She was not going to get roped into an hour’s chat on the history of the corset while the batteries bled out in their waiting car.
“Never is a long time,” she said. “Who knows what I’ll be wearing in a hundred years? Besides, I had Serafina pack away a few for special occasions and you can borrow them whenever you like. Just try not to stretch them out. Now come on,” she said as his smile went crooked with genuine humor. “It’s time to go.”
“To everything, there is a season,” he murmured, running his gaze along the empty hall. “And a time to every purpose under heaven.”
Lan waited.
“Do you know the verse?” he asked as he finally set off.
“No. I never was one for poetry. But I reckon I can believe it. It was how I lived in Norwood. How everyone lived, really. We plant and we harvest. We work and we rest. We go out—” She nudged his arm in a friendly fashion. “—and we come home. Everything in its own time, Azrael.”
“And is it our time now, my Lan?”
“It’s always our time for something.”
“Impeccable logic.”
“But it can only be coming home if you make it home.”
He did not answer, which was a bad sign until she risked a glance and saw the unmistakable light of contemplation flickering in the deep sockets of his mask.
“What are we calling it, anyway?” she asked. “Even if no one ever finds it, a town’s got to have a name and it’s probably not a good idea to call it New Haven. And don’t you dare call it Lanachee or anything stupid like that.”
“No,” he said with uncharacteristic hesitance. “Not Lanachee. But I do have a name in mind, if…if you think it appropriate.”
“Let’s have it.”
But he didn’t, not right away, walking in brooding silence until the stairs of the grand foyer were in sight before he suddenly said, “Maya.”
Her breath couldn’t catch, her heart couldn’t lurch, her cheeks couldn’t burn with a flustered blush, but he knew he’d slapped her all the same.
“Maya,” he said again, staring straight ahead. “I’d like to call our home Maya.”
The knotted mess of her emotions knotted up even more. She wanted to shrug it off, say whatever he needed to hear to feel good about leaving Haven, but she wasn’t sure she could. The thought of throwing her mother’s name out into the whole world for anyone at all to see and hear bashed around and around inside her head and would not lie quiet.
“Why?” she asked at last, determined not to say no…not yet.
“You told me once she named you for the town she came from, in remembrance of her past. I think it only fitting we close the circle and name our town for her.” He glanced at her. “Although I don’t imagine she would approve the lending of her name to a town for the dead and I would not hurt you by insulting her memory.”
There it was, the perfect excuse to say no. If she did, she knew he’d never bring it up again and the new place would probably end up named Avalon after all. But she didn’t.
“All right,” she said.
“You’re certain?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know my mother very well,” Lan admitted. “As a person, I mean. But I know she’d want me to have a better life than the one she had. A world without Eaters. A town without walls. I like to think she’d be happy I was there with someone who could give me that. So, yeah. I’m all right with it.”
He regarded her as they descended the stairs, their footsteps echoing like drumbeats, and when they reached the bottom, he said, “And if it comes to pass that I can’t give it to you after all? Will the ruin of this endeavor become your mother’s legacy?”
“My mother understood about sacrifice. She used to tell me all the time how there are no guarantees. You can do everything right, pay it out in full, do all the work and still take it up the ass.”
“I see now where you come by your way with words.”
“Also my chin, I’m told. But she also used to say it’s not failure unless you let it stop you from trying again. If we had to name a hundred towns after her, she’d only get prouder.”
“I love your chin.”
“Thank you. I know what folk say about good intentions, but fuck them. Why you want something matters. It matters, Azrael. So I need to know you want this.”
His step faltered.
“I need to know you believe in it and you’re not just doing this for me.”
He stopped walking and just stood there in the grand foyer, his neck bent and his eyes too bright.
“Please,” she said softly.
“No one knows better than I how readily even the best intentions and the purest beliefs lead to grief. Having said that…” He lapsed into silence, staring out into the courtyard, and when he spoke again, it was as a confession of the very worst kind of sin: “I am hopeful.”
“Doesn’t always feel good, does it?”
He might have laughed, but if so, he chose that exact moment to run a hand over his scarred throat and the rasp of his dry skin rubbing together obscured all other sound. “I have built all the worst mistakes of my life on that foundation. Lan, I want this, but…I’m frightened.”
“It’s all right,” she told him and shrugged. “It’s just the world.”
He stared at her as Deimos waited by the open car and the rain blew in and puddled on the marble floors where no one would mop it up. Then he smiled. “Is that all it is?”
“That’s it. And it’s not waiting for us. Our little house is out there right now, in Maya,” she added, testing the name for flavor and finding it bittersweet. “It’s there on the highest rock with every window looking at the sea and we’re here, not seeing it. Our greenhouses are all empty beds and bags of seeds and we’re here, not planting. Our life is there,” she told him, smiling as she extended an empty hand back at the empty hall in which they stood. “This one’s over.”
“And when that one ends?”
“We go on.” She reached up and unfastened his mask so she could smile into his true face. “And on. And on.”
He took his mask from her and held it a long time as he gazed at the hall—the dark lamps and curtained windows, fine carpets neatly rolled and marble floors polished one last time, the paintings and statues covered with canvas—and when his eyes came at last to the empty sockets of the golden mask, he let it fall. It hit the tiles and rocked onto its side, seeming to stare back up at him accusingly as Azrael turned away. He took a step, paused, and offered her his arm.
She took his hand instead and they walked to the door together. There, he suddenly swept Lan up off her feet and into his arms. He carried her over the threshold and out into the rain. The sky was full of fog, with the sun behind it turning it all to a single color—not quite white, but pale and promising, like a blank page where anything could be written. Anything at all.
THE END
April 2014 – October 2015
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 82