Everything…becomes more precious when you buy it in pieces. But no, my Lan, it is not yet morning. I only thought you might like to see the stars before we go, as the rains are likely to return.”
That it may be the last time she ever saw them hung as heavy as a millstone on her heart, but “Never a long wait in this accursed country,” was all she said. Gathering her strength, and with his help, she sat up and at once slumped against him, rallying her forces for the long climb to her feet. She looked up and, through the wisps of weatherclouds smudging up the sky, saw a scattering of lights, bright but cold, like the glint of sun on broken water or chips of ice on winter grass. Still, it was pretty, and the longer she looked, the prettier it got.
Unbidden, a slip of memory came to mind, of her own self sitting at his table when that was still uneasy and new, telling him pretty was only pretty because it didn’t last. The stars would last forever. They were only pretty now because she was leaving.
Azrael pretended not to see as she wiped at her eyes. He put his arm around her, absently rubbing the chillflesh both into and out of her skin, and said, “You’re so cold. Shame on me, that I let you lie so long in the rain. What will your handmaiden say?”
“To you? Nothing. Me, she’ll call a nuisance and say I’m being difficult again. I don’t know where she gets that crap,” Lan added with a wan smile. “I’m bloody marvelous. Just a constant fucking delight. And it’s not like she’s got to put up with it for much longer.”
He held her and said nothing.
Lan watched the stars. She’d somehow got it into her head as a child that if you saw one fall, you could make a wish and it would come true, but she’d never actually seen one fall. They didn’t seem to move at all. They flickered some, but stayed where they were. And wishes didn’t really change things anyway, no more than tears. It didn’t stop her from watching them, though, no more than it stopped her from wiping now and then at her eyes.
Time slipped away, hour by hour. The sky took on the yellow-grey stain of dawn and lightened. The stars faded without ever falling, not even one. Lan wished on the sun as it rose and, with nothing left to keep her, got up to go home. The pill bottle fell out as she gathered her wet clothes and bounced away. She blocked it with her foot before it could reach the steep concrete embankment and lose itself in the river, then went ahead and kicked it in. Azrael did not comment, but he must have seen, because he let her stand as long as she wanted, watching the water buck and froth and take her last hope away, and he never asked why.
They must have talked together on the long walk back to the palace. She had vague memories of the sound of his voice rising and falling, of her own answering, inquiring and sometimes laughing, but of the words themselves, there was nothing. By the time they reached the courtyard, the gardeners had come and gone and the smell of cut grass was stronger even than that of last night’s rain on the stones. She took a moment to breathe it in (because it was the last time, that hateful whisper told her), then went in on his arm with her muddy slippers in her hand.
They left twin trails of wet footprints on the fine floor halfway down the hall. His soon dried, but her skirts dragging behind her ensured something for the servants to clean up all the way to the door of his chambers. There, he helped her out of her dress and into his dry bed, but he didn’t join her.
“Are you going to breakf
ast?” she asked, thinking she ought to offer to accompany him, even though she’d already let him tuck her in and so obviously had no intention of doing anything of the kind. It was the thought that counted.
“Are you hungry?”
She thought about it and was pleasantly surprised to discover she was, a little. Having missed dinner the night before (and sicked up lunch), she was empty enough that, even without an appetite, the thought of food had some faint appeal. But the bed was already here and she didn’t have to fight to keep herself in it the way she knew she’d have to fight to keep a breakfast in her. “Not enough,” she said at last.
Azrael nodded and lay his cool hand over her brow in a stroking motion that used to smooth her hair back, back when she had hair. “Later, then. I’ll take something with you later.”
“You don’t have to wait on me.”
“I don’t go to dinner for the food.” He bent to offer her a kiss; she took it as best she could, trying not to think too hard about how she must taste. He stayed that way for some time, his lips on hers, not moving, and when he finally straightened, he turned away and masked himself before she could get a good look at his face.
She wanted to ask if he was all right, but she knew what a stupid question it was, so she just let him walk away. She didn’t mean to fall asleep—if it was the last time, she didn’t want to be alone—but in the dark, in the quiet, sleep took her anyway.
The next time she opened her eyes, she thought she was having a nightmare about her own corpse leaning close to kiss her, but she scarcely had time to process that before her cadaverous twin tumbled up into the air and vanished, leaving Serafina beside the bed with a mirror in her hand.
“Oh good,” said Serafina, plainly relieved. “You’re…ah…awake.”
“What are you doing?” Lan asked groggily, struggling up as far as her elbows before collapsing back into the cushions. “Is it dinnertime?”
Serafina hesitated, then said, “I’ve been sent to make you ready.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to say she didn’t want to go anywhere if she had to put any more effort into it than what it took to get up and walk, but hell, it might be the last time. Lan heaved herself out of bed and onto her feet, head swimming, and staggered over to the bath on Serafina’s arm.
She soon fell asleep in the water, as impossible as that should have been after sleeping all day and all night, but Lan didn’t fight it when she found herself nodding off. There were no good ways to be bathed, certainly not the way Serafina did it, but sleeping through it was better than most. So she slept, catching only vague impressions of what was happening to her unimportant body—rubbed, rinsed, lifted, dried, waxed, lotioned. Only when it was being dressed did Lan suppose she really ought to wake all the way up and help her handmaiden out a little.
The dress in which she found herself was not one she knew, but it fit her too well to have been made for anyone else. It had no beads, no embroidery, no corset; just a plain dress cut from fine cloth, blindingly white. It softened her wasted body the way snow softens uneven ground, but that softness only made the parts of her it couldn’t hide seem more haggard. On another woman, maybe even on the woman she herself had been only a few short months ago, it might have seemed a bridal gown; on Lan, this day, it was a burial shroud.
“Don’t you dare,” Serafina said as she outlined Lan’s stinging eyes in defining black, faking the lashes that had mostly fallen out by now. “He’ll be here any minute. Do you want him to see you crying?”
No. Lan willed her tears back and tried not to look at her reflection.
Serafina kept working, stealing swift glances at the person beneath the canvas she painted, until she apparently decided her mistress needed consoling. “You don’t look that bad. You looked so much worse before your treatments.”
“Thanks.”
“Honestly, even on your best days, you were never a great beauty, so it isn’t as if you’ve lost your best quality.”
And, because even at the end of all things, Lan had a bitchy side, she said, “Like what?” and felt with weary satisfaction as her handmaiden’s work came to a sudden stop.
“Well…that is to say…I’m sure you have many, many…many…”
“Name one.”
Serafina patted a layer of powder over Lan’s scalp, thinking hard, and finally said, “You still have your charm.”
The door opened. Azrael’s reflection appeared in the mirror as glints of gold over man-shaped shadow. He watched without speaking as Serafina made a last pass with the powder brush over every inch of Lan’s exposed skin, then beckoned the dead woman to him.
Lan pretended not to listen to the few words they exchanged, but could make out nothing clearly anyway, apart from Serafina’s, “Yes, my lord,” at the end of it.
“Something wrong?” Lan asked as her handmaiden withdrew.
Azrael looked at her, his eyelight dim and strained through the sockets of his golden mask.
“Something else, I mean.”
He still didn’t answer aloud, but he came to the vanity and pulled her gently from her chair. He touched her cheek, rubbed his powdered fingertips together, then took her over to the bath and knelt to dip one of his wash-towels in the water.
“Serafina worked hard on that,” said Lan as he wiped away an hour’s work in seconds.
“Needlessly.”
She tried to laugh.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, running the towel over her bald head.
“I am not.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Stop trying to fiddle me up. I know what I look like.”
“No, you don’t,” he said, erasing black eyeliner and smears of shimmery color to expose the sunken, pallid truth. “Or you would know how beautiful you are.”
Lan still stubbornly smiled, but her voice shook as she said, “Yeah, and if you really believed that, you wouldn’t have had her start painting me up in the first place.”
“Only so that none could look on your true face but me.” He wiped the cloth across her lips, slowly, like a kiss. “But there must be no masks tonight.”
She reached up.
He stepped back at once, but then bent his neck and allowed her to unbuckle the straps that held his horned mask on. Her arms trembled as she took its weight; he caught her wrists and steadied them as she lifted the mask and set it on the shelf with the others.
They looked at each other.
When she took the wash-towel from his hand and found a clean corner, he turned his cheek very slightly toward her, although his gaze never left hers. “This is nearly healed,” she remarked, dabbing at the edges of the wound.
“Nearly closed, you mean.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There will always be a scar.”
“It’ll heal, too. In time.”
“Outwardly, perhaps,” he said, looking straight ahead and speaking in that distant, distracted sort of way that usually meant a storm of terrible emotion just below the surface. “I will always feel it.”
“But it won’t always hurt.” She put the towel down and smiled at him. “Shall we go to dinner?”
He did not return her smile, but he did offer his arm.
She walked at his side past ranks of pikemen to the stair, refusing to allow him to carry her up, but grateful for his strength to support her as she climbed out of the dark underfloor beneath the palace to the marble halls that glowed with light.
There were no guards outside the dining hall tonight, no pikemen lining the walls within, no servants waiting to wait on them, only Azrael’s steward, bowing self-importantly up to murmur assurances that all was in order. He bustled away to the kitchen at Azrael’s wave, leaving them to make the long, long walk to the imperial table unobserved. The rain drumming onto the high windows covered their footsteps in the echoing hall and helped soften the harsh pants of Lan’s breath. Once upon a time, she’d walked all the way from the Channel to Norwood; now it was all
she could do just to make it to the other side of this room.
Azrael did not hurry her, nor offer to carry her, nor ask if she was all right. He simply held her up and slowed his pace to match hers. When they finally reached the narrow dais steps, he ascended first and helped her to follow, then brought her the last mile to her chair and lent her the strength of his arm one last time so she could sit without collapsing. A lady never plops into her chair, she reminded herself. Manners were so important.
She reached by habit for her napkin, but she had none. The imperial table had not been set for dinner. It was, in fact, entirely empty apart from candles, several garlands of gold ivy and white crepe, and half a dozen bowls, each boasting a squat and singularly ugly plant—a bulbous, yellowish lump with a few thick green leaves and tumorous-looking blossoms drooping from its nubby stalks.
“Adenia,” Azrael said, watching her. “A member of the passion flower family.”
Lan fingered one of the flowers and took a hesitant sniff. It didn’t have a strong scent, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Not what she’d call a passionate smell, but not bad. “I’ve never seen one before.”
“Hardly surprising. Its native soil is far from this land.” Azrael pushed one claw deep into the skin of his inner arm and drew it out stained black with his blood. He fed two thick drops to the plant nearest to him through a split place on the stalk and watched without expression as its leaves slowly curled. “These are from my daughter’s private collection.”
Lan reached again for the napkin that wasn’t there, then folded her hands in her lap and stared meaningfully at the empty place where no plate was being filled in front of her. Azrael finished killing his plant and leaned back in his throne to watch the rain ripple down the window glass. He did not speak, did not look at her, did not touch her.
After several minutes of absolute nothing between them, Lan plucked one of the ugly flowers and tossed it at him. It bounced off his chest.
“Be patient,” he said, picking up the flower and placing it in the sandy soil of its bowl.
“I’m really hungry,” she said, emphasizing every word. The days when she had any kind of an appetite were few and far between of late. She didn’t want to waste it, certainly not just to sit in this big empty room and stare at the ugliest centerpiece on the planet.
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