Land of the Beautiful Dead (69 page)

She didn’t think he’d answer. She could feel his muscles coiling and knew, however indifferently he might meet her challenging stare, she was making him angry. Later, she would wonder if she were trying to make him leave, so she wouldn’t have to keep answering his own questions, but if that was the case, he knew it before she did and parried the blow before she thrust.

“No,” he said. He did not raise his voice, did not drop his eyes. “For ages, I have coveted the life that Men have. I have imagined myself among them a thousand, thousand hours and dreamed in my waking way of sharing in all the things they do. To dine in halls filled with music. To taste sweet wine on a woman’s lips. To live as one among many rather than one apart. I built Haven in memory of that world…but I built it on a foundation of bone. I have become Death.”

“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?”