Lullaby for a Lost World (2 page)

His eyes are dry; his face expressionless, with not an ounce of compassion. “I do what I have to. So that I survive. So that we all survive. And no.” He shakes his head, slowly, gently. “The house will only take you one way, and it's not the way it took me.”

Isaure shivers. “I see.” And, turning slightly away from him, kneeling on the grass, one hand inches from the edge of your exposed bone—“Will … will there be pain?”

He pauses then; and time seems to hang suspended, for a moment; it flows backward until he's standing at your grave again, and your mother asks that same question, slowly and fearfully—and he could change the course of things, he could speak truth, instead of lying as he's always lied, but he merely shakes his head. “No. We'll give you poppy and opiates. It will be like going to sleep.”

Liar.
You want to scream the words, to let the winds carry them all the way around the house, so that they know the price they pay for their safety, the price you paid for their sakes, only to lie unremembered and broken beneath the gardens, the only ones who still come a betrayer and a doomed girl—but you have no voice, and the earth chokes you, and you cannot …

Above you, Isaure rises, smiles—cautiously, reassured by words, by the presence she's known all her life.

“It's time,” your master whispers, and she's turning toward him to follow him meekly, back into the house, to the wreck of her body and another grave at the bottom of the gardens, and soon they'll both be gone, beyond your reach until it's too late for anything but futile grieving—

No!

You
push
—with broken bones, with decayed hands and arms and legs—and your body twists and shifts as the earth presses against it, and your muscles shiver and coalesce again, and butterfly hairpins melt as if within a furnace—and you turn and turn and
change
—and rise, bloody-mouthed, four-legged, from the earth.

Your horn is the yellow, gleaming bone of your femur, sharpened to a killing point; your mane is your blood-matted, earth-clogged hair, dragging worms and flies' eggs from the shadowed rest of your grave; and your skin is scraps of red, blood-drenched cotton, knitted and patched over the rawness of muscles bunched to leap.

Isaure watches you, her mouth open—the flames of your eyes reflected in her own—and your master is watching, too, but—unlike her—he knows.

“Charlotte…”

Isaure jerks, as if something had pulled on strings at her back. “No,” she whispers, as you paw at the ground with silver hooves.

You run her through, before she can say another word—her blood splatters, warm and red—the same hue as your skin, drenching the grass in vivid, obscene colors—a crunching of bones beneath you, and then you've leapt over her remains, and there is only you and your master.

He has not moved. He stands, watching you—no expression on his face, his blue eyes dry and fearless. “You know I do not lie,” he says. He stands as if rooted within the earth, his swallow-tailed jacket billowing in the wind, his face alight with that same strange, fey radiance. “There is always a price to be paid for safety. Don't you know this, Charlotte?”

You know this. You have always known this. Blood and pain and sacrifice and the power of the house—the only true things in a dying world, and what does it matter if not everyone pays them? Only the sick and the weak, or the innocent, or the powerless?

There is no rest. There is no forgiveness. And never, ever, any safety.

“It's too high a price,” you say—every word coming out distorted, through a mouth that wasn't meant to shape human sounds—and you drive your horn, slowly and deliberately, into his chest—feeling ribs crack and break, and the feel of a body bending backwards, crumpling under you—an odd, twisting sensation as the house flickers—reeling, wounded and in agony, retreating to the safety of the underground altar.

Too high a price.

You look at the house in the twilight, in the rising wind and shadows—at the golden limestone walls still untainted by smoke; at the pristine, unbroken windows facing the desolation of the city; at the vast, brittle abundance of greenery in the gardens—the tapestry of lies that made your old, careless life possible.

It's gone now, smashed to splinters beneath you, and that price will never be paid again.

Then you move—running toward the house, the grass shriveling under each strike of your hooves, strands of darkness following in your wake like nightfall—toward the fading circle in the cellar and the dozens, hundreds of people who sent girls to die in agony for the good of the house—you run, to finish what you have started here.

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 by Aliette de Bodard

Art copyright © 2016 by Alyssa Winans